This doesn't make much sense for retail, as the CCV isn't used or recorded; the user enters a PIN at the point of sale. But, the CCV could be recorded and fraudulently reused by any online retailer or man-in-the-middle. Randomly changing CCV's would limit the damage.

Thanks for the comments. All fair points, particularly your remarks about 20-20 hindsight/grass is greener.

I think that Asimov's observations on the inhibitory effect of visibility and accountability are applicable to the smaller forms of creativity and risk taking like trying new tools and technologies.

I've seen this occur with SCRUM. We had dev team build a new product, burning down backlog through multiple sprints, with an overall results that were pedestrian. By which I mean functional, pretty interface; nothing to complain about really, code was reviewed, tests passed, etc. But you were left wondering there is a better fundamental approach to the problem.

Then they got a bit of down time and someone on the team prototyped a new architecture that would have halved the development effort. This exploration could have been done at the beginning and had been thought of by the person concerned, but the talented - and introverted - individual didn't advocate for it in the face of daily stand-up and burn-down visibility.

When I submitted this article, the preview wasn't reliably displaying changes to text in the edit box; "needs struggles" got by me.

Thanks for that 19th. I quite enjoyed reading it. :)

We just had a major shit-storm in Canada over a government bill (C-30) that would allow the police the right to identifying information without a warrant. The bill has been hustled off to committee for amendment as a result of public outrage. Government politician must be rolling their eyes at the timing of CIMA's demands.

This is part of an emerging pattern in which consumers are sold restricted systems with enforced toll collection. Cory Doctorow refers to this as "the coming war on general-purpose computing". His analysis is thought provoking. It is disheartening to consider how may technologies with security benefits can also be used to restrict the rights of customers.

Traffic management is necessary because bandwidth is less than infinite. Extreme consumers will impair service to others if there is no mechanism to prevent this. My company recently implemented bandwidth guarantees for VOIP traffic on the fiber between our buildings because file transfers were causing drop outs on phone calls. In other words our routers throttle file transfers to provide decent QOS for voice. I like the CRTC's approach because it provides transparency of ISPs QOS policies and creates an environment for competitive incentive to avoid abusive restrictions, with some fallback for adult supervision.

I'm a moderately heavy bittorent (Vuze) user. My ISP is Rogers Cable, whose internet service is available in a number of speeds/caps/pricing from $25 to $150 per month. Rogers has been reasonably open about its traffic management practices and is on record as throttling bittorrent on the upstream (from the house) because this is a scarce resource. Problems for me - nil; obscure torrents with few peers/seeds run slowly, popular torrents download like sh** through a goose; surfing and Skype work smoothly even in peak periods. I left Bell Sympatico when my experience was the opposite.