There are a lot of custom, in-house apps developed with Java specifically to handle cross-platform issues.

We couldn't have done a lot of our apps if we had to write separate versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

They don't need to create an Installer, they need to create an entire port to a new operating system. The low-level threading and memory management, the GUI.. who wants their Java apps to be running under X11 on Mac?

I use MediaTomb on my Linux server and the PS3 as the living room appliance. Works a treat, and no one in the family has any problems using it at all.

Plus, Blu-Ray, games.. bingo.

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The original PS3 models probably don't suffer from this, as they use on-board flash ram chips to hold the firmware.

Later versions of the PS3 cut out those flash ram chips as a cost-saving measure, in favor of bootstrapping the firmware from the hard drive. These models store the firmware on the drive, and these are the ones that might have this problem.

Point the first: 1^1020 = 1.

Point the second: 1/1 = 1, which is greater than a trillionth.

Point the third: The cited article calculates 2.55453 X 10^20, and a trillion is 10^12, so the trillionth guess was only off by 8 orders of magnitude, not 1,020 orders, as I thought when I wrote that.

Point the main: I should not try to show off my math on the Internet.

And while I'm confirming my hand-waving stupidity, I'd like to cite http://cubesat.wikidot.com/opticalflux, which has a quick calculation showing on the order of 2.55453 x 1020 photons.s-1.m-2, so when I cleverly said 'less than a trillionth of that amount', you should read 'less than 1^1020th' of that amount instead.

Fortunately for me, 1^1020 is more than a trillionth, so dividing it out would result in 1/1^1020, which is less than a trillionth. So it kind of works out.

Ups, of course I did, thanks.

The figure of 0.0002 pounds of pressure per photon is off by a vast degree. The Wikipedia article on Solar Sails cites a figure of 4.57x106 N/m2, or .00000457 Newtons of force ( 0.000001027 pound-feet) against a square meter of sail material given the full flux of the Sun at Earth's orbit. A single photon would provide less than a trillionth of that amount.

Java's strength in a multithreading context is due to the fact that multithreadedness was built into the language, and library authors and programmers have known to explicitly document what libraries are safe for multithreaded use and which are not.

Java the language provides just enough support (the Hoare Monitor and explicit memory model) to enable higher level thread-aware libraries, like the Java 5 concurrency classes.

Using those higher level classes can give you really good support, better than anything this side of Erlang, anyway.

As opposed to all of the other bills that go through Congress every year? Every interest group (commercial, union, or private) has a huge number of lobbyists and legislative specialists who pore over every bill that goes through congress.

Believe me, they have read this bill.

And government isn't "taking over" healthcare. They are not privatizing the health care market, they are setting up conditions to allow a real market in individual / small business insurance to exist.

Mitt Romney did something similar with MassachusettsCare, and the Republicans proposed something similar in opposition to the Clinton plan back in 1994.

Many in the Republican party act as if any Democratic initiative is the end of the republic and must be blocked, even if they do worse themselves when in power.

The polling on the bill has moderated a great deal in recent weeks as Obama has come out and started fighting for the bill. A number of polls now show the public fairly evenly balanced between opposing and supporting the bill.