Clearly it is at a good height now for imaging the whole surface, but as there is no atmosphere could it get down to a mountain scraping orbit? Just high enough to get round the lumps and bumps and variability in the roundness of the object? Would that enable it to image things at a really small pixel size?

in theory, one day the desktop will run the phone operating system. I think this is what they mean by convergence, it will all be the same and it will all be QML. You might still be able to run GTK things on a desktop, but I am not 100% sure of that, I just can't see a viable desktop based on just QML things if it is supposed to be a successor to Ubuntu desktop.

no, you don't need to have an account to use the phone, you need a SIM card. If you want to use various googley (alphabetty) features like gmail then you need a google account. If you want to use telegram then you need a telegram account, same for facebook and ebay and various other things. Your phone will collect accounts, get over it. If you want to install things from the store then I think you need a launchpad/ubuntu account in order to leave feedback, fairly sure you can install apps one way or another without having that - but your phone will collect accounts, get over it.

it runs various QML programs and there are a bunch of web based things mildly optimised for it.
Yes, you can run a terminal out of the box.
No, you can't run KDE or a different GUI (well you probably can, but if you were going there this isn't a good starting place)
The scopes are equally pointless with or without privacy violating things (and really, that is almost entirely bogus FUD anyway based on the misunderstanding that the global search box in Unity was an application launcher, those concerns don't apply on the phone (there is no global multi-scope search)). Scopes are just categories of things you can search for, they are not that exciting.
It uses a browser based on QML and Webkit, it is called Oxide and they ripped off the Safari icon for it (compass needle pointing north east).
If you know Ubuntu and have been using it avidly since 2006 and know Unity 7 really well, then forget all that you have learned because this isn't the same at all. It is a new phone platform, bit like Android or iOS with no clearly defined market. I have one, it is my one and only phone, it is OK, but really I am not very demanding and completely anti-social so I don't really need to have a phone at all :)

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." and this is a clear exception to that rule.

it is a result of quite a few years of lobbying by organisations such as Open Forum Europe and internal pressure from certain folk within the civil service. The government is reasonably receptive to well made arguments. They have a big love-hate thing going on with Microsoft. They know they are being screwed over by an American company that doesn't pay it's full share of UK taxes, so they like to kick back a bit now and then.

At the start of this year VAT changed so that for digital online sales the place of supply is where the consumer belongs. This means if you sell an app/ebook/knitting pattern/recipe/tune then you have to collect two bits of non-conflicting evidence of the place of belonging of the consumer, then figure out which of the 70 or so rates of VAT across 27 countries applies for the specific product (several have special ebook rates) then you add VAT to the price and remit it to HMRC through the mini one stop shop (VATMOSS). There is no threshold for this and you can get penalties each quarter from 27 different countries if you get it wrong. Or, you can geoblock and say "screw you, I can't cope with this shit." to potential customers outside the UK.
Geoblocking is about the only sane response to VATMOSS.

this "preparing for the workplace" mantra is the thing that ripped computing out of primary and secondary schools and replaced it with Microsoft Office training. The assorted coding in schools initiatives (Codeclub, the Barclays code playground, Rewired State Codecademy and so on) are the rest of the industry trying to put teaching back into schools. Even Microsoft know they went too far pushing training and want to get teaching of coding back into schools.
I have a suspicion that Finland will make this work (they have a good track record of making stuff work) but I think it is important to distinguish between training and teaching.

Is this something that is going away and will come back in 10 years? why? or is it something that is expected to last for 10 years?

so you have to make the pasta, make the filling, then load the machine with dough and filling, then wait two minutes per ravioli, then apply pressure to each one to check it is sealed and waterproof then drop them in the water to cook them. Or, seeing as you have made the dough already, roll it out, pop it over a ravioli tray http://www.amazon.co.uk/World-... put a spoonfull of filling in each bit and roll over another sheet of pasta, job done 12 at a time.
I can see 3d printing as being interesting for high end intricate and decorative chocolate/sugar creations. Most pasta is formed by extrusion anyway, and you probably could do something interesting with 3d printing pasta, but not ravioli.

here is the working group list referred to in the parliamentary answer http://www.publications.parlia...

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/...

what a complete and utter waste of democracy this man is.

The initial plan of austerity meant huge unemployment and poverty, paying off debt as fast as possible whilst the economy tanked, making it harder and harder to pay off the debt. This isn't a great plan for anyone involved including the creditors.
A revised plan which involves jobs and productivity and increasing their ability to pay would be a plausible way out. If they want a restructuring of the debt on the basis of giving free electricity to poor people I can't see what is in it for the creditors. Raising the minimum wage is a fairly neutral thing to do, it cuts some rubbish jobs and increases the value of some more reasonable jobs, in itself it isn't a huge deal either way in terms of repaying the debt (or making the debt more affordable, nobody actually wants the debt repaid, they just want it to be reliably serviced)

I want people to understand loops. Loops that happen a number of times, loops that run at least once and end on a condition, loops that are entered on a condition and may never run. I want people to get an understanding of how fast computers are at calculating things. I want people to understand functions, datatypes and recursion. These are all completely academic topics, nothing harder than long division. There is no reason not to teach this stuff. You can do it all with block based languages (scratch/blockly) or with various text languages. That doesn't matter. It is the fundamental concepts that everyone needs to be introduced to, just like everyone gets to do a bit of algebra and a bit of chemistry and a bit of geography.

being an Ubuntu user I don't have a wheel group, but this seems to be related to the fact that local users don't need root to install packages from the repositories. If there is a bad package in a trusted repository, then an untrusted local user could install it and the bad package could give that user root access. This is expected behaviour, I don't think you can install local packages through this rule (if you can then there is a vulnerability, create your own deb package with an install script that gives you root, then install it) but the point of trusted repositories is that you trust them, so you can install updates and new packages without admin access. The report seemed more concerned about talking about wheels and grinches than actually explaining the vulnerability.