Yes (assuming you mean that it uses game-time based skill acquisition, where you set up a list of skills you want to acquire and your character slowly learns them whether you're playing or not). But unlike most modern MMOs which have interesting solo games, it's only really worth playing if you can get deeply involved in a guild (or corporation, to use the local terminology), which demands quite a bit of time in most cases.

I didn't realise the aliens were involved in a massive accountancy war.

I though airline pilots were paid an annual salary, not an hourly rate...?

It does however go on to suggest that some high-intensity flickering may be detectable (by cones only and not by rods) at up to 60Hz, which is somewhat closer to OP's figure.

At least here in the UK, there is no law that would require them to do so as far as I am aware. The only obligation to destroy the data rests with the data controller, who in your scenario is not even the cloud provider. The cloud provider may have undertaken to do so on behalf of the data controller, but I am uncertain if such an obligation would survive the company being declared insolvent: at such a time, recovering the maximum possible revenue for the company's creditors becomes the highest legal priority; honouring existing contracts is relegated to a distinct second place.

If this really has happened, you should be able to point to the details of the particular case. Common wisdom is that this simply does not happen any more (as the likelihood of being able to recover enough information to achieve a conviction has become much, much lower with modern disks that are much more accurate in head positioning than older disks), so I'd really like to see actual documentation of cases where such a technique has been successfully used in, say, the last 10 years.

Maybe they should consider firing the person who made the decision to pass on confidential data to an uncertificated contractor without performing any due diligence, or is that perhaps a little too radical?

But as nobody has suggested a criminal offence of which the contractor may be guilty, it hardly seems relevant.

Of course there's a contract: there's one described in the summary above. The contractor agreed to wipe the machines in exchange for getting them for free. There, that's a contract. Now, it may be difficult to sue him for breach on the basis that there doesn't appear to have been a *written* contract, but that's an entirely different matter from there being no contract at all.

Still: I've gone through 3 consumer-grade routers over the last 10 years, and each time I've got a new one it's because the old one isn't up to the job, not because it's failed. They shouldn't need active cooling (they don't use more than about 2W in typical use), and the power supplies seem perfectly adequate for the task to me.

Is there a documentary I could watch that will give me some idea of the absurd disaster scenarios somebody has invented for this technology?

Sure, but this article contains data showing that the difference in profit margin between Apple and Samsung phones is minimal these days, so you're clearly just making this shit up.

Switching between client and server is a large enough switch anyway. I'd say it's actually *easier* to work in different languages on each side, because it allows you to keep your conceptualisations of each side more distinct in your mind. Sure, I can't justify that in any way, but I doubt you can justify any assertion of a cost in a "mental context switch", either.

That's because there are certain ways in which Java *is* slow:

* AWT is a heap of shit, very badly designed, and takes a positive age to initialize. Swing is no better, because Swing is built as a layer on top of AWT.
* Java's performance for floating point leaves a lot to be desired because Java's specification of some mathematical operation means that processor-specific instructions cannot be used, e.g., to calculate the result of Math.exp() on x86 processors, so it must be done in software. This bug: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7174532 suggests they may have recently found a solution, but I don't think this is in any released version of Java yet.
* Garbage collection is much slower than hand-optimized memory allocation, and heap allocation is much slower than stack allocation, so a well written C++ application can always outperform Java on memory handling.

This doesn't mean that Java isn't perfectly suitable for the vast majority of tasks, particularly those that are I/O bound like a typical server application, but there are things that it really isn't good enough for.

(Signed, somebody who once attempted to write a high-performance neural network simulator in a language that can't do exp() at a reasonable speed.)

Not even then, I would imagine. V8 is not marketed as an enterprise-class product. There is no support for V8; it's a free product, released only because they wanted a world-class javascript engine to include in Chrome. Any other uses are practically irrelevant as far as Google are concerned.