...just in time to steal the front pages in the days before the Queensland state election, when his preferred party was leading but starting to attract bad press. Sneaky bastard.

If they can't get good linux drivers for their graphics card, then it's very possible they're stuck with no 3D acceleration. Depends whether the rig was intentionally built for linux or not.

Yeah, alas it seems to rely pretty heavily on 3D acceleration. If you don't have 3D acceleration then it tries some sort of software rendering that is S-L-O-W (10 seconds sometimes to open the dash!) even on fast computers. And if the dash has been swapped out of RAM then again it's slow to activate. On my computers with supported 3D acceleration it's usually a very pleasant experience. On my new netbook... I grudgingly use 12.04 and the 2D version.

Thankfully the snooping is going to remain optional (although still opt-out rather than opt-in). I've still got it turned off on my desktop, but reading documents like this (specifically the Data and metrics passed to the Smart Scopes service section) are a little reassuring, in that you can see that the developers are thinking about how to take only the data they need and are trying to protect it. I particularly like their (far-off) plans for sending location information: they won't send your exact co-ordinates like Google or Apple does - they'll round them off to maybe a 10km square because that level of location accuracy is probably not needed for the search. There's also a friendlier summary of the spec available.

That said, while this kind of fuck up is still happening, I'm going to keep online search off, despite being tempted by functionality like its iView (Aussie Hulu) support.

I too hope that you don't need an Ubuntu One account to use the tablet...

Now I finally see what Shuttleworth's been meaning when he says the same applications run on all form factors - as a developer, you separate the logic from the UI, and write three UIs: one for phone, one for tablet, and one for desktop. Until now I thought "nice in concept, but what's the point?". But if your device itself suddenly switches from a phone or tablet to a desktop, then your app can keep running and switch UIs on the fly.

What I really find neat is how tablet apps can become phone apps when docked on the side, for multitasking. This finally looks like a tablet that's not purely for consuming content.

Unlike an iPhone, you don't have to hack into your expensive new smartphone in order to use applications that have been deemed too powerful for the average user, or to access the filesystem.

Unlike Android, you can be confident that if you turn off the online search, your phone will not send lots of data about you to the world-champion data-miners.

I have been waiting a long time for something like this.

I just discovered that my uncle's computer is affected by this. He turned on FileVault in 10.6 because it looked cool, then upgraded to 10.7. Lion only tells you that you have a legacy version if you open the Security/Filevault preference pane, which he never did since using 10.7. When we opened it today, it gave us the options of keep using the legacy version or turning it off - I think "keep using legacy version" was the default option (could be wrong). In order to upgrade we had to visit a separate tab, unlock it, hit upgrade and go past a number of scary-looking warnings. So nerds who like to explore probably would not be affected by this, but others certainly are.

Firstly, I'm not going to do more than my fair share. Hence my interest in making others do theirs, or at least pay others to do their share for them. Secondly, my personal energy consumption is already quite low. I'm a student, so I can't afford a car. I live in a pretty temperate climate so I rarely need heating or aircon. I don't fly often. And I turn things off when I'm not using them (if they use more than 10W). I live where parking is bad and public transport is OK, so none of these hurt much.

Take a look at the grey band - it's more obvious in the second graph, the 10 year moving average. The grey band is the 95% uncertainty interval for Berkeley's calculation of the average temperature - statistically on each data point there is a 5% chance that the real average temperature lies outside the grey band. You will see that in the year 1800, the grey band is massive: +/- 0.5 degrees. But over time, as there are more measurements around the world, and those measurements have less randomness in them (i.e. get more accurate), the uncertainty shrinks pretty slowly.

This is true - no matter how much we heat up the earth, life will survive. But if the climate changes too much from our current conditions, then there will be massive changes. Lots of creatures will become extinct (eventually new ones will evolve, taking advantage of the abundance of food/lack of predators but that happens very slowly) and we will probably have to totally rethink our farming practices. We should move our cities too given that many would no longer be well-situated, but what would probably happen is that we turn up our air-conditioners and burn even more coal. I concede that the effects of climate change are less well understood (at least by me!) than that it is happening.

Seriously? I give you the Berkeley graphs, which appear to have used a pretty rigourous method, where you can download their temperature data and source code, and is being peer-reviewed, and you rebut this with a graph that does not have a labelled y-axis and appears to have been drawn with a bezier tool? If you want to convince me that there is no scientific consensus, i.e. that researchers who know what they're doing and are doing it properly, disagree that global warming is happening/is a problem, then please stop using graphs like that. Especially when they disagree with the graph I provided, which gives its sources (IIRC, every temperature measurement they could get their hands on), and includes three other groups' sets of numbers on the same axes - none of which agree with the graph you provided.

Again, the really-long-range graphs don't have much to do with the current debate, because I'd like life to survive in its current form as much as possible. When large-scale, seemingly-irreversible (on the scale of centuries) changes are made to the only planet we live on, I get nervous about the potential for things to go wrong.

There are too many graphs on that page to go through them individually, but it doesn't give that site any credibility to include graphs like this one, which show very suspicious behaviour - local temperature swings around wildly and then the music stops, when we would expect local temperature always to fluctuate on a year-to-year scale.

Thank you for replying with a little detail. It is good to be able to assess the evidence that others believe to support their beliefs.

Looking at the 10-year moving average (which is almost long enough to smooth out sun cycles, el nino cycles etc) - because the graph shoots up so fast, so far and so dramatically between 1970 and 2005, I would do a happy dance then go skiing if it started dropping as dramatically over a 10-15 year period, but a 15-20 year plateau would make me seriously question what was happening. Anything shorter than that could easily just be another bump on the moving average that is mostly skyrocketing.

Here's a checkup on a Hansen prediction from 1981. I wouldn't call it near-exact, but still pretty good for a 30-year-old model of a very complicated set of things.

Speaking of graphs, I find this one really scary, and would want to see it flatten out or drop for a good few years before I stop caring about my energy usage.

The software centre took forever to load in 11.10, but is waaaaay faster in 12.04. It's actually usable now and I prefer it to Synaptic for my simple needs because the installations are handled by a daemon: you can start something installing, queue up a bunch more installations, close the GUI, and it will keep downloading/installing everything in the background.

There's one more step between 4 and 5: Usually the journal will typeset your article, hopefully proofreading it and fixing the engrish. Depending on how well the journal is set up, this may involve retyping your beautifully formatted LaTeX submission from scratch *facepalm*. The typesetter/proofreader is paid to do this.

Also, in my experience compulsory page charges for the author are much more common in open-access journals than reader-pays journals - which is another reason that all authors haven't switched to open-access journals.

Apart from the typesetters, the publisher, sales, and marketing people get paid. If the journal goes open access, then presumably the sales people could all be laid off though...

The details of the plan are that it's an emissions trading scheme, initially with a fixed price per tonne of CO2 emitted. Only heavy-emitting companies have to pay it - I can't remember what the threshold is, but it affects roughly 500 companies. Of course those companies will pass much of the costs onto consumers, however they will also put effort into reducing their carbon emissions to gain financial advantage. Petrol/gas is specifically exempt from the trading scheme for individuals.

The modelling of increased cost of living, which takes into account increased grocery prices, electricity prices, etc, comes out at $10 per week for the average household. The government is spending part of the money raised in the form of tax cuts and pension increases, compensating low income earners a bit more than $10 per week. If those low income earners then reduce their carbon footprints (get rid of the second fridge, buy the now-cheaper goods with a lower carbon footprint), then they come out ahead. Those earning over $80K can afford the $10 per week.