Having enjoyed Ubuntu as a novel change from Slack and Debian, I was pretty unconvinced by Gnome Shell or Unity when they appeared, switched to Mint and, as Gnome 3 started to improve, switched to Fedora. Eventually, I released I missed the Ubuntu repos and familiarity of the Debian derivative structure, and returned to experimental Ubuntu Quantal.

The first thing I did was install Gnome Shell, as I still haven't warmed to Unity, and this has brought some interesting regressions. But I live with them (and have great, well-meaning intentions of delving into the code) because I now, for whatever reasons, really like Gnome Shell. In fact, having been introduced to Mac for the first time in the last few weeks, albeit a version a year or two out of date, I found the interface a wee bit clunky, not particularly intuitive and distinctly unslick for a moderately heavy terminal user. Nice enough, but knowing the alternatives, I wouldn't pay good money for it. That's fine, I'm not in the target demographic. Garage Band, however, I'm sold - those kind of experience applications I think Mac does fantastically, and I believe there are fantastic IDE/code versioning/project management GUIs, but that not the point here.

So I guess this article refers to me. I certainly don't remember jumping on any band wagons, in fact I'm pretty sure I ended up here by repeatedly jumping off them, and despite being decidedly unhardcore, I claim to be "excitingly different" on blind date forms, as the interwebs tell me preferring Gnome Shell to XFCE, Fluxbox or TTY makes me rarer than a unicorn in hen tooth pyjamas.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the Nature article and Google links, the title of this post is misleading: this is about England & Wales (which share their legal system) rather than the rest of the UK - there's an article here about the different implications that such a law would have on the Scottish legal system (English libel reform raises new Scottish question). I haven't seen any indication whether we'd adopt this in Northern Ireland.

I think there's a good point here about the impact of this kind of process on a business, whether Kim Dotcom's or anybody else's and regardless of the outcome.

"Innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law. In a world where decisions are made on the basis of an opportune fortune cookie that fell out of a bag on the shelf where I spotted my subscription copy of "Advertiser's Guide to Large File Hosting Monthly", law enforcement storming an executive's private residence with a cornucopia of guns and officers has an impact. Given the vast sums of money that change hands over ephemeral and esoteric patents on a component of a specific product, this is another order of magnitude in competitive disadvantage.

My point isn't that this specific case is right or wrong, but that we trust government, not the judiciary, to ensure this catastrophe only happens to the bad guys, which may be necessary but is still incompatible with "innocent until proven guilty". If there's a mistake, commensurate restitution is simply infeasible. Which is one reason many court cases involve name suppression, but then that opens another can of worms.

As someone simulating fluid-structure interaction with a number of constituent models and a lot of finite element (i.e. big matrix problems; using FEniCS - fenicsproject.org), using Python makes my overall quite-long algorithm much easier to flick through. Invaluable for debugging the theory as well as the implementation. FEniCS' Python interface ties into the standard C/C++ libraries using SWIG and, in simple cases, saves me working in C++. Very clear, well-written C++ is great for this application but I find it takes considerably longer to write than clear Python.

When I hit a more intricate problem, I realized I was going to have to solve a series of FE matrices by hand (with PETSc, written in C). It turned out to be pretty straightforward to pick up SWIG, write a short module in C and a Python interface. Done! Particularly useful as I believe getting FEniCS and petsc4py to play well is tricky.

So, I'd agree - having written a C++ version of my (simpler) problem and a Python/C version of the complicated one, the latter was definitely easier, and all the rate-limiting stuff is in C anyhow.

Doubt it would be true for every situation but +1 from an FE perspective.

An extra day for a 1st March deadline.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the most impressive part for me has been how the Raspberry Pi team, and, notably, not the high profile global distribution networks, have been keeping everybody up-to-date on a pretty much continuous basis since launch. Over-communicating seems a little unfair accusation, given that they'd been getting such a high volume of queries since the sites went down - better than under-communicating, I say! I didn't have much trouble finding out what was going on from the Twitter stream, and realizing that they were having as much difficulty getting in touch with RS & Farnell as anybody else, to work out why the distributors had made up their own rulebook at gametime.

While the requirements are different, I think its pretty harsh for some of the other comments here to complain that the core team are underprepared when they have managed to keep their indie site up (largely?) but the pre-warned distribution chains have folded. In the nicest possible way, I actually thoroughly enjoyed watching the first couple hours of minute-by-minute, tell-it-like-it-is commentary from @Raspberry_Pi, who were getting a fantastic volume of tweets and doing a sterling job of keeping up with reports of RS & Farnell collapsing. Good work, peeps.

So, I dunno what's going on, but reading the Twitter stream makes me feel a lot more sympathetic to them than to either the distributors or the people complaining about service, whether my "Expression of Interest" gets me Raspberry Pi or no. At least you're not purchasing from NZ - Farnell NZ was offering them at ~US$65, probably pre-general-added-costs, with a 24 day delay.

That's a fair comment. I recently had difficulties working remotely (necessarily) within a student network, primarily as the university erred on the side of caution maybe moreso than most. While I got the logic, it probably left me a little biased in this regard :) I've also come across a number of situations where students end up being tied into university, rather than self, directed learning.

Absolutely, it is important, and I don't think the grandparent made the point that students must take responsibility for their learning in the most constructive way. It would be a pretty awful profession to be in if you didn't care about students, and surely education is most effective when it is a co-operative act. So, apologies, I think we agree.

When I fly with, say, Air New Zealand, I am paying to arrive at my destination. My flight, depending on the direction, departure point and destination may well have significant subsidies both governmental and, de facto, from other flyers. However, if I had Ryanair service for 40 hours I'd be a little upset, and quite possibly in need of medical help on landing. While the whole point of the air journey is to arrive, I'm flying with AirNZ because (IMO) they provide a much better experience over that trip than the alternatives, for similar money. Multiply up to three years.

So, yes, the taxpayer does subsidize the average public university to a significant degree. The university makes many expenditures on the life-style of admin, faculty, postgrads and students, whether that is the odd kitchenette, subsized cafeteria prices, subsized health care, etc. There is no guarantee that these actually contribute to the productivity of the individual, but they do contribute to morale and quality of life.

I'm not going to say that Facebook access at University is fundamental to happiness, that'd be bizarre, but the suggestion that students aren't paying enough to have a say in their environment is a little odd.

Ultimately, if students are unwilling to participate by learning, there isn't, and shouldn't be, anything that tutors can do to force them. If a tutor can't convince a student, who has chosen to sign up, why they should be interested enough to pass the course, there is an underlying problem with the attitude of either the tutor, or far more likely, the student. Overuse of the internet is a symptom, not a cause. While there is a valid point in terms of disruption, many lectures will be filled with students note-taking on laptops. Unless someone's just found a new Youtube gem and everybody else is crowding around, same difference. If so, see above. Bandwidth, fine, but do you expect students outside the lecture not to use social media? Can the cost of access incorporated in the student fees really be justified solely by the unblocked websites? Corralling them into the exam room, blocking internet access, etc. only masks the problem and raises the question - what do their marks signify? Capacity to work when coerced? Not much use for an employer, not much use as a life skill.

As a Brit in NZ, I can confirm that this makes you very far away indeed. In fact, I am almost exactly (with a decent walk of) 19,000km from where I was born, so I guess that's close enough to 47.5%. As such, I felt at liberty, amongst other things, to eat macaroni cheese for lunch, sunbathe and watch three movies on Christmas Day. In fact, as well as being in the furthest city in the world from where I was born, I'm doing postgrad at the farthest university from my undergrad. While I know this can easily be surpassed (e.g. any Kiwis in Spain or v.v.), I'd be interested to know how frequently it is - anybody else 19,000km or more?

The front page of The Times yesterday alerted readers to an 'unprecedented assault' on downloading by the UK gaming industry.

All harbingers of things to come, I reckon. Feel it in the water.