Amazing isn't it. India announces they are doing chemical weapons research, and nobody seems to care because it is fully organic and tastes great!

I must remember this PR tactic next time I'm looking for more cost effective ways to give permanent blindness and 3rd degree burns to crowds.

And letting people select if they want filtered or unfiltered content when they subscribe to a service wouldn't provide the same warm fuzzies? You could even mandate public and workplace systems get filtered if you want.

The current plan should die because my freedoms are being removed by other peoples morals and potentially other peoples political opinions. I currently live in a country with censored Internet and know just how pointless and annoying this filtering is. There is just too much outcry when you block major sites, so YouTube didn't stay offline for very long, and you can't do it for long and banning small sites is whack-a-mole with a million moles and a single mallet. It will be pathetic if when I finally return home to Australia it has censorship on par with the third world with all the underlying hypocrisy. What is Conroy's electorate again and is it a safe seat? I might see if I can change my registered voter's address.

Please, won't somebody think of the adults for a change? The kids aren't even old enough to vote!

So your saying people should continue to develop MySQL because it already does everything it needs to? If you want a better MySQL you can get it today. MySQL development has nowhere to move as there are better options in every direction. It can sit right where it is though running millions of Wordpress sites quite happily for quite some time due to inertia and apathy. I wouldn't be banking on any commercial customers though.

Its a false question. Local weather goes up and down per the seasons, sunspots, whatever. Global Warming is concerned about trends over time and, unsurprisingly given the name, that trend is going up according to the vast, vast majority of people who study this stuff. Global Warming proponents do not and never have claimed the trend is going down by definition.

Yes, it is falsifiable - everything you list happened before humans existed (unless you are a Creationist).

Anthropogenic Global Warming proponents never have and never will claim that all these events occur purely because of humans - only straw man arguments like yours do that. Anthropogenic Global Warming just claims that humans contribute significantly and perhaps changing our habits might stop catastrophe. Of course, sane people don't really care what the cause except to the extent that it might find a solution.

btw. AGM is a terrible acronym, as the second most popular definition is 'Anti-Global Warming'.

Which would be particularly annoying if your next stop was Nepal, where 500 and 1000 rupee notes are not considered legal tender and technically an offence to bring into the country.

Its not their fault that volunteers keep getting jobs. If you need to employ a developer for an OS project, are you going to employ someone without experience in that project or someone with a proven track record? I'm aware of some OS projects that look like Corporate projects simply because there is a sponsor with a vested interest in it moving as fast as possible. They keep employing volunteers who do good stuff so they can do good stuff full time.

One problem with *all* the digital download distributors at the moment is international pricing. I use Steam for demos and occasionally a special or game that will never hit the shelves here. New release A-list titles are $US 12-18 here, I believe mainly to remain competitive with the pirates selling the title for $US 6 and because the local market just can't afford to pay more when $US 600/month is considered a good wage. The local distributors have worked out how to make a buck but the US based companies don't seem to be interested.

And think of the girls too. You want a selection of books so that every student will be able to find something they will love. Most of the recommendations I'm seeing here would be for the male highschool student of 10-20 years ago, and the beloved wish fulfillment novel of a 14 year old male geek in 1985 won't translate that well to 2009. If you have Ender's Game or the Dark is Rising, make sure you have alternatives available. Look to the World Fantasy Awards, Phillip K. Dick awards, Arthur C Clark awards, Hugo awards, Nebula awards of the last 5 years, 10 years tops. And the young adult variants too if need lighter works for the high school students. Get things more topical and from a modern pov that the students are more likely to relate too. Otherwise, getting something timeless will be pretty hard (eg. Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart)

The museum should enter into an agreement with an escrow or backup company to maintain a copy of the data. Its nuts that every museum in the world needs to think all this through and implement their own solutions themselves, or accept home brew solutions from the artists themselves. Go to the experts who know this stuff and get storage and insurance contracts drawn up to cover lossage should the worst occur.

The free DLCs are also an attempt to reduce piracy and force registration. The Mass Effect DLC was released free with their first patch, but required registering your details and using your CD key to obtain a key for the DLC.

That might be deliberate. There are a huge number of apps out there that don't respect your browser choice and just fire off IE. These apps just won't work without IE on the system. If the choice is between IE and broken apps, IE wins. The status quo preserved whilst complying with the monopoly rulings.