This is the method that's called during idle time. Then it repaints the game view, and puts itself on the AWT event queue to be run again when idle. The net result is that the display is surprisingly responsive, the game runs at a constant speed, and there is no need to worry about synchronization. Sure, right now I'm only drawing dots and lines, but there's some pretty nasty calculations going on under the hood. Thanks to a bitchin' FPU in the Pentium, game designers were free to throw away all their fixed-point assembly routines, and recline in the forgiving arms of floating point numbers.
Life is indeed good.
They may make some things simpler, but they introduce a world of complications. Division by zero, multiplication overflow, addition overflow. That's about it. Physics really ain't my cup of tea, but the challenge and satisfaction of seeing algorithms in action is worth the headache. Maybe it was too easy.