Staring to like Russia? You do realise that it's one of the most undemocratic and corrupt countries on earth and that most promises of significant reform that Medvedev/Putin have made over the years are meaningless. If you don't believe me go and live there for a while..

Or put http://www.senatoronline.org.au/ first. If they get a senator in, you can direct them to vote how you want and lobby your friends to do the same..

I wonder if anyone read TFA or just saw the word Monsanto and started frothing at the mouth/keyboard. For those too lazy to read it, here is what Prof Jones said about them: "Some fear the domination of the seed industry by multinationals, particularly Monsanto. Monsanto is certainly the most determined and successful agbiotech company. In their view, they had to be; they bet the company on agbiotech because unlike their rivals (who also sell nylon or agrichemicals) they had nothing else to fall back on. But monopoly is bad for everyone. Here's a part solution; deregulate GM. If it costs more than $20m (£13m) to get regulatory approval for one transgene, lots of little GM-based solutions to lots of problems will be too expensive and therefore not deployed, and the public sector and small start-up companies will not make the contribution they could. Never before has such excessive regulation been created in response to (still) purely hypothetical risks. The cost of this regulation - demanded by green campaigners - has bolstered the monopoly of the multinationals. This is a massive own-goal and has postponed the benefits to the environment and to us all." That sounds more to me like he is encouraging changes that would open up companies like Monsanto up to more competition. There are perhaps other regulatory changes that may help too (removing subsidies and relaxing the scope of what is patentable and for how long would also be very helpful) but the comment he makes seems quite valid. And not the sort of comment that a shill would make.

I kind of have the opposite view. The language is ok - but kind of verbose and a bit quirky as one of its design goals was to keep it similar to C++. However, for all the criticism that you may level at its API (and not all of it is awful - most is reasonably usable) what I like is that it does *so much* and it's available everywhere and works in the same way. That's a huge time saver. When I moved from Windows to Linux as my main OS, I didn't have to relearn *anything* to continue doing Java development; the main Java IDEs were identical as they're written in Java too. And when I go back to Windows at a client's site and they're using Java, it doesn't phase me more the same reason.