Comment Blocking porn websites? (Score 5, Insightful) 186
Good luck with that.
Good luck with that.
Traders who make money through "arbitrage" need access to more than one exchange — they're making money off the price differences of securities on each. They justify this as being beneficial to the market, because they're making prices equal across the world. Guess it's just coincidence that it's beneficial to their bottom line too, eh?
It's a lot more complicated than that: GP Practices are often private partnership businesses (between a bunch of GPs) and most definitely are run "for profit" in the sense that they have to bid for work from the healthcare commissioners (mostly this used to be the PCTs, now it's mostly the regional StHAs, etc). And the NHS does farm out some work to private hospitals to meet its waiting-list targets (and also under the banner of "Choice" that the Blairite government brought in)...
I agree there is significant waste, yes. But removing the context of something for a snappy headline — misrepresenting something to get a soundbite — is bad journalism. Geeks expect better!
Healthcare? Profitable? I worked for the National Health Service for four years. It most definitely has its fair share of wastage. But the NHS — being state-owned and state-provided healthcare — is certainly not "profitable"
About that £3500 PC...
The media reporting this story appear to be doing a good job of ignoring what that £3500 PC actually is: three years of PC, with software licensing, hardware replacement, upgrades, maintenance and support. It's not just the bare metal put on someone's desk but the full service behind it.
If you take the IT budget for a large healthcare public sector organisation and divide it by the number of desktop PCs they support, it'll probably come out at around £1000/year.
Current UK Government, with its close ties to Murdoch and News Corp, is unlikely to be fighting for neutrality in this situation. They're not fighting for an equalities commission to look at the News Corp buy-out of BSkyB. I can't see them stepping in here either, even to protect the BBC.
"Best efforts" might mean "best effort getting that traffic through our really congested upstream transit provider".
Something with higher quality might be a direct private peering.
Of course, it's not unknown that ISPs engineer congestion on those upstreams to force a private peering -- and you can bet your bottom dollar it won't be a "settlement free" peering.
This is what the drive to the lowest price possible gets you: a broadband that loses the ISP money in an attempt to get that TV and billboard price-point of £5.99 per month. How does the ISP make money and remain competitive? Answer: more bites at the cherry! Phorm, getting content providers to pay... etc...
I'd be amazed if Comcast had only one 10Gbit/sec transit interface to one of their two upstreams: it's likely they take several at multiple different TATA POPs.
Multi-national providers are likely to be running their graphs in UTC - reading the graph that way makes a lot more sense.
Taken from wikileaks' Twitter at http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17498238199 is this:
"Wired's war on WikiLeaks continues. See comment by 'mpineiro' http://bit.ly/aZm4US"
Not so quick to judge Wired's coverage at face value...
Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.