The internet has nothing wrong with it that we couldn't fix with a combination of net neutrality and convincing American ISPs to get off their asses and bring us up to speed with the rest of the third world.
As for this BS marketroid term "Internet of Things"... Please people, just... Don't let them win. The internet has always had "things" on it. Whether that "thing" means your PC or your phone or your microwave. The idea of having every device in your house online should terrify you, not delight you, so fuck upgrades that make it easier for your fridge to tell the NSA that you eat the same things as Joe Terrorist.
I have no faith in our leaders here in the US or in the EU to stop Putin.
Stop him from doing what, exactly?
So far, we have a bunch of former Soviet satellites holding referendums on independence. Pooty hasn't actually "done" anything yet.
This makes the US and EU situation particularly laughable - Whether or not Crimea really wants to join Russia or not, we have imposed sanctions against private individuals because unrelated third parties held protest-votes that make the UN look bad. And the closest we can come to even calling those votes/referendums illegal, they violate the will of a group of thugs who overthrew the legitimate, democratically elected Ukraine government a few months ago.
We need to stay the fuck out of this debacle before we start WW3 over literally nothing.
I have to wonder why the idea of adaptive vsync wasn't thought of earlier or implemented into display standards earlier.
I have to wonder why we still use the concept of sync and porch and blanking interval and even frames, etc at all, when we all now run pixel-addressable digital displays rather than a magnetically confined analog electron beam physically sweeping over a surface.
"Tearing" results from the display updating halfway through a complete refresh. Why the hell do displays still do complete refreshes? No need whatsoever to update anything but the small subset of pixels that have changed. And no need whatsoever to do that in some blessed-from-on-high linear scan pattern from left-to-right top-to-bottom manner, either.
How about if the next gen of video hardware stops pretending it still needs to support CRTs, and we can all move on from caring about metrics like "refresh rate" that haven't meant a damned thing in over a decade?
"GM thinks they'll be drawn to 'a powerful antenna that's stronger than that of a smartphone, along with a Wi-Fi hotspot that operates without draining a mobile device's battery. That hotspot is on any time the car is on."
I actually use a 4g modem for my primary home internet. I have a cute little USB-powered fob that acts as a hotspot, and it has an external antenna port if you need a better signal.
And yes, I take it with me when I go on road-trips - I'd trade it in a heartbeat for "real" broadband at home, but portable does have its perks.
So what, exactly, does GM view as its market for this particular scam? People who need near-broadband speed in their cars, for some use that draws very little actual data (based on the caps mentioned), and have no clue how to use a MiFi/JetPack/etc 4g hotspot?
Too big to fail? More like too dumb to realize they've already died.
By the time you actually have two years of experience, you will count as a senior developer.
That said, I'll give you the same advice I give everyone that applies to my company - Learn the Microsoft food chain. Yes, I do Open Source dev on my own time too. I run and like Linux at home. But when I hire someone, I want you to know ASP.NET inside and out. You know PHP? Great... Cute... Next!
Another factor is that a person is not always producing, but a competence resource. What is a five minute action for a person with competence can be a week long investigation for another
Google "101%" and you'll get an idea of just what level of BS most CEOs believe.
They consider us fucking robots. Every second of downtime means lost productivity to them - Despite the fact that when I get the chance to browse Slashdot at work, it means everything works well at that moment in time.
Meanwhile, if MSN loads slowly, we get nonstop calls from the entire upper management team. Funny, that - No doubt the latest sports stats and Lindsay Lohan adventures weight heavily on the long-term strategic position of my company.
Another factor is that a person is not always producing, but a competence resource. What is a five minute action for a person with competence can be a week long investigation for another
This.
I wouldn't describe my job as "hard". I have about a 30% duty cycle, on a typical day. And yet, that doesn't mean you could replace three people like me with just me. When the time comes to save the day, I need similarly qualified "boots on the ground" to get everything done ASAP and minimize downtime. Compare that to how much it costs for a multinational to lost the ability to post sales for an hour, and I look like a goddamned steal.
For the most part, I try to fill my spare time with "fun" projects that just happen to marginally benefit my employer. But when something goes wrong, having me there to fix it in seconds rather than letting the company falter uselessly for days at a time more than justifies my salary.
Now, if they wanted to pay me somewhere around 5k per half-hour incident 15-20 times a year (and let me sleep in most days), hey, I wouldn't object. But Corporate America hasn't really matured yet to the point where they understand that it doesn't take a body at a desk to put out the occasional fire.
Which one of those arguments did you want to plant your flag on?
I see in hindsight how folks could take my point the wrong way. I actually just meant "X are not subsets of the features of this game", trying to stay on the original topic as much as possible. I could (and perhaps should) also have used "shooting Nazi zombies" and "intergalactic trade missions" to express my point, though I don't feel those would have come across quite so sharply (for good or for bad).
Welcome to America, where we have now passed through the stage where money is equivalent to speech and reached the point where money is the only socially-acceptable form of speech.
I bemoan that exact point often. I don't, however, feel it really appropriate to use my free speech rights to complain about game content. Sure, I may bitch about flaky RNGs every now and then, but that doesn't really reach the level of starting an outright movement to force the publisher's hand to include content I want but they did not.
Or we could just, y'know, use Chromium/Iron or MSIE or even a dark-horse like Opera or Safari.
Personally, I still use FF on my PC, though the last ESR version, I don't piss around with their daily feature-breaking releases. But for mobile, FF's refusal to just port the desktop version has left it so badly broken and unconfigurable to behave better that I actually use the default Android browser over FF. I'd go with Chrome, but by some incomprehensible business decision, Google hasn't backported Chrome to anything prior to ICS.
FTA: "But we will experiment. In the coming weeks, we’ll be landing tests on our pre-release channels to see whether we can make things like the new tab page more useful, particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history."
Or how about just not recommending anything to me? That too complicated a concept, or just not enough money in it?
Funny thing about the web - I get to decide where I go and what I see and when. Any attempts to circumvent that control, whether by obnoxious advertising or regional access controls or even hijacking my new blank tabs with anything other than a new blank tab, people will push back against. And people will succeed, because you ain't the only game in town - And yes, that includes Mozilla, it includes Google, it includes Microsoft. Give us what we want, not what you wish we wanted, or we will move on and leave you to die from prolonged irrelevance.
I completely support the right of gays to marry (to the extent that I support any marriage, an institution I wholly reject, as does my long-term partner). But this amounts to a purely manufactured controversy. The game contains what it contains; don't like it? Don't play it. Send a message with your wallet, rather than pissing and moaning about a game you didn't create not behaving like you want it to.
So they pick up a large number of people who won't ever pay a dime while disenchanting the existing base of people who are known to play video games. That's idiotic.
I think, though, that pretty much perfectly explains the 24 hour trend mentioned...
I play free games almost exclusively. A great many of them make it very obvious that you won't get far without paying - And that alone explains the rapid player die-off. Most free gamers don't want to pay to play, and once they discover that a given game makes it all but impossible to play without forking over cash, the player drops it like a wet turd.
By comparison, I have a handful of freemium games that I've played on and off for literally years. Two things to note about that - First, that the game has lasted for years, when the more abusive pay-to-play games tend to vanish within a few months of release. And second, that the game remains playable despite the majority of players not paying anything.
That right there describes the key to a successful F2P game: All aspects of the game need to function well and not have an unreasonable difficulty level for all players, not just the paying ones (and on the flip side, if you can pay for stuff that makes the game too easy, the paying players will get bored and go away). I would go further and say that games like that also somewhat explain the 0.2% figure as well, in that those players essentially subsidize the entire playerbase for relatively non-game-breaking perks. Most commonly, it gives paying players just enough of an edge to put them in the hall-of-fame/leaderboards/top-players listings, effectively "crediting" them for their support, but not much else.
I have to suspect most of the hate for F2P games in this discussion comes from people who have never played one of the "good" ones. Yes, complete crap exists, and yes, it describes the majority of the F2P market. You have to factor in to your evaluation of the market as a whole the fact that it costs nothing to try them, however.
No one is going to shoot you for not paying taxes.
And what do you suppose they do when someone refuses to peacefully submit to arrest for failure to pay their official annual extortion fee, through a barred and reinforced door?
Hint: They don't challenge you to a debate.
They may imprison you, but that's a conscious choice.
A choice between prison and? Again, we go back to "Government Guns". We always go back to that, because the government really has no other power except the power to kill us if we don't oblige them. The Bill of Rights doesn't grant us our rights, it merely carves out a niche of special subjects We The People outright ban the government from regulating. Try reminding them of that next time you stand in a designated Free Speech Zone(tm).
/ Fact of the day: The US made it through over half of its existence with no income tax in place except for extremely limited wartime assessments.
So this ruling of course means that CMU will compensate some professor or former student handsomely with royalties for this IP that they stole via their "Top Hits of the Robber Barons" terms of employment/enrollment?
For a privately owned company that helps keep people warm in the winter. My conscience can live with that.
Has your government done anything you're not proud of? Comitted any acts you call evil? You chose to pay taxes didn't you?
No, actually, I don't. I submit to taxation only under duress, the threat of Government Guns appearing on my doorstep. I actively oppose the majority of US foreign policy, and consider the government in its current form as little more than an occupying entity entirely hostile to both the constitution and the founding principles of my country.
You do realize that the FCC has thousands of employees. And that you just called them all dipshits, over the rules created by the FCC leadership, which was appointed and installed by various politicians...
Did you choose where you currently work, or did someone pull you out of your home at gunpoint and command you to do job X?
When someone choses to work for incompetent dipshits, it doesn't really reflect well on their own level of genius.
The problem here comes from having two groups of people in the world - People who like dousing themselves in mostly-alcohol every morning, and people who hate the first group for making the office reek like a French whorehouse. Thankfully, perfume (and cologne - Males don't get a pass on this one) wearers fall into a small minority, but it only takes one or two to ruin it for everybody.
As for Bitcoin specifically... Can you say "jumped the shark"? And make no mistake, I quite like Bitcoin and use it, well, if not "regularly", a few times a year (and yes, for entirely legal purchases - My weed dealer only takes USD, haters!). But the "scent" of a virtual currency? Pathetic.
/ like a slightly-too-warm video card baking off the nauseating aroma of cigarette tar clogging the heat sink.
They are selling something the don't own, so it won't be around long.
No, they have sold something they do own - Their own time, spent camping in the spot while people bid. As you point out, you can already do what TFS describes, without an app... You just won't optimize your revenue without the ability to list it in a place where a large number of bidders can compete.
Realistically, I really don't see how SF could outlaw this without accidentally banning just about every "we waste our time so you don't have to" service already in existence.
Would you blog if you thought the police could come and arrest you for anything the authorities might take offense to even if it wasnâ(TM)t' against the law technically speaking?
On the flip side of that, you can expect to see a ton of new Russian-language blogs spring up in "Iowa".
Funny how the internet works like that. You can only ban anonymity or censor certain types of content to the extent that you can lock down every single point of access.
Is that really so strange? In Italy we have the same law and it is purported as something good and beneficial to public order!!
Somehow, I don't really think you'll get very far trying to use the Italian legal system as a role model for "good and beneficial" these days.
Now, if only they could have found a way to pin the L'aquil earthquake on Knox' Satanic orgies, well, then we could talk. But as it stands, they just look silly.
No one should be storing any sort of sensetive file on a cloud service without first encrypting it.
Came in here to say exactly this.
Whether or not you trust Joe Sixpack with your files, why the hell do you trust DropBox themselves? Corporate America has proven to us, over and over and over, that they'll sell us out to the highest bidding government in a frickin' heartbeat. Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt!
I use Boxcryptor on all of my cloud services... Truecrypt also works well for that sort of thing.
Personally, I just use 7zip with a password and AES encryption. It doesn't necessarily have to thwart a direct attack by the NSA, just keep out Joe Sixpack, Google, and nosey Dropbox employees casually looking for homemade porn.
ISPs hold a monopoly on their customers, there is no other way to get to their network.
ISPs only have customers because of peerage agreements that let their customers get to the rest of the internet.
Any two-bit ISP (and in this context, that includes even the likes of Comcast) that thinks they can twist L3's arm has one hell of a nasty surprise waiting for them when their current contracts expire. This doesn't work quite the same as not getting to see this week's episode of Glee because of a pissing contest between cable companies and content providers - A week where Comcast customers can't get to Por... er... Google, means a week where Comcast loses half its customer base.
Slashdot Mirror
The internet has nothing wrong with it that we couldn't fix with a combination of net neutrality and convincing American ISPs to get off their asses and bring us up to speed with the rest of the third world.
As for this BS marketroid term "Internet of Things"... Please people, just... Don't let them win. The internet has always had "things" on it. Whether that "thing" means your PC or your phone or your microwave. The idea of having every device in your house online should terrify you, not delight you, so fuck upgrades that make it easier for your fridge to tell the NSA that you eat the same things as Joe Terrorist.
I have no faith in our leaders here in the US or in the EU to stop Putin.
Stop him from doing what, exactly?
So far, we have a bunch of former Soviet satellites holding referendums on independence. Pooty hasn't actually "done" anything yet.
This makes the US and EU situation particularly laughable - Whether or not Crimea really wants to join Russia or not, we have imposed sanctions against private individuals because unrelated third parties held protest-votes that make the UN look bad. And the closest we can come to even calling those votes/referendums illegal, they violate the will of a group of thugs who overthrew the legitimate, democratically elected Ukraine government a few months ago.
We need to stay the fuck out of this debacle before we start WW3 over literally nothing.
I have to wonder why the idea of adaptive vsync wasn't thought of earlier or implemented into display standards earlier.
I have to wonder why we still use the concept of sync and porch and blanking interval and even frames, etc at all, when we all now run pixel-addressable digital displays rather than a magnetically confined analog electron beam physically sweeping over a surface.
"Tearing" results from the display updating halfway through a complete refresh. Why the hell do displays still do complete refreshes? No need whatsoever to update anything but the small subset of pixels that have changed. And no need whatsoever to do that in some blessed-from-on-high linear scan pattern from left-to-right top-to-bottom manner, either.
How about if the next gen of video hardware stops pretending it still needs to support CRTs, and we can all move on from caring about metrics like "refresh rate" that haven't meant a damned thing in over a decade?
"GM thinks they'll be drawn to 'a powerful antenna that's stronger than that of a smartphone, along with a Wi-Fi hotspot that operates without draining a mobile device's battery. That hotspot is on any time the car is on."
I actually use a 4g modem for my primary home internet. I have a cute little USB-powered fob that acts as a hotspot, and it has an external antenna port if you need a better signal.
And yes, I take it with me when I go on road-trips - I'd trade it in a heartbeat for "real" broadband at home, but portable does have its perks.
So what, exactly, does GM view as its market for this particular scam? People who need near-broadband speed in their cars, for some use that draws very little actual data (based on the caps mentioned), and have no clue how to use a MiFi/JetPack/etc 4g hotspot?
Too big to fail? More like too dumb to realize they've already died.
By the time you actually have two years of experience, you will count as a senior developer.
That said, I'll give you the same advice I give everyone that applies to my company - Learn the Microsoft food chain. Yes, I do Open Source dev on my own time too. I run and like Linux at home. But when I hire someone, I want you to know ASP.NET inside and out. You know PHP? Great... Cute... Next!
Another factor is that a person is not always producing, but a competence resource. What is a five minute action for a person with competence can be a week long investigation for another
Google "101%" and you'll get an idea of just what level of BS most CEOs believe.
They consider us fucking robots. Every second of downtime means lost productivity to them - Despite the fact that when I get the chance to browse Slashdot at work, it means everything works well at that moment in time.
Meanwhile, if MSN loads slowly, we get nonstop calls from the entire upper management team. Funny, that - No doubt the latest sports stats and Lindsay Lohan adventures weight heavily on the long-term strategic position of my company.
Another factor is that a person is not always producing, but a competence resource. What is a five minute action for a person with competence can be a week long investigation for another
This.
I wouldn't describe my job as "hard". I have about a 30% duty cycle, on a typical day. And yet, that doesn't mean you could replace three people like me with just me. When the time comes to save the day, I need similarly qualified "boots on the ground" to get everything done ASAP and minimize downtime. Compare that to how much it costs for a multinational to lost the ability to post sales for an hour, and I look like a goddamned steal.
For the most part, I try to fill my spare time with "fun" projects that just happen to marginally benefit my employer. But when something goes wrong, having me there to fix it in seconds rather than letting the company falter uselessly for days at a time more than justifies my salary.
Now, if they wanted to pay me somewhere around 5k per half-hour incident 15-20 times a year (and let me sleep in most days), hey, I wouldn't object. But Corporate America hasn't really matured yet to the point where they understand that it doesn't take a body at a desk to put out the occasional fire.
Which one of those arguments did you want to plant your flag on?
I see in hindsight how folks could take my point the wrong way. I actually just meant "X are not subsets of the features of this game", trying to stay on the original topic as much as possible. I could (and perhaps should) also have used "shooting Nazi zombies" and "intergalactic trade missions" to express my point, though I don't feel those would have come across quite so sharply (for good or for bad).
Welcome to America, where we have now passed through the stage where money is equivalent to speech and reached the point where money is the only socially-acceptable form of speech.
I bemoan that exact point often. I don't, however, feel it really appropriate to use my free speech rights to complain about game content. Sure, I may bitch about flaky RNGs every now and then, but that doesn't really reach the level of starting an outright movement to force the publisher's hand to include content I want but they did not.
Fine, write your own browser.
Or we could just, y'know, use Chromium/Iron or MSIE or even a dark-horse like Opera or Safari.
Personally, I still use FF on my PC, though the last ESR version, I don't piss around with their daily feature-breaking releases. But for mobile, FF's refusal to just port the desktop version has left it so badly broken and unconfigurable to behave better that I actually use the default Android browser over FF. I'd go with Chrome, but by some incomprehensible business decision, Google hasn't backported Chrome to anything prior to ICS.
FTA: "But we will experiment. In the coming weeks, we’ll be landing tests on our pre-release channels to see whether we can make things like the new tab page more useful, particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history."
Or how about just not recommending anything to me? That too complicated a concept, or just not enough money in it?
Funny thing about the web - I get to decide where I go and what I see and when. Any attempts to circumvent that control, whether by obnoxious advertising or regional access controls or even hijacking my new blank tabs with anything other than a new blank tab, people will push back against. And people will succeed, because you ain't the only game in town - And yes, that includes Mozilla, it includes Google, it includes Microsoft. Give us what we want, not what you wish we wanted, or we will move on and leave you to die from prolonged irrelevance.
Now read that with s/LGBT/animals/.
Now read that with s/LGBT/power tools/.
I completely support the right of gays to marry (to the extent that I support any marriage, an institution I wholly reject, as does my long-term partner). But this amounts to a purely manufactured controversy. The game contains what it contains; don't like it? Don't play it. Send a message with your wallet, rather than pissing and moaning about a game you didn't create not behaving like you want it to.
So they pick up a large number of people who won't ever pay a dime while disenchanting the existing base of people who are known to play video games. That's idiotic.
I think, though, that pretty much perfectly explains the 24 hour trend mentioned...
I play free games almost exclusively. A great many of them make it very obvious that you won't get far without paying - And that alone explains the rapid player die-off. Most free gamers don't want to pay to play, and once they discover that a given game makes it all but impossible to play without forking over cash, the player drops it like a wet turd.
By comparison, I have a handful of freemium games that I've played on and off for literally years. Two things to note about that - First, that the game has lasted for years, when the more abusive pay-to-play games tend to vanish within a few months of release. And second, that the game remains playable despite the majority of players not paying anything.
That right there describes the key to a successful F2P game: All aspects of the game need to function well and not have an unreasonable difficulty level for all players, not just the paying ones (and on the flip side, if you can pay for stuff that makes the game too easy, the paying players will get bored and go away). I would go further and say that games like that also somewhat explain the 0.2% figure as well, in that those players essentially subsidize the entire playerbase for relatively non-game-breaking perks. Most commonly, it gives paying players just enough of an edge to put them in the hall-of-fame/leaderboards/top-players listings, effectively "crediting" them for their support, but not much else.
I have to suspect most of the hate for F2P games in this discussion comes from people who have never played one of the "good" ones. Yes, complete crap exists, and yes, it describes the majority of the F2P market. You have to factor in to your evaluation of the market as a whole the fact that it costs nothing to try them, however.
No one is going to shoot you for not paying taxes.
And what do you suppose they do when someone refuses to peacefully submit to arrest for failure to pay their official annual extortion fee, through a barred and reinforced door?
Hint: They don't challenge you to a debate.
They may imprison you, but that's a conscious choice.
A choice between prison and? Again, we go back to "Government Guns". We always go back to that, because the government really has no other power except the power to kill us if we don't oblige them. The Bill of Rights doesn't grant us our rights, it merely carves out a niche of special subjects We The People outright ban the government from regulating. Try reminding them of that next time you stand in a designated Free Speech Zone(tm).
/ Fact of the day: The US made it through over half of its existence with no income tax in place except for extremely limited wartime assessments.
So this ruling of course means that CMU will compensate some professor or former student handsomely with royalties for this IP that they stole via their "Top Hits of the Robber Barons" terms of employment/enrollment?
Alright genius, where do you work for?
For a privately owned company that helps keep people warm in the winter. My conscience can live with that.
Has your government done anything you're not proud of? Comitted any acts you call evil? You chose to pay taxes didn't you?
No, actually, I don't. I submit to taxation only under duress, the threat of Government Guns appearing on my doorstep. I actively oppose the majority of US foreign policy, and consider the government in its current form as little more than an occupying entity entirely hostile to both the constitution and the founding principles of my country.
Any more questions?
You do realize that the FCC has thousands of employees. And that you just called them all dipshits, over the rules created by the FCC leadership, which was appointed and installed by various politicians...
Did you choose where you currently work, or did someone pull you out of your home at gunpoint and command you to do job X?
When someone choses to work for incompetent dipshits, it doesn't really reflect well on their own level of genius.
The problem here comes from having two groups of people in the world - People who like dousing themselves in mostly-alcohol every morning, and people who hate the first group for making the office reek like a French whorehouse. Thankfully, perfume (and cologne - Males don't get a pass on this one) wearers fall into a small minority, but it only takes one or two to ruin it for everybody.
As for Bitcoin specifically... Can you say "jumped the shark"? And make no mistake, I quite like Bitcoin and use it, well, if not "regularly", a few times a year (and yes, for entirely legal purchases - My weed dealer only takes USD, haters!). But the "scent" of a virtual currency? Pathetic.
/ like a slightly-too-warm video card baking off the nauseating aroma of cigarette tar clogging the heat sink.
I did say "mythical". ;)
Yes, good catch, kudos to you, mea culpa.
Though as an aside, you make my earlier point quite nicely - How, exactly, do we define a clinical term as having a certain score on a mythical scale?
/ Charisma as the dump stat, FTW!
Informative, but that appears to be for NYC rather than SF?
Not to mention, largely unenforceable.
Reserving a spot "through his/her presence in the roadway"??? That would, amusingly enough, include actually parking as a violation. Brilliant!
Wow, people still want to pretend that a 'tard with a "mythical" IQ of 80 can someday become a rocket surgeon? That is so SCARY.
They are selling something the don't own, so it won't be around long.
No, they have sold something they do own - Their own time, spent camping in the spot while people bid. As you point out, you can already do what TFS describes, without an app... You just won't optimize your revenue without the ability to list it in a place where a large number of bidders can compete.
Realistically, I really don't see how SF could outlaw this without accidentally banning just about every "we waste our time so you don't have to" service already in existence.
Would you blog if you thought the police could come and arrest you for anything the authorities might take offense to even if it wasnâ(TM)t' against the law technically speaking?
On the flip side of that, you can expect to see a ton of new Russian-language blogs spring up in "Iowa".
Funny how the internet works like that. You can only ban anonymity or censor certain types of content to the extent that you can lock down every single point of access.
Is that really so strange? In Italy we have the same law and it is purported as something good and beneficial to public order!!
Somehow, I don't really think you'll get very far trying to use the Italian legal system as a role model for "good and beneficial" these days.
Now, if only they could have found a way to pin the L'aquil earthquake on Knox' Satanic orgies, well, then we could talk. But as it stands, they just look silly.
No one should be storing any sort of sensetive file on a cloud service without first encrypting it.
Came in here to say exactly this.
Whether or not you trust Joe Sixpack with your files, why the hell do you trust DropBox themselves? Corporate America has proven to us, over and over and over, that they'll sell us out to the highest bidding government in a frickin' heartbeat. Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt!
I use Boxcryptor on all of my cloud services... Truecrypt also works well for that sort of thing.
Personally, I just use 7zip with a password and AES encryption. It doesn't necessarily have to thwart a direct attack by the NSA, just keep out Joe Sixpack, Google, and nosey Dropbox employees casually looking for homemade porn.
ISPs hold a monopoly on their customers, there is no other way to get to their network.
ISPs only have customers because of peerage agreements that let their customers get to the rest of the internet.
Any two-bit ISP (and in this context, that includes even the likes of Comcast) that thinks they can twist L3's arm has one hell of a nasty surprise waiting for them when their current contracts expire. This doesn't work quite the same as not getting to see this week's episode of Glee because of a pissing contest between cable companies and content providers - A week where Comcast customers can't get to Por... er... Google, means a week where Comcast loses half its customer base.