1,490 karma · joined May 1, 2014
To put it in context, my PC isn't on 24 hrs a day but it's almost certainly drawing at least 250W for the 9 or 10 hours it is on. It's just a cost of working from home.
We've just moved to a place where our only other option was a £400 a month leased line delivering synchronous 100Mbps. For less than a quarter of that, Starlink gives us roughly 120-150Mbps down, around 7Mbps up, and pings around the 30 ms mark. Upload is slow but workable for now.
It's easy to complain for clout when you don't actually need the service. But if you don't have another affordable option, Starlink is remarkable. I keep having to remind myself that I'm running a business from my rural home via space.
And, sure, there are elements that aren't perfect (the cable on our dish isn't replaceable unless you want to manually splice wires, but reports on the Starlink subreddit say that Starlink will send you a new dish if the cable gets damaged). The power draw is around the same as a fairly typical lightbulb from 20 years ago, so I can totally live with that.
I know it's frustrating for people who can't get Starlink, especially if they know someone who wants transfer their dish to them, but that's the price of avoiding oversubscription.
If you can take the Starlink dish off your roof and still post your videos complaining about Starlink then you were never the target customer anyway.
In practice, the BBC is part of the establishment but that doesn’t mean it is an arm of or voice for the government. Governments of all stripes have had a rocky relationship with the BBC.
The BBC outside the UK is a voice of a particular kind of Britishness rather than of the government. You could perhaps call that a soft power promotion of that aspect of British culture but no more than CNN International is for one aspect of US culture.
The BBC is very far from perfect and in danger of losing relevance but it is a misunderstanding to think of it as propaganda for the UK.
Or are you saying that journalists and their editors believe there's a need for wealth taxes and so they're pushing that line?
As for Ionica, it wasn’t that long ago that you would still see the dishes on roofs and chimneys in the Midlands. Its downfall, though, was less to do with rain and more that it was narrowband, so good only for voice and maybe dialup modem, at a time when cable networks were not far off launching DOCSIS broadband.
And then over in Northumberland there's Once Brewed, Twice Brewed, Snodgrass.
Fortean TV was, admittedly, fun but silly fun nonetheless.
Some good place names in Shropshire, too, but Durham has my favourite with No Place and Pity Me.
Schools need to use and teach the technologies that children will encounter in their daily lives, not those that tick an ideological box.
Electric Highway (Ecotricity) has a high rate of broken chargers. When you find one, they seem to charge a minimum fee of £12 regardless of how much you use.
Most chargers are slow. Either 7kw or 11kw is common; 20kw is considered rapid in some places.
The fragmentation of networks means you need at least four crap apps just to get around and then you’ll probably need to install a new app if you’re going somewhere new.
What you call convenient locations are a mixed blessing. Spaces for chargers are often ICEd in my experience because they’re in busy car parks.
I just want to pull up, plug in, and tap my credit card. The charge networks seem to go out of their way to make using the service painful.