A lot of it is down to the famous 15 percent rule--the idea that their researchers and engineers are free to spend 15% of their time pursuing their own ideas.

Some of the younger developers at our place are in awe of Google having "invented" the whole one day a week innovating thing, and are shocked that some of the less cool corporations were doing this back in the sixties.

OK--perhaps it will have little effect on anybody taking decisions, but it won't take more than a few minutes of your time, and if it can drive stories in the press etc, so much the better.

1. Create an account at that rather lame new government site about repealing unneccessary laws to save money.
2. Search for Digital Economy Act, or go to http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ayourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk+digital+economy. Vote up some of the many threads that you find. Comment in support of each of these threads.
3. Start your own thread asking for the repeal of the Digital Economy Act.

You can be as arch as you like, but until this "Slashdot" thing allows me to respond to your comment by inserting an interactive Sudoku, I'm sticking with Wave, thank you very much.

Sure: Wave is a new paradigm that disrupts preconceptions about how users can be empowered to create collaborative social content in real time, and it's situated at the convergence of several key web 2.0 technologies.

Thanks for the informative response. (Note to mods--iapetus is apparently the customer in question.)

Please don't emigrate just yet—you may be in luck. The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of speech for all EU citizens. It was enshrined into UK law by the Human Rights Act in 1998; this was the biggest fundamental change in the law regarding freedom of speech for centuries.

The problem is, the way it is enshrined into UK law also introduces a significant number of restrictions, mostly around the areas of security, crime, and morals. But the government has to actually pass specific legislation to limit speech in these areas, and if these national laws fall short of the European Convention then they can be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights.

One of the weaknesses of the British constitutions is that most people—even most British people—seem to have been persuaded that we don't have one, so few people are willing to stand up and fight against unconstitutional laws.

Far from free speech not being a vote winner, it looks likely that reform of our libel laws will become a significant issue at the next election, for example with campaigns like libelreform.org causing a lot of unrest in political circles.

Maybe it's because TV and movies--regardless of how much the original director or writer put in--are always a team effort, the product of lots of different actors', artists' and technician's visions. A novel on the other hand is the unique product of a single imagination, so it inevitably carries a stronger stamp of its creator.

The Philippines, South Africa--English is an official language in both of those countries. The South Africans and Philippinos I've met may have had interesting accents, but either English was their first language or they were damn good at sounding like it.

I say wrench.

Yes, Nokia make some amazing stuff, like that web server I had running on my phone, what, two and a half years ago. The problem is that the department responsible for communicating the more cutting-edge of what they do is based in a secret bunker under the Finnish tundra, and have the national shyness in spades.

And they also need to pay for:

6) Over half a million pounds for the National Codes Centre at Bletchley Park

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/571874

An announcement from March 2009. The funding came via a government body called English Heritage whose remit is to fund historical monuments and heritage centres.

The story here is that the government refused to provide funding on the basis that they were already providing funding.

They have a working reconstruction of the Colossus at the Bletchley Park museum:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/visit/attractions.rhtm

Bletchley Park is not particularly neglected— they're canny fundraisers and this is a good way of drumming up some publicity.

As a Brit and a CS PhD student, you should definitely visit if you're passing near Milton Keynes. There is a museum there; I've been and it's a really great one. The article title is just plain misleading—what actually happened is that they weren't given the same national status as the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum.

More cash for them would of course be nice, but the evidence if you visit says they're not doing badly without it.

I visited the Bletchley Park museum last time I was in Milton Keynes on business. As you'll see from the link in the article, it's a fascinating site and an interesting collection, complete with reconstructions of the Bombe and Collossus. The place seems in pretty good shape and pretty well supported; lots of plaques announcing funding from big corporates (IBM, I seem to remember)—better funded, certainly, than a lot of museums.

It recently got a grant from English Heritage, the UK government agency responsible for supporting museums and sites of historical interest. This story is about it not getting a direct grant from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (but that's not how most of our museums are funded anyway).

And the beauty is that you just described the complex way of doing it. If I'm no power user, I can just select "applications", "add/remove" and pick what I want.

Try doing that add/remove trick using what I believe in Windows is called the "control panel", and if I remember correctly it doesn't even give you a list of programs to install; you have to scrape around for something called an "exe". Will Windows ever be ready for the desktop?

PS. We seem to see a lot of these comments about the insurmountable difficulty of installing apps in Ubuntu. A subtle troll doing the rounds, surely.