Well, the definition of what is risque is cultural. In Kazikistahn, women showing their ankles is considered a lewd act. In Australia, bare breasts on TV isn't something that we care too much about. We've had two TV shows about sex, notably "Sex" and "Sex/Life", plus numerous documentaries. Both of these TV shows showed both sexes naked at various times. I belive the broadcasting laws say it's ok, as long as it's after 9PM. I've been back in Australia for 3 days, after spending 11 months in Canada, where almost all of the TV is American. In three days of casually flicking through all 5 of our TV stations, I've seen more nudity than all the time I was in Canada.
Maybe they should have put a clause like that into these net censorship laws. No www.playboy.com before 9PM;-)
Quite seriously, the tirade of obscenities which this action has caused me to spew forth is so vulgar and vile that common decency stops me from typing. I really hoped that for once our government would have some f**king brains, but nooo.
EFA is totally correct in saying that it is a political stunt. Honestly, they don't give a s**t about the moral wellbeing of Australians. Considering that one of our award winning adverts consiteted mainly of the word "Bugger", and that "If you drink and drive you're a bloody idiot" is a slogan endorsed by our police forces, that gives you a kind of idea about how non-anally retentive we all. Except Brian Haradine. This bill was introduced to pacify him, and him alone, so they could sell off our national phone service, and introduce a GST. Total assholes. I for one totally support the EFA's call for Richard Alston to resign.
But hey, at least it's still legal to burn our flag, and that they don't think that sticking the 10 commandments up on the wall, and confiscating nail clippers will stop mass murders in schools.
If anyone else was to provide internet service over cable, they would have to pay @Home for the bandwidth that their users use. Believe me, any ISP with half a brain would limit the speeds people can upload with, to stop servers, as they would end up paying @Home for what their users transfer. The only difference I would see if more people could provide access over cable is a possible additional pricing model, where you as the user pay for the data transferred, just like the ISP does. Small fry users would do this, since they use less, and "power users" would go for the flat rate but speed limited model, while warez puppies would have go for the @Work type service if they wanted to run their servers. Meaning more banner ads. Woop-de-f*cking-doo.
How often do you download 100mb of stuff in one day? Once a month maybe? Twice? Ok, say you're running a MP3 FTP server, with some good songs on it.. you're very likely to transfer up to 5GB+ per day of data. Over a month, you transfer about 150GB of data.. even if you're the biggest leech, it's unlikely you'll download anywhere near that much data. The point of this block is probably to discourage people from running servers, and in doing so, decrease the amount of data going over their pipes.
My point was that with a modem, *generally* you don't do much uploading, at least, I never have in the last 4 years I've had one, instead mostly downloading, where cablemodem is much faster. But I do agree with you, I think they should change it to "download speeds 100 times faster than modem".. or even better, compare it to a 56k modem instead of a 28.8.. "download speeds close to 40 times faster than a modem". Neither of which is likely to happen unless someone does the all american thing of suing their pants off for false advertising:-)
The reason they can provide very fast access for $40/month is because their economic model assumes that the connection won't transferring data all the time. If you want a connection where you can do that, be prepared to pay for it. Data transfers cost ISPs per/mb usually. With modem based ISPs, the people who pay $20/month and d/l 3mb of mail usually make up for the people who pay $20/month and transfer 700mbs of MP3s to a few hundred of their close friends. With cablemodem ISPs, the temptation is there to use it to run servers and all that stuff, but honestly, if everyone did that, there's no way they could keep prices as low as they do. Just think, for $20/month with a modem based ISP, you're paying for a connection to the net through your modem. For $40/month with cable, you're paying for the modem (outright cost usually $799), the infrastructure, the bandwidth you use, an IP address (class A blocks don't come cheap), tech support, email address.. blah blah blah. If a normal modem based ISP had to provide all these things, you'ld pay a lot more than $40.
Cablemodem isn't meant as a cheap way to host your website. It's a cheap way to view other people's websites at amazingly fast speeds. To host your website, pay $4.95/month to somewhere like prohosting.com, or get a T1 into your house. I think they're only about $10k install + $1k/month, for 1.45Mbps:)
Allow me to explain how capping upstream rates helps them meet network demands.. if you have 10 people spewing data out of their computer at 128kbps, they use less bandwidth than 10 people spewing out data at 798kbps. Say the ten people spewing at 798kpbs saturate the bandwidth of the area.. the 11th person who wants to browse the web will be slowed down by them. Say these 10 people are now limited to 128kbps. This means there's enough bandwidth for 60 people, instead of just 10, thus enabling them to provide service cheaper, because they don't have to lay more fiber to deal with all the bandwidth hogs.
@Home's promise of 100 times faster than a modem is still true. Download speeds are unchanged, which, if you use @Home like a modem, is all that matters. But the thing is, many @Home users DON'T use @Home like they use a modem. They use it like a broadband service, running FTP/Hotline/WWW/Game servers. Things which most @Home affiliates' AUP specifically forbids. As much as I like and use all the servers people run from @Home connections, I think it's time for you all to give up. I mean, face it.. you've been breaking the AUP and forced @Home's hand. Just be happy that they're just slowing your uploads (read: you leech-puppy's downloads) and not totally cutting off your service for breaking the AUP. Even with these limits, @Home is still great value. Think of how cheap 128kb ISDN access is some time:) And think what it would have cost to get 3mbit/sec downloads back in 95. And be glad you're not in Australia, where Cablemodem is limited to about 3 citys, costs $65/month for 100mb of downloads, then 35c/mb after that. My semi flamericious response to all of you complaining about this is: Quit whining. You have it pretty damn good.
Good to know you didn't worry about getting shot. Did you have to carry a gun to feel safe? Society works better on the principle that "he won't shoot me because he doesn't have a gun" than on "he won't shoot me because I have a gun too".
I don't know about AIM, since I don't use anything AOL branded, but I know that ICQ's lisence prohibts disassembling the protocol, so I would assume that adding ICQ support would breach the lisence for whatever ICQ client was used to develop it from.
I also agree that this sort of thing should be a seperate program. Adding it to Mozilla seems silly.
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Well, the definition of what is risque is cultural. In Kazikistahn, women showing their ankles is considered a lewd act. In Australia, bare breasts on TV isn't something that we care too much about. We've had two TV shows about sex, notably "Sex" and "Sex/Life", plus numerous documentaries. Both of these TV shows showed both sexes naked at various times. I belive the broadcasting laws say it's ok, as long as it's after 9PM. I've been back in Australia for 3 days, after spending 11 months in Canada, where almost all of the TV is American. In three days of casually flicking through all 5 of our TV stations, I've seen more nudity than all the time I was in Canada.
;-)
Maybe they should have put a clause like that into these net censorship laws. No www.playboy.com before 9PM
Quite seriously, the tirade of obscenities which this action has caused me to spew forth is so vulgar and vile that common decency stops me from typing. I really hoped that for once our government would have some f**king brains, but nooo.
EFA is totally correct in saying that it is a political stunt. Honestly, they don't give a s**t about the moral wellbeing of Australians. Considering that one of our award winning adverts consiteted mainly of the word "Bugger", and that "If you drink and drive you're a bloody idiot" is a slogan endorsed by our police forces, that gives you a kind of idea about how non-anally retentive we all. Except Brian Haradine. This bill was introduced to pacify him, and him alone, so they could sell off our national phone service, and introduce a GST. Total assholes. I for one totally support the EFA's call for Richard Alston to resign.
But hey, at least it's still legal to burn our flag, and that they don't think that sticking the 10 commandments up on the wall, and confiscating nail clippers will stop mass murders in schools.
:-)
If anyone else was to provide internet service over cable, they would have to pay @Home for the bandwidth that their users use. Believe me, any ISP with half a brain would limit the speeds people can upload with, to stop servers, as they would end up paying @Home for what their users transfer. The only difference I would see if more people could provide access over cable is a possible additional pricing model, where you as the user pay for the data transferred, just like the ISP does. Small fry users would do this, since they use less, and "power users" would go for the flat rate but speed limited model, while warez puppies would have go for the @Work type service if they wanted to run their servers. Meaning more banner ads. Woop-de-f*cking-doo.
How often do you download 100mb of stuff in one day? Once a month maybe? Twice? Ok, say you're running a MP3 FTP server, with some good songs on it.. you're very likely to transfer up to 5GB+ per day of data. Over a month, you transfer about 150GB of data.. even if you're the biggest leech, it's unlikely you'll download anywhere near that much data. The point of this block is probably to discourage people from running servers, and in doing so, decrease the amount of data going over their pipes.
My point was that with a modem, *generally* you don't do much uploading, at least, I never have in the last 4 years I've had one, instead mostly downloading, where cablemodem is much faster. But I do agree with you, I think they should change it to "download speeds 100 times faster than modem".. or even better, compare it to a 56k modem instead of a 28.8.. "download speeds close to 40 times faster than a modem". Neither of which is likely to happen unless someone does the all american thing of suing their pants off for false advertising :-)
The reason they can provide very fast access for $40/month is because their economic model assumes that the connection won't transferring data all the time. If you want a connection where you can do that, be prepared to pay for it. Data transfers cost ISPs per/mb usually. With modem based ISPs, the people who pay $20/month and d/l 3mb of mail usually make up for the people who pay $20/month and transfer 700mbs of MP3s to a few hundred of their close friends. With cablemodem ISPs, the temptation is there to use it to run servers and all that stuff, but honestly, if everyone did that, there's no way they could keep prices as low as they do. Just think, for $20/month with a modem based ISP, you're paying for a connection to the net through your modem. For $40/month with cable, you're paying for the modem (outright cost usually $799), the infrastructure, the bandwidth you use, an IP address (class A blocks don't come cheap), tech support, email address.. blah blah blah. If a normal modem based ISP had to provide all these things, you'ld pay a lot more than $40.
:)
Cablemodem isn't meant as a cheap way to host your website. It's a cheap way to view other people's websites at amazingly fast speeds. To host your website, pay $4.95/month to somewhere like prohosting.com, or get a T1 into your house. I think they're only about $10k install + $1k/month, for 1.45Mbps
Allow me to explain how capping upstream rates helps them meet network demands.. if you have 10 people spewing data out of their computer at 128kbps, they use less bandwidth than 10 people spewing out data at 798kbps. Say the ten people spewing at 798kpbs saturate the bandwidth of the area.. the 11th person who wants to browse the web will be slowed down by them. Say these 10 people are now limited to 128kbps. This means there's enough bandwidth for 60 people, instead of just 10, thus enabling them to provide service cheaper, because they don't have to lay more fiber to deal with all the bandwidth hogs.
Try using a modem sometime, then complain about how slow @Home is.
@Home's promise of 100 times faster than a modem is still true. Download speeds are unchanged, which, if you use @Home like a modem, is all that matters. But the thing is, many @Home users DON'T use @Home like they use a modem. They use it like a broadband service, running FTP/Hotline/WWW/Game servers. Things which most @Home affiliates' AUP specifically forbids. As much as I like and use all the servers people run from @Home connections, I think it's time for you all to give up. I mean, face it.. you've been breaking the AUP and forced @Home's hand. Just be happy that they're just slowing your uploads (read: you leech-puppy's downloads) and not totally cutting off your service for breaking the AUP. Even with these limits, @Home is still great value. Think of how cheap 128kb ISDN access is some time :) And think what it would have cost to get 3mbit/sec downloads back in 95. And be glad you're not in Australia, where Cablemodem is limited to about 3 citys, costs $65/month for 100mb of downloads, then 35c/mb after that. My semi flamericious response to all of you complaining about this is: Quit whining. You have it pretty damn good.
Good to know you didn't worry about getting shot. Did you have to carry a gun to feel safe? Society works better on the principle that "he won't shoot me because he doesn't have a gun" than on "he won't shoot me because I have a gun too".
I don't know about AIM, since I don't use anything AOL branded, but I know that ICQ's lisence prohibts disassembling the protocol, so I would assume that adding ICQ support would breach the lisence for whatever ICQ client was used to develop it from.
I also agree that this sort of thing should be a seperate program. Adding it to Mozilla seems silly.