I hate to agree, but I do. I have a 9700 all-in-blunder, and the updated drivers (3.4) have caused me such grief that I'm considering formatting the machine... but I'm not confident that even on a clean install, these drivers would not have the same problems.
Running 3dmark on your system is an excellent predictor of how 3dmark will run on your system. Unless it's not, of course.
My system can run most games at 1280x1024 or even 1600x1200, all detail controls maxed out, and give a frame rate that exceeds the refresh rate of the display. Why on earth would I upgrade? I can't see smaller pixels, faster framerate is irrelevant, and 90% of the games coming out are still going to be so awful that I wouldn't waste hard drive space installing them.
I think they are finding ways. People don't like metered connections. Even if you can prove that it's cheaper for 99% of the people, they don't like the idea of an unknown liability.
A solution that seems a lot more likely is that your $50 a month cable connection will get throttled if you send (recieve?) more than X kb in X hours. 95% of the users will never notice it; they just want to browse MSN and Yahoo faster, and send family pictures to friends. The other 5%, some will be annoyed but still decide it's a reasonable arrangement, and a small number - mostly telecommuters, etc., will opt to go with a bigger "plan".
Many cable networks are capable of moving around mind-boggling amounts of data, but CATV operators are a little gun-shy about offering those capacities. It's a lot like giving liquor and car keys to high-school kids.
P2P is a huge bandwidth hog. The numbers in the article seem quite realistic. If you're an ISP and 50% of your monthly expense is upstream bandwidth, there's an awfully strong incentive to have P2P become less of a problem.
Wait.. There's something other than commercials on broadcast radio?? Damn. If only I'd listened for another 3-4 hours, I might have gotten the privilege of listening to an obscenely compandered Pink song.
I know, I know. I could put a computer in my trunk and burn a gazillion MP3's to a hard drive. But I still really really really like my XM radio.
Before I had gotten XM, radio had gotten so awful, that I simply turned it off and used the time I spent driving to just think.
(while I get really annoyed with the thieves who justify downloading music, simply because nobody's sticking their sorry asses in jail yet, now and then I do feel a compulsion to whack some sense into the RIAA. In that spirit...)
Dear Senator Fastpocket,
We at Amalgamated Motors are deeply concerned. The automobile industry is in dire condition, and immediate action is required.
Our sales have been nearly flat since 2001. While some apologists for lawbreakers might blame trivial things like a global economic downturn, big increases in unemployment, or the total meltdown of the telecom sector. We know that's simply not the case.
It's vehicle piracy, plain and simple.
We try to manufacture good cars for the public. We expect the public to buy those cars, and possibly even drive them.
But we simply cannot abide by the rampant vehicle piracy going on. It's become commonplace to see "used car" lots, where one can buy a car from an indivdual who is not us! And who - horrors - may even make a profit re-selling our good(ahem) products!
Not only that, but an entire industry has sprung up blatantly encouraging the open, shameless RENTAL of vehicles.
Surely you can't help but notice that these businesses are located near airports, and are commonly staffed by people who are suspiciously dark in skin tone. The conclusion is obvious: If we allow vehicle rentals, The Terrorists Win. No other conclusion is possible.
The only reasonable solution is more thorough strip-searches of every passenger who fails to display their own car keys when checking in. Especially those who are not wearing federally-approved plaid golf pants.
We also seek federal aid to fund a public awareness campaign against the casual "lending" of vehicles between friends and family members. It's even crept into prime-time television, where it's simply treated as common humor when a teenage boy asks dad if he can borrow the car.
Surely you can understand the dire straits(ka-ching!) our industry is in, as we clash(ka-ching!) with these nickle-and-dime, and even 50-cent(ka-ching!) criminals.
We believe that the highly publicized arrests of the entire staff of Avis, Hertz, and Budget are only reasonable.
I've bid on things on ebay, and sold things there too. Most people (99%?) seem to be reasonable about feedback and realistic about it. If I see someone with a feedback rating of 50, and some guy with a feedback of 1 posts a questionable gripe.. WHO CARES?
Ok. I can understand the seller's point. It's like being a good store, and having some kook stand outside telling people not to shop there. He's entitled to do that. People are entitled to - and likely will - ignore him.
You made me angry, so I'll punch your paperboy.
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The amazingly stupid thing about this is:
1) it makes a clear case for increasing criminal penalties for interfering with comm services.
2) It doesn't hurt SCO. It may, however, bankrupt the small, independent ISP they chose to do business with.
3) Even if it did hurt SCO, who gets canned over it? The lawyers? Nope. The CEO? Nope. The first-level support guys who live paycheck-to-paycheck? Yep.
DDOS'ing a company is a stupid, childish, and completely counter-productive thing to do. It harms nobody but innocent bystanders. Cheering these idiots on is no different from cheering on any other vandal.
Your HVAC system will continue to supply plenty of fresh dust, so without a large filtering system, it's hard to have much of an effect on it.
I had a similar problem with a dusty store basement, and the solution was (please don't laugh) a chrome air cleaner (sized for a Holley 750 double pumper) attached to the blower fan. The automotive air filter was really cheap, replaceable, and quite effective. They have a big enough surface area that you have very little flow restriction. We did end up using a larger-diameter fan, which had a side benefit of making the server quieter.
Not only will you get into slashdot, but you'll have a pefect metaphor reflecting the quality of today's top 10... I can't bring myself to call them musicians. Clowns with microphones? No, that's insulting to circus performers.
The closest I've ever seen was a form-letter C&D sent to OpenOffice.org, because of a filename that was very similar to an MS office app was on a public FTP site.
When the (BSA?) was informed of their error, they apologized politely, and dropped the matter immediately.
Again, if the RIAA was doing something like using spyware to locate mp3's that you might not be the owner of, and doing so without your permission, then absolutely.
But participating in a public listing service like kazaa, and making lists of files available to poeple, and making downloads of them freely available..
What should the standard of proof be? Remember, as you make it more challenging to identify violators, the penalties must go up to deter others from the same offense.
I'm inclined to think that the "information superhighway" model made more sense than people thought; requiring license plates or other identification on every device attached would put the firewall/anti-spam/IDS pitchmen out of business almost immediately.
(and you've got to admit, the idea of "random clue checkpoints" would remove a lot of idiots from the net!)
True. But that leaves us in the position of either elevating the offense to a criminal level, which would probably be excessive, or simply not allowing any mechanism for enforcing civil litigation.
Cops have their hands full already; pulling someone off an assault case to track down some guy running gnutella just doesn't seem sensible... and it plays into the argument that broader wiretap powers with less oversight are necessary for law enforcement.
Eh? Ok.. maybe I'm alone in this regard, but I honestly can't see the RIAA as spending the money to go chase users down for.. doing nothing?
Let's get real here. The RIAA represents *business* interests. Their mission is to act as an advocate for the various record companies.
Now, I'm all with you on considering 99.8% of everything that's on display in the CD section of the local Best Buy to be worthless crap. Don't get me wrong there. I wouldn't ruin a perfectly good blank CD by burning 50 cent onto it, and Metallica has become a parody of Spinal Tap without realizing it.
But remember this: It costs money to get lawyers to do *anything*. The various record companies don't like writing big checks to the RIAA, because it cuts into their paychecks.
Well, it doesn't sound like it's quite that simple. You have to file a sworn statement detailing what you believe to be the nature of the offense. For example, that I have a copy of Emimem's new hit "I'm a talentless hack" posted on my computer.
If I (the guy with Eminem's greatest hit) have a legitimate reason (such as a license from Endlessly Repetitive Records), then I tell you you're mistaken and you go about your business.
Or if I know that you simply made the information up to get a subpoenae, then I turn it over to the cops. You've commited a *criminal* offence of perjury, and possibly a civil offense (libel).
The more I look at this.. the more it seems reasonable.
I'm inclined to think they should treat music/software piracy the same as they treat, say, turnstile-jumping in major cities: It's a civil offense punishable by a small (say $500) fine the first time, and it becomes a criminal offense ($5,000 fine, 30 days in the county lockup) the second time around.
I'd REALLY like to hate the RIAA. Anybody who inflicts Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and Creed on innocent civilians deserves mucho public hatred. But, I also know that perhaps 25% of internet backbone traffic is Kazaa/gnutella/whatever, and most of what's being "shared", don't belong to the person sharing it. If you can't enforce the ownership of music, information, data.. then you have no reason to expect yours to be protected either.
I dunno. This is one of those cases where it's "wife-beater vs. town drunk"... You've got a bunch of slime-encrusted sadists bent on monetizing every aspect of american culture, and on the other side you've got a company that wants to protect it's subscribers privacy - so THEY can sell a telemarketing company the fact that you called a cancer support group last month. ("Hello! I'm calling for Bob's discount chemotherapy...")
Not a rhetorical question here. There's an allegation that someone has broken a law. Verizon can identify that person. What is our interest in stopping them from doing so? How is this a "privacy" matter any differently from subpaenoing a witness to a car theft to testify as to what they observed?
I think it's because most of us think of a confession as something that is done formally, in front of cops (or a priest).. but IIRC (IANAL, BTW) any time a person admits to having committed a crime, it's a confession.
Of course, a jury would be a lot more likely to weigh a videotaped confession in front of police and lawyers than they would an oral description of a confession by a cellmate.
It's funny how a word or phrase can end up meaning something to one group that it doesn't mean to another. "insult" to a doctor describes an injury or damage to a body part. "refrain" means something to a lawyer, something entirely different to a musician. And "promise" to a politician means what "pick-up line" means to a beer-crazed 20-year-old.
You don't have to admit to a crime in front of a cop for it to be used as evidence.
This bozo sounds like a typical id10t. He knew what he was doing. He understood that his actions would harm his employer and co-workers (if you can't charge for PPV movies, you stop showing them).
If I take a brick and smash your car windows with it, you're likely to be pissed. Rightfully so.
What difference does it make that I was only curious what noise the glass would make when it shattered? or that I was pointing out a "known vulnerability" in the glass?
Yes, you can. And to avoid making agreements more complicated than absolutely necessary, cable operators take that risk.
They know that people who buy cable modem service generally have certain characteristics. Some, who use even less bandwidth than average, subsidize those who download the beta and demo of every game they can get their hands on (meaning me)
I kept saying the same thing - about unlimited usage - but when I look over my subscriber agreement, I see no such provision. The ads DO imply that it's unlimited.. but then again, ads also imply that drinking beer will make attractive women throw themselves at your feet.
You're correct, there's no perfect correlation between number of computers and support/BW consumption. But ISP's have difficulty in selling tiered services; witness the failure of Divx. Nobody likes buying into an unknown liability.
In the end, I have to side with the evil overlords(tm). I feel that when you sell something, your should be able to decide for yourself what terms you offer to customers.
I should have been clearer. Wholesale transit bandwidth costs, I meant, measured in 95th-percentile mb/sec.
It works out because most home users only use a small percentage of their bandwidth. I download the demo to Splinter Cell (130mb or so?) but then the next day I won't even sit down at my computer.
ISP's (theoretically) profit by aggregating the use of many people to take advantage of the economy of scale. (In practice it often doesn't work out, as demonstrated by a depressing number of ISP's folding)
Peering is an option, but nowadays it's often not worth it. If you have to pay for backhaul to an IX, hardware at the location, support for it, a port on the switch, and rack space... it's easy to end up paying more for "free" bandwidth than for wholesale bandwidth.
This is something that cable ISP's need to address.
Groan. Sorry. I couldn't help myself.
But they know this is an issue, and that's why they'd rather turn a blind eye to the guy who has an ethernet connected to his canon inkjet printer, and concentrate on the kid who's sharing his connection with two neighbors and a file server.
The source of these numbers are netflow reports and similar traffic measurements, both my own and other published data.
If you really want to play word games, I define an idle machine as "a computing platform with an operating system loaded and running, but without a user interacting with the system".
I'm glad you like to run a caching DNS server and diskless workstations. Really. But to most people, computers are just tools to play games and send email. They're purchased at places like Sears and CompUSA, and they automatically download things like windows update, antivirus software, etc.
Last time I checked, a caching DNS server only reduces traffic if you have a large enough, active user base to populate and refresh the cache.
Bandwidth (about $50-130/mb wholesale) Customer support (additional troubleshooting) Security (more machines, more chance for trojans, etc) Repairs (the guy with six people sharing a cable modem is going to expect instant service restoration, whether he's paying for it or not)
And frankly, it ain't your network. If you want to start up an "all the bandwidth you want for free" ISP, knock yourself out.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to agree, but I do. I have a 9700 all-in-blunder, and the updated drivers (3.4) have caused me such grief that I'm considering formatting the machine... but I'm not confident that even on a clean install, these drivers would not have the same problems.
Running 3dmark on your system is an excellent predictor of how 3dmark will run on your system. Unless it's not, of course.
My system can run most games at 1280x1024 or even 1600x1200, all detail controls maxed out, and give a frame rate that exceeds the refresh rate of the display. Why on earth would I upgrade? I can't see smaller pixels, faster framerate is irrelevant, and 90% of the games coming out are still going to be so awful that I wouldn't waste hard drive space installing them.
I think they are finding ways. People don't like metered connections. Even if you can prove that it's cheaper for 99% of the people, they don't like the idea of an unknown liability.
A solution that seems a lot more likely is that your $50 a month cable connection will get throttled if you send (recieve?) more than X kb in X hours. 95% of the users will never notice it; they just want to browse MSN and Yahoo faster, and send family pictures to friends. The other 5%, some will be annoyed but still decide it's a reasonable arrangement, and a small number - mostly telecommuters, etc., will opt to go with a bigger "plan".
Many cable networks are capable of moving around mind-boggling amounts of data, but CATV operators are a little gun-shy about offering those capacities. It's a lot like giving liquor and car keys to high-school kids.
P2P is a huge bandwidth hog. The numbers in the article seem quite realistic. If you're an ISP and 50% of your monthly expense is upstream bandwidth, there's an awfully strong incentive to have P2P become less of a problem.
Wait.. There's something other than commercials on broadcast radio?? Damn. If only I'd listened for another 3-4 hours, I might have gotten the privilege of listening to an obscenely compandered Pink song.
I know, I know. I could put a computer in my trunk and burn a gazillion MP3's to a hard drive. But I still really really really like my XM radio.
Before I had gotten XM, radio had gotten so awful, that I simply turned it off and used the time I spent driving to just think.
(while I get really annoyed with the thieves who justify downloading music, simply because nobody's sticking their sorry asses in jail yet, now and then I do feel a compulsion to whack some sense into the RIAA. In that spirit...)
Dear Senator Fastpocket,
We at Amalgamated Motors are deeply concerned. The automobile industry is in dire condition, and immediate action is required.
Our sales have been nearly flat since 2001. While some apologists for lawbreakers might blame trivial things like a global economic downturn, big increases in unemployment, or the total meltdown of the telecom sector. We know that's simply not the case.
It's vehicle piracy, plain and simple.
We try to manufacture good cars for the public. We expect the public to buy those cars, and possibly even drive them.
But we simply cannot abide by the rampant vehicle piracy going on. It's become commonplace to see "used car" lots, where one can buy a car from an indivdual who is not us! And who - horrors - may even make a profit re-selling our good(ahem) products!
Not only that, but an entire industry has sprung up blatantly encouraging the open, shameless RENTAL of vehicles.
Surely you can't help but notice that these businesses are located near airports, and are commonly staffed by people who are suspiciously dark in skin tone. The conclusion is obvious: If we allow vehicle rentals, The Terrorists Win. No other conclusion is possible.
The only reasonable solution is more thorough strip-searches of every passenger who fails to display their own car keys when checking in. Especially those who are not wearing federally-approved plaid golf pants.
We also seek federal aid to fund a public awareness campaign against the casual "lending" of vehicles between friends and family members. It's even crept into prime-time television, where it's simply treated as common humor when a teenage boy asks dad if he can borrow the car.
Surely you can understand the dire straits(ka-ching!) our industry is in, as we clash(ka-ching!) with these nickle-and-dime, and even 50-cent(ka-ching!) criminals.
We believe that the highly publicized arrests of the entire staff of Avis, Hertz, and Budget are only reasonable.
The ruling seems to make good legal sense.
I've bid on things on ebay, and sold things there too. Most people (99%?) seem to be reasonable about feedback and realistic about it. If I see someone with a feedback rating of 50, and some guy with a feedback of 1 posts a questionable gripe.. WHO CARES?
Ok. I can understand the seller's point. It's like being a good store, and having some kook stand outside telling people not to shop there. He's entitled to do that. People are entitled to - and likely will - ignore him.
The amazingly stupid thing about this is:
1) it makes a clear case for increasing criminal penalties for interfering with comm services.
2) It doesn't hurt SCO. It may, however, bankrupt the small, independent ISP they chose to do business with.
3) Even if it did hurt SCO, who gets canned over it? The lawyers? Nope. The CEO? Nope. The first-level support guys who live paycheck-to-paycheck? Yep.
DDOS'ing a company is a stupid, childish, and completely counter-productive thing to do. It harms nobody but innocent bystanders. Cheering these idiots on is no different from cheering on any other vandal.
Your HVAC system will continue to supply plenty of fresh dust, so without a large filtering system, it's hard to have much of an effect on it.
I had a similar problem with a dusty store basement, and the solution was (please don't laugh) a chrome air cleaner (sized for a Holley 750 double pumper) attached to the blower fan. The automotive air filter was really cheap, replaceable, and quite effective. They have a big enough surface area that you have very little flow restriction. We did end up using a larger-diameter fan, which had a side benefit of making the server quieter.
Not only will you get into slashdot, but you'll have a pefect metaphor reflecting the quality of today's top 10 ... I can't bring myself to call them musicians. Clowns with microphones? No, that's insulting to circus performers.
The closest I've ever seen was a form-letter C&D sent to OpenOffice.org, because of a filename that was very similar to an MS office app was on a public FTP site.
When the (BSA?) was informed of their error, they apologized politely, and dropped the matter immediately.
Again, if the RIAA was doing something like using spyware to locate mp3's that you might not be the owner of, and doing so without your permission, then absolutely.
But participating in a public listing service like kazaa, and making lists of files available to poeple, and making downloads of them freely available..
What should the standard of proof be? Remember, as you make it more challenging to identify violators, the penalties must go up to deter others from the same offense.
I'm inclined to think that the "information superhighway" model made more sense than people thought; requiring license plates or other identification on every device attached would put the firewall/anti-spam/IDS pitchmen out of business almost immediately.
(and you've got to admit, the idea of "random clue checkpoints" would remove a lot of idiots from the net!)
True. But that leaves us in the position of either elevating the offense to a criminal level, which would probably be excessive, or simply not allowing any mechanism for enforcing civil litigation.
Cops have their hands full already; pulling someone off an assault case to track down some guy running gnutella just doesn't seem sensible... and it plays into the argument that broader wiretap powers with less oversight are necessary for law enforcement.
Eh? Ok.. maybe I'm alone in this regard, but I honestly can't see the RIAA as spending the money to go chase users down for .. doing nothing?
Let's get real here. The RIAA represents *business* interests. Their mission is to act as an advocate for the various record companies.
Now, I'm all with you on considering 99.8% of everything that's on display in the CD section of the local Best Buy to be worthless crap. Don't get me wrong there. I wouldn't ruin a perfectly good blank CD by burning 50 cent onto it, and Metallica has become a parody of Spinal Tap without realizing it.
But remember this: It costs money to get lawyers to do *anything*. The various record companies don't like writing big checks to the RIAA, because it cuts into their paychecks.
Well, it doesn't sound like it's quite that simple. You have to file a sworn statement detailing what you believe to be the nature of the offense. For example, that I have a copy of Emimem's new hit "I'm a talentless hack" posted on my computer.
If I (the guy with Eminem's greatest hit) have a legitimate reason (such as a license from Endlessly Repetitive Records), then I tell you you're mistaken and you go about your business.
Or if I know that you simply made the information up to get a subpoenae, then I turn it over to the cops. You've commited a *criminal* offence of perjury, and possibly a civil offense (libel).
The more I look at this.. the more it seems reasonable.
Hmm. Good point.
I'm inclined to think they should treat music/software piracy the same as they treat, say, turnstile-jumping in major cities: It's a civil offense punishable by a small (say $500) fine the first time, and it becomes a criminal offense ($5,000 fine, 30 days in the county lockup) the second time around.
I'd REALLY like to hate the RIAA. Anybody who inflicts Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and Creed on innocent civilians deserves mucho public hatred. But, I also know that perhaps 25% of internet backbone traffic is Kazaa/gnutella/whatever, and most of what's being "shared", don't belong to the person sharing it. If you can't enforce the ownership of music, information, data.. then you have no reason to expect yours to be protected either.
I dunno. This is one of those cases where it's "wife-beater vs. town drunk"... You've got a bunch of slime-encrusted sadists bent on monetizing every aspect of american culture, and on the other side you've got a company that wants to protect it's subscribers privacy - so THEY can sell a telemarketing company the fact that you called a cancer support group last month. ("Hello! I'm calling for Bob's discount chemotherapy...")
Not a rhetorical question here. There's an allegation that someone has broken a law. Verizon can identify that person. What is our interest in stopping them from doing so? How is this a "privacy" matter any differently from subpaenoing a witness to a car theft to testify as to what they observed?
Or do I misunderstand the case?
I think it's because most of us think of a confession as something that is done formally, in front of cops (or a priest).. but IIRC (IANAL, BTW) any time a person admits to having committed a crime, it's a confession.
Of course, a jury would be a lot more likely to weigh a videotaped confession in front of police and lawyers than they would an oral description of a confession by a cellmate.
It's funny how a word or phrase can end up meaning something to one group that it doesn't mean to another. "insult" to a doctor describes an injury or damage to a body part. "refrain" means something to a lawyer, something entirely different to a musician. And "promise" to a politician means what "pick-up line" means to a beer-crazed 20-year-old.
You don't have to admit to a crime in front of a cop for it to be used as evidence.
This bozo sounds like a typical id10t. He knew what he was doing. He understood that his actions would harm his employer and co-workers (if you can't charge for PPV movies, you stop showing them).
If I take a brick and smash your car windows with it, you're likely to be pissed. Rightfully so.
What difference does it make that I was only curious what noise the glass would make when it shattered? or that I was pointing out a "known vulnerability" in the glass?
Here's to lots of goatse.cx for this jackass.
Yes, you can. And to avoid making agreements more complicated than absolutely necessary, cable operators take that risk.
They know that people who buy cable modem service generally have certain characteristics. Some, who use even less bandwidth than average, subsidize those who download the beta and demo of every game they can get their hands on (meaning me)
I kept saying the same thing - about unlimited usage - but when I look over my subscriber agreement, I see no such provision. The ads DO imply that it's unlimited.. but then again, ads also imply that drinking beer will make attractive women throw themselves at your feet.
You're correct, there's no perfect correlation between number of computers and support/BW consumption. But ISP's have difficulty in selling tiered services; witness the failure of Divx. Nobody likes buying into an unknown liability.
In the end, I have to side with the evil overlords(tm). I feel that when you sell something, your should be able to decide for yourself what terms you offer to customers.
I should have been clearer. Wholesale transit bandwidth costs, I meant, measured in 95th-percentile mb/sec.
It works out because most home users only use a small percentage of their bandwidth. I download the demo to Splinter Cell (130mb or so?) but then the next day I won't even sit down at my computer.
ISP's (theoretically) profit by aggregating the use of many people to take advantage of the economy of scale. (In practice it often doesn't work out, as demonstrated by a depressing number of ISP's folding)
Peering is an option, but nowadays it's often not worth it. If you have to pay for backhaul to an IX, hardware at the location, support for it, a port on the switch, and rack space... it's easy to end up paying more for "free" bandwidth than for wholesale bandwidth.
This is something that cable ISP's need to address.
Groan. Sorry. I couldn't help myself.
But they know this is an issue, and that's why they'd rather turn a blind eye to the guy who has an ethernet connected to his canon inkjet printer, and concentrate on the kid who's sharing his connection with two neighbors and a file server.
The source of these numbers are netflow reports and similar traffic measurements, both my own and other published data.
If you really want to play word games, I define an idle machine as "a computing platform with an operating system loaded and running, but without a user interacting with the system".
I'm glad you like to run a caching DNS server and diskless workstations. Really. But to most people, computers are just tools to play games and send email. They're purchased at places like Sears and CompUSA, and they automatically download things like windows update, antivirus software, etc.
Last time I checked, a caching DNS server only reduces traffic if you have a large enough, active user base to populate and refresh the cache.
The additional costs are for:
Bandwidth (about $50-130/mb wholesale)
Customer support (additional troubleshooting)
Security (more machines, more chance for trojans, etc)
Repairs (the guy with six people sharing a cable modem is going to expect instant service restoration, whether he's paying for it or not)
And frankly, it ain't your network. If you want to start up an "all the bandwidth you want for free" ISP, knock yourself out.
The most likely thing to annoy neighbors is visitors/co-workers blocking driveways or using up parking (assuming it's in a fairly busy area.
Zoning is one of those ordinances that's only enforced when someone gets pissed off.
The numbers don't bear this out. Even if two machines are just sitting idle, they both download patches, query DNS, etc.
ISP's *do* realize that people want to connect more than one machine. This is simply a mechanism for identifying people who violate their agreements.
... if you're paying for a service where you're only supposed to connect one host, it seems reasonable, doesn't it?