Now all we need is an apostrophe robot that check's all our submissions!

Apparently (google tells me) ants live about 90 days. Let's say that humans live about 90 years. In that case, saying "The ants can probably be in any place within their enclosures in less than a minute..." equates to "The humans can probably be in any place within their enclosures in roughly 6 hours, but even in these simple spaces, they organize into these spatial groups."

"It wasn't the Tory party that sold it off, it was Ofcom, but you can guarantee it's the Tory party that instigated this investigation."

According to the BBC, "The NAO's move was prompted by a complaint by Labour MP Helen Goodman." I don't think the Tories care particularly how much money was raised; ideologically, they don't want the government to have money. You could argue that cheap 4G licences will translate to higher profits and so more tax revenue... if any of these companies paid their taxes, that is...

The French?

Martha Stewart's pretty yummy, you insensitive clod! Not everyone goes for bland identikit 20-somethings... (Exhibit A: the endless niches of internet porn.) BTW I don't suppose you have Hillary Clinton's number?

For me the confusing thing is that there was a single point of failure. I thought that much of what the cloud was about was resilience; I would expect that someone designing cloud infrastructure would have done an analysis of failure points, and implemented failover mechanisms (or at least monitoring and recovery procedures). Ok, maybe not a cloud-startup-du-jour, but certainly a big enterprise-style entity like Microsoft.

The most exciting thing about an Ubuntu tablet would be if it means open source drivers for all the hardware. A reference tablet that anyone can install OSS onto would be great for tinkerers. (Or is the Nexus 7 already this?)

It's the American Way!

Write a (Linux, BSD) filesystem driver that keeps its file metadata in a database.

Use queries to construct the filesystem layout. E.g.

• /bin -> files where executable=true and package=LSB (or whatever)
• /sbin -> files where executable=true and package_owner=root (or whatever)
• /usr/local/{name}/ -> files where package={name}
• /etc/{name}/ -> files where package={name} and type=configuration

...and so on. Don't ask me what the exact queries should be - the idea is just that files are arranged in the filesystem because of their attributes rather than having a single home.

Add a chattr command (or somesuch) to modify metadata for a particular file, or implement the inverse of the queries as attribute changes (i.e. mv /bin/ls /sbin/ls causes the owner=root attribute to be set on the file).

I'm not saying it'd be useful to anyone in the FOSS world, but it would be great fun.

Rename to Monty!

Android is less locked-down in certain ways (e.g. you can install apps from anywhere), but it's still ultimately locked down, by carriers in some case, and by Google. E.g. it isn't possible to remove certain apps - like Facebook (on my old t-mobile phone) and the Google apps (on a Nexus 4). You need to jailbreak it (root it) to do the really interesting things. If you care about such things: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman

That's .40 cents, not 40 cents. Not even a half-penny per play.

But there's no difference between .40 cents and 40 cents! https://xkcd.com/verizon/

How long have we got till peak silicon? I'm going to start stockpiling sand for the forthcoming commodities bubble.

Phone OS innovations: 1) it's truly open source 2) it's built by a not-for-profit organisation 3) it exists so that apps can be built in HTML5 and run off the internet, which is where the world was headed before Apple introduced the notion of apps and erected the walls of their garden

I presume it's dialogue with your companion NPC. In hetero-SWTOR (as I suppose we must now call it) you can end up flirting with your companion NPC, provided they're of the opposite gender.