My car continues to report fuel usage in "miles per gallon", despite the fact that my petrol is bought in litres.
Not only that, but with the internationalisation brought about by the internet, when someone quotes "miles per gallon" you have no idea if they are using imperial gallons or US gallons.
Suppose you don't like to eat dog shit but everyone else does. You really can't understand their crazy (to you) preferences but in a spirit of tolerance you let them eat their dog shit but you certainly don't want any yourself. Now tell me you are OK with your food being cooked on the dog shit grill and being smeared with bits of dog shit?
Except most vegitarians I know claim they don't want to eat meat because of the ethical concerns, not because they don't like it. If they don't like it then fair enough, but a lot of vegies I know say they are doing it for ethics, and/or because they don't find meat particularly interesting to eat rather than because they actually _dislike_ it; and yet they will complain if their food so much as touches meat. These same people complain that I'm being fussy when I ask them not to boil up my veg along with certain types of veg which have a taste that I find makes me feel sick, and that I should just be happy to pick out the stuff I don't like (even though the flavour has well and truely transferred into everything else).
I saw an article on one of the major UK newspaper web sites in the past week or two about some guy who lost hundreds of pounds after getting a stomach bypass. It referred to his weight / weight loss in stone. I was rather surprised that they still use stone over there beyond old men talking to each other.
The press aren't exactly representative of the general public. For example, they frequently use degrees C for low temperatures and degrees F for high temperatures, because it makes them sound more extreme (although I think this has largely stopped now, possibly because the papers have realised that temperatures in degrees F are completely meaningless to anyone under the age of 50).
I don't know of anyone who talks about their weight in the UK in kilograms. Everyone, even 15 year olds, talk about their weight in stones.
Really? I've tended to use kilograms for many years, not through any particularly concious effort to be metric, but because it's usually the most convenient measure. Admittedly we used stones when I was a kid, but thats largely the influence of my parents. When I have children I imagine they would use kilos for their weight, since both myself any my fiancée do. Also, when you go to the doctor, they will be taking your weight in kilos (same goes for pretty much anything vaguely official/technical). I think the only time I hear someone quoting their weight in stones is when I talk to my parents, pounds even less so (they may say "10 and a half stone" but never "10 stone, x lb" or "x lb").
Also everyone talks about pints of beer and milk, including teenagers.
I'll agree with you about beer, which makes sense since its illegal to sell beer in anything other than pints, 1/2 pints and 1/3 pints. Occasionally you hear people talking about "a pint of milk", but since its usually (although not always) sold in round metric quantities people seem to say "a 2 litre bottle" or similar when actually buying it. Indeed, a pint is a very small quantity, I would seriously struggle for fridge space if I bought it in 1 pint bottles. In my household we tend to just refer to the milk bottle sizes as "small" (1 litre), "big" (2 litre) and "really big" (4 litre), and we never have cause to buy anything smaller than a litre.
I'm fairly amused when the press goes on about people "not knowing how much a pint of milk costs" as if it is some common knowledge that everyone should have, since I certainly couldn't tell you off the top of my head - firstly, as mentioned, I never buy anything smaller than a litre so I honestly couldn't tell you how much the smaller bottles cost; secondly I (like most people) pick up milk from the supermarket together with the rest of my shopping, so the price of the milk alone makes very little impact on my memory, I could probably tell you the rough monthly total cost of all my groceries though.
And miles. I've never heard of anyone in Britain talking in kilometers or km/h regardless of age.
Yep, I'll agree with you there, and thats largely because all the road signs are only in miles, which is a bit nutty since imperial units aren't taught in school. Every few years, the DfT makes an estimate on how much it would cost to replace all the road signs, and this is invariably a huge figure so metrication of the road signs never happens. It would be far more sensible to put both metric and imperial units on new road signs (which is currently illegal) since this would have a relatively small cost.
It's convenient for political organizations to pretend everyone agrees with them.
As of this writing (January 2013) the United Kingdom still uses MILES to measure distance, MILES PER HOUR to measure speed, STONES and POUNDS and OUNCES to measure weight, and FLUID OUNCES to measure volume.
Certainly not true. I've not seen stones, pounds and fluid ounces used in years. I guess people born before the mid-60s might still use them in conversation, but younger generations don't and you won't find them being used in any kind of technical or commercial setting.
You just stop ordering "a pint of brand X" and order "a brand-X". If Canadians can do it, you'll be okay.
Go into a British pub and ask for "a coke" and you could end up with either a half or a pint, which seems odd given that "a beer" will always get you a pint. However, nothing wrong with the European model of "a large beer" (500ml) or "a small beer" (250ml)...
I don't see how a country that drives in miles, weighs in stones (pounds for other things), and sells things by the gallon counts as metric.
I've not seen anything weighed in stones/pounds or sold in gallons for a loooong time. However, I will agree that using miles on the roads and pints for beer (which are both units that haven't been taught in schools for *decades*) is insane. Even more fucked up is that british law relating to road signs states that for short distances, such a sign should be placed multiples of 100 metre away from the hazard but must say "yards" on it - i.e. a "low bridge 200 yards ahead" sign is actually 200 metres from the low bridge. (Placing metric units on the sign, or selling beer in half-litre measures is, of course, illegal).
Well how do you define an animal? The meat will have to be alive to be grown in a lab, so you'd still be killing it before consumption (well most of us will).
The cells in a carrot are alive whilst it is being grown and when you cook it you kill it - what's the difference?
(Yes, plant cells and meat cells are physically different, but if neither organism has a central nervous system, is that ethically important?)
@ A/C No2 - As for the 'New Fruit', well of course I'd try it. I am a keen explorer of flavour and am more than willing to try new foods (providing they are veggie;) ) which is one of the reasons I never find food boring.
To quote your original post, "what's the point" in trying a new fruit? You said there was no point eating in vitro meat because you don't miss meat; presumably you also don't miss this new fruit, so what would be the point in trying it?
You seem to have said that the point of trying the new fruit is because you'd like to explore new flavours. I'm sure that, despire having had meat at one point in your life, you haven't tried all types of meat, so presumably the point of trying in vitro meats would be the same - to explore new flavours. On the whole I don't see any difference between in vitro meat and fruit/veg - neither seems any more unethical, so logically they can be treated identically.
If you're a vegetarian for that specific reason it would be quite hypocritical to eat "animal-free meat" that was developed from the suffering of all those poor cuddly cows, mice and rats...
Seems like an extension of the sunk cost fallacy - if the cost has already been paid, refusing to use the product doesn't really make sense.
TBH, this is something that really winds me up about vegitarians - If you want to reduce animal suffering by not eating meat, or reduce environmental impact, then fair enough. But refusing to eat anything that has been grilled on the same bars as meat makes no sense - no extra suffering is going to happen because someone didn't wash the grill pan between cooking their bacon and your vegi-burgers. Similarly, flatly refusing to eat some meat that is only going to be thrown away if no one eats it is completely nonsensical. The best way to reduce your environmental impact is to use as much of the produce as possible, rather than refusing to eat left over meat and grilling up some vegi-burgers instead!
Everything does not need to be a Heli- variant. If standards are in place you could go with a much more efficient normal flight and solve the landing via ILS or a VTOL system on the drones.
How about fixed wing craft for long distance, and mid-air transfer of the cargo onto a quadrocopter (or similar) operating near the recipient for the takeoff/landing?
I cannot help but feeling pissed of each time I buy one film and am forced to endure minutes of ads against pirating (But I even paid the bloody thing!) or for films I will not see or for violent films when the DVD contains a cartoon for the kids.
That's why those sections of the DVD are marked with the "auto-skip" flag, so your DVD player will avoid showing them. Although for some reason I think the DVD spec calls this a "must not be able to skip" flag or somesuch:)
Ad networks should be considered hostile and blocked at all opportunitie. Why?
Take *one* look at any download service and the massive amounts of fake "Download" buttons you can press. Adware. Spyware. Malware. It's all there, unless you have the technical wherewithal to separate the good from the bad... Something most people don't.
So for the average user the choice comes down to this: Adblock or infection.
Clearly, the only responsible choice is to block ads.
I'm all for blocking the "bad" ads like you mention, but the likes of Adsense tend to be pretty harmless and out of the way (occasionally even useful), so blocking *all* ads seems counterproductive. Far better to draw up some industry guidelines for what constitutes a good ad and block things that fall outside those guidelines.
OTOH, Google's ads on Youtube have definitely crossed the line, and blocking those would be a good thing.
My God will this be annoying. Canada has the worst rates when it comes to data. 6GB often costs $40+ ON TOP of a required minutes plan of some form. Most of the time people are getting 1-2gb and many (like myself) have only 250mb.
VOIP over mobile here is way to expensive to be economical. This will only be useful in a wif-fi area.
I think you overestimate the amount of data VoIP uses. Full duplex 11Kbps Speex is going to top out at 165KB/minute (probably lower since its VBR), so thats 1552 minutes of talktime in your 250MB...
My PAYG plan gives me 150MB "free" (expires after 45 days) every time I credit my balance with £5, and I can buy a 2GB bundle (expires after 30 days) with that £5 credit. Out-of-bundle data is 31p/MB (obviously you'd be nuts to use this). Voice calls are 26p/minute. This basically means that if I were to use the phone for nothing but data, I'd essentially get as much bandwidth as I need for £5 every 30-75 days (depending on how quickly I eat up the "free" 150MB - it usually lasts me over a month so £5 every 60 or so days).
Lets say you use 11Kbps Speex. So full duplex that's 165 kilobytes per minute, so the "free" 150MB alone will give you 931 minutes, the 2GB bundle will give you 8.8 *days* of talktime. Even if you use the out of bundle data (which is crazy), you're only paying 5p/minute. Also, that's assuming a worst case - in reality, you're not going to be using 11Kbps full duplex because most of the time one party is talking and the other party isn't, and a sensible VoIP system will do silence suppression so the media stream won't be transmitted during silences.
So yes, I can live with those kind of prices. Obviously you have to include PSTN gateway charges if you're making VoIP calls onto the PSTN, but it still works out way cheaper than paying the MNO for voice calls.
I for one would not be upset at all if/when Facebook fails. Another thing to consider: is your data plan advantageous? I tried VOIP on android over wifi once, it was terrible... almost unusable. With ideas like this, I am amazed FB is still in business.
I use VoIP from my cellphone all the time (SIPDroid on a Samsung Captivate Glide connecting to my Asterisk server). It works extremely well over both Wifi and 3G using the Speex codec. Using my (PAYG) mobile data to make calls from my landline is certainly a lot cheaper than paying per-minute charges, although the main advantage is that it ties in with my home and office phone numbers so I can get those calls wherever I am without messing about with call redirects.
I did try this many years ago when I first got an Android device (HTC Dream) and VoIP over 3G was unusable, even though VoIP over Wifi was fine. I can't really explain this since I've used the same MNO for both (Three), the only thing I can think is that using 3G might require more CPU and the Dream wasn't powerful enough to do that at the same time as running the softphone.
Centos reworked the build process significantly after the 6.0 release. The 6.2 and 6.3 releases were out 14 and 18 days after the upstream release. SL was somewhat behind after that (72d and 48 days respectively). Source: Wikipedia
Centos have never been especially good with timely security updates either though, and the developers tend to be downright abusive on the mailing lists.
if you want to be able to use anaconda when cent7 comes out, you'll need to start practicing with fedora 18 asap.
Judging by how well Centos tend to do with updates, I wouldn't expect to see Centos 7 for a good few years. This is why we switched to using Scientific Linux some time ago...
The 2nd hand market exists because the price of games are too high.
Second hand markets will continue to exist, no matter what the price of the new product; so dropping the price of new games isn't going to solve that "problem". I do wonder what effect abolishing the second hand market would have on new games sales though - nievely you might say that new sales will increase because there is nolonger any competition, but that ignores the fact that the customer only has a finite amount of money. Lots of people fund their new purchases (in part) by selling stuff they no longer want, if they can't sell their old stuff they have less money to invest in new stuff. I'd certianly be less inclined to blow £50 on a game if I knew I could never sell it, and similarly less inclined to spend £hundreds on a console if I knew I could never buy any cheap games for it. (But then maybe I'm wrong - I'm not a gamer, I can think of far more fun things to do with my time and money than sit in a darkened room in front of a console for hours on end).
Yes, F=ma. Could you please tell the class then if when you drive you keep the pedal floored? Or at some point do you stop accelerating and move at a constant velocity?
I keep the pedal floored until I'm half way to my destination, then decellerate at the same rate for the remaining half:)
Electric/hybrid vehicles should pay less per mile as they do less damage to the roads.
Thats down to weight, not engine type. A Toyota Prius (hybrid) has a kerb weight of 1420Kg, my roadster (petrol) has a Kerb weight of about 1100Kg - why exactly is my petrol car going to be doing more damage to the road than a hybrid? If you were to compare similar classes of cars you'd also find the hybrids are often heavier than the petrol equivalents because of the extra weight of batteries, motors, etc.
Increasing taxes on efficient vehicles, whilst leaving unefficient ones with low taxes does seem counterproductive. Far better to just increase fuel tax across the board until the total fuel tax revenue is around the required amount to maintain the roads.
Of course, here in the UK the government has gone to the other extreme and the motorist is largely seen as a cash-cow for the government, rather than just paying their own way - fuel taxes are so high they are actively damaging the domestic economy (and fuel tax revenues are several times what is spent maintaining the roads). We also have to pay a yearly tax on each vehicle, which is based on the vehicle's quoted fuel economy (so owning an old but rarely used vehicle costs a disproportionate amount of money). A few years ago the government were proposing introducing per-mile charges by installing tracking devices in everyone's cars - a massive privacy nightmare, huge infrastructure costs and you can bet that we'd be paying that *as well* as the existing taxes rather than instead of them; thankfully this plan seemed to disappear once Labour were kicked out of government. However, the current government are talking about privatising parts of the road network and charging tolls to people who use them; again you can bet that they won't be reducing the existing taxes to offset this. This all works out quite good for the government though - the car driver will pay several times the maintenance cost of the road to the government, who will pocket the money and not maintain the roads, then the car driver will have to also pay the people who *do* maintain the roads in order to use them.
What do you mean "unfortunately"? I'm British and I love metric. Fuck imperial units. I like doing things in powers of ten. It's only a shame we can't get measuring distances in km and speeds in km/h. I for one would be happy to make that switch.
It was planned to happen decades ago, unfortunately the whole metrication thing ground to a halt and we're stuck using pints for beer, miles and yards for road signs, even though these units aren't taught in schools any more (by the time I was at school, education was entirely metric. Sure you come across the imperial units still, but no one has been taught how to make calculations in them for decades.)
Also annoying is the car industry's continuance to quote fuel consumption in miles per gallon, even though no one has bought petrol in gallons for decades. The advent of the internet has made this more of a problem due to the international scope of published information - when looking at car specifications on the internet, you now largely have no idea if the MPG figure quoted is based on imperial gallons or American gallons.
Every few years, the DfT do a study on the cost of replacing road signs, but they never actually do the replacement. A good start would be to use metric for new road signs and to legalise the sale of beer in metric units.
The suggestion was to charge a tenth of a penny per email. For regular folks who email, that works up to less than a penny per day. (No fees for business emails from private or hosted exchange servers, of course.) This would discourage spam emails and mass marketings from public accounts (although it wouldn't stop spam from zombie email accounts on private domains.)
Unsolicited SMS messages cost money and are illegal: spammers still use them. Unsolicited paper mail costs money (much more than a tenth of a penny): spammers still use it.
How exactly is charging for sending email going to stop spam before the cost is high enough to have a significant detrimental effect on the rest of us too?
This is exactly why I cringe when I hear people saying "we need to replace that hardware because its been running for a few years now so might fail soon" - the chances of your brand new hardware going pop are often far higher than the tired old hardware. Eventually the old kit will of course die, but in my experience that is far further into the future than most people imagine.
I've not quite figured out the optimal hardware replacement frequency, but I tend to think that for servers (excluding the hard drives) the time you want to replace it is largely when it is no longer powerful enough to do what you want, rather than because its a bit old and creaky and you're worried it might break.
Hard drives, on the other hand, seem to break with reasonable frequency whatever their age, so usually I just run them (in a RAID) until they either give up, or SMART tells me they are reallocating large numbers of sectors, rather than trying to preemptively replace them.
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My car continues to report fuel usage in "miles per gallon", despite the fact that my petrol is bought in litres.
Not only that, but with the internationalisation brought about by the internet, when someone quotes "miles per gallon" you have no idea if they are using imperial gallons or US gallons.
Suppose you don't like to eat dog shit but everyone else does. You really can't understand their crazy (to you) preferences but in a spirit of tolerance you let them eat their dog shit but you certainly don't want any yourself. Now tell me you are OK with your food being cooked on the dog shit grill and being smeared with bits of dog shit?
Except most vegitarians I know claim they don't want to eat meat because of the ethical concerns, not because they don't like it. If they don't like it then fair enough, but a lot of vegies I know say they are doing it for ethics, and/or because they don't find meat particularly interesting to eat rather than because they actually _dislike_ it; and yet they will complain if their food so much as touches meat. These same people complain that I'm being fussy when I ask them not to boil up my veg along with certain types of veg which have a taste that I find makes me feel sick, and that I should just be happy to pick out the stuff I don't like (even though the flavour has well and truely transferred into everything else).
I saw an article on one of the major UK newspaper web sites in the past week or two about some guy who lost hundreds of pounds after getting a stomach bypass. It referred to his weight / weight loss in stone. I was rather surprised that they still use stone over there beyond old men talking to each other.
The press aren't exactly representative of the general public. For example, they frequently use degrees C for low temperatures and degrees F for high temperatures, because it makes them sound more extreme (although I think this has largely stopped now, possibly because the papers have realised that temperatures in degrees F are completely meaningless to anyone under the age of 50).
I don't know of anyone who talks about their weight in the UK in kilograms. Everyone, even 15 year olds, talk about their weight in stones.
Really? I've tended to use kilograms for many years, not through any particularly concious effort to be metric, but because it's usually the most convenient measure. Admittedly we used stones when I was a kid, but thats largely the influence of my parents. When I have children I imagine they would use kilos for their weight, since both myself any my fiancée do. Also, when you go to the doctor, they will be taking your weight in kilos (same goes for pretty much anything vaguely official/technical). I think the only time I hear someone quoting their weight in stones is when I talk to my parents, pounds even less so (they may say "10 and a half stone" but never "10 stone, x lb" or "x lb").
Also everyone talks about pints of beer and milk, including teenagers.
I'll agree with you about beer, which makes sense since its illegal to sell beer in anything other than pints, 1/2 pints and 1/3 pints. Occasionally you hear people talking about "a pint of milk", but since its usually (although not always) sold in round metric quantities people seem to say "a 2 litre bottle" or similar when actually buying it. Indeed, a pint is a very small quantity, I would seriously struggle for fridge space if I bought it in 1 pint bottles. In my household we tend to just refer to the milk bottle sizes as "small" (1 litre), "big" (2 litre) and "really big" (4 litre), and we never have cause to buy anything smaller than a litre.
I'm fairly amused when the press goes on about people "not knowing how much a pint of milk costs" as if it is some common knowledge that everyone should have, since I certainly couldn't tell you off the top of my head - firstly, as mentioned, I never buy anything smaller than a litre so I honestly couldn't tell you how much the smaller bottles cost; secondly I (like most people) pick up milk from the supermarket together with the rest of my shopping, so the price of the milk alone makes very little impact on my memory, I could probably tell you the rough monthly total cost of all my groceries though.
And miles. I've never heard of anyone in Britain talking in kilometers or km/h regardless of age.
Yep, I'll agree with you there, and thats largely because all the road signs are only in miles, which is a bit nutty since imperial units aren't taught in school. Every few years, the DfT makes an estimate on how much it would cost to replace all the road signs, and this is invariably a huge figure so metrication of the road signs never happens. It would be far more sensible to put both metric and imperial units on new road signs (which is currently illegal) since this would have a relatively small cost.
It's convenient for political organizations to pretend everyone agrees with them.
As of this writing (January 2013) the United Kingdom still uses MILES to measure distance, MILES PER HOUR to measure speed, STONES and POUNDS and OUNCES to measure weight, and FLUID OUNCES to measure volume.
Certainly not true. I've not seen stones, pounds and fluid ounces used in years. I guess people born before the mid-60s might still use them in conversation, but younger generations don't and you won't find them being used in any kind of technical or commercial setting.
You just stop ordering "a pint of brand X" and order "a brand-X". If Canadians can do it, you'll be okay.
Go into a British pub and ask for "a coke" and you could end up with either a half or a pint, which seems odd given that "a beer" will always get you a pint. However, nothing wrong with the European model of "a large beer" (500ml) or "a small beer" (250ml)...
I don't see how a country that drives in miles, weighs in stones (pounds for other things), and sells things by the gallon counts as metric.
I've not seen anything weighed in stones/pounds or sold in gallons for a loooong time. However, I will agree that using miles on the roads and pints for beer (which are both units that haven't been taught in schools for *decades*) is insane. Even more fucked up is that british law relating to road signs states that for short distances, such a sign should be placed multiples of 100 metre away from the hazard but must say "yards" on it - i.e. a "low bridge 200 yards ahead" sign is actually 200 metres from the low bridge. (Placing metric units on the sign, or selling beer in half-litre measures is, of course, illegal).
Well how do you define an animal? The meat will have to be alive to be grown in a lab, so you'd still be killing it before consumption (well most of us will).
The cells in a carrot are alive whilst it is being grown and when you cook it you kill it - what's the difference?
(Yes, plant cells and meat cells are physically different, but if neither organism has a central nervous system, is that ethically important?)
@ A/C No2 - As for the 'New Fruit', well of course I'd try it. I am a keen explorer of flavour and am more than willing to try new foods (providing they are veggie ;) ) which is one of the reasons I never find food boring.
To quote your original post, "what's the point" in trying a new fruit? You said there was no point eating in vitro meat because you don't miss meat; presumably you also don't miss this new fruit, so what would be the point in trying it?
You seem to have said that the point of trying the new fruit is because you'd like to explore new flavours. I'm sure that, despire having had meat at one point in your life, you haven't tried all types of meat, so presumably the point of trying in vitro meats would be the same - to explore new flavours. On the whole I don't see any difference between in vitro meat and fruit/veg - neither seems any more unethical, so logically they can be treated identically.
If you're a vegetarian for that specific reason it would be quite hypocritical to eat "animal-free meat" that was developed from the suffering of all those poor cuddly cows, mice and rats...
Seems like an extension of the sunk cost fallacy - if the cost has already been paid, refusing to use the product doesn't really make sense.
TBH, this is something that really winds me up about vegitarians - If you want to reduce animal suffering by not eating meat, or reduce environmental impact, then fair enough. But refusing to eat anything that has been grilled on the same bars as meat makes no sense - no extra suffering is going to happen because someone didn't wash the grill pan between cooking their bacon and your vegi-burgers. Similarly, flatly refusing to eat some meat that is only going to be thrown away if no one eats it is completely nonsensical. The best way to reduce your environmental impact is to use as much of the produce as possible, rather than refusing to eat left over meat and grilling up some vegi-burgers instead!
Thats when you switch tools, free software often goes unmaintained as well
What part of "you are free to hire someone" were you confused about?
Everything does not need to be a Heli- variant. If standards are in place you could go with a much more efficient normal flight and solve the landing via ILS or a VTOL system on the drones.
How about fixed wing craft for long distance, and mid-air transfer of the cargo onto a quadrocopter (or similar) operating near the recipient for the takeoff/landing?
I cannot help but feeling pissed of each time I buy one film and am forced to endure minutes of ads against pirating (But I even paid the bloody thing!) or for films I will not see or for violent films when the DVD contains a cartoon for the kids.
That's why those sections of the DVD are marked with the "auto-skip" flag, so your DVD player will avoid showing them. Although for some reason I think the DVD spec calls this a "must not be able to skip" flag or somesuch :)
Ad networks should be considered hostile and blocked at all opportunitie. Why?
Take *one* look at any download service and the massive amounts of fake "Download" buttons you can press. Adware. Spyware. Malware. It's all there, unless you have the technical wherewithal to separate the good from the bad... Something most people don't.
So for the average user the choice comes down to this: Adblock or infection.
Clearly, the only responsible choice is to block ads.
I'm all for blocking the "bad" ads like you mention, but the likes of Adsense tend to be pretty harmless and out of the way (occasionally even useful), so blocking *all* ads seems counterproductive. Far better to draw up some industry guidelines for what constitutes a good ad and block things that fall outside those guidelines.
OTOH, Google's ads on Youtube have definitely crossed the line, and blocking those would be a good thing.
My God will this be annoying. Canada has the worst rates when it comes to data. 6GB often costs $40+ ON TOP of a required minutes plan of some form. Most of the time people are getting 1-2gb and many (like myself) have only 250mb.
VOIP over mobile here is way to expensive to be economical. This will only be useful in a wif-fi area.
I think you overestimate the amount of data VoIP uses. Full duplex 11Kbps Speex is going to top out at 165KB/minute (probably lower since its VBR), so thats 1552 minutes of talktime in your 250MB...
Data plans are just so mch cheaper than minutes.
Well, yes... they are.
My PAYG plan gives me 150MB "free" (expires after 45 days) every time I credit my balance with £5, and I can buy a 2GB bundle (expires after 30 days) with that £5 credit. Out-of-bundle data is 31p/MB (obviously you'd be nuts to use this). Voice calls are 26p/minute. This basically means that if I were to use the phone for nothing but data, I'd essentially get as much bandwidth as I need for £5 every 30-75 days (depending on how quickly I eat up the "free" 150MB - it usually lasts me over a month so £5 every 60 or so days).
Lets say you use 11Kbps Speex. So full duplex that's 165 kilobytes per minute, so the "free" 150MB alone will give you 931 minutes, the 2GB bundle will give you 8.8 *days* of talktime. Even if you use the out of bundle data (which is crazy), you're only paying 5p/minute. Also, that's assuming a worst case - in reality, you're not going to be using 11Kbps full duplex because most of the time one party is talking and the other party isn't, and a sensible VoIP system will do silence suppression so the media stream won't be transmitted during silences.
So yes, I can live with those kind of prices. Obviously you have to include PSTN gateway charges if you're making VoIP calls onto the PSTN, but it still works out way cheaper than paying the MNO for voice calls.
I for one would not be upset at all if/when Facebook fails. Another thing to consider: is your data plan advantageous? I tried VOIP on android over wifi once, it was terrible... almost unusable. With ideas like this, I am amazed FB is still in business.
I use VoIP from my cellphone all the time (SIPDroid on a Samsung Captivate Glide connecting to my Asterisk server). It works extremely well over both Wifi and 3G using the Speex codec. Using my (PAYG) mobile data to make calls from my landline is certainly a lot cheaper than paying per-minute charges, although the main advantage is that it ties in with my home and office phone numbers so I can get those calls wherever I am without messing about with call redirects.
I did try this many years ago when I first got an Android device (HTC Dream) and VoIP over 3G was unusable, even though VoIP over Wifi was fine. I can't really explain this since I've used the same MNO for both (Three), the only thing I can think is that using 3G might require more CPU and the Dream wasn't powerful enough to do that at the same time as running the softphone.
Centos reworked the build process significantly after the 6.0 release. The 6.2 and 6.3 releases were out 14 and 18 days after the upstream release. SL was somewhat behind after that (72d and 48 days respectively). Source: Wikipedia
Centos have never been especially good with timely security updates either though, and the developers tend to be downright abusive on the mailing lists.
if you want to be able to use anaconda when cent7 comes out, you'll need to start practicing with fedora 18 asap.
Judging by how well Centos tend to do with updates, I wouldn't expect to see Centos 7 for a good few years. This is why we switched to using Scientific Linux some time ago...
The 2nd hand market exists because the price of games are too high.
Second hand markets will continue to exist, no matter what the price of the new product; so dropping the price of new games isn't going to solve that "problem". I do wonder what effect abolishing the second hand market would have on new games sales though - nievely you might say that new sales will increase because there is nolonger any competition, but that ignores the fact that the customer only has a finite amount of money. Lots of people fund their new purchases (in part) by selling stuff they no longer want, if they can't sell their old stuff they have less money to invest in new stuff. I'd certianly be less inclined to blow £50 on a game if I knew I could never sell it, and similarly less inclined to spend £hundreds on a console if I knew I could never buy any cheap games for it. (But then maybe I'm wrong - I'm not a gamer, I can think of far more fun things to do with my time and money than sit in a darkened room in front of a console for hours on end).
Yes, F=ma. Could you please tell the class then if when you drive you keep the pedal floored? Or at some point do you stop accelerating and move at a constant velocity?
I keep the pedal floored until I'm half way to my destination, then decellerate at the same rate for the remaining half :)
Electric/hybrid vehicles should pay less per mile as they do less damage to the roads.
Thats down to weight, not engine type. A Toyota Prius (hybrid) has a kerb weight of 1420Kg, my roadster (petrol) has a Kerb weight of about 1100Kg - why exactly is my petrol car going to be doing more damage to the road than a hybrid? If you were to compare similar classes of cars you'd also find the hybrids are often heavier than the petrol equivalents because of the extra weight of batteries, motors, etc.
Increasing taxes on efficient vehicles, whilst leaving unefficient ones with low taxes does seem counterproductive. Far better to just increase fuel tax across the board until the total fuel tax revenue is around the required amount to maintain the roads.
Of course, here in the UK the government has gone to the other extreme and the motorist is largely seen as a cash-cow for the government, rather than just paying their own way - fuel taxes are so high they are actively damaging the domestic economy (and fuel tax revenues are several times what is spent maintaining the roads). We also have to pay a yearly tax on each vehicle, which is based on the vehicle's quoted fuel economy (so owning an old but rarely used vehicle costs a disproportionate amount of money). A few years ago the government were proposing introducing per-mile charges by installing tracking devices in everyone's cars - a massive privacy nightmare, huge infrastructure costs and you can bet that we'd be paying that *as well* as the existing taxes rather than instead of them; thankfully this plan seemed to disappear once Labour were kicked out of government. However, the current government are talking about privatising parts of the road network and charging tolls to people who use them; again you can bet that they won't be reducing the existing taxes to offset this. This all works out quite good for the government though - the car driver will pay several times the maintenance cost of the road to the government, who will pocket the money and not maintain the roads, then the car driver will have to also pay the people who *do* maintain the roads in order to use them.
What do you mean "unfortunately"? I'm British and I love metric. Fuck imperial units. I like doing things in powers of ten. It's only a shame we can't get measuring distances in km and speeds in km/h. I for one would be happy to make that switch.
It was planned to happen decades ago, unfortunately the whole metrication thing ground to a halt and we're stuck using pints for beer, miles and yards for road signs, even though these units aren't taught in schools any more (by the time I was at school, education was entirely metric. Sure you come across the imperial units still, but no one has been taught how to make calculations in them for decades.)
Also annoying is the car industry's continuance to quote fuel consumption in miles per gallon, even though no one has bought petrol in gallons for decades. The advent of the internet has made this more of a problem due to the international scope of published information - when looking at car specifications on the internet, you now largely have no idea if the MPG figure quoted is based on imperial gallons or American gallons.
Every few years, the DfT do a study on the cost of replacing road signs, but they never actually do the replacement. A good start would be to use metric for new road signs and to legalise the sale of beer in metric units.
The suggestion was to charge a tenth of a penny per email. For regular folks who email, that works up to less than a penny per day. (No fees for business emails from private or hosted exchange servers, of course.) This would discourage spam emails and mass marketings from public accounts (although it wouldn't stop spam from zombie email accounts on private domains.)
Unsolicited SMS messages cost money and are illegal: spammers still use them.
Unsolicited paper mail costs money (much more than a tenth of a penny): spammers still use it.
How exactly is charging for sending email going to stop spam before the cost is high enough to have a significant detrimental effect on the rest of us too?
Look up "bathtub curve" sometime.
This is exactly why I cringe when I hear people saying "we need to replace that hardware because its been running for a few years now so might fail soon" - the chances of your brand new hardware going pop are often far higher than the tired old hardware. Eventually the old kit will of course die, but in my experience that is far further into the future than most people imagine.
I've not quite figured out the optimal hardware replacement frequency, but I tend to think that for servers (excluding the hard drives) the time you want to replace it is largely when it is no longer powerful enough to do what you want, rather than because its a bit old and creaky and you're worried it might break.
Hard drives, on the other hand, seem to break with reasonable frequency whatever their age, so usually I just run them (in a RAID) until they either give up, or SMART tells me they are reallocating large numbers of sectors, rather than trying to preemptively replace them.