Interesting Links for 20-12-2014

• How UKIP will do in the 2015 general election: a seat-by-seat prediction
  (tags: UKIP politics uk )
• Hot tip - if your job revolves around entities of non-provable existence, DON'T DISS SANTA!
  (tags: religion Christmas faith )
• Amazon is selling rape porn about Zoe Quinn. Hurrah for GamerGate!
  (tags: rape porn Amazon games )
• The Pope Just Helped the US and Cuba Make Up. What International Conflict Will He Fix Next?
  (tags: usa cuba pope diplomacy Israel Palestine )
• NASA just e-mailed a wrench to space
  (tags: 3dprinting space NASA )

Internet...upgraded!

Looks like Virgin has finally upgraded our internet speed.

At the same time, one of the Powerline extenders I was using (to connect the study to the living room) was being intermittently dodgy. So I grabbed a new pair of AV500 (to replace the old AV200 ones), and did a before/after test with SpeedTest.net.

With the AV200 ones I was getting around 50Mb/s. With the AV500 ones:


That'll do. For this week :->

(I really should plug a laptop directly into the router and see what speed _that_ gets. With our walls, and laptops that don't support 5GHz they max out around 32Mb/s over wireless.)

Insurance Companies - a proposal for more transparency

I'd love it if insurance companies had to make it clear how much of the money they took in as premiums was paid out again to policyholders.

Because I don't object to pooling risk, but I do object to large rake-offs.

(The Affordable Care Act said that health insurance companies have to spend 80% of their income on medical care. I don't want to go so far as to regulate it. But if you make it public then people can at least take it into account when making their decisions.)

Via discussion here.