No they couldn't. SDLP got 3 seats; Alliance 1; Green 1. Still only 320. They'd have to bring in the Scottish Nationalists as well to get to 326 and an absolute majority.

And that of course is the absolute minimum working majority. One MP refuses to do what the whips tell her and they loose.

Exactly the point about having a local MP. My MP is a good constituency MP and was squeaky clean in the expenses; this was a very important factor in deciding my vote. (As was, to be fair, the fact that her main opponent had a good record of local civic duty. Almost a pity to have to choose.)

There were plenty of MPs at this last election who didn't steal quite enough taxpayers money to be deselected by the party but did enough to get kicked out of parliament.

Two words. Palm Foleo.

Easily.
"Hello, is that the Web development team? This is the CEO. I'm browsing our site on my new iPad, and it's broken. Fix it."

Well, the thing is that while dedicated GPS devices are better at navigation, an iPhone is more general purpose, doing lots of things apart from navigation. For example, I have an app that uses the GPS while I'm out for a walk to track how far I've gone and how many calories I've burned.

The issue that if you're navigating you need local maps was fixed long ago; all the navigation apps you buy do this. The builtin maps app doesn't of course, but it's not really for navigation; it just has that included as a "might as well put this in". It's for location aware searching.

If my beloved TomTom fell under a bus... I'd probably replace with TomTom for iPhone, Maybe not as good, but as with cameras, the best GPS is the one you have with you, and I've always got my phone with me.

I don't think you should call ChromeOS real Linux. I mean, I know it is Linux, but since you can't install ANYTHING on it...

(And yes, I know that if you install ChromiumOS yourself you can get to a shell, and you can install software on it, and Hexxeh is really, really clever and I have no doubt he will figure out a way to get an app launcher in there somehow, but I can't see hardware companies preferring that to installing genuine ChromeOS and getting all that lovely Google branding.)

As a happy Sony user, let me explain the limited zoom thing. Not really their fault: since PDFs are typically designed for turning into paper, they have a lot of white space around the text, so often if they display it full screen the text gets too small.

(it does show the PDF very well, BTW, so if it doesn't have big margins you're fine. And see below.)

Now, they can't easily zoom in to cut out the margins because that needs horsepower the devices don't have, to figure out where the margins are (especially with page numbers).

So what they do instead is, if you hit the zoom button while in a PDF, is extract the text from the PDF and display that instead. Which works, but they can't reflow it easily, again because PDF is designed for text.

(This is below: There's a third alternative in Calibre (open source software for converting/loading books on the device, ugly as sin but a million times better than what gets bundled with the reader) which is to use the PC's horsepower to trim off the margins before syncing it. Calibre plays nice with Stanza on iPhone too, so I reckon geeks switching to iPad from an existing ebook reader are going to keep using it no matter how fancy iBookStore is!)

So where I have a choice, I always get books in EPub, which refactors and flows and zooms beautifully, but just dropping a PDF file onto the SD card in my PRS-505 works. It's not as nice, but it works.

There's a 2a, which is moving the controls further apart so you hit them cleanly, and a 2b, which is reducing the number of controls so you have room for them after you've done 2 and 2a.

And as Ultrabot says, 3) add multi-touch style controls as needed, such as flicking or swiping or pinching.

And I guess 4) reduce UI latency, because not having an app instantly respond feels much more broken when you're actually touching the UI for some reason.

And 5) reduce dependency on accurate selection. It took apple so long to do Cut+Paste for a reason - accurate selection in a touch UI is difficult.

Oh, I guess there's a 5a) of changing the UI to accomodate multiple item selection, which you tend to have to do with a seperate checklist mode.

And 6) ensure you can get to all the UI without right-click/middle-click

An exercise for those complaining about lack of a camera in the iPad.

Get something the size and shape of one - a pad of paper or a (closed!) netbook is close enough. Hold it like an iPad for a few minutes; do the sort of things you'd expect to do. Touch the surface, do a pinch to zoom, set it on your knees to type,

Now stop and think about where a camera would be in all of that. What was it pointing at? The ceiling? Up your nose?

Ah, you say, I'd hold it up in front of my face for doing a video call. OK, try that. Feel your arms getting heavier? But maybe it's a short call. OK, the camera's pointing at your face, right? Now turn it to landscape. Camera's pointing at your ear now, isn't it?

And boy, those manufacturers loooove netbooks, don't they, with their race to the bottom prices and the way they cut into their consumer laptop market.

I'm repeating myself from below, but if the form factor takes off, it'll be BECAUSE of iPad, not DESPITE it. Tablets have been around for almost a decade without anyone buying them.

Examples, please?

What file is there she will want to look at that won't work? Flash video? Who's left that doesn't offer a HTML5 version for iPhone? How many of those will last a month of complaints about their product not working on iPad before they add one?

You do realise that installing a game or astrology app on an iPhone, and hence one supposes on an iPad, is about, oh, two zillion times easier than doing it on a PC?

I just did it now. Took me 30 seconds.

Turn on, App Store, search, star sign. List of dozens, with screen shots and reviews; pick one; confirm password, bought, downloads in the background, done. Apparently I am loyal, romantic, direct and stubborn. Good to know.

I'd say try that on a PC, but I'm worried you might not be running Linux, and I'd feel very guilty if you downloaded a random Windows app you found off Google and it mailed your credit card details to the Mafia.

Well, the thing is, Apple have concluded that locking it up tight as a drum is the only way to make it a slick experience, and they figured out with iPhone that more people value that than openness.

Hell, I'm a huge geek, and a PDA/smartphone obsessive from way back, and I agree with them! In the device that runs my life from my shirt pocket I value slickness more than the openness. I have never had a tech device as flat out useful as my iPhone, because it all just works.

There have been tablets around for years. Years! XP Tablet edition came out in 2002. So did the ProGear Linux tablet.

And did any of you buy one? No. No-one did. Bill Gates - with the unholy power of Microsoft's marketing division - has been trying to persuade people to use Tablet PCs for nine years and no-ones bought one.

So anyone saying that "these new tablets coming out soon will beat the iPad" is flat out insane. You can buy a Linux tablet right now. But none of you do.

Hell, the iPad is the best thing to happen to Linux tablets ever. It'll drive the price down, and make everyone else raise their game when they see it eating into their consumer notebook markets.

The UK police don't even demand you get on the floor; they shoot you in the head before you have a chance to trigger a detonator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes