Well, having lived in London at the height of the IRA bombing campaign (a campaign which was, as I recall, supported actively by many Americans and tacitly by most of its politicians - terrorism is in the eye of the beholder) I can tell you that the threat level is a lot lower now than it was then when you couldn't so much as walk past a cast-iron post box on the street without wondering if it was imminently going to explode and eviscerate you. Not many bombings were preceded by warnings.

The Security Services were pretty much useless at preventing attacks. Despite their collusion in murder, use of inhumane and degrading treatment, internment and fitting-up numerous unfortunates innocent of everything but having an Irish accent. Or rather, because of these things, they were useless as they had no support in the community in which these attacks were planned.

Oh, but mass surveillance is going to be much more acceptable than hooding and beating the crap out of people, isn't it? No possibility of alienating an entire community just by spying on them, surely? Until people get fed up of the police knocking on their doors because they looked at the "wrong" website or have relatives in the wrong part of Pakistan and have been flagged as one of the many high number of false positives that are inevitable. Though of course the security services have mended their ways since the 1970s - no possibility of torture or political cover-ups since then - so those people have nothing to fear, right? Well, maybe there is a chance of history repeating itself,

Where there's acknowledged injustice and no interest in addressing it, you're bound to get terrorism. Much cheaper and more productive to fix the problems. Apart from that, the truly dangerous will stick out like a sore thumb when the majority are happily leading their daily lives without a sense of fear and oppression. How does mass surveillance contribute to that objective?

Meanwhile, I noticed on my visit last week to the medieval Dutch city of Amersfoort that every house in the historic city centre had an orange fibre tail outside the front door awaiting connection...

Attendance Allowance has not been replaced by DLA. AA is available to over 65's who need support in their daily living owing to illness or disability. It's a key benefit for elderly care. That said, the application process is lengthy and often requires supporting medical evidence so people tend to rely on charities such as Age UK to do it for them - I can't really believe that anyone would *want* to do this online.

They're not even patents necessarily describing what SIP does, they're really about providing a telephone service. One is a patent on rerouting calls between telephone exchanges in response to circuit failures defined in extremely old PSTN jargon ("tandem" exchanges are specifically mentioned). In the case of SIP, this is mostly going to be handled at the IP layer and not in the manner described, as far as I can tell. Another is a method for detecting whether conflicting features (eg call waiting and call forwarding on busy) have been selected for a particular customer line. They might potentially apply to anyone operating a telephone network (regardless of technology), but may equally not apply to everyone operating a telephone network. BT have taken this kind of thing to court before (the notorious hyperlink case), so the recipients of these licensing invitations not only need to evaluate 99 patents for potential infringement but factor in the cost of a potential defence.

Libel tourism in the UK has been an increasingly serious problem having a chilling effect on free speech around the world. It was only going to be a matter of time before the world realised how to exploit the broken US system of patents and civil law. The fix is to change the law, not to offer up a different target.

That's why smart people punched sequence numbers in columns 73-80. It helped if you had access to a card sorter, otherwise you'd incur machine time using the sort program to punch a new deck.

There was a lot of standalone electromechanical hardware (not just punches and sorters) to support punched card data processing - my mother (now 80) worked for a utility company in the 50s and alternated her time between doing data entry (card punch) and data verification - essentially retyping the data on a card verifier with the punched card in place to check the data entry was correct.

Actually, an early version of the IBM FORTRAN compiler (for a real computer) marked the cards according to the statement type on a lexical analysis pass and then sorted the cards by that field so it could load the compiler code that dealt with each particular type of statement in turn (the computer having very little memory). The generated code was then resorted to match the original program card sequence.

...the letters "B-Ark" should be distinctly visible.

I did do some reading before posting, so I do have some understanding of what the project has achieved. In this specific case, there is an opportunity to optimise because the virtualisation host is providing most of the services you need including an emulated standard network controller and disk controller. However it's not correct to draw the conclusion (as the OP did) that this is the case for a general virtualisation workload - if you need access to a wider range of physical devices or you need to co-ordinate service provision across multiple virtual machines, for example, you're going to end up with something that looks a lot like a guest OS, whatever you choose to call it. I'm not questioning the project's goals or achievements, but the fact that some virtualised servers might have very lightweight requirements for traditional OS services does not justify the proposition "Virtual servers in the future may stop using OSes entirely". And I'm pointing out that, historically, simplified solutions seem gradually and quietly to regrow the complexity they loudly shed.

What part of "there is a specific set of applications of the industrial control type that can run hardwired into interrupt vectors and physical address space" are you trying to contradict?

I have in front of me a Cambridge University Computer Science Tripos examination paper from June 1975. Question 7 reads:

"Computer operating systems are very complicated things whose purpose is to help people to share the use of equipment. They will become largely obsolete as the equipment becomes cheap enough not to need sharing". Discuss the prescience or wrongheadedness of this remark.

This was long before the personal computer which came along later and initially more or less dispensed with the traditional operating system for more or less the reason stated. And as personal computers became more powerful and cheaper and even less intended for sharing, they pretty much all came to run an operating system with multi-user security, process scheduling, protection rings, paging, layered device driver architectures that would be familiar to someone who knew MULTICS or OS/360 with TSO.

Now, there will be a specific set of applications, particularly those whose only I/O operations happen across a network, whose operating system requirements may be sufficiently limited they can be inherited from a parent virtual machine - just as there is a specific set of applications of the industrial control type that can run hardwired into interrupt vectors and physical address space. However, to suggest that virtual servers in general in the future may be able to do away with OSs is contrary to historical precendent. And insane.

I have a perpetual motion machine and am seeking investors. I take it you'll be subscribing?

... I wonder what other people of my age have been doing so wrong that they still need employment - they've had careers with salaries and conditions that noone is ever going to get in the future and ought to have been banking that while the going was good.

On the rare occasion I stray back into a "real" business to do a bit of consulting, I feel like I'm walking into a kindergarten: it's all competitive attention seeking and fingerpainting (sorry, Powerpoint).

I would feel desperately sorry for a younger generation if they thought they were going to have to be in that environment all their lives - but mainly because it would demonstrate a lack of ambition and foresight. You really ought to have some control over your own destiny by the time you reach your 50s. If you haven't, you've wasted the last 30-odd years.

All the court has decided, it appears, is that the copyright owners don't have a "proprietary" right to the proceeds of infringement. That's a specific form of legal shortcut to seizing assets. The issue of whether there is a valid claim is still proceeding, just not using that specific legal mechanism. No decision has been made on anyone's entitlement to anything, except the entitlement of a copyright owner to make a particular form of legal submission.

Actually, no.

IPv6 failed the moment that the IETF decided that Not Invented Here was more important than fixing the problem. Had the original IAB recommendation been adopted, we'd be on to IPv8 by now. The window of opportunity to manage a transition before there really was a "consumer" internet was lost.

It's not just a problem with ISP's penny-pinching - most of the consumer routing kit supplied to date doesn't do IPv6 and to the extent that consumers have any technical knowledge at all, it's a recognition of the pattern "192.168.x.y".

The logisitics of doing this the official way are so horrendous, it's hardly surprising that ISPs are looking at any alternative, however unattractive.

Not PC and not relevant either.

Society is also a genetic construct that has (co-)evolved. If the current shape of society results in a poorer survival rate for people, then either people will die out or people in a different form of society will eventually become more numerous. In any case, we won't know the evolutionary effect of a change in societal behaviour for many generations, so it's probably better to optimise for present well-being rather than contemplate sacrificing (other) people for a hypothetical benefit to future generations that most likely will not occur and which none of us will see.

Just a bit of background to set the context for this.

English* Universities depend very heavily on the income from overseas students as the total funding from English students (fees + government grants) does not, allegedly, meet the costs of the education provided. It's also now the only growth area for student recruitment (applications from English students were down around 10% this year as fees have risen steeply). The last I heard, Newcastle University was building on its campus a college for overseas students of 16+ to improve recruitment rates to the University itself for those same students when they reached 18.

The current government, on the other hand, is committed to substantially reducing immigration levels which it is finding very hard to do - the Eurozone financial situation means that immigration from Europe is increasing (and EU treaties require the free movement of people) and clamping down on overseas students is seen as an easy short-term win. There's been a big argument between Universities and the government about whether students should count in the immigration figures at all (since most of them leave at the end of their courses) which was resolved only in September (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9541141/Foreign-students-to-be-marked-out-in-immigration-figures.html) with a compromise which keeps student numbers under very close review.

Universities fear increasingly tight controls on studying in the UK might dissuade students from enrolling and are increasingly starting to open overseas campuses (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=415018) which have the potential additional benefit of tapping the market for those who don't have the resources to relocate for their education. There is talk in some institutions that serving UK students may become an incidental consequence of their academic activities rather than an institutional goal.

It's in the midst of this ongoing policy shift - withdrawing government money from universities then encouraging them to make it up overseas and then tightening up on student visas - that Universities find themselves trapped. They need the money, so they need the visas, so they have to do what the governnment requires to get them. And while government funding for undergraduates may no longer be significant, Univeristies still depend heavily on government funding for their postgraduate programmes, which is where they get their reputations from. So don't expect any crusades from the moral high ground.

*Somewhat different situation in Scotland and Wales