Do you really need to watch a youtube video demo or will browsing regular webpages do? do you really need a video call or will voice/text do? Does it really need to be done right now or can it wait until I get back to somewhere with a fixed line? do you really need to watch cat videos to entertain yourself or could you play a game with minimal data usage instead?
That is the kind of question that people on limited mobile plans will be asking themselves, and in many cases the answer will be that they don't need to use large volumes of expensive mobile data.
Sure some people will be too rich to care, but I expect those people are a small minority.
You have one choice for a sensible ISP in England in the form of BT, and they haven't really invested in anything beyond basic ADSL. 1MBit down is probably all you'll get for the most part.
It sounds like you have read the rants from people living in poorly served rural areas and taken them as representive of the country as a whole.
Most people have a choice of ISPs as BT was forced to open up their access networks to comptitors at a variety of levels. As far as access speeds go BT and their compeitors have been pushing out newer versions of ADSL and BT openreach have also been doing a major rollout of FTTC with VDSL for the final connection to the customer.
Yes there are still "not-spots" where the service sucks for various reasons. Not all cabinets have FTTC, some people are too far from the cabinet for FTTC to work, some phone exchanges are still on 20CN which limits ADSL speeds and leads to high costs for ISPs.
Cable is arround too. Where it is available it offers better downstream speeds than openreach FTTC but worse upstream speeds. Unfortunately the regulator hasn't forced Virgin Media (the result of a string of cableco mergers) to open up their network to competition so if you want to use a cable connection then you have to use Virgina Media as your ISP.
Between smartphones and PCs most people even in engineering have little need for standalone calculators nowadays. The exception is students at school/college/university. Most exams allow some form of calculator (how advanced varies) while forbidding smartphones, pdas, tablets, laptops etc. If you want to do well in those exams then unless you are a mental arithmetic wizard you need to buy and get familiar with a calculator that is accepted by the exam rules.
The playstation 2 was released in Japan in March 2000, North America in October and Europe in November The gamecube was released in Japan in September 2001, North america is November and Europe in May 2002. The xbox was released in North america In November 2001, Japan in Febuary 2002 and Europe in March 2002.
So the playstation 2 had a year or more of head start over the Xbox and Gamecube.
The problem is they don't just build up a reasonable financial cusion and then stop begging.
Instead they use that financial cusion as an excuse to expand the operation, way beyond what is actually needed to run the site. Pretty soon they are running short on cash again and have to intensify the begging campaign even more.
A sensible encryption setup for a camera would use asymetric crypto. So recording stuff would only require the public key, the private key could remain safely at home.
Uber is just taxi over-the-internet and traditional taxi drivers have these rights.
The self-employed do not have those rights because there is no employer, only customers and suppliers.
Of course employers would love to do an end-run arround employment law by claiming the people who work for them are self-employed. So the legal system has to make a determination of whether someone is truely self-employed or not.
Many taxi drivers in the UK are self-employed. Hackney carriage drivers can operate entirely independently if they want though many of them sign up with an operator to get extra jobs. Private hire drivers can only take jobs that are pre-booked through an operator but there is nothing stopping a driver registering as their own operator and taking bookings on their cellphone (with handsfree kit of course). Even when there is an operator they usually only act as an agency passing out jobs. Occasionally a job is paid-for through the operator but usually the customer pays the driver directly.
Basically this case seems to come down to uber exerting a level of control over the drivers far greater than what traditional taxi operators do and as-such pushing it over the boundry from a service providing jobs to indepdent drivers to an employer of drivers.
Undersea cables are an expensive long term project. It takes years to go from concept to surveys to permits to installation and finally to actually selling services over the line, and that's assuming a friendly political enironment. If politicans are obstructive it can take even longer or stall indefinately.
Local CDN nodes on the other hand are relatively cheap and quick to deploy
Fundamentally inflation happens when the money supply in circulation grows faster than the economy, deflation happens when the money supply grows slower than the economy.
Fractional reserve banking increases the effective money supply. A proportion of customers deposits are kept as central bank money in reserve. The rest is loaned or invested. The result is that the total customer deposits (which as far as the customer is concerned are effectively money) is greater than the totl ammount of "central bank money" in the system.
In our current system governments/central banks can control the effective money supply in a couple of ways. They can put in place minimum reserve requirements on banks and they can control the ammount of "central bank money" money in circulation.
For fractional reserve banking to work customers must have high confidence in the safety of the banking system. This is ensured through a cobination of government-backed "insurance" schemes and stract regulations on bank investment practices.
So what about bitcoin. The rules for the supply of real bitcoins (analogous to central bank money) are largely fixed. Afaict there is currently no significant fractional reserve bitcoin banking going on. So the inflation and deflation is largely tied to the size of the bitcoin economy and the proportion of bitcoin that is hoarded by speculators rather than circulatin in the bitcoin economy.
A successful introduction of fractional reseve banking would cause a sudden increase in the effective money suppy and with it a burst of inflation.
So the question is would fractionl reserve bitcoin banking be successful? My bet is NO.
The problem is how is the fractional reserve bitcoin bank going to invest the money that they aren't keeping in reserve. There are two options I see both bad.
1. They could make bitcoin denominated loans. However given bitcoins's overall deflationary tendancies and massive volatility only an idiot would take out such a loan. 2. They could invest in something non-bitcoin denominated but then the bank is taking on the risk from bitcoins deflation and volatility.
Either way I expect any fractional reserve bitcoin bank to find themselves bankrupt fairly quickly.
Stopping production of pennies won't stop lazy customers taking them out of circuation. So without a supply of new coins coming into circulation shopkeepers will quickly run out.
People expect to be able to go into a shop, pay for something and be given change. So the shop owners will be forced to come up with a new policy on how they give change in the absense of any supply of pennies.
It's not just VPSs. A project I cofounded used a dedicated server running Debian from dreamhost (chosen because it was cheap and came with unlimited bandwidth). In setting the server up we removed apache and installed nginx.
Doing so broke the boot process!
IIRC Dreamhost support managed to find a way to manually boot the box but couldn't help with actually fixing it and then we found a way to hack up their scripts so it would boot by itself again.
The amazon term is "stickerless comingled inventory". Sellers can choose to have their products commingled with that of other sellers and that of amazon itself. From the sellers side this saves having to label up the products with seller information. From amazon's side this presumablly makes logistics more efficient.
Which works great until you have unscrupulous sellers introducing substandard (fake, damaged, not new, not the correct model etc) into the supply chain. Customers can order from a reputable seller or amazon themselves and yet end up getting stock from the unscrupulous seller.
Some product categories are excluded from stickerless comingled inventory and amazon claims to track where the products actually came from, but apparently this is not enough to keep the problem under control.
Worse than that amazon operates commingled inventory. With commingled inventory the seller you select is simply the one who gets your money, not nessacerally the one who supplied the product.
In general for products with high counterfieting risk I would advise avoiding amazon completely.
All this does is provide an excuse to throttle "less important traffic", i.e. any website that doesn't pay greedy ISPs for higher priority.
The already existing prioritisation features are more than enough to do that.
In that case, they need their own dedicated network. The public internet cannot guarantee a packet gets from Point A to Point B, let alone gets there in a specified time.
I would agree that you won't be able to run such services over the "public internet".
The point AIUI is to allow you to build one network over which all your traffic flows while maintining deterministic bandwidth/latency/jitter for those applications that need it.
The multipoint coaxial segments are gone, replaced by point to point twisted pair. CSMA/CD is pretty much gone*. replaced by switching. The simple wire-level "manchester encoding" is pretty much gone repalced by a highly complex multilevel encodings with echo cancellation
All that is really left is the frame formats and the addressing scheme.
Just because a design descision made sense at a particular time and in a particular context does not mean it will make sense for all time and in all contexts.
* By pretty much gone, I mean that the hardware still supports it, but it's only used when connecting to legacy equipment.
The pro-brexit side didn't "decide to put the question to the people" (though once the descision was made to put it to the people they did put out propaganda painting an unrealistically rosy view of brexit).
Anti-EU sentiment in the UK had been rising. Cameron and his cronies (pro remain) offered the refferendum to pacify both Euroskeptics in his own party and voters who might otherwise vote for UKIP. Unfortunately for them (and IMO for the UK as a whole) they didn't get the result they wanted. Cameron then resigned leaving the rest of the tory party to pick up the peices.
However after an agreement is reached there should be another vote.
AIUI the problem is that once article 50 is invoked the clock starts ticking on our (the UKs) EU membership. If the clock runs out we get a hard exit
The only way to stop that clock is to make an agreement with the rest of the EU. It's not at all clear if they would offer us "remain a member on your current terms".
Well, that's nice, but this Article is about the UK leaving the EU, so UK legislation is really the only legislation of relevance.
Surely EU legislation is important too.
What exactly happens if Teresa says "fuck you" to the british courts and sends the article 50 notification anyway? can the EU accept it and begin the process of kicking the UK out of the EU?
As a brit I can see a few reasons to use credit cards.
1. If you need to borrow money short-term they are the cheapest option. You get about a month interest-free by default and you can get far longer if you have a good credit rating and are prepared to apply for a new card. 2. Regularly using and paying off a credit card builds your credit rating which is useful if you ever want to get a mortgage and buy a house. 3. The legal protections in the event of fraud are much stronger with credit cards than debit cards. 4. You can often get various rewards for spending on a credit card that you would not get with a debit card or cash.
The chip machines shift the liability to whoever is least secure - if your bank still gave you a swipe card and the retailer can take chip, the liability shifts to the bank
What i've always wondered is what happens if a criminal clones a chip card onto a magstripe only card.
Is there some mechanism to warn the merchant in this case or does the merchant get screwed for doing a magstripe transaction on a clone of a chipped card?
that normally implies something has been arbitrarily disabled.
Linux distros on the Pi have their issues, lack of a fully functional and properly integrated 3D graphics driver being the big one. Anholt is working on one but my understanding is that it's still very much in beta. This limits the ability to use the latest fancy desktops but classic desktops like LXDE, XFCE and Mate work fine.
OTOH Windows on the Pi will only run a single app at a time and that app has to be a "universal windows app" rather than a regular desktop app.
Prior to the Pi MS had a version of windows with a working desktop on other ARM hardware but they refused to allow third party Desktop apps to run. This was clearly an arbitary limitation. I belive that the limitations of windows on the Pi are equally artificial.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really need to watch a youtube video demo or will browsing regular webpages do? do you really need a video call or will voice/text do? Does it really need to be done right now or can it wait until I get back to somewhere with a fixed line? do you really need to watch cat videos to entertain yourself or could you play a game with minimal data usage instead?
That is the kind of question that people on limited mobile plans will be asking themselves, and in many cases the answer will be that they don't need to use large volumes of expensive mobile data.
Sure some people will be too rich to care, but I expect those people are a small minority.
You have one choice for a sensible ISP in England in the form of BT, and they haven't really invested in anything beyond basic ADSL. 1MBit down is probably all you'll get for the most part.
It sounds like you have read the rants from people living in poorly served rural areas and taken them as representive of the country as a whole.
Most people have a choice of ISPs as BT was forced to open up their access networks to comptitors at a variety of levels. As far as access speeds go BT and their compeitors have been pushing out newer versions of ADSL and BT openreach have also been doing a major rollout of FTTC with VDSL for the final connection to the customer.
Yes there are still "not-spots" where the service sucks for various reasons. Not all cabinets have FTTC, some people are too far from the cabinet for FTTC to work, some phone exchanges are still on 20CN which limits ADSL speeds and leads to high costs for ISPs.
Cable is arround too. Where it is available it offers better downstream speeds than openreach FTTC but worse upstream speeds. Unfortunately the regulator hasn't forced Virgin Media (the result of a string of cableco mergers) to open up their network to competition so if you want to use a cable connection then you have to use Virgina Media as your ISP.
I'm guessing more "not a student or parent"
Between smartphones and PCs most people even in engineering have little need for standalone calculators nowadays. The exception is students at school/college/university. Most exams allow some form of calculator (how advanced varies) while forbidding smartphones, pdas, tablets, laptops etc. If you want to do well in those exams then unless you are a mental arithmetic wizard you need to buy and get familiar with a calculator that is accepted by the exam rules.
The playstation 2 was released in Japan in March 2000, North America in October and Europe in November
The gamecube was released in Japan in September 2001, North america is November and Europe in May 2002.
The xbox was released in North america In November 2001, Japan in Febuary 2002 and Europe in March 2002.
So the playstation 2 had a year or more of head start over the Xbox and Gamecube.
The problem is they don't just build up a reasonable financial cusion and then stop begging.
Instead they use that financial cusion as an excuse to expand the operation, way beyond what is actually needed to run the site. Pretty soon they are running short on cash again and have to intensify the begging campaign even more.
A sensible encryption setup for a camera would use asymetric crypto. So recording stuff would only require the public key, the private key could remain safely at home.
Uber is just taxi over-the-internet and traditional taxi drivers have these rights.
The self-employed do not have those rights because there is no employer, only customers and suppliers.
Of course employers would love to do an end-run arround employment law by claiming the people who work for them are self-employed. So the legal system has to make a determination of whether someone is truely self-employed or not.
Many taxi drivers in the UK are self-employed. Hackney carriage drivers can operate entirely independently if they want though many of them sign up with an operator to get extra jobs. Private hire drivers can only take jobs that are pre-booked through an operator but there is nothing stopping a driver registering as their own operator and taking bookings on their cellphone (with handsfree kit of course). Even when there is an operator they usually only act as an agency passing out jobs. Occasionally a job is paid-for through the operator but usually the customer pays the driver directly.
Basically this case seems to come down to uber exerting a level of control over the drivers far greater than what traditional taxi operators do and as-such pushing it over the boundry from a service providing jobs to indepdent drivers to an employer of drivers.
Undersea cables are an expensive long term project. It takes years to go from concept to surveys to permits to installation and finally to actually selling services over the line, and that's assuming a friendly political enironment. If politicans are obstructive it can take even longer or stall indefinately.
Local CDN nodes on the other hand are relatively cheap and quick to deploy
Fundamentally inflation happens when the money supply in circulation grows faster than the economy, deflation happens when the money supply grows slower than the economy.
Fractional reserve banking increases the effective money supply. A proportion of customers deposits are kept as central bank money in reserve. The rest is loaned or invested. The result is that the total customer deposits (which as far as the customer is concerned are effectively money) is greater than the totl ammount of "central bank money" in the system.
In our current system governments/central banks can control the effective money supply in a couple of ways. They can put in place minimum reserve requirements on banks and they can control the ammount of "central bank money" money in circulation.
For fractional reserve banking to work customers must have high confidence in the safety of the banking system. This is ensured through a cobination of government-backed "insurance" schemes and stract regulations on bank investment practices.
So what about bitcoin. The rules for the supply of real bitcoins (analogous to central bank money) are largely fixed. Afaict there is currently no significant fractional reserve bitcoin banking going on. So the inflation and deflation is largely tied to the size of the bitcoin economy and the proportion of bitcoin that is hoarded by speculators rather than circulatin in the bitcoin economy.
A successful introduction of fractional reseve banking would cause a sudden increase in the effective money suppy and with it a burst of inflation.
So the question is would fractionl reserve bitcoin banking be successful? My bet is NO.
The problem is how is the fractional reserve bitcoin bank going to invest the money that they aren't keeping in reserve. There are two options I see both bad.
1. They could make bitcoin denominated loans. However given bitcoins's overall deflationary tendancies and massive volatility only an idiot would take out such a loan.
2. They could invest in something non-bitcoin denominated but then the bank is taking on the risk from bitcoins deflation and volatility.
Either way I expect any fractional reserve bitcoin bank to find themselves bankrupt fairly quickly.
Stopping production of pennies won't stop lazy customers taking them out of circuation. So without a supply of new coins coming into circulation shopkeepers will quickly run out.
People expect to be able to go into a shop, pay for something and be given change. So the shop owners will be forced to come up with a new policy on how they give change in the absense of any supply of pennies.
It's not just VPSs. A project I cofounded used a dedicated server running Debian from dreamhost (chosen because it was cheap and came with unlimited bandwidth). In setting the server up we removed apache and installed nginx.
Doing so broke the boot process!
IIRC Dreamhost support managed to find a way to manually boot the box but couldn't help with actually fixing it and then we found a way to hack up their scripts so it would boot by itself again.
The amazon term is "stickerless comingled inventory". Sellers can choose to have their products commingled with that of other sellers and that of amazon itself. From the sellers side this saves having to label up the products with seller information. From amazon's side this presumablly makes logistics more efficient.
Which works great until you have unscrupulous sellers introducing substandard (fake, damaged, not new, not the correct model etc) into the supply chain. Customers can order from a reputable seller or amazon themselves and yet end up getting stock from the unscrupulous seller.
Some product categories are excluded from stickerless comingled inventory and amazon claims to track where the products actually came from, but apparently this is not enough to keep the problem under control.
Worse than that amazon operates commingled inventory. With commingled inventory the seller you select is simply the one who gets your money, not nessacerally the one who supplied the product.
In general for products with high counterfieting risk I would advise avoiding amazon completely.
All this does is provide an excuse to throttle "less important traffic", i.e. any website that doesn't pay greedy ISPs for higher priority.
The already existing prioritisation features are more than enough to do that.
In that case, they need their own dedicated network. The public internet cannot guarantee a packet gets from Point A to Point B, let alone gets there in a specified time.
I would agree that you won't be able to run such services over the "public internet".
The point AIUI is to allow you to build one network over which all your traffic flows while maintining deterministic bandwidth/latency/jitter for those applications that need it.
Modern Ethernet is really Ethernet in name only.
The multipoint coaxial segments are gone, replaced by point to point twisted pair. CSMA/CD is pretty much gone*. replaced by switching. The simple wire-level "manchester encoding" is pretty much gone repalced by a highly complex multilevel encodings with echo cancellation
All that is really left is the frame formats and the addressing scheme.
Just because a design descision made sense at a particular time and in a particular context does not mean it will make sense for all time and in all contexts.
* By pretty much gone, I mean that the hardware still supports it, but it's only used when connecting to legacy equipment.
The pro-brexit side didn't "decide to put the question to the people" (though once the descision was made to put it to the people they did put out propaganda painting an unrealistically rosy view of brexit).
Anti-EU sentiment in the UK had been rising. Cameron and his cronies (pro remain) offered the refferendum to pacify both Euroskeptics in his own party and voters who might otherwise vote for UKIP. Unfortunately for them (and IMO for the UK as a whole) they didn't get the result they wanted. Cameron then resigned leaving the rest of the tory party to pick up the peices.
However after an agreement is reached there should be another vote.
AIUI the problem is that once article 50 is invoked the clock starts ticking on our (the UKs) EU membership. If the clock runs out we get a hard exit
The only way to stop that clock is to make an agreement with the rest of the EU. It's not at all clear if they would offer us "remain a member on your current terms".
Well, that's nice, but this Article is about the UK leaving the EU, so UK legislation is really the only legislation of relevance.
Surely EU legislation is important too.
What exactly happens if Teresa says "fuck you" to the british courts and sends the article 50 notification anyway? can the EU accept it and begin the process of kicking the UK out of the EU?
I seem to remember Americans getting rather heated about taxation without representation at one time.
And yet the USA still has plenty of taxation without representation.
But for the most part you pay those "slightly inflated prices" whatever payment method you use.
Indeed with the right credit cards you can get some of those transaction fees back in the form of "rewards".
As a brit I can see a few reasons to use credit cards.
1. If you need to borrow money short-term they are the cheapest option. You get about a month interest-free by default and you can get far longer if you have a good credit rating and are prepared to apply for a new card.
2. Regularly using and paying off a credit card builds your credit rating which is useful if you ever want to get a mortgage and buy a house.
3. The legal protections in the event of fraud are much stronger with credit cards than debit cards.
4. You can often get various rewards for spending on a credit card that you would not get with a debit card or cash.
AIUI blot cutters tend to be something of an all or thing thing. With cheap locks they are the quickest method but high end locks can resist them.
Grinders are slower but will work their way through almost anything if you have the patience.
It seems to vary a lot. Some benchmarks it's as high as 70% while other it's as low as 23%
http://www.anandtech.com/bench...
The chip machines shift the liability to whoever is least secure - if your bank still gave you a swipe card and the retailer can take chip, the liability shifts to the bank
What i've always wondered is what happens if a criminal clones a chip card onto a magstripe only card.
Is there some mechanism to warn the merchant in this case or does the merchant get screwed for doing a magstripe transaction on a clone of a chipped card?
that normally implies something has been arbitrarily disabled.
Linux distros on the Pi have their issues, lack of a fully functional and properly integrated 3D graphics driver being the big one. Anholt is working on one but my understanding is that it's still very much in beta. This limits the ability to use the latest fancy desktops but classic desktops like LXDE, XFCE and Mate work fine.
OTOH Windows on the Pi will only run a single app at a time and that app has to be a "universal windows app" rather than a regular desktop app.
Prior to the Pi MS had a version of windows with a working desktop on other ARM hardware but they refused to allow third party Desktop apps to run. This was clearly an arbitary limitation. I belive that the limitations of windows on the Pi are equally artificial.