Whilst I accept that the car thing is true. One needs to be careful about just how "the same" these cars actually are. I discovered that there are often some very subtle difference between exactly the same model of car in two different markets. Not just equipment levels, but engineered elements as well. The one example that sticks in my mind was a Mazda 2 or Corolla or something where there was an entire cross member at the rear of the chassis (to the extent that there is even a chassis in these cars) that was just not included in the cars exported into some market. this had implications for their "safety rating" and the cost of repair for 0kph accidents where the cross member would protect the rest of the chassis from requiring repair in such impacts. So the line price of the car was 5% less but a tiny bingle was many times more expensive to repair. Likewise airbags etc are very rapidly dropped out of cars to hit a target price in a given market

Yeah, this is a great idea because we all know how a company mandated monopoly supplier has such a great track record of providing cost effective services!!!

The real reason I Hated our IT people was that when I asked for something to help me meet my clients needs. I would be told "can't be done". Half a day of my own research later and I would posit a solution that was acceptable. That's not my fucking job it's theirs. And then they charge me criminal amounts of money for their "services". Morons!

My kids are heading towards this age and I feel this area is very complex.

I don't want my kids to be afraid to surf anywhere, but by the same token, I want to know where they are going, but then again I can imagine that there are things they might want to research that they don't want me to know about. So my regime at the moment is... everything will be logged through the access proxy installed at our home. Except for periods of time where they can go and look at anything they want, but during these times, they must be supervised by an adult that we trust, of which we know enough that are sufficiently broad minded that I know there is nothing they couldn't go surfing for if they wanted to.

In particular I am thinking sites about sexuality, drugs, medical issues or other controversial topics that theor parents could never understand.... :-)

If this goes well, they will be allowed to surf unsupervised and unlogged as they get older.

Some problems do not require technical solutions, or rather do not require gatekeepers but perhaps better chaperones.

How long must we sulfur these outrageous puns. Someone should put a radon these people until they argon. It is becoming more than I can barium and seems like some kind of silicon.

Here the offence for driving whilst influenced by alcohol has been revised to be "Prescribed Concentration of Alcohol" which in the jurisdiction is 0.05 for normal drivers, 0.0 for provisionally licenced drivers (recently licenced ones) and variously for other categories of drivers like Taxis and Trucks.

As a result the offence is not a subjective one about onces capacities to drive but rather just the amount of alcohol in your blood.

As a consequence, the application of "Random Breath Tests" or RBT is a fundamental part of driving. The police require no warrant to randomly sample the driving populace for testing their breath for the presence of alcohol. A result in excess of the PCA means a test at a more accurate machine and subsequently a blood test if a driver refuses the breath test.

As a driver, my privacy is not invaded, I am not "targeted by the state" but rather a part of the duties attached to my _licence_ to operate a motor vehicle is the requirement to drive with less than the PCA in my blood. End of story.

You USA folk need to get clear on the distinction between rights and duties, one cannot have one without the other.

A random breath test (as we call it where I'm from) is a completely acceptable price to pay when travelling on a limited public resource (the roads) with a bunch of asshats that continue to drive drunk putting me in danger.

Or more straightforward, let all the passengers vet the other passengers on their flight. Maybe a reality TV type approach where each passenger is voted on or off the plane by all the other passengers.

It's only half a joke.

My cynical side says that it's because neither want you to be able to "extract" content from the things you use your phone for and rather than design the feature thoroughly to encompass uncopyable elements they just went for the zero case.

To be fair, man problems in software come down to the zero, one or many case in terms of design and in the case of copy and paste, I can imagine that the full implementation of what they want copy to be is very complicated. Simpler just to make it always impossible to copy rather than to decide when it is right and wrong.

It's this kind of thing that just shits me about digital restricitons.

Have all the other passengers on the plane vet each passenger. All the passengers get into the departure lounge, each gets a handset/chair with a red/green button as each passenger is called, all other passengers are entitled to vote red or green. If you get a majority of red you ain't on the plane. Sorry.

Naah, the correct punishment is for the offender to be offered the oppurtunity to repent their acting or else the offending team is actually allowed to hurt them as much as they are acting. I reckon diving would be out of the game in a minute. Particularly if teams started picking a "specialty" player who was say 2 metres tall and 125kg with a side line in debt collecting.

Try the "Total War" series. Turn based game where you can choose to play thebattles in a 3d world. Most excellent fun. It is something that a turn based game can get from a 3d zooming structure.

I have to say I am impressed. I have had a play with some of the demos and I like what I see. Whilst I agree that there are limitations this project seems fantastic.

Having tried and failed to use "win runner" in the past due to the complexity of the GUI application I was testing, this scripting would get past the problems we were having.

I can envisage sending canned scripts to my folks for doing maintenance on their own machine, even just some diagnostics that I find hard to do over the phone.

I have a couple of itches of my own that I reckon I could scratch with this, for example I have a macbook that I sometimes attach to an external display. Sometimes the external is on the left of my laptop, sometimes the right, sometimes directly above it would be cool to have a script that allowed me to just click an icon to arrange the displays appropriately. Sikuli is close. I am about to go off and see if that will work.

I mean they have associative arrays indexed by a freaking picture. That is simply, well, paradigm shifting. I am less concerned about the actual efficacy of Sikuli than I am about the ability to hook applications together through their GUI. I am thinking about something like "GUI pipes" which is something I have been thinking about for some time. Mark III of this stuff could be amazing.

I honestly think this project is potentially awesome, in the olden days, before the net was quite so pervasive we used to talk about using the RussTerm, which was basically getting our guy on the ground in a foreigh country (Russell) to type stuff on the machine he was looking at whilst we talked him through it over the phone, mostly because we could not automate the stuff we wanted to do. This would address many of the use cases for which similar requirements might exist today. That's just one idea that occurs off the top of my head.

Many posters have noted that much of this functionality exists already in tools like; AutoIt, AutoHotKey, some numpty even mentioned sendkeys in VB. But these people have missed the point, until now its all been very "Goto X,Y -> Click" not "find(Thing).click()". Even things like WinRunner or RationalTest seem, in my experience to be far to rigid to be useful. I can see how I would have used this tool to do much good work for our software back when I was demoing, devloping and testing stuff.

That it is wrapped in a nice scripting language as well just makes it even better.

I'm off to see how good it actually is....

The fundamental problem with many internal IT departments and particularly with regard to the development of software is the lack of discipline that the customers have because of the absence of price as a constraining behaviour.

When you are a good external provider of bespoke software you end up being able to use the price of your overall service and in particular, intra project "changes" in order to make sure that the customer is disciplined about defining and holding to a realistic set of requirements. It is difficult to understate how critical this is to success. In most of the crappy internal IT departments that I have dealt with the only constraint that the customer has is time and as such everything "can be done" because they just change their requirments with no impact on their budget and so the project delays and slides inexorably towards failure.

This is without even looking at the issue of competing internal requests for limited IT resource where, assuming that the resource is limited, the best solution for the company as a whole is to provide the limited resource to the profit centre that can most afford to pay them, thus allocating the resource to the mest problems within the business. This particular point is a bit of an over generalisation but I feel that _more_ rather than _less_ business focus from the IT folk is the way to ensure less projects fail.

TFA, reasons that the IT department should go back to the business with "with a set of recommendations for how he thought he could deliver a superior set of solutions that would meet their needs in 2012". In other words act like a domain expert business whose services the customer would be willing to purchase and to whose advice the customer would be willing to listen to illuminate, improve or limit their requirments.

Why doesn't this happen? Because the vast majority of IT departments are not run like business and they have not demonstrated the expertise (through repeated success) to allow the actual profit centres of the company to be willing to listen to them.

Indeed rather than behaving less like a business IT should behave more like a business, or perhaps more acurately more like an entrepeneur with a goal of maximising profit and then

Those that can't teach, teach teachers
Those that can't teach teachers profess
And those that can't profess work in University administration

Apparently those too stupid to work in University administration work in school administration