Wait a minute, my Nokia N8 (Belle) can do this (single-search of both the local device and Internet) no problem.
And Vlingo is a halfway decent alternative to Siri. I can do more on my non-iDevices than most people I know with an iDevice.
What has this got to do with Android? Sweet bugger all, but I have to wonder why Nokia is allowed to get away with it and Android (Samsung) is not? More to the point, what about other Android-heavy manufacturers like HTC? Is this just a case of the two megaliths battling and everyone else sitting on the sidelines waiting for an outcome or what?
It gets better - much of the time, factory workers live on the premises because many of them have come from small villages hundreds of kilometres away and finding an apartment either doesn't make sense or is difficult and/or unaffordable.
Shit, sorry, didn't mean to mod that as Funny. But damnit if you aren't correct!
Long story short: Copying of evidence for the purposes of determining culpability. Taking said copies out of the jurisdiction in question thereby not complying with the laws of the original jurisdiction: criminal activity & completely illegal.
I believe in the USA they go one step further and are even supposed to have permission to go from one state to another - once someone is freed from jail they're not allowed to even leave the state without prior permission or whatever?
It's really not. Except when you need to do something useful. The use of digital certificates is fairly common for some forms of government interaction BUT the certificate can only be used on the computer it was generated on. So, if you change law firms/accountants OR if the computer they used dies, you're SOL and have to buy a new cert (or something to that effect).
...and as a Christian nation that was founded by people fleeing religious persecution...
I'm not confident that is entirely accurate. Suuuuuuuure, it's the story you get told at school, but... you know.
The pilgrims went so that they could persecute, not because they were being persecuted. If they were "fleeing", it's because they failed to push around those damned liberal English (and in some cases, later the even more damned liberal Dutch as well) in to taking up their moralistic ideals... If anything, history suggests they were more or less deported.
It seems the whole country has been built on and has been supporting this kind of behaviour for centuries.
I'm not entirely sure China would be able to stop me searching for information on Falun Gong if I'm in the US or Europe or Australia, but they can (and already do) if I'm in China.
I *think* these countries would be making suggestions to stop people in their own countries from accessing content and using the argument to legitimize the various mechanisms already in place, but I get the feeling they couldn't realistically stop people in other countries from accessing the same content.
The reason I think this is otherwise you'll have nations squabbling over what should and shouldn't be allowed on the Internet: Muslim countries would want to stop anything anti-Muslim or non-Muslim from being there, Christian countries would want to stop anything anti/non-Christian and so on, China might want things removed that are perfectly legal in say, the Netherlands... and so on.
I should HOPE that any kind of UN control would basically suggest that "Hey, what's (il)legal in China is (il)legal in China only - you can't affect anything in any other nation" - the same as if I were to smoke marijuana in Netherlands (where it's not a crime) versus the same in Japan (where it is): Japan can't prosecute me if I fly from Amsterdam to Tokyo, even if I still have THC in my blood. At the time I committed the "offense" I was in a territory where it is perfectly legal.
That all being said, I guess I need to read the actual proposal to decide whether it's really a good or a bad thing.
For the record, I'd add India to this list as well. They're not proving themselves to be particularly competent at anything Internet related and as a foreigner living in India, I'm rather unimpressed with a lot of what is going on here.
As it is now, definitely the sheep. NOBODY that I know voted for National. I certainly didn't. They can't even do basic maths or get statistics right (I've been arguing with my local National MP about the bad maths on his campaign brochures for over 2 years).
Interestingly, since the last election, those who are able have moved out of New Zealand - young people (in particular) are fleeing in droves. Including myself, of course, but I fled before it became the trend;)
Irrespective of the currency's strength or weakness, Chinese wages have gone up by about 500% in that same time period..
An interesting programme for you to watch would be "The Town Taking on China" http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hn6l8 which is about a company in the UK which does an experiment to see whether continuing to have a factory in China (after all of the hassles and expenditures involved in doing that) is still as economically beneficial as it was several years ago.
For those who don't feel like watching said programme, the outcome of the experiment is "not really" (there is some minute cost saving in favour of the Chinese factory, but it's not significant) and they end up shifting all the jobs back to the UK.
Of course it's call sign is Air Force One (while the president is on board) - that's the whole point of the exercise: "The presidential call sign was established for security purposes during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The change stemmed from a 1953 incident where an Eastern Airlines commercial flight (8610) had the same call sign as a flight the president was on (Air Force 8610). The aircraft accidentally entered the same airspace, and after the incident the unique call sign "Air Force One" was introduced for the presidential aircraft."
My understanding is that it's called SAM28000 or 29000 (according to which of the VC25 Jets it is) when it's NOT got a president on board, or when it's being used for a former president, SAM standing for "Special Air Mission", of course. In both cases though, like with everything else presidential, I'd say they'll have 2 callsigns: one public and one classified.
Anyway, now that that's over with, I have one question: why would the president's office want to hide a visit to Afghanistan in the United States, while it's public knowledge in Afghanistan as the local media is telling everyone he's there. Are they thinking some terrorist is going to show up on some known route waiting for Obama only to find out "oh, he's in Afghanistan, I could have saved $2,500 on flights and crappy airline food" and then give up and go home? I doubt it.
Apple is probably the worse possible company to choose as an example of a "tax dodge". Why don't you go after Samsung, HTC, or any of the other phone manufactures that make billions in sales in the US market but have all of their operations based overseas.
Samsung is originally Korean. HTC is originally Taiwanese. By originally, of course, I mean founded & incorporated by Korean or Taiwanese citizens in those respective countries. For them, the US is a market which is dealt with by a US subsidiary. Legitimately. Apple on the other hand, was founded & incorporated in the US by US citizens.
Believe it or not, this is a crucial difference in this argument, irrespective of how much the companies made in the US or even where the products they sell are manufactured.
I do this with my personal domain: [website or company name]@[mydomain.tld] - have done since I purchased the domain about 10 years ago.
Sometimes when I give my email address to organizations in person (like when opening a bank account, I've been asked "how can you have an email address with our company name in it?". After explaining my reasons for doing this, those who understand think it's a good idea, those who don't just give me a blank look and go "oh, ok".
But, as I operate a catch-all, I get tons of spam - not that I ever see it... it's all dictionary attacks, variations on email addresses used for junk messages or actual spam received after some company's email database was compromised.
All I have to do is remember to update my email filters when I sign up for new stuff so that legit messages don't get marked as spam - the result of which is that my email filters tend to be pretty good at sorting messages in to separate IMAP folders - if it lands in my actual inbox, it's probably safe to read.
Considering I'm in the process of building a network, I find the topic of FUPs and Bandwidth Management both interesting and of some concern.
As a consumer, I look at it from the perspective of "this is unfair, how dare you throttle my connection", while as a provider, I look at it from the "it's literally impossible to provide superior service at the cost consumers are willing to pay".
It's very true that much of the cost of building a network comes from the last mile - equipment and whatnot is a nominal cost as far as I'm concerned, but bandwidth depends very much on the market in which I'm buying it.
Let's assume for a moment I'm buying on the UK market - if I pay say GBP20,000 per month for a 10gbit/s link between New York, that gives me an effective price of GBP2.50 per megabit (80% utilization). Add to that peering of say GBP1000 per month for a 10gbit/s link which gives us GBP0.125 per megabit. Add equipment and last mile costs of GBP5 per subscriber per month and other overheads of about GBP5 per subscriber per month (being not 100% familiar with wholesale prices in the UK, I can only hypothesize, but I do know the prices where I am, so I'm trying to rationalize in the same way) we can establish that I can not effectively charge less than GBP12.625 + VAT for 1mbit/s if I wanted to make no money - add a 30% markup and we could say about GBP16.50.
Considering Virgin charges about that much for a 10mbit/s line (not counting phone or special offers http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/up-to-10mb.html), obviously then, there are various points on the network at which there will be contention. It is my understanding that the UK allows a maximum of 50:1 contention ratio (which in my view is a flawed measurement of network performance, but I digress), which effectively limits the amount of data available to each user to consume.
With the ratio at 50:1, a 1mbit/s user could reasonably expect about 6GB of actual usage if the lines were under heavy utilization - a 25:1 ratio 12GB and 10:1 ratio 30GB. Multiply that by the number of megabits they offer on any given plan, and you can see there what the ISP is expecting each user to use.
I mean, sure, a 10mbit/s plan *could* allow you to download about 3TB in a month, and 100mbit/s 30-odd TB, but that kind of usage is impractical to most people. Then there is the other argument: if you're using more than a few hundred GBs a month, what are you downloading? Of course it's none of my business as a provider, but it's highly likely that there is a significant amount of pirated material there.
The idea is not so much that each user needs to have capacity available megabit for megabit, but that the network is shared in such a way that it can be utilized effectively, that is, transfers are finished sufficiently fast that the lines are free for other users to do their transfers - as such, 100mbit/s for 35 pounds, as the average consumer willing to pay GBP35-40 for less contention, especially if he is only going to be using 50-100-150GB a month. And why should he pay the same amount as you do for significantly less usage?
Being that Virgin is one of the few ISPs to not have a strict data-cap on their plans, this traffic management seems to be a way of trying to avoid going down that path, and while I disagree with FUPs in principle, I understand that they are necessary at some level. On the other hand, I also disagree with provider's use of "Unlimited". We use the term flat-rate because the meanings are very different - as you can probably guess, "unlimited" pertains to usage, whereas "flat-rate" is all about price.
At the end of the day, if you're really so desperate to saturate the lines 24/7, perhaps you should be offered either a pay-as-you-go usage plan, free of traffic management (if the provider charged a nominal amount for the infrastructure, then say 10p per GB), because the next alternative is that you should buy a dedicated line of some kind.
Methinks that we also need to talk to his payment processor (clickbank) and ask them to stop processing his payments (and/or freeze his account)....but if he's in Auckland NZ, I'm happy to drive up there (it's only an hour) with a few... goons... and sort this guy out. I'm sure WLUG, AuckLUG, NZLUG, NZOSS and so one will have plenty to say about his activites.
Are you sure that list is complete? You seem to be missing a couple of ISPs in India.
BSNL claims somewhere on it's website to have a number of millions of subscribers (the numbers vary depending on which page you look at... and they're at least 3 years out of date).
Though it should also be known that a significant percentage of those are using this strange technology called "dialup", with the rest being on mobile, wimax or adsl... so an accurate number isn't easy to ascertain....However, I'm sure they have a few bot hosts.
Slashdot Mirror
They still are in many countries, including but not limited to India and most of Africa.
Dilbert: Ethics (S02E17) "I've been authorized to do whatever it takes..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds1NnDC18_4&feature=relmfu - Fast forward to 3:45 :)
Yes. End of discussion.
Wait a minute, my Nokia N8 (Belle) can do this (single-search of both the local device and Internet) no problem.
And Vlingo is a halfway decent alternative to Siri. I can do more on my non-iDevices than most people I know with an iDevice.
What has this got to do with Android? Sweet bugger all, but I have to wonder why Nokia is allowed to get away with it and Android (Samsung) is not? More to the point, what about other Android-heavy manufacturers like HTC? Is this just a case of the two megaliths battling and everyone else sitting on the sidelines waiting for an outcome or what?
It gets better - much of the time, factory workers live on the premises because many of them have come from small villages hundreds of kilometres away and finding an apartment either doesn't make sense or is difficult and/or unaffordable.
You should probably be adding India to that list of relatively heavily censored countries.
From 2Degrees Mobile in NZ: http://www.2degreesmobile.co.nz/paymonthly/plans/shared-data - NZ$5 charge + devices at $1 per month per device.
Seems a whole lot more reasonable than what Verizon plans to offer. You Americans are getting totally ripped off.
ISPs and Telcos could learn from this (I know I have): don't rip off your customers and they will love you.
Shit, sorry, didn't mean to mod that as Funny. But damnit if you aren't correct!
Long story short: Copying of evidence for the purposes of determining culpability. Taking said copies out of the jurisdiction in question thereby not complying with the laws of the original jurisdiction: criminal activity & completely illegal.
I believe in the USA they go one step further and are even supposed to have permission to go from one state to another - once someone is freed from jail they're not allowed to even leave the state without prior permission or whatever?
It's really not. Except when you need to do something useful. The use of digital certificates is fairly common for some forms of government interaction BUT the certificate can only be used on the computer it was generated on. So, if you change law firms/accountants OR if the computer they used dies, you're SOL and have to buy a new cert (or something to that effect).
You live in India too, huh?
...and as a Christian nation that was founded by people fleeing religious persecution...
I'm not confident that is entirely accurate. Suuuuuuuure, it's the story you get told at school, but... you know.
The pilgrims went so that they could persecute, not because they were being persecuted. If they were "fleeing", it's because they failed to push around those damned liberal English (and in some cases, later the even more damned liberal Dutch as well) in to taking up their moralistic ideals... If anything, history suggests they were more or less deported.
It seems the whole country has been built on and has been supporting this kind of behaviour for centuries.
I'm not entirely sure China would be able to stop me searching for information on Falun Gong if I'm in the US or Europe or Australia, but they can (and already do) if I'm in China.
I *think* these countries would be making suggestions to stop people in their own countries from accessing content and using the argument to legitimize the various mechanisms already in place, but I get the feeling they couldn't realistically stop people in other countries from accessing the same content.
The reason I think this is otherwise you'll have nations squabbling over what should and shouldn't be allowed on the Internet: Muslim countries would want to stop anything anti-Muslim or non-Muslim from being there, Christian countries would want to stop anything anti/non-Christian and so on, China might want things removed that are perfectly legal in say, the Netherlands... and so on.
I should HOPE that any kind of UN control would basically suggest that "Hey, what's (il)legal in China is (il)legal in China only - you can't affect anything in any other nation" - the same as if I were to smoke marijuana in Netherlands (where it's not a crime) versus the same in Japan (where it is): Japan can't prosecute me if I fly from Amsterdam to Tokyo, even if I still have THC in my blood. At the time I committed the "offense" I was in a territory where it is perfectly legal.
That all being said, I guess I need to read the actual proposal to decide whether it's really a good or a bad thing.
For the record, I'd add India to this list as well. They're not proving themselves to be particularly competent at anything Internet related and as a foreigner living in India, I'm rather unimpressed with a lot of what is going on here.
Is that sarcasm? I seem to recall having seen documentaries to the contrary.
Why haven't the citizens of New Zealand simply started a civil war to end this bullshit?
It's your responsibility to kick us out of your home. If you can't defend your territory, it will be usurped and taken over.
Maybe that will be what is needed to get people to wake up and demand fresh elections.
As it is now, definitely the sheep. NOBODY that I know voted for National. I certainly didn't. They can't even do basic maths or get statistics right (I've been arguing with my local National MP about the bad maths on his campaign brochures for over 2 years).
Interestingly, since the last election, those who are able have moved out of New Zealand - young people (in particular) are fleeing in droves. Including myself, of course, but I fled before it became the trend ;)
Wrong country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dame_Edna_Everage
Irrespective of the currency's strength or weakness, Chinese wages have gone up by about 500% in that same time period..
An interesting programme for you to watch would be "The Town Taking on China" http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hn6l8 which is about a company in the UK which does an experiment to see whether continuing to have a factory in China (after all of the hassles and expenditures involved in doing that) is still as economically beneficial as it was several years ago.
For those who don't feel like watching said programme, the outcome of the experiment is "not really" (there is some minute cost saving in favour of the Chinese factory, but it's not significant) and they end up shifting all the jobs back to the UK.
Screw worrying about the software - hopefully the important stuff is on a clean backup anyway.
My concern would be whether they may have installed a hardware spy device of some description.
Of course it's call sign is Air Force One (while the president is on board) - that's the whole point of the exercise: "The presidential call sign was established for security purposes during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The change stemmed from a 1953 incident where an Eastern Airlines commercial flight (8610) had the same call sign as a flight the president was on (Air Force 8610). The aircraft accidentally entered the same airspace, and after the incident the unique call sign "Air Force One" was introduced for the presidential aircraft."
My understanding is that it's called SAM28000 or 29000 (according to which of the VC25 Jets it is) when it's NOT got a president on board, or when it's being used for a former president, SAM standing for "Special Air Mission", of course. In both cases though, like with everything else presidential, I'd say they'll have 2 callsigns: one public and one classified.
Anyway, now that that's over with, I have one question: why would the president's office want to hide a visit to Afghanistan in the United States, while it's public knowledge in Afghanistan as the local media is telling everyone he's there. Are they thinking some terrorist is going to show up on some known route waiting for Obama only to find out "oh, he's in Afghanistan, I could have saved $2,500 on flights and crappy airline food" and then give up and go home? I doubt it.
Apple is probably the worse possible company to choose as an example of a "tax dodge". Why don't you go after Samsung, HTC, or any of the other phone manufactures that make billions in sales in the US market but have all of their operations based overseas.
Samsung is originally Korean. HTC is originally Taiwanese. By originally, of course, I mean founded & incorporated by Korean or Taiwanese citizens in those respective countries. For them, the US is a market which is dealt with by a US subsidiary. Legitimately. Apple on the other hand, was founded & incorporated in the US by US citizens.
Believe it or not, this is a crucial difference in this argument, irrespective of how much the companies made in the US or even where the products they sell are manufactured.
I do this with my personal domain: [website or company name]@[mydomain.tld] - have done since I purchased the domain about 10 years ago.
Sometimes when I give my email address to organizations in person (like when opening a bank account, I've been asked "how can you have an email address with our company name in it?". After explaining my reasons for doing this, those who understand think it's a good idea, those who don't just give me a blank look and go "oh, ok".
But, as I operate a catch-all, I get tons of spam - not that I ever see it... it's all dictionary attacks, variations on email addresses used for junk messages or actual spam received after some company's email database was compromised.
All I have to do is remember to update my email filters when I sign up for new stuff so that legit messages don't get marked as spam - the result of which is that my email filters tend to be pretty good at sorting messages in to separate IMAP folders - if it lands in my actual inbox, it's probably safe to read.
Considering I'm in the process of building a network, I find the topic of FUPs and Bandwidth Management both interesting and of some concern.
As a consumer, I look at it from the perspective of "this is unfair, how dare you throttle my connection", while as a provider, I look at it from the "it's literally impossible to provide superior service at the cost consumers are willing to pay".
It's very true that much of the cost of building a network comes from the last mile - equipment and whatnot is a nominal cost as far as I'm concerned, but bandwidth depends very much on the market in which I'm buying it.
Let's assume for a moment I'm buying on the UK market - if I pay say GBP20,000 per month for a 10gbit/s link between New York, that gives me an effective price of GBP2.50 per megabit (80% utilization). Add to that peering of say GBP1000 per month for a 10gbit/s link which gives us GBP0.125 per megabit. Add equipment and last mile costs of GBP5 per subscriber per month and other overheads of about GBP5 per subscriber per month (being not 100% familiar with wholesale prices in the UK, I can only hypothesize, but I do know the prices where I am, so I'm trying to rationalize in the same way) we can establish that I can not effectively charge less than GBP12.625 + VAT for 1mbit/s if I wanted to make no money - add a 30% markup and we could say about GBP16.50.
Considering Virgin charges about that much for a 10mbit/s line (not counting phone or special offers http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/up-to-10mb.html), obviously then, there are various points on the network at which there will be contention. It is my understanding that the UK allows a maximum of 50:1 contention ratio (which in my view is a flawed measurement of network performance, but I digress), which effectively limits the amount of data available to each user to consume.
With the ratio at 50:1, a 1mbit/s user could reasonably expect about 6GB of actual usage if the lines were under heavy utilization - a 25:1 ratio 12GB and 10:1 ratio 30GB. Multiply that by the number of megabits they offer on any given plan, and you can see there what the ISP is expecting each user to use.
I mean, sure, a 10mbit/s plan *could* allow you to download about 3TB in a month, and 100mbit/s 30-odd TB, but that kind of usage is impractical to most people.
Then there is the other argument: if you're using more than a few hundred GBs a month, what are you downloading? Of course it's none of my business as a provider, but it's highly likely that there is a significant amount of pirated material there.
The idea is not so much that each user needs to have capacity available megabit for megabit, but that the network is shared in such a way that it can be utilized effectively, that is, transfers are finished sufficiently fast that the lines are free for other users to do their transfers - as such, 100mbit/s for 35 pounds, as the average consumer willing to pay GBP35-40 for less contention, especially if he is only going to be using 50-100-150GB a month. And why should he pay the same amount as you do for significantly less usage?
Being that Virgin is one of the few ISPs to not have a strict data-cap on their plans, this traffic management seems to be a way of trying to avoid going down that path, and while I disagree with FUPs in principle, I understand that they are necessary at some level. On the other hand, I also disagree with provider's use of "Unlimited". We use the term flat-rate because the meanings are very different - as you can probably guess, "unlimited" pertains to usage, whereas "flat-rate" is all about price.
At the end of the day, if you're really so desperate to saturate the lines 24/7, perhaps you should be offered either a pay-as-you-go usage plan, free of traffic management (if the provider charged a nominal amount for the infrastructure, then say 10p per GB), because the next alternative is that you should buy a dedicated line of some kind.
Methinks that we also need to talk to his payment processor (clickbank) and ask them to stop processing his payments (and/or freeze his account). ...but if he's in Auckland NZ, I'm happy to drive up there (it's only an hour) with a few... goons... and sort this guy out. I'm sure WLUG, AuckLUG, NZLUG, NZOSS and so one will have plenty to say about his activites.
I came up with a similar theory myself nearly 10 years ago, and I have my books to prove it...
That aside, I'm sure I've seen other sources with the same idea between that time and now.
Are you sure that list is complete? You seem to be missing a couple of ISPs in India.
BSNL claims somewhere on it's website to have a number of millions of subscribers (the numbers vary depending on which page you look at... and they're at least 3 years out of date).
Though it should also be known that a significant percentage of those are using this strange technology called "dialup", with the rest being on mobile, wimax or adsl... so an accurate number isn't easy to ascertain. ...However, I'm sure they have a few bot hosts.