Because someone was able to make progress towards gaining complete control of the device largely due to the "Other OS" feature. This would've made it rather easy to bypass all DRM put in place by Sony for the device, and we all know Sony really really likes their DRM and wants to shove it down our throats (ala.. rootkits). So their response was to completely remove "Other OS."
They initially added it because many people wanted it but also because EVERY OTHER CONSOLE was cracked solely to be able to run custom software on it (in many cases, Linux), and if that feature is available out-of-the-box, nobody needs to crack it. People got curious and wanted to crack it just because we weren't given full machine-level control over the devices we pay for and own (hopefully this will get pwned in a court of law requiring that manufacturers ship products that give the owner 100% access to the entire device, not just an isolated HV jail), and at that point "Other OS" outlived its usefulness as an anti-cracking feature. The only way things like this can be stopped is by legal precedent that says that manufacturers can't sell someone a product and restrict them to only using it for 1 singular action. If I buy a brick, it's a perfectly good door-stop too. If I buy any device with a processor and I want to reprogram it to control my sprinklers, I should be able to do that. What Sony is saying is "nope, you can't do anything we don't say you can do, you don't own that device, we're just kind enough to let you borrow it, now bend over!"
Whatever happened to "embrace, extend, extinguish" ? Is it possible that they're trying this with the entire FOSS movement? Your points are certainly true -- however, it doesn't benefit Microsoft as much as it does the FOSS crowd for the likes of Linux distributions. FOSS applications that prove to be big hits and successful in the Windows world (from an end-user perspective, not from a technical expert perspective), their easy adaptation and uptake in Linux will make it that much more capable of doing everything Windows can (again, to the end-user, think.. your grandmother perhaps), and the capability of it to serve as a drop-in replacement with exactly the same favorite applications running on it leaves one asking "why Windows?"
No matter how you look at it, a large increase in FOSS software for Windows will also greatly benefit the Linux world towards moving into a competing spot with Microsoft in their most lucrative area: desktop operating system licensing. If Linux wins in this arena, Microsoft will effectively become the next IBM. So that raises the question, what's Microsoft's deception here? Maybe acquiring any possible patents or contributing patented code to FOSS projects with the promise of "we'll never charge a licensing fee to use this..... as long as it's on Windows.. of course......"? Whatever the hidden story is here, it'll be interesting to see what Microsoft does next (after Ballmer is removed, of course, because he's a moron).
nlog(n) < n when log(n) < 1, log(n) < 1 when n < e (or 10, depending on whether you know math or you just do math), the next biggest integer is 3 (or 10). When you're talking about 3 (or 10) things, you usually don't care about the efficiency of the algorithm. When testing on standardized hardware, theoretical and actual results are close except in two cases: 1. When n is very small. 2. When optimization (be it in software or hardware) plays a large role. Both of these are largely negligible by using a very large test case and compiling in debug mode, so in reality, this metric is quite honestly useless.
Well after spamming for Viagra for 5 years they realized they've probably caused plenty of new VD cases, so antibiotics seems like an enterprising choice. It's good to see that the spammers are looking out for us. Thanks spammers!
1. You aren't citing a source of this information. I'd love to know who is the authority on copyright infringement rates, they're usually wild estimates that are highly inaccurate.
2. You're falling victim to the common fallacy that 1 copyright infringement = 1 lost sale. This is simply not the case. I've only ever seen infringement to hurt bad games, the ones that even with massive publicity cannot survive. I've bought many an indy game simply because myself or a friend got it free and thought it was cool. Yep, betcha didn't see that one coming, did you? Because it NEVER, EVER HAPPENS in the minds of morons who can't see beyond this simple fallacy.
3. Yes, because a requirement of a consistent internet connection is gaming friendly. Do remember many games lasted for well over a decade because people could play them with their friends on a LAN -- even without the internet. When you require something that is, at times, as difficult to obtain as an internet connection (even such a seemingly simple requirement) you instantly kill that and your customer base will quickly get annoyed, very annoyed, at random outages when your servers fail (yes, everyone has outages, even you) or when they're playing a SINGLE PLAYER GAME and their internet cuts out because their ISP sucks ass (like most in the USA do) and suddenly their game tells them "oh hey you damn pirate, gtfo!" and closes. Thanks so much for thinking of your paying customers.
The simple solution for you is to stop worrying about these "pirates." The customer is always right, and your loyal, paying customers are getting fucking tired of telling you to STOP DOING THAT. When it's clear that "piracy" leads to a reduction in offensive DRM and higher accessibility to games, even those who would pay to buy your game won't. It's simply not worth the aggravation imposed "for the good of the game."
Maybe, just maybe, Oracle hates open source projects. Buy the leading open source database.. check. Buy the company that created and owns the encumbered patents to one of the most popular open source programming languages.. check. Attack any company of any reasonable size producing commercial products with open source technology.. say.. Google.. a win would cement a victory against any company they might want to challenge.. so check.
Oracle's products are pretty terrible with the one exception of the DB. And that's pretty ugly too, it just happens to work pretty well, not that its configuration is simple, intuitive, or quick, nor that its logging capabilities really tell you anything. I've never looked at Oracle as an example of how to write software or as a token example of a what a good, successful software company should look like. But it seems like Oracle is scared of the new kid in town and wants to kick his ass to demonstrate Oracle's badassness. I hope Oracle loses, and big. More rulings against software patents. And when you buy a company just to get the patents it owns to troll bigger fish, you've entered a new realm of "patent trolling." Oracle seriously lost any amount of respect I might've ever given them with this move. Just another patent troll. Just another big software company that can't win any way but fighting dirty. Let's hope the judicial system actually works properly for once -- retroactively kill all software patents and stop the issuance of any future ones, and possibly reverse the purchase of Sun by Oracle. It was clearly not about growth, but about obtaining a new weapon to run around shooting at people. Why this was allowed in the first place, I can't possibly imagine... oh wait, yeah I can. It looks something like this: $$$$$.
I went to college. I don't think it was ignorance you know. Considering I learned almost nothing from the courses, and books I had already read in middle school covering every topic taught in college and then many more. All of the MSDN Mag articles I had read. All of the code I had read of open source projects and independent papers published by prominent mathematicians and computer scientists on new ideas. All of the software I had reverse engineered. Perhaps it was because I had been coding for longer than some of my professors. Perhaps it was because I viewed CS as a hobby I've always loved and have always wanted to know more. I thought I was "hot shit" when I went into college. It didn't change any getting a degree, as most of the professors didn't know as much practically about the subjects as I did, having read the actual source of projects that implemented the vaporous concepts they were alluding to. Having read the actual papers by the originators of many of the ideas they held so grand. I'm not really sure. But in reality, I'm still a nobody. It wasn't ignorance. It was arrogance, ignorance's big nasty brother. I'm still arrogant but it doesn't matter so much. Would you prefer an arrogant prick that could get his work done with phenomenal pace and innovate on the spot or an ignorant kid who got a CS degree because he thought it'd get him a good job and.. he liked computers anyway so he figured it'd be cool? I just don't feel like your assumption that "going to college" somehow ends with someone having ignorance schooled of them has any merit. From my experience there are two kinds of computer science students: those who already knew just about everything they were going to learn, and those who just jumped into it. Not to say the latter CAN'T be great computer scientists, it's just a lot more uncommon.
"You must register with the authorities to qualify for anonymity." No.... it can't be.. they must be fucking with us. In order to get anonymity, you must forfeit anonymity? I give up hoping that there's a single sane law maker on this planet.
To offset the insane price markup on text messaging, it's going to need to cost each one of those companies some billions of dollars. They've been doing it forever, charging $5/month for 300 texts or $20/month for unlimited, when in fact it costs them $0.000000 for each text message. That markup nears infinity, it's clearly a massive scam, too bad the FCC is too busy failing in every way possible, if we had a real FCC texting would be free already. To be honest, how has this texting scam remained so long? Would charging people per e-mail while simultaneously charging them for internet service last this long?
Lucky. I had everyone in my typing class asking me to do their assignments because I was done with the entire day's work within the first 2 minutes of class. I just sat there, then the teacher saw my scores and said "wow, this is what everyone should type like." To which I responded "yeah, I know right, it's faster than you type. You typing teacher, you."
Sadly, the x64 extensions are built on top of a horrendously poor design, making x86-64 just that much messier than the default x86. At least some useless opcodes were deprecated in 64bit mode and the new prefixes are just some bits resulting in a dedicated opcode range rather than completely dedicated opcodes per prefix (tsk tsk Intel, tsk tsk tsk). I still say x86 should just die a horrible death and we should use something with a better design aimed at more modern hardware.
If you could lay golden eggs, why would you let someone else sell them and take 99.5% (if 100k/day is accurate assuming ~180k salary) of the profits when you could just sell them yourself? I'll equate your comment about those that lead/run successful financial firms as the farmers which crowd 100 of these golden egg laying geese in a single shed and then every day goes out to sedate them and steal the eggs. Maybe that's your idea of "high risk" (sneaking in the lair and stealing the valuable goods to use for yourself), but I prefer to call it needless profiteering. Even if these geese could only pull 20% of what their boss does for a single egg, they'd be making 40 times their current salary. Sounds like a win to me.
If you're living in New York, that is probably accurate. In any case, if the software they're writing is producing $100,000/day, it sounds to me like they're on the wrong side of this software. Why not write your own and then use it on the side for some extra $$?
From what I understand, Google had the ability to do this long ago. Before, though, they gave copyright holders (big companies like Viacom) the ability to digitally remove all infringing videos automatically from YouTube. I do believe that includes future uploads as well (hence what you saw). But this was at the behest of a large copyright holder, not Google itself.
My question here is now that Google seems to be looking into proactively blocking copyrighted music from uploaded videos, their selective censorship is made by the service provider (here the SP is YouTube, owned by Google). Doesn't this destroy their safe harbor under the DMCA? If so, why would they give up their only defense against companies like Viacom?
Really? Because Obama's been doing that a lot lately... The "idea" here being economic stimulation and job creation. Let's point out "temporary job" != "job". If someone gets a real job, they can easily expect to be employed for 10-15 years if it's not some contractual based bs. What his spending, at a rate of about 99%, is about is creating a job on the basis that "here, here's a big pile of cash, do XYZ", and as a result, with that money people can be hired. But that's only a fraction of it, and the money isn't inexhaustible even if it's a very large sum, in most cases the "jobs" created (or "saved") are GONE in a few months. So effectively he's throwing money at job creation, but not really making a large impact.
The irony of it all though, is that in this "stimulation," it's coming out of the pocket books of US citizens (those here legally mainly), so the largest spending class in the US is being charged to create temporary jobs and artificially inflated worths in various markets, at the cost of not having as much money as they would've had to spend. So in net, it costs everyone more money on average than people benefit from it (I say average because banks and various other corporations are making insane amounts of money on this spending, oddly enough). Economy 101, when people have less money, they spend less. We call this economic decline. Irony because it's all being blasted out there as if from a money-shotgun in hopes to hit some magic point in space that will cause the economy to turn around and start thriving again, but in reality it's doing the exact opposite. That's what you get for having a morons (everyone in congress and the president's administration) in power.
The reality is that no one is experiencing speeds anywhere near to what their ISP claims to offer, at least not when it comes to Web surfing. This isn't entirely the ISP's fault. The ISP's claimed throughput rates are for sustained downloads of an individual file. Web pages are typically made up of several files: the HTML code, graphics, Flash elements, and so forth. For each file, there's latency, essentially the time it takes from when your computer requests the element and when the Web site's server starts sending it to you. And then there are all the vagaries of the Internet as data from the Web site hops from router to router down to your computer. This is why, when ISPs advertise download speeds, they're only referring to downloads directly from their own servers.
The claimed throughput rates are generally a maximum and may include a burst maximum. The maximum can be reached on a file that is a few hundred KB as are many components of modern over-loaded websites. The real problem here isn't this phantom "latency" as latency isn't calculated into speed determination. That may affect very slightly your browsing experience, unless you're connecting to a server on the other side of the planet. The last bit here is also completely incorrect.
The internet isn't just a "pay for a speed and you get it everywhere" device. Your ISP sells you a connection which has a maximum of X Mbps. When you request some file from some remote server, how fast you get it is determined in part by your connection speed, but also by the speed at which the server is willing to or is capable of sending it. I have 10Mbps which I verify as I consistently download at 1100+ KB/s. But I often find downloading files (be it large images, installers, or even other web related files) from various web hosts at anywhere from 20KB/s to 250KB/s, I rarely find one that's willing to go over 300. It's not your connection that's at fault, it's the bandwidth limit set by the server itself. The added latency on a badly built website may be ~100-200 ms, and for web browsing this is completely acceptable. What's not acceptable is when you connect to a webpage that may require ~1MB of data to be downloaded for rendering to be complete when the server won't serve you more than 50KB/s, in that case it can take up to 20-30 seconds and appear "slow."
Run a bandwidth test at a place like www.speedtest.net. It'll test it with a server that has a very large bandwidth and with a transfer that'll be uncapped. If the speed there, to a server most likely not owned by your ISP, matches or exceeds your ISP's advertisement, then you're fine. If it doesn't, consistently, you're being screwed. Don't base "my internet connection is slow" complaints on the fact that websites and files aren't being downloaded at an insane speed like you expect.
If schools are anything like mine, the computer science department requires a $50 "computer access fee" for each computer science course in which you enroll. This would technically constitute payment for services, so a question I have here is if such a mandatory fee is imposed on access to lab machines, do they still have the right to force no SSL traffic? If so, do ISPs have the right to block your SSL traffic to certain websites since in both cases you can technically make the case that you're paying for service. I see this as a nasty can of worms.
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Because someone was able to make progress towards gaining complete control of the device largely due to the "Other OS" feature. This would've made it rather easy to bypass all DRM put in place by Sony for the device, and we all know Sony really really likes their DRM and wants to shove it down our throats (ala.. rootkits). So their response was to completely remove "Other OS."
They initially added it because many people wanted it but also because EVERY OTHER CONSOLE was cracked solely to be able to run custom software on it (in many cases, Linux), and if that feature is available out-of-the-box, nobody needs to crack it. People got curious and wanted to crack it just because we weren't given full machine-level control over the devices we pay for and own (hopefully this will get pwned in a court of law requiring that manufacturers ship products that give the owner 100% access to the entire device, not just an isolated HV jail), and at that point "Other OS" outlived its usefulness as an anti-cracking feature. The only way things like this can be stopped is by legal precedent that says that manufacturers can't sell someone a product and restrict them to only using it for 1 singular action. If I buy a brick, it's a perfectly good door-stop too. If I buy any device with a processor and I want to reprogram it to control my sprinklers, I should be able to do that. What Sony is saying is "nope, you can't do anything we don't say you can do, you don't own that device, we're just kind enough to let you borrow it, now bend over!"
Whatever happened to "embrace, extend, extinguish" ? Is it possible that they're trying this with the entire FOSS movement? Your points are certainly true -- however, it doesn't benefit Microsoft as much as it does the FOSS crowd for the likes of Linux distributions. FOSS applications that prove to be big hits and successful in the Windows world (from an end-user perspective, not from a technical expert perspective), their easy adaptation and uptake in Linux will make it that much more capable of doing everything Windows can (again, to the end-user, think.. your grandmother perhaps), and the capability of it to serve as a drop-in replacement with exactly the same favorite applications running on it leaves one asking "why Windows?"
No matter how you look at it, a large increase in FOSS software for Windows will also greatly benefit the Linux world towards moving into a competing spot with Microsoft in their most lucrative area: desktop operating system licensing. If Linux wins in this arena, Microsoft will effectively become the next IBM. So that raises the question, what's Microsoft's deception here? Maybe acquiring any possible patents or contributing patented code to FOSS projects with the promise of "we'll never charge a licensing fee to use this..... as long as it's on Windows.. of course......"? Whatever the hidden story is here, it'll be interesting to see what Microsoft does next (after Ballmer is removed, of course, because he's a moron).
nlog(n) < n when log(n) < 1, log(n) < 1 when n < e (or 10, depending on whether you know math or you just do math), the next biggest integer is 3 (or 10). When you're talking about 3 (or 10) things, you usually don't care about the efficiency of the algorithm. When testing on standardized hardware, theoretical and actual results are close except in two cases: 1. When n is very small. 2. When optimization (be it in software or hardware) plays a large role. Both of these are largely negligible by using a very large test case and compiling in debug mode, so in reality, this metric is quite honestly useless.
Well after spamming for Viagra for 5 years they realized they've probably caused plenty of new VD cases, so antibiotics seems like an enterprising choice. It's good to see that the spammers are looking out for us. Thanks spammers!
1. You aren't citing a source of this information. I'd love to know who is the authority on copyright infringement rates, they're usually wild estimates that are highly inaccurate.
2. You're falling victim to the common fallacy that 1 copyright infringement = 1 lost sale. This is simply not the case. I've only ever seen infringement to hurt bad games, the ones that even with massive publicity cannot survive. I've bought many an indy game simply because myself or a friend got it free and thought it was cool. Yep, betcha didn't see that one coming, did you? Because it NEVER, EVER HAPPENS in the minds of morons who can't see beyond this simple fallacy.
3. Yes, because a requirement of a consistent internet connection is gaming friendly. Do remember many games lasted for well over a decade because people could play them with their friends on a LAN -- even without the internet. When you require something that is, at times, as difficult to obtain as an internet connection (even such a seemingly simple requirement) you instantly kill that and your customer base will quickly get annoyed, very annoyed, at random outages when your servers fail (yes, everyone has outages, even you) or when they're playing a SINGLE PLAYER GAME and their internet cuts out because their ISP sucks ass (like most in the USA do) and suddenly their game tells them "oh hey you damn pirate, gtfo!" and closes. Thanks so much for thinking of your paying customers.
The simple solution for you is to stop worrying about these "pirates." The customer is always right, and your loyal, paying customers are getting fucking tired of telling you to STOP DOING THAT. When it's clear that "piracy" leads to a reduction in offensive DRM and higher accessibility to games, even those who would pay to buy your game won't. It's simply not worth the aggravation imposed "for the good of the game."
Maybe, just maybe, Oracle hates open source projects. Buy the leading open source database.. check. Buy the company that created and owns the encumbered patents to one of the most popular open source programming languages.. check. Attack any company of any reasonable size producing commercial products with open source technology.. say.. Google.. a win would cement a victory against any company they might want to challenge.. so check.
Oracle's products are pretty terrible with the one exception of the DB. And that's pretty ugly too, it just happens to work pretty well, not that its configuration is simple, intuitive, or quick, nor that its logging capabilities really tell you anything. I've never looked at Oracle as an example of how to write software or as a token example of a what a good, successful software company should look like. But it seems like Oracle is scared of the new kid in town and wants to kick his ass to demonstrate Oracle's badassness. I hope Oracle loses, and big. More rulings against software patents. And when you buy a company just to get the patents it owns to troll bigger fish, you've entered a new realm of "patent trolling." Oracle seriously lost any amount of respect I might've ever given them with this move. Just another patent troll. Just another big software company that can't win any way but fighting dirty. Let's hope the judicial system actually works properly for once -- retroactively kill all software patents and stop the issuance of any future ones, and possibly reverse the purchase of Sun by Oracle. It was clearly not about growth, but about obtaining a new weapon to run around shooting at people. Why this was allowed in the first place, I can't possibly imagine... oh wait, yeah I can. It looks something like this: $$$$$.
I went to college. I don't think it was ignorance you know. Considering I learned almost nothing from the courses, and books I had already read in middle school covering every topic taught in college and then many more. All of the MSDN Mag articles I had read. All of the code I had read of open source projects and independent papers published by prominent mathematicians and computer scientists on new ideas. All of the software I had reverse engineered. Perhaps it was because I had been coding for longer than some of my professors. Perhaps it was because I viewed CS as a hobby I've always loved and have always wanted to know more. I thought I was "hot shit" when I went into college. It didn't change any getting a degree, as most of the professors didn't know as much practically about the subjects as I did, having read the actual source of projects that implemented the vaporous concepts they were alluding to. Having read the actual papers by the originators of many of the ideas they held so grand. I'm not really sure. But in reality, I'm still a nobody. It wasn't ignorance. It was arrogance, ignorance's big nasty brother. I'm still arrogant but it doesn't matter so much. Would you prefer an arrogant prick that could get his work done with phenomenal pace and innovate on the spot or an ignorant kid who got a CS degree because he thought it'd get him a good job and.. he liked computers anyway so he figured it'd be cool? I just don't feel like your assumption that "going to college" somehow ends with someone having ignorance schooled of them has any merit. From my experience there are two kinds of computer science students: those who already knew just about everything they were going to learn, and those who just jumped into it. Not to say the latter CAN'T be great computer scientists, it's just a lot more uncommon.
"You must register with the authorities to qualify for anonymity." No.... it can't be.. they must be fucking with us. In order to get anonymity, you must forfeit anonymity? I give up hoping that there's a single sane law maker on this planet.
To offset the insane price markup on text messaging, it's going to need to cost each one of those companies some billions of dollars. They've been doing it forever, charging $5/month for 300 texts or $20/month for unlimited, when in fact it costs them $0.000000 for each text message. That markup nears infinity, it's clearly a massive scam, too bad the FCC is too busy failing in every way possible, if we had a real FCC texting would be free already. To be honest, how has this texting scam remained so long? Would charging people per e-mail while simultaneously charging them for internet service last this long?
You seem to have an infinitely poor understanding of mathematical infinity and probability.
Lucky. I had everyone in my typing class asking me to do their assignments because I was done with the entire day's work within the first 2 minutes of class. I just sat there, then the teacher saw my scores and said "wow, this is what everyone should type like." To which I responded "yeah, I know right, it's faster than you type. You typing teacher, you."
Sorry, I read that first line as "I am the IT dictator of a school in the US." Must be the caffeine.
Sadly, the x64 extensions are built on top of a horrendously poor design, making x86-64 just that much messier than the default x86. At least some useless opcodes were deprecated in 64bit mode and the new prefixes are just some bits resulting in a dedicated opcode range rather than completely dedicated opcodes per prefix (tsk tsk Intel, tsk tsk tsk). I still say x86 should just die a horrible death and we should use something with a better design aimed at more modern hardware.
So Dells are going to get worse?
Oh boy.
If you could lay golden eggs, why would you let someone else sell them and take 99.5% (if 100k/day is accurate assuming ~180k salary) of the profits when you could just sell them yourself? I'll equate your comment about those that lead/run successful financial firms as the farmers which crowd 100 of these golden egg laying geese in a single shed and then every day goes out to sedate them and steal the eggs. Maybe that's your idea of "high risk" (sneaking in the lair and stealing the valuable goods to use for yourself), but I prefer to call it needless profiteering. Even if these geese could only pull 20% of what their boss does for a single egg, they'd be making 40 times their current salary. Sounds like a win to me.
If you're living in New York, that is probably accurate. In any case, if the software they're writing is producing $100,000/day, it sounds to me like they're on the wrong side of this software. Why not write your own and then use it on the side for some extra $$?
Google's reaction: And I would've gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling slashdotters!
Can someone say "too broke to fix" ?
"Windows is such an easy target for exploit and success"
It's not Windows that's being targeted. It's the people using Windows. Get it right.
This brings a whole new meaning to the word "gaping privacy holes."
It's called programming.
From what I understand, Google had the ability to do this long ago. Before, though, they gave copyright holders (big companies like Viacom) the ability to digitally remove all infringing videos automatically from YouTube. I do believe that includes future uploads as well (hence what you saw). But this was at the behest of a large copyright holder, not Google itself.
My question here is now that Google seems to be looking into proactively blocking copyrighted music from uploaded videos, their selective censorship is made by the service provider (here the SP is YouTube, owned by Google). Doesn't this destroy their safe harbor under the DMCA? If so, why would they give up their only defense against companies like Viacom?
"Government cann't just throw money at an idea"
Really? Because Obama's been doing that a lot lately... The "idea" here being economic stimulation and job creation. Let's point out "temporary job" != "job". If someone gets a real job, they can easily expect to be employed for 10-15 years if it's not some contractual based bs. What his spending, at a rate of about 99%, is about is creating a job on the basis that "here, here's a big pile of cash, do XYZ", and as a result, with that money people can be hired. But that's only a fraction of it, and the money isn't inexhaustible even if it's a very large sum, in most cases the "jobs" created (or "saved") are GONE in a few months. So effectively he's throwing money at job creation, but not really making a large impact.
The irony of it all though, is that in this "stimulation," it's coming out of the pocket books of US citizens (those here legally mainly), so the largest spending class in the US is being charged to create temporary jobs and artificially inflated worths in various markets, at the cost of not having as much money as they would've had to spend. So in net, it costs everyone more money on average than people benefit from it (I say average because banks and various other corporations are making insane amounts of money on this spending, oddly enough). Economy 101, when people have less money, they spend less. We call this economic decline. Irony because it's all being blasted out there as if from a money-shotgun in hopes to hit some magic point in space that will cause the economy to turn around and start thriving again, but in reality it's doing the exact opposite. That's what you get for having a morons (everyone in congress and the president's administration) in power.
The reality is that no one is experiencing speeds anywhere near to what their ISP claims to offer, at least not when it comes to Web surfing. This isn't entirely the ISP's fault. The ISP's claimed throughput rates are for sustained downloads of an individual file. Web pages are typically made up of several files: the HTML code, graphics, Flash elements, and so forth. For each file, there's latency, essentially the time it takes from when your computer requests the element and when the Web site's server starts sending it to you. And then there are all the vagaries of the Internet as data from the Web site hops from router to router down to your computer. This is why, when ISPs advertise download speeds, they're only referring to downloads directly from their own servers.
The claimed throughput rates are generally a maximum and may include a burst maximum. The maximum can be reached on a file that is a few hundred KB as are many components of modern over-loaded websites. The real problem here isn't this phantom "latency" as latency isn't calculated into speed determination. That may affect very slightly your browsing experience, unless you're connecting to a server on the other side of the planet. The last bit here is also completely incorrect.
The internet isn't just a "pay for a speed and you get it everywhere" device. Your ISP sells you a connection which has a maximum of X Mbps. When you request some file from some remote server, how fast you get it is determined in part by your connection speed, but also by the speed at which the server is willing to or is capable of sending it. I have 10Mbps which I verify as I consistently download at 1100+ KB/s. But I often find downloading files (be it large images, installers, or even other web related files) from various web hosts at anywhere from 20KB/s to 250KB/s, I rarely find one that's willing to go over 300. It's not your connection that's at fault, it's the bandwidth limit set by the server itself. The added latency on a badly built website may be ~100-200 ms, and for web browsing this is completely acceptable. What's not acceptable is when you connect to a webpage that may require ~1MB of data to be downloaded for rendering to be complete when the server won't serve you more than 50KB/s, in that case it can take up to 20-30 seconds and appear "slow."
Run a bandwidth test at a place like www.speedtest.net. It'll test it with a server that has a very large bandwidth and with a transfer that'll be uncapped. If the speed there, to a server most likely not owned by your ISP, matches or exceeds your ISP's advertisement, then you're fine. If it doesn't, consistently, you're being screwed. Don't base "my internet connection is slow" complaints on the fact that websites and files aren't being downloaded at an insane speed like you expect.
If schools are anything like mine, the computer science department requires a $50 "computer access fee" for each computer science course in which you enroll. This would technically constitute payment for services, so a question I have here is if such a mandatory fee is imposed on access to lab machines, do they still have the right to force no SSL traffic? If so, do ISPs have the right to block your SSL traffic to certain websites since in both cases you can technically make the case that you're paying for service. I see this as a nasty can of worms.