Housing is the big problem in the UK. It costs a huge fraction of your income to rent or buy. Many of the foreigners doing the job are prepared to live in worse conditions and can therefore get by on the wages.

"Scientists at XMM-Newton" - who writes this rubbish? XMM is a European space X-ray observatory in elliptical orbit around the earth. Nobody is "at" XMM.

It's not so difficult if it's pure Python and you're not compiling anything. The main problem was getting Qt to compile so I could compile my extensions. For your project, I'd make a virtual machine with something like WinXP (this makes it easier to make new releases if nothing changes), install Python and the associated PySide. Install any other modules you need. I used PyInstaller to make the runnable exe file. See e.g. here for my pyinstaller file. I then used NSIS to make an installer using this configuration file.

In theory, though Python is compiled with a particular version of Visual Studio. It's rather hard to compile for yourself, as the latest versions aren't supported. Extensions have to be compiled with the same version as Python or you get cross-compatibility C library problems. This makes it tricky if you want to link a Python extension (an old Visual Studio version) against Qt (perhaps mingw when I looked at it). I ended up having to compile everything against the version of Visual Studio that Python was built with.

I try to avoid the registry, but you have to at least register file types there and Qt uses it to store settings be default. DLLs weren't too bad until I got to the stage of manifests and conflicting crt versions.

It can be very difficult. My scientific plotting package, veusz, was written using Python and Qt, so it should be easily portable. However setting up a sensible developer environment on Windows to compile the Python C extensions was a nightmare. Windows is pretty developer-hostile if you're used to Linux. Trying to find and install the correct version of Visual Studio Express was difficult. I had to learn far too many things about the registry, DLLs, building installers, etc. Mac OS X was rather more difficult, however. You have to download the massive Xcode and the non-standard way that Mac OS packages executables and libraries was very difficult to understand. It took a long time to get fat binaries working.

You do get a different class of user on Windows and Mac OS X, however. The Linux people are closer to being knowledgeable about development, whereas Windows and Mac OS people are primarily users, wanting more help and hand-holding.

It's also possible to write code for 2.6/2.7 which works fine with 3.3+. With the aid of the six module or similar ideas you can work around the differences. Many people think this is the best way to have joint compatibility with python 2 and 3. It also makes it possible to do the development with python3, which running 2to3 doesn't allow. As others have mentioned, there is no good 3to2.

Fedora is actually a very good KDE distribution.

The minimum design lifetime isn't the actual lifetime of the mission. I believe there is enough helium for three years, but the multistage cooler is designed to be able to run in the event of coolant loss. ASTRO-H replaces ASTRO-E2 which suffered a catastrophic coolant loss. There are more details here, but it's behind a paywall.

The forthcoming ASTRO-H X-ray observatory mission will have a cooling system that will be able to run without coolent. The X-ray microcalorimeter detectors must be cooled down to 50 mK in temperature. ASTRO-H should be launched in 2014.

Really? Most fundamental medical advances are created in academia, mostly with public money. Many companies just take the relatively small step to a commercial product. William H. Oldendorf would have done his pioneering work on the CAT scan, whether there was a patent system or not. Indeed, looking at his wikipedia biography, he worked in public institutions for most of his life.

It has been one of the wettest ever Junes here in the UK and it is still raining heavily. When it is not raining it's heavy cloud. Although that's stereotypical weather here, it's more like what you'd expect in the winter. I'm feeling like an extra in Waterworld and shall shortly be growing gills... The problems started when drought measures were brought in to combat falling water reserves.

Oh really? I trust that you will now go home and put your head in a microwave oven for a few minutes. Of course some radio waves are harmless and some are harmful, it's just a question of where the boundary lies. Given that you're unlikely to have a smart meter sitting next to you all day, it's pretty unlikely to be harmful.

As mentioned below, it can play 1080P video:
video.