Ignoring the politics a little bit, there was a really good example of how this CAN work recently with the B4RN project.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21442348

A consortium of local farmers came together and allowed the use of their farmland and spare time to place fibre and hook up the local residents with gigabit internet speeds. By coming together as a consortium and being cooperative (rather than greedy) they have combined both entrepreneurial vigour with a sense of social awareness. I don't see why this model couldn't work in France too...

They compare it to the iPad, which is pretty bad to repair... However, as a general purpose computer running a full OS, a fair comparison would also be the MacBook Pro Retina.
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-with-Retina-Display-Teardown/9462/ ...1 out of 10 as well.

This is a bad trend with custom screws, glue and all sorts of crap.

It's not about the ethics of the animal in question, it's about the promises made by the manufacturer (no mention of horse) and the questions of quality control, correct process and oversight.

My concern isn't "OMG HORSIES!"

My concern is "fuck you consumer" as they pump the product full of whatever they think they can get away with to turn a profit.

OK, I'll bite. Aside from miles to measure distance and speed on the roads, we certainly do not use pounds and ounces in daily life. All meat, food etc is sold in grams. Almost all drinks are sold in litres. Temperature is done in C on the TV and most cookbooks are metric (often with imperial translations).

The only exceptions I can think of are:
1. Beer and milk - we still buy these by the pint (with the metric equiv printed on the label)
2. Roads, as mentioned
3. Human weight is still often done in stones and lbs

Is it perfect? No. However, most people born in the last 30-40 years will have been taught exclusively metric at school. They're comfortable with it.

The UK isn't perfect and we're not all the way there yet, but I don't think people are running around confused. We're getting there (to metric) it just might take a bit longer... The important thing is that we've started!

One thing I've always admired about you (but found difficult to emulate myself) is your steadfast consistency and refusal to compromise your principals.

With that said, are there any times when you look back and failed to do this - or perhaps wished you had been less hardline?

It's written in the judgement, section 84:

"Apple itself must (having created the confusion) make the position clear: that it acknowledges that the court has decided that these Samsung products do not infringe its registered design. The acknowledgement must come from the horse's mouth. Nothing short of that will be sure to do the job completely."

The judge took believed Apple deserved it because they had to lean up the mess they created. The judgement (http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html) is very easy to read and the summary of the Publicity Appeal (section 64 onwards) goes through this verdict. I was quite surprised at how informal and layman-oriented the language was.

A Google van drove past me about 2 weeks ago here in the UK, which last I checked is part of Europe.

For those not familiar with this paradigm shift in OS X, John Siracusa nails it in his Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review.

I don't think either implementation makes the applications easier to use. They seem to have been done for no other reason than "we can".

Mountain Lion's implementations aren't as awful, adding back most of the 10.6 functionality to iCal and making Address Book usable without constantly clicking between screens. However, they've gone this far, it would be trivial to remove the stitching and faux leather leaving them with standard apps that follow colouring conventions.

Certainly from a HUI perspective and imho the changes aren't positive.

With older versions it was pray to save, so this is an improvement!

I used to work in a store when Chip & PIN was introduced to the UK - after the switchover we were told in no uncertain terms that we would take liability if we didn't use Chip & PIN when it was available (e.g. verify by signature). This makes a lot of sense to me, as some peoples signatures had rubbed off and others really didn't match.

Whenever I go to the US, my card is almost never checked. I usually get my card back before I even sign. There is often zero fraud prevention at the point of sale. Even when they ask for photo ID (rarely) they often just check the picture, not my name or even if it's valid ID.

From my side, I would consider liability to be very much on a merchant who didn't bother checking properly and reduce it as an incentive to help me reduce fraud (e.g. chip & pin systems).

Why does GNOME have to find new niches? It's the de-facto desktop installation for an awful lot of distributions and has been the primary choice for an awful lot of people for the past 10+ years.

It seems to me that they already had a huge user base and many more coming on-board through the likes of Fedora, Ubuntu and Linux Mint. They had a good thing going with a consistent toolkit (GTK+2), LGPL and some really nice software. From my humble perspective, this is a great starting point.

Instead they released GNOME 3. I have no idea who it's for? I remember GNOME 1.x and the thousands of configuration options - it was definitely overkill for a standard desktop environment. I think GNOME 3 is bad for exactly the opposite reasons - completely no customisation. I have no idea why they can't get this right and understand their target audience.

Fortunately, there are solid alternatives. However, I find it a great shame that GNOME seems to be determined to lose its userbase to meet some CS/HCI textbook ideal.

Add this to your .vimrc for numpad:
"================
" Numpad Hacks
"================
" Map numpad keys 0-9 to their respective digits
:imap Oq 1
:imap Or 2
:imap Os 3
:imap Ot 4
:imap Ou 5
:imap Ov 6
:imap Ow 7
:imap Ox 8
:imap Oy 9
:imap Op 0

iTerm2 is a decent terminal emulator in my opinion.

Not saying OS X is perfect, but at least you an use numpad now. My vimrc has a couple of other tricks for OS X too:
http://matt.fragilegeek.com/vimrc

In 1998 my mother bought me a 'Linux' book with Red Hat 5.2 attached. Being a geek I installed it and loved it. I dabbled with upgrading it and using the Ximian beta Gnome 2. It always felt clunky though.

Then I discovered Debian. Not only did it have an AWESOME package manager, but it taught me about free software. It showed me that people can collaborate across the globe to make an integrated, high quality operating system for free. Around this time, I was finding my place in the world and I honestly think the spirit of Debian helped me discover Humanism and a concept of greater, moral good.

To this day I am in awe of this effort. Looking across its entire collection, the social structure and the individual elements (kernel, GNU toolchain, X, OpenSSH etc) I think free software is one of humanities greatest achievements. Whether you use it or not, take reflection in how awesome this completely free project is and how much it's brought us.

Thanks Debian!

The problem with what you say is that NBCs coverage was profit driven. They tape-delayed shows to ensure prime-time audiences, cut large elements out of the opening/closing ceremonies and most events were not free to watch online without a cable subscription.

Whilst the BBC and the Television License is a subject of debate in the UK, it's very narrow-minded to say the $230 USD (not $300) brings only dramas. Comedy, news, current affairs, radio, light entertainment, online streaming, education and a whole load of other content ad-free.

I haven't looked up the figures, but my bet is that the BBC channels are amongst the most popular TV and Radio offerings in the UK - people clearly seem to like what they produce (myself included, I would pay the license fee just to have Radio 4).

Cisco is presently moving to IOS-XE which is the classic IOS binary blob running under a Linux kernel, which strikes them a balance between stability/portability (Linux) and features (IOS).

Of course, it's somewhat disingenuous to describe IOS-XE as "Linux" as it's really using it as a hardware layer - more like a heavy hypervisor which can host other applications.