It appears that the only result in Google for gold settlement foundation is your post (and i suspect mine as well now). Could you tell me what that is?

Whoops, fixed that - "Global Settlement Foundation". By which I was trying to reference all the digital gold currencies (not that I think they're necessarily the way forward, but they're attempts)

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Responding to endtime:

Capitalism was a product of earlier ("classical") liberalism, but has not been fully absorbed into society. A modern capitalist should be against bank bailouts, currency monopolies, and high taxes. These views undermine established institutions and seek to distribute power, and are therefore liberal.

Technology isn't political (by doing instead of talking), but can still be liberal or conservative. DRM, paypal data mining, and national firewalls all seek to slow change and preserve established institutions, which is the fundamental tenet of conservatism.

The technology of web 2.0 is conservative in that it's the old thin-client model. Rather than your computer being your agent, it merely acts as a terminal into a monolithic system run by an institution that you're required to trust completely.

(case in point of having to edit this unrelated comment to post my already-written reply. I trust HN to kill stories to remove them from the front page, but I've no choice but to also allow it/them to prevent an already-established interaction between us.)

remember e-gold? that ended in tears for all involved. Hell, I've still got approx USD$200 in e-gold I can't get to.

All bachelors are men.

don't forget "for fear of recriminations"

or "because he is not authorized to publicly discuss the details"

Does their town have many villages in it?

and the biggest one of all, the inability to downvote.

You can downvote once you pass a karma threshold. But don't worry about it too much; hopefully you will not be using it much here.

You can down vote comments once you get 201 karma. Articles can't be downvoted. (And don't you dare use the flag as a downvote, that's a no no ;)

Great fanfic btw.

sounds very much like the misconceptions of much of those in Silicon Valley

Having spent enough time in both places I can tell you that it's much, much, much worse here. In SV, you have actual businesses to counter-weight. Here, you don't.

no, they just pass it along to the service listening on that port. How would you verify HTTPS without decrypting it?

Let’s be careful here.

Yes there are firewalls/proxies which check for validity of HTTP over port 80, though others don’t bother, or just look at the first bit of traffic for each connection.

HTTPS goes over port 443, and I imagine there are some firewalls somewhere or another which block it altogether. Probably not enough of them to worry too much about though.

Some firewalls at least make sure that traffic over port 443 does a proper SSL handshake.... after that the data is encrypted, so they have no way to tell just what’s going through.

So would FlashSocket traffic get blocked by these firewalls if it was trying to sneak in through port 80, then? That would kinda beat the purpose of this effort.

Even if your firewall doesn't track it, you could set up an IDS system to detect and alert on it, if you were into that sort of thing.

You don't need to be able to decrypt anything to identify an HTTPS flow. An unencrypted SSL/TLS handshake takes place first, before any encrypted data is sent across the wire.

Some firewalls can track this.

Right. But you can still run whatever protocol you like -on top- of SSL.

Hah. Good point. Thanks.

Scenario 1: The Germans decide to not kill the jews, and even let the top Jewish physicists stay. With their help, the Germans create a nuclear weapon in 1943-44 instead of canceling the whole project in 1942.

Scenario 2: The guy in charge of the Luftwaffe isn't a complete retard. The germans finish off the french instead of letting them run off to britain, they then invade Britain, not giving the Americans a base of operations.

I can keep going.

The Jew-loving Nazis of Scenario 1 seem like a pretty big departure from the Nazis we know and love, but yes, if the Germans had got the bomb things would have worked out differently.

I don't buy Scenario 2. The loss of Britain would have made bombing Germany difficult, not impossible. Worst-case scenario is that they have to develop a long-range bomber. More likely they'd have invaded some part of Europe or North Africa (most likely Britain itself) as a first order of business upon entering the war -- I doubt they would have made it to 1945 without a well-defended slice of Europe. Of course this scenario probably also has a non-negligible Luftwaffe defending German cities in 1945 but, heck, the nukes have gotta get through eventually.

I'm not sure your second scenario is as quickly solvable as you think. The loss of the uk would have been the loss of an important strategic platform - essentially allowing a second front to squeeze Germany from when it came to attack. Also it would have given Germany pretty consolidated control of our side of the North Atlantic, supply routes would have been severely disrupted.

I think ultimatelythe war would have been won but redeploying to, say, North Afric would have taken a while.

It's more interesting to look at alternative histories for World War I, in my opinion. Because the parties involved weren't as clearly `good' or `evil'.

the thing is though, WWI was mostly static trench warfare. There wasn't much that could "go" differently.

I guess the US could have never joined

Actually people tend to really overestimate how important trenches were to the stalemate. Sure, it took a lot of effort to break through a trench line but both sides were perfectly capable of doing it when they could devote enough resources. The problem was that railroads meant that the mobility of the defenders was always much greater than the mobility of the attackers and telegraphs meant that the abilty of the defenders to coordinate was much greater than the ability of the attackers to coordinate. The internal combustion engine and radio changed this when WWII rolled around.

There were also very many places where things could have turned out differently. For instance, if the Germans had stuck to the original Schlieffen plan and managed to outflank the allies they might very well have captured Paris right at the start.

Do you mistake the western front for the whole war?

Interesting would have been: Germany, instead of planning of going after France first, Russia later--goes for Russia only and just defends against France. After defeating Russia (let's assume), they try to make peace in the west.