Yeah Huntsman spiders seem to love cars. We had one that lived "somewhere" on the outside of our car for a few months last year. Must have been somewhere in the engine bay or something.
Every time we thought we had gotten rid of it, we'd be out driving and it would scurry across the outside of the windscreen. Would scare the shit out of you if you weren't expecting it. Even going 110km/h+, it wouldn't fall off, amazingly.
Fortunately we live in Canberra and so once the weather got cooler, we saw no more of our eight-legged friend. Canberra is sorta nice in that way, we get our fair share of bugs and snakes and spiders in summer, like everywhere else in Australia, but those winter freezes kill everything off so you do have 4 or so months of the year bug-free:)
Because the UK press likes to massively hype up anything involving dangerous animals and Australia.
I LIVE in Australia and had not heard about this supposed "story" at all. And I'm a very avid news-watcher.
Complete hype. Yes Australia has large spiders in some places. They might look scary but they are not dangerous at all. Like most places... it's the small spiders that are the most venomous. In Australia it's the Redback, White Tailed and Trapdoor spiders that are considered very dangerous... and these are all very small.
Not that unusual actually. 3G broadband is really quite common in Australia and many other countries. I know plenty of households that use it are their main connection, and share it via a router. It's very common for students in sharehouses too because they aren't fixed to a particular location, so when they move house (which happens regularly), their internet plan goes with them.
Hell, I'm on regular 24 Mbps ADSL2+ in an urban area in Australia. But my DSL modem/router still offers a fall-back to a 3G connection if the DSL line fails. It's becoming rather common for laptops, home routers etc to have 3G capability actually.
I'm confused by the terminology. Around here (southern USA) an apartment is something you rent. A Condominium is like an apartment in that it is on managed grounds but you can "buy" them.
Only in North America. I had never heard the word 'condo' in my life before I visited the US. In the rest of the world an apartment, more typically called a flat most English speaking countries, can be either rented, or bought. The nature of your legal rights over the property (i.e. whether you own it or not), does not change what it IS.
I say "buy" in quotes because the concept of buying half of a building attached to someone else's half does not sound like anything I would want to buy.
Huh? Most of the world lives in (and owns) such dwellings (flats, townhouses, any other medium or high density houses in which one or more walls/floors/ceilings are shared with another dwelling). The big, separate houses you see in American suburbia are NOT the norm for many countries.
I live in a flat/apartment, although it is technically called a townhouse because we have a small private garden/courtyard. One wall is shared with another person's property. And my ceiling is someone else's floor (although I'm on the ground floor so noone is below me). And I own it. But it's still a flat/townhouse/apartment... just cause I own it doesn't make it something different.
So I think the US word 'condo' must refer more to the type of ownership, rather than the type of building, per se? I have to admit... I hear that word on American TV shows sometimes and don't really know what the hell it means:)
so the thing to do is not worry now, worry later. the warm weather will mitigate the flu. then we should all keep a very wary eye come october, that's when the swine flu will prove if it is a superkiller or not
prepare now, you have until fall until the scythe comes (hopefully, it won't, it could still fizzle out)
...unless of course you are in the Southern Hemisphere where it's just starting to get cold and wintery about now.
I'm a little worried about this actually (I'm in Australia). Just this last weekend, we had our first cold snap of the winter (which in my area means 20s-40s F and some snow in elevated locations). The normal start of our 'flu season' is right about now... and they've announced 5 people who are currently being tested in Australia for possible swine flu (recent travelers to North America).
I have relatives in the US flying over to visit next month. I sure hope this thing doesn't spiral out of control and disrupts their trip (well, if that happens, their trip is the last of my concerns actually). They've already announced they will be doing body temperature scanning of all passengers arriving at Australian airports from the US, Canada and Mexico from midnight tonight.
I'm a huge proponent of using nuclear power. It's the only proven technology we have NOW that is zero-emissions and can produce on the type of scale we need. Wind and solar are great too but cannot yet cope with the demand alone.
You still have a large amount of CO2 emissions coming from the transport and agriculture sectors. But the energy sector still forms a big part of total CO2 emissions and nuclear power is, for the medium term at least, the answer IMHO.
Ahh so there are some others out there who have also thought of this. I've always thought this would be quite effective... just go outside after a hot day and feel how dark asphalt roads keep radiating heat pretty much all night long.
My thoughts always turn to villages in places like Italy and Spain, where the buildings are whitewashed/painted white and overwhelmingly the towns have a very high albedo (bring your sunglasses if you go there!). You don't feel anywhere near as much of that heat island effect at night, and even in hot Spanish summers, the interior of these houses stays pretty comfortable, with no AC needed.
Using concrete for roads instead of asphalt would be the most obvious way to increase urban albedo. Problem is, concrete roads cost a lot more (but they also last a lot longer too). That's why highways are often built from concrete but small urban roads aren't - they aren't expected to have as much traffic. I suppose one has to look also at the relative energy and cost to create an asphalt road vs a concrete one.
An alternative approach is to go for the 'shade' approach. Rather than paint things white, try to plant a metric buttload of trees over the city, such that most paved surfaces are shaded most of the time. Even if they are dark surfaces, if there is no sun hitting them, it's not a problem. Trees themselves have quite a low albedo of course, but they don't hold anywhere as much heat overnight as pavement. Plus trees have other benefits too (sucking up CO2, making places more pleasant to be in etc).
On my (many and regular) visits to the US I am constantly astonished at these things (average size of the cars and percentage of processed vs fresh food on supermarket shelves). Some other things that seem particularly wasteful:
- Lighting up vast, unused/empty open areas at night with an insane amount of light (e.g. empty carparks, car dealerships lit floodlights that would be more at home in a football stadium etc). Not only that but the lights used are often non-directional, sending at least 50% of that blazing light uselessly up into the night sky. No wonder you guys can't see the stars. Use dimmer, more directional lights... or just turn the damn things off after midnight or something!
- Close to zero use of reusable fabric/hessian bags for grocery shopping. This might vary from state to state though. But where I come from, traditional paper/plastic grocery bags rapidly falling out of favour and probably are used by less than one-third of shoppers now. Frankly, cloth bags are better anyway - they don't tear/rip and are more comfortable to carry.
- Big big houses with a lot of bathrooms. Sometimes up to one bathroom per resident (!?). Honestly, is that really necessary? Ok so this doesn't necessarily mean the total volume of water consumed is greater, it's just spread out over more rooms. But more energy has to go to heating/cooling/building these larger dwellings.
Basically, there's a lot that could be done to reduce waste in the US that I can see that doesn't require any new regulations or anything. Just simple stuff that is already the norm in many other places.
Factual correction - the second stage did not detach properly and fell, along with the payload, into the ocean east of Japan. Rest of the post remains valid though.
Agreed. I don't think this is a complete failure. Especially considering their last few attempts either exploded on the launch pad, or ditched into the ocean just offshore after barely going a few miles.
This one successfully launched, dropped its first booster stage west of Japan, flew over Japan, dropped its second stage booster neatly on the other side of Japan... and eventually did fall into the Pacific. But they are getting closer to orbit, that's for sure.
That's not even considering the possibility that they were in fact ~intending~ to hit that spot randomly in the middle of the Pacific (i.e. "if we can hit this spot, we can hit anywhere within that radius...).
Huh - all of 'heavily populated' Australia has 3G and even most of rural Australia has it. Telstra's NextG network covers 99% of the population (and yes, it's 3G/HSDPA, on the 850 Mhz band). Sure it's overpriced and Telstra is evil... but virtually ALL of Australia has it available, and it's damn fast too as wireless services go.
What you probably meant is the other carriers (Vodafone, 3, Optus etc) don't have 3G coverage in some heavily populated areas. Which is true. But it's not true to say there's no 3G service at all.
I think the ageism thing might also be a somewhat bigger issue in the US than some other countries, due to their (rather unique) practice of tying health care to employment (i.e. as part of your salary and benefits package). Older people are more expensive to insure, health-wise (although that probably only matters once you're 45 or 50, rather than 35).
OTOH in my country (Australia) and ~most~ other countries, health insurance is like car insurance. You buy it yourself with your own money, and can choose whichever provider you want to. So companies don't have to worry about it, from a financial or administrative perspective.
Education is not a substitute for experience. Remember ISA cards, IRQ settings and COM 1,3 vs 2,4 problems, and how to work around it? Kids today don't. They depend on PnP to magically make it work.
Quoted for truth.
I remember that stuff (but I don't really miss it), and I'm 'only' 25. Had to fiddle around with those kind of problems (and making 9 different variations of autoexec.bat) to get various software even working back when I was aged 13-16. Would have been in MSDOS 5, 6 and 6.22.
But I reckon I'm in the very youngest group of people who had to hack around a bit on the command line and deal with that kind of stuff, and even I'm no guru compared to those a few years older. I'm just on that 'edge' of the generation that grew up with the command line and config files etc (in the MSDOS/Windows world at least - Linux people even today have to dabble in it still).
People just a couple of years after me though would have grown up starting with at least Win 95 which did have rudimentary plug-n-play and largely avoided all those problems. Even some of my similarly-aged peers raise an eyebrow at me sometimes when I go into a command prompt in XP to do things instead of using the GUI method (e.g. ipconfig/renew * is a lot quicker than doing it via the control panel)
Yep... work travel is overrated and I actually dread it these days. I'd rather stay home, close to my family and my hobbies.
Don't get me wrong, I love travel and travel extensively for vacations. But work travel is sorta awful. All you see is the inside of some office somewhere, and a hotel room or two. Plus the stress of flying long distance and jet lag etc.
The exception to this is if you can manage to get some leave to take while you're over there. That can be nice. But with my job at least, it's like "ah, can you go to Singapore for Mon-Thurs next week? Great." And you'll fly out on a Sunday, and have the redeye back on the Thursday night and there won't be any time sightseeing.
That's normal. Remember you have to leave room in your upstream for the TCP ACK packets that result from what you're ~downloading~, before you even consider devoting whatever's left to actually uploading torrent content. Doesn't matter what speed connection you've got, you need to cap your upload at about 60-80% of its full rate to ensure torrents download at a good rate.
Replying to myself but realised I should have said 'most ISPs' rather than 'most people'. Because Telstra and Optus are about the only major offenders, but they are large players. I don't think serious P2Pers would use those ISPs unless they had no other option, though. iiNet/Internode/etc are available pretty much everywhere Telstra is (they resell Telstra/Optus services if they don't have their own DSLAMs in an area), and don't engage in such shenanigans.
Well yes. Perhaps I should have said "not here, for most users". There's always exceptions to rules but I didn't want to make the post too long. For ***most*** people, P2P throttling and no-server rules don't apply.
1. I was just talking about how they did it here. Obviously I'm not suggesting an ISP in the US use Australian pricing... lol. The OP would have to pick appropriate pricing and allowances for his market.
2. The prices you quote are absolutely insane even by Australian standards. Seriously. Must be Telstra/Bigpond (or a Telstra reseller)? I pay half of what you do for almost 4x the data (ADSL2+, it would be a bit more expensive for ADSL1 but still nowhere near your figures).
3. You can't compare pricing in North America to Australia for ISPs, or for anything else really. There are reasons data costs more here (limited international transit and the VAST majority of content people want coming from US servers is the main one).
But even that is fairly irrelevant because, the general cost of living in Australia is higher than in North America to begin with. Compare the cost of a loaf of bread, or a pair of shoes, or a new car. All are similarly higher in Australia than in US/Canada. That's just the downside of living in an isolated continent with no real manufacturing industries of its own.
Some places still have region locked DVD players? Wow...
In my country, all DVD players sold are region free, and have been for the better part of a decade. In fact I think it might be a legal/regulatory requirement now that they are region free. I think it was only the first few years after the introduction of DVDs that region-locked players existed.
Which is a good thing because my wife is from a different country and a different DVD region, and it would be a shame if we couldn't watch her substantial DVD collection just because it's the 'wrong' region.:)
Yep - that's how they do it here in Australia and despite all the flak we cop on Slashdot about our metered ISP accounts, the user-pays system actually avoids a lot of the problems you see with ISPs overseas.
- P2P throttling? Not here. - Artificial speed shaping or restrictions. Not here, unless you surpass your monthly limit on a flat rate plan. - Forbidding servers on residential connections? Not here. - Deep packet inspection and other traffic manipulation? Not here. - Bad contention ratios. Not here (on the good ISPs at least).
The 70:1 contention ratio in the summary is pretty shocking... good ISPs here (iiNet, Internode etc) have 10:1 or less and buy more bandwidth proactively, before they actually need it. They can afford to do that, and keep their links running at 50-70% capacity, BECAUSE it's a user pays system. Additional bandwidth use means more revenue for the ISP and hence it's attractive to them to keep their pipes un-congested and fast.
The other advantage is that light users can pay pretty small amounts for a basic connection. My parents just use email and so I put them on a TINY 1GB per month plan. They never even use more than half of that, and the cost savings are significant (consider that they pay only 20 bucks a month, but larger plans of 50, 100, 200 GB per month cost 60-100 bucks).
So if you absolutely cannot upgrade your links, the "bill, don't throttle" approach is more attractive. It's less work than setting up packet shaping infrastructure and rules, won't affect the large majority of your customers, and will make sure that top 5% of leechers keep their habit under control a bit better (or pay for a higher account, which means more money for you!).
Oh and one last thing. Don't bill for excess usage - just shape their connection. Because if Joe Sixpack gets a virus and their connection downloads 100s of GB without their knowledge, they are not going to want a huge bill. The way most ISPs do it in Australia is after you reach your monthly limit (say, 80 GB at 24 Mbps), they'll shape your traffic to a slower speed (e.g. 128 kbps). That's still fast enough to browse the web and stuff, but will ease backhaul congestion due to P2P etc.
Hell, the Nintendo DS, which is a relatively new piece of hardware (released way after WPA was common) supports only WEP. So if you have a DS in the house and you actually want to use the online features... you have to use WEP. Argh!
Probably been said above, but completely legal in Australia and actually, VoIP has a very high market penetration here compared to the US from what I can tell.
I, and most of my friends, have no traditional PSTN voice service at all. We physically have the landline there, but there's no dialtone. It's just for DSL (so called 'Naked DSL').
There's half a dozen big Australian VoIP services out there which offer very cheap call rates... simply sign up to one of those, whack the relevant SIP settings in your router and you are good to go. Some ISPs offer you a discount if you bundle their VoIP service with your DSL service.
The killer feature for me, other than low cost calls, is that you can choose a local phone number (or multiple numbers) in different cities which is fantastic if you have relatives scattered far and wide... they can call you for local call cost). Software solutions like Skype offer this too I believe (SkypeIn numbers).
Huh? Venus is visible in the day a lot of the time. It's the next planet 'in' toward the Sun of course, so from Earth's perspective, it's always relatively close to the Sun. So you tend to see it for a few hours before and after sunrise and sunset each day.
Like any body closer to the Sun than we are, Venus exhibits phases. So sometimes it's brighter than other times. But where I live at least (Australia, city of 350,000 people but relatively tough anti-light-pollution regulations), it's often very bright, sitting in the red sunset sky to the west, somewhere a little bit 'above' the Sun. Basically, it looks like the first 'star' of the night (but it's obviously a planet).
Actually, Pandora 'pulled the plug' on anyone accessing the site from ANYWHERE outside of the US (and possibly Canada?). I'm in the same boat as you are, here in Australia. Used to love Pandora, but now... no love:(
Anyway, point is, Pandora becoming US-only had nothing to do with UK authorities/organisations. It happened purely due to American laws/regulations.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah Huntsman spiders seem to love cars. We had one that lived "somewhere" on the outside of our car for a few months last year. Must have been somewhere in the engine bay or something.
Every time we thought we had gotten rid of it, we'd be out driving and it would scurry across the outside of the windscreen. Would scare the shit out of you if you weren't expecting it. Even going 110km/h+, it wouldn't fall off, amazingly.
Fortunately we live in Canberra and so once the weather got cooler, we saw no more of our eight-legged friend. Canberra is sorta nice in that way, we get our fair share of bugs and snakes and spiders in summer, like everywhere else in Australia, but those winter freezes kill everything off so you do have 4 or so months of the year bug-free :)
Because the UK press likes to massively hype up anything involving dangerous animals and Australia.
I LIVE in Australia and had not heard about this supposed "story" at all. And I'm a very avid news-watcher.
Complete hype. Yes Australia has large spiders in some places. They might look scary but they are not dangerous at all. Like most places ... it's the small spiders that are the most venomous. In Australia it's the Redback, White Tailed and Trapdoor spiders that are considered very dangerous ... and these are all very small.
Not that unusual actually. 3G broadband is really quite common in Australia and many other countries. I know plenty of households that use it are their main connection, and share it via a router. It's very common for students in sharehouses too because they aren't fixed to a particular location, so when they move house (which happens regularly), their internet plan goes with them.
Hell, I'm on regular 24 Mbps ADSL2+ in an urban area in Australia. But my DSL modem/router still offers a fall-back to a 3G connection if the DSL line fails. It's becoming rather common for laptops, home routers etc to have 3G capability actually.
I'm confused by the terminology. Around here (southern USA) an apartment is something you rent. A Condominium is like an apartment in that it is on managed grounds but you can "buy" them.
Only in North America. I had never heard the word 'condo' in my life before I visited the US. In the rest of the world an apartment, more typically called a flat most English speaking countries, can be either rented, or bought. The nature of your legal rights over the property (i.e. whether you own it or not), does not change what it IS.
I say "buy" in quotes because the concept of buying half of a building attached to someone else's half does not sound like anything I would want to buy.
Huh? Most of the world lives in (and owns) such dwellings (flats, townhouses, any other medium or high density houses in which one or more walls/floors/ceilings are shared with another dwelling). The big, separate houses you see in American suburbia are NOT the norm for many countries.
I live in a flat/apartment, although it is technically called a townhouse because we have a small private garden/courtyard. One wall is shared with another person's property. And my ceiling is someone else's floor (although I'm on the ground floor so noone is below me). And I own it. But it's still a flat/townhouse/apartment ... just cause I own it doesn't make it something different.
So I think the US word 'condo' must refer more to the type of ownership, rather than the type of building, per se? I have to admit ... I hear that word on American TV shows sometimes and don't really know what the hell it means :)
so the thing to do is not worry now, worry later. the warm weather will mitigate the flu. then we should all keep a very wary eye come october, that's when the swine flu will prove if it is a superkiller or not
prepare now, you have until fall until the scythe comes (hopefully, it won't, it could still fizzle out)
...unless of course you are in the Southern Hemisphere where it's just starting to get cold and wintery about now.
I'm a little worried about this actually (I'm in Australia). Just this last weekend, we had our first cold snap of the winter (which in my area means 20s-40s F and some snow in elevated locations). The normal start of our 'flu season' is right about now ... and they've announced 5 people who are currently being tested in Australia for possible swine flu (recent travelers to North America).
I have relatives in the US flying over to visit next month. I sure hope this thing doesn't spiral out of control and disrupts their trip (well, if that happens, their trip is the last of my concerns actually). They've already announced they will be doing body temperature scanning of all passengers arriving at Australian airports from the US, Canada and Mexico from midnight tonight.
Having to replace a CFL every 6-12 months is probably on the high end too :) For the ultimate in laziness, take my case.
I replaced every bulb in my home with CFLs in one hit. Two and a half years ago. Not a single one has needed swapping out yet. Not one.
Not flamebait at all.
I'm a huge proponent of using nuclear power. It's the only proven technology we have NOW that is zero-emissions and can produce on the type of scale we need. Wind and solar are great too but cannot yet cope with the demand alone.
You still have a large amount of CO2 emissions coming from the transport and agriculture sectors. But the energy sector still forms a big part of total CO2 emissions and nuclear power is, for the medium term at least, the answer IMHO.
Ahh so there are some others out there who have also thought of this. I've always thought this would be quite effective ... just go outside after a hot day and feel how dark asphalt roads keep radiating heat pretty much all night long.
My thoughts always turn to villages in places like Italy and Spain, where the buildings are whitewashed/painted white and overwhelmingly the towns have a very high albedo (bring your sunglasses if you go there!). You don't feel anywhere near as much of that heat island effect at night, and even in hot Spanish summers, the interior of these houses stays pretty comfortable, with no AC needed.
Using concrete for roads instead of asphalt would be the most obvious way to increase urban albedo. Problem is, concrete roads cost a lot more (but they also last a lot longer too). That's why highways are often built from concrete but small urban roads aren't - they aren't expected to have as much traffic. I suppose one has to look also at the relative energy and cost to create an asphalt road vs a concrete one.
An alternative approach is to go for the 'shade' approach. Rather than paint things white, try to plant a metric buttload of trees over the city, such that most paved surfaces are shaded most of the time. Even if they are dark surfaces, if there is no sun hitting them, it's not a problem. Trees themselves have quite a low albedo of course, but they don't hold anywhere as much heat overnight as pavement. Plus trees have other benefits too (sucking up CO2, making places more pleasant to be in etc).
+1
On my (many and regular) visits to the US I am constantly astonished at these things (average size of the cars and percentage of processed vs fresh food on supermarket shelves). Some other things that seem particularly wasteful:
- Lighting up vast, unused/empty open areas at night with an insane amount of light (e.g. empty carparks, car dealerships lit floodlights that would be more at home in a football stadium etc). Not only that but the lights used are often non-directional, sending at least 50% of that blazing light uselessly up into the night sky. No wonder you guys can't see the stars. Use dimmer, more directional lights ... or just turn the damn things off after midnight or something!
- Close to zero use of reusable fabric/hessian bags for grocery shopping. This might vary from state to state though. But where I come from, traditional paper/plastic grocery bags rapidly falling out of favour and probably are used by less than one-third of shoppers now. Frankly, cloth bags are better anyway - they don't tear/rip and are more comfortable to carry.
- Big big houses with a lot of bathrooms. Sometimes up to one bathroom per resident (!?). Honestly, is that really necessary? Ok so this doesn't necessarily mean the total volume of water consumed is greater, it's just spread out over more rooms. But more energy has to go to heating/cooling/building these larger dwellings.
Basically, there's a lot that could be done to reduce waste in the US that I can see that doesn't require any new regulations or anything. Just simple stuff that is already the norm in many other places.
Factual correction - the second stage did not detach properly and fell, along with the payload, into the ocean east of Japan. Rest of the post remains valid though.
Agreed. I don't think this is a complete failure. Especially considering their last few attempts either exploded on the launch pad, or ditched into the ocean just offshore after barely going a few miles.
This one successfully launched, dropped its first booster stage west of Japan, flew over Japan, dropped its second stage booster neatly on the other side of Japan ... and eventually did fall into the Pacific. But they are getting closer to orbit, that's for sure.
That's not even considering the possibility that they were in fact ~intending~ to hit that spot randomly in the middle of the Pacific (i.e. "if we can hit this spot, we can hit anywhere within that radius...).
Huh - all of 'heavily populated' Australia has 3G and even most of rural Australia has it. Telstra's NextG network covers 99% of the population (and yes, it's 3G/HSDPA, on the 850 Mhz band). Sure it's overpriced and Telstra is evil ... but virtually ALL of Australia has it available, and it's damn fast too as wireless services go.
What you probably meant is the other carriers (Vodafone, 3, Optus etc) don't have 3G coverage in some heavily populated areas. Which is true. But it's not true to say there's no 3G service at all.
I think the ageism thing might also be a somewhat bigger issue in the US than some other countries, due to their (rather unique) practice of tying health care to employment (i.e. as part of your salary and benefits package). Older people are more expensive to insure, health-wise (although that probably only matters once you're 45 or 50, rather than 35).
OTOH in my country (Australia) and ~most~ other countries, health insurance is like car insurance. You buy it yourself with your own money, and can choose whichever provider you want to. So companies don't have to worry about it, from a financial or administrative perspective.
Education is not a substitute for experience. Remember ISA cards, IRQ settings and COM 1,3 vs 2,4 problems, and how to work around it? Kids today don't. They depend on PnP to magically make it work.
Quoted for truth.
I remember that stuff (but I don't really miss it), and I'm 'only' 25. Had to fiddle around with those kind of problems (and making 9 different variations of autoexec.bat) to get various software even working back when I was aged 13-16. Would have been in MSDOS 5, 6 and 6.22.
But I reckon I'm in the very youngest group of people who had to hack around a bit on the command line and deal with that kind of stuff, and even I'm no guru compared to those a few years older. I'm just on that 'edge' of the generation that grew up with the command line and config files etc (in the MSDOS/Windows world at least - Linux people even today have to dabble in it still).
People just a couple of years after me though would have grown up starting with at least Win 95 which did have rudimentary plug-n-play and largely avoided all those problems. Even some of my similarly-aged peers raise an eyebrow at me sometimes when I go into a command prompt in XP to do things instead of using the GUI method (e.g. ipconfig /renew * is a lot quicker than doing it via the control panel)
Yep ... work travel is overrated and I actually dread it these days. I'd rather stay home, close to my family and my hobbies.
Don't get me wrong, I love travel and travel extensively for vacations. But work travel is sorta awful. All you see is the inside of some office somewhere, and a hotel room or two. Plus the stress of flying long distance and jet lag etc.
The exception to this is if you can manage to get some leave to take while you're over there. That can be nice. But with my job at least, it's like "ah, can you go to Singapore for Mon-Thurs next week? Great." And you'll fly out on a Sunday, and have the redeye back on the Thursday night and there won't be any time sightseeing.
That's normal. Remember you have to leave room in your upstream for the TCP ACK packets that result from what you're ~downloading~, before you even consider devoting whatever's left to actually uploading torrent content. Doesn't matter what speed connection you've got, you need to cap your upload at about 60-80% of its full rate to ensure torrents download at a good rate.
Replying to myself but realised I should have said 'most ISPs' rather than 'most people'. Because Telstra and Optus are about the only major offenders, but they are large players. I don't think serious P2Pers would use those ISPs unless they had no other option, though. iiNet/Internode/etc are available pretty much everywhere Telstra is (they resell Telstra/Optus services if they don't have their own DSLAMs in an area), and don't engage in such shenanigans.
Well yes. Perhaps I should have said "not here, for most users". There's always exceptions to rules but I didn't want to make the post too long. For ***most*** people, P2P throttling and no-server rules don't apply.
1. I was just talking about how they did it here. Obviously I'm not suggesting an ISP in the US use Australian pricing ... lol. The OP would have to pick appropriate pricing and allowances for his market.
2. The prices you quote are absolutely insane even by Australian standards. Seriously. Must be Telstra/Bigpond (or a Telstra reseller)? I pay half of what you do for almost 4x the data (ADSL2+, it would be a bit more expensive for ADSL1 but still nowhere near your figures).
3. You can't compare pricing in North America to Australia for ISPs, or for anything else really. There are reasons data costs more here (limited international transit and the VAST majority of content people want coming from US servers is the main one).
But even that is fairly irrelevant because, the general cost of living in Australia is higher than in North America to begin with. Compare the cost of a loaf of bread, or a pair of shoes, or a new car. All are similarly higher in Australia than in US/Canada. That's just the downside of living in an isolated continent with no real manufacturing industries of its own.
Some places still have region locked DVD players? Wow...
In my country, all DVD players sold are region free, and have been for the better part of a decade. In fact I think it might be a legal/regulatory requirement now that they are region free. I think it was only the first few years after the introduction of DVDs that region-locked players existed.
Which is a good thing because my wife is from a different country and a different DVD region, and it would be a shame if we couldn't watch her substantial DVD collection just because it's the 'wrong' region. :)
Yep - that's how they do it here in Australia and despite all the flak we cop on Slashdot about our metered ISP accounts, the user-pays system actually avoids a lot of the problems you see with ISPs overseas.
- P2P throttling? Not here.
- Artificial speed shaping or restrictions. Not here, unless you surpass your monthly limit on a flat rate plan.
- Forbidding servers on residential connections? Not here.
- Deep packet inspection and other traffic manipulation? Not here.
- Bad contention ratios. Not here (on the good ISPs at least).
The 70:1 contention ratio in the summary is pretty shocking ... good ISPs here (iiNet, Internode etc) have 10:1 or less and buy more bandwidth proactively, before they actually need it. They can afford to do that, and keep their links running at 50-70% capacity, BECAUSE it's a user pays system. Additional bandwidth use means more revenue for the ISP and hence it's attractive to them to keep their pipes un-congested and fast.
The other advantage is that light users can pay pretty small amounts for a basic connection. My parents just use email and so I put them on a TINY 1GB per month plan. They never even use more than half of that, and the cost savings are significant (consider that they pay only 20 bucks a month, but larger plans of 50, 100, 200 GB per month cost 60-100 bucks).
So if you absolutely cannot upgrade your links, the "bill, don't throttle" approach is more attractive. It's less work than setting up packet shaping infrastructure and rules, won't affect the large majority of your customers, and will make sure that top 5% of leechers keep their habit under control a bit better (or pay for a higher account, which means more money for you!).
Oh and one last thing. Don't bill for excess usage - just shape their connection. Because if Joe Sixpack gets a virus and their connection downloads 100s of GB without their knowledge, they are not going to want a huge bill. The way most ISPs do it in Australia is after you reach your monthly limit (say, 80 GB at 24 Mbps), they'll shape your traffic to a slower speed (e.g. 128 kbps). That's still fast enough to browse the web and stuff, but will ease backhaul congestion due to P2P etc.
Hell, the Nintendo DS, which is a relatively new piece of hardware (released way after WPA was common) supports only WEP. So if you have a DS in the house and you actually want to use the online features ... you have to use WEP. Argh!
Probably been said above, but completely legal in Australia and actually, VoIP has a very high market penetration here compared to the US from what I can tell.
I, and most of my friends, have no traditional PSTN voice service at all. We physically have the landline there, but there's no dialtone. It's just for DSL (so called 'Naked DSL').
There's half a dozen big Australian VoIP services out there which offer very cheap call rates ... simply sign up to one of those, whack the relevant SIP settings in your router and you are good to go. Some ISPs offer you a discount if you bundle their VoIP service with your DSL service.
The killer feature for me, other than low cost calls, is that you can choose a local phone number (or multiple numbers) in different cities which is fantastic if you have relatives scattered far and wide ... they can call you for local call cost). Software solutions like Skype offer this too I believe (SkypeIn numbers).
Huh? Venus is visible in the day a lot of the time. It's the next planet 'in' toward the Sun of course, so from Earth's perspective, it's always relatively close to the Sun. So you tend to see it for a few hours before and after sunrise and sunset each day.
Like any body closer to the Sun than we are, Venus exhibits phases. So sometimes it's brighter than other times. But where I live at least (Australia, city of 350,000 people but relatively tough anti-light-pollution regulations), it's often very bright, sitting in the red sunset sky to the west, somewhere a little bit 'above' the Sun. Basically, it looks like the first 'star' of the night (but it's obviously a planet).
Actually, Pandora 'pulled the plug' on anyone accessing the site from ANYWHERE outside of the US (and possibly Canada?). I'm in the same boat as you are, here in Australia. Used to love Pandora, but now ... no love :(
Anyway, point is, Pandora becoming US-only had nothing to do with UK authorities/organisations. It happened purely due to American laws/regulations.