James Fallows

In gratitude to the many readers who have sent in pointers to this item, and in ongoing appreciation of the living national treasure that is Randall Munroe of xkcd, and as a little pre-Superbowl feature, here is a look at Munroe's latest "What If?" feature. In this installment, "Interplanetary Cessna," he asks how a small aircraft would fare on different bodies in and around the solar system. Sample visual aid:

Just now on CNN, the estimable* Candy Crowley asked a panel about the endless partisan standoffs and battles between the Obama administration and the Republican opposition.__

OK, I know, we get the point that Chuck Hagel's appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee displayed neither the nominee nor his inquisitors in a flattering light.

But there's another reason to feel bad about it! Here is a "word cloud" of what was discussed in the questions and the answers during Hagel's testimony:

1) Earlier today I mentioned several valuable, and in all cases downbeat, after-action reports on the dustup between former Senator Chuck Hagel and the current members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. To put the links all in once place, it's worth reading: Winslow Wheeler at Time's Battleland site, Michael Cohen in The Guardian, Matthew Duss in The American Prospect, Fred Kaplan in Slate, and John Judis in The New Republic. Plus others I'm sure I've missed. (Like Amy Davidson in The New Yorker.)

2) Here is a bonus entry by Gordon Adams in Foreign Policy. Apart from the reasons to moan about what the senators said at yesterday's session, Adams says we should worry about what they didn't say:

Putative secretary of defense Chuck Hagel had his baptism-by-fire yesterday at the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was all theater. One of its most striking features was the absence of almost any serious attention to the challenge he will actually face if he is confirmed: the management of a defense drawdown.

No senator focused on the Pentagon's long-term budget and management challenges. Not one.

3) A staff member for a former Republican member of the Senate adds this note of cheer:

Here's what bothers me about yesterday's confirmation hearing.

Say former Sen. Hagel does get confirmed.  The first bar a Secretary of Defense has to clear to be effective involves persuading people in that building across the river that he can't be pushed around.  You'll remember that Les Aspin, smart and well-connected as he was, failed to clear that bar 20 years ago.  But Gates cleared it, and so did Panetta.  Even Rumsfeld cleared it.

It will be more important for a Secretary who will have to impose budget reductions and other policy changes on the services to show he's not just a nice, thoughtful guy.  He'll need to show people in the Pentagon he can't be taken advantage of -- and also that he's strong enough to stick up for them should they come under political attack.

My sense is that Hagel didn't clear that bar yesterday.  Sure, members of the committee were unimpressive.  I don't know why people would be surprised by that.  The whole reason Hagel got this nomination, though, was that President Obama thought he'd be an effective Secretary of Defense.  Hagel's performance yesterday made me wonder whether Obama was right.

4) In the same vein, from another reader:

The 'beware what you wish for' misery index watch is next.

Hagel now knows that his tenure,while likely, is now doomed to ridicule and Senate/ House staff harassment.

That is now the true internal question.

Does he want to endure 4 years of staff to staff strife ?

10 to 15 Senate Dem staffer back stair emails to the WH is the key for the week. With the Iran whiff being the primary topic.

Secondly, if Republicans pick up Senate seats in 2014 the misery index will get pegged.

William Cohen must be grinning at this ...

5) Finally from Charlie Stevenson, former long-time Senate staffer and general expert in defense policy, this summary:

The Republican Senators seemed to be trying to bloody Hagel's nose as a surrogate for Obama's. They performed typically -- McCain especially. [I remember how he called the Joint Chiefs of Staffs liars in the late 1990s when they were unwilling to say Clinton's defense budget left America weak.] They acted as if Hagel would have the final say on policy questions, most of which would for sure be decided by the President. In other words, they were grandstanding. They had no strong argument against Hagel, just a thousand cuts of little misstatements from his past.

Hagel wasn't as crisp or clever or self-assured as I expected. He may not have realized how tough it is to be on the receiving end of TV-conscious Senators. He may also have thought that prior friendships would still count in this age of hyper-partisanship and after he became an apostate Republican.

I still think he can win a majority vote if it's taken soon. But if Republicans want to delay a vote with a threatened filibuster, they might reach a tipping point where the White House and Senate Democrats give up.

I also still think that Hagel will (and should be) confirmed. But his situation looks worse now than it did a few days ago.

Two years ago, Mark Bernstein was part of the stellar guest-blogger team in this space, when I was holed up in China in a fever of book-writing. In his day job, Mark Bernstein is the head of Eastgate software and the creator of a program I use every day, Tinderbox.

He is in his own own fever of composition now, preparing a new version of Tinderbox. On his site he has a fascinating account of how he went about adding a particular feature to this new release. Here's the headline:



If you have any interest in software, I think you'll find this worth reading. It reminded me in many ways of the months I once spent on a Microsoft program-design team. But much more broadly it is part of the endlessly engrossing category of "how things work" in the world.

I won't give my full speech on that topic right now, but I will say that for me one of the big appeals of journalism is the opportunity and excuse to meet people in far-flung roles and ask: OK, can you tell me exactly, step by step by step, how you [decide on questions for the SAT / figure out how much weight you can take out of a car's design so it uses less gas / decide when software is "bug-free enough" to be released / create an airplane with a parachute / teach a computer to "understand" speech or automatically group related news articles / set up a factory that employs 250,000 people / decide what to put into a half-hour news broadcast, back when those existed / anything else.]

Almost any organized human activity is much more complicated and interesting than you would expect, once you examine it in its particularity. For instance: I have never taken mail delivery for granted after my earliest paying jobs as a parcel-post sorter and then letter carrier at the local Post Office. People scoff at the USPS, but it pulls off some amazing feats of volume management -- even as today's volume sadly goes down.

This brings me back to Mark Bernstein's chronicle. The next time you grumble at some aspect of the tech world -- "wow, this is ugly UI!" "why won't this damned program do what I want?" -- reflect on the long series of choices and trade-offs that go into even the simplest-seeming feature of program. As a reminder, here is where you can read more.

For decades Winslow Wheeler was an influential congressional staffer on matters of budget, strategy, and policy involving the military. Back in 2008 I mentioned the excellent book he had overseen, America's Defense Meltdown.

This morning, on Time's Battleland site, he convincingly explains why yesterday's Chuck Hagel hearing should be considered "profoundly depressing" all around. Heart of the argument, with which I agree:

Unlike most effective politicians who are always clever at saying nothing or changing positions, [Hagel] was so inarticulate at doing so that it is also hard to understand how he ever could have been elected twice to the Senate from Nebraska.

As fumbling and apologetic as Hagel's answers were to the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, even my low expectations for the performance of the senators on that committee went unmet.

A few more details after the jump. Not a great day for anyone.

More »

1) Whoever helped former Senator Chuck Hagel (AP photo) prepare for today's hearings should retire from the hearing-preparation business. It is hard to imagine how Hagel could have walked into that hearing room without bulletproof (or at least confident-sounding) replies ready on three of the questions he was sure to be asked: about his opposition to the Iraq "surge," about his comments on "the Jewish lobby," and about his policy toward Iran.

Maybe this was the same team that prepared Barack Obama for his first debate last fall? Just a thought.

2) Whatever mistakes Obama may have made as president, today's hearings reminded us of one very important accomplishment. Because of him, the choleric and bullying figure that John McCain has become does not sit in the White House.

3) Virtually none of the hostile questions for Hagel reflected awareness that a secretary of Defense, no matter how influential, does not set U.S. foreign policy, does not decide where and whether to commit troops, does not decide on boycotts versus engagement with Iran, does not make war-or-peace decisions, and in countless other ways is not the President of the United States. We're used to "security theater" at the airport. "Hearings theater" is a far longer-established practice.

1) Here is a beautiful photo by Patrick Yuen, used with his permission, that captures the mood and drama of Chen Guangcheng's presentation at the National Cathedral last night.



The picture is from more or less the place where I was sitting and distills the hold that Chen Guangcheng had over the audience as he spoke.

2) In addition to the Washington National Cathedral's own webcast of the event, another MP4 video of the whole session is available here.

When I find a transcript of the speech as a whole, I will mention it. But here is another sample section, about the role and potential influence of foreigners:

I'm often asked what the international community can do to help promote democracy and rule of law in China. I sincerely hope that people around the world will lose their fear of offending China because it's rich and powerful. I want people to stop turning a blind eye to the abuses that people throughout China are suffering. Stop supporting the myth that anyone who urges the Communist Party to abide by their own laws will be retaliated against and be treated as an enemy of the state. Don't do anything on the basis that China's rulers will be pleased or not pleased

In the last part of the panel discussion, Jerome Cohen, Cheng Li, and Dorinda Elliott enlarge on what this means in practice.

3) The latest Chinese-based hacking attacks against the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and other news outlets may well have occurred at a level where passwords on individual accounts don't offer protection. Nonetheless, I've used this as an occasion to change all my important passwords, which I've done today. (Background point one: this piece. Background point two: I use and like LastPass.)

Of course, we must maintain an open mind about these episodes. Heed the words of the Chinese foreign ministry, which says that the idea of Chinese hacking is "groundless":

"To arbitrarily assert and to conclude without hard evidence that China participated in such hacking attacks is totally irresponsible," said spokesman Hong Lei.

"China is also a victim of hacking attacks. Chinese laws clearly forbid hacking attacks, and we hope relevant parties takes a responsible attitude on this issue."

Noted. For the record, here is Chen Guangcheng last night on what Chinese laws "clearly forbid." Let's hope his assessment proves too harsh:

In China, the law is optional, something that those in power use when it suits them and ignore when it doesn't. The law in China is nothing more than empty words, just scraps of paper. 

I think most members of the (very large) crowd that came (through thunderstorms) to the Washington National Cathedral to hear Chen Guangcheng tonight had the sense of witnessing a moment they will remember.

Just now I see that a video of the whole session has been posted on the National Cathedral's site. I don't see a way to embed it, but here is a shot of how things looked in real time. 

Anyone interested in China, anyone interested in democratic change and the power of individuals and groups, will find Chen's presentation moving, and inspiring. His presentation starts at around time 7:40 of the video; the standing ovation that followed his remarks begins about 30 minutes later; the post-speech panel, featuring Cheng Li, Dorinda Elliott, and Jerome Cohen and moderated by me, starts at around time 39:00.

The power of Chen Guangcheng's statement, and the subject of most of the post-speech discussion, was its combination of harsh realism and idealistic confidence. A sample of the harsh assessment (my notes, not official transcript -- which I'll provide when available):

The current situation in China works against the long-term stability of the Party, and senior officials are aware of this--they just can't do anything because the Party refuses to relax its grip on power. As long as China's rulers use mafia-like suppression to maintain stability, rather than legitimacy, China will only become increasingly unstable. The Communist Party officials are leaders in name only, in reality closer to our nation's kidnappers.

And of the contrasting confidence:

Courage is starting to spread as Chinese citizens become more aware of the issues via the Internet and more willing to speak out about injustices. They are no longer afraid,

According to a Chinese saying, there are no difficult tasks, but rather only people who lack the courage to act. And as more and more Chinese people speak out and demand their rights, change in China will become unstoppable. ...

 Our fate is in our own hands. People are overcoming their fears and when this number reaches a critical mass change will become inevitable. Nothing could scare the Chinese government more than the fact that the people are losing their fear.  In the past, threats and violence were effective.  But when people are no longer afraid, violence and threats lose their power.  Instead of silencing people, it motivates them. 

I don't think anyone filling the recesses of the Cathedral regretted the effort of getting there on a difficult night. Jerome Cohen also pointed out the the very act of gathering a large crowd for Chen in America offset one of the standard fears of the exile civil-liberties crusader: that once he is sent away from the homeland, people will stop paying attention. Chen deserves close attention, and respect.

If you're in Washington DC this evening, January 30, you have a chance to hear Chen Guangcheng speak about the "Search for China's Soul." Here is a picture of Chen from our "Brave Thinkers" issue last fall.

1) What's wrong with the 787 Dreamliner? No one knows for sure, now that the simplest and most easily correctable problem -- some production defect in the specific batch of batteries involved in two recent incidents -- appears to have been ruled out.

2) Which means that the problems are by definition worse than they originally appeared. Not necessarily worse in a fundamental-safety or design-defect sense, but worse for Boeing and the airlines in commercial and reputational terms, because it will take longer to be sure what exactly has gone wrong and what it will take to correct the problem.

2A) It is still likely that this will ultimately prove to be one more "glitch" in the roll-out of the 787, rather than a "threat" to its commercial and technological viability. Most new airliners have early problems as they go into service. But no one can be sure that this is in "glitch" category until the problem is fully understood.

2B) This is "one more" glitch for the Dreamliner because of the multi-year delays that arose from Boeing's unusually aggressive outsourcing of the plane's design, as I discussed in China Airborne and as the LA Times exhaustively examined two years ago.

3) Today's most trenchant data point comes from Elon Musk (above), one of the Atlantic's "Brave Thinkers" from two years ago, whom I interviewed at our 'Atlantic Meets Pacific' conference late in 2011. In an email exchange with Zach Rosenberg of Flight Global, Musk says that the lithium-ion batteries in the Dreamliner are "inherently unsafe" in the configuration Boeing has chosen for the plane.

Musk's views have weight. Not simply does he have aerospace credibility, as head of the SpaceX company that has sent successful missions into space. He also is head of Tesla, which uses lithium-ion batteries in its electric cars. [For the record: his SpaceX company also competes with a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture for commercial launch customers.] The Flight Global article lays out his argument in detail. The simplest version of Musk's complaint is that Boeing has concentrated the battery power in too small a number of large cells located too close to one another -- rather than dispersing the power among smaller, more widely separated cells. As Musk put it:

When thermal runaway occurs with a big cell, a proportionately larger amount of energy is released and it is very difficult to prevent that energy from then heating up the neighboring cells and causing a domino effect that results in the entire pack catching fire.

Every day the problem is not isolated and identified makes the story worse for Boeing. Again, it's likely that this will be a containable and correctable issue, but Boeing will be in much better shape when it can say that for sure.

I mentioned last month that the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, "my" NRA, was like the real NRA in some of its intransigent lobbying -- but different in its near-obsessive focus on identifying and reducing the factors that create dangers from flying, for pilots and innocent passengers alike. The video below is the kind of thing I have in mind. It's a recreation, from the AOPA's Air Safety Foundation, of the "accident chain" that led to the death of four people -- in the same kind of airplane that I fly. ___
* In both cases, the essential problem was the one that William Langewiesche described 20 years ago in his Atlantic article "The Turn." If you cannot see out of an airplane, if you can't look at the ground or orient yourself to the horizon, it is simply impossible by "seat of the pants" sensations to tell up from down, or know which direction you are flying. That sounds unlikely, but Langewiesche explains why it is so -- and why pilots who have not been through "instrument training" inevitably start spiraling toward the ground once they get into the clouds. That is what happened to JFK Jr., and it is what appears to have happened in this sad case.

I took my "practical exam," or check flight, for an instrument rating the day after the JFK Jr. crash. I heard about it in detail through those next few hours.

Last week I mentioned the effects that China's latest pollution emergency was having on Chinese citizens and foreigners living there. Here's a picture posted on Twitter just now from a friend in Beijing, showing the view from the 30th floor out toward our former neighborhood.



Some related notes that have come in, about a problem increasingly recognized inside China as a national emergency. From a reader in the United States:

A reader with experience in Asia writes, in a note with the subject line "Karnow in the Harvard journalism pantheon":

I don't believe you can understand the period [Vietnam and the Sixties] without reading Karnow, Halberstam, and Teddy White basically at same time.

Adding Robert Caro is probably needed as well.*

Any university course on the early 60's, LBJ, and Vietnam is really quite vacuous without these 4 writers.

Which the critics and reviewers, with their fancy emphasis on "plot" and "casting," might not encourage you to do. But this is what my wife and I unexpectedly ended up doing last night after trawling through the TiVo to see what movies it had hauled in.

Reason One: This movie humanizes the TSA. It had to happen sometime.

Reason Two: The dramatic payoff, which I can reveal without spoiler danger, occurs when a previously downcast and disrespected character demonstrates his overall success in life (plus success with the girls) by becoming ... a Cirrus SR-22 pilot!

Good to see a movie that is so true-to-life in depicting the markers of suaveness and accomplishment.
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Bonus reason to see the movie: the very edgy Krysten Ritter, best known as the doomed consort of Aaron Paul/Jesse in Breaking Bad, returns as the sarcastic, put-down-look-that-could-shoot-a-Predator-drone-out-of-the-sky friend of the leading lady.

Bonus proof that the She's Out of My League guy figured out exactly the right way to demonstrate his omni-directional appeal and sophistication: Angelina Jolie flies this plane too. So there.

 

Taylor Branch is known to the world as author of the monumental "America in the King Years" trilogy. He's additionally known to Atlantic readers for his definitive cover story "The Shame of College Sports" in late 2011. He is additionally known to me as my immediate predecessor as a writer and editor at The Washington Monthly in the early 1970s. I was just out of graduate school and looking for a job, and he was leaving the job and headed to Texas to work with a young aspiring politico from Arkansas [yes, Yale law student Bill Clinton] on the McGovern campaign there.

This afternoon I had an opportunity to interview Taylor Branch at the Aspen Institute's offices in Washington on his new book The King Years, as part of Aspen's Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series. This was about as interesting an hour-plus as I can remember spending. The video of the session is below. When you have some time to listen to Taylor's full account, I think you will be glad to have done so. If you want to feel both better and worse, contrast the way you hear Taylor discuss the currents and contradictions in America's politics with the way you usually hear them presented by practitioners and analysts today. Better, because of the context he adds; worse, because of what is normally left out.



If you can hear only a little bit of this, listen to the first 10-minute discussion, in which Taylor Branch explains why he thinks we should be kicking off a series of week-by-week observations of the 50th anniversary of fateful moments of 1963. Here is the YouTube link as well.

Thanks to many people who have written in about the small-plane crash on Tuesday night near the airport in Danbury, Connecticut (KDXR for you aviation people). This gets my attention because the plane that went down was the same Cirrus model whose design and business concepts I've often written about (book, article, different book) and that I now fly.*

It got attention in the non-flying world because the crash ended up in a "save." The most famous feature of the Cirrus line of aircraft -- which are now the most popular small propeller planes in the world**, from a company founded in Duluth, Minnesota that is now owned by the Chinese state aerospace corporation -- is the parachute for the whole plane. These are designed to save everyone on board (up to four people) when the alternative is a crash. Here is how the parachute looked in test deployments -- bringing the whole plane down more or less level to the ground.




Now, here is a post-crash picture on Tuesday night in Danbury.



It's not entirely clear why the plane is pointing nose-downward. Perhaps the parachute was deployed late, so that its "risers" that level out the descent did not have time to deploy fully? (Here is a diagram, from my book Free Flight, of what happens with the risers in the few seconds it takes the chute to deploy fully. Read it from right to left.) Perhaps the plane got hung up on something near the ground? Whatever the reason, the cockpit and cabin were intact, the pilot and passengers were unharmed, and all aboard walked away.

Why did the plane crash at all? For one reason or another, the plane's engine apparently stopped running a few miles short of the Danbury airport. A mechanical failure of some sort? Simply running out of gas, or "fuel starvation," which is statistically the most common cause of small-plane engine failures? All this will be sorted out eventually. The Cirrus has a very sophisticated systems-monitoring device that would presumably survive this crash and that records second-by-second measurements of most flight variables.

For the moment the reaction in pilot-land is "the penalty for bad luck or mistakes should not be death." The consequences of engine failure, at night, over wooded terrain would usually be quite grim. Or, as a local fire official put it to WTNH:

A parachute safety system deployed to help bring the plane down slowly. Airport officials say the pilot reported engine problems 5 miles out and when they were 2 miles out they pulled the parachute.

"They were nervous 'cause it just happened but other than that it was just like a normal accident. They were upset that the plane had crashed but they were fine," said Asst. Chief Steve Williams. "The airplane's designed for this. The company that designs this airplane sells this parachute as a safety item and obviously it worked. 3 people are walking around with no injuries because of the parachute system."

__

If you don't have time to watch all 30 minutes of the "G+ Hangout" that ended an hour ago, about the current pollution emergency in China, I strongly recommend that you watch at least the last 10 minutes. Here's the background:

This broadcast is part of a weekly series on events in China, run by Fons Tuinstra, whom I knew in Beijing. The main guest is Richard Brubaker, who lives in Shanghai and teaches at a well known business school there. The topic is the recent spate of historically bad air-pollution readings in many Chinese cities, especially Beijing. The whole discussion is important and interesting, and here are some of the early highlights:

• Time 9:20+ how ordinary Chinese citizens are affected by the emergency
• 11:15+ why the respective geographies of Beijing and Shanghai usually make problems worse in Beijing (which like LA sits in a bowl where air gets trapped), but why Shanghai is suddenly "catching up" and in a worst-ever situation for air quality;
  
• 12:15+ why parents of small children must constantly worry about air quality, along with food safety
• 13:00-15:00+ why not only foreigners but increasing numbers of young Chinese say they are thinking of leaving the country to escape the air, water, and food problems.
  

That's just the buildup. What I really want you to watch is ....



... the last ten minutes of the broadcast, starting around time 20:00. Very matter-of-factly Brubaker lays out the basic realities of China's environmental/economic/social/political conundrum:

• that its pollution and other environmental strains are the direct result of rapidly bringing hundreds of millions of peasants into urban, electrified, motorized life;
• that China's economic and political stability depends on continuing to bring hundreds of millions more people off the farm and into the cities;
• that China's practices and standards in city planning, transport, architecture, etc are still so inefficient enough that, even with its all-out clean-up efforts, its growth is disproportionately polluting. In Europe, North America, Japan, etc each 1% increase in GDP means an increase of less than 1% in energy and resource use, emissions, etc. For China, each 1% increment means an increase of more than 1% in environmental burden. And, the most important part for Western readers:
• this cannot go on. Brubaker makes a point ignored in virtually every breezy prediction of the inevitable Chinese future: that environmental constraints are the most urgent of several limits affecting the famed "Chinese growth model," and because of them it is far from obvious that China will ever "overtake" the United States or anyone else.

None of this is "new," but it is useful to have it all put together so concisely. I respond so strongly to this point because it's a central argument of my recent book and other dispatches for the Atlantic. Also Brubaker explains why it's "true," but meaningless, that every industrializing country has gone through its own stage of hellish rape-of-the-land-and-air. I grew up in the Southern California of the terrible-smog era of the 1960s, and have described what that bodes for possible improvements in Beijing. (Part one, two, and three.) Alexis Madrigal recently compared China's problems to those of Pittsburgh at its worst.

Brubaker's point, which I agree with, is: the comparisons don't matter. China's scale and speed are so different that its environmental problems constitute a unique emergency, for its own people and for the world.

Happy New Year!

I'm not that one man -- I'm the one who has been passing along various warnings about possible vulnerabilities in the Java programming language.

But for the record, here's another side of the story, from a long-time programming veteran in Canada the UK named John Spragge. He lays out one version on his site but sent this elaboration. At the end he points out that even he has disabled Java on his own browser -- but he wants to defend the honor of Java in a broader sense. Emphasis added:

•  In a neighbourhood afflicted by a string of burglaries, the headlines do not read: Locks Fail in Leaside. Every story about an "exploit" should, at least in passing, lay the blame where it belongs: with people who take advantage of that security flaw to harm or extort other people. Yes, I do mean every single story, every single web log post. I do expect journalists to continually remind us, and themselves, that we have a choice about living in the network version of Hobbes's war of all against all.
  
  
•  On the subject of war: the governments that have evidently decided to take their conflicts into our living rooms, work places, children's schools, power plants and hospitals by making it "cyber war" do not answer to some mysterious force from outer space. They answer to us. We can demand general disarmament. Whether or not we choose to do this, I expect the people now hounding Oracle for "security flaws" to at least mention the truth in passing. Government preparations to make war on the net don't threaten us because of Java; they threaten us because of the choices many of our own governments make.
  
  
• Every day, I encounter downloads of applications from publishers that don't provide a digital signature and expect me to run their products in native mode, on the bare metal in my computer. Like most users, I make the best of this: I scan every file I load or download with two virus scanners, one of which keeps demanding that I uninstall the other. In this environment, the idea that Java stands out as a particular threat, particularly one so severe it requires government coercion, doesn't pass the laugh test.

I have a simple plea: let us not lose sight of the many innovations of Java.

Working with Java, I and many other programmers first encountered an integrated approach to coding and documentation through JavaDoc. Java offered the first and still some of the best facilities to integrate a flexible programming language and the W3C xml language. 

Above all, Java integrated the language and support routines, and in the process instituted and enforced coding standards. Languages such as c and c++ have no rules and standards for identifiers: Java does. That alone adds considerably to a priceless asset: any reasonably skilled programmer who knows Java conventions can read a Java application source and have a pretty good chance of understanding it. With c or c++ or some other language that does not provide a common naming scheme, a programmer must work harder to do the same thing. Java designers also added considerably to its readability by eliminating the requirement for headers, that fragmented the sources of c and c++ into headers and regular files, the simple rational structure of packages, classes and interfaces, and the rule that every public class should have its own source file, and that file should have the name of the class it contains. These simple intuitive rules, coded into the structure of the Java language, did a huge amount to propagate good program design practise....

I should emphasize that my plea for perspective does NOT mean I ask people to disregard the practical advice to disable Java applet containers on web clients. Implementation of Java applets on Firefox and other web browsers does probably present a security risk. Users should certainly download the latest patches, and if the web sites they use do not require Java applets (the ones I use don't) they should disable Java on the browser (I do). Unfortunately, the attacks on this remarkable programming language have gone way beyond this simple wisdom and turned into a vendetta, which risks ignoring a great many significant accomplishments.

Another perspective on Java here, thanks to reader EG.