I live in Cambridge. I don't want it to become a big city.

The reason is that it will invariable become more shit. The traffic won't be thought of properly, leading to even more horrendous traffic than there is now. Large housing estates don't have significant facilities in them (shops, pubs, dentists, GPs) because the building developers don't have a legal obligation to, and if the councils deny it due to lack of facilities, they just appeal to central government which will wave it through as-is because 'we need more housing' - and the resulting development is a soulless bleak cesspit that causes greater demands on the existing infrastructure, which already can't cope with what we have got.

Also I like having green fields and cows 10 minutes walk from the city centre.

The UK needs joined up planning and governance, not the hodgepodge that we've been left with after the country's been hollowed out by successive Conservative governments. Simply building more housing of any sort is not the answer - the problem is deeper than that.

There is a problem with this - it forces a hole in the 'plausible deniability' defence. Really, how many people keep bits of /dev/random data lying around on the filesystem? Having this tool 'officially' point out that it is random data means the police can ask you, however impolitely, for the encryption keys (UK encryption key laws...). And you don't really have a defence for that, as what are the chances of it _actually_ being completely random data?

There's a simple solution to this - cat your encrypted file with a certain length of /dev/random data, both front and back, and remember the offsets. Then, when you want to access it, dd the encrypted part into a ramdisk, then dd it back when you're done. Problem solved.

Mine are named after discworld characters:

Main desktop - vetinari
Laptop - vimes
Shell account/web/mail server - lipwig (of course)
eeePC - rincewind (lots of travelling, see)?

It's even better if the character and computer role match up :D

At my university, we started off on ML (the functional programming language). This very quickly introduced the concept of a function as a repeatable series of instructions that could be called several times - for a functional programming language, it is almost essential to call the same function several times. This also introduced recursion and types (as part of the compiler type inference) very quickly, something which is probably quite hard for people to grasp.

The only other courses in the first term was digital electronics and pure mathmatics courses. Only in the second term was Java introduced as the perennial OOP/procedural language. I think we've got one of the lowest dropout rates in the country (but don't quote me on that).