Porn sites don't like to be filtered? An awful lot of them ask people to confirm they are >18 and provide links to net filtering software for concerned parents.
The age thing is for legal reasons.
Porn sites want to be filtered away from viewers who will result in legal complications to their operations (such as kids). They want everyone else to see them.
Ghettoization in.xxx doesn't help them at all, since it will be blocked en masse by corporate firewalls and even entire countries.
I'm sure you'll see plenty of porn operators registering.xxx domain names, but I doubt a single one of them will pull up stakes from.com.
If you're buying just plane tickets from Expidea, Travelocity, or Orbitz, 9 times out of 10 it's cheaper to buy the ticket directly from the airline in question. Cut out the middleman.
Very true, for domestic USA flights only. And the best way to figure out which airline is often to use the engine at ITA Software's site. Sometimes you will find weird (unusably weird) routings but you will also get a list of the best published fares available. Some you can get at the airline's web site, others you need to print out the codes and take to a travel agent.
For international flights you're almost always better off with a good travel agent.
If you're buying just plane tickets from Expidea, Travelocity, or Orbitz, 9 times out of 10 it's cheaper to buy the ticket directly from the airline in question. Cut out the middleman.
Very true, for domestic USA flights only. And the best way to figure out which airline is often to use the engine at ITA Software's site. Sometimes you will find weird (unusably weird) routings but you will also get a list of the best published fares available. Some you can get at the airline's web site, others you need to print out the codes and take to a travel agent.
For international flights you're almost always better off with a good travel agent.
That's totally different. I am also willing to pay an extra $100 to get a "better" monitor. But the post you replied to talks about paying an extra $100 to get the exact same monitor.
Yes, that's the idea with price discrimination: You try to separate your price-sensitive customers from those who are not so price-sensitive. You give lower prices to the price-sensitive ones, so you don't lose them to your competitors, but you charge more to the rest, to keep your profits up. Since no customers will identify themselves as not being price-sensitive, it's usually done by making near-cost-neutral differentiations between versions of the same product, or attaching artificial rules at various price points.
For instance, airlines often charge more for round trips that don't include a Saturday night stay, even though it obviously doesn't cost the airline any more to fly you back this week than it will next week.
Another common example is different-sized packages of the same item. In US supermarkets you can normally find Lucky Charms breakfast cereal in three sizes. The largest size costs about half as much per gram as the smallest size.
After taking into account the cost of packaging, what's going on here is textbook price discrimination: Consumers who are price-sensitive will buy the large box. But a number of others will choose the small one for whatever reasons, signalling that they care about some other factor more than price.
I don't think you'll find many people who will place an angry call to the attorney general because they bought two small boxes of Lucky Charms and thus paid twice as much as the person who bought one large box. But that's because it's a form of price discrimination they're familiar with.
You make far more coherent points than the original respondent.
However I don't find population density is that smooth - it's not as if a country with a low overall density is that way because people have spaced themselves equidistantly (with some exceptions, and those are probably well suited for wireless).
Mostly outside the cities, at least from what I've seen, it's small but dense settlements, and then a smattering of more isolated houses and compounds.
I am not arguing against the use of wireless technologies to bridge the substantial distances between settlements, but just for the last mile. Some of my arguments are more to the general case of wireless vs wired last-mile and do not find great traction in this particular environment.
Wired infrastructure is not free of operational costs. Bandwidth costs money, no matter how you distribute it. Upgrading a wireless concentrator is on the same magnitude of expense as upgrading a wired concentrator, even on eBay.
The fact that there always costs, or that costs are similar for a certain piece of equipment which is fundamentally irrelevant to the underlying transport except for the interface bolted onto the side, sidesteps the point that there are a lot of costs which are quite different, from spectrum rental, to managing active infrastructure spread as densely as every few hundred meters across the coverage area, to the far faster upgrade cycle of current wireless technology.
Wired infrastructure also obsoletes quickly and expensively. Google for new york obsolete telephone for some very costly examples.
I see a lot of stories about equipment that was decommissioned after decades in service, long after depreciation writedown had faded to distant memory. What is that supposed to tell me?
Africa is not a homogeneous zone of people "who almost never go farther than a quick walk [from] their home[s]". The various metropolises of the continent's northern coast are each different from Capetown. Mining and river towns of the eastern interior certainly have different communications needs than the coastal port cities on the western half of the continent or the fishing communities of the north who need to deal with international markets on a daily basis. And yes, there are some Africans who, for various reasons, will never want or need any kind of telephone.
If this discussion is about providing coverage to Mombasa and Cairo, then it's pretty irrelevant that we're talking about Africa, as the problems and issues are about the same as anywhere else at similar levels of development and economic activity. It's the interior and the small places where it becomes interesting.
But nevertheless, in the cities and the countryside, just like in Europe and everywhere else, a wired last-mile is cheaper in the long run and just as useful (or moreso) in the majority of situations. As a consumer you may not clue into this, since cell phones seem cool, and that Crazy Frog is really a tremendous artistic milestone. Perhaps your cultural bias is clouding your judgment.
Please don't let your cultural baises and lack of information prejudice your viewpoints in this manner.
I'm curious about the cultural bias you've identified. Can you clarify? For instance, where am I from? I will mention that I've lived and worked in Africa (as well as Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania), and traveled on foot and by hitched rides on cargo trucks across much of the continent, meeting an awful lot of those people who don't get out of town much. You?
DSL in the U.S. sucks? I get 6Mbps/768Kbps all the time with under 50ms latency via Speakeasy. If that's your definition of "sucks" I'd hate to see what's good.
How about 50-megabit down, 3-megabit up, for about US$40/month? Move to Japan, then sign up here.
Frankly, I'm addicted enough to the Internet that I'd sell my house and move closer to a city before this even became an issue.
I think we now face the true test of your supposed addiction. Tokyo's waiting.
This is correct. Many areas of Africa finally getting some cash in hand, or from the US, are skipping the wired step, and going right to wireless.
Thus providing yet one more in the endless series of examples of short-sighted development assistance that fails to help in the long run.
Wireless is cheap to put in but it provides vastly inferior quality and limited bandwidth. And while the capital infrastructure costs are lower, the ongoing operational costs (you know, the ones that you have to pay forever) are higher.
For the majority of Africans who almost never go farther than a quick walk of their home, wirelessness is a pointless frill that they'll be paying for for years to come.
Prior to my discovering the online community in 1980, my longest stint off the grid was my three years in the Army '85-'88. Not only was I off the grid but completely computer-less. I made up for it by coming back to the fold with a nice new Amiga 2000. Man was that a sweet machine with tons of online community activity around it as well. So, even my year Studying abroad (or was that studying a-beer?) in Germany '93-'94 and my six months in Croatia (in a bombed out town during the tail end of the Yugoslavian war) were not so bereft of computers and online access as my time in the Army.
It's different now. They're all sitting around on MSN every minute they're not eating or on duty. Heck, I've been in several places (outside the USA) where the only way to get online was to be granted access to US military facilities. Though even that was another time - the net is pretty easy to find in the Arabian Peninsula these days, formerly home to several of the last holdouts.
I suggest being very friendly and getting a gun. Really. Hell, this is a good idea everywhere outside of Europe.
Other than the "really friendly" part, which is good advice, this is a remarkably stupid idea. In most countries you can end up in jail for a long, long time with no phone calls and no Vaseline. And how are you going to get your gun there anyway?
The rate of violent crime is higher in the USA than most other countries, so the safety question (at least wrt crime - there's always traffic and disease to worry about) becomes less significant when you travel elsewhere. But even so, waving a gun around in a situation where you don't understand the culture, don't know who is carrying what, and don't know who is on whose side (clue: if you, as a stranger, show up and start escalating situations, nobody is on your side), is pretty much just asking for a bullet in the head.
Not really. Wool blankets and a woven sack are both clearly technology; neither one grows directly on trees, and both arts took centuries to perfect.
And now that I think about it, both the wool and the corn are the result of thousands of years of artificial genetic modification, so they're advanced tech, too.
Not to mention all that fancy dental work and tetanus vaccine. He's basically a cyborg. If someone honestly wants to go camping without technology, instead of just "playing camp" like some wiener yuppie trying out a new hobby, they'll have to do it my way, and that starts with a pair of pliers and a full set of black market lymph nodes from Angola.
Is it possible to DOS a torrent, even partially? Join the tracker, collect IPs for 5 minutes, then initiate thousands of incoming connections?
It's probably hard to find an ISP that would host them if they're engaging in that kind of behavior.
There's currently a mechanism to refuse any further connections from machines that are sending bad data. It would not be hard to make that also apply to connections that don't do anything useful at all. Also, there's a connection limit; it won't accept thousands of connections (I think max 80 by default).
As a person who finally got x10 working with his linux box (why would you ever want to use this with a machine that doesn't have crond?), I can say x10 is *very* overrated. There are a few lights that I automate, but most would be just as happy with those outlet timers for $1 for the dollar store.
The only thing I ever found it "useful" for was shelling into the linux box over wifi and turning lights on and off to confuse guests.
p2 266 - openbsd/i386; authenticating gateway for a custom app
486 dx2-50 - freebsd/i386; mail (soon to go away)
p2 266 - openbsd/386; mail, lists
p2 266 - openbsd/i386; primary dns
p2 266 - openbsd/i386; secondary dns
ultra 5 - solaris 8; some java apps... sits behind that p2 266 at the top
ss20 - openbsd/sparc w/qfe; firewall
p3 866 - openbsd/i386; cvs
p2 466 - nt4/386; exchange (don't know why this is still there)
p3 1ghz - freebsd/i386; www
p4 2.6ghz - freebsd/i386; mythtv
That's an awful lot of electricity, isn't it? For $600 you could get a machine powerful enough to take on almost everything those machines are doing. It'd pay for itself pretty quickly.
If the advertising isn't intrusive, I really don't see it as offensive, or even why people would bother to block it (I said "intrusive"--this includes popups, blinking, noticable delays to the page loading, blinking, launching more windows, blinking, taking up large amounts of space, blinking, audio effects, blinking, appearing in front of text, blinking, and, most importantly, blinking).
Ditto. I try to be responsible in my use of Adblock, knowing that lower ad view numbers hurt the people who put together the sites I find interesting.
However, as soon as I get one of those flashing ads on the screen, I do whatever is necessary to make sure I never have to see it again.
Perhaps with a distributed database of blinking ad purveyors, we could put a stop to the whole phenomenon.
I personally enjoy hiking. I hike places where I can't get a cell signal. In such places, even if I could get a signal, what good would it do me?
You'd ssh to your serial console box from your phone (which you can do on any halfway decent phone these days, at least in GSM-land), and reboot the machines or whatever you need to do. If there is a hardware problem and you have no hot standby you could be out of luck, but otherwise, with a little preparation, a cell signal is enough to handle most problems that frequently come up.
Despite the article authors critique of DSL, he could at least get a pay-as-you-go mobile for a reasonable fee, one that works everywhere.
I don't understand why this isn't modded offtopicker. I mean, since he's in Europe he can also get affordable health care and a decent falafel. But that doesn't illuminate the DSL situation much.
4. x-minute contracts are rounded up minutes. Its not "50 minutes of calls a month", its "50 calls a month, of 1 minute or less each". And the minutes expire.
Five years ago, when there were 50-minute contracts, you might have been onto something. These days it's 2000-minute contracts.
10. phones are bound to a particular area code. If you move, you either need a new number, or people pay long distance rates to get to your phone.
BFD. Anyone calling you with a mobile phone isn't paying long-distance charges anyway. And everyone else STILL pays less to dial long-distance in the USA than it would cost to dial any mobile phone within Europe.
All this point does is call attention to how expensive European phone calls are.
Many call centers have done this for years. They are subtle about it these days, though, because they found that it really freaked their customers out.
Ok, let's put Gartner aside. I bet 10.000 USD that by 2020 there will be not a single POTS line left in any OECD country
I'll take that bet. Post a reply and I'll email you (the sunrise tel address?) to work out the particulars and an escrow arrangement. We'll each put US$10,000 in an interest-bearing account, and on January 1, 2020, if I can't provide a single example of a POTS line in an OECD member nation (we'll need to agree whether to use current membership or 2020 membership, but as things are I'm already pretty happy with Turkey and Mexico up my sleeve) you get both accounts, otherwise I do.
There are still party lines and pulse-dial-only lines and all sorts of ancient crud out there in the rich, developed world. The old biddies (who vote!) scream if someone wants to make any changes to how their phones work, so the government steps in and forces the providers to accommodate old equipment and services. Remember, 2020 is today what today is to 1990 - that is, not really all that far away
For $4000 and it's closed-source AND only runs on Windows? No thanks. I'll put up with the Asterisk interface and avoid Televantage's crippling drawbacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would anyone give a rat's ass that someone in the ORSC had laid claim to the domain?
The age thing is for legal reasons.
Porn sites want to be filtered away from viewers who will result in legal complications to their operations (such as kids). They want everyone else to see them.
Ghettoization in .xxx doesn't help them at all, since it will be blocked en masse by corporate firewalls and even entire countries.
I'm sure you'll see plenty of porn operators registering .xxx domain names, but I doubt a single one of them will pull up stakes from .com.
Very true, for domestic USA flights only. And the best way to figure out which airline is often to use the engine at ITA Software's site. Sometimes you will find weird (unusably weird) routings but you will also get a list of the best published fares available. Some you can get at the airline's web site, others you need to print out the codes and take to a travel agent.
For international flights you're almost always better off with a good travel agent.
Very true, for domestic USA flights only. And the best way to figure out which airline is often to use the engine at ITA Software's site. Sometimes you will find weird (unusably weird) routings but you will also get a list of the best published fares available. Some you can get at the airline's web site, others you need to print out the codes and take to a travel agent.
For international flights you're almost always better off with a good travel agent.
Yes, that's the idea with price discrimination: You try to separate your price-sensitive customers from those who are not so price-sensitive. You give lower prices to the price-sensitive ones, so you don't lose them to your competitors, but you charge more to the rest, to keep your profits up. Since no customers will identify themselves as not being price-sensitive, it's usually done by making near-cost-neutral differentiations between versions of the same product, or attaching artificial rules at various price points.
For instance, airlines often charge more for round trips that don't include a Saturday night stay, even though it obviously doesn't cost the airline any more to fly you back this week than it will next week.
Another common example is different-sized packages of the same item. In US supermarkets you can normally find Lucky Charms breakfast cereal in three sizes. The largest size costs about half as much per gram as the smallest size.
After taking into account the cost of packaging, what's going on here is textbook price discrimination: Consumers who are price-sensitive will buy the large box. But a number of others will choose the small one for whatever reasons, signalling that they care about some other factor more than price.
I don't think you'll find many people who will place an angry call to the attorney general because they bought two small boxes of Lucky Charms and thus paid twice as much as the person who bought one large box. But that's because it's a form of price discrimination they're familiar with.
Trust me, make that incision, and you'll enter a whole new world of scratching pleasure.
You make far more coherent points than the original respondent.
However I don't find population density is that smooth - it's not as if a country with a low overall density is that way because people have spaced themselves equidistantly (with some exceptions, and those are probably well suited for wireless).
Mostly outside the cities, at least from what I've seen, it's small but dense settlements, and then a smattering of more isolated houses and compounds.
I am not arguing against the use of wireless technologies to bridge the substantial distances between settlements, but just for the last mile. Some of my arguments are more to the general case of wireless vs wired last-mile and do not find great traction in this particular environment.
The fact that there always costs, or that costs are similar for a certain piece of equipment which is fundamentally irrelevant to the underlying transport except for the interface bolted onto the side, sidesteps the point that there are a lot of costs which are quite different, from spectrum rental, to managing active infrastructure spread as densely as every few hundred meters across the coverage area, to the far faster upgrade cycle of current wireless technology.
I see a lot of stories about equipment that was decommissioned after decades in service, long after depreciation writedown had faded to distant memory. What is that supposed to tell me?
If this discussion is about providing coverage to Mombasa and Cairo, then it's pretty irrelevant that we're talking about Africa, as the problems and issues are about the same as anywhere else at similar levels of development and economic activity. It's the interior and the small places where it becomes interesting.
But nevertheless, in the cities and the countryside, just like in Europe and everywhere else, a wired last-mile is cheaper in the long run and just as useful (or moreso) in the majority of situations. As a consumer you may not clue into this, since cell phones seem cool, and that Crazy Frog is really a tremendous artistic milestone. Perhaps your cultural bias is clouding your judgment.
I'm curious about the cultural bias you've identified. Can you clarify? For instance, where am I from? I will mention that I've lived and worked in Africa (as well as Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania), and traveled on foot and by hitched rides on cargo trucks across much of the continent, meeting an awful lot of those people who don't get out of town much. You?
How about 50-megabit down, 3-megabit up, for about US$40/month? Move to Japan, then sign up here.
I think we now face the true test of your supposed addiction. Tokyo's waiting.
Thus providing yet one more in the endless series of examples of short-sighted development assistance that fails to help in the long run.
Wireless is cheap to put in but it provides vastly inferior quality and limited bandwidth. And while the capital infrastructure costs are lower, the ongoing operational costs (you know, the ones that you have to pay forever) are higher.
For the majority of Africans who almost never go farther than a quick walk of their home, wirelessness is a pointless frill that they'll be paying for for years to come.
It's different now. They're all sitting around on MSN every minute they're not eating or on duty. Heck, I've been in several places (outside the USA) where the only way to get online was to be granted access to US military facilities. Though even that was another time - the net is pretty easy to find in the Arabian Peninsula these days, formerly home to several of the last holdouts.
Other than the "really friendly" part, which is good advice, this is a remarkably stupid idea. In most countries you can end up in jail for a long, long time with no phone calls and no Vaseline. And how are you going to get your gun there anyway?
The rate of violent crime is higher in the USA than most other countries, so the safety question (at least wrt crime - there's always traffic and disease to worry about) becomes less significant when you travel elsewhere. But even so, waving a gun around in a situation where you don't understand the culture, don't know who is carrying what, and don't know who is on whose side (clue: if you, as a stranger, show up and start escalating situations, nobody is on your side), is pretty much just asking for a bullet in the head.
Not to mention all that fancy dental work and tetanus vaccine. He's basically a cyborg. If someone honestly wants to go camping without technology, instead of just "playing camp" like some wiener yuppie trying out a new hobby, they'll have to do it my way, and that starts with a pair of pliers and a full set of black market lymph nodes from Angola.
It's probably hard to find an ISP that would host them if they're engaging in that kind of behavior.
There's currently a mechanism to refuse any further connections from machines that are sending bad data. It would not be hard to make that also apply to connections that don't do anything useful at all. Also, there's a connection limit; it won't accept thousands of connections (I think max 80 by default).
The only thing I ever found it "useful" for was shelling into the linux box over wifi and turning lights on and off to confuse guests.
That's an awful lot of electricity, isn't it? For $600 you could get a machine powerful enough to take on almost everything those machines are doing. It'd pay for itself pretty quickly.
Ditto. I try to be responsible in my use of Adblock, knowing that lower ad view numbers hurt the people who put together the sites I find interesting.
However, as soon as I get one of those flashing ads on the screen, I do whatever is necessary to make sure I never have to see it again.
Perhaps with a distributed database of blinking ad purveyors, we could put a stop to the whole phenomenon.
You'd ssh to your serial console box from your phone (which you can do on any halfway decent phone these days, at least in GSM-land), and reboot the machines or whatever you need to do. If there is a hardware problem and you have no hot standby you could be out of luck, but otherwise, with a little preparation, a cell signal is enough to handle most problems that frequently come up.
That's exactly the post I was going to make (you beat me to it), but I have to admit I never imagined it would be modded +1 Informative.
Schengen covers Greece.
In a nutshell, it's the pre-expansion countries plus Iceland and Norway, minus the UK.
I don't understand why this isn't modded offtopicker. I mean, since he's in Europe he can also get affordable health care and a decent falafel. But that doesn't illuminate the DSL situation much.
Five years ago, when there were 50-minute contracts, you might have been onto something. These days it's 2000-minute contracts.
BFD. Anyone calling you with a mobile phone isn't paying long-distance charges anyway. And everyone else STILL pays less to dial long-distance in the USA than it would cost to dial any mobile phone within Europe.
All this point does is call attention to how expensive European phone calls are.
Many call centers have done this for years. They are subtle about it these days, though, because they found that it really freaked their customers out.
"The hard way"? Were you fired for looking at a photo of a giant homemade duck? Or are you just suffering from a severe case of melodramatitis?
I'll take that bet. Post a reply and I'll email you (the sunrise tel address?) to work out the particulars and an escrow arrangement. We'll each put US$10,000 in an interest-bearing account, and on January 1, 2020, if I can't provide a single example of a POTS line in an OECD member nation (we'll need to agree whether to use current membership or 2020 membership, but as things are I'm already pretty happy with Turkey and Mexico up my sleeve) you get both accounts, otherwise I do.
There are still party lines and pulse-dial-only lines and all sorts of ancient crud out there in the rich, developed world. The old biddies (who vote!) scream if someone wants to make any changes to how their phones work, so the government steps in and forces the providers to accommodate old equipment and services. Remember, 2020 is today what today is to 1990 - that is, not really all that far away
For $4000 and it's closed-source AND only runs on Windows? No thanks. I'll put up with the Asterisk interface and avoid Televantage's crippling drawbacks.