“In summary, you and Tim are preventing me from achieving my one and only goal. You have become a barrier blocking me from achieving my most important goal. As a result, if Tim doesn’t meet with each one of his employees in the next 24 hours, I will have no choice but to fire him and to fire you. Are we clear?” Digressing from the topic a little, but an arbitrary threat of firing over that? What if: - Tim's team have a very important deadline to meet the next day?Is it more important that the deadline is met, or that a one-to-one meeting is held? - Tim doesn't make it into work that day, due to illness or other extenuating circumstances? I realise the typical CEO response to that would be to shout "Don't make excuses!" and then to fire people. As they do. And yes, 12-16 hour days is a lunatic amount of time to expect people to spend in the office. Unless your job is to stand on a production line putting things into boxes - i.e. next-to-no thought required - then you will not be able to perform as well at work after a certain amount of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_of_State_for_Wales (Although constitutionally he'd be ineligible, of course)

I was going to say Arch on the basis that the ArchWiki is a brilliant resource for learning the ropes of Linux - but it's probably not what you want in an enterprise setting: I wouldn't bet my life & work on a system upgrade not breaking something. On balance, I'd say Debian: not the sexiest distro, but you get to use Gnome 2, each release is supported for a relatively long time, stable & dependable.

Oh yeah, I know that OpenJDK is included. I was dabbling with Java for the first time a couple of months ago, and I installed the Oracle JDK because I wasn't sure whether I might run into discrepancies between OpenJDK and Oracle JDK. You normally run into enough gotchas when taking your first steps with a new language without having to worry about things like that... (BTW, that was me above; forgot to sign in!)

It's always a good idea to take articles published in the Daily Mail, especially one published under the mysterious pseudonym 'DAILY MAIL REPORTER' with a rather large pinch of salt: the paper has a well-deserved reputation for fanning the flames of moral panic by regularly publishing poorly researched stories that indicate that "the country is going to the dogs". I wonder how many students boycott lectures on the basis that they conflict with their religious beliefs? My guess would be that it's a tiny minority.