Adding Eric's equals method and some test and build improvements

I added the simplified equals method from the emailed suggestions (I think I copied/pasted from Eric's email, to be exact). I did a bunch of experimentation to add robustness in the event of StackOverflows, but was never successful. So I added new tests that expect a StackOverflow, and I think this is the anticipated behavior of our Thing42's.

I also added debug improvements to the build.xml. Oh, and I added some specifics to some of the other tests, if you disagree with those changes, I can remove them easily enough.

It's probably important that we all mutually agree/disagree with this approach, so you should all weigh in on this particular code review, I think…

@SterL @stevilstick @JamieWohletz @moquin101 @Kimmsudenver @ericvangelder