Which bit of the software are we talking about? Presentation layer? Business layer? Service layer? Persistence layer?

Each of these needs have input of varying degrees from different populations, so the users have important things to say about the presentation layer but I am not sure I would want them anywhere near the persistence layer.

Stupid question really.

Rosie

Blimey! That's a great deal of effort to go to - I didn't realise I was talking to an SME.

I don't expect you change your mind based on anecdeotal evidence posted up by a stranger on the internet - that'd be silly. I suppose you checked out Belle de Jour? Other than that I can't think of any online resources to point you towards.

Anyhow, my friends, whilst not being entirely sparkly clean, are hardly a scourge on society either - just like pretty much everyone else in the world.

And they're NOT the kind of people who act as a warm, wet, hole - they're services are for an entirely more discerning kind of customer.

Point of order sir. I have a number of friends who work in the adult services industry and they are certainly not the disease-ridden, duplicitious individuals you are generalising them to be.

Nick

I'm not sure that paying someone a fair price for a product (which is what fair trade aims to do) constitutes giving them aid.

Really? That's not the medicine that I recognise. It seems to be more along the lines of 'this looks about right so we'll give it to some people and see what happens'. There seems to be very limited understanding of how the drug actually works and interacts with other compounds in the body.

In that ways it's a lot like climate - both deal with large. complex, only partially understood systems. Both get reasonable results most of the time. Both acknowledge there are gaps and both are workign to close those gaps.

Possibly, but there's evidence (http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/fst30years) to the contrary.

Whilst I agree with you that, in general, comments that explain the intent are always to be welcomed, your example is not so good. You'd define a constant called REVERSAL_OF_CREDIT, set to 3 and possibly another one called DEBIT_ENTRY your SELECT becomes:

select blah from foo where trans_type = REVERSAL_OF_CREDIT

or even more clearly (as reversal of credit is a bit of a double negative)

select blah from foo where trans_type = DEBIT_ENTRY

True enough, but when you do need it you really need it.

Case in point. The project I'm working on at the moment has no connection to the internet and I needed to get some Perl modules built. CPAN doesn't help to much under these circumstances, especially not if the mandated build tool is maven. We're running Solaris without the GNU tool chain so getting things to build was a little challenging. Without access to the source code I wouldn't have been able to tweak things to get them building under our environment, let alone track down a failing #DEF that pointed to another #DEF that was defined in a third file.

So no, from a purely pragmatic perspective, most of the time you don't need access to the source code but if you do, not having access can be a complete show-stopper.

Nick

Yep, it's a UK thing, though it has some form http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pants.

Oh I don't know about that.

A friend of mine gave me some of that funky native American multi-coloured corn stuff which I duly harvested a few kernels off and stuck in some mud to see what would happen. At the moment I've got 5 (of 5 kernels planted) apparently healthy corn plants growing in a bucket in the back garden.

It's a bit early in the year to see whether I'll get any kind of harvest from them but it's looking fairly hopeful so far. Of course, I'm only doing this for the fun of it so I don't know how well it'd work on a larger scale but a 100% germination rate is pretty rare, even (or even especially) for seeds that have been bought specifically for growing produce from.

Given the material is tunable and x-rays are just another wavelength then I don't see why it can't be used. However, as the material merely guides the light rather than lengthening its wavelength, it would cause x-rays to be concentrated onto your retina which may not be the effect you were after.

Nick

Now that was strange. I went and looked up the River Severn, the longest river in the UK and home to the second biggest bore in the world and it's a landmark feature of type 'stream'. What on earth does place need to do to get classed as a river?

So the Empire of Murdoch can't emtirely dominate in the UK due to the BBC

So The Sun, the UK's most popular paper and owned by the Empie of Murdoch, changes its support from Labour to the Conservatives

And the BBC's board back down.

Abso-bloody-lutely marvellous. Now we can have news of the quality and independence served to the US by Fox.

*> Ever heard of input sanity checking? It was very popular in the say, 60's, 70's and 80's.

Exactly! Guard the borders of your application, regardless of where those borders are: file, UI, webservice, whatever. Do it right at the border and only when you're sure it's not going to blow a hole in the system, then let it through.

And always use whitelists.

Y'know I wonder if the whole Witch thing needs to become a corollary fo Godwin's law?

Us Witches are perfectly capable of hexing you until you glow if you get too annoying ;).