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Comment Re: I'm sorry to break it to you... (Score 1) 71

It was available as a test in The Netherlands for a while as well, on regular ftth connections, in many places, including in this 160.000 people city and some much more sparsely populated areas.
The biggest fiber network that is quickly expanding is now doing 2.5gbit PON instead of dedicated fibers like they used to, in an effort to be as monopolistic as possible.

Comment Re: Europe people said abolish but leaders don't a (Score 1) 252

If you keep the same time in the nothern countries, you have two choices: in the winter it gets light really late, near the end of the morning. Or in summer it gets light really really really early, well before most people wake up, and dark early again. And light is good for people when they are awake, and not so good when they are asleep. So, DST has big benefits, I would say much much bigger than adjusting your schedule for the large majority of people.

Comment Re: Europe people said abolish but leaders don't a (Score 1) 252

No, it was 75% coming from Germany. The 3.79% was the percentage of the population of Germany that filled in the survey.
See https://ec.europa.eu/transport... .If you plot it in a graph, it is as on this page (sorry about the Dutch): https://nos.nl/artikel/2248411... you can see why I said this, and why this survey is meaningless.

an open online survey is never a good way to determine anything. Unless you take special care to reach certain groups, mainly those with a very strong opinion will answer. And even then it is tricky, and special care was not taken at all here. If you want to do a poll on subjects like this, it should either be a public referendum, or a representative sample of the population. That was not the case here, see the graph above.

Comment Re: Europe people said abolish but leaders don't a (Score 1) 252

A big _online_ survey, with the selection criteria being whoever fills it in. Most of the responses came from Germany, and most of those came from a group opposing DST and organizing to all respond on that survey.
Those results are absolutely meaningless.

And to all those opposing abolishing DST because it is annoying at two moments a year, you probably have not really thought about the negative effects of having the same time year round, which is much longer than those small periods of jet lag.

Comment Re:What is with refrigerator designers these days? (Score 1) 241

Or better: just buy a proper energy efficient fridge.
The most efficient fridge/freezer combinations, EU energy label A+++, use only about 160 KWh per year, or about half that if you buy one without a freezer. Which is about three times less than the combination used in your link.

Comment Re:He's wrong of course (Score 1) 149

Your paying customers will start complaining. And switching to other providers. Or making others switch to other providers by publicly complaining.
So, no, there's no obligation other than needing to offer good services to be able to keep your customers.

Let's consider the alternative: you throttle Netflix. This hurts Netflix's business. It will benefit Netflix's competitors. Internet access is a utility, where traffic should be treated equally in order to allow people and businesses to use the internet as a way of providing their services. With equal treatment from ISPs.
If your ISP wants to manage their traffic, they could for example ask their customers money for faster connections, or ask money per amount of data transmitted. Or upgrade their lines.

This post has been posted from a connection through which all traffic is guaranteed to be treated equally by national law. And Netflix works just fine.

Comment Re:Too little too late (Score 1) 128

Because for most readers that's in the wrong language and far too long, a summary:

Encryption nowadays is everywhere and getting more easy to obtain/use. It's important for businesses, and for people who want to keep their private life private. It is getting more and more impossible to break encryption. This is a problem for national security and intellegence services. However, there's no foreseeable way of putting in backdoors without compromising security. Cooperation with industry partners is required for intelligence/security tasks. The cabinet (meaning the ministers) sees the importance of encryption for security/safety onn the internet, for privacy of civilians and confidential communication for the government and businesses. Therefore it considers it undesirable to take limiting measures regarding the development, availability and use of encryption within the Netherlands. Internationally, The Netherlands will promote these views and conclusions.

Then there's mention of a budget amendment that recently has been accepted. It means the state will donate 500.000 euro to open encryption projects, like openssl, libressl, etc. They say they're actually going to do that.

Comment You need competition (Score 1) 622

For providers, bandwidth is rather cheap, especially in urban areas. All you need is enough competition.

Here the government decided DSL and fiber networks should be open to competition for a fair price. Cable networks are not open at the moment.
An example of what happened as a result of this:
In this city you can choose Cable, DSL or fiber. For cable there's one provider, for DSL many providers and for fiber at least three (one of which has many sub-brands). It means I can get a 1 Gb/s fiber connection for 55 euro, uncapped, including TV. Or, the next fastest provider, 58 euro's for 500 Mb/s and tv. If i want to pay less, i can and I'll just get lower speeds - currently i'm quite happy with my 50 mbit/s connection, that does 70-80 mbit/s in practice.
If a provider were to put a cap on the connection, people would switch to another one really fast.

Do not be fooled in thinking this is 'congestion management' or even 'cost management'. You are suffering from the effects of an oligopoly.

Comment right... (Score 2) 489

While I haven't read the FCC's version of net neutrality, The Netherlands has had net neutrality for several years. In the meaning that an ISP cannot prioritize traffic, or block traffic, or pay for (faster) access to a specific service. With very few exceptions. You can let people pay for faster speed and download caps are allowed.

This has not caused any problems, at all. Internet access is still fast and affordable. fiber/cable/dsl do not have usage caps. ISPs have not gone bankrupt.

Comment the public understands just fine (Score 1) 217

there's a proven, simple way to let the public understand this: let all the telecom operators announce that from now on, you get only a basic internet connection. No skype, facebook, spotify or netflix.

Oh, you want those services? well, facebook is 5 euro, spotify 3, netflix 10. Oh, skype. hmm, thats annoying competition. 15 euro.

Here all major mobile telecom providers announced plans like this roughly the same time for their cellphone plans.

We had a law guaranteeing net neutrality in weeks.

Comment let him try a rewrite! (Score 1) 507

If he thinks the code is bad, ask him why the code is bad. Ask what his problem is with the code, and what he wants to improve and why. Ask him to be very specific, with examples of what could be improved, why, and how.

If you still disagree about the code and how it works, you can decide to actually let him rewrite a bit. Make sure you both agree on a relatively isolated/small part. Set a time constraint on the task. Then, when he's done, check. If he made better code - great! You might learn something and you have better code. He may not be so bad after all. If he made things worse, or broke them, or even if there it's just a matter of taste- great! He might learn something!

Also what you can do is get another person to look at the code, who you know writes clean code. Ask him what he thinks, and see if it matches the criticism of the intern.

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