Sorry, but I not only think Stallman was completely right here, but I don't think anything he said could be construed as anything other than respectful. Lacking class? No, I just don't see it.

C++ is pretty pervasive and most companies have drunk the Kool Ade nowadays , so you can't get away from it.

Interesting. 10 years ago, I'd have agreed with you. These days, I'd say it's Java you can't get away from.

Also, what might be considered "a lot of money" in an Anglo-Saxon country may be just regular stuff here. You, see, I live in a very expensive geographical area

That's probably true for some areas, but not for most of South East England, and you'll struggle to find a more expensive place than London. The Mercer list is somewhat misleading, in that it measures purchasing power in US dollars, so currency fluctuations tend to dominate and skew the results (hence the ridiculous situation of Luanda topping the list in recent years). If you look at the cost of living in local currency, London and Moscow have been vying for the top spot for several years. Trust me, if you get a well paid job with a London based firm, you'll have no problems funding life in LÃtzebuerg. And you may not believe it, but yes, I'm positive you're good enough to do so. The current economic climate means that now is probably not the best time to be making a leap like that, but in a few years, I'd say you'd be fine.

Sure. I used to run such things daily when responsible for multi-user boxen at work. But on my home fileserver, there's only the two of us using it and I haven't bothered until now. Like I said, progress is getting me into bad habits. Disk space is cheap. The easy option is just to grow the filesystem when it fills up.

Well, I suppose I might as well contribute, and do my bit. I wasn't convinced by this new fangled login business, so when /. added them, I held off on registering for what seemed like forever. Eventually, I gave in and created an account, hence my high(!) UID...

Our new Ts&Cs are not as good as our current ones

Errr... but doesn't that violate TUPE? I know that when I went through this, the new employer wasn't allowed to change the T&Cs at all.

never, ever admit to anything that could be considered a weakness in an interview unless you get a chance to talk about how you are dealing with it successfully and being more productive

Never admit to anything that could be considered a weakness in an interview. If they're the sort of company that asks you what your weaknesses are, they're the sort of company I don't want to work for (this may or may not apply to you, but I suspect it applies to most geeks).

FWIW, I went through the whole TUPE mess some years ago when the startup I was at was bought out. For values of "bought out" that equate to "asset stripped", leaving me with a bunch of worthless options in the now dormant startup company. I was one of the assets transferred to the buyer (in this case, LloydsTSB). It's been a few years, but I seem to recall there was a minimum period that they had to keep you on for after the transfer. IIRC, something like 6-12 months.

I don't know if GIMP/SANE can do Multi-Page PDF

Errrr... no. That's not something I'd have expected from an image scanning application. I'd expect it to, you know, scan images! And actually, that's all that SANE is - a means of getting data from the scanner. What you do with it afterwards is up to you. But it's trivial to write a shell script[1] to scan the images, convert them to PDFs and combine them into a single multipage PDF. I've just never needed to do so. I'm sure if there were sufficient demand, it would be easy enough to make a GUI front end for this, although I'm not aware of anyone having done so. But like I said, that could just be because I've never had the need, so I haven't looked. I tend to keep my scanned documents as PNGs and just use naming conventions to associate multiple linked pages with each other.

[1] In addition to the GUI frontends, you can also access a SANE scanner from the command line.

VueScan not running

OK... why? I know you've said elsewhere that GIMP/SANE don't give you what you need and so you run VueScan. Having never tried it, what's so good about it? I have to say, scanning from GIMP using SANE gives me everything I need (scanned images, networked scanner), so I've never had a need to try anything else. What makes VueScan better?

Sod computer gaming. My first through when reading this was "can I fit it inside my race helmet and improve my performance in real life?"

The Polar Ice Caps were quoted as saying "Yeah, dude, we're still here, chillaxing as always."

Yeah, because y'know, the north polar ice cap hasn't really shrunk to open up the north west passage for the first time since records began...

A rocket. On a car. Now why does that sound like a terrible idea?

Sounds like a great idea to me. I've seen a couple in the flesh. Take a look at Laffin-Gas for a current example, or Eric Teboul for a rocket powered bike (which even I think sounds like a terrible idea, but it seems to work in practice).