While I agree that music is much less annoying than the noise of other people trying to get their jobs done, sometimes when I'm coding alone in my house I need to crank some Aphex Twin or other discordant mentalism just for a base level of distraction - I find if 10% of my mind is trying not to get distracted it helps the other 90% just get on with the job in hand.

I suppose it's sort of like chewing gum or fiddling with stationary - there's just a bit of your mind dedicated to looking out for tigers, and if you're confident there are no tigers in your office you need to give it something else to do.

Please don't insult those of us who actually like science - these guys were not and are not scientists. They're just some people with university-level education and a load of fancy gadgets. No scientist would ever - ever - delete raw data, at least without a gun to his or her head.

I think partly the issue is one of specificity. People with claims to make are always 'scientists'. Found a new subatomic particle? Scientist. Got a probiotic yoghurt to sell? Scientist. It feels to me like calling anyone who makes things a builder, whether they make fine wines or aircraft carriers.

The point that people overlook when comparing science to religion is that science doesn't want your belief. It doesn't want your respect. It wants you to look at the evidence, try to reproduce it, try to touch it and play with it, and see if you agree. I hate saying I believe in science, because I don't. However, in my experince and the experience of others whom I respect, the scientific method is the most valid way - nay, the only valid way - to reach conclusions, whether they be huge and far reaching ("The Higgs is here! We found it!") or entirely meaningless ("I leaned back on my chair and a siren went off! My chair must have developed a siren!" vs "I leaned back on my chair and a siren went off. Hmm... Lean forward, lean back, lean forward, lean back... Just a coincidence. OK then.").

Indeed I shall - it got him a series of logical arguments with which to dispute the wisdom of the time. Gradually, through debate and observation and experimentation, more and more people realised he had made a series of logical points that disproved the old ways of doing things.

Let us compare this to the argument from incredulity - the equivalent would have been Einstein saying, "But I don't understand it! How does it work? No, look, see, the feather and the hammer land at different times! Ha! Scientists are dumb!" in which case I doubt he would have quite the same status in the history books.

This. This this this.

The number of times I've had to explain to my ISPs tech support that they just need to tell me what they want, as opposed to which button in XP to click, at one point got so bad that I feel I was justified in pirating Windows just so I could dual boot into it for those idiots. I had a friend once who was getting a slow connection speed from his router to the ISP, and they told him he'd have to get Windows before they could help him, because they don't support Linux.

Normally with these places the answer is that you just ask, 'What's your favourite distro?' as soon as they pick up, and if they say anything along the lines of, 'Umm...' or, 'What?' just hang up there and then - that's what the redial button is for. With a staff of 40, unless they're thinking of paying network-admin-level Euros, maybe two of these people is gonna have a frickin' clue how to troubleshoot malware on Linux, if the Germans are lucky.

I love the idea of a malware support line not being aimed at Windows users - I mean, come on. Seriously. We can debate why, we can debate how, we can debate many, many things, but we cannot possibly pretend that malware is a serious problem for every single user of Linux or Mac or whatever that hasn't spent hours upon hours setting up security buffers and manually hacking virtualized Windows so that they can save flashsites and then run them on the virtualized system-within-a-system; that's what you get with Windows. At least, that's what I get with Windows, and I have spent more of my life than I care to think about installing firewalls and AVs and giving them custom configs and then realizing too late that I have to do it again and I should have saved the config since I regularly (see: ~ once per year) have to reinstall Windows to get some speed back...

This is so naive it very nearly pains me. Not because you think the CRIA might lose - I think of that as optimism. No, rather because you think that $60 billion is a lot of money, and that they will have to pay it. Now, IANAL, but I am pretty sure that once a company declares itself bankrupt and disappears from the face of the Earth, that's it. Gone.

Two weeks later, the Canadian Association for the Recording Industry will pop up, and lo and behold! All the same employees, bar the dead wood they were trying to shift in the first place!

Of course, I sincerely hope I am wrong. I like to think of myself as quietly optimistic, and as such I look to a future where the greedy and the vicious are chastened by society's scorn and live lives of charity and humility. Unfortunately, while that bit of my brain is being quietly optimistic, there's another bit shouting DON'T BE SO STUPID!

I was going to go to the doctor about these voices in my head, but if the RIAA hear about them singing that Miley Cyrus song I'll be done for. No, better off just keeping quiet, like they want...

Here's another point - he is rich and white - the only way he could (statistically) live longer is be female or live in any other developed nation. Because of this, a year to him is worth less, since he'll be getting blowjobs from cybwhorgs and swallowing a pill for dinner long after I've kicked the proverbial. Since his time is worth less, he should spend much longer in prison than a normal human. QED.

I take it you didn't see that study recently that showed that America alone wastes 1 400 kilocalories per person per day, or 150 trillion kilocalories per year. It takes roughly 1 000 kilocalories per day to reverse malnutrition in children. So, just taking food from America's trash, we could eradicate hunger in children. Of course, then they'd be poisoned by all the crap in fast food, but nevertheless.

Alternatively, you could just read this .doc file, pointing out that we already produce enough food to feed double the population of the world? I know, accepting the idea that people starve because of the greed and apathy of wealthy nations combined with the corrupt governments of rich and poor nations, rather than because of some complex socio-economic problem, but it simply isn't true that world hunger is a complex problem.

tl;dr: the world produces enough food to make everyone in the world fat, we just throw it away instead of feeding the 1 000 000 000 starving people.

I would take that point, but pretty much reverse it - if you walk into an Apple shop and try to buy the equivalent of the laptop I'm using right now, you'd be spending more than double (£800 versus £1699; $1322 vs $2808; yes, electronics are expensive here). For that kind of cash for a high-mid-range laptop I'd expect ruggedization, water-resistance... Well, to be honest I just wouldn't spend that on a high-mid laptop. For the price you pay for Apple products, I'd expect them to be completely fucking bulletproof.

That depends what you mean - who do I trust more to know what they're doing? The NSA.

Who do I trust more to tell me the truth about what they are doing? Hmm... Do I trust the Pope or Ayatollah Khamenei more to help my kids learn about safe sex? To make a bad car analogy, what do I trust more to fix my car - the patch of rust on the chassis, or the kid that wants to hotwire said car?

So most MS employees are competent, just chronically mismanaged, and most NSA employees are very definitely competent to do their jobs - I just wouldn't trust them as far as the average slashdotter could throw them, ie at all. All I can say is, if I was a completely amoral security agency specialising in computers, and I got called in to work on the code for the world's most common OS brand - as used by many in the Chinese government - I'd stick a back door in there before I said hello to the dude in the office next to mine.

Not that I want to take part in a game of oneupmanship, but round these parts we recently had a radioactive paedophile on the loose...

Simple. Go to your FF address bar and type file:///C: then click on Program Files. You will be faced with a long list of software that FF is claiming is installed on your system, but can't just uninstall. I find it odd that you seem to think a few developers of a piece of software should be able to override the makers of the operating system. Maybe you also think that all the viruses and rootkits and trojans Windows gets from the web is a Firefox problem too?

A while ago there was a fuss about the Dalai Lama's computers getting hacked by Chinese dudes, and one of the guys asked for advice here. The overriding issue was that pretty much any modern software is hackable, if you have a team of experts working on it. MS has such a team, and they chose to target a specific program running within their own operating system - how were the FF devs supposed to stop them? OK, so they make good software, but they can't force you to use a different/better operating system.

Here in the UK there is a fascinating point of law - religions only get tax-exempt status if they are monotheistic. Richard Dawkins has a big thing about trying to persuade a Hindu temple to go to court for charity status, since they are legally a polytheistic, and thus heathen, religion, but actually all the gods are avatars of the one God, or something. Anyway, profit should be taxed, whether you dance around chicken innards or sell chocolate.