The US isn't losing its scientific dominance...yet...

We were talking at lunch about the story in the NY Times; and I'm not sure that I agree with their premise. However, on /. there is an interesting comment:

"It's the fact that these (NSF) grants are very hard to get, and even top researchers with excellent track records of doing things with funding are not getting grants"

Uh, yah, that'd be us. Our group had funding for about 17 consecutive years; I show up and all hell breaks loose. I swear it's not related. Still, we're waiting to see if we get any funding this go-around. It puts a big cramp in our planning because we know if we get funding, we have a research direction and we will be able to achieve these goals with suitable funding. So, we really can't go down any other paths until we know if we have funding. And, if we don't get funding, everyone in our group will need to do some soul-searching or it'll bounce us all out of P.Q.S. (see below)!

As one of my colleagues has said, "Vote for people who want big bombs and planes. We like them. They fund us." So so so true.

Oh, this is me, by the way: Living with P.Q.S. It's not even funny. Yah, it is, actually.

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Are wildcard imports harmful in Java?

I got into a discussion the other day with a colleague who thinks that fully qualified import Java statements are a horrible idea and that all packages should be imported via the .* idiom (i.e. import java.util.List vs. java.util.*).

My personal experience has been that this is a bad idea as the .'s make it almost impossible to understand the class hierarchy when you try to read the code. I've also been bitten a number of times by inadvertent class collisions. Can anyone shed some light on what the *current recommended practice is? Has the Java community (perhaps the OSS Java community) settled upon an accepted modus operandi for doing imports?

Beers to people at the next ApacheCon if they can shed some light on this. And, yes, I realize this could be a bikeshed, but I don't care...

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