“I'd just like to take this opportunity to say I was wrong. I thought this whole thing was a lot of fuss about nothing, and that the MPs had played by the rules. But then I found out that they had to sign each expenses claim declaring that they were "costs wholly, exclusively, and neccessarily in the course of performing [their] parliamentary duties.". That was before we had house-flipping, £225 pens, and claims on homes that didn't exist or didn't qualify. I still think it's a bit blown out of proportion - if you call it an allowance you can't get too upset if they treat it like an allowance - but the whole debacle is yet another reminder of the contempt our politicians have for the public.”

“I use Audacious at work and Amarok at home, but I certainly don't enjoy either of them.”

“Yeah. Sound on Linux still sucks. We might have got the backend sorted out, but for an end user it's been that way for ages - my soundcard's worked since 2000. But the media players suck, the sound editors are mediocre, and the sequencers are buggy as hell. And that's even before you look at truly unique software, like Acid or Reason. There's nothing like that on Linux.”

“This is amazing. It is the best thing I've seen for a long while. It's only been around for a couple of hours and it's already got through 20,000 pages of MP's documents. I've found my MP claims about 1,200 a month on unspecified "consultancy", George Galloway claims a lot for food, Ian McCartney paid almost £600 for a paper shredder, and Gerald Kaufman spent £225 on a pen.”

“Sigh. This is the beginning of the end. It's all downhill from here.”

“The thing that did it for me was this line: > So while Opera is right to seize on to the social networking meme, they’re doing so largely to increase the waning relevance of their browser. As if there's only room for one browser, or two or three. I really like Opera, and that's why I use it. If other people want to use Firefox, or IE, or Safari, I don't care. I use what works for me, other people use what works for them. People don't complain that there's too many soda brands, and what we really need is one soda to rule them all. There's room in the browser 'market' for plenty of different players.”

“You're using guesswork here to ascribe motive; it's possible the number of people are accurate, but there was something objectionable in the crowd at that point (protest banners, other nation's flags, etc). 4 small patches of cloning doesn't mean it's been photoshopped to increase attendance. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm just saying there's other possible explanations.”

“Each photoshoot gets its own directory under ~/Documents/Images/Digital, with a date and a description. The RAW files go in here. I have a bash alias like this: > alias picconv='ufraw-batch --out-type=jpeg --out-path=Proofs/ --shrink=3 --exposure=0 *.cr2' That makes a bunch of jpegs in a folder "Proofs" that are 1/3rd the size of the original, to check things like composition, sharpness, etc. I use The Gimp to edit the ones I like best into a final version. I'm getting more and more dissatisfied with The Gimp for photo editing, but the conversion from RAW is fine for me. I've not heard of a lot of the tools which others have recommended, so I'm definitely going to check them out.”

“Stick it on eBay, you'll get the market value for it. As others say, include as much detail about *your* camera as you can, and include some decent pics of it. Start the bidding low (say, 99 cents) and people will be more likely to bid. You can always list it with a reserve if you're nervous.”

“I'm presuming that the person wielding the knife is untrained and emotional - ie. lashing out due to fear or anger rather than planning their attack. If you get stabbed pretty much anywhere in the torso, you're in some real trouble, and most people tend to react to stabbings by trying - unsuccessfully - to jump out of the way. That is, they get hit anyway. A slash leaves worse scars, but doesn't go as deep and you'd have to be unlucky to catch a major blood vessel. Also, people are more likely to put their hands/arms up in response to a slashing motion, which leads to less life-threatening injuries. The above is pure conjecture, but I would rather have someone try to slash me than stab me.”

“I was going to say that it's pointless, as you'll just get more slash wounds instead. But they're way less lethal, so that's probably worthwhile. I think the biggest obstacle to adoption isn't the cost, but getting people to think that members of their household are likely to stab them.”

“That's a *bold* claim. If this turns out to be a reannouncement of Opera Turbo, I will be very disappointed.”

“Most citizens have some powers of arrest. The police sometimes get a few more, and are better trained/equipped to carry them out, but generally the police are meant to be 'of the people'. (Some of this is UK-centric).”

“You want something you use, something that is missing a feature/has a bug that bothers you, and something you *really* like. This last part is important. A lot of OSS projects have some prominent dickslaps in their ecosphere, and/or have an atmosphere of being ascerbic rather than helpful. Liking the software a lot will help you cope with this, and give you the drive to find answers on your own when others won't help you.”

“In other news, as well as being able to fashion specialised tools, some birds have been found that are able to write simple shell scripts.”

“Oh my. When this launches, I will audibly squeal with delight.”

“Pretty much any of them. Digital cameras are at the mercy of very complex technology - sensors, control systems, and software - but film cameras are little more than a light-tight box. We've been messing with them for 150 years now so we're quite good at it. To put it another way: with digital the camera itself has a definite impact on the pictures you make, whereas with film it's all about the lens. You will do better to pick up a crappy body and a decent lens than the other way around. The real decision you have to make is how manual you want to go. If you can put up with no auto-exposure and manual focusing, people will pretty much fling second-hand cameras SLRs at you. The amount of bargains out there are unbelievable. The Canon T70, for instance, is an amazing camera that will set you back a mere £40ish on eBay. The Olympus OM-10 can be had, with a lens, for £25-30. These cameras will teach you the fundamentals of photography very quickly, simply because you have to think more to use them well, and this education will stand you good stead throughout your photography. But there are downsides: you have to spend money to get your pictures, and the cost increases with the number of photos you take. Feedback on what picture you took is not immediate, and you won't get EXIF data (so either you remember how you took the picture, or try to reverse-engineer it later). You'll get more fuckups - misloaded film, completely wrong exposure because your meter's battery was nearly dead, double exposure, accidentally opening the camera and ruining your film, and so on. Finally, the money you pour into it is wasted if you want to upgrade to digital later. You can negate some of these by getting a more modern film camera. The prices for the bodies are still fairly cheap. A Canon EOS 500 will set you back £25 from eBay, and it takes EF lenses so you can get yourself a digital body in a few years and use all your lenses with it. The same goes for Nikon's offerings. So which film SLR to get depends on how likely you are to upgrade in the future. If you want an older, fully manual camera you can pretty much take your pick. The Olympus OM-10 is a classic, as is the Canon AE-1 or T70/T90. There are some highly-regarded Pentax models out there. You'll find more second-hand options for lenses/accessories for bigger names, but you can pick up whatever you like here and get a good camera. This is also the cheaper option. If you're going to go for something that lets you take your lenses with you in a future digital upgrade/augmentation, then you should think a bit more. Personally I shoot Canon, but if I were to start again today I would go with Nikon (simply because their flash gives you more flexibility than Canon's). It's still a matter of personal preference, but because the lenses are still used by a wide swathe of the photography community they're not cheap. Sorry for the length.”

“What makes you think it won't make it to the final release? I'll be very disappointed if it doesn't.”

“I'm quite impressed so far (but I am a huge Opera fanboy). The rendering engine seems much faster, as does its Javascript/DOM manipulation. Facebook lags in Opera 9.6 when compared with Firefox, but this has been solved in the beta. Last.fm is quicker too. Visual tabs are a neat idea, but I don't think it's something I'd ever use (just because I have too many tabs open to justify it). The worst I can say about it is that the "Welcome to Opera 10" page (http://portal.opera.com/upgrade/) is ugly as sin. Oh, can we have a way to organise RSS feeds, please? A folder heirarchy would be lovely.”

“I'm pretty sure that Spotify is just burning through their venture capital ("We lose something on every track we stream, but we make it up on volume"). I'd be delighted if they could find a way to do it without haemorraging cash, though.”

“This whole thing strikes me as a storm in a teacup. The Telegraph paid a ridiculous sum to get their hands on the data early, and now they have to sex it up so they get their money's worth. The MPs had a set of rules, and they followed those rules. What's the problem with that? I'd find it more interesting to see the same kind of deep scrutiny on the register of minister's interests, but that kind of corruption isn't as sexy and won't shift as many papers.”

“I think that there's 3 things you need to do with this project: 1. Establish who is responsible for saying what the system does and doesn't do. This may be someone high up in the company, or it might be you. But somebody needs to be able to say "This system will do X, but it won't do Y." Someone has to be able to say when it is finished, at least for this version. 2. Set up a visual representation of what's left to be done, along with how much time it will take to do each task. The traditional way is with index cards, but it doesn't have to be. By making the remaining time tangible, as well as what needs to be done in that time, you help others understand that adding/changing things at this point has a cost, whether that cost is extending a deadline or dropping something else. 3. Impose a feature freeze. "Sorry, we've allotted this time for testing the system and fixing the bugs that we find. If we have to use this time for development then we can't do that, and we can't test a system that's changing." One final observation: why do you care? This project is going to be a trainwreck at this point no matter what you do. If you've been given a promotion and put in the hot seat then OK, but from your text it sounds like you're still the production DBA who has to import some data. If that's still your role, I would keep this project as far away from you as possible. Don't be a hero. You can't fix it at this point, so you're better off keeping your head down and not getting any of the blame when it all goes tits-up.”

“http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/obama_inauguration/7837927.stm For UK users.”