Yes. I would recommend starting your development with Java 8. Any compatibility problems you run into will likely go away within the month as more libraries add Java 8 support. Most of them already work fine out of the box. Some of them depend on bytecode internals (e.g. the ASM library) so it'll take them a bit longer to run properly under Java 8.

That didn't really work all that well in WW2, did it? :)

Guess what? Not all wars are created equal. Some wars are good to get involved in, and others are bad.

Congress can't declare war because the American people have been brainwashed to believe that all wars are wrong. If WW2 were to happen tomorrow, we'd still sit on the sidelines as long as possible and you can be sure that the second we declare war there will be protests in the street.

The country is polarized in every which direction. How can you expect the government to do anything when the people can't figure out what they want to do themselves?

Yes, vigilance is important... but nothing is absolute. Good governance requires trust. The level of cynicism we've reached makes it absolutely impossible to run an efficient government. This remind me of someone who micromanages their employees: nothing gets done.

We need to find a middle ground between vigilance and trust. Either extreme will kill this country.

Slashdot users are waaaaaaaaaay too paranoid. The government doesn't care about going after Joe Nobody. Somewhere down the line you guys confused real tyrants with people who intercept your mail. No one cares what you had for lunch. Seriously.

Please take a minute of your time to read about what *real* tyrants do to their people in the rest of the world and then come back to complain. All this crying about it being a slippery slope isn't making us any safer. It's just leading to a dysfunctional government that can't get anything done. You spend more energy keeping the government politically correct than efficient and in the end the very tyrants you aim to prevent will take over your country by pure economic force (think China).

All I'm saying is... please keep things in perspective. You have legitimate points, but a government that is untrusted by its people (and by all accounts Americans don't trust any existing political party) cannot effect effective governance. In other words, you're asking your government to fail and then whining when they do. That's not very productive.

There is nothing more I hate than websites that made me adhere to their arbitrary password security rules. The more hoops you make me jump through, the harder the password is to remember, and the dumber the password I pick (in the hopes of making it easier to remember).

Please, leave me alone.

Do you honestly believe that even 25% of the people in question are receiving military pensions? I highly doubt it.

This sounds like a strawman argument to me.

They should make the appeal nonetheless and at worse shame Russia. The fact that they failed to live up to their end of the bargain is shameful.

The agreement in question dealt exclusively with Lebanese territory. Not Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian or any other country. There are plenty of countries in the Middle-East that make up conflicts on a monthly basis that have no grounding in fact. So long as Arabs are slaughtering Arabs in the Middle-East, even within their own countries, I think it is safe to say the probability of an Muslim-Jewish peace is very low (if they can't even get along with themselves, how can we expect them to play nice with others?)

Hezbollah is a Lebanese organization, not Syrian. As such, they have no legitimacy in demanding the return of the Sheba Farms region to Lebanon. This territory was never part of Lebanon and Israel is fully in the right according to international law in that it withdrew 100% from Lebanon. Syria is more than welcome to restart peace negotiations with Israel if it so wishes. Please don't open up this discussion to other conflicts, as this is a separate discussion.

The fact of the matter is: the International Community made political and military guarantees with respect to Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, and it failed to adhere to them. The same is true in the case of Ukraine. Had Ukraine kept their nuclear weapons you can be sure Russia would not have invaded.

This isn't the first time that international bodies have promised to protect a country's borders in return for it withdrawing from some territory, or giving up arms... but when it is time for those same international bodies to act they do not.

Another recent example is when Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 to UN sanctioned, internationally-recognized borders. A short while later, Hezbollah started threatening Israel again, claiming it was occupying some fictitious piece of land that was never part of Lebanon. Instead of the UN and international bodies backing Israel's claim that it had fully withdrawn from all of Lebanon, they publicly referred to this piece of land as "disputed territory". This taught us two things:

1. All it takes is one idiot to claim ownership of some land, and regardless of the facts that land becomes "disputed".
2. International guarantees are utterly meaningless.

Countries are better off retaining their weapons and enforcing the peace themselves. Regardless of how much political pressure you're under, ignore it, because at the end of the day you cannot outsource your citizens security.

And on the flip side: the international community should shut the !#@ up until they gain a record of walking the walk instead of talking the talk. It's criminal to play with other people's lives in this way.

So you're telling me that North Korean and Iranian scientists are just as likely to contribute malicious code to libraries used by Western agencies as anyone else? I think not.

Open-source is supposed to be about maximum transparency, not about hiding information that might actually be relevant. Imagine having to apply security at airports if you had no idea whether the person you are about to scan is a 90 year old grandmother or an 18-25 male from the Middle East. Statistics and common sense tells you that one is a lot more likely to be malicious than the other, so why throw common sense out the window?

One is proven by science. The other is "proven" by Al Gore :)

What I resent about the latter is that there was plenty of scientific evidence before/after Al Gore's stupid movie, but that bit of "science" only got momentum because of the movie. We shouldn't make decisions based on what's popular. We should make decision based on scientific fact.

So to reiterate: I'm not arguing whether Global Warning exists or not, but rather that it's stupid that people only began saying it exists because that movie came out.

There are plenty of non-controversial gasses that we know for a fact kill people every day, but instead we're pouring billions of dollars into something controversial for popularity reasons.

We need devices that consume less power and batteries that last longer (retain the same charge across multiple cycles).

Any other formula will lead to devices that waste power and burn through batteries with increasing speed. I'm not looking forward to garbage lots filled to the sky with used batteries.

Impressive but overwhelming. I don't look forward to learning, reading or maintaining such code. So as usual: functionality is inversely proportional to usability :)

It seems that every time extremists resort to threats and violence, they have gotten the censorship they were seeking.

Many newspapers are now self-censoring for fear of violence. Is this really where we are headed?