"This certainly differs from TIOBE's methodology (based on Google searches)."

Actually TIOBE's methodology is absolutely awful. It takes the most popular sites on the net and weights them in an inversely exponential manner.

One of these pages is Wikipedia, which is editable by anyone, and it puts a massive weighting on them. Similarly it applies arbitrary filters that cut out legit results for some languages, and throw in illegitimate results in favour of other languages.

You can as an individual trivially subvert TIOBE by making up a new language, posting on Wikipedia with a number of links to it, and creating a number of fake blogs on it.

Long story short, TIOBE is utterly worthless so using it as a standard of comparison is complete nonsense. Any more rational index would take job postings and so forth from global job posting sites and that sort of thing. Weighting based on information on sites that anyone who wants to can trivially manipulate is utterly stupid.

So if I don't pay taxes I become an independent nation or?

The difficulty in creating a nuclear weapon isn't the command and control, it's creating the warheads and the delivery vehicles. Slapping on different electronics to control the missiles would've been a trivial task compared to the job of developing warheads and rocket technology required for delivery.

It's probably the one thing about creating nuclear weapons that your average bedroom hardware hacker could do with physical access to the missiles.

Though it should also be noted that many of the USSR's weapons were created in the Ukraine in the first place, so the Ukraine probably still has some of the guys who actually made these things to start with, regardless of the fact that actual command and control was in Russia.

I think there's two camps, there's the clear and obvious propaganda campaign, you see this on prominent sites like the BBC when they have live feeds on the topic and it's full of nonsense such as:

Nikki e-mails: I LOVE PUTIN HE'S THE GREATEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE AND THE WHOLE WORLD SHOULD BE OWNED BY RUSSIA!!

Okay that was hypoerbole, but you get the point. Then you get sites like this, where there is a non-negligible bunch of useful idiots available. These are people that just like to argue, they like to do so even if their point is completely untenable, and they'll pursue it long after their points has been highlighted as complete and utter bollocks. They like to play devils advocate, which is sometimes useful, as it's good to question, but other times it just makes them look more than just a bit retarded.

A handful are ideological, you get people who were so scarred by what the West did in fucking up in attacking Iraq in 2003 that they think everything that's wrong in the world is entirely the fault of America and it's allies, and that no other nation could ever possibly be evil, hence, if America has an opinion on it, they assume it's automatically wrong, and the other guy is right. These people really are retarded, they're the people who were arguing that because America had a problem with Ahmadinejad's Iran and his nuclear program, that Iran must inherently be a peaceful, friendly, freedom and liberty loving nation. It was just incomprehensible to them that there could be wrongs on both sides of the argument.

"As a matter of fact, India left the British empire without war. Look up Ghandi..."

Why even just use India as an example? Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. There are many many more examples. The manner in which countries left British control covers pretty much every part of the spectrum, from violent exit, to exit by referendum, to the British themselves deciding it's time for them to go independent.

"But in the end what we know is that once Russia offered, if there were a fair and free referendum the Crimean people would like to join Russia and leave Ukraine.

No we don't know that, if anything we can only say we know the opposite - a handful of weeks before the Russia occupation support for joining Russia in a poll was only at 41%. There was slightly higher support for independence - 52%, but certainly we absolutely cannot say in a free and fair referendum people would've voted to join Russia - polls without the barrels of Russian soldiers watching over them tell a completely different story to what you're suggesting. At worst they'd have voted for independence by a margin of only 2%.

"Notably: OECD received invitation to the elections to monitor them. They came under massive pressure from EU and US and ended up declining the invitation."

Wow, what an obscure twist on reality. The OECD observers were fucking shot at as soon as they tried to get near Crimea:

http://www.dw.de/warning-shots...

Being shot at and told you're not welcome is not even remotely the same as "They came under massive pressure from EU and US and ended up declining the invitation.". Putin and his cronies make statements like "But we invited the OECD, it's all the West's fault!" precisely because he's talking to the folk at home who can't get information from anything other than state outlets. I'm amazed there are people like you who do not take advantage of what is available to us in the West - plurality of media information to realise what actually went on.

You seem to have swallowed Putin's propaganda hook, line, and sinker. What's wrong with you?

"6 months after the C64 came out were there already rumblings that the Amiga was on its way? Obviously in a decade where you went from the ZX80 to the 486 there were new computers on a fairly regular basis, but it was really not the same as it is today with yearly PC updates (cpu/video), yearly phones, yearly games"

Really, it wasn't much different, only the technology that rapid iteration happened to changed. As I pointed out there are systems today that have relatively long life cycles (consoles) just as there were then, but similarly just as there were then there were short lifecycle systems too. All that's changed is that the highly dynamic open architecture of the PC won out as the most prominent computing device in people's homes, whilst those fixed-spec systems just found their niche in the console gaming arena and so forth.

Comparing phones seems pointless, there was a constant flurry of new landline phones you could buy back then, but given that mobile phones didn't really exist beyond the fairly experimental stage it's silly to compare them, they're a whole new market that just wasn't around then.

There were games coming out every year, I'm pretty sure off the top of my head that the Dizzy series of games were a yearly thing given that there were so many in such a short few years for example.

As someone else pointed out to you the whole nickel and diming thing was incredibly prominent with 80s arcade culture too.

He used to but they outsourced his job to India.

"there is going to (predictably) be a new and (slightly) improved model next year or in a couple of years at the most, there is not as much attachment as there used to be."

The C64 came out in 1982, the Commodore Amiga, and Commodore 128 came out in 1985, with the Amiga 500 in 87, the Amiga 500 Plus in 1991, the Amiga 600 in March 1992, and finally, the Amiga 1200 in October 1992. That's 3, 2, 4, 1, and 0.5 years respectively between releases.

In contrast, the Xbox 360 lasted from 2005 until 2013 before a new model came out, that's 8 years. The PS3 only one year less. If you want computers, then I guess we have to look at the PC, but it's a different situation because they're so bespoke nowadays, however a moderate PC is going to last at least 5 years (mine from 2008 even is still perfectly good for modern releases like the latest Diablo expansion etc.).

Suggesting there's ever been any longer period of release cycles on some devices then than there is now is nonsense, but there's a rather amusing irony when you're suggesting so to try and argue the joke "nostalgia is better than it used to be" is true.

Long story short, you've fallen victim to nostalgia, and are trying to argue against it being possible now, begging the question, do you even know what nostalgia is? It's hit you and you don't even know it.

"It is important to note that the 2C you are talking about is surface air temperature. It is less than 1 percent of our climate overall. The oceans are a vast reservoir of thermal sink, as is the stratosphere."

Right, but that's a sustained 2C, you can't have one thing at 2C and an adjacent thing much lower. Heat transfer occurs from hot to cold and the rate of transfer is proportional to the difference in temperature. To maintain a 2C surface temperature increase that means everything else must have increased too so pretending only 1% of our climate is going to increase in temperature is utter nonsense - the entirety of the oceans and stratosphere must also drastically increase in temperature for that 2C increase in surface temperature to be sustained, otherwise you wouldn't get a sustained 2C increase because the temperature would just be pulled into the oceans and stratosphere.

Just because the surface temperature is commonly cited doesn't mean that's the only thing changing, everything else has to increase too, it's just more convenient to quote the only immediately obvious temperature to your average human - that which they're sat in day in and day out rather than to quote all the possible ecosystems that will increase by their relative but varying amount.

"Local effects will be more extreme - milder arctic winters and longer growing seasons should improve crops in Russia, Canada and northern Europe."

Right, central and southern North America, Australia, and much of Africa and the Middle East will become too prone to drought for any reliable crop growth. Why just focus on the areas where crop yield potential will improve and ignore the vast swathes of the Earth where agriculture will become impossible unless you have some kind of insanely biased agenda here?

"Africa will see more precipitation turning the Sahara into grassland again."

Great, that's Europe and South America fucked then given that dust from the Sahara blown to those continents is essential for the fertilisation that allows the high levels of green growth.

What, you thought you could change a major ecosystem in the globe like the Sahara and there wouldn't be impacts elsewhere? that's not the way the world works.

"This may stress reefs, but really - they are millions of years old and have seen this before."

Not on a timescale that leaves no time for adaptation via evolution.

At first you seemed to have an extremely over simplistic understanding of the natural world, and that that was leading you to reach a gross underestimation on the negative impacts global warming would have, but your cherry picking of the benefits and certain statistics implies it's not necessarily that you don't or couldn't understand the respective elements of the natural world, but that you're being intentionally dishonest to push a short sighted and selfish view.

Well he's still the legal owner by law, so there's nothing to stop him literally just walking in, picking them up, and walking out with them. Common sense would suggest telling the police you're doing exactly that first, and letting them know you've done it afterwards, but legally short of them preventing you accessing the shop (in which case you'd have to get the police to do it for you) there isn't jack shit they can do to stop you just taking your items back.

In fact, it'd arguably be immoral not to just take them back, because anyone buying them is potentially liable for handling stolen goods, even if they weren't aware they were stolen, so letting them stay there risks leaving someone else at risk of prosecution when they've not knowingly done anything wrong.

If the shop owner has a problem with you walking into his shop and just picking up your items and walking off with them then it's upto him to call the police and take it up with them, it's not your problem - they're your goods and they legally belong to you still. If he's lost money on it then tough shit, he should've worked harder to make sure the goods were legit by asking for an original receipt or something.

Yep, no need to beat about the bush, there has been numerous occasions where CEX has been found peddling stolen goods.

When big well known nationwide brands are doing it and getting away with it what have the small guys got to worry about? CEX is the place of choice for many criminals trying to offload stolen Blurays, laptops, DVDs, video games, and mobile phones.

"Sure it was a coup and the vote for impeachment happened after the coup."

That doesn't even make sense, how can you have a coup if the leadership is not yet deposed? Changing will of parliament is not a coup, not under any circumstances. That's democracy in action. If the leader is still in power then by definition, no coup can have happened. To follow the constitutional process a committee to investigate the offence had to be formed, but Yanukovych resigned before that happened (then rescinded his resignation when he got to Russia which IS unconstitutional). Let's be clear - Yanukovych ran before he was pushed because he saw the tide had turned against him, there was a 73% majority in favour of impeachment which was enough to trigger the required investigation which he resigned before could happen.

"But if you consider what happened as a coup, then it all starts making sense."

Yes, I suspect if you view most things with a predetermined bias then they make sense to you, but that's no reflection on what actually happened.

The only changes that have occurred other than preparing for elections and acting in a security capacity are those to revert the constitution and a couple of other things that were already agreed by Yanukovych and the existing parliament before the interim leadership came into play. You seem to be implying this interim government plans to stay permanently but where is your evidence for this? the election date is set and there's not the slightest shred of evidence they're going to cancel this - in fact, despite the fact Russia has started now to send Spetsnatz units into Eastern Ukraine the leadership has explicitly not called a state of emergency because by law that would mean they would have to cancel the elections.

"I am not saying that the situation on Crimea wasn't a sham. There was no need to rig that vote really, the majority would have voted for an annexation anyway."

This doesn't make sense, if they would've voted for it anyway (polls prior to the Russian invasion suggest they wouldn't) then why go through such extraordinary effort to rig the vote including all the things I mentioned previously on top of installing an unelected puppet leadership in Crimea that called the referendum (again, things that most definitely were unconstitutional).

"Yes it was a coup d'etat. A coup does not have to be a military one. Every illegal usurpation of the government is a coup."

Yes you're right, but there was nothing illegal here. The democratically elected parliament voted for early elections and to impeach the president after deciding to support the will of their constituents (the Ukrainian people). That's not illegal by any measure, therefore, it wasn't a coup.

It was more akin to the parliament voting to impeach the president and then resigning themselves. Unless you're saying parliaments shouldn't be able to bring down a president that has lost popular support, or unless you're saying parliamentarians shouldn't be able to resign and force early elections, then there's no reasonable way this can possibly be described as a coup.

"No. Even in the most fraudulent vote outcome (Rostov region) Putin has received 58.99% of the votes."

I think his comment was largely hyperbole, but really, he's right. Putin has a long history of rigged polls. If there was anything legitimate about the view of the Crimean people in the referendum then why did Putin have to deny international observers, limit all propaganda to pro-Russian propaganda, shut down all communication in and out of Crimea prior to the referendum? Surely if it's what the people wanted then a verifiably free and fair referendum would've been far easier and far easier for him to claim victory for a more legitimate annexation? It's hard to see how an election can ever be called fair when the ballot counting isn't independently verified by objective observers and when it takes place under the barrel of the guns of only one side of the debate. That's before you consider the ballot options - independence and closer ties to Russia, or join Russia. Where was the "Fuck off Russia" option? Surely you can't honestly believe that was a legitimate referendum even putting aside arguments about what the people supposedly did or didn't want?

Scotland is holding an independence referendum later this year, would you believe it legitimate if English soldiers turned up outside every polling station with guns, tore down all the independence campaign posters and replaced them with "Alex Salmond and the SNP are Nazis", took over the television and radio airwaves to broadcast pro-union propaganda, shut down the cell phone towers to lock down communications, and took away all the ballots to be counted at David Cameron's house? That's what Putin did in Crimea.