It begun with the invention of the computer as we know it... - Charles Babbage,"Father of the computer", British - Alan Turing, "Father of modern computer science", British

Then there was Margret Thatcher who decided the internet was a fad and wasn't worth investing in internet infrastructure in the country.

Where did the multi billion (if not trillion by now) industry end up? Silicon Valley and elsewhere....

Bravo UK... Bravo </sarcasm>

The mistake Thatcher made was to open up the telecoms market to competition at a time when the legacy provider (BT) were starting to build a high speed internet highway/backbone. In hindsight, this could indeed be considered an error but looking how BT have fared since, perhaps not?

We're now in the absurd situation where 4 out of 6 power generating companies are foreign owned and the Japanese own our chip manufacturer.

All because of her policies that originally envisioned that the share holding would be by the British public, not foreigners.

And the latest scandal is that our water companies are dumping ridiculous amounts of sewage into our waterways while giving out huge dividends. And there's nothing anyone seems to be able to do about it.

I recall Blair saying he regretted not doing enough about energy security when he was in power, I don't recall him blaming Thatcher?

Brown expands nuclear ambitions (2008): The prime minister said that with oil prices soaring, it was time to be "more ambitious" for nuclear plans... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7424158.stm

There has been a long history of failure, by both sides of the political spectrum.

Blair was the only other recent politician with similar power. He was actually a fan of privatisation and deregulation (and still is, if you read recent interviews).

And recent governments don't even want to fix it, the status quo benefits their rich donors, even if it's massively hurting Britain's long-term prosperity. You've also got a significant section of the Tory party that still believe in the thoroughly discredited neoliberalism Thatcher followed, as seen by Liz Truss' disastrous tenure.

I'm not a Thatcher hater, but there were a lot of negatives as well as positives.

This is the most charitable interpretation of events (no sarcasm intended[1]), and one I would like to believe, but greed is very powerful and leads people to evil, so I can well imagine various lobbying groups would have seen the easy mid-term money to be made from such sales.

[1] "Never attribute to malice that which may be adequately be explained by incompetence."

She decided it was better to open the market to foreign cable TV providers and so barred BT from selling TV access.

Without TV there was no driver for fibre investment.

Where BT would have had a requirement to provide universal access to fibre, as with phone provision, Telewest and NTL just did geograhically limited roll outs of legacy coax and the rest is history.

Also it denies agency to those in power in the decades that followed. I mean did that decision bind the policymakers that followed when it became clear how important the internet really was?

This seems unbelievable now, but the relevant reference is https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

Much happier with 1Password since we switched from Lastpass. Consistent UI, proper OS integration, multiple separate vaults, not to mention the security story seems better (I've seen several LP vulnerabilities of concern but not yet seen a 1PW one that worried me).

[0] https://lastpass.com/support.php?cmd=showfaq&id=8126

http://www.lucianofiandesio.com/1password-in-linux

I've been tempted to do away with the extra clicks and just use iCloud Keychain and encrypted Notes, but 1Password feels like less of a black box at this point (maybe just because I've been using it longer). It also seems smarter about filling out forms than the browser-native options in Chrome and Safari — not perfect, but better. I don't use their subscription service, just the desktop and mobile app.

Thinking about it I'm really only using it for convenience, security/strong passwords is in second place.

Given all the problems with OpenSSL, I really wished they used something like BoringSSL.

For basic crypto algorithms, there's little to no difference. Most of the changes in BoringSSL are in higher-level code, like TLS and certificate management.

Asking the richest capitalists in the world if capitalism works is a silly question if you ask me...

Can I ask what you did with the rest of your time?

I love your frugal approach. You deserve everything you got. Nice to see how professionally you both handled the negotiations and it certainly teaches me the virtue of patience!