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Unless the SIM becomes active on the UK network every 28 days, service will be deactivated within 3 months and won't work again until 10 further months of activity in the UK.

Data roaming in the USA is throttled, yes.

Three UK have a complicated abuse checker implemented. For every calendar month, if you spend time roaming on a Feel At Home partner network you must also have your SIM register on the Three network in the UK at some point in that calendar month.

Failure to do that for 3 times in a rolling 12 months will automatically end your roaming privileges.

That implementation is designed to prevent someone buying a Three UK SIM and using it as a global traveling SIM. It's designed for people who instead travel between the UK and other destinations frequently. (i.e. their SIM will check in on the UK network at least once per calendar month)

Three UK have infrastructure in place to DPI traffic to detect tethering and if it's not enabled on your Three UK account plan then the tethered device doesn't get internet access.

Three Ireland currently don't do this for Three Ireland accounts, though tethering is prohibited on All You Can Eat by policy, not by network infra.

On Android, when you use the inbuilt VPN functionality: no tethered traffic goes through the VPN.

I can't use TextSecure on my new Android device because it's not available on the Amazon App Store - it's only available on Play.

The people I communicate with are on iOS where there's no TextSecure client.

But the bit I dislike about TextSecure and whatsapp is that it's based on a phone number bound to the contactlist of your Google Play Android phone. I see a very strong movement towards kik messenger among my peers because usernames are so easy to deal with and share around in semi-public places.

Nice product but would you mind sharing the reasons why you abandoned it?

Bing image search used to have a nearly identical feature but the flow was different. You would start with a keyword search for images, and could refine your search by drawing on a pixel grid in the colours of your choice. I personally got a kick out of drawing things like drawing a yellow sunset setting in the left over a blue ocean and having image search results contain that.

Sadly bing appears to have removed that very very hidden feature. Perhaps for technical reasons similar to yours (if any?)?

ARQ to Amazon Glacier for my system configuration ARQ to Amazon S3 for the files that change more often Tarsnap to S3 for my servers.

The main advantage for all of the above is I always get to keep my secret key secret.

I personally saw a completely different reason for this, it wasn't that the best developers didn't work for TCS or that the best developers worked for the highest bidders.

For all the years we had TCS developers working with the team, our developers stayed as developers and improved. Yet with TCS the status symbol there was to be a manager. We had a lot of churn over the years as the more experienced developers became with TCS, they stopped development and moved into a more "prestigious" role as a manager and stopped coding.

I'm glad to hear sleep and hibernate are improving on Linux laptops and I really hope more manufacturers will follow suit with their own initiatives like this.

However, will any portable laptop get 7 hours of battery life on Linux with wifi on like the 13" Macbook Airs do?

HN isn't really much of a Q&A site but there both quora [0] and stackoverflow [1] have existing questions and answers that may point you toward better answers.

SCTP is a below HTTP so you'll find some operating systems with drivers that can communicate using it. A quick look at wikipedia shows this fine list of implementations in the OS and userland implementations [2].

I'm not aware of anything that serves HTTP exclusively over SCTP.

You may want to pay attention to devices along the path which could cause problems though! [3]

[0] http://www.quora.com/SCTP [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/sctp [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pro... [3] http://serverfault.com/questions/145716/sctp-stability-and-p...

These are very useful. Here in Ireland that service already exists as ParcelMotel.

As someone who has used ParcelMotel, I can't help but notice the differences between the things I love about the PM site that aren't on the BufferBox site. BB use uninspiring stock images but PM have commissioned an entire set of custom artwork that's a strong brand and very cutsey and describes their service using metaphors.

PM are very explicit about the pricing. It takes up a big chunk of their homepage. After several minutes I still can't find how much bufferbox costs!

And do BB only email out the PIN? Surely sending it to everyone by SMS would be a better idea?

The product is a great idea and it's implemented so well through different companies here in Europe. It's good to see something similar starting off over there also.

You say that same sex couples adopting is a very sensitive issue, but the lack of full civil marriage between same sex couples impacts on the kids of all the existing partnerships.

I have a friend who was raised by a same-sex couple. One was a biological parent, and they had to go through huge complex legal procedures to compensate for inheritance rights, adopting the child and others as he was a stranger-in-law to the non-biological parent that raise him.

I have a lesbian friend who has 3 biological kids of her own. The only social issues they've faced are from other adults being uncomfortable with it. But it's a bigger issue when those people vote against civil marriage and deprive those kids of legal protections kids of hetrosexual marriages have.