Whatever the photographer can do with a 320x240 cellphone camera, he can do with a good DSLR. However, with the DSLR he can do things that he cannot do with the cellphone.
No, I was just giving an example of technology that limits creative expression. Maybe someone really wanted to create a photorealistic game 15 years ago, but could not do that because the technology could not do that.
OTOH, you can create a game with low quality graphics on modern machine, which means that you have more options to express your creativity.
I said a cellphone that does 320x240. You can sense light composition etc all you want, but you still won't be able to recognize the person you took the photo of (especially if the person is father away). At least in my experience, cell phones have trouble taking photos in bad lighting conditions (for example at night), while a decent camera can have very long exposure and take the picture. A bigger sensor in a camera means that the noise is lower, useful when it's dark.
Also, my friend once told me that if is very difficult if even possible to take a photo of a spider's web with a camera that does not have manual focus (since autofocus will focus to whatever is behind the web).
Same thing on PC games - System Shock 2 (which IIRC is reviewed as "good game") or half life was not possible on the NES. Minecraft too. OTOH, you can have Super Mario Bros on a current PC (whether using an emulator or porting it).
No, that's like saying that a photographer with a good DSLR or a film SLR camera can be more creative than a photographer with a cell phone that takes 320x240 photos. The photographer with a good camera can make his photos low resolution, but he can also take high resolution photos where you see every detail, while the photographer with a cell phone cannot take high resolution photos even if he wants to.
You can make a low resolution PC game (Minecraft or any old PC game) but you can also make a high resolution game if you want to. If you were creating a game for the NES or a PC 15 years ago, you would not be able to create a game with good graphics even if you really wanted to.
There was a similar game before, but MC is quite different from it now.
What do they have in common? They could run on hardware that is 10 years old.
Portal is on Source engine. While it could run on 10 year old hardware, the graphics would suck. You need a better video card (at least) to make it have decent FPS at max graphic settings on 1600x1200 or higher resolution.
Minecraft requires less resources, but also has worse graphics. I have installed the HD texture pack, because while the game itself is good, I did not like the low quality graphics.
A long time ago I used to play Wolfenstein3D all the time. It was a fun game and I didn't care about the graphics. Now I can't really play it without any higher resolution mod because the graphics are too low quality for me (and my head starts to hurt after a few minutes of playing it, though I can play newer games for hours without problems).
High quality graphics are necessary to me, like good controls. A game cannot be good on those two factors alone, but if graphics or controls suck then I most likely won't play the game. There are exceptions, I played "The Longest Journey" (fixed resolution - 640x480) with AA and AF turned to max and endured the bad graphics (mainly due to low resolution - my monitor has visible black lines between the scanlines at such low resolution), but usually I have to be able to easily see and recognize things in a game for me to fully enjoy playing it (no, I don't play text based games).
If you cheat, you would just get locked out of the anti-cheating enabled servers (VAC protected). You wouldn't lose access to games, although, there are two titles where this is a bit of a gray area.
The crux of it is, if the payment you make via Paypal for anything you buy on Steam doesn't go through for any reason, routine or not, Steam will think you've stolen the game and your account will be banned, along with all the games you've purchased on it. And according to this man's account of events, Steam are not very open to allowing you to rectify the situation.
So if it turns out that I do not have enough money in my "internet-enabled" card I can lose my games, nice.
In reality, you licensed them.
How nice of the content creators - when it's piracy they all talk about it like I stole a physical item ("You wouldn't steal a car..."), but when I buy something it turns out that I only licensed it and actually do not have it.
There is something nagging at me though, I get the feeling that you never really investigated how Steam's DRM really worked
Well, it works well enough for me (and I don't want to cheat) that I did not have to investigate how it works in detail. However, if I ever run into problems with Valve, they can disable/delete my account and I will lose all my games. They could, in theory, start charging a monthly fee and I would either have to pay it or lose my games.
I bought those games, I paid for them, so I should be able to play them regardless of what the store does after my purchase. If I go to a store and buy a CD (with music) I can continue to use it even if the store goes out of business or if the store starts hating me for some reason.
In a trusted computing environment, it's something that helps against unauthorized code/modifications that could for example, assist in cheating.
You can crack the DRM to modify files or modify files that are not monitored by the DRM (video drivers for example). Client-side DRM can be cracked to allow the client to run - removing the whole reason for the DRM to be created. Also, you can have all the cheating prevention tools that you want while still allowing the client to run (and connect to servers that have cheating prevention disabled or run in single player mode). For a single player game DRM cannot be used like you describe (since the game is single player) and should be completely removed.
You can ban their IP or account. You can require a Steam account to play online and require that the game be bought to play it without any client-side DRM. That way the cheater will be able to play on non-Steam servers (as he can do now with a pirate copy) or play the same on single player, but not play it on Steam-enabled servers.
If someone will pay for an illegitimate copy, they would definitely download an illegitimate copy.
Or they would buy the legitimate copy. Not everyone who buys the illegitimate copy does so knowingly and specifically (if, for example, their internet connection is too slow to download the pirate copy, they would either buy a pirate copy or a legitimate copy).
I'm concerned that arguments here appeal to the convenience of the process, rather than morality of their actions.
Yes, and most of the time the pirate copy is more convenient - no DRM, no need to pay, no need to go to the store etc.
Surely you can imagine a situation where paying is only a tiny iota more inconvenient than downloading for free?
Yes, but so far I have not seen such situation.
Also, if someone chooses to pay any amount for the pirate copy when a free pirate copy is available (as is for the vast majority of things) then he is much more likely to buy the legitimate version.
2) If someone sells illegitimate copies of copyrighted materials for prices a little above bandwidth costs (e.g. allofmp3.com), are they really that much worse than those who just give away for free?
Yes.
There is a huge difference in price between $0 and $0.01. At least for me, to pay any amount, I need to trust the seller enough to give my card info (better if he accepts paypal) have the money in my account that is associated with the card (I usually do not keep money there in case someone manages to get my card number). Also, if something's free I can just test it and if I don't like it - no big deal, but if I paid some money for it then it means that I "lost" the money.
One suggestion for reducing or eliminating email spam was to charge $0.01 for each email (then optionally allow people to give the money to some charity) with the idea that for anyone it should not be expensive (how many emails do you send in a month?) but it would be too expensive for spammers. For some reason people didn't like it.
3) Why do we need to make a loophole for non-commercial sharing?
Because people have copied records/tapes and taped off TV/radio for a long time now and the industry is not bankrupt for some reason, maybe the non-commercial copyright infringement is not as bad as MAFIAA says it is?
4) If free versions are available, then everyone who would have bought a commercial illegitimate copy will now just take a free version, thus making any bans on commercial infringement completely and utterly ineffective.
So, make the legit product somehow better. Include something in the box that collectors would appreciate. Make updates (bug fixes and new content) free to those who bought the game, but charge some money from those who pirated. Make multiplayer only available for legit users. Services like Steam (without DRM though) that allow you to play the game on other computers without recording it to DVD or torrenting it again (maybe the ISP does not allow P2P). Oh, and reduce the prices - $50 is something like 16% of the minimal wage before taxes. However, somebody who gets the minimal wage has to pay taxes, pay for his flat/house, electricity, internet, food, clothes, fuel for car etc. The $50 price becomes quite high, especially for a game.
Also remember that usually it is not possible to return a game if it sucks. When I bought a defective video card (analog output was blurry) I returned it and got my money back. If I bought "Big Rigs Over The Road Racing" I could not return it even though the game is even more broken than the video card (that I assume could output good picture over the DVI port).
2) Sharing is only bad when companies do it (though I've had real trouble getting anyone to be able to justify why that is)
Sharing copyrighted material for profit is bad, how about this?
What I mean is - it is difficult to prove or disprove that somebody who downloaded the game for free would have bought it, after all, there is a huge price difference between free and $50 and I have a limited amount of money and could buy a limited amount of games, while I could download much more games (depending on the hard drive size and connection speed). However, if somebody bought the game from a pirate it is more likely that they would have bought the game legitimately if the pirated version was not available (even worse is when the pirate tricks the buyer into thinking that it is the legit version and sells it for the price of the legit version).
Interesting. To get a credit card I would need to show my bank that my salary in the last 6 months was above a certain amount (I don't really know the exact amount since I don't need a credit card). I can get a debit card easily though. Also, the debit card is really a debit card - it's not possible to take more money from it than is in the account.
I think I saw a coprocessor that worked with AMD's HT and plugged in place of another CPU (on a motherboard with multiple sockets).
Itanium+x86 CPU would be expensive and still slow, I mean if all your current programs are x86 (because Itanium was a new CPU, it did not have any software written for it at first) it does not make much sense to buy a CPU that is slow on x86 but would be faster if you rewrote or recompiled your software (in case of locally written apps) or bugged the developer to do it (in case of licensed apps). Also, IIRC, Intel was trying to get away from x86.
It probably is also much more expensive to get the specialized chips and write software specifically for them instead of just buying a faster general purpose CPU. CUDA and similar are useful in only a minor subset of jobs (ones that can be split to a huge number of cores, do not need a lot of memory and do not need to access it often).
Yes, emulation is an option, but I don't think that ARM running x86 emulation layer will be competitive with native x86 CPUs. Didn't this happen to Itanium? Slow x86 performance and AMD's x86-64 resulted in virtually zero market for Itanium.
Current Windows software won't run on ARM. Maybe that's not a big concern for Linux, since most of the Linux software is open source and can be compiled on whatever platform you want, but I don't see companies buying ARM computers instead of x86 ones (you know, the ones that still use IE6 because some business app requires it, going to ARM will be even worse, since all their current apps won't work, not just the badly written ones).
If the person crashes and simply says "it was an accident" when it was really caused by talking on a cell phone, chances are they will pay no fine.
Well, it all depends on the severity of the accident. If the accident is minor enough for the police not to fine the driver then, well, he should not pay the fine.
There are a lot of things that are distracting and do not leave evidence - talking to a passenger, falling asleep (assuming the guy wakes up before the police arrive), reading a book, changing a tape (or CD, or radio station), eating, drinking (not alcohol) etc. Why single out talking on the cellphone?
It's misuse when the driver talks on the phone (hands-on or maybe even hands-off). A passenger talking on the phone does not increaase the risk of an accident.
Drunk driving probably increases the risk of an accident more than 4x, but alcohol is not banned. Misuse (driving while drunk) is punished though. However, if the passenger is drunk while the driver is sober, nobody is punished.
When was the last time you brought a hand gun into a school? Why ban them? We should only punish the nut jobs that cause the rampages and not everyone else who has a god given right to bear arms anywhere they like.
The rampages in schools where guns are not allowed prove that the ban on guns is not effective. OTOH, if the other students had guns, maybe one of them could have shot the crazy guy and prevent him from killing a bunch of people.
I think its proven that making calls (at least hands-on calls) while driving dramatically increases the chance of being in an accident.
So is driving drunk. But alcohol is not banned. Drunk drivers are punished though.
Why mandate seat belts? They only serve to increase your chances of living through an accident.
I'm with you on this one. If you want to die - go ahead.
A fee/charge for using hands-on cell phones while driving is appropriate, and possibly hands-off if it really distracts people so much (statistically speaking).
A fine is good too. Either if the police sees you driving with a phone in your hand or when you cause an accident.
Last night I saw an individual driving very poorly and of course when I passed them they had a pen and paper in hand writing notes while driving... distracted drivers cause accidents.
Let's ban paper then. Actually, I don't know how it is in the USA, but where I live, if there is an accident the police determine who caused it and punish him accordingly, his insurance pays for the damage to the other cars or public property (lamp post or whatever). If the accident is minor (public property not damaged, nobody severely injured) and the drivers agree to who is at fault, they do not need to involve the police, just fill in a declaration and give it to their insurance companies.
The problem is the reckless people will talk on their mobile phone, crash into something, then tell the police they were not talking on a phone.
So what? He still crashed and (I guess) it was his fault and he will pay the fine. Or do you think falling asleep while dirving should result in a lower fine than talking on the phone while driving?
Small users would rather pay a usage-based fee and thus not support your habit of saturating your connection. It's just like prepaid vs. post-paid phones.
Small users would not get my 200/200/80/80 connection too. They can get a 20/20/5/5 and pay 11EUR for it, instead of ~29 that I pay. If the user uses the internet even less, he can get a 10/10/1/1 connection for 2.8EUR/month, but can only use it for 5 days (any 5 days in a month), each additional day is 0.58EUR. This is for those who can get fiber.
Now, if the user actually uses the internet very little, it makes more sense to get a data plan for a cell phone, since the connection will always be with you. For 9.49EUR/month (on top of whatever plan you have) you can get 1mbps connection with 3GB cap. If you go over it, every ~345MB will be 1EUR extra. I have this plan on my cell phone and use it when I am away from home (or whem my home connection goes down) - I either browse the 'net on my phone or connect the phone to my laptop (or my main PC).
If your brother in law goes over 100GB a month and isn't on fibre optic - he probably pays more than his monthly plan is set for.
Depends on where he lives. When I had DSL I could saturate the connection the whole month (and my upload was saturated all the time) and the ISP didn't care. Now I have fiber and a much faster connection and upload way more than I could with DSL and the ISP still doesn't care.
But yes, because if the way internet works, I'd rather pay a fixed fee and not one based on data transferred. If I paid for every MB transferred then I should not pay for the packets lost in the ISPs network for example.
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Whatever the photographer can do with a 320x240 cellphone camera, he can do with a good DSLR. However, with the DSLR he can do things that he cannot do with the cellphone.
No, I was just giving an example of technology that limits creative expression. Maybe someone really wanted to create a photorealistic game 15 years ago, but could not do that because the technology could not do that.
OTOH, you can create a game with low quality graphics on modern machine, which means that you have more options to express your creativity.
I said a cellphone that does 320x240. You can sense light composition etc all you want, but you still won't be able to recognize the person you took the photo of (especially if the person is father away). At least in my experience, cell phones have trouble taking photos in bad lighting conditions (for example at night), while a decent camera can have very long exposure and take the picture. A bigger sensor in a camera means that the noise is lower, useful when it's dark.
Also, my friend once told me that if is very difficult if even possible to take a photo of a spider's web with a camera that does not have manual focus (since autofocus will focus to whatever is behind the web).
Same thing on PC games - System Shock 2 (which IIRC is reviewed as "good game") or half life was not possible on the NES. Minecraft too. OTOH, you can have Super Mario Bros on a current PC (whether using an emulator or porting it).
No, that's like saying that a photographer with a good DSLR or a film SLR camera can be more creative than a photographer with a cell phone that takes 320x240 photos. The photographer with a good camera can make his photos low resolution, but he can also take high resolution photos where you see every detail, while the photographer with a cell phone cannot take high resolution photos even if he wants to.
You can make a low resolution PC game (Minecraft or any old PC game) but you can also make a high resolution game if you want to. If you were creating a game for the NES or a PC 15 years ago, you would not be able to create a game with good graphics even if you really wanted to.
Portal: innovative.
Yes
Tower of Goo: innovative.
Haven't played it, so I'll take your word for it.
Minecraft: innovative.
There was a similar game before, but MC is quite different from it now.
What do they have in common? They could run on hardware that is 10 years old.
Portal is on Source engine. While it could run on 10 year old hardware, the graphics would suck. You need a better video card (at least) to make it have decent FPS at max graphic settings on 1600x1200 or higher resolution.
Minecraft requires less resources, but also has worse graphics. I have installed the HD texture pack, because while the game itself is good, I did not like the low quality graphics.
A long time ago I used to play Wolfenstein3D all the time. It was a fun game and I didn't care about the graphics. Now I can't really play it without any higher resolution mod because the graphics are too low quality for me (and my head starts to hurt after a few minutes of playing it, though I can play newer games for hours without problems).
High quality graphics are necessary to me, like good controls. A game cannot be good on those two factors alone, but if graphics or controls suck then I most likely won't play the game. There are exceptions, I played "The Longest Journey" (fixed resolution - 640x480) with AA and AF turned to max and endured the bad graphics (mainly due to low resolution - my monitor has visible black lines between the scanlines at such low resolution), but usually I have to be able to easily see and recognize things in a game for me to fully enjoy playing it (no, I don't play text based games).
If you cheat, you would just get locked out of the anti-cheating enabled servers (VAC protected). You wouldn't lose access to games, although, there are two titles where this is a bit of a gray area.
I meant other problems, not cheating, for example:
http://rockpapershotgun.com/rpsforum/topic.php?id=3394
The crux of it is, if the payment you make via Paypal for anything you buy on Steam doesn't go through for any reason, routine or not, Steam will think you've stolen the game and your account will be banned, along with all the games you've purchased on it. And according to this man's account of events, Steam are not very open to allowing you to rectify the situation.
So if it turns out that I do not have enough money in my "internet-enabled" card I can lose my games, nice.
In reality, you licensed them.
How nice of the content creators - when it's piracy they all talk about it like I stole a physical item ("You wouldn't steal a car..."), but when I buy something it turns out that I only licensed it and actually do not have it.
There is something nagging at me though, I get the feeling that you never really investigated how Steam's DRM really worked
Well, it works well enough for me (and I don't want to cheat) that I did not have to investigate how it works in detail. However, if I ever run into problems with Valve, they can disable/delete my account and I will lose all my games. They could, in theory, start charging a monthly fee and I would either have to pay it or lose my games.
I bought those games, I paid for them, so I should be able to play them regardless of what the store does after my purchase. If I go to a store and buy a CD (with music) I can continue to use it even if the store goes out of business or if the store starts hating me for some reason.
In a trusted computing environment, it's something that helps against unauthorized code/modifications that could for example, assist in cheating.
You can crack the DRM to modify files or modify files that are not monitored by the DRM (video drivers for example). Client-side DRM can be cracked to allow the client to run - removing the whole reason for the DRM to be created. Also, you can have all the cheating prevention tools that you want while still allowing the client to run (and connect to servers that have cheating prevention disabled or run in single player mode). For a single player game DRM cannot be used like you describe (since the game is single player) and should be completely removed.
You can ban their IP or account. You can require a Steam account to play online and require that the game be bought to play it without any client-side DRM. That way the cheater will be able to play on non-Steam servers (as he can do now with a pirate copy) or play the same on single player, but not play it on Steam-enabled servers.
If someone will pay for an illegitimate copy, they would definitely download an illegitimate copy.
Or they would buy the legitimate copy. Not everyone who buys the illegitimate copy does so knowingly and specifically (if, for example, their internet connection is too slow to download the pirate copy, they would either buy a pirate copy or a legitimate copy).
I'm concerned that arguments here appeal to the convenience of the process, rather than morality of their actions.
Yes, and most of the time the pirate copy is more convenient - no DRM, no need to pay, no need to go to the store etc.
Surely you can imagine a situation where paying is only a tiny iota more inconvenient than downloading for free?
Yes, but so far I have not seen such situation.
Also, if someone chooses to pay any amount for the pirate copy when a free pirate copy is available (as is for the vast majority of things) then he is much more likely to buy the legitimate version.
2) If someone sells illegitimate copies of copyrighted materials for prices a little above bandwidth costs (e.g. allofmp3.com), are they really that much worse than those who just give away for free?
Yes.
There is a huge difference in price between $0 and $0.01. At least for me, to pay any amount, I need to trust the seller enough to give my card info (better if he accepts paypal) have the money in my account that is associated with the card (I usually do not keep money there in case someone manages to get my card number). Also, if something's free I can just test it and if I don't like it - no big deal, but if I paid some money for it then it means that I "lost" the money.
One suggestion for reducing or eliminating email spam was to charge $0.01 for each email (then optionally allow people to give the money to some charity) with the idea that for anyone it should not be expensive (how many emails do you send in a month?) but it would be too expensive for spammers. For some reason people didn't like it.
3) Why do we need to make a loophole for non-commercial sharing?
Because people have copied records/tapes and taped off TV/radio for a long time now and the industry is not bankrupt for some reason, maybe the non-commercial copyright infringement is not as bad as MAFIAA says it is?
4) If free versions are available, then everyone who would have bought a commercial illegitimate copy will now just take a free version, thus making any bans on commercial infringement completely and utterly ineffective.
So, make the legit product somehow better. Include something in the box that collectors would appreciate. Make updates (bug fixes and new content) free to those who bought the game, but charge some money from those who pirated. Make multiplayer only available for legit users. Services like Steam (without DRM though) that allow you to play the game on other computers without recording it to DVD or torrenting it again (maybe the ISP does not allow P2P). Oh, and reduce the prices - $50 is something like 16% of the minimal wage before taxes. However, somebody who gets the minimal wage has to pay taxes, pay for his flat/house, electricity, internet, food, clothes, fuel for car etc. The $50 price becomes quite high, especially for a game.
Also remember that usually it is not possible to return a game if it sucks. When I bought a defective video card (analog output was blurry) I returned it and got my money back. If I bought "Big Rigs Over The Road Racing" I could not return it even though the game is even more broken than the video card (that I assume could output good picture over the DVI port).
2) Sharing is only bad when companies do it (though I've had real trouble getting anyone to be able to justify why that is)
Sharing copyrighted material for profit is bad, how about this?
What I mean is - it is difficult to prove or disprove that somebody who downloaded the game for free would have bought it, after all, there is a huge price difference between free and $50 and I have a limited amount of money and could buy a limited amount of games, while I could download much more games (depending on the hard drive size and connection speed). However, if somebody bought the game from a pirate it is more likely that they would have bought the game legitimately if the pirated version was not available (even worse is when the pirate tricks the buyer into thinking that it is the legit version and sells it for the price of the legit version).
And with a 255.1 system you grow more ears?
You can process the signal that's going to the headphones so that it sounds like surround, after all, headphones have a speaker for each ear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Headphone
Interesting. To get a credit card I would need to show my bank that my salary in the last 6 months was above a certain amount (I don't really know the exact amount since I don't need a credit card). I can get a debit card easily though. Also, the debit card is really a debit card - it's not possible to take more money from it than is in the account.
I think I saw a coprocessor that worked with AMD's HT and plugged in place of another CPU (on a motherboard with multiple sockets).
Itanium+x86 CPU would be expensive and still slow, I mean if all your current programs are x86 (because Itanium was a new CPU, it did not have any software written for it at first) it does not make much sense to buy a CPU that is slow on x86 but would be faster if you rewrote or recompiled your software (in case of locally written apps) or bugged the developer to do it (in case of licensed apps). Also, IIRC, Intel was trying to get away from x86.
It probably is also much more expensive to get the specialized chips and write software specifically for them instead of just buying a faster general purpose CPU. CUDA and similar are useful in only a minor subset of jobs (ones that can be split to a huge number of cores, do not need a lot of memory and do not need to access it often).
Yes, emulation is an option, but I don't think that ARM running x86 emulation layer will be competitive with native x86 CPUs. Didn't this happen to Itanium? Slow x86 performance and AMD's x86-64 resulted in virtually zero market for Itanium.
Current Windows software won't run on ARM. Maybe that's not a big concern for Linux, since most of the Linux software is open source and can be compiled on whatever platform you want, but I don't see companies buying ARM computers instead of x86 ones (you know, the ones that still use IE6 because some business app requires it, going to ARM will be even worse, since all their current apps won't work, not just the badly written ones).
If the person crashes and simply says "it was an accident" when it was really caused by talking on a cell phone, chances are they will pay no fine.
Well, it all depends on the severity of the accident. If the accident is minor enough for the police not to fine the driver then, well, he should not pay the fine.
There are a lot of things that are distracting and do not leave evidence - talking to a passenger, falling asleep (assuming the guy wakes up before the police arrive), reading a book, changing a tape (or CD, or radio station), eating, drinking (not alcohol) etc. Why single out talking on the cellphone?
It's misuse when the driver talks on the phone (hands-on or maybe even hands-off). A passenger talking on the phone does not increaase the risk of an accident.
Drunk driving probably increases the risk of an accident more than 4x, but alcohol is not banned. Misuse (driving while drunk) is punished though. However, if the passenger is drunk while the driver is sober, nobody is punished.
When was the last time you brought a hand gun into a school? Why ban them? We should only punish the nut jobs that cause the rampages and not everyone else who has a god given right to bear arms anywhere they like.
The rampages in schools where guns are not allowed prove that the ban on guns is not effective. OTOH, if the other students had guns, maybe one of them could have shot the crazy guy and prevent him from killing a bunch of people.
I think its proven that making calls (at least hands-on calls) while driving dramatically increases the chance of being in an accident.
So is driving drunk. But alcohol is not banned. Drunk drivers are punished though.
Why mandate seat belts? They only serve to increase your chances of living through an accident.
I'm with you on this one. If you want to die - go ahead.
A fee/charge for using hands-on cell phones while driving is appropriate, and possibly hands-off if it really distracts people so much (statistically speaking).
A fine is good too. Either if the police sees you driving with a phone in your hand or when you cause an accident.
Last night I saw an individual driving very poorly and of course when I passed them they had a pen and paper in hand writing notes while driving... distracted drivers cause accidents.
Let's ban paper then. Actually, I don't know how it is in the USA, but where I live, if there is an accident the police determine who caused it and punish him accordingly, his insurance pays for the damage to the other cars or public property (lamp post or whatever). If the accident is minor (public property not damaged, nobody severely injured) and the drivers agree to who is at fault, they do not need to involve the police, just fill in a declaration and give it to their insurance companies.
The problem is the reckless people will talk on their mobile phone, crash into something, then tell the police they were not talking on a phone.
So what? He still crashed and (I guess) it was his fault and he will pay the fine. Or do you think falling asleep while dirving should result in a lower fine than talking on the phone while driving?
Or turn off the engine if your car has automatic transmission.
Phones are evil, you'd have much better time driving when reading a good book. Audiobooks are evil too, you need a proper book.
Small users would rather pay a usage-based fee and thus not support your habit of saturating your connection. It's just like prepaid vs. post-paid phones.
Small users would not get my 200/200/80/80 connection too. They can get a 20/20/5/5 and pay 11EUR for it, instead of ~29 that I pay. If the user uses the internet even less, he can get a 10/10/1/1 connection for 2.8EUR/month, but can only use it for 5 days (any 5 days in a month), each additional day is 0.58EUR. This is for those who can get fiber.
Now, if the user actually uses the internet very little, it makes more sense to get a data plan for a cell phone, since the connection will always be with you. For 9.49EUR/month (on top of whatever plan you have) you can get 1mbps connection with 3GB cap. If you go over it, every ~345MB will be 1EUR extra. I have this plan on my cell phone and use it when I am away from home (or whem my home connection goes down) - I either browse the 'net on my phone or connect the phone to my laptop (or my main PC).
If your brother in law goes over 100GB a month and isn't on fibre optic - he probably pays more than his monthly plan is set for.
Depends on where he lives. When I had DSL I could saturate the connection the whole month (and my upload was saturated all the time) and the ISP didn't care. Now I have fiber and a much faster connection and upload way more than I could with DSL and the ISP still doesn't care.
But yes, because if the way internet works, I'd rather pay a fixed fee and not one based on data transferred. If I paid for every MB transferred then I should not pay for the packets lost in the ISPs network for example.