Yeah, as someone who does Canberra, Australia to Madison, WI, USA multiple times a year, I most definitely would LOVE to see the return of supersonic travel. Comfort be damned - that flight takes way too long no matter how good the seats. Takes around 26 hours door to door:
Check in and security in CBR: 1 hr CBR-SYD: 40 mins Transfer flights at SYD: 2-3 hr SYD-LAX: 13 hr (of pure hell) Immigration, customs and security in LAX: 2-3 hr LAX-ORD: 4 hr Drive from Chicago to Madison: 2 hr
Clearly if the long SYD-LAX leg could be 2 or 3 times faster, it would make this journey a lot less tiring. So I'd be all for supersonic travel becoming widespread in the future.
Very true - but I see this as a wider issue with the way funding is allocated to States under the laws you have in the US, rather than a flaw specifically with having a Federal sales tax.
Mind you we have similar debates going on here occasionally. Typically it's the states like Western Australia and Queensland (rich mining-boom States at the moment) complaining that they don't get enough and the 'slacker' states (hehe, NSW) get too much. It's not so much a carrot and stick problem - it's set out plainly in law how the funds are allocated - but rather that they feel the formula doesn't give them a fair share of revenue, considering the wealthy states are obviously paying a lot more ~in~ to the sales tax bucket in the first place.
That doesn't fully explain the high degree of complexity though. Some other countries (e.g. Australia) also have a Federal-State system, also originally formed from the union of separate colonies, and have similar Consitutional divisions of power between Federal and State as in the US. Yet they have a single, consistent, Federal sales tax (although in Australia's case this was only implemented relatively recently, in 2000).
Let's face it, there are a lot of conventions, systems and aspects of life that are needlessly complex in the US. Mostly this is due to tradition and sheer momentum: it works, there's no pressing need to change it and overhauling the system would take a lot of work, so meh. This is part of what makes the US interesting (to me, as a visitor at least - the separate States are surprisingly different from each other in a lot of ways, some subtle, some not so). But it must add up to an incredible waste of money and time on a nation-wide scale.
Yep - this is the way to go. Abolish the State/local sales taxes and replace with a single Federal sales tax. It works.
The US system is insanely complex with every State taxing different things, plus counties and cities whacking extra % charges on top etc. As a visitor to the US, the most obvious side effect of this complexity is that the shelf/sticker price of an item is always given without tax included. Tax then gets added on at checkout.
At home (Australia FWIW), sales tax (GST) is a single Federal tax. The revenue collected by the Federal Govt. is then distributed among the State Governments according to some formula. Much simpler for the end consumer (and, for that matter, for retailers who don't have to have huge tax tables and deal with different pricing every bloody county). It means the list of taxable goods/services is consistent everywhere. It means the amount of the tax is consistent everywhere. And most importantly, it means that ~you actually pay the price on the price tag ~for items - no need to perform mental gymnastics to figure out what something will actually cost you.
Yeah I agree that you certainly don't have any guarantees that your traffic will go direct to the US. As you say if something gets damaged it may well end up going via another country, and you have no guarantees or control what route it will take at any given moment. Looking at the major cables to the US:
SXC / Southern Cross Cable: This has a loop topology. The southern half of the loop does go through NZ, however, the northern half goes direct from Sydney to the US (Hawaii, then onwards to California). Which side of the loop your traffic goes by is out of your direct control however.
PPC1 / Pipe Pacific Cable: This goes from Australia to Guam (which is US territory btw). I believe there are landing points in PNG but I'm not sure if there's a breakout here where traffic can actually be rerouted/monitored.
AJC / Aust-Japan Cable: This also goes direct from Australia to Guam (US), then onwards to Japan. Not sure about the network architecture here, but I imagine that US-bound traffic doesn't go all the way to Japan... it'd get routed eastward at Guam across to the mainland US.
So in summary if things are working as they should, most US-bound traffic shouldn't go through any other countries other than NZ occasionally.
I'd have a fighting chance with this exam I think, but I'd probably still fail. Geography was compulsory where I went to school, and Latin was offered too (and I took it for six years). I'm in my 20s so this wasn't long ago (late 90s). Geography is still compulsory here AFAIK (NB. I'm not American).
Frankly I don't understand why geography isn't considered compulsory or at least important/recommended in America. To me, understanding the world around you is a fairly fundamental subject. This isn't just a matter of rote learning the location of countries and cities... it's also an appreciation of ~how~ the natural world works. For example, I note that there are some questions in the exam asking the student to mark the basins (watersheds) of various rivers. But I reckon a lot of people these days wouldn't even understand what a watershed is or what it represents, and how it influences human settlement, agriculture etc.
Learning a bit of geography demystifies the world. There are so many people out there that can't answer basic questions ~even about their local area~ (e.g. 'why is this local mountain range significantly wetter on the western flank than the east?' or 'where does this river that flows through town end up' or 'roughly how far is it from here to the nearest coast/border/etc'). These are often also the same people who genuinely believe that weather forecasters literally make up numbers, because they don't understand at least the basics of the world around them.
Oh and btw, I agree that if you can spend $70 for unlimited 25/25 fibre, that is freaking awesome. But you're lucky to get that - most places in the US can't. I have a place in the US, in a major city, and can't get more than 6 Mbps/768 kbps DSL for any price.
Seems like if you're on the eastern or western seaboards or a couple of other lucky places, you can get FiOS or some other equivalent. But there are huge portions of the country where you can't get anything better than standard DSL or cable.
The caps historically exist due to the fact that we are in the unique situation of being an English-speaking island located on the other side of the world from where 99% of English content is hosted (i.e. North America and the UK). The vast majority of standard traffic in Australia is thus to/from distant international locations. This contrasts with the US/Canada, where most traffic is domestic, meaning a much greater proportion of traffic stays within your ISP's network or the networks of those that your ISP has peering agreements with. It also contrasts with places like Japan and Korea, which again have mostly domestic traffic due to the fact they are using a 'local' language.
Each ISP in Australia therefore has to buy a fair chunk of ~expensive~ reserved capacity on the couple of undersea cables that link us to the rest of the world. If they didn't, the bandwidth use (particularly P2P) would be so great as to quickly saturate the amount of undersea capacity that ISP has purchased. This means they would have to buy more (did I mention it was expensive?). Which would rapidly also reach saturation.
But having explained ~why~ the caps have existed here, I should also point out that they are becoming less and less relevant, simply due to how large they are becoming. You can get residential plans with caps of 1TB and upwards now. This is so large that it may as well be unlimited. And, if that still isn't enough, there are some genuinely unlimited plans around too (these have only popped up in the last year or two). But regardless, for 99.9% of people caps aren't an issue, as they never use anywhere close to that much (and if they do, then just upgrade to the next plan up). For instance, I have a 300 GB cap which I never even use half of in a given month. But even if I did, I'd just pay the extra $10 a month to upgrade to the 600 GB cap...
I should also point out that US ISPs indirectly 'cap' you by artificially limiting speeds. E.g. they'll charge you some amount for DSL capped at 3 Mbps, a different amount for it capped at 6 Mbps, etc. This in practice sets a limit on the impact you can have on the network at any given time. Download caps achieve essentially the same thing, just amortised over time. But in Australia, since downloads are metered, they don't really give a crap how fast you connect. DSL is sold by the amount of download cap, not the line speed. The line speed you get is simply "the highest your modem can negotiate with the DSLAM over your particular phone line" (which is up to 24 Mbps if your line is short and in good condition). Which I kinda prefer - I'm no huge downloader but when I do want to get something, I want to get it fast. Less stuff, but quicker quicker, rather than more stuff, but slower.
Anyway the point I was really trying to make was that yes, the caps exist and yes, they suck in some ways. But I'd still prefer the situation here vs. the US. Faster speeds, greater ISP choice and the caps are rapidly becoming a non-issue unless you are downloading over 1 TB a month (in which case you really should be looking at a business plan!). There's only one major ISP currently offering genuine unlimited... but I feel that will change in the coming few years as more new undersea cable projects are finished.
Well I'm not American so I wasn't aware they did that. That's ridiculous. I buy a calling/data plan from my carrier, not my phone. What phone I choose to use on that plan is completely irrelevant and none of their business.
(From my perspective as a non-USian, at least... hell I've had my current phone on 3 different carriers just within the last year).
That's precisely what I'm saying. AT&T works elsewhere. T-Mobile, at least according to the coverage map on their website, has no coverage north of MKE/MSN. Certainly none in Green Bay/Fox River Valley area where I am most of the time. So sadly, I am stuck using AT&T when I'd prefer T-Mobile.
Huh... you don't need WiFi (or cellular data for that matter) just to make a CALL. Nothing stops you throwing a 'smartphone' on a plan without cellular data and still using it to make calls and SMS. If you wanted to be doubly sure you weren't using cellular data then just turn that feature off (I'm assuming all smartphones can do this - the iPhone certainly has a 'Cellular Data ON/OFF' toggle so I'm sure most other phones do too.
Yep - T-Mobile is awesome if you're in an area where they have coverage. I dread to think what will happen once the AT&T acquisition really kicks in.
Sadly when I'm in the US I'm mostly in Wisconsin, which other than in Milwaukee, has no T-Mobile service. Have to use AT&T. I'm not American but I visit and pop a local SIM in my (unlocked) GSM phone when I do... and would much prefer to use T-Mobile over AT&T if I could.
Yes have to admit, not sure how much difference this will make in the US market where there is already an incredlibly small choice of carriers compared to most other markets. How many of those little 'city-wide' or 'statewide' local carriers really still exist in the US? Most seem to have been swallowed up by AT&T (if GSM) or Verizon or Sprint (if CDMA).
Normally the US leans away from regulating such things and forcing businesses to make agreements with each other. So it says a lot about the lack of competition in the US cellular market that they are considering such a move. By comparison, here in Australia (which is an "OMG socialist' country by comparison to the US) doesn't force carriers to have roaming agreements (even though as a whole there is much more government regulation of industry here than in the US). But we have at least 6 or 7 major nationwide carriers here, so roaming isn't really even necessary in the first place.
I visit the US regularly (am there for several months a year) and the state of the mobile telephony and ISP industries in the US is frankly, awful. Australia is generally way more expensive in most areas of life... but not in Internet/phone. In Australia I can pick from 30+ ISPs and a dozen cellular carriers (all GSM) at any point and most offer contract-free service. In the US most places have 1 choice of cable ISP, 1 choice of DSL ISP, and maybe 2 or 3 cellular networks (which aren't even interoperable with each other, i.e. once you pick a GSM/CDMA phone you are stuck with those carriers).
So here's hoping this opens the door for some smaller carriers in the US to increase their market share and get some competition back into the market. It's sorely needed.
Trying to explain to Americans why the more conservative of the two main parties in Australia is called the Liberal Party is one of my favourite hair-pulling activities. You have to explain the semantics and history of the word, how the meaning of the word got twisted/altered over time so it ended up meaning somewhat different things in different places etc. On top of that you have to do it in the context of explaining how the entire political spectrum in the two countries differs quite a bit.
As an Australian married to an American (and hence having half his family being American now), it makes me avoid bringing politics up over there whenever possible (not because I don't enjoy political debate, but because explaining semantic differences is annoying). It always starts with "who do you vote for in Australia?" "well usually Liberal Party, though not every election..." "Liberal?" "Um yeah, that's more conservative than Labor" "Uh what?"... etc:P
Not only that, if you move countries, you may find that all of a sudden, all the games you legitimately purchased on Steam no longer work (if you are detected to be connecting from a region that differs from the license region you bought the software in). Tends to happen most often on games that were purchased in a 'cheap' region, then played in an 'expensive' region (e.g. buy game from Steam while in Brazil, then attempt to play it on a PC in the USA).
Good point. Steam is known around the world. GameStop is just an American (and Canadian?) store (honestly don't know - never heard of it myself).
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OK instead of just posting the above drivel I looked it up on Wikipedia. GameStop is originally American but has acquired games stores in many other countries. So while I'm Australian and have never heard of GameStop, they are the parent company of EB Games (which we most definitely do have here). In fact it appears they trade using quite a few different names. I wonder if they have considered a consolidation - renaming all their stores to one name to boost global brand recognition.
Still I prefer Steam to any physical games retail store because in this country, at least, we get shafted on the price of physical boxed games. Steam is much cheaper. (Though importing a boxed game from the US is cheaper still... lucky Americans don't know how cheap their prices are by world standards!).
It's just occurred to me I may have misinterpreted your post. I thought you were expressing a sentiment against the 'renaming' of kilobyte to kibibyte. That is, you felt that the binary measurements should remain being called by the kilo - mega- etc units.
However your post could equally be interpreted as saying that the whole binary measurement system (1024 bytes to a kibibyte) was ridiculous, and that it should have been kilo = 1000 from the start. In which case, I apologise, as my reply was misguided.
The word 'kibibyte' itself might sound silly, but I don't think anyone could argue that there isn't a need to be able to distinguish binary vs. decimal measurements in computing. Especially since certain things (e.g. RAM) is generally measured in binary and other things (hard drive size) is generally measured in decimal. Not to mention that in communications, bitrate has always been in decimal specified (1 kilobit/sec has always meant 1000 bits/sec, not 1024).
In the absence of any other agreed upon standard, there's nothing wrong with using kilo- vs. kibi- to distinguish this for now.
Indeed. Although 'klicks' is a weird one. Metric countries don't usually repeatedly say 'kilometres' in full either. They just say 'k' (i.e. "kay").
"Where's the next turnoff?" "Oh about 4 k down that way"
Of course you run the risk of confusing that with other measurements. I say 'k' for kilobytes too. Still context would normally make it pretty obvious when you're talking about distance rather than amount of data.
That's nuts. I have great respect for the toughness of people living in that region... I would die.:P Frankly I can barely stand it when it 'only' falls down to 20 degrees here after a 40 degree day: very difficult to sleep. Though I'm guessing everyone just hangs out in AC there (whereas I don't have AC, unfortunately).
Australia has a slightly unique situation, in that it has mostly English-speakers and most English content is hosted in the US. It's not the internal network capacity that's the problem, it's the capacity on the handful of undersea cables linking us to the US. Metering in Australia has mostly been required to prevent those international links from hitting capacity (the cables as a whole have plenty of capacity, but ISPs obviously only buy a particular amount of capacity, and it's damn expensive). For an ISP to offer unlimited here they'd need to purchase a massive amount of undersea capacity which would be uneconomical for all but the biggest players. In fact, the main well-known ISP who does offer unlimited can only afford to do so because it is a majority owner of the largest undersea cable (referring to TPG and the PPC1 cable to Guam).
This problem doesn't apply to the US so I fully agree with your comments in the US context. There should be no real reason to cap connections in the US - it's simply ISPs being lazy and not wanting to spend money upgrading their network as required (i.e. maximise profits, as you said).
Wow that sucks. I always thought that Canada, with its proximity to the US (which has the majority of Internet hosts that English speakers would access), would have higher caps and lower prices than Australia. Both are untrue. Not only do our caps go up to 1TB+, but our prices are cheaper than yours for the same sized caps. I get 150 GB for $44.95 (AUD and CAD are worth about the same so conversion not really necessarily).
That's a bit sad when most of our traffic is US-bound and has to go through a handful of (expensive) undersea cables to the other side of the world, and your traffic just has to hop over the land border on one of many, many links...
Well we have 'bad' ISPs here as well but there are quite a few good ones that are genuine innovators and care a lot about the quality of their network and customer service etc. Since we have such a huge selection of ISPs to choose from (for example, here are the ISPs/plans I can choose in my State). They have to differentiate themselves somehow, much more so than in the US, if they want to attract customers and survive. Some compete on price, others on network quality, customer service, bundled extras etc.
The ISP I'm on (Internode) is not the cheapest, but their network is second to none and they are more customer-focused than most. They are considered in a way a geeks' ISP in that they trial newer technologies earlier than most (first fully native IPv6 residential connections in Australia being one recent example). Previously I was with iiNet who are also top notch IMO.
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Yeah, as someone who does Canberra, Australia to Madison, WI, USA multiple times a year, I most definitely would LOVE to see the return of supersonic travel. Comfort be damned - that flight takes way too long no matter how good the seats. Takes around 26 hours door to door:
Check in and security in CBR: 1 hr
CBR-SYD: 40 mins
Transfer flights at SYD: 2-3 hr
SYD-LAX: 13 hr (of pure hell)
Immigration, customs and security in LAX: 2-3 hr
LAX-ORD: 4 hr
Drive from Chicago to Madison: 2 hr
Clearly if the long SYD-LAX leg could be 2 or 3 times faster, it would make this journey a lot less tiring. So I'd be all for supersonic travel becoming widespread in the future.
Very true - but I see this as a wider issue with the way funding is allocated to States under the laws you have in the US, rather than a flaw specifically with having a Federal sales tax.
Mind you we have similar debates going on here occasionally. Typically it's the states like Western Australia and Queensland (rich mining-boom States at the moment) complaining that they don't get enough and the 'slacker' states (hehe, NSW) get too much. It's not so much a carrot and stick problem - it's set out plainly in law how the funds are allocated - but rather that they feel the formula doesn't give them a fair share of revenue, considering the wealthy states are obviously paying a lot more ~in~ to the sales tax bucket in the first place.
That doesn't fully explain the high degree of complexity though. Some other countries (e.g. Australia) also have a Federal-State system, also originally formed from the union of separate colonies, and have similar Consitutional divisions of power between Federal and State as in the US. Yet they have a single, consistent, Federal sales tax (although in Australia's case this was only implemented relatively recently, in 2000).
Let's face it, there are a lot of conventions, systems and aspects of life that are needlessly complex in the US. Mostly this is due to tradition and sheer momentum: it works, there's no pressing need to change it and overhauling the system would take a lot of work, so meh. This is part of what makes the US interesting (to me, as a visitor at least - the separate States are surprisingly different from each other in a lot of ways, some subtle, some not so). But it must add up to an incredible waste of money and time on a nation-wide scale.
Yep - this is the way to go. Abolish the State/local sales taxes and replace with a single Federal sales tax. It works.
The US system is insanely complex with every State taxing different things, plus counties and cities whacking extra % charges on top etc. As a visitor to the US, the most obvious side effect of this complexity is that the shelf/sticker price of an item is always given without tax included. Tax then gets added on at checkout.
At home (Australia FWIW), sales tax (GST) is a single Federal tax. The revenue collected by the Federal Govt. is then distributed among the State Governments according to some formula. Much simpler for the end consumer (and, for that matter, for retailers who don't have to have huge tax tables and deal with different pricing every bloody county). It means the list of taxable goods/services is consistent everywhere. It means the amount of the tax is consistent everywhere. And most importantly, it means that ~you actually pay the price on the price tag ~for items - no need to perform mental gymnastics to figure out what something will actually cost you.
Yeah I agree that you certainly don't have any guarantees that your traffic will go direct to the US. As you say if something gets damaged it may well end up going via another country, and you have no guarantees or control what route it will take at any given moment. Looking at the major cables to the US:
SXC / Southern Cross Cable: This has a loop topology. The southern half of the loop does go through NZ, however, the northern half goes direct from Sydney to the US (Hawaii, then onwards to California). Which side of the loop your traffic goes by is out of your direct control however.
PPC1 / Pipe Pacific Cable: This goes from Australia to Guam (which is US territory btw). I believe there are landing points in PNG but I'm not sure if there's a breakout here where traffic can actually be rerouted/monitored.
AJC / Aust-Japan Cable: This also goes direct from Australia to Guam (US), then onwards to Japan. Not sure about the network architecture here, but I imagine that US-bound traffic doesn't go all the way to Japan ... it'd get routed eastward at Guam across to the mainland US.
So in summary if things are working as they should, most US-bound traffic shouldn't go through any other countries other than NZ occasionally.
That was precisely what I thought.
I'd have a fighting chance with this exam I think, but I'd probably still fail. Geography was compulsory where I went to school, and Latin was offered too (and I took it for six years). I'm in my 20s so this wasn't long ago (late 90s). Geography is still compulsory here AFAIK (NB. I'm not American).
Frankly I don't understand why geography isn't considered compulsory or at least important/recommended in America. To me, understanding the world around you is a fairly fundamental subject. This isn't just a matter of rote learning the location of countries and cities ... it's also an appreciation of ~how~ the natural world works. For example, I note that there are some questions in the exam asking the student to mark the basins (watersheds) of various rivers. But I reckon a lot of people these days wouldn't even understand what a watershed is or what it represents, and how it influences human settlement, agriculture etc.
Learning a bit of geography demystifies the world. There are so many people out there that can't answer basic questions ~even about their local area~ (e.g. 'why is this local mountain range significantly wetter on the western flank than the east?' or 'where does this river that flows through town end up' or 'roughly how far is it from here to the nearest coast/border/etc'). These are often also the same people who genuinely believe that weather forecasters literally make up numbers, because they don't understand at least the basics of the world around them.
Um ... whoosh?
Sad. I've never understood the hate for Voyager. I have a soft spot for it.
Then again I'm not a hardcore Trek fan. I do enjoy it though, like most people who frequent Slashdot and have a general interest in sci fi.
Oh and btw, I agree that if you can spend $70 for unlimited 25/25 fibre, that is freaking awesome. But you're lucky to get that - most places in the US can't. I have a place in the US, in a major city, and can't get more than 6 Mbps/768 kbps DSL for any price.
Seems like if you're on the eastern or western seaboards or a couple of other lucky places, you can get FiOS or some other equivalent. But there are huge portions of the country where you can't get anything better than standard DSL or cable.
The caps historically exist due to the fact that we are in the unique situation of being an English-speaking island located on the other side of the world from where 99% of English content is hosted (i.e. North America and the UK). The vast majority of standard traffic in Australia is thus to/from distant international locations. This contrasts with the US/Canada, where most traffic is domestic, meaning a much greater proportion of traffic stays within your ISP's network or the networks of those that your ISP has peering agreements with. It also contrasts with places like Japan and Korea, which again have mostly domestic traffic due to the fact they are using a 'local' language.
Each ISP in Australia therefore has to buy a fair chunk of ~expensive~ reserved capacity on the couple of undersea cables that link us to the rest of the world. If they didn't, the bandwidth use (particularly P2P) would be so great as to quickly saturate the amount of undersea capacity that ISP has purchased. This means they would have to buy more (did I mention it was expensive?). Which would rapidly also reach saturation.
But having explained ~why~ the caps have existed here, I should also point out that they are becoming less and less relevant, simply due to how large they are becoming. You can get residential plans with caps of 1TB and upwards now. This is so large that it may as well be unlimited. And, if that still isn't enough, there are some genuinely unlimited plans around too (these have only popped up in the last year or two). But regardless, for 99.9% of people caps aren't an issue, as they never use anywhere close to that much (and if they do, then just upgrade to the next plan up). For instance, I have a 300 GB cap which I never even use half of in a given month. But even if I did, I'd just pay the extra $10 a month to upgrade to the 600 GB cap...
I should also point out that US ISPs indirectly 'cap' you by artificially limiting speeds. E.g. they'll charge you some amount for DSL capped at 3 Mbps, a different amount for it capped at 6 Mbps, etc. This in practice sets a limit on the impact you can have on the network at any given time. Download caps achieve essentially the same thing, just amortised over time. But in Australia, since downloads are metered, they don't really give a crap how fast you connect. DSL is sold by the amount of download cap, not the line speed. The line speed you get is simply "the highest your modem can negotiate with the DSLAM over your particular phone line" (which is up to 24 Mbps if your line is short and in good condition). Which I kinda prefer - I'm no huge downloader but when I do want to get something, I want to get it fast. Less stuff, but quicker quicker, rather than more stuff, but slower.
Anyway the point I was really trying to make was that yes, the caps exist and yes, they suck in some ways. But I'd still prefer the situation here vs. the US. Faster speeds, greater ISP choice and the caps are rapidly becoming a non-issue unless you are downloading over 1 TB a month (in which case you really should be looking at a business plan!). There's only one major ISP currently offering genuine unlimited ... but I feel that will change in the coming few years as more new undersea cable projects are finished.
Well I'm not American so I wasn't aware they did that. That's ridiculous. I buy a calling/data plan from my carrier, not my phone. What phone I choose to use on that plan is completely irrelevant and none of their business.
(From my perspective as a non-USian, at least ... hell I've had my current phone on 3 different carriers just within the last year).
That's precisely what I'm saying. AT&T works elsewhere. T-Mobile, at least according to the coverage map on their website, has no coverage north of MKE/MSN. Certainly none in Green Bay/Fox River Valley area where I am most of the time. So sadly, I am stuck using AT&T when I'd prefer T-Mobile.
Huh ... you don't need WiFi (or cellular data for that matter) just to make a CALL. Nothing stops you throwing a 'smartphone' on a plan without cellular data and still using it to make calls and SMS. If you wanted to be doubly sure you weren't using cellular data then just turn that feature off (I'm assuming all smartphones can do this - the iPhone certainly has a 'Cellular Data ON/OFF' toggle so I'm sure most other phones do too.
Yep - T-Mobile is awesome if you're in an area where they have coverage. I dread to think what will happen once the AT&T acquisition really kicks in.
Sadly when I'm in the US I'm mostly in Wisconsin, which other than in Milwaukee, has no T-Mobile service. Have to use AT&T. I'm not American but I visit and pop a local SIM in my (unlocked) GSM phone when I do ... and would much prefer to use T-Mobile over AT&T if I could.
Yes have to admit, not sure how much difference this will make in the US market where there is already an incredlibly small choice of carriers compared to most other markets. How many of those little 'city-wide' or 'statewide' local carriers really still exist in the US? Most seem to have been swallowed up by AT&T (if GSM) or Verizon or Sprint (if CDMA).
Normally the US leans away from regulating such things and forcing businesses to make agreements with each other. So it says a lot about the lack of competition in the US cellular market that they are considering such a move. By comparison, here in Australia (which is an "OMG socialist' country by comparison to the US) doesn't force carriers to have roaming agreements (even though as a whole there is much more government regulation of industry here than in the US). But we have at least 6 or 7 major nationwide carriers here, so roaming isn't really even necessary in the first place.
I visit the US regularly (am there for several months a year) and the state of the mobile telephony and ISP industries in the US is frankly, awful. Australia is generally way more expensive in most areas of life ... but not in Internet/phone. In Australia I can pick from 30+ ISPs and a dozen cellular carriers (all GSM) at any point and most offer contract-free service. In the US most places have 1 choice of cable ISP, 1 choice of DSL ISP, and maybe 2 or 3 cellular networks (which aren't even interoperable with each other, i.e. once you pick a GSM/CDMA phone you are stuck with those carriers).
So here's hoping this opens the door for some smaller carriers in the US to increase their market share and get some competition back into the market. It's sorely needed.
Trying to explain to Americans why the more conservative of the two main parties in Australia is called the Liberal Party is one of my favourite hair-pulling activities. You have to explain the semantics and history of the word, how the meaning of the word got twisted/altered over time so it ended up meaning somewhat different things in different places etc. On top of that you have to do it in the context of explaining how the entire political spectrum in the two countries differs quite a bit.
As an Australian married to an American (and hence having half his family being American now), it makes me avoid bringing politics up over there whenever possible (not because I don't enjoy political debate, but because explaining semantic differences is annoying). It always starts with "who do you vote for in Australia?" "well usually Liberal Party, though not every election..." "Liberal?" "Um yeah, that's more conservative than Labor" "Uh what?" ... etc :P
Not only that, if you move countries, you may find that all of a sudden, all the games you legitimately purchased on Steam no longer work (if you are detected to be connecting from a region that differs from the license region you bought the software in). Tends to happen most often on games that were purchased in a 'cheap' region, then played in an 'expensive' region (e.g. buy game from Steam while in Brazil, then attempt to play it on a PC in the USA).
Good point. Steam is known around the world. GameStop is just an American (and Canadian?) store (honestly don't know - never heard of it myself).
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OK instead of just posting the above drivel I looked it up on Wikipedia. GameStop is originally American but has acquired games stores in many other countries. So while I'm Australian and have never heard of GameStop, they are the parent company of EB Games (which we most definitely do have here). In fact it appears they trade using quite a few different names. I wonder if they have considered a consolidation - renaming all their stores to one name to boost global brand recognition.
Still I prefer Steam to any physical games retail store because in this country, at least, we get shafted on the price of physical boxed games. Steam is much cheaper. (Though importing a boxed game from the US is cheaper still ... lucky Americans don't know how cheap their prices are by world standards!).
It's just occurred to me I may have misinterpreted your post. I thought you were expressing a sentiment against the 'renaming' of kilobyte to kibibyte. That is, you felt that the binary measurements should remain being called by the kilo - mega- etc units.
However your post could equally be interpreted as saying that the whole binary measurement system (1024 bytes to a kibibyte) was ridiculous, and that it should have been kilo = 1000 from the start. In which case, I apologise, as my reply was misguided.
The word 'kibibyte' itself might sound silly, but I don't think anyone could argue that there isn't a need to be able to distinguish binary vs. decimal measurements in computing. Especially since certain things (e.g. RAM) is generally measured in binary and other things (hard drive size) is generally measured in decimal. Not to mention that in communications, bitrate has always been in decimal specified (1 kilobit/sec has always meant 1000 bits/sec, not 1024).
In the absence of any other agreed upon standard, there's nothing wrong with using kilo- vs. kibi- to distinguish this for now.
Indeed. Although 'klicks' is a weird one. Metric countries don't usually repeatedly say 'kilometres' in full either. They just say 'k' (i.e. "kay").
"Where's the next turnoff?"
"Oh about 4 k down that way"
Of course you run the risk of confusing that with other measurements. I say 'k' for kilobytes too. Still context would normally make it pretty obvious when you're talking about distance rather than amount of data.
That's nuts. I have great respect for the toughness of people living in that region ... I would die. :P Frankly I can barely stand it when it 'only' falls down to 20 degrees here after a 40 degree day: very difficult to sleep. Though I'm guessing everyone just hangs out in AC there (whereas I don't have AC, unfortunately).
Australia has a slightly unique situation, in that it has mostly English-speakers and most English content is hosted in the US. It's not the internal network capacity that's the problem, it's the capacity on the handful of undersea cables linking us to the US. Metering in Australia has mostly been required to prevent those international links from hitting capacity (the cables as a whole have plenty of capacity, but ISPs obviously only buy a particular amount of capacity, and it's damn expensive). For an ISP to offer unlimited here they'd need to purchase a massive amount of undersea capacity which would be uneconomical for all but the biggest players. In fact, the main well-known ISP who does offer unlimited can only afford to do so because it is a majority owner of the largest undersea cable (referring to TPG and the PPC1 cable to Guam).
This problem doesn't apply to the US so I fully agree with your comments in the US context. There should be no real reason to cap connections in the US - it's simply ISPs being lazy and not wanting to spend money upgrading their network as required (i.e. maximise profits, as you said).
Wow that sucks. I always thought that Canada, with its proximity to the US (which has the majority of Internet hosts that English speakers would access), would have higher caps and lower prices than Australia. Both are untrue. Not only do our caps go up to 1TB+, but our prices are cheaper than yours for the same sized caps. I get 150 GB for $44.95 (AUD and CAD are worth about the same so conversion not really necessarily).
That's a bit sad when most of our traffic is US-bound and has to go through a handful of (expensive) undersea cables to the other side of the world, and your traffic just has to hop over the land border on one of many, many links...
Well we have 'bad' ISPs here as well but there are quite a few good ones that are genuine innovators and care a lot about the quality of their network and customer service etc. Since we have such a huge selection of ISPs to choose from (for example, here are the ISPs/plans I can choose in my State). They have to differentiate themselves somehow, much more so than in the US, if they want to attract customers and survive. Some compete on price, others on network quality, customer service, bundled extras etc.
The ISP I'm on (Internode) is not the cheapest, but their network is second to none and they are more customer-focused than most. They are considered in a way a geeks' ISP in that they trial newer technologies earlier than most (first fully native IPv6 residential connections in Australia being one recent example). Previously I was with iiNet who are also top notch IMO.