Indeed. Even as someone entering on a visa-waiver from a friendly, closely-allied country (such as Australia or the UK) is asked on their visa waiver (I94) form: "have you ever been refused entry to, or deported from, the United States?". Answering 'yes' is likely to make you ineligible to enter again without going through a whoooole bunch of paperwork.
So you really, really want to avoid incorrectly entering the US. They don't forget and they don't forgive;)
Agreed. Similarly here in Australia: people just use EFTPOS (swipe card, PIN, money comes out of normal transaction account) for the vast majority of things. They might pull out the credit card in an emergency or a big purchase for which they will need to pay off over a few months.
Then again even if you do use a CC here, I've never heard of a merchant asking for your postal code. I don't think it's illegal... but it's just not something that they do.
I am in the US quite a lot though (have family over there) and usually just say "I don't live in America" when they ask. It's interesting how some Americans love to accuse every other country of being big-brotherish, yet don't realise that you get asked for ID/personal information much more in the US than in most other countries. Also the flagrant abuse of the SSN over there (they seem to ask it for everything) baffles me. The equivalent number in Australia is the TFN and that's considered something you never give anyone other than your employer, and your bank (for tax purposes).
Bzzt. The vast majority of convicts sent to British colonies in the 1700s (which includes Australia, and GASP, also America pre-1776!) were petty crooks. Small time thieves, people stealing some food for their family, or general undesirables that managed to piss off the establishment. Serious criminals (murderers and rapists etc.) would most definitely have been executed in England at the time. They wouldn't waste time and money shipping them to the other side of the planet.
On a related note though, I suspect an internet kill-switch would be much more difficult to implement in America (from a technical viewpoint) than almost any other country. Because:
- The US still has more internet hosts than other countries, including most of the 'important' ones (from an 'average Joe's communication needs' POV) like Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. Most internet content consumed in the US would be domestically hosted;
- Related to the above, the US has many diverse routes (domestically) to get to all this content. You would need to shut all (or at least the majority) of these down.
Compare the situation in a smaller country however. Most hosts accessed would be not be located within that country, and there would only be a few links in/out of the country. Cut these few links and you have rendered most sites unusable. Those few that were still working (i.e. domestic hosts) may still be useful for communication internally, but these would be invisible to the outside world.
I live in Australia and the same would apply here: the vast, vast majority of hosts on the Internet that Australians connect to would be located outside Australia. As an isolated island continent with a small population, that means most of our traffic flows through just a few undersea cables to the outside world. In fact, all you'd need to do is turn off PPC1, Southern Cross Cable, and SeaMeWe. There are a few other cables but they have far less capacity and would be almost immediately overwhelmed by traffic (making them close to unusable).
Actually I'd be curious to see what happened if you completely cut off a country from the outside world like that. What would happen to sites like Google, which have local mirrors? Would they keep working flawlessly, or do they rely on regular 'phoning home' to some master servers in the US, or what? Hmm...
Well I agree it doesn't look like much, but then again it's 10,000 years old. That's much older than most other such remnants in the world. Either way, it's definitely not natural. Humans did this. The question is: for what purpose?
If it does align perfectly on the with the sun on the solstices, then this becomes very interesting. The likelihood that humans happened to place the rocks on that exact alignment by pure chance (as opposed to any other random alignment) is small.
If on the other hand the alignment isn't really very significant from a solar/stellar perspective it's probably just some ancient place marker or something instead. Still interesting, mind you, but nothing globally unique.
That's a fair point. Although I reckon that says a lot about the stupidity of certain people who really shouldn't be frittering money away on such things. The iPhone tends to only be available on the higher end contracted plans (e.g. $50-$100/month caps), and I bet ya the vast majority of people don't come anywhere near actually using their included value each month. Yet people'd rather pay $2000 over 2 years for a phone and plan which they barely use, than $1000 up front for the phone and a cheap 10 or 20 buck plan.
Or maybe most people just use the phone a hell of a lot more than I do? I bought the iPhone outright and whacked it on a $20 cap ($150 included value). They wouldn't sell it contracted on such a low end plan. But I'm lucky to use a quarter of even that meagre plan per month (I don't call much... mostly use it for data and it has 1 GB included, again which I rarely use more than a quarter of).
Ah true. I keep forgetting the A in APNIC is Asia. It's physically based here in Australia so I tend to forget that. But needless to say, it's Asia (mainland China, mostly) gobbling them up, not really Australia, NZ, Japan, South Korea (which have older, more established internet presences)...
And outside right now here, it's outside of the official operating conditions too. Currently:
Temp: 38 C / 100 F (outside operating range) Dewpoint: 3 C (giving a relative humidity of ~10%, which is OK but not far from outside acceptable range)
Having said that I've been using my phone outside all day and I don't think anything bad is going to happen to it. It's on the cold/moist side of things that you might trip the sensor, not the hot/dry side. I wonder what the maximum operating temp is set so low for actually (35 C would be surpassed in almost all temperate climates in summer at least once or twice).
Amazing how deep the regional differences in phone penetration run. There was a time here (2007-2009ish) where you basically saw nothing ~but~ Symbian devices...
I remember visiting the US in the 90s and even then being astonished at how little market presence Nokia had there (this is the GSM era). Some of that probably had to do with the fact the US had very little GSM coverage back then (was mostly TDMA/CDMA/analog). But even so, I saw a lot of Motorolas and other things and not so many Nokias. Whereas at home during the 90s, EVERY PHONE was a Nokia (maybe one person in ten had something different, and they were laughed at!):)
So looks like Nokia never really managed to get a foothold in North America that much, even though 3GSM coverage there now is quite good.
I think he means "a whole lot more than what the price ~looks~ like it is in the US" (of course, when you add on the 2 years worth of contract, it's not cheaper at all, and in fact US consumers are probably paying MORE on average, unless they are quite heavy users).
In general Apple iOS devices are priced at the top of their product class. For instance, comparing the price of various smartphones here in Australia (outright, without a contract, and not locked to a network), the 32 GB iPhone 4 is $999. This is more than most Android smartphones, which come in at the $500-800 range. For instance, the HTC Desire (commonly seen as a direct competitor) is $750-800. The Samsung Galaxy S is priced at the same point.
The iPad on the other hand is a bit more competitive. It is similarly priced to most Android tablets, and in fact is slightly cheaper than the Galaxy Tab (except for the 64 GB 3G version). Of course, you have to keep in mind that Apple products ALWAYS sell for their RRP, whereas you can usually get deals on Android stuff from particular stores, so you might get it cheaper.
We can ask them to do that. In fact some organisations that initially had very large (/8) allocations have already given some of their pool back. However, the growth of the internet is consuming a/8 worth of IPs every 4-6 weeks, at present. So even if all organisations with a/8 gave it back, it'd give us maybe a year's extra time, if that.
Some consumer routers have already supported it for some time: e.g. the Apple Airport Express, some NetComm routers, Fritz!Box (popular in Europe, mostly). For the rest, the firmware will be forthcoming, no doubt. My DSL modem/router manufacturer (Billion, http://www.billion.com/) has already released firmware updates to some models to enable native dual stack. My particular model is due to be updated 'Q1 2011', so within the next two months. Which is great as my ISP already has native IPv6 available to its end customers now and a fully IPv6 backbone, so it should be a seamless transition.
Having said that there are slack router manufacturers and crappy ISPs that have sat on their hands for too long and will now have to madly scramble. (Or implement carrier grade NAT which is an ugly kludge - I would immediately leave any such ISP that implemented it).
There is one small problem however: some cheap/old routers don't physically have the onboard memory to fit a firmware containing both an IPv4 and IPv6 stack. So there will definitely be some users that need to physically replace their hardware, unfortunately.
That is precisely what you'd do. Dial-up modems are perfectly able to connect to dial-up ISPs in different countries. Hell I remember doing it myself in the mid-90s, just to see if it would work (dialed into a US ISP from Australia: it worked, but was very slow and required the use of the 0015 prefix to force it to use high quality fax lines rather than the normal 0011 prefix for voice calls).
Well depends if we are talking about relative humidity or absolute humidity.
You guys in the northern hemisphere get very low winter temperatures compared to us. So you naturally get very low absolute humidity/dew points (since the dew point cannot be greater than the current temperature). But your relative humidities in winter aren't that low... it's just that that the air is so cold that even a high relative humidity is still only a very small amount of moisture.
For instance on a cold day in the single digits F, under the influence of a dry polar air mass, you'll still have 40 or 50% humidity. But 50% humidity in the single digits F equates to a dew point of around -10 F. That's very dry: actual amount of moisture in the air is very low.
In inland Australia in winter, we also commonly sit around 50% rel. hum. But our air temp is more like 50 F. Air holding 50% of its possible moisture at 50 F is a lot more moisture than at 10 F.
But inland Australia in summer has winter-like dew points with very high air temperatures (90-110 F). This gives us relative humidities under 20% most days. Sometimes when the wind is blowing from the desert interior, we get dew points like your northern winter (-10 F), which gives us literally 1% or 2% absolute humidity!
So we think of summer as our dry season and winter as being more 'humid', even though in actuality the amount of moisture in the atmosphere doesn't change that much from season to season.
(Note this doesn't apply near the coasts or in the tropical areas: they have humid summers due to increased evaporation from ocean, more similar to the US).
Of those three popular brands you've mentioned, I've never heard of two of them, and the last (Linksys) isn't particularly popular here (Australia).
Here the most popular brands are Billion, Netgear, D-Link. I know you can download IPv6 firmware for most Billions (I have one) and I'm sure the others will follow suit. Also unlike in the US, it is very uncommon for your ISP to loan or give you the modem/router. You buy your own... any standard ADSL2+ modem/router will work with any ISP. They also tend to cost considerably more than $50. Mine was over $300, but it's a high-end model (Gigabit LAN, SIP VoIP, VPN endpoints etc).
Guess it goes to show you that YMMV depending on where you live. But here, I don't see the shift to IPv6 being a particularly expensive or problematic thing for most people.
Precisely. The US was responsible for a good slice of the advances during the 20th century. But we still benefited from them here in Australia, as did the rest of the Western world. It's not like you guys invented the television or the dishwasher or reinforced steel skyscrapers or microchips or the Internet and kept it locked up behind US borders. Everyone uses these things. Innovation occuring elsewhere might hurt the national pride a bit, but the benefits will still flow your way.
Yeah a lot of people take the 'download all the free apps you can find, try them and delete the bad ones' approach. Easy to get to 10B that way. If they were all paid apps (even cheapo ones at $1.99 or whatever) they probably wouldn't have even got to 1B yet.
Interesting. I'm 28 and can never remember being taught anything but -ise, and was always told -ize is American.
Mind you I'm Australian. It's possible that -ize was historically more acceptable in Britain than here, or that we shifted from -ize to -ise at an earlier date. This kind of stuff fascinates me...
Once your ISP starts dishing out IPv6 addresses, you don't really have to do much at all. Your OS almost certainly already supports IPv6. Most newish routers do (and those that don't will receive a firmware update to add IPv6 capabilities). Might need to go into your router and check that you have DHCPv6 turned on if you want IPv6 addresses on your local LAN (or you can continue to have IPv4 on the LAN side and IPv6 on the WAN side, if you want).
Of course you can play around with it earlier via tunneling but your ISP is going to have to start doing native IPv6 eventually. Personally I'm not going to bother because I'm lazy, and I know that native IPv6 is just around the corner (my ISP is currently trialling it with some customers, and will roll it out nationwide later this year). And when that day comes it should be pretty painless.
Heh, as a tangential comment, where I live, you genuinely DON'T own your house. Land here is leasehold rather than freehold. So when you buy property you technically only buy a 99-year lease on that land, not the land itself. The lease is as good as ownership and has all the same rights as ownership. And it can't be taken from you without fair compensation. But ~technically~ you don't really 'own' it, per se.
Most new home routers do actually support IPv6 now, and older ones are getting the capability added via firmware updates. My several-year-old router didn't have IPv6 initially but it does now (firmware update sometime last year added it).
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Indeed. Even as someone entering on a visa-waiver from a friendly, closely-allied country (such as Australia or the UK) is asked on their visa waiver (I94) form: "have you ever been refused entry to, or deported from, the United States?". Answering 'yes' is likely to make you ineligible to enter again without going through a whoooole bunch of paperwork.
So you really, really want to avoid incorrectly entering the US. They don't forget and they don't forgive ;)
Agreed. Similarly here in Australia: people just use EFTPOS (swipe card, PIN, money comes out of normal transaction account) for the vast majority of things. They might pull out the credit card in an emergency or a big purchase for which they will need to pay off over a few months.
Then again even if you do use a CC here, I've never heard of a merchant asking for your postal code. I don't think it's illegal ... but it's just not something that they do.
I am in the US quite a lot though (have family over there) and usually just say "I don't live in America" when they ask. It's interesting how some Americans love to accuse every other country of being big-brotherish, yet don't realise that you get asked for ID/personal information much more in the US than in most other countries. Also the flagrant abuse of the SSN over there (they seem to ask it for everything) baffles me. The equivalent number in Australia is the TFN and that's considered something you never give anyone other than your employer, and your bank (for tax purposes).
Bzzt. The vast majority of convicts sent to British colonies in the 1700s (which includes Australia, and GASP, also America pre-1776!) were petty crooks. Small time thieves, people stealing some food for their family, or general undesirables that managed to piss off the establishment. Serious criminals (murderers and rapists etc.) would most definitely have been executed in England at the time. They wouldn't waste time and money shipping them to the other side of the planet.
This is very true.
On a related note though, I suspect an internet kill-switch would be much more difficult to implement in America (from a technical viewpoint) than almost any other country. Because:
- The US still has more internet hosts than other countries, including most of the 'important' ones (from an 'average Joe's communication needs' POV) like Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. Most internet content consumed in the US would be domestically hosted;
- Related to the above, the US has many diverse routes (domestically) to get to all this content. You would need to shut all (or at least the majority) of these down.
Compare the situation in a smaller country however. Most hosts accessed would be not be located within that country, and there would only be a few links in/out of the country. Cut these few links and you have rendered most sites unusable. Those few that were still working (i.e. domestic hosts) may still be useful for communication internally, but these would be invisible to the outside world.
I live in Australia and the same would apply here: the vast, vast majority of hosts on the Internet that Australians connect to would be located outside Australia. As an isolated island continent with a small population, that means most of our traffic flows through just a few undersea cables to the outside world. In fact, all you'd need to do is turn off PPC1, Southern Cross Cable, and SeaMeWe. There are a few other cables but they have far less capacity and would be almost immediately overwhelmed by traffic (making them close to unusable).
Actually I'd be curious to see what happened if you completely cut off a country from the outside world like that. What would happen to sites like Google, which have local mirrors? Would they keep working flawlessly, or do they rely on regular 'phoning home' to some master servers in the US, or what? Hmm...
Well I agree it doesn't look like much, but then again it's 10,000 years old. That's much older than most other such remnants in the world. Either way, it's definitely not natural. Humans did this. The question is: for what purpose?
If it does align perfectly on the with the sun on the solstices, then this becomes very interesting. The likelihood that humans happened to place the rocks on that exact alignment by pure chance (as opposed to any other random alignment) is small.
If on the other hand the alignment isn't really very significant from a solar/stellar perspective it's probably just some ancient place marker or something instead. Still interesting, mind you, but nothing globally unique.
Well if Vodafone Egypt is anything like Vodafone Australia, the distinction between the network being 'on' or 'off' will be difficult to spot! :P
That's a fair point. Although I reckon that says a lot about the stupidity of certain people who really shouldn't be frittering money away on such things. The iPhone tends to only be available on the higher end contracted plans (e.g. $50-$100/month caps), and I bet ya the vast majority of people don't come anywhere near actually using their included value each month. Yet people'd rather pay $2000 over 2 years for a phone and plan which they barely use, than $1000 up front for the phone and a cheap 10 or 20 buck plan.
Or maybe most people just use the phone a hell of a lot more than I do? I bought the iPhone outright and whacked it on a $20 cap ($150 included value). They wouldn't sell it contracted on such a low end plan. But I'm lucky to use a quarter of even that meagre plan per month (I don't call much ... mostly use it for data and it has 1 GB included, again which I rarely use more than a quarter of).
Ah true. I keep forgetting the A in APNIC is Asia. It's physically based here in Australia so I tend to forget that. But needless to say, it's Asia (mainland China, mostly) gobbling them up, not really Australia, NZ, Japan, South Korea (which have older, more established internet presences)...
That will give us an extra 4-6 weeks, at current rates of IPv4 growth. So handy, but by no means life-saving.
And outside right now here, it's outside of the official operating conditions too. Currently:
Temp: 38 C / 100 F (outside operating range)
Dewpoint: 3 C (giving a relative humidity of ~10%, which is OK but not far from outside acceptable range)
Having said that I've been using my phone outside all day and I don't think anything bad is going to happen to it. It's on the cold/moist side of things that you might trip the sensor, not the hot/dry side. I wonder what the maximum operating temp is set so low for actually (35 C would be surpassed in almost all temperate climates in summer at least once or twice).
Hmmm interesting :)
Yes my visit in the 90s was ... come to think of it, the (very) late 90s. 1999 into 2000. So I guess I shouldn't have said '90s' :)
Amazing how deep the regional differences in phone penetration run. There was a time here (2007-2009ish) where you basically saw nothing ~but~ Symbian devices...
I remember visiting the US in the 90s and even then being astonished at how little market presence Nokia had there (this is the GSM era). Some of that probably had to do with the fact the US had very little GSM coverage back then (was mostly TDMA/CDMA/analog). But even so, I saw a lot of Motorolas and other things and not so many Nokias. Whereas at home during the 90s, EVERY PHONE was a Nokia (maybe one person in ten had something different, and they were laughed at!) :)
So looks like Nokia never really managed to get a foothold in North America that much, even though 3GSM coverage there now is quite good.
I think he means "a whole lot more than what the price ~looks~ like it is in the US" (of course, when you add on the 2 years worth of contract, it's not cheaper at all, and in fact US consumers are probably paying MORE on average, unless they are quite heavy users).
In general Apple iOS devices are priced at the top of their product class. For instance, comparing the price of various smartphones here in Australia (outright, without a contract, and not locked to a network), the 32 GB iPhone 4 is $999. This is more than most Android smartphones, which come in at the $500-800 range. For instance, the HTC Desire (commonly seen as a direct competitor) is $750-800. The Samsung Galaxy S is priced at the same point.
The iPad on the other hand is a bit more competitive. It is similarly priced to most Android tablets, and in fact is slightly cheaper than the Galaxy Tab (except for the 64 GB 3G version). Of course, you have to keep in mind that Apple products ALWAYS sell for their RRP, whereas you can usually get deals on Android stuff from particular stores, so you might get it cheaper.
We can ask them to do that. In fact some organisations that initially had very large (/8) allocations have already given some of their pool back. However, the growth of the internet is consuming a /8 worth of IPs every 4-6 weeks, at present. So even if all organisations with a /8 gave it back, it'd give us maybe a year's extra time, if that.
Some consumer routers have already supported it for some time: e.g. the Apple Airport Express, some NetComm routers, Fritz!Box (popular in Europe, mostly). For the rest, the firmware will be forthcoming, no doubt. My DSL modem/router manufacturer (Billion, http://www.billion.com/) has already released firmware updates to some models to enable native dual stack. My particular model is due to be updated 'Q1 2011', so within the next two months. Which is great as my ISP already has native IPv6 available to its end customers now and a fully IPv6 backbone, so it should be a seamless transition.
Having said that there are slack router manufacturers and crappy ISPs that have sat on their hands for too long and will now have to madly scramble. (Or implement carrier grade NAT which is an ugly kludge - I would immediately leave any such ISP that implemented it).
There is one small problem however: some cheap/old routers don't physically have the onboard memory to fit a firmware containing both an IPv4 and IPv6 stack. So there will definitely be some users that need to physically replace their hardware, unfortunately.
That is precisely what you'd do. Dial-up modems are perfectly able to connect to dial-up ISPs in different countries. Hell I remember doing it myself in the mid-90s, just to see if it would work (dialed into a US ISP from Australia: it worked, but was very slow and required the use of the 0015 prefix to force it to use high quality fax lines rather than the normal 0011 prefix for voice calls).
Well depends if we are talking about relative humidity or absolute humidity.
You guys in the northern hemisphere get very low winter temperatures compared to us. So you naturally get very low absolute humidity/dew points (since the dew point cannot be greater than the current temperature). But your relative humidities in winter aren't that low ... it's just that that the air is so cold that even a high relative humidity is still only a very small amount of moisture.
For instance on a cold day in the single digits F, under the influence of a dry polar air mass, you'll still have 40 or 50% humidity. But 50% humidity in the single digits F equates to a dew point of around -10 F. That's very dry: actual amount of moisture in the air is very low.
In inland Australia in winter, we also commonly sit around 50% rel. hum. But our air temp is more like 50 F. Air holding 50% of its possible moisture at 50 F is a lot more moisture than at 10 F.
But inland Australia in summer has winter-like dew points with very high air temperatures (90-110 F). This gives us relative humidities under 20% most days. Sometimes when the wind is blowing from the desert interior, we get dew points like your northern winter (-10 F), which gives us literally 1% or 2% absolute humidity!
So we think of summer as our dry season and winter as being more 'humid', even though in actuality the amount of moisture in the atmosphere doesn't change that much from season to season.
(Note this doesn't apply near the coasts or in the tropical areas: they have humid summers due to increased evaporation from ocean, more similar to the US).
Of those three popular brands you've mentioned, I've never heard of two of them, and the last (Linksys) isn't particularly popular here (Australia).
Here the most popular brands are Billion, Netgear, D-Link. I know you can download IPv6 firmware for most Billions (I have one) and I'm sure the others will follow suit. Also unlike in the US, it is very uncommon for your ISP to loan or give you the modem/router. You buy your own ... any standard ADSL2+ modem/router will work with any ISP. They also tend to cost considerably more than $50. Mine was over $300, but it's a high-end model (Gigabit LAN, SIP VoIP, VPN endpoints etc).
Guess it goes to show you that YMMV depending on where you live. But here, I don't see the shift to IPv6 being a particularly expensive or problematic thing for most people.
Precisely. The US was responsible for a good slice of the advances during the 20th century. But we still benefited from them here in Australia, as did the rest of the Western world. It's not like you guys invented the television or the dishwasher or reinforced steel skyscrapers or microchips or the Internet and kept it locked up behind US borders. Everyone uses these things. Innovation occuring elsewhere might hurt the national pride a bit, but the benefits will still flow your way.
Sweet, didn't know that. Will give it a shot when I'm bored on the weekend ;)
Yeah a lot of people take the 'download all the free apps you can find, try them and delete the bad ones' approach. Easy to get to 10B that way. If they were all paid apps (even cheapo ones at $1.99 or whatever) they probably wouldn't have even got to 1B yet.
Interesting. I'm 28 and can never remember being taught anything but -ise, and was always told -ize is American.
Mind you I'm Australian. It's possible that -ize was historically more acceptable in Britain than here, or that we shifted from -ize to -ise at an earlier date. This kind of stuff fascinates me...
Once your ISP starts dishing out IPv6 addresses, you don't really have to do much at all. Your OS almost certainly already supports IPv6. Most newish routers do (and those that don't will receive a firmware update to add IPv6 capabilities). Might need to go into your router and check that you have DHCPv6 turned on if you want IPv6 addresses on your local LAN (or you can continue to have IPv4 on the LAN side and IPv6 on the WAN side, if you want).
Of course you can play around with it earlier via tunneling but your ISP is going to have to start doing native IPv6 eventually. Personally I'm not going to bother because I'm lazy, and I know that native IPv6 is just around the corner (my ISP is currently trialling it with some customers, and will roll it out nationwide later this year). And when that day comes it should be pretty painless.
Heh, as a tangential comment, where I live, you genuinely DON'T own your house. Land here is leasehold rather than freehold. So when you buy property you technically only buy a 99-year lease on that land, not the land itself. The lease is as good as ownership and has all the same rights as ownership. And it can't be taken from you without fair compensation. But ~technically~ you don't really 'own' it, per se.
Most new home routers do actually support IPv6 now, and older ones are getting the capability added via firmware updates. My several-year-old router didn't have IPv6 initially but it does now (firmware update sometime last year added it).