Maybe we could simply encourage the companies to put their code changes in a repo, such as GitHub and just provide a link to their profile?

How effective would methane generators be in small farming communities, which already produce methane as a by-product? If they work well, then they may be able to be off-grid completely?

I am a recent convert to Unison. I discovered this because I was trying out Google Drive, which I found worked well, but I don't want to keep more of my data in someone else's cloud if I have to. So far I have been using the Mac OS UI. With a solution with Unison you will need your own server with ssh access to the Internet. The downside is that you have to worry about backups or uptime, though you don't have to worry about some government taking the service offline permanently (or while they spends years trying to establish possible guilt).

The advantages with solutions like Drop Box or Google Drive is that you not have to worry about the server side. Depending on the amount of data you want to store you will have to choose between the basic paid access or the paid access, which gives you more storage.

BitTorrent is probably the worst solution here, since it only works well when the data is massively distributed. If you only ever have one peer, then you are better off with one of the solutions mentioned above.

Another approach would be for the pirate bay to start using IPv6 in addition to IPv4. It is always going be cat and mouse, so we just need to make sure the mouse is more techno savvy and uses technology to its advantage.

Which 33 countries surveyed is important, since percentages vary and also why people pirated is also important. You can't start fixing a problem until you understand the motive behind the act. For example Photoshop is probably heavily pirated amongst home users because of the $1000 price tag and they use it no more than a few days a year.

Indeed. Until other companies start using this, then it is purely Apple centric. At least it falls back to SMS. In many ways if the phone service companies didn't charge so much for SMS, then this would never have been an interesting feature. I must admit I have started using Whatsapp in certain cases for this, but until it is standard on all phones, then it still feels like a kludge.

You are confusing CDMA as signal encoding and the CDMA data specification' (aka Qualcomm CDMA). GSM always been an umbrella standard covering what features are needed for communication. Originally GSM went with TDMA as the encoding, but in recent years have switched to CDMA. 3G GSM refers to the third generation of the GSM standard, which also includes the CDMA signal encoding. It does not use the Qualcomm CDMA data specification.

GSM was as a standard was formed by multiple entities to avoid the incompatiblities encountered during the analogue days. The GSM standard includes many technologies and evolves over time. As long as the licensees follow the standard, then everyone communicates.

Even at $100 it may still be cheaper than digging up the ground and laying fibre optics in certain cases. I think what would really change things is if these were easily installable by someone who isn't a specialist.

While the technology is old, the implementation seems to be new. Also, the form it has taken means that we are likely to see cheaper commercial solutions coming out or a whole bunch of hobbyists implementing this themselves - or both. $100 vs $4000+. I can just imagine mesh networks based on this.

If these can be coupled with solar power and are of low energy use, then I can imagine these being alternative solutions to laying cables in remote areas.

Sure, but I suppose the definition of 'purchaser' in this context needs to be clarified. After all if you download a 'free' piece of software, then are you 'buying' a piece of software for 0€? This is important, since Java can freely be downloaded in compiled or source form, with the latter under GPL.