From my days in the "large blue multinational computer company" sales force:
"How do you find out you're in a sales competition?"
"They announce in a team meeting that you won a prize".
No kidding, this happened so often there was a joke about it.

especially for being pornographic. That guarantees lots of kids will read it. Since it's slightly better written than most other trash kids read, maybe the ban will have a [slight] positive outcome.

So, will we finally be able to read Stephen Maturin's papers?

In fact, pitifully incompetent. There's no need to spend so much on vehicles and wages, if you have a bit of imagination. I was recently working for GlobalMobilePhoneProvider, who also sell M2M (machine-to-machine) applications. They gave away data mobile units to the company that collects garbage, and fitted them to the garbage trucks. Guess what? Those guys visit every premises. And collect signal strength data. And they collect signal strength not only of GMPP's network, but al the competitors too. What's the cost? A few hundred mass-produced cell devices, no wages, and no capital cost of trucks.

Usng USA solutions elsewhere is really risky. I've seen several of my customers go down (ie cease to exist) ultimately because they chose a software solution built for US states (as opposed to a whole country). Example: one of my customers (a savings bank) wanted to completely refresh every software application they had, so bought an American integrated package that appeared to be pretty successful and pretty widely used. They ran almost immediately into severe performance problems - the elapsed time to process a whole day's transactions was 28 hours. On digging into why this was the case, they discovered that none of the other user sites had more than 100,000 accounts. My customer had 2 million accounts. The software package was simply not built to handle that, and the authors didn't care enough about one customer to rewrite the package. That savings bank now exists only as a brand name.

At my last contract, I was given a corporate laptop - good recent hardware with Win 7 on it, perfectly capable of booting in 60 secs. However the build on it took 2 mins to reach the log-in screen, and a further 5 mins to reach a usable desktop.

This was because there was so much corporate cruft to run before I could be permitted to do actual work.

Naturally, no-one was permitted admin access.

I'm 66. In the last few years I've learned enough Python and PHP to do useful work, and learned Linux enough to get an LPI cert. Considering all these things are free to download, there's no barrier preventing you learning, except your own false belief that you are too old.

Skynet has taken it...getting tooled up for the fight....when the Falcon hits the ground at Mach 20, the target will get obliterated. If you are named Connor, and are in the phone book, and live anuwhere near Vandenberg, now's the time to Get Moving.

/*it's incredibly rare for a rugby player to make the headlines for bad behaviour or shagging some other woman.*/

But when they do, it's a choice lady. Remember who it was that Will Carling (captain of England national rugby team) (allegedly) had a fling with?

You are absolutely right about the attitudes - the mountain rescue team mentioned that. Three problems (1) mobile phone signal in the mountains is completely untrustworthy (and Murphy's Law says that the place where you bust your leg has lousy signal) (2) smartphone batteries do not last long enough (while GPS and map screen are in use) for a whole day on the hill. Murphy's Law also says the moment that your battery starts giving up is the moment the fog arrives (3) the maps in smartphones are not good enough to enable you to work a safe route off the mountain - people end up stuck at the top of cliffs