It is interesting how easily people forget.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Japan was the one copying, making knockouts and whatnot. But what happened is exactly what you described: they learned. And that is exactly what is happening to China right now.

I wish people would take your (great) advice and just do it, instead of discussing the flaws and merits of their pet politician.

Wake up, guys. As Bill Nye said, write even if you don't like him (Obama or Romney). Afterwards we can discuss it. But don't waste time NOW.

Believe or not, Mark Shuttle worth does not have a car. He bikes to work. When in London he usually either bikes, takes the tube or, in case of something urgent, a taxi.

Is it an evil brochure ?

I see you still can't hijack their bodies, and need to use technical measures.

Please return your evil overlord card.

You are right. YOU can't do it. You are so lame.

Actually, there are plenty of women around. They just don't want to talk to you :)

Hate it ? I couldn't care less one way or the other. I can only say about hiring practices and, at least on the marketing I have been watching, JAVA programmers are more in demand.

Also, JAVA means iPhone and Android development, another hot field right now.

I stopped discussing which language is "amazing" or whatnot back in the Lisp vs. Prolog days ...

(I'm going to disregard every single anecdotal evidence that is going to pop)

I started my career as an ASM developer, coding firmwares. Later I did projects in C and C++. I've seen serious projects in several languages, ranging from COBOL, FORTRAN, C, C++, FORTH, REXX, DELPHI, JAVA, C# and a few others.

If you want to get ahead in your career, stop playing with TOY languages. VB.NET is ok if you are doing a small 1-2 person project to manage your uncle's gas station, or something equivalent. If you want to work big corp, you need something that works for big projects. And that means more than just switching languages. You need to rethink your whole methodology. Software modeling, UML, the whole shebang.

If you want to be a 1 man shop, then you need to focus on reusability, portability and things like that. That means JAVA.

Script languages like RUBY and Python might also be a good idea if you want to go into web development.

So, what should you do ? I ask a different question: what can you afford to do ? Can you afford the time and costs of retraining ? What will you do in the mean time ? This switch is going to take you a couple years, most likely.

You need to understand your options a little better before deciding what you should do. Who knows, maybe a complete career change is in order. I'm a bit younger than you, and I'm working on switching out of IT. It is a 5-8 years plan. Doesn't happen overnight either.

So, let me get this straight. Said civilization is technologically advanced enough to build a Dyson sphere, but not to avoid energy leakage in heat form ? Sorry, I don't buy it. If they are starving for energy and have that kind of technology, why not convert that heat "exhaust" into thermal energy ?
 

Me ? Or narcc (412956) above ? :D

If they managed a single sale, they outperformed expectations ...

Humm, in my book, upsetting existing business models is the essence of capitalism. And that is a very good thing.

If you are careful, you can migrate most of the native apps to the new firmware. I did it with Motorola's MotoID. Make a backup with Titanium Backup, and restore it after flashing.