Global warming won't result in near-extinction for humans. It will make life a lot less pleasant though, and will probably prove fatal to many in less-resilient (ie poorer) areas as food crops fail and prices rise. There will almost certainly be wars fought over access to water. Current global population levels will become unsustainable.

Some animal and plant species will certainly become extinct as habitats shrink, and ocean acidification will really hit a lot of food chains that we consider important (bye bye cheap protein from fish, already vulnerable due to overexploitation).

But you and me? We're part of the global elite, with the luxury of having the time and money to be posting on this site rather than scratching a living from subsistence farming. We'll pay higher prices for our food, and grumble about all the floods and tornadoes pushing up insurance premiums, but we're unlikely to die from starvation or war as a result of climate change.

This is why I replaced my much-loved HTC Desire with a Samsung GSIII instead of a One X. Sorry HTC, Samsung had the features I needed for the same price.

All your other points are correct, but USB mass storage was removed in Ice Cream Sandwich and replaced by MTP, which is a pig to deal with on pretty much any OS - especially linux-based ones - and is a source of immense frustration. I shouldn't have to run a FTP server on my phone in order to access the files that previously I could get to just by plugging in a USB cable. Major fail for what is an otherwise great smartphone platform.

The "fact" was made up by a wikipedia user as a joke, then used by a lazy journalist on the Mirror. The Mirror article was then cited on WP as a source, verifying the "fact".

This is not the only time a similar thing has happened.

Interesting that you attempt to make this (easily refuted) argument on a science and technology site. The same processes of inquiry, hypothesis formation, testing, refutation, evidence gathering etc etc that led to the invention of semiconductor transistors, laser diodes, optic fibres, LCD displays and such other technologies as you are using to read and post on this site, when applied to biology, have led to the acceptance of speciation by evolution and provided evidence for this from every scale from the geological to the molecular.

If you don't accept evolution as a fact, then you shouldn't believe in the Internet either.

Go on, have a read of George Dyson. Evolutionary processes are as evident in information technology as they are in biology. It's just that the mutation and selection mechanisms are different.

This is clearly false as many effective vaccines have no heavy metal adjuncts. Remember Edward Jenner? The cowpox virus he inoculated his subject with had no metals in, yet provoked an immune reaction nonetheless.

Got to love the demonisation of the poor. It's much cooler than being racist. SImply change the word "black" for "welfare recipient" in all of your rants and no-one will bat an eyelid.

It's not like we're in the middle of the worst economic crisis for decades, with many people being laid off and needing society to help them get by while they try to be the one person out of the two thousand who applied to actually get the menial, low-paid job that is all that's on offer in the ex-industrial town they had the misfortune to be born in. Heaven forbid anyone would aspire to owning a consumer good which the constant saturation of advertising states is the only way to validate yourself as a person.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chavs-Demonization-Working-Owen-Jones/dp/184467696X might open your eyes (UK context but applicable to many western countries)

Aye, it is at that, so it is by the way.

You're clearly reading the wrong books. Try Christopher Brookmyre.

I bet some of those Ohioans have Scottish ancestry too.

Right. So that Intenet thing you're using to communicate with other individuals, that was created by a meaningless organisational structure? That government which your parents paid taxes to to do things like educate you and keep you safe from criminals, that is a meaningless organisational structure? The extended family and community which you grew up in and kept you nurtured to the point where you could read Ayn Rand and regurgitate nonsense such as you posted, that's just a meaningless organisational structure?

You are alive today because of the collective endeavours of millions of humans who worked to increase our knowledge about the world, invented medicines and medical procedures, even invented world-wide telecommunications networks to share their knowledge for the good of all of our species. If that isn't society, I don't know what is.

Humans are a social species. Get over it, put down the narcissistic libertarian bullshit books, and join in the fun.

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3068759&cid=41108347

"They need educated" is a perfectly correct construction in many forms of English. It's used extensively in west central Scotland, for instance - "those dishes need washed", "my fence needs mended", "those football clubs need investigated for tax dodging" etc. Are you suggesting that the University of Glasgow (founded in 1451, the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world) is not somewhere that provides a good education, simply because many of its graduates use a particular verbal construction?

This, however, is not a typically accepted construction.

Glass houses, man. Glass houses.

Why does having a vaccination "stress [your] son's immune system out" more than his routine everyday exposure to hundreds of potential pathogens, such as those on your skin or in his crib?

There's a good review here of the development of the human immune system both pre- and post-natal. It's entirely possible that the difference in immune function between young children and adults is an adaptive trait, given that most classes of pathogen will be encountered in the first few months of life. Your baby might look fragile, but he's had T-cells since he was a 12-week old fetus.

What "upgrade now" window? Firefox gets updated with the other packages on my system, by PackageKit or yum upgrade. Do you have to manually update each of your applications individually? That must get really annoying. Is there something wrong with your OS that it forces you to do that? ;-)

No-one does that any more. We just boot up a simulated world full of imaged human minds and overclock the substrate until they've rewritten the code for us. After that we wipe the simulation before they can develop an exploit that lets them jump out of the VM. Much simpler than hand-coding AIs.

"Hi Valve, it's me. You know, Anonymous Coward. I'd like you to pay me money to tell you what you're doing wrong... hello? Hello?"

... "Hi Valve, Anonymous Coward again. We got cut off - are your phones working ok? Hello? That's odd, it's happened again."

On the subject of dependencies, from what I understand, because Bedrock essentially has pretty much full distro installs in chroots, each distro uses its own libraries, so it's possible to have different library versions coexisting as applications will only load the libraries they are linked against - the particular chroot/$PATH/bind mount magic that Bedrock does takes care of it. As packages are installed using individual "client" distros package management tools, they will pull in whatever dependencies they need and install them in that "client" distro's chroot.

It seems quite elegant to me, although I haven't the patience to set it up myself as I'd effectively be administering 5 distros instead of one. It might be quite nice for a combined CentOS/Rawhide system though, kind of super-stable but with easily added bleeding edge bling.