RegalPotoo

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn't be a cap on the penalty they could impose.

In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Yeah, pretty much. The way the rest of the world deals with it is by splitting the infrastructure maintenance and retail sides to eliminate the profit incentive to not do maintenance.

You have a company who owns a/the fibre network in an area and is obligated by anti-monopoly rules to sell access to the network at the same rate and terms to anyone who wants it. They have a profit incentive to maintain the network to a reasonable standard because having a functioning network is how they make money. In a lot of places this wholesale provider will be at least part government owned given that the government usually pays a good chunk of the cost to build out large national infrastructure projects like fibre networks.

Separately, you have retail ISPs who buy access to the fibre network (or 4g, satellite, ...) and sell it to the public along with value adds like tech support, IP addresses, peering agreement etc.

It's never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

Something like

!"A line with exactly 0 or 1 characters, or a line with a sequence of 1 or 3 or more characters, repeated at least twice"!<

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Syntactically valid Perl

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 weeks ago (6 children)

It's not the issuance that's the headache, it's the installation. There are more things that need valid certs than just webservers

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I agree with your analysis of the law, but I do get why people are a bit uncomfortable with this. Elon has been a shit human, rocket launches have impacted wildlife and SpaceX and Tesla have been toxic places to work for a long time, but that's only become a problem recently because he's been getting more involved in politics? The whole point of having a regulatory state separate from the rest of the government is so they can set and enforce rules fairly and impartially.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But it's all the government's fault for having regulations that stop him doing what he wants - he'd be on Mars by now if it wasn't for the stupid government stopping him from poisoning a protected nature reserve and crashing rockets into people.

Don't they understand? It's really important to get people to mars so there is a place for rich assholes to go when the environment on earth is completely trashed beyond repair

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

bold_move.gif

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago

Not mine, but there is a certain compelling logic to this: https://bruces.medium.com/the-mysterious-visit-of-mr-babbage-by-bruce-sterling-2017-7c941028c4d8

tl;dr - accepted history is that Charles Babbage designed a series of mechanical computers in the mid 1800s, and the underlying theory behind them would go on to influence work a century later when the technology had caught up to the idea, but they were never built. There are a bunch of coincidences and unexplained meetings that suggest that maybe he sold his plans to Italy who then built one of his designs in secret. This is also supported by modern attempts to build a computer from his plans - there was 1 measurement wrong across tens of thousands of parts, and it worked perfectly. Babbage was a skilled engineer but to get all that correct, on the first go, entirely from theory is maybe a bit much

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Language specifiers include country level variants - de-DE, de-AT, de-CH

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Yup, this - batteries are consumables. They have a service life of ~2-5 years depending on load. If the manual doesn't tell you how to replace them then it's basically ewaste already

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