Unless it gets regulated and reputable banks start supporting it though, I can't see it getting very far. People aren't going to want to give their money to BitBollox Cyber Exchange to buy some crypto that they don't know how to properly store, just to use Steam. And Valve probably don't want to deal with it either, since there will be endless complaints about theft and unauthorized transactions, and no standard process for handling them.

It's only a logical step for Windos to evolve from a successful malware delivery platform to an actual malware. Fits to MS typical business strategy - if someone else is commercially successful on their platform, they'll drive them out with a built-in product.

I hope the anti-trust agency will stop them and demand that the malware division and the OS division become distinct legal entities. I mean, they already have the anti-competitive advantage that you can pay them in USD and don't have to buy bitcoins.

I wonder how genuine the bankruptcy was. If they actually ran out of money because the business model was not sustainable, then the consumer has a choice between an unsupported and possibly dead (if it needs cloud stuff to configure/work) product, and the option to pay a subscription. If they engineered it to give legal justification for changing the business model, that's basically fraud.

The less for the consumer is always the same. Make sure it has full local only operation. Ideally open source firmware. Don't install firmware updates unless there is some critical security issue, at least for a few months so you have time to see if it's sabotage. If you can't disable/control firmware updates, don't buy it.

Maybe it was different where you live, but the locals used to object to shops selling adult stuff near them back in the day. There was far less choice than the internet offers.

Nobody has come up with a good solution to this. Bitcoin is volatile, an environmental disaster, and slow. None of the other crypto currencies have really gained any traction for general spending.

The people behind it claim that they first asked Steam to remove the games, but Steam ignored them. They probably get a lot of requests like that. So then they contacted the payment processors. They say they asked only for specific games to be removed, but Steam just removed all the adult stuff. They probably hit the nuclear option when Visa and Mastercard queried potentially illegal material on their website.

As for how potentially illegal it is, it depends on jurisdiction. In some places the depiction of characters look too young, even if they are canonically adults, can be illegal.

Another aspect of socialism is distributed power through democracy. Rather than concentrating it at the top or in a few people, e.g. a president, it is distributed as widely as possible from local councils up.

The Nordics do that fairly well, having representative democracy and many levels to it, with no individual having too much power and everything needing to be a compromise or negotiation between interested parties.

That's precisely the encouraging part. If only the first hit is free there's the hope that simply not paying will make them go away and stop hitting you.

It's always great news that some 'feature' isn't going to be free; because that means it isn't being fast tracked toward obnoxious mandatory default.

I'd be a bit curious what the distribution of 'middle and top level' titles looks like. It's not like venture capital is 100% a confidence game; but there definitely seems to be an element of prestige involved(both in terms of obtaining capital to VC with and in terms of being a name that gets shouted from the press releases if it is involved in a funding round). That seems like the sort of environment where there would be an incentive for basically everyone who puts their name directly only a deal to be classified as at least midlevel to senior; because titles are cheap and having your funding round handled by "junior loser for rookie numbers" just doesn't look as good.

You probably can't get away with an employee directory that is nothing but 'senior master of the universe'; but to the degree that prestige matters there would be an incentive to have a sharp jump between the people who don't put their names directly on deals who can be classified as various flavors of analyst and the people who do, where you might as well just have them jump immediately to being classified as midlevel with a specific area focus or senior.

You know that someone has a couple of screws loose when they are treating "sufficiently wealthy that working hard is optional" as some kind of disaster.

Isn't that the whole point of being wealthy? Sure, if your hobby is making line go up you do you; but for most people money is a means to an end, not an end in itself, so if you've already got the money why would you keep grinding away when you could be pursuing your ends instead?

It's just a capitalist crying into his overpriced beer that Norway is doing capitalism wrong. His assumption is that because it's a sovereign wealth fund, a form of socialism, it must be bad. Starting from that assumption, he seeks justification for making it.

Norway is a nice play to live, citizens are looked after. I doubt they care if they could be more efficient by making life worse for themselves.

Bad analogy, because science has no choice but to use the lanes that the signals are emitted on. You, on the other hand, can use absolutely any frequency you please. That won't affect you.

I disagree. First, the bands used for astronomy are regularly used by others, which is one reason why radio telescopes have radio silence zones. Second, astronomy certainly trumps the need for cat videos or porn. Thirdly, you really really don't need all the frequencies that are currently being used for domestic purposes, because they're being used very inefficiently. You can stack multiple streams onto far fewer lanes and use multiplexing. Fourthly, whingers lost any sympathy they might have got from me by voting in twits who keep cutting the science budget. If we had space radio telescopes, you could do what the F you wanted on Earth, but because of the current lunatic situation, you're not only grabbing what scientists need, you're stopping them from alternative solutions as well.

I might sign up for it, depends on the cost and performance. I use a VPN habitually anyway. UK ISPs and the UK government can spy on me, or the Chinese can, and arguably the latter is less of a direct threat to my well-being. In either case the mitigations are the same.

It's not a question of it being cheap, it's a question of if we don't do it we are leaving huge economic benefits on the table.

There are a lot of jobs and business opportunities related to the transition away from fossil fuels. The only question is who is going to get them, and how soon.

And that's not even considering the costs of mitigating uncontrolled climate change.

It has to be said though that in a lot of cases it is now cheaper to be green. Wind is by far the cheapest source of electricity. For a relatively small increase in build cost, a new house can have close to zero energy bills. EVs are now around the same price as comparable fossil cars in some markets, and of course the cost of ownership is way lower.