What does it mean to be a daemon thread?
<p>I'm fully aware of the impact of flagging a thread as a daemon thread on JVM exit (if all non-daemon threads exit, the JVM will exit.)</p>

<p>Are there other side-effects to setting a thread as a daemon?</p>

<p>(as a complete aside, which is really irrelevant except for semantics, is the meaning of a daemon thread not backwards in this case: shouldn't a daemon thread keep the JVM alive...for instance, if I wrote my own HTTP daemon and started it running, wouldn't I want the JVM to remain alive as long as that thread is alive?  Or is there some other semantic for the term 'daemon'?)</p>
