By the way, thanks for the foot note for "Merkins", we need it 'cause we ain't got no learin in these parts.
Well, I just thought that people might not know the term, is all...
In reply to everyone else, the bloke I knew who did the Churchill level was an economist who came up in 1994. I don't think he's ever released it to the public. It doesn't surprise me that other people did one too given that Churchill is techie-land.
There's a Churchill College Quake level which one of my friends did instead of revising. Since Churchill is largely brown it's quite realistic.
I once got a mail from a friend who said he'd been in the Moller Centre and felt like he was in a Quake level. He claimed he'd run into some of the Churchill fellows[1] while in there, and had escaped alive, but with no ammo left.
[1] Note for Merkins: "fellow" is like a professor in the US, I think.
I went to a state school, middle class parents, working class grandparents. I've now got a MSci in physics from Cambridge.
Hey, me too.
F*****g hard it was too.
Amen to that.
Not bitter because we was too stupid to get in are we?
Possibly, or maybe he/she was trolling. Or believed the media hype about Laura Spence. There's a nice take on that incident here.
One of the American physicists at Churchill who did her MPhil here said that the US system was broader but less in depth, FWIW (this was largely in reference to the level of mathematics in the Cambridge course).
I first posted about it 30 minutes after installing it and finding the bug in the system.
There's no bug in the system (if by system you mean Python). There are multiple postings pointing out that
from os import * is a Bad Thing(TM). I suppose that the fact it's allowed at all could be considered a bad feature of the language, but it does exactly what it's advertised as doing, so it's not a bug.
open requires the full path, which you're not giving it.
It's worth remembering that on the overwhelming majority of occasions, when you think you've found a bug in the language/compiler/whatever, you just don't understand your program well enough (Kernighan and Pike say this in the chapter on Debugging in The Practice of Programming).
(Now everyone will reply with anecdotes about finding compiler bugs...)
Python can't seem to do this. Unfortunately, that is a major drawback since most other major languages CAN do that.
Bzzt. Wrong.
Try prepending the path of the directory you told it to list to the filename you're telling it to open. You're listing / and then trying to open a filename from there in the current directory. Not surprisingly, this fails.
Top tip: don't use from foo import *, it can lead to name collisions.
I do think there is some validity to the notion that the moral decline in our country is very much due to the mindsets of people who have abandoned any Code, who forsake all religion, just because the primary religion observed in our country (Christianity, but you knew that) for such a long period of time was realized to be tainted with holes, contradictions, and hypocrisy. This strikes me as throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I've been thinking the same thing for some time. A code to live by is important. Spirituality is also important. I know religion is not for everyone, but there is also a lot to be learned from non-religious philosophies (eg: Taoism) that help people put things in perspective. Good role models also help.
I've just read Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age again. In the book, the societies which have unifying beliefs and social norms are those which do well. I think Stephenson is right (he makes a similar point in Cryptonomicon, in relation to Christianity explicitly).
Of course, the reason for believing any given thing should be because you think it is true and good, not because you think it will benefit society. But ISTM that good belief system will have benefit the society which believes it. Stephenson envisages people realising these benefits and choosing to live in a society which has rules and in which it is OK to say that some things are right and other things are wrong.
What put me in mind of Stephenson was the discussion on hypocrisy further up the thread. There's a nice bit in the book where the point is made that if you want to say someone is bad but you've got a relativist viewpoint, the only thing you can do is accuse someone of hypocrisy. (I'd add "intolerance" too, especially when it is used as a code word for merely saying that some things are good and others bad). That's why hypocrisy and intolerance are seen as the worst possible sins today, I suppose: there are no others left.
Note: I'm not saying hypocrisy and intolerance are good things, but there are worse things which seem to be taken for granted. Materialism and selfishness, for example.
RIP doesn't ban crypto content (eg crypto software). It puts in place a legal framework for interception and key disclosure. If Sealand really is independent, it won't have to comply with RIP.
Of course the onshore receivers for the microwave transmitters would have to comply (assuming that they'll be in the UK: ISTR microwave transmitters work on the line of sight).
Unless they are an independant state they in fact can't simply make up rules and regulations as they go along. However if they were an independent state they are certainly not a signatory to WIPO on which the US DMCA is based. Either way the MPAA has no case.
Neither Oxford nor Cambridge are independant states (cool idea, but I'm not sure where the borders would be as both universities are located within the cities: there is no campus as such). Some Cambridge University statues some kind of legal status, ISTR, but I don't remember the details.
The point is that when you enter the university you sign up to obey the Statues and Ordinances of the university. This includes their policy on computing equipment. Hence you have very little recourse if they yank your pages because they're about to cost the university time and money.
One thing I do remember is that some of the Statues at Cambridge specifically relate to the protection of free speach. I can't remember any more information that that, however. Anyone else know?
Every time I read a history of a programme and find a line "completely re-wrote the code", I begin having second thougths about how really good the programme is.
Really? You might want a complete re-write for a couple of reasons:
Often the best way to get a handle on a problem is to write a prototype. ISTR this is what's behind Fred Brooks' saying "Plan to throw one away: you will, anyhow."
Refactoring because the desired functionality changed and there was then a much better way to implement the remainder.
With the ever-faster-growing complexity of programmes, it becomes more and more difficult for humans, even aided with computers, to keep track of the project. But if you teach everyone how the computer logic works, the programming would become only about writing the necessary simple code (ha! hackers, get this!).
I don't understand your point here. What do you mean by computer logic in this context?
There are ways of expressing solutions to problems (different programming languages, CASE tools and so on) which are well suited to particular problems, but there are no magic bullets.
I personally think that under the circumstances it would be a good idea to open source the software behind it.
Does it use those funny text filter things: there's one for Biff, one for Jive, one for Valley Girl, and so on? I've got them sitting in/usr/games on my Debian box (though I can't remember the package name, maybe I'll ask dpkg when I get home). If so I imagine they're already open source. It'd be a minimal amount of work to hook that up to a web-page: I suppose you'd need to make sure it left tags alone, but that's about it.
Anybody know their real name?, if they are in the UK then what they have done is WAY Illegal under the data protection act, assuming that the information they have collected could be considered personal data (not entirely sure about that, but it would seem to be).
Doesn't matter what their real name is, that's for the DPA to find out. There is an MP3P registered as a limited company with Companies House, but there's a different address given there, so maybe it's not the same people.
If you get on to the DPA about something, they're generally helpful although slow to respond. If you're British and your account gets cancelled as a result of the actions of this company, send the DPA a snail mail. Might do some good. That said, my experience with the DPA (in dealing with a British spammer) is that they're not too clued about the Internet and in general they don't have a lot of teeth. But this experience was before the EU law got incorporated into British law, so things may have changed now.
Paula Nancy isn't a real person. The name in the radio series is someone called Paul Neil Johnston (or something like that) who was at school with Adams, I think. Don't Panic says that the name was changed for the books after he complained.
Costs which will probably run to the hundreds of thousands, of course, barristers costing what they do. Oh well, the rest of my article was right, anyway.
How does one retrieve a document? You have to know it's title and/or keywords, plug them into a client, and here it comes?
I'd invisage people putting in an index when they submit a collection of files, so you'd know where to find related stuff, and publishing the location of this index by other means. People could collect these indexes together into meta-indexes: it'd be a bit like Yahoo or something. It would then be possible to crawl through these links and do an Altavista. It is going to be more difficult than the web though (and the current lack of crypto signed updates would make updating the index impossible: that's a bit of a pain).
If not searchable, how does IT find stuff in itself? (To anthropomorphize a bit.)
A recent (and misguided IMHO) court case in the UK ended with Demon Internet (an ISP) being held liable for a libelous usenet post originating from one of their home customers. Demon were ordered to pay a large (I believe about 400K - but this is from memory so don't quote me) settlement.
Demon weren't ordered to pay anything. They settled out of court, presumably because they realised they were going to lose. They settled for 15 Kpounds plus costs.
Demon have argued for common carrier status, but don't yet have it. I think the reason for this is that the Government don't understand the technical difficulties in monitoring the volume of traffic that passes though Demon's systems.
Note that common carrier is a technical term under UK law which does not mean what you think it does (I found this out because I posted to uk.net and uk.legal using this term: see this article for details). It's best not to use the term in discussions on UK law.
To link this comment in - I don't think FreeNet stand a cowboy's chance in a nuclear explosion of getting common carrier status.
Who cares? Freenet has gone as far as they can in terms of plausible deniability by encrypting the stuff on the servers, but in any case, Demon's problem was that they could not use the innocent dissemination defence because they did not remove the material when requested. If you're running a Freenet node in the UK, all you do is remove something when you're asked to. This will have a minimal effect on the rest of the Freenet, of course, but that's the problem of the person threatening to sue you.
A more interesting question is what happens when you remove something when you're asked to and then you end up caching it again. I suppose server owners might want the option not to cache data (or data and links, if you're Demon) for particular keys. That said, all that happens then is someone resubmits under another key.
On the next hand, the rallying call of slashdot and e-commerce is: "Keep the government out!" but then with one issue, such as spam, all of a sudden the rallying call is for more laws. Go one way or the other, I'd say."
Alas, the government has made it illegal for someone to bring down the spammers' dialup connections (winnuke, pings with ATH and so on) or websites. Given that the goverment has already intervened to this degree, if we want protection from spam the government is going to have to provide it, ISTM. The Internet isn't really a true anarchy.
If i found someone online that i went to highschool with and emailed them "hello!" would that be spam, since it wasn't solicited?
No, since spam is unsolicited bulk email.
If i sent a notice of a class reunion to my entire high school class, again is that spam or not? Could it be spam for the people that didn't like me, but not in the case of the ones that did?
Depends on what your current relationship to those people is. Arguably you have a previous relationship with people from your school. I suspect whether this was OK or not would be a function of how you went about it (eg subscribing them all to the Hangem High Alumni list without asking would be bad).
Anyone know if spammers are stripping off the stuff after the + symbol? I might have to get more creative.
ISTR Exim allows you to specify an arbitrary character as the separator. If spammers did get wise to the + symbol trick, all you do is change the symbol used.
Anyone think we should be campaigning for a day off then?:-)
Definitely.:-)
Mnemonic for pi (from "Bluff your way in mathematics"):
How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
(Count the letters in each word).
The book claims that various obscene versions can be found on the walls of the lavatories in various maths or science departments. (Except at the Cavendish and DAMPT, where they have blackboards in the loos anyway, of course).
What do you propose to do when slashdot joins the thousand of other usenet topics that are slammed with junk?
I think an NNTP interface to slashdot would mean that slashdot ran its own NNTP servers, separate from the rest of Usenet. Registered users could log in with their slashdot username and password to validate their posts (NNTP allows this, ISTR), otherwise you'd be an AC. The posts could then be duplicated on the website. To read, you'd need to connect to the slashdot news server, rather than your own. (That said, it might be a nice idea to pass a read only version to Usenet: make it moderated to ensure it doesn't get spammed, make the moderation address an auto-response bot telling you that you need to go to a particular NNTP server or the site to post).
Moderation would still only be possible via the website. You could put moderation scores in X-headers, as someone else has already suggested. Changed moderation levels should be instantly reflected in the articles served by the slashdot NNTP server. This requires the ability to change the articles in place though, which means that any mirror to Usenet would not track these changes (I'm not really keen on using supercedes for this): one reason for reading on the Slashdot servers.
Since it'd be slashdot's own group (possibly their own heirarchy) rather than part of usenet, the format for postings could be HTML if this was desired: no one on Usenet can get picky about this if the rules for the group/heirachy allow it.
Those of you concerned by this article might like to take a look at a project I, and a dedicated band of Java coders, have been working on for almost a year now, which is nearing its first release. It is called Freenet
Excellent stuff. This is the closest thing I've seen to this. We cannot have a stable physical location for storing material which someone may object to (a "data haven") because of the lack of suitable places (Cryptonomicon notwithstanding). Your paper provides a virtual alternative (or at least, part of it).
I'd urge everyone with coding time and a concern about this to get behind this project.
How far has development progressed? Are you building in the trapdoor function and signed update facilities mentioned in section 9 of the paper? I think updates would be necessary for developers to use the system as a means of publishing code.
Is there anyway that we can use the data protection act (think that's the right one) and demand a copy of all the information they have on us. If enough of us do this, it's going to be rather time consuming for them...
Yes. I think you can at the moment, but you definitely can when the EU directive beomes law. The changes to European Union law will be propagated into UK law effective on 1st March, according to the Data Protection Registrar's website.
The subject access rights have been extended:
Whereas under the 1984 Act the data subject was only entitled to have a copy of any data processed by reference to him, the new Act states that he is also entitled to a description of the data being processed, a description of the purposes for which it is being processed; a description of any potential recipients of his data and except in limited circumstances, any information as to the source of his data (where available).
The website also says:
In addition Schedule 2 provides that processing may only be carried out where one of the following conditions has been satisfied i.e., where;
the individual has given his consent to the processing
the processing is necessary for the performance of a contract with the individual
the processing is required under a legal obligation
the processing is necessary to protect the vital interests of the individual
or to carry out public functions
the processing is necessary in order to pursue the legitimate interests of the data controller or certain third parties (unless prejudicial to the interests of the individual).
Depends on whether Doubleclick's address tracking is "legitimate" I suppose... AFAIK, the DPA is criminal law: you don't have to sue them yourself.
I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is it really that hard to find open-source programs, CVS repositories, cryptography software, text documents, and other free speech related stuff on the net right now?
It's not hard to find sites which contain the DeCSS source, say, or warez, MP3s and so on. These sites spring up quickly and are gone again when the lawyers' letters come in or the sysadmin notices the stuff in the Incoming directory, or whatever.
However, if someone wants to start an open source project doing something that a large company doesn't like (such as developing a DVD player for Linux), you need a stable virtual location for that project which cannot be attacked legallly (this probably doesn't equate to a stable physical location as AFAIK there are no suitable places: I'm talking about some URL-like scheme here), which can be used anonymously. Otherwise, lawsuits cause the resources for the project to be constantly on the move, making life very hard for developers and making it hard for the project to get new developers. Without anonymity, the developers also will be under legal threat (hasn't a Linux DVD developer already given up because of legal problems?)
There are a few ways this could be accomplished (Ross Anderson's Eternity Device springs to mind), but there no-one seems to have settled on and implemented a standard way of doing this.
I wonder if you automatically get an Aston Martin and a Walther PPK
More like a keyboard and a place to sit: they're responsible for the electronic and computational side of things, not the James Bond stuff. There are a fair few Cambridge CompSci's who've worked there (not me, I hasten to add).
The first of the series is The Colour of Magic, starring Rincewind, Twoflower et al. It really is worth a read and a good place to start your collection, which I am sure you will after you read it:)
CoM is quite different from the other Discworld books, though: he's not really settled into his style there. It's still funny, though. I think everything from Mort onwards is more typical.
Recently he's got a bit darker: his recent books are more satirical and less laugh-out-loud funny than the books from the middle of his career. I also think he's starting to repeat himself a bit (compare Lords and Ladies and Carpe Jugulum, for example). Still well worth reading though.
Slashdot Mirror
See, there is a use for P2P after all. These CNET types don't know what they're talking about...
Well, I just thought that people might not know the term, is all...
In reply to everyone else, the bloke I knew who did the Churchill level was an economist who came up in 1994. I don't think he's ever released it to the public. It doesn't surprise me that other people did one too given that Churchill is techie-land.
I once got a mail from a friend who said he'd been in the Moller Centre and felt like he was in a Quake level. He claimed he'd run into some of the Churchill fellows[1] while in there, and had escaped alive, but with no ammo left.
[1] Note for Merkins: "fellow" is like a professor in the US, I think.
Hey, me too.
F*****g hard it was too.
Amen to that.
Not bitter because we was too stupid to get in are we?
Possibly, or maybe he/she was trolling. Or believed the media hype about Laura Spence. There's a nice take on that incident here.
One of the American physicists at Churchill who did her MPhil here said that the US system was broader but less in depth, FWIW (this was largely in reference to the level of mathematics in the Cambridge course).
There's no bug in the system (if by system you mean Python). There are multiple postings pointing out that
It's worth remembering that on the overwhelming majority of occasions, when you think you've found a bug in the language/compiler/whatever, you just don't understand your program well enough (Kernighan and Pike say this in the chapter on Debugging in The Practice of Programming).
(Now everyone will reply with anecdotes about finding compiler bugs...)
Bzzt. Wrong.
Try prepending the path of the directory you told it to list to the filename you're telling it to open. You're listing / and then trying to open a filename from there in the current directory. Not surprisingly, this fails.
Top tip: don't use from foo import *, it can lead to name collisions.
I've been thinking the same thing for some time. A code to live by is important. Spirituality is also important. I know religion is not for everyone, but there is also a lot to be learned from non-religious philosophies (eg: Taoism) that help people put things in perspective. Good role models also help.
I've just read Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age again. In the book, the societies which have unifying beliefs and social norms are those which do well. I think Stephenson is right (he makes a similar point in Cryptonomicon, in relation to Christianity explicitly).
Of course, the reason for believing any given thing should be because you think it is true and good, not because you think it will benefit society. But ISTM that good belief system will have benefit the society which believes it. Stephenson envisages people realising these benefits and choosing to live in a society which has rules and in which it is OK to say that some things are right and other things are wrong.
What put me in mind of Stephenson was the discussion on hypocrisy further up the thread. There's a nice bit in the book where the point is made that if you want to say someone is bad but you've got a relativist viewpoint, the only thing you can do is accuse someone of hypocrisy. (I'd add "intolerance" too, especially when it is used as a code word for merely saying that some things are good and others bad). That's why hypocrisy and intolerance are seen as the worst possible sins today, I suppose: there are no others left.
Note: I'm not saying hypocrisy and intolerance are good things, but there are worse things which seem to be taken for granted. Materialism and selfishness, for example.
Of course the onshore receivers for the microwave transmitters would have to comply (assuming that they'll be in the UK: ISTR microwave transmitters work on the line of sight).
Neither Oxford nor Cambridge are independant states (cool idea, but I'm not sure where the borders would be as both universities are located within the cities: there is no campus as such). Some Cambridge University statues some kind of legal status, ISTR, but I don't remember the details.
The point is that when you enter the university you sign up to obey the Statues and Ordinances of the university. This includes their policy on computing equipment. Hence you have very little recourse if they yank your pages because they're about to cost the university time and money.
One thing I do remember is that some of the Statues at Cambridge specifically relate to the protection of free speach. I can't remember any more information that that, however. Anyone else know?
Really? You might want a complete re-write for a couple of reasons:
With the ever-faster-growing complexity of programmes, it becomes more and more difficult for humans, even aided with computers, to keep track of the project. But if you teach everyone how the computer logic works, the programming would become only about writing the necessary simple code (ha! hackers, get this!).
I don't understand your point here. What do you mean by computer logic in this context?
There are ways of expressing solutions to problems (different programming languages, CASE tools and so on) which are well suited to particular problems, but there are no magic bullets.
Does it use those funny text filter things: there's one for Biff, one for Jive, one for Valley Girl, and so on? I've got them sitting in /usr/games on my Debian box (though I can't remember the package name, maybe I'll ask dpkg when I get home). If so I imagine they're already open source. It'd be a minimal amount of work to hook that up to a web-page: I suppose you'd need to make sure it left tags alone, but that's about it.
Doesn't matter what their real name is, that's for the DPA to find out. There is an MP3P registered as a limited company with Companies House, but there's a different address given there, so maybe it's not the same people.
If you get on to the DPA about something, they're generally helpful although slow to respond. If you're British and your account gets cancelled as a result of the actions of this company, send the DPA a snail mail. Might do some good. That said, my experience with the DPA (in dealing with a British spammer) is that they're not too clued about the Internet and in general they don't have a lot of teeth. But this experience was before the EU law got incorporated into British law, so things may have changed now.
Costs which will probably run to the hundreds of thousands, of course, barristers costing what they do. Oh well, the rest of my article was right, anyway.
I'd invisage people putting in an index when they submit a collection of files, so you'd know where to find related stuff, and publishing the location of this index by other means. People could collect these indexes together into meta-indexes: it'd be a bit like Yahoo or something. It would then be possible to crawl through these links and do an Altavista. It is going to be more difficult than the web though (and the current lack of crypto signed updates would make updating the index impossible: that's a bit of a pain).
If not searchable, how does IT find stuff in itself? (To anthropomorphize a bit.)
RTFM :-)
Demon weren't ordered to pay anything. They settled out of court, presumably because they realised they were going to lose. They settled for 15 Kpounds plus costs.
Demon have argued for common carrier status, but don't yet have it. I think the reason for this is that the Government don't understand the technical difficulties in monitoring the volume of traffic that passes though Demon's systems.
Note that common carrier is a technical term under UK law which does not mean what you think it does (I found this out because I posted to uk.net and uk.legal using this term: see this article for details). It's best not to use the term in discussions on UK law.
To link this comment in - I don't think FreeNet stand a cowboy's chance in a nuclear explosion of getting common carrier status.
Who cares? Freenet has gone as far as they can in terms of plausible deniability by encrypting the stuff on the servers, but in any case, Demon's problem was that they could not use the innocent dissemination defence because they did not remove the material when requested. If you're running a Freenet node in the UK, all you do is remove something when you're asked to. This will have a minimal effect on the rest of the Freenet, of course, but that's the problem of the person threatening to sue you.
A more interesting question is what happens when you remove something when you're asked to and then you end up caching it again. I suppose server owners might want the option not to cache data (or data and links, if you're Demon) for particular keys. That said, all that happens then is someone resubmits under another key.
Alas, the government has made it illegal for someone to bring down the spammers' dialup connections (winnuke, pings with ATH and so on) or websites. Given that the goverment has already intervened to this degree, if we want protection from spam the government is going to have to provide it, ISTM. The Internet isn't really a true anarchy.
If i found someone online that i went to highschool with and emailed them "hello!" would that be spam, since it wasn't solicited?
No, since spam is unsolicited bulk email.
If i sent a notice of a class reunion to my entire high school class, again is that spam or not? Could it be spam for the people that didn't like me, but not in the case of the ones that did?
Depends on what your current relationship to those people is. Arguably you have a previous relationship with people from your school. I suspect whether this was OK or not would be a function of how you went about it (eg subscribing them all to the Hangem High Alumni list without asking would be bad).
ISTR Exim allows you to specify an arbitrary character as the separator. If spammers did get wise to the + symbol trick, all you do is change the symbol used.
Definitely. :-)
Mnemonic for pi (from "Bluff your way in mathematics"):
(Count the letters in each word).
The book claims that various obscene versions can be found on the walls of the lavatories in various maths or science departments. (Except at the Cavendish and DAMPT, where they have blackboards in the loos anyway, of course).
I think an NNTP interface to slashdot would mean that slashdot ran its own NNTP servers, separate from the rest of Usenet. Registered users could log in with their slashdot username and password to validate their posts (NNTP allows this, ISTR), otherwise you'd be an AC. The posts could then be duplicated on the website. To read, you'd need to connect to the slashdot news server, rather than your own. (That said, it might be a nice idea to pass a read only version to Usenet: make it moderated to ensure it doesn't get spammed, make the moderation address an auto-response bot telling you that you need to go to a particular NNTP server or the site to post).
Moderation would still only be possible via the website. You could put moderation scores in X-headers, as someone else has already suggested. Changed moderation levels should be instantly reflected in the articles served by the slashdot NNTP server. This requires the ability to change the articles in place though, which means that any mirror to Usenet would not track these changes (I'm not really keen on using supercedes for this): one reason for reading on the Slashdot servers.
Since it'd be slashdot's own group (possibly their own heirarchy) rather than part of usenet, the format for postings could be HTML if this was desired: no one on Usenet can get picky about this if the rules for the group/heirachy allow it.
Excellent stuff. This is the closest thing I've seen to this. We cannot have a stable physical location for storing material which someone may object to (a "data haven") because of the lack of suitable places (Cryptonomicon notwithstanding). Your paper provides a virtual alternative (or at least, part of it).
I'd urge everyone with coding time and a concern about this to get behind this project.
How far has development progressed? Are you building in the trapdoor function and signed update facilities mentioned in section 9 of the paper? I think updates would be necessary for developers to use the system as a means of publishing code.
Yes. I think you can at the moment, but you definitely can when the EU directive beomes law. The changes to European Union law will be propagated into UK law effective on 1st March, according to the Data Protection Registrar's website.
The subject access rights have been extended:
The website also says:Depends on whether Doubleclick's address tracking is "legitimate" I suppose... AFAIK, the DPA is criminal law: you don't have to sue them yourself.
It's not hard to find sites which contain the DeCSS source, say, or warez, MP3s and so on. These sites spring up quickly and are gone again when the lawyers' letters come in or the sysadmin notices the stuff in the Incoming directory, or whatever.
However, if someone wants to start an open source project doing something that a large company doesn't like (such as developing a DVD player for Linux), you need a stable virtual location for that project which cannot be attacked legallly (this probably doesn't equate to a stable physical location as AFAIK there are no suitable places: I'm talking about some URL-like scheme here), which can be used anonymously. Otherwise, lawsuits cause the resources for the project to be constantly on the move, making life very hard for developers and making it hard for the project to get new developers. Without anonymity, the developers also will be under legal threat (hasn't a Linux DVD developer already given up because of legal problems?)
There are a few ways this could be accomplished (Ross Anderson's Eternity Device springs to mind), but there no-one seems to have settled on and implemented a standard way of doing this.
More like a keyboard and a place to sit: they're responsible for the electronic and computational side of things, not the James Bond stuff. There are a fair few Cambridge CompSci's who've worked there (not me, I hasten to add).
CoM is quite different from the other Discworld books, though: he's not really settled into his style there. It's still funny, though. I think everything from Mort onwards is more typical.
Recently he's got a bit darker: his recent books are more satirical and less laugh-out-loud funny than the books from the middle of his career. I also think he's starting to repeat himself a bit (compare Lords and Ladies and Carpe Jugulum, for example). Still well worth reading though.