There is only reason for keeping details of patents secret: you know that some of them won't stand up to open scrutiny. In other words: you do it if you are engaged in confidence trickery. So turn it into a game of bluff and wrap those who do see them up in restrictive disclosure contracts.

It would be nice to see many of these patents shown to be invalid; then those who have been screwed by this mafia like protection racket to sue and get their money back. However: I don't expect to see that happen, the system is too broken.

For those apps that absolutely demand access to something, then you should be able to fake it. So: the app that demands access to your address book, you give it one with a couple of bogus entries. It is my machine so I should get to choose what is allowed.

I suspect that most users will not bother or just don't care and so will not check permissions - for them it is easier to complain & blame someone else when they get a problem.

Maybe not a lot of them at the moment, but a textbook only needs to be written once, 'published' for free and it can be used by everyone for ever afterwards. OK: not quite so simple since they will need to be updated for changing curriculum needs (especially things that change like the sciences) and will need to be translated into different languages. But an e-textbook done properly & you can do so many things that paper cannot: links to videos, links to stuff on the net, good searching, student annotation/highlights & linking between topics.

Writing good textbooks takes effort, but a start would be copies from the net of individual articles explaining single topics -- bitty and inconsistent styles but a start. The traditional textbook vendors are going to fight back, it will get dirty but, in time, they will lose.

Joe Sixpack suffers a loss as a result of such an attack, who compensates him ? He has never heard of the possibility, but ignorance cannot be claimed by neither the smart TV manufacturers nor the TV broadcaster nor the local standards regulator. All of the latter will claim that it was some 'malicious 3rd party', but they knew about it and took no action to mitigate the threat. It is no longer an excuse to complain that ''it is software and very complicated''.

Who will compensate Joe Sixpack ?

I read it, but it all just made me feel dizzy!

Add self-serving & corrupt bankers and lawyers to that lot and you get my vote

That is wearing a face mask in public, it does not cover private pictures.

However: so that you can recognise me when we meet to plant our bomb at the embassy I have some pictures of me.

who persistently find in favour of the woman, ignoring the benefits that a father can bring to children: if mother does not want her ex-partner around the courts do little to help dad remain in the kids lives. She can break court orders with little penalty while dad is faced with huge legal bills and delays. The courts pretend to act in the best interests of the children - but really they are prejudiced in favour of mothers.

that I can sue the NSA for trying to crack my machines and that the USA will extradite the NSA employees to the UK so that they can be tried in our courts ? Do the people at the USA DOJ understand the meaning of the word ''irony'' ?

This is more outlandish than even something that most political satire writers would have dreamed up.

BT do not resell bandwidth to the Internet, it operates a packet switching network over ATM that connects you to your ISP. You ISP connects you to the Internet and might filter or throttle some sites. BT does not look inside the ATM packets that travel over its network and so does not throttle some traffic - in theory anyway.

BT also operates as an ISP which is probably where the confusion lies.

including other countries; I did not notice anything in the article restricting this to computers in the USA. Other countries might not agree with the USA DOJ allowing computers in their countries to be cracked -- thus the USA cops/investigators will be conducting criminal acts in other countries -- how does that make them different from what the USA wanted to grab Gary McKinnon for ?

your anaolgy does not work. PCs and mini-computers were fundementally different, applications written for one would, generally, not work on the other. When low end tablets become more powerful: AMD has the products to just slot in and take advantage. AMD has both x86 & ARM chips -- it even has one that does both!

The other thing to worry about is business relationships with the tablet vendors. AMD sells to many of them, so no problem there.

No, AMD is not locking itself out of this market.

by those selling ARM. So why should AMD compete ?

The project Alluvion site is approximately 8 miles east from the current Microsoft data center in West Des Moines

8 miles is not far. It is not too hard to envisage a disaster that could affect both sites at once. For starters: Iowa is smack in the middle of Tornado Alley. They are close enough that power supplies and Internet connections will be 'related'. OK: it makes it easier for staff to visit both sites, but 80 miles seems to me safer than 8.

The license used is:

"It basically says these seeds are free to use in any way you want. They can't be legally protected. Enjoy them."

This is a GPL type license. There is nothing to stop Monsanto from going to a farmer who is using these seeds and saying:

Pollen from one of our products blew in last year and so these seeds now contain some of our genes, so you now owe us for using these seeds and can't give it away to anyone.

The only way to deal with Monsanto is to beat them at their own game. One way would be to develop a seed with some novel genes (call them NoGe) and copyright these under something like the GPL. Then grow these seeds upwind of a Monsanto development facility; when, later, Monsanto then sue someone for illegal use of their seeds a NoGe 'owner' could testify that the Monsanto seeds must be allowed free to everyone use due to the 'viral nature' of the GPL. That legal punch up would be interesting to watch!