With quality DVD+/-R media available that can last 30 years or more, prints are NOT the way you want to preserve these memories. The best thing you can do is to cull your photos since digital photography typically results in way more shots than you will ever find a use for (hint: if you don't like a shot today, you are not going to be any fonder of it in 30 years). So keep your archive nice and trim. Then, go get two different brands of nice quality DVD DL media (since the only risk to optical storage is "bad batch syndrome", and make a backup of your archive on to a set of discs. Verify the backup. Put those discs in slim jewel cases, then in an airtight bag, and put that bag in a completely opaque, preferably sturdy container. Put that container somewhere safe. If you are really paranoid, make another pair and give them to a close relative like your parents for safe keeping. This will be around in about 25 years when your son is ready for them, and he can decide where they will live for the next generation.
If your son is two now the first thing they'd do as an adult presented with these old pictures is get online to find out what scanner to use to best get them into digital format where they belong.
Hahaha, this is right on the money. The first thing I thought of is "god, if only my parents had digital copies of all of those pictures they gave me"... Focus on finding a long lasting DIGITAL storage solution (there are plenty of ways to store things reliably) instead. Don't you dare get a stack of 4x6 prints that you can shove in the basement next to all of the ones you probably got from YOUR parents that are next to useless until you put weeks and weeks of work into scanning and retouching.
Where did you find a Walmart selling the 360 4GB + Kinect bundle? I am not really sure why i give two shits about this but I looked and all the Kinect bundles in all the stores in my area (and online) from Walmart are the 250GB HDD version which sells for $399. Throw two gold year cards on that for $99.92 and you are over the $458 by $40 (but you have a nice hard drive and no ETF, on the other hand you DID have to venture into a Walmart)...
ugly, overpriced abomination that should die, die, die.
Why kill it? It's one more tax on idiocy. Idiots are paying our providers.
Oh yes, because everyone else is an idiot. It's good we have Thansin, who is not an idiot, because what would we do otherwise.
Look, not everything is priced at the lowest point compared to other services like the internet. Yes, per megabyte price for SMS is huge. But who the fuck tries to transfer data with it anyway? On top of that most people have unlimited SMS with their plans now. Even without that SMS price isn't that high and it was very convenient.
By the way, SMS was also developed by Nokia engineers, accidentally actually. Just shows how much groundwork Nokia has done for mobiles and that they actually deserve every patent they have (most of which they've given for free use anyway).
The real problem is that the providers aren't really happy just charging high fees to the people that "don't know better" as the GP thinks (with his non-idiot intellect,) instead they use it (like someone else mentioned) to get enough laws and regulations in their favor that they make everyone an idiot, stringing together enough fees and tiers and contracts that there is basically no escape except to "settle" on some compromise between quality, ease of use, and cost. But God bless the free market for providing us with the opportunity to choose and lose!
"'SMS is the closest thing to pure profit ever invented" - Sir Chris Gent, founder of Vodafone.
(from here)
And to think, the only thing you have to do to avoid the SMS charge is use the phone as a PHONE and call the person you wanted to communicate with. And yet somehow the texting option is more popular despite the constantly increasing cost...
Wait a minute, pay *less* now in exchange for greater incurred expense later on? If only there a way we could do this on a much bigger scale than with just Xboxes... Like put down a small amount now to get the consumer hooked and then have them pay the rest off later. A revolutionary concept indeed...
I've heard of slow news days, but seriously, what is this shit?
You mean to tell me, that this house that I bought for the great price of $200,000 (talked those suckers down from 210) will actually cost me $450,000 by the time the mortgage is paid? NOooooOOOooooooOOooOoOoOOoOoooO!
But seriously, the cost difference is $75 which after 2 years works out to 19% interest (slightly more if you decide to get the second XBL card 12 months later instead of up front). Not great, but far from exploitative. Plenty of people willingly enter into credit card contracts for higher rates than that. Slashdot, feel free to unearth the scandal that is short term loans, or better yet, rent-to-own places. You will be shocked, SHOCKED, to see what kind of a rip off those things are. Better scoop the story now!
Yes, because we can debug syntax errors in any language that computers speak and none of the ones people speak.
Only after reading it again an hour later does it seem like "ordinarily" is the intended word. That, and who doesn't use a spellchecker in their browser? I don't care about their/there/they're or similar typos that are easy to ignore by parsing phonetically but when a word just isn't right it would really help to have some error checking.
It seems like cell immortality basically equals cancer elsewhere in the body. Maybe since brain cells are not orginarily regenerated, longevity won't cause a direct problem?
This is an ideal way of sending information when you want to report that you saw something that may need their attention, but you personally don't need a response.
Presuming you can get sufficient detail in the message to make it useful. 911 Operators typically ask questions for a reason. I can just see a whole bunch of text like "I saw an accident on I-80" with no further detail in the messages. Then the operator may need to call to find out the details.
You mean 911 operators cant find out exactly where your cellphone is and which direction you are traveling any time they want? Even just through getting a text message? But I saw that on CSI like two years ago...
I have found one use for metric units in daily life: increasing ones 'geek cred'. Since expressing dimensions in metric units is a form of elitist obfuscation, it is a great way to be annoying.
Hah, too true. I love throwing out "do you mean short ton or long ton?" whenever someone uses the word "ton" as an expletive attributive in conversation. Did I mention that I am a vocabulary pedant too? Anyhow, don't forget about the true pinnacle of intellectual elitism, the completely useless and obscure systems of measurement (a good list is on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement) Enjoy!
The first mistake is that they are still talking in inches instead of metric units.
This was my thought exactly. If we continue to build new standards around obsolete measurement systems we are just pandering to the Luddites. It is time to move America forward into the 19th century. If we can't engineer for the 21st century, we should turn the creation of standards over to people can.
Actually most server and rack manufacturers offer specs primarily in cm/mm, and include inches as subtext or a footnote. Upon closer inspection, the Opencompute stuff also offers all drawings this way in mm and in. I suspect they said "this will be 21 inches instead of 19" so it would be more generally consumable, since not everyone finds it as illustrative when they hear "this will be 538mm instead of 482mm". If you can't be bothered to look, then enjoy your time in the 18th century. The rest of us (even if we are in the US) are getting along just fine using the metric system.
Its spun as a "30% cut" story but an apple i-competitor to dropbox was the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. Then I realized apple had i.mac or idrive or some such subscription thing just like dropbox except it costs money, that I never subscribed to, years and years ago. Does apple still have that? Perhaps they're planning a relaunch or rebranding and that's the real story of suddenly coming down on dropbox like a box of bricks.
(disclaimer, I like dropbox because of its flawless linux client. I like it alot, at least until GOOG releases a linux goog-drive client thats as good. Then its bye bye 2 gig dropbox hello 5 gig GOOG-drive. I also have stopped buying idevices and started buying android devices.)
iCloud is basically their competition to Dropbox except "applefied" meaning it does a few specific things (and probably very well) but is not a generic utility like Dropbox is. Nevertheless, they would prefer users to see things their way and subscribe to iCloud instead of Dropbox, unless they are going to get their cut. I agree, Dropbox and other generic/multi-platform services are far superior to iCloud but that's just my opinion from outside the reality distortion field.
Also, if you didn't get in on the free +3gb offer for using Dropbox photo sharing (taking your total to 5.25 GB or more if you have referrals) then shame on you;-)
I'd love to see a more vibrant market for this. The cost paid per bug (perhaps normalized by product revenue) would be a really useful measure of software reliability.
Interesting idea but for there to be a market there needs to be something liquid. You could say that only companies willing to have a (transparent) bug bounty program are running tight software ships but thats still not enough to convince everyone out there to start bounty programs. It's not about the net value of a bug in x program to x program's owner, it's the value of the time that random hackers have to devote to finding the bugs. The higher the price the harder it was to find (and theoretically the more secure the software is) but with that its going to take a lot of competition to drive the price up considering how infrequent the bounties are cashed in.
According to TFA, the idea is actually somebody else's and previously published. This is an extension of the idea that uses a training phase, presumably a part of the Trojan where the user interacts with the phone for benign reasons (perhaps playing a game or entering data for a legitimate purpose) that it uses to calibrate the correlation between taps and the accelerometers.
It's pretty clever. Presumably, it can be defeated by refusing to allow background apps to have access to the sensors, though I can imagine applications where you want to allow that kind of thing (pedometers, for example).
The dead giveaway would be the app that keeps the motion sensors alive all the time crushing the battery usage stats on the phone. Not that many are bothered to check for such things, but its a dead giveaway that an app thats not supposed to be running is alive and doing nefarious things (especially if the motion driver is high on the usage list too).
Are you kidding? If you have a rogue app on your device it's probably going to find a way to steal all kinds of information. This is nothing more than a pretty interesting new use for motion sensors. It is not, however, any surprise that a rogue app can have whatever it wants from your smartphone, motion sensors or not.
There was Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Just recently there was a bill before congress to eliminate overtime for IT employees. Nobody else, just IT employees.
The entire H-1B visa workers scam was manufactured to bash tech employees.
The reason that techies are so easy to stomp, is that techies are not organized. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and so on, are organized, and they can protect themselves (to some extent) against conspiring employers. Techies will never learn.
Too true. Techies are egalitarian, we want to see the world through tinted glasses that make everyone get paid exactly as much as they are worth no matter who they know or whose ass they kiss. Sad fact is that not only is it untrue, but there are many people out there (most of them run companies) who want the EXACT opposite. But don't worry, soon this ruby on rails salary calculator I am working on is going to fix all that. Yes...
Seriously, it doesn't get much more clearly evil. I think they've effectively ruined their corporate image with this.
What are you, the new Bonch? I bet if Google didn't want to have a nice, friendly "anti-poaching agreement" with apple you would be here whining about how they had to steal talent to get ahead. This is preliminary litigation, very few facts are out, and it will be a while before the whole story is known. Or, we can just call them evil and call it a day. Whatever.
That strikes more at the heart of the issue here than you may realize. The actual aircraft sitting in their hands is much closer to a compiled binary than source.
You would think, but it turns out the drone was run on very well documented Ruby. Lucky for us, at the time the drone was built the government was using Rails 1.2 and after trying to upgrade the environment to Rails 3 the Iranians broke every single unit test. What good is a drone with Rails 1.2 these days??? Anyhow, that thing won't be flying again for a long time.
I maintain 6 macs, and then are always up to date... I have never seen what you described (save the occasionally having to reboot with updates)...
I have seen EXACTLY what he described in the most recent update with Snow Leopard (maybe the magic intrusion-free update feature was only introduced in Lion?) The system prompted about needing to reboot for updates and after it was OKed, it probably spent at least 10 minutes in "update mode".
why should two different apps that probably have two totally different delivery mechanisms
What, one greases their bytes so they slide over the network easier?
You think Comcast (who owns NBC by the way, the chief content provider for Hulu) has no idea where Hulu comes from, they just let it on to their network and say "hey we won't count it in this special case"... Netflix, on the other hand, truly does come from wherever Netflix wants it to and Comcast accounts for the bandwidth as such.
Is Comcast giving special accommodation to local/friendly services and not Netflix a neutrality no-no? Of course it is. Is content from Hulu and Netflix the same "thing" on Comcast's network? Of course it ISNT. Hulu is cheaper for them to deliver (aside from other competitive advantages) and they "pass the savings on" as it were. Or, they "violate neutrality by giving special consideration to certain content". It's all a matter of perspective.
Nope the last mile is the last mile no matter what. 0s and 1s don't change just because you use a different service. Maybe get a better understanding of streaming media and understand that the ONLY reason they are doing this has nothing to do with the costs associated, but everything to do with making people THINK there are different costs associated when in reality there are not.
People seem to like the idea that "bandwidth is next to free" and the cost is only in the last mile, and for all intents and purposes it has gotten very cheap compared to years gone by but if it were free (or somewhere approaching free) then explain to me how CDNs are a multi-billion dollar a year business, please. Surely it can't be that network operators at the national level are interested in optimizing traffic (in the name of reducing costs) by moving the content closer to the consumer, can it? But but but bandwidth is free! If Akamai were going to earn $1 billion a year from moving data around surely they are doing it by hand-delivering DVDs to consumers thus reducing the last-mile cost! Oh, wait, that's a different company.
For example, if I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all. The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment. In what way is this neutral?
Dear user,
You thought we were going to be neutral if you opt to not use one of our (for-pay) services? Interesting.
Sincerely, Comcast
Seriously, even from a purely technical standpoint why should two different apps that probably have two totally different delivery mechanisms automatically be forced to have the same bandwidth treatment? Apples to oranges. If you want your internet provider to like your choice of media subscription then go find one that specifically is. If not, go ahead and get Comcast.
i would add an additional item, and move it to the top of the list - companies that aim to track everything you do and aggregate that in one place. you could also add the gov't agencies that collude with them to track citizens. This would put FB and Goog tied at the top of the list. Not sure who is first, but they're both trying.
Considering the walled garden that is Apple, are you really naive enough think they are exempt from the list of "tracking everything that you do"? They are, ipso facto, in purview of *everything* that their users do at the device level. Just because they haven't found a marketable use for all that user data doesn't mean they don't have it and won't find one in the future...
Slashdot Mirror
You do not have a son. You are a son, living in your mom's basement.
How do you know he doesn't ALSO have a son of his own, living in the basement's basement? I hear that it's basements all the way down.
With quality DVD+/-R media available that can last 30 years or more, prints are NOT the way you want to preserve these memories. The best thing you can do is to cull your photos since digital photography typically results in way more shots than you will ever find a use for (hint: if you don't like a shot today, you are not going to be any fonder of it in 30 years). So keep your archive nice and trim. Then, go get two different brands of nice quality DVD DL media (since the only risk to optical storage is "bad batch syndrome", and make a backup of your archive on to a set of discs. Verify the backup. Put those discs in slim jewel cases, then in an airtight bag, and put that bag in a completely opaque, preferably sturdy container. Put that container somewhere safe. If you are really paranoid, make another pair and give them to a close relative like your parents for safe keeping. This will be around in about 25 years when your son is ready for them, and he can decide where they will live for the next generation.
If your son is two now the first thing they'd do as an adult presented with these old pictures is get online to find out what scanner to use to best get them into digital format where they belong.
Hahaha, this is right on the money. The first thing I thought of is "god, if only my parents had digital copies of all of those pictures they gave me"... Focus on finding a long lasting DIGITAL storage solution (there are plenty of ways to store things reliably) instead. Don't you dare get a stack of 4x6 prints that you can shove in the basement next to all of the ones you probably got from YOUR parents that are next to useless until you put weeks and weeks of work into scanning and retouching.
Where did you find a Walmart selling the 360 4GB + Kinect bundle? I am not really sure why i give two shits about this but I looked and all the Kinect bundles in all the stores in my area (and online) from Walmart are the 250GB HDD version which sells for $399. Throw two gold year cards on that for $99.92 and you are over the $458 by $40 (but you have a nice hard drive and no ETF, on the other hand you DID have to venture into a Walmart)...
ugly, overpriced abomination that should die, die, die.
Why kill it? It's one more tax on idiocy. Idiots are paying our providers.
Oh yes, because everyone else is an idiot. It's good we have Thansin, who is not an idiot, because what would we do otherwise. Look, not everything is priced at the lowest point compared to other services like the internet. Yes, per megabyte price for SMS is huge. But who the fuck tries to transfer data with it anyway? On top of that most people have unlimited SMS with their plans now. Even without that SMS price isn't that high and it was very convenient. By the way, SMS was also developed by Nokia engineers, accidentally actually. Just shows how much groundwork Nokia has done for mobiles and that they actually deserve every patent they have (most of which they've given for free use anyway).
The real problem is that the providers aren't really happy just charging high fees to the people that "don't know better" as the GP thinks (with his non-idiot intellect,) instead they use it (like someone else mentioned) to get enough laws and regulations in their favor that they make everyone an idiot, stringing together enough fees and tiers and contracts that there is basically no escape except to "settle" on some compromise between quality, ease of use, and cost. But God bless the free market for providing us with the opportunity to choose and lose!
"'SMS is the closest thing to pure profit ever invented" - Sir Chris Gent, founder of Vodafone. (from here)
And to think, the only thing you have to do to avoid the SMS charge is use the phone as a PHONE and call the person you wanted to communicate with. And yet somehow the texting option is more popular despite the constantly increasing cost...
Wait a minute, pay *less* now in exchange for greater incurred expense later on? If only there a way we could do this on a much bigger scale than with just Xboxes... Like put down a small amount now to get the consumer hooked and then have them pay the rest off later. A revolutionary concept indeed... I've heard of slow news days, but seriously, what is this shit?
You mean to tell me, that this house that I bought for the great price of $200,000 (talked those suckers down from 210) will actually cost me $450,000 by the time the mortgage is paid? NOooooOOOooooooOOooOoOoOOoOoooO!
But seriously, the cost difference is $75 which after 2 years works out to 19% interest (slightly more if you decide to get the second XBL card 12 months later instead of up front). Not great, but far from exploitative. Plenty of people willingly enter into credit card contracts for higher rates than that. Slashdot, feel free to unearth the scandal that is short term loans, or better yet, rent-to-own places. You will be shocked, SHOCKED, to see what kind of a rip off those things are. Better scoop the story now!
Yes, because we can debug syntax errors in any language that computers speak and none of the ones people speak.
Only after reading it again an hour later does it seem like "ordinarily" is the intended word. That, and who doesn't use a spellchecker in their browser? I don't care about their/there/they're or similar typos that are easy to ignore by parsing phonetically but when a word just isn't right it would really help to have some error checking.
It seems like cell immortality basically equals cancer elsewhere in the body. Maybe since brain cells are not orginarily regenerated, longevity won't cause a direct problem?
"orginarily"?
As suggested by a Facebook friend, Jordan Elliot:
"OMG! thrs lik sum GUY ty 2 brake into my house! DAFUQ!?!? LOL PLS HLP!!!"
Facebook? I thought for sure I saw that posed on Chuck Grassley's twitter feed...
This is an ideal way of sending information when you want to report that you saw something that may need their attention, but you personally don't need a response.
Presuming you can get sufficient detail in the message to make it useful. 911 Operators typically ask questions for a reason. I can just see a whole bunch of text like "I saw an accident on I-80" with no further detail in the messages. Then the operator may need to call to find out the details.
You mean 911 operators cant find out exactly where your cellphone is and which direction you are traveling any time they want? Even just through getting a text message? But I saw that on CSI like two years ago...
I have found one use for metric units in daily life: increasing ones 'geek cred'. Since expressing dimensions in metric units is a form of elitist obfuscation, it is a great way to be annoying.
Hah, too true. I love throwing out "do you mean short ton or long ton?" whenever someone uses the word "ton" as an expletive attributive in conversation. Did I mention that I am a vocabulary pedant too? Anyhow, don't forget about the true pinnacle of intellectual elitism, the completely useless and obscure systems of measurement (a good list is on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement) Enjoy!
The first mistake is that they are still talking in inches instead of metric units.
This was my thought exactly. If we continue to build new standards around obsolete measurement systems we are just pandering to the Luddites. It is time to move America forward into the 19th century. If we can't engineer for the 21st century, we should turn the creation of standards over to people can.
Actually most server and rack manufacturers offer specs primarily in cm/mm, and include inches as subtext or a footnote. Upon closer inspection, the Opencompute stuff also offers all drawings this way in mm and in. I suspect they said "this will be 21 inches instead of 19" so it would be more generally consumable, since not everyone finds it as illustrative when they hear "this will be 538mm instead of 482mm". If you can't be bothered to look, then enjoy your time in the 18th century. The rest of us (even if we are in the US) are getting along just fine using the metric system.
2. Do not compete with services offered by Apple.
Its spun as a "30% cut" story but an apple i-competitor to dropbox was the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. Then I realized apple had i.mac or idrive or some such subscription thing just like dropbox except it costs money, that I never subscribed to, years and years ago. Does apple still have that? Perhaps they're planning a relaunch or rebranding and that's the real story of suddenly coming down on dropbox like a box of bricks.
(disclaimer, I like dropbox because of its flawless linux client. I like it alot, at least until GOOG releases a linux goog-drive client thats as good. Then its bye bye 2 gig dropbox hello 5 gig GOOG-drive. I also have stopped buying idevices and started buying android devices.)
iCloud is basically their competition to Dropbox except "applefied" meaning it does a few specific things (and probably very well) but is not a generic utility like Dropbox is. Nevertheless, they would prefer users to see things their way and subscribe to iCloud instead of Dropbox, unless they are going to get their cut. I agree, Dropbox and other generic/multi-platform services are far superior to iCloud but that's just my opinion from outside the reality distortion field.
Also, if you didn't get in on the free +3gb offer for using Dropbox photo sharing (taking your total to 5.25 GB or more if you have referrals) then shame on you ;-)
I'd love to see a more vibrant market for this. The cost paid per bug (perhaps normalized by product revenue) would be a really useful measure of software reliability.
Interesting idea but for there to be a market there needs to be something liquid. You could say that only companies willing to have a (transparent) bug bounty program are running tight software ships but thats still not enough to convince everyone out there to start bounty programs. It's not about the net value of a bug in x program to x program's owner, it's the value of the time that random hackers have to devote to finding the bugs. The higher the price the harder it was to find (and theoretically the more secure the software is) but with that its going to take a lot of competition to drive the price up considering how infrequent the bounties are cashed in.
According to TFA, the idea is actually somebody else's and previously published. This is an extension of the idea that uses a training phase, presumably a part of the Trojan where the user interacts with the phone for benign reasons (perhaps playing a game or entering data for a legitimate purpose) that it uses to calibrate the correlation between taps and the accelerometers.
It's pretty clever. Presumably, it can be defeated by refusing to allow background apps to have access to the sensors, though I can imagine applications where you want to allow that kind of thing (pedometers, for example).
The dead giveaway would be the app that keeps the motion sensors alive all the time crushing the battery usage stats on the phone. Not that many are bothered to check for such things, but its a dead giveaway that an app thats not supposed to be running is alive and doing nefarious things (especially if the motion driver is high on the usage list too).
Are you kidding? If you have a rogue app on your device it's probably going to find a way to steal all kinds of information. This is nothing more than a pretty interesting new use for motion sensors. It is not, however, any surprise that a rogue app can have whatever it wants from your smartphone, motion sensors or not.
It's been going on for a long time.
There was Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Just recently there was a bill before congress to eliminate overtime for IT employees. Nobody else, just IT employees.
The entire H-1B visa workers scam was manufactured to bash tech employees.
The reason that techies are so easy to stomp, is that techies are not organized. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and so on, are organized, and they can protect themselves (to some extent) against conspiring employers. Techies will never learn.
Too true. Techies are egalitarian, we want to see the world through tinted glasses that make everyone get paid exactly as much as they are worth no matter who they know or whose ass they kiss. Sad fact is that not only is it untrue, but there are many people out there (most of them run companies) who want the EXACT opposite. But don't worry, soon this ruby on rails salary calculator I am working on is going to fix all that. Yes...
Seriously, it doesn't get much more clearly evil. I think they've effectively ruined their corporate image with this.
What are you, the new Bonch? I bet if Google didn't want to have a nice, friendly "anti-poaching agreement" with apple you would be here whining about how they had to steal talent to get ahead. This is preliminary litigation, very few facts are out, and it will be a while before the whole story is known. Or, we can just call them evil and call it a day. Whatever.
That strikes more at the heart of the issue here than you may realize. The actual aircraft sitting in their hands is much closer to a compiled binary than source.
You would think, but it turns out the drone was run on very well documented Ruby. Lucky for us, at the time the drone was built the government was using Rails 1.2 and after trying to upgrade the environment to Rails 3 the Iranians broke every single unit test. What good is a drone with Rails 1.2 these days??? Anyhow, that thing won't be flying again for a long time.
I maintain 6 macs, and then are always up to date... I have never seen what you described (save the occasionally having to reboot with updates)...
I have seen EXACTLY what he described in the most recent update with Snow Leopard (maybe the magic intrusion-free update feature was only introduced in Lion?) The system prompted about needing to reboot for updates and after it was OKed, it probably spent at least 10 minutes in "update mode".
why should two different apps that probably have two totally different delivery mechanisms
What, one greases their bytes so they slide over the network easier?
You think Comcast (who owns NBC by the way, the chief content provider for Hulu) has no idea where Hulu comes from, they just let it on to their network and say "hey we won't count it in this special case"... Netflix, on the other hand, truly does come from wherever Netflix wants it to and Comcast accounts for the bandwidth as such.
Is Comcast giving special accommodation to local/friendly services and not Netflix a neutrality no-no? Of course it is. Is content from Hulu and Netflix the same "thing" on Comcast's network? Of course it ISNT. Hulu is cheaper for them to deliver (aside from other competitive advantages) and they "pass the savings on" as it were. Or, they "violate neutrality by giving special consideration to certain content". It's all a matter of perspective.
Nope the last mile is the last mile no matter what. 0s and 1s don't change just because you use a different service. Maybe get a better understanding of streaming media and understand that the ONLY reason they are doing this has nothing to do with the costs associated, but everything to do with making people THINK there are different costs associated when in reality there are not.
People seem to like the idea that "bandwidth is next to free" and the cost is only in the last mile, and for all intents and purposes it has gotten very cheap compared to years gone by but if it were free (or somewhere approaching free) then explain to me how CDNs are a multi-billion dollar a year business, please. Surely it can't be that network operators at the national level are interested in optimizing traffic (in the name of reducing costs) by moving the content closer to the consumer, can it? But but but bandwidth is free! If Akamai were going to earn $1 billion a year from moving data around surely they are doing it by hand-delivering DVDs to consumers thus reducing the last-mile cost! Oh, wait, that's a different company.
For example, if I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all. The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment. In what way is this neutral?
Dear user,
You thought we were going to be neutral if you opt to not use one of our (for-pay) services? Interesting.
Sincerely,
Comcast
Seriously, even from a purely technical standpoint why should two different apps that probably have two totally different delivery mechanisms automatically be forced to have the same bandwidth treatment? Apples to oranges. If you want your internet provider to like your choice of media subscription then go find one that specifically is. If not, go ahead and get Comcast.
i would add an additional item, and move it to the top of the list - companies that aim to track everything you do and aggregate that in one place. you could also add the gov't agencies that collude with them to track citizens. This would put FB and Goog tied at the top of the list. Not sure who is first, but they're both trying.
Considering the walled garden that is Apple, are you really naive enough think they are exempt from the list of "tracking everything that you do"? They are, ipso facto, in purview of *everything* that their users do at the device level. Just because they haven't found a marketable use for all that user data doesn't mean they don't have it and won't find one in the future...