Nonsense the IPCC predicted that at 350ppm C02 the climate would become unstable, there would be continuous storms and droughts and wars over water supply.
The also said that the worst case scenario it would be 0.6C hotter than 2000 by now. We exceeded their worst case for C02 and Methane emission yet they were totally wrong and the temperature rise has been way below their best case scenario. The science has been spun from the beginning to try and create political action.

What's more anyone who simply points out that the amount of AGW may be less than what the models predicted is attacked as a denier and attempts made to silence them to avoid debating the accuracy of the models.

The major problem is that it a tragedy of the commons situation. The cost of action is much higher than is claimed and whomever acts first suffered great economic disadvantage while those who continue to increase emission benefit. You need to start with low cost changes and get global agreement to adopt them before any progress will be made.

Attempts to read ideology into opinion polls is silly. You get all these arguments about American's are stupid because less of them believe in AGW than Europeans, and liberals are smarter because they believe in Catastrophic AGW regardless of the data. The simple fact is that the recent warm winter raised belief in AGW in the US by close to 20%, and the cold winter in Europe drop belief in AGW over 15% in a poll there. Poll don't mean much.

It is cheaper to use solar than fossil fuels in the middle of a sunny summer day. The problem with that is that it therefore becomes more expensive to sell base load and peak power when it isn't sunny. And wind causes the same problems when it is windy. This means that it no longer economically viable to build combined gas power stations for peak power generation. The result is that power prices go up and supply become unreliable.

This is particularly a problem in Germany where they committed trillion to subsiding solar power and the result has been the government renigging on feed in tariffs for solar and subsiding coal power plants to guarantee supply raising emissions. Shutting down their nuclear plants will only make this even worse.

The US economy faultered because it was being driven by consumption, rapidly rising house prices and financial speculation all funded by unsustainable borrowing.
The financial speculators just failed first. And in the process managed to expose the structural problems of low economic growth and massive government debt in Europe.

Nonsense. C is a general purpose language and you can do everything in it. Providing you have the time to design, code and test everything properly in C it will give you the most efficient and reliable programmes. There only a few very specialised things like concurrency that standard C won't do (and there are Cs that will).
C syntax is the basis of most programming languages and learning C will will provide a very good base for whatever programming you want to do.

The reason you don't use C is that other languages are easier and faster to program for a lot of things. With something like Python you can learn to write readable code and do things quickly without having to worry about all the low level stuff. That makes them good for teaching introductory programming. No one has been able to books or websites suitable for a child to learn C because it is not the sort of language that works for such an approach. With C you get K&R, a reference manual and some course of exercises to do and sit down and figure it out.

I spent an hour exploring it all and completing all the quests. For the get 5000 damage I just stood next to a skeleton and went and had lunch. There were a few players doing that which looked quite funny.

Once you know where everything is you can sneak past the monsters in your T-shirt and get to an unguarded drop where you can get everything you need kill the Skeleton King in a couple of minutes. It is just a simple demonstration of the technology. As it is open source someone might make a dungeon with good gameplay out of it.

<quote><p>I thought the whole "Got a problem with invasive species x? Import invasive species y!" schtick had gone wrong so many times over the years that there would be more caution about it now.</p>

Actually there is whole new movement in Ecology devoted to the idea. Emma Marris is a leading promoter of it:
http://www.emmamarris.com/rambunctious-garden/

Getting tired of discussing habitat degradation and arguing that there are few untouched wildernesses anymore they have started constructing hypothetical ecosystems that may be more stable and an improvement on current ecosystems which have lost important species or become unbalanced by introduced species. So far it is mostly just conference papers but there have been a few projects. There has been a big game ecosystem created in a park in Holland, large domestic horned cattle were introduced to wilderness area in Europe to replace the wild cattle that humans wiped out ages ago and wolves have been reintroduced to national parks in North America to control deer, caribou and bison.

Introducing elephants to the tropical grass lands of Northern Australia is purely hypothetical and never going to happen.

<quote><p>Except these things have such a huge presence and impact on the modern world that a mandatory intro to understanding and programming them is a damn good idea.</p></quote>

Yes these things have a huge presence. But this nonsense goes against all ideas of economics. Productivity dictates that you employ a few hundred or thousand people to work on Android and then just employ low skilled labour install it on billions of phones. The people building the phones, transporting the phones, selling the phones and using the phones which make up just about all the employment involving mobile phones don't have, nor will ever need to have, a clue about coding Android.

The idea that teaching 100% of 15 years to code will produce an economy where 100% of the labour force is made up of highly paid programmers is the typical fallacy that has made the British education system and economy the disasters that they are. Not the solution. And what is the economic reality of this high tech nirvana we are being promised British IT graduates are doing the worst of all graduates in terms of employment and their salaries are declining.

In a modern economy over 80% of the jobs are in service industries. You keep a job by dealing with people in some way that can't easily be replaced by a computer, robot or someone in China or India. You get paid in inverse proportion to the number of people prepared to do your job, which is often only restricted by artificial or regulatory barriers.

Sure you can teach everybody to hack perl. But if they are working on your accounts system, stock systems or customer database they better be able to write code that is reliable, test it thoroughly, make sure it is scalable and train their replacement in its use and maintenance or you will be out of business within a year. Only a few people are ever going to be capable or able to be needed to write the software that the majority will just learn how to use, and which will of course eventually run our Robot Overlords.

I love the engineering of the Raspberry Pi but seriously what on earth is it good for? We have seen this with thin clients and $100 laptops before.
They will only sell a few thousand to geeks who can always find a use for another box they can kit out with spare parts.

But for its supposed use by the time you fit a power supply, display, keyboard and a server and provide the training and support to use it in an institutional setting it it will cost roughly the same as a set up using cheap laptops or desktops. And they will be much more reliable and come with enough memory to run what ever you want.

As for hobby programming forget about it. The barrier to hobby programming isn't the hardware, pretty much anyone who wants to can scavenge an old intel desktop or laptop and install a live linux system and whatever language they feel like. Programming is largely a hobby of the wealthy and not important for kids. As long as they are properly trained in a bit of maths and logic in school they can pick up programming whenever they need it easily. The reason why kids spent time programming BBC Micros in the past was because they didn't have access to Angry Birds and cable TV. Those days are long gone and can't be brought back.

<quote>"Over and over, we read of hidden, manipulated, and cherry-picked data, refusals to abide with having outsiders vet their work, and allowing naked advocacy into the IPCC reports on climate change as if they were peer-reviewed science. "

No, we don't; you just made those things up.</quote>

He did not make them up. They are all well documented. Various inquiries have found that Mann and Jones and his colleagues at the CRU did cherry pick data, they did manipulate figures to hide declines in temperature. The inquiries, including by the NSF, then concluded that this was normal scientific practice so there was no problem. The IPCC bigwigs did appointed lots of mates to write sections of its reports, including things like the classic section on India where the information was cut and paste from WCF propaganda on ice melting that was discredited.

Of course the fact that a few scientists stupidly exaggerated stuff and fudged a few graphs doesn't change the fact that the planet is warming. What this and the lame attempts to cover-up this up and deny it did was simply to cause serious damage to the climate change activists' agenda. Which is what the article is about. They are trying to blame their failure to win the political argument on a lack of scientific knowledge. They want to make up a scientific argument so they can ride roughshod all over the messy business of democracy and people's rights.

The majority of the population has never understood science and never will. It doesn't matter. In the past that lead to blind acceptance of science as progress but it leads now to cynicism about science. And given the actions of pharmaceutical companies that is fairly easy to understand and sensible. It isn't science that is going to win elections but politics. They have to stop bothering about trying to silence their critics and just debate them and campaign for support.

Significance testing is poor and confusing way of doing statistics that is used mostly in the humanities. The standard method of estimation is much better at conveying the magnitude of the difference and accuracy and likely repeatability of the experiment. Most academic who use significance testing never understood first year statistics anyway. There is a good argument on this issue here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2011/3333636.htm

I suspect that one of the reasons that Quorum did better in the experiment what that it uses white space rather than semi-colons and brackets. Misplaced semi-colons and brackets are common trivial errors that experienced programmers make. For novices writing in an editor (without any syntax highlighting or compiler errors to pick them up) under exam conditions that would be a major issue. It will be interesting to see their suggested further research with larger sample and languages like Python and C included.

On Perl. Perl was not a carefully designed language. It was intended for for text processing and just grew with the functionality of a shell, sed, awk, REs, bits of OO and whatever else you can think of thrown in. It is large, irregular and requires of lot of learning by rote and practice to master. It is very powerful and efficient at doing what it does but I don't think anyone is going to claim that it is a good language for quickly teaching the concepts of programming to beginners or the disabled. Which is what the authors of the paper are interested in and are comparing.

And if Perl is so wonderful and easy to use then why have they spent over a decade trying to clean up the syntax, reduce the number of ways of doing the same thing and improve the implementation with Perl 6? A neater language with Perl's functionality may have been a good idea but it has taken so long that other languages have been developed to fulfill roles (PHP, Java, Javascript, C#, Python, Ruby, Haskell etc) along with languages designed for modern issues like concurrency and cloud based applications e.g. Go, Opa and Dart.

Perl's main advantage are that there are lot of people who can do stuff quickly in Perl 5 and there is a lot of code available on the net. Perl 6 will now have little to offer because you would have to rewrite everything. It will be easier to back port new functionality where useful into Perl 5 (as is happening e.g with say (which is another illogical bit to have to learn by rote)) than to do that.

Centrelink already runs such a system for welfare recipients and it sucks.

Instead of just opening a letter you get an email or SMS to tell you that you have an electronic letter. Then you have to log into their website past a password and security question and download a PDF of the letter.

The website is offline most Sundays and nights for routine maintenance. At other times it is overloaded and so slow that it hard to use. For a while some of the PDFs were corrupted and unreadable by either Foxit or Adobe. And if you missed the email or SMS you missed the letter which could be important and leave you open to having your welfare suspended.

The Government has never implemented a single IT project properly and always wastes billions. I went back to getting letters and intend to continue doing so.

50 pixels -- that's an extra limb you can see while watching porn on your netbook!

You should say "See you later I am going somewhere else with reasonable conditions".
However, if you can't say that you should say "Excellent idea sir".

Linux has never ever been on its way to desktop success. It has never had more than 1% of the desktop market and is not growing. That is the entire point of the PC World article. That is not the result of a conspiracy, and referring to PC World article is not trolling.

Most people don't want to have to bother with updating an OS, let alone partitioning and installing one and hunting around to find drivers that work. Then hunting down and installing the applications they want to run. Homes and businesses want to buy a computer, push a button and use it. That is why the major desktop OS is still Windows XP, and it will become Windows 7 as people buy new computers because that is what will be installed on the computer they buy.

Linux computers cost more because they sell in smaller numbers and Linux is more costly to install, support and train users in. With Linux and X Windows, Gnome, KDE and host of libraries needed to run applications a full version of Linux runs slower than XP on a netbook. That is why Dell and Asus are ditching it, it is simply dollars because the cost of an OS is irrelevant compared to the testing and support to get and keep it working.

As to all this that my uncle's cousin runs it as a desktop so it must be growing and will soon take over the market that is all nonsense. Yes many people use Linux, but the fact is only 1% of the desktop market. Linux is modular and flexible and free but it is not homogenous, simple or easy and was never intended to be a mass market commercial OS.

And there is the claim here that universities use Linux so that is future. Not as desktops in Australia they don't. I have worked for two major universities one uses all Mac desktops and laptops the other used a mix of Macs and PCs but is now switching to centralised PCs and laptops with Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, Internet Explorer and MS Office all supplied and supported on a tender from one major computer supplier, because that is the cheapest to install and support.

Tasmania is a trial programme. The ISP are being charged a heavily subsided connection fee of $300 per customer.

There has been no cost benefit analysis down on the scheme, there have been wholesale prices set and we have no idea what it will cost in the end.

The Government's figures are for an average cost of $6000 per household, or $2000 per person. Regional centres will cost $8000 and rural properties up to $22,000 all subsidised by metropolitan users. The remotest 7% will be served by wireless and satellite.

To make that possible they are requiring 70-90% uptake. Which will be generated by ripping out copper phone lines and ADSL and restricting spectrum for wireless to make a corporatised monopoly operating on a set 6-7% profit margin to pay back the Government, and whom ever they eventually sell it of too.

No other country has tried fibre to the door of such a large low density population. No other fibre programme has gotten greater than 30% market penetration or made a profit, or generated any economic benefit. It is far from certain that retail ISP will even want to be involved in much of it, including low profitable rural areas where household incomes are on average 25% less than in metropolitan areas which would forcing the government to run its own subsidised ISP for them.

Assuming all this works the whole charges are expected to be about $33/month plus usage.

Currently the ACCC sets ADSL pricing at $16/month plus usage. At that level 40% of low income households in cities can't afford broadband. The bottom 10% of households can't afford the internet at all.

The NBN is a massive uncosted risk.