Fortunately one Canonical employee is prepared to share what they know with us: from TFA:
Rick Spencer, who announced the change back to Google, said that Canonical have decided to change back to Google after deciding that Google Search will be more familiar to a lot of users upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04...

Of course, you may choose not to believe that. But Canonical are providing an explanation.

Depending on the university or college you attend, there will be a (small) group of political organisations who traditionally dominate local student politics, and have the infrastructure (and possibly the cash) to prevent independents and candidates from other political groups from winning elections.

My 1st university (in the West of Scotland) was dominated by one political group (Labour Students - the West of Scotland elects anything with a Labour rosette). "Independent candidates" were non-Labour Students who just happened to have a Labour Party membership card (or, at best, were "fellow travellers").

Look at a National Union of Students conference, and see just how many independents there are - the vast majority of delegates are members of one or other political group.

This isn't intended to be a complaint against Labour/Labour Students: they were simply the dominant group at my university. Other groups that dominate on campus include various Trotskyist organisations that are immensely powerful on their own campuses, but virtually unheard of in real-world politics, and the Union of Jewish Students, who are huge in London and the South East but - naturally - don't exist outside of student politics.

That's nothing - I'm still waiting for TeX to hit version 4. It seems like it's been around the 3.14159 point forever!

For goodness sake let them know what you've just told us. A polite letter explaining that you were seriously intending to support them, but won't now, will do more than you might expect.

Ah, that's good to hear. Acquisitions are also somewhat variable - 24 started out on BBC, first two series on BBC 1 (I think) then series 3 on BBC 3. Then Sky bought the rights. That strikes me a license-payer funded bait-and-switch - get us hooked on 24, then we'll all cheerfully move to Sky like happy drones. No thanks, BBC! No thanks, Sky!

FX isn't available on "council telly", however - you need Sky or cable. Or, at least, if it is available on Freeview it ain't available on Freeview where I live, which is all that matters ;-)

I'd like some clarification from the BBC or uk.gov on point 1 - I agree with your (implicit) argument against the BBC importing US programmes, but I worry that it'll affect joint BBC/US productions. Recently I've seen a (IMHO) positive trend for the BBC and HBO to work on co-productions - "Rome", for example, was the BBC and HBO (and an Italian broadcaster); "Five Days" was also the BBC and HBO.

BBC 3 does have some good programming. I've never seen "Hole in the Wall", but can imagine just how dreadful it is. That shouldn't distract from the good work the channel does, and I'm also concerned that UK TV is going to hand teenage programming in its entirety over to Channel 4. Don't get me wrong, Channel 4 is good, but Britain - even its teenaged section - deserve choice. And freedom from advertising is surely something we should be pushing to teenagers?

Actually, scratch that last paragraph. I've just checked today's listings for BBC 3 and it's unremitting shite. The only high point is a programme called "Family Guy", which (a) disproves my argument against importing US programmes, and (b) could easily be broadcast on some other channel. (And I'll bet Stewie Griffin's last diaper that both episodes are repeats...)

I'd be interested to know which Scottish force that was. My experience is with the largest (and one of the UK's largest) force - Strathclyde. I don't trust them at all, but I gather Lothian & Borders are just as bad. (For the non-Scots, the bulk of Scotland live in "the Central Belt", an area served by two forces - Strathclyde in Glasgow and the West, and Lothian & Borders covering Edinburgh and the East).

By contrast, I've heard good things about Dumfries & Galloway: the UK's smallest force, and also the force who held the largest investigation (their area covered Lockerbie, and they investigated the Pan Am bombing).

One good thing about the English police is civilian review: complaints against Scottish police officers are investigated by Scottish police officers.

True, but £1 million p.a. is, for intents and purposes, approaching infinity for the vast majority of the UK workforce. £610,000 net is not what most of us would call poor ;-) That's ~20x higher than my last UK (gross) salary. Assuming you managed to "only" spend half your salary you'd still have enough left over to buy a decent house outright - 2 or 3 decent houses if you were buying outside the South of England.

Pink unicorns, no less!

I used to have a couple of colleagues who would pick up every language going - particularly languages of the Erlang, Haskell, Scala, Go variety. They'd played with Go (they weren't developing the language itself) and quite liked it.

Since income tax is a marginal tax, your average tax burden would increase slightly. You wouldn't be paying 40% of your total income in tax (and never would: paying nearly 40% tax on total income only becomes a possibility as your income approaches infinity).

This is what killed my trust in the English police: an old-Etonian Earl and ITN (Britain's independent TV news agency) condemning the disproportionate actions of the police against women and children.

I don't trust New Labour to prevent atrocities like this, but this particular one took place under the Conservatives. And it wasn't an isolated incident.

Back on topic, I believe "UK police" here really means "English and Welsh police": I *believe* one of the few things the Scottish "polis" get right is that they don't retain DNA evidence unlawfully. Or at least they haven't been caught yet.

Well, I was referring to the "It's quite a big player in [the] IT job market" part as sarcasm. I assumed that no one here would actually follow the link... (or that everyone but our trolling friend could guess what the link referred to) ;-)