The $5 is in the wrong direction for that to be the case.
Google already receives consideration from the developer in the form of an app submitted to their gallery for use by Google's customers.
On the other hand, the developer doesn't receive compensation from Google for developing and submitting an app.
The average person does not have online access with their CC provider and a habit of constantly logging into their online account and refreshing the page every 30 seconds to
look for any unusual $5 transactions they do not remember.
Much of the population won't have a chance of knowing about the $5 charge until 30 days later when they receive their paper statements.
Of those people..... many won't notice a $5 unexpected Google charge in there.
If they do, they might not immediately realize this isn't something they (or their spouse bought) earlier in the month.
Doubly so if they've ever actually bought anything from Google.
Oh right.... 30 days is Plenty of time for a malicious extension to have attracted some people, got it installed, and done damage.
In the off chance that the CC owner notices, just try again, repeat ad naseum.
As for houses, locks are to keep out wild animals and to help slow down a potential intruder.
The burglar alarm, and devices like the.40 S&W and 9mm are supposed to be the real deterrants and defense against human threats.
Specifically, the 2nd amendment of the constitution which guarantees the people the right to bear arms and defend themselves and their constitutionally protected rights, including the right to life, and the right to the security of their effects.
It is considered to make things worse to use antibiotics except where medically essential.
Use of antibiotics promotes growth of bacteria resistant to the antibiotics.
The resistant strains can then share genes with more harmful bacteria.
The result is the antibiotic is less effective, or might not even work when it's really needed due to a live-threatening infection,
which is antibiotic-resistant due to the frivolous use of the antibiotic.
The "harm" is not that the antibiotic hurts you; the harm is that the use of the antibiotic makes the antibiotic less effective in the future when you (or other people)
will live or die based on the question of whether or not the antibiotic will work.
They are not rewarding the early adopters. They are penalizing everyone who hasn't published an extension yet.
If you wrote the code and haven't gotten the account to publish to the gallery yet, then you are screwed over by the $5 fine/penalty.
Charging everyone a $5 penalty as a way to "deal with" the 3 or 4 script kiddies kind of sucks.
All a malware author needs is a couple dozen people to install their malicious app and get critical info snooped, or snooker the user into paying more,
they will easily get PROFIT after the $5 fine.
On the other hand, for us folks writing free apps, the $5 fee is kind of debilitating.
I think we will stick with browsers whose authors are less hostile to developers, such as Firefox.
Last I checked Apple does not charge for the ability to develop Safari extensions and have them appear in the extension gallery.
I believe you must be thinking of something different Apple charges for; you don't need a WWDC subscription to write safari browser extensions and publish.
I think the AGs from other states are playing an intimidation game here
They might not have a legal leg to stand on, and no charges they can bring successfully... but their concerns and the way they keep publicizing them may harm the reputation of the site.
It would be interesting to see Topix Suing 32 state AGs for defamation and some type of abuse, instead of caving in.
Probably, registering the domain through one of the massively popular proxy services to anonymize whois, and going through great lengths to not disclose the identity of the company,
would help with these types of things.
Can a Kentucky attorney general get a court order or subpoena to make an ISP in California reveal the identity of the company operating the web server,
without a specific suspicion or even California law being alleged as broken?
Maybe.
Can a Kentucky AG get an ISP in Mexico, Canada, or Newfoundland to do the same?
Probably not.
If Slashdot can have Anonymous cowards, why have forum sites not taken a similar stance, if it can offer them some minor protection against having 33 AGs suddenly going after them when they didn't even break any laws.....?
That's amazing. I didn't realize the servers ran on 0 Watt power
Your ISP doesn't run the webservers you are talking to.
They only run the network infrastructure; switches and routers.
Of course these consume power, but the variations of ISP network equipment electricity usage are so small that they are irrelevent, even when multiplied by the number of customers.
There is a much larger quantity of electricity that is consumed by idle capacity.
Every port that is lit up consumes electricity, regardless of whether a modulated signal is being transmitted over it or not.
Your "always on" connection uses electricity on ISP equipment even when the data rate is 0.
fiber optics magically planted themselves in the ground to expand network capacity.
Broadband ISPs don't need to plant the fiber.
In most cases, additional fiber is not needed to meet their needs; the expensive connection is the one between the end user and the ISP's aggregation point.
Once the network media reaches the ISP's aggregation point, capacity is cheap.
The large broadband providers can expand capacity by adding more colors of light to their fiber (DWDM), and there are vast quantities of dark fiber in major facilities sitting idle.
Network capacity is not hard to add, and not scarce, some of them would just like you to think that it is.
Ironically this situation is also reflected in the electricity situation. The electrical system has a maximum load it can deliver as well.
And the telephone system has a maximum load as well. If 40% of the people in a city try to pick up their handset at the same time, and make a local call, things will get messy very quickly.
Telco switches have a limited number of simultaneous calls that can be switched, and it's a small number (compared to the number of phones connected).
And yet i've never heard of a Telco cutting anyone off for using the phone too often, or trying to bill per-minute beyond a certain amount of local calling usage.
There are very few systems where capacity limits aren't a possible concern, aside from the number of listeners of a broadcast transmission.
The only real question is... how expensive to maintain capacity, and how expensive it is to expand/upgrade.
And expanding broadband/ISP capacity turns out to be easy.
It's more expensive for an ISP to add new customers than to expand capacity to their aggregation points, which are usually in Telco COs and Datacenters, where obtaining more bandwidth and peering with other providers is inexpensive.
Their primary cost would be equipment upgrades.
A drop in the bucket compared to what electric companies have to spend, however.
In the case of broadband providers, most of the infrastructure is already paid for, with other services. For example, if you have a Cable provider. Your monthly fee for cable TV already covered their costs of maintaining all that cabling.
The monthly fees cover infrastructure.
Most infrastructure that would be subject to the elements is buried; unlike with power, transmission of communication signals is efficient enough underground, and infrastructure is rarely ever damaged.
Cable companies don't charge you metered TV access, no matter how much you watch, or how many TVs you have, the price is the same. I wonder what the average consumer thinks when they've bought such a service for 10 years, and the same cable co. comes out with an "unlimited" broadband service?
Infrastructure maintenance does not cost more based on usage (unlike with Electricity). There are no transformers to burn out, mass produced electronics: cable modems are cheap.
The ISP will not have to maintain more cabling to customers just because some people are buying internet services or using X Gigabytes/month; the additional infrastructure needed for IP connectivity is smaller in comparison.
The additional infrastructure required for broadband providers is backhaul, their own internet connectivity, per-port hardware and software licensing costs imposed by their head end manufacturers, and they don't pay much for this per customer, maybe a few bucks a month.
Where I live electricity is generated by water falling out of the sky, collecting in a river, and eventually turning a turbine.
Yes.. some people have a fuel supply that is in the public domain and easier to extract from, and it's difficult to determine the cost for resources like flow through a river which are paid for by someone other than the plant operator.
But that plant still has to be maintained.
Those turbines are expensive, and every time they are turned, there is some amount of mechanical wear incurred.
It's not like an ISP's switch, which does not experience mechanical wear as it forwards each packet.
Electricity is scarce enough commodity, that there is a limited supply and a market for it, and it can be bought and sold easily.
Bandwidth cannot be bought and sold easily like a normal commidity, except in large datacenters.
If your ISP has a 3 Gigabit pipe to a node in your city, which is barely utilized, it is not like they can sell off the unused portion on the market to other providers, unless of course they can find someone who needs that kind of bandwidth, in or through your city.
Once all the river flow is used up, the plant operator cannot just build another river.
Electricity is billed by the kWH, because there a certain number of pounds of coal, petro, or other fuel that must be burned to produce each kWH.
It turns out, that obtaining fuel and using it to generate electricity incurs a per-kWH cost on the producer.
The cost of extracting coal, oil from the earth is high.
The cost of catching solar radiation, hydro power, geo power, or operating any type of electricity production is also expensive and there is literally a cost for each kWH generated, based on the resources that have to be consumed to get a kWH.
What would be more like network bandwidth would be the transmission of electricity.
Suppose you could buy Electricity from whatever power plant you wanted, and you had to pay an Electricity grid operator to allow you to download that electricity from your chosen power plant.
Maybe the grid operator offers various plans, a '500 Watt plan' 'a 1000 Watt plan' and a '10000 Watt plan'
for an electricity connection.
And they list it as "unlimited". The average user's assumption is you can download an unlimited amount of kWH, and you are restricted only by your transfer rate cap, the speed of your connection (e.g. there are no provider imposed "limits").
What some of the other posters suggest is that "unlimited" would mean "You can transfer some electricity 24/7 continuously", not
"There is no kWH limit, other than your cap"
The thing is, the network operator doesn't have per-kWH or per-megabit costs.
They increase profit from selling people more, with the expectation they won't have to deliver everyone's full limit to everyone 24/7.
And take advantage of statistical over-subscription, so they can sell resources multiple times, according to the fact that
most people will use less than what they bought most of the time.
It's like web hosting providers that sell people 100gb of disk plans for $5 a month.
If 95% of their users will only use a small portion of what they have paid for, then they can oversubscribe 95% of the resources.
The 5% that actually use the whole 100gb cost so little, that the oversubscription is worth it.
If they got too greedy for their own good, they could try to find reasons to suspend the accounts of the 5% or convince them to go away.
This might increase the profit slightly, but would also put them at risk of having even consumers in the 95% to get angry with them.
On the other hand..... if they were a broadband provider in the US, they have essentially a monopoly.
And customers have no easy methods of retaliation, because they obviously want the bandwidth, and there is no competition to switch to.
So why not take advantage of this situation, and use it as a chance to get more money?
Not really. Imagine if electricity worked like internet data. i.e. You pay $400 a month and get unlimited usage.
Oh... stop right there.
Electricity is completely different from network capacity.
Electricity has to be generated, by consuming raw materials that produce an equivalent amount of electricity.
Electricity is a finite scarce, consumable resource, generating it is expensive.
And once used it is gone, and must be replaced by using more resources to generate more electricity.
Usage of an ISP network, on the other hand, is not permanently consumed.
When you download at 10 Megabits for 5 or 6 hours, the ISP does not permanently lose and have to replace anything,
to give the next person 10 Megabits.
The moment you stop the download, all the transfer gets returned to the network.
More network bandwidth does not have to be generated by consuming more raw materials, for the next user.
Network bandwidth is not a consumable good like electricity, as mentioned... it's more like a library book.
Adding network capacity is inexpensive, compared to generating electricity.
It requires building more infrastructure, but once its built -- more work is not required as long as it can serve simultaneous data needs of the nodes on the network.
Bandwidth scarcity is about what nodes are trying to do simultaneously on the network, not about total bits transferred.
For example, if 10 million people want to watch a live video feed that starts at exactly 6:00 PM EST.
That causes a hell of a lot more network congestion, than if 20 million people want to download a Linux ISO over BitTorrent
over a 5 day period.
Nice try. Last I checked "Unlimited" and "Always On" were two different features, and always listed as different features.
"10 Megabits / 512k Download Unlimited"
Means you can download and achieve 10 megabits, and unlimited means you are allowed to download at 10 Megabits down and 512kbps up, continuously, 24/7.
720 hours a month, and that is what is included in the quoted price.
Consume is not the right word here... bandwidth is not "consumed" really.
Infrastructure is utilized.
The difference is when you 'consume' something it's gone, when you utilize something it is just tied up until you are done with it.
For example: You consume a piece of meat. Because once you eat it, that piece of meet is gone.
However, when you check a book out at the library you don't consume the book, you just have a hold of it temporarily, you utilize one book, and are supposed to return it in a few days.
Similarly, when you download a file, you utilize network capacity, and once your file download is completed, the network capacity in fact is automatically returned, without you having to go drive somewhere and return your 100Mb of bit time on the wire.
By definition if you are no longer using those bit times, they have been returned.
Don't buy the iPad if it doesn't have the features you need.
This is not a corporate filter: every company has to make technology decisions about what they include and don't include in their products,
depending on the target audience and what they want the functionality of the device to be.
The iPad is not the be all end all, end of the line product for Netbook owners to switch to.
If it does not meet people's needs it will not sell. Every technology has features and limitations.
And there will be competition, if there are markets whose needs are not met by iPad, because there is profit to be made in selling people what they want.
Just because your shiny new iPad doesn't have a parallel port to plug in your 1990s-era printer doesn't mean we have a devolution.
Sometimes the market moves away from older technologies, and you have to switch to the new standards when you get new toys.
P.S. I neglected to mention the iJail / iPrison has much more effective means of disabling Jailbreakers than Apple could hope to accomplish with the iPhone.
And pissed off "vigilantes" who got a ticket issued by the system, who decided they wanted to take it out on the camera.
It just takes one jerk with a shotgun to put a hole in your plan quite literally.
So just ruggedness against the weather and bad electricity isn't the only concern here.
You might want to think about surveillance monitoring for security as well, IR camera, and a robust data uplink, so at least you have a chance of getting a picture if anyone decides they want to try to tamper with the system.
Slashdot Mirror
The $5 is in the wrong direction for that to be the case. Google already receives consideration from the developer in the form of an app submitted to their gallery for use by Google's customers.
On the other hand, the developer doesn't receive compensation from Google for developing and submitting an app.
The average person does not have online access with their CC provider and a habit of constantly logging into their online account and refreshing the page every 30 seconds to look for any unusual $5 transactions they do not remember.
Much of the population won't have a chance of knowing about the $5 charge until 30 days later when they receive their paper statements.
Of those people..... many won't notice a $5 unexpected Google charge in there. If they do, they might not immediately realize this isn't something they (or their spouse bought) earlier in the month.
Doubly so if they've ever actually bought anything from Google.
Oh right.... 30 days is Plenty of time for a malicious extension to have attracted some people, got it installed, and done damage.
In the off chance that the CC owner notices, just try again, repeat ad naseum.
It is really more like this situation. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one.
As for houses, locks are to keep out wild animals and to help slow down a potential intruder. The burglar alarm, and devices like the .40 S&W and 9mm are supposed to be the real deterrants and defense against human threats.
Specifically, the 2nd amendment of the constitution which guarantees the people the right to bear arms and defend themselves and their constitutionally protected rights, including the right to life, and the right to the security of their effects.
It is considered to make things worse to use antibiotics except where medically essential. Use of antibiotics promotes growth of bacteria resistant to the antibiotics.
The resistant strains can then share genes with more harmful bacteria.
The result is the antibiotic is less effective, or might not even work when it's really needed due to a live-threatening infection, which is antibiotic-resistant due to the frivolous use of the antibiotic.
The "harm" is not that the antibiotic hurts you; the harm is that the use of the antibiotic makes the antibiotic less effective in the future when you (or other people) will live or die based on the question of whether or not the antibiotic will work.
\
Sorry.. no.. I saw the Neistat Brothers' video "Bike Thief"
People still bikes in broad daylight en masse, nobody cares.
They can't really do it, as that would effect m any legitimate developers.
Many people do not have any credit cards, and use debit, or prepaid cards instead, for online transactions.
No... I would say it hinders petty criminals and has minimal effects on large-scale criminals.
They would need to do more than simply charge a $5 fee to have an effective barrier.
They are not rewarding the early adopters. They are penalizing everyone who hasn't published an extension yet.
If you wrote the code and haven't gotten the account to publish to the gallery yet, then you are screwed over by the $5 fine/penalty.
Charging everyone a $5 penalty as a way to "deal with" the 3 or 4 script kiddies kind of sucks.
All a malware author needs is a couple dozen people to install their malicious app and get critical info snooped, or snooker the user into paying more, they will easily get PROFIT after the $5 fine.
On the other hand, for us folks writing free apps, the $5 fee is kind of debilitating. I think we will stick with browsers whose authors are less hostile to developers, such as Firefox.
Last I checked Apple does not charge for the ability to develop Safari extensions and have them appear in the extension gallery.
I believe you must be thinking of something different Apple charges for; you don't need a WWDC subscription to write safari browser extensions and publish.
This is a side effect of "hate speech" laws that have come about.
In the US, there is no hate speech laws, the 1st amendment of the US constitution broadly prohibits regulation of the content of speech.
China cannot sue you in the US for laws broken in China.
China also cannot extradite you, unless you were physically in China, broke laws when in China, and fled from justice there.
Even if you did, the US might not hand you over for extradition.
I think the AGs from other states are playing an intimidation game here
They might not have a legal leg to stand on, and no charges they can bring successfully... but their concerns and the way they keep publicizing them may harm the reputation of the site.
It would be interesting to see Topix Suing 32 state AGs for defamation and some type of abuse, instead of caving in.
Probably, registering the domain through one of the massively popular proxy services to anonymize whois, and going through great lengths to not disclose the identity of the company, would help with these types of things.
Can a Kentucky attorney general get a court order or subpoena to make an ISP in California reveal the identity of the company operating the web server, without a specific suspicion or even California law being alleged as broken?
Maybe.
Can a Kentucky AG get an ISP in Mexico, Canada, or Newfoundland to do the same? Probably not.
If Slashdot can have Anonymous cowards, why have forum sites not taken a similar stance, if it can offer them some minor protection against having 33 AGs suddenly going after them when they didn't even break any laws.....?
And how would that be remotely legal at all?
They are not required to remove comments, they chose to do so. They could change their stance to only remove comments with a court order.
That's amazing. I didn't realize the servers ran on 0 Watt power
Your ISP doesn't run the webservers you are talking to. They only run the network infrastructure; switches and routers.
Of course these consume power, but the variations of ISP network equipment electricity usage are so small that they are irrelevent, even when multiplied by the number of customers.
There is a much larger quantity of electricity that is consumed by idle capacity. Every port that is lit up consumes electricity, regardless of whether a modulated signal is being transmitted over it or not.
Your "always on" connection uses electricity on ISP equipment even when the data rate is 0.
fiber optics magically planted themselves in the ground to expand network capacity.
Broadband ISPs don't need to plant the fiber. In most cases, additional fiber is not needed to meet their needs; the expensive connection is the one between the end user and the ISP's aggregation point.
Once the network media reaches the ISP's aggregation point, capacity is cheap.
The large broadband providers can expand capacity by adding more colors of light to their fiber (DWDM), and there are vast quantities of dark fiber in major facilities sitting idle.
Network capacity is not hard to add, and not scarce, some of them would just like you to think that it is.
Ironically this situation is also reflected in the electricity situation. The electrical system has a maximum load it can deliver as well.
And the telephone system has a maximum load as well. If 40% of the people in a city try to pick up their handset at the same time, and make a local call, things will get messy very quickly.
Telco switches have a limited number of simultaneous calls that can be switched, and it's a small number (compared to the number of phones connected).
And yet i've never heard of a Telco cutting anyone off for using the phone too often, or trying to bill per-minute beyond a certain amount of local calling usage.
There are very few systems where capacity limits aren't a possible concern, aside from the number of listeners of a broadcast transmission.
The only real question is... how expensive to maintain capacity, and how expensive it is to expand/upgrade. And expanding broadband/ISP capacity turns out to be easy.
It's more expensive for an ISP to add new customers than to expand capacity to their aggregation points, which are usually in Telco COs and Datacenters, where obtaining more bandwidth and peering with other providers is inexpensive.
Their primary cost would be equipment upgrades. A drop in the bucket compared to what electric companies have to spend, however.
In the case of broadband providers, most of the infrastructure is already paid for, with other services. For example, if you have a Cable provider. Your monthly fee for cable TV already covered their costs of maintaining all that cabling. The monthly fees cover infrastructure.
Most infrastructure that would be subject to the elements is buried; unlike with power, transmission of communication signals is efficient enough underground, and infrastructure is rarely ever damaged.
Cable companies don't charge you metered TV access, no matter how much you watch, or how many TVs you have, the price is the same. I wonder what the average consumer thinks when they've bought such a service for 10 years, and the same cable co. comes out with an "unlimited" broadband service?
Infrastructure maintenance does not cost more based on usage (unlike with Electricity). There are no transformers to burn out, mass produced electronics: cable modems are cheap.
The ISP will not have to maintain more cabling to customers just because some people are buying internet services or using X Gigabytes/month; the additional infrastructure needed for IP connectivity is smaller in comparison.
The additional infrastructure required for broadband providers is backhaul, their own internet connectivity, per-port hardware and software licensing costs imposed by their head end manufacturers, and they don't pay much for this per customer, maybe a few bucks a month.
Where I live electricity is generated by water falling out of the sky, collecting in a river, and eventually turning a turbine.
Yes.. some people have a fuel supply that is in the public domain and easier to extract from, and it's difficult to determine the cost for resources like flow through a river which are paid for by someone other than the plant operator.
But that plant still has to be maintained. Those turbines are expensive, and every time they are turned, there is some amount of mechanical wear incurred.
It's not like an ISP's switch, which does not experience mechanical wear as it forwards each packet.
Electricity is scarce enough commodity, that there is a limited supply and a market for it, and it can be bought and sold easily.
Bandwidth cannot be bought and sold easily like a normal commidity, except in large datacenters.
If your ISP has a 3 Gigabit pipe to a node in your city, which is barely utilized, it is not like they can sell off the unused portion on the market to other providers, unless of course they can find someone who needs that kind of bandwidth, in or through your city.
Once all the river flow is used up, the plant operator cannot just build another river.
So are the increased trends in searches for android due to Google's Android OS?
Or do these statistics just show a sudden increase in popularity of Mr. Data, the Android from Star Trek?
Or a resurgence of popularity in regards to artificial bipeds and robotics in general?
Electricity is billed by the kWH, because there a certain number of pounds of coal, petro, or other fuel that must be burned to produce each kWH.
It turns out, that obtaining fuel and using it to generate electricity incurs a per-kWH cost on the producer. The cost of extracting coal, oil from the earth is high. The cost of catching solar radiation, hydro power, geo power, or operating any type of electricity production is also expensive and there is literally a cost for each kWH generated, based on the resources that have to be consumed to get a kWH.
What would be more like network bandwidth would be the transmission of electricity.
Suppose you could buy Electricity from whatever power plant you wanted, and you had to pay an Electricity grid operator to allow you to download that electricity from your chosen power plant.
Maybe the grid operator offers various plans, a '500 Watt plan' 'a 1000 Watt plan' and a '10000 Watt plan' for an electricity connection.
And they list it as "unlimited". The average user's assumption is you can download an unlimited amount of kWH, and you are restricted only by your transfer rate cap, the speed of your connection (e.g. there are no provider imposed "limits").
What some of the other posters suggest is that "unlimited" would mean "You can transfer some electricity 24/7 continuously", not "There is no kWH limit, other than your cap"
The thing is, the network operator doesn't have per-kWH or per-megabit costs.
They increase profit from selling people more, with the expectation they won't have to deliver everyone's full limit to everyone 24/7. And take advantage of statistical over-subscription, so they can sell resources multiple times, according to the fact that most people will use less than what they bought most of the time.
It's like web hosting providers that sell people 100gb of disk plans for $5 a month.
If 95% of their users will only use a small portion of what they have paid for, then they can oversubscribe 95% of the resources. The 5% that actually use the whole 100gb cost so little, that the oversubscription is worth it.
If they got too greedy for their own good, they could try to find reasons to suspend the accounts of the 5% or convince them to go away. This might increase the profit slightly, but would also put them at risk of having even consumers in the 95% to get angry with them.
On the other hand..... if they were a broadband provider in the US, they have essentially a monopoly. And customers have no easy methods of retaliation, because they obviously want the bandwidth, and there is no competition to switch to.
So why not take advantage of this situation, and use it as a chance to get more money?
Not really. Imagine if electricity worked like internet data. i.e. You pay $400 a month and get unlimited usage.
Oh... stop right there.
Electricity is completely different from network capacity.
Electricity has to be generated, by consuming raw materials that produce an equivalent amount of electricity. Electricity is a finite scarce, consumable resource, generating it is expensive.
And once used it is gone, and must be replaced by using more resources to generate more electricity.
Usage of an ISP network, on the other hand, is not permanently consumed. When you download at 10 Megabits for 5 or 6 hours, the ISP does not permanently lose and have to replace anything, to give the next person 10 Megabits.
The moment you stop the download, all the transfer gets returned to the network.
More network bandwidth does not have to be generated by consuming more raw materials, for the next user. Network bandwidth is not a consumable good like electricity, as mentioned... it's more like a library book.
Adding network capacity is inexpensive, compared to generating electricity. It requires building more infrastructure, but once its built -- more work is not required as long as it can serve simultaneous data needs of the nodes on the network.
Bandwidth scarcity is about what nodes are trying to do simultaneously on the network, not about total bits transferred.
For example, if 10 million people want to watch a live video feed that starts at exactly 6:00 PM EST.
That causes a hell of a lot more network congestion, than if 20 million people want to download a Linux ISO over BitTorrent over a 5 day period.
Nice try. Last I checked "Unlimited" and "Always On" were two different features, and always listed as different features.
"10 Megabits / 512k Download Unlimited"
Means you can download and achieve 10 megabits, and unlimited means you are allowed to download at 10 Megabits down and 512kbps up, continuously, 24/7. 720 hours a month, and that is what is included in the quoted price.
Are you sure it's the Linux ISO that is pornographic and not the one time pad that is pornographic?
With the right One time Pad, you can turn a Linux ISO into a Windows XP install CD....
Consume is not the right word here... bandwidth is not "consumed" really. Infrastructure is utilized.
The difference is when you 'consume' something it's gone, when you utilize something it is just tied up until you are done with it.
For example: You consume a piece of meat. Because once you eat it, that piece of meet is gone.
However, when you check a book out at the library you don't consume the book, you just have a hold of it temporarily, you utilize one book, and are supposed to return it in a few days.
Similarly, when you download a file, you utilize network capacity, and once your file download is completed, the network capacity in fact is automatically returned, without you having to go drive somewhere and return your 100Mb of bit time on the wire.
By definition if you are no longer using those bit times, they have been returned.
Don't buy the iPad if it doesn't have the features you need. This is not a corporate filter: every company has to make technology decisions about what they include and don't include in their products, depending on the target audience and what they want the functionality of the device to be.
The iPad is not the be all end all, end of the line product for Netbook owners to switch to.
If it does not meet people's needs it will not sell. Every technology has features and limitations. And there will be competition, if there are markets whose needs are not met by iPad, because there is profit to be made in selling people what they want.
Just because your shiny new iPad doesn't have a parallel port to plug in your 1990s-era printer doesn't mean we have a devolution.
Sometimes the market moves away from older technologies, and you have to switch to the new standards when you get new toys.
P.S. I neglected to mention the iJail / iPrison has much more effective means of disabling Jailbreakers than Apple could hope to accomplish with the iPhone.
Specifically: armed guards.
Vandalism
And pissed off "vigilantes" who got a ticket issued by the system, who decided they wanted to take it out on the camera.
It just takes one jerk with a shotgun to put a hole in your plan quite literally.
So just ruggedness against the weather and bad electricity isn't the only concern here.
You might want to think about surveillance monitoring for security as well, IR camera, and a robust data uplink, so at least you have a chance of getting a picture if anyone decides they want to try to tamper with the system.