I get that from a 30-year familiarity with Doctor Who.
For example, Season 1 ran from 23rd November 1963 (An unearthly Child ep 1) to 12th September 1964 ( Reign Of Terror ep 6). The stories that season were:
An Unearthly Child (4 parts) The Daleks (7 parts) The Edge of Destruction (2 parts) Marco Polo (7 parts) The Keys of Marinus (6 parts) The Aztecs (4 parts) The Sensorites (6 parts) The Reign of Terror (6 parts) giving a total of 42 half hour episodes.
Season 2 had 39 episodes. Season 3 had 45 episodes.
By Jon pertwee's time (seasons 7 to 11), things had settled down to a fairly routine 26 episodes per season.
In Tom Baker's first season (season 12, 28 Dec 1974 to 10 may 1975) this dropped to:
Robot (4 parts) The Ark In Space (4 parts) The Sontaran Experiment (2 parts) Genesis Of The Daleks (6 parts) Revenge of The Cybermen (4 parts) giving a total of 20 half-hour episodes.
Seasons 13 to 17 were stable at 26 episodes, Season 18 had 28 eps.
By the mid-80's Colin Baker 'hiatus' phase the seasons were getting a lot shorter admittedly. Season 23 (Trial Of a Time Lord) only had 14 episodes. Each of Sylvester McCoy's seasons (seasons 24 - 26) had just 2 4-parters and 2 3-parters, or 14 episodes a season. Hence the average over the 26 year run comes in around the 13-hours per season mark.
In any case, current trends in 2004 (which incidentally don't seem to match the BBC I watch) aren't all that relevant to a show that ran for 26 years from 1963 to 1989.
For the new series starting in 2005, Mal Young (Exec Producer and Head of Drama Serials at the BBC) has said there will be around 13 episodes of 45 minutes each. I suspect he may have some clue as to the nature of current trends in Drama Serials at the BBC;)
This claim is not Informative. It is, rather, nonsense. An account which actually contains some truth and factual content is available from the BBC's Restoration Team who do the rework on the older material to make it fit for VHS and DVD release.
7 parters were quite common during the early Pertwee era (early 1970's) - the move to colour constrained the budgets, and if a story which would have been a 6-parter was done in 7, you could save on sets and costumes (and maybe actors fees to?). A lot of season 7 was 7 parters - Ambassadors Of Death, Silurians and Inferno spring to mind.
Unfortunately with Daleks' Masterplan, we now have thee episodes, but there were 12 in all, or 13 if you count the standalone prequel "Mission to The Unknown" broadcast a month earlier.
other than that, 'The War Games' was a 10-parter, 'Invasion' was an 8-parter and i can't off the top of my head think of anything else longer than 7 parts (unless you count Season 23, Trial Of a Time Lord, but that was really several four parters plus some top and tail stuff).
This is apparently due to the BBC Archives storing the recordings in B&W, even though they were broadcast in colour
I think you're mixing up two secenarios here. BBC1 went to colour in 1969 (BBC2 went colour in 1967).
The first Doctor Who to be shot in colour was 'Spearhead From Space', Jon Pertwee's first story, the start of season 7, aired in 1970. Any colour images of Doctor Who from before Spearhead are publicity stills or amateur film footage from behind the scenes.
Now, there *are* several (originally colour) episodes from the 1970s (bits of 'Ambassadors Of Death' and 'The Mind Of Evil' spring to mind) which now only exist as black and white footage, the original colour videotape having been recycled - maybe this is what you're thinking of?
The original studio work was on videotape, with film used for outside broadcast footage, and everything transferred to video for final editing and domestic broadcast.
The film prints were taken from the videotape for overseas sales, and fortunately, the BBC film library had much better retention policies than the broadcast departments.
Remember that there was no domestic video market back then, TV shows were 'fire and forget' - nobody believed anyone would ever watch this stuff after the original broadcast, so expensive videotape was recycled. The film prints in the library survived rather better, and most of the 'lost' material recovered recently has been in the form of film copies returned from overseas broadcasters.
Not on DVD, but a collective called Loose Cannon has been doing 'reconstructions' of the lost episodes using surviving soundtracks and 'telesnaps' (a chap called John Cura was contracted to take stills approx. every 30 seconds throughout the filming in the 60s and 70s and most of these still survive) plus, more recently some computer animation. The idea is that you buy the official BBC VHS of the surviving episodes of your story of choice (to keep it ethical) and then get someone on the Loose Cannon tape tree to dub you up the recon for the missing parts.
It's a surprisingly satisfying solution. At least, it is if you're an obsessive fan;)
Ironically, they only finished up their recon of Daleks' Masterplan last week, so it'll be interesting to see how their take on Ep 2 compares with the original. (Eps 5 and 11 of the 12 were the only ones believed to have survived until yesterday).
26 seasons of, on average, 13 hours each. There's some debate in fandom about the box set approach.
At present, we get single stories (mostly 4-6 half hour episodes per story) per DVD, with heavy restoration / rework by the BBC's Restoration Team (descratching, cleaning up the soundtrack, a wondrous process called VidFire developed by Peter Finklestone to restore the original smooth 50 fps video look to grainy 25 fps film stock, on The Ark In Space and Dalek Invasion Of Earth, alternative CGI'd versions of some of the grottier FX), plus usually a good hour or so of extras, commentaries, old documentary footage, newly filmed documentaries and so forth.
It takes a while to make a package that lavish, and I for one would be very disappointed to see the approach change to 'slap it all onto disc as quick as possible for a quick buck'.
Also bear in mind that only two seasons of Doctor Who were Arc-based (Season 16 'The Key To Time' and Season 23 'Trial Of A Time Lord'). Otherwise it's all standalone stories.
Though the 12-part "Daleks' Masterplan" and the ten-part "War Games" could be considered Arc-y, they're not complete seasons.
Only 108 lost episodes to go. It's 5 years since 'The Lion' was found, so we should have the lot back by 2544, just in time for the Dalek-provoked Galactic War against the Draconian Empire;)
They also wish to use nets like these to charge people for each mile driven. And the price will vary depending on the time of day, ... in short, a wonderful implementation of the most basic principle of capitalism: that allowing the market to set the price based on supply and demand is the most efficient way to allocate a scarce resource. And demand for space on the roads is very rapidly outstripping supply of space on the roads.
The only alternative to restricting road use is to pave what's left ofthis little island. and if you're going to restrict road use, Adam smith's invisible hand seems as good a mechanism as any. Whatever, we certainly can't cope with car use rising at its current rate without making some very painful decisions.
I'd be more angry to see a Cultural Treasure such as Hitchhiker's in the hands of some big-name Hollywood chump.
Agreed - while I've no idea who Garth Jennings is or what his work looks like, I'm much happier with that than I am with hearing that they've let Jonathan Frakes get his hands on the holy, sacred writ of Thunderbirds.
"Come friendly bombs and rain on Slough, It isn't fit for humans now"
John Betjeman, 1937 (full text) - the town has been a byword for dull mundanity for over 60 years now, and to some extent the series could be seen as an extrapolation of the poem.
It's in Adams' notes in the Radio Scripts book (London, Pan Books, 1985):
"I wanted it to sound as gross as possible, while still being broadcastable. So I started with something completely unbroadcastable, which was PHARTIPHUKBORLZ and simply played around with the syllables until I arrived at something which sounded that rude, but was almost, but not quite, entirely innofensive"
But then we got the bit about the word Belgium inserted in our edition of the books to offset the sanitizing of the Rory for The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Fuck" in a Serious Screenplay. (Also "arsehole" was replaced with "kneebiter".)
'Belgium' (I'm so sorry!!!) was in the Radio Series, season 2, Fit The Tenth (In which our heroes have some close encounters with others and themselves), uttered, in total desperation, by Zaphod as he hangs from the lip of the Nutrimatic Cup, thirteen miles above the surface of Brontitall ("There's nothing out there Ford, like no Ground! Some cat's taken the ground away!") and tries to persuade Ford to rescue him instead of discussing the origins and applications of the phrase "Holy Zarquon's singing fish" ("I don't want to be interested, I don't want to be stimulated or have my horizons broadened. I just want to be rescued, Ford, I just want to be swutting well rescued").
When Ford refuses, Zaphod utters the unmentionable imprecation; Ford relents and goes to fetch his towel.
Frankly, the interactions of the series, the TV show, the stage plays and the books is one whole joojooflop situation already before we try and retcon a film into the mix.
The radio show *WAS* the Hitch Hiker's Guide. The books, TV series, LPs on Megadodo Records, superlarge towels, stage play, computer game and so forth were mere spin-offs.
And there's no trouble incorporating the expositions, after all, it was always announced as "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, By Douglas Adams, starring Peter Jones as The Book" (cue 'Journey Of The Sorcerer' by The Eagles).
Never 'starring Simon Jones as Arthur Dent' or 'starring Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect' or 'starring Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox'.
Or, to quote Adams: "This is the story of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to The Galaxy, perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor".
While the Stop Stick does look like a better tyre-deflater than the Stinger, it still falls prey to the very issue discussed in the article - that car manufacturers will very soon be selling models which can run safely with a flat tyre. Clearly no sane government could prohibit the introduction of such an obviously great safety improvement, so some alternative to tyre-deflation as a means of stopping rogue vehicles is needed.
Maybe if we mandated a homing target thingy embedded in the block for the medium-caliber gun to aim at we could reduce the risk of the high-pulbicity funeral ?;-)
I'm afraid that the escalation to remote trackers and disablers however will cause an escalation in theft tactics.
True, but ISTM that Supply and Demand will play their inevitable role.
When the alarms and ignition disablers went in, the 'price' of stealing a car increased - if you take a car from a deserted street, it might be hours before the police are called and you'll not face charges of threatening behaviour or armed robbery on top of theft. Currently, you face the threat or armed robbery charges, the odds are the jacked driver will call the police straight away, so the odds of being caught and the sentence *if* you're caught, in other words, the 'price' of stealing the car, increase. As the supply of non-alarmed cars falls with time, I'd imagine the number of potential offenders prepared to pay 'the price' is likely to decrease as that 'price' rises.
Adding remote immobilisers would constitute another 'price' rise in terms of equipment needed, time needed to do the hack, potential for charges of kidnap, the absolute certainty that the police will give an armed kidnap case top priority, which should tend to suppress the demand side - there will always be *some* car theft, let's not kid ourselves. But a measure like this might well decrease the volume somewhat, which (other factors of privacy, or whatever ignored for a moment) can't be a bad thing, surely?
If you're such a mind-bogglingly stupid, naive and incompetent crook as to use your own car, licensed and registered to you, traceable through the DVLA, then you're going to get caught long before the firmware in your car becomes an issue.
You don't use your own car, you nick someone else's and use that.
I don't know about Morticians, but there's a team of Forensic Anthropologists in Knoxville, Tennessee, who run a 'body farm' with about 20 decomposing donated cadavers left out for around 4 years each to measure the processes of decomposition.
The centre has data on about 200 cadavers over the last 30 years - if anyone has evidence of this trend, they might be the ones.
Well, i'm not Indian, and every Indian film i've seen has had at least one huge music / dance number in it, but...
For me, that's the best thing. It's good old-fashioned escapist entertainment. I've never had as much fun in a British cinema as I have in packed, steaming cinemas in India, howling with laughter at the jokes, screaming boos and hissing at the moustache-twirling Bad Guy, roaring and cheering as the Good Guy gets The Girl and Kills the Baddies, clapping to the beats and singing along with the choruses. Don't need to know a word of Maratha or Kannada or Tamil or Hindu to get what's going on.
None of this 'sshhh, don't rustle that popcorn' nonsense. Less like an orchestral concert, more like a moshpit with a big screen.
Lagaan, on the other hand, is a wonderfully-crafted work of subtle beauty that can easily hold its head up high alongside Casablanca in my book. Plus some great music and dancing, natch.
There was one nation that truly broke the backbone of Nazist Germany: The Soviet Union.
For all the very genuine contribution of the US to allied victory in WW2, it disgusts me to see 20 million Russian dead discounted from the calculation every time the argument about who saved whose ass in the war comes up.
Which admission comes pretty hard to someone of Polish descent, believe me.
what makes them think that the French agree with Chirac? Considering that in the final run-off for the Presidency against Le Pen, a popular slogan on banners and placards was "vote for the thief rather than the fascist", and the rise in Chirac's vote once the contest boiled down to only him and Le Pen, you're bang on the money with that comment.
A large chunk of Chirac's vote in the run-off came from people who'd voted for Jospin, the socialist candidate, in the first round, couldn't stand Chirac's guts, had opposed him and his party for decades, but felt they needed above all to ensure that a racist demagogue didn't get a seven-year term as President.
HTA is a lot simpler than XUL. There's no custom widget description, it's genuinely no more than a run-of-the-mill HTML file with normal tags with the sole addition of a tag like this:
in the <head> section, which turns off various toolbars and opens the gates on the script sandbox giving the HTA full access to the local machine. There are a few other attributes that can go in there too, depending exactly what you want to switch on or off, but that's about all there is to it. UI elements in HTAs are just standard HTML <form> stuff - input tags, option tags and so forth.
Write HTML+script file, add one dangerous tag, rename as.hta, and Bob's your 0wn3r.
We're still SQL7-based at the moment: it's paid for and it does the job. We've put SQL2k on a couple of test boxes, and restored most of the main production databases onto them to see how they go (triggers, queries onto system tables, big ugly sprocs, realistic enough systems). It's basically been a question of backup on 7, restore to 2000, footle around a bit with security stuff like Linked Servers, relax and enjoy the better Optimiser. And the ability to GROUP BY a Bit column:)
There's some new stuff (SQLXML, UDFs et al) but basically SQL2000 seems to be SQL7 but better. Our existing databases work, and they generally work a bit faster. In fairness, we haven't put any heavy load on those test boxes yet, so I can't comment on that side of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I get that from a 30-year familiarity with Doctor Who.
;)
For example, Season 1 ran from 23rd November 1963 (An unearthly Child ep 1) to 12th September 1964 ( Reign Of Terror ep 6). The stories that season were:
An Unearthly Child (4 parts)
The Daleks (7 parts)
The Edge of Destruction (2 parts)
Marco Polo (7 parts)
The Keys of Marinus (6 parts)
The Aztecs (4 parts)
The Sensorites (6 parts)
The Reign of Terror (6 parts)
giving a total of 42 half hour episodes.
Season 2 had 39 episodes.
Season 3 had 45 episodes.
By Jon pertwee's time (seasons 7 to 11), things had settled down to a fairly routine 26 episodes per season.
In Tom Baker's first season (season 12, 28 Dec 1974 to 10 may 1975) this dropped to:
Robot (4 parts)
The Ark In Space (4 parts)
The Sontaran Experiment (2 parts)
Genesis Of The Daleks (6 parts)
Revenge of The Cybermen (4 parts)
giving a total of 20 half-hour episodes.
Seasons 13 to 17 were stable at 26 episodes, Season 18 had 28 eps.
By the mid-80's Colin Baker 'hiatus' phase the seasons were getting a lot shorter admittedly. Season 23 (Trial Of a Time Lord) only had 14 episodes. Each of Sylvester McCoy's seasons (seasons 24 - 26) had just 2 4-parters and 2 3-parters, or 14 episodes a season. Hence the average over the 26 year run comes in around the 13-hours per season mark.
In any case, current trends in 2004 (which incidentally don't seem to match the BBC I watch) aren't all that relevant to a show that ran for 26 years from 1963 to 1989.
For the new series starting in 2005, Mal Young (Exec Producer and Head of Drama Serials at the BBC) has said there will be around 13 episodes of 45 minutes each. I suspect he may have some clue as to the nature of current trends in Drama Serials at the BBC
This claim is not Informative. It is, rather, nonsense. An account which actually contains some truth and factual content is available from the BBC's Restoration Team who do the rework on the older material to make it fit for VHS and DVD release.
7 parters were quite common during the early Pertwee era (early 1970's) - the move to colour constrained the budgets, and if a story which would have been a 6-parter was done in 7, you could save on sets and costumes (and maybe actors fees to?). A lot of season 7 was 7 parters - Ambassadors Of Death, Silurians and Inferno spring to mind.
Unfortunately with Daleks' Masterplan, we now have thee episodes, but there were 12 in all, or 13 if you count the standalone prequel "Mission to The Unknown" broadcast a month earlier.
other than that, 'The War Games' was a 10-parter, 'Invasion' was an 8-parter and i can't off the top of my head think of anything else longer than 7 parts (unless you count Season 23, Trial Of a Time Lord, but that was really several four parters plus some top and tail stuff).
This is apparently due to the BBC Archives storing the recordings in B&W, even though they were broadcast in colour
I think you're mixing up two secenarios here. BBC1 went to colour in 1969 (BBC2 went colour in 1967).
The first Doctor Who to be shot in colour was 'Spearhead From Space', Jon Pertwee's first story, the start of season 7, aired in 1970. Any colour images of Doctor Who from before Spearhead are publicity stills or amateur film footage from behind the scenes.
Now, there *are* several (originally colour) episodes from the 1970s (bits of 'Ambassadors Of Death' and 'The Mind Of Evil' spring to mind) which now only exist as black and white footage, the original colour videotape having been recycled - maybe this is what you're thinking of?
The old Doctor Whos were on film, not video tape
The original studio work was on videotape, with film used for outside broadcast footage, and everything transferred to video for final editing and domestic broadcast.
The film prints were taken from the videotape for overseas sales, and fortunately, the BBC film library had much better retention policies than the broadcast departments.
Remember that there was no domestic video market back then, TV shows were 'fire and forget' - nobody believed anyone would ever watch this stuff after the original broadcast, so expensive videotape was recycled. The film prints in the library survived rather better, and most of the 'lost' material recovered recently has been in the form of film copies returned from overseas broadcasters.
Not on DVD, but a collective called Loose Cannon has been doing 'reconstructions' of the lost episodes using surviving soundtracks and 'telesnaps' (a chap called John Cura was contracted to take stills approx. every 30 seconds throughout the filming in the 60s and 70s and most of these still survive) plus, more recently some computer animation. The idea is that you buy the official BBC VHS of the surviving episodes of your story of choice (to keep it ethical) and then get someone on the Loose Cannon tape tree to dub you up the recon for the missing parts.
;)
It's a surprisingly satisfying solution. At least, it is if you're an obsessive fan
Ironically, they only finished up their recon of Daleks' Masterplan last week, so it'll be interesting to see how their take on Ep 2 compares with the original. (Eps 5 and 11 of the 12 were the only ones believed to have survived until yesterday).
26 seasons of, on average, 13 hours each. There's some debate in fandom about the box set approach.
;)
At present, we get single stories (mostly 4-6 half hour episodes per story) per DVD, with heavy restoration / rework by the BBC's Restoration Team (descratching, cleaning up the soundtrack, a wondrous process called VidFire developed by Peter Finklestone to restore the original smooth 50 fps video look to grainy 25 fps film stock, on The Ark In Space and Dalek Invasion Of Earth, alternative CGI'd versions of some of the grottier FX), plus usually a good hour or so of extras, commentaries, old documentary footage, newly filmed documentaries and so forth.
It takes a while to make a package that lavish, and I for one would be very disappointed to see the approach change to 'slap it all onto disc as quick as possible for a quick buck'.
Also bear in mind that only two seasons of Doctor Who were Arc-based (Season 16 'The Key To Time' and Season 23 'Trial Of A Time Lord'). Otherwise it's all standalone stories.
Though the 12-part "Daleks' Masterplan" and the ten-part "War Games" could be considered Arc-y, they're not complete seasons.
Only 108 lost episodes to go. It's 5 years since 'The Lion' was found, so we should have the lot back by 2544, just in time for the Dalek-provoked Galactic War against the Draconian Empire
They also wish to use nets like these to charge people for each mile driven. And the price will vary depending on the time of day, ... in short, a wonderful implementation of the most basic principle of capitalism: that allowing the market to set the price based on supply and demand is the most efficient way to allocate a scarce resource. And demand for space on the roads is very rapidly outstripping supply of space on the roads.
The only alternative to restricting road use is to pave what's left ofthis little island. and if you're going to restrict road use, Adam smith's invisible hand seems as good a mechanism as any. Whatever, we certainly can't cope with car use rising at its current rate without making some very painful decisions.
I'd be more angry to see a Cultural Treasure such as Hitchhiker's in the hands of some big-name Hollywood chump.
Agreed - while I've no idea who Garth Jennings is or what his work looks like, I'm much happier with that than I am with hearing that they've let Jonathan Frakes get his hands on the holy, sacred writ of Thunderbirds.
"Come friendly bombs and rain on Slough,
It isn't fit for humans now"
John Betjeman, 1937 (full text) - the town has been a byword for dull mundanity for over 60 years now, and to some extent the series could be seen as an extrapolation of the poem.
It's in Adams' notes in the Radio Scripts book (London, Pan Books, 1985):
"I wanted it to sound as gross as possible, while still being broadcastable. So I started with something completely unbroadcastable, which was PHARTIPHUKBORLZ and simply played around with the syllables until I arrived at something which sounded that rude, but was almost, but not quite, entirely innofensive"
But then we got the bit about the word Belgium inserted in our edition of the books to offset the sanitizing of the Rory for The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Fuck" in a Serious Screenplay. (Also "arsehole" was replaced with "kneebiter".)
'Belgium' (I'm so sorry!!!) was in the Radio Series, season 2, Fit The Tenth (In which our heroes have some close encounters with others and themselves), uttered, in total desperation, by Zaphod as he hangs from the lip of the Nutrimatic Cup, thirteen miles above the surface of Brontitall ("There's nothing out there Ford, like no Ground! Some cat's taken the ground away!") and tries to persuade Ford to rescue him instead of discussing the origins and applications of the phrase "Holy Zarquon's singing fish" ("I don't want to be interested, I don't want to be stimulated or have my horizons broadened. I just want to be rescued, Ford, I just want to be swutting well rescued").
When Ford refuses, Zaphod utters the unmentionable imprecation; Ford relents and goes to fetch his towel.
Frankly, the interactions of the series, the TV show, the stage plays and the books is one whole joojooflop situation already before we try and retcon a film into the mix.
The radio show *WAS* the Hitch Hiker's Guide. The books, TV series, LPs on Megadodo Records, superlarge towels, stage play, computer game and so forth were mere spin-offs.
And there's no trouble incorporating the expositions, after all, it was always announced as "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, By Douglas Adams, starring Peter Jones as The Book" (cue 'Journey Of The Sorcerer' by The Eagles).
Never 'starring Simon Jones as Arthur Dent' or 'starring Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect' or 'starring Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox'.
Or, to quote Adams: "This is the story of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to The Galaxy, perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor".
Exposition's not an issue.
One Lakh is one hundredth of a Crore.
That's not too hard, is it?
I personally am for the use of stop sticks .
;-)
While the Stop Stick does look like a better tyre-deflater than the Stinger, it still falls prey to the very issue discussed in the article - that car manufacturers will very soon be selling models which can run safely with a flat tyre. Clearly no sane government could prohibit the introduction of such an obviously great safety improvement, so some alternative to tyre-deflation as a means of stopping rogue vehicles is needed.
Maybe if we mandated a homing target thingy embedded in the block for the medium-caliber gun to aim at we could reduce the risk of the high-pulbicity funeral ?
I'm afraid that the escalation to remote trackers and disablers however will cause an escalation in theft tactics.
True, but ISTM that Supply and Demand will play their inevitable role.
When the alarms and ignition disablers went in, the 'price' of stealing a car increased - if you take a car from a deserted street, it might be hours before the police are called and you'll not face charges of threatening behaviour or armed robbery on top of theft. Currently, you face the threat or armed robbery charges, the odds are the jacked driver will call the police straight away, so the odds of being caught and the sentence *if* you're caught, in other words, the 'price' of stealing the car, increase. As the supply of non-alarmed cars falls with time, I'd imagine the number of potential offenders prepared to pay 'the price' is likely to decrease as that 'price' rises.
Adding remote immobilisers would constitute another 'price' rise in terms of equipment needed, time needed to do the hack, potential for charges of kidnap, the absolute certainty that the police will give an armed kidnap case top priority, which should tend to suppress the demand side - there will always be *some* car theft, let's not kid ourselves. But a measure like this might well decrease the volume somewhat, which (other factors of privacy, or whatever ignored for a moment) can't be a bad thing, surely?
Harden your car against that system
If you're such a mind-bogglingly stupid, naive and incompetent crook as to use your own car, licensed and registered to you, traceable through the DVLA, then you're going to get caught long before the firmware in your car becomes an issue.
You don't use your own car, you nick someone else's and use that.
I don't know about Morticians, but there's a team of Forensic Anthropologists in Knoxville, Tennessee, who run a 'body farm' with about 20 decomposing donated cadavers left out for around 4 years each to measure the processes of decomposition.
The centre has data on about 200 cadavers over the last 30 years - if anyone has evidence of this trend, they might be the ones.
Just wondering, why did this news not make front page on BBC online?
Right now, at 14:45 GMT, it's the #3 story at http://news.bbc.co.uk after Musharraf Survives Bomb Blast and Pope Condemns Terrorism.
Well, i'm not Indian, and every Indian film i've seen has had at least one huge music / dance number in it, but...
For me, that's the best thing. It's good old-fashioned escapist entertainment. I've never had as much fun in a British cinema as I have in packed, steaming cinemas in India, howling with laughter at the jokes, screaming boos and hissing at the moustache-twirling Bad Guy, roaring and cheering as the Good Guy gets The Girl and Kills the Baddies, clapping to the beats and singing along with the choruses. Don't need to know a word of Maratha or Kannada or Tamil or Hindu to get what's going on.
None of this 'sshhh, don't rustle that popcorn' nonsense. Less like an orchestral concert, more like a moshpit with a big screen.
Lagaan, on the other hand, is a wonderfully-crafted work of subtle beauty that can easily hold its head up high alongside Casablanca in my book. Plus some great music and dancing, natch.
There was one nation that truly broke the backbone of Nazist Germany: The Soviet Union.
For all the very genuine contribution of the US to allied victory in WW2, it disgusts me to see 20 million Russian dead discounted from the calculation every time the argument about who saved whose ass in the war comes up.
Which admission comes pretty hard to someone of Polish descent, believe me.
what makes them think that the French agree with Chirac?
Considering that in the final run-off for the Presidency against Le Pen, a popular slogan on banners and placards was "vote for the thief rather than the fascist", and the rise in Chirac's vote once the contest boiled down to only him and Le Pen, you're bang on the money with that comment.
A large chunk of Chirac's vote in the run-off came from people who'd voted for Jospin, the socialist candidate, in the first round, couldn't stand Chirac's guts, had opposed him and his party for decades, but felt they needed above all to ensure that a racist demagogue didn't get a seven-year term as President.
HTA is a lot simpler than XUL. There's no custom widget description, it's genuinely no more than a run-of-the-mill HTML file with normal tags with the sole addition of a tag like this:
.hta, and Bob's your 0wn3r.
<HTA:APPLICATION id="arbitraryString"
applicationname="MyGroovyHTAthingy"
maximizebutton="yes"
minimizebutton="yes"
icon="someIconFile.ico"
>
in the <head> section, which turns off various toolbars and opens the gates on the script sandbox giving the HTA full access to the local machine. There are a few other attributes that can go in there too, depending exactly what you want to switch on or off, but that's about all there is to it. UI elements in HTAs are just standard HTML <form> stuff - input tags, option tags and so forth.
Write HTML+script file, add one dangerous tag, rename as
We're still SQL7-based at the moment: it's paid for and it does the job. We've put SQL2k on a couple of test boxes, and restored most of the main production databases onto them to see how they go (triggers, queries onto system tables, big ugly sprocs, realistic enough systems). It's basically been a question of backup on 7, restore to 2000, footle around a bit with security stuff like Linked Servers, relax and enjoy the better Optimiser. And the ability to GROUP BY a Bit column :)
There's some new stuff (SQLXML, UDFs et al) but basically SQL2000 seems to be SQL7 but better. Our existing databases work, and they generally work a bit faster. In fairness, we haven't put any heavy load on those test boxes yet, so I can't comment on that side of it.
If the Time Lords hadn't intended us to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, they woudn't have given us Sonic Screwdrivers.
Scream Of The Shalka, starring Richard E Grant as The Doctor, out now at BBCi.