Unless the names or the people who paid were 'grnfrgleArghhhBurble' or 'snap'.

He co-wrote it. I have the comics here.

Alan Moore's Judge Dredd was a major part of my staple fiction diet during my youth. Those stories were dark, amusing, insightful, prophetic, and downright nasty and callous in places.

All in all excellent stuff, with some stories that still make me dig out my collection.
Yup, still got every one up in my loft, as bought from the newsagent each week as they came out.

Never read Watchment though, to be honest I hadn't heard of it till this movie. My main fascination is SF pulp from the fifties and sixties though, so I kind of hang out elsewhere in the SF biosphere.

How does it compare to Judge Dredd? (anyone who thinks I mean that godawful film needn't reply..)

Any system to be used in the event of a fire *cannot* be optional, or under the control of those subjected to it. Thats a fact, one learned the hard way in the past, that cannot be argued. Give people the option of not doing something, and they won't, at least not always, because 'nothings going to happen'.

Most likely it was someone who looked at the amount of physical registers needed for the current system, thought an electronical system would be cheaper/more efficient, and it got pushed through. I agree with the fire safety side,. Its a shame that people will likely need to die in fire even to start an 'urgent review' of the system if it gets widely adopted.

Whenever I read of things like this I'm always reminded of the university office of a lecturer whose research speciality was issues around the paperless office. Her room was so full of piles of papers, boxes of papers, books and other processed tree junk that she only had around a third of her desk available for her laptop. She also had *really* nice legs, but thats off message somewhat..

The issue is not whether to legitimise it, the issue is whether the industry trying to kill the second hand market will succeed in getting enough corporate mindshare to have it thought of as a bad thing.

Every major high street game pc/console game retailer I have seen has a secondhand section.
Amazon sell used books too, another practice that printed word distributers tried to kill off (a bizarre strategy in itself).

This limited activation DRM thing is part of the idea that secondhand game sales can be prevented, but it still doesn't work. All it means is those games become useless to someone in the habit of selling off their used games to buy new ones (I used to), so they tend not to purchase them new either.

Did you actually read my post?

Release history on a well known open source project hosting site, Sourceforge, Google Code, places like that, or a large easily verifiable team.

He was reprimanded most severely. That is I mean I think he was. Actually I heard they denied him cake once. Well, someone I know said they read it.

I think.....

I doubt that. More likely they intend to make its detection and negation easier.

After all, the best language man can devise can only work as well as the coders who utilise it. If they are forced to cut corners in order to meet deadlines, errors will creep in, and we all know the urge to be first to profit is a prime reason for such things.

When Europeans first started to exert control over large areas of the Australian coast, they put a stop to the Aboriginal practice of starting bushfires annually. This was done to stop such fires damaging their crops and newly built properties for the most part.

However, this frequent and deliberate starting of bushfires had come into being as a survival strategy. By starting such fires often, the Aboriginies avoided having vast, uncontrollable fires that posed a real danger.

Since that time, bushfires have occurred that are exactly what the aboriginal practice had been designed to avoid, and due to the high density of Australia's coastal regions, the dmaage cost and death toll have been high.
This has been noticed to a greater extent recently because the press are looking for things they can point to as evidence of global warming. This alas is no such thing, its just evidence of man failing to adapt to the requirements of an atypical environment.

I get where you're coming from but when I was a post grad teaching first year students my experience was that that they found Emacs to be uncomfortable and used it only when the tutorial sheets required them too. Most of the time the dominant linux text editor in use by students I taught was kwrite.

Actually you've hit on a major problem of programers that we don't like to talk about (well, except me, obviously..). The thing is, GUI design is a complex art, one that takes a long time to learn to do well, so its hard to be good both at visual interfaces and the often very complex code that they control.

I know this from my own work. I'm a pretty good coder (gosh, how modest of me). I can write code to just about anything, and charge a pretty penny to do so, but my ability to code a user interface is rather poor. Sure I know all the theory, but there's something extra you need, that 'eye for the visually pleasing' thats hard to cultivate unless user interfaces are what you do all the time.

I've used plenty of applications where the guy who wrote the backend code also coded the gui, and as a rule the gui is somewhat lacking. This is't just restricted to single coder projects, it also occurs when a project is full of able back end coders, and they build the gui to suit their own level of ability to use the code.

You can see this if you use Emacs. Nice though that software is in features, the interface is godawful, and actively prevents anyone new to computer usage or programing from using it.

Because I want the audibooks writer and performer to get paid for my enjoyment of their shared work. Its as simple as that. Everything else is just people trying to shove their agendas down my throat.

Audible have already cornered the market in DRM encumbered audiobooks. I've been a regular customer of theirs for years, buying dozens of titles. Yet I have not a single drm file in my collection, thanks to those nice people who packaged up the 'how to strip Audible DRM' set and stuck it on piratebay that is.

I'd prefer if they had no DRM to start with, but for the moment they have lots of titles I want, so I just pipe the downloaded files through the stripping process and discard their drm. It takes all of 20 minutes usually.

If however they changed their DRM to make it harder to crack, I would cancel my account that day and never go back.