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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.

Comment Re:Not yet... (Score 4, Informative) 151

Regardless of the law being accepted or not, the combination of the resistance amongst the public and the politicians agains the telco plans and the proposal of this law had a significant effect: the telco's withdrew their plans. And they are slowly switching to a different pricing model, where data is the main component. And in one case, already the new phone subsidy has changed into a phone lease, for which you pay separately if you want it.

This does mean that the price of data becomes a significant amount of the price of your monthly phone bill. It doesn't magically mean that data is now free and unlimited, and not even that things like price differences within and outside of your data limit will disappear. You will not suddenly pay less in all cases, telephone companies still need to make money. But it does force them into a more fair pricing plan.

Comment Re:INSIDE THE CONTAINMENT CHAMBER (Score 2) 282

Lastly, nobody at Chernobyl had to dive into water to release a valve. That would be the absolute worst possible design a reactor could be, and the Russians were smarter than that. On top of that, even when not in meltdown, the water in a plant is going to be incredibly warm - close to boiling if not actually boiling, so it should not be possible to do anything in that environment. You probably couldn't open your eyes or do anything useful because of the intense pain of being boiled alive. This situation never happened, and you are probably confusing the name of Chernobyl with what happened at Three Mile Island (which was nowhere near as dramatic as diving into a reactor).

I'm sorry, but people really had to dive into emergency cooling water to release a valve. Not in the reactor, but in a pool under a reactor. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Steam_explosion_risk if you want to know more.

Comment Re:I as an IT person have directly dealt with this (Score 1) 417

Spend money for software for remote work with laptops? You need very little money for this purpose:

1. A VPN, with a public/private keypair per user. Please use an open standard, or it'll be horrible for anything but windows. And then there's no software to buy, you can use free software.
2. full disk encryption that locks automatically after some inactivity, or at least the parts that contain user data. You can get this for free as well.

If anyone steals the laptop, the user data will be useless without the encryption key and you can just no longer accept his key for the VPN. Done!

Comment the article contains a few mistakes (Score 1) 136

the article mentions this program is unique as it only uses electrical cars.

The autolib website has a lists of cars you can rent. It contains many cars, none of which are electrical.

The article mentions this is 12 euro a month. The website mentions 12 euro a month, plus an hourly price and a price per kilometer.

(and the thing about them not being the first, but i think this may have been mentioned in other posts :))

Comment it's allowed outside of the US as far as i know... (Score 1) 619

I get a robot call every time the company that owns the house i rent makes a repair. They present me with some questions about how happy i am with the repairs, on a scale from 1 - 9. Never heard of debt-collectors doing that around here.

But you can block all telemarketing calls to your number here in this country, and at the end of every call they have to tell you how to block it. That helps :)

Comment This news is ancient and out of date! (Score 1) 500

This plan is actually very old, from 2001. They tried again in 2005, then again somewhere in 2009/2010. The plan is discarded by the current government. One of the few good things they have done in my opinion. The road trail the article cites is from february 2010. Over one and half year old.

The plan would be a horribly complex technical solution, just to solve the problem of being able to buy gas in another country and charging more for busy roads during peak hours. Also, the plan was a major privacy concern because you would have to be tracked continually.

Comment so many misconceptions... (Score 1) 349

Clearly you Americans haven't seen, heard or driven a Diesel engine in recent times. A modern diesel:

- does not emit black clouds when accelerating (the filters work great and clean themselves)
- does not smell bad
- does accelerate quite well
- does not make lots of noise, although when cold more than a gas powered car
- starts even in rather cold weather
- doesn't need to be 6 or 7 liters, you can use a 1.4 or 1.6 liter turbodiesel engine on smaller cars, up to a 3 liter if you really need over 200 horsepower.
- has a very good mileage (70 mpg is possible with some of the smaller cars)

however, they are a lot more expensive to buy. Around here with a diesel, you pay less tax on the fuel (diesel is 1.28 euro a liter, gasoline is 1.60 euro), but more tax anually. So it's only interesting if you drive enough kilometers a year (i think around 18.000 km a year is enough). And the ones with very good mileageare tax exempt, so that's different. Of course, this tax bit does not apply to the US, or even other countries in Europe.

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