...to start reversing the DEPLORABLE conditions started by Jimmy "I'm a fucking moron" Carter.
You know - the guy who thought that if the US didn't RECYCLE nuclear waste back into fuel (which would SOLVE the "nuclear waste storage" issue) it would be an "example" to tin-pot dictatorships and insane genocidal religious nations like North Korea, Pakistan, India, Iran, Syria, China... and they wouldn't try to get nuclear weapons. Yeah, how'd that work out for us?
The guy who coddled so-called "environmentalists" to the point where we haven't built SAFE, CLEAN electrical power generation anywhere because nobody can get past the permits process and NIMBY enviro-wacko whining.
Think about it - even the founder of Greenpeace (who long ago left the organization when it became obvious the commies and inmates were running the asylum and not interested in real, rational discussion) says we need nuclear energy because so-called "renewable" sources are inherently (a) unreliable and (b) limited in the scope of what we can do with them.
Obama doesn't support this - remember, it's about "hope" and "change." Apparently, "hope" that magic pixies will bestow unlimited energy on us or something.
Obama opposes our drilling for our OWN oil resources, which is about FAR more than gas: think about how much plastic, rubber, oil-based lubricants, you use in your daily lives: it ALL comes from oil. That pen in your pocket? OIL. The plastic bag you used for your groceries, and the plastic involved in 90% of the food packaging (plastic sealed pouches virtually everywhere, plastic milk jug, plastic lids, etc)... OIL. Your tires on your car or even your bike? That's right, OIL involved. Half of your car's structure? Plastics - OIL again.
Just about everything you use in your daily life comes from petroleum in some fashion, most likely directly some chemical derivative in ADDITION to the heat generation for the melting/forming processes.
Obama is on record that "I am not a nuclear energy proponent", and claims the only energy bill he pushed in the IL senate is an ANTI-power plant bill.
...to start reversing the DEPLORABLE conditions started by Jimmy "I'm a fucking moron" Carter.
You know - the guy who thought that if the US didn't RECYCLE nuclear waste back into fuel (which would SOLVE the "nuclear waste storage" issue) it would be an "example" to tin-pot dictatorships and insane genocidal religious nations like North Korea and Iran and they wouldn't try to get nuclear weapons.
The guy who coddled so-called "environmentalists" to the point where we haven't built SAFE, CLEAN electrical power generation anywhere because nobody can get past the permits process and NIMBY enviro-wacko whining.
Think about it - even the founder of Greenpeace (who long ago left the organization when it became obvious the commies and inmates were running the asylum and not interested in real, rational discussion) says we need nuclear energy because so-called "renewable" sources are inherently (a) unreliable and (b) limited in the scope of what we can do with them.
A flaw that requires someone to load a hacked savegame, and do something specific in a specific game?
Further, the only difference between the two being that in the second case, the "flaw" is actually the FIX for the broken and stupid nature of the OS?
Really now. I have right of first sale on my side. I bought *hardware*. If I want to load linux on it, that's my fucking business and Nintendo can go fuck themselves. The worst they can do is void my warranty and refuse to contract with me for servicing if the hardware fails.
I don't care if you believe me or not. Given that we all got our consoles from the same launch party, they probably were all from the same bad batch. Our gamestop's had a number of people complaining of the same thing as well recently.
Still, fuck nintendo. They know the right thing to do, but instead they soak us for more cash for their faulty product.
This li'l piggie got ripped off by nintendo when they shipped with a known faulty heatsink and weren't as honest as Microsoft about fixing their error.
Seriously. Me and 10 friends all had launch consoles. EVERY ONE failed with black dots one month past warranty. Nintendo's response? "Too bad, pay us $75 and ship it in."
Microsoft at least admitted the RRoD was their fault and fixed my console for free. Fuck nintendo.
- a guy who's been involved in numerous shady deals and bribery schemes during his tenure as an IL state senator and then again in the US Senate... including disenfranchising hundreds of people just to be sure that when the time came for elections, his was the only name on the ballot (kinda reminds you of how "elections" in communist nations like China and Russia and Cuba work really).
- a guy who has had to kick more than a dozen high-ranking people off his campaign when it turned up they were raving anti-semites associated with terrorist groups and fundraising efforts.
- a guy whose economic policies make Karl Marx look tame.
- a guy who insists his father (who was in the US for barely 2 years, and knocked up Obama's mom while having a wife and kids back in Kenya) was buried in a coffin with the US flag on it... in KENYA.
- a guy who marinated in a racist church for 20 years, steeping in "mother continent Africa", the "Black Value System" (which looks a lot like KKK literature with black/white reversed), and "God Damn America."
- a guy who can't decide if his "God Damn America" pastor is (a) as close to him as his grandmother, "like an uncle", "a member of the family", or (b) only "tangentially associated" with him.
- a guy who browbeats Americans who are working to make ends meet about making more charitable contributions, while less than 1% of his extremely sizable (even before the bribery) income goes anywhere but his own pocket.
- a guy who made his fortune on racist, trumped-up, falsified "civil rights" lawsuits
- a guy who does a damn lousy job as senator, with a record of missing more than 30% of votes and then only voting "present" a sizable time more.
- a guy who considers a baby the result of teenage sex to be a "punishment" that needs to be rectified with an abortion... it's too bad for us that his 19-year-old mom, knocked up by a married liar, didn't take that advice!
- a guy so cold-hearted that if a baby happens to survive an abortion attempt, he's perfectly okay with just dumping it into a trash bin and letting the child die anyways.
"I have a dream... where [people] will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."(MLK Jr) - by ANY measure, Barack Hussein Obama's character has been shown.
I don't care the color of his skin. I care that he's a corrupt scumbag. And on that measure, if you can honestly say knowing all this that you'd still vote for him, then you are probably one too.
in Oblivion sometimes a wolf will drop a gold coin or a fork - WTF?),
You've obviously never seen the list of stuff they've found in shark stomachs. I don't find it at all beyond reason that a hungry predator might gobble down a coin or small metallic object along with its meal.
That would be known as a "tpyo." I meant to type "scarce", not "scare", which anyone with half a brain would realize from context.
Dishonesty is a separate issue, which I purposely chose not to address, and I won't get bogged down with here.
Ooh... dodge the point that eviscerates your bullshit. Dodge it good and don't ever address it!
Tell me, do you have $cientology training by any chance?
And this is where someone uneducated in economics tries to force a solution that is impossible and does not give a good result. Again, I really don't care about what has happened in the past (though it does need to be resolved -- and I happen to agree with you that contracts should be honored, but not in perpetua).
Funny. Now it looks like you don't understand basic economics - the difference between a company dishonestly failing to fulfill their contractual agreement and a "solution that is impossible." It is certainly possible for the companies to fulfill their agreements, but what they are doing is dishonestly trying to change the rules and cheat on their contractual responsibilities instead.
"contracts should be honored, but not in perpetua" - Funny. As it stands, every ISP out there should be on the hook for breach of contract as it is. The only thing stopping it is not their inability to do so, but that they are more willing to lawyer up and try to evade their contractual responsibility than they are to actually act honestly.
The ISP's have never honored their contracts. I say make them honor their contracts first, as required by the law, THEN we can talk about other things.
Unfortunately, for most games and programming structures, the "fedex quest" mindset is a result of the structure of the programming.
Bethesda are great at trying to avoid this, and they spent a ton of time on it (compare the Morrowind to Oblivion engines, and see the designer commentary on all the work they had to do just to get the "watch a guy hide something" quest early in Morrowind to work right). But they still sometimes fall back on the trap.
The basic problem is, for a quest/story mechanic to work, you need triggers. Somewhere in the game, there's a bit or routine that checks for X, Y, Z completion requirements. "Is X in inventory and talking to Bob selecting Dialog Option 3" make for a really easy set of variables to code for, and then the game flips the bit so that X is removed from inventory. Even quests that are "Go talk to person X" are really fedex quests - you're "carrying" a bit that signifies that you're on the quest and person X is who you need to talk to, thus when you talk to them, the appropriate dialog box (which probably wasn't available before) is opened up... you've just handed in the "plot coupon" as it were.
The better a programmer hides the triggers - making you hide somewhere (in-game) and spy on someone, or specifically avoid encounters to get a really good item or piece of info - the better and more seamless the story will seem. The underlying programming still needs those triggers, though.
My suggestion? Stop buying crappy games like GTA, and go with games where the programmers put some thought into the storyline and making it fit better. The industry could survive just fine with a few less programmers making crappy movie-tie-in games (*coughIronmancough*) and a few more making really GOOD games like Thief or Oblivion.
The fact of the matter is that bandwidth is a scarce good (in an economic sense; we have quite a lot of it actually, but not enough to serve everyone at high usage).
Actually, most people have no effing clue what bandwidth really is. You prove how clueless you are by calling it a "scare good."
So how de we ensure that bandwidth can be apportioned fairly across users?
Bandwidth is not a commodity as such. Unlike most commodities, it cannot be stored for future use. It is entirely a function of the momentary capability of the attached routing system. It's much like telephone systems in that regard; there are only a certain amount of circuits ("lines") that a particular neighborhood or area can have active at a given time.
We can make sure that people pay for the bandwidth they use, by metered sale or by tiered pricing.
And here is where it gets stupid. If you sell someone "X GB/month", then people will STILL get fucked over when they try to use the "bandwidth" (actually, absurd data capacity) they bought during a time when others are doing the same. Tiered plans are in place NOW for most providers, and the companies are lying to us about what they sold anyways - the "up to X kbits/second" tier usually isn't even doing as well as the next tier below.
And this says nothing of the off-period times when most sane people are at work or asleep. You're charging people the same price for the "scarce" times (similar to the daytime cell rates) as for the rates when the routers are just sitting more or less idle.
This is where the crackheads in corporate accounting offices and management start drooling - they can set up a complicated pricing scheme that the normal consumer barely understands, and get away with tagging in all sorts of hidden fees. I for one think the companies should be held responsible for upgrading their network and fulfilling the service they contracted for rather than trying to wiggle out of it after they overbooked.
All the US has is monopoly areas. That's because our fucked-up government handed out monopolies on phone service way back when, and "deregulation" doesn't help anything but picking who bills your phone service: all they do is "lease" your particular line from the company that owns it.
For example: #1 - In my old apartment, I could only get DSL. DSL was only available through SBC. I could get phone service from any one of 5 phone providers, but SBC was the only one that could provide DSL, because SBC owned the lines and the DSL routers - and if I went with phone from one of the other phone companies, then I couldn't get DSL because SBC required an "active phone account" before providing the DSL service.
#2 - Where I live now, we can't get DSL (no router close enough). We can only get cable from Comcrap, because they have a monopoly on cable TV service in the area. When I called Verizon about FiOS, I was told - surprise surprise - that FiOS will ONLY ever be available in places where Verizon owns the phone line infrastructure. So, my options are now either (a) Comcrap cable modem or (b) shitty satellite service with >2000ms pings.
The kicker? I asked my elected representative why this is allowed, and they said that there is "national competition" between the phone companies... meanwhile, the gov't sits back and allows monopoly abuse by the data providers all over the fucking place.
In the big metropolitan area I live in, we get radio ads trying to get people to "switch" between cable modem and DSL all the time. Yet looking over the map, less than 10% of the people even exist in an area where DSL and cable modem services overlap. It's all a big fraud.
It's "may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their genitals."
The underlying problem is just as you described though - unless they come up with a DAMN GOOD tool to show you how much bandwidth you've used, how will the normal consumer know? Any app that phones home uses bandwidth. Updating your virus scanner or patching your OS (doesn't matter windows, mac, or linux) uses bandwidth. Xbox360, Wii, PS3 all use bandwidth. Instant messaging uses bandwidth.
Only a VERY select few people actually know how much bandwidth each of these uses. Training your average user to use something like Freemeter is going to be pretty tough, and even then, that only covers their PC. It still misses the rest of whatever network devices you may have.
Setting a cap up is a grab to try to stick people with extra fees, nothing more. Welcome to the U$A, home of the hidden fee - now bend over, spread the cheeks, and take it.
Until AMD opens up its ATI hardware and software specs, or produces their own decent Linux drivers, ATI cards are just not going to work well with Linux. (Which is reason #5 of why I'm an nVidia fan.)
AFAIK, both companies produce only closed-source drivers.
From every linux evangelist who tried to sell me on making a Mythbox, one of their deals was about all the "open sourced drivers" and how it should be "compatible with everything, especially if it's been around a few years."
Sorry. Clearly that's not the case. For all their crowing about being able to fix incompatibilities, they turn around and do this? Add to that the fact that there is no equivalent in Nvidia-land to the All-In-Wonder (and it's crappy enough as it is trying to fit Video board, Audio board, Gigabit ethernet, and then have one solitary PCI slot with which to either put the HDTV tuner OR a second SATA controller with modern "no you can't have expansion slots" motherboards)...
I'm not an Nvidia fan nor an ATi fan. ATi just made the components I was after, when I was on the market. If the Linux guys can't figure out support for the hardware I bought 5+ years ago in some cases, that puts the lie to their claims of support for Linux as far as I'm concerned.
Step 2: Try to figure out what "default" settings are for my PC.
Step 3: Try to figure out why the fuck Linux keeps deciding randomly (on reboot) that/dev/sda1,/sdb1,/sdc1 are different fucking drives. I'd set my data drives the way I wanted them thanks, I don't need Linux deciding that for some reason/media/Video1 should now map to THE FUCKING WINDOWS PARTITION. After two hours of hunting, I find the barely-documented "UUID" setup... why the fuck does Linux not use that by default?
Step 4: drivers, drivers, drivers. I own 2 ATi capture cards (TV Wonder, HDTV Wonder) and 3 ATi (All-In-Wonder) video boards. Not a fucking one of them "fully supported." Advice I get from the Linux posers? "Duuude ati sux go buy nvidia and get a hauppauge or homerun capture card." Sorry: The hardware I already bought a couple years backworks fine. I'm not going to go spend $300+ on this.
Step 5: Back to WinXP and the ATi recorder software. It's not perfect but it beats the hell of of MythTV, which seems to ONLY work if you have the EXACT FUCKING SAME HARDWARE CONFIG AND CABLE PROVIDER AS ONE OF THE WRITERS.
I tried. I really tried to give MythTV a shot. No fucking way am I going to deal with that, and no fucking way am I shelling out ridiculous amounts of cash when I already have working parts. The Linux guys always scream about how they can fix anything, code anything, blahblahblah... well? Give me a working driver so the ATi capture hardware works and video playback doesn't look like crap compared to the Windows video playback, and I'll switch. Till then? Mythbuntu remains one more example of why Linux fails.
Wow... who designed this system, a Vogon? All that's missing is forms filled out in triplicate before being buried in a pile of bugblatter beast droppings!
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing how messed up Slashdot's moderation system is.
...to start reversing the DEPLORABLE conditions started by Jimmy "I'm a fucking moron" Carter.
You know - the guy who thought that if the US didn't RECYCLE nuclear waste back into fuel (which would SOLVE the "nuclear waste storage" issue) it would be an "example" to tin-pot dictatorships and insane genocidal religious nations like North Korea, Pakistan, India, Iran, Syria, China... and they wouldn't try to get nuclear weapons. Yeah, how'd that work out for us?
The guy who coddled so-called "environmentalists" to the point where we haven't built SAFE, CLEAN electrical power generation anywhere because nobody can get past the permits process and NIMBY enviro-wacko whining.
Think about it - even the founder of Greenpeace (who long ago left the organization when it became obvious the commies and inmates were running the asylum and not interested in real, rational discussion) says we need nuclear energy because so-called "renewable" sources are inherently (a) unreliable and (b) limited in the scope of what we can do with them.
Obama doesn't support this - remember, it's about "hope" and "change." Apparently, "hope" that magic pixies will bestow unlimited energy on us or something.
Obama opposes our drilling for our OWN oil resources, which is about FAR more than gas: think about how much plastic, rubber, oil-based lubricants, you use in your daily lives: it ALL comes from oil. That pen in your pocket? OIL. The plastic bag you used for your groceries, and the plastic involved in 90% of the food packaging (plastic sealed pouches virtually everywhere, plastic milk jug, plastic lids, etc)... OIL. Your tires on your car or even your bike? That's right, OIL involved. Half of your car's structure? Plastics - OIL again.
Just about everything you use in your daily life comes from petroleum in some fashion, most likely directly some chemical derivative in ADDITION to the heat generation for the melting/forming processes.
Obama is on record that "I am not a nuclear energy proponent", and claims the only energy bill he pushed in the IL senate is an ANTI-power plant bill.
...to start reversing the DEPLORABLE conditions started by Jimmy "I'm a fucking moron" Carter.
You know - the guy who thought that if the US didn't RECYCLE nuclear waste back into fuel (which would SOLVE the "nuclear waste storage" issue) it would be an "example" to tin-pot dictatorships and insane genocidal religious nations like North Korea and Iran and they wouldn't try to get nuclear weapons.
The guy who coddled so-called "environmentalists" to the point where we haven't built SAFE, CLEAN electrical power generation anywhere because nobody can get past the permits process and NIMBY enviro-wacko whining.
Think about it - even the founder of Greenpeace (who long ago left the organization when it became obvious the commies and inmates were running the asylum and not interested in real, rational discussion) says we need nuclear energy because so-called "renewable" sources are inherently (a) unreliable and (b) limited in the scope of what we can do with them.
would have prevented Mario Kart from running except for a little "check for OS version X" flag.
It was Nintendo's way of trying to force updates.
I call foul.
and why won't you share you stingy bastard?
A flaw in an internet-aware OS: one thing.
A flaw that requires someone to load a hacked savegame, and do something specific in a specific game?
Further, the only difference between the two being that in the second case, the "flaw" is actually the FIX for the broken and stupid nature of the OS?
Really now. I have right of first sale on my side. I bought *hardware*. If I want to load linux on it, that's my fucking business and Nintendo can go fuck themselves. The worst they can do is void my warranty and refuse to contract with me for servicing if the hardware fails.
Modded down to -1 overnight by the brainwashed obamabots.
I don't care if you believe me or not. Given that we all got our consoles from the same launch party, they probably were all from the same bad batch. Our gamestop's had a number of people complaining of the same thing as well recently.
Still, fuck nintendo. They know the right thing to do, but instead they soak us for more cash for their faulty product.
This li'l piggie got ripped off by nintendo when they shipped with a known faulty heatsink and weren't as honest as Microsoft about fixing their error.
Seriously. Me and 10 friends all had launch consoles. EVERY ONE failed with black dots one month past warranty. Nintendo's response? "Too bad, pay us $75 and ship it in."
Microsoft at least admitted the RRoD was their fault and fixed my console for free. Fuck nintendo.
Check this out too:
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=6185320
Know how much of this guy's money wound up in kickbacks to Obama? Loads!
Care to explain why every obamabot out there is modding "-1 troll" any time someone stands up to speak the truth about him in this thread?
Look into how Obama disenfranchised voters and made sure his name was the only name on the ballot in some of his Illinois races.
Then look at all the money he got in the various bribery scandals over the years. Start with the $1million+ "discount" he got on his house.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
I've lived RIGHT NEXT to Obama's district. He's dirty as fuck, more corrupt than a louisiana politician. YOU are the one who's been misled.
Absolutely astounding how many obamabots with mod points are modding "troll" to people who expose their corrupt bastard of a candidate for what he is.
- a guy who doesn't know how many states there are in the union.
- a guy who's been involved in numerous shady deals and bribery schemes during his tenure as an IL state senator and then again in the US Senate... including disenfranchising hundreds of people just to be sure that when the time came for elections, his was the only name on the ballot (kinda reminds you of how "elections" in communist nations like China and Russia and Cuba work really).
- a guy who has had to kick more than a dozen high-ranking people off his campaign when it turned up they were raving anti-semites associated with terrorist groups and fundraising efforts.
- a guy whose economic policies make Karl Marx look tame.
- a guy who insists his father (who was in the US for barely 2 years, and knocked up Obama's mom while having a wife and kids back in Kenya) was buried in a coffin with the US flag on it... in KENYA.
- a guy who marinated in a racist church for 20 years, steeping in "mother continent Africa", the "Black Value System" (which looks a lot like KKK literature with black/white reversed), and "God Damn America."
- a guy who can't decide if his "God Damn America" pastor is (a) as close to him as his grandmother, "like an uncle", "a member of the family", or (b) only "tangentially associated" with him.
- a guy who browbeats Americans who are working to make ends meet about making more charitable contributions, while less than 1% of his extremely sizable (even before the bribery) income goes anywhere but his own pocket.
- a guy who made his fortune on racist, trumped-up, falsified "civil rights" lawsuits
- a guy who does a damn lousy job as senator, with a record of missing more than 30% of votes and then only voting "present" a sizable time more.
- a guy who considers a baby the result of teenage sex to be a "punishment" that needs to be rectified with an abortion... it's too bad for us that his 19-year-old mom, knocked up by a married liar, didn't take that advice!
- a guy so cold-hearted that if a baby happens to survive an abortion attempt, he's perfectly okay with just dumping it into a trash bin and letting the child die anyways.
"I have a dream... where [people] will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."(MLK Jr) - by ANY measure, Barack Hussein Obama's character has been shown.
I don't care the color of his skin. I care that he's a corrupt scumbag. And on that measure, if you can honestly say knowing all this that you'd still vote for him, then you are probably one too.
I use a gigabit router. Tomato's no help.
in Oblivion sometimes a wolf will drop a gold coin or a fork - WTF?),
You've obviously never seen the list of stuff they've found in shark stomachs. I don't find it at all beyond reason that a hungry predator might gobble down a coin or small metallic object along with its meal.
WTF is a "scare good"?
That would be known as a "tpyo." I meant to type "scarce", not "scare", which anyone with half a brain would realize from context.
Dishonesty is a separate issue, which I purposely chose not to address, and I won't get bogged down with here.
Ooh... dodge the point that eviscerates your bullshit. Dodge it good and don't ever address it!
Tell me, do you have $cientology training by any chance?
And this is where someone uneducated in economics tries to force a solution that is impossible and does not give a good result. Again, I really don't care about what has happened in the past (though it does need to be resolved -- and I happen to agree with you that contracts should be honored, but not in perpetua).
Funny. Now it looks like you don't understand basic economics - the difference between a company dishonestly failing to fulfill their contractual agreement and a "solution that is impossible." It is certainly possible for the companies to fulfill their agreements, but what they are doing is dishonestly trying to change the rules and cheat on their contractual responsibilities instead.
"contracts should be honored, but not in perpetua" - Funny. As it stands, every ISP out there should be on the hook for breach of contract as it is. The only thing stopping it is not their inability to do so, but that they are more willing to lawyer up and try to evade their contractual responsibility than they are to actually act honestly.
The ISP's have never honored their contracts. I say make them honor their contracts first, as required by the law, THEN we can talk about other things.
Unfortunately, for most games and programming structures, the "fedex quest" mindset is a result of the structure of the programming.
Bethesda are great at trying to avoid this, and they spent a ton of time on it (compare the Morrowind to Oblivion engines, and see the designer commentary on all the work they had to do just to get the "watch a guy hide something" quest early in Morrowind to work right). But they still sometimes fall back on the trap.
The basic problem is, for a quest/story mechanic to work, you need triggers. Somewhere in the game, there's a bit or routine that checks for X, Y, Z completion requirements. "Is X in inventory and talking to Bob selecting Dialog Option 3" make for a really easy set of variables to code for, and then the game flips the bit so that X is removed from inventory. Even quests that are "Go talk to person X" are really fedex quests - you're "carrying" a bit that signifies that you're on the quest and person X is who you need to talk to, thus when you talk to them, the appropriate dialog box (which probably wasn't available before) is opened up... you've just handed in the "plot coupon" as it were.
The better a programmer hides the triggers - making you hide somewhere (in-game) and spy on someone, or specifically avoid encounters to get a really good item or piece of info - the better and more seamless the story will seem. The underlying programming still needs those triggers, though.
My suggestion? Stop buying crappy games like GTA, and go with games where the programmers put some thought into the storyline and making it fit better. The industry could survive just fine with a few less programmers making crappy movie-tie-in games (*coughIronmancough*) and a few more making really GOOD games like Thief or Oblivion.
starts at the very beginning.
The fact of the matter is that bandwidth is a scarce good (in an economic sense; we have quite a lot of it actually, but not enough to serve everyone at high usage).
Actually, most people have no effing clue what bandwidth really is. You prove how clueless you are by calling it a "scare good."
So how de we ensure that bandwidth can be apportioned fairly across users?
Bandwidth is not a commodity as such. Unlike most commodities, it cannot be stored for future use. It is entirely a function of the momentary capability of the attached routing system. It's much like telephone systems in that regard; there are only a certain amount of circuits ("lines") that a particular neighborhood or area can have active at a given time.
We can make sure that people pay for the bandwidth they use, by metered sale or by tiered pricing.
And here is where it gets stupid. If you sell someone "X GB/month", then people will STILL get fucked over when they try to use the "bandwidth" (actually, absurd data capacity) they bought during a time when others are doing the same. Tiered plans are in place NOW for most providers, and the companies are lying to us about what they sold anyways - the "up to X kbits/second" tier usually isn't even doing as well as the next tier below.
And this says nothing of the off-period times when most sane people are at work or asleep. You're charging people the same price for the "scarce" times (similar to the daytime cell rates) as for the rates when the routers are just sitting more or less idle.
This is where the crackheads in corporate accounting offices and management start drooling - they can set up a complicated pricing scheme that the normal consumer barely understands, and get away with tagging in all sorts of hidden fees. I for one think the companies should be held responsible for upgrading their network and fulfilling the service they contracted for rather than trying to wiggle out of it after they overbooked.
All the US has is monopoly areas. That's because our fucked-up government handed out monopolies on phone service way back when, and "deregulation" doesn't help anything but picking who bills your phone service: all they do is "lease" your particular line from the company that owns it.
For example:
#1 - In my old apartment, I could only get DSL. DSL was only available through SBC. I could get phone service from any one of 5 phone providers, but SBC was the only one that could provide DSL, because SBC owned the lines and the DSL routers - and if I went with phone from one of the other phone companies, then I couldn't get DSL because SBC required an "active phone account" before providing the DSL service.
#2 - Where I live now, we can't get DSL (no router close enough). We can only get cable from Comcrap, because they have a monopoly on cable TV service in the area. When I called Verizon about FiOS, I was told - surprise surprise - that FiOS will ONLY ever be available in places where Verizon owns the phone line infrastructure. So, my options are now either (a) Comcrap cable modem or (b) shitty satellite service with >2000ms pings.
The kicker? I asked my elected representative why this is allowed, and they said that there is "national competition" between the phone companies... meanwhile, the gov't sits back and allows monopoly abuse by the data providers all over the fucking place.
In the big metropolitan area I live in, we get radio ads trying to get people to "switch" between cable modem and DSL all the time. Yet looking over the map, less than 10% of the people even exist in an area where DSL and cable modem services overlap. It's all a big fraud.
It's "may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their genitals."
The underlying problem is just as you described though - unless they come up with a DAMN GOOD tool to show you how much bandwidth you've used, how will the normal consumer know? Any app that phones home uses bandwidth. Updating your virus scanner or patching your OS (doesn't matter windows, mac, or linux) uses bandwidth. Xbox360, Wii, PS3 all use bandwidth. Instant messaging uses bandwidth.
Only a VERY select few people actually know how much bandwidth each of these uses. Training your average user to use something like Freemeter is going to be pretty tough, and even then, that only covers their PC. It still misses the rest of whatever network devices you may have.
Setting a cap up is a grab to try to stick people with extra fees, nothing more. Welcome to the U$A, home of the hidden fee - now bend over, spread the cheeks, and take it.
Oh, right, this is slashdot, home of the fucktards with linux rectally inserted.
Until AMD opens up its ATI hardware and software specs, or produces their own decent Linux drivers, ATI cards are just not going to work well with Linux. (Which is reason #5 of why I'm an nVidia fan.)
AFAIK, both companies produce only closed-source drivers.
From every linux evangelist who tried to sell me on making a Mythbox, one of their deals was about all the "open sourced drivers" and how it should be "compatible with everything, especially if it's been around a few years."
Sorry. Clearly that's not the case. For all their crowing about being able to fix incompatibilities, they turn around and do this? Add to that the fact that there is no equivalent in Nvidia-land to the All-In-Wonder (and it's crappy enough as it is trying to fit Video board, Audio board, Gigabit ethernet, and then have one solitary PCI slot with which to either put the HDTV tuner OR a second SATA controller with modern "no you can't have expansion slots" motherboards)...
I'm not an Nvidia fan nor an ATi fan. ATi just made the components I was after, when I was on the market. If the Linux guys can't figure out support for the hardware I bought 5+ years ago in some cases, that puts the lie to their claims of support for Linux as far as I'm concerned.
Step 1: Install.
/dev/sda1, /sdb1, /sdc1 are different fucking drives. I'd set my data drives the way I wanted them thanks, I don't need Linux deciding that for some reason /media/Video1 should now map to THE FUCKING WINDOWS PARTITION. After two hours of hunting, I find the barely-documented "UUID" setup ... why the fuck does Linux not use that by default?
Step 2: Try to figure out what "default" settings are for my PC.
Step 3: Try to figure out why the fuck Linux keeps deciding randomly (on reboot) that
Step 4: drivers, drivers, drivers. I own 2 ATi capture cards (TV Wonder, HDTV Wonder) and 3 ATi (All-In-Wonder) video boards. Not a fucking one of them "fully supported." Advice I get from the Linux posers? "Duuude ati sux go buy nvidia and get a hauppauge or homerun capture card." Sorry: The hardware I already bought a couple years backworks fine. I'm not going to go spend $300+ on this.
Step 5: Back to WinXP and the ATi recorder software. It's not perfect but it beats the hell of of MythTV, which seems to ONLY work if you have the EXACT FUCKING SAME HARDWARE CONFIG AND CABLE PROVIDER AS ONE OF THE WRITERS.
I tried. I really tried to give MythTV a shot. No fucking way am I going to deal with that, and no fucking way am I shelling out ridiculous amounts of cash when I already have working parts. The Linux guys always scream about how they can fix anything, code anything, blahblahblah... well? Give me a working driver so the ATi capture hardware works and video playback doesn't look like crap compared to the Windows video playback, and I'll switch. Till then? Mythbuntu remains one more example of why Linux fails.
Wow... who designed this system, a Vogon? All that's missing is forms filled out in triplicate before being buried in a pile of bugblatter beast droppings!