The reason all GSM phones have it is because it's a US requirement. Having developed the feature for the US market, the easiest thing is to have it on all phones, no matter where they are sold.
I think you'll find its a European requirement. GSM originally meant "Groupe Spécial Mobile", which is a clue to its origin.
My extremely old (early 1990s) GSM phone allowed dialling the emergency number even if the keypad was locked -- either 999, the normal UK number, or 112, which works in every European country (from landlines, too) and every GSM phone.
(Though it seems the PRS doesn't care if you play only Creative Commons / Public Domain / etc music. Maybe. I won't provide a citation or link, if you care you should probably ask them.)
In 2007, PRS for Music took a Scottish car servicing company to court because the employees were allegedly "listening to the radio at work, allowing the music to be 'heard by colleagues and customers.'"
It's predicted that meat will be too expensive for most of the world's population by 2050, and some scientists have proposed that westerners should eat insects instead. See entomophagy.
I'd quite like to try some of the big insects. I've tried some tiny ones (waxworms and crickets) and found them tasteless except for the sauce they were served in.
Insects have some advantages over mammals, birds and fish. They like to live in colonies, which is good for factory farming. They're very high in protein -- sometimes as much as 70%, compared to about 15% by mass for a cow. They take a lot less energy to produce. And many humans already eat them, unlike in-vitro muscle.
What can be cheaper is doing the manufacturing somewhere cheaper. Many ready meals sold in British shops say "Made with Thai chicken" for example -- Thai labour is cheap, and if the labour is in Thailand it makes sense to use Thai chicken. So it probably depends how labour intensive the food is.
That still won't lead to chicken from several countries being mixed together. The label on the box could say "chicken from one or more of X, Y, Z", but any individual package will probably use only one source of meat.
I don't think your cost would be any less without the landline. Voice service subsidises the broadband. Virgin broadband without voice service is only very slightly (£1 or something) cheaper than with voice service -- they hope to make money from the phone calls. (I have Virgin broadband and no landline.) It's unfortunate that there is no competition for cable service, and limited availability.
When I get back from a trip somewhere and have 4GB or so of photographs to copy to the gallery on my website/server
At 100k per photo, that's 40,000 photos you are uploading to get 4GB. Instead, it sounds like you're uploading uncompressed photos in native format, which is silly. Convert them to jpeg first at reasonable sizes.
On a 16 or 18 or whatever-it-is megapixel camera, JPEG photos produced by the camera on my most recent trip averaged 4.5MB. (Raw files are 16-17MB, I don't use them very often). 4000MB is around 900 photos. Typically I delete the crap ones, so I actually uploaded about 2.6GB of photos from my 10-day trip, plus 0.5GB from a family event the next day.
The photos need to go onto the server at a decent resolution, and since it's my server they may as well serve as an on-line backup.
I didn't make the pricing clear. It's actually fairly reasonable.
I currently pay £30/month for 30Mb/s (1Mb/s up). From the same ISP: * £35/month would give me 50Mb/s (1.5Mb/s up). * £45/month would give me 100Mb/s (10Mb/s up). The connection is by coaxial cable, so the actual speed is 99% of what's advertised. I don't have landline phone service or cable TV, though the ISP offers them for additional cost.
My parents probably pay around £6 to £15 a month for the addition of "up to" 8Mb/s broadband to their landline deal. It depends when they last threatened to switch company -- there are many ADSL suppliers, and good competition between them. They actually get 7Mb/s (1Mb/s up). Since they already have a phone line from the appropriate company, upgrading to the 40Mb/s (10Mb/s up) service would cost them £28, minus whatever they're already paying (£6 to £15), so £22 to £13 per month. The £35 was the price for me, since I don't have a landline and the 40Mb/s isn't available without one.
My upgrade from 30 to 100Mb/s: £180 per year. Their upgrade from ~7 to 40Mb/s: £150 to £260 per year, depending what they're already paying.
now try complaining about "high gasoline prices" in the US.
Then try walking somewhere, and using public transport, as I did on my recent trip. People would walk up to me and ask if I was OK, or ask where I was visiting from. People who don't look poor mostly Just Don't Walk.
(I asked the hotel receptionist for directions to an art gallery, and she recommended a taxi for a 900 metre walk!)
This is a bit off-topic, but it's not the most interesting story.
If you'd like to compare how much tax you pay with how much I pay: - go to ListenToTaxMan (put a salary in £ in the gold box) - add £800 to £2500, on average, of local tax ("Council Tax"), depending how valuable your house is. - add 20% of everything you buy (VAT), although 0% on some "essentials" like many kinds of food, books. And only 5% on electricity. - if you drive, petrol here is £1.34/L. About 80p of that is tax (50p fuel cost, 5p profit).
There are other taxes, principally a local tax for businesses (which I obviously don't pay directly), but I've covered about 98% of the tax I pay in a year.
I just checked if my parents could get BT Infinity, and BT tells me their area will have the service from March 2012. They live in a village of about 3000 people, in he Midlands.
I live in London, and it will be available here from January, though I already have 30Mb/s from Virgin, and don't have time for a new 12+ month contract.
(The 10Mb/s upload would be useful for both houses. I'll get it next time I move house.)
I've thought of a way they could tempt me to upgrade: faster upload speed. When I get back from a trip somewhere and have 4GB or so of photographs to copy to the gallery on my website/server, it would be good it if would transfer at more than 1Mb/s. Upgrading to the £5 more package with my current ISP (Virgin) would raise that to 1.5Mb/s, which isn't worth it. 10Mb/s would be, which is what BT are offering. But only from December, and for £38/month, with an 18 month contract, which is too long -- I'm planning to move. But it's something to look for at my next place...
My dad would be interested too, since he likes to print some photos, and it takes ages to upload them to the photo printing website. And my brother (still lives at home) could upload his YouTube videos much faster.
All the good offers from Virgin seem to say "when taken with a Virgin phone line".
I have just 30Mb/s broadband (and nothing else), which costs £30. It's been over a year, so I bet if I phone up they'll reduce it to the current £28.50 price, but that might come with a new 12 month contract, which I don't want. 50Mb/s would cost £35/month, and I'm not sure I see the point of upgrading... what is the point? Slighly faster downloads, if the server is fast enough, but almost everything is either so fast it's essentially instant, or something to check back on in a couple/few minutes.
You can use GMail in KMail / Eudora / etc. It can be a bit clunky, but it should be good enough to delete attachments. You can even sort by size, which GMail can't do either.
You've got what I need to do backwards. I want to delete the attachment and *keep* the email so I have a complete reference for the conversation.
I used to do that using KMail (in KDE). I've just checked, and the functionality is still there: right click an attachment icon and select "Delete Attachment". The attachment is replaced with a meta-description "The attachment xxx has been deleted".
It seems Outlook can do this too (right click the attachment, "Remove"), although it doesn't leave the meta-information behind.
Say Facebook et al. won't surrender to these new regulations, for whatever reasons. So according to the proposal, these social networks would no longer be allowed to do business on the EU's internal market" which would be enforced exactly how?
Facebook Ireland, who take all the money for marketing to EU organisations, would be closed. Their datacentres in Europe would be closed.
Facebook could remain accessible throughout all this, but there'd be room for a competitor to start, and a recently vacated market greater than the USA... would Facebook risk that?
The USA has a list of countries and organisations with which it's not permitted to do business -- Cuba, etc. I don't think Europe has such a thing, but it could be done. Then it would be illegal to buy advertising or data from Facebook. (Buying personal data would be illegal anyway, if the data concerns Europeans).
And consumers generally should have the right to delete their data at any time, especially the data they post on the internet themselves.
Very interesting language. It suggests that data you haven't posted might be considered yours. I wonder how this applies to a range of gray areas social networking sites provide - such as someone posting a compromising photo of you, or even more interesting, something you've posted but someone else shared/reposted.
Under existing law, I have some rights about data that I didn't create, but which is about me. E.g. I can view it and require incorrect facts to be corrected. The data must not be shared without my consent.
It seems reasonable to decide whether (a) a photograph of me, and (b) the 'tag' identifying me in the photo, and (c) the comment about me on the photo are data about me, even though I didn't take, upload, tag or comment on the photo. Personally, I think (a) and (b) are, and (c) could be -- depending what's said, e.g. someone else's opinion about me shouldn't come under data protection laws.
32floz = 946ml of Coke in US McDonalds has 86g of sugar, so there is some ice / extra water (otherwise it would be 100g of sugar). 86g of sugar is 811ml worth of Coke in a bottle -- still twice as big as a British medium coke, and 60% bigger than a UK large.
Redoing my calculations taking the ice into account:
At McDonalds (figures from the websites): - A "large" drink in the UK is 0.5L, a "medium" about 0.4L, a "small" 0.25L (Germany has the same sizes). - A "large" drink in the US is 0.81L, a "medium" is 0.55L, a "small" 0.38L, and a "child" 0.27L.
That makes the US child size about the same as the UK small size.
I will probably root it at some point, although I've had the phone for over a year and not had any issue annoying enough to make me do it. I've had to remove apps to save space though.
From the list on Wikipedia there are a few things I use regularly. I assume there are alternative Flashlight, Camera, Calculator, Clock and Alarm apps.
But without HTC Sense, would I still see contact details (phone number & email) from Facebook when sending a text, making a call, or writing an email? That's important. Would Facebook events show in the calendar? And can I still connect to an Exchange server for mail?
(I can probably find the answers myself, but I haven't had enough motivation yet.)
Easy, you'll use the most recent version of the flash player on your Android device for the next 5 years or so while people migrate.
I won't. The "built in" Flash on my HTC Desire keeps trying to update itself to the latest version via the Android Market, which uses the last few MB of space I have for apps. The only way I've found to prevent this happening is to "Clear Data" for the Market app -- deselecting the "Update automatically" box for Flash doesn't make any difference.
This annoys me greatly. It's supposed to be my device, HTC. (I would remove Flash completely if I could. I don't ever seem to visit websites that need Flash on my phone.)
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The reason all GSM phones have it is because it's a US requirement. Having developed the feature for the US market, the easiest thing is to have it on all phones, no matter where they are sold.
I think you'll find its a European requirement. GSM originally meant "Groupe Spécial Mobile", which is a clue to its origin.
My extremely old (early 1990s) GSM phone allowed dialling the emergency number even if the keypad was locked -- either 999, the normal UK number, or 112, which works in every European country (from landlines, too) and every GSM phone.
The European law is from 1991.
(Though it seems the PRS doesn't care if you play only Creative Commons / Public Domain / etc music. Maybe. I won't provide a citation or link, if you care you should probably ask them.)
In the UK there is the PRS.
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRS_for_Music
In 2007, PRS for Music took a Scottish car servicing company to court because the employees were allegedly "listening to the radio at work, allowing the music to be 'heard by colleagues and customers.'"
It's predicted that meat will be too expensive for most of the world's population by 2050, and some scientists have proposed that westerners should eat insects instead. See entomophagy.
I'd quite like to try some of the big insects. I've tried some tiny ones (waxworms and crickets) and found them tasteless except for the sauce they were served in.
Insects have some advantages over mammals, birds and fish. They like to live in colonies, which is good for factory farming. They're very high in protein -- sometimes as much as 70%, compared to about 15% by mass for a cow. They take a lot less energy to produce. And many humans already eat them, unlike in-vitro muscle.
its soy
and no. the best meat is grassfed.
It's "soya bean" or "soya" in British English, and substituting J for Y is an easy mistake if one's first language isn't English.
The best meat is expensive, most meat is fed with grain of some kind.
What can be cheaper is doing the manufacturing somewhere cheaper. Many ready meals sold in British shops say "Made with Thai chicken" for example -- Thai labour is cheap, and if the labour is in Thailand it makes sense to use Thai chicken. So it probably depends how labour intensive the food is.
That still won't lead to chicken from several countries being mixed together. The label on the box could say "chicken from one or more of X, Y, Z", but any individual package will probably use only one source of meat.
100k-200k is plenty for the vast majority of pictures. 4.5MB is just gratuitous, especially if you're talking about vacation and family pictures.
But I don't know which one I'll want to look at / print in more detail later, so how do I decide what information (extra resolution) to delete?
So you *were* visiting from somewhere else.
Yes -- but I wasn't expecting people to be able to work that out based on my appearance and choice of inner-urban transport.
(Translation: around half a mile. A meter is a little more than a yard, so ~= 2700 feet, a little over a half a mile.)
900m is about 9 minutes brisk walk for me (100m/min).
I don't think your cost would be any less without the landline. Voice service subsidises the broadband. Virgin broadband without voice service is only very slightly (£1 or something) cheaper than with voice service -- they hope to make money from the phone calls. (I have Virgin broadband and no landline.) It's unfortunate that there is no competition for cable service, and limited availability.
When I get back from a trip somewhere and have 4GB or so of photographs to copy to the gallery on my website/server
At 100k per photo, that's 40,000 photos you are uploading to get 4GB. Instead, it sounds like you're uploading uncompressed photos in native format, which is silly. Convert them to jpeg first at reasonable sizes.
On a 16 or 18 or whatever-it-is megapixel camera, JPEG photos produced by the camera on my most recent trip averaged 4.5MB. (Raw files are 16-17MB, I don't use them very often). 4000MB is around 900 photos. Typically I delete the crap ones, so I actually uploaded about 2.6GB of photos from my 10-day trip, plus 0.5GB from a family event the next day.
The photos need to go onto the server at a decent resolution, and since it's my server they may as well serve as an on-line backup.
I didn't make the pricing clear. It's actually fairly reasonable.
I currently pay £30/month for 30Mb/s (1Mb/s up). From the same ISP:
* £35/month would give me 50Mb/s (1.5Mb/s up).
* £45/month would give me 100Mb/s (10Mb/s up).
The connection is by coaxial cable, so the actual speed is 99% of what's advertised. I don't have landline phone service or cable TV, though the ISP offers them for additional cost.
My parents probably pay around £6 to £15 a month for the addition of "up to" 8Mb/s broadband to their landline deal. It depends when they last threatened to switch company -- there are many ADSL suppliers, and good competition between them. They actually get 7Mb/s (1Mb/s up).
Since they already have a phone line from the appropriate company, upgrading to the 40Mb/s (10Mb/s up) service would cost them £28, minus whatever they're already paying (£6 to £15), so £22 to £13 per month. The £35 was the price for me, since I don't have a landline and the 40Mb/s isn't available without one.
My upgrade from 30 to 100Mb/s: £180 per year.
Their upgrade from ~7 to 40Mb/s: £150 to £260 per year, depending what they're already paying.
now try complaining about "high gasoline prices" in the US.
Then try walking somewhere, and using public transport, as I did on my recent trip. People would walk up to me and ask if I was OK, or ask where I was visiting from. People who don't look poor mostly Just Don't Walk.
(I asked the hotel receptionist for directions to an art gallery, and she recommended a taxi for a 900 metre walk!)
This is a bit off-topic, but it's not the most interesting story.
If you'd like to compare how much tax you pay with how much I pay:
- go to ListenToTaxMan (put a salary in £ in the gold box)
- add £800 to £2500, on average, of local tax ("Council Tax"), depending how valuable your house is.
- add 20% of everything you buy (VAT), although 0% on some "essentials" like many kinds of food, books. And only 5% on electricity.
- if you drive, petrol here is £1.34/L. About 80p of that is tax (50p fuel cost, 5p profit).
There are other taxes, principally a local tax for businesses (which I obviously don't pay directly), but I've covered about 98% of the tax I pay in a year.
bah .... We don't think we invented *everything* .... but we did invent the idea of not paying all your crazy repressive taxes.
Now we have have our own crazy taxes, so feel free to return the favor. ;)
That's OK, you don't make me pay your taxes.
Although, you make my dual nationality friend who lives and works in England pay your taxes, which is strange.
I just checked if my parents could get BT Infinity, and BT tells me their area will have the service from March 2012. They live in a village of about 3000 people, in he Midlands.
I live in London, and it will be available here from January, though I already have 30Mb/s from Virgin, and don't have time for a new 12+ month contract.
(The 10Mb/s upload would be useful for both houses. I'll get it next time I move house.)
I've thought of a way they could tempt me to upgrade: faster upload speed. When I get back from a trip somewhere and have 4GB or so of photographs to copy to the gallery on my website/server, it would be good it if would transfer at more than 1Mb/s. Upgrading to the £5 more package with my current ISP (Virgin) would raise that to 1.5Mb/s, which isn't worth it. 10Mb/s would be, which is what BT are offering. But only from December, and for £38/month, with an 18 month contract, which is too long -- I'm planning to move. But it's something to look for at my next place...
My dad would be interested too, since he likes to print some photos, and it takes ages to upload them to the photo printing website. And my brother (still lives at home) could upload his YouTube videos much faster.
All the good offers from Virgin seem to say "when taken with a Virgin phone line".
I have just 30Mb/s broadband (and nothing else), which costs £30. It's been over a year, so I bet if I phone up they'll reduce it to the current £28.50 price, but that might come with a new 12 month contract, which I don't want. 50Mb/s would cost £35/month, and I'm not sure I see the point of upgrading... what is the point? Slighly faster downloads, if the server is fast enough, but almost everything is either so fast it's essentially instant, or something to check back on in a couple/few minutes.
You can use GMail in KMail / Eudora / etc. It can be a bit clunky, but it should be good enough to delete attachments. You can even sort by size, which GMail can't do either.
You've got what I need to do backwards. I want to delete the attachment and *keep* the email so I have a complete reference for the conversation.
I used to do that using KMail (in KDE). I've just checked, and the functionality is still there: right click an attachment icon and select "Delete Attachment". The attachment is replaced with a meta-description "The attachment xxx has been deleted".
It seems Outlook can do this too (right click the attachment, "Remove"), although it doesn't leave the meta-information behind.
Say Facebook et al. won't surrender to these new regulations, for whatever reasons. So according to the proposal, these social networks would no longer be allowed to do business on the EU's internal market" which would be enforced exactly how?
Facebook Ireland, who take all the money for marketing to EU organisations, would be closed. Their datacentres in Europe would be closed.
Facebook could remain accessible throughout all this, but there'd be room for a competitor to start, and a recently vacated market greater than the USA... would Facebook risk that?
The USA has a list of countries and organisations with which it's not permitted to do business -- Cuba, etc. I don't think Europe has such a thing, but it could be done. Then it would be illegal to buy advertising or data from Facebook. (Buying personal data would be illegal anyway, if the data concerns Europeans).
Very interesting language. It suggests that data you haven't posted might be considered yours. I wonder how this applies to a range of gray areas social networking sites provide - such as someone posting a compromising photo of you, or even more interesting, something you've posted but someone else shared/reposted.
Under existing law, I have some rights about data that I didn't create, but which is about me. E.g. I can view it and require incorrect facts to be corrected. The data must not be shared without my consent.
It seems reasonable to decide whether (a) a photograph of me, and (b) the 'tag' identifying me in the photo, and (c) the comment about me on the photo are data about me, even though I didn't take, upload, tag or comment on the photo. Personally, I think (a) and (b) are, and (c) could be -- depending what's said, e.g. someone else's opinion about me shouldn't come under data protection laws.
Hmm...
500ml of Coke in a bottle has 53g of sugar http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/brands/coca-cola.html
500ml of Coke at UK McDonalds has 53g of sugar, so there's no ice http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/food/nutrition/nutrition-counter.mcd
(They obviously serve it with ice, but that's not considered part of the drink for the nutrition info.)
32floz = 946ml of Coke in US McDonalds has 86g of sugar, so there is some ice / extra water (otherwise it would be 100g of sugar). 86g of sugar is 811ml worth of Coke in a bottle -- still twice as big as a British medium coke, and 60% bigger than a UK large.
Redoing my calculations taking the ice into account:
At McDonalds (figures from the websites):
- A "large" drink in the UK is 0.5L, a "medium" about 0.4L, a "small" 0.25L (Germany has the same sizes).
- A "large" drink in the US is 0.81L, a "medium" is 0.55L, a "small" 0.38L, and a "child" 0.27L.
That makes the US child size about the same as the UK small size.
I will probably root it at some point, although I've had the phone for over a year and not had any issue annoying enough to make me do it. I've had to remove apps to save space though.
From the list on Wikipedia there are a few things I use regularly. I assume there are alternative Flashlight, Camera, Calculator, Clock and Alarm apps.
But without HTC Sense, would I still see contact details (phone number & email) from Facebook when sending a text, making a call, or writing an email? That's important. Would Facebook events show in the calendar? And can I still connect to an Exchange server for mail?
(I can probably find the answers myself, but I haven't had enough motivation yet.)
Move flash to the SD card. Flash on my N1 only takes up 72KB.
For some reason I don't have that option.
Easy, you'll use the most recent version of the flash player on your Android device for the next 5 years or so while people migrate.
I won't. The "built in" Flash on my HTC Desire keeps trying to update itself to the latest version via the Android Market, which uses the last few MB of space I have for apps. The only way I've found to prevent this happening is to "Clear Data" for the Market app -- deselecting the "Update automatically" box for Flash doesn't make any difference.
This annoys me greatly. It's supposed to be my device, HTC. (I would remove Flash completely if I could. I don't ever seem to visit websites that need Flash on my phone.)