Or ISPs in Canada. We have an election coming up with three parties in a dead heat. One is the Nazi party, one is a freedom loving party, and the third is a corrupt party that will spend its entire time in office giving the telcos a reach-around.

Guess which party I am going to vote for.

In a word, Yes. Plus the major ISPs in Canada pretty much have been caught doing traffic shaping, injections, and handing stuff over to the police willy nilly.

My VPN has not. Plus an hour after they are caught I will be switching VPNs along with about 1 million of their other customers. A typical VPN customer is going to be more sophisticated plus very concerned with privacy and very prone to reacting quickly and negatively to this sort of thing.

Therefore it would probably be priority number one to maintain our privacy even over a high quality service as I suspect if they sent me a letter saying, "We will be dropping speeds by 10% because we feel that we had to increase our crypto to something next gen." that most customers would nod and say, "Good."

How can they be respecting my privacy seeing that such a feature would require that they have access to my browsing history. Even if (in theory) they aren't downloading my browsing history and it is my browser making the requests they can deduce what sites I must be browsing to request such "suggestions."

So if I mostly go to sites that involve sex with bowls of pasta and my browser were to request suggestions involving bowls of pasta porn it isn't much of stretch for them to guess what kind of sites I go to.

This shit pisses me off. I already use a VPN to keep my ISP from this sort of interference. Now it is my damn browser ratting on me.

How about a big fat no. Firefox already has a dropping market share and now it will drop by at least one more(me).

Just to be clear as to how much I value my privacy and don't want tracking. I use a VM for all services that I log into that goes through a separate VPN. Thus my day to day surfing is 100% separate from anything that has any logins. So any cookies/IP address that facebook, google, etc might have handed to me aren't available during my general web surfing.

I break zero laws yet I still want nobody tracking me as is my right.

*Heard. damn it.

From what I have read and herd take two is the absolute norm for a horrible game studio that exploits the crap out of its employees first to buy fancy cars for the founders and then when they get pushed aside by the MBAs to buy fancy cars for them.

At what point will someone set up a game company that is a true workers cooperative where there are no Ferrari driving founders. Just lexus driving everyones?

People just fix the things that have been reported, they don't actually look at what they mean. Because most people don't really know what all the crypto really means.

Paying a hitman with a cryptocurrency on SilkRoad 3.0 ? ;-)

If you read on WIkipedia it says it wouldn't be impossible:

"In December 2013 computer scientists Michael Hanspach and Michael Goetz released a paper to the Journal of Communication demonstrating the possibility of an acoustic mesh networking at a slow 20 bits per second using a set of speakers and microphones for ultrasonic communication in a fashion similar to BadBIOS's described abilities."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

So, I think what they are saying is:
split traffic at the ISP-router and sent latency sensitive traffic over the microwave link.

They say the investment is:
"At a $100,000 installation cost per tower, this network would cost $253 million, with a $96 million per year operating cost. Amortized over 5 years, the yearly cost would be $147 million."

If you build it, providers will buy it ?

I wonder how useful that will be as the world has already started deploying all the new technologies: CoDel (which fixes bufferbloat), fiber-to-the-home and HTTP/2 and QUIC (which supports network coding to fix packet loss. Especially useful for wireless devices).

I was told by a guy who build computer models of pandemics that when the media is blah blahing about ebola and whatnot that the key test is that if we first hear of a disease and 10,000 are dead then it is time to run for the hills but no sooner. Everything else is pure hype. But he also said that he didn't think that the governments of the world fully understood the math behind a truly nasty disease and that they wouldn't do the right thing when it came to quarantines especially with "favoured" countries. He said shutting down all transport to the Ivory Coast was enough of a political hand-grenade so what would be like to shut down all travellers to and from Japan, or England? The key being not most travellers but all including the VIPs who will potentially make calls to the whitehouse or whitehall as the case may be.

So while he thought that we could easily deal with any pandemic along the lines of the worst in history that the mamby-pamby governments of today wouldn't so he had a cabin way in the woods to sit it out until the various governments realized that PR was now out the window and that measures for survival now needed and could be brutally implemented. A great example would be the aggressive measures taken against malaria in the Southern US would be very difficult to implement in today's political climate.

But at the same time he was working on a model that showed that our ability to deal with diseases is soon approaching the point where pretty much no disease could really wipe out huge majorities of populations.

By the way the second test of a really dangerous disease was that another 10,000 were dead in western countries in that many diseases are local by their very nature such as Malaria; so a disease that spread in a modern non tropical country would be a dire problem. Ebola basically not spreading in the West is a perfect example.

Around 2000 I was playing with a Digital (the computer company) technology where you could do microtransactions on web pages. I forget the exact size but it was as low as something like 1/1000th of a cent. This was pretty cool in that you could charge customers to visit your website page by page or however you would like to structure the transaction. The idea was that an end user would have put, say, $10 in their wallet and each time they would go to a website it would pop up and say, "This site will charge x amount per page" you could also put limits on a given site or have it pop up every so many cents and so on. This way some site couldn't screw you with frames or some such scummery.

I loved their implementation as it was beta but fundamentally clean. They also indicated that they had a handful of major banks onboard so it wasn't DOA. I think the death of Digital itself was what killed it.

But I would love this and would have no problem paying a tiny bit for slashdot, NYT, The Economist, stack-overflow, even reddit. But I would say FO to sites like huffpo who you know would spread their articles out so thin that it would be pretty much one word per page.

Plus it would be funny to watch great site after great site implode after the MBAs took over and just started to try to skin their customers by jacking up the prices over and over and over until the site collapsed. Which is sort of how many sites operate now as an ever higher percentage of their surface area is dedicated to ads and an ever growing percentage of their content becomes clickbait.

But one of the greatest parts in the Digital plan was that they only took a tiny taste, a very tiny taste vs the massive cut that google takes on adsense and most others take on their ad platforms. So when you gave a penny to slashdot they would basically get that penny.

What is even worse was that at this point paypal wasn't the domination machine that it was to become. Thus this platform could have become the defacto payment system for all transactions in that it didn't only do microtransactions but you could do ebay sized ones without any difficulty but at a much lower fee.

Just watched part of the documentary from early 2012, I didn't remember correctly, but the consequences are the same, probably worse.

You should look at it an other way:

Greece and Germany 2 very different countries shouldn't have been part of the same monetary and economic policy system, in this case the Euro.

When Greece wanted to join they had to much debt to be allowed to join by the EU-rules.

So far so good. Nothing bad happened.

Now there is this company in the US called Goldman Sachs which was willing to take on this debt for a number of years in return for a hefty payment.

Greece accepted that offer, which if they really understood the terms and consequences of the agreement they probably would have never done so.

If I remember correct they for example had the interest rate pegged on an index inverse to the GDP of Greece or other similar variable connected to the economy of Greece.

Now after that deal Greece didn't have that large of a debt any more and was able to join the EU.

The terms of the Goldman Sachs agreement said they would need to pay it back after 10 years or whatever but after at that point Greece would not only get their debt back but also a new debt with Goldman Sachs. Obviously Greece couldn't pay that. They probably paid the at least part of the Goldman Sachs debt by getting loans from others. Because the interest of the Goldman Sachs loans was very high especially after the financial crisis.

So Goldman Sachs made a lot of money and had very little risk as the EU would have a big stake in Greece not failing and if the economy of Greece was doing awesome Goldman Sacks would also get paid.

Have a look at the video, you'll probably want to enable the subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Now Germany and a lot of other EU countries want to put as much of the burden of this problem with Greece, as much as Greece can bear.

Basically about trying to find the right balance:
The people in Greece say: we are suffering enough, our economy is shit and things will get really bad and recovery will take decades.
Germany and other EU countries are saying: you can bear some more of the burden.

However Germany and others are not interested in seeing Greece leave, that would be bad for the Euro.

So the Greece government had some leverage there to force the other EU countries to help them.

As I mentioned at the start, Germany and Greece shouldn't have been in the same monetary system, if they were not Greece would have been able to go bankrupt and just take their losses. They would have recovered much faster from that then being stuck as they are.

Agile development in the more pure form such as XP is doing just fine where I see it being used. But the management/certification/terminology/paid courses version of Agile should be taken out behind the woodshed and shot. Basically when I hear a company has SCRUM masters then I add it to the dead pool of tech companies that my friends and I bet chocolate bars on. I have a long list of these sort of silver bullets that can claim to turn shitty programming teams into productive machines. Six Sigma would be another pet peeve.

I am partial though to some parts of the PMI PMBOK type stuff but some care needs to be taken distinguishing between certification and ability. At least half of managing people is being a people person.

But to me agile seems to be mostly adopted by really really shitty programmers who aspire to management so as to cover up their complete inability to get anything done. Also many Agile people tend to use the guise of agile to ram their shitty programming style down everyone's throat as some kind best practice. People who like ++i or have insane commenting styles.

I am going with coverup. Information is power and they would feel so special being in the know of something so momentous when everyone else is in the dark. Even if a few came out and leaked it unless they had a massive massive data dump they would just end up a crank on the History channel. Look at that former Minster of Defence we have in Canada. He is all "blah blah ALIENS blah blah ALIENS!!!" yet outside of crank TV he is ignored.

But for many they would suppress it for all kinds of paternalistic/religious/nationalistic reasons. Then after they suppressed it for a while they would just keep suppressing it so they didn't get the blame for being the one to suppress it.