It's pretty much unusable. Even what looks like a relatively simple, plain site these days is hundreds of kilobytes in size (which, when you are downloading at maybe 3 or 4 kB/s, takes quite a while to load!)
It's not just a matter of 'patience' either, as many sites actually fail to render properly as the downloading of various page elements just times out.
Hmmm, I can think of a few places where strengthening with novel carbon structures would be quite welcome...
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Not all universal healthcare systems are equal. Something like Germany or Australia's (which still optionally has private insurers and private medical providers) would probably work better in the US than the Canadian system or UK NHS-style systems.
How can a single payer (the government) 'screw up' that badly though? All they are is the PAYER, not the entity providing medical treatment. All they do is pay the bill. The worst screw up they could manage is
Writing from the perspective of someone living in a single payer healthcare country here (Australia), where the government pays the bill (or most of it at least). Doctors clinics themselves are still private businesses - I can pick any doctor I want and switch at will. "Single payer" means precisely that: single ~payer~ (i.e. the government pays the doctor, or reimburses me for what I've already paid to them). The Canadian system is different. It is indeed single payer but the problems your extended family are describing aren't related to that aspect of the system.
PS. I've lived in Canada, the UK, Australia and the US. The former three are all 'single payer universal' systems but all are different in terms of the actual provision of treatment side of things.
Uh, living in a country with single payer universal healthcare Australia
What ever gave you the idea that you can't go to the doctor whenever you feel like it? That'd be a pretty awful system - indeed part of the reason why universal health care has better health outcomes in the first place is BECAUSE there's no cost barriers to going to the doctor. You can go when you feel you need it and not put something off because of cost. Prevention/early detection is better than cure after all.
Now if you're talking about hospital treatment, then yes, on occasion you may need to wait. Same as if you showed up at emergency
Single payer doesn't necessarily imply single ~provider~ (though, in some countries, it does). I live in Australia, which has a single-payer universal system. But I can choose to go to any doctor I want. Those doctors' clinics are still private practices and the doctors are not government employees or members of any wider 'system'. It's just that when I go to the front counter to pay the bill at the end, the government foots some or all of the bill (depending on what was actually done during the consultation).
We have private hospitals in addition to the public ones, and you can still choose to get private health insurance if you want it (indeed, the government gives you a tax incentive to do so, since you are less of a burden on the public system if you also have private insurance). But it's not required. The point is though that 'single payer' does not mean "no options". You have just as many options as you did before in terms of ~treatment~ providers
250 GB might blow, but generally markets where monthly download/upload allowances are the norm, also offer a RANGE of plans with different download allowances. His limit is probably 250 GB because he chose a 250 GB plan, because that met his needs. He could pay a bit more and upgrade to a higher limit if needed.
I'm guessing here of course, but I've lived in several countries with download allowances of this nature, and in all cases, my download 'limit' was self-imposed by the plan I chose. A typical ISP in a country like Australia will have low end plans with maybe 30 or 50 GB per month, some midrange plans in the 'couple of hundred GB' range, and high end plans with 1 TB and upwards per month. All at the same speed and identical in every respect except download limit and price.
The problem is, DSL is becoming less and less a 'real' option. Vast areas which have 'DSL' service are still only ADSL1, which technically maxes out at 8 Mbps downstream but is sold in most markets in tiers up to 6 Mbps (e.g. 768kbps, 1.5 Mbps, 3 Mbps, 6 Mbps). 6 Mbps downstream is pretty limiting these days, to say nothing of the awful upstream bitrates (384kbps? what a joke)
ADSL2+ (up to 24 Mbps down), VDSL, and VDSL2 (which can be as fast as cable if your line length is short) are better but not available in many places. Plus it's often hard to tell what you can get as ISPs obscure the actual technology used behind a generic product name (e.g. Uverse is delivered either over ADSL2+ or VDSL, depending on location, and the only way you can find out is by applying and seeing what speeds they'll offer you).
I'm a Charter customer (relatively new, just under 2 years now). I just have standalone internet though. No phone, no TV. Wondering what specifically you've found that sucks about them.
For me, using them for internet only, they seem fine. I've been quite happy:
- Seems to perform as advertised (60 Mbps down, 4 Mbps up)
- Downtime so far has been in the 'couple of hours per year' range, which is fine for a residential connection.
- I have servers at home and they don't seem to block any incoming ports (or at least, none of the ports I use)
- Price was good for the first year (29.99/month). It's now higher ($47.46/month including my local taxes), but that's still "OK".
Maybe I've been lucky - any horror stories you want to share?
I'm just waiting for drones that will simultaneously cut my lawn and deter burglars.
According to Gary Larson, that would be robodog Ginger featured in "You call that mowing the lawn? Bad dog! No biscuit!" Well, you might have to put a beanie prop-hat on the dog, but it would be pretty close...
Just 1 would probably do it - occasionally I still have to copy some files to/from a USB stick or external hard drive, or download things off a camera. Don't think I'd ever need to do more than one of those at the same time. This is assuming that the same port ~isn't~ also used for other necessary things like ethernet and charging (ala the new Macbook).
Notwithstanding the dodgy 1% calculation, Pandora is only available in three countries:
USA: population ~318M
Australia: population ~24M
New Zealand: population ~4M
So you only have a total population of ~346 million people who could even ~potentially~ be Pandora subscribers.
To paraphrase, you can't be too rich, too thin, or have too many bits of precision in a calculation. With single precision you have to be enormously careful not to drop digits even in comparatively modest loops; with double precision you can many digits before you run out. You can see it in almost any computations involving trig and pi -- single precision pi degrades in series much faster than double precision pi. It isn't just a matter of not using forward recursion to evaluate bessel functions, which is unstable in any precision (or for that matter, using book definitions of e.g. spherical bessel functions in terms of trig functions) or reordering series to avoid subtracting big numbers and running small to big instead of big to small -- there is simply a big difference between cumulating a random walk with a random digit at the 16th place and one at the 8th place.
A second problem is the exponent. 10^38 just isn't "big" in a modern large scale computation. It is easy to overflow or underflow a single precision computation. 10^308 is a whole lot closer to big, even expressed in decibels. One can concentrate a lot more on writing simple code, and a lot less on handling exponent problems as they emerge.
A final problem is random numbers. This is actually a rather big problem, as lots of code (all Monte Carlo, for example) relies on a stream of algorithmically random numbers that (for example) do not have a period less than the duration of the computation and that do not have significant bunching on low dimensional hyperplanes or other occult correlations. It is much more difficult to build a good random number generator on fewer bits, because the periods of the discretized iterated maps scale (badly) with reduced numbers of bits and it is more difficult to find acceptable moduli for various classes of generators from the significantly smaller discretized space. You can watch this problem emerge quite trivially by building a Mandelbrot set generator in float and rubberbanding in -- oops, you hit bottom rather quickly! Rebuild it in double and you at least have to work to rubberband in to where it all goes flat. You have to build it in a dynamically rescaleable precision to rubberband in "indefinitely" as the details you wish to resolve eventually become smaller than any given finite precision. This actually illustrates the overall problem with single precision quite nicely -- the emergent flat patches in an graphical representation of an iterated map are isomorphic to the establishment of unintended correlations in long runs of iterated maps in a random number generator and the clipping of the graphical representation of small numbers illustrates the problems with mere underflow in real computations of interest.
Personally, I dream of default quad precision and 128 bit processors. 34 decimal digits of precision means that a random walk with n unit steps (which accumulates like \sqrt{n}) require (10^30)^2 = 10^60 steps to get to where I don't still have 4 significant digits. Even a rather large cluster running a rather long time would have a hard time generating 10^60 add operations. In contrast, with only (say) 8 decimal digits a mere 10^16 operations leaves you with no digits at all, assuming you haven't overflowed already. I've run computations with a lot more than this number of operations. I also like the idea of having overflow around 10^5000. It takes quite a while adding numbers at the overflow of double precision to hit overflow, and one basically could add overflow scale single precision floats forever and never reach it. That gives me comfort. It would also make writing a Mandelbrot set explorer tool where one would be likely to give up before rubber banding all the way to the "bottom" -- there are a whole lot of halvings of scale in there to play with that still leave you with much more resolution than needed on the screen.
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I like to make sure that the wires are very slightly tipped when I talk so that the electrons go downhill into my phone. Otherwise the wire gets clogged.
Isn't that why the phone lines run overhead? Otherwise the people on the second floor couldn't use the phone!
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In many (most?) countries, the government adds interest payable to the amount of the refund when they pay you back. Of course right now, interest rates are very low in most places so this doesn't amount to much...
6 Curses = 1 Hexahex
