That seems to be one area where Microsoft have actually been successful so far. I know a handful of friends and family who have bought new desktop/laptop PCs since Windows 8 was released. The ones actually running Windows 8 are those who didn't have a reasonable alternative, because what they bought came with version 8 preinstalled by the manufacturer and for one reason or another upgrading to Windows 7 wasn't a practical option. Several of them have been extremely vocal about their views on Windows 8, which are typically not things you would repeat in polite company, but buying a good laptop that even has the option of Windows 7 preinstalled instead of 8 now seems very difficult, at least here in the UK.

That's really not a very long list, and it includes quite a few people who aren't climate scientists. I've got nothing against (say) physicists, but I don't go to climate scientists for the latest theories on dark matter. Moreover, there's three categories in that Wikipedia entry: people who generally distrust the modeling and think the predictions are unreliable, people who think the observed warming is not anthropogenic, and people who don't think there is a single main cause. There is no category for scientists who think the planet isn't warming up.

Of course the planet has been much hotter than it is now. The problem is that we have a large civilization that is adapted to a climate that's been varying within limits for thousands of years, and is getting outside those limits. The planet will survive. The biosphere will survive. Humanity will survive. It's very likely to be extremely expensive, though.

Or have different goals than some of us.

Conservatives tend to doubt good science on global warming. Every political movement is based partly on irrationality (it's really hard to build a big movement on the cool-headed rational people), but they tend to be irrational about different things, or at least in different directions. I'm not claiming that liberals are necessarily more rational, but on climate science they tend to line up with the scientists.

If we're talking about stuff in the kernel, we're talking about needing performance with minimal runtimes. This usually rules out the usual garbage collection. At that point, you probably should consider C++, which provides string and array equivalents with bounds checking but is as efficient as C.

C++ has safe buffers in the standard library.

While the militia was a decent harassing force, and worked remarkably well in operations with regulars (such as they were), the main fighting was done by trained armies. In the meantime, we had French help (which even extended to control of the sea at Yorktown), and the British were quite distracted by other stuff going on and had a long logistical tail.

I think partisan warfare in WWII is a useful comparison: partisans themselves could not defeat even badly led, badly trained, badly equipped regular forces with bad morale, at least not until partisans started organizing like regular armies.

Early firearms replaced longbows on the basis of requiring much less training to be effective. They replaced crossbows largely by becoming cheaper overall.

It was quite a while before a really good gun user would be more dangerous than a really good archer, but armies have to be equipped with stuff the soldiers can use effectively.

Sometimes lost in the Fukushima discussion is a tsunami that killed about 25K people. That may have contributed to secondary effects.

Crappy standards conformance, and that's with Herb Sutter in charge. Both g++ and clang have had C++11 conformance for a long time now, and VS2013 doesn't.

I understand there are efforts to get more men into women-dominated professions, such as nursing. I don't pay attention because I really like working as a software developer, and really don't want to be a nurse.

I would be amazed if any sign there were older than 1897. However, yes, you are correct that that is when the warming trend started -- somewhat earlier than the rest of the globe. You're implying that this stands in opposition to AGW. Let's review:

The foundation of AGW is based on the physical properties of CO2, specifically its absorption spectrum. This is measurable both under laboratory conditions and via satellite. Theoretically you could measure it yourself. Sunlight shines on Earth, and Earth re-radiates this same energy at a lower wavelength. This is described by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. You can trivially calculate that, based on the incident solar irradiation and Earth's albedo, the planet should be about -18 degrees C. The effect of the atmosphere is to slow radiation leaving the Earth (the atmosphere is mostly transparent to incoming solar radiation). Outgoing radiation is absorbed and re-emitted often before it reaches space.

The lower atmosphere is already pretty much opaque to outgoing radiation; increased CO2 does not block more radiation than would otherwise be blocked. There was a point where it was theorized that no warming could occur because of this. However, it was determined that the effect of an increased partial pressure of CO2 was to extend the CO2-rich region further into space. That this increases the heat energy on the planet's surface should be obvious. The direct effect of a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere is extremely easy to calculate, again using Stefan-Boltzmann, and it comes out to 3.7 W/m^2, which is usually considered to be equivalent to 1 degree C.

Unless you can find a new way to radiate energy to space, or unless everything we know about radiation is wrong, then the Earth must experience at least that degree of warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Anything further than that is a matter for study and scientific debate, and of course the effects in different places. However, given that warming must be happening, the ability of scientists to say whether specific incidents are or are not related is more plausible.

I am glad you visited Alaska. I lived there for about 25 years, in the middle of the Chugach Mountains. There was some degree of glaciation on all of the surrounding peaks. Being in an isolated town meant that going anywhere else meant traveling across a great deal of the land. The glaciers have been melting my entire life, but the warming accelerated in the late 1990s; retreat measured in meters or tens of meters per year is very noticeable. This is very easily explained as an effect of AGW. Some other plausible explanation would be quite welcome; anything that would give me the hope of some day having the Alaska of my memory back. Unfortunately there is a great deal of science that speaks against the possibility.

One necessary requirement to be placed on the software is security. This is expensive, for a variety of reasons. Low-priced software will likely be hackable or manipulable, and the confidence in the vote will be compromised.

So we set up electronic voting kiosks. In what way is this better than machine-counted paper ballots? In what way is this superior to vote-by-mail for disabled voters who may not have easy net access? What happens if the voting machines lose power or connectivity? What happens if something goes wrong on the website? Paper has this very great advantage that it can be used in almost all conditions, and in difficult circumstances can be stored for later counting.