I really miss the good old days when technical debates were over the merits and faults of such simple things as different kinds of kernels, and not about whether or not every single thing you do online is being stacked into half a dozen nation's permanent data storage facilities.

The Linus vs. Tanenbaum dustup is from a simpler, more positive age.

That's rubbish. Most of the major platforms have had Java ported to them. Including various obscure systems is ludicrous. If I want a program that I'm almost guaranteed will run without recompile on Linux, Windows, BSD and even many mainframes, then Java remains the best solution. I'm not saying, from a programming perspective, that it's all that great, but from a platform neutral perspective for most of the systems that a programmer will encounter, it remains the best.

Have fun running an x86-64 Linux binary natively on a Windows 8 machine. I can. however, write a Java program that I can almost guarantee will in fact run on x64 Linux or Windows.

No, it is popular because, despite a good many flaws, it remains the best cross platform solution we have.

Thank goodness, too, otherwise I'd confuse Superman with Supperman.

I feel totally protected.

Superman, standing for truth, justice and IP rights!

Talk to me agitation when you've read the IPCC report. I won't debate with John Regurgibots.

In other words, fuck out you lying ignoramus

Or we can analyse the fallacy involved in you trying, without any justification, to tie climatologists to eugenicists. It seems your Just as guilty of the behaviours laid out in the article ad, say, Creationists

If you shot all the people you believe are demon possessed, there will be far less people you believe to be demon possessed. That doesn't make demon possession real.

Eugenics is based in part on gross oversimplifications of genetics and in part on the absurd idea that attributes like economic status are biologically heredity.

True, but some of us are willing to accept that the universe doesn't give a fuck about ideology.

When AGW first became a big issue in the 1990s I was talking against it as a big scam on Usenet; particularity my old haunt talk.origins. it was when one of the regulars, a biologist (why any scientist would waste his time debating Creationists I'll never understand), pointed out to me that the theory was reasonably well supported, there were a boatload of papers and that science isn't the product of emotional need, and I finally accepted that AGW, even if it suggested things that I didn't like, was legitimate science.

The analogy seems fine to me. In both cases you have a large amount of potential energy (in one case gravity, in the other frictional forces) and in both cases a catalyst of relatively small amounts of energy can upset the system and cause a much larger release of energy.

Oil company employee finds no problem with oil extraction. News at 11.

If extraction is causing property damage, then property owners should be compensated. If other forms of environmental damage are being caused by these practices, the practices should be evaluated.

I'm not clear why it should. If you have geological structures under stress, there is already considerable energy in the system, and it may only take a small amount of additional energy to release the much larger amount being pent up.

If you have a bowling ball balanced at the top of a cliff, the energy released by it falling and hitting the ground far below is far greater than the energy required to push it over the cliff.

Huh? It's been demonstrated many times in many different ways that gravity is by far the weakest of the fundamental interactions. Gravity makes little difference at the atomic and subatomic levels. Atoms are not mini-solar systems. The forces that bind atomic nuclei and bind electrons to atomic nuclei are fundamentally different from gravity. Here's a tip; at least at the temperatures and densities you will find virtually everywhere in the universe today; gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak interactions are very different.

Christ pal, your claim was known to be rubbish eighty years ago. To see someone making a claim that atoms are mini solar systems in the 21st century isn't too far different from someone claiming the Sun orbits the Earth.

No, they really are not. Gravity has very little effect at the atomic level, but at the level of solar systems is the primary force.