Re:Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards
on
Bandwidth Use In MMOs
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· Score: 1
What should my dad, who never exceeds 1 GB per month, subsidise someone downloading 250 GB of warez every month? Caps and grades of service makes people pay for what they use. The only people who object to that are the minority of people currently being subsidised by the majority of normal users.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but as an American, I object because I know how corporations work around here.
Lets say we are all paying $50 for (functionally) unlimited internet now, and your dad is subsidizing the warez kid. That is $100 going into the company for 251 GB in bandwidth.
Now, we implement some metering, American Megacorp-style! Now, everyone pays $40 for their first 60GB, and $5 for every additional 10GB.
Your dad uses 1GB, pays $40. The warez kid uses 250 GB, pays $135. Now $175 is going to the company for 251GB in bandwitdh.
Your dad may not be subsidizing the warez kid anymore, but he is sure as hell subsidizing some executive's vacation home. Maybe he doesn't care as he got a $10 discount out of my hypothetical plan, but it should be clear this isn't good for the customer market as a whole to have 75% more money drained out of it for zero improvement in service.
And SMS's? They cost 7cents. With options to lower the price. To see the smart crowd of/. even taking into consideration that those 20cents are somehow explainable in technical terms is.... frightening.
Lets be fair, in technical terms, 7 cents is no more explainable than 20. In both cases its a frighteningly overpriced (up to) 160 bytes of data
Perhaps, though I think global economic collapse would probably be more likely than nuclear winter to cause cultural separation and language drift, if for no other reason than that things like that have happened so many times before.
I may just be a bit of a pessimist here, but my opinion is that if things collapse economically to the point where we don't have Internet/Televsion/Radio/Powered Transit which standardize the language over huge portions of the world, the nukes will be lobbed before we give in to that reality and start riding horseback from Boston to Chicago again.
English is certainly in a much better position to survive for the long haul than most ancient languages because it's spoken and read by so many people in all parts of the world, either as a first or second language. However I think if we were talking about this subject 2000 years ago, we would both be astounded to hear that few people nowadays can read or understand either Latin or Koine Greek, the two most common and widely-dispersed languages of that era.
2000 years is a long time.
For the most part agreed, but frankly I'm cocky enough to believe that we have much better perspective on the issue with 2,000 more years of history, technology and wisdom on our shoulders compared to the time of the Greeks and the Romans. The post-electricity world of the last 300 years is so dramatically different than the 1700 years before it (where most of the language drifting took place). Like I said, someone may read these posts (though I don't think the post itself will survive) and laugh their ass off at me, but I'm pretty damned sure they will be able to read my English.
Just so they can laugh at me further, the only scenarios I see killing English in 2,000 years:
1) The above economic collapse/nuclear winter scenario 2) World has some summit and decides that we need to standardize on a language for the sake of advancing humanity, and we choose Chinese or Esperanto or some other language (maybe a new one). We then phase out old languages over a few generations, only teaching the new one in school, etc etc. 3) Aliens. All bets are off here of course, but arguing "aliens" is like saying English will die because an asteroid slammed into Earth and killed us all. Well sure, but not really worth discussing. 4) Some sort of sci-fi cyborgish telepathy implant where we all just think to each other or transmit data to each other because we are half machine and it is more efficient. I don't see it happening, but I will concede that the Greeks would have considered long distance telephone or internet to be sci-fi nonsense too.
Someone may end up laughing at this post in 300 years, but I really don't think English is going to change much at all in terms of the ability for people in 300-2000 years to understand.
That would be bucking the trends of the past, but we already do that in so many ways. If they had the internet (or even a telephone) and were globally connected 400 years ago, I think we'd all still be speaking pretty much Shakespeare English.
I mean, if you started two new cities in 2008 as close together as Boston and New York, I don't think you'll end up with two different accents and cultures as much as we did over the last 400 years, there is just too much cultural exchange these days.
Of course if we are digging ourselves out from a nuclear winter in 2000 years, then we may very well have more language "drift".
This can also be especially fun, as the world gets a hell of a lot more dangerous when there are 10 to 100 people in a world designed for a few thousand. I played on some private EQ1 servers for kicks once, and its amazing how spawned full of monsters some zones will get when there is nobody knocking the monsters back down.
Shit man, I hate bandwidth caps too, but do you treat the electric company meterman with such disdain? I just have to trust the dial on the meter, I don't add up all my appliance use for the month.
Also on a computer it is trivial to log your total Upstream/downstream usage for the month.
I looked it up on Zillow. I'll give you credit, I didn't believe it, I'm from North Dakota and it doesn't even get that cheap there. Why is real estate so cheap in Springfield?
These days it's unacceptable to require the player to find secrets with no hint towards them or have huge mazes without any map function. Really? I've found it to be more or at least as prevalent in games these days to hide secrets which are completely unsolvable without a guide. I think the developers are just assuming that kids will disseminate the information on GameFAQs or other websites. It's really a shame too, as I like to solve things myself. You can probably beat the game without any of that game guide bullshit, but you won't "100%" it.
Oh, and as far as the built in map functions these days, I liked mapmaking on graph paper, but I can concede at least that I'm a huge nerd from another generation on that one.
Spam is already a pretty ethically dubious thing, but this should be viewed differently in the eyes of the law (in the event we actually catch somebody behind it in a 1st world country). Sort of how if you assualt an able bodied man on the street you'll be punished, but assault a grandma with a walker or a boy in a wheelchair, and you'll likely have the book thrown at you. Abusing handicapped accessiblity should really fall into the "boy in a wheelchair" category.
You'd almost hope that the same sort of honor amongst theives that (sometimes) keeps a common mugger from attacking children might keep spammers from attacking acessibility loopholes, but with anonymity, I think you'll find the former a lot more ethical than the latter, on average.
Linux is far easier to support than is Windows. Have you seen the EeePC?
Linux is far more modular, offers far more diagnostic tools, and is far less brittle than Windows.
With Linux you can troubleshoot a bad video driver for X and still have the system workable. Using ssh you can administer the machine remotely.
Windows sucks to support, the answer is always the same "Reboot." It works now? OK, good by. Sure, but which costs more? You can have the end user reboot all day while talking to a phone monkey, and its fairly cheap.
You can't expect today's end users to open a terminal, type arcane commands and successfully read back the output to the phone support person. SSH is neat but in my experience with linux half of the support calls will be about failed wireless networking issues, so remote administration won't fly.
I'll give the other points, but where do you get that the battery has to be replaced every 7 (ish) years? I don't have the link handy, but I recall reading that of all the 2001 Prius'es (Prii?) sold in North America, there have only been something like 15-25 batteries replaced yet.
You still can really. All the bite in the Unlawful Internet Gambling act is about blocking financial companies like MasterCard and Western Union from transferring money around. It doesn't really say much about you, the gambler sitting at the table. Just send them a cashiers check, and they'll do the same. Problem solved.
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What should my dad, who never exceeds 1 GB per month, subsidise someone downloading 250 GB of warez every month? Caps and grades of service makes people pay for what they use. The only people who object to that are the minority of people currently being subsidised by the majority of normal users.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but as an American, I object because I know how corporations work around here.
Lets say we are all paying $50 for (functionally) unlimited internet now, and your dad is subsidizing the warez kid. That is $100 going into the company for 251 GB in bandwidth.
Now, we implement some metering, American Megacorp-style! Now, everyone pays $40 for their first 60GB, and $5 for every additional 10GB.
Your dad uses 1GB, pays $40.
The warez kid uses 250 GB, pays $135.
Now $175 is going to the company for 251GB in bandwitdh.
Your dad may not be subsidizing the warez kid anymore, but he is sure as hell subsidizing some executive's vacation home. Maybe he doesn't care as he got a $10 discount out of my hypothetical plan, but it should be clear this isn't good for the customer market as a whole to have 75% more money drained out of it for zero improvement in service.
A "dime" in sports book gambling is 10x your yearly bankroll. Do you ever find the Italians snickering at you when you place a dime bet?
Try blocking an annoying user on a web forum... not gonna happen anytime soon.
Huh? What webforum software doesn't have options to ignore users you don't like?
And SMS's? They cost 7cents. With options to lower the price. To see the smart crowd of /. even taking into consideration that those 20cents are somehow explainable in technical terms is.... frightening.
Lets be fair, in technical terms, 7 cents is no more explainable than 20. In both cases its a frighteningly overpriced (up to) 160 bytes of data
worst troll ever
Unfortunately spammers being the scum of the earth that they are would exploit this by faking their own murder and claiming the bounty.
Perhaps, though I think global economic collapse would probably be more likely than nuclear winter to cause cultural separation and language drift, if for no other reason than that things like that have happened so many times before.
I may just be a bit of a pessimist here, but my opinion is that if things collapse economically to the point where we don't have Internet/Televsion/Radio/Powered Transit which standardize the language over huge portions of the world, the nukes will be lobbed before we give in to that reality and start riding horseback from Boston to Chicago again.
English is certainly in a much better position to survive for the long haul than most ancient languages because it's spoken and read by so many people in all parts of the world, either as a first or second language. However I think if we were talking about this subject 2000 years ago, we would both be astounded to hear that few people nowadays can read or understand either Latin or Koine Greek, the two most common and widely-dispersed languages of that era.
2000 years is a long time.
For the most part agreed, but frankly I'm cocky enough to believe that we have much better perspective on the issue with 2,000 more years of history, technology and wisdom on our shoulders compared to the time of the Greeks and the Romans. The post-electricity world of the last 300 years is so dramatically different than the 1700 years before it (where most of the language drifting took place). Like I said, someone may read these posts (though I don't think the post itself will survive) and laugh their ass off at me, but I'm pretty damned sure they will be able to read my English.
Just so they can laugh at me further, the only scenarios I see killing English in 2,000 years:
1) The above economic collapse/nuclear winter scenario
2) World has some summit and decides that we need to standardize on a language for the sake of advancing humanity, and we choose Chinese or Esperanto or some other language (maybe a new one). We then phase out old languages over a few generations, only teaching the new one in school, etc etc.
3) Aliens. All bets are off here of course, but arguing "aliens" is like saying English will die because an asteroid slammed into Earth and killed us all. Well sure, but not really worth discussing.
4) Some sort of sci-fi cyborgish telepathy implant where we all just think to each other or transmit data to each other because we are half machine and it is more efficient. I don't see it happening, but I will concede that the Greeks would have considered long distance telephone or internet to be sci-fi nonsense too.
Someone may end up laughing at this post in 300 years, but I really don't think English is going to change much at all in terms of the ability for people in 300-2000 years to understand.
That would be bucking the trends of the past, but we already do that in so many ways. If they had the internet (or even a telephone) and were globally connected 400 years ago, I think we'd all still be speaking pretty much Shakespeare English.
I mean, if you started two new cities in 2008 as close together as Boston and New York, I don't think you'll end up with two different accents and cultures as much as we did over the last 400 years, there is just too much cultural exchange these days.
Of course if we are digging ourselves out from a nuclear winter in 2000 years, then we may very well have more language "drift".
They run the Post Office pretty damned spiffy.
What is wrong with the ISC? That's 10 times better than scrabulous, and the oppenents don't suck or cheat as much, either.
Wait what is my other option to get live out of market MLB games while I drive across the country?
This can also be especially fun, as the world gets a hell of a lot more dangerous when there are 10 to 100 people in a world designed for a few thousand. I played on some private EQ1 servers for kicks once, and its amazing how spawned full of monsters some zones will get when there is nobody knocking the monsters back down.
Shit man, I hate bandwidth caps too, but do you treat the electric company meterman with such disdain? I just have to trust the dial on the meter, I don't add up all my appliance use for the month.
Also on a computer it is trivial to log your total Upstream/downstream usage for the month.
Isn't this sort of like going to sleep at night, or to undergo anaesthesia?
I mean, is your internal monologue and experience of life not already discontinous?
I looked it up on Zillow. I'll give you credit, I didn't believe it, I'm from North Dakota and it doesn't even get that cheap there. Why is real estate so cheap in Springfield?
Twice what your house is worth? Really? Do you live in a trailer in Appalachia?
Oh, and as far as the built in map functions these days, I liked mapmaking on graph paper, but I can concede at least that I'm a huge nerd from another generation on that one.
Your Starbucks only brews one variety of black regular coffee at a time? They should have at least two.
Spam is already a pretty ethically dubious thing, but this should be viewed differently in the eyes of the law (in the event we actually catch somebody behind it in a 1st world country). Sort of how if you assualt an able bodied man on the street you'll be punished, but assault a grandma with a walker or a boy in a wheelchair, and you'll likely have the book thrown at you. Abusing handicapped accessiblity should really fall into the "boy in a wheelchair" category.
You'd almost hope that the same sort of honor amongst theives that (sometimes) keeps a common mugger from attacking children might keep spammers from attacking acessibility loopholes, but with anonymity, I think you'll find the former a lot more ethical than the latter, on average.
Why does basketball get a mention in particular?
Is this really that terrible? What online bank isn't using https and killing the session as soon as the browser is closed.
Hell, even if the next person does see your bank balance is $2,762.10, what are they really going to be able to accomplish with that?
This system assumes that your users could pass a 7th grade English class.
Linux is far more modular, offers far more diagnostic tools, and is far less brittle than Windows.
With Linux you can troubleshoot a bad video driver for X and still have the system workable. Using ssh you can administer the machine remotely.
Windows sucks to support, the answer is always the same "Reboot." It works now? OK, good by. Sure, but which costs more? You can have the end user reboot all day while talking to a phone monkey, and its fairly cheap.
You can't expect today's end users to open a terminal, type arcane commands and successfully read back the output to the phone support person. SSH is neat but in my experience with linux half of the support calls will be about failed wireless networking issues, so remote administration won't fly.
I'll give the other points, but where do you get that the battery has to be replaced every 7 (ish) years? I don't have the link handy, but I recall reading that of all the 2001 Prius'es (Prii?) sold in North America, there have only been something like 15-25 batteries replaced yet.
You still can really. All the bite in the Unlawful Internet Gambling act is about blocking financial companies like MasterCard and Western Union from transferring money around. It doesn't really say much about you, the gambler sitting at the table. Just send them a cashiers check, and they'll do the same. Problem solved.