I think you overestimate the capabilities and patience of a large percentage of the population of the UK. I think these actions will shut down 80% of the movie sharing. It is a right royal pain in the bum, and personally I think the MPAA just don't understand that any action they take will have unintended consequences, but on the whole, it will have the effect they desire - most of the traffic will be gone.

They should just be careful what they wish for.

Scope is a must. Imagine a surgeon operating on anyone these days without Diagnostic Imaging.
HP 3312A Sig Gen (bought broken off *bay, fixed it)
HP 5385A Frequency Meter (bought broken off *bay, fixed it)
HP 54502A 400Mhz dual trace digital scope (bought broken off *bay, fixed it)
Homebrew GPIB adapter!
dual PSU (bought broken off *bay, fixed it)
DVM (bought broken off *bay, fixed it)
Open Logic Sniffer for a logic analyser
Multiple small USB-based toys
multiple small multimeters, going from tiny hand-held Chinese 4.5 digit autoranging one to an Avo 8 and an Avo Multiminor
SMT rework station
Weller soldering iron
Good old fashioned EPROM/EEPROM/GAL/PAL programmer

Small problem with your sig there ..

Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at isohunt.com

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ will find you a page where you can mail your MP and they will answer. I complained to my MP about the police use of Terror laws to detain David Miranda, and I know it got to him as he replied. He did reply saying it was a police matter and nothing to do with Parliament, but hell, it struck home! Power to the People ..

I recall when IBM introduced the IBM AT Keyboard (84-key keyboard, with function keys down the left hand side where &deity. intended) they also introduced the 'System Request' key, intended as a non-maskable attention grabbing key. I don't think that was ever used either - though it did propagate into the 101/102 key keyboards later. Those of us who remember teletypes will recall the attention / break key as well - which never worked, trying to get attention on a round-robin timeshare system was always a pain - you kept getting timed out if you were a slow typist, and had to wait your turn ..

It was exactly this point about anti-competitive practices that made sure IBM did not patent the PS/2 mini-DIN Connector. Hello, we even agonised for months over whether we should bundle the mouse with the computer or not, since that might be seen to exclude fair competition. Trying to balance between shipping a product that was complete, and would work when it arrived and ensuring that competitors had a fair chance at shipping their product in the place of one of IBMs was difficult, when IBM was a behemoth trying to be good.

I had to fax my timesheets to an agency not so long ago .. got the old dial-up modem out, found a power supply for it, plugged it in, installed software, found a phone cable that actually worked .. all because my printer had run out of paper for me to walk to the fax machine with ..

Me too. By the way, I got myself a new permanent job at the age of 57, so no real problem in getting hired. I need a job to support my disabled wife, my stepson who is a bankrupt and my grandsons, as well as the rest of the family. Work has very little to do with supporting me.

Surely even fibre cables need active (viz, electronic) repeaters every so often? Wouldn't that be the sensible place to install a tee junction to listen to the traffic as well?

Surely anyone worth their salt would just put their data in the Cloud, and password-protect it? Ah, just remembered it is illegal in the UK not to remember a password when the Authorities want you to decrypt something - punishable by itself with 2 years imprisonment - not to mention obstruction and all of the other offences they could mention.

I use X all the time at home - over the wireless, over wires. I run a whole bunch of applications from the Linux machine in the office to my MacBook. Running Eagle is really slick, but it does go a little slow reading presentations ..

.. and if he were to disappear, do you think anyone in public office would give a wet slap? We've had a steady stream of nuclear scientists, environmental scientists and people working in the field of genetics to die in mysterious circumstances over the years, and once they disappear it doesn't take long for the memories to fade.

I wonder how many of the software technologies that these agencies are using, have their roots in open source? Hadoop? Hbase? Hive? Mahout? It would be nice to see them publishing their developments back to the Open Source communities.

day we celebrate Thanksgiving in England .. ;-)

And before anybody says it, CADAM was 2D - it was Dassault who extended it to CATIA / CAEDS which added the all-important third dimension.