William Lower
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Students Pay High Price for Freedom
An excellent article in the Herald today about looming VSM. This is just a terrible idea.
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"The answer to all our problems is bound up with what people believe. Governments do not stand a chance against a world population that truly understands. You think this is implausible? Wrong. Every revolution in human history began with a single idea. When that idea spreads, because it is convincing, the rulers wake up to a new world. It can and will happen again, and it could be in our lifetime."
This is from a Mises Institute fundraising email. Not typically the most quotable sort of document, but I thought this was good.
(Source: hipsterlibertarian)
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FaceTime Calls May Be Cheaper Than You Think
A few months back, I performed a very unscientific trial of Apple’s new FaceTime service on mobile internet connections; comparing the cost of a FaceTime call on a data connection with a traditional voice call over the mobile network. What I found was quite surprising.
Okay, so I made a 43 minute call which used 74MB of data. That works out at less than 2MB/minute (1.72MB), sent and received.
What this means for us Kiwis on the Telecom XT network…
On the prepaid 500MB Telecom XT plan, after you have used the 500MB of data, you could call unlimited for $0.115/minute with FaceTime.
Or $0.026/minute on the prepaid 4GB plan at $61.51/month after bonus credit, then the above rate. This works out at about 39 hours of video calling! After this, the per minute rate goes up to $0.17.
So, that’s two-way video calling to another FaceTime user anywhere in the world from any iPhone, or Mac with mobile broadband, from less than 3c/minute!
I haven’t actually tested the data efficiency of Skype video calls, but I expect they are not far off. I will make sure I keep an eye on the data usage next time.
All this sounds good to me. Carrier-based calling and text services will inevitably decline in favor of VoIP solutions, but it looks that the transition is closer and more cost-effective than I initially thought.
(Source: telecom.co.nz)
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Using Location-Based Services to Visualize Spatial Social Patterns in Urban Environments
Emergent social networking applications which take advantage of location-based services such as Foursquare, Facebook Places, and Google Latitude, present opportunities to aggregate data and analyze social patterns.
This research report is interesting in itself, but also provides an indication of what will follow. Exploring the relationships between geographic elements and social life, using these new technologies, is a chance to better understand our environments and provide insight into ways our cities can be better designed for the future.
Take a look: urbagram.net/archipelago
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How to pet a kitty
The Oatmeal’s guide to the protocols surrounding human-cat contact. Absolutely hilarious. Check it.
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