I'm in Southern Illinois right now and I've just finished negotiating 100mbit/s DIA on a 1gbit port for $10/mbit. The next hops will be St Louis > Chicago in one direction and Paducah > Atlanta in another. Including 3 phone-lines to the office, I'm coming out at $1090 + tax / month with capacity to upgrade if/when I need to.
Mediacom and Frontier wanted as much as $20/mbit (for DIA), although Frontier came down to $13 when I pushed them really hard. Verizon wanted $55/mbit.
Doesn't AT&T (at least) have a function on their phones whereby if it's moving at more than a certain rate (25mph?), it would cripple the phone and prevent you using it?
I seem to recall seeing it advertised by at least one of the carriers I was looking at, and while it may have been a subscription based service, since it is technically feasible and considering it's a law and all, shouldn't they be making it free/mandatory/default [assuming texting-while-driving really is a significant problem over and above the existing things that cause crashes]?
Surely this + voice dialing (ICE) would at least be a step to solve the problem... especially if voice dialing were only available to call emergency services and/or the ICE contact on the device.
Of course, we all know why something so sensible won't happen: profit.
I had a problem like this with an airline which I won't name. It took around 40 emails and twice as many phone calls (International), here's what I did:
1. Submit the receipts as per their requests. Call them every day at least once, email them every day at least once to follow up on the call (or reverse that, up to you) 2. When they inevitably don't pay on time, send them an invoice for time and emails (30 minutes per email at whatever your hourly rate is, let's say around $20-30 an hour if you're in the $40-60k/year bracket; plus $1 per minute for international phone calls) with the terms as 7 days and a notification of late fees & interest in the footer (like any company would do if you didn't pay your bills on time) 4. When they inevitably don't pay on time, send an updated invoice with that week's time & calls added on. You'll have the logs in your phone or on your VOIP provider's website or whatever, just do a screen-grab or something. 5. Repeat 3 times 6. Add late-notice fees - nominal, let's say $50 per notice. 7. When they still don't pay on time, send them a final notice that failure to pay within 48 hours will result in the debt being sent to collections. 8. Within 48 hours, send the debt to a collections agency (no-win-no-fee, if possible).
For a $200 ticket and a claim that was, by anyone's standards certainly reasonable considering the circumstances; I was reimbursed the better part of $1,000 by the end of it.
Am I ripping off the system? No, even if it could be perceived that way. Does that make me an asshole? Yeah, probably. Is it *exactly* what they would do if you were in a position to pay for flights *after* taking them and failed to pay your bill [or if they were in another industry where they sold a product on a post-paid basis]? Damn right it is.
This seems to be an HFC network - they talk about connecting with DOCSIS 2.0 which is a bit old and crusty these days - and would explain why the speeds basically top out at 20mbit/s.
If you were paying for infrastructure separately, $5.70 might be feasible. Since you're not, you'd be more reasonable to expect something like $35.70 for 100mbits.
Could a private entity feasibly set up a new network in the US, with the ruse being that it's set up - let's say "on behalf of" - a municipality (or at least with it's blessing), and offer the service for these sorts of prices without being sued in to the ground?
So... basically the same as Google is doing (now that I think about it?)
IMO the answer is basically a yes, but, the next question is "does that company need to have sufficiently deep pockets to do so"... because that's the stumbling block.
The company itself would be for-profit and thus in direct competition with the big boys, so they'd then be private entity vs private entity rather than private entity vs government...
So now the computing public can think that us Linux-ites are ~20 years behind, comparing modern-day Linux to a system released in 1993. Just what we need to encourage widespread adoption!/s
...more to the point, how does one buy Bitcoins *using* Visa or Mastercard or Paypal. Maybe I was reading in all the wrong places but I couldn't find an easy way at all, as almost all Bitcoin exchanges go by bank transfers or similar (and then all those vague other methods like Liqpay and PaySafeCard and whatever).
When's the last time you hear of Jains being violent?
There is violence in all branches of Hinduism. Live in India.
There are mainstream trends and so far, Jains are at one end, then Buddhists, then Christians and lastly Moslems at the other end.
I don't know about you but I've personally had more conflicts with Christians than Muslims - the country I live in has the largest Muslim population in the world (significantly outnumbered by Hindus, of course but still, can't exactly ignore them), and the country I'm currently *in* as I write this is Muslim and I feel extremely safe here.
Another factor is that Islam hasn't had a reformation...
Yet. I reckon Islam now is about where Christianity was back in the 14th-15th century - strictly by age - so all things considered, a reformation/revolution shouldn't be far off now.
...and it is Monotheistic (everyone else is wrong).
That reminds me of another religion... err... what was it... OH YEAH, Christianity and it's essential predecessor, Judaism. What is the *first* commandment again?
...but they are hard-pressed to see where Islam can be divorced from the tribalistic culture it started with.
Being an Abrahamic religion that would be... Christianity? The Christians at the time thought this newfangled Islam thing was a pretty radicalized version of Christianity - I mean, let's face it - it has a lot of the same books as the Christian bible so... I dunno, maybe I'm oversimplifying things.
Ahhh Maxnet. I remember when I was able to get a whole 2mbit/s from them (when everyone else had 128k) with 40GB of usage. Wasn't cheap though.
Vocus, however, is a wholesaler - I don't know what interest they would have in having Maxnet/Fyx turn off such a feature, as it would surely be beneficial - so long as they get paid for the megabits, what would they care? That is, unless, it was done by somehow abusing the PacificIX infrastructure (which, when it was being pitched to me, effectively allows NZ ISPs to peer as if they were in Sydney).
Also, I've crossed the border all those times with truecrypt volumes on external hard drives, on the laptop directly and on numerous flash drives, so I can't report any issues with that either.
Worst case scenario if they *did* decide to poke in to my flash drives they might see... oh... the PDF of my plane ticket(s), a passport copy and a few other random docs but nothing spectacular - and more importantly, no obvious evidence of the truecrypt volumes on each of the drives which store the few GB or so of documents which I'd consider sufficiently vital to my life and work that they're worth encrypting and having something like 7 copies of (this, even though truecrypt does run in my system tray).
Guess I just don't look dodgy enough and they have bigger fish to fry;)
Who has crossed the US border 6 times in the last 6 months (Chicago x3, Orlando, Atlanta and Detroit), occasionally going to/coming from "areas of interest" and *always* opting out of the millimetre wave-scanners, I've never even been looked at twice, let alone hassled to even turn on my laptop or plug in my hard drives (I usually carry at least 3).
The first time I crossed in to the US, I was petrified that I was going to be treated as you're expecting but as it turns out, being white, dressed nicely (not in thongs, stubbies and a singlet, for example), smiling, polite and prepared for maximum efficiency with all coins, keys, portable electronics, belt, shoes & jacket in the tray well before I get to the bloke who has to pat me down has it's advantages.
If you do happen to be slightly coloured (of Greek or Italian stock, or even part-Aborigine perhaps?), I'd probably reiterate that the smile and be polite part is important.
This all reminds me of that scene in "The Simpsons: Movie" where the show the massive wiretapping complex with thousands of people and then the one guy suddently jumps up saying "Hey everybody, I found one!"
Business world, huh? I finally switched my business laptop full-time (after being on & off for about 6 years) a little over a year ago, and I'm finding a significantly different experience to you, but considering that my use of Excel may be comparatively basic (as I'm not writing macros or anything like that), Libreoffice seems to handle the relatively complex formulas and dynamic linking between documents that I need. It handles my document templates perfectly well, and my presentations are just as exciting as anything I'd find in Powerpoint.
And realistically, I don't think I'm that much of an outlier here - probably apart from the visual basic stuff (which I've not personally seen for quite a while, but then again, I've also not walked in to an F500 for a while either) myself and a significant percentage of spreadsheet users could probably get away with Libreoffice or Calligra on Linux without too much difficulty - my employees do perfectly well on their Linux systems with Libreoffice and other tools, and that extends right from the office clerks and call-centre people right up to management.
Everyone's devices "just work" when they plug them in to USB or connect via bluetooth (usually this is just syncing phone data or uploading photos, but sometimes they get used as bluetooth modems too) and printers auto-configure themselves when they plug in.
As far as hardware goes, over the past ~8 years, I've installed some of the more common distributions on a variety of hardware - mostly stock standard models from the usual manufacturers - and found most (if not everything) to work fine. I've not had trouble setting up WiFi since the mid-2000s, I've never had a problem with sound, and it's been years since I had to do anything with x configuration to coerce the video to work.
What can't I do? Probably a lot - but 1. it doesn't relate to my job and 2. the same could be said about any system: the key is to use the system that works best for your needs - whether that's Windows, Mac, Linux, or even OS/2, it shouldn't matter, so long as it gets the job done. Certain parts of the team got Macs for obvious reasons but all in all, I think we've pretty much phased out Windows, and nobody seems to be complaining. This wasn't even a cost-based decision, either - when you buy a PC, it's already there, and I'd probably still use something like LibreOffice in place of MS Office anyway simply because MS Office doesn't seem to give me any real advantage (and if it does, it's never been conveyed to us).
As mentioned, I've been through a variety of distros, but these days I'm on Mint and when I buy a new laptop in the next week or so, I fully expect whatever I end up buying to work out of the box with it, with little to no messing about - and it'll probably be easier than replacing Windows 8 with Windows 7 too.
All too often I get candidates who just don't know anything despite having the qualifications - at least on paper - yet can't answer the basic questions. It's got to the point where I just ban certain (types of) schools from even reaching the interview stage.
Sounds like something that's been imported. If I had to guess, I'd say India. Firstly because of the amount of times I've had to throw electronics away (hard-drives are especially painful) due to ants and secondly because places like Houston have large populations of Indian immigrants, many of whom probably shuffle back and forth once a year to visit family, so it's entirely possible there might be an ant or two in a suitcase.
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Should have asked the city to make ensure the franchise agreement is non-exclusive.
I'm in Southern Illinois right now and I've just finished negotiating 100mbit/s DIA on a 1gbit port for $10/mbit. The next hops will be St Louis > Chicago in one direction and Paducah > Atlanta in another. Including 3 phone-lines to the office, I'm coming out at $1090 + tax / month with capacity to upgrade if/when I need to.
Mediacom and Frontier wanted as much as $20/mbit (for DIA), although Frontier came down to $13 when I pushed them really hard. Verizon wanted $55/mbit.
Too soon.
Doesn't AT&T (at least) have a function on their phones whereby if it's moving at more than a certain rate (25mph?), it would cripple the phone and prevent you using it?
I seem to recall seeing it advertised by at least one of the carriers I was looking at, and while it may have been a subscription based service, since it is technically feasible and considering it's a law and all, shouldn't they be making it free/mandatory/default [assuming texting-while-driving really is a significant problem over and above the existing things that cause crashes]?
Surely this + voice dialing (ICE) would at least be a step to solve the problem... especially if voice dialing were only available to call emergency services and/or the ICE contact on the device.
Of course, we all know why something so sensible won't happen: profit.
I had a problem like this with an airline which I won't name. It took around 40 emails and twice as many phone calls (International), here's what I did:
1. Submit the receipts as per their requests. Call them every day at least once, email them every day at least once to follow up on the call (or reverse that, up to you)
2. When they inevitably don't pay on time, send them an invoice for time and emails (30 minutes per email at whatever your hourly rate is, let's say around $20-30 an hour if you're in the $40-60k/year bracket; plus $1 per minute for international phone calls) with the terms as 7 days and a notification of late fees & interest in the footer (like any company would do if you didn't pay your bills on time)
4. When they inevitably don't pay on time, send an updated invoice with that week's time & calls added on. You'll have the logs in your phone or on your VOIP provider's website or whatever, just do a screen-grab or something.
5. Repeat 3 times
6. Add late-notice fees - nominal, let's say $50 per notice.
7. When they still don't pay on time, send them a final notice that failure to pay within 48 hours will result in the debt being sent to collections.
8. Within 48 hours, send the debt to a collections agency (no-win-no-fee, if possible).
For a $200 ticket and a claim that was, by anyone's standards certainly reasonable considering the circumstances; I was reimbursed the better part of $1,000 by the end of it.
Am I ripping off the system? No, even if it could be perceived that way. Does that make me an asshole? Yeah, probably. Is it *exactly* what they would do if you were in a position to pay for flights *after* taking them and failed to pay your bill [or if they were in another industry where they sold a product on a post-paid basis]? Damn right it is.
The key? A paper trail.
This seems to be an HFC network - they talk about connecting with DOCSIS 2.0 which is a bit old and crusty these days - and would explain why the speeds basically top out at 20mbit/s.
If you were paying for infrastructure separately, $5.70 might be feasible. Since you're not, you'd be more reasonable to expect something like $35.70 for 100mbits.
Could a private entity feasibly set up a new network in the US, with the ruse being that it's set up - let's say "on behalf of" - a municipality (or at least with it's blessing), and offer the service for these sorts of prices without being sued in to the ground?
So... basically the same as Google is doing (now that I think about it?)
IMO the answer is basically a yes, but, the next question is "does that company need to have sufficiently deep pockets to do so"... because that's the stumbling block.
The company itself would be for-profit and thus in direct competition with the big boys, so they'd then be private entity vs private entity rather than private entity vs government...
Just throwing it out there.
But what I really want to know is... does it come with SkiFree?!
So now the computing public can think that us Linux-ites are ~20 years behind, comparing modern-day Linux to a system released in 1993. Just what we need to encourage widespread adoption! /s
Smoking has been banned for how many decades now, yet for reasons I completely fail to understand, there are still ashtrays being installed in A380s.
Since these days things are supposed to be all about saving cost, *not* installing ashtrays would surely be more logical, right?
Mt Everest become Chinese? Despite being "right on the border" I'm pretty sure the country that it's known for being in is Nepal, not China.
Even Google Maps says it's in some province of Tibet, yet clearly marks Everest as being on the Nepalese side.
...more to the point, how does one buy Bitcoins *using* Visa or Mastercard or Paypal. Maybe I was reading in all the wrong places but I couldn't find an easy way at all, as almost all Bitcoin exchanges go by bank transfers or similar (and then all those vague other methods like Liqpay and PaySafeCard and whatever).
When's the last time you hear of Jains being violent?
There is violence in all branches of Hinduism. Live in India.
There are mainstream trends and so far, Jains are at one end, then Buddhists, then Christians and lastly Moslems at the other end.
I don't know about you but I've personally had more conflicts with Christians than Muslims - the country I live in has the largest Muslim population in the world (significantly outnumbered by Hindus, of course but still, can't exactly ignore them), and the country I'm currently *in* as I write this is Muslim and I feel extremely safe here.
Another factor is that Islam hasn't had a reformation...
Yet. I reckon Islam now is about where Christianity was back in the 14th-15th century - strictly by age - so all things considered, a reformation/revolution shouldn't be far off now.
...and it is Monotheistic (everyone else is wrong).
That reminds me of another religion... err... what was it... OH YEAH, Christianity and it's essential predecessor, Judaism. What is the *first* commandment again?
...but they are hard-pressed to see where Islam can be divorced from the tribalistic culture it started with.
Being an Abrahamic religion that would be... Christianity? The Christians at the time thought this newfangled Islam thing was a pretty radicalized version of Christianity - I mean, let's face it - it has a lot of the same books as the Christian bible so... I dunno, maybe I'm oversimplifying things.
Ahhh Maxnet. I remember when I was able to get a whole 2mbit/s from them (when everyone else had 128k) with 40GB of usage. Wasn't cheap though.
Vocus, however, is a wholesaler - I don't know what interest they would have in having Maxnet/Fyx turn off such a feature, as it would surely be beneficial - so long as they get paid for the megabits, what would they care? That is, unless, it was done by somehow abusing the PacificIX infrastructure (which, when it was being pitched to me, effectively allows NZ ISPs to peer as if they were in Sydney).
A year ago, another small NZ ISP (FYX) had the same thing, but then they closed it after a very short time - http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/05/after-just-two-days-nz-isp-shuts-down-its-region-skipping-global-mode/
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha (continue the "haha" as if I were laughing at this remark for about 10 hours straight).
Didn't you see the publications by the Fraser Institute in January published in the likes of NYT?
I mean sure, it's only one opinion/publication/etc but hey, what's that America? I can't hear you over my freedom!! ;)
Enough said.
Also, I've crossed the border all those times with truecrypt volumes on external hard drives, on the laptop directly and on numerous flash drives, so I can't report any issues with that either.
Worst case scenario if they *did* decide to poke in to my flash drives they might see... oh... the PDF of my plane ticket(s), a passport copy and a few other random docs but nothing spectacular - and more importantly, no obvious evidence of the truecrypt volumes on each of the drives which store the few GB or so of documents which I'd consider sufficiently vital to my life and work that they're worth encrypting and having something like 7 copies of (this, even though truecrypt does run in my system tray).
Guess I just don't look dodgy enough and they have bigger fish to fry ;)
Also, worst case scenario: stick it on MEGA or Google Drive or something.
Who has crossed the US border 6 times in the last 6 months (Chicago x3, Orlando, Atlanta and Detroit), occasionally going to/coming from "areas of interest" and *always* opting out of the millimetre wave-scanners, I've never even been looked at twice, let alone hassled to even turn on my laptop or plug in my hard drives (I usually carry at least 3).
The first time I crossed in to the US, I was petrified that I was going to be treated as you're expecting but as it turns out, being white, dressed nicely (not in thongs, stubbies and a singlet, for example), smiling, polite and prepared for maximum efficiency with all coins, keys, portable electronics, belt, shoes & jacket in the tray well before I get to the bloke who has to pat me down has it's advantages.
If you do happen to be slightly coloured (of Greek or Italian stock, or even part-Aborigine perhaps?), I'd probably reiterate that the smile and be polite part is important.
This all reminds me of that scene in "The Simpsons: Movie" where the show the massive wiretapping complex with thousands of people and then the one guy suddently jumps up saying "Hey everybody, I found one!"
Excuse the quality, but http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ2VQ2Rwb_k
Business world, huh? I finally switched my business laptop full-time (after being on & off for about 6 years) a little over a year ago, and I'm finding a significantly different experience to you, but considering that my use of Excel may be comparatively basic (as I'm not writing macros or anything like that), Libreoffice seems to handle the relatively complex formulas and dynamic linking between documents that I need. It handles my document templates perfectly well, and my presentations are just as exciting as anything I'd find in Powerpoint.
And realistically, I don't think I'm that much of an outlier here - probably apart from the visual basic stuff (which I've not personally seen for quite a while, but then again, I've also not walked in to an F500 for a while either) myself and a significant percentage of spreadsheet users could probably get away with Libreoffice or Calligra on Linux without too much difficulty - my employees do perfectly well on their Linux systems with Libreoffice and other tools, and that extends right from the office clerks and call-centre people right up to management.
Everyone's devices "just work" when they plug them in to USB or connect via bluetooth (usually this is just syncing phone data or uploading photos, but sometimes they get used as bluetooth modems too) and printers auto-configure themselves when they plug in.
As far as hardware goes, over the past ~8 years, I've installed some of the more common distributions on a variety of hardware - mostly stock standard models from the usual manufacturers - and found most (if not everything) to work fine. I've not had trouble setting up WiFi since the mid-2000s, I've never had a problem with sound, and it's been years since I had to do anything with x configuration to coerce the video to work.
What can't I do? Probably a lot - but 1. it doesn't relate to my job and 2. the same could be said about any system: the key is to use the system that works best for your needs - whether that's Windows, Mac, Linux, or even OS/2, it shouldn't matter, so long as it gets the job done. Certain parts of the team got Macs for obvious reasons but all in all, I think we've pretty much phased out Windows, and nobody seems to be complaining. This wasn't even a cost-based decision, either - when you buy a PC, it's already there, and I'd probably still use something like LibreOffice in place of MS Office anyway simply because MS Office doesn't seem to give me any real advantage (and if it does, it's never been conveyed to us).
As mentioned, I've been through a variety of distros, but these days I'm on Mint and when I buy a new laptop in the next week or so, I fully expect whatever I end up buying to work out of the box with it, with little to no messing about - and it'll probably be easier than replacing Windows 8 with Windows 7 too.
I'm not.
All too often I get candidates who just don't know anything despite having the qualifications - at least on paper - yet can't answer the basic questions. It's got to the point where I just ban certain (types of) schools from even reaching the interview stage.
Sounds like something that's been imported. If I had to guess, I'd say India. Firstly because of the amount of times I've had to throw electronics away (hard-drives are especially painful) due to ants and secondly because places like Houston have large populations of Indian immigrants, many of whom probably shuffle back and forth once a year to visit family, so it's entirely possible there might be an ant or two in a suitcase.