810.777 Kelvin .... nuff said.

Why are these guys surprised that a project backed by a company rejected there hacking tool. Firstly the name 'sqlninja', I mean come on, it's got to be a hacking tool, can you imagine that on the front page of a news paper 'evil open source firm ok's sqlninja'. Then when I googled it, the website declares it is a 'sqlninja - a SQL Server injection & takeover tool'. In no way do they pretend it is for testing or whatnot. They had to reject the tool. And what business is red hat in, oh year selling a server os, would it really be a good idea for them to bundle a 'takeover tool'?

Yes, correct. but I don't see the MPs doing anything about it because they all did vote to join the coalition.

Yes the conservatives by nature do want to cut spending. However, they are also the most 'liberal' (small l) party in parliament By this I mean they are against an Orwellian state. This is fundamentally different to the stance taken by Labour. Hence, scrapping ID cards, the introduction of the great repeals bill where they are asking the public which legislation they want scrapped, and scrapping crazy data bases.

Yes defiantly, they seem to be making sensible decisions most of the time. I think it will stay together for the full term, firstly because they are going to change the rules so that 55% of the MPs need to vote to for a dissolution. However no party can muster 55% of the votes in this parliament and secondly because Nick and Dave _believe_ they are doing the best thing for the country.

Also is it me or since the last government left office, have the stories on slashdot about the UK been positive. With the last government the stories were all about ID cards, locking people up for 90 days with no reason, random crazy terror legislation etc.. and now it is all about our freedoms and how the goverment is going to cut up this state from 1984.

I still don't get it. 15 years ago when computers which did maths were not practical to carry around a complicated calculator made sense. Today if you want to do real maths for a reason you use a PC. But school and university exam question can be made so they can be solved by hand there is no need to set questions requiring the integral of a Gaussian function. It might do kids some good not to be able to press plot and get a function plotted. May be it would be good for them to think about the roots and where it crosses the axes, then do a bit of differentiation to find the stationary points.

last time i used a graphics calculator (before I migrated to octave/matlab/maple), the whole point of the thing was that you could program it? And why would anybody spend 100$ on a calculator when you can almost get a laptop for that price today?

If it is true that the price has gone up by 400% I can see why they are doing it but fom my point of view as a researcher not at UC, it means that there will be (slightly) less competition to get in to Nature. It also means when I go for a job interview and I am up against a UC candidate I will have the nature paper and he wont. Which will mean I will get the job. Having a paper in Nature is the gold standard in research and I don't think this stance will do their researchers any good.

even though fedora is my desktop of choice, it just fails to boot on my brand new mac book. grown...

All correct except your use of the word 'elected'. Lord Mandelson who is heading this bill is not elected at all. He is a Lord and that apparently means it is ok for him impose rules on us. Secondly, Brown our prime minister was never elected as prime minister, he just 'took over' after Blair stood down. So in short this is a c**p bill imposed my unelected morons. However, on the up side there will be a general election with in three months, so it will probably never reach the statute books.

clearly your post was a joke, but a serious answer to your question would be Linux Device Drivers: http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/ Understanding the linux kernel: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596000028 I found both books fantastic and well worth a read, they will take you from knowing C to developing drivers for the linux kernel.

I wish Thunderbird of evolution had some type of automated system for encryption, where you tagged your public key to the bottom of every e-mail. When an in coming e-mail was detected with a key at the bottom all replys were automatically encrypted. I think the problem with encryption at the moment is that people have to think about it so it does not happen.

Oh well, I just won't bother reading it then. I will read www.bbc.co.uk or www.telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk or www.zeit.de or cnn.com or slashdot.org or www.dailymail.co.uk or and the list goes on.

two tin cans and a piece of string?

that is odd, I was starting to think it was a British site. I keep on seeing a disproportionately number of stories about the UK government doing crazy oppressive fascist shit. Or may be there is another reason for that......

sorry can somebody pleas explain why you are not allowed a fully functioning fighter jet. I thought you guys were had a right to bare arms, what is the difference between a shot gun and a jet?