Don't forget "Lessons", the last chapter of "The Inner Light".

It would be more interesting to hear who they're *not* spying on these days.

A much shorter list like that would certainly save a lot of time.

Esperanto? le mi varkiclaflo'i cu culno lo angila! You mean Lojban, I presume.

13 months is a little annoying, yes; you have to split the months on week boundaries to make quarters. But we actually do have 13 lunar cycles in a year, so this naturally aligns the months with the real moon. And we keep 7 day weeks, which is a win both because we're used to our week, and because 7 days is a natural quarter-moon. And no more "30 days hath December..."

Thing is, a workable Earth calendar never is going to be evenly divisible by powers of 10, because it has to stay aligned with astronomical cycles which are subtly varying; even the Sun and Moon don't strictly align. So everything's going to be a bit of a juggle. Frankly, I think this is the best alternate calendar design I've seen in a long while.

Because it's the second stupidest deliberate misuse of computational capacity to artificially create digital scarcity since Bitcoins.

The correct way to distribute large files like movies online is to copy the bits as locally to the endpoints as possible, and cache them pervasively at all levels of the network. Nothing would need to be sent more than once down any given cable. It would be fast, cheap, make use of the Internet as it was designed to function, and give us near-unlimited bandwidth.

But that would mean that those bits don't become artificially scarce and can't be tracked and audited by the media companies for copy-protection purposes. So instead of copying, we stream them over and over and over again, generating terabytes of needless, duplicated data traffic, and creating huge bandwidth storms that suck all the capacity out of the Internet.

tldr: Video streaming is expensive because it was designed to be. It wasn't designed by or for you, and it doesn't benefit you.

Yeah, I hate it too when I score a counter-riposte to my opponent's flying parry and there's just a beep on the referee's scoreboard and no blood.

A company deliberately installing back doors to the world wide Internet.

So, we're now talking about the NSA backdoors in routers made by US companies?

It's interesting that the Boston Globe's article talks about astrophysics and chemistry PhDs as if that is still where all the smart people end up.

I would say that one of this country's biggest problems is that we 'track' so many of our best and brightest into the financial 'industry' where their mathematical and creative talents are frittered away coming up with better arbitraging formulas and the like. In other words, not doing anything useful at all, just figuring out ways to make the overall economy more unstable and susceptible to crashes. If all of the great minds who ended up on Wall Street over the past two generations had ended up in science careers, there would have been less market instability, and more scientific and industrial advancement.

On a side note, it's too bad (and somewhat depressingly predictable) that the 'debate' here largely turned into a boring malthusian/eugenics discussion.

o_O ... a what now?

There's an iTunes store in most European markets, but it's more of an afterthought where the original videos are usually inacessible and you only get localized/dubbed crap even though the original version is right there next to it on the server.

It's now subsidized by the NSA?

Well, now we know what John Titor was really looking for with his leet IBM 5100 mining rig.

.... not even a kernel panic?

$615,000 in drug, terrorist and child porn money? Or assuming some innocent parties involved in Bitcoin, at the very least $615,000 of juicy leads and contact details for the people who are dealing the hard stuff? Yes, it's conceivable that they perhaps might. You know, since tracking and catching thsi stuff is pretty much the number one job of all the West's police, intelligence and militaries at the moment.

Lie down with Bitcoins, wake up with whatever it is that Bitcoin merchants are selling. And possibly the FBI knocking on your door to ask nicely if you have any drug dealers or terrorists in your address book.