If you don't have enough time in the day to read bits of /. during office hours, you don't have enough staff. There should always be a bit of idle time in an IT department's day so that when the shit does hit the fan you've got enough slack time to deal with it without sacrificing other things.

Yep. It's called Active Directory and Group Policy. Plus Windows Installer is amazing for managed applications.

We were once like that, with every room having a printer. Now it's all centralised and it's a 5 minute trek to your nearest printer to collect anything.

American cars manage straight lines perfectly well, but fail miserably around a small feature of most road networks - corners with a radius of under 300 yards.

Come to Europe and we'll explain concepts such as handling, fuel efficiency and build quality.

I knew American cars always had a blind spot for manual transmissions, but popping out of gear at high temperatures? Is your friend revving the nuts off it or what?

Here's why. Imagine your car, full to the brim of GPS, rangefingers and inter-car communication - it's completely ready to drive in harmony with other road users and speed you to your destination.

Then, it tries to switch lanes whilst doing 70mph down the motorway and gets walloped by the lorry coming up on the outside because a) the rearward facing rangefinders can't see into the other lane and b) the lorry driver hasn't bothered to fit £3,000 worth of gear so that his cab can tell your car what it's doing.

The 3GS had an oleophobic screen you didn't have to clean quite as often. I however seriously doubt they're going to finish development on, test, announce and ship a new iPhone before Christmas.

It seems to be an ongoing trend in the world that vocational and academic strands of life are being muddled into one, and they shouldn't be. I would not expect a plumber (with a vocational, hands-on, 'tradesman' career) to be able to design a dam any more than I would expect a hydrodynamic engineer (with an academic, theoretic, 'professional' career) to be able to fit my toilet.

The trouble is the word 'professional' - I would consider that plumbers, electricians and mechanics are all professionals since they have a profession they do for a living.

I'm an Online Services Team Computing Officer, in the Online Services team, which is a part of ICT Services department, which is a part of Business Systems.

If anybody can tell me what's supposed to go on my business card (and by extension my CV) I'll give them a cookie.

I'd strongly recommend hitting the East Coast Main Line up to York, but generally speaking if you cannot get to where you want to go directly from London then it's really not worth the hassle of fighting the UK rail network.

Alternatively, you can pay for access to the BT OpenZone hotspots on either a short or longer term, which tend to be broadcast from some phone booths, places like Starbucks, McDonalds etc so it's unlikely you won't be able to find wifi within 50 yards unless you're outside the tourist areas.

One's colder than the other, even taking into account England's notoriously unreliable weather.

In all seriousness though, they do taste quite different.

Small but incredibly useful tip if you plan on travelling around London to see the sights and intend on using the tube (It's easier and in most cases faster than anything else):

Get an Oyster Card instead of buying individual or daily tickets. Cheaper fares, easier getting through the gates, and it works on busses as well.

Another one voting for this. It also has the benefit in that it installs entirely within a roaming 'Documents and Settings' directory if the windows network makes use of one. I use Dropbox to sync my Mac laptop, my Ubuntu VM, my XP installation, and my University roaming profile (and the app follows me around campus with no need to install on every machine). The web interface is quite good as well, plus it sports sharing of files if you want to.

It lacks the ability for you to encrypt it with your own key, however it's a matter of convenience vs security. I'm not keeping my doomsday device plans on there and I think it fairly unlikely that the company is going to sell my lab reports, so the lack of 'privacy' in an absolute sense is balanced out by the fact that communication between client and server is encrypted and it does what I want it to.

Technical level is easy: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156412