While most people replying to this seem to have gone the way of the Thinkpad T-series, I went with a 15" Edge. They are significantly cheaper than the T and are obviously not as durable, but the keyboard is excellent and I'm very impressed with the engineering on this thing. Removing a single panel from the bottom exposes the RAM, HDD and the Mini-PCI slots. The keyboard is easy to remove and, although it's not got the Ultrabay system, I picked up an aftermarket caddy and swapped the optical drive with the HDD (SATA2 port) and put an SSD in the free bay (SATA3 port). The battery is easy to replace and the screen has a matte finish to it - I'll never buy another laptop without that last part.

On the downside, the screen resolution is not great at 1366x768 and the battery life is mediocre at best - 3-4 hours of light use or 1 hour if I really push the AMD A6-3420 APU hard. Speaking of which, while I may have sprung for the quad-core option at build time, I wish I hadn't - the reduced overall clock rate of a single core when running a single threaded process doesn't hit the speed the dual-core would have managed, even with it's turbo boosting features working flat out.

So, although I have misgivings about this thing, there is one massively important thing that just wipes the floor with almost every other option I looked at - price. It was around a third of the price of other options I considered (Thinkpad T-series and Macbook Pro included) so the fact it's survived two and a half years before the rising threshold of my processor requirements has started to outpace it is highly impressive.

If I'm understanding this correctly, the music labels are now resorting to re-educating future generations in a futile attempt to protect their obsolete business models. Their meddling with the legal system, constant redefinition of copyright terms and heavy-handed persecution of those they see as "offenders" have, as predicted by everyone except them, done nothing to prevent people doing what human beings have loved to do with audible culture for millennia - sharing it. These idiots probably see this as a good idea. What next? Selectively assigning breeding privileges to the population based on an exam paper sponsored by the Corporate Overloads of America to ensure your opinions conform to our scientifically proven CorrectThink(TM)?

Good to see the playground my-console-is-better-than-your-console war is still going, I remember watching the SNES and Megadrive owners fighting it out when I was in junior school.

Now get off my lawn!

Yup, just like it's always mentioned in any news story about him that Assange is evading extradition on rape charges.

Grats. Which constituency are you standing in? I'm gonna collect dog turds from the park, put them in paper bags with your leaflets and set them on fire on your voter's doorsteps. You know, just as a standard welcome-you-in thing. You're welcome. ;)

The Trident missile program

Politicians spend too much time in Prime Minister's Question throwing mud at each other across the table. They've got so caught up in the internal bullsh*t of parliamentary debate they don't realise how far from reality those arguments are removed. Just recently Cameron and Milliband were claiming they both had figures showing waiting times in hospital A&E's were simultaneously long-term records for longest and shortest at the same time. The quality of the debate was so poor I almost expected to come back half an hour later to find them both standing on the table nose to nose screaming "Duck Theathon!", "Wabbit Season!" at each other.

We expect there to be parliamentary debate and the parties to contradict and keep each other in check, but at some point you need a third party to pipe up and say "you can't possibly both be right, so let's figure out how to resolve this." Unfortunately, this third party is currently in cahoots with the Conservatives.

Yeah, it's funny, I haven't had any trouble at all accessing any of my favourite porn sites, including those that house somewhat questionable "vintage" Hentai that's probably in contravention of the indecent publications act (or whatever it's called) that came in a few years ago, yet I have to go through a proxy to get The Pirate Bay... ...Did I just share too much? I had a point though, right? Right?

Don't look at me like *that*!

Once you get the hang of reading between the lines, this is actually quite an honest admission. It goes something like this:

"Whaddya mean you're not going to let us get away with it?!"

We can either look at it from a moral perspective or from a selfish survival perspective. I prefer the latter - reduction of biodiversity in the ecosphere reduces humanity's long term continuation chances.

In Soviet Russia, jellyfish piss on you!

There's two ways of looking at it.

1) Humanity does not have the moral right to wipe out other species.

2) Humanity damages it's long-term survival chances by reducing biosphere diversity.

Take your pick.

That may be a factor, but as I understand from a documentary I saw a few months ago (is Slashdot temporally displaced or something?) the overfishing of areas where they spawn means their aren't enough fish hoovering up the billions of jellyfish eggs generated per spawning individual and their populations are out of control.

It's not much of an edge up against the sheer overwhelming weight of numbers the jellyfish have achieved. There's little any individual can do when billions of jellyfish clean out it's entire ecosystem.

The main ecosystem failure causing this has been in the jellyfish spawning grounds themselves. The fish that would normally pork their way through the billions upon billions of jellyfish eggs have been over-fished to the tipping point where the jellyfish population has exploded out of control and overwhelmed all the other species in the region. The clouds of fertilized eggs then wash out into the ocean and the immense blooms form thousands of miles from the spawning grounds where the adults do some porking of their own.