Considering all the nice things I've heard about American ISPs, you already seem more buttfucked than the goatse guy. But I guess from now on you'll pay extra for lube.

That sounds familiar...

Mass production killed the repair business, unless it's really expensive they just come cheaper off the assembly line than having a repairman with the skills, parts and tools fix them one item at the time. I don't think I could find a seamstress or cobbler anymore if I wanted to repair my clothes or shoes, at least I'd have to search far and wide. I'm sure a tailor would do it for way too much money but it wouldn't be cost efficient. Same goes for my furniture, if anything breaks it's almost certainly easier and cheaper to replace than repair. Small electronics repair has died entirely, cars and houses are still expensive enough to repair but not much else. Particularly if you're not really sure if it's properly fixed or the repaired part is weaker than the original and taking into account that the item is worn and likely to break again sooner than a new one.

Not that it's just repairs, in many areas you're so outpaced that being self-sufficient is more expensive than at the store. Like for example my dad and I used to chop firewood, but now we buy it and if you add up the raw material cost (owning a forest patch), the production costs (chain saw, blade, chain, fuel, oil, protection gear, cleaver, transport) and a modest self cost for your time (getting there, felling, cutting into pieces, transporting to the road, cleaving, getting it home, stacking for drying) it's still cheaper to work, pay taxes and buy firewood from a company that drives around with big forest machines and creates more firewood in an hour than we can manage in a week. Customization is really more interesting and worth a premium, but it's rarely combined with the urgency of needing it from my own printer. Or if it's that urgent, I probably can't wait for the printer.

Our one example hasn't really been around for very long though, all estimates of the Sun's life cycle indicates Earth should remain habitable for another billion years or more. Where were we even a thousand years ago? It doesn't matter if the technology isn't ready until 3014, it's still a blink of an eye on the time scales we're talking here. And there's already semi-realistic craft designs like Project Orion that'll take hundreds of years to reach the next star, not tens of thousands. Unless the world goes for WW3 and a new stone age, it seems plausible that the technology will be available in a thousand years.

Well that's the price for being ahead of the curve, recently I was sending a file to a friend and his 40 Mbit download was the limiting factor not my 100 Mbit upload. But it's been this way since we had modems, only now it's a thousand times faster. So what? When I'm on gigabit then 100 Mbit will be normal, 10 Mbit slooow and 1 Mbit stone age. Besides, it will probably mostly be burst transmissions. During "The Gathering", a huge LAN party with 6000 participants - obvious all at their computers most the time - they saw up to 14 Gbps of traffic total with 30 Gbit capacity, in 2012 they had 200 Gbit just for show but it was never close to being used even when they tried to get everyone to do a stress test. Of course people are there for all sorts of nerdy events not just to leech off that pipe, but still.

If you take the people there to be above average interested and above average active compared to the average person on an average day, it's still only about 2.3 Mbit/person. Imagine you had a gigabit line, bought a 20GB game on Steam? Okay it's done in less than 3 minutes but then you're probably going to play it for hours. Download a BluRay? That's 7 minutes but probably 1:30-2:00 hours run time. And that's only when you have actual leisure time, if you're asleep or at work or school or doing housework or hobbies those hours are already filled. I already download everything I want, gigabit would only enable me to do it faster getting back to idle.

No doubt Theo will do a solo run as usual, then bitch about all those ungrateful companies using it and giving nothing in return just like with OpenSSH. Meanwhile, this looks like a genuine attempt at starting a "Linux-style" project with lots of corporate support like the Linux kernel that all seem to have a stake in users trusting their computers for shopping and banking and cloud services and whatnot. Of course Theo can make his heroic and sacrificial stand, but this looks more like collaborative open source in progress "You know these low level libraries we all depend on? Well they're not really getting the attention they should have, none of us alone are going to do all the grunt work but if we pool our resources..." It can of course be fluff and PR but really it doesn't seem like a big seller to their end users, there's more potential for PR blunders if big bugs slip past them.

Are they going to hit the ground running? No. But I think you underestimate the potential here if they really choose to take... well, not ownership but stewardship over key libraries and provide the level of development, patching, review, testing, auditing etc. they lack today. Of course they will need skilled people, but those companies certainly have the capability to provide that if they want to. It's not like Theo is the only coder who knows his stuff around and he's still only one person with so many hours in a day and who'd better not get hit by a bus. And it still remains to be seen how clean the code Theo writes is in someone else's eyes, I usually think my code is perfectly clear until I ask others to look at it...

The flip side of that is the old adage "divide and conquer", the OSS community is almost self-defeating at times. Long before the mouse trap is the kind of smooth experience users want the core developers have moved to their new and even more grand mouse trap refactoring/redesign/remake that'll fix all the fundamental issues they discovered in the last design. Not that it's really different from proprietary software, at work it's exactly the same I'd love to get rid of the old and in with the new because even though it's not entirely done yet it's so much better than the old. The difference is at work I can't just drop working on our existing software and with our current user base, what pays the bills is what they get done not what I feel like doing. With OSS the train is leaving the station quite often, either you're on it or you're on your own.

And by on your own, I mean good luck finding a backport of any modern software to run on a distro 5+ years old or figuring out all the dependencies yourself. Just upgrade, it's free as in beer and in speech... but not as in time. Almost every 6 month cycle when I was on Ubuntu there was something I wanted and a bunch of unwelcome changes that tagged along. With Windows 7 I feel pretty confident that I can install any 2014 application on my 2009 OS, it'll work and it'll involve just that application. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's somebody out there who wants the new version but as long as it's not broken for me, don't fix it. I just wanted a new app, not a new distro.

This is why most of the apps I installed on my Android phone come from the F-Droid store. Everything in there was useful to at least one person, not just written in the hope that someone can be persuaded to buy it. Sadly, this does mean that it contains very few games...

It's a shame then that they chose a name that explicitly excludes large portions of the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem.

OpenSSL has nothing to do with Linux, other than that a number of vendors that bundle it with their products also bundle Linux. The FreeBSD or NetBSD Foundations would have made as much sense (i.e. none).

I switched from giffgaff when they put up their prices and engaged in misleading advertising ('look, we're cheaper than everyone else if you pick the really expensive plans that you have to dig around on their web sites to even find and ignore the ones that are the same price we were offering before we put prices up!'). I guess the difference is what you count as a plan. I regard their goody bags as an add-on, not a plan. On a pre-pay plan you don't get anything included - that's the point. Given that Giffgaff's cheapest goody bag (which expires after a month) costs what I spend on my phone in 3-4 months, I think it reinforces my point. You get unlimited texts only if you buy them in bulk. The 200 minutes and 250MB that the £7.50 goody bag gives you would cost me £8.50, so if I used that much it would be a good deal (although I'd then be paying 7p/minute more for calls above that, so I'd have to be making close to exactly 200 minutes of calls a month for it to make sense). I spend under £2/month on my phone currently though, so it's a pretty poor deal with that in mind.

If you start in London, you don't have to go that far. Cost of living drops by a factor of 3-4 when you get outside London and, as an added bonus, you aren't living in London. Oh, average life expectancy also increases by two years once you stop breathing London 'air' too.

They did release it DRM free if you bought it from them. If you bought it via another publisher then you got some extra crap and had to go back to them to get the DRM-free version. How about next time giving money directly to the company that sells DRM-free games, instead of to a company whose only contribution was to add some DRM crap and put it in a box?

You're assuming that everyone who wants to get an illegal copy needs to crack the DRM. That's not how it works. One person cracks it then releases it on file-sharing sites / networks and everyone copies it. It may prevent casual copying (e.g. I lend a friend the CD), but these days it's easier to give someone a link to a .torrent file than to lend them a CD anyway. More importantly, if someone doesn't know about things like BitTorrent then when they try to copy their game and find that they can't, they're going to ask their favourite search engine and discover that they can get games that they can copy for free. With something like GOG, you get all of the convenience of illegal downloads (actually more - the downloads are a lot faster and they always work), and I get to support the companies that are releasing the games in a way that I want.

The first or the second? I really enjoyed the first, but about the only improvement in the second was the graphics (and my laptop could only handle the lowest detail at a playable rate anyway). The combat was a lot better in the first one and the characters seemed more interesting.

It's a difficult balance in this kind of game between making it open (so the player feels in control of what's happening) and providing a story (because part of the reason for buying the game like this is to be told a story). The first one seemed to get the balance right, but the sequel felt too scripted to me - I was just running from one plot element to the next and then making the four token decisions. There were lots of side-quests in the first one that impacted the story later on and interactions with characters that told you interesting things.

I think the sequel also got off to a bad start, because it let you import your save game from the first one, but after being given a silver sword by a Goddess and a steel sword by a king and finding some legendary armour exploring a tomb, I discovered that the first person I killed had a better sword than me. More importantly, swords and armour made a significant difference in the second. One thing that always annoys me in fantasy games is when the equipment makes more of a difference in fights than the skill. In The Witcher, the difference between a crappy sword stolen from a low-paid henchman and the amazing sword forged for the kind was about 10-20%. Enough to give you a slight edge, but not enough to make a real difference unless a fight was very close. The difference between Geralt at the start and Geralt after he'd (re)learned a load of fighting skills was significant. In contrast, in The Witcher 2, you can get a really good sword and then be easily able to beat monsters that would kill you easily with a less-good sword, without learning any new skills.