>terminals and PCs w(h)ere common in 1983

No they weren't.

The IBM PC was introduced in 1981. You couldn't do much with it, certainly not much related to mainframe programming. They were very expensive for what they did. Minicomputers existed, but they also didn't cross over mainframe territory.

People with heavy data processing requirements were mostly using DOS/VSE on S/370 and 4300 mainframes. No timesharing in DOS. It was still extremely common in industry to have people sitting with coding forms that were then passed to data preparation teams for punching. I've sat with teams painstakingly writing DOS JCL onto coding sheets.

If you were a larger user that could justify the investment in MVS, you could potentially use the Time Sharing Option, an interactive environment with a reputation for being cumbersome and inefficient - you'd only extend the "luxury "of using it to a comparatively few select people.

Computer time was also extremely expensive. Cambridge University wrote their own version of timesharing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_%28computer%29) for their (early) S/370 in order to support a larger number of users and time on it was still so restricted that usage was "priced" to reflect demand at different times of day and CS students would either have to work at 3am or make extensive use of cards or other offline data entry to get their projects completed within the allocated budget.

Whereas there were minicomputers and early personal computers around, they were scarcely to be seen in what was still the predominant environment of the computer industry - the (IBM) mainframe shop.

Actually, the British government tended to prefer homegrown procurement and more of its staff were likely to be working with George 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEORGE_%28operating_system%29), which had a far better interactive environment than IBM offered.

For the same reason they're so keen on guns and against healthcare - the populus been induced into a state of perpetual fear so that it might more easily be manipulated. And fear needs to be fed.

And even for the unwilling, there's very little moral determination that can't be diluted with sufficient money.

Of course, if women don't have children, the near future for most of us is pretty bleak - no income, no services, no food.

There's a clear societal benefit in both enouraging women to work and to have children - until such time as they're grown in jars.

The issue here seems to be that the necessary cost of doing that is unfairly and randomly dumped on employers who will likely, whatever the legal position, attempt to minimise their exposure to risk. It's really a cost that needs to be born from general taxation.

This is the same Vint Cerf who opined recently that "privacy may be an anomaly" and "[our] experience with privacy is a result of our own behavior".

It's precisely because such people are so keen to work on stuff they "couldn't share ... with friends" that their friends find themselves the target of what they've developed.

There's a UK rail service that uses this technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

And people who are secretly resentful, and people who are keeping their noses clean until they have worked their way into a position useful to their foreign handlers.

The more you seek to eliminate the people of whom you might be suspicious, the greater becomes the proportion of the people left who are either disaffected or "not suspicious" as a result of knowing how your "suspicions" are aroused.

Merry Contemporary England still has a system in which the power of the government is theoretically delegated from the Sovereign whose authority is established by divine right.

The Founding Fathers' descendants still have a system based on the quasi-divine right of the constitution.

One has GCHQ, the other has the NSA.

Using only one side of the paper, explain how the "US Concept" to which you refer makes a material difference to "The People".

>It's the one Jewish school that they pick on.

No, it isn't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...

However, one Jewish reference gets the propaganda industry into full swing.

But as I read it, the issue seems to arise from the fact that HTTP2 will permit TLS to be used with both http: and https: URLs. If it is used for http: URLs, then existing proxy and caching mechanisms will simply break. I think this is a proposal for "trused proxies" to be permitted where an http: URL is in use and TLS is also employed, I don't think it's proposed that this should apply to https: URLs.

In other words, it doesn't make things any worse than the current situation (where http: URLS are retrieved in plain text all the time) and does permit the user to control whether they want some protection against interception or potentially better performance. And it doesn't appear to change the situation for https: at all.

Or that's how it appears to me.

The fact that judges have opinions that are regarded as controversial doesn't always mean that their opinions cannot be predicted to be pro-government in specific cases. Laws has already made it very clear that whereas it may be that certain countries see the judiciary as a check on state actions, in Britain there is:

a deep sense that matters of state policy are in essence the responsibility of the elected arms of government

In other words, it was quite predictable that he would side with the executive in this matter. That's probably not a coincidence, either.

It has been a tradition in the UK for courts to refuse to intervene in executive decisions made on "security" grounds, with the justification that as the courts have no access to classified materials, they can't come to a judgment about whether the decision was properly made.

The rather notorious judge Lord Denning summed this up quite nicely in his decision supporting the deporation from the UK of US journalist Mark Hosenball for daring to mention the existence of GCHQ in an article for Time Out magazine:

They [the executive] have never interfered with the liberty or the freedom of movement of any individual except where it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the state. In this case we are assured that the Home Secretary himself gave it his personal consideration, and I have no reason whatever to doubt the care with which he considered the whole matter. He is answerable to Parliament as to the way in which he did it and not to the courts here.

The extent of his cognitive dissonance can be seen from his prefacing remarks:

In some parts of the world national security has on occasions been used as an excuse for all sorts of infringements of individual liberty. But not in England.

In other words, Denning (and two other judges on the bench concurred) was simulaneously of the opinion that every judgment the government had ever made in the past in curtailing liberty was justified; that the Home Secretary was above challenge in a court of law; and that England was a bastion of individual liberty.

With judges like that, courts are essentially redundant.

Incidentally, in a judgment on an attempt by the Birmingham Six (whose convictions as IRA bombers were finally quashed) to sue the police for beatings they received before finally confessing, Denning said:

If the six men win, it will mean . . . that the convictions were erronoeous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would either have to recommend they be pardoned or he would have to remit the case to the Court of Appeal . . . This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say it cannot be right that these actions should go any further.

So, don't look to the law if you want justice.

It's not people who work for a living that are at particular risk, it's people who work for a living AND have ordered their affairs in such a way that even a short absence of work would result in financial disaster.

Fortunately for employers, most people do arrange their lives in this way. It's easy to see why - you can have your house, car, wife and 2 veg, shiny stuff and the occasional vacation at the time you feel entitled to them, rather than when you're old, jaded and impotent. Of course, the more stuff you acquire on credit or contract to pay for in endless monthly installments, the more jobs of precisely this kind become available and the more money there is for the people who employ them.

It's not even a new phemomenon, back in the days of the company store, it would be well stocked with alcohol at the end of the week so that the workers' wages would be in till by the end of the weekend and the penniless workers would have no choice but to be in work bright and early on Monday morning.

If more people had a "fuck you" buffer in their finance stream, the employment experience would be very different. Most people, though, don't even consciously think about their leap into premature indebtedness and most of those that do would take the badge rather than feel they were "reduced" to using public transport or drinking water from the tap.

I was confronted by this problem about 15 years ago when I was asked by a listings magazine to provide them with a system that would allow the input not only of community events, but theatre performances, film showings, exhibitions etc. and then use this data to automatically lay out their print as fell as feed their emerging website.

I did an extensive search of software available at the time and nothing really cut it and had to develop something from scratch. Although it's easy for one-off events, when it comes to events that repeat every alternate Tuesday except at half-term and you want to show them precisely once in a listing of events occuring over an arbitrary period (rather than once for each occurrence), it's a really tricky problem to solve. Even finding a data representation which can be searched in a reasonable time is hard - scouring through thousands of iCalendar files isn't a solution. Finding a workable user interface that allows the entry of the whole range of wacky recurrence rules is harder still. In the end, I compromised and did the whole thing by date only, leaving times (e.g. a film that might run at 14:00, 16:00, 18:30 and 21:00) to be recorded simply in the text description of the event. And I didn't have to bother with time zones, daylight savings times, etc.

Although I'm now retired, they're still using my software from 15 years ago and I occasionally have to dig out the documentation to pass on to the next IT company they appoint, promising to come up with a more modern solution and finally thinking better of it.

If you did put in all the work to create a completely generic solution, potential users would just turn round and complain it was too complicated for their very specific subset of needs. So people create solutions that meet specific requirements that then don't work for other people.

Quite. I have just received from Linked In a message that: "McAfee, Verizon and AT&T are looking for candidates like you". I now loathe myself for apparently exhibiting qualities they appreciate...