Wiese is among 52 sex offenders living under a busy bridge over Biscayne Bay that connects Miami to Miami Beach. The state insisted two years ago it would urge them to leave, but the community has only grown. It has become a makeshift town of parolees and others who struggle to find affordable housing that doesnâ(TM)t violate strict local ordinances against sex offenders living too close to schools, parks and other places children congregate. In the angled area where the bridge meets a concrete slope, residents have put up domed tents, a shack housing a makeshift kitchen, a camper, even a weight bench. They've spray painted the slope and the pillars supporting the bridge: âoeWe âRâ(TM) Not Monsters.â âoeThey Treat Animals Better!!!â âoeWhy?â âoeThey throw us under here and just hope that we can do something ourselves,â said 47-year-old Wiese, standing in the doorway to a small shack made of collected wood scraps. âoeIf I was a murderer, they would help me, they would find me a home, they would find me a job.â [...] Once entered in the sex offender registry, a person typically stays for life. In Miami-Dade County, such people must live at least 2,500 feet from places children gather, making only a handful of areas--generally out of an offender's price range--possible homes. The countyâ(TM)s rules governing its 1,030 registered sex offenders are considered among the stateâ(TM)s most restrictive.
Many offenders have family or friends who would house them but can't because they live too close to a school or playground or bus stop.
The state says offenders found the bridge because it was among the few covered places in compliance with the local ordinances. Officials say probation officers haven't suggested it outright, though some residents dispute that. Either way, it has become one of the only solutions.
âoeSometimes when a probation officer is helping somebody to look for a place to live and they're not having any luck and the probation officer is required to know where a person is every night, they may suggest that there is a place where they can check on them," Rackleff said.
And furthermore, US has some of the worst cellphones and some of the most stripped down cellphones. Here in Europe I can buy retail any Nokia phone and just insert my SIM card and it just works. The worst I've seen when buying a phone from a GSM company like Orange or Vodaphone with a plan (so the cellphone is much cheaper than retail) is having VoIP or FM radio disabled but otherwise there's no such thing as not being able to use your own ringtones or stuff like that..
The judge is supposed to give a ruling in 5 minutes... it's obvious no judge will have time to analyze the information received so it's just as bad as the previous law imho... they only changed the law by the tiniest amount so that it would pass
That's true.. I'm looking right now at a 17" Dell monitor and it says Dimensions (HxWxD) 16.4" x 15.9" x 16.5"
You can get now a 19" Asus VW198T LCD running natively at 1680x1050 that has the dimensions Phys.Dimension(WxHxD): 444x368x210 which in inches means roughly 17.48" x 14.48" x 8.26". So, you get higher resolution, you don't damage your eyes so much, only for an extra inch in width, but I guarantee you when you see the space that was once lost because of the CRT's depth, you won't regret it.
The only downside I see is you get about one less inch in height. If this bothers you, you can opt for benq E2200HDA which has the following dimensions: 20.5" x 16.05" x 7.35" but packs a resolution of 1920x1080 inside those 22 inches.
I don't endorse any of the LCD displays above, I just browsed my local IT store's site right now and picked these as having cheap price and high res / diagonal inches
Yes, dude, because when they order 50.000 cd's they pay something like 5 cents for each manufactured disc, so the shipping price is the only real cost they had. I distinctly remember they had on the page a note saying people should ask for at least 5 and give the extra discs around because it used to cost them the same to ship one or five discs or ten discs.
You wouldn't be able to do this with USB sticks because unlike CD's which fit nicely in an envelope, USB sticks are bulky and relatively heavy and cost more to ship.
USB drives are still more expensive and heavier compared to CDs.. They can easily order 50.000 cd's cheaply... When they offered Ubuntu for free, they were practically begging people to request up to 10 discs at once and give the ones they don't need to friends because the shipping costs were higher than the costs of manufacturing them.
This just means there will be no re-trial, but the Pirate Bay still has an appeal, it doesn't mean they have to pay to fine or go to jail yet. That's still far away.
I'm not stupid but I couldn't join any game... just can't figure out, each time I join a game it shows the console and stays there.
The interface is horrible and inconsistent, in a hundred colors, with basic things anyone would expect missing. But it does have matrix style text in the console... meh.
For example, there's no 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 setting in the video options but you have two boxes where apparently you have to enter manually the resolution.... but the first time you click on it you just type and overwrite the numbers in the box, the second time you click you actually have to press Backspace to clear the numbers...
Instead of just going to game they had to bother with the ugly irc application that's pointless because nobody bothers chatting when they want to play...
That Windows XP support is emulated, using some modified Virtual PC. Some stuff like dongles, special printers on serial ports or parallel ports won't work, and lots and lots of other things won't work. Plus, that Windows XP will work ONLY if the processor has virtualization support if I remember correctly, and some companies won't buy expensive processors that have the virtualization functions just to run XP.
If I remember correctly, users just had to set a different service center number (the number that receives the SMS messages) and send a sms with a text like *pin*100 to the phone number that's supposed to receive the money and that person would receive 100 in the currency of that country. Both parties would receive an SMS back letting them know that the money was sent / that they received the payment.
The documentary was showing lots of happy truckers who were no longer worried of going tens of miles through desert to deliver stuff and return with loads of money on them, they just delivered the cargo and ask the other person to sms them the payment instantly.
Just as they have now SD, HQ and HD streams there's no problem adding another video encoded with sane settings for mobiles. After all, there are h264 levels designed for mobile phones and lots of phones already decoding them. It's just silly to add yet another format besides h263 and h264. Current mobile phones probably have chips that do hardware decoding of h264 clips up to a certain bitrate/level whatever probably no phone can do now theora in hardware.
IE will probably render any video tag through Silverlight, forcing you to install it. That's how you make market share for your products in Microsoft land. On the good side, Silverlight 3 has support for both WMV and h264 and can decode them in hardware using the video card.
The easiest solution would be to have the price of the domain NOT refundable and more expensive. Something like 30$ for the first year, 15$ for each year that comes, and keep the values in tune with the dollar value.
The guys that keep tons of domains do it by buying and dropping it within the allowed time limit so they only lose a few pennies and the instant they drop the domain another company that's owned by the same person (or group, whatever) buys the domain back.
Sure, companies will have to work harder and check the credit card better to prevent fraud and so on, but I'm sure they'll also get a better commission out of it.
Some people won't bother growing themselves because it may not be worth it. You have to use a lot of electricity, the right humidity, have space, not everyone will care enough to learn how to grow their own stuff. Some people may also prefer to experiment with various types of marijuana, of various THC levels, and it's probably not that easy to grow 10 types of plants in your closet.
You could now have pots at the window with tomato plants for example, but you don't care to plant your own because it's cheaper and easier to just buy from store.
The state can easily place a 30-50% tax on it and it will probably get cheaper than the current street prices in a few months after all the excitement is gone. The state could also use laws to restrict growing plants at home to less than 10 plants for example and require you get a license if you want to grow more, and can get for example 10$ per plant per year from you in this case. Or why not, let you buy seeds from an authorized seller, grow your stuff and sell it back to a company and make money legally.
Just because marijuana would be legal it doesn't mean anyone will be allowed to sell it, just like you're not allowed to make alcohol in your basement and sell it. You need a license to make sure the alcohol is safe for human consumption, and just like that, you could sell marijuana legally with a license that guarantees the plants have a minimum quality.
That's right. If a child won't play nice with his toys, he'll lose his toys, plain and simple. There's no "right" to be able edit Wikipedia, it's a privilege which you keep if you follow and respect the rules
That's somewhat justified because almost all the traffic that Australian users do is to and from OUTSIDE Australia...
As you're on an island, all traffic goes through a few ocean cables which have limited capacity, and that capacity costs a lot. This is not the case in Europe and especially US where the telecommunication companies already received tons of money to invest in infrastructure yet they all screw their customers.
1. add several highly anonymous proxy servers in the ISP network and with the next bill, give them instructions on how to optionally use it if they want to. Obviously, no logs on the proxy servers. The ISP will log according to the rules connection being made from the proxy's IP to destination address, times and so on, it will be according to the law, but nobody's responsible for the proxy server and there's no law saying the proxy server must also have logs so they won't be able to tell which person actually used the proxy at that time.
2. just give each user IPv6, users actually get a/48 and that's usually millions of IPs... I'd like to see how they'll be able to log so many different ip's especially if I change the ipv6 ip every 5 minutes. Let's see RIAA prove that at precisely 5.12 pm I was using the IP they made screenshot of, especially if I have a wireless access point or several computers in the house.
3. just get an wireless access point, place it at the window and let anyone connect to it. As Swedish and the countries around most have 100mbps plans, it wouldn't be a big deal to allocate 10mbps to a wireless access point and let anyone connect to it. If each subscriber in a city will do the same, it would be tough to sue one person if thousands do it... I suppose you could call it civil disobedience.
Someone will soon design something like TOR or a software that would work like a cluster of proxy servers so soon the ISP logs will be useless as you won't be able to say a certain packet of data was made intentionally by the user that subscribed for the Internet connection.
I'm using line-height: 150% or something like that. Not the same but close enough for my not-so-serious websites. But you're right, it's something that's missing and I notice it every day.
...as opposed to getting about 50 cents to a dollar on each CD, and that's if you're lucky to be Madonna or someone already famous...
I'd say it's a very good deal.
one obvious drawback to this model is that you canÃ(TM)t sell an on-demand CD at shows, where enthusiastic fans are most likely to pick one up.
I don't think there would be anyone stopping the band from buying the CDs from Amazon for $9 and selling them at the concert for $15, with an autograph and some booklet, or for something like $25-50 with a signed t-shirt and booklet.
They'd only lose about 5$ on each CD, but in the end it may still be better than ordering and paying in advance for a 500-1000 batch of discs at a duplication factory.
With these bigs pipes in place they will no longer have any justification for caps. Their main justification (at least in UK's case) is that (1) the copper infrastructure in UK has poor quality or (2) that it's overloaded or (3) BT Telecom's prices for bandwidth and connecting are huge.
For the 3rd point, you can read about how much BT charges ISPs here:
Let me quote from that page because probably some people will be too lazy to click the link:
A central pipe can be ordered with a maximum capacity of 622Mbps (we could buy pipes with less, e.g. 155Mbps but we only buy 622â(TM)s now).
There are four charges associated with the central pipes. The first is a one off installation fee of £175,000. In general there is a lead time of around 3 months for a new installation, but this can take longer if new fibre needs blowing, especially if that requires extra digging.
Secondly, thereâ(TM)s a per customer rental charge of £1.25 per month. With around 200,000 customers on IPStream that equates to £250,000 per month.
Then thereâ(TM)s a base rental for the 622Mbps central pipe of £160,000 per year and from there a £166,800 yearly rental for each 155Mbps segment that is active.
cabling.pngSo you have yearly charges as follows:
0Mbps of capacity - £160,000
155Mbps of capacity - £326,800
311Mbps of capacity - £493,600
466Mbps of capacity - £660,400
622Mbps of capacity - £827,200
As you can see, because of the £160,000 base rental it actually costs less per Mbps the more segments are active. It will cost less per year to have one fully active 622Mbps than have two centrals with two segments lit each. But you then have to balance that against the lead time for installing a new central pipe.
As such, 1Mbps costs per month costs the following (the calculations are based on 139Mbps per segment which is the usable amount excluding overheads):
With 155Mbps of capacity - £195.92
With 311Mbps of capacity - £147.96
With 466Mbps of capacity - £131.97
With 622Mbps of capacity - £123.98
At the time of writing we have 25 active segments across 7 pipes giving us a total annual cost of:
(7 x 160,000) + (25 * 166,800) = £5,290,000
Which equates to a per Mbps cost of £126.86 per month before we consider any transit or routing costs on our own network.
So while in US or in Holland I can get bandwidth from a datacenter at an average price of 7$ for 1mbps, in UK this ISP pays about $190.
With 10gbps links all over UK, how will BT keep justifying those insane rates? At least the installation fee wouldn't exist anymore, because the fibers would already be in place. Will probably have to see.
ISP companies currently rely on the fact that people don't use their Internet connections at the speeds they offer.
The behavior of the Internet subscribers changes and more people are doing interactive things or watching video broadcasts on their Internet connection, keeping a certain amount of bandwidth in use for longer periods of time.
Before video, Youtube, Napster and all the wonderful things appeared, ISP companies cheated by connecting let's say 150 users with a 1mbps plan to a 10mbps Internet Connection knowing they won't even use that. So you'd have a whole neighborhood connected to a 100mbps fiber optics cable and things went smoothly.
Now these people start to use their plans for video and stuff so that 100mbps (which is now probably 1gbps) won't keep up. You'd need to upgrade to a 10gbps fiber or more to keep those customers happy.
So it's not a question of killer application... It's enough for 5 x 10 story apartment buildings with 4 apartments on each story to each watch CNN HD online or Netflix Online (3mbps streams) to have a need for about 600mbps of bandwidth. Not to mention even game consoles automatically downloading games, updates for games, trailers and other stuff.
It's not a question for what you're going to use it. With the capacity, innovative ways to use your Internet connection will come.
For example, nobody stops me from establishing a company that would stream TV channels to people at let's say 1080p at 20mbps for a small subscribe fee.
If my business plan wants to allow that subscriber to view up to three TV stations at a time (he watches ESPN, wife watches Travel Channel, kid watches Cartoon Channel), that subscriber would need to have about 75mbps of bandwidth available.
Now, he won't need 75mbps all the time, because the kid goes to school, maybe he goes to work but he needs to be able to push up to that value. On the other side, maybe seeing the average subscriber now has stable 100mbps connection, I as a company would be interested in giving people HD+, let's say 2560x1600 @ 35mbps or even cinema like resolutions or 3D movies @ 50mbps for people who may get in a couple of years a 3D projector .
The ISP would need to have a 10gbps pipe (or more) up to a series of house, or apartment building or whatever, just to be sure it would be able to provide all these users a good enough Internet connection at peak times.
It's the same as when you build a house you use wires capable of powering 30 computers in a room or grow marijuana in your house, even though you'll probably have only two-three computers and a TV ever.
But your book gets older and newer books about the topic are being written so people will tend to buy newer books "new" and older books like yours "used".
If people buy from the used category, the publisher should drop the price to increase his revenue.
And by the way... you say "Just royalty statements that show very few sales." Are you 100% sure they're not cheating you?
Also, if you're upset about ebooks you should be just as upset about used books being resold, because you neither you or the publisher get any revenue.
I'd say just let it go, work more on improving the book and bringing it up to date, work on improving your website, advertising your books better and so on.
They would either way, eating straw or other stuff, so why not make them do something good as long as they don't do anything besides farting and breathing?
Slashdot Mirror
They're already forced to live under bridges: http://www.cnsnews.com/Public/Content/article.aspx?RsrcID=45831 :
quoting:
Wiese is among 52 sex offenders living under a busy bridge over Biscayne Bay that connects Miami to Miami Beach. The state insisted two years ago it would urge them to leave, but the community has only grown.
It has become a makeshift town of parolees and others who struggle to find affordable housing that doesnâ(TM)t violate strict local ordinances against sex offenders living too close to schools, parks and other places children congregate.
In the angled area where the bridge meets a concrete slope, residents have put up domed tents, a shack housing a makeshift kitchen, a camper, even a weight bench. They've spray painted the slope and the pillars supporting the bridge: âoeWe âRâ(TM) Not Monsters.â âoeThey Treat Animals Better!!!â âoeWhy?â
âoeThey throw us under here and just hope that we can do something ourselves,â said 47-year-old Wiese, standing in the doorway to a small shack made of collected wood scraps. âoeIf I was a murderer, they would help me, they would find me a home, they would find me a job.â
[...]
Once entered in the sex offender registry, a person typically stays for life. In Miami-Dade County, such people must live at least 2,500 feet from places children gather, making only a handful of areas--generally out of an offender's price range--possible homes. The countyâ(TM)s rules governing its 1,030 registered sex offenders are considered among the stateâ(TM)s most restrictive.
Many offenders have family or friends who would house them but can't because they live too close to a school or playground or bus stop.
The state says offenders found the bridge because it was among the few covered places in compliance with the local ordinances. Officials say probation officers haven't suggested it outright, though some residents dispute that. Either way, it has become one of the only solutions.
âoeSometimes when a probation officer is helping somebody to look for a place to live and they're not having any luck and the probation officer is required to know where a person is every night, they may suggest that there is a place where they can check on them," Rackleff said.
And furthermore, US has some of the worst cellphones and some of the most stripped down cellphones. Here in Europe I can buy retail any Nokia phone and just insert my SIM card and it just works. The worst I've seen when buying a phone from a GSM company like Orange or Vodaphone with a plan (so the cellphone is much cheaper than retail) is having VoIP or FM radio disabled but otherwise there's no such thing as not being able to use your own ringtones or stuff like that..
The judge is supposed to give a ruling in 5 minutes... it's obvious no judge will have time to analyze the information received so it's just as bad as the previous law imho... they only changed the law by the tiniest amount so that it would pass
That's true.. I'm looking right now at a 17" Dell monitor and it says Dimensions (HxWxD) 16.4" x 15.9" x 16.5"
You can get now a 19" Asus VW198T LCD running natively at 1680x1050 that has the dimensions Phys.Dimension(WxHxD): 444x368x210 which in inches means roughly 17.48" x 14.48" x 8.26". So, you get higher resolution, you don't damage your eyes so much, only for an extra inch in width, but I guarantee you when you see the space that was once lost because of the CRT's depth, you won't regret it.
The only downside I see is you get about one less inch in height. If this bothers you, you can opt for benq E2200HDA which has the following dimensions: 20.5" x 16.05" x 7.35" but packs a resolution of 1920x1080 inside those 22 inches.
I don't endorse any of the LCD displays above, I just browsed my local IT store's site right now and picked these as having cheap price and high res / diagonal inches
Yes, dude, because when they order 50.000 cd's they pay something like 5 cents for each manufactured disc, so the shipping price is the only real cost they had.
I distinctly remember they had on the page a note saying people should ask for at least 5 and give the extra discs around because it used to cost them the same to ship one or five discs or ten discs.
You wouldn't be able to do this with USB sticks because unlike CD's which fit nicely in an envelope, USB sticks are bulky and relatively heavy and cost more to ship.
USB drives are still more expensive and heavier compared to CDs.. They can easily order 50.000 cd's cheaply... When they offered Ubuntu for free, they were practically begging people to request up to 10 discs at once and give the ones they don't need to friends because the shipping costs were higher than the costs of manufacturing them.
Just in case someone jumps to conclusions...
This just means there will be no re-trial, but the Pirate Bay still has an appeal, it doesn't mean they have to pay to fine or go to jail yet. That's still far away.
I'm not stupid but I couldn't join any game... just can't figure out, each time I join a game it shows the console and stays there.
The interface is horrible and inconsistent, in a hundred colors, with basic things anyone would expect missing. But it does have matrix style text in the console... meh.
For example, there's no 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 setting in the video options but you have two boxes where apparently you have to enter manually the resolution.... but the first time you click on it you just type and overwrite the numbers in the box, the second time you click you actually have to press Backspace to clear the numbers...
Instead of just going to game they had to bother with the ugly irc application that's pointless because nobody bothers chatting when they want to play...
That Windows XP support is emulated, using some modified Virtual PC. Some stuff like dongles, special printers on serial ports or parallel ports won't work, and lots and lots of other things won't work. Plus, that Windows XP will work ONLY if the processor has virtualization support if I remember correctly, and some companies won't buy expensive processors that have the virtualization functions just to run XP.
This was already done in Africa, there was even a documentary about it on TV.
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=160576
http://whiteafrican.com/2008/09/26/if-it-works-in-africa-it-will-work-anywhere/
http://ghanabusinessnews.com/2009/04/15/electronic-payment-another-use-of-mobile-phone-technology/
If I remember correctly, users just had to set a different service center number (the number that receives the SMS messages) and send a sms with a text like *pin*100 to the phone number that's supposed to receive the money and that person would receive 100 in the currency of that country. Both parties would receive an SMS back letting them know that the money was sent / that they received the payment.
The documentary was showing lots of happy truckers who were no longer worried of going tens of miles through desert to deliver stuff and return with loads of money on them, they just delivered the cargo and ask the other person to sms them the payment instantly.
Just as they have now SD, HQ and HD streams there's no problem adding another video encoded with sane settings for mobiles. After all, there are h264 levels designed for mobile phones and lots of phones already decoding them. It's just silly to add yet another format besides h263 and h264.
Current mobile phones probably have chips that do hardware decoding of h264 clips up to a certain bitrate/level whatever probably no phone can do now theora in hardware.
IE will probably render any video tag through Silverlight, forcing you to install it. That's how you make market share for your products in Microsoft land.
On the good side, Silverlight 3 has support for both WMV and h264 and can decode them in hardware using the video card.
or maybe I just want to get the definition of the word, kind of like this page shows : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex
Or maybe I just want information about a show, or a studio or lots of other things, like this page shows: http://www.google.ro/search?q=define%3Asex
The easiest solution would be to have the price of the domain NOT refundable and more expensive. Something like 30$ for the first year, 15$ for each year that comes, and keep the values in tune with the dollar value.
The guys that keep tons of domains do it by buying and dropping it within the allowed time limit so they only lose a few pennies and the instant they drop the domain another company that's owned by the same person (or group, whatever) buys the domain back.
Sure, companies will have to work harder and check the credit card better to prevent fraud and so on, but I'm sure they'll also get a better commission out of it.
Some people won't bother growing themselves because it may not be worth it. You have to use a lot of electricity, the right humidity, have space, not everyone will care enough to learn how to grow their own stuff. Some people may also prefer to experiment with various types of marijuana, of various THC levels, and it's probably not that easy to grow 10 types of plants in your closet.
You could now have pots at the window with tomato plants for example, but you don't care to plant your own because it's cheaper and easier to just buy from store.
The state can easily place a 30-50% tax on it and it will probably get cheaper than the current street prices in a few months after all the excitement is gone.
The state could also use laws to restrict growing plants at home to less than 10 plants for example and require you get a license if you want to grow more, and can get for example 10$ per plant per year from you in this case.
Or why not, let you buy seeds from an authorized seller, grow your stuff and sell it back to a company and make money legally.
Just because marijuana would be legal it doesn't mean anyone will be allowed to sell it, just like you're not allowed to make alcohol in your basement and sell it. You need a license to make sure the alcohol is safe for human consumption, and just like that, you could sell marijuana legally with a license that guarantees the plants have a minimum quality.
That's right. If a child won't play nice with his toys, he'll lose his toys, plain and simple. There's no "right" to be able edit Wikipedia, it's a privilege which you keep if you follow and respect the rules
That's somewhat justified because almost all the traffic that Australian users do is to and from OUTSIDE Australia...
As you're on an island, all traffic goes through a few ocean cables which have limited capacity, and that capacity costs a lot.
This is not the case in Europe and especially US where the telecommunication companies already received tons of money to invest in infrastructure yet they all screw their customers.
Or just:
1. add several highly anonymous proxy servers in the ISP network and with the next bill, give them instructions on how to optionally use it if they want to. Obviously, no logs on the proxy servers. The ISP will log according to the rules connection being made from the proxy's IP to destination address, times and so on, it will be according to the law, but nobody's responsible for the proxy server and there's no law saying the proxy server must also have logs so they won't be able to tell which person actually used the proxy at that time.
2. just give each user IPv6, users actually get a /48 and that's usually millions of IPs... I'd like to see how they'll be able to log so many different ip's especially if I change the ipv6 ip every 5 minutes. Let's see RIAA prove that at precisely 5.12 pm I was using the IP they made screenshot of, especially if I have a wireless access point or several computers in the house.
3. just get an wireless access point, place it at the window and let anyone connect to it. As Swedish and the countries around most have 100mbps plans, it wouldn't be a big deal to allocate 10mbps to a wireless access point and let anyone connect to it. If each subscriber in a city will do the same, it would be tough to sue one person if thousands do it... I suppose you could call it civil disobedience.
Someone will soon design something like TOR or a software that would work like a cluster of proxy servers so soon the ISP logs will be useless as you won't be able to say a certain packet of data was made intentionally by the user that subscribed for the Internet connection.
I'm using line-height: 150% or something like that. Not the same but close enough for my not-so-serious websites.
But you're right, it's something that's missing and I notice it every day.
...as opposed to getting about 50 cents to a dollar on each CD, and that's if you're lucky to be Madonna or someone already famous...
I'd say it's a very good deal.
one obvious drawback to this model is that you canÃ(TM)t sell an on-demand CD at shows, where enthusiastic fans are most likely to pick one up.
I don't think there would be anyone stopping the band from buying the CDs from Amazon for $9 and selling them at the concert for $15, with an autograph and some booklet, or for something like $25-50 with a signed t-shirt and booklet.
They'd only lose about 5$ on each CD, but in the end it may still be better than ordering and paying in advance for a 500-1000 batch of discs at a duplication factory.
With these bigs pipes in place they will no longer have any justification for caps. Their main justification (at least in UK's case) is that (1) the copper infrastructure in UK has poor quality or (2) that it's overloaded or (3) BT Telecom's prices for bandwidth and connecting are huge.
For the 3rd point, you can read about how much BT charges ISPs here:
http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/02/28/how-uk-isps-are-charged-for-broadband-the-cost-of-ipstream/
Let me quote from that page because probably some people will be too lazy to click the link:
A central pipe can be ordered with a maximum capacity of 622Mbps (we could buy pipes with less, e.g. 155Mbps but we only buy 622â(TM)s now).
There are four charges associated with the central pipes. The first is a one off installation fee of £175,000. In general there is a lead time of around 3 months for a new installation, but this can take longer if new fibre needs blowing, especially if that requires extra digging.
Secondly, thereâ(TM)s a per customer rental charge of £1.25 per month. With around 200,000 customers on IPStream that equates to £250,000 per month.
Then thereâ(TM)s a base rental for the 622Mbps central pipe of £160,000 per year and from there a £166,800 yearly rental for each 155Mbps segment that is active.
cabling.pngSo you have yearly charges as follows:
0Mbps of capacity - £160,000
155Mbps of capacity - £326,800
311Mbps of capacity - £493,600
466Mbps of capacity - £660,400
622Mbps of capacity - £827,200
As you can see, because of the £160,000 base rental it actually costs less per Mbps the more segments are active. It will cost less per year to have one fully active 622Mbps than have two centrals with two segments lit each. But you then have to balance that against the lead time for installing a new central pipe.
As such, 1Mbps costs per month costs the following (the calculations are based on 139Mbps per segment which is the usable amount excluding overheads):
With 155Mbps of capacity - £195.92
With 311Mbps of capacity - £147.96
With 466Mbps of capacity - £131.97
With 622Mbps of capacity - £123.98
At the time of writing we have 25 active segments across 7 pipes giving us a total annual cost of:
(7 x 160,000) + (25 * 166,800) = £5,290,000
Which equates to a per Mbps cost of £126.86 per month before we consider any transit or routing costs on our own network.
So while in US or in Holland I can get bandwidth from a datacenter at an average price of 7$ for 1mbps, in UK this ISP pays about $190.
With 10gbps links all over UK, how will BT keep justifying those insane rates? At least the installation fee wouldn't exist anymore, because the fibers would already be in place. Will probably have to see.
ISP companies currently rely on the fact that people don't use their Internet connections at the speeds they offer.
The behavior of the Internet subscribers changes and more people are doing interactive things or watching video broadcasts on their Internet connection, keeping a certain amount of bandwidth in use for longer periods of time.
Before video, Youtube, Napster and all the wonderful things appeared, ISP companies cheated by connecting let's say 150 users with a 1mbps plan to a 10mbps Internet Connection knowing they won't even use that.
So you'd have a whole neighborhood connected to a 100mbps fiber optics cable and things went smoothly.
Now these people start to use their plans for video and stuff so that 100mbps (which is now probably 1gbps) won't keep up. You'd need to upgrade to a 10gbps fiber or more to keep those customers happy.
So it's not a question of killer application... It's enough for 5 x 10 story apartment buildings with 4 apartments on each story to each watch CNN HD online or Netflix Online (3mbps streams) to have a need for about 600mbps of bandwidth. Not to mention even game consoles automatically downloading games, updates for games, trailers and other stuff.
It's not a question for what you're going to use it. With the capacity, innovative ways to use your Internet connection will come.
For example, nobody stops me from establishing a company that would stream TV channels to people at let's say 1080p at 20mbps for a small subscribe fee.
If my business plan wants to allow that subscriber to view up to three TV stations at a time (he watches ESPN, wife watches Travel Channel, kid watches Cartoon Channel), that subscriber would need to have about 75mbps of bandwidth available.
Now, he won't need 75mbps all the time, because the kid goes to school, maybe he goes to work but he needs to be able to push up to that value. On the other side, maybe seeing the average subscriber now has stable 100mbps connection, I as a company would be interested in giving people HD+, let's say 2560x1600 @ 35mbps or even cinema like resolutions or 3D movies @ 50mbps for people who may get in a couple of years a 3D projector .
The ISP would need to have a 10gbps pipe (or more) up to a series of house, or apartment building or whatever, just to be sure it would be able to provide all these users a good enough Internet connection at peak times.
It's the same as when you build a house you use wires capable of powering 30 computers in a room or grow marijuana in your house, even though you'll probably have only two-three computers and a TV ever.
But your book gets older and newer books about the topic are being written so people will tend to buy newer books "new" and older books like yours "used".
If people buy from the used category, the publisher should drop the price to increase his revenue.
And by the way... you say "Just royalty statements that show very few sales." Are you 100% sure they're not cheating you?
Also, if you're upset about ebooks you should be just as upset about used books being resold, because you neither you or the publisher get any revenue.
I'd say just let it go, work more on improving the book and bringing it up to date, work on improving your website, advertising your books better and so on.
They would either way, eating straw or other stuff, so why not make them do something good as long as they don't do anything besides farting and breathing?