That sounds like pretty much every sportsing description ever!

I thought the movie was an accurate view of the book, as can be seen here: http://lotrproject.com/blog/20...

How many nits could a nit picker pick, if a nit picker could pick nits?

There are lots of languages that run on the JVM. At my current work, we regularly use Scala and Groovy alongside our existing Java codebase.

Tim Bray wrote about this situation years ago: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace (and I think I heard the "sharecropping" term used from earlier, too). Essentially, when developers work on a platform owned by someone else, you are fully at their mercy.

I originally read that as "America is a set of subhumanity", which seemed a bit harsh.

Having some sort of online presence is a great way to control (or at least influence) the image about you online. There's a heap of stuff on google about personal brand management. This one looked like it had a lot of relevant points regarding why you should consider this to be important: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/04/building_personal_brand.html