I flattered that you display such faith in my libido and physical condition as to call my floppy a crowbar. But I can assure you nothing is further from the truth.
TFA and the Krome website state that the sword fighting is something that you do throughout the game, but that the Duel-mode is exclusive to the Wii.
How could it be any different? Most SW games I've played hinged on sword fighting. Particularly since I found the cheats to give me a sword in the first two levels of Jedi Outcast.
I hate to say this but pretty much every serious software I've installed on Windows in the past 3 years has let me pin-point where to install it. Even the games do.
I always thought IP meant Internet Protocol. But that's just me.
If I'm not mistaken though, it's largely Thomas Jefferson's work to define copyright law. To keep ye learned men writing ye learned works or some such.
I'm relatively sure the concept was, at first, relatively benign and not sinister at all.
I never said it's OK to advertise unlimited and not offer it. I just said I understand why it's being done and I understand why things can never be unlimited really. So, having said that....
I guess my main point is just that this is a typical/. discussion being made out of a non issue. It's not like Comcast is waging war on autonomous countries halfway across the globe, now is it?
In Dutch we would call (some of) the/. crowd people who make mountains out of mole-hills.
You, sir, just wrote the first well-balanced post in this discussion. I'll grant you all the points you made.
Bravo.
I also think it helps that you weren't whining about the amount of Hi-def dvd's you want to download for your kid's friend on the fifth PC in your villa.:-D
Hm. I never said I do serious work in the photography industry. First of all because I believe there is no such thing as "serious" photograhy. The only form of "Serious" and thereby "important" photography is the MRI they take of me when the shit hits the fan.
What I did say were two things:
1) I'm a photography "nut" 2) I don't need to print billboards.
This would indicate that I'm a hobbyist to those that actually read it. I can "plug" my site here but I won't. If you were ever to come across it, you'll see I ain't half bad either though. The photography-industry is not "most people". If it were, a friend of mine wouldn't have to have spent 7 years of his life busting his back trying to break into that same photography industry.
You lost your perspective on who John Q Subscriber is. John Q Subscriber is a man with a Canon Ixus 55 who likes to take pictures of his dog, kids and some flowers in jpeg mode.
I also work for tech support. I just spent 96 hours working on an escalation with one of the biggest banks in Europe. Still I don't think that most people have a 700 node HP-UX data centre at home connected to an XP disk array and a 2400-slot LTO3 silo.
I'm well aware of the different formats, that's why I mentioned a size and the fact that it got somehow ripped from DVD.:-D Obviously, there will be formats that will demand more space/bandwidth. I don't assume these are the formats that are currently most downloaded.
Go to any torrent tracker or p2p search engine, go to iTunes, e-music right now, and you'll see that 99.9% of content is Mp3 (or equivalent loss-based compression schemes), Xvid, streams or things like it. As you know, any business model takes time to adapt to shifts in technology. Just because Warner decides to make Die Hard 4 a Hi-def 20 GB movie, that don't mean your ISP is going to have triple the fibre infrastructure running along the railroad track the next morning.
If you had told yourself 5 years ago you could get 24 mbit down, 2-5 mbit up (or like I had in Sweden, 100 up/down) for 80 dollars a month with a 100 GB cap, you would have invited half the block for a party out of sheer joy. Now all of a sudden, the ISP's are the bad guys because their infrastructure has limits?
And the funny thing is that we're talking movies, music and such. Back in the day when you had no other options but to actually purchase an LP, the amount of people that had a 50000 song library could be counted on one hand in any given population. Now that it's potentially "free" as in "gratis" or low-cost, all of a sudden everyone wants everything for as little money as possible.
I am a good example. I buy CD's if I like the music. I have a collection of 1100 CD's, most of which are actually purchased. When I went on-line with a P2P client, however, I downloaded 24 different versions of Mr Bojangles just because I could. They are now gathering dust in some corner of a 250 GB HDD I have mounted.
Which in turns makes me say that we're devolving into spoilt children.
Given the amount of time it took for every household to have a VCR, a Dolby Set, a DVD and such things (they still don't), my guess is that it will take quite a while before everyone on the planet (haha.. solve aids and food first) will have a 42" plasma on their wall (or have a wall, even) sitting on top of a Hi-Def DVD player.
In the mean time the early adopters and fans of geekery are asking companies to make billion dollar investments to cater to the need of a niche of the market. In simple terms of dollars and cents, it simply don't make sense. There is a reason why McDonalds and Coke are a bit more ubiquitous than bottles of Bolly seventy-two or Beluga caviar, you know.
TANSTAAFL. Remember that phrase. And shut up about "coulda, woulda, shoulda".
Anyway, it's funny that you say that p2p file-sharing would be the saving grace to internet content (which is not true) and then you refer to four YouTube links (thanks for proving my own point).
Mercedes had a slogan in Holland in the eighties. "Every owner can become a millionaire". They sold their cars under the premise that any Mercedes can clock 1.000.000 kilometres. Now if I bought a Mercedes, chip-tuned it, took it for a rally in the ice of Finland, crossed the Sahara with it at a speed of 120 kph through the sand, and then complained that the thing broke down after 200.000 km, anyone would tell me this is unreasonable.
You can only become that millionaire if you treat your car right, use it like a normal human would do and everyone knows it. I don't think it's up to Mercedes to explain that to anyone as it's common sense.
At a restaurant where you eat "Spareribs Unlimited" you don't expect them to go out and shoot a pig once some 300 pound glutton single-handedly finishes the night's supply of baby back ribs and still asks for more. People that buy into the "Unlimited" thing should start to realize that nothing on this green earth is, as a matter of fact, unlimited.
Objectively speaking you're right. It would be "fairer" to indicate a reasonable limit. But maybe it costs them way less to deal with the complaints from.1 % of their customers than to actually market a "limited but very cool" package. This is true for any business.... The restaurant, the car manufacturer and the ISP alike.
However, I wish people would only up- respectively down-load things they actually Use/Watch/Listen to. I have plenty of friends in Israel that download things because they are "free" as in "gratis". This results in people that are sitting on 300 burnt DVD's they haven't seen yet, downloads of crappy movies or bad music and games for their cracked PS2 they will never play. This even causes a degree of cultural contamination. It drives a demand for shit. It makes the internet the stinking arm-pit of popular culture.
You see, I'm from the generation of internet users that started with BBSes and Tape-swapping. I/we take offense in people sending mail in HTML format with a bunch or rotating widgets and animated smileys, because I don't think an e-mail should be anything else than text with links in it. SMTP is not designed for funky stuff or 25 MB Home-video attachments. I take offense in the continuous mis-use of the public bandwidth with PetaBytes of uninteresting, unnecessary, blasé and objectionable data.
I fear that as time goes by, Internet is just becoming the same as commercial TV. A load of crap buzzing around with one promille of quality on the fringes.
Who do you think you are? "See what I did there" I haven't heard since I saw Billy Crystal portray Buddy Young, Jr...
Of course you don't have to be at your computer to use bandwidth, and if you would actually *read* the arguments I've brought to the discussion you would discover I never questioned that. My question has always been the following:
Why the hell are people so bent on using all the bandwidth in the world if it results in data they have no use for? It's like causing traffic jams by cruising up and down the highway in rush-hour traffic for no other purpose than to cruise up and down the highway.
So I do see what you did there. You missed the point, called me an idiot and managed to look like one yourself.
Let me guess, you work 14 hours a day. The rest of that time is spent browsing your 500 GB music collection and watching 2-3 movies every night. Then you finish one game per 24 hour period (like The Godfather, Blackhand edition, even though it costs me 30 hours to get through one story arc).
It seems to me you must be overweight and pasty of complexion, haven't seen your neighbors or family in the last decade or so, think that relationships are best had on-line, never had sex and last read an actual book back in 1982 when your kindergarten teacher made you go through Momo or something like it.
"Most" people don't use FLAC. "Most" people don't store their photo's "Raw". I am a big photography nut, but I've never had to print billboards. Which means a 2.5 MB 6 MP jpeg (which I store and manage locally) is fine for me.
Again, you're still not demonstrating to me how ComCast is screwing the average John Q Subscription-payer. You, sir, are a member of a very noisy, unreasonable fringe movement.
Don't get me wrong. I am a geek too. But since I've spent the better part of 12 years working in the industry, I actually see the benefit of pursuing interests that don't force me to sit behind my damn monitor on my time off. And I suggest that all of you who are complaining about their 100 GB Cap on downloads do the same.
Who knows? You might find out that the sun still exists if you step out the door.
Not a single thing of what you've just written down is based on empirical, measurable facts. You've just written a piece of propaganda without content. Whereas what I wrote is calculated by bits and bytes. I know the cost and effort involved in maintaining a large IT and Network infrastructure. I know the cost and effort involved in maintaining a help-desk or even call-centre of any kind.
I know that renting 20 movies a month (dvd rips) or 134 movies a month (Divx rips) or 1050 hours of audio a month is more than adequate for your average family. I know that I do not buy 20 large video games per month. I know that I don't purchase more than 1 or two movies per month while downloading the odd one, seeing some on TV and then renting a couple from the Blockbuster. I know that when my boy will be born in February, somewhere along the line I hope I will get him to play soccer outside and read actual books sometimes.
So I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you're full of shit. 90/100 GB / month is a perfectly plausible usage model which 90% of internet users don't even begin to nibble at. It's the 10% freaks, geeks and conspiration theorists that do the heavy downloading. Not the average 2.4 kid family. Bollocks, bollocks, trice I say bollocks.
The average user that is doing DVD-rip downloads is doing illegal downloads anyway. They don't get my empathy. If I'm downloading divx rips, nine out of ten times I'm still doing it illegally. If I'm looking at youtube streams or some such, the bandwidth I'm consuming is much, much less. I haven't yet looked at a counter for my NIC while doing that, but I can imagine I can cram 50 minutes of "tv" in a 100 MB stream.
If a 700 MB Divx is 1.5 hrs of video, one second is roughly 130KB. This means that roughly 330 GB will give you 24/7 video to watch for one month. 90 GB will therefore give you 202 hrs of video. If you went to the Blockbuster, this would be the equivalent to 134 movies. 80 Dollars a month would therefore give you a price of $1.65 per movie, assuming you don't read/., newspapers, watch Youtube or play games for that money.
134 movies spread over 30 days still yields 4.5 movies/day. Unless you're on the dole or independently wealthy, I don't know a soul who would have the time or inclination to watch that many movies.
DVD-rips are where things get interesting. Let's say you download 4.4 GB DVD rips. 90 GB gives you 20 movies. Which means that you watch one movie every weekday. This is a more realistic approach. This you can actually watch while remaining a sane human.
Anything over that volume is ludicrous. Which makes this whole discussion ludicrous. There are just no two ways about it... a 90-100 GB cap on bandwidth consumption is perfectly reasonable for those $80 per month.
So shut up and get on with your lives if you have one, will ya?
I think this discussion is somewhat over the top. Obviously, all the g33ks on/. would be outraged at a 100GB cap on downloads, but it's perfectly legitimate to question the validity of their usage model. 30.000 MP3's of 3 MB a piece. If I were to assume a 224bit or even higher sampling rate, we're looking at 4-6 MB for a 3-4 minute song. By that definition, we're talking about 25 KB per second of Audio.
If you divide 90 GB by 25 KB (ie 94371840/25) you get 3774874 seconds of audio. That's roughly 1050 hours. Assuming 24 hours to the day, you are looking to download 44 days of continuously streaming unique Audio per month. A month, may I remind you, ranging anywhere from 27-31 days.
This means that every month yields a month and a half's worth of data to peruse *if* you do it full time. Subsequently, you would have one year's worth of listening per 8 months.
Anyone who complains about that download limit is seriously deranged, in posession of a Tardis or immortal. You choose.
Assuming they are Chinese is an equally large if not much larger fallacy. However, since these satellites are clearly not EU military gear, actually I don't give a rat's ass if they are remnants of Saddam Hussein's lease car fleet, we (the EU) ought to get rid of them.
Now the fact that I believe these satellites *are* US gear has nothing to do with me having a "false" (if any, even) sense of "security". I don't trust the US or anyone else farther than I see them, and since I live way out of sight of the US, I guess it just means I don't trust the US much at all.
By the way, something strange seems to have happened to your keyboard when you got to the word fallacy.
Although it stands to reason that if the US monitors the skies and publishes anything that moves in them, they wouldn't go through great pains to keep Chinese spy satellites off of that list.
For the obtuse amongst us, I guess I mean that if the US chose to not publish these 20-30 objects, you can bet they are theirs.
Neurological research has tentatively stated that there is no measurable decline in cognitive ability of the brain itself with old age, barring brain dysfunction because of medical conditions. It is said that it's more the attitude towards learning new things than the actual ability to learn new things that causes the loss of flexibility. My own mother is a good case in point. At 70, she's still highly capable of accruing new data if the subject interests her, but in some areas she dismisses new information by saying "at my age I can't be bothered with that anymore".
Furthermore I would argue that they get the causality reversed. Recent neurological studies in the Netherlands suggest that certain aspects of character, gender and sexuality are already hard-wired into the brain at 16 weeks into the development of a fetus, sometimes even at odds with the physical development of the body (transgenderism and hermaphrodites come to mind). Therefore I would be tempted to say that because of the hard-wiring in the brain, certain individuals will swing towards liberal viewpoints and some towards conservative viewpoints. Not the other way around.
If nothing else, life is cynical. The Lord won't save you from gaining that experience if it happens to be coming your way. Furthermore, the road to hell is paved with proverbial good intentions. Shit will happen, in your life too. If it doesn't, count your blessings, son.
> People do not simply transform from healthy and loving to hateful and miserable
I don't understand where you get this notion. I don't need to go as far as to drag the cliched holocaust screaming from the vaults to show you people turn bitter because of what life has in store for them. I'll talk to you again when one of your children dies. Typically couples don't survive such events together, as it were. But it doesn't need to get that extreme. Chances are that if you take the notion for granted that your wife will never simply tire of you, you are not doing what you should to make sure it doesn't happen.
And even if you did, the whole notion of "control" is a tricky one. People aren't even finished debating if such a thing as free will exists, let alone "control". Typically what you control in this life is what you see when you close your eyes: Nothing. All the rest are just illusions. Don't get me wrong, I hope for your sake these illusions will never get taken from you.
I noticed you seem to be a Christian. Read the stories of Job or the Pharaoh during the plagues for more thoughts on "control" if you desparately need the biblical angle for your understanding.
> Duty will keep me doing what's right.
Will it? Tell that to the million Iraqis that recently died overseas. What I'm trying to say is that what is "right" might not always be obvious to you. Duty is synonym to guilt. The notion that you owe someone something. And I can recount plenty of stories where a misplaced sense of duty did more to botch things than you can imagine. I'm not even saying the notion of love isn't dangerous. Love definitely makes us do horrid things too. I'm just saying that you and I scarcely know what is "the right thing to do".
Any man claiming he *does* know what "the right thing" is surely does not. That's what I know.
Out of sheer curiosity I would like to know how long you've been married. The longest I've lived with one woman was five years. I have nothing positive to say about the last three of them, and in retrospect the first two years weren't that cool either. I hung on out of a combined sense of duty and a fear of being alone. We were not married, but strange as it might sound I was so committed I hung on like a pitbull. And in the end it was complete folly to have done so.
Maybe you are luckier in some ways. Maybe you're just complacent, blase or inexperienced. All I see here is that further discussion with you is pointless as you and I represent two worlds that will never see eye to eye. So much is clear from your stance on things and the fact that your sig points to christian music.
With regards to the "days where I don't feel very loving towards them" I must say that I am worried for your children. My father and mother raised me with the utmost of Wisdom (granted, that was mum's department) and Love (both o' them), and I can guarantee you that no matter what I did in my childhood, no matter what happened, I always was 100% safe in the knowledge there was not a single day in my life I was not intensely loved. To this day, now that only my mother is here to give me this feeling, I know this.
It is your damn duty to not have days where you're not very loving towards your kids, if you really want to talk about duty. I know that quoting a movie like Hellboy is retorical suicide, but in it they say: "You like people for their qualities, but you love them for their defects." Think about this before you ever have kids.
Slashdot Mirror
I flattered that you display such faith in my libido and physical condition as to call my floppy a crowbar. But I can assure you nothing is further from the truth.
Careful there.... I managed to knock up my girl.
Hehehe... who's your daddy?
TFA and the Krome website state that the sword fighting is something that you do throughout the game, but that the Duel-mode is exclusive to the Wii.
How could it be any different? Most SW games I've played hinged on sword fighting. Particularly since I found the cheats to give me a sword in the first two levels of Jedi Outcast.
For most /.-ers, sadly the ego is the only thing that stands a chance of getting stroked by others.
I hate to say this but pretty much every serious software I've installed on Windows in the past 3 years has let me pin-point where to install it. Even the games do.
Don't expect that behavior from MS installs.
This post reminds me of something Samuel used to say: "English. Do you speak it, motherfucker?"
I always thought IP meant Internet Protocol. But that's just me.
If I'm not mistaken though, it's largely Thomas Jefferson's work to define copyright law. To keep ye learned men writing ye learned works or some such.
I'm relatively sure the concept was, at first, relatively benign and not sinister at all.
Isn't that what NiN already does? They're not exactly Chet Baker, are they?
I never said it's OK to advertise unlimited and not offer it. I just said I understand why it's being done and I understand why things can never be unlimited really. So, having said that....
/. discussion being made out of a non issue. It's not like Comcast is waging war on autonomous countries halfway across the globe, now is it?
/. crowd people who make mountains out of mole-hills.
I guess my main point is just that this is a typical
In Dutch we would call (some of) the
You, sir, just wrote the first well-balanced post in this discussion. I'll grant you all the points you made.
:-D
Bravo.
I also think it helps that you weren't whining about the amount of Hi-def dvd's you want to download for your kid's friend on the fifth PC in your villa.
Hm. I never said I do serious work in the photography industry. First of all because I believe there is no such thing as "serious" photograhy. The only form of "Serious" and thereby "important" photography is the MRI they take of me when the shit hits the fan.
What I did say were two things:
1) I'm a photography "nut"
2) I don't need to print billboards.
This would indicate that I'm a hobbyist to those that actually read it. I can "plug" my site here but I won't. If you were ever to come across it, you'll see I ain't half bad either though. The photography-industry is not "most people". If it were, a friend of mine wouldn't have to have spent 7 years of his life busting his back trying to break into that same photography industry.
You lost your perspective on who John Q Subscriber is. John Q Subscriber is a man with a Canon Ixus 55 who likes to take pictures of his dog, kids and some flowers in jpeg mode.
I also work for tech support. I just spent 96 hours working on an escalation with one of the biggest banks in Europe. Still I don't think that most people have a 700 node HP-UX data centre at home connected to an XP disk array and a 2400-slot LTO3 silo.
Funny, ain't it?
I'm well aware of the different formats, that's why I mentioned a size and the fact that it got somehow ripped from DVD. :-D Obviously, there will be formats that will demand more space/bandwidth. I don't assume these are the formats that are currently most downloaded.
Go to any torrent tracker or p2p search engine, go to iTunes, e-music right now, and you'll see that 99.9% of content is Mp3 (or equivalent loss-based compression schemes), Xvid, streams or things like it. As you know, any business model takes time to adapt to shifts in technology. Just because Warner decides to make Die Hard 4 a Hi-def 20 GB movie, that don't mean your ISP is going to have triple the fibre infrastructure running along the railroad track the next morning.
If you had told yourself 5 years ago you could get 24 mbit down, 2-5 mbit up (or like I had in Sweden, 100 up/down) for 80 dollars a month with a 100 GB cap, you would have invited half the block for a party out of sheer joy. Now all of a sudden, the ISP's are the bad guys because their infrastructure has limits?
And the funny thing is that we're talking movies, music and such. Back in the day when you had no other options but to actually purchase an LP, the amount of people that had a 50000 song library could be counted on one hand in any given population. Now that it's potentially "free" as in "gratis" or low-cost, all of a sudden everyone wants everything for as little money as possible.
I am a good example. I buy CD's if I like the music. I have a collection of 1100 CD's, most of which are actually purchased. When I went on-line with a P2P client, however, I downloaded 24 different versions of Mr Bojangles just because I could. They are now gathering dust in some corner of a 250 GB HDD I have mounted.
Which in turns makes me say that we're devolving into spoilt children.
Given the amount of time it took for every household to have a VCR, a Dolby Set, a DVD and such things (they still don't), my guess is that it will take quite a while before everyone on the planet (haha.. solve aids and food first) will have a 42" plasma on their wall (or have a wall, even) sitting on top of a Hi-Def DVD player.
In the mean time the early adopters and fans of geekery are asking companies to make billion dollar investments to cater to the need of a niche of the market. In simple terms of dollars and cents, it simply don't make sense. There is a reason why McDonalds and Coke are a bit more ubiquitous than bottles of Bolly seventy-two or Beluga caviar, you know.
TANSTAAFL. Remember that phrase. And shut up about "coulda, woulda, shoulda".
Old fart... Bloody hell, I'm 32... :-D
Anyway, it's funny that you say that p2p file-sharing would be the saving grace to internet content (which is not true) and then you refer to four YouTube links (thanks for proving my own point).
Listen, TANSTAAFL. And you know it.
.1 % of their customers than to actually market a "limited but very cool" package. This is true for any business.... The restaurant, the car manufacturer and the ISP alike.
Mercedes had a slogan in Holland in the eighties. "Every owner can become a millionaire". They sold their cars under the premise that any Mercedes can clock 1.000.000 kilometres. Now if I bought a Mercedes, chip-tuned it, took it for a rally in the ice of Finland, crossed the Sahara with it at a speed of 120 kph through the sand, and then complained that the thing broke down after 200.000 km, anyone would tell me this is unreasonable.
You can only become that millionaire if you treat your car right, use it like a normal human would do and everyone knows it. I don't think it's up to Mercedes to explain that to anyone as it's common sense.
At a restaurant where you eat "Spareribs Unlimited" you don't expect them to go out and shoot a pig once some 300 pound glutton single-handedly finishes the night's supply of baby back ribs and still asks for more. People that buy into the "Unlimited" thing should start to realize that nothing on this green earth is, as a matter of fact, unlimited.
Objectively speaking you're right. It would be "fairer" to indicate a reasonable limit. But maybe it costs them way less to deal with the complaints from
Well, many users tend to want to support that.
However, I wish people would only up- respectively down-load things they actually Use/Watch/Listen to. I have plenty of friends in Israel that download things because they are "free" as in "gratis". This results in people that are sitting on 300 burnt DVD's they haven't seen yet, downloads of crappy movies or bad music and games for their cracked PS2 they will never play. This even causes a degree of cultural contamination. It drives a demand for shit. It makes the internet the stinking arm-pit of popular culture.
You see, I'm from the generation of internet users that started with BBSes and Tape-swapping. I/we take offense in people sending mail in HTML format with a bunch or rotating widgets and animated smileys, because I don't think an e-mail should be anything else than text with links in it. SMTP is not designed for funky stuff or 25 MB Home-video attachments. I take offense in the continuous mis-use of the public bandwidth with PetaBytes of uninteresting, unnecessary, blasé and objectionable data.
I fear that as time goes by, Internet is just becoming the same as commercial TV. A load of crap buzzing around with one promille of quality on the fringes.
Who do you think you are? "See what I did there" I haven't heard since I saw Billy Crystal portray Buddy Young, Jr...
Of course you don't have to be at your computer to use bandwidth, and if you would actually *read* the arguments I've brought to the discussion you would discover I never questioned that. My question has always been the following:
Why the hell are people so bent on using all the bandwidth in the world if it results in data they have no use for? It's like causing traffic jams by cruising up and down the highway in rush-hour traffic for no other purpose than to cruise up and down the highway.
So I do see what you did there. You missed the point, called me an idiot and managed to look like one yourself.
> watching a few movies every night after work.
Let me guess, you work 14 hours a day. The rest of that time is spent browsing your 500 GB music collection and watching 2-3 movies every night. Then you finish one game per 24 hour period (like The Godfather, Blackhand edition, even though it costs me 30 hours to get through one story arc).
It seems to me you must be overweight and pasty of complexion, haven't seen your neighbors or family in the last decade or so, think that relationships are best had on-line, never had sex and last read an actual book back in 1982 when your kindergarten teacher made you go through Momo or something like it.
"Most" people don't use FLAC. "Most" people don't store their photo's "Raw". I am a big photography nut, but I've never had to print billboards. Which means a 2.5 MB 6 MP jpeg (which I store and manage locally) is fine for me.
Again, you're still not demonstrating to me how ComCast is screwing the average John Q Subscription-payer. You, sir, are a member of a very noisy, unreasonable fringe movement.
Don't get me wrong. I am a geek too. But since I've spent the better part of 12 years working in the industry, I actually see the benefit of pursuing interests that don't force me to sit behind my damn monitor on my time off. And I suggest that all of you who are complaining about their 100 GB Cap on downloads do the same.
Who knows? You might find out that the sun still exists if you step out the door.
Not a single thing of what you've just written down is based on empirical, measurable facts. You've just written a piece of propaganda without content. Whereas what I wrote is calculated by bits and bytes. I know the cost and effort involved in maintaining a large IT and Network infrastructure. I know the cost and effort involved in maintaining a help-desk or even call-centre of any kind.
I know that renting 20 movies a month (dvd rips) or 134 movies a month (Divx rips) or 1050 hours of audio a month is more than adequate for your average family. I know that I do not buy 20 large video games per month. I know that I don't purchase more than 1 or two movies per month while downloading the odd one, seeing some on TV and then renting a couple from the Blockbuster. I know that when my boy will be born in February, somewhere along the line I hope I will get him to play soccer outside and read actual books sometimes.
So I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you're full of shit. 90/100 GB / month is a perfectly plausible usage model which 90% of internet users don't even begin to nibble at. It's the 10% freaks, geeks and conspiration theorists that do the heavy downloading. Not the average 2.4 kid family. Bollocks, bollocks, trice I say bollocks.
The average user that is doing DVD-rip downloads is doing illegal downloads anyway. They don't get my empathy. If I'm downloading divx rips, nine out of ten times I'm still doing it illegally. If I'm looking at youtube streams or some such, the bandwidth I'm consuming is much, much less. I haven't yet looked at a counter for my NIC while doing that, but I can imagine I can cram 50 minutes of "tv" in a 100 MB stream.
/., newspapers, watch Youtube or play games for that money.
If a 700 MB Divx is 1.5 hrs of video, one second is roughly 130KB. This means that roughly 330 GB will give you 24/7 video to watch for one month. 90 GB will therefore give you 202 hrs of video. If you went to the Blockbuster, this would be the equivalent to 134 movies. 80 Dollars a month would therefore give you a price of $1.65 per movie, assuming you don't read
134 movies spread over 30 days still yields 4.5 movies/day. Unless you're on the dole or independently wealthy, I don't know a soul who would have the time or inclination to watch that many movies.
DVD-rips are where things get interesting. Let's say you download 4.4 GB DVD rips. 90 GB gives you 20 movies. Which means that you watch one movie every weekday. This is a more realistic approach. This you can actually watch while remaining a sane human.
Anything over that volume is ludicrous. Which makes this whole discussion ludicrous. There are just no two ways about it... a 90-100 GB cap on bandwidth consumption is perfectly reasonable for those $80 per month.
So shut up and get on with your lives if you have one, will ya?
I think this discussion is somewhat over the top. Obviously, all the g33ks on /. would be outraged at a 100GB cap on downloads, but it's perfectly legitimate to question the validity of their usage model. 30.000 MP3's of 3 MB a piece. If I were to assume a 224bit or even higher sampling rate, we're looking at 4-6 MB for a 3-4 minute song. By that definition, we're talking about 25 KB per second of Audio.
If you divide 90 GB by 25 KB (ie 94371840/25) you get 3774874 seconds of audio. That's roughly 1050 hours. Assuming 24 hours to the day, you are looking to download 44 days of continuously streaming unique Audio per month. A month, may I remind you, ranging anywhere from 27-31 days.
This means that every month yields a month and a half's worth of data to peruse *if* you do it full time. Subsequently, you would have one year's worth of listening per 8 months.
Anyone who complains about that download limit is seriously deranged, in posession of a Tardis or immortal. You choose.
Assuming they are Chinese is an equally large if not much larger fallacy. However, since these satellites are clearly not EU military gear, actually I don't give a rat's ass if they are remnants of Saddam Hussein's lease car fleet, we (the EU) ought to get rid of them.
Now the fact that I believe these satellites *are* US gear has nothing to do with me having a "false" (if any, even) sense of "security". I don't trust the US or anyone else farther than I see them, and since I live way out of sight of the US, I guess it just means I don't trust the US much at all.
By the way, something strange seems to have happened to your keyboard when you got to the word fallacy.
Although it stands to reason that if the US monitors the skies and publishes anything that moves in them, they wouldn't go through great pains to keep Chinese spy satellites off of that list.
For the obtuse amongst us, I guess I mean that if the US chose to not publish these 20-30 objects, you can bet they are theirs.
Neurological research has tentatively stated that there is no measurable decline in cognitive ability of the brain itself with old age, barring brain dysfunction because of medical conditions. It is said that it's more the attitude towards learning new things than the actual ability to learn new things that causes the loss of flexibility. My own mother is a good case in point. At 70, she's still highly capable of accruing new data if the subject interests her, but in some areas she dismisses new information by saying "at my age I can't be bothered with that anymore".
Furthermore I would argue that they get the causality reversed. Recent neurological studies in the Netherlands suggest that certain aspects of character, gender and sexuality are already hard-wired into the brain at 16 weeks into the development of a fetus, sometimes even at odds with the physical development of the body (transgenderism and hermaphrodites come to mind). Therefore I would be tempted to say that because of the hard-wiring in the brain, certain individuals will swing towards liberal viewpoints and some towards conservative viewpoints. Not the other way around.
OMG! Are you suggesting negroes are black?!? I wonder what Richard Pryor would have to say about that, young man.
Seriously: Perfectly spot on. Luckily in Israel noone is PC so I'm no longer subjected to such discussions.
> I know my wife extremely well
Do you?
If nothing else, life is cynical. The Lord won't save you from gaining that experience if it happens to be coming your way. Furthermore, the road to hell is paved with proverbial good intentions. Shit will happen, in your life too. If it doesn't, count your blessings, son.
> People do not simply transform from healthy and loving to hateful and miserable
I don't understand where you get this notion. I don't need to go as far as to drag the cliched holocaust screaming from the vaults to show you people turn bitter because of what life has in store for them. I'll talk to you again when one of your children dies. Typically couples don't survive such events together, as it were. But it doesn't need to get that extreme. Chances are that if you take the notion for granted that your wife will never simply tire of you, you are not doing what you should to make sure it doesn't happen.
And even if you did, the whole notion of "control" is a tricky one. People aren't even finished debating if such a thing as free will exists, let alone "control". Typically what you control in this life is what you see when you close your eyes: Nothing. All the rest are just illusions. Don't get me wrong, I hope for your sake these illusions will never get taken from you.
I noticed you seem to be a Christian. Read the stories of Job or the Pharaoh during the plagues for more thoughts on "control" if you desparately need the biblical angle for your understanding.
> Duty will keep me doing what's right.
Will it? Tell that to the million Iraqis that recently died overseas. What I'm trying to say is that what is "right" might not always be obvious to you. Duty is synonym to guilt. The notion that you owe someone something. And I can recount plenty of stories where a misplaced sense of duty did more to botch things than you can imagine. I'm not even saying the notion of love isn't dangerous. Love definitely makes us do horrid things too. I'm just saying that you and I scarcely know what is "the right thing to do".
Any man claiming he *does* know what "the right thing" is surely does not. That's what I know.
Out of sheer curiosity I would like to know how long you've been married. The longest I've lived with one woman was five years. I have nothing positive to say about the last three of them, and in retrospect the first two years weren't that cool either. I hung on out of a combined sense of duty and a fear of being alone. We were not married, but strange as it might sound I was so committed I hung on like a pitbull. And in the end it was complete folly to have done so.
Maybe you are luckier in some ways. Maybe you're just complacent, blase or inexperienced. All I see here is that further discussion with you is pointless as you and I represent two worlds that will never see eye to eye. So much is clear from your stance on things and the fact that your sig points to christian music.
With regards to the "days where I don't feel very loving towards them" I must say that I am worried for your children. My father and mother raised me with the utmost of Wisdom (granted, that was mum's department) and Love (both o' them), and I can guarantee you that no matter what I did in my childhood, no matter what happened, I always was 100% safe in the knowledge there was not a single day in my life I was not intensely loved. To this day, now that only my mother is here to give me this feeling, I know this.
It is your damn duty to not have days where you're not very loving towards your kids, if you really want to talk about duty. I know that quoting a movie like Hellboy is retorical suicide, but in it they say: "You like people for their qualities, but you love them for their defects." Think about this before you ever have kids.