Yes, I spend a lot of my leisure time reading today's "great" literary fiction, and like much of it. I didn't much like Franzen's The Corrections, but then, Franzen's degree is in German, which offers other career opportunities if that writing thing doesn't work out for him. I've not read Don DeLillo, but I note that his degree is in "Communication Arts", but also that he worked as an advertising copywriter before becoming an author, so it looks as if that degree offers other career paths that pay better than waiting at tables.

Still counts as a "liberal art" -- it has general application, rather than being specifically vocational.

They're more likely to your boss (or, more likely given your blinkered attitude, governing the welfare system you depend on) than waiting tables.

Depends. What do you count as "important"? A lot of great books (which do have commercial value, for the Gradgrinds reading this) are written by English Lit graduates, and are likely better for that. Of course, being an author isn't a "tenure-track job", which the OP seems to think is the only sort of job that matters.

The GiffGaff "goodybag" SIM-only bundles look as if they'd be a good option if she's in Glasgow or Edinburgh, because they're a reasonable price with no long-term contractual tie in that I can see. Their 4G coverage doesn't seem to extend to other Scottish towns and cities, though.

If "all major locations" means Glasgow and Edinburgh (and Aberdeen & Dundee if you're lucky), yes.

Then she's going to have to be very picky where she goes in Scotland, or find another source of high speed data.

And even where there is nominal 4G coverage, it's patchy. I live in London, which is supposed to be pretty well covered by 4G, but much of the time I can't get it.

On the other hand, 3G should be fine in Scotland. Sure, a lot of Scotland has no cellphone signal at all, but that's because a lot of Scotland is wilderness. If the OP's daughter is actually studying in a town, the mobile signal should be fine. And there will be plenty of free WiFi hotspots - coffee shops, bars & McDonalds - if she wants to voip home to ask for money.

I'd be interested to know how much difference Amazon's actions are actually making to Hachette. If I want to buy a book online I Google for it and find a supplier that has it for a reasonable price (and can deliver in reasonable time, if I'm buying the dead tree version). If Amazon doesn't have it or has a long lead time, won't folks just go somewhere else? It's not as if they actually have to walk down the street to get to the next store. As far as I can see, all Amazon is doing is encouraging buyers to check out the competition, but I don't know whether the figures back that up.

Not actually true -- I live in London, and it's a five-minute walk from my house until I get on camera (basically, when I get to my local high street). The majority of the cameras you see reported in London (and the UK as a whole) are private security cameras inside shops. And the figures for the vast number of cameras in the UK are bogus -- they were based on counting the number of cameras on two busy shopping streets and multiplying by the total number of streets in the UK.

With any luck it will mean they start spending money on storyline instead of VFX.

And as we see, occasionally we find someone who doesn't so much have a dick as is a dick.

See above. About 1%. So if you take Facebook's membership as about 1 billion, that's about ten million users. Probably worth the effort of some extra items in a drop-down menu.

I learned almost entirely from books. I've no idea what Kernigan and Ritchie were like in front of a class -- I was in the wrong country to find out -- and for all I know they might have written The C Programming Language in their moms' basements. Ditto Knuth, ditto Booch, and so on. Sure, there's no reason for a programmer not to be a great presenter, but there's no reason they have to be for us to learn from them.

I am against the death penalty for one simple reason. It gives the government more power than I trust the government with,