My Epson was bought on the premise of having a separate ink cart per colour, so I expected this to improve ink economy. However, it turns out that Epson have done their best to avoid any such economy improvements:

1. It flatly refuses to print at all if any of the carts are empty - a number of times I've been unable to print important black & white documents because one of the colour carts is empty and I didn't have a replacement to hand.
2. Whenever you change a single one of the carts, it reprimes all of them, wasting a lot of ink from them all.
3. When the display tells you one of the carts is empty, it won't let you look at the stats to see which other carts are almost empty (so you could swap them at the same time). This invariably leads to me changing one colour, watching it reprime all of the carts (see (2) above) and immediately tell me that another has run out because of the priming, so then I have to change that one and let it reprime all of them *again*.

Also, I find that blocked heads are perpetually a problem, leading to me having to waste lots of ink repeatedly running the cleaning cycle. Next time I buy a printer it won't be an inkjet.

I'm seeing an increasing number of websites sticking transparent div elements over flash so that you can't click on them in flashblock. I've got to assume it's an effort to devalue flashblock and make people turn it off. (It causes me to close the web site in question, unless I absolutely have to use it, in which case I fire up firebug and delete the element)

That argument seems to work fine for government/military officials

The difference, of course, is that Win98 was distributed on a CD, so not installing the CD drivers by default is a bit dumb...

Last time I installed a windows system off a CD, after installation it couldn't see the CD or network until I'd found appropriate drivers and installed them from floppy. Of course, this is going back a few years - I've not installed Windows since Win98 :)

Sounds like Apple's Timemachine, which we've stopped using here because every so often it decides there is an error in the (remote) backup image, and rather than offering to repair it it just blows the damned thing away and starts running a backup from scratch (last time it did that was when the hard drive was in the process of dieing and having the backups auto-deleted was the last thing we wanted!)

I use rsnapshot for my always-on machines, but that's not so useful for other machines.

Why not S/MIME? - Seems like a better technology to me, since you can encrypt entire MIME parts (including attachments and (some) headers) rather than just body text.

I'd counter that by saying that supporting publishers that over-restrict the public's rights is immoral.

DRM removal is covered by the European Union *COPYRIGHT* Directive, and the US's Digital Millennium *COPYRIGHT* Act.

No, these resources aren't available to her at all. Also, IT departments don't get involved in writing code for analysing data - they do stuff like imaging Windows machines, etc.

Her time is better spent doing "doctor" stuff, not sitting behind a computer coding. (Unless it was her hobby of course..)

The work in question is actually a mandatory part of her job.

Very much depends on what you're doing. If you're writing stuff that's going to be used by other people (possibly networked) then yes, there is potential for danger. More commonly, we're talking about a quickly hacked up bit of code to process some one-off data, which carries very little danger.

While I agree to some extent, I think you do need to give kids the initial push into trying something they have never done before - for the most part, unless it is a universally fun activity, people won't see how they could enjoy something until they've actually had a serious go at it.

I'm not sure why it should be elective at younger ages when other classes are not. e.g. when I was at school (before starting my GCSEs), I was _required_ to do art, music and French(*), all of which I was terrible at, and I'd argue were far less useful than some basic CS stuff.

(*) I'm actually in favor of teaching a second language to kids, and this has been shown to be a big help with mental development too. However, the current system here is to only start teaching a second language in secondary school, by which point it is way too late.

I don't think I've seen any kids doing hunt-and-peck for decades. Given that kids have access to computers from a very young age, they learn to type fast naturally, no need to teach this.

Whilst most jobs don't _require_ coding skills, a lot of them would be done more efficiently if people had those skills. I would argue that knowing some basics about coding is probably more useful to the "average person" than a large chunk of the history, biology, maths, art, geography, etc. classes that we send kids to today.

Of course, what's "most useful" shouldn't be the only criteria used in education - giving someone a well rounded education is also an excellent idea, but I think it's hard to argue that teaching people some basic coding skills wouldn't also fit into that.

You could say the same about a lot of subjects though - do children _have_ to understand maths, history, geography, art, music, etc? However, having a broad education is a Good Thing. Furthermore, being able to write simple code can be a massive help in many non-coding jobs.

For example, my wife is a hospital doctor - probably the last thing you'd expect that job to need is coding skills. However, she needs to do audits over records occasionally, and I end up writing simple Python scripts for her to process the data - she has no coding skills, so without me to do that she would be spending hours doing stuff manually that I can write code in minutes to do. She tells me that her IT classes at secondary school were almost entirely taken up by teaching about the health and safety concerns related to using computers, rather than actually learning how to use them. I'm 5 years older (which puts me in the BBC/Acorn era) and my GCSE level IT classes taught me some basics about word processors, databases, etc, but no coding - I learnt to code in my own time. Being _taught_ to code didn't happen until A levels in my case, by which time anyone who isn't planning to have a career in computing or electronics has opted out in favor of other subjects.

I've been wondering for a while whether the affected ISPs would have cause to sue the government/courts/publishers for compensation as a result of losing customers due to the enforced filtering (which doesn't apply to smaller ISPs). TTIP sounds like it would open up that possibility if they can't already...