International wire transfers cost $20 or $25 depending on the bank. Sometimes there's a SWIFT fee (USD20) on top of that too. I think that's the relevant comparison, since the Indian PayPal mechants in question would probably be receiving most of their payments from overseas.

Using VOIP over 3G while on roaming in another country would be by far the most expensive way to make a call... data roaming charges are typically so high the iPhone even has a specific option to disable 3G data on roaming connections.

In case anyone who can't read Russian was wondering... There's nothing useful whatsoever on that site - just the name and contact details of the company (in case you want to phone them or send them a letter), a copyright notice and a link to the site of another company which sells construction materials.

If that's true, how do Optus get away with charging for unlocking access to tethering?

So if I am a gun store owner, and I believe someone is going to murder someone, is it illegal for me to sell them bullets? If someone later (after the murder) can show that I knew about the murderer's intention and I sold the bullets anyway, can I be sent to prison?

Honest question - I genuinely want to know.

I imagine that upon receiving such an injunction, you could (if you were concerned) contact the court and verify its legitimacy.

If you decided to ignore it because it didn't even have your name on it, that would be another matter.

Don't delete them. Instead, open hundreds or even thousands of accounts in your own name, all with bogus and different info. Write a little script to randomly trawl other people's accounts for messages/photos/etc and copy them at random to your own hundreds of accounts, as if they were real postings. Noone would know the difference. Then if your employer/the police/whoever tried to dig up any dirt on you, it would be buried among such a volume of spam that finding it would be a Herculean task.

No doubt the social networking sites would try to shut you down somehow, but surely on Slashdot noone has to explain how to cover your tracks well enough to make it unreasonably difficult for them.

And best of all - Facebook and Twitter can keep reporting in the press "Look, our membership base is growing by a x million accounts a day! At this rate, we will have more subscriptions than there are people on the planet in just a few months! Advertisers flock to us!" ... everyone wins!

I don't think UltraMon does, but there's a free utility called ZoneSize that does exactly that.

http://www.whatsoniphone.com/reviews/wifinder

That's very handy for such situations.. just leave it going, walk around, and when you notice it make a noise/vibrate take your phone out and you have a wifi connection!

I haven't seen any combination of those 3 individual devices (camera, phone, and mp3 player) that together occupy less space than any current smartphone.

Here's one.

And I wish Apple the best of luck should they ever wish to block it.

I just checked and got a 404... is the list working (I'm in Australia)? Or did a malware site just get slashdotted?

I'm not 100% sure on this, but no doubt someone with more clue will chime in if I'm wrong.

I think if you leave things to run their own way, the distribution will be "equal" but weighted by connections, not users.

Now, web pages use one or a handful of connections at most (one for the text and a few others for images - sometimes), and online gaming uses just one from the player to the server, but bittorrent opens hundreds or even thousands of connections per user (one to each peer). Every connection would be given even priority, but in terms of users, the bittorrent user is getting a weight of thousands compared to a weight of 1 for users of other protocols.

There are technological ways to fight this and the most reasonable seems to be QoS shaping, i.e. the network being configured so: "If there is plenty of vacant bandwidth, your bittorrent connections can have it all. But if a more important protocol demands some bandwidth, your bittorrent packets will be put at the end of the queue and they will be served first".

You might even set this up on your home router if you use bittorrent a lot, and also game or use VOIP telephony - so that bittorrent can run at full speed while you're asleep but gets shoved aside if you make a VOIP call, so that you can have enough bandwidth for a good quality conversation. The technology is old and is even supported now in many consumer grade routers.

Many ISPs, including (from TFS) Rogers do exactly this. What they're saying is that if in the future they're not allowed to do this, by law, then they don't know what they'll do instead.

The strongest suggestion here on /. is that one thing they could do, is stop selling a service like "20MBps unlimited" which is not supportable by their network if more than a small fraction of users actually utilise the full advertised features of the product they paid for. Instead, they could offer a service marketed as "sometimes 20MBps not really unlimited, but close enough for web pages and email and gaming" for that price, and keep the bittorrenters well appraised that "because this service isn't unlimited, really, we'll shape your downloads into oblivion - if you don't want that pay the full price for a low contention business grade connection".

The problem as I see it (although I live in Australia and am removed from the broadband situation on the North American continent) is twofold: one, that services are advertised as unlimited and they really aren't (and cannot feasibly be), which leads to all these issues of how much shaping is legal, what disclosure is required, how much overselling, etc.

Two, is that the amount of bandwidth used by plain old ma and pa customers is going up compared to 10 years ago - without bittorrent, people are watching videos on youtube, streaming TV from hulu, doing video phone chats over the net, uploading gigs of photos and videos to picasa, etc - not just downloading web pages at a few kb of text each like they used to. But, the ISPs still have the same network they did then, and even more customers than they did then as broadband becomes more prevalent.

In Australia the first problem is more or less solved, with the ACCC having successfully lobbied government to make it illegal to advertise plans with any kind of limit as "unlimited". So, they are sold as "20gb per month" with peak and off peak times clearly marked. This wasn't always so in Australia - in fact there was even a baseball cap made with the writing "I signed up for an unlimited Internet account with Telstra but all I got was this 3GB CAP". It beats me why some countries still allow the old style "unlimited" false advertising.

The second problem isn't solved but people are working on it with various ISPs trying for FTTN or FTTH networks and massive government grants going towards this (at least in principle - in practice they're up in the air amidst massive controversy). The short story is though, that Telstra, being the formerly-state-owned-but-now-privatised monopoly, and most expensive ISP by a factor of not less than 2 and possibly as high as 3 compared to the next most expensive on the market, still somehow manage to hold a 50% market share. The other players are getting big enough now to be eyeing this off so there is investment in building a better network than what Telstra have in a bid to steal some of that 50% (which is harder than it sounds because their network - although it's old school copper - was built by the government back in the day with the typical "money is no object" government attitude usually applied to utilities). Nonetheless, Telstra are getting scared and beating their chest saying they'll also build their own new network...

I don't know what's happening in the States and Canada, but it seems from what I read on /. that there's no pressure at all to keep the incumbent monopolies on their toes. So, no new investment is increasing network capacity at all.

Anyway, I think you wanted a simpler answer but you got my rant instead ;) Hopefully you'll still be awake by the time you get to this paragraph.

As an offtopic aside, if my screen width is 1600px, why is the comment edit box about 300px wide? The rest of the space seems to be well used by the important function of displaying gray pixels. It's annoying, fix it!

Money doesn't get created, but what gets created is real output that is worth something. You use the $10 you borrowed from me to buy some pumpkin seeds (for simplicity, let's say from me), which you plant and tend.

Your time spent working on tending the pumpkins is worth something to me, because it means that I can eat a pumpkin without myself having to spend any time on growing and tending it.

Because of that, I'm willing to pay you some money for the pumpkin (what I'm actually paying you for is your time spent doing pumpkin work rather than something else). That is money you use to pay me interest on the loan.

So we can use the same money back and forth - it's just a tool for transacting to avoid the double coincidence problem which would occur if we traded by barter instead. What creates the "extra" wealth is that you spend your time on an activity that results in more pumpkins being available than before.

So in case the above explanation wasn't clear - it's all to do with the pumpkin.