Sex for tuition! #UK #Tories #EverydaySexism

Hey, UK college girls 17-24!

Do the Tory government's 200% tuition hikes have your stomach in knots?

Worried about a lifetime of Yank-style student debt servitude?

Well, worry no more, your prayers are answered! Wealthy businessmen will pay your tuition! Full ride!

All you have to do is sleep with a complete stranger four times a term.

Well, maybe five:

In a secretly filmed encounter with an Independent reporter posing as a student, a male “assessor” from the website asked that she undertake a “practical assessment” with him at a nearby flat to prove “the level of intimacy” she was prepared to give before being permitted to find a sponsor online.

He said this was required for “quality control”.

And just so we're absolutely clear, by "sleep," we mean:

He told her that the more she was prepared to do, the more money she would get.

Kinda makes the Portland tradition of college girls working in strip clubs seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

Why I think the #Microsoft #Surface will win the tablet wars | #ipad #nexus

Let's take a look at the closest thing we have to an apples-to-apples comparison of the lowest end of three tablet offerings:

• iPad 2, wifi only, 16GB: $399


• Google Nexus 10, 16GB, wifi only: $399 and up


• Microsoft Surface, 32GB: $499 and up

Why does the lowest-end Microsoft Surface have double the flash storage? It is, apparently, because it comes with productivity software that takes up a lot of space. To those of us who are use to Microsoft's cruft, this comes as no surprise.

Frankly, as a consumer, the Surface looks overpriced to me. If I want a 10" tablet, then what I really care about is screen size (the Surface is only marginally larger), connectivity (4G is available for the Nexus and iPad but not the Surface), and application availability (Google and Apple both dominate here). And I hate Windows 8.

But if I'm buying for a business, my main concern isn't going to be any of the above. My main concern, in fact, is going to be how well each of these products integrates with my existing IT infrastructure. And here, the Surface has one advantage that the others will never have: it comes with full-blown, no-shit Microsoft Office installed. Between that, and the fact that the Surface will almost certainly integrate well with the rest of my Microsoft infrastructure (think: domain controllers, no need for macs, etc.), the Surface is going to slowly overtake the rest of the corporate world. Furthermore, if Microsoft relents and releases a way to run VB6 applications on the Surface, then it wins the adoption wars hands down.

"But," I hear you saying, "Google has its own email and office suite, and there are ways to use Office documents on the iPad." Both true. Thing is, right now Google is still a minority player in the business environment world, and is likely to remain one indefinitely barring a seismic shift. And all the methods to make the iPad work with Office are clunky.

The good news for developers is this: all three of these tablet environments still run lightweight software written in HTML5, Javascript and CSS; presumably Apache Cordova will also continue to work in all three as well. The bad news is that you will probably need different development environments for each - XCode for iPad apps, Eclipse for Nexus apps, and Visual Studio for Surface apps. The ugly news is that a lot of Windows developers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag are going to start writing Surface apps soon, and guess who's going to have to maintain their crap?