Over the last 2 months the Drudge report has been full of climate news. All of it being evidence against AGW.

Well when you go looking for evidence, you tend to find it. Both sides in any debate like this will present veritable mountains of evidence in favour of their position, we've seen it time and again. It doesn't make you right.

Such as the US just had one of the 10 coldest years on record.

Citation? Also localized event, also short dips do not contradict long-term trends, also potentially not all that remarkable if it's only the ninth or tenth coldest on record (the statement is pretty non-specific).

The UK getting record snowfall despite AGWers claiming the UK wouldn't see snow after 2008.

Who said that? Someone whose opinion actually matters in this debate or just some newspaper reporter on a slow day?

Antarctica getting within .5 degrees of the coldest recorded temperature on earth.

Well how cold does it usually get in that part of Antarctica? If it gets within a few degrees most years, then that's not news.

Along with 2000 record low temperatures recorded over the last couple of months.

As opposed to a typical winter, which sees... how many? Really, this needs to be placed in context.

Add that to the IPCC report showing no warming for 17 years.

Who said that? The people who made the report or someone else? If someone else, then I bet they're disagreeing with the people who did make the report. So what is the point of disagreement? What part of the IPCC methodology was flawed? Who reached this conclusion and how did they reach it? There are no details to go on here.

Its become pretty obvious which side has been lying.

Lies. Lies and deceptions. If it were so 'obvious' there would not be such protracted debate over the issue. Truth of the matter is, most people don't know what to think any more. Both sides seem to have so much evidence that trying to sift through it all is an exercise in futility. We've got to the point where it's a handful of 'true believers' on both sides who are absolutely convinced they are right, and a majority of confused individuals who don't know what side to take if they should even be taking a side at all.

Now they are grasping at straws to report ANYTHING that shows their side "might" be right.

Yep.

I'm going to ignore the alarmists and look at the evidence myself.

Nope. You're very clearly one of the true believers, you're going to find what you want to find and believe that it was just coincidence that all the evidence reinforced what you thought already.

If AGW was real, they wouldn't have to lie as often and at least ONE of their predictions would have happened.

Don't believe me? Look at what you just typed. You are not looking for the truth because you believe you already found it, so what would be the point of looking further?

Don't hold your breath, I stand by every word of it.

Meanwhile, those of us that like both Star Wars & Star Trek are thinking, "hrrm, Episode 7 has a chance now of not sucking."

Assuming you actually liked Star Trek XI, which I didn't. At all. Not even a bit. In fact, I rated it my second worst Star Trek movie (saved from the bottom only by The Final Frontier). Want some reasons? I've got plenty, but here's just a few (spoilers incoming!):

First, I see a lot of people talking about transwarp beaming, with some even defending it going "Oh, well you know beaming was just to save on money in the first place", which was was, which is irrelevant. Beaming was fine because beaming had rules. You can only beam over certain distances, you can't beam through certain atmospheric conditions, you can't beam at warp unless it's between two ships and they're both going at exactly the same speed and you have an extremely skilled operator. These rules keep it from being too powerful a plot device. So what does Abrams do? Transwarp beaming! Beam to a ship ridiculous distances away that's travelling at warp from a (relatively) stationary planet!

That's bullshit because it's just lazy. Abrams wrote himself into a corner. Kirk needs to be on the planet to meet future Spock but Kirk and Scotty need to be on the Enterprise to fulfil their destinies, but oh shit the Enterprise warped off fucking hours ago. I know! Deus ex machina, and they're in the engineering section. It's just bad writing.

It also brings me too... oh fucking hell, give me a second. It brings me too... the worst set. In all of Star Trek history. Even the Original Series. That engineering section. Just... what? Seriously, what? What is it? What are all these pipes? What do they do? How do they fit on the Enterprise? What was the designer smoking? I really, really don't get this set. Even in a narrative sense, what's it for? One stupid scene where Scotty gets stuck in the pipes? You could've cut that whole scene from the movie and nothing else would have to change. So why? Why not at least make it match the bridge and shuttlebay in style and design rather than feeling like a totally difference franchise in there?

Oh, but then we come to style and design. It's just rule of cool, even when it makes no sense. The Romulan mining ship? A 'simple mining ship' that looks like some fever-dreamed eldrich abomination? I mean, I know it has to look imposing but that's not just some lowly mining ship so why does it look like that? Because it's cool of course! Explanations are for losers! Also 'red matter', surely the midicholorians of Star Trek. An incredibly powerful substance out of nowhere that can make black holes out of nothing and destroy whole stars because that's not overpowered. Also, 'red matter'? Even Spock calls it red matter, is that really what it's called? That's the scentific name? Red matter? They couldn't even care enough to give it a vaguely 'sciency' name like 'trilithium' from Generations? It may be small, but the small things are what make you know they care, and they didn't with this movie.

If this is what Star Wars VII is going to be like then we're going to see something very special. We're going to see the franchise find an even lower place than the prequel trilogy.

The CEO of Orange is full of shit.

Not really surprising. As a former customer of their UK arm, I can attest that Orange is shit. They're probably trying to gouge Google because of all the money they're losing from their actual customers leaving and not coming back.

I've generally found myself getting used to them with two main problems left:

#1: No official way to bind activities to key combinations. I see an unofficial way of hacking this into Plasma, which seems to indicate high demand for this feature, but the developers have proven supremely uninterested in official support for it.

#2: No way to bind applications to activities. If I'm supposed to use activities to group applications, then why the fucking hell can't Plasma remember which activitiy an application was grouped in last session? Why do I need to tell it all over again every time I log in? I still do not understand why this wasn't fixed at 4.1/4.2, nevermind being left this way until now. Again, the developers seem completely uninterested in this, instead taking time to implement mandlebrot wallpaper generation...

I was hoping 4.9 would have progress on at least one of these points, but instead we get some bullshit about Folder View.

Really, it is about time we protect our children and others who don't want to see this kind of stuff. Objectionable material should not be seen by minors and there are many others who prefer not to be subjected to this stuff.

Fine by me too, but here's an idea: Why don't they opt-in?

People who don't want to see 'objectionable material' or who don't want their children to see the same can opt-in to a filtering system, that ISPs are required to provide at no charge and notify all their customers of, and anyone who doesn't gets the same internet they always have, warts and all.

Because you see, the internet is what it is. It has pornography, hate speech, and even illegal materials. Those are facts of life. But when I ask to get 'the internet', I want the internet, not some filtered subset of it. So the default should be an unfiltered connection, and those who want filtering should have to ask for it. I'm perfectly willing to make it easier for those who want filtering to have access to it, that is their choice. But it should be their responsibility to ask for such things, not my responsibility to ask for them to be removed.

Also, should this 'opt-in' filtering come into effect on my ISP (Sky Broadband, I believe they haven't started yet, please inform me now if I'm mistaken because they haven't told me anything) then I am taking my 'opt-in' rights, and if someone should say "So you're opting-in to pornography then?" I tell them "No, I'm opting-out of your stupid, unnecessary filter that I did not ask for and do not need".

Well this seems as good a time as any to ask if there's a tool similar to Flashblock for HTML5. I'd be using HTML5 at YouTube already except for the fact that YouTube plays videos automatically (whether I like it or not) and I use Flashblock to prevent YouTube from doing that. But that only works for Flash Video it seems, not HTML5 Video.

This was my first thought too. People getting all pissy about Firefox getting rapid releases and switching to Chrome in response. Do any of them realize that Google were the pioneers of rapid release? Google started out with quarterly releases, which they then cut to six weeks, which was then adopted by Mozilla as their release schedule as Google seemed to have made a compelling argument for it.

So feel free to criticize Mozilla for rapid releases if you like, but give Google some credit too. It was their idea.

It has for me. Back on 7.0.1, all of my add-ons were already marked as compatible up to 9.x, and it's not like I've only got two or three, I currently have twenty-seven active extensions. Maybe I'm exceptionally lucky, but it's working for me so far.

I'm not so sure about that. IE 10 got 6 fails while Firefox got 164 and Chrome got 415? All well and good, but note that Opera 11.52 got 3750 fails. That's a huge amount, but then the commenters note that Opera 11.60 beta gets a total of... 11 fails.

So Opera 11.52 to Opera 11.60 brings the fail count down from 3750 to 11? Given how fast Opera seem to have improved their total, I'd think Mozilla and Google can probably do similar and IE's excellent score may just be a matter of timing. In other words, the test you cited may well be meaningless.

But I don't want Napster! What's going on?!?

My main question here would be why the hell are you still using OpenOffice.org anyway? I've been on LibreOffice for ages now, and (in Debian at least, as far as I can tell) LibreOffice Calc does not require any sort of Java runtime.

This would make sense given that one of the aims of LibreOffice is to "reduce Java dependency".

Talking of extensions (I believe the above poster is actually referring to extensions rather than plugins, plugins generally don't break with new versions), is there any easy way to determine whether or not my current set of extensions are compatible with a given version? I'm on Debian so all of my updates come through my package manager, and the 'easiest' way at the moment seems to be cross-referencing each extension (all twenty-six of them) with Firefox Add-ons, which tedious in the extreme.

Is there just some tool which can scan through my extensions and report back on which aren't marked as compatible with 6.0 or above?

Many people have suggested what you just have. It's never worked before and there's no reason to think it will work now.

Your statement about running KDE apps on GNOME and vice-versa does puzzle me though. Right now I've got a complete mix of KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK+ applications running on my KDE 4.6 desktop, and all is well. They may be using slightly more resources than strictly necessary, but I don't really care about that. Stuff like the Portland Project and the Tango Desktop Project seem to have done their work in making applications both function correctly and look right on my desktop, and Oxygen-Gtk is taking that even further by making GTK+ apps look nearly indistinguishable from Qt apps. Probably best to ask someone else what's going on with the GNOME/Xfce side though.

I really don't think a merger is possible or necessary, what is necessary is more communication and cooperation between developers of various desktop environments, and in the five years I've been using Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux, I am a Debianite now...) I've seen massive strides in this. I can comfortably use whatever applications seem best regardless of widget toolkit with no worries about whether it will all function correctly, and that's good enough for me.

It would be awesome if 5.0 were more like 3.5 again (its behaviour and settings), but with the modern graphics features of 4.0 :)

In a way, it might be.

From my understanding (and from having used both KDE 3.5 and 4.2 through to 4.6) the main problem with KDE 4.x was that it was a complete rewrite from the 3.x series, and to say the transition was rough would be an understatement.

But if what I heard earlier is correct, KDE 5 will be more like KDE 3 in that it will extend from the KDE 4 codebase rather than dumping everything and starting from scratch. Hopefully resulting in a smoother transition and less crippling bugs.