This is funny. You should say that you are joking or the conservatives might print it.

This is crap. "Decisions at a local level?" So now we are entitled to facts at a local level. In one county, they think the earth is flat and the other they think it is round. This whole think puts the whole country to shame. Government should not force academia to any facts. Historians write history not f**ing politicians. Shame shame, this is why the GOP is being depleted of brains, you only have wackos there now.

A well designed java app would probably run very close to C++. Depending on what they do, using easy caching, streaming and string manipulation techniques by using StringBuffer when possible can make all of the difference in the speed. I would pick java because is a powerful language with very strong rules and without the pitfalls of writing code in C/C++. I have 20 years experience working with C/C++, Java, Pascal. I only ever venture in C/C++ just to write low level hardware dependent stuff. VB is a joke. My choice would be Java.