We have a bad track record of being violent with our own species, we have committed massive species genocide. Any aliens that contact us are either

A) Very stupid - unlikely.
B ) Very dangerous - by process of elimination, more likely.

The rest are likely to understand 'survival of the fittest' and stay hidden deliberately if they exist. Dark matter and dark energy could be aliens in hiding ;-)

Perhaps an Alien lifeform will pick up our RF signals and send devices to exterminate us before we can exterminate them, we might have a few thousand years before they/their weapons can get to us.

Has spreadsheet conditional formatting been fixed yet? The last time I tried to use it, it went berserk after a few copy/paste/deletes of ranges of cells.

GM foods are safe*

Windows 7 !!! I want the Windows 2000 functionality and I have it with Classic start menu.

could lead to "voluntary" blocking of peoples opinion that a state/eu doesnâ(TM)t like

It's already happening I tried to visit http://www.gilad.co.uk/ on my mobile and was surprised that it is blocked by default by O2, to view this page I was supposed to prove to the provider that I was 18 in order to get this site of a musician and political commentator unblocked. Gilad's crime - being Jewish and not supporting Israel.

We are more than half way down the slippery slope.

My concern is what exactly does this mean:

Devices must be connected to the internet and have Windows Update enabled.

Windows update enabled, Once? All year? A handful of checks? When, now? next year? This really needs further explanation. Since I've heard so many times about automatic updates fubaring peoples installs, I prefer to wait a while before installing updates.

They charge £16.50 a month for NOT having a phone line, how does that make any sense?

http://store.virginmedia.com/b...

When I was with Virgin Media they had the worst throttling, I'd literally see my 10M connections upload speed drop to dial-up speed. They still have crap download/upload ratios and the mandatory line rental is a complete ripoff.

So two things:
Censor = block, these companies will happily block political / controversial sites even by default (O2).
Not blocking is not just the problem if they are going to degrade the connection severely like VM do/did.

It invented cats, I think that's cool, who knows what it'll invent next.

So when the price of oil goes back up to $120, they will suggest that philanthropists* re-invest? They should be divesting because fossil fuels are screwing up the planet, not because they are not giving the best returns.

*Leaches who take a lot more than their fair share and then think they are good because they invest is shitty corporations and then donate some of the interest to charity.

The summary, most of the article and most of the posts here are completely missing the point.

In November, when the U.S. and China announced a historic agreement to curb carbon emissions in coming decades, it sent a strong, if vastly overdue, message to the world's carbon kingpins: Global governments are mobilizing to meet the threat of climate change. If they're going to take that message seriously, more than two-thirds of established fossil-fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground.

The oil, coal and natural gas need to stay in the ground, regardless of what we are paying for it, $50, $150 per barrel, people still pay for it.

Is civilisation going to end when we stop using fossil fuels? Of course not.

Far better article about global warming:Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere â" the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.)

"It was a mistake by an individual"

And the individual's supervisor and the person who trained the individual and the person who devised the individual's test after the training and the person who checked that the test was suitable and the person that did the risk assessment for the work the individual was doing and the person who checked the risk assessment for the work.

There are methods for making sure accidents don't happen, if those methods aren't followed then a lot of people are responsible.

You'd think they could get this stuff right after half a century of dealing with waste.

Could be worse... The Mafia's Deadly Garbage: Italy's Growing Toxic Waste Scandal

In a perfect world everybody would be fixing the world's problems you say!!

https://bitlaunder.com/bitcoin...

Site linked launders over time which apart from extremely large transfers would destroy any trace. Any intelligent criminal would use bespoke software or arduous work to split the stolen coins into dozens or even hundreds of small wallets of varying size, those could then be sold for hard cash or goods etc.

So yes, bitcoins are ideal for traceless laundering.