How do you get the eSIM out to quickly move to another phone - say a cheap spare??

If I can transfer by calling the provider, then someone else can too.

I know the whole identity and address book in the SIM days are long gone, but having a physical module to control access to the network (or, rather, the benefits supplied by that setup) was one of the key reasons customers prefered GSM over CDMA networks. I can't quite see how eSIM differs from the old CDMA lock-in - anyone care to enlighten me?

Sheep generally nibble grass, not pull it out by the roots. Grass regrows from it’s roots, so in an area with a mix of plants, grass has a competitive advantage against other plants where sheep are eating them all.

It’s one of the reasons why you mow lawns regularly - gives the grass a competitive advantage against the weeds that are trying to establish themselves.

Cows on the other hand use their tongues to pull up handfuls (tonguefuls?) of grass and some will come up roots and all. Most grass will break off before that point, but not all. Grab a handful of longer grass and give it a sideways, twisting pull, and you’ll see the effect for yourself.

As a generalisation, Cows prefer long grass, sheep prefer shorter. Though I have seen sheep that don’t eat grass at all in the Orkney islands there is a breed that eats seaweed!

None of this makes the grass intelligent either.

Not really on the breaking part - the main reason the Apple (and equivalent clones - I’ve tried several) adaptors break seem to be that the tiny wires connecting the DAC chip embedded inside the plug are fragile and don’t withstand the stresses of everyday use (cable tugging, bouncing in pockets, etc)

After trying several kinds of adaptors I gave up and found some affordable Bluetooth earbuds (Lenovo LP40) that are good enough (much better than any other cheap ones I tried) and cheap enough that when I inevitably lose them I can replace them without feeling too sad. I can buy 10 pairs for what apple charges.

The original poster is considering the forces created due to change in angular momentum as a body moves, as well as the centrifugal force. I have done the experiment myself in an earth-based centrifuge and the sideways pull on your arm as you raise it is quite disconcerting. You can try it for yourself on the right fairground ride.

I don’t know how bad the effect would be on a centrifuge of the scale of the one described in the article. I think the effect would be less as the change would be smaller in proportion to the total size, but the body is quite sensitive to small things being ‘off’.

I don’t live in the USA, but I have visited in the past, and I have never seen a sign anywhere about taking your receipt. I remember having to do so in Italy where there was a fine (50 euros I think) if you didn’t, but that law was there primarily to prevent money laundering.

Kind of depressing if dishonesty is so endemic that this kind of control is necessary, or even expected

I read that one of the reasons that 99c prices became popular was that they forced the employee to operate the register in order to give change - ensuring the transaction was recorded.

On many LCD screens polarising filters work well. So long as the filter is in the opposite direction to the one on the screen, screen appears black. Polarising sunglasses are already a thing, though the direction is usually set to block reflection off surfaces. Shouldn’t be too hard to make one with the lenses rotated 90 degrees!

Natural Gas is a poor vehicle fuel as it reamins a gas in pressurised cylindars - so you only get a small ammount of fuel in a heavy cylindar. As a result the engine needs to be dual NatGas/Petrol which makes it sub-optimal at fuel efficency (Natural Gas burns best under quite different compression profiles from petrol.) Where I live we used to have lots of NatGas vehicles (called CNG here) but everything is now LPG (Liquified Petrolium Gas) - just like my barbeque :-) . Because LPG is liquid in compressed storage cars go a lot further on a fill. Even so, Taxi drivers (who watch their costs closely, so are a good belwether) seem to have mostly moved to hybrids (petrol/electric) as they have replaced their vehicles.
   

New Zealand is already running a highly simplified tax code. Some features of interest: (for comparison: not tax advice and not precise)
* Company tax rate essentially the same as individual tax rate. Company tax then ‘imputed’ against the dividend payments, so the tax can be reclaimed against your individual tax bill (ie: it’s paid once only)
* almost no deductions against personal income tax. (Not to be confused with rules on calculating the profit of a business - as in someone’s example of a house rental below)
* a GST (Value Added Tax) that applies to everything with no complicated exceptions. This prevents loopholes like writing stock off and then using it yourself to avoid sales tax. You will have still paid most of the tax to the previous owner in the chain (like warehouse or distributor). As you only remit the tax on the increment (the value add) you can only ever evade that part. When the GST replaced the old sales tax last century the government revenue was significantly above what they calculated due to a number of avoidance tactics suddenly becoming worthless.
* no seperate capital gains tax. This one is arguable, and I’m not convinced it’s for the best. Capital gains are taxed as income, at income tax rates where the intent was to make income from the rise in value. For example if you are day trading the profits are income. If you buy and hold for dividends the capital gain is not taxed. (Obviously the dividends are taxed). Same with rental property. The problem here is with proving intent. And this has made the law complex with various ’bright-line’ tests (like holding a property for less than 5 years) triggering an assumption that you intended to profit from the gain in value. It would probably be simpler to just have a CG tax like everywhere else.
* Most wage earning people do not have to file a tax return as the IRD already has all the information they need and can send you a statement at the end of the year for you to check.

So, now that’s all tested and you’ve got your test completion report, please approve for deployment. Thanks.

For those outside Australia and New Zealand: EFTPOS stands for Electronic Funds Transfer at Point Of Sale. It is a household name and is used to refer to paying by debit card, ‘do you want pay by eftpos or cash?’ as well as the machines themselves and debit cards. Its card transactions are considerably cheaper than those on the Visa network, driving popularity with merchants who pay the fees. It launched with swipe+PIN authorisation, putting it ahead of other countries versions which had swipe and sign (eg: UK Switch)

Not sure how many people will be aware of the company behind it though. The name is almost a generic, and I suspect many people would have trouble parsing the sentences in the summary as eftpos so firmly refers to the machine or the process that referring to it sending something live sounds like the rise of the machines.

I wasn’t counting the size of the lookup table in the tokeniser size, as it has to exist to decode the tokens for display on screen anyway. Yes, there are ways of compressing the token to keyword table, which also speed up parsing, for example by storing a lookup tree or a representation of the finite states for the parse tree with the token at the end. Stopping after the first unique letter would certainly work for parsing. But two way lookup is needed, and in any case both the Microsoft Altair basic and Sinclair basic both used simple flat tables based on the ROM decodes I looked at..

You’re right - the tokeniser is much smaller than I would have thought. I counted 106 bytes of machine code in the 4K basic you mention.
[Disassembled here ]Though with only 1k RAM and 4k ROM that’s about 2.5% of your code storage so I wouldn’t put it past Sinclair to try and optimise the code that way. I wonder how it compared to the size of the keyboard code needed to vary output with context? Or did they just make the token and the character have the same value?

Entering the basic commands this way meant that the BASIC interpreter did not requre a tokeniser. The tokens were entered directly and just displayed as text. I suspect that this saved a whole lot of ROM space and possibly made a speed difference.

It is not obvious from the summary, but would be known to it’s UK users that SKY is a major subscription TV provider (satellite, cable and IP) as well as an having become an ISP. So they have a major vested interest in preventing unlicensed streaming.