Check out the blog post and the many many negative user comments!

In a nutshell, the UI on Windows is changing to a full screen UI, with overcomplicated horrendous Windows design touches. It truly beggars belief that they can be so wrong about this and misjudge their user base so.

One comment on the blog that sums it up well is:

"An app like Skype should be really out of the way most of the time. For me it is a great communication tool, but I have to switch if this is Skype’s future."

It seems like Skype’s ego has taken over and forgotten that it is just  a phone on steroids. If your mobile phone suddently became the size of your laptop, you’d get rid of it for a better one. Skype will haemorrhage users if they don’t rethink this UI disaster.

I can only think that most of the developers/producers with a clue have left Skype and new people post Ebay takeover are completely ruining the company.

Who knows, our entire company might …. shudder… have to switch to iChat. At least it has multi-way video and app sharing. It doesn’t have SkypeIn or SkypeOut though of course, but we currently don’t use those and will not start if Skype’s UI goes this awful awful way.

Check out this excellent article detailing the thankfully widening appreciation that meat consumption at the levels we see in the West is simply not sustainable, especially on a global scale. China is entering the global food import market and the relative affluence developing there and in other countries is going to make it impossible for meat consumption to continue as it is.

You simply cannot feed millions of tons of grain to animals in order to eat them and ignore the fact that this food goes a lot further when fed directly to humans. It is deeply ironic that China, with a diet typically very low in dairy and meat produce, may well be the deciding factor as to whether people in Western countries do or don’t have meat on their plate most days of the week in 5 years time.

One thing’s for sure - its going to become a lot more expensive, which is as it should be. The gap between non-organic and organic prices is likely to narrow as the bottom-of-the-barrel produced meat prices increase due to scarcity. This is probably a good thing in the long term, as people will have notchoice but to eat less but better reared meat and dairy products. It might even in time turn around the prospects of our respective nations’ health - but possibly not so for the Chinese.

We have serious literacy problems here in the UK, demotivated and stressed young children, and a culture that seems to be losing social cohesion each year.

The review backs up other experts that say that children in the UK are being tested far too much, receiving formal schooling too early (4yrs in most cases, age 5 by law) and that Steiner schools and home-schooled children are doing much better.

View the BBC TV news report on it

Also listen to the discussion on Radio 4 Today programme this morning - Note the ridiculous comment from the woman criticizing the research, who says that children in home or alternative (i.e. Steiner) schools fare better because they are "middle class". The evidence clearly shows entire countries do better - e.g. Sweden - with this kind of approach. Is everyone in Sweden middle class?

The government seems to be desperately fighting their indefensible corner while they constantly increase the pressure on our children, teachers and schools to "perform" by reaching ever increasing numbers of goals and targets. The government seems to be extremely keen on helping the disadvantaged, by forcing them to give up their childhood early, in under funded schools, with constantly changing methodologies that are effectively experimentation on a national scale. Which of these changes is actually producing better results? Are they not aware of amazing people like Bill Strickland who works wonders with the disadvantaged in America?

If you think the new EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) policy which makes it law to start teaching children to read and write from the ages of 4 years is too much, please sign up to the Open Eye petition on the Downing Street website. Open Eye is a group of academics and childhood experts who are making a stand against the Government’s increasingly testing-led and high-pressure education policies for young children.

If you’re interested in this subject, watch out for the media coverage and see how many times you can count the government ministers or representatives saying how EYFS is "a flexible framework". It’s flexible as long as you work within it.

Our school campaign has taken a new twist, with an almost derisory response from the DCSF (education department) which fails to address several of the specific legal issues we raised in our letter requesting full exemptions for Steiner schools. We are now about to make our next move…

Please take a look and sign up to the early years petition if you can.

It’s like groundhog day. You enter your details, press "Sign in" and… it comes back to the login form prompting for password again. Yahoo finance occasionally lets the first re-login work (which happens whenever you try to do something after it has first logged you in), but after that its no go.

I’ve cleared caches, removed cookies several times. No change.

What the f**k is going on, and why don’t these people have "report a bug" on their website instead of the useless Help content they include?

QA points to Yahoo and Myspace: zero.