this is the beginning of the end of nuclear power in japan. maybe the usa. probably europe

I doubt that, and I have numbers to back me up Majority Americans Say Nuclear Power Plants Safe Americans are fear mongers and still think nuclear power is safe after the incident. Since Japan loves futuristic tech and had no problems with it before the incident I doubt the fear will stick as much as you think it will. What is your basis for such a high level of fear?

I agree and think that would be a fair compromise. A hacked PS3 can't go on the PSN. They should not freeze or kill your account just tell you can't do X with your console.

This reminds me of a real issue that would make sense for Sony to try and protect it self from. Online players hacking their consoles to give them an unfair advantage in online games. I have a friend who is an avid PC and Xbox gamer. He has told me that while players on Xbox are more annoying it's a far more fair playing field since fewer people cheat.

If you are referring to the Jains they have been discussed elsewhere in this thread. The conclusion was that most of them depend on milk for their diet. While not meat it's close enough to prove that humans need animals for food.

Interesting group. I think they are as close as any group can get but they still drink milk. I'm not sure what's in milk exactly but I would think it's closer to meat then to soy milk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

This might surprise you but I agree with you on just about all points. Some people can do it and if you can, I'm happy for you. The people that bother me are the militant vegans who claim that if you can't do it's YOUR fault and that not eating animals solves all your health issues.

Personally I've been waiting for lab meat ever since I found out where meat comes from as a kid. I don't want to kill some other creature to eat but not doing so not reasonable until lab meat is a reality.

I have a friend who has grown up on this diet. He eats eggs and drinks milk. I've talked to him about vegans vs vegetarians and he agrees that people can't be healthy on a vegan diet. An interesting note is that he also thinks how important dairy is to this diet may be why cows are considered sacred in India.

True and I should have been clearer on this. Part of my point is that any vegitarian must have some animal product if they want to be healthy. Maintaining animals you don't plan to eat is not much easier then maintaining animals you do plan to eat. Clearly synthetic eggs would be similar to lab grown meat. But I also think that synthetic meat is similar to the kind of synthetic milk you would need to support a healthy vegitarian diet.

Name one. I could be wrong about this but I bet any society that you have in mind does have a source of meat or at least animal product. In some they are hunters so the meat is rare, in others they have fish or eggs in their diet. Like I said the American diet has WAY to much meat in it but a diet with no meat at all is not something I think most people can live on.

I do. http://voraciouseats.com/2010/11/19/a-vegan-no-more/ It's long and anecdotal but worth a read. The general gist of it is that she was a vegan for many years but get horribly sick because no matter what she tried she could not put together a diet that did not leave her in a state of malnutrition. Once she (very very reluctantly) started eating meat again she was back to healthy in no time.

As a species we have eaten meat for too long. Yes, Americans eat far to much meat and some people might be able to do with out it but to say that it's possible for everyone to do with out it is wrong.

An important point in that link is that she clams to have contacted other vegan bloggers and they said in private that they cheat and have meat on occasion to keep healthy. To me this is a sign that while many people brag about having not eaten meat in X years most of them are likely lying to preserve their hard earned and (in their social circles) highly respected vegan status. They put so much effort in to something they believed in only to have it thrown back in their face as impossible must be a horrible experience that they refuse to come to terms with.

Parent is most valuable post here. If parent is accurate either 1) this project and results are total bullshit or 2) This experiment will end up being mentioned in high school chemistry text books in about a decade because it was the first clue that we royally fucked up nuclear bonding energy calculations or something else really fundamental. I'm guessing 1 but hoping for 2.

Um... http://articles.cnn.com/2010-01-27/politics/obama.gays.military_1_repeal-policy-that-bars-gays-servicemembers-legal-defense-network?_s=PM:POLITICS

I agree that he did not physically vote for this and he could have done far more but to say this is "no thanks to Obama" is just plain wrong.

Yeah it's a cool project and another reason why the JVM is what matters not Java it self.

If you are referring to what I said about twitter there are several reasons I can think of why they would move to Scala instead of using JRuby. The main one is that the JVM does not yet have native support for weakly typed languages. JRuby is fast but held back by the need to make a weak typing layer over the JVM. The Da Vinci project will fix this but there is not yet a release of Java that plans to include it.

The other two reasons are that
1) I'm guessing twitter is a small application so a full rewrite is not a big task
2) Scala is designed for scaling (hence the name) while Ruby was designed to be a fun language to write in that got back to the SmallTalk roots of OOP

I know this sounds like I'm trolling but the speed of the JVM blows Python out of the water.

Most of the time that JavaScript file was uploaded by a Java server. There is a good reason that twitter moved from Ruby to Scala, Scala runs on the JVM and the JVM is fast (despite what people tend to think).

As I understand it IBM is a 'solution company' AKA they make their money by solving your problems. They don't really care about HOW they solve it or whit what as long as you are happy. An Oracle DB vs a IBM DB does not matter. In fact pushing software that is not the right fit would cost them in the long run because they want your support contract. They do a good job and you will stay signed on.

This is why Java and Linux are valuable to them. The software costs nothing to install, they can afford the technical power to install and run it and if push comes to shove and they REALLY need to they can throw programmers at it to fix bugs. They don't care how it works only that it works.

Bringing this back to Oracle. Siding against Oracle is biting the hand that feeds them since they need to work with them to get Oracle server bugs fixed. Oracle likes to hold a grudge and might go nuts on IBM if they don't toe the line. As long as they can fix Java bugs via OpenJDK and JCP the actual license of Java for others does not matter to them. While siding with Oracle might hurt them in the long run fighting them is a bigger risk(Oracle to IBM:"oh you needed that bug fixed THIS year?") for little reward (IBM:"Hurray! Java is free! Now we can view the source and fix bugs....just like before....").

Java is irrelevant compared to the JVM. All the cool powers that Java has are coded in to the JVM with some incredibly impressive run times. As a Java programmer I consider the language it self ugly but the JVM magic.