Surely forgetting your password is perfectly legitimate.

Ask any first line corporate helpdesk staff member what the most common problem is, and I bet it's users forgetting their passwords and locking themselves out. Virtually every website has a link to automate the reset process. People forget their passwords all the time.

OK, I accept it's less likely that you'll forget the password to access your home PC, but I've done that, been there, had to reboot from a recovery disk - if the data was encrypted I'd have lost access to it.

Exactly.

From the judgement: "Conversely the claimant says: The defendants are free if they wish to create a red on grey London icon image. They can even have a Routemaster before the Houses of Parliament. As their own evidence shows, these can be depicted in all sorts of different ways. But what they cannot have is a southbound Routemaster on Westminster Bridge before the Houses of Parliament at the same angle as the claimant's work on a greyscale background and a white sky, in circumstances where they have admitted seeing the claimant's work"

The judge shot that down as putting the case too high. What he seems to be saying is that seeing a picture of a red southbound routemaster bus in a desaturated view of Westminster bridge, as used to advertise one product, and then asking a photographer to create something similar to advertise your own product is copyright infringement.

Having said that, I think the compositions are different enough to avoid any risk of confusion.

And secondly, if I'd been responsible for either image I'd be hiding in my corner that taste forgot rather than making a big deal out of it. Seriously, selective colouring? Still?

Noone should be doing that. They should be using a CMS of some sort, so that the design is configured and set once, and once only, and all they have to do is type the content in.

The designers create the layout, then either implement it or get it implemented in the CMS of choice. End content creators then come along and type up the content.

I very much doubt if the major news sites have someone cranking out new screens for every article - the content will be in a database and the system will pull it out and format the html around it when requested.

I sort of agree, except it's the standard term so everyone knows what it means.

I'd see hoarding as something slightly different anyway. Application grabs memory because it needs it. Then doesn't release it when it not longer needs it. If it then reuses that memory internally next time it needs some, that's hoarding. It's not admitting that the OS might do a better job of memory management and being greedy. Same with applications that grab more than they need on startup instead of waiting for when they really need it.

Leaking would be grabbing memory, not releasing it, "forgetting" about it (i.e. losing the pointer) and then asking for more when needed.

That 28 days includes public holidays, so really it's 20 days (when comparing with the two weeks that seems to be the norm in the US). Still better, but not as good as it sounds.

I get 25 days (plus the bank/public holidays). It used to be that you had to be at the company five years to earn the last five days, but now it's standard for all employees. We're expected to use it and can't carry more than 5 days forward to the following year (and then the days have to be used in the first quarter).

The difference for me, though, is that JK Rowling creates characters you can care about and can tap into human emotion better, in my opinion, than Tolkein. I've read a lot - Tolkein, Dickens, plenty of classics as well as a lot of pulp, and initially I was sceptical about adults reading kids books when the whole Harry Potter thing took off.

Then I read them. Sure, the early ones are written for a young audience and they're full of plot holes and cliches. However, I rarely get a lump in my throat when reading, and there are scenes in the Potter novels that do just that.

I appreciate that this isn't an argument likely to be popular on a geek site, where people will probably be more concerned with her poor handling of time travel paradoxes in Azkaban, but there's a warmth to the Potter books that I find lacking in LotR.

I read them at around that age, after we'd read the Hobbit at school and I wanted to read more. It sparked my brief teenage flirtation with D&D and all things fantasy.

However, recently re-reading them I was disappointed. It's not great literature. The significance is in practically launching a genre.

Apples and oranges, but give me a Dickens any day...

I get around this by using the neck strap. I hold the camera at full arms length so the strap is taut around my neck and I'm applying pressure - it works a treat for keeping LCD based cameras steady.

I have a Nikon D7000 as my main SLR, but use a Panasonic GF1 with the 20mm lens as my occasional shooter. It's getting a bit long in the tooth now and it's high ISO performance is a little lacking, but it's a nice camera to use.

Er, we're not the United States of Europe just yet. Refer to the southern and western countries, sure, but not states.

I'd have thought that the eastern countries would have lower take up than the western ones though - the new EU members that were once part of the eastern bloc - but perhaps if you live in Spain or Portugal you have better things to do than spend your life on the internet...

I go to Erotica in London every year (if you don't know what it is, google it - it's held at Olympia every November).

In previous years, photography has been banned outright. You were even supposed to leave cameras with security if you had them on you when you arrived.

This year, the terms and conditions allowed for photography as long as it was with the consent of the subject. I guess they realised they were fighting a tide and couldn't police all the camera phones so just gave in to the inevitable.

Lots of people dress up (or down!) for it, though, and some give free rein to their "thing" - you see people in slave gear, cross dressers and so on. Despite the rules, people were taking surreptitious snaps which no doubt would end up online. OK, the subjects won't be tagged, but who's to say that they won't be spotted?

While I firmly believe noone should care what you do in your private life, a genuine picture blocker would be useful in the sad world in which we live.