If you have old copies time-stamped by the operating system that pre-date the versions of the usurper, then have your attorney threaten them with theft of copyright. They can put your name back as originating author, and themselves as enhancers/updaters, but failure to do so should be accompanied by legal sanction. FWIW, always have a good attorney as a personal friend. I do, and it has served me well in such cases. I do his tech support pro-bono. He does my legal work pro-bono as well. A good quid-pro-quo situation.

I think that Oracle has just killed their golden goose! Gee, I wonder just how long before some one else addresses this issue? 10...9...8...

There are two faults here. One is yours in that you left your equipment connected to the network such that external access was allowed. The other is the supplier/vendor of the equipment who performed a modification of the equipment without your explicit approval. IMO, the supplier is fully responsible/liable for ALL of your costs and/or losses caused by this action on their part. I think an attorney would agree, unless there is a clause in your support or purchase/license agreements that allows for this, in which case, caveat emptor! As for a network connection timeout, this is not really feasible. However, proper configuration of your network firewalls (I assume you have such?) should mitigate this sort of unauthorized access. If the equipment doesn't need local network access for management/monitoring purposes, then simply disconnect it. If it does, then the firewall rules have to be adequate to block remote access without your permission and intervention.

If you read my message, this level of math is NOT required for most programming jobs (though formal logic is helpful). However, for a job as software engineer or computer scientist, then I stick with my opinions about that! Engineer/Scientist == math...

How neat is this!? :-) Physics at its best. My late father, an astro-geo-physicist (and director of the National Science Foundation), would have been delighted to see this work!

On a modern OS, such as Windows or Linux (preferable), you can use a virtual machine to run older DOS and such operating systems, passing the RS-232 ports of the host though to the virtual machine. Works great for me, and I use that for dealing with similar embedded systems all the time. FWIW, my preferred host OS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, Scientific Linux (SL). CentOS is another such clone, and widely used in industry. I use SL because I personally know the maintainers of SL at Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois (my wife is a staff scientist/physicist there), so if I have an issue, I can contact them directly. My preferred virtual machine manager tool is currently VirtualBox (open source, from Oracle/Sun), but KVM will also work very well for this. That said, I prefer the GUI and configuration tools provided by VirtualBox.

If you want a degree in either software engineering or computer science, then the math is part of the (pardon the pun) equation! I do performance engineering (actual job title is Senior Systems Engineer) for a tier-one Fortune 50 company. Without the math (3rd order differential equations at the least), I could not do my job. No, I don't need that on a daily basis, but I DO need it from time to time, such as when developing predictive analytics algorithms to properly analyze system performance and time-to-failure (Kalman filters anyone?). FWIW, my previous job was developing risk analysis (real-time) software for the options trading industry - keeping the portfolios of traders and market makers properly balanced, using (primarily) the Black-Scholes risk algorithms - again, 3rd order differential equations. :-) So, want a position that is just something more than being a code monkey? Then math is your best friend!

Now the banks have an inkling of how we feel about them stealing us blind in the mortgage fiasco! I only wish these hoods got away with about $4.5B instead of a paltry $45M. Then, the results would have been more equitable... :-(

Yeah. Definitely a possibility! :-)

My best guess is that a bunch of our "brilliant" legislators have been burned by this (unlockable phones) and are now going to do something about it! :rolleyes:

RH was a force of nature, and we who grew up on his wizardry will miss him!

I often download Linux DVD images and such using bittorrent. Bittorrent isn't "evil" - it is simple a means to share the load of moving large amounts of data. To make it illegal should be considered something akin to making automobiles and pickup trucks illegal - as they can move both large amounts of legitimate as well as other goods from point A to point B, and they can use many routes to get to B.

I only run Windows in a Linux virtual machine. If it gets a virus, I just revert to the last snapshot. That said, I do run ClamWin (ClamAV for Windows), but it only runs scans when I want, such as when I think that something is trying to get in my "pants". I do AV cleansing for clients, but I use ClamAV and 2 other professional-level scanners on a Linux system. I connect the infected drive to my linux system using a docking bay, make a bit-image backup of the drive and file systems, and then scan the file system images with 3 scanners (I don't touch or mount the infected drive/partitions) - each generates some false positives, and each catches viruses that the others don't. Then I clean the system. This costs my clients $$, but they get back systems that are clean, and their data is intact. Just like there is "safe sex", there is "safe computing". Here are a few simple rules. 1. Don't download and open email attachments from people you don't know. 2. Don't download and open email attachments from people you do know unless you have scanned them first. 3. Don't respond to spam messages, and don't open them except in a "sandbox" environment, such as gmail's spam folder. 4. Make sure your internet browser is kept up to date, disable java plugins, and make bit-image backups of your system at regular intervals. That way, if you do get infected, you can revert to a "known good image". 5. Keep your user data on a file system or device separate from the system. IE, system stuff on one drive/partition, and user data on another. This is called "separation of domains of responsibility".

I read a lot of tech magazines. Some I still get in hardcopy form, such as my IEEE publications. Most others I get in electronic (PDF) format. I read at least 10-20 magazines in both formats each month.

I like the "starter" cord idea! :-) Cute!