Though much less awesome was all the Flash, Realplayer and other plugins required.

The historical Java patterns of factories of gizmos modified by adapters on adapters etc. really makes the large codebases miserable to work on. Along its enterprise lifespan it picked up all the fad modelling/project jargon/pattern nonsense (which as you rightly say were there to limit creativity) and that is now embedded in codebases. It might be that a new Java enterprise application started from scratch would be lovely, but those are rarely seen in the actual enterprise world.

I don't think it was ever uncool because of the core language, it was always uncool because of the standard libraries, UIs and culture.

I'd be interested to know how you think the business folks should judge the benefit statements without the detail that they could run by experienced developers? Surely they get a lot of vapourware pitches all the time.

> Nothing about downloading an MP3 that says they can't put a targeted ad in it; there's podcasts that do that based on your IP. I assume the reason most don't is just how much more trustworthy it sounds when the host reads an ad script live in the episode.

I'm in the UK and noticed both kind of happening: an ad for LinkedIn (I think) was localised to use a UK example in several episodes of This American Life during the last year. It was spliced into the programs seamlessly and sounded just like any of their usual sponsorship segments.

I'm presuming they just edited a handful of versions of the program for their largest listener regions and there was no need to do anything on the fly except pick which to serve. Of course I paid little attention to the ad as I was distracted more by it being the first time I'd noticed that kind of localisation.

The main purpose of that statement (as always with Ryanair) was to state it was outside of their control and therefore they will auto-reject any claims for delay compensation, regardless of legality.