Firstly we have the perennial problem that the security services are allowed to spy on anyone with very little oversight. If they want to spy on someone they should be required to get a court order, and that court order should be made public so that everyone can see what they are doing. If the court order cannot be immediately made public for legitimate security reasons then it should be made public as soon as possible (i.e. certainly within a year, preferably sooner). Furthermore, information gathering should not start until that court order is issued - i.e. there should be no requirement for ISPs/telcos to log and retain traffic "just in case" it is needed at a later date.

So given that we already have this problem, further extending the powers of the seucrity services seems like a bad plan.

Futhermore, this stuff is always justified as "to stop a serious threat", and yet there seems to be very little evidence that there are lots of "serious threats" that need stopping. And as always, this stuff is always spun as "to stop the criminals" and attention is diverted from the fact that not everyone who uses a lawyer is a criminal.

Even if you can't use the evidence in court, it can be used to influence a court case, either by directing a line of questioning, or helping with parallel construction of evidence.

Except these things clearly aren't happening, or even intended to happen.

The whole point of communications with your lawyer being privalidged is that you can have a completely frank discussion with them in order to prepare your defense. This cannot happen if you are constantly having to avoid incriminating yourself - one of the reasons for getting a lawyer is that they can tell you when to stop talking to avoid that, so if you can't discuss this with them then that seriously harms your defense. If the authorities believe that there is no merit in allowing private legal discussions then this should be true on both sides - the prosecution should be required to make all their discussions public too. As it stands, the laws are very one-sided and stack the deck against anyone the authorities decide to attack, guilty or not.

Not true - I can't find the link at the moment, but the London Underground has been working with card issuers for a few years to ensure the cards are quick enough to be used to pay for journies during rush hour. ISTR they required transactions to complete in under about 300ms.

Not uncommon in a crowded place. The article suggested performing the attack at an airport since foreign currency transactions would not be unusual - if you've ever waited in line while going through airport security you'd realise that an attacker would have ample opportunity to stand right next to you for many seconds if not minutes.

Untrue. The protocol allows the card reader to enumerate multiple cards at the same time, select which to talk to and to freely switch between them. Multiple cards are not an issue here.

it's browsing history held in the ISP, not on your PC... that means anything accessed from your IP address will be available... the only way to do any private browsing now will be via a proxy or using a wifi access point away from your house. and what's the bets that use of a proxy is deemed to be suspicious?

I want to be able to take the battery OFF the bike to recharge it...

The bike remains locked up down in the shed to a ground anchor, not dripping all over the floor up in my third floor flat which by the way only has stairs, no lift...

Also means I can take the battery inside to recharge when at work.

electric assist means I can do my 7 mile commute without getting sweaty... takes the hills out and kills the headwinds... no lycra... ordinary street clothes and shoes

I guess no-one's told these people that then... "Not many cities can boast 27 percent of cyclists continue using their bikes several times a week all year-round, especially not in cities with eight and half months of winter or an average of 256 days of thermal winter and snow. Oulu, Finland (population 191.000), however, is no ordinary town. It is a town where 98 percent of the cycling network is maintained all winter and all routes have street lighting. Timo PerÃlà founder of the Winter Cycling Federation and organiser of the first Winter Cycling Congress in 2013 recently gave us the backstory on his hometown; itâ(TM)s worth retelling here."

Inclination changes are really expensive. By comparison, a Hohmann transfer orbit to the moon and back can be cheaper and can use the moon's gravity to change inclination. The Apollo missions used a free-return trajectory rather than Hohmann transfer orbit since they needed to get to the moon quickly (don't want a bunch of astronauts spending a few months in deep space), which is why they needed significantly more delta-V. Its worth noting that a commercial satellite generally has a significant amount of station keeping fuel since its expected to stay in service for many years - sacrificing a few years of service is reasonable if the alternative is to completely abandon the satellite because its in the wrong orbit.

I think in the incident in question, someone (Lockheed?) ended up patenting the manouver...

STacker and doubledisc certainly helped back then, but nowadays, most of our media is already compressed as much as it will go unless you want to lose reosolution or bitrate...

on a frictionless surface... and in a vacuum...

so when is the US Government going to be indicted on terrorism charges then?

if wearing a t-shirt or other item of clothing with a copyrighted or trademarked item/logo?

it's streamlined so there's a lot less drag...

I am the owner of any code I sumbit to the Linux kernel, *but* it is also considered a "derived work" of the rest of the kernel (which means, legally, I'm not the *sole* owner) and therefore the GPL applies.

The contract was non-specific on what code they were talking about - it was a blanket "you will give us a perpetual nonexclusive licence to do what we want with any IP in your ownership which you produced before, after or during your employment with us" (or words to that effect - I can't recall the exact wording).

I don't know how legal it was - as I mentioned, the company in question was already ignoring their TUPE obligations. However, legal or not, I saw no merit in signing it, so I didn't.

The GPL doesn't prevent dual-licensing code for which you are the sole owner (i.e. you wrote it, or the copyright was assinged to you; and it is not derived from anyone else's code). This even extends to commercial licences - i.e. I can write some code and release it under GPL, at the same time as selling a paid-for licence with non-GPL terms to a few people. However, when you contribute code to an existing project, it is usually considered to be a "derived work" since it almost always makes use of existing parts of that project's code - therefore the writer of contributed code would seldom be considered the sole owner, so whatever licence it is released under would need to be fully compatible with the licence used on the rest of the project. This generally precludes dual-licencing code that has been contributed to a GPLed project.

Much like other copyrighted stuff like music - if you make a song that is derived directly from someone else's song then you can't just blindly release it yourself - generally to release a derived song you need to get a licence to do so from the owner of the original song.

Yes, one of the reasons I cited for refusing to sign it is that a lot of my past work is stuff like Linux kernel coding (which automatically inherits the GPL) - I can't give anyone a non-GPL licence to this work, which is what they were demanding.

But aside from that - if someone wants a licence to all the work I do over the entire course of my life outside of my employment with them, they can damned well pay me a salary for my entire life too! As far as I'm concerned, an employer is entitled to any work I do during my contracted working hours (usually 37.5 hours a week - 09:00 - 17:30, excluding lunch hour); if they want to claim ownership on anything I do in the other 130.5 hours a week then they are going to need to pay me 3.5 times as much for the same hourly rate.

FWIW, this was during a contract renegotiation after my department had been sold off - in theory the new owner needed to comply with TUPE legislation but they had issued a "sign the new contract or be fired" order (which is illegal). However, when I refused to sign, they did reword the contract to remove that clause, so I guess they were trying to do *something* to avoid getting sued.

I've not got any patents, but at one point I was handed an employment contract that demanded I grant a licence to all my past and future work (which I refused to sign), so you could very well be right. (I'm in the UK, although the company in question was headofficed in Canada)

the Supreme Court is most likely fatally compromised as the NSA will already have all the dirt they need on the Judges in order to get them to make the "decision" they need....