I say this because I have to constantly hear stupid stuff from fellow programmers like "MD5 is broken!!!11.
While MD5 can not be considered broken as a hash for data verification where not malicious modification is suspected, enough potential practical "attacks" have been published to suggest that all new cryptographic code should use something else.
We do work for banking organisations, and a number of them now specify that MD5 should not be used as a has function in any new project work and should be phased out of existing code where practical. If our clients consider it broken, then we have to, or at least we have to support other algorithms as an option.
Unless you are working in an embedded environment with very little computing power available (so your hand is forced by what-ever algorithms your chosen CPU/chipset has built-in hardware functions for) or are hashing *massive* amounts of data and the hashing is a significant bottleneck, the computational complexity difference between MD5 and SHA1 is not significant so why not use the method that is generally considered more future proof at this point?
1. Provide a good service, a tool, a format.
2. Make it cheap.
3. Wait 'til everyone uses it because it was cheap.
4. Jack up the price.
5. Profit.
1. Provide a good service, a tool, a format.
2. Make it cheap.
3. Wait 'til everyone uses it because it was cheap.
4. Sell for an overly inflated price to a big company by convincing them that it might be the next big thing (look at all those users you could exploit!) and that if they don't buy one of their competitors will.
5. Profit.
6. Sit back and watch the company that bought the thing struggle to make a return on the investment while you relax and enjoy the benefits of being on the receiving end of that investment.
So why was he so good with it? Punch cards are quaint from my perspective but I wouldn't know where to start with them. Is he also proficient with using a morse code transmitter?
Maybe using an "old style" keyboard had become something of a game, something that engineering students would compete on to prove they were hard core.
Or maybe, just maybe, it is only a piece of entertainment. If you are going to fail to suspend disbelief at the moment Scotty is able to use a keyboard proficiently how did you get through the previous scenes like the time travel thing, the whales communicating with aliens, and so on.
I will go shoot myself now, for being sad enough to post the above!
FlashBlock stops Flash from running after a second or two. Some of the remote code still runs. This may be enough time for an attack to get through.
I was under the impression that it replaced the flash objects in the page's DOM before Firefox gets chance to call the plugin. I'll have to see if I can't verify that...
This makes FlashBlock all the more useful. No flash that I don't explicitly enable ever runs in my browser, which should stop these drive-by attacks in their tracks (unless they somehow infect flash objects I would normally allow, instead of injecting a new "hidden" object into the hacked sites).
Microsoft now says that they had already been on the path for several months toward releasing the software under GPLv2 before Kroah-Hartman got in touch.
I wonder if MS would accept that same reasoning if it were applied next time an auditor finds a pile of incorrectly licenses MS product in a company. "Ah, yes, that. I'm on the path toward paying for the licenses I should have."
There are also a small pile of inductive power transfer technologies for low power devices that are claimed to be ready for market RealSoonNow(tm). I'd prefer that to people using camera flashes all the time in the library.
That is good, but as it is not yet a W3C standard the issue remains for the time being.
While the chance Apple would risk doing anything about it is very small (if they did they'd have to do it across the board, not just to MS, and the outcry from all angles (F/OSS, opera, MS) would be difficult to manage) I doubt MS's legal department or stockholders would be happy about the product opening itself to the risk.
...or so I heard. It was supposedly removed a couple weeks before release for reasons unkown to me.
My memory of that rumour is that MS's XML plugin was just not nearly ready for release (too slow and buggy) so it was decided it would be less embarrassing to not include it and encourage people to use Adobe's plugin for IE instead. Development was going to continue for inclusion in later IE revisions, but as IE development was sidelined the SVG project was canned completely.
IIRC, one of the reasons that MS has thus far resisted any idea of implementing the canvas tag is that there is some IP issue regarding Apple that may be relevant). Some have suggested that F/OSS browsers shouldn't be doing canvas related stuff until it is cleared up.
I've never particularly liked SVG myself, like most things XML is has "designed by committee" stamped all over it, but it is at least an open standard more so than the canvas tag is while that IP issue hangs over it.
The LAN party thing is definitely a valid point, and one where I agree that consoles tend to win by a massive margin. Heck, with many games you can't even play from two distinct user accounts on the same PC at different times. But as I (and no doubt a not insignificant segment of the market) don't tend to play games that way it doesn't make much difference to my buying decisions.
I'm not really a social gamer. For me and most of my circle gaming is a relatively solo event, or at least turn based, and we are much more likely to drink, eat, watch a movie, talk, and so on when we meet up. We might talk about games socially, passing on recommendations and swapping the odd tip and such, but we don't generally play them socially. Not that I have anything against social gaming - I know people for whom their gaming circle is their closest friends (in some cases they met through gaming, in other cases gaming is just their preferred excuse to get together for an evening's entertainment) and they seem perfectly satisfied with that too. But saying that "console gaming is cheaper than PC gaming in general because of the cost of playing as a group" implies that everyone plays games in the same way and for the same reasons which simply isn't the case.
On the neglect of older hardware, you are again generalising too far I think. While the major studios show massive bias to the bleeding edge there are also many good very recent indie games that will run on really quite old hardware perfectly well. And because of the number of games out there you can usually find something to your taste and hardware level when you are bored and want something "new", either in the cheap baskets in bricks-and-mortar retail stores or increasingly through online outlets like http://www.gog.com/ and even through bigger name outlets like Steam. Again, how significant these points are to you will vary greatly depending on your attitude to gaming and the places that it fits in your life.
E.coli his a very common bacterium with a large family of strains, only a few of which are particularly dangerous to a healthy human (and few more are harmful only to people who are in not-so-good good condition such as the elderly or people with serious illness particularly those with an immune system targeting disease or those weakened by chemotherapy).
Get ready to panic: you almost certainly have a couple of strains of e.coli throughout your intestine right now. Everyone does. As do most warm-blooded animals. It really is that common and generally harmless.
The strain you are presumably most concerned about, as it is one that has hit the headlines a number of times in the last decade or so, is O157:H7 which is a common agent in food poisoning outbreaks. 157/7 is a nasty bugger, and a hardy one too, but I doubt the researchers in this story are using it when there are so many much less troublesome varieties to play with.
E.coli is often use in research like this because its genetics relatively simple and so it is relatively well understood, meaning it is more predictable so experiments are less likely to misfire in surprising ways. It is also comparatively stable (unlike some bacteria and other organisms that mutate every second sneeze). I very much doubt they are working with a strain that is in any way dangerous to a human, and E.coli is not transmitted by air so even if some of the cells in a bacterial computer mutate into a more deadly type they are not going to harm you unless you eat the thing directly or your food comes into contact with it.
Diablo3 and Starcraft2 will probably be the last two major PC game titles.
I'm guessing the people at Valve and a number other studios that we could mention would disagree with you there.
Microsoft worked very hard to kill off the PC as a gaming platform. It was clearly a strategic decision; they wanted people to use the xbox instead of the PC.
I don't think MS wants to kill of Windows gaming really. Many game makers would like to, because it is easier to manage their rights at the expense of the users on consoles. I'd say MS's position with the xbox family is more making sure they get a share of the console market pie rather than wanting to push people that way themselves.
What is the difference to MS between me having bought bioshock for the PC and Karl having bough it for the xbox? In both cases MS have had money from the user directly (a windows license or the console) and from the game producer (in terms of SDK/support sales and licenses to use relevant logos on packaging), and in both cases none of that income is going to Sony or Nintendo.
Consoles cost less than PCs.
As someone that has always owned a reasonable PC for other reasons that "console are cheaper" has never worked out that way for me. Paying an extra 50 quid for a better graphics card than I'd otherwise have is cheaper than plumping down 200+ for a console and from what I've seen a given PC game is cheaper than the console equivalent more often than the other way around (especially a while after release). OK, so that extra for the graphics card is not a one off as I'll probably upgrade my 18ish month old 3850 at some point in the next year but buying a console isn't a one-of either given how many new controllers and other add-ons I've seen my cousins nag their mum into buying because some games aren't as good (or just plain don't work) with the standard ones.
Consoles don't have varying technical specs like PCs. Consoles have DRM and make it easier to sell downloadable content. Etc. Etc.
Those points I can agree with and they can make console much more attractive to game developers, but in an ideal world these shouldn't be my problem as an end-user. Of course the variation of PC hardware can be an advantage - if you make a game for a fixed spec (i.e. a console) there is a limit to how far you can push things, but in the PC world you can push the boundaries for the benefit of high-sec kit as long as you make sure the game is playable and looks good enough on more common configurations.
Re:Just standard clothespins
on
Hung Out to Dry
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· Score: 1
Oh thankyou Captain Obvious, we would never have noticed without you! ;)
The device is made on a build-to-order basis, with a suggested UK retail price of £650.52 including VAT â" that's an astonishing $1074.69 at current exchange rates.
I love how people quote "at current exchange rates" when talking about tech gear. I don't know how well it works the other way around, but here in the UK it isn't often that we see true exchange rate parity for either hardware or software. Even when the pound was worth ~1.8 of your dollars it wasn't unusual to see consumer kit priced at closer to 1UKP==1USD, and I'm comparing online prices here (so I'm not making the mistake of comparing US online prices to UK high-street prices). Not that I'm bitter or anything...
I would be very wary of making such an investment, certainly for as much or more than I would expect to pay for a game once complete (and it is rare that I pay full-price-as-at-release-date for a game), because the cynic in me would expect something akin to Hollywood Accounting to be used to make sure that I didn't get the cut at the end.
Though if the level of investment required is less than what I'd expect to pay for the game once complete, the risk of getting nothing back (no game, no cut of profits) might be small enough considering the investment amount for me to be willing to take a punt on an idea I like the sound of.
Hear hear. The same with the disgust some people have about the French eating horse meat. As long as the animal has been well treated in life (including the end of its life not involving unnecessarily stress and pain) I don't see a Korean eating dog or a Frenchman eating horse as any worse than me eating pork.
There are those that try bring intelligence into it, claiming that the intelligence of dogs makes them more objectionable as food than what we generally consider farm animals. This is crap as you'll almost certainly find your average pig to be no less intelligent than some dog breads (pigs are probably more than those yappy little rats fashionable people carry around).
My argument stands or falls on the "being treated well" part, of course, and I'm sure you can find many examples of dogs being mistreated prior to being lunch. But the force feeding of geese to produce foie gras, and other examples of abuse closer to home than the east, means that we can't really claim moral superiority on the issue.
On a totally unrelated note -- why are we so concerned with drug sniffing dogs? OMG!! Someone wants to get high!!! Quick -- clone some dogs so that we can put them in jail!!!
It is not quite as simple as that. These dogs are not just out there to find the little bag-o-mary in your inside coat pocket, they are there to pick up on a variety of stronger drugs that are massively addictive and cause the country various troubles such as the extra crime created by the badly addicted running out of money but still needing their next fix, needing to run treatment programs for the addicted, needing to fund medical care for the health complications that result from certain drug use and persist even long after the addiction is dealt with, and so on.
I would agree that seeing this research go into bomb sniffing as well as drug sniffing dogs, but how do we know it isn't in another lab? This report is specifically about one set of dogs resulting from one lab's work, which happens to center around a particularly proficient drug detecting animal.
Embeded font is there. Is unusable for a long period of time, maybe 5, maybe 10 years. Once the old browsers are forgothen and the new browsers dominate.
As long as your design degrades gracefully in browsers that don't support the new bells and whistles there is no problem using the latest and greatest. I don't see a problem from the user's point-of-view with giving people with the newest browser your "best" look and people with older browsers the "good enough" look.
Of course this may introduce a technical problem for you the designer because you might need to be extra careful to make sure you test that the design does indeed degrade gracefully - but that is the price you pay for playing close to the bleeding edge.
I can see this being *very* irritating if certain PHBs and corporate branding people catch wind of the new feature. First they'll demand to have the corporate font used for all pages, will be told that it will look different on older browsers (which they'll say "fine" to without actually taking in what is being said). Then a couple of weeks later they'll visit the site on Aunt Betty's old machine with IE6 and FF1.5 and demand that the site should look the same on all, and we'll be back to having sites that use images (or proprietary plugins) for all text just to get the fonts right...
If I pay for a 5Mb/s connection with unlimited downloads, I should be able to GET 5Mb/s no matter what I do at what time. If I want to be a leech for 24/7. Hey, that's what I paid for.
That is the nail, right there, taking a knock to the head. I have no problem at all with ISPs imploying traffic management, if they are honest about the way that they do it. Unfortunately there is a competitive disadvantage being honest - if an ISP sells "5Mbit, with the following traffic management" then they'll lose customers to the ISPs that claim "5Mbit completely unlimited" even if said other ISPs are managing traffic the same way.
Basically the ISPs need to stop selling contended services as if they are dedicated services. But that won't happen until they are forced to because no one ISP will want to risk being the first. The only way to make them all do it at the same time is to legislate which would in itself be a waste of time because they'd find a loophole next week and their customers would be back to square one.
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I say this because I have to constantly hear stupid stuff from fellow programmers like "MD5 is broken!!!11.
While MD5 can not be considered broken as a hash for data verification where not malicious modification is suspected, enough potential practical "attacks" have been published to suggest that all new cryptographic code should use something else.
We do work for banking organisations, and a number of them now specify that MD5 should not be used as a has function in any new project work and should be phased out of existing code where practical. If our clients consider it broken, then we have to, or at least we have to support other algorithms as an option.
Unless you are working in an embedded environment with very little computing power available (so your hand is forced by what-ever algorithms your chosen CPU/chipset has built-in hardware functions for) or are hashing *massive* amounts of data and the hashing is a significant bottleneck, the computational complexity difference between MD5 and SHA1 is not significant so why not use the method that is generally considered more future proof at this point?
1. Provide a good service, a tool, a format. 2. Make it cheap. 3. Wait 'til everyone uses it because it was cheap. 4. Jack up the price. 5. Profit.
1. Provide a good service, a tool, a format.
2. Make it cheap.
3. Wait 'til everyone uses it because it was cheap.
4. Sell for an overly inflated price to a big company by convincing them that it might be the next big thing (look at all those users you could exploit!) and that if they don't buy one of their competitors will.
5. Profit.
6. Sit back and watch the company that bought the thing struggle to make a return on the investment while you relax and enjoy the benefits of being on the receiving end of that investment.
Nice work if you can get it!
Well obviously you have never experienced this 'bad money replaces good money' effect in your life yet.
Or maybe he has always been an active practitioner of the "paying no money" methods of music acquisition?
It may not be completely logical, but since when is the human mind completely logical?
I don't see no points on your ears boy, but you sound like a Vulcan...
Forget the medical advancement. Where can I get me a cool blue/white rat?!
A "keyboard"... how quaint.
So why was he so good with it? Punch cards are quaint from my perspective but I wouldn't know where to start with them. Is he also proficient with using a morse code transmitter?
Maybe using an "old style" keyboard had become something of a game, something that engineering students would compete on to prove they were hard core.
Or maybe, just maybe, it is only a piece of entertainment. If you are going to fail to suspend disbelief at the moment Scotty is able to use a keyboard proficiently how did you get through the previous scenes like the time travel thing, the whales communicating with aliens, and so on.
I will go shoot myself now, for being sad enough to post the above!
FlashBlock stops Flash from running after a second or two. Some of the remote code still runs. This may be enough time for an attack to get through.
I was under the impression that it replaced the flash objects in the page's DOM before Firefox gets chance to call the plugin. I'll have to see if I can't verify that...
This makes FlashBlock all the more useful. No flash that I don't explicitly enable ever runs in my browser, which should stop these drive-by attacks in their tracks (unless they somehow infect flash objects I would normally allow, instead of injecting a new "hidden" object into the hacked sites).
Microsoft now says that they had already been on the path for several months toward releasing the software under GPLv2 before Kroah-Hartman got in touch.
I wonder if MS would accept that same reasoning if it were applied next time an auditor finds a pile of incorrectly licenses MS product in a company. "Ah, yes, that. I'm on the path toward paying for the licenses I should have."
There are also a small pile of inductive power transfer technologies for low power devices that are claimed to be ready for market RealSoonNow(tm). I'd prefer that to people using camera flashes all the time in the library.
That is good, but as it is not yet a W3C standard the issue remains for the time being.
While the chance Apple would risk doing anything about it is very small (if they did they'd have to do it across the board, not just to MS, and the outcry from all angles (F/OSS, opera, MS) would be difficult to manage) I doubt MS's legal department or stockholders would be happy about the product opening itself to the risk.
...or so I heard. It was supposedly removed a couple weeks before release for reasons unkown to me.
My memory of that rumour is that MS's XML plugin was just not nearly ready for release (too slow and buggy) so it was decided it would be less embarrassing to not include it and encourage people to use Adobe's plugin for IE instead. Development was going to continue for inclusion in later IE revisions, but as IE development was sidelined the SVG project was canned completely.
IIRC, one of the reasons that MS has thus far resisted any idea of implementing the canvas tag is that there is some IP issue regarding Apple that may be relevant). Some have suggested that F/OSS browsers shouldn't be doing canvas related stuff until it is cleared up.
I've never particularly liked SVG myself, like most things XML is has "designed by committee" stamped all over it, but it is at least an open standard more so than the canvas tag is while that IP issue hangs over it.
The LAN party thing is definitely a valid point, and one where I agree that consoles tend to win by a massive margin. Heck, with many games you can't even play from two distinct user accounts on the same PC at different times. But as I (and no doubt a not insignificant segment of the market) don't tend to play games that way it doesn't make much difference to my buying decisions.
I'm not really a social gamer. For me and most of my circle gaming is a relatively solo event, or at least turn based, and we are much more likely to drink, eat, watch a movie, talk, and so on when we meet up. We might talk about games socially, passing on recommendations and swapping the odd tip and such, but we don't generally play them socially. Not that I have anything against social gaming - I know people for whom their gaming circle is their closest friends (in some cases they met through gaming, in other cases gaming is just their preferred excuse to get together for an evening's entertainment) and they seem perfectly satisfied with that too. But saying that "console gaming is cheaper than PC gaming in general because of the cost of playing as a group" implies that everyone plays games in the same way and for the same reasons which simply isn't the case.
On the neglect of older hardware, you are again generalising too far I think. While the major studios show massive bias to the bleeding edge there are also many good very recent indie games that will run on really quite old hardware perfectly well. And because of the number of games out there you can usually find something to your taste and hardware level when you are bored and want something "new", either in the cheap baskets in bricks-and-mortar retail stores or increasingly through online outlets like http://www.gog.com/ and even through bigger name outlets like Steam. Again, how significant these points are to you will vary greatly depending on your attitude to gaming and the places that it fits in your life.
That is one of the things I was referring to as "licenses to use relevant logos on packaging".
E.coli his a very common bacterium with a large family of strains, only a few of which are particularly dangerous to a healthy human (and few more are harmful only to people who are in not-so-good good condition such as the elderly or people with serious illness particularly those with an immune system targeting disease or those weakened by chemotherapy).
Get ready to panic: you almost certainly have a couple of strains of e.coli throughout your intestine right now. Everyone does. As do most warm-blooded animals. It really is that common and generally harmless.
The strain you are presumably most concerned about, as it is one that has hit the headlines a number of times in the last decade or so, is O157:H7 which is a common agent in food poisoning outbreaks. 157/7 is a nasty bugger, and a hardy one too, but I doubt the researchers in this story are using it when there are so many much less troublesome varieties to play with.
E.coli is often use in research like this because its genetics relatively simple and so it is relatively well understood, meaning it is more predictable so experiments are less likely to misfire in surprising ways. It is also comparatively stable (unlike some bacteria and other organisms that mutate every second sneeze). I very much doubt they are working with a strain that is in any way dangerous to a human, and E.coli is not transmitted by air so even if some of the cells in a bacterial computer mutate into a more deadly type they are not going to harm you unless you eat the thing directly or your food comes into contact with it.
Diablo3 and Starcraft2 will probably be the last two major PC game titles.
I'm guessing the people at Valve and a number other studios that we could mention would disagree with you there.
Microsoft worked very hard to kill off the PC as a gaming platform. It was clearly a strategic decision; they wanted people to use the xbox instead of the PC.
I don't think MS wants to kill of Windows gaming really. Many game makers would like to, because it is easier to manage their rights at the expense of the users on consoles. I'd say MS's position with the xbox family is more making sure they get a share of the console market pie rather than wanting to push people that way themselves.
What is the difference to MS between me having bought bioshock for the PC and Karl having bough it for the xbox? In both cases MS have had money from the user directly (a windows license or the console) and from the game producer (in terms of SDK/support sales and licenses to use relevant logos on packaging), and in both cases none of that income is going to Sony or Nintendo.
Consoles cost less than PCs.
As someone that has always owned a reasonable PC for other reasons that "console are cheaper" has never worked out that way for me. Paying an extra 50 quid for a better graphics card than I'd otherwise have is cheaper than plumping down 200+ for a console and from what I've seen a given PC game is cheaper than the console equivalent more often than the other way around (especially a while after release). OK, so that extra for the graphics card is not a one off as I'll probably upgrade my 18ish month old 3850 at some point in the next year but buying a console isn't a one-of either given how many new controllers and other add-ons I've seen my cousins nag their mum into buying because some games aren't as good (or just plain don't work) with the standard ones.
Consoles don't have varying technical specs like PCs. Consoles have DRM and make it easier to sell downloadable content. Etc. Etc.
Those points I can agree with and they can make console much more attractive to game developers, but in an ideal world these shouldn't be my problem as an end-user. Of course the variation of PC hardware can be an advantage - if you make a game for a fixed spec (i.e. a console) there is a limit to how far you can push things, but in the PC world you can push the boundaries for the benefit of high-sec kit as long as you make sure the game is playable and looks good enough on more common configurations.
Oh thankyou Captain Obvious, we would never have noticed without you! ;)
The device is made on a build-to-order basis, with a suggested UK retail price of £650.52 including VAT â" that's an astonishing $1074.69 at current exchange rates.
I love how people quote "at current exchange rates" when talking about tech gear. I don't know how well it works the other way around, but here in the UK it isn't often that we see true exchange rate parity for either hardware or software. Even when the pound was worth ~1.8 of your dollars it wasn't unusual to see consumer kit priced at closer to 1UKP==1USD, and I'm comparing online prices here (so I'm not making the mistake of comparing US online prices to UK high-street prices). Not that I'm bitter or anything...
I would be very wary of making such an investment, certainly for as much or more than I would expect to pay for a game once complete (and it is rare that I pay full-price-as-at-release-date for a game), because the cynic in me would expect something akin to Hollywood Accounting to be used to make sure that I didn't get the cut at the end.
Though if the level of investment required is less than what I'd expect to pay for the game once complete, the risk of getting nothing back (no game, no cut of profits) might be small enough considering the investment amount for me to be willing to take a punt on an idea I like the sound of.
Hear hear. The same with the disgust some people have about the French eating horse meat. As long as the animal has been well treated in life (including the end of its life not involving unnecessarily stress and pain) I don't see a Korean eating dog or a Frenchman eating horse as any worse than me eating pork.
There are those that try bring intelligence into it, claiming that the intelligence of dogs makes them more objectionable as food than what we generally consider farm animals. This is crap as you'll almost certainly find your average pig to be no less intelligent than some dog breads (pigs are probably more than those yappy little rats fashionable people carry around).
My argument stands or falls on the "being treated well" part, of course, and I'm sure you can find many examples of dogs being mistreated prior to being lunch. But the force feeding of geese to produce foie gras, and other examples of abuse closer to home than the east, means that we can't really claim moral superiority on the issue.
On a totally unrelated note -- why are we so concerned with drug sniffing dogs? OMG!! Someone wants to get high!!! Quick -- clone some dogs so that we can put them in jail!!!
It is not quite as simple as that. These dogs are not just out there to find the little bag-o-mary in your inside coat pocket, they are there to pick up on a variety of stronger drugs that are massively addictive and cause the country various troubles such as the extra crime created by the badly addicted running out of money but still needing their next fix, needing to run treatment programs for the addicted, needing to fund medical care for the health complications that result from certain drug use and persist even long after the addiction is dealt with, and so on.
I would agree that seeing this research go into bomb sniffing as well as drug sniffing dogs, but how do we know it isn't in another lab? This report is specifically about one set of dogs resulting from one lab's work, which happens to center around a particularly proficient drug detecting animal.
Maybe it is one of those arrangements where they'll let you in on the secret, eventually, if you donate a block of venture capital...
Embeded font is there. Is unusable for a long period of time, maybe 5, maybe 10 years. Once the old browsers are forgothen and the new browsers dominate.
As long as your design degrades gracefully in browsers that don't support the new bells and whistles there is no problem using the latest and greatest. I don't see a problem from the user's point-of-view with giving people with the newest browser your "best" look and people with older browsers the "good enough" look.
Of course this may introduce a technical problem for you the designer because you might need to be extra careful to make sure you test that the design does indeed degrade gracefully - but that is the price you pay for playing close to the bleeding edge.
I can see this being *very* irritating if certain PHBs and corporate branding people catch wind of the new feature. First they'll demand to have the corporate font used for all pages, will be told that it will look different on older browsers (which they'll say "fine" to without actually taking in what is being said). Then a couple of weeks later they'll visit the site on Aunt Betty's old machine with IE6 and FF1.5 and demand that the site should look the same on all, and we'll be back to having sites that use images (or proprietary plugins) for all text just to get the fonts right...
If I pay for a 5Mb/s connection with unlimited downloads, I should be able to GET 5Mb/s no matter what I do at what time. If I want to be a leech for 24/7. Hey, that's what I paid for.
That is the nail, right there, taking a knock to the head. I have no problem at all with ISPs imploying traffic management, if they are honest about the way that they do it. Unfortunately there is a competitive disadvantage being honest - if an ISP sells "5Mbit, with the following traffic management" then they'll lose customers to the ISPs that claim "5Mbit completely unlimited" even if said other ISPs are managing traffic the same way.
Basically the ISPs need to stop selling contended services as if they are dedicated services. But that won't happen until they are forced to because no one ISP will want to risk being the first. The only way to make them all do it at the same time is to legislate which would in itself be a waste of time because they'd find a loophole next week and their customers would be back to square one.