Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers
on
Solar Powered Wi-Fi
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· Score: 1
And then you'd just get bored kids trying to shoot it down as target practice just because it hovers.
It would be cool to see it hover, but given the power needed to make it actually hover then I think the solar energy they'll be getting at the moment is probably best used on the WiFi for now.
The idea is good, but it's not as if it'd actually work for a whole day solid here in the UK for a good proportion of the year!
Yeah, and I can't quite see Gordon being quite so friendly with Bush.
Bush: Religious, Christian, American, believes that makes him better than the English because America is a proud nation. Brown: Religious (Presbitarian, IIRC), Christian (branch of - see previous), Scottish, believes that makes him better than the English because...well, just because he's Scottish, no other explanation needed.
See, no similarities at all:D
(Note: the above is an attempt at a joke based on the fact that both are religious and not English. I don't know their actual opinions of the English)
I've never personally owned a contract phone, but my dad has had one through the company for years. A couple of times we wanted to try something out on his phone using a different sim and it took my Orange sim in his O2 or T-Mobile phone without a problem. Call bullshit all you want, but that's my most direct experience and I know some friends had the same.
Yes, there's a grey market for unlocking phones (you can't go into a market without finding one, and I've seen several independent shops on the high street with signs in their windows), but this company contract phone wasn't one of them.
Any more detail on that, or just a blanket "it isn't true"?
Some of the exact details may be wrong, but the general "MS being a distributor of GPL3 and hence bound under GPL3" thread of my reply seems to agree with the thread of the main reply to the OP.
Strangely it's normally the reverse in the UK. Pay as you go (PAYG) phones (the ones where you top them up with credit when you need it rather than getting a monthly bill) are normally locked to a single network. Contract phones are normally cheaper but unlocked, so you can use it with any network.
I guess the difference in the UK is that contract phones still have to have the contract paid on them, so you're making up the difference in cost through your monthly base charge, where as PAYG phones don't guarantee the network any money they they try to dissuade you with minor impediments like locking to a network (that can normally be removed in a minute or so by anyone with a data cable and the right program).
The claim I've always seen from the FSF is that Microsoft will (when Novell's Suse distro starts using GLP3 packages) become a "GPL3 distributor" because of their vouchers. There's something in being a distributor that means they're not allowed to be part of the deal that they were part of (which would mean they couldn't have the vouchers, which would mean they would be in the situation, which would mean the GPL3 might never have included the section prohibiting it, which means MS and Novell may have done a deal...)
TBH, I can't see how it would stand up in court, but then IANAL.
Those Finnish books must be quite boring if they don't contain any spoken language - how do the characters communicate?;)
I think a lot of non-Brits have problems with Harry Potter as it uses a lot of Briticisms. My fiancee runs a website to help fanfiction authors improve their writing (and some of them need help - a lot of help!) and one of the main issues tends to be Americans getting confused by the Briticisms, or asking what the British way of doing/saying something would be.
Also, if you've got a person of 11-16 (depending on the book and the character) talking and it's based in a time period 'around now' then it makes sense they talk in a similar way to a British teen. Okay, so you wouldn't want it spoken as badly as some children, but given that Hogwarts is approaching an Eton-esque public school in terms of students and teaching techniques then it makes sense that they're a bit better educated and spoken.
But then the vPro being a Vpro doesn't emphasise the fact that it's a "Pro" something (assumedly) with added 'v'. Similarly the iPod being an Ipod doesn't do such a good job as a name of emphasising that it is some form of pod with added 'i'.
Also, in the UK then the police don't actually have to allow +/- anything, it's just a recommendation from some other organisation that people tend to assume is followed.
I can't find an online source for it at the moment, but anyone who has a new A3ish AA road map with a section on speeding in the first few pages should be able to find it to confirm.
Perhaps they would, but that still doesn't explain why any old resident of France, Russia, Iraq, Jamaica, Papa New Guinea or Mongolia would need to get a.uk. Without huge amounts of paper work then there's never going to be any way that you can stop all registrations that aren't applicable under a rule set, but you can certainly reduce it by making it more effort to dissuade the lazier registrants.
Also, there may be 5m 'ex-pats', but how many of them want to own.uk domains? and how many are more elderly people who have no interest in technology retired abroad for the sun (mainly Spain)? and how many of those who do want.uk domains don't have a family member who they can use as the registrant contact if they were to check.uk domains were British residents?
As I said, Canada manages it somehow so it must be possible.
It also seems fairer to have 60 million potential registrants have access to the domains they want for their own country TLD with the side effect that 5 million potential registrants (a number less than 10% of the residential population) have to have family in the country or similar to register a.uk compared to having 60 million potential registrants possibly not able to get the domain of their choice in the TLD of the country of their residence because one of the approx 6,613,900,000 other potential registrants in the world (who are 11,000% of the number of residents) got to it first.
(Yes, I know the numbers also include children and babies, but it is easier to estimate off pure populations).
Other countries with residency requirements (some I thought of and quickly checked and skimmed):.us,.ca,.fr and I'm sure there's more (IIRC.dk might have requirements, but I've spent enough time hunting around various sites)..de allows non-residents to register, but you have to have a real German administrative contact address for them to server documents to. Those were the only ones I checked and all have residency checks or limitations of some degree.
There's always borderline cases, but from a quick skim of their rules then I think Canada has it right. As long as you've got a presence in the country (citizen or company) then you have a reason to have a domain. I had an old domain that got snapped up by an American from New Jersey, though. Why would they have need to have a.uk presence? Surely a.com or even (logic forbid) a.us would be more applicable.
I could agree that citizenship would be difficult to enforce (although I guess the Canadians do it somehow) but residency should be easy enough and very fair from the point of view of the residents - you just need a valid address in the UK. Again, you could fake it, but then you get screwed when they try to send some required information to you.
As I mentioned in another comment, I'm all for companies having their details published but not individuals. Companies have a need to be accountable. Individuals can be traced through their registrar for legal issues, but aren't accountable in the same way.
Profit is a bit of a bad example, though. Anything that is the face of a company or other such sales person is more reasonable. Something along those lines covers the spammed drugs sites and the like, but allows for bloggers and individuals to 'make a profit' through affiliate links and AdWords etc.
I doubt seeing details would help work out where spammers are, though. All they'll end up doing is providing false details. ICANN say they'll terminate domains where they can't contact the owner, but how many times do they actually try to contact them?
Lack of transparency leads to fraud....It shouldn't be anonymous, there should be accountability, you should be able to know at all times who you're dealing with,..
Which is why I think there's no real need to extend it to companies as well.
With my.uk domains, you still get to see my name on the registration, you just don't get to see my address. Assuming I live in the UK* (which I do) then why do you need to know whether I live in London or Manchester? And even worse, why do you need to know which number of which street in which smaller town outside Manchester or London I live at?
*.uk domains are actually open to any registrant from any country, but personally I think that's just an oversight of Nominet and that national domains should be for residents only, unless it's some small place that'll never use them like Tuvalu and its.tvs.
I run a private little website as a hobby. I pay $25 per year for hosting (reasonable quality host, 75MB disk space and 3GB monthly bandwidth, email, the lot). I pay £3.69 per year (~$7-$8) for a.co.uk domain or $9 per year for a.com.
Total normally: about $35 per year, tops.
The Registrars follow your "must show details" and I suddenly have to pay £58 per year (~$120) to get a PO Box, or twice that if I don't want to have to keep checking it but instead have it delivered to my real address? (UK PO Box prices)
Total with PO Box: at least $150 to $250!
I think the only thing I can say there is "WTF? Hell, no!" That's a ridiculous amount of expense compared to the website itself.
Exactly. If there's a reason why someone wants your contact details when you don't have them public (or have opted out of showing them if you're an individual with a.uk domain) then what's wrong with proving they have a reason before they can get them?
Okay, maybe it doesn't need to go quite as far as a full police warrant, but some degree of arbitration and complaints with the registrar that complies with a code of conduct should be a reasonable compromise. In theory.
I think that's taking it a bit too far. Personally, I think they should roll out something similar to UK domains across on to.coms as well.
With a.uk then you have to show your details unless you are a non-trading individual. If you are such an individual (like me, who run sites as hobbies) then you can opt out of having your details shown and it's free and done by Nominet, not the individual companies you buy domains from.
While I can see a reason for companies not to be able to hide their details (it gives you a definite address for them that you can then match to a trading location, assuming its real), I think individuals have a right to not have their details easily available on the 'net for anyone with a vigilante inclination to be able to find and abuse.
Yeah, that thing, that's what I meant:) I've just never been so interested in physics, sound and waves as I have in computers so I didn't know the technical stuff.
I thought, though, that the FCC cracked down on advertisers trying to pull that loudness BS quite a while back
It still happens in the UK, and you can definitely notice it with the most annoying adverts (like those insurance comparison places). It's probably more filling a wider range of frequencies than actual increased volume, but it just generally sounds louder to the untrained ear.
What is this "What up" of which you speak? I regularly greet my acquaintances with a cheery "What-ho, old chap" and can often be heard yelling "tallyho" as I ride off on the thrill of the hunt* in my spanking red uniform with baying hounds at heel, but never have I uttered "what up". To my finely attuned ears it almost sounds like the language of yobs with their lower-class call of "what is up".
Now, I demand you hand over a metaphorical pound so that I may deposit it in my metaphorical savings account. And no metaphorically handing it over - that would just be unsporting and definitely not cricket.
* I've never actually gone hunting, and don't plan to. I've never ridden a horse for one thing!
From that definition then IMO you'd be showing an international or non-American PoV, but not an "un-American bias". Bias implies some form of degradation or improvement in opinion based on a PoV. PoV is just the point of view with regards who "you" are and what's local (and for the BBC then British is local) with no particular changed opinion.
My original suggestion of "anti-American" was because the OP seemed to be saying that it was some form of racial bias that we were specifically picking out the Americans as if they were different when they were a large proportion of the Internet.
As someone else mentioned, it's "our" language because it's English. "Your" language is American. American is a derivative of English that branched off with colonisation, while 'modern' English is the continuation of older English that has remained in England.
If you want to be picky then we speak British English, but people don't tend to say "he speaks British" where as they do say "he speaks American" for American English.
I think you did miss the memo, though. Anyone who emigrated to America became (eventually) American. Yes they have English/British heritage, but they're still American;)
As for the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, that's apples and oranges. We developed their language and it gained a different name. Americans speak American and often insist on just calling it English (like the amount of times I've seen games install as "English" then use "color"). Not quite the same situation;)
We'll stop calling websites for the USA "US Websites" when you stop butchering our language. The word you were looking for is "anti-American";) "un-" means "not", "anti" means "against", you meant "bias against America" not "bias that's not American".
Also, if you check your history then Europe created the public WWW (with the CERN site in France/Switzerland) and it was a Brit, Tim Berners-Lee, who first developed HTML and worked on the original HTTP specification (Wikipedia references).
Slashdot Mirror
And then you'd just get bored kids trying to shoot it down as target practice just because it hovers.
It would be cool to see it hover, but given the power needed to make it actually hover then I think the solar energy they'll be getting at the moment is probably best used on the WiFi for now.
The idea is good, but it's not as if it'd actually work for a whole day solid here in the UK for a good proportion of the year!
Yeah, and I can't quite see Gordon being quite so friendly with Bush.
:D
Bush: Religious, Christian, American, believes that makes him better than the English because America is a proud nation.
Brown: Religious (Presbitarian, IIRC), Christian (branch of - see previous), Scottish, believes that makes him better than the English because...well, just because he's Scottish, no other explanation needed.
See, no similarities at all
(Note: the above is an attempt at a joke based on the fact that both are religious and not English. I don't know their actual opinions of the English)
I've never personally owned a contract phone, but my dad has had one through the company for years. A couple of times we wanted to try something out on his phone using a different sim and it took my Orange sim in his O2 or T-Mobile phone without a problem. Call bullshit all you want, but that's my most direct experience and I know some friends had the same.
Yes, there's a grey market for unlocking phones (you can't go into a market without finding one, and I've seen several independent shops on the high street with signs in their windows), but this company contract phone wasn't one of them.
Any more detail on that, or just a blanket "it isn't true"?
Some of the exact details may be wrong, but the general "MS being a distributor of GPL3 and hence bound under GPL3" thread of my reply seems to agree with the thread of the main reply to the OP.
Strangely it's normally the reverse in the UK. Pay as you go (PAYG) phones (the ones where you top them up with credit when you need it rather than getting a monthly bill) are normally locked to a single network. Contract phones are normally cheaper but unlocked, so you can use it with any network.
I guess the difference in the UK is that contract phones still have to have the contract paid on them, so you're making up the difference in cost through your monthly base charge, where as PAYG phones don't guarantee the network any money they they try to dissuade you with minor impediments like locking to a network (that can normally be removed in a minute or so by anyone with a data cable and the right program).
Yes you can, it just normally ends up dropping straight through to answer phone. Okay, it's not useful, but you can normally do it.
Unless these strange American "cell phones" work differently to British mobile phones and have some additional check in the number as you dial it.
The claim I've always seen from the FSF is that Microsoft will (when Novell's Suse distro starts using GLP3 packages) become a "GPL3 distributor" because of their vouchers. There's something in being a distributor that means they're not allowed to be part of the deal that they were part of (which would mean they couldn't have the vouchers, which would mean they would be in the situation, which would mean the GPL3 might never have included the section prohibiting it, which means MS and Novell may have done a deal...)
TBH, I can't see how it would stand up in court, but then IANAL.
Those Finnish books must be quite boring if they don't contain any spoken language - how do the characters communicate? ;)
I think a lot of non-Brits have problems with Harry Potter as it uses a lot of Briticisms. My fiancee runs a website to help fanfiction authors improve their writing (and some of them need help - a lot of help!) and one of the main issues tends to be Americans getting confused by the Briticisms, or asking what the British way of doing/saying something would be.
Also, if you've got a person of 11-16 (depending on the book and the character) talking and it's based in a time period 'around now' then it makes sense they talk in a similar way to a British teen. Okay, so you wouldn't want it spoken as badly as some children, but given that Hogwarts is approaching an Eton-esque public school in terms of students and teaching techniques then it makes sense that they're a bit better educated and spoken.
But then the vPro being a Vpro doesn't emphasise the fact that it's a "Pro" something (assumedly) with added 'v'. Similarly the iPod being an Ipod doesn't do such a good job as a name of emphasising that it is some form of pod with added 'i'.
Then lawyers for some large corporation will argue that it's actually some previously rare form of feathered marsupial?
Also, in the UK then the police don't actually have to allow +/- anything, it's just a recommendation from some other organisation that people tend to assume is followed.
I can't find an online source for it at the moment, but anyone who has a new A3ish AA road map with a section on speeding in the first few pages should be able to find it to confirm.
Perhaps they would, but that still doesn't explain why any old resident of France, Russia, Iraq, Jamaica, Papa New Guinea or Mongolia would need to get a .uk. Without huge amounts of paper work then there's never going to be any way that you can stop all registrations that aren't applicable under a rule set, but you can certainly reduce it by making it more effort to dissuade the lazier registrants.
.uk domains? and how many are more elderly people who have no interest in technology retired abroad for the sun (mainly Spain)? and how many of those who do want .uk domains don't have a family member who they can use as the registrant contact if they were to check .uk domains were British residents?
.uk compared to having 60 million potential registrants possibly not able to get the domain of their choice in the TLD of the country of their residence because one of the approx 6,613,900,000 other potential registrants in the world (who are 11,000% of the number of residents) got to it first.
.us, .ca, .fr and I'm sure there's more (IIRC .dk might have requirements, but I've spent enough time hunting around various sites). .de allows non-residents to register, but you have to have a real German administrative contact address for them to server documents to. Those were the only ones I checked and all have residency checks or limitations of some degree.
Also, there may be 5m 'ex-pats', but how many of them want to own
As I said, Canada manages it somehow so it must be possible.
It also seems fairer to have 60 million potential registrants have access to the domains they want for their own country TLD with the side effect that 5 million potential registrants (a number less than 10% of the residential population) have to have family in the country or similar to register a
(Yes, I know the numbers also include children and babies, but it is easier to estimate off pure populations).
Other countries with residency requirements (some I thought of and quickly checked and skimmed):
There's always borderline cases, but from a quick skim of their rules then I think Canada has it right. As long as you've got a presence in the country (citizen or company) then you have a reason to have a domain. I had an old domain that got snapped up by an American from New Jersey, though. Why would they have need to have a .uk presence? Surely a .com or even (logic forbid) a .us would be more applicable.
I could agree that citizenship would be difficult to enforce (although I guess the Canadians do it somehow) but residency should be easy enough and very fair from the point of view of the residents - you just need a valid address in the UK. Again, you could fake it, but then you get screwed when they try to send some required information to you.
As I mentioned in another comment, I'm all for companies having their details published but not individuals. Companies have a need to be accountable. Individuals can be traced through their registrar for legal issues, but aren't accountable in the same way.
Profit is a bit of a bad example, though. Anything that is the face of a company or other such sales person is more reasonable. Something along those lines covers the spammed drugs sites and the like, but allows for bloggers and individuals to 'make a profit' through affiliate links and AdWords etc.
I doubt seeing details would help work out where spammers are, though. All they'll end up doing is providing false details. ICANN say they'll terminate domains where they can't contact the owner, but how many times do they actually try to contact them?
makes more sense and is what I meant.
Which is why I think there's no real need to extend it to companies as well.
With my
*
Taking my former blog site as an example:
I run a private little website as a hobby.
I pay $25 per year for hosting (reasonable quality host, 75MB disk space and 3GB monthly bandwidth, email, the lot).
I pay £3.69 per year (~$7-$8) for a
Total normally: about $35 per year, tops.
The Registrars follow your "must show details" and I suddenly have to pay £58 per year (~$120) to get a PO Box, or twice that if I don't want to have to keep checking it but instead have it delivered to my real address? (UK PO Box prices)
Total with PO Box: at least $150 to $250!
I think the only thing I can say there is "WTF? Hell, no!" That's a ridiculous amount of expense compared to the website itself.
Exactly. If there's a reason why someone wants your contact details when you don't have them public (or have opted out of showing them if you're an individual with a .uk domain) then what's wrong with proving they have a reason before they can get them?
Okay, maybe it doesn't need to go quite as far as a full police warrant, but some degree of arbitration and complaints with the registrar that complies with a code of conduct should be a reasonable compromise. In theory.
I think that's taking it a bit too far. Personally, I think they should roll out something similar to UK domains across on to .coms as well.
.uk then you have to show your details unless you are a non-trading individual. If you are such an individual (like me, who run sites as hobbies) then you can opt out of having your details shown and it's free and done by Nominet, not the individual companies you buy domains from.
With a
While I can see a reason for companies not to be able to hide their details (it gives you a definite address for them that you can then match to a trading location, assuming its real), I think individuals have a right to not have their details easily available on the 'net for anyone with a vigilante inclination to be able to find and abuse.
Yeah, that thing, that's what I meant :) I've just never been so interested in physics, sound and waves as I have in computers so I didn't know the technical stuff.
It still happens in the UK, and you can definitely notice it with the most annoying adverts (like those insurance comparison places). It's probably more filling a wider range of frequencies than actual increased volume, but it just generally sounds louder to the untrained ear.
What is this "What up" of which you speak? I regularly greet my acquaintances with a cheery "What-ho, old chap" and can often be heard yelling "tallyho" as I ride off on the thrill of the hunt* in my spanking red uniform with baying hounds at heel, but never have I uttered "what up". To my finely attuned ears it almost sounds like the language of yobs with their lower-class call of "what is up".
Now, I demand you hand over a metaphorical pound so that I may deposit it in my metaphorical savings account. And no metaphorically handing it over - that would just be unsporting and definitely not cricket.
* I've never actually gone hunting, and don't plan to. I've never ridden a horse for one thing!
From that definition then IMO you'd be showing an international or non-American PoV, but not an "un-American bias". Bias implies some form of degradation or improvement in opinion based on a PoV. PoV is just the point of view with regards who "you" are and what's local (and for the BBC then British is local) with no particular changed opinion.
My original suggestion of "anti-American" was because the OP seemed to be saying that it was some form of racial bias that we were specifically picking out the Americans as if they were different when they were a large proportion of the Internet.
As someone else mentioned, it's "our" language because it's English. "Your" language is American. American is a derivative of English that branched off with colonisation, while 'modern' English is the continuation of older English that has remained in England.
;)
;)
If you want to be picky then we speak British English, but people don't tend to say "he speaks British" where as they do say "he speaks American" for American English.
I think you did miss the memo, though. Anyone who emigrated to America became (eventually) American. Yes they have English/British heritage, but they're still American
As for the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, that's apples and oranges. We developed their language and it gained a different name. Americans speak American and often insist on just calling it English (like the amount of times I've seen games install as "English" then use "color"). Not quite the same situation
We'll stop calling websites for the USA "US Websites" when you stop butchering our language. The word you were looking for is "anti-American"
Also, if you check your history then Europe created the public WWW (with the CERN site in France/Switzerland) and it was a Brit, Tim Berners-Lee, who first developed HTML and worked on the original HTTP specification (Wikipedia references).