At least Vodafone Germany intentionally blocks (or used to block) foreign IPs for their gateway. I'll always trust them to needlessly ruin perfectly fine technologies.
Fortunately, as far as I remember at least iPhones route VoWiFi traffic over a VPN, if any is connected, so that's one way to still use it abroad.
This is actually less unreasonable than it seems at first.
The Vo WiFi spec only defines handover procedures for networks that implement VoLTE, but VoLTE roaming was historically almost nonexistent, although the situation is improving somewhat.
This means that if you go out of range of your WiFi router, your cell phone has no idea how to request a handover from the network, and the call drops.
As noted by other commenters, some carriers (I think all of the UK carriers) use IP-based geoblocking to ensure that Wi-Fi Calling only works when using an IP address registered in the UK.
I think most EU carriers use geo blocking for VoWiFi. A lot of non-European carriers advertise VoWiFi as a cheap alternative for roaming.
For EU carriers roaming used to be a big business (Europe is probably the region where most traveling abroad happens, many small countries close together without travel restrictions). The EU carriers don't seem to be able to let go of crazy roaming charges (5€ per minute and more are not uncommon outside of EU).
I have a dual-SIM Pixel 7, the eSIM "slot" has a data-only subscription, the other slot has a pay-as-you-go SIM that I can make phone calls with (I make so few phone calls to actual lines, that having credit that I can top-up every few months is much more cheaper than paying monthly for free minutes). The PAYG SIM offers WiFi calling, and the phone appears to even offer "WiFi"-calling over the data connection, for a much better audio quality.
Interesting to see this brought up again by Businessweek but this is far from news – Nestlé and PepsiCo were featured in the 2009 documentary Tapped, which came to many of the same conclusions, and brought up other potential health issues with bottled water, such as the use Bisphenol-A (BPA) in bottle plastics.
Signup seems to be broken? I've tried a few 'random' (keyboard-mashing) usernames to no avail. As guptaneil pointed out, some immediate form feedback on username availability would be very helpful as well.
Perhaps they meant that foreign (specifically Chinese) competition has done much better globally than those companies currently holding most of the US market.
The idea that we should create a ban on private primary and secondary-ed institutions to fix the public system is incomprehensible to me. Should we force people with enough time and effort to devote to quit homeschooling, too? How about those who can afford private tutors? How far do you plan to take this to eliminate any economic advantage? Inciting conflict and anti-governmental feelings is a great way to inspire creative workarounds by the upper class, not creative solutions to a broken shitpile of an educational system. Ask yourself: would you really be inclined to fix something that someone else broke because you were forced to by the government?
The solution to fixing a broken system isn't to prohibit an alternative and force everyone to use it; those with resources will find a way to circumvent any specific ban, as that's significantly easier than solving a systemic failure. Also, why is it their problem? I'm by no means a libertarian, or particularly anti-government at all, but why should individuals with higher socioeconomic status be burdened with repairing a malfunctioning piece of government above and beyond voting and paying taxes?
What the US public educational system needs is to incentivize the most qualified individuals—potentially those who graduated from private secondary schools, even—to join and help fix the system as it currently stands. The vast majority of teachers in US public schools aren't there because the pay and benefits are any good, and I've known several former educators who've since moved on to other careers due to the need for a living wage. If we want to restore the system correctly, it needs to be done by providing impetus for its repair, at which point perhaps those individuals will actually admire it enough to send their own future children there.
The real issue isn't private schools, the wage gap, or any of that, it's the dismal lack of motivation for anyone capable of overhauling the system to do so.
I'm not proposing that private schools all close their doors tomorrow - of course there would be chaos - but that in long term planning of the education system, we should consider that that privatization of education perhaps leads to a greater socioeconomic gap.
Likewise, I'm not saying that the problem magically fixes itself. It's a long, hard road to undo all of the damage. But if the most influential people aren't on board, it becomes significantly harder. I don't think there's any hard and fast reason that we can't have a public education system that serves the needs of everyone.
As a means of affecting change, I think it's important that the wealthiest, most influential people are involved. Consider - I think it's not a stretch to say that a congressman with no kids in the public system would be more willing to vote to cut funding or vote for a counterproductive measure. And we do rely on the wealthy more to contribute to society. Someone making $500k/year is required to contribute at least $200k of that labor to the government - while someone making $30k might be barely required to contribute anything. And so one might say that it's not without precedent.
I see there's a mini-shitstorm going on here, but let's say Google is in fact a business acting in its own self-interest to some degree, which seems reasonable. Let's say they're giving away Chromebooks because a) they wish to do good in the world, and b) they'd like to get more people using Google services, and this seems like a rather effective method of gaining long-term users. Now, ignoring the fact that you can indeed use crouton, enable dev mode, or otherwise "hack the platform" so to speak, where's the actual issue in having these kids using Google services? Google's offering them free computers. Does we honestly think that a poor kid in India wouldn't eagerly give written consent to become a user of Google's services, letting Google benefit from that as they do from any similar user, especially when they're not being forced in any way whatsoever to continue doing so in the future?
I'm a goddamn middle-class American, I believe I have a reasonable knowledge of what Google will get out of this deal (as they do every day from my heavy usage of their services), and I would accept the free computer. Even at that, poor kids without regular access to the internet aren't your average highly tech-literate, open-source-aware HN user, and I really doubt they care about Google's relatively responsible* use of collected information in exchange for a rather nice free netbook, even if they were fully aware of its implications.
*Sure, I understand this is an arguable definition, but in the larger scheme of things, it seems fair to say that Google doesn't have a malicious use of the data in mind.
I love quoting RMS.
"What schools should refuse to do is teach dependence. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes to minors: to get children addicted. They will not give discounts to these students once they've grown up and graduated."
Surely this applies only if you consider chromebooks as free and this not true atleast by RMS standards.
You should move the survey response bars into a more neutral organization, otherwise it places "respectful" and "team player" in a context where they appear to be lacking compared to your other traits. Also, I believe you mean 'persistent' in your scrolling text bit at the top.
