"Programmer" was good enough for Brian Kernighan, so it's definitely good enough for me. If I were Dennis Ritchie I'd call myself a computer scientist, but I've met Dennis Ritchie and I'm no Dennis Ritchie. However, I can still program computers way better than most and that's good enough for me.

Why all the freakishly negative comments about one of the best languages to come along in a while? Super blazingly fast and fun to program. No, it's not ruby or python, but then again those languages are slow as thick shit in comparison. Anyway, if Java is going to succeed on the desktop it has to be possible to write apps which don't take up 500M of RAM, like Eclipse for example. That thing uses 500M of real memory for what!? Displaying a UI, edit three or four files, a console window ... I mean, this is 500M we're talking about. I blame Swing and the fact that its components are based on AWT Component, which is a huge memory hog with about 60 instance variables - holy cow, I thought I was exaggerating but it's close enough (53 + 13 because JComponent extends Container not Component). 66 * 8 = 512 bytes although not all elements are pointers I admit. Awesome! (not). I wonder if things would have been different if they didn't completely screw up Swing. AWT was done in about a week in 1995, it's OK that it wasn't perfect. But there is no excuse for Swing to suck so badly.

I delete all my cookies except a few every time I close my browser. That works in Chrome, Safari and Firefox now. In chrome I press a button to remove the cookies it would delete if I exited right now. I checked the advertising sites and they don't know me. Google knows me for as long as I keep my browser window open. Facebook doesn't follow me around on the web either. I use the Vanilla plugin for chrome. Hope that's good enough.

On FB, everything you post is recorded for later reference by the authorities.

Until it scrolls off the bottom you mean ... right!?

If it wasn't way more than spit-shined people wouldn't fall for it. There's a reason why people are, in increasing numbers, willing to pay an Apple premium: the product exhibits better taste from the hardware design to the software running on the thing, whether it's computers, phones, iPods, wi-fi base stations. You can deny that if you want but you start to look stupid after a while. Are all the people in the world paying more that stupid? Or are you just that stubborn? Or are you a closet fanboy?

I'll tell you what's stupid: paying for the same old products from Microsoft and expecting a 20 year old situation to suddenly be different. MSFT's products are getting worse over time (except for the Vista hiccup) especially in the MSFT Office department, where Word is truly one of the worst applications I have ever seen in my life. Exhibiting poor taste and poor quality at every step of the way, it kills me that everybody continues to buy that crap and feed the monster.

OK: I am willing to say Windows 7 might be an improvement over XP. But ... just barely ... and what was it, 10 years later?

During slow periods (or "important research") at my last job, we spent hours playing Grand Theft Auto in the office. On the way home from work I had to resist the temptation to side-swipe a cop in downtown Palo Alto, and even more amazing was I didn't feel the need to hit the breaks going around the corner, and I squealed the whole way around the corner. And I was already a 20 year driving veteran who is getting more cautious as time goes by. I cannot imagine what a teenager would be like under the same circumstances. I am sure they would be playing a lot more than I, as well.