Your equating "stop that trend" (ie. cut down traffic from the pathological users) with "hold back innovation" is somewhat of a stretch. I strongly doubt that many of these users are transmitting TBs of scientific data (and if they were, they'd be using university connections or sneakernet). They're swapping seasons of TV shows that they'll probably never even watch, simply because they have the bandwidth to burn - hardly what I'd call an innovation.
I'm on TW out of the Albany area, and in a busy month I can download 1TB of linux isos. And if TW rolled that crap out here, I'd switch and so would everyone in my extended family who only got TW because I recommended it in the first place.
Most ISPs I've used have unmetered file mirror sites with all the latest distros / game demos. They don't care so much about your percentage utilisation of your ADSL link, just about the expensive upstream traffic.
Usage based billing works well for finite, tangable things -- which the things you mentioned are. Bandwidth and bits, just don't work like that. A DS3 is always a DS3; it's always moving 45mbps of either packets or an idle pattern. Bits are transient, temporal creatures. They exist only when we use them. They cannot be stockpiled for a rainy day or a nuclear winter. The bandwidth of my DS3 that wasn't used today cannot be used tomorrow.
This is true, but the other side of the equation is that bandwidth is a shared resource. Internet pipes aren't cheap. A user who's gulping down 100GB a month is costing their ISP 100 times as much in terms of percentage pipe utilisation as one that only downloads 1GB. Also, international traffic is often charged by data, not bandwidth allocation. This is plain common sense - data transfers are usually bursty, so reserving bandwidth based on continual streaming is inefficient. Obviously not so much an issue in the States, but yeah.
As I have said many places, if TW cared about network traffic, they would throttle connections above some "cap". Instead, it's as clear as a road flare, they want more money - period. And this is how they're going to get it. Most of their customers aren't exceeding the cap, so expect the caps to be lowered and bills to increase. This is stupid; their network cannot handle the demands of modern networking, so instead of spending anything to support the ever evolving networking demands, they want everyone to go back to the relative stoneage of dialup era limited use. They advertise faster and faster connections (to stay competitive) but don't have the infrastructure to support it, and won't spend the money to be able to. (the modern web ceased to be usable at dialup speeds many years ago.)
Throttling to 64kbps is widely applied here in Australia to internet connections once they reach their "soft cap". The problem is that even at 64kbps, a determined leech can download 10GB+ a month over their quota, so they can't raise it, but it's really not usable.
Let me tell you my secret recipe - this one is easy enough that I used to make it when I was single, and tasty/nutritious enough that my wife asked me to make it for dinner last night.;)
You will need:
Two packets of Indo Mie mi goreng
Two eggs
A medium-sized onion
A tomato
A small can of mushrooms in butter sauce
Whatever else is in the fridge
Butter
Heat a small pot, add about 1/2 Tbsp butter. Crack two eggs into the pot and scramble. When eggs are mostly solid, add chopped onion and tomato, along with whatever else (meat, other veggies, leftovers) you find in the fridge that looks like it'd go well. Cook for 3-4 mins, stirring occasionally, until onion starts to soften. Add mi goreng noodles and flavouring to the pot along with the can of mushrooms. Add around 1 cup boiling water, and simmer for 5 minutes or so, stirring occasionally.
Note: This concoction generally *looks* pretty iffy, but it tastes fantastic and isn't too bad for you healthwise. It's also brilliant hangover-cure food.:)
P.S. Your point (1) in your after-work story is the problem. The reason you feel bodgy is the mismatch between brain-tired and body tired: When you get home from work, instead of collapsing, try to get 20-30min exercise. Go for a bike ride, jog, do weights, whatever. Not only will it kickstart your stagnating metabolism, but (I find) a bit of exercise really cuts down your desire for greasy food and alcohol afterwards.:)
WTF? It's bad if you are a human. Good/bad are words that have context: human context.
We need to distinguish here between "bad for me" (which seas rising and humans being wiped out in droves probably is for a human) and "bad for life on this planet". Nature doesn't really care about you, me, the precious endangered tree frogs in the Amazon. Nature just is. All that shit about saving endangered species is just a pathological overextension of the empathy/altruism that we've evolved to allow us to live successfully in large groups.
Sounds like plausible deniability to me - the worm reproduces by itself, pretty hard to prove that the neighbour deliberately copied it to your shared pron folder and renamed it portman_grits_hd.avi.exe
Change happens, when your city decides to sink into the swamp perhaps you should move instead of asking the rest of your fellow citizens to spend Sagan's trying to build ever higher levees.
Most of the estimates of sea level rises that I've seen are on the order of 50cm. Is it really that hard to add another half meter of dyke on top of a wall that's already several meters high? Honestly I'd think that reclaimed land is some of the least at risk, compared with land that's already at sea level but completely unprotected.
It's also worth remembering that some of the most populated parts of the Earth are also very close to sealevel. It wouldn't take much of a rise to displace very, very large numbers of people --- like, billions, and they're not just going to sit there and drown.
Of course not, they'll evolve to become aquatic apes, and thousands of years in the future, after extensive genetic remodelling to make themselves more suited to open ocean life, they will use pure mind power to transport themselves millions of years into the past to a time when the oceans were unsullied.
Much later, their great-great-great-grandchildren will be mixed in with your can of tuna.
That aside, Jupiter just phoned. Apparently it's winter there, and while slightly embarrassed, Jupiter assures us that its spot is "just a bit chilly" and not permanently shrinking. It goes on to remind you that its spot is still bigger than our silly little planet so who are we to make fun of it.
What? You labour in an open-topped fabric-covered doorless half-height cube? Good god, that's barbaric!
It is, it's terrible. It's also pretty dang good for communication, I've worked in an office before and I hated it. What, you prefer to rely on email or IM (or intercom, yuck) for *all* the times you need to say "hey bob, could you check in foozballwidget.dll please?" Unless you have the luxury of being the sole maintainer of a system, your job probably requires you to frequently talk to people, which is easier of you have LoS on most of the office.
Probably just that (like most of us) he's sick of people saying "THIS GAEM IS 2 EZ" to try and make themselves look good. To add injury to insult, the people that say this are usually prime examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect, lending their copious quantities of fail to whatever endeavour they join before blaming everyone but themselves and leaving in a storm of self righteous name calling.
What in the world makes you think that Google can't feed different "Google Store" pages to different users based on carrier?
What in the world makes you think that Google would want to fragment their app base into lots of little segments based on inane carrier licenses, and force devs to put out umpteen different versions of each app? They want people to actually develop for the platform, y'know.
Is there anything in the licensing agreement to prevent someone else starting up a rival App Store clone that just provides apps without caring about telcos' evilness?
Yep. They're just providers of the internets now, and they hate it. They've spent the last 100 years charging insane prices for specialised bandwidth. Now, this "internet" thing provides vastly higher data throughput because it needs to transmit things like porn and torrented episodes of Scrubs. They try and keep people thinking that "voice" and "text messages" are somehow special, and are different to all the other data, so they can charge more for them, but people are catching on. They're just going to have to move with the times.
I would have thought that they'd be more against a tether in the opposite direction, letting you use the phone as a wifi VOIP handset. That may be, though, because Australia is the arse end of the Internets and home of the shittiest phone data plans in the known universe, and using your ADSL line is pretty much always cheaper than using a wireless connection. $40 / 6GB is about the best plan you can get. Amusingly, though, providers here actively encourage tethering.
The application lets users connect their G1 Android phones via Wi-Fi to their laptops and then access the Internet from the laptop using the phone's cellular connection.
Giant compensatemobile? I drive an MA70 Supra.:P It's around the same size (if slightly smaller than) a family sedan, it's a Japanese Group A car (ie. turbo 3L)... as for compensating, it's rather small and the journey is sometimes over before it really gets satisfying, if you get my drift.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Your equating "stop that trend" (ie. cut down traffic from the pathological users) with "hold back innovation" is somewhat of a stretch. I strongly doubt that many of these users are transmitting TBs of scientific data (and if they were, they'd be using university connections or sneakernet). They're swapping seasons of TV shows that they'll probably never even watch, simply because they have the bandwidth to burn - hardly what I'd call an innovation.
I'm on TW out of the Albany area, and in a busy month I can download 1TB of linux isos. And if TW rolled that crap out here, I'd switch and so would everyone in my extended family who only got TW because I recommended it in the first place.
Most ISPs I've used have unmetered file mirror sites with all the latest distros / game demos. They don't care so much about your percentage utilisation of your ADSL link, just about the expensive upstream traffic.
Usage based billing works well for finite, tangable things -- which the things you mentioned are. Bandwidth and bits, just don't work like that. A DS3 is always a DS3; it's always moving 45mbps of either packets or an idle pattern. Bits are transient, temporal creatures. They exist only when we use them. They cannot be stockpiled for a rainy day or a nuclear winter. The bandwidth of my DS3 that wasn't used today cannot be used tomorrow.
This is true, but the other side of the equation is that bandwidth is a shared resource. Internet pipes aren't cheap. A user who's gulping down 100GB a month is costing their ISP 100 times as much in terms of percentage pipe utilisation as one that only downloads 1GB. Also, international traffic is often charged by data, not bandwidth allocation. This is plain common sense - data transfers are usually bursty, so reserving bandwidth based on continual streaming is inefficient. Obviously not so much an issue in the States, but yeah.
As I have said many places, if TW cared about network traffic, they would throttle connections above some "cap". Instead, it's as clear as a road flare, they want more money - period. And this is how they're going to get it. Most of their customers aren't exceeding the cap, so expect the caps to be lowered and bills to increase. This is stupid; their network cannot handle the demands of modern networking, so instead of spending anything to support the ever evolving networking demands, they want everyone to go back to the relative stoneage of dialup era limited use. They advertise faster and faster connections (to stay competitive) but don't have the infrastructure to support it, and won't spend the money to be able to. (the modern web ceased to be usable at dialup speeds many years ago.)
Throttling to 64kbps is widely applied here in Australia to internet connections once they reach their "soft cap". The problem is that even at 64kbps, a determined leech can download 10GB+ a month over their quota, so they can't raise it, but it's really not usable.
Let me tell you my secret recipe - this one is easy enough that I used to make it when I was single, and tasty/nutritious enough that my wife asked me to make it for dinner last night. ;)
:)
:)
You will need:
Two packets of Indo Mie mi goreng
Two eggs
A medium-sized onion
A tomato
A small can of mushrooms in butter sauce
Whatever else is in the fridge
Butter
Heat a small pot, add about 1/2 Tbsp butter. Crack two eggs into the pot and scramble. When eggs are mostly solid, add chopped onion and tomato, along with whatever else (meat, other veggies, leftovers) you find in the fridge that looks like it'd go well. Cook for 3-4 mins, stirring occasionally, until onion starts to soften. Add mi goreng noodles and flavouring to the pot along with the can of mushrooms. Add around 1 cup boiling water, and simmer for 5 minutes or so, stirring occasionally.
Note: This concoction generally *looks* pretty iffy, but it tastes fantastic and isn't too bad for you healthwise. It's also brilliant hangover-cure food.
P.S. Your point (1) in your after-work story is the problem. The reason you feel bodgy is the mismatch between brain-tired and body tired: When you get home from work, instead of collapsing, try to get 20-30min exercise. Go for a bike ride, jog, do weights, whatever. Not only will it kickstart your stagnating metabolism, but (I find) a bit of exercise really cuts down your desire for greasy food and alcohol afterwards.
WTF? It's bad if you are a human. Good/bad are words that have context: human context.
We need to distinguish here between "bad for me" (which seas rising and humans being wiped out in droves probably is for a human) and "bad for life on this planet". Nature doesn't really care about you, me, the precious endangered tree frogs in the Amazon. Nature just is. All that shit about saving endangered species is just a pathological overextension of the empathy/altruism that we've evolved to allow us to live successfully in large groups.
Sounds like plausible deniability to me - the worm reproduces by itself, pretty hard to prove that the neighbour deliberately copied it to your shared pron folder and renamed it portman_grits_hd.avi.exe
Change happens, when your city decides to sink into the swamp perhaps you should move instead of asking the rest of your fellow citizens to spend Sagan's trying to build ever higher levees.
Most of the estimates of sea level rises that I've seen are on the order of 50cm. Is it really that hard to add another half meter of dyke on top of a wall that's already several meters high? Honestly I'd think that reclaimed land is some of the least at risk, compared with land that's already at sea level but completely unprotected.
It's also worth remembering that some of the most populated parts of the Earth are also very close to sealevel. It wouldn't take much of a rise to displace very, very large numbers of people --- like, billions, and they're not just going to sit there and drown.
Of course not, they'll evolve to become aquatic apes, and thousands of years in the future, after extensive genetic remodelling to make themselves more suited to open ocean life, they will use pure mind power to transport themselves millions of years into the past to a time when the oceans were unsullied.
Much later, their great-great-great-grandchildren will be mixed in with your can of tuna.
That aside, Jupiter just phoned. Apparently it's winter there, and while slightly embarrassed, Jupiter assures us that its spot is "just a bit chilly" and not permanently shrinking. It goes on to remind you that its spot is still bigger than our silly little planet so who are we to make fun of it.
What? You labour in an open-topped fabric-covered doorless half-height cube? Good god, that's barbaric!
It is, it's terrible. It's also pretty dang good for communication, I've worked in an office before and I hated it. What, you prefer to rely on email or IM (or intercom, yuck) for *all* the times you need to say "hey bob, could you check in foozballwidget.dll please?" Unless you have the luxury of being the sole maintainer of a system, your job probably requires you to frequently talk to people, which is easier of you have LoS on most of the office.
Hmm... actually, yeah, that could very well make you think that.
"the real haters of Fox" -- Real Scotsman fallacy.
You're wrong, because a REAL Scotsman wouldn't use a fallacious argument.
What's all this SHOUTING? We'll have no TROUBLE HERE!
Rather!
Probably just that (like most of us) he's sick of people saying "THIS GAEM IS 2 EZ" to try and make themselves look good. To add injury to insult, the people that say this are usually prime examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect, lending their copious quantities of fail to whatever endeavour they join before blaming everyone but themselves and leaving in a storm of self righteous name calling.
I don't think I've ever seen a /whoosh/ post that was rated higher than 2 or 3.
What in the world makes you think that Google can't feed different "Google Store" pages to different users based on carrier?
What in the world makes you think that Google would want to fragment their app base into lots of little segments based on inane carrier licenses, and force devs to put out umpteen different versions of each app? They want people to actually develop for the platform, y'know.
Is there anything in the licensing agreement to prevent someone else starting up a rival App Store clone that just provides apps without caring about telcos' evilness?
Only a matter of time until someone produces a biological symbiont that *absorbs* alcohol and renders it harmless before it can affect you...
They wouldn't DARE!! -_-
Fork bomb? I thought it was a smiley threesome.
Then all of the participants had lots of kids. Lots and lots and lots of kids.
Yep. They're just providers of the internets now, and they hate it. They've spent the last 100 years charging insane prices for specialised bandwidth. Now, this "internet" thing provides vastly higher data throughput because it needs to transmit things like porn and torrented episodes of Scrubs. They try and keep people thinking that "voice" and "text messages" are somehow special, and are different to all the other data, so they can charge more for them, but people are catching on. They're just going to have to move with the times.
I would have thought that they'd be more against a tether in the opposite direction, letting you use the phone as a wifi VOIP handset. That may be, though, because Australia is the arse end of the Internets and home of the shittiest phone data plans in the known universe, and using your ADSL line is pretty much always cheaper than using a wireless connection. $40 / 6GB is about the best plan you can get. Amusingly, though, providers here actively encourage tethering.
The application lets users connect their G1 Android phones via Wi-Fi to their laptops and then access the Internet from the laptop using the phone's cellular connection.
Slashdot is an MMO, you can't 'win' it. That's why some of us have been playing for decades and we still haven't quit. ;)
Giant compensatemobile? I drive an MA70 Supra. :P It's around the same size (if slightly smaller than) a family sedan, it's a Japanese Group A car (ie. turbo 3L)... as for compensating, it's rather small and the journey is sometimes over before it really gets satisfying, if you get my drift. ;)
Pfft, I'm used to playing from Australia, our pings are much worse! :P
;)
I jest, but I'm sure there's plenty of online pursuits that quite happily tolerate an hour of round trip time. Slashdot, for one!
Call me when you find these "men who are less interested in sex".
;)
All women would be interesting...