Banks going bust overnight, the US government nationalising huge companies, share prices falling through the floor, rescues, refinancing and restructuring. What are we to make of it all?

Strikes me that we are seeing evidence that unrestrained capitalism doesn't work. It certainly doesn't work in terms of a fair society. In a society, the people who find it hardest to make a living ought to be protected and catered for by those who are more well off. The total collapse of Lehman Brothers and the willingness of the financial regulators in the States to allow that to happen demonstrates that this is not the case. I know that a lot of the people affected by this collapse will be previously well-paid brokers but not exclusively and indirectly a lot more people will be affected.

This could also be a time when we're seeing a first seismic shift in the move from the modern economy into the post-modern version. There will be more and it will take time to make that shift but it seems to be happening already.

So, what do we need at this time? We need the most progressive and redistributive tax plan we've ever seen, which is what is on offer from the Liberal Democrats. Read the BBC's report on Nick Clegg's conference speech and watch or read the speech itself.

(I always thought Jupiter was kind of pretty with that spot and all..)

Jakub makes some great points about general usability with Planet SUSE and I'll monkey with the CSS to try and make it clearer. My personal views on this subject are as follows though:

• I've never been a big fan of white space. It can just look like dead space or wasted space.
• Although it's my doing, I'm not a massive fan of a vertical logo either. The thing was that having it horizontally:
  1. Pushed the first bit of actual content down the page even further.
  2. Created even more white space above the first entry.
• I was of the view that the position of the header for each entry - within the same border as the entry itself - made it clear which one it belonged with. Would it be more obvious if the border was perhaps a little thicker (i.e. more visible)?
• The way Planet GNOME is designed means that I almost never get more than a single entry on my screen at once because the div that contains each post has a maximum width. On Planet SUSE, the width of each post is entirely dependent on the browser width and so I rarely only see one post (unless Miguel was the last person to post of course)
• The paragraphs are padded incidentally but again, maybe they could be by more.

Why, in this age of electronic calendaring, do we still say we'll pencil in a tentative appointment?

BBC News: New Hitchhiker's author announced.

Noooo! This is just wrong! How can anyone possibly presume to pick up from Douglas Adams? What will be next? Is Dirk Gently going to be given another mystery to solve using the principle of the fundamental inter-connectedness of all things?

I'll be buying it the day it comes out of course.

Federico: Glad you like the way I've set Planet SUSE up for hiding feeds. It's only fair that I pass the credit on to where it belongs which is to Facebook.

The old version of Facebook had very handy little 'x' icons next to items in your news feed which made it very clear that that was how you knocked off those items (and also adjusted the weightings of different types of stories) and I just nicked the idea.

Sadly, by trying to introduce more user-level control, this has been replaced with a drop-down menu of 'Options' which I've already lost interest in. Perhaps the designers of Facebook could take a leaf out of GNOME's design principles.