Ugh. Wow. I hope primary schools never teach x=x+1.

In the computer industry, we've probably been set back by years or even decades by BASIC and imperative programming. Imperative programming makes intuitive sense because computers process things step by step, and that's what's exposed in imperative languages, but concurrency will be the downfall of imperative programming.

Personally, I think BASIC helped me in primary school maths, but it drove me away from being a programmer. It's challenging enough to do things in BASIC, but the step-by-step flow is clearly there. Then I looked at C and C++, and the pages of keywords and data types, and the need to buy a compiler to get anything to work, and it was no fun. And then I looked at event-based systems, like the Macintosh, and Where is the first step? How does defining a function just make things happen? Why is this nothing like the C/C++ books? It's so confusing and I quit. I only got back into programming because I took a music class from David Cope, and he taught LISP, and I was like, Woah, there's an entirely different way of programming, and it's more like math.

So, it's thoroughly discouraging to see Codeacademy, and the first thing they're doing is sequential, imperative programming, with output via console.log() and blocking function calls to alert() and prompt(), and I'm internally screaming. This is so wrong. This is not how we're going to train programmers for concurrent systems.

Of course not all US Internet sucks. Google Fiber is in some neighborhoods, a few places have FiOS, and Chattanooga has an electricity company. Better Internet connections are available if you pay, but in most of the US including yours, it is too expensive. In my workplace's part of San Francisco, we tried to get Internet from the cable company, but they said they didn't have the cable in the ground in that part of the block. I guess we could have tried digging some fiber at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a monthly cost of thousands of dollars. Instead, we went with Sonic.net Fusion bonded 2-line DSL. It was affordable because AT&T Business phone lines are expensive.

I forgot to mention that 1Mbps is not an end goal. Apple FaceTime is barely HD, 720p with huge blocky artifacts. Full HD and actual video quality take exponentially greater bandwidth. Simultaneous calls also multiply the bandwidth. That's just video calls.

Additional bandwidth creates additional opportunities. An interactive Javascript web app like Gmail doesn't work well on 56k dial-up. It needs hundreds of kbps broadband. Photo sharing like Facebook requires several Mbps of bandwidth. 4K video requires several more. If you want to be watching videos from your own personal library, no copyright owner restrictions, no corporate tracking and monetizing, then that needs to be upload bandwidth. Greater upload bandwidth would also enable other fascinating applications that haven't been invented, yet.

IPv6 could restore end-to-end communications on the Internet. The Internet was invented as a peer-to-peer network. You want to chat with someone, you get your computer to connect to their computer. Simple, direct, hard to spy on. Then NAT came along, and most computers cannot connect to each other. We need middlemen, servers with global IP addresses, to do anything. For most applications, middlemen just destroy your privacy and make you more dependent. For latency-sensitive applications, middlemen can break the application.

It has long been known that NAT is the main problem for VoIP and video calls. All peer-to-peer communications are immensely more complicated than they should be. As IPv4 exhaustion moves into crunch time, and carriers start installing CGNAT, then I expect applications will have to start budgeting their use of outbound ports to avoid exhausting the CGNAT's translation tables. IPv4 needs to die.

I hope you'll one day look back on that with chagrin. Every new technology has faced ridicule. Why would you want the instantaneous social pressure and low sound quality of telephone when you could have easy-to-read telegraph? Why would you want to see actors on a blurry television screen when you can hear them perfectly well on the radio? Technology improves. My barely-HD FaceTime is already much better than the webcams I used in the 1990's, and even better technology exists. These improvements in webcams require increases in upload bandwidth. And increased address space and bandwidth enable new applications. You know, that innovation thing.

Because all those cross-platform hacks directly contribute to its bugginess. The Heartbleed bug was facilitated by a cross-platform reimplementation of malloc that was written for speed rather than security.

And also because the OpenSSL developers have been demonstrated to sit on patches for years instead of fixing bugs.

For a morbidly good time, go look at OpenSSL Valhalla Rampage, a blog highlighting some of the insanity that the OpenBSD devs are encountering as they rewrite OpenSSL into LibreSSL. It becomes clear that Theo de Raadt was right, and the OpenSSL devs are not responsible people.

More download speed would be nice, but hardly revolutionary. My biggest problem with Internet speeds is lack of upload bandwidth.

We're well into the 21st Century. We're supposed to be able to do full-screen video calls, and the technology does exist to do that. My Mac comes with a barely-HD video camera, which takes 1Mbps to do a single video call. That's more bandwidth than most of the AT&T U-verse deployments. And this video call will glitch if anybody in the household does anything else at the same time, because the entire 1Mbps upload bandwidth is needed for the ACK packets on any downloads.

Countless applications have been eliminated because of this fundamental lack of upload bandwidth. I think it's the second-largest barrier to Internet innovation right now. Right behind lack of IPv6.

And then there are quotas, and latency, and bufferbloat, and extreme overselling. Internet in the US sucks.

What you need to do is to look at the available routers, and find which ones have supported chipsets and adequate flash storage and stuff.

In the 802.11n dual-band generation, the best seemed to be the Atheros AR7161 routers, such as the Netgear WNDR3800. I bought that specifically because it has robust open-source drivers for both radios, so it works smoothly with OpenWRT. It's not the fanciest, but I used 802.11g for years without problem, so it can't be that bad.

For the 802.11ac generation, I'd guess that devices with version 2 of the Qualcomm Atheros QCA-9880 might work best, such as version 2.0 of the TP-Link Archer C7, but I haven't been following it since I don't need an upgrade, yet.

I agree about the Model M. Mine was built in 1991, and I've had it since 2003.

I use it with my Mac, through a USB adapter. Interestingly, when I set the keyboard preferences to treat the Alt key as Command, it still treats the right Alt key as Option. I don't know if it's something specific to the Model M, or if it's something weird with my generic Holtek-based adapter. I use all 4 modifiers, so that was a bit of a bonus.

USB adapters are a lemon market. So far, I've tried buying 3 adapters. The Holtek one works well with keyboards, but not mice. The second one works well with mice but not keyboards. The third one doesn't work at all. They're all too cheap to bother returning. This is one way that Amazon, with its incredibly generous return policy, is increasing its retail dominance.

Were you around in 2000? I was. It was not a wasteland.

WiFi was already starting to become popular. Apple introduced the Airport in 1999. By 2001, I had my own WiFi network, and my school had a (very poorly functioning) network. It wasn't a "given," but it was available to the savvy people who would buy that thing.

The Web was already pretty interesting. There was streaming media, in the forms of RealPlayer, QuickTime, and Windows Media. Yahoo and Microsoft had webmail. Slashdot had fewer idiot editors. Amazon had shopping. And who knows what that device could have turned into, if it had more development.

The Nokia M510 could very well have been a flop. Sony's eVilla was a disaster. Steve Jobs refused to release the iPad until it was sufficiently "magical" in 2010. But I think this had more to do with design discipline and marketing than what was technically possible back then. After all, Palm was pretty big back then.

It doesn't even work entirely for those. Civic duty used to be an important part of American education. Now we have mega-banks that capture markets and suck the value out of everything they can.

Commodities Speculation: A Cause of Food Crises? A Crime Against Humanity?

How Morgan Stanley Has Raked in Billions by Manipulating the Prices of Everyday Commodities

Sasha Breger: How Commodities Hoarding Distorts Food Prices

There was an article I read with an evocative image of grain rotting in rail cars while crises erupt in the Middle East, but I can't find that article right now.

Civilizations have rarely ended in abrupt catastrophes. The most analyzed ending of a civilization is probably the Fall of the Roman Empire, and that ended over hundreds of years of debauchery and neglect. It takes a while for a major civilization to collapse.

Modern Western Civilization could end faster. A nuclear power plant dies much more quickly than a Roman aqueduct, and fluctuations in the market for crops in America have destabilizing effects on governments in the Middle East. On the other hand, the widespread travel and communication among nations' elites seems to be making them less likely to disrupt the channels of commerce.

In general, survivalists are ready for civilization to end suddenly. They are not prepared for civilization to continue.

Most Internet communications are carried in packets with unique source address and unique destination address. Conceptually, it doesn't matter whether those packets are encoded with Point-to-Point Protocol on a serial cable, or whether they go through a bunch of routers first. A more pedantic term is unicast. So, the actual counterexample would be multicast, and despite best efforts, there's very little of that on the Internet.

The real exception to point-to-point communications is WAN acceleration, but I'm guessing that its effects are minor across the Internet.