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Maybe for American geeks, but Australian geeks have had quota systems for years and it works perfectly well. The last unlimited account I had was a dialup account in the early 2000's (iiNet Explorer), but even unlimited dialup is something of a rarity these days. There are a handful of providers offering unlimited downloads on low-speed ADSL connections (usually 256kbit), but the vast majority of ADSL plans give you a fixed amount of downloads per month at a fixed price. For home accounts, exceeding your quota typically results in you being shaped for the remainder of the month (to 64 to 128kbit depending on the ISP) so you can still access the internet but it's not much fun. On business-oriented accounts they'll normally charge a per-megabyte fee for excess usage. Some ISPs also let you buy blocks of additional quota on an ad-hoc basis for a premium, to encourage people to keep within their monthly quota (presumably this makes it easier for the ISP to anticipate demand on their network).

While I would of course prefer to be able to download an unlimited amount of data each month, obviously that's not realistic and a quota system like this makes it clear what the actual costs are and keeps demand in check. This system works perfectly well, but the trick is actually getting ISPs to switch to it -- if all your competitors advertise "unlimited downloads*" and you advertise "100 GB per month" you're going to look much worse, even if your "unlimited" competitor throttle particular types of traffic. Here it happened when they started rolling out ADSL, because having unlimited downloads at 10x the speed of dialup was utterly untenable. Bandwidth costs are a lot lower in the US so they've been able to keep offering "unlimited" for a lot longer knowing that the majority of users would subsidise the few who actually do use a lot of bandwidth, but the increasing speeds of consumer internet connections coupled with the increasing amount of high-bandwidth content available means the camel's back has to break, eventually.

evolution is the only theory of biological diversification over time that has significant scientific backing

To say that there never will be any evidence to support evolution (neglecting the completely ignorant statement that there currently is no such evidence) is not a statement about reality

If anyone wants a screenshot of what the page looked like before its hosting server melted through the floor, here you go.

These were taken on a visit to the Chernobyl area by staff of the upcoming game "STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl" (based on the Chernobyl area)...

I could not find the original hosted site, but I had it backed up so I uploaded it for everyone here. It is very haunting. Anyway, check it out:

http://ii.net/~eenhoorn/s/Chernobyl/chern.html

• We have a Universal Service Obligation enforced by law which requires that access to communication services be equal in rural areas to high density cities. In a very large country with a very low population density, that increases the cost of providing the service.
• We are geographically isolated. Undersea fibre links cost a lot of money to run and maintain. Why is this such a big deal? We predominatently want Internet content from other English-speaking countries. Asian countries have very cheap broadband because most of their bandwidth use is domestic (most content they want is locally hosted). Not so with Australia - we produce relatively little content, but consume loads of it (so we generally pay the majority of the cost of the link rather than sharing the cost with the other countries we peer with).
• Domestic IP traffic costs even more to carry than international IP traffic. There isn't enough scale on the long-haul interstate fibre connections for the price to fall to reasonable levels.
• Our biggest (49% privately owned) telco owns all the core infrastructure (exchanges, local loop, ADSL hardware), and are more interested in making a healthy profit than delivering affordable services.

If you want a large ISP in WA, I recommend WestNet. They're a bit too big to still be really caring, but their reliability is a notch above iiNet's.

If you want an excellent quality smaller ISP in WA, choose ArachNet. They also have excellent colocation terms, and this bloke can sell you a dandy little rack box to colocate with (review coming soon). I use ArachNet myself. There are others.

If you want reliable DSL in Oz and damn the cost, try Request or Optus (nice picture). Everyone else has to go through Telstra to get their DSL (and these two will also if they have no DSLAM in the exchange), which costs you a big reliability hit.

Telstra account for your data as the sum of both directions. Most Oz ISPs will bill you for the max of in and out, or just bill you for in, but no, not Telstra. As a 'phone company, they're not too bad (their service actually works). As a "competitive" ISP, they suck.

And having worked for an ISP, I'd have to agree that about half (in bytes) of the web traffic there was porn. Hey users! Get a life!

I have one client who was dual-homed ADSL through Optus and iiNet. iiNet is Western Australia's biggest ISP, and they started out well, then went corporate on us and bought everyone else (and meanwhile the quality of service drove off a cliff). iiNet is the only ISP in Western Australia which manages to have more DSL downtime from their own incompetence than from Telstra faults. Optus DSL is much more expensive than most others, even Telstra, but OTOH the only time it ever when down was when lightning razzed the modem on the client's premises.

The same client now has a WestNet DSL (DSLAM by Telstra) and is looking at fibre through Request, whose underlying provider is RUCC for their second home at their new premises. RUCC seems to be nearly as reliable as Optus, and notably cheaper.

Telstra is the only ISP I know of in Australia who normally charges you for traffic in both directions. Some ISPs will charge you only for recieved traffic, others will charge you for the max of recieved and sent, but not Telstra.

Before you ask, I use ArachNet, one of the few surviving Western Australian ISPs which is both competent and small enough to care.

It isn't a crime in most places.

Condoning spam actually encourages spammers, not just to continue their business at everyone else's expense, but sometimes even to sue people who refuse to pay for receiving the pitches for their scams.
This means that as long as spam is considered a legitimate business, fighting it can be dangerous, even though it is spying out your personal data and usage patterns as well as inundating your entire families' inboxes (including those of children!) with UCE for all sorts of fraud and porn.

Fortunately the voices of reason are finally being heard, therefore much of this is changing:
Spam has just become illegal (article 13) in the entire European Economic Area.

Soon spam will swamp everything else. (...)
OK, spam is not a good thing, but aren't we getting a little carried away here?

The one point you're forgetting could actually be seen as implied in your own statement: Spammers spam everything, everyone, every address, everywhere, all the time. If it's legal, their numbers will continue to rise.

Digital convergence brings eMail addresses to phones, and pagers have also had them for a long time (now tell me how you click "opt out" on any of these!). If the phone or pager of a doctor becomes unusable due to this "perfectly legal activity", it won't be long before people are dying. If the same happens to the device of a firefighter, a hospital's or an airport's system administrator, people are dying all the same, in the name of spam.

If you think this threat is greatly exaggerated, Japan is a few years ahead in mobile technology (page 3), and with spam making up more than 80% of all messaging, their experience with what will globally become everyone's future of electronic communications is just devastating.

Make sure there will be a federal law against spam - and you'd better speak up before it's too late...

Your congress(wo)man is waiting for your mail.
Just now. And tomorrow. And all week/month/year through, until they finally stop the spam.

Anyway, it isn't as bad as you make it out to be in your post. I live in Sydney and have iiNet ADSL, which has 12GB caps on a 512/128 link for AU$80. They shape you to 72kbps once you hit the cap, and they have a heap of unmetered internal content, including a few 128kbps Shoutcast streams and free P2P within your state. It puts the value you get from Telstra/Optus to shame.

i-green offer unlimited 256/64 for AU$80 too. Data caps aren't the end of the world - they just encourage competition in the market, and encourage ISPs to peer together to offer cheaper data to the customers.

Just as a quick follow-up, i've put up a small website currently which is linking to heaps of the information in relation to this case.

It's available at http://winchester.ii.net/spamsuit.

thewinchester

I've spoken to Mr. McNicol this afternoon, he is a great bloke and he deserves all the help he can get fighting off this spammer.

I've gone through all the sites I maintain and put a little link encouraging net users to find out about this and see how they can help. A sample of this is located at http://dvdstore.ii.net/ and http://winchester.ii.net/. This links ppl to their case website located at http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au.

I would encourage anyone who would love to see justice brought down upon this Spammer donate to Mr McNicol's legal fund.

They are currently accepting Fax donations (Print off the form at http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au/donate/fax/index.h tml), or wait a few days and he should be accepting PayPal donations.

Please, Please everyone get on board - this could set a dangerous international legal precident if it goes the way of the spammer. Make sure that this helps on the path to putting the breaks on spam!

I've spoken to Mr. McNicol this afternoon, he is a great bloke and he deserves all the help he can get fighting off this spammer.

I've gone through all the sites I maintain and put a little link encouraging net users to find out about this and see how they can help. A sample of this is located at http://dvdstore.ii.net/ and http://winchester.ii.net/. This links ppl to their case website located at http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au.

I would encourage anyone who would love to see justice brought down upon this Spammer donate to Mr McNicol's legal fund.

They are currently accepting Fax donations (Print off the form at http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au/donate/fax/index.h tml), or wait a few days and he should be accepting PayPal donations.

Please, Please everyone get on board - this could set a dangerous international legal precident if it goes the way of the spammer. Make sure that this helps on the path to putting the breaks on spam!

My, isn't it quiet here in this little sub-topic...?

You did read the details of Patterson's speech, no? Is convergence everywhere, or not?

`Well-supported' means that there is much evidence to back it. Evolution has had much opinion, much theory and much modelling grow up around it but essentially zero actual hard evidence in support of it being right.

Well, despite your claims, there is overwhelming evidence that evolution occurs. And the theory of evolution explains the data. Just like the theory of gravity explains the effects of gravity.

One of the big problems with evolution is that it can be bent to fit almost any circumstance, almost any evidence. In other words, it has very little - if any - actual
explanatory power.

Well, you are the one trying to use a theory in the field of biology for questions dealing with geology (see below), or Adolph Hitler

About Pattersons lecture. Everything he wrote before and after that time supports evolution. So I expect that it is an out of context quote, an opening dialog meant to be contraversial to get their audiences attention.

After a particularly telling paper by Marcel Shutzenberger of the University of Paris, the chairman of the gathering, C.H. Waddington, said, "Your argument is simply that life must have come about by special creation!" The stenographer records, "Schutzenberger: No! Voices: No!" Anything but creation; it wasn't even fair (in spite of the evidence!) to bring up the word. --
Facts of Life , Page 21 (quote from the transcript)

Well, I don't know what an evolutionist would do with this but I could guess. When I ask them about evolution the only answer I get from them is, "Convergence is everywhere." -- Pattersen again

Oh yes, Baughs famous hammer. Typical creationist "Evidence". A 19th century miners hammer encased in soluble minerals.

And Mt St Helens - you really cannot try to compare "canyons"
carved through ash to canyons carved in rock.

Furthermore, evolution isn't supposed to explain these two things. Evolution is a theory in the field of biology, and those events are (other than fraudulent or deceptive) in the field of geology.

Is this the one? Like the dude that replied to you already I dont know whether to believe it or not... He's right that the bed should be more messy. Whether it's staged or not, it's still a hilarious pic though.

I've made a copy of the file (minus images) since it got slashdotted within one minute.

http://whatever.ii.net/mirrors/terafile.html

There's a petition to make it happen here: http://b5petition.ii.net/

And if you want B5 in anamorphic widescreen on DVD, don't forget to sign the petition!
--
Paul Gillingwater