The decline of slashdot continues. Dice is basically cashing in on what small shred of credibility that the site had left.

Torrent has been the only way that I've downloaded FreeBSD ISOs when they're released for at least 5 years. It is lightening fast compared to even the fastest HTTP or FTP mirror.

You clearly did not read the article. You are saying that it is possible to make good estimates by using the methods you spelled out. The article is saying that it is not possible to make estimates, and that the solution is to not make estimates at all, but to follow Agile software development.

Everyone beat me to the Jigawatt joke.....

Interesting points. The problem of bad software becoming entrenched is definitely a problem in more fields than this. Perhaps the only way to loosen the cruft is to modify the laws governing the software to make the poorly written ones non-compliant?

Perhaps you are correct. Lets back away from that solution a little bit. How about a full non-profit organization that produces medical software? Or, a government agency tasked with writing medical software?

Do any of you think it would be feasible to start a company that makes FOSS medical software for doctors' offices? I imagine that what an office needs isn't very different from office to office. The company would earn its money long-term providing support for the software. It would also need to be compliant with HIPAA and all other regulations.

If that's where they're trying to block, I hope people start putting up more bridge nodes. According to recent news, there is a growing shortage of bridge nodes.

I think you and the others misread what I wrote (I just reread it, and it seems clear to me, but whatever). A Tor user in Japan's traffic from their computer to the next inside the Tor network cannot be blocked easily.

What I said was that the traffic from the exit nodes to the destination address can be easily blocked. The article was talking about preventing anonymous posts being made to Japanese web forums. If they block traffic from all exit nodes, posts made directly from these exit nodes would be blocked as long as the forum is hosted in Japan.

Day after day the number of comments on stories on slashdot number around 200-300 for popular stories and the rest barely break 100. I think we're seeing the end of days for slashdot. Nothing on the internet dies quickly, so the site will slowly continue to decay over the next few years until even the people who maintain the site stop bothering to even do that.

Notorious criminals behave like someone is watching them most of the time, I would imagine.

The solution to this problem is to setup an group of I2P outproxies inside of Japan's networks. It will take some time for Japan to catch up to current technologies, if they're only getting around to targeting Tor as late as now.

Also, is Japan trying to copy China, or something?

They can still block any traffic from the exit nodes. All the ISPs in Japan can null route all traffic from Tor exit node IP addresses. The list of addresses is published by Tor so people can do just this (it's not meant for the ISP level, rather, they publish it so people can block Tor from message boards and such). This would prevent all Tor traffic from entering Japan's networks directly

Using a proxy immediately after Tor would be the only solution to this, but even this could be blocked since lists of public open proxies are maintained in a number of locations such as XRoxy.

The police actually hide the surveillance cameras in your country?

Fascinating.