Posts by Tom -1 112 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jul 2015
"I think you have that bassakwards ... try instead "suffering from the effects of lower intelligence, leading to radio wave paranoia"
No, it's a vicious circle so iyt can be expressed either way - the paranoia leads to lower intelligence which amplifies the paranoia which descreases the intelligence which ....
"Where did I say I was a Trump or Cruz supporter? I hated them both. I would much prefer someone like Allen West or a libertarian such as Gary Johnson. I cant believe that these idiots are the best we can find to run our country but then again...WE don't find them really they are chosen for us for the most part."
That "we don't find them" strikes me as totally naive. It was very clear that most of the senators and representatives of the Republican party thought Trump was a terrible candidate who, if elected, would make a disastrous president, so it wasn't them who found him. It's the ordinary guys like you (but not like me, I'm a Scot not an American so guys like me had no say) who chose him as your party's candidate. SO yes, YOU (maybe not you individually, but certainly the collective YOU corresponding to your WE) did find him and choose him, so stop pretending it was otherwise.
I find it rather difficult to understand what William 3 is trying to say. He appears to be objecting to hypocritical wankers, which is remarkable since that would clearly mean he is objecting to himeslf. anyone who believes that aprox 37% of eligible voters constitute a democratic majority for a massive change in direction isclearly an idiot (like those who set this referendum up without a minimum threshold like that used for the 1979 scottish referendum), but since he pretends to believe that everyone who thinks there should be sensible minimum threshold for such referenda is clearly died in the wool hard left marxist he is clearly a hypocritical wanker since there is abundant evidence that that is not true (Margaret Thatcher, for example, supported having a minimum threshold included in the legislation for the 1979 referendum, and although william 3 is clearly an idiot he surely can't be quite enough of a fuckwit to believe that she was a hard left marxist).
Well, I suppose I ought to happy that william 3, a person so poisonous, uncivilised, and idiotic as to be rare even in these columns, has proven himself to be a hypocritical wanker and evidently hates himself.
"..... don't hire people that were not born and raised in the US. even then they should be at least second generation born in the US before they should be able to get a security clearance"
What a load of coblers! Clearly you must think it was a terrible mistake letting people like Benjamin Franklin (whose parents were born in England) or Patrick Henry (parents born in Scotland) take on positons of trust. They were 1st generation American, not 2nd, unlike those other evidently (according to you) even less trustworthy founding fathers, Thomas Paine (born in England) and Alexander Hamilton (born in Nevis) who weren't even 1st generation American, Presumably you also reckon Washington was an insecure idiot for appointing Hamilton, a French-Scottish cross from Nevis, as his principal military aide during the war. Clearly you haven't a clue.
Your list of 5 points is interesting, but I would hope that a CS course would cover something a bit more scientific and a lot broader than your point 2" developing useful tests" (perhaps "error detection, containment, recovery and elimination") and while I have great respect for Tony Hoare and his CSP I would prefer people to be familiar with Rob Milner's work instead (CCS, ACCS, SCCS, and Pi-calculus) because it covers a much wider spectrum of styles of cooperation between processes. And I would regard your 1st example as good material for an engineering course but not computer science, and the 5th is about a particular build tool, nothing to do with science, and may be of interest to one employer in four.
I'm not aware that we had a Tory PM any time between 2003 ans 2007, while the selling off of DERA at a bargain price to Tony's cronies was played out.
If your suggesting that Blair was a tory prime minister you re just crazy - no tory prime minister in history was such disgraceful right wing twit as that man.
At least a decade? Actually at least since July 2000 (when RIPA receied Royal Assent) and maybe a lot earlier, depending on when the various agencies started using section 94 of the Telecomms Act 1984 - I know it was used as early as October 2001 (after 9/11), but that's seven and a quarter years after the Act received Royal Assent so it may have been used for mass surveillance any time after July 1984.
It's sad to see a Tory Home Secretary trying to top the anti-privacy pro-surveillance stuff promoted by the Home Secretaries of the Blair and Brown periods, but she is the Home Secretary who guided the Identity Documents Act 2010 which abolished the Blair era national identity card and the associated register so she can't be all bad.
"Just how is it that Flash is so relentlessly shit and never seems to improve any?"
Maybe Adobe is incompetent at producing any reasonably secure software? I've heard it said that over the years almost every alternative to Acrobat has been more secure than the Adobe product, and I decided years ago to avoid all use of Acrobat and stick to Foxit for viewing and printing PDF. If I could avoid all use of Flash I would.
In fact I would like to be completely Adobe free.
So no-one wants to enforce the constitution? After all, the supreme court ruled (in February 1993) against the confiscation of assests of innocent people even if those assets are themselves tainted in whole or in part by illegal activities. And it ruled (in June 1993) that confiscation of assets is a punishment (the Department of Justice had contended it wasn't) and a strong case can be made that a punishemnt applied to innocent people is cruel and unusual (which was why the DoJ was frightened of confiscation being classed as a punishment). And it further ruled (in June 1993) that eighth amendment's prohibiion of unreasonable seach and seizure applies to confiscation of assets.
I'm not aware of the supreme court having reversed itself in any of those matters, or of any constitutional amendment since 1993 that could void any of the rulings in question. But maybe that's because I no longer keep track of the shambles that is the American "justice" system since I no longer go to the USA.
But I suppose that it's situation normal in the USA: the powers that be (even minor powers like the local cops) will merrily violate the constitution (with the possible exception of the second amendment) and there is little or no chance of them being prevented from doing this or being punished for doing it or for anyone getting redress when harmed by it since it would be inconvenient for the ruling plutocrats to have the laws and the constitution enforced.
I suspect that we are better off with our "unwritten constitution" than with a written one like the American one or the Russian one,
Your Gaelic doesn't appear to be quite up to the challenge. But you're right that "Bhoid" isn't a word, and that this story is the result of a pedant being rather silly (unless it's the result of someone thinking the missing grave accent was a m opportunity for goofg laugh).
"Eilean Boid" means literally "The Island of a Penis" which would, by the usual rules of translating place names, "Penis Island". "Eilean Bod" is meaningless, because it is grammatically incorrect - bod is nominative case, but in a name like that the second word needs to be in the genitive case. Of course if bod were a proper name (Bod) rather than an ordinary noun, the the genitive case would be Bhoid but it couldn't mean penis since penis isn't a proper name.
Being oversensitive about "bod" in a placename seems rather ungaelic, though. Up in Skye people are happy to call a particular rock "bod an Stòrr" (bowdlerised by Màiri Mór to "Leac an Stòrr" in her famous song "Nuair bha mi òg") so why should people dow south be so upset by his missing accent?
"because people who've done bad stuff often shred, delete or otherwise dispose of evidence that may not help their case"
The reason that some bodies are given such powers is as you state, but sometimes the reason those powers are excercised is not for their intended purpose but rather inspired by vindictiveness (much damage can be done to a business by depriving it of access to its data by impounding all its documents and computer systems). At least it is hard to attribute the retention of documents and computer equipment for very long periods after it has been ascertained that they conain no such evidence to any other motivation.
It appears that he's unhappy that Starbucks spelled his name Alistor instead of Alistair. As he claims it's a Gaelic name, it's evident that he doesn't know how to spell it himself - both his spelling and the Starbucks spelling break a fundamental Gaelic spelling rule twice. The gaelic name is writen "Alasdair".
" If this carries on, I shall cover the entire front of my property in tarpaulin and only
allow people in to see it if they pay me a dodecaquid, or perhaps a thrup'ny bit; I
need to consider the pricing model. "
Surely you would want to go for a nicely shaped chunk of money, so wouldn't a dodecahexaquid be the regular choice?
Too true. Rather interestingly, in the case of getting money converted to foreign curency and trasferred to an account (where the cash to cash rip-off rates and commissions generally don't apply) there are changers of two sorts; those who operate the usual internet model of provide them with a card number etcetera, and those who require you to transfer funds to them using a transfer initiated by you (which is pretty easy and very quick using fast transfer). I use only companys which (a) have a good reputation and (b) receive the money by interbank transfer; that way I don't have to trust them to keep any of my keys/passwords/credit card numbers/etcetera safe.
"propriety"
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Well, he (the Met Commissioner) does come from South Yorkshire, so you can expect some non-tonic vowels to be suppressed and some "r"-s to disappear, but getting from "proprietary" to "propriety" without noticing that it's a different word with a completely different meaning does seem rather extreme; but it's rather likely in context that "proprietary" is what he meant.
But I really like the footnote on it.
Actually Basic was introduced into classes at Dartmouth College 52 years ago, and I suspect that padding a string on the left was something that cropped up in class within the first couple of years of using it as as a teaching language. By the mid-70s it was used all over the place. So I think 40 years ago is more likely than 30, and it 's quite likely that it turned up in a tutorial developed at Dartmouth 50 years ago.
I tend to have hordes of applications on my machines, a lot of which are used pretty rarely. Remembering where I'd put them in hierrchical menu was a pain, and ordering the whole lot alphabetically was also pain. So Windows 8.1 with search instead and hence also Windows 10 are n improvement rather than a step bckwards, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm a mathematician who turned into an engineer and a computer scientist, and have worked with computers for very long time - June this year will see the 50th aniversary of my first computer program. During those fifty years I've see lot of change, often change for the worse (for example the hype about C as a "high level" language suitable for writing an OS, when in fact it was a low level language with pointer arith,metic which made it impossible to do comprehensive compile time type checking as well as impossible to spot bounds violations) and both Burroughs and ICL had been writing OS in genuine high level languages (two dialects of Algol 68) for years before C was invented and even longer before it was used to translate the assembler code of an OS into something marginally easier to understand. I've also seen a lot of stagnation, and the results of that have not encouraged me to believe that it's useful thing to have - the history of computing is littered with defunct compnies who filed becuse they thought they didn't need to change (along with a few who tried to change faster than they could cope with). My personal experience is that I was rather often brought in to rescue things that were in trouble, and to do that I had to change things - stagnation wasn't an option. dsO I tend to be in favour of change. Windows 8 was an attempt to release some changes that were immature, not really ready for the marketplace; becuse it was immature, it got slagged and had a (mostly undeserved) reputation problem. Windows 8.1 was the mature version, but has inherited the reputation. I'd rather have 8.1 than be stuck with Windows 7 or (heaven forbid) XP, so clearly I'm in favour of change. The changes going forward from windows 7 through windows 8 nd 8,1 nd ending with windows 10 seem to me to be on the whole good (although Cortana is maybe another thing released while still immature, it's good that finding search no longer requires fancy gestures but putting the 8.1 search capability on that button insted of Cortana would have been less ambitious but also less dangerous).
All the howls about Windows 10 seem to indicate two things: a lot of people are scared of change, not having seen any real change since Windows 3; and a lot of those people haven't a clue about privcy (compared with Google MS is very much supportive of customers' privacy - it's terms are shorter and clearer than any of Googles obfuscation, and it provides users with fr more control over datat about them that Google does (it provides options between "don't use our stuff and we won't get dt about you" and "use our stuff and agree to us collecting anything we like about you and doing anything we like with it" which are in practice the only two possibilities with Google.
You may not have noticed AC that not too long after the Model T, the motor car industry
pretty much settled on a standard arrangement of accelerator, clutch, brake and gear shift.
It's now just a couple of months short of 89 years since the deth of the Model T, and rather a lot of essential bits of the car driving interface are still not standardised. Where are the controls for sidelights, headlights, warning lights, front windscreen wipers, rear windcreen wipers, turn indicators, front fog lamps, and rear fog lamps? Not in the same place in different brands of car, or even in different models of the same brand.
Not even the set you say is standardised is actually standardised yet: is the gear shift operated with a lever through the floor by moving it backwards and forwards and sideways or with a handle through the dashboard by turning it left or right and moving it and backwards and forwards?
So I think AC understands this stuff somewhat better that you do. And as Bill Ashly pointed out you were wrong on automobile patents too.
The Zuse's Z3 was not an electronic computer, the logic was electromechanical relays, not anything electronic. The Z4 prototype build was not completed until the sping of 1945, not many days before the end of the war in Europe, and 16 months after the first Colossus, so the Z3 is the only Zuse computer you can be referring to, and it wasn't an electronic computer at all.
The first programmable (not stored program) electronic digital computer Colossus, the first digital electronic computer was the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (which wasn't programmable), the first stored program electronic digital computer was the Manchester SSEM (ENIAC was earlier than the SSEM, but didn't support any stored program at first; a very limited stored program capability was added to ENIAC about 3 months after the SSEM was operational) and the first stored program electronic digital computer used to provide a computing service was the Manchester Mark 1 (which beat its rival, the Cambridge University EDSAC, by just one month).
That is all well known history, a matter of record. Claiming that something that wasn't electronic was the first programmable electronic computer isn't going to change that history.
No, it works for most accented Western European alphabetic characters; no real problem with accents within the extended ascii range (U+00 - U+FF)
the vowels á à â ã ä å æ é è ê ë í ì î ï ó ò ô õ ö ø ú ù û ü ý are ok
(capitals: À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý)
and so are the consonants ç ð ñ þ (Ç Ð Ñ Þ).
The only vowel it doesn't work for in that range is ÿ (U+FF), which I think is always lower case in modern West European languages (in some African languages it can be upper case, maybe in some East European languages too, and that's U+176 I think). The only consonant (in that range) it doesn't work for is ß (sharp s, 0xDF) which is used only in German and is traditionally lower-case only.
So he bit flipping trick (xor with 0x20) works for every alphabetical character in the range 0x00 to 0xFF except those two, which have to be left unchanged if you're capitalising West European text. Of course not mucking up the non-alphabetical characters (you don't want to change space into null, for example) means you have to have a list of unchangeable characters for that task anyway, and adding these two to that list is rather trivial.
I somehow think that's bullshit; Blair's government did more damage than the current lot, with its RIP Act in 2000 and amendments in 2003, and its Terrorism Act in 2000, Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security act in 2001 and continuation order in 2003, Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, and Terrorism Act 2006. Sections of at least two of those acts have been ruled by the courts to be contrary to the 1998 HRA (this has no direct little effect on the laws, since the 1998 HRA says when a minister certifies his legislation is HRA compatible that's the end of it - Blair and crew weren't going to pass an act that allowed the UK courts to enforce ECHR against them), but does sometimes embarrass the government into introducing changes). And Brown's introduction of secret inquests and the "guilty until proven innocent" law about photographs including constables (It is a defence for a person charged with this offence to PROVE that they had a reasonable excuse for their action is not exactly an enhancement to our civil liberties.
If we use French words like entendre and entrepreneur there's surely nothing wrong with introducing nother one (entendreur)? So perhaps a "double entendreur" is a person who, on hearing a double entendre, instantly understands both meanings, rather than a spelling mistake?
Evidently you think, for example, that the statement "there is institutional sexism in the N American sales division of Company X" implies that there is institutional sexism in every institution anywhere in the world? That makes it pretty clear that either you aren't aware that "institutional" in the context of that message could only mean "occurring habitually or customarily within an organization" and could not possibly mean "related to institutions in general" or you are deliberately writing nonsense in the hope of confusing some of your readers.
30% of all big projects doesn't mean 30% of big IT projects. About 50% of the government's big IT projects are expected to fail.
And all NAO saying 50% of big gov IT projects will fail in the next 5 years means is that NAO is still stupidly optimistic about government IT. After all, govenment is still using the firms who created all the total disasters that government IT has suffered in the last few decades, so the result should be predictable.
Sometimes I wonder is the projects would suddenltystart succeeding instead of failing if the government adopted a policy where the rewards for the big contractors were greater for success than for failure, inded if the contractors paid for their failures instead of us taxpayers rewarding them for failing. Unortunately our politicians have the strength neither to override the civil servants on the contract terms that they hand out to the big boys who might see them all right in "retirement", nor to override the desires of their fellow politicians who have something to gain from the usual incompetents getting the usual ridiculously generous terms.
I like Windows 10, and I also like windows 8.1 - they are better than any previous MicroSoft OS.
It's a pity that Windows 8.1 and windows 10 get tarred with the Windows 8 brush - and a pity too that Windows 8 got a reoutation that, for all its faults, it didn't deserve.
Yes, windows 8 was a pain in some ways, and not really suitable as a desktop OS unless the user was very adaptable to something not much like Windows 7 or Windows XP (ancients like me, who had decades of computing in pre-DOS days and on the various Unixes as well as on windws from day 1 onwards, didn't have much trouble with it; others did); in other ways, it was marginally better than windows 7 (certainly I could get better SQL Server performance on Windows 8, and it booted faster than Windows 7 too). Windows 8.1 was a big improvement on both Windows 7 and Windows 8, much better performance and very easy to use. The only problem I see with Windows 10 is that awful Cortana thing, which seems to be designed to ensure you can't find anything; it's even lighter weight (hence better performing) that Windows 8.1.
Currently I'm back on WIndows 8.1, after a nasty hardware problem and being driven back from windows 10 to Windows 8 (I won't use that hardware repair outfit again).
I suspect that part of the reason for not offereing free upgrades to 10 from Vista and XP is that the old hardware thos OSs will mostly be running on does not provide some of the security features required for 10 - code location randomisation and prevention of data execution and so on.
Only if you want to disable a massive amount of stuff that doesn't have anything to do with windows spying.
Has the idiot who generated that package changed it so that it no longer completely disables windows update, prevents access to msdn, and does nummerous other damaging things that reduce both the utility and the security of your computer? If so, it might be worth considering after an extremely careful check on just what it is now doing. If not, I would advise keeping it off your machine.
Sink a couple (daily) and "your life's duration will shrink infinitesimally"???
That's nonsense. Your life's duration will increase, and not infinitesimally - unless all I ever learned about statistics is utterly wrong. And if the couple is a couple of pints of 3.6% bitter and you are a 5ft 10in tall male weighing 161 lbs an extra jar (to make it 3 pints daily) would produce a further increase in life expectancy. (But if you are overweight you have to keep the alcohol down to a level where it won't make that worse, which may mean very little alcohol at all).
Senior civil servants selecting the evidence to deliver the result they want (the famous prejudice-based judgement) is not at all unusual, it appears to be far more common in those circles than evidence-based judgement, and is certainly very visible in these draft recommendations and the accompanying claptrap.
I've reached the grand old age of 71 now and decided to keep my alcohol consumption down to a reasonable level - no more than 50 units per week.That will reduce my life expectation compared to 42 units per week, but will probably be better for me than 28 units per week unless my weight starts going up. At least that's how I, as a mathematician and engineer, read the evidence.
Touu wrote: "During WWII everyone in the UK had a National Identity Number (and a NI card). At the end of the war the government conceded to liberal (small l) concerns and announced that they were abolished. Fairly soon after that it was announced that they were needed after all - to use the new NHS - they became NHS numbers."
That's all balderdash.
National Identity cards were not dropped at the end of the war, they were dropped seven years later in 1952; although several members of Atlee's cabinet spoke against them, but did nothing to eliminate them, and voted in favour of renewing the 1939 act when it came up for review in 1947. Opposition to them was fuelled by blatant abuse by the police of their powers under section 6, sub-section 4 of the 1939 National Registration act, with even Lord Chief Justice Goddard recognising the abuse and making it clear that the courts would not support the police's abuse - his strong comments on a 1951 case helped ensure the end of the system in 1952.
The NHS number had been the NI number from the beginning of the NHS, long before the National Registration act lapsed, so NHS numbers certainly didn't cause any announcement soon after identity cards were abolished that the numbers were still needed - that was obvious since the numbers had been used as NHS numbers for years.
I managed to miss the time when it was a great airline, if it ever was. I've used United exactly once - 17 or 18 years ago - and never again. It was my worst flying expeience ever. When I commented to an American colleague about how awful it was he told me that the degree of awfulness was par for the course for flying United.
"cuntier
I'm relatively OK with the occasional bastardisation of English (Queens version or not), but that one beats them all"
Why do you think it bastardisation? It's the comparative form from the adjective cunty, and comparitves of adjectives ending with a consonant followed by y are so regularly formed that good dictionaries don't bother to give them an entry (eg you won't find an entry for "sillier" in OED). Since the adjective cunty is there in the OED (with 9 quotations to support the entry, dating from 1890 to 2007) it seems safe to assume that "cuntier" is a valid an English comparative form of that adjective.
No, it is not easy to fix. The USA already agreed that it would not prevent US companies from protecting data to the required standard. They then prevented US companies from doing that, without any sort or legal check that the disclosure of the data was for legitimate purposes.
so what goo will it do if the US government undertakes the same commitment again? Why should anyone trust them - they already promised to do that, and deliberately broke that promise. That's nit a good basis for trust.
It's quite clear that the USA doesn't give a shit about rights or EU citizens, or about conforming to its international commitments, or about anything other than doing whatever it likes in the international field regardless of restrictions imposed by international law (including laws it has committed to comply with, and including laws which, although it has not committed to comply with them, it requires to be enforced on non-us governments), and regards any attempt by a non-US government to require US companies operations in that government's territory to conform to the laws of that territory as unacceptable.
That makes the USA a country that's impossible to deal sensibly with, because no meaningful sensible deal can ever be made - the USA will break the terms any time it feels like it, and claim that there's no requirement on it to do what it agreed to do. In other words, it's impossible to fix the data protection problem, because it's impossible to trust the USA at all.
Anyway, no civilised country or international organisation should have any dealings with a country that has declared that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to some of its activities - and that makes the USA the worlds number one pariah. Of course it was already close to that position even before the DoJ made that bizarre ruling, being the only western democracy that has ratified neither Protocol 1 nor protocol 2 of the conventions.
I think you are missing three points here:
1) The USA entered into an agreement that it would provide a certain degree of protection to personal data. Clearly it never had any attention of doing that, and was behaving dishonestly to enable American companies to get business in the EU. Of course everyone should be fully aware that the USA regards international obligations that it agrees to as not worth a sheet of toilet paper (I predicted years ago in several forums that safe-harbour would be declared illegal by the ECJ). It's clear that the CEC knew that the data wouldn't be protected and the commissioners who rubber-stamped the deal were doing a pretty good emulation of America's version of "honest dealing", but that doesn't negate the fact that the government of the USA has been totally dishonest in its dealings with this agreement from beginning to end. So why should Europe want to trade with it in anything where trust is needed?
2) Various American companies operate in EU countries; to do that, they are required to conform to the laws of those countries just as a European company which operates in the USA is required to conform to the laws of the USA. Doing business in Germany requires conformance to the laws of Germany, which include many European laws. Data protection law is one of them. If an American company is not going to follow those laws, it should not attempt to operate in a country whose laws they are.
An executive sitting in and Office in Menlo Park or Washington in New York is in international law no more protected from EU law if his company does business in the EU than an executive of a European company is protected from US law if his company operates in the US. Take a look at enforcement on anti-internet-gambling laws in various states, and prosecutions of European businessmen who operated websites providing gambling in Europe. Note that the US didn't care that a website had a .UK or .FR or .DE address, and that Europeans therefor regard Google's claim that it doesn't have to make google.com compliant to EU law, only google.co.uk and google.fr and so on (and only in countries where the courts have instructed it to conform - law doesn't apply to google until the courts tell them, apparently, unlike US law applying to European companies).
3) If EU (and many other) companies stop using US companies to hold their data that will damage the US economy substantially. It may well improve European economies - maybe our computer hardware industry will come back to life - and maybe other non-US economies too: after all, non-US companies like Fujitsu, LG and so on have very large EU presence and some are quite capable of providing cloud storage is there's a market for it. And nothing prevents European companies using hardware and software provide by US companies - it's not really difficult to use a firewall to prevent the software or hardware phoning home, and (quite amusingly) the data we want to protect is generally in application software which isn't US-provided (and the providers of that software will have strong incentives to make sure its data is not understood by the underlying hardware).
To me it all seems pretty simple.
We need strong copyright - we mustn't allow people to steal other people's work.
We need sensible rules - if I buy a book (and the right to read it) in Paris, I need to be able to take it with me and read it when I go from Paris to Seattle.
It's all as simple as that. Why can't these idiots understand it, and tell the corporations who are trying to prevent such simple rules from applying to get lost?
"That means investigation to establish evidence of a crime being committed.
IE Real police work"
It requires only that a suitably senior police officer (Superintendant - or is it Chief inspector, I can't remember) state that it is it is necessary and proportionate to require the key - maybe also evidence that a crime has been (really "may have been") committed. But does any connection between the crime and the decryption need to be established by evidence other that the police officer's opinion? I don't remember seeing any such requirement in any (UK) legislation.
"However, if you send an encrypted email then the encryption was applied by you, not the CSP so they don't have any responsibility to decrypt it."
When did they repeal the law that said if you refused to provide them with the key you were guilty of an offence with very severe punishments?
Unless Cisco has changed dramatically since I was stuck with working with their products, this simply means that OpenDNS will deteriorate, becoming bug-ridden and insecure. But I'm very out of date on Cisco, as the only Cisco products I have any experience of (apart from firewalls) have been products shipped more than 13 years ago, because twelve and a half years ago I started suggesting putting non-Cicso switches in customer proposals and a decade or more ago I recommended to my employer that no Cisco switch or BBSM should ever again be included in any proposal to any customer and the suggestion was welcomed with open arms as Cisco products were definitely causing problems.
"If Uncle Larry prevails in this API nonsense under the current eternal copyright regime, Java belongs to AT&T as a derivative of C"
No, because if the nonsense does rule AT&T don't own C as it is a derivative of Algol 60 (derived mostly by throwing away the useful bits) or perhaps of BCPL.
Although in reality in some versions of copyright law lampoons are permitted derivative works, so Java can't be infringing the C copyright which in turn can't be infringing the BCPL copyright. Or does the lampoon get-out not apply in cases where the creator of the derived work didn't intend it to be a lampoon?
Of course why anyone ever wanted to produce software in any C or any of its derivatives is quite beyond comprehension, but it does seem to be a rather popular idiocy.
Windows 10 has brought me a different problem. My laptop attempted to upgrade, but the upgrade failed. That ought not tp be a problem - but in the process of tryinhg and failing it has somehow completely diabled windows update. I doesn't appear to have damaged anything else, but windows update doesn't work at all.
@lambda_beta: try reading the first sentence of the article before claiming that it doesn't say that it's not the same as HP's resistance-based hopelessly over-running memory project based on Chua's research and Williamson's laoratory device (memristor - not sure why you dropped the "r" in you second post).
Hopelessly over-running: HP in Oct 2011 announced commercial availability by April 2013; current HP estimate of commercial availability is 2018.
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