Demand the root password too. If you're going to trust them not to do anything bad with your Facebook login details, they should reciprocate by trusting you not to run rm -rf / as root.

It's faster than Ruby, and it most definitely is object oriented. Expressive is rather more subjective, but I've used it to some extent and I've found it very expressive.

I second this. A couple of years ago I built an LFS system - unfortunately I buggered up the GRUB install somehow and couldn't fix it, so I wound up overwriting it with Slackware instead. Next time I have a go at it, I'll probably use a desktop rather than a laptop perched on the bed - it was not nice being sat there waiting hours for stuff to compile!

Agreed, but we're going to need some very radical reforms to achieve it. One possibility is for a tax-free minimum income for all adults, which people can choose to supplement through paid employment, and another is for using legislation to reduce people's working hours. Unfortunately I don't see much of the electorate liking either - businesses would probably campaign against reducing working hours, and it's all too easy to imagine a minimum income being painted as encouraging "scroungers".

Agreed in principle, but that's not how it tends to pan out in practice. It does seem like there's going to be less and less jobs available in the future, but what are we doing? Harangueing the unemployed ever harder to get jobs. Years ago futurists were predicting that increasing automation would mean workers would be working less hours, and some were even predicting the possibility of a basic minimum income that people could choose to supplement by working. What actually happened is companies just had fewer workers doing the same amount of work. Unless something changes, we may well wind up with more and more workers chasing fewer and fewer jobs.

Not really. Most households in the developed world, will have two or more toilets nowadays, but there's also toilets in workplaces, and public toilets.

I have a number of different email accounts, but my primary one is my Gmail account. It's been fairly widely distributed over the years since I got it, but nonetheless I still get very little spam. By contrast, I set up two other accounts fairly recently (one Hotmail, one Yahoo Mail) and they attract spammers like jam attracts wasps. I'm sure that either Google don't allow things beyond a certain amount of spamminess into mailboxes at all, or many spammers just don't bother spamming Gmail accounts because they're so much less likely to actually end up in the inbox.

I can specifically recommend Linux Format. It's got a fun, slightly irreverent tone, but also imparts a hell of a lot of useful stuff in an easily accessible way. The previous issue had a great tutorial on how to use Backtrack to carry out a few simple exploitations in a VM, which was very interesting. They have a great website here.

In my last job (a fairly typical customer service/back office admin type thing), when someone else left, I inherited the task of dealing with updating a series of spreadsheets with loads of really crappy macros in. It had to be done once a week, and had to be perfect every time. One part of it involved cleaning up the names of a load of financial advisers in the spreadsheet - the same company's name would crop up many times over, but written differently. It was generally fairly easy to tell who each one should be, but it took me over half an hour each time, and was a very dull task.

Now, having learned Perl fairly recently, I knew that this was an obvious job for regular expressions. So I found out how to use regexes in VBA, and wrote a function that contained a dictionary with the keys as regular expressions that would match the appropriate names, and the values as the names they should be. With this, I was able to do a boring task that took about half an hour a week in about thirty seconds flat.

From my experience in that job, there were a lot of tedious tasks that could have been made a lot easier if people knew at least the basics of coding.

To be honest, most of that is the complete bullshit dug up by the likes of the Daily Mail.

As a first choice, I recommend getting an anthology of some kind. The problem with getting a novel of some kind is that if it turns out you don't like it, you're stuck with it regardless, whereas an anthology of short stories means that if a particular story is dull, it doesn't matter because you won't be reading it for long. I recommend The Mammoth Book of Best New SF, which is a collection of short stories that gets released each year in around August/September (most recent one is number 24), and is inexpensive, but also a very dense book, and the quality of the stories is consistently good. I also liked The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF from the same publisher (worth it just for Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" and Alastair Reynolds' "Sleepover").

Novel-wise, I'd recommend virtually anything by Ian McDonald, who largely specialises in SF with a third-world setting. His book River of Gods could be described as a kind of Gibson-esque cyberpunk set in India, although that really doesn't give it justice as this makes it sound derivative when it's anything but - he's also produced a great book of short stories in the same future India called Cyberabad Days. Adam Roberts is also an excellent author, and I'm very fond of the sci-fi work of Richard Morgan, particularly his Takeshi Kovacs novels. Charles Stross has also been mentioned elsewhere, and I'd recommend his work. If you're not put off by hard SF, Alastair Reynolds is an excellent author, especially House of Suns and the Revelation Space series.

I sometimes think it would do better if it had been named FreeOffice. OpenOffice was my induction into the world of FOSS when I didn't want to shell out for a copy of MS Office (I went on to discover Thunderbird and Firefox, before moving from Windows to Ubuntu), and for all we like to talk about the importance of free-as-in-free-speech, the free-as-in-free-beer angle is what gets a hell of a lot of people using FOSS in the first place, and the name FreeOffice would emphasise this.

I've got a Dell Mini 10v and it's an awesome machine. I previously had an Asus Eee PC, and while it was fine for what it was, the Xandros-based distro that shipped with it was utter crap, and the keyboard and screen were just too small to be that much use. My Mini shipped with Windows XP, but I installed the netbook edition of Ubuntu Lucid and that works really well. It's powerful enough for most of what I do, including fairly heavy-duty web browsing, mucking about with various scripting languages, and the odd game of Homeworld on occasion, yet it's small and light enough that I can just slip it in my bag and go. It's actually by far the single machine I use the most, in preference to my 2008 MacBook and a bigger, more powerful Dell laptop.

This. Much as the cloud is an annoying buzzword, there's a lot to be said for moving what you can to one of these services if you haven't got the time to maintain it yourself. Google Apps is a solid, inexpensive, reliable and powerful solution for email, and if you're rushed off your feet, it makes sense to offload everything you can get away with.

The company I work for is just over a year old (although the parent company is somewhat older), and is a UK-based e-commerce business selling veterinary supplies and medicine. The senior developer was the sole IT guy until I joined at the start of September, and another developer joined us in November. We do all the systems administration, desktop support and web development for the company, and there's a total of ten people at present. Not sure what their profit margins are like, but I see the running total of the sales every day, and sales tend to average around £6,000 a week, so turnover is almost certainly above the £1 million mark.

Granted, they have the parent company's resources to fall back on, but they very deliberately kept the infrastructure entirely separate from the parent company. Conceivably there's one or two people in the parent company who we could call on if necessary to help, but they'd probably only really be of any use for desktop support or network problems - the parent company's IT infrastructure is mostly Windows Server based, while all of our critical systems run on Ubuntu Server (we use Google Apps for email as well). Otherwise there's no-one else we could really call on for help. So it can be done - however, we're in the very lucky position of not having to deal with any kind of legacy infrastructure, so we're free to make the decisions ourselves. I can imagine things might be a lot harder in a longer-established company.