So what's it like programming on DOS in 2014?

Your statement is shit. "Some guy I knew a long time ago once used threads for some unspecified purpose and when he got to thousands of threads it become very slow". Well that is just great. What was he trying to do? How was he trying to do it? You act like your anecdote proves something but without this information it contributes nothing to what could have been an interesting discussion.

Since the discussion was originally about COBOL, are you suggesting that language is more suited to massive multithreading than Java? If so, why? And if you truly need thousands of threads, perhaps you need Erlang?

Are you seriously suggesting COBOL is more suitable for massive multi-threading than Java?

Irrelevant, an actual testdrive is also not going to cover all possible scenarios, and appears to be sufficient at this time. Remember, perfect is the enemey of good.

I imagine someone who would do that on purpose must be suffering from some serious mental problem, or must have been blackmailed or under some kind of duress. Certainly they do deserve sympathy and help.

If it flies at approximately the same height as where the fireworks explode, how would that happen?

Volatile tells the compiler it may not eliminate or introduce reads and writes to a variable that did not exist in the source code. They also cannot be reordered with respect to other volatile variables.

No, that would be implementation defined behavior.

While one might argue that forbidding them from donating is unfair, or has a basis in incorrect assumptions, let us not pretend that allowing gay men to donate blood would make a significant difference if a shortage exists. What percentage of the population is a homosexual male? Perhaps 3%?

Since the sun gets about 10% brighter every billion years we'll be dead long before either of those things happen.

Remember kids, what goes up must come down... in unrelated news, people who oppose drones can be recognized by the nails, wires, and other 'terrible obstacles' that embedded in their face.

Oh my god that's so unreasonable, especially compared to the rest of Europe!

Not this compiler-inserted backdoor crap again... Look, an assembler could insert a backdoor as well. And any of the developers could insert a backdoor. Did you read the entire source code? Even if you did, do you think you could find a cleverly hidden backdoor?

Besides, all you need to do to get rid of the hidden compiler backdoor (assuming there is one) is write your own compiler, use it to compile the suspected compiler, then use the generated compiler to compile itself, and presto, the backdoor is gone. Writing an interpreter instead of a compiler is also an option. Since you only need to do this whole process once, your compiler doesn't need to do any smart optimization and it's acceptable for the whole process to take some time (a week? a month? who cares).