There are safeguards. There are home office guidelines that the police must follow (they must only detain people suspected of involvement in terrorism, for example) and there's an independent reviewer who oversees the application of the law.

At least after a quick glance it seems that the police ignored (or took a very broad interpretation of) the guidelines and that the independent reviewer will be holding a triple-cunting when he meets the Metropolitan Police Service. One can hope.

Schedule 7 has been revised (no more than six hours of detention, "suspect" must have a lawyer) and the new version is going through parliament now, so that's something.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23763625

From the linked article:

Furthermore, in addition to the original feature set, VideoLAN has added more ways to synchronize media (upload over Wi-Fi, native Dropbox integration, support for third-party apps through the Share dialog, and via Web download), support for network streams, video filters, passcode lock, background audio playback, and playback speed manipulation. There is also support for subtitles (including Closed Captions and complex SSA), native support for multiple audio tracks, and playback on external screens or AirPlay.

Go around a university library and see what the students are using. Here at Cambridge it's about 50% mac, 25% win, 25% pen and paper.

MS have lost the next generation of consumers.

I don't think that's correct. If I had a range of other measurements and cherry-picked the ones that agreed with mine, thinking the others were outliers, that would be confirmation bias.

What we have here is a large set of independent measurements that all agree. Where is the bias? There is none.

Fortunately for science the Mauna Loa readings are in good agreement with those taken at hundreds of other sites around the globe.

Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html

I'm not sure you're right on the 30% stake being their interest. App stores do not make large amounts of money and MS know that.

Instead, they think the future is mobile, and that they MUST have a competitive product. A mobile product needs a good app selection, a good app selection needs a lot of developers, and developers need a market to sell to, or they'll work on another platform.

Metro is a way to create a market for phone apps without having (yet) a significant phone product. For it to work it must be thrust in the face of desktop users.

I do both: I get a delivery every two weeks of bulky and heavy dry goods, and I walk/cycle to the supermarket every other day to get fresh fruit and veg. It works well for our family anyway.

A friend of a friend made this:

http://www.printcraft.org/

Make something in minecraft on this (free) server and it emails you a 3D printer file of your object when you disconnect.

To expand on your tribal point: politics becomes part of your identity. You start to think of yourself as a republican / liberal / libertarian, not as a supporter of policy X. In fact, the specific set of policies that comes with that identity are, for many people (and many politicians lololol), rather fuzzy.

This is why it was so easy to flip people in this experiment. The experimental subjects were not asked to change their identity, just their specific policy opinions.

You can do this the other way around too. Changing someone's mind on a difficult issue like global warming or abortion is very, very difficult, because these large single issues do become part of someone's identity. They think of themselves as a "warming sceptic", or a "pro-choicer" or whatever. To make someone move on an issue like that you have to somehow make the person see themselves in a different way.

Oh I agree, "Leftism gone mad" etc. is a very loaded and crude way to talk about the politics back then. I was responding to the [citation needed] in the dead-on-the-streets post.

I think it's a reference to the Winter of Discontent, which I'm old enough to remember well.

This was a wave of strikes triggered by the government's cap on public sector wages in a period of high inflation. From the article above:

The most notorious action during the winter was the unofficial strike by gravediggers, members of the GMWU in Liverpool and in Tameside near Manchester. As coffins piled up, Liverpool City Council hired a factory in Speke to store them. On 1 February a persistent journalist asked the Medical Officer of Health for Liverpool, Dr Duncan Dolton, what would be done if the strike continued for months, Dolton speculated that burial at sea would be considered. Although his response was hypothetical, in the circumstances it caused great alarm. The gravediggers eventually settled for a 14% rise after a fortnight's strike.

(not a maggie fan, just providing some background)

You can type any part of the description as well, you don't need to know the app name.

There's also the traditional category view. Press the win key to get the overview, click on the "Applications" button and you get a big grid of icons showing all the installed programs in alphabetical order. A set of filters down the right let you reduce the list to just "Sound & Video" (for example), or "System Tools".

You can turn min and max back on with tweak-tool. You can also disable dynamic workspaces. Handy!

Your figures are a bit high. The hue is $199 for three bulbs plus bridge, $60 for each extra bulb thereafter. Each bridge can control 50 bulbs, enough for most houses. You don't need an electrician.

It's not cheap, sadly :-( but less than you suggested.

I've made a disco lighting system for my kitchen for 'only' a few hundred, it's been fun. I'm not sure I'd do the whole house though.

No one cares, but here's what I think they should fix. I wrote this ages ago for a mailing list, so sorry about the formatting. And it's just things that annoy me, I'm sure other people would have other ideas. And I've not tried to list the nice things, so it seems one sided.

Since I wrote this, windows does seem to have moved a good way in this direction, so that's nice. It needs to move a bit more though.

I've been thinking a little about what sucks in windows (I've been having to work on it this week) and made a list. I'm sure I've missed or misunderstood lots of things because I don't really understand it :-(

* architecture

Very general: windows is a huge collection of interconnected services that have built up over a period of decades. It's a right old pickle. Everything seems to depend on everything else. This causes two problems that annoy me:

• 1) Why does windows need a firewall at all? Can't they just not open the ports in the first place? It's apparently because the clipboard depends on DCOM, DCOM depends on the RPC daemon, the RPC daemon needs an open port. So unless you have port whatever open, you can't copy-paste in your desktop apps.
• 2) You can't strip it down. This is (largely) why WinCE exists (IMO). You can't just remove stuff you don't need. Because everything is interconnected, everything stops working if you take anything away. So to make a tiny windows they need a (largely) separate codebase. Which pollutes google with crap when I'm trying to search for API stuff, gah!

Solution: reorganise stuff in a nice layered structure the way every sane computer does. Don't make dependencies unless it really makes sense, and never, ever make circular ones. Also, sort out the who-owns-the-desktop thing so more than one person can be logged in at once and use that to implement fast user switcing in a non-stupid way.

It sounds like w2k8 has moved a long way in the direction, hoorah!

* API

The win32 API is horrible. I've been fighting CreateProcess() and it's a disaster of race conditions, deadlocks and inflexibility that programmers have to work their way around. Make something nicer and put win32 into a compatibility layer somewhere.

* FS semantics

Gah for not being able to delete open files. They need something like *nix's refcounting thing. There you can delete open files and the delete actually occurs when the last close happens.

Also: needs proper symlinks and mount points and everything should support them. Do something clever about dangling symlinks for extra points! And driver letters must die.

I don't like case-insensitivity. It means you have to have a complete unicode engine in the kernel, which seems like bad engineering to me. And the library that's available to programs does not use the same case folding rules as the ones the kernel uses, so you can't predict when filenames will clash. I'd also like to scrap all charset encodings except UTF-8. Just have UTF-8 everywhere, much simpler.

NTFS is extremely slow at creating and deleting files, perhaps more than 100 times slower than *nix, maybe it's ACL? I'm not sure. It needs fixing.

* Object formats

.exe and .dll need to be thrown away. Dlls are a particular cause of suckage and are missing basic features like back linking and lazy linking and undefined symbols.

Speed up process launch too pls. Win at the moment is two orders of magnitude slower than linux at launching processes and I don't really understand why.

Get rid of the distinction between GUI and CLI .exes, there's no point to it and it just causes pain.

* CLI

I'm not sure about PowerShell, it seems to 'heavy' to me (it needs about 20x more memory than dash, for example), it's more like perl# than a cli. Make a simple, lightweight scripting engine to automate stuff and put a nice terminal app on top of it.

* Desktop

Explorer should be able to handle large directories, copying large directories, and should be a lot quicker. Maybe they could license dopus. Also, multiple desktops, better window management.

* Registry

Just needs a bit of sorting out, IMO. I like the way gconf works: they have a network registry, a OS registry, one for the system and one for each user, with nice simple rules for which keys can override what. Each one is stored as a tree of files, with each set of key/vale pairs in a bit of XML. Programs talk to a single demon which organises all this stuff for you, but you can also use all the regular XML tools to manipulate them. OS X has something similar.

* Package management

Desperately needed. Something like apt would be nice, but maybe they can innovate and do even better. The infrastructure should be available for non-MS software too use too, ofc. If they can link it to some kind of store (AppShop?) that would be fun. Should handle updates and patching too, of course.

Also needs clear and rigid packaging standards that everyone sticks to.

* MFC This and everything even slightly related to it must be burnt. Pick a GUI nice toolkit and support it for more than a couple of years.