I wish I could remember enough details to do a proper search for a proper citation but I recall seeing on TV something about an airplane crash because the pilots ignored one too many warnings.
As was the case with AF447. Pilots turned off the stall alarm.
This is why "autopilot" is a really shitty name and should be changed immediately to "something" assist (I'd suggest Lazy c*nt mode, but that'd never make it past the censors). Autopilot isn't a safety feature, it's just something to make the job easier. Autopilot is analogous to traditional cruise control, it's supposed to keep the aircraft level and on course. Pilots still monitor it like crazy and are ready to take over because even an Airbus will just throw control back at the pilots if it encounters a situation it cant handle. Autopilot will do nothing to avoid an accident, it can even be programmed to have an accident as in Germanwings Flight 9525.
The Tesla driver pushed the limits like those hotdog pilots and suffered the same fate.
.
I have to disagree here. For the analogy to be accurate the Telsa attendant (he wasn't a driver, so I cant call him that) would need to have hacked the system to drive dangerously, in this case he set it to drive normally and then ignored it and all the warnings. He wasn't being a daredevil, he was lazy and careless and this is going to become more common as these systems encourage laziness and carelessness.
1) The driver was responsible for the accident because he didn't maintain control
2) Tesla Autopilot was not good enough on its own to prevent the car from driving into the truck.
The inferences we can make here is that:
1) The driver was not paying attention.
2) "Autonomous" cars are not good enough to have a driver that is not paying attention.
The legal precedent that we have here is that the driver is still liable for an accident even if the car was driving itself. For anyone with a working knowledge of the road rules/highway code, this result is not unexpected. I would expect that this will remain the case for some time. Sadly, for those who have no idea about the technology involved, fully autonomous cars where you can watch movies and talk on the phone will not be coming in 2019... probably not even in 2029. Steering wheel attendants will still be required to attend the steering wheel.
Now aforementioned steering wheel attendants may not think much of this, but it matters when they're ignoring the "autopilot" and it hits someone elses car at 20-30 MPH. This means you're still liable for accident even though the car did it. It doesn't matter if the vehicle was in autonomous mode or not, you are expected to be in control of the vehicle at all times. So expect a huge increase in your insurance.
For drivers this is Good News(JM) as in James May, it means that human controlled cars aren't going anywhere.
Paying and 'service' in the US is the thing I hated. The service in the restaurants (not fast food or food chains) was not better than I would get in Europe. If anything, I would say that it was a little bit worse. The reason is that when I am asked if I want a desert and say no, I would still be able to sit, empty the bottle of wine, order a coffee and cognac and enjoy the evening.
Getting good service in Europe and Australia means you have to be nice to service people. I rarely get bad service here in the UK, then again I'm nice, polite and treat others with the respect I would want in return. The person serving me is in the same position in society as me. Tipping promotes inequality between purchasers (haves) and staff (have nots). Whenever this kind of inequality exists, it cultivates arseholes.
Be rude and arrogant to the nice Dutchperson serving you and you'll get a curt reply back, OK the Dutch are fastidiously polite so lets try that again, be rude and arrogant to the English serving you and you'll be told to jog off, be polite and kind with the English person serving you and you'll experience good service. In the US, you can be rude and arrogant to staff and it makes no difference because they're dependent on tips. Arseholes under a non-tipping system either never get good service or learn to be civil.
Everyone hates tipping because in North American culture, we're at the point where it's considered obligatory not optional. One of the nice things about travelling to Japan or Australia is that no one expects to be tipped.
Yes, we pay our workers a wage that can be lived on. Sure it's not a life of luxury, but you aren't dependent on handouts either.
The core value of metric is not just the decimal calculations, but that the units for different measures, such as weight and volume, fit together in an easily comprehensible way. No more medieval mess of fluid ounces, cups, pints and gallons.
This, 1L of water is 1 cubic metre and weighs 1 KG.
Along with being easily convertible, its also designed to be scale-able. 1000 mm in a metre, 1000 metres in a kilometre. Need more granularity you've got centimetres, decimetres, gigametres, nanometres. No dealing with 3 and 2/5 inches, in metric you can measure at the scale and granularity you need.
I assume everyone who travels a lot knows this. Eat food at the time you want to be waking up in the new timezone. Your body get's a clue and goes along with it. That's why a fry up in LHR at 7.00am GMT after flying from the USA is ideal.
I've never considered food to be part of the equation... but something to try out on my next big flight. Then again, I've never been fastidious about keeping to correct meal times, I usually just eat when hungry.
For me, beating jet lag is easy. The easiest way to adjust your circadian rhythm is to stay up to a normal bed time at your destination, any time past 8pm local time is good. Sometimes this means forcing yourself to stay awake. I always try to get flights that arrive in the late afternoon/evening of my destination because I've never been able to sleep on planes. Getting into LHR at 7:00 am is terrible for me, however 15:30 means I get home around 18:30, dinner, shower and relax until I'm ready to sleep.
First time I came to London from Perth, Western Australia I arrived at my lodgings at 19:00, went to sleep sometime around 20:30, woke up at 07:00, but completely adjusted to my new time zone.
Also, exposure to sunlight helps adjust your circadian rhythm.
If someone is happy to do night shift or graveyard shift, don't keep switching it around every 2-3 weeks with the inevitable disruption.
I still haven't heard anyone explain _why_ workplaces want to keep regularly changing everyones shifts.
It takes me up to a week to get used to a new sleep schedule, so my body would be screwed up for 2 weeks every month if I had to do changing shifts.
I work in an almost 24/7 operation. The reason we swap shifts around is because we have lives, families, girlfriends/wives. Not all of us want to work nights every single week. Distributing it makes the system fairer so someone isn't stuck with the crappy shifts for weeks or months on end. Also, most people can easily adjust their sleep cycles, for me, I can do it in a day if need be.
The money for doing shift work is also quite good.
I look forward to the day when my Ford Focus can only be serviced by Ford technicians, and I can only use Ford Certified (TM) tires on my wheels to ensure "optimum user experience."
I believe the auto industry already tried this and got smacked down hard for it.
If Ford took the attitude of Apple in repairability, if you blew a tyre you'd need to remove the entire drive train to replace it and Fords recommendation would be to buy a new Ford. I've never understood the mindset of Apple fans when they'll accept that kind of treatment for a brand name.
If you want to find out how much of an anti-Apple bias this site has, just make a post that is only slightly critical of Apple and see how long it takes for that to get modded into oblivion.
Take a look at your tax statement this year (you do pay tax in the UK, right?). It will have a breakdown of the amount that you're paying into the EU.
For those too lazy or scared to look the numbers up, the amount the UK is scheduled to pay is £17 billion, However we have an instant rebate of £4 billion, reducing the invoiced total to £13 billion. Over £4 billion of that comes back to the UK in the form of EU spending (mostly on the poorer regions of the UK and NI) so the balance is actually £8.6 billion.
This may sound like a lot, but realistically this is a tiny amount of the £730 billion collected by HMRC,
The NHS costs £116 billion in comparison, state pensions are £74 billion. What we pay to the EU is a drop in the bucket, what we'll lose by leaving the EU is a good portion of 44% of the UK's trade. If the HMRC's receipts go down by 10% (which is a very optimistic projection, realistically we're looking at losing more than 10%) that's £74 billion, that is a deficit of at least £61 billion not taking into account the cost of replacing the EU's spending in the UK.
However Brexit will never come to pass because the EU will never give us free access to the single market and the UK knows it's economic suicide to leave the single market. Right now, everyone is just looking for a way out that saves face. I know 3 people who voted leave, 2 have changed their minds having seen what has happened to the UK economy, the 3rd is almost quite literally a Nazi (seriously, he opposes the human rights accord, I understand conservatism, but he's a proper right wing nut job).
The UK isn't out of the EU yet. It will most likely remain a member for about two more years.
And likely never will be. In the recent election, the only parties still campaigning for a hard Brexit got 0 seats. T-May and the Conservatives shrewdly changed tack from hard to soft Brexit half way thought the campaign, this cost them a few votes from the extreme right, but it gave them a lot more votes from the moderate right. In retrospect, the backflip paid off for them and is probably the only reason they still have enough numbers to form a government.
Europe will never offer us a good deal on Brexit, So everyone is just looking for a graceful way out that saves face.
"Discrimination" is a normal word, mean roughly to choose according to some criteria.
What the GP clearly meant was "illegal discrimination" and pretending otherwise just demonstrates that you don't have the necessary IQ to have discussion about it.
Yet, but it sure seems to be where we're headed. How long till it's a hate crime to refuse sex when you discover that woman you've been dating has a penis?
That has and only ever will exist in the minds of extremist right wing nut jobs trying to draw false equivalence because they don't understand the subject, but want to oppose it anyway (well until someone picks on them, then they want that person silenced because RWNJ's can never stand up to criticism).
The rules imposed by the progressives won't make logical sense
The problem is, what you think are progressives are just a figment of your imagination. You fail to grasp the basics of the proposed rules and think that they all about eliminating your freedom to be an arsehole (and have everyone silently agree with you whilst being an arsehole).
Media corporations in Australia have inflicted The Wiggles on the rest of the world.
Because of this they owe the world untold Trillions of dollars in damages, copyright infringement is a small, civil, crime compared to the Wiggles.
That was retaliation for Sesame Street. YOU fired first.
As for the original article... I defy anyone to point out a television show produced by Channel Ten (originally Channel Zero, btw) that anyone would go to the trouble of pirating.
CH10 aren't complaining about the crap shows they produce being pirated, no-one in their right mind wants to watch Masterchef, the Project or whatever crap they're pedalling. That's the crap that's making money.
CH10 are complaining that they signed a rubbish deal for international films that aren't paying for themselves like they did before the internet was a thing. Of course coming from the (un)Australian, they've got a "piracy is the root of all evil" slant instead of telling us CH10's execs signed a crap deal because Newscorp and Foxtel are both owned by Murdoch and Murdoch needs the government to protect his business model.
Amazon's no checkout will be stopped by liquor laws unless they have an person on staff to check id's also city's / states may try to pass laws like the ones that say you can't pump your own gas just to keep people working.
They'll just do what they did here in the UK, have one person to check ID's at 20 self service checkouts. The checkout detects any item that requires verification and wont complete the sale until a staff member clears it.
Thats why I go through a manned checkout when buying my booze. Also £1.80 for a bottle of ale, highway bloody robbery.
1. A headline is usually in the present tense: "USPTO Grants Patent to Amazon".
2. When the agent is obvious, such as only USPTO that ever grants patents, the sentence is flipped to passive voice: "Amazon Is Granted a Patent".
3. It's common to drop "is" and "are" from a passive main clause: "Amazon Granted a Patent".
And other such butcherings of the queens English.
The headline has words errantly cut out of it, but then you given an explanation in the present tense when this is describing an event that has already occurred, so it should be in the past tense. The headline should have used the past participle "Amazon was granted a patent". Without the word "was", the meaning of the sentence becomes obscure and it can easily be misconstrued as "Amazon has granted a patent" which as the GP was complaining about as Amazon cannot grant patents.
Passive voice should be avoided as it adds unnecessary confusion to the point you're trying to get across, important verbs should not be left out of sentences. The same needs to be said about determiners (the, my, their).
But I digress as this is Slashdot and as always endeavours never to meet a minimum standard of grammar.
Australia's refusal to let their citizens buy/watch foreign films has cost them billions of dollars.
Hey, you gotta point out both sides of the problem.
Ex-Australian here. The problem is twofold.
1. American companies treat Australia like the recycling bin, old crap goes in and not a second thought is given. We regularly get things months if not years after other countries and are then expected to pay a premium for it. We got sick of it and then figured out ways to get around it such as grey importing and piracy. Aussies are actually a rather smart bunch (well some of us). So by the time these movies are shown on TV, everyone's already seen them.
2. Chanel 10 (CH10) is stuck in the 80's way of thinking before we had the internet with all the pirate bays, netflixes and VPN's. They signed a deal thinking the good times would never end.
The problem is, CH10's money spinners are crappy reality TV shows that have so much fake, overhyped drama that the E! network is openly jealous. People are moving on from these as well because its more of the same crap. Their other money spinner was The Simpsons, which is now on pay TV.
Also it should be noted that the article appears in The Australian, which is ironically the most unAustralian publication you can find. The Australian is owned by Newscorp who's been waging their own war against piracy because Foxtel (cable TV) has been steadily losing customers as well. So I wouldn't just take what you read in The Australian with a grain of salt, but a shot of tequila and slice of lime as well.
"Piracy is a much bigger channel and an illicit economy than the three main commercial networks combined."
And your dumbass got in bed with those commercial networks anyway. How much more are they charging you than the other countries? How much longer must you wait for content? How much are they holding back? Did they offer you a higher price to get it sooner? Are they force-feeding you their commercials as part of the deal?
Pirates refused the bullshit terms. You did not. Now cry.
Chump.
Pirates didn't refuse the bullshit terms. People did, now they're just labelled as pirates because they don't want to sit through 60 minutes of annoying ads to watch a 90 minute piece of dross that was released 6 to 12 months ago. People are no longer beholden to networks that treat them like a product, times change, change with them or get left behind.
That might be the nice reason they gave but the real reason why they changed hotmail is because of the god awful poor reputation it had by 2005 for spam. Its the same reason why they changed the name of internet explorer and they dont advertise the microsoft brand name prominantly on their xbox console and console boxes. Even their email program (outlook express) has gone through a dozen odd name changes because of its poor reputation.
Hence I said "one of the reasons". Also, Live.com didn't have the same problem, that was a marketing "harmonisation".
The Romans had all the technology to make guns. But they didn't, because they lacked the requisite mindset to make black powder and bronze gun barrels.
That is a bad analogy. A better analogy would be that the Romans knew how to make black powder but didn't know how to make gun barrels. Of course the Romans had no idea how to make black powder and kind of had early gun barrels in their balistas.
However that's incorrect because we lacked the technologies to make phones portable until the 1980's. We couldn't develop an integrates circuit efficient enough to use a portable battery until the 80's where Motorola released the DynaTAC. That was still a huge beast which offered an amazing 10 hours of standby time and a whopping 30 minutes of talk time, it wasn't until the Lithium-Ion battery came around in the 90's before the modern mobile phone took shape.
Without modern miniaturization, spread-spectrum, and modern data compression, it would have been for an elite. We are lucky it wasn't rolled out in the 40's because it would have been a nickel-plated vacuum tube thing, and allocated to high-payers before the technology to allocate it widely existed.
This, the first integrated circuit (IC) was not commercially available until 1959... and then the only customers were military. But batteries were the main problem, the first lithium-Ion battery was not commercially released until 1991. Before then we would have had to use NiCad or lead acid batteries which are F-ing heavy. A 1970's era mobile phone would have been as big as a AN/PRC 77 Radio Set (Vietnam era man portable radio), that had an IC in it but it weighed 6.2 KG, most of the size and weight were batteries.
Car phones were around since 1946, but these were radio based which limited their capacity (so only for the elite). The first cellular ones appeared in 1971. They were only installed in cars because of their size and weight, however because the network could handle greater capacity, every business prick rich enough could have one in his Merc.
The Immaculate Conception actually refers to Mary, not Jesus. The belief goes that Mary was absolved of 'original sin' by God so that later when she bore Jesus she would have a clean soul. This belief started in the 12th century and became official Catholic doctrine in 1854. The belief that Mary was a virgin when she became pregnant is the Doctrine of Incarnation.
In actual fact, Mary got knocked up by Amnon down the street after too much mead at the tavern and couldn't think of a better story to tell Joseph.
You might want to check that.
CDMA lost the GSM vs CDMA war because very few places outside of the US use CDMA in any meaningful measure, most of those networks are being shut down. CDMA may have beaten GSM's UTMS to market, but the overwhelming majority of telco's still chose GSM. Even those who used CDMA eventually switched over to GSM because maintaining a different technology to most of the market was costing them money and customers.
And CDMA has no current generation technology, Qualcomm decided not to develop it in 2009 so its essentially dead (well, pining for the fjords). Verizion, the sole reason for CDMA still existing is switching over to LTE.
The time-limited nature of TDMA is also why GSM coverage is worse in rural areas
Nope, that was due to frequency wavelengths. GSM users were typically assigned bands in the 1700-2200 MHz range, if use a lower frequency (800-900) you get better range. 1700-2200 MHz is fine for a city where you want smaller cells, but bad for rural areas where you want larger cells. When the last CDMA network was shut off in Australia, the government sold the free'd up 850 MHz band to Telstra, 850 MHz has a much larger range. Telstra deployed HSDPA+ (3.5G) on this frequency. Optus followed suit by buying up the 900 MHz band but only deployed HSDPA on it.
Had GMail since it was invite-only, and yes - Google will scan your email for advertisement, but if all you use it for is forum updates, Slashdot notifications, signing up for games etc., then what are you honestly afraid they'll find?
I know this borders on the whole "If you have nothing to hide" mentality, but seriously, it's email. If you're sending sensitive information, use a different MEDIUM, not a different PROVIDER.
I'm not worried about Google, they're the only free mail service that gives you a reasonable assurance that the data they sell is anonymised (I don't trust any mail provider not to be selling my data unless I control it). For anyone who I think is going to abuse my email, they get a hotmail address I've had since 1998. Nothing but spam or pron site password resets go there now. I have got a 4 letter hotmail address.
The biggest problem with GMail is that its nigh upon impossible to get a unique address now (one of the reasons MS changed Hotmail to Live.com then Outlook.com). If you want anything resembling your name it's going to be contorted with numbers, dashes, dots and special characters. I got my Gmail account in 2005, so I've got (firstinital)(lastname)@gmail.com but I'll never get anything like that now even with my rare surname.
If you want something that's not Frank.Avelone1987-2_b52-no-really-its-Frank@gmail.com or to keep an iron-fisted, paranoid control over your data, you need to run your own mail server.
That being said, I'm surprised people are still using Yahoo! for anything that matters. The last Y! hold out I knew gave up in 2009 and just started using Gmail. Even then he struggled to get his very uncommon name @gmail.com.
We had an EU friendly phone plan.
We drove to Andorra...great skiing, good food, nice hospitality.
There was a thief in the Mountains, who waylaid our travelers....Andorra Telecom. They sent a message saying that we'd used 50 euro in data (for some google maps...an hour's drive maybe). We turned off data. Then, they shut off our phone for a 250 euro data charge, which had magically run up in that 45 minutes before the 50 euro shutoff message.
Andorra Telecom put a black eye on an otherwise interesting place-they are a robber in the hills...so . F@!K Andorra Telecom.
Well... Andora isn't in the EU, same as Switzerland but unlike Switzerland, they use the Euro because they've never had their own currency (prior to the Euro they used French and Spanish money). You should have checked that out before leaving.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I could remember enough details to do a proper search for a proper citation but I recall seeing on TV something about an airplane crash because the pilots ignored one too many warnings.
As was the case with AF447. Pilots turned off the stall alarm.
This is why "autopilot" is a really shitty name and should be changed immediately to "something" assist (I'd suggest Lazy c*nt mode, but that'd never make it past the censors). Autopilot isn't a safety feature, it's just something to make the job easier. Autopilot is analogous to traditional cruise control, it's supposed to keep the aircraft level and on course. Pilots still monitor it like crazy and are ready to take over because even an Airbus will just throw control back at the pilots if it encounters a situation it cant handle. Autopilot will do nothing to avoid an accident, it can even be programmed to have an accident as in Germanwings Flight 9525.
The Tesla driver pushed the limits like those hotdog pilots and suffered the same fate.
. I have to disagree here. For the analogy to be accurate the Telsa attendant (he wasn't a driver, so I cant call him that) would need to have hacked the system to drive dangerously, in this case he set it to drive normally and then ignored it and all the warnings. He wasn't being a daredevil, he was lazy and careless and this is going to become more common as these systems encourage laziness and carelessness.
What we know from this incident;
1) The driver was responsible for the accident because he didn't maintain control
2) Tesla Autopilot was not good enough on its own to prevent the car from driving into the truck.
The inferences we can make here is that:
1) The driver was not paying attention.
2) "Autonomous" cars are not good enough to have a driver that is not paying attention.
The legal precedent that we have here is that the driver is still liable for an accident even if the car was driving itself. For anyone with a working knowledge of the road rules/highway code, this result is not unexpected. I would expect that this will remain the case for some time. Sadly, for those who have no idea about the technology involved, fully autonomous cars where you can watch movies and talk on the phone will not be coming in 2019... probably not even in 2029. Steering wheel attendants will still be required to attend the steering wheel.
Now aforementioned steering wheel attendants may not think much of this, but it matters when they're ignoring the "autopilot" and it hits someone elses car at 20-30 MPH. This means you're still liable for accident even though the car did it. It doesn't matter if the vehicle was in autonomous mode or not, you are expected to be in control of the vehicle at all times. So expect a huge increase in your insurance.
For drivers this is Good News(JM) as in James May, it means that human controlled cars aren't going anywhere.
Paying and 'service' in the US is the thing I hated. The service in the restaurants (not fast food or food chains) was not better than I would get in Europe. If anything, I would say that it was a little bit worse. The reason is that when I am asked if I want a desert and say no, I would still be able to sit, empty the bottle of wine, order a coffee and cognac and enjoy the evening.
Getting good service in Europe and Australia means you have to be nice to service people. I rarely get bad service here in the UK, then again I'm nice, polite and treat others with the respect I would want in return. The person serving me is in the same position in society as me. Tipping promotes inequality between purchasers (haves) and staff (have nots). Whenever this kind of inequality exists, it cultivates arseholes.
Be rude and arrogant to the nice Dutchperson serving you and you'll get a curt reply back, OK the Dutch are fastidiously polite so lets try that again, be rude and arrogant to the English serving you and you'll be told to jog off, be polite and kind with the English person serving you and you'll experience good service. In the US, you can be rude and arrogant to staff and it makes no difference because they're dependent on tips. Arseholes under a non-tipping system either never get good service or learn to be civil.
Everyone hates tipping because in North American culture, we're at the point where it's considered obligatory not optional. One of the nice things about travelling to Japan or Australia is that no one expects to be tipped.
Yes, we pay our workers a wage that can be lived on. Sure it's not a life of luxury, but you aren't dependent on handouts either.
The core value of metric is not just the decimal calculations, but that the units for different measures, such as weight and volume, fit together in an easily comprehensible way. No more medieval mess of fluid ounces, cups, pints and gallons.
This, 1L of water is 1 cubic metre and weighs 1 KG.
Along with being easily convertible, its also designed to be scale-able. 1000 mm in a metre, 1000 metres in a kilometre. Need more granularity you've got centimetres, decimetres, gigametres, nanometres. No dealing with 3 and 2/5 inches, in metric you can measure at the scale and granularity you need.
I assume everyone who travels a lot knows this. Eat food at the time you want to be waking up in the new timezone. Your body get's a clue and goes along with it. That's why a fry up in LHR at 7.00am GMT after flying from the USA is ideal.
I've never considered food to be part of the equation... but something to try out on my next big flight. Then again, I've never been fastidious about keeping to correct meal times, I usually just eat when hungry.
For me, beating jet lag is easy. The easiest way to adjust your circadian rhythm is to stay up to a normal bed time at your destination, any time past 8pm local time is good. Sometimes this means forcing yourself to stay awake. I always try to get flights that arrive in the late afternoon/evening of my destination because I've never been able to sleep on planes. Getting into LHR at 7:00 am is terrible for me, however 15:30 means I get home around 18:30, dinner, shower and relax until I'm ready to sleep.
First time I came to London from Perth, Western Australia I arrived at my lodgings at 19:00, went to sleep sometime around 20:30, woke up at 07:00, but completely adjusted to my new time zone.
Also, exposure to sunlight helps adjust your circadian rhythm.
If someone is happy to do night shift or graveyard shift, don't keep switching it around every 2-3 weeks with the inevitable disruption.
I still haven't heard anyone explain _why_ workplaces want to keep regularly changing everyones shifts.
It takes me up to a week to get used to a new sleep schedule, so my body would be screwed up for 2 weeks every month if I had to do changing shifts.
I work in an almost 24/7 operation. The reason we swap shifts around is because we have lives, families, girlfriends/wives. Not all of us want to work nights every single week. Distributing it makes the system fairer so someone isn't stuck with the crappy shifts for weeks or months on end. Also, most people can easily adjust their sleep cycles, for me, I can do it in a day if need be.
The money for doing shift work is also quite good.
I look forward to the day when my Ford Focus can only be serviced by Ford technicians, and I can only use Ford Certified (TM) tires on my wheels to ensure "optimum user experience."
I believe the auto industry already tried this and got smacked down hard for it.
If Ford took the attitude of Apple in repairability, if you blew a tyre you'd need to remove the entire drive train to replace it and Fords recommendation would be to buy a new Ford. I've never understood the mindset of Apple fans when they'll accept that kind of treatment for a brand name.
There is a definite anti-Apple bias on this site.
You must be new here.
If you want to find out how much of an anti-Apple bias this site has, just make a post that is only slightly critical of Apple and see how long it takes for that to get modded into oblivion.
Take a look at your tax statement this year (you do pay tax in the UK, right?). It will have a breakdown of the amount that you're paying into the EU.
For those too lazy or scared to look the numbers up, the amount the UK is scheduled to pay is £17 billion, However we have an instant rebate of £4 billion, reducing the invoiced total to £13 billion. Over £4 billion of that comes back to the UK in the form of EU spending (mostly on the poorer regions of the UK and NI) so the balance is actually £8.6 billion.
This may sound like a lot, but realistically this is a tiny amount of the £730 billion collected by HMRC,
The NHS costs £116 billion in comparison, state pensions are £74 billion. What we pay to the EU is a drop in the bucket, what we'll lose by leaving the EU is a good portion of 44% of the UK's trade. If the HMRC's receipts go down by 10% (which is a very optimistic projection, realistically we're looking at losing more than 10%) that's £74 billion, that is a deficit of at least £61 billion not taking into account the cost of replacing the EU's spending in the UK.
However Brexit will never come to pass because the EU will never give us free access to the single market and the UK knows it's economic suicide to leave the single market. Right now, everyone is just looking for a way out that saves face. I know 3 people who voted leave, 2 have changed their minds having seen what has happened to the UK economy, the 3rd is almost quite literally a Nazi (seriously, he opposes the human rights accord, I understand conservatism, but he's a proper right wing nut job).
The UK isn't out of the EU yet. It will most likely remain a member for about two more years.
And likely never will be. In the recent election, the only parties still campaigning for a hard Brexit got 0 seats. T-May and the Conservatives shrewdly changed tack from hard to soft Brexit half way thought the campaign, this cost them a few votes from the extreme right, but it gave them a lot more votes from the moderate right. In retrospect, the backflip paid off for them and is probably the only reason they still have enough numbers to form a government.
Europe will never offer us a good deal on Brexit, So everyone is just looking for a graceful way out that saves face.
What the GP clearly meant was "illegal discrimination" and pretending otherwise just demonstrates that you don't have the necessary IQ to have discussion about it.
That has and only ever will exist in the minds of extremist right wing nut jobs trying to draw false equivalence because they don't understand the subject, but want to oppose it anyway (well until someone picks on them, then they want that person silenced because RWNJ's can never stand up to criticism).
The problem is, what you think are progressives are just a figment of your imagination. You fail to grasp the basics of the proposed rules and think that they all about eliminating your freedom to be an arsehole (and have everyone silently agree with you whilst being an arsehole).
Like green energy subsidies to prevent green projects from going broke.
Need to check your facts buddy, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation was making money where as coal needed government support.
Hey, but people like you never let facts get in the way of political bullshit.
Media corporations in Australia have inflicted The Wiggles on the rest of the world.
Because of this they owe the world untold Trillions of dollars in damages, copyright infringement is a small, civil, crime compared to the Wiggles.
That was retaliation for Sesame Street. YOU fired first.
As for the original article... I defy anyone to point out a television show produced by Channel Ten (originally Channel Zero, btw) that anyone would go to the trouble of pirating.
CH10 aren't complaining about the crap shows they produce being pirated, no-one in their right mind wants to watch Masterchef, the Project or whatever crap they're pedalling. That's the crap that's making money.
CH10 are complaining that they signed a rubbish deal for international films that aren't paying for themselves like they did before the internet was a thing. Of course coming from the (un)Australian, they've got a "piracy is the root of all evil" slant instead of telling us CH10's execs signed a crap deal because Newscorp and Foxtel are both owned by Murdoch and Murdoch needs the government to protect his business model.
Amazon's no checkout will be stopped by liquor laws unless they have an person on staff to check id's also city's / states may try to pass laws like the ones that say you can't pump your own gas just to keep people working.
They'll just do what they did here in the UK, have one person to check ID's at 20 self service checkouts. The checkout detects any item that requires verification and wont complete the sale until a staff member clears it.
Thats why I go through a manned checkout when buying my booze. Also £1.80 for a bottle of ale, highway bloody robbery.
1. A headline is usually in the present tense: "USPTO Grants Patent to Amazon".
2. When the agent is obvious, such as only USPTO that ever grants patents, the sentence is flipped to passive voice: "Amazon Is Granted a Patent".
3. It's common to drop "is" and "are" from a passive main clause: "Amazon Granted a Patent".
And other such butcherings of the queens English.
The headline has words errantly cut out of it, but then you given an explanation in the present tense when this is describing an event that has already occurred, so it should be in the past tense. The headline should have used the past participle "Amazon was granted a patent". Without the word "was", the meaning of the sentence becomes obscure and it can easily be misconstrued as "Amazon has granted a patent" which as the GP was complaining about as Amazon cannot grant patents.
Passive voice should be avoided as it adds unnecessary confusion to the point you're trying to get across, important verbs should not be left out of sentences. The same needs to be said about determiners (the, my, their).
But I digress as this is Slashdot and as always endeavours never to meet a minimum standard of grammar.
Australia's refusal to let their citizens buy/watch foreign films has cost them billions of dollars.
Hey, you gotta point out both sides of the problem.
Ex-Australian here. The problem is twofold.
1. American companies treat Australia like the recycling bin, old crap goes in and not a second thought is given. We regularly get things months if not years after other countries and are then expected to pay a premium for it. We got sick of it and then figured out ways to get around it such as grey importing and piracy. Aussies are actually a rather smart bunch (well some of us). So by the time these movies are shown on TV, everyone's already seen them.
2. Chanel 10 (CH10) is stuck in the 80's way of thinking before we had the internet with all the pirate bays, netflixes and VPN's. They signed a deal thinking the good times would never end.
The problem is, CH10's money spinners are crappy reality TV shows that have so much fake, overhyped drama that the E! network is openly jealous. People are moving on from these as well because its more of the same crap. Their other money spinner was The Simpsons, which is now on pay TV.
Also it should be noted that the article appears in The Australian, which is ironically the most unAustralian publication you can find. The Australian is owned by Newscorp who's been waging their own war against piracy because Foxtel (cable TV) has been steadily losing customers as well. So I wouldn't just take what you read in The Australian with a grain of salt, but a shot of tequila and slice of lime as well.
"Piracy is a much bigger channel and an illicit economy than the three main commercial networks combined."
And your dumbass got in bed with those commercial networks anyway. How much more are they charging you than the other countries? How much longer must you wait for content? How much are they holding back? Did they offer you a higher price to get it sooner? Are they force-feeding you their commercials as part of the deal?
Pirates refused the bullshit terms. You did not. Now cry.
Chump.
Pirates didn't refuse the bullshit terms. People did, now they're just labelled as pirates because they don't want to sit through 60 minutes of annoying ads to watch a 90 minute piece of dross that was released 6 to 12 months ago. People are no longer beholden to networks that treat them like a product, times change, change with them or get left behind.
That might be the nice reason they gave but the real reason why they changed hotmail is because of the god awful poor reputation it had by 2005 for spam. Its the same reason why they changed the name of internet explorer and they dont advertise the microsoft brand name prominantly on their xbox console and console boxes. Even their email program (outlook express) has gone through a dozen odd name changes because of its poor reputation.
Hence I said "one of the reasons". Also, Live.com didn't have the same problem, that was a marketing "harmonisation".
The Romans had all the technology to make guns. But they didn't, because they lacked the requisite mindset to make black powder and bronze gun barrels.
That is a bad analogy. A better analogy would be that the Romans knew how to make black powder but didn't know how to make gun barrels. Of course the Romans had no idea how to make black powder and kind of had early gun barrels in their balistas.
However that's incorrect because we lacked the technologies to make phones portable until the 1980's. We couldn't develop an integrates circuit efficient enough to use a portable battery until the 80's where Motorola released the DynaTAC. That was still a huge beast which offered an amazing 10 hours of standby time and a whopping 30 minutes of talk time, it wasn't until the Lithium-Ion battery came around in the 90's before the modern mobile phone took shape.
Without modern miniaturization, spread-spectrum, and modern data compression, it would have been for an elite. We are lucky it wasn't rolled out in the 40's because it would have been a nickel-plated vacuum tube thing, and allocated to high-payers before the technology to allocate it widely existed.
This, the first integrated circuit (IC) was not commercially available until 1959... and then the only customers were military. But batteries were the main problem, the first lithium-Ion battery was not commercially released until 1991. Before then we would have had to use NiCad or lead acid batteries which are F-ing heavy. A 1970's era mobile phone would have been as big as a AN/PRC 77 Radio Set (Vietnam era man portable radio), that had an IC in it but it weighed 6.2 KG, most of the size and weight were batteries.
Car phones were around since 1946, but these were radio based which limited their capacity (so only for the elite). The first cellular ones appeared in 1971. They were only installed in cars because of their size and weight, however because the network could handle greater capacity, every business prick rich enough could have one in his Merc.
The Immaculate Conception actually refers to Mary, not Jesus. The belief goes that Mary was absolved of 'original sin' by God so that later when she bore Jesus she would have a clean soul. This belief started in the 12th century and became official Catholic doctrine in 1854. The belief that Mary was a virgin when she became pregnant is the Doctrine of Incarnation.
In actual fact, Mary got knocked up by Amnon down the street after too much mead at the tavern and couldn't think of a better story to tell Joseph.
"Immaculate conception... are you certain dear?".
You might want to check that. CDMA lost the GSM vs CDMA war because very few places outside of the US use CDMA in any meaningful measure, most of those networks are being shut down. CDMA may have beaten GSM's UTMS to market, but the overwhelming majority of telco's still chose GSM. Even those who used CDMA eventually switched over to GSM because maintaining a different technology to most of the market was costing them money and customers.
And CDMA has no current generation technology, Qualcomm decided not to develop it in 2009 so its essentially dead (well, pining for the fjords). Verizion, the sole reason for CDMA still existing is switching over to LTE.
The time-limited nature of TDMA is also why GSM coverage is worse in rural areas
Nope, that was due to frequency wavelengths. GSM users were typically assigned bands in the 1700-2200 MHz range, if use a lower frequency (800-900) you get better range. 1700-2200 MHz is fine for a city where you want smaller cells, but bad for rural areas where you want larger cells. When the last CDMA network was shut off in Australia, the government sold the free'd up 850 MHz band to Telstra, 850 MHz has a much larger range. Telstra deployed HSDPA+ (3.5G) on this frequency. Optus followed suit by buying up the 900 MHz band but only deployed HSDPA on it.
Thirded.
Had GMail since it was invite-only, and yes - Google will scan your email for advertisement, but if all you use it for is forum updates, Slashdot notifications, signing up for games etc., then what are you honestly afraid they'll find?
I know this borders on the whole "If you have nothing to hide" mentality, but seriously, it's email. If you're sending sensitive information, use a different MEDIUM, not a different PROVIDER.
I'm not worried about Google, they're the only free mail service that gives you a reasonable assurance that the data they sell is anonymised (I don't trust any mail provider not to be selling my data unless I control it). For anyone who I think is going to abuse my email, they get a hotmail address I've had since 1998. Nothing but spam or pron site password resets go there now. I have got a 4 letter hotmail address.
The biggest problem with GMail is that its nigh upon impossible to get a unique address now (one of the reasons MS changed Hotmail to Live.com then Outlook.com). If you want anything resembling your name it's going to be contorted with numbers, dashes, dots and special characters. I got my Gmail account in 2005, so I've got (firstinital)(lastname)@gmail.com but I'll never get anything like that now even with my rare surname.
If you want something that's not Frank.Avelone1987-2_b52-no-really-its-Frank@gmail.com or to keep an iron-fisted, paranoid control over your data, you need to run your own mail server.
That being said, I'm surprised people are still using Yahoo! for anything that matters. The last Y! hold out I knew gave up in 2009 and just started using Gmail. Even then he struggled to get his very uncommon name @gmail.com.
We had an EU friendly phone plan. We drove to Andorra...great skiing, good food, nice hospitality. There was a thief in the Mountains, who waylaid our travelers....Andorra Telecom. They sent a message saying that we'd used 50 euro in data (for some google maps...an hour's drive maybe). We turned off data. Then, they shut off our phone for a 250 euro data charge, which had magically run up in that 45 minutes before the 50 euro shutoff message. Andorra Telecom put a black eye on an otherwise interesting place-they are a robber in the hills...so . F@!K Andorra Telecom.
Well... Andora isn't in the EU, same as Switzerland but unlike Switzerland, they use the Euro because they've never had their own currency (prior to the Euro they used French and Spanish money). You should have checked that out before leaving.