Posts by Martin Torzewski 6 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2007
a) There was no longer much of a distinction between the oil in the sump and the water in the coolant circuit (a la Third Policeman) - and the engine didn't much care.
b) Cobbler's children: the vehicle was assigned to the mechanic in charge of the workshop which kept all the site's vehicles & plant functioning, and thus was the worst maintained item on the site. And I wasn't sufficiently senior to authorise replacing it . . .
Many decades ago, I had to drive a Series I while working on a road construction project
It had a cracked engine block, so before taking it out, you had to check the dipstick for the oil level. If it was low, you topped up the radiator before setting off.
Didn't know how to double declutch before stepping into it the first time; did by the time I stepped out.
The cost model (& thus arguably the revenue model) for providing Internet service is largely analogous to electricity supply.
How much data you down or up load = how much electricity you use. (Though in contrast to smart metering, you pay for up loading, rather than getting a refund!).
The capacity of the pipe to your endpoint (e.g. home) = maximum demand tariff (how large a current is capable of being delivered)
With Internet service, there is one other factor – traffic prioritisation, for e.g. streaming media (in electricity supply, it’s always real time!)
Accommodating these three factors contribute independently to the cost of provision, therefore should be charged separately. Any deviation from that should be recognised as a special deal for a particular type of user, which as such subsidises that user, inevitably penalising others.
However, audio and visual media suppliers and users are the ones with most to gain from the subsidy, hence the strength of lobbying on grounds of ostensible democracy, fairness, etc.
Such a charging model would also highlight the dominance in general Internet use of bandwidth and processor hungry rich media content delivered, unasked, as advertising. This currently contributes massively to bandwidth usage, slowing access to services whose providers may not even have profiled the proportion of traffic which is theirs as opposed to the advertisers’.
One aspect missed by your commentators so far (techies, bless 'em!) is the issue of liability. When some harm occurs (from as trivial as a family PC having to be rebuilt at, to them, great inconvenience and cost, upwards), who ought to provide compensation?
I have mailed a UK national newspaper about this in relation to something much more trivial (a button being transparently overlayed by an advert which thus took me to the site of a UK airline) and recieved a holding reply.
Is it the newspaper which is the end deliverer? The advertiser with whom they contract? And so on upstream. My take is that it OUGHT to be the site which I chose to visit, as I have no control over anything upstream (hence the issue in the first place).
I don't know where the law stands.
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