If your ISP blocks incoming ports by default, (or put it behind a NAT that you don't control) then they're not making your computer part of the Internet, they're connecting your machine to something that is connected to the Internet.
That said, it can be easier to pro-actively block ports used by malware and spammers than having to deal with educating the overly large customer base about Internet security, especially if the ISP has an undersized abuse team.
I like to chose an ISP based on technical merits of being able to do their job, which is forwarding IP packets (v4 and v6) based on with a minimum amount of fuss.
If you get a virtual server, then the hosting provider becomes one of your ISPs and had better be up to the job of keeping the connectivity working, and the virtual server behaving as well.
It's not like they can't afford to buy outright and have to rent (or lease).
And so, it seems that some of Google'd UK-earned income will be re-invested in the country, in the form of (temporary) jobs for the construction workers, construction materials suppliers, and some profit for the developer that bought the surplus land from what used to be British Rail Property Board. It will therefore be interesting to see how the developer's tax affairs are (King’s Cross Central General Partner Limited by the look of it).
I take it that the police's interest in the call logs should stop the moment the SIM is blocked (on networks with SIMs), and a replacement SIM issued to the correct user of that phone number.
A portion of the output of an airliner's jet engines goes to the generators (or when the main engines are not running, the APU), to provide cabin power, avionics power etc.
No reason why the wings couldn't be covered in solar cells, so that the generators need to provide less output, hence the jet engines are more efficient at propelling the aircraft along, in the same sort of way as a Solar PV array on a house is grid-tied.
Of course, all those solar cells, and three-phase inverters do have mass, and that hauling that around with the aircraft needs to be taken into account in potential savings.
During cruise, airliners tend to fly above the clouds, and mostly at daytime. Solar PV could be quite useful.
I wonder if they took that into account, and the fact that vehicle production does use quite a bit of power, and a lot of vehicle manufacturers are now going out of their way to have renewable sources of power. There's also new lightweight manufacturing processes for cars, like the Graham Murray Design factory designs for the T.25 and T.27 cars.
My own power mix is about 50% renewables and increasing that percentage. No, I don't have solar panels on my roof, and I don't personally own a wind turbine, hydro turbine, wave or tidal power; I just chose an ethical energy supplier that invests in renewable generation. I'm not driving an electric car, but I'm not intending to buy another new internal combustion engined car.
I used to interview for Windows sysadmins.
Ask them what their favourite way of doing a particular task is, and how this differs from Microsoft's preferred exam answer. A good sysadmin will know that Microsoft's preferred exam answer (the only one that would be the 'correct' answer in their multiple choice) probably isn't the only way of doing something. A really good one will know several ways of doing it, and will pick holes in Microsoft's exam questions.
Then ask them how to achieve the same when Microsoft's preferred exam answer fails
Then ask them how to achieve the same when their favourite way fails.
Example: Terminal Services service on a physical server in a remote location has stopped working. How do you restart it remotely?
That will stop the point-clicky desktop jockeys.
How would you restart it remotely from the command line or a scripted fashion?
How would you monitor the remote server to alert you if something isn't running, using nothing but the base tools installed with the OS?
Sure, there's ways of addressing IPv6 with link-local style addresses, these tend to start fe80::, but if you want your packets to be routed out onto the big wide Internet and back, they'd better have proper addresses. IPv6 doesn't do NAT, but if you really need to renumber your network (say, if you've changed ISPs, and have got far too much statically configured kit, and don't know how to do a simple search and replace on some configs), you can do a network prefix translation thing, which is a bit of a bodge, in the same way that NAT is a bodge.
The government insists that motor vehicles have at least one licence plate that is easily readable, and that you have that on display whenever you're on the public roads.
Anyone could sit beside the roads, and write down licence plate numbers. It's boring as hell. Trainspotters do this with locomotive numbers at railway stations. Plane spotters do this with aircraft registrations at airports. In most countries, this requires no special permission or legislation. Co-incidentally, those countries that do require prior permission to do this sort of thing are themselves heading towards being a police state.
All the DEA are doing is automating this mundane task. This is already done for other purposes all over the place.
Fuel filling stations use ANPR to deny fuel to known fuel thieves, car parks use ANPR instead of passes for private car parks.
Of course, once the criminals work out what capturing and analysing images of licence plates is done to analyse criminal behaviour and catch criminals, they will work around it by having fake plates.
The added complexity here is whether a licence plate identifies an individual. There's parallels to IP addresses here. You can often infer that an IP address is one usually used by an individual, but you cannot prove that it was only that individual using that IP address. In most places, the licence plate identifies the vehicle, not the driver - though there's often a near 1:1 correlation. In countries with strong personal data privacy laws, there may be requirements to purge records of almost-personally-identifying records after a short period.
Last time I tried, 3G did not connect to the public Internet; it didn't give my device a unique IP address that would allow other devices to send it data directly. Until the 3G networks provide proper, non-NAT, non-proxied IPv6 (or IPv4 if you're feeling really lucky), it's not full network access. It's access to something that looks a little bit like the Internet (sufficient for most dumb one-way HTTP traffic), and is connected to the Internet.
Ditto for most public wifi access points though. Most of them aren't full internet access. I wonder how long before someone gets hauled up in front of a court somewhere for offering IPv6 only open access?
There are ways of roaming across wifi access points, one of which is UMC, where a mobile device with a SIM tries to connect to wifi, and route the 3G (or 2G) traffic over wifi instead in preference to 3G/2G, and it will fall back to 3G/2G when out of range. Sadly, not widely implemented on handsets and mobile operator networks - even though they get to charge for something the user would get for free otherwise.
If your insurance covers third party cover as authorised driver on another person's vehicle, you will find that that's just as a DRIVER. It doesn't cover the need for that vehicle to be separately insured.. If the insurance is good for the vehicle, the vehicle registration will not show up on the hotlist of uninsured VEHICLES.
If you are in the motor trade, you'll have trade plates, won't you?
It's not called 'road fund license' or 'road tax'. It's Vehicle Excise Duty.
It goes into the same bucket with general taxation, along with VAT, income tax etc. it's not collected solely to fund, or tax, the use of road.
Excess grid output, typically at night time, goes into places like Dinorwic (North Wales) and Ben Cruachan (Scotland), which are massive pumped-storage systems, which do a remarkable job of smoothing out the supply vs demand on the National Grid, by pumping millions of litres of water uphill at 'quiet' times, and can turn up the output on demand at ridiculously short notice (far faster than any thermal power station - oil,gas,coal, nuclear) when the population decide to turn on their kettles in sync during advert breaks on telly etc.
Stating the units used: This doesn't stop the brain-dead UK Department of Transport stating that road signs denoting distance to road works should be measured in metres, and placed at 100 metre intervals, but stating the distance is yards, when it is in fact, metres. Still, I guess it's safer - metres are longer than yards, so if you stretch the definition of a yard to be 1 metre, the drivers get a few seconds more to react.
This seems to have gone off-topic and road works signage is of little relevance to space projects.
It's district heating. Very wise use of waste heat, rather than just wasting energy throwing air conditioning at it and throwing the waste heat away from a data centre, you duct the surplus hot air through insulated pipes at a local neighbourhood. (or you pass it through a heat exchanger to warm a liquid which is then piped to local housing / swimming pools / public buildings etc).
ActiveSync is available for all Google Accounts, and is their preferred sync method:
From http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/
On most devices, Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your device, existing data may be removed from your phone. Please make sure to back up before you set up Google Sync.
Please note that administrative security controls are only available for Google Apps Premier and Education customers. Also, at this time not all N60 devices are supported with this feature. See the Google Sync Help Center for more information.
cacert.org works for me. Indeed, their root certificate isn't included by default with IE or Firefox, but it's a one-off client change, and you can't argue with the price. If the clients happen to be in a Windows Domain, they can easily be forced to do whatever the group policy tells them to.
Ban the receivers, so that ATC couldn't buy them? What about ATC at a small airfield? How large an airfield would you have to be to be allowed to purchase such receivers? If you ban the sale of receivers, are you going to ban someone from reading the specification to cobble one together? Last time I was in the tower at my nearby small airfield, they had such a receiver, despite the fact that the airfield didn't have radar, and most aircraft that used the airfield didn't have Mode S transponders. Using the receiver was better than nothing.
Once something has been invented, it cannot be un-invented. Once something has been widely deployed, it cannot easily be widely un-deployed.
The only thing that you could sensibly ban is being a terrorist.. Oh, that's already banned. You naughty terrorists out there.. go and sit on the naughty step.
Only last week, a merchant's fancy EPOS system was completely down, and they were having to revert to doing all stock control by pen and paper, and use the old fashioned card imprinter - somethng that I haven't seen done in many years. It will be interesting to see if the paper trail does eventually finish, and someone manages to read the very poorly recorded card number. I guess if the NCR slip is unreadable, the liability lies with the merchant.
and don't get be started on the correct formatting of telephone numbers, and how Excel (and Excel-compatible) spreadsheets tend to wreck telephone numbers by attempting to parse them as floating point numbers.
So, in what way is a 6510 emulator not interpreting machine code opcodes, and executing, er.. program code, and why is that different to that same interpreter interpreting a program that allows you to interpret BASIC program code?
They went downhill after Office '97, when Microsoft realised that most of the functions in the Office menus were not used by most of the users, so they did the silly "collapsible" menu thing and hid stuff until you found it was there. Actually, I'd go as far as saying that the user interface for Word for Windows went downhill after Word for Windows 6.0, since the one that became part of Office '97 had clippy.
You will find that the carriers don't really get a choice. It's got a SIM card slot. You buy the device, from Nokia, or a reseller, then you go to your preferred 3G network provider, and get a SIM-only contract or pay-as-you-go SIM from them. Job done. SIM only contracts give far better value for money, and tend to only by month-on-month rolling contracts, not silly tie-you-in-for-years contracts.
Yes, it may cost quite a bit of money up front that way, but that's the real cost of the device. I'm sure you might be able to get some sensible credit deals on it, or even a bank loan. Once you buy it, it's yours. You can do with it what you like. Swap the SIM for another network - sure. Sell it on after twenty seconds - sure.
You forgot about the pay-and-display machines that only take certain coins (no 1p, 2p and 5p) and don't give change, and with charges set such that it's impossible to pay for the amount of time you actually want. It's £1.05 per hour, you want to pay for 20 minutes, you have to pay a minimum of £1.10, £1.20, £1.50 or £2, depending on what coinage you have. Even if you do find a pay and display car park that allows short stay, you'd better synchronise your watches to the clock on the machine (rather than the actual time), since if you buy 30 minutes of parking, and turn up to reclaim your car 30 minutes later, and if the machine's clock is running fast, it will have printed an expiry time a few minutes before you thought, and by the time you get back, your car will have been visited by the parking control vultures, and you will have gained a ticket.
The issue here is using mobile broadband (3G data or Wimax etc) as fill-in coverage for where other fixed line services aren't going to work, or even be worthwhile deploying upgrades for.
As an example, my parents currently live on a farm out in the sticks. They live too far from the exchange for ADSL to work, fibre is out of the question, PSTN modems barely work, but they have got a reasonably good 3G data connection (though I question the ability for a mass-market mobile phone operator to be able to provide an ISP service - they don't appear to do DNS properly, and their outgoing SMTP smarthost regularly dies). There's also small outfit that is offering Wimax that covers the area.
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If your ISP blocks incoming ports by default, (or put it behind a NAT that you don't control) then they're not making your computer part of the Internet, they're connecting your machine to something that is connected to the Internet. That said, it can be easier to pro-actively block ports used by malware and spammers than having to deal with educating the overly large customer base about Internet security, especially if the ISP has an undersized abuse team. I like to chose an ISP based on technical merits of being able to do their job, which is forwarding IP packets (v4 and v6) based on with a minimum amount of fuss. If you get a virtual server, then the hosting provider becomes one of your ISPs and had better be up to the job of keeping the connectivity working, and the virtual server behaving as well.
It's not like they can't afford to buy outright and have to rent (or lease). And so, it seems that some of Google'd UK-earned income will be re-invested in the country, in the form of (temporary) jobs for the construction workers, construction materials suppliers, and some profit for the developer that bought the surplus land from what used to be British Rail Property Board. It will therefore be interesting to see how the developer's tax affairs are (King’s Cross Central General Partner Limited by the look of it).
I take it that the police's interest in the call logs should stop the moment the SIM is blocked (on networks with SIMs), and a replacement SIM issued to the correct user of that phone number.
A portion of the output of an airliner's jet engines goes to the generators (or when the main engines are not running, the APU), to provide cabin power, avionics power etc. No reason why the wings couldn't be covered in solar cells, so that the generators need to provide less output, hence the jet engines are more efficient at propelling the aircraft along, in the same sort of way as a Solar PV array on a house is grid-tied. Of course, all those solar cells, and three-phase inverters do have mass, and that hauling that around with the aircraft needs to be taken into account in potential savings. During cruise, airliners tend to fly above the clouds, and mostly at daytime. Solar PV could be quite useful.
I look forward to the first compliant 2D inkjet and laser printers, even more so if they are affordable.
I wonder if they took that into account, and the fact that vehicle production does use quite a bit of power, and a lot of vehicle manufacturers are now going out of their way to have renewable sources of power. There's also new lightweight manufacturing processes for cars, like the Graham Murray Design factory designs for the T.25 and T.27 cars. My own power mix is about 50% renewables and increasing that percentage. No, I don't have solar panels on my roof, and I don't personally own a wind turbine, hydro turbine, wave or tidal power; I just chose an ethical energy supplier that invests in renewable generation. I'm not driving an electric car, but I'm not intending to buy another new internal combustion engined car.
I used to interview for Windows sysadmins. Ask them what their favourite way of doing a particular task is, and how this differs from Microsoft's preferred exam answer. A good sysadmin will know that Microsoft's preferred exam answer (the only one that would be the 'correct' answer in their multiple choice) probably isn't the only way of doing something. A really good one will know several ways of doing it, and will pick holes in Microsoft's exam questions. Then ask them how to achieve the same when Microsoft's preferred exam answer fails Then ask them how to achieve the same when their favourite way fails. Example: Terminal Services service on a physical server in a remote location has stopped working. How do you restart it remotely? That will stop the point-clicky desktop jockeys. How would you restart it remotely from the command line or a scripted fashion? How would you monitor the remote server to alert you if something isn't running, using nothing but the base tools installed with the OS?
Sure, there's ways of addressing IPv6 with link-local style addresses, these tend to start fe80::, but if you want your packets to be routed out onto the big wide Internet and back, they'd better have proper addresses. IPv6 doesn't do NAT, but if you really need to renumber your network (say, if you've changed ISPs, and have got far too much statically configured kit, and don't know how to do a simple search and replace on some configs), you can do a network prefix translation thing, which is a bit of a bodge, in the same way that NAT is a bodge.
The government insists that motor vehicles have at least one licence plate that is easily readable, and that you have that on display whenever you're on the public roads. Anyone could sit beside the roads, and write down licence plate numbers. It's boring as hell. Trainspotters do this with locomotive numbers at railway stations. Plane spotters do this with aircraft registrations at airports. In most countries, this requires no special permission or legislation. Co-incidentally, those countries that do require prior permission to do this sort of thing are themselves heading towards being a police state. All the DEA are doing is automating this mundane task. This is already done for other purposes all over the place. Fuel filling stations use ANPR to deny fuel to known fuel thieves, car parks use ANPR instead of passes for private car parks. Of course, once the criminals work out what capturing and analysing images of licence plates is done to analyse criminal behaviour and catch criminals, they will work around it by having fake plates. The added complexity here is whether a licence plate identifies an individual. There's parallels to IP addresses here. You can often infer that an IP address is one usually used by an individual, but you cannot prove that it was only that individual using that IP address. In most places, the licence plate identifies the vehicle, not the driver - though there's often a near 1:1 correlation. In countries with strong personal data privacy laws, there may be requirements to purge records of almost-personally-identifying records after a short period.
Ditto for most public wifi access points though. Most of them aren't full internet access. I wonder how long before someone gets hauled up in front of a court somewhere for offering IPv6 only open access?
There are ways of roaming across wifi access points, one of which is UMC, where a mobile device with a SIM tries to connect to wifi, and route the 3G (or 2G) traffic over wifi instead in preference to 3G/2G, and it will fall back to 3G/2G when out of range. Sadly, not widely implemented on handsets and mobile operator networks - even though they get to charge for something the user would get for free otherwise.
If your insurance covers third party cover as authorised driver on another person's vehicle, you will find that that's just as a DRIVER. It doesn't cover the need for that vehicle to be separately insured.. If the insurance is good for the vehicle, the vehicle registration will not show up on the hotlist of uninsured VEHICLES. If you are in the motor trade, you'll have trade plates, won't you?
It's not called 'road fund license' or 'road tax'. It's Vehicle Excise Duty. It goes into the same bucket with general taxation, along with VAT, income tax etc. it's not collected solely to fund, or tax, the use of road.
Excess grid output, typically at night time, goes into places like Dinorwic (North Wales) and Ben Cruachan (Scotland), which are massive pumped-storage systems, which do a remarkable job of smoothing out the supply vs demand on the National Grid, by pumping millions of litres of water uphill at 'quiet' times, and can turn up the output on demand at ridiculously short notice (far faster than any thermal power station - oil,gas,coal, nuclear) when the population decide to turn on their kettles in sync during advert breaks on telly etc.
Stating the units used: This doesn't stop the brain-dead UK Department of Transport stating that road signs denoting distance to road works should be measured in metres, and placed at 100 metre intervals, but stating the distance is yards, when it is in fact, metres. Still, I guess it's safer - metres are longer than yards, so if you stretch the definition of a yard to be 1 metre, the drivers get a few seconds more to react. This seems to have gone off-topic and road works signage is of little relevance to space projects.
It's district heating. Very wise use of waste heat, rather than just wasting energy throwing air conditioning at it and throwing the waste heat away from a data centre, you duct the surplus hot air through insulated pipes at a local neighbourhood. (or you pass it through a heat exchanger to warm a liquid which is then piped to local housing / swimming pools / public buildings etc).
ActiveSync is available for all Google Accounts, and is their preferred sync method: From http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/ On most devices, Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your device, existing data may be removed from your phone. Please make sure to back up before you set up Google Sync. Please note that administrative security controls are only available for Google Apps Premier and Education customers. Also, at this time not all N60 devices are supported with this feature. See the Google Sync Help Center for more information.
cacert.org works for me. Indeed, their root certificate isn't included by default with IE or Firefox, but it's a one-off client change, and you can't argue with the price. If the clients happen to be in a Windows Domain, they can easily be forced to do whatever the group policy tells them to.
Ban the receivers, so that ATC couldn't buy them? What about ATC at a small airfield? How large an airfield would you have to be to be allowed to purchase such receivers? If you ban the sale of receivers, are you going to ban someone from reading the specification to cobble one together? Last time I was in the tower at my nearby small airfield, they had such a receiver, despite the fact that the airfield didn't have radar, and most aircraft that used the airfield didn't have Mode S transponders. Using the receiver was better than nothing. Once something has been invented, it cannot be un-invented. Once something has been widely deployed, it cannot easily be widely un-deployed. The only thing that you could sensibly ban is being a terrorist.. Oh, that's already banned. You naughty terrorists out there.. go and sit on the naughty step.
Only last week, a merchant's fancy EPOS system was completely down, and they were having to revert to doing all stock control by pen and paper, and use the old fashioned card imprinter - somethng that I haven't seen done in many years. It will be interesting to see if the paper trail does eventually finish, and someone manages to read the very poorly recorded card number. I guess if the NCR slip is unreadable, the liability lies with the merchant.
and don't get be started on the correct formatting of telephone numbers, and how Excel (and Excel-compatible) spreadsheets tend to wreck telephone numbers by attempting to parse them as floating point numbers.
So, in what way is a 6510 emulator not interpreting machine code opcodes, and executing, er.. program code, and why is that different to that same interpreter interpreting a program that allows you to interpret BASIC program code?
They went downhill after Office '97, when Microsoft realised that most of the functions in the Office menus were not used by most of the users, so they did the silly "collapsible" menu thing and hid stuff until you found it was there. Actually, I'd go as far as saying that the user interface for Word for Windows went downhill after Word for Windows 6.0, since the one that became part of Office '97 had clippy.
You will find that the carriers don't really get a choice. It's got a SIM card slot. You buy the device, from Nokia, or a reseller, then you go to your preferred 3G network provider, and get a SIM-only contract or pay-as-you-go SIM from them. Job done. SIM only contracts give far better value for money, and tend to only by month-on-month rolling contracts, not silly tie-you-in-for-years contracts. Yes, it may cost quite a bit of money up front that way, but that's the real cost of the device. I'm sure you might be able to get some sensible credit deals on it, or even a bank loan. Once you buy it, it's yours. You can do with it what you like. Swap the SIM for another network - sure. Sell it on after twenty seconds - sure.
You forgot about the pay-and-display machines that only take certain coins (no 1p, 2p and 5p) and don't give change, and with charges set such that it's impossible to pay for the amount of time you actually want. It's £1.05 per hour, you want to pay for 20 minutes, you have to pay a minimum of £1.10, £1.20, £1.50 or £2, depending on what coinage you have. Even if you do find a pay and display car park that allows short stay, you'd better synchronise your watches to the clock on the machine (rather than the actual time), since if you buy 30 minutes of parking, and turn up to reclaim your car 30 minutes later, and if the machine's clock is running fast, it will have printed an expiry time a few minutes before you thought, and by the time you get back, your car will have been visited by the parking control vultures, and you will have gained a ticket.
The issue here is using mobile broadband (3G data or Wimax etc) as fill-in coverage for where other fixed line services aren't going to work, or even be worthwhile deploying upgrades for. As an example, my parents currently live on a farm out in the sticks. They live too far from the exchange for ADSL to work, fibre is out of the question, PSTN modems barely work, but they have got a reasonably good 3G data connection (though I question the ability for a mass-market mobile phone operator to be able to provide an ISP service - they don't appear to do DNS properly, and their outgoing SMTP smarthost regularly dies). There's also small outfit that is offering Wimax that covers the area.