The key in all this is who's AI? The AI of google? AI of the NSA? AI of some hedgefund? AI of some brilliant but disturbed scientist who was rejected from Harvard? AI of some brilliant guy at a game company?

There are many people working with adaptive systems that have a wide variety of problems. Many might even scoff that they are working on AI. But the critical point is when any one of these systems is flexible and adaptive enough to start improving the fundamentals of how it works. Once that magical point is crossed the system will grow way beyond the wildest dreams of its creator.

I always thought that 3.1 was critical because it worked just that bit better that made it usable in many more scenarios.

Sort of like the jump from 95 to 98. 95 was a huge leap but had so many problems that people were often sticking to 3.1 but with 98 you simply had to modernize.

When I was young getting a video game literally involved programming it. That pretty much was as much of a trial by fire as possible. Then after that getting commercial games generally involved piracy that was really really hard and later it involved hardware tweaking and noodling with that stupid config.sys crap to get the machine just so.

So popping a disk into an XBox or downloading content just isn't the same. Although I would be willing to bet that through xbox mods, xbox fixing, and cellphone repairs that there are a whole bunch of electrical engineers being born.

I would say that for those potential CS/engineers out there that the arduino type direction will be more fruitful.

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?

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.

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.

One pet theory that I always loved (and finally found in a sci-fi book) is to wonder how far dinosaur civilization would have to have gotten before we would have already found incontrovertible evidence?

I suspect that Neanderthal level would simply have left little trace with any findings being self-supressed by the palaeontologist.

Even North American Indian culture of 500 years ago would still be largely invisible after 65 million years again with the aid of people dismissing the few oddities they found.

But the aliens that I have long thought we would encounter would be some sort of machines sent out to just explore. Not even terribly advanced machines. Think about the warp drive or emdrive that NASA is tinkering with. If we barely got those to work I could see us firing out zillions of little probes to explore and eventually report back. Not all would make it back.

For the love of all science fiction be aliens!!! How many Sci-fi stories have we all read where an asteroid/comet/artefact is floating around our Solar system and it turns out to be some uber cool alien thing that has warp drive or a stargate or whatever and off we go adventuring around the galaxy?

In fact I could even narrow the question down to how many sci-fi stories have we all read where the artefact involved Ceres?

So while if I had to bet I would go with ice, soil disturbance, tectonic, or maybe even something a little cool like magnetic. But I want aliens!

I am thinking various space probes floating about. Some of those things will keep going for centuries. There is also some solar powered crap on the moon. That could keep going for stupendous amounts of time. Maybe millennia depending on the degradation of the solar panels.

But maybe there is some geothermal system that will just keep going for eons as the power generation aspect of a thermocouple should last indefinitely and is buried so it won't be subject to any weathering.