Actually, I never advertised unlimited usage and no, I'm not an asshole, except of course when dealing with anonymous cowards. When we offer service to our clients we explain the pro's and con's to each of our plans and let the user choose. We allow a very wide range of tolerance within each of those plans because I have found that a user may do a considerable amount of downloading on month trying to get the perfect linux distro installed with all the goodies, and the next month have significantly less usage.
What I will not ever support is a client who thinks he can set up his system to continuously download warez from the newsgroups a 1.2 mbits/sec but not pay for bandwidth required to support that level. If you think that you should be able to do that at a fraction of what it cost then in reality you are the asshole, but you have already established that with your initial post.
Having a flatrate account is a great thing from the billing side (I am an ISP) in that it makes things easy. However, we reserve the right to boink users who think $39 will get them a T1's worth of unique incoming bandwidth, meaning stuff I can't cache locally. Even with local caching the cost of the telco ATM connection becomes an issue if one user is hogging the resource.
If all of the users are reasonable (we have a wide range for reasonable) then there is no problem. We have only boinked one user because he thought it was his constitutional right to consume $12oo of service while paying me $69. It is all about economics, some use more and some use less but the average works out where I get enough money to pay my employees and the house payment and that is good enough for me.
The problem is that freeways aren't free. You and I are paying for them with our taxes. Big trucks pay a LOT more for their licenses that we do for our light trucks and cars because they use more of the resource in terms of wearing out the roads and requiring stronger foundations, bridges, etc. To argue that it is free is to ignore how it came to be "free".
The issue with intellectual property is a very important one for everybody. If something you create is not really yours, then what is your value? What should you be compensated for your work? Why should you work harder than anyone else to create bigger, better things/ideas? This has implications for more than scientists, artists and writers. What is the value of the individual in a manufacturing facility? Or a teacher? Or any other profession? Everyone has a work product (well almost everyone) and to some degree is based upon intellectual activity. The lack of intellectual property is called communism. Think about it... you are not valued as an individual with unique abilities. You are not compensated for those unique abilities. The society sinks to the lowest common denominator. I don't disagree that changes may be in order for the length of intellectual property protections, but to remove them totally is to go down a path that's already been tried. BTW, if this guy really believes in no intellectual property why did he publish his comments in a book? Why not on Slashdot or somewhere else on the web with explicit notice that the material was not copyrighted?
Consistency of the user interface is one of the most important aspects of any complicated system in securing a dominant market position. If total domination is desired then consistency of a very high level is required to bring along the "technically challenged" that live among us. As to the application of choice in user interface design, the function I have most desired for some of my clients is an obvious choice to reset the user interface for an application to the default configuration (or some presaved config). I am constantly required to assist someone who is looking at their computer after the grandchildren have been to vist and they can't find the stock program. I encourage the customization of the interface as a way to build loyalty among advanced users, but don't forget to latch on to newbies and suck them in.
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Actually, I never advertised unlimited usage and no, I'm not an asshole, except of course when dealing with anonymous cowards. When we offer service to our clients we explain the pro's and con's to each of our plans and let the user choose. We allow a very wide range of tolerance within each of those plans because I have found that a user may do a considerable amount of downloading on month trying to get the perfect linux distro installed with all the goodies, and the next month have significantly less usage. What I will not ever support is a client who thinks he can set up his system to continuously download warez from the newsgroups a 1.2 mbits/sec but not pay for bandwidth required to support that level. If you think that you should be able to do that at a fraction of what it cost then in reality you are the asshole, but you have already established that with your initial post.
Having a flatrate account is a great thing from the billing side (I am an ISP) in that it makes things easy. However, we reserve the right to boink users who think $39 will get them a T1's worth of unique incoming bandwidth, meaning stuff I can't cache locally. Even with local caching the cost of the telco ATM connection becomes an issue if one user is hogging the resource. If all of the users are reasonable (we have a wide range for reasonable) then there is no problem. We have only boinked one user because he thought it was his constitutional right to consume $12oo of service while paying me $69. It is all about economics, some use more and some use less but the average works out where I get enough money to pay my employees and the house payment and that is good enough for me.
The problem is that freeways aren't free. You and I are paying for them with our taxes. Big trucks pay a LOT more for their licenses that we do for our light trucks and cars because they use more of the resource in terms of wearing out the roads and requiring stronger foundations, bridges, etc. To argue that it is free is to ignore how it came to be "free".
The issue with intellectual property is a very important one for everybody. If something you create is not really yours, then what is your value? What should you be compensated for your work? Why should you work harder than anyone else to create bigger, better things/ideas? This has implications for more than scientists, artists and writers. What is the value of the individual in a manufacturing facility? Or a teacher? Or any other profession? Everyone has a work product (well almost everyone) and to some degree is based upon intellectual activity. The lack of intellectual property is called communism. Think about it... you are not valued as an individual with unique abilities. You are not compensated for those unique abilities. The society sinks to the lowest common denominator. I don't disagree that changes may be in order for the length of intellectual property protections, but to remove them totally is to go down a path that's already been tried. BTW, if this guy really believes in no intellectual property why did he publish his comments in a book? Why not on Slashdot or somewhere else on the web with explicit notice that the material was not copyrighted?
Consistency of the user interface is one of the most important aspects of any complicated system in securing a dominant market position. If total domination is desired then consistency of a very high level is required to bring along the "technically challenged" that live among us. As to the application of choice in user interface design, the function I have most desired for some of my clients is an obvious choice to reset the user interface for an application to the default configuration (or some presaved config). I am constantly required to assist someone who is looking at their computer after the grandchildren have been to vist and they can't find the stock program. I encourage the customization of the interface as a way to build loyalty among advanced users, but don't forget to latch on to newbies and suck them in.