Slashdot Mirror

why does living in England exclude you from understanding tipping? Is this a serious question, or a troll?

According to that bastion of incontrovertible knowledge, 10% tipping is customary in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_%28gratuity%29)

Don't care for wikipedia? How about the arrogant Cecil? http://www.straightdope.com/co...

Yet another link claims the practiced started in English bars. http://www.billshrink.com/blog...

if you don't like any of the above explanations you can always google your own...

If it isn't about using a gold standard, why does the article keep giving examples of people using competing currencies that are *backed by gold*?

How likely is it that the gold supply will not be stable in the future for any reason? Speculators have been able to corner the silver market - its possible for this to happen gold too.

The liberty dollar is one example of a currency pegged to the US Dollar. E-gold.com, in-game virtual currency, Vedic City, Iowa's Raam, and the Birkshire's BirkShares are all legal and have been around for years.

What is 5% huge relative to? My house is huge compared to an ant, and tiny when compared to a skyscraper. The question is, what are interest rates relative to other countries? According to this, the US is doing rather well: http://www.billshrink.com/blog/7050/the-highest-global-inflation-rates/

Thankfully sensible people *do* exist.

Nexus One vs iPhone, Droid & Palm Pre

It doesn't look like anyone has recommended BillShrink.com. You tell them what type of plan you want, if you want to get a new phone or not, where you live and where you work, and it will give you a list of possible phones and/or plans from each provider, along with a rating of how strong each carrier is expected to be in the areas where you'd usually want to use your phone.

Of course if you want to be really safe you ought to find some coworkers or neighbors with different kinds of phones and see what kind of coverage they get. Combined with the list from BillShrink, all you have to do is decide how to balance how much you want to pay with what kind of coverage you're willing to deal with. (And maybe you'll even get lucky like me and find that the cheapest company (T-Mobile currently) also has the best coverage in your area =)

Woah, that's huge. According to billshrink's comparison there are only 300 apps currently for the Pre.

There are 1,040 apps available now in the App catalog, not including 300 homebrew apps. Still, it is a lot less than Android (14,000 apps), or iPhone (100,000 apps) or even creaky old PalmOS (50,000 apps)

Woah, that's huge. According to billshrink's comparison there are only 300 apps currently for the Pre. The lack of apps was the #1 reason I haven't bought a Pre yet.

This should let them easily get 10x the number of current apps for a relatively cheap price. Also since there are so few apps to start with it should be fairly easy for any descent app to at least get the $1k prize.

...I'm willing to take a crack at some amateur number crunching.

Per billshrink, Sprint is responsible for 51M out of 268M or so that are in the cell phone market. 8M of those were monitored via data collected via Sprint, and it is unknown whether or how this number scales across the other providers.

Google holds the US population at 304M.

CNN has the US prison/probation/parole population at 7.3M.

Right off the bat, it seems like you have a greater chance of having the government track your GPS data than being actually convicted of a crime. And this assumes the numbers are equal, where they are not.

7.3M from a total of 304M is 2.4%. The odds of you being a criminal are approximately three in one hundred.

8M from a total of 51M is 15.6%.

6.5 times as many people, proportionately, were spied upon by Sprint on behalf of law enforcement.

Extrapolating that out, something close to 50M people's cell phone data was shared with law enforcement. Looking at the prison population numbers, this means for every criminal in the entire system, something like five were investigated. And that doesn't completely hold up either because those 7.3M aren't cell customers on the one hand, and not every citizen in the US is a member of the market share.

And this is just the data we know about.

Again, the math here is almost certainly wrong, but I'm sure some bright slashdot folks can come along and help us with that.

I'm only now willing to throw in the towel and buy an iPhone 3Gs. I've resisted until now because I hate AT&T, but this new model is too compelling for me to resist. I know a couple of guys who are lusting after the Pre but they won't buy it because they hate Sprint.

I have the Pre and love it.

Sprint isn't the same Sprint of 7 years ago. I just switched from Verizon to Sprint for the Pre, and my coverage is the exact same.

Sprint gives you 30 days to try out a new phone without penalty. I would definitely recommend the Pre if you can get your hands on one.

Also, for what it's worth, the Sprint plans are way cheaper than the AT&T plans.

http://www.billshrink.com/blog/mobile-cell-phone-plan-cost-markup/

recent post "Dissecting The Mobile Phone Plan Markup"

ISP VOIP has to be better than this