The contract that I have for Internet is 8M/800k ADSL - the fastest available to me, and admittedly it's pretty expensive for that. There is fibre in the making in this village which will be much faster and much cheaper but it's all I have. Other parts in the city - especially the high rises - have 1000M available, and can get 100M at like half the price I pay. For what I do it's sufficient. Faster would be nicer, but well it's not there and I can live with it, there's nothing that I want to but can't do because of the speed.
Cable, don't know really how many channels, about 30 free including three pay-TV channels of choice. It could have been 100 and I wouldn't have watched it, it could have been none - my previous home we had no cable TV, just cable Internet. It's included mostly as incentive to have you buy more from them. It's worth nothing to me, so I credit the full fee I pay to the Internet service, and $0 of it to the cable service (which is digital, too, so when watching cable channels my downloads suffer).
My Internet which includes a handful of cable TV channels - $298; my phone - $98 (including reduced speed but unlimited data & tethering allowed); son's phone $35 (voice only); wife's phone also about $100 (including data).
Total telecomms bill for the family $531 or just under USD 70 per month. Now we don't have TV sports packages or so (those run $200-500 a month), just don't care enough about that, and I'd rather go to a bar or so if there would be anything actually worth watching in that realm.
Here I hear talk about just cable TV at USD 150 a month. That's before mobile phones and so. Maybe it's time for a free market or so, better quality and lower prices.
A vast majority of households in my country has an Internet connection at home, and with on average 3.2 people per household that's easily another three mobile data plans on top of that. So four Internet connections per household. We have a grand total of three ourselves (my 9yo doesn't have data on his phone).
So most people have Internet already, and don't buy an Internet connection just for Netflix. Netflix is just one of the many things one can do with an Internet connection - in between playing online games, trolling Slashdot and other forums, reading the news, downloading movies and music from The Pirate Bay, and more. It becomes an add-on, so it's pretty fair to not add much if any cost of the existing Internet connection to Netflix, at most the share of the connection that is used for Netflix.
My mail server doesn't even accept imap connections, only imaps. That is one of the measures I took almost without thinking years ago when I set it up. Why even still support unencrypted imap? No good reason for that. The imap port is even closed in the firewall.
When connecting to a hotspot I prefer it to be an encrypted over-the-air connection (WPA-PSK for example), but that is often not available. Starbuck's et.al. don't do that, it's easier to connect without. No password. Just an activation code (hard enough) to get your 30 mins free wifi. That connection is unencrypted, a sniffer could probably see that I connect to my mail server or to slashdot.org or whatever (encryption won't stop that part unless you go for a VPN), but not my passwords as that's over encrypted connections.
The focus is now also on the free WiFi access points, but how about the other two dozen or so connecting points between me and the Slashdot server just to post this rambling? Are they secure? Can I even know whether they are secure, I mean, hello NSA!
Incidentally, a lot of "security" consultants use this trick.....they set up a fake wireless access point in an office, and when a lot of people accidentally connect to it, thy sniff some passwords.
Indeed they do expose a serious security risk: browsers (or other software) sending login credentials in plain text over an untrusted connection (which is ANY connection on the Internet, except maybe a patch cable between your laptop and the server you try to connect to).
At least in my area there are several singles (speed dating) groups, but most of them are actually pretty small. It's indeed a bit odd to add it to dating sites.
Besides, is it nowadays immoral to even just visit dating sites?
Last time I checked for my phone (and that was pretty recent) all adblockers required root access to even work. That requirement is for most people enough to put them off (even for me and I'm far more tech savvy than average). Installing an ad blocker for a web browser is a lot easier, but it's not the browser I use much on my phone, it's the apps, and that's where the ads annoy me most.
You're not the only one. I don't use my phone much to browse the web, but I do play games and those flashing ads (preferably between the image and its negative for maximum contrast) are really annoying, totally distracting.
It's not the ads that drive me to use an ad blocker. I don't mind ads, I know websites and games need to get their revenue somehow.
It's the flashing bits on a web page that are very distracting, it's the pop-up ads that block my view of what I want to read (those apparently unblockable "sign up for our newsletter" ones are also a constant source of irritation), it's the pop-unders that are almost as irritating, it's the floaters that move around and ask you to chase them down before you can start reading what you came for, it's the flashing and moving banners above the game I'm trying to concentrate on.
Incidentally, ad blockers take away all those annoyances. That they take away the ads as well, that's collateral damage. I don't mind ads not being there.
If slamming on the brakes causes an accident (almost certainly a rear-end collision - something that appears to far more prevalent in the US than other parts of the world considering anecdotal evidence on/.), it simply means that the people behind it were either keeping insufficient distance or not paying attention or both. Both those issues would be solved with an autopilot, and even more so a way for cars to broadcast a "I'm braking!" kind of warning to other nearby vehicles.
car crashes can now be handled like air crashes, so rare that each one can be meticulously analyzed to pick apart how the system failed.
The fact that only a tiny, tiny fraction of all the cars on the road has this function, and the fact that it is something very new, is definitely helping.
Now if all cars would have just this autopilot crashes would occur much more frequently - even if still far less than the current rate. Then they're probably becoming so common again, like crashes with regular cars nowadays, that you won't hear about it except in the form of end-of-year statistics, or the occasional really bad one.
This is interesting... although I don't think the technology is ready for something like this. Consider the thought experiment of having to select one of two options, where in one you die and in the other you kill somebody else, for instance: you're going on the highway, and ahead of you, blocking all the lanes, are different subjects, and hitting anyone will kill them. What should the autopilot do?
Simple: slam on the brakes and come to a full stop as soon as possible. Autopilot will be at least a second faster than any human in this, lessening whatever impact. Maybe the accident can not be fully prevented, but that one extra second of braking can make a huge difference, including that between life and death.
According to TFS, Elon Musk believes if the autopilot was active it would have prevented this accident from happening.
So let's just take his word for that. Driver makes an error and causes a crash that autopilot would have prevented, while driving a car that has the autopilot function installed and in good working order but the driver decided to operate the car fully manually.
We have cars with technologies like traction control, anti-lock braking, assisted braking/steering options, there are various collision prevention options - technologies that are active at all times, and the driver may not even have the option to switch it off. Now there is an accident which autopilot could have prevented, but it didn't.
Should autopilot, even when disabled by the driver and not actively driving the car, always be alert and step in to prevent these accidents? And - as direct follow up - could or even should we blame Tesla for not leaving autopilot in standby acting as a driver's assistant?
A very impressive feat it is, putting that spacecraft into a very well defined orbit around this planet. But what I am wondering is how do they know where the thing really is? Just like catching up with that comet, the Rosetta mission. Sending a tiny craft out in space so far out you can't see it, to catch up with an equally invisible comet (invisible from earth for the first part of the mission at least).
It's too small to see from earth. There is no GPS system or so at Jupiter. No trees, no landmarks - they did it blind, without visible light camera. There is not even a well defined surface for radar to bounce off and determine an actual height.
Can anyone give a simple explanation on how this works?
Makes you wonder what is in dairy that is not in breast milk. The most common chemical that causes reaction is lactose, but that's present in breast milk as well.
What should be looked into more are things like nut allergy. It seems that every other US kid has some kind of nut allergy, often severe and potentially life threatening, while in Europe it's rare and in Asia it's pretty much a non-issue.
One notable difference: in the US, parents are advised to stay clear of peanuts and other nuts for the first year or so, until sure there is no allergy.
In Asia, peanut oil is some of the most commonly used cooking oils, peanuts and other nuts are used in food big time, and children start munching nuts the moment their teeth are strong enough. The latter is also pretty much the case in Europe. Kids are not separated from nuts.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but it's pretty much proven that exposure to germs makes one resistant or even immune to them; it should be expected that the same accounts for allergens. So keeping kids away from nuts may actually cause nut allergy.
After all those decades of various Linux distributions unsuccessfully trying to look like Windows, now you can make Windows actually look like one such distributions - Ubuntu.
Oh, the irony. It seems that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has finally arrived, but not in a way anyone could have anticipated:)
Slashdot Mirror
The contract that I have for Internet is 8M/800k ADSL - the fastest available to me, and admittedly it's pretty expensive for that. There is fibre in the making in this village which will be much faster and much cheaper but it's all I have. Other parts in the city - especially the high rises - have 1000M available, and can get 100M at like half the price I pay. For what I do it's sufficient. Faster would be nicer, but well it's not there and I can live with it, there's nothing that I want to but can't do because of the speed.
Cable, don't know really how many channels, about 30 free including three pay-TV channels of choice. It could have been 100 and I wouldn't have watched it, it could have been none - my previous home we had no cable TV, just cable Internet. It's included mostly as incentive to have you buy more from them. It's worth nothing to me, so I credit the full fee I pay to the Internet service, and $0 of it to the cable service (which is digital, too, so when watching cable channels my downloads suffer).
Crazy, isn't it? And maybe a bit sad, as well.
My Internet which includes a handful of cable TV channels - $298; my phone - $98 (including reduced speed but unlimited data & tethering allowed); son's phone $35 (voice only); wife's phone also about $100 (including data).
Total telecomms bill for the family $531 or just under USD 70 per month. Now we don't have TV sports packages or so (those run $200-500 a month), just don't care enough about that, and I'd rather go to a bar or so if there would be anything actually worth watching in that realm.
Here I hear talk about just cable TV at USD 150 a month. That's before mobile phones and so. Maybe it's time for a free market or so, better quality and lower prices.
Either Netflix pays the ISPs, or it needs to be bought by one of them (Verizon?).
No Verizon here.
Come to think of it, not sure if Netflix itself is available here. And if it were, half of the content probably wouldn't be.
So you can keep that crap in within your borders, and the rest of the world is just a little better off.
Isn't it even simpler: hours the TV is on?
A vast majority of households in my country has an Internet connection at home, and with on average 3.2 people per household that's easily another three mobile data plans on top of that. So four Internet connections per household. We have a grand total of three ourselves (my 9yo doesn't have data on his phone).
So most people have Internet already, and don't buy an Internet connection just for Netflix. Netflix is just one of the many things one can do with an Internet connection - in between playing online games, trolling Slashdot and other forums, reading the news, downloading movies and music from The Pirate Bay, and more. It becomes an add-on, so it's pretty fair to not add much if any cost of the existing Internet connection to Netflix, at most the share of the connection that is used for Netflix.
My mail server doesn't even accept imap connections, only imaps. That is one of the measures I took almost without thinking years ago when I set it up. Why even still support unencrypted imap? No good reason for that. The imap port is even closed in the firewall.
When connecting to a hotspot I prefer it to be an encrypted over-the-air connection (WPA-PSK for example), but that is often not available. Starbuck's et.al. don't do that, it's easier to connect without. No password. Just an activation code (hard enough) to get your 30 mins free wifi. That connection is unencrypted, a sniffer could probably see that I connect to my mail server or to slashdot.org or whatever (encryption won't stop that part unless you go for a VPN), but not my passwords as that's over encrypted connections.
The focus is now also on the free WiFi access points, but how about the other two dozen or so connecting points between me and the Slashdot server just to post this rambling? Are they secure? Can I even know whether they are secure, I mean, hello NSA!
and even Slashdot has switched to https recently (just yesterday noticed it, not so long ago I was still connecting on http)
Incidentally, a lot of "security" consultants use this trick.....they set up a fake wireless access point in an office, and when a lot of people accidentally connect to it, thy sniff some passwords.
Indeed they do expose a serious security risk: browsers (or other software) sending login credentials in plain text over an untrusted connection (which is ANY connection on the Internet, except maybe a patch cable between your laptop and the server you try to connect to).
At least in my area there are several singles (speed dating) groups, but most of them are actually pretty small. It's indeed a bit odd to add it to dating sites.
Besides, is it nowadays immoral to even just visit dating sites?
Then you get to watch the ad twice, why?
Last time I checked for my phone (and that was pretty recent) all adblockers required root access to even work. That requirement is for most people enough to put them off (even for me and I'm far more tech savvy than average). Installing an ad blocker for a web browser is a lot easier, but it's not the browser I use much on my phone, it's the apps, and that's where the ads annoy me most.
You're not the only one. I don't use my phone much to browse the web, but I do play games and those flashing ads (preferably between the image and its negative for maximum contrast) are really annoying, totally distracting.
It's not the ads that drive me to use an ad blocker. I don't mind ads, I know websites and games need to get their revenue somehow.
It's the flashing bits on a web page that are very distracting, it's the pop-up ads that block my view of what I want to read (those apparently unblockable "sign up for our newsletter" ones are also a constant source of irritation), it's the pop-unders that are almost as irritating, it's the floaters that move around and ask you to chase them down before you can start reading what you came for, it's the flashing and moving banners above the game I'm trying to concentrate on.
Incidentally, ad blockers take away all those annoyances. That they take away the ads as well, that's collateral damage. I don't mind ads not being there.
As a content creator on Slashdot you already get the option of switching off ads.
If slamming on the brakes causes an accident (almost certainly a rear-end collision - something that appears to far more prevalent in the US than other parts of the world considering anecdotal evidence on /.), it simply means that the people behind it were either keeping insufficient distance or not paying attention or both. Both those issues would be solved with an autopilot, and even more so a way for cars to broadcast a "I'm braking!" kind of warning to other nearby vehicles.
car crashes can now be handled like air crashes, so rare that each one can be meticulously analyzed to pick apart how the system failed.
The fact that only a tiny, tiny fraction of all the cars on the road has this function, and the fact that it is something very new, is definitely helping.
Now if all cars would have just this autopilot crashes would occur much more frequently - even if still far less than the current rate. Then they're probably becoming so common again, like crashes with regular cars nowadays, that you won't hear about it except in the form of end-of-year statistics, or the occasional really bad one.
This is interesting... although I don't think the technology is ready for something like this. Consider the thought experiment of having to select one of two options, where in one you die and in the other you kill somebody else, for instance: you're going on the highway, and ahead of you, blocking all the lanes, are different subjects, and hitting anyone will kill them. What should the autopilot do?
Simple: slam on the brakes and come to a full stop as soon as possible. Autopilot will be at least a second faster than any human in this, lessening whatever impact. Maybe the accident can not be fully prevented, but that one extra second of braking can make a huge difference, including that between life and death.
According to TFS, Elon Musk believes if the autopilot was active it would have prevented this accident from happening.
So let's just take his word for that. Driver makes an error and causes a crash that autopilot would have prevented, while driving a car that has the autopilot function installed and in good working order but the driver decided to operate the car fully manually.
We have cars with technologies like traction control, anti-lock braking, assisted braking/steering options, there are various collision prevention options - technologies that are active at all times, and the driver may not even have the option to switch it off. Now there is an accident which autopilot could have prevented, but it didn't.
Should autopilot, even when disabled by the driver and not actively driving the car, always be alert and step in to prevent these accidents? And - as direct follow up - could or even should we blame Tesla for not leaving autopilot in standby acting as a driver's assistant?
Just the basic principles will do, not planning to launch my own space craft or so.
To make matters worse, before finding them, they probably don't even know whether the cats are dead or alive.
A very impressive feat it is, putting that spacecraft into a very well defined orbit around this planet. But what I am wondering is how do they know where the thing really is? Just like catching up with that comet, the Rosetta mission. Sending a tiny craft out in space so far out you can't see it, to catch up with an equally invisible comet (invisible from earth for the first part of the mission at least).
It's too small to see from earth. There is no GPS system or so at Jupiter. No trees, no landmarks - they did it blind, without visible light camera. There is not even a well defined surface for radar to bounce off and determine an actual height.
Can anyone give a simple explanation on how this works?
Makes you wonder what is in dairy that is not in breast milk. The most common chemical that causes reaction is lactose, but that's present in breast milk as well.
What should be looked into more are things like nut allergy. It seems that every other US kid has some kind of nut allergy, often severe and potentially life threatening, while in Europe it's rare and in Asia it's pretty much a non-issue.
One notable difference: in the US, parents are advised to stay clear of peanuts and other nuts for the first year or so, until sure there is no allergy.
In Asia, peanut oil is some of the most commonly used cooking oils, peanuts and other nuts are used in food big time, and children start munching nuts the moment their teeth are strong enough. The latter is also pretty much the case in Europe. Kids are not separated from nuts.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but it's pretty much proven that exposure to germs makes one resistant or even immune to them; it should be expected that the same accounts for allergens. So keeping kids away from nuts may actually cause nut allergy.
After all those decades of various Linux distributions unsuccessfully trying to look like Windows, now you can make Windows actually look like one such distributions - Ubuntu.
Oh, the irony. It seems that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has finally arrived, but not in a way anyone could have anticipated :)
every time i see some weird killswitch legislation proposed in the UK im boggled as to how this gets implemented...
How it's implemented? Very simple: not.
That's anyway not the job of politicians. They only decide what has to be done. Not how it has to be done.
Yes.
The other 99%: "what's a proxy?"