Only way we can convince people of othervise, is to make great games and great programs. Sitting around and talking each others ears off in a JAVA forum sponsored by SUN. Will never convince anyone.
That's a laudable aim, but it is NEVER going to work on it's own. Education - especially in the face of large vested interests and FUD - is all about a multi-pronged attack (preferably co-ordinated to maximum effect).
Hence, the GTG are (from what little they tell us):
- trying to get Sony to support a JVM on playstation
- trying to persuade large client-middleware companies (like Gamespy etc) to get more involved (I would imagine they're hoping ultimately to get them to properly support and provide java-versions of their libs)
- running a competition to find good java games
Unfortunately, they fail in several ways too. For instance:
- Jeff has now been tantalising us (for more than a year, no?) with a document that has actual facts and figures on how much dev time can be saved using java on a games project. It is sheer insanity that he "never has the time to photocopy this or put it up on a website" (paraphrase) and, IMHO, whoever is letting that be so low on his priorities deserves a slapping for sheer idiocy
- they sporadically (definitely not always) try to work against games developers and middleware providers instead of with them, citing their need to "make money". Despite ignoring several obvious ways they could work with developers AND make money. OK, so I guess that really they're being cunning and trying to get more in tune with the games industry by adoptiong NIH as their mantra

, so that they can speak the same language as games-industry execs
- Whoever the heck is in charge of press relations needs to be replaced. The majority of the press still have no idea the GTG even exists, and I'm still seeing press stories in major (6-digit readership) games and IT industry mags on java games issues where the GTG hasn't even been consulted. This is a year after they were founded!
Look these kinds of discussions are endless and fruitless.
Maybe for you. There are a lot of smart people in the mainstream games industry, and I've convinced more than a few that java is viable simply by explaining why it's as fast or faster than C++. These people are not stupid (at least, not all of them

) they're just ignorant; many have written GC's and similar themselves, more than once - just telling them which algorithms JVM's use these days for certain operations is enough to get them to sit up and say "Ah, well in *that* case, this is actually sounding worth using...".
I hear that constantly even at a instititute of "higher learning"
Then go find a better institute

although I sympathise; many academics have their heads rammed so far up their backsides it's hard for them to hear anything in the outside world, and they are often IME years if not decades behind the state of the art

. That's not necessarily a bad thing - if all you want them for is specialisation, great, but at *teaching* institutes its a frequent and major problem, since they often teach undergrads to be misinformed idiots

.