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Sacrificial Broadband?
BitGuy asks: "SBC's VP of Network Engineering reckons that 78% of broadband users would give up their daily newspaper instead of living without their broadband connection (hmm, being a broadband user, I don't need a newspaper), and 63% said they'd give up their morning coffee (the freaks!). Personally I'd rather give up watching TV - what would the rest of Slashdot give up to keep your real sweet net access?"
My ocean view ... whoops.
My crime-free neighborhood ... whoops.
Well, I might give up TV for broadband. But not coffee.
Don't need to give up anything... In Portland, Oregon, DSL by Hevanet is wonderful.
Oh, wait...
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
oops. That was pretty stupid.
I second giving up TV. Smartest thing I did when I moved was not getting cable.
Splurge and get the extra 256k download and you'll still be money a head.
I have a lot of friends that say "Yeah, but there are great shows on." True, but for every 1 good show I watch 3 horrible ones. It's too damn easy to come home and hit the power button. You just sit and watch and suddenly 2 hours is wasted out of an already short day. After 3 months, I'm over $100 richer and I've read more than I have in the past year. I go to my friends place on Monday for the important shows on Fox. It's amazing how annoying commercials are after not seeing them.
Try it for a few months! If you need an entertainment fix, listen to radio streaming off the net.
A speech...
I wouldn't mind sacrificing a few trolls or Bill Gates or Louis Gerstner in the name of broadband. Hell, I'd sacrifice them for no good reason at all.
Someone hates these cans.
I'd give up 10 euros a month for a 100 MBit connection to the internet. :^)
That's actually what I'm paying now.
Ok, maybe I'd pay 15 euros.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
At least here, all of our major newspapers are online. All of their articles are online and all of the classifieds are online. The only things you don't get are coupons, comics and "fillers" (like the political cartoons). But you can get most those in other places. The other advantage of online news is you get the exact amount of coverage you want for what you want, and in many cases quicker than even the 24/7 TV networks can get it.
For TV...I'ld give it a few years and we'll probably be getting all of our TV over a broadband connection. For those that don't know, there are already services that deliver pre-recorded international television (Japan, India, UK, etc) over the internet. All of the major US TV shows (i.e. Enterprise) are already being posted to usenet the same day they are shown.
You can also get phone service online. And for many with Cell Phone service, they have already dropped their land line.
I think there are quite a few things that you can give up to keep a broadband connection if you think about it.
Not _my_ kidney of course. I'm not an idiot..
nzelnick(tm)
I just bought the original painting
"Andalusian Dogs Playing Poker" on e-bay
Look upon my works and despair
In the breakroom at work, the TV continually blasts CNN and there are at least two different newspapers scattered around the tables.
I read the newspapers - usually, all of them. I stare blindly at Connie Chung as she goes on another heart-felt tirade against x with a sorry, pathetic half-smile on her face.
But that's really just to kill time while smoking a cigarette and downing a Dew during a union break. Given the choice, I'd rather be reading Salon.
I never feel like I learn anything from the AP stories carried in the paper. They're continually filled with strange, misleading errors and missing information, or (perhaps worse) dumbed-down numbers.
I never feel like I get anything from CNN these days, as they nowseem to carry everything but news. I find myself squinting at the ticker at the bottom of the screen, trying to decipher from their broken half-sentance synopsis whether or not anything important is happening in the world, and usually failing.
At home, the only thing I ever watch is the History Channel, TLC, and Discovery. The latter two have seen better days, much as CNN and MTV (I do remember, long ago, that MTV did play music), while the history channel remains largely OK with the exception of their exceptionally inane game shows.
I do like auto racing, but I can't get Speed from Time Warner without paying a king's ransom on top of the already high bill for a digital box and a new service tier.
Of course, these somewhat desirous networks all kick over to informercials during my prime viewing hours, which greatly inhibits my ability to watch them.
That all said, were it not for my 2-year-old's healthy addiction to Spongebob, I'd have dropped cable TV a long time ago. I still may - I've been considering programming the TiVo at my parents' house to keep a few fresh episodes of her favorite shows, and dumping them to VHS on an as-needed asis.
As far as the newspaper, I don't care much about it. The local news rag carries all of their own stories on-line for free, in a much easier-to-follow format. For other stuff, there's Salon[1].
1: Slashdot omitted due to lack of news, and a dearth of stuff that matters.
Kid-proof tablet..
After having some way or another to connect myself first to BBS'es, and then to the Internet since December'94 - i finally got disconnected in July this year (2002). And a wonderful thing it has been.
:)
I'm still connected to the internet from the university or from my workplaces - but after work/study hours, I'm free.
I've actually started reading books again! Yay! I've started walking in the the woods again! Even started watching a tiny little bit of TV (Less than 3 hours a week I would guess). I've started working out again. I've started to hack on my laptop again, instead of wasting time on IRC. I've started watching movies with friends again.
Hell I enjoy beeing disconnected at home. I'm NOT planning on getting an Internet connection at home any time soon. _Maybe_ I'll set up a radio network with friends - but there is just NO WAY i'm gonna get connected 24/7 again. Or have any way of using dialup.
So, what would I give up to keep my broadband connection? Nothing! I've given it up without having to. I don't miss it. I don't want it back.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
I pay nothing to get my daily newspaper (called "20 minutes", or "Metro"), it is free. I can take it at the train/metro station every morning.
I wish I'd pay the same for my internet connection !
McCartney fans pay bus tickets. [...] Lennon fans too, with discretion.
-Female company
-Contact to the world
-Discussions that can go on for more than 2 minutes without differential equations being drawn in.
That's life at engineering school, but I have access to that sweet, sweet 100mbit university network and 24 way Sun E10K's.
Bo
Who needs a girlfriend when you can have high-speed porn?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Archeologists belive the Aztecs commited ritual human sacrice to postpone the end of the world.
Maybe if we take all the worthless people (McDonalds Managers, all the Democrats, every Republican over the age of twenty-five, pedophiles and those guys who host religous programming on public access) and commit ritual human sacrifice for ping times.
As proof of concept that Human Sacrifice works I would like to point out that the world hasn't ended yet.
>
I subscribed for the major newspaper in my region (western Sweden) and decided to drop my subscription after three months due to two problems: 1) I have to carry my paper recycling to the recycle station once a week instead of once every other month, 2) I had to get up 30 minutes earlier than usual each morning because I browsed the articles and always found something interesting. /. on the weekends and the odd app that needs registration.
Now I read the same articles on quiets moments from work, where I also do my bigger downloads and burn them out on a CDRW and bring them home. At home I have a 56k modem which is good enough for mail and
As for giving up TV, yes, it is a good idea. I think that I will miss the local news though, as they are difficult to find on the net.
Spongebob already has 6 half-hour episodes on DVD.. Where have you been?
Lowmag.net
Never give up the Coffee!! ....Never give Up! Never Surrender!
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene i: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"
I have broadband, and occasionally think about going back to dialup. The Terms Of Service are absolutely ludicrous. "No servers of any kind," give me a break. Many things run poorly without at least a dummy (or tcp rst) Ident, and tcp/ip is just plain broken without some amount of ICMP. "Only one PC connection," I have a firewall and one desktop back of it, so they get no more traffic than if the firewall weren't there - less, because I proxy/cache on that machine, too.
I stick by the spirit of my original TOS, and run a few highly restricted services for my own use, only. The speed is nice, but if they ever started cracking down and *really* enforcing the rules, I'd probably have to go back to dialup. I just wish I were close enough for DSL.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Since I'm a poor college student I had to choose between cable TV and broadband. Easiest choice I ever made.
On a related note, someone I know went to get cable internet but not cable TV. So the cable TV people sent a salesperson over (who, ironically arrived a day before the internet installer) who tried to push cable and premium channels, about how they had a great deal going for $50 bucks a month and how you got some nice premium channels with that as well.
This guy told her, "Why should I spend and extra $50 bucks a month, when I can download most of those movies over *your* cable internet connection"
sex
oh wait... I am married
With all the porn on the net, I wouldn't need the magazines.
... the C programming language.
I cannot say enough about how nice life is without TV and only a net connection and radio.
I still get current news and the like, but when people are complaining about getting inundated with stuff (christmas ads, particular news stories) I'm perfectly happy.
Try this just for a month and you'll see what I mean.
For those who say they'd give up their TV's.... you probably don't have a TiVo, do you?
I would probably pick broadband over TV, but consider this: If someone asked me to choose between the TiVo on a 2" black and white TV or the 42" color TV without a TiVo, I'd choose the 2" black and white TV. Yep, it makes *that* much of a difference.
~GoRK
I'd rather lick all the fur off my cat when she's shedding than go without broadband.
I should have picked out the nickname Demosthenes!Tecumseh.
The only difficulty is that i find it too damn usefull for answering those odd questions tha pop into my head. Whats the flying speed of an english sparrow? What time was that movie again? WHy are we invading Iraq again?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
This type of question, as humorous as it may be, is exactly what the carriers love. Ask the people who complain the most about the prices of their broadband connection ' What would you give up most?' and you find out exactly how much more theyr'e willing to pay. I am personally tired of seeing the rates increase about what seems like once a month.
... that's all i wrote...
i would gladly give up my (offline) life for broadband - seems i already have...
I have ReplayTV, and it has totally changed how I watch TV. I don't sit down and surf to whatever is on; I sit down and watch something that I already decided I was interested in. And I agree, commercials are so much more annoying now that I don't see them at home.
Seems like this should have been a poll:
What would you give up to keep your broadband connection:
- coffee
- chocolate
- David Letterman
- baseball
- foosball
- Cowboy Neil's kidney
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
I'd give up slashdot in a second.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
I can confidently say that inorder to keep my 1.5MB cable line...
I would do with out:
1. Repairing a non-performance affecting electrical problem with my car.
2. Pay channels on my cable
3. ST:TNG Season 4 DVD's
4. Warcraft 3
5. 2 magazine subscriptions
6. cut the cost of lunch from $7+ to $5.00
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Dear Mr. I-can't-tell-sarcasm-from-a-troll-from-my-arse:
I also hope you get your wick trimmed in meta-mod.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I'd give up $19.95 a month.
What would I give up to KEEP my broadband? Hell, where do I GET my broadband in the first place??
--David
Man, google would've given you this answer in a second!! God I'm sick of these obvious ask slashdot questions...
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22what+would+dave+ give+up+to+keep+his+broadband%22
I'd give up my computer to keep high speed access.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I would sell my family without hesitation...
In all seriousness though, I have discovered that I primarily use my broadband connection for on-line gaming and system maintenence-related downloads
(*kicks Mr. Gates squarely in the nutz*).
You've been trolled so badly you're flipping around in the bottom of the boat now, motherfucker.
Death before decaf!
I'd give up paying for it
Only 'flamers' flame!
n fct 'd gv p ll th vwls
I metamoderate, therefore I am
Personally I'd rather give up watching TV - what would the rest of Slashdot give up to keep your real sweet net access?
$40/month
Actually, I watch TV only when I feel like it. I don't have cable, so I we get only TWO channels, and only one of these has anything good on. My mother tapes a few programs I watch, and once in a while I watch an entire season in a row.
I only watch live TV when there's important news (and as I live in Israel, it's more often than most places).
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org