Two questions

[David Chase]

Question #1 is more or less a portability trivia question that I hope
someone can answer for me.  I am quite capable of summarizing to the net,
so please reply to me.

1) Has the C compiler ever been ported to a machine supporting one's
   complement arithmetic, and if so, what was the result of 1+MAXINT?
   Do you know of any interesting or amusing problems that they had (or
   might have, or might have had)?

Question #2 is a thought problem for careless gurus and idle lawyers.  It
was inspired by the juxtaposition of Lauren's "UUCP and me" and the
"Publishing security issues" articles.  Does know of similar situations,
or have ATT's lawyers ever commented on this?  
Again, I will summarize, so spare the poor net.

2) Lauren's comments on how one learns protocols &c seems plausible; what
   does this do for papers and books describing the security holes of the
   Unix system, and similar stuff?  How is that stuff learned?  I agree
   with Lauren (because I'm afraid he's right, much as I hate the
   license), but to what degree is this usually applied?
   It seems that conversations on this list about some of the bugs and
   their solutions violate trade secret laws (not the discovery of the
   bugs, but often the description of why it broke and how XYZ fixes it).
   Do gurus exchange licenses before trading Unix stories over Coke and
   Twinkies?

   Anecdotes or legal advice, anyone?

I was once told by a reliable person with a serious interest that (he says
the ATT lawyer said to him) "code containing Unix system calls [i.e,
"read", "write", and the rest of the stuff described in section 2] cannot
be distributed to non-licensed people."  [I don't remember if "code" is
source code or binaries].  Conveniently enough, K&R describes several of
those system calls.  Serious confusion here, I think.

Again, please reply to me only, and I will send the good stuff to the net
and the Raw Bits somewhere else.

David Chase

"Raw Bits" is probably a trademark of the PHC, but I don't think that they
care.  If you don't understand, then you should listen to more public radio.
You should listen to more public radio anyway, if you have the time to read
this stuff.