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Comment Re:Great but (Score 1) 28

Yup, moved to NZ from the UK and I went from 80Mbit fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK (and only getting around 50MBit to the house in reality) to getting gigabit fibre to the premises in NZ - and the NZ offering had no caps, got on average 950MBit plus sustained, and was half the price of the UK offering.

Comment Re:40x income is still 40x paid to gov't (Score 4, Informative) 191

Other countries have solved these problems.

In the UK, most people dont have to file taxes - there are no deductions for the vast majority of people, you dont get to deduct your mortgage costs, healthcare costs or anything else. You pay your tax in monthly instalments taken from your wage by your employer, based on well known tax codes and your level of earning, and at the end of the year you get a piece of paper saying how much you paid. If you switched jobs and earned more but underpaid tax, your tax code is adjusted for the next financial year and you pay more tax per month to cover both the previous years shortfall and your new tax requirement.

If you run a business, then the business does file returns, and does have deductions - so that covers your business, Uber driver, travel expenses and everything else. People travelling for business claim expenses through the company, and the company deals with the tax implications.

A businesses accounts and the accounts of the business owner are very very strictly separate - the business owner does not get to dip into the business for their own usage, they get paid a wage or dividend, which is taxed like everyone else as income.

Comment Re:Unsubscribe (Score 2) 30

Don’t unsubscribe, mark it as junk. And if it gives you the option to block the sender, do it.

Gmail has such an inconsistent behaviour here it’s unbelievable - how the web ui works is very different to the apps.

Gmail also is terrible at spotting obvious spam, and im regularly marking actual spam as such.

Comment Re:but what about the kickbacks on the $20K tech f (Score 2) 54

You joke but a lot of suppliers to the US government, including the military, works on a two-contract basis - the initial acquisition of the item, and then the support contract for the item.

A lot of suppliers bid low on the initial acquisition contract, because they know they can make up losses on the support side later on. The supplier is also more willing to take on more risk as part of the supply, again because they can make money back on the support.

If the support contract becomes uncertain because the military can go elsewhere to support the item, then expect the supply contracts to get a lot more expensive, and a lot fewer contractors willing to undertake fixed price deliveries for anything.

The US government did try something similar to this in the late 1980s and early 1990s - they split the procurement of new items into two contracts, the first being the development of the item, and the second being the delivery of the item. Whomever won the development contract had to hand over everything needed to produce the item to whomever won the delivery contract. The problem is, all the risk exists in the development contract, and all the profit exists in the delivery contract.

It did not go well and after a couple of very bad outcomes for development contract winners, they stopped bidding. So the approach was dropped.

Comment Re:Fuel or electrical? (Score 2) 106

Another greater possibility is that one engine failed for some reason and the pilots reacted incorrectly causing the good engine to be shut down. This is the most likely and there have been other crashes caused by this kind of mistake. Pilots spend their whole careers maintaining equal thrust between a plane's engines, but then when an engine failure happens they have to go for maximum unequal thrust.

This is unlikely because its been shown that the time it takes to go through the 787 engine-out checklist, to get to the point where you do anything that could conceivably turn the good engine off, is longer than the time between when the aircraft took off and crashed.

If this was the case, it would have been done by a crew member not going through the checklist.

Comment Re:"Up and Down" vs. "Around the World" (Score 1) 39

The only person bringing SpaceX into this is you.

Why does there have to be any comparison at all? Why does there have to be a perceived competition between what Blue Origin are doing here and what SpaceX are doing over there?

There is something broken in western news media and social media, in that everything simply *must* be a race or a competition, and if one entity in the perceived competition is behind then they shouldn't even bother - it doesn't matter that none of the actual entities themselves see themselves as being in a competition or race, they dont matter, its an external thing being forced on them by observers.

The concept that an entity can be entirely about their own milestones, rather than judging their progress by measuring against another entity, is rapidly becoming an impossibility in many peoples minds.

You see it all the time, with SpaceX being used as the thing to measure against - someone hops a rocket, oh but they are a decade behind SpaceX so why are they even bothering. Someone launches a new rocket but its not reusable, doesn't matter than it meets all the internal requirements of the project and the project sponsors, its not reusable so they are so far behind SpaceX so why are they even bothering. Blue Origin launches a sub-orbital rocket, entirely meeting their own internal goals, but its not orbital so they are so behind SpaceX, so why are they even bothering...

Not everything has to be a competition.

Comment Meanwhile... (Score 1) 30

Any criminal gang with two braincells to rub together will simply download any one of the free and secure cryptography libraries, any one of the free and secure messaging protocol libraries, put the two together with a Bootstrap based UI, and ... enjoy secure communications while the rest of us have our messages read by some sweaty oik eating cheetos in a dungeon office somewhere in Austria....

Comment Re:More importantly. (Score 1) 122

You have a point.

But what large group of people has there ever been where there has been no toxicity or social problems within?

Facebook, Twitter, social media in general, IRC, ICQ, news groups.... I've been around a looooong time on the internet, enough time to understand that the problem is not the platform, its the people.

How do we solve that?

Comment Re:That is called fraud (Score 2) 141

Inaccurate.

Broadcoms cease-and-desist to perpetual license holders was in regards to applying updates after the support part of the contract expired. The perpetual licenses are still in effect, frozen at the last update that was included under the support part of the contract - perpetual license holders can extend the support contract separately.

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