I'd counter that by saying that supporting publishers that over-restrict the public's rights is immoral.

DRM removal is covered by the European Union *COPYRIGHT* Directive, and the US's Digital Millennium *COPYRIGHT* Act.

No, these resources aren't available to her at all. Also, IT departments don't get involved in writing code for analysing data - they do stuff like imaging Windows machines, etc.

Her time is better spent doing "doctor" stuff, not sitting behind a computer coding. (Unless it was her hobby of course..)

The work in question is actually a mandatory part of her job.

Very much depends on what you're doing. If you're writing stuff that's going to be used by other people (possibly networked) then yes, there is potential for danger. More commonly, we're talking about a quickly hacked up bit of code to process some one-off data, which carries very little danger.

While I agree to some extent, I think you do need to give kids the initial push into trying something they have never done before - for the most part, unless it is a universally fun activity, people won't see how they could enjoy something until they've actually had a serious go at it.

I'm not sure why it should be elective at younger ages when other classes are not. e.g. when I was at school (before starting my GCSEs), I was _required_ to do art, music and French(*), all of which I was terrible at, and I'd argue were far less useful than some basic CS stuff.

(*) I'm actually in favor of teaching a second language to kids, and this has been shown to be a big help with mental development too. However, the current system here is to only start teaching a second language in secondary school, by which point it is way too late.

I don't think I've seen any kids doing hunt-and-peck for decades. Given that kids have access to computers from a very young age, they learn to type fast naturally, no need to teach this.

Whilst most jobs don't _require_ coding skills, a lot of them would be done more efficiently if people had those skills. I would argue that knowing some basics about coding is probably more useful to the "average person" than a large chunk of the history, biology, maths, art, geography, etc. classes that we send kids to today.

Of course, what's "most useful" shouldn't be the only criteria used in education - giving someone a well rounded education is also an excellent idea, but I think it's hard to argue that teaching people some basic coding skills wouldn't also fit into that.

You could say the same about a lot of subjects though - do children _have_ to understand maths, history, geography, art, music, etc? However, having a broad education is a Good Thing. Furthermore, being able to write simple code can be a massive help in many non-coding jobs.

For example, my wife is a hospital doctor - probably the last thing you'd expect that job to need is coding skills. However, she needs to do audits over records occasionally, and I end up writing simple Python scripts for her to process the data - she has no coding skills, so without me to do that she would be spending hours doing stuff manually that I can write code in minutes to do. She tells me that her IT classes at secondary school were almost entirely taken up by teaching about the health and safety concerns related to using computers, rather than actually learning how to use them. I'm 5 years older (which puts me in the BBC/Acorn era) and my GCSE level IT classes taught me some basics about word processors, databases, etc, but no coding - I learnt to code in my own time. Being _taught_ to code didn't happen until A levels in my case, by which time anyone who isn't planning to have a career in computing or electronics has opted out in favor of other subjects.

I've been wondering for a while whether the affected ISPs would have cause to sue the government/courts/publishers for compensation as a result of losing customers due to the enforced filtering (which doesn't apply to smaller ISPs). TTIP sounds like it would open up that possibility if they can't already...

My take on this is that if I'm required to infringe copyright on a legally purchased product in order to make sensible use of it, why should I actually purchase it instead of just infringing copyright and getting it for free from a torrent?

For the record, I don't do either - I've steered away from ebooks entirely until the publishers stop taking the piss. Since books were invented there have been various generally accepted things that everyone did with them that ebooks don't allow you to do: e.g. if I buy a paper book, I can read it, then pass it on to my wife to read, lend it to a friend to read, stick it on the book shelf for years, then hand it onto kids to read, who can hand it onto their kids, or I can sell it, etc. Compare to the T&Cs of Google Play (as an example) which say that I'm not even allowed to lend my tablet to my wife so that she could read an ebook I purchased, let alone actually transfer it to someone else's device. When I can get ebooks with the same rights as I have for paper books, I'll think about buying some.

The problem there is that you end up cutting short important stuff to stay on-schedule. Thankfully, where I work now (my own company) I just arrange ad-hoc meetings and hammer details out till we're done, which is very productive; but I used to work for $large_multinational and meetings where we got into a detailed discussion about something really important only to have the chairperson halt the discussion to prevent the meeting getting off-schedule were the norm. The result: meetings were so superficial that they were useless, because they never got down to the nitty-gritty detail that actually _needed_ to be discussed. The same goes for anything that demands the meeting stay on some kind of a schedule - i.e. multiuser meeting rooms where you're required to wrap up you meeting by a specific time so the next person it's booked to can start theirs.

1. Limit what you're going to cover in the meeting - spending an hour hammering out a single detailed design point is better than having a uselessly superficial discussion on 20 points.
2. Limit who's going to be in the meeting - if you're discussing 10 different things and one of those things needs an extra person, schedule a separate meeting for that one thing rather than either wasting that person's time or abandoning discussions in order to stay on schedule.
3. Figure out if a meeting is actually the best plan - it might be that a good chunk of the discussion would be better done by email, which gives time for people to research their arguments and present them in a more coherent way.
4. Ensure everyone has plenty of "overrun time" so you can extend the meeting unexpectedly. i.e. if you're expecting to spend the 2 hours after the meeting doing some coding then that's fine since you can just postpone the coding, but if you're expecting to have to drive off to see a customer right at the end of the meeting then you're screwed if you're not on time.
6. Make sure everyone has plenty of information to prepare with before the meeting (another good reason for having detailed email discussions first!).

Well, right up until the Daily Mail gets blocked... and given how offensive the lies the DM peddle are, it really should by any kind of "offensive content" filter.

Networks are allocated as /64 chunks because it makes autoconfiguration easy. It is often argued by newcomers that this is a huge waste, but really, 128 bits gives you so many addresses that you can stand to do a bit of wasting in order to make things simple. Generally the "what a waste" crowd severely underestimate just how big 128 bits is.

Yes and no. You _can_ allocate networks smaller than a /64, but you can't use SLAAC on such networks. That means you're stuck manually configuring devices or using DHCPv6. I believe Android has no support for DHCPv6, so you're probably very restricted if you choose to use a nonstandard network size.

Oddly enough, yes - ISPs really shouldn't be restricting your internal infrastructure. If your ISP is being a dick about this then the answer is pretty obvious - switch to another ISP, it isn't as if ISPs are thin on the ground.

Its undesirable in _some_ cases, it's absolutely required in others. So if you have a single IP address and you have to NAT everything, you win in the "some cases" situation and you lose for "others" (even worse with CGNAT). If you get rid of NAT and stick a stateful firewall in, you get the best of both worlds and can choose the best for the situation at hand.

That attitude is definitely wrong. The warm fuzzyness you're currently feeling is false security - lots of ways to trick a NAT into giving access to internal machines that you think are unaddressable. What you need is a stateful firewall - that gives you real security without breaking all the stuff that NAT does.

/64 is only big enough for a single network. /48s were quite common for a while, then recommendations were for ISPs to issue /56 to end users. There is no specific recommendation these days, but you certainly want to have more than a /64 if you can. I'd argue that /60 is a pretty reasonable size for a consumer grade ISP to hand out.. maybe /62 at a push, but that's starting to feel unreasonably scrimpy.