Currently, as a result of back room deals between the government and the Christian lobby, Australia has a moral anchor rather than a moral compass.

Given your exposé of the facts on Slashdot, and the way you describe your colleagues and your own understanding of stats, I would say there is a 90% chance you are wrong and they are right. Or maybe 95%.

I think after quashing a hundred or so of this type of allegation, only to find out it was absolute rubbish put about for propaganda, one quite rightly gets tired of chasing down the filibustering allegations of the tin foil hat denialist brigade. The obviously fervent prejudices of this "Institute", plus the precise timing, sets off enough alarms to warrant skipping further analysis. As other people have said here, show me the top-tier peer-reviewed climate science journal article if you want to be noticed. If you believe there is some massive global collusion amongst scientists preventing such articles from being published, then you know very little about scientists (or global politics for that matter).

"Can you cite some research which isn't based on CRU's Hockey Stick graph which has been debunked" Can you cite some research about atoms that isn't based on the 'plum pudding' model of atoms, which has been debunked? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_pudding_model The point is that the climate models evolve over time. The word "based on" that you use is ambiguous - we must assume you mean 'refined/evolved from'. Example of an improved climate model: http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20091009-00

There is a natural variability that correlates to several known processes. There have been dips and peaks of greater magnitude since the start of the industry and beyond. The long term clear is very though; http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/ and fits well with the increasingly accurate climate models that have been refined over time to include these know processes.

This is more about making users use F-Spot, an unpopular and feature-deficient piece of software to say the least. This is probably more about sneaking more mono into Gnome than anything else.

Almost as convincing as a "scientific" anti-wrinkle cream advertisement .. but not quite. Perhaps you need to look prettier?

Mozilla is just miffed because they didn't think of it first. Now they have set themselves up to look like hypocrites if they follow suit.

"I think at the starting point of it you need manufacturers of both hardware and software to devise technology that makes it difficult or impossible for people to be defrauded,"

Because obviously we have already done that for telephones.

Heh. Actually I wrote those .. thanks for the attribution swanzilla.

"we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer"

Would you like to purchase a parachute, sir?

"is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?"

Another thing that annoys me is the diversity of animals and plants on Earth. It makes it so hard to study them all. Isn't it time to concentrate on the consolidation and standardisation living species in general?

"So for you academics out there, be careful. Groklaw notes this is interesting considering some of its results quote 2001: A Space Odyssey or Douglas Adams. Claiming copyright on that material may be a bold move." You can copyright something if it quotes someone else - people do it all the time (*especially* academics). The question is whether it is (a) a "work" in the copyright law sense and (b) fair use of the material. I would posit that the W|A engine is putting together a document in response to a query. Short quotes are probably fair use. I'm not sure who the "creator" or the work is though :-) Interesting ...