I too like the ads. But programs with "tip of the day"s in them have had this problem solved for a long time, just including a check box for never show me again. You could make the argument with some programs that it interferes with a minimalist design, but you'd have to admit this does not appear to be what steam is going for.
Well you can look at how the US has done in the middle east for an example of the economic cost of asymmetric warfare. Though I generally agree with your point that it's not going to work out well for the invaded country either unless another state actor comes to their aid. It's also worth noting that the French Resistance was considered important not just for the acts of sabotage and intelligence it gave the allies as they advanced but also in the rapid growth of the FFI after the allies invaded.
When you read it your also copying it into cache. We could argue the technicalities but really it's about copyright law not the colour of bits. Or if you prefer we can just say it's legal to copy the ebook to a new owner if you remove your own copies (which is one process the above poster refereed to by writing "bar some caveats").
Netflix did offer to have their client generate random upstream traffic to balance the load. Which netflix says was met with silence in the meeting where they proposed it. It has some amusing implications where netflix saturates verizon's network to pay less.
It's actually a historical issue. In the US cellphones orginaly used standard POTS numbers while in other countries cellphones often had an easily distinguishable format. This means that in the US granny wouldn't know she was calling a cellphone so charging her extra would be an unpleasant suprise, while in other countries she knew and was thus implicitly accepting to pay the charge.
Seems to me a government mandated program might seem more limitless and be less personal and thus you don't feel like your taking advantage of the kindness of caring people or stopping resources going to those who are possibly even more needy.
On a related note: One of the things I somewhat like about taxes for welfare rather than "rely on the largess of charitable billionaires/private entities" argument is that it helps ensure expenses from charitable acts wouldn't be a drain on a business competing. Thus 'asshole' private entities wouldn't have a concrete market advantage over 'nice' private entities.
One of the problems is they're natural monopolies. You only need the one data link and so it's (arguably) more cost effective to have a single regulated monopoly on the last mile side. You can create hybrid systems (like the UK) where other businesses buy capacity wholesale from the monopoly provider and compete over the same infrastructure.
The same could be said of the grocery stores or car dealerships in my town. The problem is that as soon as you say it'd be more efficient to have all our eggs in one basket, the human nature of the carrier kicks in and says, "Hey I've got it made now. I can take it easy because no one's allowed to compete with me". Unfortunately, hiring some delegate who's multiple-times removed from the consumer/voter and is likewise unmotivated to improve the situation doesn't change that.
Yes doing the trenching and tunneling through various neighborhoods is disruptive and requires heavy machinery, etc. but that's just to create a hole in the ground. Once some conduit is laid (as a public good by the municipality?) it should be relatively easy for new carriers to come in and pull fiber or what-have-you. You just have to make the channel big enough for e.g., several cables and then you lease the space to the x highest bidders for five years at a time where x > 1.
There are probably better ways to finance things and minimize the disruption, etc. but overall it doesn't seem infeasible to me.
Region locking fun. The worst part being they say in the eula that you can not use VPN services with the Origin shop. So the choices is between either play guess the interface with real money or having them be able to say we blocked your account you no longer have access to your games.
Well, as a German I don't have problems understanding German, I just prefer having it like everything else in English. But it is a reason for me not to use them.
The fix isn't particularly ridiculous. Updating an exisiting databases value from an 8 bit to 32 bit integer would have required quite possibly rebuilding the entire database and any software that was bound to getting an 8 bit integer as a return value (For example messages split by length rather than coupled with a label). Which might have been made harder because the hardware costs involved (say for the extra 20 hardrives to store the 20GB of data) would have been much higher than now. Much easier just to create another table that includes century and a foreign key pointing back to the database entry. Not great but it does the job and you can patch over what look like minor visual or selection errors as they pop up rather than dealing with every custom form that relies on the database throwing exceptions that stop workflow altogether.
As embarrassing as this headline is you can at least say the people who were supposed to get the communications did.
Most Y2K issues were not about 8 bits vs. 32 bits, but about storing years as two-character strings. Otherwise we might have seen problems in years like 2028 or 2156.
This story is proof that one cannot "patch over minor [...] errors as they pop up" as you say.
To simplify: Bitcoin miners race to discover a code that gives them 50 bitcoins. This code gets harder to find each time it is found. This decision is pre-baked in using the bitcoin system (other e-currencies have different traits.)
If you join a mining pool then you split the 50 coins with everyone else in the pool (and they'll split with you) if you are the lucky machine than found the code.
The analogy is pretty direct: mining is the same as going and doing work to dig up gold, buying from the market is the same as buying gold in the market.
