Indeed, the US has a major lack of fixed-line competition and lack of regulation. Starlink doesn’t really help with that, at least in urban areas.

I’m not familiar with the wireless situation. You’re saying that there are significant coverage discrepancies to the point where many if not most consumers are choosing a carrier based on coverage, not pricing/plans? There’s always areas with unequal coverage but I didn’t think they were that common.

Here in NZ, the state funding for very rural 4G broadband (Rural Broadband Initiative 2 / RBI-2) went to the Rural Connectivity Group, setting up sites used and owned equally by all three providers, to reduce costs where capacity isn’t the constraint.

Starlink plugs the rural coverage gaps, but in urban areas it’s still more expensive than either conventional fixed-line connections or wireless (4G/5G) broadband. Even in rural areas, while it’s the best option, it’s rarely the cheapest, at least in the NZ market I’m familiar with.

It also doesn’t have the bandwidth per square kilometre/mile to serve urban areas well, and it’s probably never going to work in apartment buildings.

This is a funding/subsidisation issue, not so much a technical one. I imagine Starlink connections are eligible for the current subsidy, but in most cases it’s probably going to conventional DSL/cable/fibre/4G connections.

Aggregate bandwidth now rivals or slightly exceeds gigabit wired connections.

Where that aggregate bandwidth is shared amongst large numbers of users, bandwidth per user can suffer dramatically.

Low density areas may be fine, but cube farms are an issue especially when staff are doing data intensive or latency sensitive tasks.

If you’re giving employees docking stations for their laptops, running ethernet to those docking stations is a no-brainer.

Moving most of the traffic to wired connections frees up spectrum/bandwidth for situations that do need to be wireless.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

I wouldn’t start worrying until 50k+ hours.

There should be a way to view SMART info and that includes an hour count.

Biggest question to me is why you need an IP in the first place?

For the authentic US experience, I’ve heard some clubs print their own $1 house currency, which the ATMs/bar staff sells.

I’m sure the strippers would love to be paid in fivers, though.

Most of the rest of the world moved the roughly $1 to $2 values to coins rather than bills/notes.

It looks like only the 1, 2, and 5c Euro coins contain steel.

Steel is cheap. Copper, zinc, nickel, brass and especially silver are rather expensive.

Many world coins up to about 10-50c are steel plated copper or similar.

Most of the world considers it unacceptable to have a coin that costs more to manufacture than it is worth, let alone have just the raw materials cost that much. Smaller coins have often been simply removed.

In the US, on the other hand, apparently the zinc industry is able to force the continued expensive existence of the penny.

You’re also potentially blocking a seat that could be used by a paying passenger, and the operator will statistically run more/longer trains at higher cost to cope with increased demand.

Hmm. They’re very common in NZ now, however it appears that document is talking about modulating the actual normal shop lighting, not just an independent transmitter.

I redid the electrical in a supermarket already fitted out with Pricer gear, and we went from dumb electronic-ballasted fluoros to dumb-driver LEDs, no DALI and certainly no comms uplink or modulation smart enough for that. I’m aware that the document suggests power-line communication to the drivers, but these were off the shelf dumb drivers/ballasts.

The ceiling mounted Pricer transceivers would have been doing all the transmitting, and as I never saw any visible light coming out of them, and the HF ripple and instability from the shop lighting would have been significant, I think it’s pretty safe to say they were using some form of IR.

Yup. They use ceiling-mounted IR transmitters that are a bit like a big multi-directional TV remote control.

FYI: This has been going on for about a month. If you still see warnings, update your ad blocker, switch to UBlock Origin, and/or check their FAQs.

Yes, or at least 9 when the seed numbers were last checked, which shouldn’t change too quickly.

As for why seed numbers listed on trackers are significantly larger than those found by actual clients, who knows.

Not all seeds are online 24/7. Sometimes leaving the torrent running for hours or days can allow you to download it when that PC/server gets switched on.

Does the exterior of the case get physically very hot? If it does, then your problem is that the case can't shed enough heat. If the case is mostly cooler, or only has a hot spot in the middle, then it's an issue with getting heat from the die to the case.

I would be looking at something like a 100x100x3 copper shim, to help with not just moving heat straight from the die to the adjacent section of case, but also spreading the heat sideways. Heat pipes would be nice but 3mm is too thin for a DIY solution.

But how do you determine what's just 'fixing poor wording' and what's actively hiding major bias or retcons of history?

Radio NZ got caught a year or so ago with a staffer who was editing articles syndicated from Reuters to be more pro-Russian. Should they be able to sweep that under the rug and claim it was only ever the one article they got caught on?

Likewise, bin Laden was originally hailed as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter. The articles relating to that are part of the historical record and kinda important.

Allowing the historical record to be retconned with impunity was probably the defining trait of 1984. It's really not a path you want to go down.