Ah, I see, you have to use the HTML entity rather than typing the character directly: €

That seems odd for a page that was sent with a UTF-8 character set indication in the headers. If you send the â character in the form it gets mangled, which is something I would have expected to happen on a site last updated in 1998, before anyone thought about encodings.

Your argument seems to require that every phone company is already making the most money that it possibly can. One wonders why they ever hire consultants or make any changes to management.

Right, I forgot, markets invariably find optimal price points on their own, and regulation never helps anything. See you in church.

The incumbent operators will have little or no incetive to build out their network capacity/coverage, since the need to upgrade capacity is mainly driven by tourists.

What are you talking about? There is almost no place on earth where the majority of phone traffic comes from tourists. Maybe airports.

increased usage means more cost for the provider. How does that offset the income loss?

Let's say the carrier currently charges EUR 1/MB for a service that costs them EUR 0.02/MB to provide, and customers use 1 million megabytes. That's EUR 20,000 in costs and EUR 980,000 in profit.

Then they are forced to charge their domestic rate of EUR 0.10/MB for roaming data, and customers stop being stingy and use 20 million megabytes. That's EUR 400,000 in costs and EUR 1,600,000 in profit.

Obviously these numbers are plucked straight from my ass but surely you can see how it's possible. Roaming charges are almost pure profit as it is, and that's only possible because we're a captive market.

P.S. What is up with Slashdot still not being able to display the Euro symbol (â)? This is 2014, isn't it?

In the USA I believe the idea of the FCC forcing AT&T to wholesale its lines to competitors is completely alien?

It actually used to be the law of the land. During that period (around 2000) there was an incredibly vibrant broadband ISP scene. Unfortunately the FCC changed its mind (and no doubt a few briefcases full of cash changed hands) and now the situation has reverted to the anti-consumer oligopoly you see today.

I don't think market cap is a good measure of size. If it were, then during the dotcom boom various online pet food suppliers, etc, which had barely any assets, employees or customers, would have counted as 'bigger' than more boring companies with a much greater footprint in the real world. Similarly, a large company may head towards bankruptcy and as it does so its market cap heads towards zero. But even if it is sold for a nominal price of one dollar, it is still a big company by any reasonable measure.

Consider how much effort and worldwide coordination has gone into the IPv6 migration, and it really doesn't make sense to do that multiple times for only 250x the address space each go-round. Why half-ass it?

I was talking about a solely 40-bit address space -- something different than IPv6.

Well, stop talking about that, it's a stupid idea. If we're going to upgrade billions of devices around the world, I don't want to have to do it again in 4 years' time when 40 bits prove to be inadequate.

Well... don't write shit programs. FTP "active mode" is an example of said shit.

Active mode FTP predates widespread usage of NAT by about 20 years.

It was a perfectly good solution at the time, and saying that its developers wrote a "shit" program is like saying that the people who built ancient Rome were shit architects because the streets weren't wide enough for semi trucks.

lease times could be really short - maybe a minute or two - even if that were not handled

That would mean more spurious data charges, and lower battery life due to frequent activity that has to trickle up from the radio board to the phone's OS. Also I don't want to lose my IP every time I'm in an elevator.

Yes, we already knew that the periodic table of elements is pretty much the same all across the universe.

That wasn't his point at all, as I hope you know. He was describing how it helped us project the specific mineral makeup of the moon, which, though falling on the same periodic table, does not necessarily have to be the same as that of the earth.

There's no issue getting 3840x2160 resolution with any even half-recent video card. I drive a T221 (3840x2400) from a five year old Dell laptop; these displays first appeared a decade and a half ago when PCs were much slower than today. Admittedly, if your new monitor takes Displayport you will need a video card capable of outputting that. Now, if you want to play games at 3840x2160 at 60Hz refresh, you're going to need some pretty serious hardware. But that has nothing to do with using the display for programming or office tasks. 30Hz refresh is quite comfortable for that.

In Windows it works better if you stick to an exact multiple of 100%. In other words your choices are 100% or 200%.