Since the 2nd modem is virtualized, it should not affect your transfer rates or bandwidth quotas.

I'm not familiar with with cable in the states, but does this mean that Comcast are selling a service well below line speed? Where I am the cable company will sell you whatever they can squeeze down the line: this week it is 1000/100, but it tends to go up every month or two as they switch cable boxes.

So you would let Ubisoft get away with it? Think of the gun more as a tool and use it get out of the room first...

Wow. Ok, now that is the kind of lifestyle that I'm looking for... as long as the four hours is coding :)

I'm not sure that I am rebutting a different argument. When you said that hunter/gathers generally have more leisure time I interpreted that as meaning "more than us". Which is exactly what I was disagreeing with.

I don't spend 8 hours a day performing an activity that pays for my food and shelter: my wage is 3x my basic needs. So it takes me about 2.5hrs of work to do that. I do actually have a flexible work environment where I could stop at that point, but instead I stick around for another 5hrs and take home more cash. That is not an excess as you have phrased it - I can operate in other markets than basic needs and I am procuring funds for those.

Also, I did not imply that you had claimed that hunter gatherers have it easy, although you may have been misled by my british turn of phrase. I would claim that 13-20hrs of work a week is having it easy, my question to you was whether or not that was true that hunter/gathers worked less than this? My assumption is that they would need more time than this to acquire food each week.

Some good points; yup CS and vocational training are miles apart and one does not imply the other.

But about elitism: how could it not be elitist to define what makes a good programmer?

Where are you drawing the line for good?

I can see that somebody could program without knowing anything at all about assembly language, but I find it difficult to believe that they would be any good at it. For many years CS curricula around the world contained the same sequence of courses: a "high" level language (be it C, C++ or Java depending on time and location), assembly language for a real architecture (SPARC, MIPS or x86) then a compiler course later in the degree that explicitly teachs the mapping from (parts of) the high level language into the low level language.

It has been understood for a long time that know both of these languages and having some explicit knowledge about what a compiler does to convert between them makes a programmer better. The vast majority of programmers my age (mid 30s) went through this sequence of courses as a mandatory part of their undergraduate education. I'm really curious what your definition of a "good programmer" is that doesn't know assembly language. How do they differ from just a programmer?

Nice summary, much clearer than the original.

There seems to be a basic mismatch between the "problem" and the "solution". Most of the lead-in talks about corporate financing, and companies free-loading without paying for development. Well, in that world the funding distribution is from Extremistan (i.e it is probably a power-law distribution). So most of the money is held in pledges that unmatched by ten peers. The matching model only makes sense in Mediocrastan (i.e the roughly a uniform distribution) where the majority of the pledges would be matched.

So let's say there is a big super important project and one million individuals put up their $1 pledges. There is also a company that wants/needs the results and is willing to put up $1 million to get it done. Sadly they are limited to $1 and the other $999,999 cannot be spent.

I don't think that a ransom-ware model for open-source is a good idea at all, but the author really needs to rethink exactly which model they use. Or to phrase that in the author's own language "carefully considerating the underlying game theory and doing a bit of mechanism design leads us to much better equilibria".

I guess that you are talking national averages, but about 1/3 of my wage covers all my basic living costs so about 13hr/week of labour. I think the national average here would be about 1/2, or about 20hr/week. Did hunter/gatherers really have it that easy?

I'm curious, do you type and argue as if you are twelve years old because:

a) you are in fact twelve years old with unsupervised access to the internet
b) YOU are SO mentally DEFICIENT that this IS the way THAT you THINK?

Yeah, because the "regulated" taxi industry *never* has these problems.

Is that the only kind of distinction that exists - the world is purely binary? Or could be that a regulated industry has fewer of these problems. Is that not better to a lesser extent?

The problem, as always, is that people like you think that "regulation"

So what is a person like me then? Is that something that you are capable of understanding based on a jokey response to a request for a sketch. Wow, your deductive power of reasoning must put the great Sherlock Holmes to shame. Either that or you over-generalise so freely that you are not even aware when you do it. You know, like an idiot.

Perhaps you should spend an hour or two reading about cognitive dissonance, and try to spot the analogy to the point that you were trying to make with Regulatory Capture. I'll warn you - your world view is about to get a dramatic overhaul.

Oh. So after all of these insults and attempts to deflect you finally mention what evidence.

Yeah, well done. I've already replied to that.

Hello and welcome to Uber.

We are going to pretend that we offer you a service like a taxi, you know - licensed and regulated so that we manage to keep whack jobs out of the driving seat and you can feel a measure of safety in your journey.

But instead, for half the price we are going to send you some completely random fucker that we have no real record of. He could be anyone, and probably is. So basically you are hitchhiking with all of the associated risks, but you are paying us for the privilege.

Yay for Uber. Please feel free to call* and ask questions if you survive your trip.

* actually not really, this would push up costs. But you know, it's the thought that counts.

Remarkable. Well that certainly narrows it down. Well done you.

One hundred years ago may have been the end of a long period of change in attitudes towards children. The drop in child mortality rates heralded a change in how parents treated their children. wiki

This is where modern etiquette seems to become so tricky. So when somebody uses that phrase I should correct them and say "Don't you mean Islam is a religion of slaves?".