It doesn't have to have one. It's based on Ubuntu 'under the hood' so it benefits from Mark Shuttleworth indirectly. Mint takes the good stuff from Ubuntu, and leaves the crap (such as the advertisements in the search functionality... get. the. fuck. out.)

The Telegraph is a conservative paper that longs for the days of Thatcher's 80s. They are probably still reeling from the removal of Latin and Greek lessons from schools, so any change to the curriculum that involves a subject less than a thousand years old is considered improper and worthy of insult. I wouldn't be too concerned about this article. The people that matter realise how important coding is to the nation, and they don't expect that everyone will be writing their own blogging platforms after a few years of tuition in school. It's about the mindframe that programming forces you into - it's good for problem solving abilities, and ushers in more technically minded youngsters. Win win. Don't listen to the idiots that don't see their own lack of technical competancy as a weakness but rather as a righteous, high brow statement of their upper class status. Look at how they compare coders to plumbers. These are the iProduct users of our time, who need every bit of their technology made ultra-simple due to their own ignorance.

This is why Warren Buffett is buying up local newspapers across the US. Online newspapers can only make money by reaching a large audience for the purposes of advertisements. Local newspapers survive because they provide local journalism that the national newspapers just aren't interested in (and rightly so - they can't make money from it). Local newspapers will survive for a long time, either in print form or in online subscription form, because there is an audience willing to pay for the news.

I have this problem on my laptop. It only started for me when I upgraded to 12.04 LTS. Ubuntu 11.10 worked like a charm, without this bug.

So if I am experiencing the same bug as the one this topic is about, then I guess it's to do with a new version of Compiz or X.org or whatever between 11.10 and 12.04. It's not a big issue for me - I use the laptop only to browse the web so I don't mind restarting when the bug appears. I'd be a lot more pissed if it happened on my desktop (productivity) machine. I would probably be driven to move distros.

I've used the BBC news website as my main and often only source of news for years. However, I am still consistently amazed every few months when I discover yet another service that the BBC has been modestly offering in the background.

A couple of years ago the Tory government in the UK were trying to reduce the BBC's budget dramatically, arguing that it's lost focus on its core objective of news. In particular, they wanted to scale back the websites to just basic news, arguing that the real content should be provided by newspapers' websites. The reality is that the public love and defend the BBC's diverse range of services, and in the end I think the bill was scrapped. Now, with the recent Olympics, the BBC successfully (without a hitch, from what I saw) broadcast web-based feeds of 30 sporting events simultaneously, to tens of millions of viewers at once. Not only that, but you could rewind and seek within the live stream videos to rewatch notable events. They've recently extended the same functionalty to their iPlayer (catch-up TV) service, allowing me to rewind a programme that's currently broadcasting if I've missed the beginning.

The licence fee is an absolute bargain. I'd happily pay twice that amount. The only comparable website (and there are no real comparisons) would perhaps be the Guardian newspaper's website, which at least competes for news content. It doesn't make a stab at history sections, archives of old film footage (such as the Titanic launch), learning/revision services for school kids, a news service entirely aimed at kids (and toddlers), science...

Ok, I was basing this on what a manager at a large electronics retailer I worked in told me. Certainly while I worked there, the company was absolutely happy to accept any WEEE goods from anyone, including those who hadn't bought anything from the shop. We had people coming in and giving us WEEE goods and then leaving without looking at anything. It seems to me that such a policy would only be in the company's interest if they were being paid by weight to do it.

Maybe companies are fined based on the weight of products sold minus WEEE collected? That could be construed as paying by weight as well as earning by weight, so perhaps we're both right. I'm happy to admit my ignorance on the matter though - my knowledge is just based on what a manager once told me.

Retailers in the UK have, I think, had to collect WEEE goods under law for a while now. I guess the EU ruling is making it mandatory across the continent. Anyway, I do know that retailers in the UK are paid by the weight of their electronic goods recycled, and not by their value in terms of rare earth metals and so on. This means that they are all too happy to collect your old washing machine when they deliver your new one or take your old desktop when you buy a new laptop. The heavier the better. Not sure if the fact that they pay by weight will bite them in the behind at some point.

Scottish universities are public organisations anyway, so the 'profit motive' you mention is quite irrelevant, especially if you contrast it to top/elite universities around the world. Scottish unversities earn money through endowments from the government's research councils and grants from government and private organisations to conduct research in specific areas. This is then used for facilities, salaries, etc.

Research themes are chosen by academics, as long as they fit the remit of the particular source of funding. Sometimes more specific areas of research are chosen by a private organisation which provides funding for it. I'd like to think it is hardly ever driven by profit motive. Besides, how could such a study benefit financially? They've just, in the spirit of science, told the world their findings and published their results.

Are you an expat? I just struggle to see why anyone that lives in America (I am guessing that you do seeing as you've criticised NBC's coverage), and who criticises networks that advertise heavily over the coverage, would have a negative opinion of the BBC.

Fair enough, got my figures completely wrong!

You're right. That's why gas power plants are also silly*. Gas is burned to produce electricity (at efficiencies of no more than about 20-30%), which could then conceivably be used in an electric fire to heat up someone's house. In this situation, the energy storage mechanism has along the line switched from chemical to electrical to thermal, with heavy losses at each stage. Would have been far more efficient to pipe the gas into the same person's house to burn for heat.

The spirit of using compressed air as a storage mechanism is surely in the theoretically high efficiencies that can be achieved. Using gas, as you say, sounds silly, especially when it's Texas, with its vast untapped solar potential.

*ASIDE: Silly, though currently necessary as a fast response mechanism to electricity grid supply/demand mismatches. In the UK, we have three pumped storage facilities of about 50MW each (or thereabouts). Considering the post-EastEnders surge (when 5 million kettles are switched on following the nation's favourite daily TV soap) regularly tops 500MW of demand, you can see why pumped storage alone is not the answer. Interestingly, we have to borrow power from Europe for 5 minutes during this time to cover demand.

I have blocked the ads on the dashboard by having my router block the following sites:

msnvideoweb.vo.msecnd.net
rad.msn.com

Unfortunately, it retains the ads provided by Microsoft themselves, which are, I think provided by the same domain as the actual Xbox Live services (i.e. unblockable if you want to continue using your Xbox online). Also, you still have the god awful presence of Bing Search in your dashboard, whether you like it or not. I cannot find a way to remove Bing like it is possible to remove other crapware that Microsoft installed along with the latest update (like the 'Zune' app - why the HELL would I ever want that?).

One thing's for certain, I'm going to stick with PC gaming (or more specifically, Linux gaming) from now on. Consoles are steadily going from being a platform for games, with pretty graphics you might otherwise not be able to get on a PC, to a direct line into your living room for the big media companies to sell you more shit. I block ads on websites, and the text-based ones that get through are never clicked. If a website's 'sign up' process gets in the way of the information I want, I either don't use it or I give them a temporary email address. I use price comparison websites to find the best price, then go to the seller directly rather than clicking through. I hate companies that make money without performing any real innovation online, and I try hard to avoid letting them make any money from my online presence. Microsoft first and foremost.

I believe the 87km circumference tunnel at the Superconducing Super Collider still exists. The land above it has been built upon since, according to Wikipedia. However, the tunnel is the most capital intensive investment in a collider project, so perhaps in the distant future there could well be a Texas collider producing new physics. In contrast to the 27km circumference Large Hadron Collider, which provided evidence for the Higgs yesterday, the 87km ring would allow even higher energies to be obtained, and, along with it, hopefully some new particles (e.g. those predicted by superstring theory and other ToEs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything)). As a citizen of the physics community and the world, here's hoping.

Michael Pritchard presented a filter device at TED in 2009 which used a similar concept to filter water. The video explains why bacteria and viruses are filtered out, and he demonstrates the process and drinks the resulting filtered water (taken from a sewage bath he concocts). Perhaps graphene's physical strength will make it a more sturdy water filter, which would be a particularly important criteria for use in the third world, but there is at least already a working prototype using a non-graphene material. http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pritchard_invents_a_water_filter.html

No one is forced to pay the licence fee. It is in fact remarkably easy to avoid paying. Besides, you don't need to be a licence fee payer to use the BBC News website. I know you get ads outside of the UK, and perhaps eventually non-UK users will face a paywall, but while the licence fee exists in the UK, UK-based users will not have to pay for their news.