Does that include this one?

I am not sure about the market for smart cards in Sub-Saharan Africa (the intended market for these smartcards). Smartcards need to work with a lot of complementary technology and infrastructure in order to deliver the benefits of convenient and secure payment (readers, communication systems, electricity to power these), and I don't know that this is present to a great extent in many African countries.

In addition, given that running a business in Lagos is a pretty difficult thing (given the chronic power shortages, difficulty in obtaining skilled manpower, poor transport infrastructure), I'm not sure the smartcards will necessarily be cheap enough to compete against imported cards, even with cheaper labour offsetting some of the costs. If Jonathan's idea is to use tariffs to level the playing field, it means that the factory's market is effectively limited to Nigeria, making it even a more dubious enterprise.

And why is that noteworthy?

Must everyone have the same kind of names used where you live?

If the devices like this really do end up working, they'd be doing what many recreational drugs do today.

I wonder what this would mean for the war on drugs...

Is the Slashdotterati going to talk about...

- Militant Islam striking again?

- Guns killing people?

- The growth of citizen video?

- The fact that this is not 'news for nerds'?

I can't wait...

I'm not sure what Stross is saying here. An important part of the process of developing technology is not just to ensure it can be developed, but that it can be developed at a price that most people can afford.

So when I seen advanced technology portrayed in SF being used by fairly ordinary people, I assume that the technology has been made affordable enough that paying for it is not an issue.

It's not fair to compare payday lenders to these guys.

Payday lenders don't get you into the debt that brings you to their doors, even if you feel that they are taking advantage of your situation.

I found it interesting that these criminals made a point of honouring their promise to provide the tools to decrypt the encrypted data.

At first, this didn't make sense to me. They are criminals; why do they have to honour anything?

But thinking about it some more, it works in their favour. Say I am a desperate person looking to get my files back, and I ask around if anyone has had any success with paying the ransom. If get responses saying "yes", then of course I am more likely to pay too, and this works in favour of the criminals' bottom line.

In addition, it dosn't cost the criminals much to provide the decryption tools, unlike if this was a kidnapping of a real person where there is the risk of the kidnapper getting caught during a hostage exchange.

Why?

What do you mean by 'decadent' here?

Sure, some people bind up their culture in a language, but for others, language is just functional - a way to get someone else to understand your thoughts. Why should the 'decadence' of a language stop you from using it if it helps you pass your message across clearly, and if it does so better than many other languages because of its rich vocabulary?

Just to be clear, the concept of nationalities isn't going anywhere any time soon, as long as there's a need for there to be law and order in society. What *may* change is a person's affinity to a particular nationality.

Nationality is really just a legal construct, anyway - it allows a body of people (known as a 'government') to determine what rights and responsibilities you have by virtue of being in a particular physical location.

I think that most people have a stronger affinity to a culture - especially the culture they grew up with - than they do to a nationality, since culture evokes a more emotional response. Of course, for many people, the two are the same - but if you're a naturalized immigrant, they are two very different things.

Nationality will become even less important to people if more countries start trying to attract people to live in them (for economic or social reasons), but I don't see happening for a long while yet.

If their security is so bad, you should be able to hack into their network.

Once you've done so, post the story of the hacking on the internet.

Nothing like public embarassment to make them clean up their security practices.

What if I don't know your email address, or I don't have access to a facility from which to email you?

What might be more convenient is to have a transcription of my voicemail sent to you as text, though (assuming your number is a mobile number).

What's more likely is the evolution of the transcription systems mentioned elsewhere in this thread, where the voicemail that the caller leaves is transcribed to text and sent as an email to the callee.

That's certainly more convenient that having to drop the call and send a separate email.

To be clear, as long as:
- callers call callees;
- callees are not available to pick up the phone;
- callers want callees to know there and then why they called;
voicemail is not going anywhere soon (although the means through which voicemail may be consumed might change).