The Guardian article goes on to say:

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“Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year,” said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before.”

His team’s study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tonnes of meltwater overall are added to the world’s oceans each year. This is raising sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, in addition to the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean.
--

This same cherry-picked factoid has been doing the rounds of the "skeptic" blogs since the article's publication, and has made it's way here.

For reference, the paper this is all based on (subscription required): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10847.html

You're entitled to your own opinions on javascript -- I'm not a huge fan myself, although I see some of it's utility, especially the proper use of first-order functions a-la List or Scheme.

Your original post, however, and many since, have contained glaring factual inaccuracies. At least try to understand the language structure and design before making an argument to whether it's good or not. There are much better critiques if you're determined to hate it.

Having operator overloading and type inference does not mean "no types to speak of" or "+ doesn't work". It means that there's a design decision about the language -- you may not like it and plenty don't, but it's hardly uncommon either. I really don't think you have vars "containing numerical values, were assigned numerical values, are treated as strings". At some stage you put a string in the variable, 1 + 1 still equals 2 in javascript. "1" + 1 does not.

It's been explained about 20 times that having classes is not the same thing as being object oriented. Here's a better and more complete explanation from Douglas Crockford (one of the people who have contributed to this "one man hack" via ECMA).

http://www.crockford.com/javascript/inheritance.html

The first couple of sentences are especially relevant:

"JavaScript is a class-free, object-oriented language, and as such, it uses prototypal inheritance instead of classical inheritance. This can be puzzling to programmers trained in conventional object-oriented languages like C++ and Java."

Says it all.

I really don't think you understand Javascript quite enough to be commenting this strongly on it.

It does have types, to speak of and to use. They are in the spec, they are in the language, they work. http://bclary.com/2004/11/07/#a-
Since when has "+" appended 2 numbers? When they are strings I would imagine, which is exactly what most languages do. You might need to get your head around javascript types to stop this happening.
Javascript has scope -- it's quite well defined.
Object oriented does not mean classes, there are other ways of doing it. In particular, the prototype pattern which is followed by javascript. It can have inheritance because of this pattern also.

Javascript has been an ECMA standard for the last 15 years, and cannot be thought of as a one-person hack in any way.

I shake my head.

FYI, nightly builds for all platforms (Mac, Win, Linux, Linux x64) available here: http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

Should get official versions soon, I guess, but I find any given nightly build (on Linux) fast and reliable.

Zones are the same concept, with the same benefit.

An added advantage Solaris zones have is flavoured zones: Make a Solaris 9 zone on a Solaris 10 host, a Linux zone on a Solaris 10 host and soon a Solaris 10 zone on an OpenSolaris host.

This has turned out much more stable, easy and simply effecient than our Vmware servers, which we now only have for Windows and other random OS's.

I use (and like) both Solaris and Linux.

I think the "stable" moniker mainly comes from Solaris + Sun hardware, not Solaris as a standalone entity. Tight coupling to SPARC hardware (and Sun-made x86 to a lesser extent) means that Solaris has the ability to take portions of RAM offline if errors are detected, deactivate individual CPU cores or sockets if errors are detected and similar fault monitoring and recovery across the hardware. It's pretty cool stuff really, have a look at it if you get the chance.

Solaris SMF also kicks the ageing init.d method for 6 as far as software fault monitoring and recovery goes IMO.

Of course plenty of consultants have oversold this, deriding other good OSs at the same time, often without any knowledge to back it up.

Same reason they've started building it's own servers - they want to expand into new markets.

Sun would sure give them a leg-up, as the two product portfolios have very little crossover, but it remains to be seen if Cisco would be any better at selling Sun technology than Sun has been of late.

As a Sun partner/reseller I'd probably prefer Cisco however, because it's less likely that the cool stuff that Sun makes, which I know and sell, would be just be swallowed up never to be seen again as would likely happen in an IBM deal.

Poor urban planning and lack of forest management are definately contributing factors.

However: We've been in drought for 12 years, this has been the driest February on record, the hottest week on record was earlier this month and the hottest day on record was the day of the worst of these fires.

It's pretty easy to convince me of global warming after living through this.

The monstrosity of JavaScript/ECMAScript is more a function of the browser/DOM and not the language. If you get the chance to use some nice prototype-based OO Javascript away from the browser, you'll find that it's actually got a lot going for it.

It could sure do with a nice standard library though, there's a lot of roll-your-own low level functionality going on, which adds to it's reputation as a pig.