Not sure how that's informative. Might be so in the US, but over here our little government just doesn't have the resources to intervene. The police are more concerned about speeding tickets and methamphetamine labs, the people are more concerned about the price of petrol and some church leader with a shiny car (search for "Brian Tamaki" and "Destiny Church"), and the government is more concerned about how to rebuild half of Auckland after the silly 'modern' building fads of the 90s.

It's voluntary. And it hasn't even reached the technology page on the NZ Herald yet. Who cares?

Watchdog has positioned themselves as filtering specialists. They always have. That's why they call themselves "Watchdog". Parental control is their biggest selling point.

Funny though, their logo is a duck. Never worked that one out.

Let me know if you pass, then I'll mod you up.

My first job used a fairly low level language (CORAL) with about 250000 lines of code. I didn't really grasp it until one day I set up a process in debug, and stepped it through a few instructions at a time. I could then follow it through the code, and learnt how the main backbone worked.

In my next job, I had about the same amount of code in PHP, written in a curious pseudo object oriented fashion (the main designer had come from ASP). So again, I started with index.php, and debugged my way laboriously through each file.

It really helps if you can grasp the overall structure, and the only way to do that is on foot...

I think you might be onto something there. A site that provides brief summaries on international and national news for free, with increasing levels of subscription (or targeted advertising) allowing you to get to the in-depth comment and exclusive local news. It could draw upon the army of small-time bloggers willing to receive a few pennies in return for good local comment. The ultimate result would be a vast network allowing you to get details and perspective as you choose, rather than a single editorial slant ("hmm - I wonder what that Iraqi guy in Paris has to say on that one...")

At the moment, we've got too many big newspapers telling us what we already know, and too many local papers which have limited contact with each other, and limited resources. I reckon the first news site that grasps this one could end up sweeping the floor.

Not really. It's on a microscopic scale, and at that level, a tiny current can vaporise silicon quite easily. That's how EPROMs work, and also why you need to be careful with static when handling circuits.

Exactly. It's a secret CIA plot to overthrow the evil dominion of A4!

Tables and divs both have their uses. I wish that I had one method that had the capabilities of both, but until then, I choose the most appropriate. Some of my younger colleagues would spout endlessly about the beauty of divs and CSS. I almost believed them until I saw their code!

I'll third that. I think we scared off a lot of customers with contracts and extortionate hourly rates (designed to cover sales, accounts, admin, cat food, the works). The customer who were happiest (and most profitable) were the ones we just charged at a (lowered) hourly rate for everything. If I'd been in charge, I would have cut the hourly rate in half, but charged them for everything, not just the time it took the techie to code it.

Our biggest bane was customers who would try to get the cheapest price, add extra features by stealth, expect the capabilities of Google, Flickr and Facebook combined, and, ah yes, fix their computer for free. If we'd just charged them a plain hourly rate, we'd have been laughing.

Sure, you need to give an idea of total cost. But make it plain that it's an estimate, not a quote!