"As far as cold in Europe, cherry picking a few UK averages doesn't actually impart much information about what's happening."

You chose Britain. If your cherry picking backfired, don't blame me. Just learn to realise that if you're going to cherry pick based on some factually incorrect newspaper article then you're going to look a massive fool when it backfires.

You talk of facts, science, and actual data. I've provided that all along - you're still just spouting bollocks without managing to back it up in the slightest with anything other than the exact opposite of facts and data - you're backing it up with others opinions who agree with yours. That is not fact, that is not science, and that is not data.

Stop being a zealot and get over the fact your argument is broken and there's a severe lack of data to back the points you've made, and, if anything, an awful lot (as I've pointed out) showing the opposite.

You spoke of cold winters in places like Britain that had bad CCD, I pointed out with actual data we have had incredibly mild winters in those years, I showed the temperature records, and you still try and deflect and call me the zealot. I can only assume you either work for Bayer, or are actually retarded.

Science and data aren't things you get to declare, you have to actual do and show them, you've failed hard. Get over it.

Have you considered learning to comprehend posts that you read?

Of course Java is used heavily for server-side programming. I know this, because I have leader server side Java software projects.

None of which changes the fact that that's still not even close to a majority of developers, and not even close to a majority of the world's computer using population.

I can only assume therefore that you're either incapable of reading posts on the internet and comprehending them. Or you're just plain batshit insane and like to say things that make no sense in the context of the discussion.

Which is it?

That's not really true. Rotating debt isn't the same as a giant monolithic debt. Paying a debt and then adding a new debt is still paying off a debt, even if you're borrowing from the same person.

But I understand what you're getting at and I definitely agree that we have (and should have) different expectations for debt when it comes to countries than when it comes to corporations, say. Debt isn't the same sort of liability for a country--I really hate it when politicians say that we should run countries 'more like companies'. It just speaks to how little they understand about countries (and probably companies).

Still not user serviceable for a simple task of replacing a battery on something that should be a workSTATION.
A stationary object used for work.
Where those extra 3-4 mm of thickness and 50-100 grams saved mean somewhere between bupkis and diddlysquat.

So one can chuck that $2000+ "workstation" into the bin in 3 years as the size of the battery does not matter when it comes to the heat-degradation.
It's how many times and how often its cells hit the "overheating" limit, causing them to shrink in capacity to under that limit.

At which point it COULD be made into a cabled-down machine with enough minutes on the battery to MAYBE save the project one is working on in the case of a power outage.
But if it is cable-only in 3 years (or maybe sooner if one likes draining the battery to the core and charging it on a bed under a blanket) - who gives a fuck about how slim or light it is?

One can buy a far better desktop machine and a UPS for that money. And it would be user-serviceable and upgradeable.

Fucker is SO sensationalism-happy it's amazing he hasn't migrated to Gawker yet. They probably wouldn't take him cause he's too old for them.

Actual summed up numbers are overall positive. From TFS:

  %
Extremely good: 24
On balance good: 28
That's 52% samzenpus, you fucking illiterate hack.

More or less neutral: 17
That's 69% who think it will be the same OR BETTER, you sensationalist troll.

On balance bad:13
Extremely bad (existential catastrophe): 18
That's a mere 31% (less than a third) who are into gloom and doom scenarios. You human cockroach samzenpus.

Oh and BTW...
Those negative numbers mostly come from "the 'theoretical' (PT-AI and AGI)" groups (with PT-AI leading in crying "The END is NIGH!") while those engaged in actual technical AI work gave mostly positive grades.
From TFA:

But the best part is that out of 170 who responded to the survey (out of 549 queried), 115 (~67.6%) belonged to the more AI-critical group of PT-AI and AGI.
Meaning that EVEN AMONG GLOOM&DOOMERS, majority is NOT buying into gloom & doom scenario.

Which means that the summary is not even wrong.
Seriously, why hasn't anyone yet replaced samzenpus with a script? No advanced AI is needed in his case.

From TFA:

So, it is good that that "M3800 is the world's thinnest" mobile workstation, cause they can shove it up their asses with that policy of chasing the "looks" factor over functionality.

Which can be seen in the design of the keyboard as well.
It sits there centered, with HUGE empty spaces on both sides, and no dedicated numeric keys while navigation keys are down to very crammed arrow keys.

Workstation?
This is a glorified e-mail machine that you discard after 3 years.

Every time you get the urge to say "it's natural so it is OK" - REMEMBER CYANIDE.
Or Ebola. Or AIDS. Cancer too...

All perfectly natural.

Just like sulfuric acid - which is used to unclog pipes once they accumulate too much sand.
Or even "apricot shells and cocoa beans" suggested by the idiotic article.
Both of which soak up water, sink to the bottom and clog up pipes - calling for more perfectly natural chemicals to poured down the drain more often.

Lay off the appeal to the poor and other forms of appeal to emotion and look at your question again.

Then, consider that the article itself argues how California (due to its economy's size) banning this particular product (which article claims is being used because it is cheaper) will FORCE the industry to stop using it altogether.
Meaning that instead of "poow witwe tows iw Wewst Wiwviwia" (Isn't appeal to emotion retarded?) it will affect the economy of the ENTIRE USA and thus indirectly the world - because "estimated 38 tons of plastic pollution in California".

On the other hand...
Why are you OK with California influencing both world economy INCLUDING Wewst Wiwviwia evowowy (OK... I'll stop) in one dictatorial form - but not in another which would be ameliorated by various federal and state grants and caps based on quantity of produced/treated sewage, AFTER it gets voted in on a federal level?
How many poow wi... how many small towns outside California would be influenced by regulations for stricter filtration INSIDE California?
Which would produce cleaner water all-round, and not just from that one form of particles.

And really... California, the 10th economy by nominal GDP, IN THE WORLD, surpassing India and Canada, can't afford better treatment of its water - so it has to shift the cost of its inhabitants fear of plastic onto everyone else's wallets?

On a side note...
Can't wait until it dawns on Californians that glitter is made out of the same stuff, only covered with various shiny metals.
I wonder if they'll ban Mariah Carey?

Dinosaurs replied that they will cross THAT particular road when they get to it.

Pretty much everyone using the Microsoft stack, which is a fairly sizeable proportion of the world's developers, even those not doing .NET and using C++ such as an awful lot game developers for example quite happily avoid Java applications on the desktop because they just use Visual Studio.

What you most likely mean is that if you're doing Java development then Java development tools written in Java for the desktop are fairly common. Some other languages spin off that to some degree (i.e. Zend Studio for PHP which is based on Eclipse), but even in the development world it's not like Java development tools are anything close to ubiquitous, and developers are a tiny portion of the world's computer users.

You seem to be declaring Java dead, because Java applets are uncommon, and that Java desktop applications are uncommon. Both these things are true, but it still only tells an incredibly small picture.

Java is still massively strong on mobile, in embedded devices, and for server side applications.

There are a lot of phones, routers, ATMs, websites, and so forth still using Java rather heavily. It's a very long way from dead, it's still used at least in part to run key elements of some of the largest sites on the web - eBay, Amazon, Google for example as well as being a big deal in nearly all the world's banks and financial institutes. It does well in the academic world, and in the medical world, from doctors surgeries to big pharma.

I hate Oracle, but I'm afraid as much as I'd like to see it, they wont be going away any time soon - there's a lot of money in providing to those sorts of companies.

So what's the alternative? I don't see how having code lumped arbitrarily somewhere, with no clear indication that it's the application entry point is better either.

There needs to be some indication in a project that that's where the program starts, else what happens when you have say 3 or 4 lumps of code in separate files in the project all lumped in the global namespace, where does it start?

It also makes it explicit that there even is a starting point, as opposed to it being, say, a library with no application entry point.

I fully get what you're saying about making things easier for beginners to spew out code, but for a multi-purpose language it also needs to support maintainability too. I'm not even convinced that making it easy for new developers to get used to bad practice even helps them that much. I remember when I learnt C as my first language, I became dependent at the start on the global namespace because that's how the tutorials said it was easy to get started. It took a while to break out of that awful habit, and start writing actual good code. God only knows I've seen others fall into that trap - I had the misfortune of temporarily maintaining a massive VBA based application whilst simultaneously throwing it away to replace it with something that was actually not shit. Everything was a global variable, the list of globals went on for page after page. It was brutal.

Long story short, I'm not convinced that making it easier for beginners to fall right into bad practices is in any way superior to making them learn a bit of boiler plate to keep things structured from the outset. I agree the syntax can be cleaned up and improved a bit, but I don't agree that it's pointless, or that writing straight into the global namespace in an unstructured manner is superior.

I see this sort of mindset a lot, but it's illustrative of short sightedness.

If you can't understand the importance of namespaces and structures, then you can't have worked on anything but the most trivial and small of codebases utilising little or no external libraries. If all you know are CS101 examples then sure, having to declare namespaces, methods, and so forth might look relatively bad.

If however you work on anything that actually matters then methods, namespaces and so forth become kind of important.

I don't see how endif is superior to }. Why would I want to type more than I have to to convey the exact same meaning? Curly brackets are meant to be jarring and to stand out, they do that to tell you a block has ended.

Maybe it's where you create an array of circular references?

"Ever wanted to hit a car that cut you off? Well in GTA it's perfectly ok for you to do it till your hearts content and it's out of your system. Just because I take great joy in forcing other drivers in GTA off the road doesn't mean I'll plow into the car next to me on the freeway."

Man you're tame. Normally if I get cut up in GTA, I ram them off the road as hard as possible, stab them in the back with a broken bottle as they run, shoot them in the head on the floor and then pour petrol on them and ignite it, often following up with a firefight with the police, ambulance and fire engine that rocks up.

I can also safely say though that I've never even remotely attempted this in real life.