Copenhagen showed the individual governments of the world will never get past self interest to agree on a common approach. It is pointless having a system where a Pacific or Indian Ocean country can scuttle a brokered deal by voting no. In the end the G8 will have to make an agreement and then enforce it on the rest of the world. So in a sense Lovelock is correct, just at the wrong level of government.

To whoever marked my post off topic Suggesting a USB turntable is not off topic, and a dozen others have suggested the same thing. The final line of his post reads "or are there better thinking-outside-the-box alternatives available?" Yes there are and one is a USB Turntable, and as he is clearly an Australian so I also pointed him to where he can get one easily.

From one Australian to another. Aldi Supermarkets have a USB Turntable on special this week for $A79 - no line in required - complete with Windows software for recording. Simple, neat and good enough for making mp3s from your old vinyl. Cassettes are a different story, but I am sure there are plenty of options in that area too.

I wholeheartedly agree with the point, it is absolutely true. Only a small percentage will try to break free. I am happy to use Linux on all of my machines, but also realize that Linux usage will probably never go past 5-10% simply because it does take effort to re-learn and you have to value true computer freedom to even want to make that effort. I just wish more people could experience the freedom of using a computer without using antivirus and all the other band aids required to just keep the system functional. Not to mention the utter waste of money involved. But I know most will never step outside of what they know, and fear being seen as deviant. cheers

The problem with eating Big Macs and Whoppers is that you become a Big Whopper yourself. Bland and full of bloat and handcuffed to the medical industry. It takes an effort to be a lean machine, the path you take is your own choice.

Written by someone who has never used GNU/Linux. For everyday usage you do not have to figure out what version you are using or care about dependencies or ever hand edit config files. You open the package manager, find the app you want and click "install" and a few seconds later it is installed and ready because the app comes from a distro specific repository. Ubuntu/Debian has 30000 plus packages. You do not use the Windows approach of searching the web for an app, downloading and installing. The apps are already in the distro repository, verified and waiting. Another reason Windows users get viruses, because you never know who packaged the program until it is too late. Linux programs from the repository are verified clean and legit. You also imply that Windows users never have a problem installing software or finding drivers. Who are you trying to kid?

You are basing your opinion on nothing but rumours and newspaper articles by conspiracy nuts and the opinions of paid political bloggers.

I would say that you have drunk the kool-aid already. You are quoting the Daily Mail as your source, not NASA or a national weather service. Eliminating data that is erroneous is absolutely required for accuracy. Here in Australia it was found that historical temperature data from one station was from a thermometer nailed to a post under a corrugated iron roof in the car park of a pub. Yet the scientists are criticised for eliminating these readings. They would be soundly criticised by their peers if they did not eliminate this data. The data has to be tested to be reliable and valid, and a lot of data does not meet this quality standard. It is not massaging the data, it is only relying on verified data for analysis. It is not a conspiracy it is science.

Yeah, but flies do not have IQs over 150 and super computers. Only people with tin foil hats could seriously believe that all the climatologists of the world are in a giant conspiracy.

On one hand we have thousands of climatologists from dozens of countries armed with super computers and the resources of government. They tell us we have a problem. Arguing against them are a bunch of people, most of whom are not climatologists or even scientists, who do not have super computers or any data of their own. They argue that there is a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data. Thousands of scientists from Europe, Asia, Australasia and the Americas all working in harmony to defraud the world, to drive up taxes and bring down civilisation - all led by the anti-christ Al Gore. Think about who you are siding with and why you believe in what you believe.

My poorly made point was and still is that Creative created the concept. You are entitled to your opinion. Whatever size HDD the Nomad 1 had it was physically the same size as the 2 (I had both). The first iPods were of a similar size, but had a prettier rounded shape. Style was more important than function to the consumer. The Nomad I only had USB 1.1 as that was what existed at the time. They moved to USB 2 and dropped Firewire, because (as you said) that is what people then had. What killed Creative, apart from Apple's marketing, was jumping in too soon when the hardware was way too expensive. I am, and always will be, biased to not use iPods because I am a Linux user and Apple go out of their way to ensure their products will not work under Linux.All Creative players are plug and play with Amarok under Linux. Only some iPods will work, generally the older models. I still have a Creative, a Zen 32gb. I have added Sennheiser buds and it runs for 30 plus hours on a charge. I still way prefer it to my daughters iPod Touch. The Touch is way too big and clunky, it is a games machine that can also play music. I do not see anything special about a Nano - oddly a name used by Creative first as well.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/06/08/23/apple_to_pay_creative_100m_in_settlement.html The settlement is reported at $100, although no one knows for sure. I had a first generation Zen, with a 20gb HDD and firewire, and still have the next model with a 30gb HDD, but USB - and it still works. And I do not have one file locked by DRM, all my music came from my CDs and now DRM free MP3s.

Except all that was done by Creative first - which is why the courts made Apple give them half a billion dollars. What Apple had was marketing

You need at least one ext2 formatted thumb drive. When I move source code around I need to preserve symlinks. Can't do that with fat32 without zipping. USB drives are so cheap now you can easily have as many file systems as you want. I also have a 160gb external drive formatted as ext3 for backups - no brainer as it is never going to be read by a Windows machine and permissions and symlinks are preserved. Having two partitions is a neat solution if you only have one drive.

Linux does have a memory limit, it is subject to the same address mathematics as any OS. What you mean is that Linux can use PAE efficiently. Most end users have never heard of PAE and it is not installed by default on any disto I have used. With any 32bit OS you cannot even read a whole 4gb, after everything is loaded you only get about 3.5 of your 4gb. To even use the whole 4gb you need to go 64bit. Motherboards also have chip limitations, not all boards can be crammed with ram even with a 64bit operating system. Linux now has 64bit flash and java and Linux drivers are all 32 and 64 bit by design. I happily use 64bit Debian Sid and 64bit Ubuntu on my machines. FFMPEG can decode anything I need so 32bit codecs are a limitation of the past. Time to move up and move on.