Fair point :)

If just for the sake of juggling four, or as the basis for tricks with five, then sure — as a means of progressing to a five ball cascade, I'm not sure that would help at all? For me, that was great for co-ordination training for three in each hand, but not as something on its own. But I guess everyone juggles for their own reasons!

If spectrum licensing is predicated on the basis of a need to prevent / minimise interference, if such a technology is developed, the requirement to license spectrum (and for governments to print money carrying out such licensing) would seem to fall away.

Yochai Benkler has already made a persuasive case (I don't know if this was officially published) around this and, if it was possible to deploy widely technology that worked irrespective of interference, we'd seem to be one step closer.

The cynic in me thinks it might fail as a result, since I doubt many governments would want to lose the money, or incumbent operators a means of excluding others from the market.

Fair advice :) I'd just skip 4 and go to 5, but I didn't express that too clearly!

If you do not have access already, get hold of a copy of Charlie Dancey's Compendium of Club Juggling — you've obviously got siteswap mastered anyway, but, as a collation of some fantastic (and some simply fun) moves for club juggling and passing, it takes some beating.

Four is a lot harder... I found (and still find) four harder than five, since juggling four in a cascade pattern is basically juggling five but "passing the gap" — making sure that the gap, where the fifth ball should be, is harder for me than actually having that fifth ball in place.

A very useful (as much as any juggling is "useful"...) technique for four is to learn to juggle two in each hand simultaneously, in both rotations and in columns. Asynchronous columns of two balls in each hand (no pun intended but, in the juggling world, "take two balls in your right hand" is a common phrase!) helps with coordination greatly. If you can juggle two ball rotations in each hand, you're not too far off being able to juggle three balls in one hand — just increase the height of the rotation to give you the extra time, and then lower the pattern down as your coordination and technique improves.

Sod knows how I ended up being a lawyer, but I still have "can juggle three machetes whilst blindfolded" on my CV :)

It was not a "code book" in any traditional sense of the term, at least in a crypto context — the message, according to this solution, was simply heavily-abbreviated plaintext.

It seems that "txtspk" actually originated from pigeon messaging :)

You may have terminated the agreement, but this does not (necessarily) mean that you do not have a right to be paid, which is probably good news for you. However, it does mean that threats based on withholding performance will have no power, and, conversely, that you could not be in a position of breach yourself for withholding payment.

The exact position would depend on the contract you have and, whilst I am a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, so can't offer specific legal advice. However, what does the contact say in terms of taking action? For example, is there a pre-agreed escalation protocol, or does it set out a dispute resolution procedure?

If you are in the UK, take a look at money claim online, and see whether that would suit your needs. If you'd like a recommendation for a lawyer, feel free to drop me a line; having someone local can be helpful, so the odds of me knowing someone I'd be willing to recommend in your area are probably slim, but, potentially worth a try.

Best of luck.

Are you still working with them / do you want to continue working with them? If so, the approaches you might take may well be different to those if you were "just" after your money.

I've not idea where you live, but it's worth being careful that breaching a contract yourself (such as failing to provide services which you are obliged to provide) is not excused on the basis that the other party is not complying with its obligations — unless your contract says that you can stop providing services if you have not been paid, simply ceasing to do so might put yourself in breach. But consider what the risk is to you, if the company really is that far behind in payments to you.

Depending on where you are, how about a letter before action — that, unless you are paid, you will take legal action? Depending on the sum you are owed, you might have a route through a local small claims procedure, even a money claim online — if it's a case of a project manager causing delays to try and stretch their budget, this approach might just get it before the company's legal team. If you've got as strong a case as your summary suggests (that might be a big "if," of course), it may be in the company's interests just to settle, to avoid litigation; you may just be looking for their legal department to put a boot up the backside of the relevant business unit to stop messing about and get it paid. If no response, go to court seeking default judgment, or perhaps see if local laws support you applying for the company to be wound up on the grounds that it is not able to meet its liabilities as they are due — even if you do not want to wind the company up (you want your money), it can take something as drastic as this to get someone to sit up and take notice.

Some companies publicise their CEO's details — try looking for those, and writing directly. Else, write a snail mail letter to the CEO's office, or the head of legal, explaining the problem succinctly, and asking that they personally attend to getting the matter fixed.

If you have no other way in, contacting them via Twitter might work, even if they are already receiving bad press — as long as you are polite and accurate, could it do anything but help at the cost of a few (more minutes) of your time?

Many lawyers will offer a free / fixed fee initial consultation — if nothing else, find out how much they would charge to take your case. Push for a fixed fee; you'll pay more for the certainty, but you will have certainty rather than billable hours which are harder to control. If the cost of getting a lawyer involved increases the likelihood of recovery sufficiently, you'll get less overall than you were hoping for, but that might be better than nothing.

my 677 page summary of proceedings — it's in point 8 Times New Roman, three columns to the A5 page.

Your comment prompts me to take another look. I'd looked at Papers, Sente and one other (I can't remember) for managing academic documents — thousands of them — but none worked very well for me. I wanted to have the software on multiple devices, and to be able to keep them in sync pretty effortlessly but without using a third party server. I wanted to be able to access the documents on my iPad, mark them up and have them synced back. I wanted the whole lot to be easily exportable to some common format, so that, if I didn't want to stick with the software forever, I could move easily.

I ended up with a directory hierarchy and owncloud, but I'll take another look, in case things have come on.

I note you are using Android, so my suggestion may not be worthwhile, but I am using PenUltimate for all my hand-written notes, and, for that simple task, it does an excellent job. No OCR, but, frankly, I'm not sure how much processing power you'd need to throw at my handwriting...

I may be able to help you here, if you have access to a Linux machine (heck, it may work natively on Android; I don't know): use ghostscript to assist in removing the lock. I have this as unlock_pdf.sh:

#! /bin/bash

# takes specified file and prints output using ghostscript

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f $1

Just save the file in question to your machine, and run sh unlock_pdf.sh pdfname.pdf and wait for output.pdf to be generated.

There may be better ways of doing this, but this has worked pretty well for me over the last couple of years, so I hope it offers some assistance.

From memory — it was some time since I checked, and perhaps a software update has improved things — some basic annotation was possible on the Kindle, but it was not at all easy, particularly to type anything of more than a few words. I'll see if things have improved — thanks for the heads-up.

It was a good couple of years ago since I first installed it, but I'm pretty cagey about this sort of thing, and don't remember having to give an email address. I think there's an option to register for an online account for some online document conversion functionality, but I haven't done this, and it has not caused me any problems in my use of the application (nor nagged me to do so).

Perhaps worth double-checking if you are otherwise tempted?

As part of the bigger picture, and the future of information sharing and knowledge creation, I agree fully with you.

As someone with a stack of documents in .pdf which I needed to read, my immediate need was finding a device which could enable me to do that :)