Well, that's funny, I also worked in the amazon for several months at a time, away from the internet (in eastern ecuador). I can't say I missed it -- no, I couldn't browse the web, but I also didn't have to deal with email and cell phone calls about stupid stuff. In that sense it was quite liberating.
It gave me a new perspective on my online life, and how much time I used to waste on stupidity like Facebook, for instance.
Most of them were in high school or junior high, and too busy being teenagers and worrying about the things teenagers normally worry about. All they are asking for is the same opportunity their parents had. You know, those people who actually were old to behave like responsible adults, old enough to vote, and actually did vote through all those costly initiatives and tax cuts that led this state to it's current dismal condition.
Compared to their parents, UC students today have to pay more, have to go deeper into debt, and to expect fewer services, and that's not their fault. Just be glad the UC system hasn't instituted the mandatory furloughs that the CSU system has, effectively shortening each semester by more than a week. College level education in this state is an utter mess. They have every right to be upset IMO, even if they are doing the silly protest and all that that college students always do.
"And yes, Java (and Windows) was designed to use low-skilled labor."
This is an assertion I've seen repeated many times, but never with anything to back it up. Do have any evidence for this, or is it just a feeling that you have? Based on what I've read, Java was designed for use in embedded systems like set top boxes, and the authors wanted to design away some common developer errors. An evolutionary biologist might say that Java was "pre-adapted" for use by low-skilled labor, but I don't think there is any indication that it was designed for it.
the authors wanted to design away some common developer errors, which average developer cannot overcome.
There is no rocket science in memory management and pointer manipulation, but, from commercial (manager's) point of view, those difficult to find and debug memory issues is the common cause of troubles with schedule and budget, because good programmers are rare, expensive and difficult to deal with, while average code monkeys are cheap in the first place, and easy to hire and replace.
That's why Java is the de-facto standard for corporate in-house development (read - coding fabrics) and no one in that world even considers that stuff like the ability (in theory) to run the same code on a different platform, especially while it is impossible in so-called objective reality. (Just try to run some bloated, poorly designed spring-hibernate-with-dependences project on a platform other than x86).
And finally, consider RoR - same approach, same and big success.
I'm not sure I'd describe them as healthy, exactly. They do place a strong emphasis on using good ingedients, but portion sizes are huge -- a chicken burrito is more than 1,000 calories.
On a computer, you have to also be concerned about error propagation and efficiency, and that can take what might be a very beautiful, simple solution on paper and explode it into a big ugly mess in code.
That doesn't mean it isn't fun, but it's a lot less clean than you might think.
http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo
How many other web companies serve ads on their "about" page? It seems like a really odd thing to do.