If you pay your money for a subscription - does that mean you can then disable your ad blocker and not have ads served to you? Call me a cynic - but I bet they still try and bombard you with visual spam.

Maybe he thought the Information Superhighway meant more roads.

... and in doing so, you show how ignorant you really are. Nice.

I work for one of Mr Murdoch's successful news operations. Specifically I work on one of their flagship web sites that gets about 40 million hits a week - and has embedded a full Google search solution. We engage the services of a prominent SEO company - one that works across a lot of web sites for this organisation. The main goal of this SEO part of work is to "rank highly on Google". Not "rank highly on search engines" - specifically Google. Mr Murdoch wants his free advertising on Google, and also wants to be paid for the privilege. We all know this is just "big business w*nking". He's on a crusade to try and make some money for nothing. It still irks.

>> A scrum master is not a manager. He's only mean to organise a handful of meetings and deal with impediments. These should not take any significant time.

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The Scrum Master does indeed manage impediments to the projects. They act as a "shit umbrella" - protecting the team from all external influences that are deemed detrimental to actually doing the job. They "keep a finger on the pulse" of the team - identifying problems (sometimes between individuals, sometimes with individuals, sometimes with external 3rd parties interfering). They are there to allow the team to develop the software they are employed to do... in a pleasant environment (that doesn't include phones ringing all the time, doesn't include constant multi-tasking, and doesn't include managers walking up and asking dumb questions every 2 minutes).

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I disagree with a previous poster that the "top people" should be Scrum Masters. Whilst the role must have someone with a strong personality and understanding of the business relationships between the project and the rest of the organisation (in a large corporate at least), they do not need to have any "hands-on" technical ability (or involvement). For similar reasons, an intern is probably not a good solution as Scrum Master either. So-called "soft" skills are more important here.

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The Scrum Master role is as facilitator - and to help "keep the team honest" with respect to Agile principles and process (regardless of what flavour your organisation has chosen to attempt).

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I've been working in Agile teams now for 4+ years - seen good and bad implementation... had lots of success - and some failures (don't we all). Agile tends to work with enthusiastic, smart, intelligent and "bright" people. It doesn't do so well if the people are dumb, unfocussed or demotivated. The Scrum Master role includes identifying these people and either working with them to "lift their game" - or works with HR to get them out of the team.

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I would object strongly if the Scrum Master role was not a full time position, and if they were wanting to act as some kind of technical team lead. Let developers do the development... let people who understand the technology stack make those recommendations... but don't confuse the roles :)

I noticed this exact same behaviour for the first time over the weekend on the Bulldog DSL (Pipex) plan I am on here in the UK. Everything stops for up to a couple of minutes, then everything works fine. Whilst this is happening all other network activity appears to work as normal. I really hope it's not a trend with ISPs out there!