You might joke, but for the last twenty years, the RAF haven't faced any opponents where a competently flown late Spitfire wouldn't have been more than adequate. I guess for ground attack some new old stock Typhoons might be more appropriate, but the days of the RAF being able to demand limitless money for fast jets to counter the Russian menace are over: the potential enemies simply don't have the equipment.

Seven lower case characters is only a problem if the web service either (a) leaks hashes or (b) fails to use proper rate limiting and locking after bad login attempts. If a web service permits a brute-force dictionary attack, that's astoundingly poor practice. If it rate limits (three bad login attempts and you're grounded for ten minutes, three cycles of that and your account is locked permanently) then the attacker only gets nine guesses. Seven lower case letters is perfectly reasonable in that case, modulo using your username as your password or something equally silly.

I guess all that talk about how keen Turkey is to join the EU is just that: talk.

It's not the damage to the purported painting behind the wall, it's the damage to the integrity of a building whose decorations have been in situ for over four hundred years. They're not talking about drilling holes in a wall painted with magnolia emulsion to get at whatever lies behind, rather doing serious damage to frescos by Vasari. That requires that you believe the remains of a painting which Leonardo himself severely damaged with braziers and part melted off the wall are of more intrinsic worth than the long-standing paintings by a non-trivial figure than have been on the walls of that room since it was given its present form. There are other artists apart from Leonardo, you know.

Google Translate does a reasonable job of the Italia Nostra press release (http://goo.gl/KcLTn) which is worth reading. That television funding has been made available for the work is dubious, to say the least: they're not going to care about Vasari, are they?

The problem now is that we're heading into "stuff that Leonardo stood on the other side of the road to is touched with his genius" obsession.

I recently went to the (London) National Gallery Leonardo exhibition, at which a substantial proportion of his surviving works were brought together (both Madonna of the Rocks, for example) and the paintings that survive in a decent condition are astoundingly good: you can argue the toss about the relative merits of Da Vinci, Velasquez, Rembrandt and the rest, but that's the company he's clearly keeping.

However, what you don't get in an exhibition of Velasquez to anything like the same extent is the huge slew of "school of", "preparatory sketch for", "disputed", "attributed" and so on. There's plenty of Velasquez (or Goya, or Titian, or at a slightly less major level Turner) to go around, and therefore there's not the same perceived need to drag up everything last scrap of paper. A lot of the stuff that's of disputed provenance (or even, in the case of Salvator Mundi, is of broadly accepted provenance) wouldn't be held in anything like the esteem it is on purely artistic grounds --- Salvator Mundi was sold without the attribution for less than fifty quid just over fifty years ago, for example, and even though otherwise sensible people can write of Madonna of the Yarnwinder "The merest touch of Leonardo's genius is better than almost anyone else's signature work" (http://goo.gl/f3B88) there's a real whiff of idolatry to this attitude. Clearly, if you want to be regarded highly as an artist, make sure a lot of your paintings decay and you have only a small pool of material for later enthusiasts to obsess over.

In this case, the chances of there being a recoverable painting are close to zero: there are accounts of the paint being melted off the wall with braziers. There's a copy by Reubens of the section that was completed, but a lot of the rest was lost anyway. The painting that's having holes drilled in it is a not inconsiderable piece. âoeBut if I had to choose, I would choose Leonardo,â rather gives the game away.

I presume I needed <irony> tags around "elite".

There is something slightly sad about kids being convinced that their elite skills mean they are undetectable finding that actually national agencies are not totally ineffective. It's a sort of hacker Dunning-Kreuger effect: people who might be able to convincingly shield their identity on-line aren't confident about it and therefore take additional precautions, while those who are confident may find their confidence is misplaced.

Very few people in the UK subscribe to magazines, because we have a huge number of newsagents. Some of them are national chains --- WH Smith, John Menzies --- who do double-duty as distributors and wholesalers. But most are sole-trader corner shops, which do newspaper delivery, sell milk and often host sub-postoffices. They stock a wide range of magazines on what amounts to sale-or-return, and will get you pretty well anything else. City centre or railway station newsagents will stock a wide range of international publications as well, and if you go to a newsagent in London near a railway station you'll be able to buy most of the European newspapers as well (last week in London I was able to buy that day's L'Equippe over the counter to read with lunch, admittedly a late lunch).

There's a middle-class tradition of subscribing to Private Eye, partly because in the 70s and 80s it was slightly harder to get over the counter due to WH Smith's refusal to handle distribution, and partly because they make it insanely cheap to do so because they need the cashflow. If you want The New Yorker or US Wired or something, again you get a subscription because, even airmail, it's half the price of buying it over the counter (I subscribed to US Wired from 1.2 until it became a life-style magazine, and I've subscribed to The New Yorker for fifteen years or more), and the same applies to things like Time. But for UK-published general interest magazines, it's usually bought at a newsagent or delivered by a newsagent. "Trade" publications, for which a lot of the readership will either get it free or have it paid for by their employer, are done by post, but that's a rather different market.

So that's why there's no subscription cards (or very few). They'll sell you a subscription if you want, but it'll normally cost you twelve times the cover price. They might throw in a small discount or a gift, and you're probably getting the postage for free, but it's lot like US publications where even an international airmail subscription is about half the cover price. You might opt for a subscription if you live in the sticks where there's no handy newsagent, or as a way of giving a gift at Christmas, or if the magazine you want doesn't have proper distribution. But in general, you don't. That we have as a household three magazines on subscription, and have had as many as six, is extremely unusual in urban England.

No, he really wasn't. Firstly, a "Don" is used of any Oxbridge lecturer; there is no such thing as "the Don ". Secondly, he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon (ie, not English) for many years, and then latterly a professor of English more generally but whose research, teaching and other interests were entirely based around Anglo-Saxon. He was most certain not an expert on how "the language" worked, etc, if by "the language" you mean anything written subsequent to Chaucer (if not earlier). Tolkein may have been an expert on Anglo-Saxon (although, as recounted by Larkin and Amis, a very boring one), but as he was writing in English, that hardly matters.

Tolkein was writing for adults. Rowling was writing for children. To attempt to make a "standards are falling, you know" point out of that is a category error.

In other news, Microsoft will be released the very best VCR you've ever seen in 2014: it'll redefine the way you use video tape, just in time for the next mid-terms.

The phone market is done and dusted. People have increasing investment (in money and in time spent learning to use) a collection of applications, and the market for "dumb phone to smart phone" transition is finished. The only market left is competing head-on to switch people away from iPhone (good luck with that) or from Android (fractionally easier, as there's evidence people can be switch to Apple).

In order to compete, Microsoft would either have to completely kill Apple stone-dead in functionality and quality, with a release one product going against a mature product with a mature eco-system (didn't Zune teach them _anything_?) or would have to undercut the commodity Android vendors on price, which is essentially impossible now, never mind in a year's time.

Microsoft are increasing slow to react, and are arriving both late and under-armed at every fight. Music Player, Smart Phone, Tablet: they've missed all three. They need to find a new place to innovate, and for as long as they refuse to do anything which isn't based around Windows, that's going to get harder and harder for them.

Some years ago, the F1 rules were changed so that cars were in parc ferme conditions, with strict limits on what can be done to them, from the start of qualifying on Saturday lunchtime until the race finishes on Sunday afternoon.

The purpose was partly to stop qualifying being its own arms race, with cars in completely different specification than for the race, and partly to reduce costs and the number of travelling staff. At the same time, "T Cars" --- a third car, available as a spare --- were banned, so that if a driver destroys a car in practice the team either have to rebuild it or not race. They're allowed to travel with a spare monocoque, but it cannot be built-up and it does not get pit space.

There were endless howlings from the teams, claiming that without a complete strip-down after qualifying, with a large crew working overnight to check everything on the car, reliability would go through the floor and races would finish with only a handful of stragglers fighting a durability battle (our US viewers may find this ironic in light of a certain US Grand Prix, of course).

The same argument was advanced, mutatis mutandis, over limitations on engines and gearboxes, limitations on the number of gear clusters available, limitations on certain forms of telemetry and a wide variety of "the cars can't just be left to run themselves, you know" interventions.

In fact, reliability is now far greater than ten years ago. It's not uncommon for there to be no mechanical retirements, certainly not from the longer-standing teams, and the days of engines imploding on the track are long gone. A front-running driver will probably only have one, if even that, mechanical DNF per season. The teams deliver a functioning car when the pit lane opens at 1pm Saturday, and that car then runs twenty or thirty laps in qualifying and sixty or seventy in the race, a total of perhaps 250 miles, without much maintenance work beyond tyres, fluids and batteries (section 34.1 on page 18 of the sporting regulations).

So again, we see that "preventative maintenance" turns out to really be "provocative maintenance", and leaving working machines alone is the best medicine for them.

That isn't quite the case. If a disk drive is seized under a search warrant or data is intercepted under a content interception warrant, then it's an offence not to hand over the keys when asked (although there are a set of defences which might hold: it isn't a strict liability offence). But the police can't ask you for the keys at their own initiative (search warrants require a court order, content interception warrants are rare beasts and require the Home Secretary's personal signature to an application) and the government can't (because they aren't the courts, and the Home Secretary is acting in his role as minister of state, not as a member of the government).

But the case of interception warrants issued by the Home Secretary is a slight side-show, as I'm not aware of any notices to produce keys for intercept product, and in practice it would be pointless to make such an order. There may be someone out there somewhere using a protocol which doesn't offer Perfect Forward Secrecy (for example, statically-keyed IPSec) but the vast majority of encryption protocols likely to be used over a network cannot be decrypted even by someone who retrospectively obtains all the static keys.

There have been notices to produce keys for disks that have been seized under search warrants, and there's a legitimate debate to be had about that. However, unless you're about fifteen and believe that sticking it to the man is a victimless crime and the police are all fascists, yah, the general contention that the courts of the land can issue search warrants and then demand that the product of that search be rendered intelligible does not seem unreasonable, nor is there the slightest evidence that the power is being over-used (about half a dozen cases in the past ten years, I believe). Moreover, the legislation quite carefully allows you to disclose session keys, rather than long-term keys, and quite carefully excludes any power to demand long-term keys.

There's a lot wrong with RIPA 2000, and a lot of the debates both at the time and more recently needed to be had. But claiming it gives the police or, worse, the government the power to seize keys (by implication long-term keys) is both untrue and unhelpful.

My point is that physical media, unencumbered by DRM, means that the content of that media is accessible in most cases, years or even decades later.

I've got some data on a reel-to-reel tape written on a Pr1me, and another from Multics. I've got some data written on QIC-11 on a long-obsolete low-volume Unix box. I've got some punch tape. All of these things might be readable in extreme circumstances (although I think the Multics data would be extremely challenging, what with 9-bit bytes and all) but for practical purposes they're dead.

On the other hand, I've copied my home directory from system to system for the past twenty-five years. I've got files with Unix time stamps in the mid 1980s (including, usefully, a Kermit'd copy of most of the data from the Multics system).

Data you want to keep needs to be on current systems, with current backups. Outside a narrow time window, older media isn't readable without extreme measures

Surely to God backup policies are not the responsibility of system administrators? They can propose, I guess, but the sign-off and the strategy must come from someone with a risk-management responsibility, and (in my experience in the UK) auditors won't sign off accounts without a discussion about IT resilience --- it's an "going concern" issue. If they are given a silly budget then ultimately there's nothing the Admins can do, but they should be banging at the door demanding sufficient budget and then telling the auditors the issues.