This. If you need "special" accounts just have it supply an AES key to decrypt the password database with, if you can crack that without having the key we're all in deep shit. Pseudo:

If (databaseLocked)
    TryDecrypt(database,password)
    If (ok)
          Print "Alright, have fun"
    Else
          Print "Sorry, service down"
    EndIf
Else
      LoginUser(username, password)
EndIf

I guess you could do that as a shared secret kind of thing (you need 3 of 5 keys to unlock) but I really don't see the point.

Does it come with an actual monkey? I wouldn't want to end up with an MSCE or some other poor substitute, monkeys are both cuter and put less shit on your servers. Of course both could be replaced by a very small shell script. but I need one for the head count and scripts run headless so that won't do.

We have a lot of cheaper places they could use as test beds, they don't pull long underwater fiber cables just for that but as PR it sounds better. It is true that they're planning to move off copper though, actually the first trial county has already gone all fiber - no more copper service just fiber + mobile and maybe cable for those who already have that. They've said the copper network is supposed to be phased out by 2017, so if Svalbard is 10 years ahead then they're many years behind schedule on the mainland. Not surprised though, they've been late to the fiber party instead trying to push xDSL, they've lost 75% of their land line subscribers since 2000 and recently announced 10% of the staff had to go. Former cable and energy companies are rushing to wire up customers, the first to offer fiber usually wins. And so far they're more in the "expand and offer sweet deals" mode than "consolidate and exploit our captive users", I'm sure they'll get there but right now it's pretty good to be a consumer.

It's only a weird 20 year old unloved redheaded step child of a TV show until someone shows an interest. If anyone with a big enough wallet went to them and said I want to redo it in HD, then it's 24 carat gold in a vault and they think like Battlestar Galactica type of remake. Much like the companies that wanted to port AAA games to Linux, they were thinking about covering porting costs and tuning a small profit to stay in business, the studios saw dollar signs and wanted millions up front for the right to make the port and most the revenue from it too. The only way it'd happen is if there was copyright reform, you could badger WB into releasing the raw HD footage and it'd be done as a fan project. And I wouldn't hold my breath for that.

If you've just bought a new game on Steam and it's a 20GB download, do you want to wait half an hour (100Mbit) or 3 minutes (Gigabit)? If you're browsing 20MP+ photos online, do the pictures load faster in your browser? What if your disk crashed and you want to get something big from online backup? And as far as I know there's still no BluRay quality streaming service, if you're downloading a torrent then 5 minutes or an hour certainly matters. Yes, 100 to 1000 Mbit is less important than 10 to 100 and even less important than 1 to 10, but I'd take it for a reasonable premium. I know the people on Gigabit trial here in Norway now has been promised to continue it for $100 (599 NOK) a month, which is only slightly more than I pay for 100 Mbit today. I don't need it, but just having more than enough and never lacking bandwidth is one less concern.

Digging a little they're talking about a 50/50Mbit connection (Norwegian), so the article is wildly exaggerated... triple the mean connection yes, not 10-20 times.

One part conveniently left out is the military's part in this, they want fiber optics for a bunch of NATO surveillance activities, polar satellites and so on. It's pretty obvious why if you look at a map. Supplying the about 2600 permanent inhabitants with really fast broadband (100% fiber optics now) is just a side effect. True, this cabin area about 3 miles from the main settlement wasn't originally included in the plans, but when the inhabitants dig the ditch and all the fiber company has to do is roll out the cable drum it's a pretty good deal for them too. There are several rural areas - though not quite that remote - here in Norway which has done the digging as a community effort to make the cost bearable for the fiber company. Just last quarter the median broadband in Norway passed 10 Mbit/s, the mean is 18.4 Mbit/s and improving at a nice pace.

Assuming there's anything useful you can do about it, For example, say that gene X means I'm ten times as likely to develop incurable condition Y, but it's a 0.1% chance as opposed to 0.01% chance in the general population. Is that going to help me in some way? If you get a long list of potential illnesses that you might be somewhat predisposed to does that do anything other than turn you into a hypocondriac? Tell me what I need to know for treatment or symptoms to look out for or lifestyle changes, the rest which may or may not come but is a throw of the dice just keep it in my journal so you know to look for it later. I don't need to hear that I'll get Alzheimer in 40 years, really I don't.

The whole problem boils down to the religious meaning of marriage. I'm perfectly fine with adults having any sexual relations with each other that they want, equal rights to secure their life partner through inheritance and such and regardless of biological capability they should have the same right to recognition as parents as other non-biological parents through adoption and such. I really don't have any problem understanding why Christians, Muslims etc. get all pissed when you use the word marriage about it though. In English buttsex (sodomy) is named after one of the dens of evil God cleansed with fire and brimstone killing every last man and there's plenty other quotes to back up homosexuality being a sin. And Jesus only redeems those who repent their sins, clearly these people aren't repenting anything.

In short, you have to get extremely creative to pretend this was any kind of union God would have blessed and not sent you on a one-way trip to Hell. And when you try to use the same word for a terrible sin and a holy union, worlds collide. Imagine if the pedophiles united and insisted people stop using the word molestation because it's bigoted and discriminatory against adult-child love relationships. Would you just roll with that or would you go "Hell no I'm not going to use the same words as when I make love to my [girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever rocks your boat]." That the government regulates marriage is an imperfect separation of state and church, it should limit itself to civil unions that provide civil rights and leave the theological and social battle over what is or is not a marriage to others.

Right now I have a feeling it's blackmail on both sides, the religious trying to deny homosexuals rights based on being same sex, while the homosexuals are trying to force a new interpretation of the Bible on the religious by forcing them to redefine their words and their concepts. Freedom of religion also means the freedom to believe in a 2000 year old text which in no shape or form recognizes a same sex couple as equal to a mixed-sex couple, no matter how much some homosexuals seem to want it to.

If it was an unexpected system failure, I might have had more sympathy. Bugs happen despite your best efforts and pinning down the source of the problem and rushing a patch or workaround through the system takes a little while. You can't really guard against the unknown unknowns. That an upgrade might fail though that's a known unknown, you don't know why but you should assume that it may and have a plan to roll back to the working version. Particularly something as stateless as the authentication system, assuming that's what actually failed and they didn't just take it down to fix something else. I mean it's like having two doors to the building and discovering that your new door jams, bar it shut and reopen the old one. I'd probably take my business elsewhere, online banking is a commodity these days and the self-service is much the same everywhere.

You seem to have already made up your mind that there'll be one winner and it'll be Oculus Rift, because the competition sucks. But there's a third option, that they're all going to fail because in the end the tech doesn't work out or people don't want it. I'm sure somebody has the best desgn for a flying car too, but it doesn't go much good. I just don't see myself wearing any kind of headset for as long as I sit in front of a monitor, but YMMV. And for many games, looking around like that doesn't make much sense anyway.

So what did the third oarsman on the left of the trading vessel accomplish by himself? Nothing new about taking a share in a great project led by a lord or rich merchant. And there's nothing new about making products that go into value chains like from wool you spin thread, from threat you weave cloth, from cloth you tailor clothes. With eBay and big data we could probably do better without money now than ever before, simply by finding closed loops where person A wants what B has, B wants what C has and C wants what A has. Particularly if we set up timed contracts, like I give you ten sacks of flour now and I get a fresh bread a week for a year. It would still be extremely inconvenient though.

So many people here seem absurdly obsessed with what money is, when to the average wage earner it's just a convenient way to convert work into shelter, food, clothes, transport, entertainment and so on. That's what 90% use it for and 9 of the last 10% just want a stable value so they don't have to become investors or speculators in real world goods while they save up for their next big purchase. Yes, like gold. Money exists as a convenience because it is universally accepted, easily divided, instantly transferable, easy to transport and so on. It exists because it's a better deal than instantly trading my pay check for gold and trading it back one milligram at a time when I want a soda.

My investments are of course valued using currency but if the dollar crashes while the investment object stays the same it just means it'll be worth more expressed in dollars, which is exactly the opposite of what happens if you're holding dollars. And if the prices all move together then it's rather irrelevant, if gold prices and house prices both double it matters little when I want to sell my gold to buy a house. I guess the rest matters if you got billions to move and millions to earn, but for most people thousands to move and soda money to earn isn't worth the bother.

It's easy to say it's just the phone company pushing it but here in Norway there used to be 2.6 million land lines (PSTN/ISDN). In the last statistics (H1 2013) there's less than 600.000 and the trend has been >10% reduction each year, so probably less than 550.000 right now. Fiber and cable are growing, xDSL is dropping the moment people get alternatives. Practically everybody already have a cell phone and would never consider dropping it, so price wise you can be on the cell phone forever before you break even having a land line as well. In the cities with multiple choices of Internet providers and plenty cell phone towers it's all but dead, serving a few elderly and such that don't want or need anything else.

I'm one of those with no land line, I have fiber + cell phone and if the power goes the fiber line goes too. Long story short, if all the towers near me go down or I can't get charge for my cell phone for so long that it's actually a problem - if I forgot to charge mine and there's an emergency I'd bang the neighbors' doors - then we're in deeper shit than me not having a cell phone. I worry as much about not being able to call for an ambulance roughly as much as being struck by lightning twice in a row. If you live on a farm far out in a rural area with crap cell phone coverage and your land line is truly your life line to civilization it's different, but I don't think it's necessary everywhere. That said, who says a tree won't fall over and take down a telephone pole or a land slide wash out a ground cable?

If I wanted to be really safe, I'd rather not depend on any local infrastructure at all and use something like inReach which I could bring along and will work no matter where I am as long as I got clear sight to the sky. Imagine you take a nasty fall and break a leg, do you really want to crawl all the way back to your land line? What if you're stuck and can't get loose? Yes, it costs a bit ($300 + $12/mo cheapest plan) and is only useful for emergencies but consider it like fire insurance - be happy if you don't have to use it ever. Of course you need to have a decent replacement for day to day activities, but it kind of puts a cap on how much the "emergency service" of land lines are worth. Cell phone only service would suck, but there's no way I'd turn down fiber or cable to replace copper.

Yes, but nearly all languages can be broken down into reusable words. The idea is that in this language the metaphors wildly change meaning depending on the context in which they were spoken. Say that in the context of clothes "being a Samantha" is someone who dresses fabulously, while in the context of sex "being a Samantha" means being a slut. So the would be diplomat tries to say "Your dress looks fabulous" but without the correct contextual clues the universal translator will say "You are such a slut" instead. A conversation becomes an irreducible complexity because taking away one sentence or one word changes the meaning of everything else being said, so it can't deduct what it is they're saying by looking at common phrases nor can it express any new sentences, like what the Enterprise crew would like to say. It's almost like trying to decipher a conversation between two people with cultural references serving as a one time pad, without the key you are totally lost.

Well you find one way to break it down... but I often feel there's so many possible ways to organize things, it's just how I'd want to solve it and when I have to interact with other people's code they've done the same thing completely differently. Just take a simple thing like pulling data from a database, putting them on a form, have someone edit the information and save it back to the database. How many various implementations of that have I seen? Maaaaaaaaany, but there's no clear winner. You can do it with an SQL query, a strored procedure, an ORM tool and they all might work. You can use the MVC pattern or you could just totally ignore it, the user will never know. Layers are a bit like mathematical models, they're simplifications of reality. Sometimes the world refuses to be simple.