The BBC Micro switching power supply design includes cycle-by-cycle current limiting in the primary side of about 2 amps and an SCR crowbar on the +5 volt output so they are going to fail cleaner than most power supplies. From browsing various discussions it looks like most failures are the paper X and Y capacitors and the aluminum electrolytic capacitors. I am surprised they cannot find someone familiar enough with switching power supply design to refurbish and improve them.

You can look up the details but the early BBC MIcro power supplies were linear and the later ones were off-line switching power supplies.

If I had a choice of countries to enforce my will upon and wanted to play the divide and conquer game, the authoritative ones will be easier to control than the democratic ones. The later are more unpredictable.

So, what was the nature of this agreement?

The nature of the agreement is that Verizon can alter it. Pray they do not alter it further.

I only brought up the status of "sweat of the brow" in the US because you said:

I disagree with the Lexra employee since a lot of *effort* and creativity goes into designing an instruction set.

The effort Lexra (or anybody else) went to in creating a work is irrelevant. Creativity and originality matter but not effort. This comes up all the time with digitized works. The effort in digitizing video or photos or text is not enough to allow copyrighting what is produced. Services like Lexus instead copyright the formatting or table of contents that they produce which are not in the original works.

The NEC case involved copyright of the microcode which NEC independently recreated through a clean room process. Microcode like program code is copyrightable but if Intel had been able to copyright the instruction set, they would have included that in the lawsuit.

I will not defend the Republicans; there is enough scum to paint both parties in this and other matters.

I linked this in other posts but not here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

I disagree with the Lexra employee since a lot of effort and creativity goes into designing an instruction set.

In the US at least, "sweat of the brow" does not by itself allow copyright protection; it is irrelevant how much work is done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The NEC versus Intel case is illustrative though. There microcode was ruled to be copyrightable but reverse engineering and clean room implementation is protected.

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/ar...

But the license between AMD and Intel second guesses whether an instruction set can be protected by copyright; it just avoids a situation where there would be a lawsuit whether copyright applies or not. MIPS went after Lextra for patent infringement and not copyright infringement.

I thought there was a court decision or something which said instruction sets are not copyrightable but was unable to find it.

Were they licensed by whoever owns the copyright?

Now we get to revisit whether the instruction set of a microprocessor is copyrightable.

Currently the premium to get ECC on an Intel system versus a comparable AMD system is about $250.

While I don't know the reason for a "tourist tax"

In the United States local jurisdictions view tourist taxes as free money. Tourists cannot vote.

This is my understanding as well. Wireless cards are approved as part of the entire system including the antenna so only those cards which were tested may be used. The FCC would not approve the laptop without these restrictions.

If the access points bridge to the same ethernet domain and have the same SSID, then it often works. Some wifi clients are dumb though.

So look at the language in the Senate Finance and HELP Committee bills which were merged to form the Affordable Care Act. The Senate Finance bill did not authorize subsidies for people where their state did not setup an exchange and the HELP committee bill specifically denied subsidies for people where their state did not setup an exchange for four years and included other punishments as well.