A lot of "we injected him with stem cells!" is rather questionable, something akin to throwing some parts into a car's engine bay if it stops working. Sure, the parts might potentially be useful, but they're not necessarily the right ones, nor will they necessarily end up in the right places. There's certainly potential for future stem-cell based therapies, but most things that you can get done in clinics today are of dubious benefit.

Agreed. Demonstrating the dangers of the Internet isn't helpful at all, and is more likely to steel them against this threat.

It's never been a codified right in the vein of the US First Amendment, other than through the European Convention on Human Rights - which allows for plenty of restrictions, including those "for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, [or] for the protection of the reputation or rights of others", all of which could be argued to be related to "inciting racial hatred".

I have a BA in biology, and am currently working on my PhD, also in biology. None of my work has anything directly to do with computers. However, as much as I enjoyed learning about science, I've come to understand during my PhD that research is not something which I want to spend the rest of my life doing: I'm not driven sufficiently by it. Instead, I've looked to what I do as a hobby, and am applying for programming jobs.

I have no academic qualifications relating to computers at all - I was massively turned off by "IT" lessons at school, which were in fact "Microsoft Office" lessons - but I do have some summer work experience setting up a database and doing software testing, and I've worked on various small personal projects over the years.

I've been pleasantly surprised at how open companies have been to the prospect of employing me as a programmer, and both companies I've applied to so far have interviewed me. I didn't quite fit with the first company, who seemed rather geared towards mathematicians (one of their earlier hires had a psychology PhD though), but things are going well with the second and I'm very hopeful.

Admittedly, I do have a harder-science background than you (not that biology is really up there with physics/chemistry/maths/engineering in most people's perception) and a PhD-in-progress to catch the eye. But I'd get your CV out there, make sure you mention the languages you know and your open source experience, and do some reading around fundamental CS concepts like computational complexity - you might be surprised. Having practical experience with real-world projects is arguably just as or more valuable as having formal education but never having used it outside of assignments, and being self-taught shows a deep level of interest - you're doing it because you enjoy it, rather than because you saw a paycheck in it. You need to find the right people to see that side, of course; I would in particular see if there are any companies specifically advertising jobs for graduates, since they won't be expecting years of industry experience in the first place.

Nope. Unfortunately, you're not going to get the kind of pay you'll get in management in any job where you do the practical work. If that's what you enjoy doing, then you have to accept the trade-off of lower pay for greater job satisfaction/enjoyment. I'd like it to be different, but that's the reality.

I'd say that your best bet is probably to be in a company that's focused around your job role rather than being an ancillary part of some other corporation. If you're a programmer, a software company is more likely to understand the value that you add than a grocery store? I could well be wrong about that, though.

Even when I used a Windows Mobile phone, I barely ever used Marketplace. It seemed to be rather empty, and was too little, too late for app distribution on that platform.

So, OnLive then?

It probably is, which probably means that the results aren't statistically significantly different. This is such a common problem: in science, if you attempt to present data that doesn't have statistical significance (i.e. it's unlikely that any difference that you see is due to chance), no-one will believe you. But in the media, tiny differences in means observed from small sample sets are regularly presented as real differences, when in all likelihood it's all down to sampling error. (How accurately do people report the amount of sleep they get, anyway?)

We're never going to see error bars and p-values in reviews and newspaper articles, though, so you just have to take stories like this with a heavy dose of salt.

Photoshop Touch has already been out for a few months on Android tablets actually, and the iPad version is "as close to identical to the Android version as is possible, given the platform differences". So that's no reason to get an iPad over an Android tablet.

I agree; the Transformer Prime is an interesting example here, though, since it does have a keyboard dock accessory with integrated trackpad, extra keyboard, and USB host port, which holds the tablet itself like the screen on a laptop (hence the name "Transformer" - it's a major feature of that tablet). The hardware has the potential to be something closer to an Android netbook, although the software isn't there yet. LibreOffice is supposed to be coming to tablets, but I don't see a port of Eclipse any time soon. What with Ubuntu for Android coming out, that kind of future might not be so far away though.

I agree, it was a strange decision. 41 megapixels is a huge headline-grabber, and they use that to promote the platform they're killing off rather than the one they're trying to build up?

The analogy about what you're allowed to grow in your garden is a decent one... On the Apple side we have a controlled neighbourhood where you're required to select one of the limited number of approved layouts and plant only the kind of plants that the committee allow, ensuring that you have a nice garden but restricting your freedom to develop it in the way you like. There are no controls on Android gardens, giving potential for more creative designs and interesting gardens, but with nothing stopping you letting your garden overgrow with thorns and weeds other than your own care and attention.

Tegra 3 has 5 Cortex A9 cores, of which one is low power and used for light loads. The other 4 make up the full-power quad-core, and each core is power-gated so they're only used when required. This means that despite it having 5 cores, battery life is as good or better than the dual-core Tegra 2.

That's generally true, but it's increasingly difficult to get large performance improvements on a single core, particularly on the desktop (mobile was lagging for a long time, though it's catching up now). It's relatively easy to add extra cores, and they provide a substantial boost in performance - provided applications can make use of them, of course.

Having two cores is immediately pretty beneficial regardless of application multithreading, since it means that any background grumblings can be shunted off to a second core and don't get into contention with the foreground task. There's less case for four on mobile right now because few programs are written to use that many threads, but I'm sure we'll be moving that way eventually.

Sounds like it would have been a better idea. It must be difficult enough to for the body to adapt to one newly-attached limb, let alone 4 at once.