If the police can demand a decryption key, then presumably they can legally demand actual decryption. E.g., if you encrypt with an algorithm for which they have no software (maybe one you invented yourself), then I suspect that they can demand that you provide the plaintext, not just the key.

If the police may demand plaintext, then they can probably demand that the plaintext data be rendered into a form intelligible to humans. A non-technical person might not distinguish the decryption from the rendering, and therefore it's possible that the law might be interpreted this way even if the wording is specific to encryption. Therefore any attempt to conceal or destroy the data would be legally equivalent to refusing to provide the encryption key.

IANAL and haven't read the text of the relevant UK act; it may not work like this. But if it does, then anyone with digital archives could be in deep shit. If you have data files you can't read because they're in a custom format and you lost the parser (and that's just about every science department of every university, for starters), then the authorities might consider them equivalent to a refusal to decrypt.

(This is speculative. Please tell me I'm wrong in this conclusion.)

"Also, stop talking about programs being "stable." Isotopes are "stable." Programs either run well, or are buggy."

Point of detail: users care a lot about true stability.

For argument's sake, define stability of a program as meaning that it always does the same thing for the same inputs and does something incrementally different for incrementally-different inputs. An unstable program is one that goes wrong at random, or for insignificant changes in the input; e.g. a contact list that accept all names except that it crashes if a name has an apostrophe.

For a user - me, for instance - instability is far worse than a feature that consistently broken. If something just doesn't work I try it once and then avoid it; but if it randomly blows my work away it's utterly toxic.

Developers in general seem to care more about fixing repeatably-broken features than unstable one, and this is exactly the wrong approach to satisfy users.

In the UK, many Sat-Nav destinations are programmed by entering the post code (which is specific to ~10 houses here). Some Sat-Navs, particularly the ones used by delivery firms, map our post code, for our house in rural Devon, to the wrong village entirely, sending the trucks up some pretty dodgy roads to a place where there aren't any locals to ask.

Sure, people don't entirely trust these things. But it's for practical reasons, not because of the angsty bullshit in TFA.

The government exists to disburse funds for paving roads etc., not to directly employ those who do the work. It's the way of collecting the money, sharing the cost across the citizenry, avoiding the arguments about who pays for what and making sure that everybody can get the essential services. In my part of the UK, government hires contractors for just about all the work, so the private sector is happy.

If government didn't mediate the service work, imagine the arguments about who pays for which bit of road. And just imagine the stink if you get poor and can't pay to get your garbage collected.

Correct. And the PRS is a British organization, so the deal is national rather than international.

Loading time depends strongly on the number of NetBeans modules. With the default modules only, my current copy of NetBeans starts about as fast as my Eclipse on the same host. My old copy of NetBeans 5.5, which has loads of might-be-interesting modules, loads very slowly.

Your mileage has definitely varied.

In the astronomy department where I work, LaTeX is not only dominant, it is mandatory. Some journals and conference series will only accept papers in LaTeX, and some of the technical projects have standardized on LaTeX: one writes about software in LaTeX because others on the same project need to write maths.

It's a pity, because LaTeX is not well suited to writing short documents about software. If the maths editor in Word 2010 is really good, then I foresee a move away from LaTeX on new projects.

5. Right not to testify against yourself such a being compelled to hand over a cryptographic key. ...

Is that the best analogy? Providing the key seems more like allowing lawful search of premises under the terms of a warrant.

He's presuming that many commercial users of the product would pay the royalties if they could get a license without paying legal fees. They would cease to be pirates.

I agree that this scheme has no effect on willful pirates. I don't think it's meant to address that. The Slashdot summary exaggerates that aspect.

I have contacts at the European Southern Observatory where the security copy of their archive is on disconnected hard-drives. Based on in-house tests, they reckon that the drives last very well provided that they are spun up at least once per year. If they are left unpowered for longer than that they tend to die.

In a ATM, the crucial work is being done back in a data centre, probably on a mainframe using software signed off by an archangel or higher authority. Much less scope for fuck-ups by the ATM maker. Further, bank presumably own the source to the back-end software, so can inspect it; details of transactions can be verified. Further still, the testing process for the whole system has to involve the bank (or their contractors other than the ATM vendor). It's not just a black box

I'm glad we had libraries before copyright lawyers.

Did we? I'd always thought that public, lending libraries were a 19th-century sort of thing. Wikipedia reckons that copyright was introduced in the 18th century.

It wasn't Straw who was conned. It was one of his constituency workers (according to the report on C4 news).