This is what I'd want myself. Mandate that ISPs implement an anti-pornography filter on their side that is activated on a strictly opt-in basis. So if I don't think to ask for filtering, I don't get any.

Given that the Tories are supposed to be all about 'personal responsibility', this should be absolutely perfect for them. Responsible parents get the tools they need to help keep pornography away from their children, but the ultimate responsibility is on the parents to be vigilant and aware.

The deniers set up multiple goalposts. There are the ones who deny it's happening at all (a favorite tactic of this group is to start their time series with 1998, which was an unusally warm year, to insist that there's been no warming trend in the last 10^H^H11^H^H12 years)

Funny coincidence, I spotted James Delingpole doing this today, while cramming as many denialist canards as possible into a single Telegraph opinion piece. Brilliantly, he actually goes even further than usual with:

If it's "global warming" you're worried about, it stopped in 1998. Global cooling is a much more imminent and serious problem. Recent changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation mean that we're now set for a 30 year cooling period guaranteed to make a mockery of all our fears about "global warming." Yet here we are, embarked on a policy guaranteed to raise our energy bills to unaffordable levels, as we enter a period of colder winters.

The man really is unbelievable.

If it's not chained to your desk, then it is not -- by definition -- a desktop.

Oh, I would love to hear you detail exactly how the government has been gouging you in particular. You know... new taxes, increases in old taxes, cuts in benefits, and how each one you list affects your bottom line. I'm sure lots of people here would like to hear all of the juicy details. So, let's hear it.

Or you could try a Debian testing/unstable mix, so you get most packages from the somewhat more stable testing, but have the ability to install newer packages from unstable whenever you feel you need to. I'm using it right now, and it seems to work well.

So it's finally happened. After months of "I hate where KDE is going with KDE 4, I'm switching to GNOME!", now it's GNOME that's making unpopular changes and people are saying "I hate where GNOME is going with GNOME 3, I'm switching to KDE!".

No, it's been in the kernel for three years but was developmental for most of that. It was only declared stable with 2.6.28, which was released just over one year ago. Personally, I'm going to wait another year or two here. When it comes to file systems, I tend to be on the conservative side.

This reminds me of a comment I made over at Moonbattery on a post entitled "Guardian Moonbat Calls for "Cull" of Western Children" where the post actually says:

This leaves little doubt as to their interpretation of The Guardian's article. I responded with:

I quickly got a response:

Obviously they must have been calling for genocide! Why else would they say "cull" unless they intended for millions of children to die?

My point is that grabbing a dictionary and harping on forever isn't the best way to ascertain extent. Sometimes people are being satirical. Sometimes people use the wrong word. Trying to say The Pirate Bay must be made to help piracy because it's The Pirate Bay isn't an argument, it's just noise.

I noticed this too, so I instinctively took a screenshot of my RSS reader to prove it did actually exist.

Anyone from Slashdot care to explain what the hell happened?

Additionally, the GNU version of rm treats root as special, so "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" would actually be necessary on most Linux systems, otherwise I believe it would just output a message saying something along the lines of "root cannot be removed" (I'm not going to find the exact message by actually trying this command myself, for obvious reasons).

I think you mean embarrassing for a stupid 15 year old who has no idea how to use multiple user accounts or Firefox 3.5's Private Browsing mode.

I get around this by using the TinyURL Decoder script for Greasemonkey. It's explicitly designed to dynamically change shortened links back to the full-length originals, telling you exactly where they go without you having to visit the page itself.

There are only two disadvantages I've found. First, there is a marked delay before it actually decodes the URL, but that's unavoidable. I found the second when visiting the Katawa Shoujo Dev Blog. It seems for reasons related to limitations of Blogspot the link to the IRC server was encoded with TinyURL, because Blogspot wasn't happy with an irc:// link. Unfortunately, the decoder script decoded the URL producing a prompt from Firefox to open the link in an IRC client, then it somehow got re-encoded, the decoder script decoded it again, and I ended up in an infinite loop with Firefox opening up a new prompt every 10 seconds or so.

I managed to fix the second problem by blacklisting the site in TinyURL Decoder's preferences, and they seem to have since fixed the code on their end. But still, that was pretty fucking annoying.

In a related story, I was watching television at about 5PM here in Staffordshire just before the 2007 local elections when I heard one of those vans. This was unusual and annoying as we don't seem to get them much around here (I'd never heard one before, and I've never heard one since). I heard it loud and clear over the television though, telling me to vote for the "Ratepayers' Association" in the coming election. I did vote, I saw their candidates, and did not vote for any of them (I had three votes to give, one went to Labour, the other two to Tories). Curiously, I later saw a local newspaper headline while I was in the supermarket. The Ratepayers' Association had lost all of their council seats in the election.

I would certainly image it does feel faster than Firefox on Linux x64. As per bug #489146, TraceMonkey is still not enabled on x64 Linux builds. This does make it feel rather sluggish on any page with serious amounts of JavaScript (i.e. any Slashdot story), and is something that really bugs me about the 3.5 release. I'm sure I'll really enjoy it someday, but not until I can actually use the biggest enhancement of the release.

To add to this, I'll agree with the 'braindead' part of your post. I can't see why people would praise BSkyB over the BBC, the BBC at least provide the service we're paying them for. Here, I bought a new Sky+ HD box and an HD subscription, planning to replace an old Sky+ box with a shiny new HD box and replace a regular Sky box downstairs with the old Sky+ box, giving both our upstairs and downstairs TV the ability to pause and record programs. Sky seemed absolutely fine with all this, so far so good.

First screw up now. We should've received two new Sky cards, one for the new HD box and another for the old Sky+ box. We didn't. No problem the installers said, we'll just use the card from the regular old Sky box, put it in the HD box, call Sky so they can transfer the old card over, and we'd have full Sky HD in about four hours! We didn't. All we got were the free-to-air/view HD channels and the regular SD package channels, but none of the HD package channels, nor would the box operate as a Sky+ box, giving error messages telling us to upgrade our subscription whenever we tried to use such functions.

What follows now is a month and no less than five calls to Sky, where we were told (and I quote) getting the box actually working "could be a week, could be a month". Despite this, Sky wasted no time in debiting my account for the full amount, including the extra £10 for the HD channels I'm not getting. We would fight for a refund, except that we tried that once when Sky mistakenly debited us for an installation that never actually happened and only ended up wasting money on phone calls only for Sky to tell us they couldn't give us our money back but they could 'credit our account' for the amount, meaning they wouldn't charge us for our subscription for a while, but Sky simply don't do refunds (I phrase it as Sky getting confused, after all we give them money, how could it possibly work the other way around?).

As I type this, it has now been one month since I got Sky+ HD, and there is still no indication that Sky are actually going to activate the functions I'm paying them extra for. The lack of Sky+ is especially ridiculous as Sky actually changed their system so anyone with a Sky+ or Sky+ HD box (which I have) and a subscription to at least one channel package (we have four) automatically gets Sky+ without needing an additional subscription! So why do I still hit pause only to get:

All Sky can tell us is that they're "having some problems" and will send an email to get some form filled out so they can actually provide us with the service as promised. We'd move television providers except that Sky has no competition here. Freeview isn't available due to the local transmitter not being upgraded and doesn't provide a fraction of the channels anyway. Cable is simply not available here in any way, shape, or form. So unlike with gas, electricity, broadband, or phone, there is no competition and we can't move. If this is somehow supposed to be better than the TV licence, I'm not seeing it.