Nah, if WMC were here every post you ever made would be modded Troll.

CO2 changes lag temperature changes by around 800 years. The logical conclusion is that temperature is the cause of changes in CO2, not that CO2 drives temperature.

And all of those issues have nothing to do with global warming. We should be spending billions on real environmental catastrophies instead of trying to mitigate an imagined catastrophe centuries away.

Well, to be fair, us westerners also have our suspicions about the number four.

Bah! You wouldn't get 2.81794 femtometres.

The love of field and coppice,
    Of green and shaded Lanes,
    Of ordered woods and gardens,
    Is running in your veins;
    Strong love of grey-blue distance,
    Brown streams and soft, dim skies -
    I know but cannot share it,
    My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
    A land of sweeping plains,
    Of ragged mountain ranges,
    Of drought and flooding rains,
    I love her far horizons,
    I love her jewel sea,
    Her beauty and her terror -
    The wide brown land for me.

The tragic ring-barked forests
    Stark white beneath the moon,
    The sapphire-misted mountains,
    The hot gold hush of noon.
    Green tangle of the brushes
    Where lithe lianas coil,
    An orchids deck the tree-tops
    And ferns the crimson soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
    Her pitiless blue sky,
    When sick at heart around us
    We see the cattle die -
    But then the grey clouds gather
    And we can bless again
    The drumming of an army,
    The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
    Land of the Rainbow Gold,
    For flood and fire and famine,
    She pays us back threefold;
    Over the thirsty paddocks,
    Watch, after many days,
    The filmy veil of greenness
    That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
    A wilful, lavish land -
    All you who have not loved her,
    You will not understand -
    Though Earth holds many splendours,
    Wherever I may die,
    I know to what brown Country
    My homing thoughts will fly.

Dorothea MacKellar (1906)

Real computer geeks know that loved ones = data = posessions. Where else do you keep your beloved data except in your posessions?

Have a listen to alchemist, you might like them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3z9oeLreOc

You've got it backwards, one is the only thing that exists and everything else is illusion. We are all a single entity, a cosmic unity divided by holographic illusions. Any bong smoker will be able to tell you that.

Perhaps Lofti Zadeh has mod points?

Seeing 30/pi=9.549 that is a perfectly accurate measurement if we round to the nearest integer. There are plenty of places you can see the bible isn't correct (who did Cain marry?) but this isn't one of them.

I've got a smaller one again! Though not as legible: threepwood, and an italic one: thorpwood italic. Both are CC attribution only, so feel free to use them as you please.

To which party do you refer? the Democrats have had 60 odd successful filibusters and the Republicans 80-90 or so. Am I mistaken and this attack was against both parties or is your bias showing?

If the government had never sold Telecom we would be up shit creek without a paddle. Telecom were complete bastards, until competition appeared we had one of the most expensive and least useful telecoms networks in the world. We still have problems with price, but usability is slowly getting better (no thanks to Telstra though). Optic to the hub or home is an unrealistic dream for a country this fucking big. Demand for high speed optic fibre cable is 20 years old and was met in small island countries like Japan, Taiwan and Maylasia but has stagnated in our country which is as large as the USA but with less than a tenth of the population.

We could implement now what the progressive countries had in the 90s or we could try to embrace the future by investing in the private sector, and especially wireless which looks to be reaching 120mbps on 4G. In other words, the fibre network will be outpaced before it even gets laid as mobile speeds exceed those of the fixed lines. 'Redundant before it gets made' is not the technology that Australia needs to sink 43 billion+ dollars into.

There's nothing much stopping say a Chinese firm reverse engineering the current iPhone and replicating it using existing technology. In fact there's never been much of anything stopping individuals from recreating any patent, that is one of the intentions of patents after all. Thinking this would be the death of patents is like saying downloads are the death of copyright. Sure, the technology disrupts things but the legal system always finds a way to screw us over.

What's stopping someone from pirating the iPhone in 2050? How's $1 million in fines per infringing copy sound? I'm sure the legal minds will think of something.

I admire that you think we'll escape the IP trap so easily, as if technology were the only obstacle. Perhaps it's you thinking too small though, if we have replicators that can replicate an iPhone we should be also able make a replicator, and pretty much anything else to boot. We would be transitioning to a post-scarcity society. Would IP matter in such a world?