X86 went away fifteen years ago. Every "x86" COU built since the last 1990s runs an x86 layer, but underneath is a very different bear.

At the time, the closest the DOS world had to multitasking was TSRs. Beside my first PC was my CoCo 3 with OS/9 level 2 with 512k of RAM with a true preemptive multitasking kernel running on an 8 but 6809 CPU. Microsoft's dominance at the time meant in many ways the most common 16 bit opposing system in the world was only marginally better than a CPM machine from 1980.

Minix was really the first of its kind; a Unix-like OS that you could run on cheap (relatively speaking at the time) commodity hardware and that you could get the source code for. A lot of the computing we take for granted now comes from Tanenbaum's work.

My first Minix install was on a 386-SX with a whopping 4mb of RAM I borrowed from work back in the early 1990s. I quickly abandoned Minix for Linux once it came out, but for several years I had Minix running on an old 386 laptop just for fun.

I really miss the good old days when technical debates were over the merits and faults of such simple things as different kinds of kernels, and not about whether or not every single thing you do online is being stacked into half a dozen nation's permanent data storage facilities.

The Linus vs. Tanenbaum dustup is from a simpler, more positive age.

That's rubbish. Most of the major platforms have had Java ported to them. Including various obscure systems is ludicrous. If I want a program that I'm almost guaranteed will run without recompile on Linux, Windows, BSD and even many mainframes, then Java remains the best solution. I'm not saying, from a programming perspective, that it's all that great, but from a platform neutral perspective for most of the systems that a programmer will encounter, it remains the best.

Have fun running an x86-64 Linux binary natively on a Windows 8 machine. I can. however, write a Java program that I can almost guarantee will in fact run on x64 Linux or Windows.

No, it is popular because, despite a good many flaws, it remains the best cross platform solution we have.

Thank goodness, too, otherwise I'd confuse Superman with Supperman.

I feel totally protected.

Superman, standing for truth, justice and IP rights!

Talk to me agitation when you've read the IPCC report. I won't debate with John Regurgibots.

In other words, fuck out you lying ignoramus

Or we can analyse the fallacy involved in you trying, without any justification, to tie climatologists to eugenicists. It seems your Just as guilty of the behaviours laid out in the article ad, say, Creationists

If you shot all the people you believe are demon possessed, there will be far less people you believe to be demon possessed. That doesn't make demon possession real.

Eugenics is based in part on gross oversimplifications of genetics and in part on the absurd idea that attributes like economic status are biologically heredity.

True, but some of us are willing to accept that the universe doesn't give a fuck about ideology.

When AGW first became a big issue in the 1990s I was talking against it as a big scam on Usenet; particularity my old haunt talk.origins. it was when one of the regulars, a biologist (why any scientist would waste his time debating Creationists I'll never understand), pointed out to me that the theory was reasonably well supported, there were a boatload of papers and that science isn't the product of emotional need, and I finally accepted that AGW, even if it suggested things that I didn't like, was legitimate science.

The analogy seems fine to me. In both cases you have a large amount of potential energy (in one case gravity, in the other frictional forces) and in both cases a catalyst of relatively small amounts of energy can upset the system and cause a much larger release of energy.

Oil company employee finds no problem with oil extraction. News at 11.

If extraction is causing property damage, then property owners should be compensated. If other forms of environmental damage are being caused by these practices, the practices should be evaluated.