This blog is really insightful, discussing many poignant issues in programming. I have spent the last hour or so browsing. Everything in the blog seems to indicate that he has it together with Java, except this part:

During a conversation with Diego today, he pointed out that the protected qualifier in Java does not prevent access to classes within the same package.

That was news to me. I always thought protected limited the access to subclasses of the class that contains the protected member.

Really? How did you not know that? No matter, the rest is pretty good.