Saniya Koktem

Ryanair, headquartered in Ireland's capital city, was founded in 1984 as a small airline with the aim of breaking the duopoly on London-Ireland flights by British Airways and Aer Lingus Ryanair. Since then, it has become Europe’s biggest budget airline with beyond 13,000 people working for the company. The airline operates more than 2,000 flights per days from over 215 airports in 37 countries. Ryanair gives its customers the lowest fare guarantee, which means that if there is a cheaper fare on the same connection with another airline, then Ryanair will pay double the difference.

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Hand baggage

The only baggage allowed on board free of charge is one small personal bag that must fit under the seat in front of the passenger. It may not exceed the maximum dimensions, included in the Ryanair’s cabin baggage policy, which is 40cm x 20cm x 25cm. If one piece of baggage is not enough, the passenger can bring another one for €25 or purchase the priority & two cabin bags, which is cheaper but needs to be added while booking a flight. With this option, passengers can avoid queues and bring additional item of baggage of 10kg that will be stored in the overhead locker. The same baggage allowance applies to Plus / Flexi / Family or connecting flight passengers. Liquids must be in a container of up to 100ml and carried in a transparent, re-sealable plastic 20cm x 20cm bag with a total capacity of up to 1 litre. Devices using lithium batteries are allowed in the cabin if the battery does not exceed 160 watt hours. Ashes are accepted for carriage as cabin baggage provided that a copy of the death certificate and the cremation certificate is held by the passenger.

Registered baggage

Each Ryanair’s customer can purchase up to 3 bags of 20kg. It is always much cheaper to add baggage when making the initial flight booking – it is €25 then, whereas it costs €40 after the booking is made. Passengers should make sure that the weight of a single bag does not exceed the 20kg limit, as the excess baggage fee is €11 per kilo. For health and safety reasons any individual item weighing more than 32kg is not permitted. The prohibited items, which cannot be placed in a checked bag, include: electronic cigarettes, explosives, lithium-ion battery operated vehicles, lithium-ion powered personal electronic devices, firearms including replica or toy guns, gases including propane and butane, flammable liquids, oxidizers and organic peroxides, toxic or infectious substances, corrosives, edible oil exceeding 1 litre in volume. Any sharp objects must be securely wrapped.

Online check-in

Passengers travelling on Ryanair can carry out the check-in process on the carrier's website or using the Ryanair mobile application. Downloading the app before the flight is a good idea not only as it saves all user's personal information, so that there is no need to enter it every time, but it also makes it possible to check-in without access to a computer, e.g. abroad, or on a busy day between the meetings, thus avoiding the £50 airport check-in fee. Online check-in is completely free and is available from 48 hours to 2 hours before the scheduled departure time, and from 60 days for the reserved seats. After logging into myRyanair account, there is the Check-in button next to the trip information. The process consists of three steps: adding ID document, checking-in extras (baggage, insurance, reserved seats), printing off the boarding pass which will be required at the airport. If travelling as a group, the reserved seat option gives passengers peace of mind that they will not be separated on board or they just can have their favourite seats. The rows 1, 2 (D,E,F) and 16-17 have extra legroom, and front seats (rows 2(A, B, C)-5) ensure faster exit. Travellers can also choose between standard aisle and window seats.

Ryanair travel classes

Ryanair's aircraft operating scheduled routes have all-economy class design to keep standard fares as low as possible. There are, however, several ticket options that can satisfy different customers. Plus tariff tickets, which start at £40.99, include a 20kg check-in bag, priority & 2 cabin bags as well as a reserved standard seat. Family Plus get all of the above along with one additional 20kg bag, which gives a total of two 20kg bags. Parents travelling with children can carry a baby bag up to 5kg in addition to their own cabin bag. Flexi Plus customers can carry out check-in at a dedicated desk at the airport free of charge, select the preferred seat make changes to the reservation at no additional cost. They are allowed to carry two cabin bags on board and check-in two 20kg pieces of baggage and also have priority boarding and disembarking the airplane. If there is no need to use all the extras, they can be added separately to a standard ticket for a fee.

Fleet

Ryanair claims to operate the newest, greenest and quietest fleet of aircraft in Europe. Ryanair owns only Boeing 737-800 aircraft, being the largest Boeing 737-800 operator, with 210 Boeing 737 MAX 200s on order. The 737 MAX 200 planes can seat up to 200 passengers. By 2024 the carrier plans to have over 520 planes in operation. In addition, Ryanair uses three Learjet 45 for the purpose of maintenance personnel and plane parts transportation.

Dublin airport

Dublin airport, opened on January 19, 1940, has handled more than 400 million passengers since its inception. It now serves 180 destinations in 42 countries on four continents. A total of 44 scheduled airlines operate flights from the airport. Its most popular international destination is London. In 2018 it welcomed a record number of 31.5 million passengers. The airport operates 24 hours a day, 364 days a year (it is closed only on Christmas Day). There are also a number of places to go before taking off – the airport features 30 restaurants as well as a variety of shops. Before or between the flights passengers can enjoy free, unlimited, fast WiFi and charge their devices at any of the free charging stations throughout the terminal. Dublin airport offers various long-term and short-term parking options to suit all travelers and budgets. Passengers can also make use of any of 18 water stations available.

Refreshments

Passengers can either bring their own food on board the aircraft, or they can choose to pre-order a hot meal. Alternatively, they can use the offer of Ryanair’s onboard Getaway Café selling an assortment of share bags, sweet and savoury snacks or pastries as well as hot, cold, and alcoholic drinks. Hot meals include options such as a vegan or classic lasagne, Maccheroni alla Bolognese, chicken tikka masala and ratatouille. Currently, meals can be pre-ordered only when checking in on the website, no later than 48 hours before the scheduled departure time, on flights from selected airports. Passengers departing from Dublin before 7am can enjoy the early Irish breakfast that includes sausages, bacon, tomato, white pudding, hash brown, brown bread, butter, orange juice and a coffee. Other departure airports with available pre-order meal option include: Birmingham, Bournemouth, East Midlands, Glasgow Prestwick, Leeds Bradford, Manchester, London Stansted, Cork, Shannon, Belfast, Porto, Faro, Malaga, Lanzarote, Gran Canaria, Tenerife South and all German bases except Frankfurt Hahn and Nuremberg; this includes Baden-Baden, Berlin Schönefeld, Bremen, Cologne, Dortmund, Dusseldorf Weeze, Frankfurt International, Hamburg, Leipzig, Memmingen, and Stuttgart. The above applies to the flights before 8:00am.

Additional services

Ryanair has its inflight magazine Runway Retail which is distributed by cabin crew but it serves as an onboard sales catalogue. It is available online as well and may be useful prior to the flight when planning a meal or gift purchase.

Ryanair offers its customers a selection of luggage from Samsonite and American Tourister available with a discount. The choice includes kids’ bags and travel suitcases for family travels or sun or city trips as well as business bags.

The 500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST), also known as China's Tianyan or "Sky Eye," officially opened to the world on Wednesday and will accept observation applications from scientists around the world.

According to China's National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), foreign scientists can submit their applications online, and all foreign applications for observation will be evaluated in a unified manner. The results will be announced on July 20, and observations will begin in August.

Located in Pingtang county, Southwest China's Guizhou Province, FAST is the world's largest single-aperture radio telescope and China owns the intellectual property rights.

About 10 percent of FAST's observation time in the first year, roughly 450 hours, is expected to be allocated to foreign scientists, said Li Di, chief scientist of the telescope and a researcher with the NAO.

Many global astronomers have been looking forward to the opening of FAST following the collapse of the 305-meter vast telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico last December. The competition for grabbing observation time is set to be fierce, Li said.

To date, FAST has found more than 300 pulsars, and the number is expected to reach 1,000 in the next five years. It also made breakthroughs in fields like fast radio bursts, a type of powerful radio wave.

According to the CAS, FAST is open to the world in line with the principle of open skies. The "Sky Eye" will provide research facilities to the world with a more open attitude and offer more observation possibilities to the global scientific community, contributing Chinese wisdom to building a community of shared future for humanity, and striving to promote the development of world science and technology and the progress of human civilization.

HTC’s slow-motion fall from smartphone grace is reportedly set to continue in 2022, with the company said to be working on a new “metaverse”-focused phone in April as the remnants of the once-flagship smartphone company continues to desperately cling to whatever zeitgeist term it can to stay afloat, according to DigiTimes.

The news comes from Charles Huang, HTC’s general manager for the Asia-Pacific region, who reportedly commented at MWC 2022 that the company would be introducing a new high-end smartphone next month with unspecified “metaverse” features. Details are slim, including any specs, markets it’ll be released in, or even what kind of AR or VR features the new device will offer.

The news sounds a lot like HTC’s last major pivot towards relevancy: its Exodus line of blockchain phones that its offered for the past few years. Promising decentralized apps (“Dapps”) and a built-in cryptocurrency wallet, the phones could run blockchain nodes and even mine paltry amounts of cryptocurrency, but — like many instances of blockchain technology — it was a solution largely in search of a problem that never really took off.

For argument’s sake, a metaverse phone would at least make slightly more sense than a blockchain one, if only because HTC has actually been a major player in the virtual reality space.

HTC’s main announcement at MWC 2022 was the debut of a nebulous “Viverse” — the company’s metaverse concept that promises to fuse VR, XR, 5G, blockchain technology, NFTs, and more together into a new, futuristic platform.

It’s even possible to imagine what a metaverse-integrated smartphone could be, given the existence of projects like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces or Microsoft Mesh, which aim to help integrate traditional devices like smartphones into VR and AR experiences.

In that vein, a high-end HTC “metaverse” phone could optimistically be one that ties deeply into the company’s VR headsets for an integrated, cross-device experience that boldly changes how we think about using smartphones (and other devices) in virtual settings.

That said, the metaverse phone could also be a lackluster smartphone that has a few half-baked VR apps preloaded. For what it’s worth, HTC’s Viverse site does explicitly call out that one will be able to interact with its metaverse concept from “any phone, tablet, PC, or VR headset,” complete with an image of a smartphone that appears to be doing just that.

Given that HTC’s Viverse doesn’t really exist — nor does widespread adoption of any modern metaverse concept — it’s easy for the company to just say it’s making a metaverse app or phone. After all, who’s to say that you aren’t?

Maybe the metaverse phone that HTC is launching will be a revelation, the kind of product that launches HTC back to relevancy and puts the company back at the forefront of the industry. But the company’s recent history doesn’t give much hope that it will be.

HTC USED TO MAKE GOOD PHONES

It’s almost difficult to remember in 2022, but HTC used to make good phones — devices for both Android and the different versions of Windows Phone that were among the best hardware you could buy. Phones like the legendary HTC HD2, the HTC Evo 4G, the HTC One X, the ultra-sleek HTC One, or the jewel-toned HTC U11.

But that was, in many ways, a different company than the HTC of today, before the company sold a good chunk of its smartphone talent to Google in a $1.1 billion deal back in 2017. Since then, Google’s Pixel phones have only gotten better and better, while HTC’s smartphone fortunes have languished.

Despite its hardware chops, HTC — like LG, Motorola (prior to its own trials and tribulations with Google), and other Android device makers — was unable to find lasting commercial success, squeezed out by Samsung’s more popular Galaxy devices on one end and Apple’s iPhones on the other.

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And that brings us to the HTC of today: hollowed out of the engineers and designers that once made its phones so great, frantically flailing with blockchain phones, metaverse phones, and whatever other major buzzword comes next to stay afloat in a smartphone market that barely resembles the one in which it was a major player.

It’s not that HTC is completely devoid of ambition or good products: the company’s still producing high-end virtual reality headsets aimed at businesses and recently launched its unique-looking Vive Flow headset for more casual customers, too.

Then again, looking back at products like the Evo 3D or Facebook-focused HTC Status and HTC First — it’s possible that being doomed to chasing gimmicks on the road to irrelevancy was always HTC’s fate.

SkyBridge Capital is a global alternative investment firm. The firm's suite of investment offerings for institutional and multidiscipline investors include commingled fund of hedge funds, customized separate account portfolios, hedge fund advisory services and a long-only mutual fund. The firm also produces the SkyBridge Alternatives (SALT) Conference and, through its media affiliate SkyBridge Media, has revived the iconic financial television programme "Wall Street Week". Headquartered in New York City, it has offices in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, Zurich and Seoul.

El Salvador, which recognized Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender on June 9, is preparing to distribute bitcoins to citizens to promote its use. The law legalizing bitcoin in El Salvador came into force on September 7, 2021. In his official address, President Nayib Boucle announced that with the participation of the Chivo mobile wallet team, each user registered in the program will receive bitcoins in the amount of $ 30.

Thus, all adult citizens will receive $30 in bitcoin together with the Chivo mobile wallet for iOS and Android, developed by decree of the authorities. In order to receive the cryptocurrency, the user will have to confirm his identity, Bukele announced. The wallet will allow you to send and receive bitcoins, as well as convert them into dollars. Payment for goods via Chivo will be carried out using a QR code. Although this is a small amount, taking into account bitcoin commissions, the use of Lightning Network technology will contribute to the spread of cryptocurrency as a means of payment.

"The application will work wherever there is a mobile network signal. You don't even have to have an active tariff. It will be possible to use bitcoin at will. Anyone who does not want this will not receive bitcoins. If someone receives payment in bitcoin, they will be able to choose automatic crediting in dollars," the president said.

On June 9, the Parliament of El Salvador, during a vote, approved a law that will make bitcoin the official means of payment of the country on a par with the dollar. Opposition politicians are trying to protest the decision, calling the law unconstitutional.

"I don't see what could stop him. This is a law, the government is working 24 to 7, striving to enforce it in 80 days," Bukele said. We have 84 seats in Congress. It takes only 43 to change monetary policy, that is, half and one more. That's the majority, right? If we are talking about the super-majority, we need two-thirds, which is 56 out of 84. We got 63 votes. Who would object to an initiative that helps people and does not cause any harm? Perhaps they are politically motivated."

He also noted that he would defend the decision taken at the vote.

"Let me remind you that bitcoin works by itself and does not depend on what we do. But, of course, what we are doing will help protect the solution and provide additional benefits for citizens."

Analyst Willy Wu expects that thanks to the distribution of bitcoin to the residents of El Salvador, the global user base of the cryptocurrency will grow by 4.5 million people or 2.5% at one point.

The El Salvador experiment

The rapid processes of bitcoin legalization in El Salvador are initiated by the authorities and therefore almost unhindered. However, these initiatives were immediately frowned upon by the IMF. The Fund threatened that because of such a decision, the country may refuse to lend to El Salvador. The World Bank has already refused to help El Salvador in introducing bitcoin into the payment system.

Meanwhile, El Salvador became the first state in the world to legalize cryptocurrency, and its example can be very informative for the global crypto community. Observing the situation in El Salvador, experts will have the opportunity to assess the future prospects of the digital asset.

Now that bitcoin has been officially accepted as a means of payment, all companies will be required to accept it for payment. Accordingly, the role of BTC in the national economy will significantly increase.

The development of the situation will also show how many ordinary citizens will prefer to make a choice in favor of bitcoin, refusing to use the dollar. The problem on the way to mass acceptance of BTC may be its volatility, but it can also bring high profits to bitcoin owners.

In February 2022, the government of the country announced the integration of the solution from AlphaPoint into Chivo. The New York-based startup has improved the wallet's user interface, fixed bugs, and added improved Lightning Network support.

"Thanks to our work with Chivo, we have seen how a significant part of the population has turned to using the app for secure and simple transactions," Vallejo said.

He referred to the work of the National Bureau of Economic Research, according to which 40% of those who downloaded the wallet continued to use it after receiving a $30 registration bonus in BTC.

According to a Bitso representative, 20% of Salvadorans worked with Chivo after they spent the funds issued by the state.

"The main obstacle to the adoption of cryptocurrencies both in Latin America and around the world is education. As we continue to provide Salvadorans with information and tools to better understand and use innovative technologies, we expect an increase in the pace of implementation," Vallejo added.

Recall that a survey by the American organization National Bureau of Economic Research showed the failure of El Salvador in the experiment with bitcoin — 60% of those who downloaded Chivo did not use it after receiving the bonus.