Might be a stupid question here - but, I currently run Ubuntu 10.04 and use Google Chrome. How would this exploit present itself to me? Could I get infected from simply visiting a page? Clicking on an email in gmail? I'm guessing checking my emails in Mutt wouldn't lead to an infection? Would it present a dialog box that is or isn't decorated in my window decoration?

Just to list a few:

For starters this is a retrospective, observational (being generous here) cohort study.
I'd like a bit more technical detail on how they ensured that they were measuring mobile calls from cars (they have assurance from the telecommunications company)
They note a 7% rise in what they believe to be car mobile phone calls at 9pm on Monday to Friday on a background of steadily decreasing phone calls from 8pm to 10pm, and they don't mention whether this spike is statistically significant.
The spike in the rise of mobile car use is of a maximum of 1/2 hour before the level reaches pre-9pm levels, and continues to decrease. This interval is short - to notice an effect the recording of the car accidents in their source would have to be pretty precise. Any errors in the reporting of car accidents is probably going to make a 30 min window period difficult to measure.
They haven't analysed the variation in traffic at different times in the evening, which makes comparison at different time periods difficult. If the traffic is less after 9pm, the rate of accidents per car could be higher.

But the main problem is:
To show 'no effect' you need to ensure that your study is powered to make this observation - which they have not done. A 7% rise in mobile usage over 30 minutes would need ?how many crashes to give a statistically significant result that rises above the noise.

To be fair, they mention some of these issues as caveats, but I'm not sure they had enough statistics input for this paper. I would like to see the confidence intervals, how they were calculated, what software was used and what the p-values are. There should be a statisticians name on the paper. Certainly, you can't conclude that mobile phones are not dangerous while driving - you can only say that they found no evidence to show this in this particular study.

Anyone want to surmise whether we'll get a desktop machine anytime soon?

Quite fancy a 5Ghz desktop beast running Amiga OS 4.

Just imagine - Full - motion - video. Less than 0 second shutdowns. Deluxe paint loading quicker than you can thumb a floppy in.

Or you could run ubuntu and have the dash load up in the time-frame your short-term memory works in.

D

I will admit that if I see anyone with one of these Ubuntu phones, I'm going to be quite a smidgen jealous!

D

The problem is that the 'enthusiasts' who would be contributing to this have just recently had several slaps to the face from Canonical in the form of window buttons, unity, unity & unity. And amazon shopping lenses. 'This is not a democracy' is still rings in the ears. Now Canonical realise that they need the enthusiasts, who's toes they stepped on, to help with this venture into the mobile space.

To be honest, I hope they succeed. I think the concept of a phone that doubles as a desktop could very well be the future of the desktop computer for many people. The hardware also looks very nice (which is a necessity to tempt anyone off android/ios) - I agree with Shuttleworth that mobile screen resolution is getting out of hand, and I'd much rather the colourful OLED displays than the ridiculously high res LCDs (which then look laggy because the graphics can't keep up - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmywUhu2Pus) and a sapphire glass screen sounds interesting (though will it be as strong as gorilla glass - I doubt it).

I wonder how many of us would have paid up if Nokia had done this with the N950?

Not true. Every person's right is another person's responsibility.

An anarchy gives no rights to any person (except maybe 'might is right'). Look at the animal world - what rights do animals have? Every right you can think of requires active intervention by a responsible person.

Absolutely. I'm still on Gnome 2, but my plan is to move to MATE. Combined with something like Kupfer - there is little that combines it's productivity and speed.

D

I don't agree - I've been using cinnamon on one of my laptops, and it's just not a replacement for gnome 2. It may be a replacement for those who used gnome 2 on linux mint, but for those who preferred the stock gnome 2 paradigm, MATE is a much better replacement.

Personally I continue to use gnome 2 on ubuntu 10.04 as my main 'get things done' laptop. We have a couple other laptops currently running cinnamon and unity, and were previously running gnome 3, gnome fallback etc... I think I need to give KDE a whirl. But nothing beats gnome 2 for speed and efficiency yet.

My plan is to upgrade to MATE - I think this will be the future of many desktops. But they will need to move up to GTK 3 (if they haven't done already).

D

How did I not know this???!

D

Agreed.

I still mainly shoot film, but I'm quite happy to shoot digital when needed (there's no denying the convenience, ability to work at low and high ISOs, and that the quality is good nowadays, particularly for full frame).

But I prefer the tonal reproduction of film (colour negative still handles highlights better than the top-of-the-range Nikon fullframes, having just recently used the D3 and D4 for a couple of weddings), the existence of only one artefact - which can be quite likeable, and much preferable to digital noise, and the spot-on colour accuracy.

I think the overall look with film is more realistic, objects have more depth. Digital gives a more controlled look, which looks like a painting of the scene. Film looks like the actual scene with a thin film of graininess in front of it.

(the problem is getting it processed and scanned somewhere good that will show the full qualities of the medium)

Let me respectfully disagree and say that fat reserves can always be decreased by decreasing your calorific intake.

True Multitasking