Posts by Any mouse Cow turd 72 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2014
I also have a common name and an firstname.lastname@gmail.com account and currently have a Hilton Honours point account and a PayPal account created with my address that I can't access due to 2FA (and I'm assuming the other guy can't either). And I keep getting various other USA car dealerships confirming my car servicing booking, which is nice. Maybe Gary would like to use one of these slots to get an oil change for his car that's never been to the UK ;)
My new build came with FTTP (no copper at all) and I'm getting a lovely ~70mbps. I could upgrade to get 300+ but I'm nowhere near my limits at the moment and to be fair I wasn't near the limit on my old FTTC speeds of 32mbps even with 3 kids on yootoob and streaming stuff all over the place.
I agree that the choice of FTTP ISPs is woeful, very little competition with only BT and Zen really offering a residential package. At least I've been able to play them off against each other to get my BT price down though
I can't see how what they did is any different to the actions of Aaron Swartz, so they should at least face the same charges (which according to the gospel of Wikipedia are "Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release."
Jaguar has already done this with the i-Pace. Exterior sounds for pedestrians (and guide dogs) as well as interior sound enhancement in sports/dynamic mode.
https://media.jaguar.com/en-gb/news/2018/10/guide-dogs-charity-supports-new-jaguar-i-pace-safety-sounds?q=&start=0&brand=jaguar
I live in a FTTP only house and was seriously looking to switch to Zen which offered £42 per month for internet but no phone so looked at a sipgate voip solution.
I threatened to leave BT, said I was going to Zen for £42 instead of the £50 that BT wanted. In the end they did me a deal of £34 for 80/20MB broadband and £10 for a phone call package. The bonus being that the call package is a 30 day rolling contract vs the 18month broadband contract so I cancelled the phone and now get FTTP for £34 and a landline for pennies through VoIP :-)
I have fibre to the premises with BT, no copper at all and therefore all my calls are VOIP but I'm still charged for a phone line because Openreach have locked out access to the Fibre Voice Access part (ATA) within the ONT and only allow ISP's that are willing to pay extra to provide a "phoneline" access.
Hence why the Openreach ONT comes with a battery backup in case of powercuts you can still use the phone but if I wanted to run my own VOIP line I'd need a separate ATA box connected to my router (which doesn't have a UPS).
It's all a con to make more money.
It might seem more efficient to broadcast rather than have everyone stream independently but has anyone done the calculations on power usage?
Considering the big transmitters are using electricity in the 1MW region and that peoples viewing habits have changed significantly I could imagine that there is a huge energy saving to be had by switching everyone to streaming.
The NowTV boxes are nobbled Roku kit and the currently available NowTV Smartbox has an aerial input and works at 50Hz (even the normal Roku kit works at 50Hz if you buy the ones with the EU chipset)
It's a shame that they are locked down and you can't load up apps from providers other than Sky and they've even locked out the developer mode so that you can't sideload Plex anymore but it does show the level of quality that Roku produce.
The way it was presented in the MIT Tech Review site was that VW were flogging these fancy ultra low emissions Diesel engines whereas the competition required urea after treatments in the exhaust to get the emissions to pass the regulations.
If that's the case then it could just be VW that's deep in the doodoo and if they are forced to ensure the engines run in low emissions mode permanently then it will cripple the cars. Those manufacturers with urea systems should be able to run fine with no fuel economy impact.
I have a NowTV subscription for TV and movies which gives the same content as available on Sky but for a fraction of the price but even Sky struggle to offer full series in perpetuity. They are currently advertising Game of Thrones box set but it turns out to be only season 1! What about the other 4? Oh well, off to the torrent sites...
So they track you through the mall, track you across the country, track what you buy, then bombard you with adverts for the things you have already purchased.
So much effort has gone in to the tracking tech, bugger all thought has gone into the advertising tech.
"We see you bought a microwave 2 weeks ago, do you want to buy another one?"
Personally, I can't see the issue with deflation. As DavCrav points out it has been happening for years as efficiencies have increased. But instead of letting the proletariat keep and spend that additional money saved and thus improve their standard of living or saving it for later the people in charge manipulate the economy to inflate prices elsewhere.
I get the issue with debt never being inflated away but if everything else gets cheaper then we have more left over to pay off the debt. But if we do that, and things are getting cheaper due to deflation then the banks are screwed since we would no longer require to get into debt as often to make those big purchases.
I have yet to see an economics article complaining about the effect of low cost airlines or computer cost reductions or the "discount" supermarkets on living standards. Personally these effects have given me increased disposable income to spend elsewhere.
How about a currency based on energy?
I cant afford to have my nails painted because because I lost my job as a spoon maker to some bloody robot. Now all the benefit of that increased productivity has gone to the factory owner.
Give it a few years and we'll be back in olden times when we were glad of a few scraps from the lord of the manor.
Tim,
I am struggling to reconcile the whole risk of recession, massive unemployment, no money Doomsday scenario that politicians and economists (yourself included) spout with your equally valid analogy of bacon in the fridge (and I suppose workers in the state).
How can we have a downturn if we've got plenty of reserves?
I can't believe that I'm reading all these Luddite comments on El Reg.
For a demographic who spend a lot of their lives working with micro controllers and embedded systems I'm surprised you yearn for simpler cars with less features and systems. Do you also wish to go back to working on 8088 chipsets, VAX clusters or DEC alphas? Maybe you prefer the solid sound of punch cards being fed into the reader rather than the silent SSD in these new fangled computers.
I for one am glad of the embedded micro controllers that monitors my wheel rotation and slip in order to provide ABS and stability control. or the system that reads the impulses from the range of mems accelerometers and figures out which airbags to fire and when within a few microseconds. The myriad of all the other systems that use ECUs all give a much better environment within the car to make things easier and safer for us all, from parking radar to automatic climate control.
Come on guys, look at the whole picture.
on the occasions when you are searching for a product I'm betting that you want to find the best site to do the price comparisons with (and \or reviews).
The fact that Google presents you with their shopping results ahead of anyone else's, and often in lieu of anyone else's clearly shows they know what you want to see but chose not to show it. Added to that they probably game their results to give themselves the largest commission if a sale does go through.
If Google were operating decently they would show the top rated shopping/comparison sites so you could get the best deal, not them!
Money is Debt. Simple as that. Before money, people traded. If you didn't have anything that the guy you were trading with wanted then there was no trade. Debt\money allows a trade to occur with a deference of payment until a later date. As more people get involved in this it makes sense to trade debts
For example, Alice owes Bob 3 sheep and Bob owes Chaz 3 sheep. Bob can either transfer the debt or try and defer payment to Chaz in the hope that Alice pays up and he can shear the sheep before passing them on to Chaz, thus having something else to trade with and so it goes on...
Money is debt, investment of debt can lead to the creation of the ability to create more debt \money.
Of course if the sheep had died whilst I'm Bobs possession then Chaz might get a bit annoyed but that's the risk you take with investments.
... that Google don't have any world class developers in its company. If they did then maybe they could (reverse) engineer a driver for the AES part of the chip. Maybe they could even open source it for all the world to keep us safe from snooping. Oh, there goes the alarm clock, time to stop dreaming...
This reminds me of the BBC Domesday Disc project. A digital record of life in Britain in the mid 1980's stored on laser disc for posterity and like the Domesday Book, useful to social scientists and historians for hundreds of years. Or as it turned out, about 5 years.
I know there is a site on the intertubes that allegedly re-creates bits of the disc but I remember playing with the disc in the school library and looking at my home village - not present on the interweb emulator thingy...
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