On my older 2.2-based phone, Firefox was completely unuseable. Really - clicking something would take more than a second to respond in some cases.

Same version of the browser on my new Android 4-based phone and it's a joy. It flies. Lately I've used the Aurora nightlies as my default browser for some time to try the new interface and it's really, really good. I abandoned Dolphin completely for Firefox once the new UI appeared. I basically only miss text reflow when zooming; other than that it is already everything I want.

So takeaway message: it really, really depens on your phone whether your experience will be good or not.

Publishing in a small, local journal that gives you few readers and few citations will not be good for your impact. Good exposure is of course important for your ideas to spread.

And truth is, promotion boards and funding agencies put a great deal of weight on where you publish as a proxy for how important your work is for the community, and if you don't publish in "good" places you will eventually be out of grant money, and out of a job. Which is kind of important if you want to live indoors, eat regularly and get a pension and health care.

Open journals don't allow republication either.

There is, for all tools at once. In the settings you can ask to save all current settings as default. You can set up all the tools you use the way you want them, then go to settings and save it all as your normal set-up.

Cheating and fraud is not rampant, and has never been. The vast majority of scientists never go close to any unethical line. Most cheating is likely found out too, sooner or later, and sooner the more flagrant and potentially important it is. Your career will not be affected in any way by the existence of fraud in the field.

What is a concern, however, is the sheer amount of young researchers and the relative lack of positions for them. Academia is an up-or-out kind of system, and at every step of the career ladder you are competing with dozens or hundreds of other qualified people. To put it bluntly, do go into science as a career if that where your hearts desire lies, but also make sure you have some idea of what to do instead if it doesn't work out.

...and I like it; surprisingly so. Scheme is off-putting at first (and Andy Wingos blog posts aimed at long-time seasoned users don't help) but once I sat down and really wrote something in it it turns out to be very expressive and readable.

What Guile needs, I think, is better packaging. Make a full-featured package set for the most popular platforms with the libraries you need to do real, fun stuff. Things like the Cairo and SDL library bindings for instance, and UI bindings.

The libraries you want already exist and work well, but installing them by hand is a pain, especially when your aim is to learn the language, not deal with installation issues.

Then add a set of docs to get things rolling. Docs for the libraries (the Cairo bindings have none; you basically use the C version docs.) A few Hello World-ish tutorials to get going with UI, graphics, communication, language bindings and so on, together with a general introduction to Scheme and Guile. Again, I think most of it is out there already, just not assembled and packaed in an accessible way.

It's a really good system; shame to see it so underused.

We use Python quite a lot in my field of work (computational neuroscience). The main tool I sue right now is slowly, gingerly, gradually removing support for Python 2.4 over the nex year or so, and will require 2.5 or later from then on. Python 3 is not anywhere on the horizon and won't be for a long time.

I don't expect to even take a serious look at Python 3 before the end of this decade.

No. An average is not really informative for things like this. Rather, it likely fails to help some people at all, it extends the lifetime of others only modestly, and it saves the life of a few.

Except you're too busy watching the ground for snakes to see the sky.

Comment titles are not clickable for me.

It would be very welcome, and (cop-out alert) had I had the time I would gladly have taken it as an excuse to learn about ebook formats.

An ebook version would be great, simply because it's searchable. But then, you want to take advantage of the format to create a really good, interactive index, perhaps links to a glossary and to external pages for all the included applications and so on. Suddenly it's no longer a quick format conversion but a whole new document.

So yes, I understand why you're reluctant to take it on.

I mostly like it too. Especially love the top menu bar; gives me extra vertical space in every app almost for free. I haven't met anybody in real life who thought Unity was a bad idea either.

Suspect this is a "greasy wheel" kind of thing, where those who are dissatisfied are loud and visible on places like slashdot, while most users have nothing much to complain about and keep silent. And most complaints really are about configurability, not basic functionality. A decent tool to do all the typical config changes people want would go a long way towards solving the issues for many of those people.

My only complaint really is Compiz, not Unity. Should use something more stable and less resource intensive.

My guess (which I wrote in another post) is that the existing options are not good fits for small buildings. A shock absorber or rubber gasket that is short enough to be fitted under a single-family home will not have anything like the horizontal travel needed to be of any use in a large earthquake. This may be compact and simple enough to be used in those cases.

Doesn't sound like a bad idea at first blush. Of course, the wax would need to retain its characteristics over a wide range of temperatures and humidities. Most of Japan is temperate, with large temperature differences from summer to winter (we get about zero - freezing - in winter to almost 40 in high summer here in Osaka for instance). And the weather can range from long dry spells to typhoons.

Small mounts can handle only small displacements. Large mounts are frequently used for large buildings but are too big for single-family homes and small commercial buildings.