The big question is whether university actually makes you richer. I know that there are studies saying that graduates make $x,000 more per annum, but how much is that down to the degree and how much is that down to them being a hard-working, smart guy? Dumb, lazy guys don't get degrees.

But I've also met smart, hard-working guys who never went to university, and you know what? They do just as well as the smart, hard-working guys who went. They just went through different routes to success (like they're a bigshot in a small company rather than a senior manager in a large one).

This is the other thing with Gates, Jobs, Ellison and so forth. They're entrepreneurs and you can't teach entrepreneurialism.

The other thing is to always do an "fundamental" degree. Do proper comp sci, and you learn about how computers work at their most fundamental level. Whatever comes along tomorrow in computing, it's still going to apply.

Degrees should not be vocational, because when the world changes, your degree may be worthless.

The main purpose of getting a Comp Sci degree is that it opens a 1st door for you, which allows you to get a job which gives you a couple of years experience which then means you have experience, which is what most people hiring care about.

I've actually wondered whether kids just offering themselves as a minimum wage programmer to a company is a good idea. Get paid shit, but get your 2 years of experience. You need the sort of company which isn't a large bureaucracy to manage that, though.

The thing is that within a few years of work, college doesn't matter for shit.

So, why do college people do better than non-college people? Because the sort of people who go to college are more generally the bright, hard-working types. So "graduates make $x more than non-graduates" is more of a correlation than causation. Every software guy who makes big bucks that I know is a smart, hard-working guy. More than most have degrees, but the degree makes far less difference than their attitude and ability.

Now define "places of worship". Turn your house into a Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and you don't get a tower within 1500ft. And if they still do it, take them to the Supreme Court on the grounds of religious bias. Actually, that's what any geek in the town should do and pretty quickly, you'll have no cell towers, rendering the regulations completely unworkable.

WinMobile will be toast. When you can run Linux/BSD on a phone, you don't need Windows. The main reasons it survives on the desktop is familiarity, Office and the huge library of software for it. And those just ain't factors with a phone.

I think we'll be down to 4 in very little time: Symbian, Blackberry, Android and iOS. Blackberry is like the old mainframes of smartphones. It's still more useful in some ways, but I suspect that iOS or Android will consume it over the next 5 to 10 years.

Nokia's problem is that they don't have the developer traction now. Android's developer site is just so much better, and that piggy-backs on people using Google's other APIs and finding them very easy to work with.

It's not about open source or "cloud-based solutions". The cost of closed source licenses to government IT costs is a drop in the ocean when you're paying £1000/day for consultants. The biggest problem (and I witnessed this 1st hand) is that the people running government IT seem to lack focus on what they want to have delivered, so projects run on and on.

I'll bet quite a lot of these "pilots" are 2 iPads, which after the pilot is a failure disappear into someone's home...

Urban sprawl led to more pollution. What I'm saying is that more internet use might actually reverse that. If you can get things to your home, or work from home, then the fact that your far from home doesn't matter.

But you've still got to buy the books as ebooks anyway.

It's just some adults having fun and burning money in the process. If it's about text books, why not give them Kindles which cost a lot less? Oh, because they're not as sexy and cool as an iPad.

That's a very good point.

The working in patterns in some shops (like books and records) are best described as 30 minutes in the morning, 2 hours at lunchtime and 30 minutes before closing, and then weekends. It's very wasteful compared to what a warehouse can do.

The report looks like someone lobbying for more "green" funds by writing an anti-progress report.

They don't seem to like people working from home because it increases urban sprawl, and then assume that leads to more pollution. But if we're working from home, we aren't doing any travelling there, and if we're internet shopping, we reduce most of our travel there too. So, it removes our biggest travelling needs.

I've been working from home for a while, and I rarely drive now. I mix up local shops which I can walk to with internet shopping.

You're talking about movie piracy which is an underground activity.

Without copyright, a projectionist would take a film, get it copied and start selling DVDs of it from a shop. Or perhaps get the film copied onto film, and the cinema down the road would show it, and there's nothing the movie company could do about it.

Now, which cinema is going to show the movie at the cheapest price? The one that's paid a load of money to the studio, or the one down the road?