Flatpackhamster

I'm afraid that isn't the case. New jobs have come along to replace those old jobs. IT jobs, for example. Assembly work for computers. Servicing. Women who once could only get work as secretaries to men are now starting their own businesses (a majority of SMEs are now run by women). IT means that someone can be self-employed, run their own diary, handle their own phone calls on the move, etc etc. There is plenty of paid employment. What there is in the UK is an active disincentive to hire, a dislike of unskilled British workers and an active disincentive to work. The disincentive to hire is the cost of employing people - Employer's NI, and the difficulty of firing incompetent staff. The dislike of unskilled British workers is a direct result of the dismal all-must-have-prizes education system, and the benefits system provides an active disincentive to work.

The argument that it takes an awful lot more land to produce meat than crops is a popular one with vegans, who all live in urban areas and shop in supermarkets and who assume that all land is equally productive and all land can be used to grow crops. It is a nonsense argument as five minutes spent with a farmer will clarify.

Do they class that as a sign of quality? I'd class it as a sign of impending doom.

We didn't have any trick-or-treaters, which was a shame, because I'd baked some chocolate brownies earlier in the day. Never mind, they won't go to waste. This thread got a bit angsty yesterday, didn't it?

Shame about the complete waste of money on a vanity project, too. That money could've been spent getting our ass to Mars.

That was pretty standard a decade ago but with so much automation now it's simply not necessary. The donkey work involved with setting up a ghosted NT4 workstation, which had to have half a dozen restarts and had to be manually told where each of the drivers was for each device, is totally different to the unattended installations of Windows 7. Although I haven't worked on a large network for a few years I'd guess that 300 devices per tech would be closer to the mark. Of course it depends on whether or not those techs are also having to do stuff like write code or design websites.

Yes, that's true. I'm in SE England, outside London (so no weighting for that), and with the cost of living down here as high as it is a 1st line tech will struggle, but I imagine that money goes further practically anywhere else in the country.

Because the BBC/Guardian believes that everyone's wealth belongs to the government to do with as they see fit.

Hi. One of the difficulties you'll run in to, I think, is that primary schools can only really afford one person for their IT. As a result of that they will hire someone with some experience, so if you don't have any you'll find it very hard to find that sort of work. You might be better off looking at secondary/grammar/public schools/colleges/universities which have larger teams and which train people from the ground up. Having done an MSc in Computing Science and had it do me no good whatsoever finding a job (in 1999/2000) I would say that in IT experience is everything and that you'll only get that experience by starting work. Even if it's just volunteer work it will help your CV and help you to decide whether or not you really want to work in IT in education. You may find that you prefer a professional environment instead of an academic one. IMO the salaries are pretty shoddy in IT. When I started (back in 99/2000) a level 1 IT tech who was new to the game was earning about £13,500. Ten years on it's about £17,000. That's a real-terms drop in salaries. Most of the geeks I know supplement their income with side work, fixing friends' or neighbours' PCs. Don't let me put you off - I've been self-employed fixing computers for 8 years and I never get up in the morning wishing I did something else. But I'm not rich and I'm never going to be.

+1 for Dr Marten's. They take a polish and shine up reasonably well. The other possibility is a good pair of shoes which you can have resoled and reheeled. It depends upon your budget.

The teacher can't see what every child is doing using that design. I had benches custom-built when I had to rejig my ICT suites. I used north-ICT's solution, but with the central row double-width and machines back-to-back.

I just had a yomp through the 'spare parts' bit of the Dell site for the Optiplex 755: Dell - Support I can't find any list of approved network cards. The other possibility is the discussion forum there: Networking, Internet, Wireless - Dell Community I've put the links in in the hope that you can bypass the pages which are making your system crash.

It's a tricky one then. Have you tried Dell support? They may have a list of compatible cards for that particular model. The only other option that I can think of is to use that USB card that I suggested and use a tiny dab of superglue to secure its plastic mounting to the bottom of the USB port. If you need to take it out, then you have to use solvent to remove it. It's not an elegant solution though.

Could you not get away with USB? Something like the miniature Edimax ew-7811un ? How exposed are the computers to prying fingers?

All of that rather hinges on which Mac and which PC you're talking about, doesn't it? They've both been around for 30 years.

I'm a fan of some of Arnie's films, so I'm not surprised to see Predator on the list here, but I didn't see Total Recall, which belongs on the list. The Running Man and Conan are also fun, but TR is a must-see. +1s to the people who've recommended the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. They are a must-see, and the bigger the screen you have, the better. Has anyone included Das Boot? Get the series, not the film. If you can find it, Stalingrad (the German film) is also phenomenal. A couple of people have mentioned earlier Bonds. Some of them (For Your Eyes Only) are awful. Others (A View to a Kill) are good. Finally, Gremlins and Ghostbusters. On a side note, I didn't think of these films as 'old', probably because I am but I don't see myself as 'old'. I suppose to someone in their early 20s I would be practically geriatric though!

I would say that whoever compared Jobs to Henry Ford is probably closest here. Ford didn't invent the motor car. He didn't invent the internal combustion engine. He didn't invent the assembly line. All of those technologies already existed. What he did was bring them together and brand them successfully. That's exactly what Jobs did. There were already tablets, already MP3 players, before Apple brought the technology together with online services and brand them successfully. That doesn't take anything away from his achievements just as it doesn't take anything away from Ford's achievements to acknowledge that he didn't invent the motor car.

A more accurate comparison would be you buying a new TV, and then going on TV and saying that you hope prices of flat-screen TVs are going to fall because then your next one will be cheaper. He hasn't said he hopes anyone dies. You've tried to over-emotionalise this by linking his behaviour first to Nazism and now to racism. It's a cheap trick. He's neither a nazi nor a racist, even if he's a twit.

If I had been telling him to live more like me, I would agree with you, but I didn't. I think MK-2 is expecting a degree of altruism to which none of us can realistically aspire in a globalised economy. As I wrote above, I don't think this guy is a nice person, but I don't agree with the hand-wringing moralising around his behaviour. What he has said is what we all do, every single day, when we sell or scrap computers, when we buy clothes from China, whatever. We're all making money off of the back of someone else's misery.

Would this guy do it to someone's face? No, and that's exactly the point. It's the distance between his actions and the reason for them that allows him to say that.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. It happens as a direct result of EU rules.

How would showing humility make the misery for those people go away? I'm not saying that he's a nice person, but I am saying that railing at him for not being a nice person is like railing at water for being wet. We all act in ways which affect others but we choose not to think about it.

Where does e-waste end up? | Greenpeace International Sorry, but it does happen. The EU's ruling has made it harder to recycle within the EU due to the increased costs of regulation, so it's shipped to third-world nations.

Do you feel guilty every time you order a piece of electronic equipment? People are dying from the pollutants put in to the groundwater in China when they extract the rare earths using an acid leaching process. When your old computers are disposed of under the EU's recycling directives, they're taken to India and dumped on a beach. There, small children are used to collect the circuitboards and melt them over open crucibles to extract the metals. The circuitboards are coated in flame-retardant chemicals which are toxic and which poison the children - facial lesions, breathing difficulties, skeletal deformities. The distance that separates your purchasing decision from the consequences of that decision affects how much you care. If it was your child being poisoned, you'd act. Since it's someone else's in a foreign country, you don't. The principle is the same. I don't think it's just a matter of 'showing humility and compassion'. This guy didn't cause the recession. He didn't create the conditions for it. But should he be poor because other people are poor, and should his children go without because other children are?

Recidivism rates are extremely high in the UK and higher still in America. I think that we should be looking at the Danish model for prisons, since their recidivism rate is amongst the lowest in the world.