There have been lots of ideas for software, but none for hardware.

Last year I bought an Odroid U2, which is roughly a smartphone board with ethernet and USB. The power consumption is minimal -- 0.2W idle, 2W under load. Mine is running Debian, but Ubuntu and Android are also officially supported. I have a 1TB external drive connected. This has been running my website, and a family photo gallery, without any problems.

Last month I bought an Odroid U3, which will be in my house. As well as the server stuff, I have a touchscreen (HDMI + USB) and will make some little apps to use it.

This guy has Hadoop running on an Odroid, which is probably more complicated than is worthwhile. (Hadoop has a distributed file system.)

We have 130GB of photos, which until very recently was far too expensive to store on a cloud service. SkyDrive apparently costs $100/year for 200GB, so that could save a lot of effort if it provides what you need.

The worrying this is you don't consider what you describe normal.

I've been unable to even find the stairs in American buildings sometimes, which is particularly annoying if my hotel room is on the first or second floor.

My office is on the first floor, the kitchen and toilets in the basement. No one grumbles...

Assuming a similar pattern across science and engineering graduates at Cambridge, Oxford, UCL -- isn't it disappointing that 15% of the best graduates apply their skills to ethically-dubious problems? These people (mostly) aren't working on consumer banking, but things like high-frequency trading.

Of my six closest friends from my CS class, who I still meet up with regularly, four work in investment banks (and one at Google, one in science). One is a trader, three write trading software. Considering CS alone, 40-50% of the class works in finance!

It was. The original developer had left, the code was barely commented, and was written in a single Perl file. There was very little structure -- just some procedures and functions. There were lots of regular expressions. It was a CGI web application, but there were no templates, and no use of the CGI HTML functions -- just HTML elements in strings.

I think the supposed requirement was something like "The CS department use this, we want to roll it out to the rest of the university". Therefore I'd anticipate a lot more changes being made in the future, so rewriting it before it's used more widely made even more sense.

(It was a semi-serious assignment. The year after I graduated they switched to some commercial software, and the students I knew all grumbled about it. The Perl system, though unmaintainable, had been reliable and functional for over a decade. The web server still seems to exist, though I can't authenticate... maybe they did redevelop it.)

One of my CS modules in final year was "Software Maintenance". For the coursework, we were given the department's exam results tracking software, which was written in Perl, and asked to plan how we would improve performance and add some new features.

IIRC, I think my group recommended rewriting it from scratch in either Java or C#, and I think we got full marks...

No -- not somewhere like China, south-east Asia, etc.

If I'd studied for three years, I'd have received a bachelor's degree (BEng).

Instead, from the start I said I'd study for four years, and receive a master's degree (MEng). The course was structured slightly differently, but it was pretty close to doing the bachelor's followed by the master's. The difference is the government subsidised all four years -- they only fund the first degree, so doing 3+1 means you have to pay for the master's yourself.

It probably makes less difference now, as the fees have gone up eight-fold in the 10 years since I enrolled.

This is unlikely to be the problem in the UK -- it's no different to employ a British person than a Portugese, Polish or Bulgarian one.

I think it's the pay. I went to Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, and was disappointed to see how many of my peers went to work in a bank or in finance. (roughly 15%). And those should be some of that year's best engineering/science graduates.

It's probably not a problem in your field -- highly skilled people (e.g. software developers) are probably too valuable to have this forced upon them.

But there are plenty of less-highly skilled office workers: receptionists, secretaries, etc.

So, it's still worth making a stand against this kind of thing -- I don't think anyone should have to wear this kind of device at work.

London is much better than it used to be. London now has the world's largest fleet of hybrid buses, there's a massive charge for brining an old diesel lorry into the LEZ, but unfortunately nothing has changed regarding taxis, and they're by far the worst offender (especially as they drive round or idle while empty for a good portion of their time).

I meant there are plenty relative to the size of the territory. See https://www.google.co.uk/searc...

Haven't you seen prices go down? The cheapest phone+broadband deal in the UK seems to be £10.50/month. I'm sure both the phone line and the dial-up access each used to cost more than that.

It's not a perfect market -- the cheapest phone-only deal seems to cost about the same. It's also not that easy to compare prices, when every company seems to offer it's own kind of deal. But there's lots of advertising trying to get people to switch.

Did you look at the list? The first one is in Arabic: (Just a redirect.), http:///./ probably won't work on Slashdot, so try http://xn--ggbla1c4e.xn--ngbc5... instead. .VERSICHERUNG is for the "German speaking insurance industry", .BERLIN is obvious, and there's a few in Russian, Chinese and Japanese.

I don't know much about Zambia, but I'm sure Zambians recognise .zm. Only having a CCTLD is no barrier in most countries, or their neighbouring countries, which is what most businesses focus on. Search for .CX websites and there are plenty based on Christmas Island.

If I've forgotten the domain, I often guess .uk (.co.uk, .org.uk) as it's more likely to take me straight to the British website of a multinational, and less likely to take me to an identically-named company elsewhere in the Anglosphere.

In Florence, some sort of regulation prevents most vehicles from driving round the narrow city-centre streets. The taxis, which were mostly electric or hybrid, had beepers, roughly as loud as a bicycle bell, to alert people or ask people to move. Much nicer than honking a horn.