Yes, so they will make some money from me when I'm abroad, just as they do when I'm at home. Compared to, at the moment, them making nothing from me while I'm abroad.

I've found that preloading your tablet / phone with openstreetmap maps works extremely well - I spent 2 weeks navigating around the Canadian rockies with Osmand running on a tablet and had no problems. Posting photos on social networks can probably wait until you're within range of a wifi hotspot.

Yes, I would. Because oddly, when I'm on holiday I'm actually more interested in doing holiday type stuff than spending my time using the internet. Its useful *occasionally* (getting weather forecasts, etc.) but it's not a huge loss to not have it. Which is why I turn roaming data off on my phone when I go abroad and just use wifi hotspots in cafes, etc. on the occasions I want to use the internet.

The rates are largely set by the market - if they could get away with raising their standard rates, don't you think they would have already done so?

Also, you're ignoring a 4th option: they might actually make more money by having reasonable roaming charges. As an example, on my PAYG contract I pay £0.01/MB while at home, but while on a trip to Canada earlier in the year it would've been £6/MB - *600 times the domestic charge*. The upshot was that I simply turned off 3G on my phone and didn't use it at all - zero profit for the MNO. If the charges had been more reasonable then I probably would've left it turned on and they would've made some money. Same goes for voice calls too. (FWIW, roaming charges within the EU have been regulated for some time and are much much lower anyway)

This is basically the EU saying "you've shown you can't be trusted to not take the piss, so we're taking our ball and going home".

Things break unexpectedly - whilst it shouldn't happen, it does and so long as it doesn't happen frequently and the vendor is reasonably proactive I'd generally give them a pass (for one thing, moving a bank account or similar is probably more hassle than a one-off outage). If it keeps happening then yes, I'd move to a vendor that has historically shown to be able to run a more reliable service.

However, one thing that I think is unforgivable is when the vendor doesn't bother to actually keep their customers informed. A single "the service is down, sorry" post which doesn't give any ETA, progress updates or anything just isn't good enough. Tell the customer what's going on! It seems to be all too common to keep the customer as uninformed as possible these days, especially with the larger companies. I imagine it's a combination of PR damage mitigation and liability concerns, but its just not helpful to the customers - I'm much happier to give my business to a company who says "oops, sorry, we screwed up, here's what went wrong, but we've now investigated and put measures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again" than a company who has an unexplained outage and doesn't provide any information about it.

I'll give an example - back in the 90s I had my internet connection from a small ISP called Demon Internet. They were pretty good - the techies knew what they were doing and they gave regular status updates. If something went wrong, they would publish it. If an outage was caused by someone screwing up then they'd let everyone know, even if it's a stupid "oops we unplugged the wrong cable". Then they got bought by Thus, a much bigger company, and the "big company" mentality very quickly showed - the techies stopped talking to the customers, status updates rarely happened and they especially never admitted that they'd made a mistake. I wasted hours on several occasions debugging my CPE because they swore blind they had no network problems so it must be my end before it became very apparent that they did know about problems in their network and they were just trying to keep it quiet. And that is why I dropped them - I'm not interested in dealing with businesses that waste my time by covering up their problems and refusing to keep their customers informed.

WRT services like MyCloud, I do wonder what kind of terms & conditions they give the end user, given that this is essentially a paid-for service. If they provide absolutely no service guarantees and can shut it all down on a whim then clearly it isn't worth paying for.

Wikipedia suggests that you probably want to keep the speed at or below 2 rpm and certainly no more than 7 rpm.

Firstly, being able to "stand on the shoulders of giants" is good for innovation. Patents often stop that, especially in a fast moving field like computing - having to wait for the patent to expire before you can build upon it is a problem. You may argue that someone who wants to build upon a patented technology should just licence it, but the licence fee may be out of the reach of many inventors. And that's assuming the patent owner is even interested in licensing it - they may well just tell you to bugger off.

Secondly, the constant fear of being sued into oblivion if you happen to accidentally infringe someone's patent is a brake on innovation. It's pretty much impossible to write software that doesn't infringe someone's patent these days, so you're basically relying on not pissing off the wrong people. And giving the existing big players the ability to shut down a new competetor before they even get going is certainly not good for innovation.

The original intention of patents was twofold:
1. give the inventor a limited time to profit from their invention and recoup development costs.
2. provide documentation of the invention so that, after the patent has expired, the public can build their own rather than being at the mercy of the inventor.
I certainly think both of these intents are great. Inventors *should* be able to recoup their development costs; but I don't think that's working these days - big companies ship such volumes that they are going to recoup their costs in short order anyway, and the small inventors simply can't afford to defend themselves, so the patents simply benefit the large companies (whether or not they are innovating) at the detriment to the small inventor. The second of these intents is a good thing too, but modern patents are trash - they are so thick with legalese that they're downright impossible to understand anyway, and the details are so scant that you wouldn't be able to reproduce the invention from the documentation provided in the patent.

So to my mind, the problems with patents currently outweigh the benefits.

No, I create stuff all the time and I think patents are a big problem. The stuff I create probably falls into 2 categories:
1. Stuff that someone else has already patented. And by that I mean I developed it on my own without knowledge of the existing patent, but someone somewhere probably already patented it. Patents are supposed to be novel enough that this should almost never happen, but we all know many modern patents are complete trash and a trained chimp could've come up with the same solution.
2. Stuff that someone else will patent at some point in the future.

Either way, I can't afford to patent all my own inventions, nor can I afford to litigate. So patents aren't helpful at all to me - they only serve to put the brakes on development because its basically impossible to write software without infringing someone's patent these days, so everyone is just living in hope that the patent holder doesn't notice or get pissed off with them. That isn't a healthy way to do things.

Spinning stations need to be large in diameter: the smaller the diameter, the faster you have to spin it, and the coriolis force starts to really screw with the people inside it. Great if you want the astronauts throwing up all the time. So spinning stations have to be big, which means expensive.

The alternative is to tether two stations together, but NASA have a history of serious problems with tethers.

Its not quite the same thing. If you buy a lotto ticket then you have a single change of winning. In the case of dropbox, you have many chances of "winning" (consider how many files dropbox stores).

Of course you're right that a collision is incredibly unlikely, but I don't think your example is especially comparable.

It becomes your problem when you lose all your customers.

This is what I don't get - yes there are rare situations where if your engine dies at the wrong moment you're going to be put in danger, but that isn't the norm. If your engine dies while you're doing 70mph down the motorway, the car doesn't suddenly burst into flames or spin off the road, it just starts slowing down (in fact, exactly like taking your foot off the accellerator does). In 6th gear, my car will go a *looong* way if I turn the engine off at 70mph and don't touch the brakes - certainly plenty of time to cross a couple of lanes and reach the hard shoulder. Even further in neutral.

I would argue that you want to *avoid* using the brakes unnecessarilly - you'd usually get 2 - 3 good "pumps" of the brakes after the engine dies before you lose the assistance so you don't want to waste them. Additionally, if it's safe to do so then leaving your engine in a high gear will keep it spinning and therefore keep your brakes working (at the cost of slowing your car down more quickly.

Anyway, I certainly agree that teaching this stuff when people learn to drive would be a good idea - everyone should know what it's like to drive their car with no power steering or assisted brakes. You're going to have to do that if you ever need a tow anyway.

The problem with "let people make their own decisions" is that it's rarely your own decision. I work 9:00 - 17:30, not because those are the hours I want to work, but because they are the hours that most people work and my customers expect me to be contactable during "normal office hours".

It seems likely to me that the people who had heart attacks after having an hour less sleep were probably going to have a heart attack *anyway* and the shorter night just stressed their body enough to make it happen marginally sooner. So if the clocks hadn't changed, maybe they would've only lasted a couple of days longer.

Similarly, the people who didn't have a heart attack on the day when they got an hour more sleep may well go on to have their heart attack a few days later.

I believe that EU courts have declared CSS to not be "effective copy protection", so it is legally breakable.

However, this new legislation does seem fairly worthless because the "consumer guide" that the government has released says that you still don't have the right to break DRM in order to exercise your new right to copy CDs/DVDs/ebooks/etc.

To be honest, I'm surprised how widely the population has accepted ebooks, given how restrictive the licensing terms and DRM are. For example, if you buy a paper book, you can read it, then your wife can read it, you can lend it to a friend/relative to read, then it can sit on your book shelf for 20 years until your kids read it. All of this stuff has been considered "normal" usage for a book - people expect to be able to do this stuff and it seems reasonable to them. Now compare to an ebook - lets take a Google Play book as an example: you "buy" it and you can read it. Then when your wife wants to read it, she has to buy her own copy. You can't lend it to a friend - they have to buy their own too. In 20 years time, your kids will have to buy their own copies (although I have serious doubts that you will still be able to get at your purchased ebooks by that time anyway). There is no mechanism within Play to let you lend books to friends or family and the licence even prevents you from letting someone else read it on your own tablet. To me, all this seems completely unreasonable and I'm really surprised that everyone else doesn't think so to, given that all this stuff has been accepted practice for hundreds of years. Of course, you can choose to strip the DRM and/or break the licence terms, but to my mind what's the point in paying for the content in the first place if you're going to be forced into breaking the law anyway?