You still have 2G? Australia shut down 2G years ago, and is shutting down 3G now. You need 4G LTE or 5G to use a phone here.

Unfortunately it seems to have been wasted.

It wasn't wasted if it helped cement the concept for you. It's a minimal example, but it clearly shows why using GDP as a proxy for use of resources is stupid.

Just using arbitrary numbers:

• Chinese company manufactures trinket and sells it for $1 profit
• Walmart imports trinket from China and sells it to American for $10 profit
• This is counted as $1 GDP for Chinese manufacturer and $10 GDP for US retailer
• The retailer that hasn't produced anything and has simply applied markup looks like it has ten times the productivity of the actual manufacturer

Comparing GDP doesn't give a useful comparison in terms of relative productivity for a given amount of pollution, since simply applying markup is treated as "productivity".

China is manufacturing stuff for the whole world while still producing substantially lower emissions per capita. If you adjust the figures to count emissions against the final consumers/users of manufactured goods, it won't be the US that looks better.

Wut? It's Tricky is fairly intelligible for rap: It's tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that's right on time, it's tricky!

Spanish (and Latin American and Filipino) names are [given names] [mother's paternal family name] [father's paternal family name]. After a woman marries, it changes to [given names] [father's paternal family name] [husband's paternal family name].

Consider former president of the Philippines Gloria Arroyo. Her name at birth was Maria Gloria Macaraeg Macapagal. Her given names are "Maria Gloria", "Macapagal" is her father's paternal family name (Diosdado Pangan Macapagal), and "Macaraeg" is her mother's paternal family name (Evangelina Guico Macaraeg). After she married Jose Miguel Tuason Arroyo, she took on his paternal family name, becoming Maria Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (dropping her mother's paternal family name). Their children had the family names Macapagal Arroyo at birth.

Refrigeration changed the way people live. Before refrigeration, there was a market for exporting ice from cold regions. Ice House Street in Hong Kong is named because that's where they kept ice imported from North America was. People used to spend a large proportion of their time preserving food so it could be kept without spoiling. Refrigeration radically changed how people live. The iPhone is nothing compared to that.

So, the U.S. prints more dollars, in the ever futile attempt to keep the dollar from weakening.

Printing more dollars is what you do if you want to weaken the dollar. You increase the supply, so the real value of each dollar is lower. That's the definition of inflation.

You really have no clue what you're talking about.

Macs came in unbleached, recycled cardboard boxes in the mid '90s. I liked that packaging. But Jobs put a stop to it when he returned. He always had a thing for shiny things.

Also if you have one... Active Directory?

This is a serious one that a lot of people seem to underestimate. Sure, AD sucks in various ways, and MS has managed to make the admin UIs worse from Server 2008 onwards. But every time I try the alternatives, they don't compete at all. There isn't another LDAP/Kerberos solution with extensible schema, replication, and an admin UI.

Our VPN software ( just Cisco AnyConnwct ) completely takes over the routing table and blocks all traffic not on the VPN except traffic going to the VPN end point.

Yes, I realise Cisco VPN software does that on Windows. However, on Linux and macOS it can't completely take over routing. It adds a high-priority route to send all traffic (besides the 127.0.0.0/8 loopback subnet) over the VPN. On Linux or macOS, a user who can sudo can still change the routing table afterwards.

But that aside, VPN software generally has an option to "allow local network traffic" or similar (yes, for the Cisco VPN client, the server administrator can disable this option in the profile causing the client to ignore it). When this option is switched on, routes for the local LAN will have higher priority than the VPN route. All the static routes announced by the DHCP server will be treated as local LAN routes.

People often recommend using VPNs to protect traffic when using public WiFi networks, etc. The hypothetical attack would be a malicious public WiFi network using a DHCP server that sets static routes for the IP addresses of servers they want to intercept traffic to. The static routes described in DHCP take precedence over the default route for the VPN.

For example, suppose I want to intercept traffic to Slashdot:

• I set up the DHCP server on my public WiFi network to announce static routes for 104.18.5.215 and 104.18.5.215 leading to my malicious router.
• You connect to my WiFi network, and connect to your VPN in the hope that it will protect your traffic from malicious parties on the untrusted public WiFi network.
• Your VPN creates a default route leading to its virtual interface to send all IP traffic across the tunnel, but the static routes configured via DHCP take precedence for 104.18.5.215 and 104.18.5.215.
• Your Slashdot browsing traffic is routed via my malicious router while the rest of your traffic goes across your VPN.

I only knew about it from Slashdot. I don't think I read TFA as it didn't look very interesting. Most of the comments were asking what the point of it is. But it must have got coverage somewhere for Slashdot to link to the stories in the first place.

When that secedes, then try on the far side.

You should learn the language before making a fool of yourself.

It's something to do with the agreements Google forces on the phone manufacturers. Android itself is free, but Google attaches various conditions to the licenses to sell phones with GMail, Google Maps, etc. pre-installed.

A pretty well-known condition is that Chrome must be pre-installed if any other Google apps are pre-installed. Previously they required that Google apps be the default handlers for everything if Google apps are pre-installed (Chrome must be default web browser, GMail must be default e-mail handler, Google Messages must be default SMS handler, etc.). The EU decided that the requirement that Chrome be the default browser is unreasonable years ago, so Android phones sold in the EU may have different default browsers.

(As an aside, although I don't use most of the Google apps, changing the defaults and uninstalling/disabling Google apps when possible, along with Facebook and the rest of that pre-installed crap, is a minor one-time annoyance for me when buying a new phone. You have to do the same thing after installing an OS on a PC after all. It's probably more of an issue for people who aren't tech-savvy.)

The majority of people are going to want to use at least one of the Google apps, and needing to install them after buying the phone is apparently too much of a burden for people who aren't techies. It's got to have that stuff out-of-the box. So the phone manufacturers will usually put up with whatever conditions Google demands. Samsung are big enough that they can tell Google to piss off if they believe the terms are unreasonable, but most of the other phone companies aren't in that position.

This brings us to the specific thing Epic is complaining about. Epic were negotiating with a few of the phone manufacturers (Oppo, OnePlus, etc.) to sell phones with the Epic store pre-installed. Google heard about this, and told the manufacturers that their licenses to sell phones with Google apps pre-installed would be terminated if they sold phones with the Epic store pre-installed. The phone manufacturers can't afford to lose the license to pre-install the Google apps, so they walked away from the deals with Epic, so there are still no phones with the Epic store pre-installed.

Epic's complaint is that attaching this condition to the licenses to pre-install Google apps unfairly stifles competition, as it prevents them from having their app store pre-installed on phones, raising the minimum effort a potential customer requires to discover/purchase something from them.