The IWF covers 95% of users but nowhere near 95% of ISPs. BT, Sky/O2 one or two thers cover about 80% of users on their own. There's plenty of room to vote with your feet.. except the sheeple probably won't.
It can be faster than DSL in some locations.. OTOH the places with poor DSL are often the places with poor HSPDA as well. There's an overlap though where the DSL is 6Mbps due to distance (which is in practical terms all you're going to get out of 3G.. 7.2/15.4 is just the headline speed).
The IWF block more than "potential child porn" - they've been caught blocking sites critical of the IWF for example. Being an unelected and unaccountable body they refuse to release the contents of the lists though, even to ISPs.
I've not found a good, easy to use one.. and there's nothing shipped except the old Windows Backup that is, well, about as crappy as you'd expect for something that hasn't changed since NT4 (and there's no proper recovery procedure - if you've ever used Time Machine you'll know how simple backup/restore can be - with Windows Backup it's a complete ballache, and we still haven't managed to get it to reliably backup to a network drive..).
You can pay for some quite nice ones I believe, but paying the kind of money they're asking (thousands, for a 'business' one) for something that is a basic admin operation sticks in the throat.
Even then.. you type in a pin, into what? It's a keypad.. looks vaguely pin machine shaped, but they're all different - it could be doing *anything* with that number, including printing it out along with your other details in an office in a back room.
As there's no verification (the ATM/Pin machine never supplies any information to you to verify that it's legit) there's no real security - MITM is possible right there at the till.
Or work for the guy that started it. I wrote the software to monitor one and he offered to graft me on somewhere near the top. As I'd done the maths I realized how sleezy it was (it was fairly obvious that those towards the bottom stood to lose every penny, whilst the guy at the top was looking at £50,000 per month) and in declined. Probably I wouldn't these days.. I'm older, wiser and have less of a conscience.
The $5 comes from work - you know, the means of selling goods and services to generate income.
You're talking about a world where nobody produces anything, so the only income they have is from banks. That's not a realistic model.
Oh and nobody creates money, except in exceptional circumstances (the central bank can, but an ordinary bank can't.. that's self evident, otherwise they'd all have infinite money). Credit to you is a net debit to the bank (and a source of income, due to the interest payments). This is why banks aren't keen to lend right now - their reserves are low as they've taken a hit from all the bad debt.. because they can only lend based on their reserves they're cherry picking the lending to the safest debtors.
Fractional reserve allows them to lend out a fraction of their reserve - hence the name. You can't create money (well, the central bank can, but it's tightly controlled because of the inflationary effect).
For a deposit of $100 they can lend out $80, that gets deposited and lent out as $64, then $51, $40, etc.
There appears to be more money in the system but there actually isn't at all. Only the initial $100 exists - it's just been lent to multiple people.
In the real world it's more complex - banks sell their debt to other banks to increase their reserves, so they can lend out more (because they make interest on lending - it's their main source of income).
Where this system falls down is where someone in that chain suddenly decides they can't pay it back. This is how we got into the mess we're in right now, where enough people failed to pay the debt back all the banks suddenly remembered that none of this money they claimed to have actually existed at all.. it was all tied up in debt.
This is true - they are adept at disguising their ships as hub caps, lamp shades and dustbin lids. Advanced technology in their ships also causes all photographs to come out blurry.
And you have to replace the batteries once a year (causing more pollution than if you're just used a standard engine in the first place), and if they crash it's a major electrical hazard and can't be dealt with by the normal emergency service response - but don't let that stop you thinking you're so cool for dropping $100k on it.
And my diesel can 'charge' in 1-2 minutes, even on the move, gets 600 miles to the tank, gets better MPG than a typical hybrid and hosts about 1/5th as much.
Electrical cars are a dead end. If you're calling 3 hours 'good' you're disconnected from reality.
Few companies would upgrade something as mission critical as Exchange anyway. The risk is too great. You'd be surprised how much exchange 2000 there is out there with no plans to upgrade in the future. Same with 2003.
Updates for Win2000 went away ages ago, but there are still a *lot* of companies still using it for infrastructure. Most are on 2003.. even Win2008 is not seeing any significant rollout yet, and we don't expect it to do so for at least another 2-3 years.
Windows 7? That won't even *start* to enter the test cycles of most companies until next year.
Hardware manufacturers will make drivers as long as there is demand. They will continue to support XP until there's no significant use of it - so you're good for another 5 years at least.
Fining them $6B would mean they'd appeal it and it'd ending up being an expensive legal mess. You want to fine enough that it destroys the extra profit made, but not enough that it's worth them rolling out the lawyers.
No, it means the retailers are free to determine the price vs. the wholesale price. Some of the cheaper ones will sell it cheaper than they do currently, and some will sell it at RRP or higher. Competition in the market is restored.
Microsoft don't get to set the price. That's the point. The can recommend one but they cannot make retailers sell at that price.
No, that's illegal. I'm surprised it isn't illegal in the US.
They can say 'If you want a contract with us, we're going to charge you $X per unit' but the retailer is free to set any price they like above or even below that. To do otherwise is price fixing - it destroys competition in the marketplace by forcing everyone to sell at the same (inflated) price.
Actually prices have remained pretty competitive - in fact some deals are insanely cheap. My electricity per unit cost is now lower than it was 5 years ago - because I don't just stick with the same provider I hop around getting the best deal.
The wholesale cost of gas shot up because we sold all our reserves to europe at a markup. Now we've run out of our most abundant natural resource and are having to buy it from russia at more than we sold it for originally. Blame that on successive short sighted governments who could only see it as a cash cow to introduce vote gaining tax cuts.
You don't need 10 sets of water pipes. 1 will do. You buy the water off a particular company, they sell it to you at a competitive price. It's not different water, you just pay someone else. They buy it wholesale at much cheaper prices than you ever could.. because the wholesaler doesn't have to maintain all the customer facing crap.
You want to pay what it *really* costs for internet? Because that's what you're asking.
Capacity is only unlimited if income is unlimited. Even in a monopoly people will only pay so much, so there's a limited income to expand the network - which puts hard physical limits on capacity, and to make any money at all the network has to be contended.
It only takes a few idiots to expect to max their connections 24/7 and the whole system slows down for everyone - hence all providers have either hard physical caps or clauses in the contract allowing them to terminate such offenders without notice.
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The IWF covers 95% of users but nowhere near 95% of ISPs. BT, Sky/O2 one or two thers cover about 80% of users on their own. There's plenty of room to vote with your feet.. except the sheeple probably won't.
It can be faster than DSL in some locations.. OTOH the places with poor DSL are often the places with poor HSPDA as well. There's an overlap though where the DSL is 6Mbps due to distance (which is in practical terms all you're going to get out of 3G.. 7.2/15.4 is just the headline speed).
The IWF block more than "potential child porn" - they've been caught blocking sites critical of the IWF for example. Being an unelected and unaccountable body they refuse to release the contents of the lists though, even to ISPs.
Triple, even. £5 a month deals for 1GB are common.
Or just use an ISP that doesn't use it... there are lots of them. Some have even sworn never to use it.
I've not found a good, easy to use one.. and there's nothing shipped except the old Windows Backup that is, well, about as crappy as you'd expect for something that hasn't changed since NT4 (and there's no proper recovery procedure - if you've ever used Time Machine you'll know how simple backup/restore can be - with Windows Backup it's a complete ballache, and we still haven't managed to get it to reliably backup to a network drive..).
You can pay for some quite nice ones I believe, but paying the kind of money they're asking (thousands, for a 'business' one) for something that is a basic admin operation sticks in the throat.
Works for Blackberry too.
Even then.. you type in a pin, into what? It's a keypad.. looks vaguely pin machine shaped, but they're all different - it could be doing *anything* with that number, including printing it out along with your other details in an office in a back room.
As there's no verification (the ATM/Pin machine never supplies any information to you to verify that it's legit) there's no real security - MITM is possible right there at the till.
Or work for the guy that started it. I wrote the software to monitor one and he offered to graft me on somewhere near the top. As I'd done the maths I realized how sleezy it was (it was fairly obvious that those towards the bottom stood to lose every penny, whilst the guy at the top was looking at £50,000 per month) and in declined. Probably I wouldn't these days.. I'm older, wiser and have less of a conscience.
The $5 comes from work - you know, the means of selling goods and services to generate income.
You're talking about a world where nobody produces anything, so the only income they have is from banks. That's not a realistic model.
Oh and nobody creates money, except in exceptional circumstances (the central bank can, but an ordinary bank can't.. that's self evident, otherwise they'd all have infinite money). Credit to you is a net debit to the bank (and a source of income, due to the interest payments). This is why banks aren't keen to lend right now - their reserves are low as they've taken a hit from all the bad debt.. because they can only lend based on their reserves they're cherry picking the lending to the safest debtors.
No thats tort money, which isn't used anywhere.
Fractional reserve allows them to lend out a fraction of their reserve - hence the name. You can't create money (well, the central bank can, but it's tightly controlled because of the inflationary effect).
For a deposit of $100 they can lend out $80, that gets deposited and lent out as $64, then $51, $40, etc.
There appears to be more money in the system but there actually isn't at all. Only the initial $100 exists - it's just been lent to multiple people.
In the real world it's more complex - banks sell their debt to other banks to increase their reserves, so they can lend out more (because they make interest on lending - it's their main source of income).
Where this system falls down is where someone in that chain suddenly decides they can't pay it back. This is how we got into the mess we're in right now, where enough people failed to pay the debt back all the banks suddenly remembered that none of this money they claimed to have actually existed at all.. it was all tied up in debt.
This is true - they are adept at disguising their ships as hub caps, lamp shades and dustbin lids. Advanced technology in their ships also causes all photographs to come out blurry.
And you have to replace the batteries once a year (causing more pollution than if you're just used a standard engine in the first place), and if they crash it's a major electrical hazard and can't be dealt with by the normal emergency service response - but don't let that stop you thinking you're so cool for dropping $100k on it.
.. and if you're on a day trip and it goes flat halfway through? You're stuck with towing it home.
btw. most people don't have garages, and I'm not keeping half a tonne of lead acid battery in my living room.
And my diesel can 'charge' in 1-2 minutes, even on the move, gets 600 miles to the tank, gets better MPG than a typical hybrid and hosts about 1/5th as much.
Electrical cars are a dead end. If you're calling 3 hours 'good' you're disconnected from reality.
Few companies would upgrade something as mission critical as Exchange anyway. The risk is too great. You'd be surprised how much exchange 2000 there is out there with no plans to upgrade in the future. Same with 2003.
That's because the figure isn't companies as the summary suggests, but IT professionals.
I'd be very surprised if 1.7% of companies jumped straight away let alone 17%. There's just too much at stake, especially now.
Updates for Win2000 went away ages ago, but there are still a *lot* of companies still using it for infrastructure. Most are on 2003.. even Win2008 is not seeing any significant rollout yet, and we don't expect it to do so for at least another 2-3 years.
Windows 7? That won't even *start* to enter the test cycles of most companies until next year.
Hardware manufacturers will make drivers as long as there is demand. They will continue to support XP until there's no significant use of it - so you're good for another 5 years at least.
Fining them $6B would mean they'd appeal it and it'd ending up being an expensive legal mess. You want to fine enough that it destroys the extra profit made, but not enough that it's worth them rolling out the lawyers.
No, it means the retailers are free to determine the price vs. the wholesale price. Some of the cheaper ones will sell it cheaper than they do currently, and some will sell it at RRP or higher. Competition in the market is restored.
Microsoft don't get to set the price. That's the point. The can recommend one but they cannot make retailers sell at that price.
No, that's illegal. I'm surprised it isn't illegal in the US.
They can say 'If you want a contract with us, we're going to charge you $X per unit' but the retailer is free to set any price they like above or even below that. To do otherwise is price fixing - it destroys competition in the marketplace by forcing everyone to sell at the same (inflated) price.
Actually prices have remained pretty competitive - in fact some deals are insanely cheap. My electricity per unit cost is now lower than it was 5 years ago - because I don't just stick with the same provider I hop around getting the best deal.
The wholesale cost of gas shot up because we sold all our reserves to europe at a markup. Now we've run out of our most abundant natural resource and are having to buy it from russia at more than we sold it for originally. Blame that on successive short sighted governments who could only see it as a cash cow to introduce vote gaining tax cuts.
You don't need 10 sets of water pipes. 1 will do. You buy the water off a particular company, they sell it to you at a competitive price. It's not different water, you just pay someone else. They buy it wholesale at much cheaper prices than you ever could.. because the wholesaler doesn't have to maintain all the customer facing crap.
You want to pay what it *really* costs for internet? Because that's what you're asking.
Capacity is only unlimited if income is unlimited. Even in a monopoly people will only pay so much, so there's a limited income to expand the network - which puts hard physical limits on capacity, and to make any money at all the network has to be contended.
It only takes a few idiots to expect to max their connections 24/7 and the whole system slows down for everyone - hence all providers have either hard physical caps or clauses in the contract allowing them to terminate such offenders without notice.
1999 called, it wants its charges back.
People pay for SMS in your country? Here even pay and go plans have unlimited SMS bundles.
And I can't even parse this statement.. "or pay $.15 per 140 characters when one of your idiot friends 'texts' you"
How can your friends make you pay for SMS? Do you have some way of sending bills over it or something?