and what hill ? It's a slight incline in places if it's anything, the use of the word hill is stretching it a bit.

Yep, as 'oh well this probably already happens anyway' as this is, regarding the logging of traffic, does it really all have to be so Pisstakingly obvious.

With these terrorists that may be true, maybe. But, as an example, the RAF in Germany in the 1970s considered the increase in surveilance and oppression that resulted from their actions to be a win. As it revealed to the general public the true nature and wishes of their government (as they believed them to be).

To steer away briefly from some of the ridiculous hyperbole this is generating, this looks like nothing more than a position statement. Its enforcement would be subjective to the point that I can't see it ever being enforced. I get the concerns being raised, definitely I do, but like a lot of EU proposals I'll wait to see if it ever genuinely goes anyway before tripping out.

Is it really completely beyond the wit of a developer to start doing some functional capture themselves, you know, ask around maybe ? Or do developers want to be battery chickens where you feed a spec in one end and code comes out the other ? Seriously, I expect my devs to be capable of independent thought and action. A dev should not just sits on their arse doing goldfish impressions when there's no discernible direction to take they should, as far as I'm concerned, be trying to find out wtf is required. I don't expect this of fresh junior developers, but any developer with a few years of experience should have achieved a modicum of the skills required to do the above. Not saying they'll get it right, and they may not have the access to capture all the requirements, but some energy expended in that direction is the least I'd expect. If they can't do that, what hope is there of capturing a change that may seriously impact the application development. In software development everyone should feel they can contribute to any part of the application build with their thoughts (from design to delivery). I don't want dev staff completely incapable of thinking outside of a functional spec.

Heh, a Dev team that accomplished nothing without a manager is a dev team I'd never want to manage.

Probably not true. If its truly cobbled together as described, and therefore a lot of it has been created 'key to disk', then most of it is probably unnecessary code. Replacing it with a rewrite would more than likely require code that is a considerable order of magnitude lighter than 200k (say between 50-100K). I've seen this kind of crap before a few times, and have succesfully replaced with rewrites, and in reasonable time frames. The main key to doing a rewrite succesfully however is NOT to look at, or replicate the code as it is (but just a bit tidier). The best approach is to go through a proper design to functional specification process, just as if it was a new application. Doing it that way you'll probably find far more elegant coding solutions than are currently being used by the 200k mess and these will cut down on coding time. Moreover it will produce better and more maintainable code, more than you ever would through a tidy and document process. If you think about it, documenting what the spaghetti is doing would probably take as much time, if not much longer, than a fresh design/spec process. Basically the time taken to do a good rewrite is very rarely going to be longer than it would be to unpick the mess. Just keep your team very, very small and make sure everyone including your programmers are involved from the first design/spec discussions onwards. Things go much faster, and you get a far better design, if your coders are invested fully in the project.

Yep , small helicopters work much better for the reasons you say. Plus a consumer HD camera is up to the job, I think this was shot with a hacked Panasonic GH2 IIRC (higher bitrate and maybe with a shorter GOP, could even be a GOP1 hack). http://www.yonderbluefilms.com/blog/ the showreel is worth a look too.

Yes, it was once. Because it wasn't IBM.