US currency lost half its theoretical purchasing power in one day in (I believe) 1938 when the US government re-assigned the dollar-to-gold exchange ratio to be nearly half what it was before... which was of course was sort of a thumbed noise at the populace at that point anyway as they had outlawed private gold ownership 6 months beforehand (no, really. look it up. private gold ownership didn't come back until the 1970s).
Then of course you've got 1930s Germany where the government's confidence problems combined with rapid currency printing to produce inflation so bad that a literal wheelbarrow full of cash wasn't enough to buy a loaf of bread.
True. Sort of. The victim should know exactly what the recipient address of those ill gotten gains are.
Technically, if I understand the way that bitcoin confidence works, half the damn bitcoin network should know about the details of the transfer.
The problem of course is figuring out who the hell the address belongs to. That is the hard part.
As I understand the technology, each and every one of those bitcoins now contain their transaction history, so -in theory- they could be "flagged as stolen", IF there were a central authority that took care of that thing, but of course there isn't as that's the point of bitcoin, no central authority.
I honestly confused if bitcoin technology is for this though. Technically, this isn't all that different from the victim leaving his front door open, and a robber coming in to steal $500,000 worth of jewelry or the like. If your home gets broken in to, you can't blame the jewelry itself for being stolen, that's what thieves -do-, steal stuff. This thief just happened to break in to his computer instead of his house. So therefore you may not want to store $500,000 of bitcoin on your own home pc just like you probably don't want to store $500,000 of jewelry in your dresser drawer. Maybe you keep a few pieces at home, and keep the rest in your safety deposit box?
I know that bitcoin technology provides for cloud-based "banks" of a sort. If they have been implemented yet, I do not know.
Check the FAQ on the website. it's too long to explain here.
The short and dirty version is "If you asked a bunch of libertarians to design a digital currency, this is what you'd get". Which isn't a wholely bad idea of course, but obviously has some issues that need to be worked out.
Actually, I'm very torn whether to replace my original Droid with a Droid 3 or an Iphone 5 when the two do mortal battle later this year... The Iphone 4s I've used are pretty snazzy, and my wife's ipad is sweet, but dammit I LIKE android.
that would be because there was an audible difference.
The reason I keep repeating this is because people don't seem to believe me, thinking I'm one of the snake oil drinkers. I know what the snake oil smells and tastes like. This wasn't it.
I used my sennheiser HD-650s daily for 4-8 hours pretty much every day from 2003 until 2010, when I replaced them with a set of Beyerdynamic DT880s pretty much just to try something new, not cause the senns were broken. The velour earpads are very... broken in, but still soft and pliable and if I really felt the need to do so, they're replaceable too.
I went through two stock cables in that time, and the $200 one, which DID break on me. twice. I got the damn thing repaired and it broke again 6 months later. So depending on how you count, 3 or 4 cables. Seeing as how they're replaceable and $12 a pop, didn't bother me too much. The $400 headphones still worked as well as the day I bought them, at least as best I recall.
The only other maintenance I did was to take the headphones apart about once a year and -carefully- use a can of canned air to blow out dust, skin flakes, cat hairs, etc.
You might want to look into the Sennheiser HD-555s. They're supposed to be pretty decent, and I -think- they have replaceable headphone cables like the HD-600/650 series do. Also since the HD-558s came out, the 555s price has been cut in half.
Are you speaking general to all money-sink hobbies, or to audio reproduction specifically?
Let's take car enthusiasts for example. There is a demonstrable, if slim, performance difference between say, a porche 911 GT3 RS and a regular base 911. The difference is probably way less than the difference between the base 911 and some non-enthusiast choice like a chevy astro van, even though the base 911 is actually closer in price to the astro van than it is to the GT3. That last little bit of extra performance is there, it's just freakin expensive.
How about computer processors? Is there a performance difference between a regular intel i7 and an extreme edition i7 (well, aside from the 6-core one)? yes. but it's pretty damn small, especially considering the price may double or triple when you go to the extreme edition. The regular i7 may be twice the price of an i3 and perform twice as fast, but the EE i7 is 3 times the price of the regular i7 and performs maybe 10% faster. (note i'm talking about trends over the past several years, not any specific cpus out right this moment). that last little bit of extra performance is there, it's just freakin expensive (Again).
You can do this with anything. A gibson custom shop historic Les Paul costs $3500 or more and is only marginally better than the $500 mass-produced epiphone plus top, but the epiphone is a whole world better than the $100 wal-mart version.
etc. etc. etc.
Why would the situation be any different with speakers, amps, cables, etc? Sure there are snake oil salesmen out there, as well as people who believe them hook line and sinker, but those exist in any business. That doesn't mean that there isn't really a difference between the $1000 speaker and the $7000 speaker... you just may not be into the hobby enough to notice the difference.
Would it be difficult? Very, because as I said, the difference was quite small. Not to mention that listening to 50 headphones would probably show enough variation in different pieces of hardware that I'd lose track of the differences in cables, because the difference was that small.
I have 0 problem admitting when two things sound exactly the same. I have said in this very same comments section that I can't reliably ABX Ogg Vorbis -q4 from lossless. I'm not trying to defend my purchase here or claim I have super hearing. In retrospec, I would never make that purchase again. What I'm saying is that if specifically looking for differences between the two, I could tell very minor differences between the two cables, and I can't even truly say that one was better than the other, only that they were different.
For all I know, that could mean that the $200 one was -worse- than the $12 one, from a sonic accuracy point of view. People have proven time and time again to prefer colored reproductions of music to accurate ones.
I'll agree that 320 is better for transcoding, but as you obviously know you shouldn't be transcoding lossy in the first place if you can possibly help it, no matter what bittrate you start at.
For any other use, I stand my statement that there shouldn't be an audible difference between 256 and 320 on modern codecs for anybody but the statistical outliers of human hearing (and they're already probably listening to lossless anyway, and annoyed with the mastering errors they hear in THOSE). The codecs have already "worked their magic" before you get to 256kbps, and they're just throwing in more data that you likely (statistically speaking anyway) can't hear only because you're asking them to do so.
See, my statement on the subject isn't "if you're willing to download 256kbps, then 320kbps is only a little bit more", it is "if you're already willing to download 320kbps lossy, then lossless starts at about twice that and comes with the benefits of archival quality and no transcoding artifacts, so if you're willing to get 320 you should be willing to get lossless." I mean seriously, with modern internet connections, you're usually talking about something the difference between 5 minutes (320kbps lossy) and 10 minutes (lossless) for a full album.
Basically I look at it like this: No reason not to use lossless for archival quality/home listening. No reason to go above ~192 lossy for portable listening
At the rate we're going, in another generation or two, storage sizes on portable devices will be so good that we may just go lossless there as well for convenience, and lossy may go the way of the floppy drive.
I would imagine another way it can go negative is when you start looking for other factors you can use to sell your product that don't actually impact the ability of the product to do "it's job" yet still cost more money, when quality on the actual product functionality may begin to slip. you see this all the time at the very high end.
like putting fancy electronic and mechanical bells, whistles, and toys into your luxury car that actually make it heavier, slower, handle worse, and get worse gas mileage than cheaper models.
making a "signature model" musical instrument that includes reproductions of every scuff, scrape, dent, and blemish of the historic instrument that your favorite artist takes on tour with him, yet sounds worse than the plain run-of-the-mill version of the model sitting next to it at the store (that costs 1/3 the price of the signature).
or for the double-whammy, putting both monster cables and dr dre's name on a pair of headphones.
I could get you the frequency response curves to prove that they're wildly different, but of course that doesn't say which one is better, only that they're different. Also I'm pretty sure that's not what you're looking for anyway, given your signature.
I'll humor you though.
Double-blind is easy to do with cables, not easy to do with headphones. Anybody who can't tell the difference between wearing a pair of sennheiser HD-650s and a pair of Alessandro MS1s (rebadged Grado SR-125s) probably needs to go to the hospital because they have lost all nerve endings on the sides of their skulls.
That said, is an HD-650 better than an MS1? pretty much across the board yes. The HD-650 reproduces both higher frequencies and lower frequencies than the MS1s, the colorization of the sound (permutations to the frequency response curve) is much less pronounced, the sound is much fuller (more tinny resonance in the MS1s), detail retrieval (hearing the subtle nuances in your music) is easier, and although it's not strictly sound-related, they are generally far more comfortable,
What makes you think that 320 is much better than 256? because the number is higher? hell VBR 256kbps is overkill for most music.
-discounting codec artifacting-: with LAME mp3, the changeover between "this sounds lossy" and "is this the original? I can't tell" happens around 192kbps or so. (more specifically, -v2 through -v0) with AAC, I believe it is around 160kbps or so, although I have not spent much time with AAC. with Ogg Vorbis, the changeover is also around 160kbps for most people on most music, specifically -q 5. Me personally, I have a hell of a time ABXing Q4.
As I said though, that is discounting artifacts that are inherent to the codec. you're going to get those at pretty much any bitrate. If you get a codec artifact at 256kbps, the chance of it still showing up at 320kbps is very high. in other words, with any of the modern codecs, 256kbps is already more than good enough for almost everything, and the few instances where it isn't good enough, 320kbps isn't very likely to fix the problem.
I think GP was saying "go to amazon. order the CD you want. it'll get delivered in a few days".
When I lived in DC (major metropolitan area with millions of residents), there was only one store I was aware of that stocked european metal, and the sold for $18 apiece. I eventually just started ordering from amazon. Even with shipping they were coming in significantly cheaper, and I had a selection that was way way better. The only downside was the wait.
Most of the target demographic probably isn't even really sure what "256kbps" means only that it's higher than what they have now, and "higher means it sounds better, right"?
Luckily, 256kbps AAC (when done right, which we have no proof apple is doing of course) sounds transparent to the vast majority of listeners on the vast majority of songs, even on good equipment. the fact that most of the target demographic is probably listening on stock civic speakers with a 500w subwoofer, or even (god forbid) the stock white earbuds, they probably couldn't tell the difference between 256kbps and
I wonder if it's true CBR 256kbps or if apple is actually leveraging the power of a modern codec and doing something like Q 0.66 VBR (~256kbps). I'm rather inclined to believe the former rather than the latter, even though there isn't a whole heck of a lot of a good reason for anybody to use CBR for anything anymore (use ABR if you absolutely must have a target file size for some random reason).
step 1. get foobar2000, load up any music you own, open file properties, delete extraneous meta tags. (hell empty out the comments tag if you're really paranoid).
step 2. save.
step 3. breathe a sigh of relief. nobody can prove where anything you own came from as it no longer has any identifying tags and the file size is now different than any existing pirated copy.
you can even do it on every file at once if you're careful about which tags you modify.
Audiophiles get a bad rap for spending money on things that nobody can really tell a difference between, but really it's all a sliding scale of how much "better" (or "different") do you want to get vs. how much money do you not care if you spend.
I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones back when I had money to burn (ah the good ole days). Was it noticeably better than the $12 cable that comes with the headphones? yes. was it $188 better? Hell fucking no. not in my opinion anyway.
Are my $400 headphones better than my $250 headphones? maybe. probably. not by very much though. Are both of them better than my $100 headphones? yes. Are $1200 headphones better than anything I own? Probably... but also likely not by very much.
Just like any given hobby, the first small/medium sized chunk of money into gets you 90% of the ultimate potential quality, and then you can spend hundreds more to get to 95%, then thousands to get to 99%, and then possibly never get to 100% no matter how much you spend.
When you hear audiophiles rave over "how much product X is than product Y", what they're generally doing is disregarding that first 90% of quality that everybody has, and talking about the differences, the remaining 10% or so. Because that's not clear to the casual reader, they look like idiots for spending $100 on a cable that makes almost no difference. Perhaps they are spending irresponsibly if that money should be going elsewhere to bills, etc... but if they have the money to spend, who is to say that whatever enjoyment they're getting out of their super low oxygen, quadruple shielded, magnesium tipped, fluorescent purple cables isn't worth every penny they spent, to them at least?
Note, I'm not talking about the people who are off the scientific deep end and debating which brand SATA cable attached to their hard drive produces the best sounding mp3s.
OP asked a question, I answered it. If you don't believe it, that's your prerogative, but as yourself a question.
If you're a business, a REAL business, and you have had a contract with another company to provide a service to you, what incentive would be needed for you to switch your business to another company? Basically shitty service or price. If you then find out that the service will be identical no matter which company you go with because -they are both using the exact same hardware and infrastructure-, that pretty much leaves price. Therefore the only reason for a company to switch away from verizon to a different provider (once again providing the same lines!) would be price.
"cost" does not include overhead, but may include network load, not sure.
My mother was actually in the telco business back in the 90s and early 2000s, working for Verizon selling T3s, OC-3s, OC-12s, etc. She was forced to compete against other companies reselling Verizon's own hardware/infrastructure cheaper than Verizon could because Verizon had more overhead as a larger company.
So at which point you say "hell yeah. fuck verizon. that's what they get for being a big monolithic company, screw the man!" until you realize that these competitors wouldn't exist without "the man" because the infrastructure they're renting wouldn't exist or be maintained.
In true slashdot style, here is your car analogy. You've got a huge ass used car dealership. they're so huge that they've put all the competition out of business. no other used car lots around. The government says "that's not fair, there is now no competition" and mandates that the car lot now allow other outside car salesmen to walk on to their lot and sell their cars. The outside salesmen can sell the cars for lower than the lot salesmen because the lot salesmen need to bump up their prices to account for property taxes, keeping auction-goers on staff (where do you think those cars come from), electricity, etc. etc.
I understand the problem of monopoly, but you have to admit that the above situation is probably not something that the founders of "Capitalism" ever dreamed of. It sounds like capitalism-on-life-support. I really wonder how long such situations can exist before they collapse in on themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what's going on in said country.
US currency lost half its theoretical purchasing power in one day in (I believe) 1938 when the US government re-assigned the dollar-to-gold exchange ratio to be nearly half what it was before... which was of course was sort of a thumbed noise at the populace at that point anyway as they had outlawed private gold ownership 6 months beforehand (no, really. look it up. private gold ownership didn't come back until the 1970s).
Then of course you've got 1930s Germany where the government's confidence problems combined with rapid currency printing to produce inflation so bad that a literal wheelbarrow full of cash wasn't enough to buy a loaf of bread.
That should read: "I am honestly confused if bitcoin technology is to blame for this though". Need more caffeine.
True. Sort of. The victim should know exactly what the recipient address of those ill gotten gains are.
Technically, if I understand the way that bitcoin confidence works, half the damn bitcoin network should know about the details of the transfer.
The problem of course is figuring out who the hell the address belongs to. That is the hard part.
As I understand the technology, each and every one of those bitcoins now contain their transaction history, so -in theory- they could be "flagged as stolen", IF there were a central authority that took care of that thing, but of course there isn't as that's the point of bitcoin, no central authority.
I honestly confused if bitcoin technology is for this though. Technically, this isn't all that different from the victim leaving his front door open, and a robber coming in to steal $500,000 worth of jewelry or the like. If your home gets broken in to, you can't blame the jewelry itself for being stolen, that's what thieves -do-, steal stuff. This thief just happened to break in to his computer instead of his house. So therefore you may not want to store $500,000 of bitcoin on your own home pc just like you probably don't want to store $500,000 of jewelry in your dresser drawer. Maybe you keep a few pieces at home, and keep the rest in your safety deposit box?
I know that bitcoin technology provides for cloud-based "banks" of a sort. If they have been implemented yet, I do not know.
Check the FAQ on the website. it's too long to explain here.
The short and dirty version is "If you asked a bunch of libertarians to design a digital currency, this is what you'd get". Which isn't a wholely bad idea of course, but obviously has some issues that need to be worked out.
No matter how famous and how many hits the band on stage had, they played at least 1 or 2 cover songs.
Shit like that is why you go see bands live in the first place. Is that illegal now too?
Or has it always been illegal and it's just that nobody gave a damn?
Actually, I'm very torn whether to replace my original Droid with a Droid 3 or an Iphone 5 when the two do mortal battle later this year... The Iphone 4s I've used are pretty snazzy, and my wife's ipad is sweet, but dammit I LIKE android.
I managed to get through to the article, and noticed that myself.
Wow, what useless journalism.
you post a list of the infected applications in the freakin summary, so when TFA gets slashdotted, we know what the hell they were?
I'm just saying...
Why would you want to part with a floppy drive that can obviously give blowjobs?
that would be because there was an audible difference.
The reason I keep repeating this is because people don't seem to believe me, thinking I'm one of the snake oil drinkers. I know what the snake oil smells and tastes like. This wasn't it.
I used my sennheiser HD-650s daily for 4-8 hours pretty much every day from 2003 until 2010, when I replaced them with a set of Beyerdynamic DT880s pretty much just to try something new, not cause the senns were broken. The velour earpads are very... broken in, but still soft and pliable and if I really felt the need to do so, they're replaceable too.
I went through two stock cables in that time, and the $200 one, which DID break on me. twice. I got the damn thing repaired and it broke again 6 months later. So depending on how you count, 3 or 4 cables. Seeing as how they're replaceable and $12 a pop, didn't bother me too much. The $400 headphones still worked as well as the day I bought them, at least as best I recall.
The only other maintenance I did was to take the headphones apart about once a year and -carefully- use a can of canned air to blow out dust, skin flakes, cat hairs, etc.
You might want to look into the Sennheiser HD-555s. They're supposed to be pretty decent, and I -think- they have replaceable headphone cables like the HD-600/650 series do. Also since the HD-558s came out, the 555s price has been cut in half.
Are you speaking general to all money-sink hobbies, or to audio reproduction specifically?
Let's take car enthusiasts for example. There is a demonstrable, if slim, performance difference between say, a porche 911 GT3 RS and a regular base 911. The difference is probably way less than the difference between the base 911 and some non-enthusiast choice like a chevy astro van, even though the base 911 is actually closer in price to the astro van than it is to the GT3. That last little bit of extra performance is there, it's just freakin expensive.
How about computer processors? Is there a performance difference between a regular intel i7 and an extreme edition i7 (well, aside from the 6-core one)? yes. but it's pretty damn small, especially considering the price may double or triple when you go to the extreme edition. The regular i7 may be twice the price of an i3 and perform twice as fast, but the EE i7 is 3 times the price of the regular i7 and performs maybe 10% faster. (note i'm talking about trends over the past several years, not any specific cpus out right this moment). that last little bit of extra performance is there, it's just freakin expensive (Again).
You can do this with anything. A gibson custom shop historic Les Paul costs $3500 or more and is only marginally better than the $500 mass-produced epiphone plus top, but the epiphone is a whole world better than the $100 wal-mart version.
etc. etc. etc.
Why would the situation be any different with speakers, amps, cables, etc? Sure there are snake oil salesmen out there, as well as people who believe them hook line and sinker, but those exist in any business. That doesn't mean that there isn't really a difference between the $1000 speaker and the $7000 speaker... you just may not be into the hobby enough to notice the difference.
Would it be difficult? Very, because as I said, the difference was quite small. Not to mention that listening to 50 headphones would probably show enough variation in different pieces of hardware that I'd lose track of the differences in cables, because the difference was that small.
I have 0 problem admitting when two things sound exactly the same. I have said in this very same comments section that I can't reliably ABX Ogg Vorbis -q4 from lossless. I'm not trying to defend my purchase here or claim I have super hearing. In retrospec, I would never make that purchase again. What I'm saying is that if specifically looking for differences between the two, I could tell very minor differences between the two cables, and I can't even truly say that one was better than the other, only that they were different.
For all I know, that could mean that the $200 one was -worse- than the $12 one, from a sonic accuracy point of view. People have proven time and time again to prefer colored reproductions of music to accurate ones.
I'll agree that 320 is better for transcoding, but as you obviously know you shouldn't be transcoding lossy in the first place if you can possibly help it, no matter what bittrate you start at.
For any other use, I stand my statement that there shouldn't be an audible difference between 256 and 320 on modern codecs for anybody but the statistical outliers of human hearing (and they're already probably listening to lossless anyway, and annoyed with the mastering errors they hear in THOSE). The codecs have already "worked their magic" before you get to 256kbps, and they're just throwing in more data that you likely (statistically speaking anyway) can't hear only because you're asking them to do so.
See, my statement on the subject isn't "if you're willing to download 256kbps, then 320kbps is only a little bit more", it is "if you're already willing to download 320kbps lossy, then lossless starts at about twice that and comes with the benefits of archival quality and no transcoding artifacts, so if you're willing to get 320 you should be willing to get lossless." I mean seriously, with modern internet connections, you're usually talking about something the difference between 5 minutes (320kbps lossy) and 10 minutes (lossless) for a full album.
Basically I look at it like this:
No reason not to use lossless for archival quality/home listening.
No reason to go above ~192 lossy for portable listening
At the rate we're going, in another generation or two, storage sizes on portable devices will be so good that we may just go lossless there as well for convenience, and lossy may go the way of the floppy drive.
I would imagine another way it can go negative is when you start looking for other factors you can use to sell your product that don't actually impact the ability of the product to do "it's job" yet still cost more money, when quality on the actual product functionality may begin to slip. you see this all the time at the very high end.
like putting fancy electronic and mechanical bells, whistles, and toys into your luxury car that actually make it heavier, slower, handle worse, and get worse gas mileage than cheaper models.
making a "signature model" musical instrument that includes reproductions of every scuff, scrape, dent, and blemish of the historic instrument that your favorite artist takes on tour with him, yet sounds worse than the plain run-of-the-mill version of the model sitting next to it at the store (that costs 1/3 the price of the signature).
or for the double-whammy, putting both monster cables and dr dre's name on a pair of headphones.
I could get you the frequency response curves to prove that they're wildly different, but of course that doesn't say which one is better, only that they're different. Also I'm pretty sure that's not what you're looking for anyway, given your signature.
I'll humor you though.
Double-blind is easy to do with cables, not easy to do with headphones. Anybody who can't tell the difference between wearing a pair of sennheiser HD-650s and a pair of Alessandro MS1s (rebadged Grado SR-125s) probably needs to go to the hospital because they have lost all nerve endings on the sides of their skulls.
That said, is an HD-650 better than an MS1? pretty much across the board yes. The HD-650 reproduces both higher frequencies and lower frequencies than the MS1s, the colorization of the sound (permutations to the frequency response curve) is much less pronounced, the sound is much fuller (more tinny resonance in the MS1s), detail retrieval (hearing the subtle nuances in your music) is easier, and although it's not strictly sound-related, they are generally far more comfortable,
What makes you think that 320 is much better than 256? because the number is higher? hell VBR 256kbps is overkill for most music.
-discounting codec artifacting-:
with LAME mp3, the changeover between "this sounds lossy" and "is this the original? I can't tell" happens around 192kbps or so. (more specifically, -v2 through -v0)
with AAC, I believe it is around 160kbps or so, although I have not spent much time with AAC.
with Ogg Vorbis, the changeover is also around 160kbps for most people on most music, specifically -q 5. Me personally, I have a hell of a time ABXing Q4.
As I said though, that is discounting artifacts that are inherent to the codec. you're going to get those at pretty much any bitrate. If you get a codec artifact at 256kbps, the chance of it still showing up at 320kbps is very high. in other words, with any of the modern codecs, 256kbps is already more than good enough for almost everything, and the few instances where it isn't good enough, 320kbps isn't very likely to fix the problem.
I think GP was saying "go to amazon. order the CD you want. it'll get delivered in a few days".
When I lived in DC (major metropolitan area with millions of residents), there was only one store I was aware of that stocked european metal, and the sold for $18 apiece. I eventually just started ordering from amazon. Even with shipping they were coming in significantly cheaper, and I had a selection that was way way better. The only downside was the wait.
*golf clap
I was going to give you a "cool story bro", but that's actually a rather impressive piece there, I award you one internet.
Sadly, you are probably 100% correct.
Most of the target demographic probably isn't even really sure what "256kbps" means only that it's higher than what they have now, and "higher means it sounds better, right"?
Luckily, 256kbps AAC (when done right, which we have no proof apple is doing of course) sounds transparent to the vast majority of listeners on the vast majority of songs, even on good equipment. the fact that most of the target demographic is probably listening on stock civic speakers with a 500w subwoofer, or even (god forbid) the stock white earbuds, they probably couldn't tell the difference between 256kbps and
I wonder if it's true CBR 256kbps or if apple is actually leveraging the power of a modern codec and doing something like Q 0.66 VBR (~256kbps). I'm rather inclined to believe the former rather than the latter, even though there isn't a whole heck of a lot of a good reason for anybody to use CBR for anything anymore (use ABR if you absolutely must have a target file size for some random reason).
step 1. get foobar2000, load up any music you own, open file properties, delete extraneous meta tags. (hell empty out the comments tag if you're really paranoid).
step 2. save.
step 3. breathe a sigh of relief. nobody can prove where anything you own came from as it no longer has any identifying tags and the file size is now different than any existing pirated copy.
you can even do it on every file at once if you're careful about which tags you modify.
Audiophiles get a bad rap for spending money on things that nobody can really tell a difference between, but really it's all a sliding scale of how much "better" (or "different") do you want to get vs. how much money do you not care if you spend.
I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones back when I had money to burn (ah the good ole days). Was it noticeably better than the $12 cable that comes with the headphones? yes. was it $188 better? Hell fucking no. not in my opinion anyway.
Are my $400 headphones better than my $250 headphones? maybe. probably. not by very much though. Are both of them better than my $100 headphones? yes. Are $1200 headphones better than anything I own? Probably... but also likely not by very much.
Just like any given hobby, the first small/medium sized chunk of money into gets you 90% of the ultimate potential quality, and then you can spend hundreds more to get to 95%, then thousands to get to 99%, and then possibly never get to 100% no matter how much you spend.
When you hear audiophiles rave over "how much product X is than product Y", what they're generally doing is disregarding that first 90% of quality that everybody has, and talking about the differences, the remaining 10% or so. Because that's not clear to the casual reader, they look like idiots for spending $100 on a cable that makes almost no difference. Perhaps they are spending irresponsibly if that money should be going elsewhere to bills, etc... but if they have the money to spend, who is to say that whatever enjoyment they're getting out of their super low oxygen, quadruple shielded, magnesium tipped, fluorescent purple cables isn't worth every penny they spent, to them at least?
Note, I'm not talking about the people who are off the scientific deep end and debating which brand SATA cable attached to their hard drive produces the best sounding mp3s.
Freedom isn't free.
It costs a hefty fucking fee.
That's right freedom costs a buck 'o five.
Well, in this case, it costs $450.
OP asked a question, I answered it. If you don't believe it, that's your prerogative, but as yourself a question.
If you're a business, a REAL business, and you have had a contract with another company to provide a service to you, what incentive would be needed for you to switch your business to another company? Basically shitty service or price. If you then find out that the service will be identical no matter which company you go with because -they are both using the exact same hardware and infrastructure-, that pretty much leaves price. Therefore the only reason for a company to switch away from verizon to a different provider (once again providing the same lines!) would be price.
Do my statements look silly now?
"cost" does not include overhead, but may include network load, not sure.
My mother was actually in the telco business back in the 90s and early 2000s, working for Verizon selling T3s, OC-3s, OC-12s, etc. She was forced to compete against other companies reselling Verizon's own hardware/infrastructure cheaper than Verizon could because Verizon had more overhead as a larger company.
So at which point you say "hell yeah. fuck verizon. that's what they get for being a big monolithic company, screw the man!" until you realize that these competitors wouldn't exist without "the man" because the infrastructure they're renting wouldn't exist or be maintained.
In true slashdot style, here is your car analogy. You've got a huge ass used car dealership. they're so huge that they've put all the competition out of business. no other used car lots around. The government says "that's not fair, there is now no competition" and mandates that the car lot now allow other outside car salesmen to walk on to their lot and sell their cars. The outside salesmen can sell the cars for lower than the lot salesmen because the lot salesmen need to bump up their prices to account for property taxes, keeping auction-goers on staff (where do you think those cars come from), electricity, etc. etc.
I understand the problem of monopoly, but you have to admit that the above situation is probably not something that the founders of "Capitalism" ever dreamed of. It sounds like capitalism-on-life-support. I really wonder how long such situations can exist before they collapse in on themselves.