The Chinese government is trying to punish Australia for having a free press by blocking trade. China imports a lot of food and commodities from Austrakia, so they are now preparing for the famine that they will cause by the resulting rises in prices. Their self imposed coal blockade is also leading to power outages in many coastal communities.

I suggest you look at the CQRS pattern. A good Java implementation is http://www.axonframework.org/. The advantage is the CQRS pattern that it is fairly simple, but highly scalable. So you can start small and simple with the confidence that you can tweak and optimise in the future to scale as required. There are good tutorials and support too. My team is using it for an industrial application and we have found that it has been very robust. It might take a bit of work to get your head around the concepts, but it is worthwhile in the end.

That helps, but in severe conditions, as we are having now, it is still no guarantee. The problem of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ember_attack after people are evacuated means that even building that are hundreds of meters from the fire can still burn down. The strategy in NSW is to evacuate if there is any risk to life, so we have the situation where many buildings have been lost but so far no lives.

I can guarantee that all late fees incurred will be paid by NAB. This is a MAJOR news story here in Australia - the bad publicity is huge. If they reneg on any fees, there'll be blood in the water while the reporters circle.

I incurred some fees from a third party once when my main bank set my account up incorrectly. A simple letter was enough to get them to refund all of the fees. If they didn't, the banking ombudsman has the power to force them.

The guys at http://www.virtualrealitytrainingsystem.com/ have created an interactive 3D simulation to evacuate entire coal mines (and other things). As far as I know, this is the only full 3D 360 degree simulation in the world and it is designed so that a group of 10 or 20 miners can work through detailed simulations with a trainer in their full equipment. I have seen a lot of virtual reality systems, and this is by far the most realistic one that I have seen. The users report that it is more like a coal mine than the concrete mock ups that they also use for training. Disclaimer - I did some work on it!

So many of us here at /. are software professionals that we find it hard to believe that other people don't see the software as being vitally important. If a company makes lathes, they would have specialists in making lathes, and the software is probably an afterthought at best. I wouldn't be surprised if it were outsourced, even.

After all, a machine making company's core competency isn't going to be software, is it?

Ahhh - that is just tooo evil. I can just imagine the worst of both worlds
But worse than that is http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~jbehren/fpx3.html. At attempt to "simplify Fortran source code development with an integrated set of macros, directives and embedded Perl/Fortran. Wow - someone has combined my two least favourite languages in an attempt to make a 'better' one!