They should at least get their kids a C64 or ZX-Spectrum, they were common and would not ruin their weird role-playing game.
Yeah, exactly. I don't remember spending all my time outside as a child. First ZX81, then ZX Spectrum, then Atari ST -- there was plenty to do inside with with pre-86 technology.
Yeah. The technology is at the stage where everyone can manage average quality. But you still need to add the magic that makes it mean something to people. The magic isn't in the wires or the chips or the plugins or the notes or whatever -- it is in how you put it all together. There's a whole scene in Brazil of people with cheapo Casio keyboards producing amazing stuff. Not 24-bit 96kHz or 6 channel or anything buzzword-compliant, but music that moves you and makes you pay attention and listen. All I can say is that making the technology easily available means that the odd genius can work wonders more easily. The rest will continue to produce poor clones of stuff they already know or weird crap that no-one likes. Then it is just a question of whether that genius is fooled by the music industry's lies or not, whether he/she appears in future as a "professional" or "amateur".
yeah, people like to live in a comfort zone — but i've found that some of the best friends come from right out of that comfort zone..
What about people who have a mix of genes from all over? Does that explain the wide genetic diversity amongst my friends, and how I like to hang out in diverse places with not much racism?
What is described here seems rather incestuous, like "all my friends are clones of me", like a bunch of Greys. I guess there are some people like that.
How about weakening it enough that it is crackable. Like when Debian accidentally weakened all the keys generated by ssh, but done intentionally. Also I like the 'humint' reference, i.e. they are planting moles in these organizations for their own purposes
Also, what about the weakness that an update of the app (forced on them by NSA/etc) may send your private keys upstream. Like Mega they claim it is hands-off, but in reality there is a mechanism through which they could obtain the private key if pressured/blackmailed/waterboarded/whatever.
War is Peace.
It's all explained in the novel "1984".
This is a War on War. We are fighting to eliminate fighting!
it's easy to trick the mind into thinking it belongs to an external body
I'll go ahead and read this as "consciousness is designed to remain functional with the associated body being arbitrary".
Sounds like direct intentional design of a functional, physically-reassignable (hence "resurrectable") soul to me.
Someone enlighten me on why this, being merely a "trick", would have evolutionary advantage such that all the neurological complexity required to remap perceptions to arbitrary point in space would naturally "emerge".
Supposing that a soul-like thing exists and it is the seat of consciousness, then the evolutionary advantage is that you'd be lying down unconscious if you didn't have one. It's much too easy to get eaten that way. So evolution went with souls (or whatever we might call them, supposing they exist).
Yes, "take it or leave it" is the only option. The throttling I'm seeing is amazingly consistent and just for that one IP address as far as I can see, so I think it is real throttling being done by their software, although probably no human in Telefonica has any idea that it is happening, even the guy that configured/misconfigured it. Yes, traceroute shows all "* * *" through Telefonica networks most of the time, and pchar gets stuck. I will consider your advice about MTUs and fiddle with that a bit.
The question is how to adapt to whatever they're doing to the network. I will experiment with the suggestions people have made here.
But the NSA, and undoubtedly their partner services such as the GCHQ have a secondary task of reporting criminal activity to the appropriate LE agency if they encounter it. No doubt, the BBC and British taxing authorities are interested in anyone bypassing the television tax. So any VPNs that are found that might be bypassing this tax could be throttled. Or cut off completely.
As long as you are not watching live TV, there is no law broken; however watching live British TV is illegal -- as I understand it. The laws were written before even VHS probably. Whilst I would happily pay the license fee to get genuine British TV in Peru (not some cut-down version), I know that will never happen because of regional licensing of programmes. They probably turn a blind eye, as the BBC promotes British values (reason/science-based, establishment, anti-alternatives, mostly royalist), and it is in their interest for British worldwide to continue to be kept in the loop. You don't have to agree with all of it to see the value of the rest. Maybe if I show my passport to my webcam and pass a facial recognition test, they could let me on.
[...] I am the calmest guy in the world but they pissed me off.
But this is typical of latin america, and if you grew up in the states it is hard to get used to the lack of rhyme and reason there.
Yeah, this sounds just like the Telefonica we know and love here in Peru. What gets me is that they will happily lie to people who don't know. I always make sure I have a leaflet from the regulator in one hand and a folder of documents in the other when I go there, so we start off on the right basis. They happily screw over 90% of the population because they don't know any better. I don't know how it is in Colombia, but there is a culture of accepting loss here rather than informing and defending yourself. Telefonica ripping you off is part of life. I wonder how this started? With the conquistadores? There is one businessman I talked to here who says he will never employ anyone who worked for Telefonica, because it is like an institutional illness they never recover from. Yes, it take a while to get used to all this.
It seems that I was wrong about the multiple connections getting more bandwidth, so unfortunately MLVPN won't help me -- but thanks all the same. I was looking at multi-path in the past when we were considering moving to a distant village which only had slow 512kbps connections, to tie several of them together. This definitely has its use cases! I've made a note.
Did you know that in most cases, you only need to bypass whatever method is used for checking your location. The server that does this, is usually not the one you stream your video from. It means that after passing the location check, you can actually connect directly to the video server for watching the video itself (and suffer much less from connectivity issues, if at all).
Having said that, did you try contacting your ISP for support? Perhaps they change something in their routing tables which happens to work very bad for you? Maybe they can help.
Many thanks for the suggestions. I'll investigate them.
Talking to Telefonica leads to premature aging and death, and is best avoided. In case of any problem I go to the regulator OSIPTEL first to hear the truth, and then armed with the truth I can detect their lies and misdirections and force a solution. This works for billing and contract problems, but really I think the chance of resolving a technical issue like this through Telefonica support is nil.
Thanks -- I'll try port 443 if/when they unthrottle me. Yes, I also get packet loss when there are storms. I guess they interfere with the microwave links over the mountains. Anyway, that is irrelevant as I get good bandwidth on all connections apart from that one IP so the weather doesn't explain it.
'pchar' looks interesting. I left it running all night piped to tee but if it generated any output, it never flushed it. I'm trying again now.
I set up my own OpenVPN with an obscure port number, but using common recommended settings otherwise. Ping times are ~220ms. In my HTTP tests I was downloading one large file with 'wget', so JS/etc weren't an issue. I notice that other people mention that iperf tends to give theoretical rather than practical figures, so that agrees with my experience. Someone below suggested 'pchar' which looks promising but I haven't managed to get results out of it yet.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
