I demand a woosh and a pop-up when I get new achievements.

critics are calling the £4.7bn scheme "farcical" and a "waste of time".

Like so many other UK schemes.

Personally, I never trusted my government with such data after so many incidents of loss that had nothing to do with the system (which may in itself be perfectly secure) - so maybe it's a good thing after all.

I absolutely agree with this comment. I'm from the UK and I suffered the same fate that you wish to throw upon your daughter - being coerced into a specific degree program at a top London university just because I excelled in that area in my secondary (high) school, without realising myself what a change it would be from the material I had learnt thus far through my life. It certainly didn't do me any favours.

I am trundling along. I appear to have the required intelligence in order to complete my degree (or so I hope!) but damn is that learning curve STEEP.

Other than that, it strikes me odd that you can't come up with some viable and interesting options yourself. Basically, unless your daughter wants to be an elementary school maths teacher, she's probably going to be surrounded by it 24/7 for the rest of her life (researcher, anyone?). If she's not going to enjoy it, please, don't make her do it - and that includes cajoling her into believing it's the only thing she's possibly good at.

Instead of asking what you have here, I suggest you ask your daughter what she'd /like/ to do - see all the other degrees and/or career paths your daughter could take, excel in and enjoy and still lead a successful life at the end of it. It'll be like a voyage of discovery for you! - finding out what professions are good for your daughter, instead of the professions you can push her into despite her distaste for them.

Good luck.

So we're trying to pin down the creation of the laptop on some guy's doodles from the 60s. He didn't even get to 'officially' propose the idea to Xerox until the 70s, and even then it wasn't reasonably possible with the available technology. There's a reason why the first 'real' laptops didn't appear until the 80s. Come on, surely having a computer that's small enough to carry around yet still contains all the functionality of a full sized computer is far from a unique idea. It's just a vision for the future. Like the human transportation tubes in Futurama. Who knows, in 40 years time...