[rab] It's not just the UK that suffers from that problem - the USA will not grant a working visa to a foreign national (or "alien", as it is so charmingly termed) if you are taking on a job for which you do not have a relevant degree. So, however generally useless my Comp. Sci. degree has been in the real world, it at least served to allow me to take on work in the States.

This seems particularly bizarre, though, when you realise that even having a degree is irrelevant if you have more than about three years of industrial experience. That hasn't stopped hiring decisions made by my boss from being blocked because the higher management felt that the degree was from a school which "wasn't good enough". Ludicrous.

[Dunx] It's 256kbps up, 512kbps down. Realistically, I can sustain ~30KBps up and ~60KBps down (in fact, it's been closer to 70 down the last few days). It seems to deal with stuff alright - although I've helped by installing mod_gzip in my Apache, so it compresses most things before transmission, if the client says it accepts compressed encodings.
[Raak] I moved to Nildram months back, because they were consistently the fastest, according to user testing at adslguide.org - now Eclipse have improved their network to take first place, but Nildram want the title back. It's not the cheapest, but it always work, is always fast, and the support people are decent. I give them an extra fiver a month for a block of static IPs. I'm more than happy with them, and recommend them at every opportunity.
[Dujon] Oh, I'm not worried, especially now I have 5 years of real experience on my CV.

Of course, it's never enough - as soon as 512kbps SDSL is available and doesn't cost all the moneys in the world, I'll be having it. I'm less bothered about increased download speed, but if I had to take more to get better upload, I wouldn't be found complaining.

Curses! Still at number 3...however, I am now worth nearly 3.4 million before kneecapping tomorrow. I spent all my JK Rowling divvy on John Leslie, who is VERY popular at the moment..