The distinction is that, on Android, you can load up a tethering app without the need to install some shady jailbreak and compromise your handset's security.
"Shady jailbreak"? It's Apple that has a problem with shady jailbreaks, not Android.
In any event, it's called "gaining root access" or rooting in the Android universe, and secondly there's nothing shady about gaining control of your own property. Let me ask you: would you tolerate HP, Dell, or for that matter Apple locking down your desktop machine in such a manner? No? Well then.
Furthermore, if you aren't on a complete dick carrier (I'm looking at you, AT&T) the standard Android Wi-Fi and USB tethering options are built-in. No need to download some shady app from the marketplace or even bother to root. Tethering is actually a part of the current Android releases, has been for some time now, and if your Android device doesn't have it it is because your cheapass, bloodsucking wireless provider thoughtfully removed it for you.
This is my favorite feature of my Nexus One. Just a few taps and it turns into a WiFi hotspot. This one feature has saved me hundreds of dollars on hotel rip-off WiFi prices. Nice also in the car to have WiFi for your passengers.
This is a feature of 2.2 (and above) unless your evil phone carrier disables it. (T-Mobile is happy with me using it.)
Nothing to do with the Nexus One, per se. It's just that the Wi-Fi tether option wasn't turned off by T-Mobile (unlike most of the other providers out there... bloodsuckers.) My G2 had that option in the stock firmware as well (I'm also a happy T-Mobile customer, and for the same reasons.) And if the AT&T buyout goes through... well, I'm going to be thoroughly pissed. Hey, even you folks out there that aren't on T-Mobile ought to be writing your Congresscrooks about this: ongoing consolidation in the industry isn't good for anyone, no matter what provider they are being screwed by.
The carrier sells you 'x' GB/month of total data transfer (where x=data_rate*seconds_in_month if they sold the plan as 'unlimited'). What the hell difference does it make which device those bits happen to end up on after transiting through your phone?
The difference is that they'd much rather limit your consumption to as small a percentage of that promised 'x' gigabytes as they possibly can, and the presumption is that a phone will consume less capacity than, say, a laptop. And that's true: but it's still a crappy way to treat your customers. Not being boned up the ass like that is why I'm on T-Mobile, and why I'm absolutely furious with AT&T for fucking up a good thing. Bastards. Can't compete? Just destroy the competition.
Personally, I think we should simply encourage everyone we know to install Netcounter (or some similar app) to track their usage, and then run network-intensive applications like Youtube as often as needed to run up as close to the cap as possible each month. Teach the carriers that they need to stop trying to find ways to screw people over and start building out more capacity because we're going to use it.
Also, while I'm aware that this could only be considered 'on topic' by the most tenuous of standards, I'm surprised we got a term so positive as 'jailbreak' into mainstream usage. The connotation that the phone as-provided is trapped in a jail, and that the user is freeing it by hacking the OS, seems like a reasonable analogy to me, it's just that I would've expected the carriers to go for a bit of negative PR. Something along the lines of "Sure, you could install that evil communist app that hasn't been authorised by an upstanding corporation's store, but you'd need to terrorist-molest your phone to do so. You don't want to do that, do you?"
As others have pointed out, the correct term for Android devices is "root" not jailbreak... not that "root-molest" sounds any better, now that I think about it.
It has been decided that America is to become a third-world country, dependent upon the largesse (or otherwise) of other countries.
Oh good, you braindead lout, I always do love a good conspiracy theory. Tell me, who has decided this? Was it the illuminati? A cabal of nameless corporations? The Bilderberg conspirators?? The same puppetmasters that installed President Bush, and who now control Obama? Please tell me who has decided this so I mock you further.
Corporate America, of course. Who else? Who else makes the decisions about where to sell, where to make products, and who is going to make them? Are you BLIND? I've spent thirty years working for industry. Started out working in a manufacturing plant running a punch press back in the seventies, but in 1981 started began developing data acquisition and process control systems for industry. It's what I still do. I've seen what's been happening to our manufacturing economy firsthand: people like you that seem to think everything is all peachy frighten me. I've worked for multi-billion-dollar American companies that had plants all around the country, all around the world, watched them shrink down to a couple of facilities... and then to nothing. I've been in once-thriving industrial cities that are now nothing but ghost towns. I've seen upper management sell their factories to "competitors", promising their workers that "nothing would change"... and then watched as those people came to work the next day, only to find chains on the doors and giant trucks hauling all the machine tools and manufacturing equipment off to China.
Hell, I remember the division chief of a once-huge outfit I used to consult for saying a few years ago, "I don't even know why we make things", in reference to Chinese competition. Maybe that's not a "conspiracy" as we usually understand the term, but it most certainly is a pattern, and you'd have to be, well, a moron not to have noticed it. But that's okay: I'll accept being a lout if you'll agree to be a moron, at least for the sake of argument. Fact is, greed is the only explanation required for what is happening, greed and a sociopathic perspective towards your fellow Americans. Ask yourself this: why are more and more CEOs of "American" corporations not Americans? Why? Because they don't want any vestigial bit of patriotism or concern for any remaining domestic workers to interfere with their plans to maximize profit now.
Get out and see what's going on, and then come back and call me a lout. Unlike many of the people here, I'm an older engineer whose been around for a long time, seen a lot of people that I worked for and with lose their jobs because it was easier to sell out than to compete, witnessed the rise of the MBA and the destruction left in their wake. So I'm sorry if you mistook my original comment (still no reason to be as insulting as you were) but you're obviously ignorant of the topic. Educate yourself, and then we can talk about what's going on more intelligently. Fox News sure won't tell you. Obama sure won't tell you. The CEO's of our once-major domestic manufacturing concerns most certainly won't tell you: according to them, everything is fine. But the sell-out has been going on for decades, is still going on, and when we're completely hollowed out, I guarantee our standard of living is not going to improve.
Face it, a free nation which cannot provide for its own citizens is anything but free.
Apple is a company that is as beligerent to competitors as Microsoft ever was. They intentionally create proprietary devices that have limited OS support and try to sabotage more widely used multi-platform standards. They have a very anti-user approach to engineering these days. They are no longer out to empower anyone. An Apple monopoly would be far worse than the Microsoft one.
Success of a multi-vendor platform trumps any sort of single vendor monopoly.
^ this is why I didn't get an iPad:P
Yeah. Me too. And I was an early adopter of Apple equipment too: 1978 in my case. But then they stopped being about creativity, freedom and openness, and started concerning themselves with control, and limits, and that's when I lost interest.
This is a more likely scenario then people hold possible right now. I see them also dominating gaming though Xbox a couple years from now, it only needs one wrong move by Sony and Nintendo.
I tend to agree, although when you get right down to it, if Microsoft wipes Sony and Nintendo off the face of the planet I won't cry much. But you're right: Microsoft tends to have a lot of persistence, and a lot of money to make something out of that persistence.
"Troubleshooting" only matters if you're installing ROM Manager yourself. More typically, folks get it bundled in preinstalled (in a version tested against their handset) the first (and only) time they install Cyanogen by hand. From that point on, it Just Works.
Personally, I get more value from an open ecosystem (where, for instance, I can install applications like Swype which change the user experience system-wide -- something Jobs would never allow on the iPhone) than I would from not having that one-time manual install overhead every time I get a new phone. YMMV.
I agree 100%. CharlyFoxtrot is making completely uninformed statements (not surprising from an iPhone owner discussing Android, really) and should stop or educate himself. What difficulties there are stem from manufacturers trying to prevent users from gaining root access to their own pocket computers. Apple, by the way, is just as guilty as anyone of promoting that drain-bamaged idea. The original Android releases were shipped rooted: it was a perceived need to protect apps from copying that led to later versions being locked.
Matter of fact, once you've achieved root, flashing Cyanogenmod is so painless nowadays that it's easier and safer than your typical provider's OTA updates (if it screws up for any reason, you can easily reflash it) and I get the latest OS and new features far faster than waiting for my carrier to deliver them. Plus which, as I'm sure you know, Cyanogen's group takes things quite a bit further than the stock firmware in many ways, stability and performance being a big priority. A lot of his stuff ends up back in the main AOSP tree, so actually even those still stuck with the stock ROM benefit in the long run. Isn't that what open source is supposed to be all about?
I pick the third option, fix the OS for that phone. I am running 2.3.3 on a Droid. WP7 won't be like that, it will be as locked down as apple without any of the upside.
This is beside the fact that its not really common to expect any updates at all from your mobile phone manufacturer.
Sure. That's because Samsung has a habit of abandoning their OS releases and their customers. That's not the case for, well, pretty much everyone else. And so far as I'm concerned, I run a third-party Android ROM and get better support from an open-source group than any of the big boys including Microsoft.
...in a country where you're charged for incoming calls! And the most outrageous/hilarious thing about it is, USians think that's completely normal.
Get your facts straight. A. if you're talking about cell phones, it's not that you're charged for incoming calls, it's that you're charged for airtime. B., we're Americans, not "USians" whatever the Hell that means, and C. no, we don't think it's "normal", it's always pissed us off. Also, I might add that you can't make such sweeping claims, it just demonstrates your ignorance. For example, many cellular providers offer completely free calling to all phones on their network, all offer some kind of more-expensive unlimited plan, and my particular provider allows me to use Skype on my Android device all I want. I can also pick ten numbers (on any network, including landlines) that I can call for free, no limits on airtime. Different providers have different options, of course, but there are plenty to choose from.
I'd say "welcome back to the 90s"... but my network worked a lot better back then. So I guess... welcome to the future!
My first high-speed connection (after I got through with dial-up) was a 4 mbit/sec symmetric service from @Home. Fast, it worked, and I had it during the heyday of Napster. That 4 meg backchannel was great: I'm on U-Verse now and I get at best 2 mbit/sec up. Too bad that @Home's management was so bad (in fact, it changed constantly) because they really had an awesome service for the time (late nineties.)
It's not like they didn't know years ago that video streaming was on the upswing and would become a dominant use of bandwidth so surely they've had time to come up with advertising collateral that accurately describes what their product can do.
They were paid in tax breaks to deliver that network, but they stole that money and delivered DSL instead. Bloodsuckers.
You can get a used Android phone and put Cyanogen on it for about $130.
Well. More correctly, you can get a used Android phone for about $130 and put Cyanogen on it for free. And yeah, I'm a big fan of Cyanogen. I'm on T-Mobile here in the U.S. and frankly I like my plan. I get a 5 Gb per month soft cap (they throttle you if you go above it, but no extra charges) and they don't care about tethering.
Interestingly, T-Mo recently announced that Skype will now be allowed to make calls over Wi-Fi and 3/4G. It works very, very well, and it's going to be a hard pill to swallow for millions of subscribers when AT&T takes over and does what I think they're going to do.
No. U-Verse is a modified form of DSL called VDSL. Fiber to the VRAD box, and then a short-haul loop to your home. That's why it's so fast compared to DSL: the signal isn't traveling very far. In either case, whether it be standard DSL or U-Verse, your standard twisted-pair phone wiring is providing the connection to your DSL modem / residential gateway.
Ah the classic "but we are bigger than you" argument.
And tell me, why wouldn't the problem scale linearly?
Untold thousands of miles of fiber that have to be laid across the whole country, for one. I remember the AT&T cable trucks that came around my area a few years ago, laying bright orange fiber optics all over the place. The amount of infrastructure required per consumer is much, much greater. You probably also don't face level of corruption, malfeasance and naked corporatism that we do. The GP was wrong about one thing: our telcos did get substantial help from the Federal Government: about a hundred billion in tax breaks (because that's what they claimed it would take to build out a national FTTH network.) What we got for that money was DSL. So yeah, the situations are simply not comparable. Our government does a lot of things well, but regulating our communications industry is no longer one of them.
And this kinda shit is exactly what the ISPs who are starting to implement caps and throttling want you to think. They've realized they can make a ton more money off you by charging you by usage just like the cellphone industry has been doing for years. If you honestly believe this then clearly they're winning and you're hopeless.
It's called an artificial scarcity. Just like what the record labels have been doing for a long, long time.
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The distinction is that, on Android, you can load up a tethering app without the need to install some shady jailbreak and compromise your handset's security.
"Shady jailbreak"? It's Apple that has a problem with shady jailbreaks, not Android.
In any event, it's called "gaining root access" or rooting in the Android universe, and secondly there's nothing shady about gaining control of your own property. Let me ask you: would you tolerate HP, Dell, or for that matter Apple locking down your desktop machine in such a manner? No? Well then.
Furthermore, if you aren't on a complete dick carrier (I'm looking at you, AT&T) the standard Android Wi-Fi and USB tethering options are built-in. No need to download some shady app from the marketplace or even bother to root. Tethering is actually a part of the current Android releases, has been for some time now, and if your Android device doesn't have it it is because your cheapass, bloodsucking wireless provider thoughtfully removed it for you.
Why the sensational title
The 'i' in Android is not at the beginning of the product name.
IAndrod? Hm ... sounds funny when you put it that way.
This is my favorite feature of my Nexus One. Just a few taps and it turns into a WiFi hotspot. This one feature has saved me hundreds of dollars on hotel rip-off WiFi prices. Nice also in the car to have WiFi for your passengers.
This is a feature of 2.2 (and above) unless your evil phone carrier disables it. (T-Mobile is happy with me using it.)
Nothing to do with the Nexus One, per se. It's just that the Wi-Fi tether option wasn't turned off by T-Mobile (unlike most of the other providers out there ... bloodsuckers.) My G2 had that option in the stock firmware as well (I'm also a happy T-Mobile customer, and for the same reasons.) And if the AT&T buyout goes through ... well, I'm going to be thoroughly pissed. Hey, even you folks out there that aren't on T-Mobile ought to be writing your Congresscrooks about this: ongoing consolidation in the industry isn't good for anyone, no matter what provider they are being screwed by.
The carrier sells you 'x' GB/month of total data transfer (where x=data_rate*seconds_in_month if they sold the plan as 'unlimited'). What the hell difference does it make which device those bits happen to end up on after transiting through your phone?
The difference is that they'd much rather limit your consumption to as small a percentage of that promised 'x' gigabytes as they possibly can, and the presumption is that a phone will consume less capacity than, say, a laptop. And that's true: but it's still a crappy way to treat your customers. Not being boned up the ass like that is why I'm on T-Mobile, and why I'm absolutely furious with AT&T for fucking up a good thing. Bastards. Can't compete? Just destroy the competition.
Personally, I think we should simply encourage everyone we know to install Netcounter (or some similar app) to track their usage, and then run network-intensive applications like Youtube as often as needed to run up as close to the cap as possible each month. Teach the carriers that they need to stop trying to find ways to screw people over and start building out more capacity because we're going to use it.
Also, while I'm aware that this could only be considered 'on topic' by the most tenuous of standards, I'm surprised we got a term so positive as 'jailbreak' into mainstream usage. The connotation that the phone as-provided is trapped in a jail, and that the user is freeing it by hacking the OS, seems like a reasonable analogy to me, it's just that I would've expected the carriers to go for a bit of negative PR. Something along the lines of "Sure, you could install that evil communist app that hasn't been authorised by an upstanding corporation's store, but you'd need to terrorist-molest your phone to do so. You don't want to do that, do you?"
As others have pointed out, the correct term for Android devices is "root" not jailbreak ... not that "root-molest" sounds any better, now that I think about it.
It has been decided that America is to become a third-world country, dependent upon the largesse (or otherwise) of other countries.
Oh good, you braindead lout, I always do love a good conspiracy theory. Tell me, who has decided this? Was it the illuminati? A cabal of nameless corporations? The Bilderberg conspirators?? The same puppetmasters that installed President Bush, and who now control Obama? Please tell me who has decided this so I mock you further.
Corporate America, of course. Who else? Who else makes the decisions about where to sell, where to make products, and who is going to make them? Are you BLIND? I've spent thirty years working for industry. Started out working in a manufacturing plant running a punch press back in the seventies, but in 1981 started began developing data acquisition and process control systems for industry. It's what I still do. I've seen what's been happening to our manufacturing economy firsthand: people like you that seem to think everything is all peachy frighten me. I've worked for multi-billion-dollar American companies that had plants all around the country, all around the world, watched them shrink down to a couple of facilities ... and then to nothing. I've been in once-thriving industrial cities that are now nothing but ghost towns. I've seen upper management sell their factories to "competitors", promising their workers that "nothing would change" ... and then watched as those people came to work the next day, only to find chains on the doors and giant trucks hauling all the machine tools and manufacturing equipment off to China.
Hell, I remember the division chief of a once-huge outfit I used to consult for saying a few years ago, "I don't even know why we make things", in reference to Chinese competition. Maybe that's not a "conspiracy" as we usually understand the term, but it most certainly is a pattern, and you'd have to be, well, a moron not to have noticed it. But that's okay: I'll accept being a lout if you'll agree to be a moron, at least for the sake of argument. Fact is, greed is the only explanation required for what is happening, greed and a sociopathic perspective towards your fellow Americans. Ask yourself this: why are more and more CEOs of "American" corporations not Americans? Why? Because they don't want any vestigial bit of patriotism or concern for any remaining domestic workers to interfere with their plans to maximize profit now.
Get out and see what's going on, and then come back and call me a lout. Unlike many of the people here, I'm an older engineer whose been around for a long time, seen a lot of people that I worked for and with lose their jobs because it was easier to sell out than to compete, witnessed the rise of the MBA and the destruction left in their wake. So I'm sorry if you mistook my original comment (still no reason to be as insulting as you were) but you're obviously ignorant of the topic. Educate yourself, and then we can talk about what's going on more intelligently. Fox News sure won't tell you. Obama sure won't tell you. The CEO's of our once-major domestic manufacturing concerns most certainly won't tell you: according to them, everything is fine. But the sell-out has been going on for decades, is still going on, and when we're completely hollowed out, I guarantee our standard of living is not going to improve.
Face it, a free nation which cannot provide for its own citizens is anything but free.
Apple is a company that is as beligerent to competitors as Microsoft ever was. They intentionally create proprietary devices that have limited OS support and try to sabotage more widely used multi-platform standards. They have a very anti-user approach to engineering these days. They are no longer out to empower anyone. An Apple monopoly would be far worse than the Microsoft one.
Success of a multi-vendor platform trumps any sort of single vendor monopoly.
^ this is why I didn't get an iPad :P
Yeah. Me too. And I was an early adopter of Apple equipment too: 1978 in my case. But then they stopped being about creativity, freedom and openness, and started concerning themselves with control, and limits, and that's when I lost interest.
This is a more likely scenario then people hold possible right now. I see them also dominating gaming though Xbox a couple years from now, it only needs one wrong move by Sony and Nintendo.
I tend to agree, although when you get right down to it, if Microsoft wipes Sony and Nintendo off the face of the planet I won't cry much. But you're right: Microsoft tends to have a lot of persistence, and a lot of money to make something out of that persistence.
"Troubleshooting" only matters if you're installing ROM Manager yourself. More typically, folks get it bundled in preinstalled (in a version tested against their handset) the first (and only) time they install Cyanogen by hand. From that point on, it Just Works.
Personally, I get more value from an open ecosystem (where, for instance, I can install applications like Swype which change the user experience system-wide -- something Jobs would never allow on the iPhone) than I would from not having that one-time manual install overhead every time I get a new phone. YMMV.
I agree 100%. CharlyFoxtrot is making completely uninformed statements (not surprising from an iPhone owner discussing Android, really) and should stop or educate himself. What difficulties there are stem from manufacturers trying to prevent users from gaining root access to their own pocket computers. Apple, by the way, is just as guilty as anyone of promoting that drain-bamaged idea. The original Android releases were shipped rooted: it was a perceived need to protect apps from copying that led to later versions being locked.
Matter of fact, once you've achieved root, flashing Cyanogenmod is so painless nowadays that it's easier and safer than your typical provider's OTA updates (if it screws up for any reason, you can easily reflash it) and I get the latest OS and new features far faster than waiting for my carrier to deliver them. Plus which, as I'm sure you know, Cyanogen's group takes things quite a bit further than the stock firmware in many ways, stability and performance being a big priority. A lot of his stuff ends up back in the main AOSP tree, so actually even those still stuck with the stock ROM benefit in the long run. Isn't that what open source is supposed to be all about?
I don't see what the big deal is - you buy the device that suits your own needs.
Yep. In my case, it was an Android device.
You mean something like a BIOS / HDD combo PC hardware has been using since the 80's ? So crazy it just might work!
Something like an Android device with a recovery partition, like the venerable G1 from HTC had?
Sorry, the Jesus Phone has no such issues when it comes to updating.
Neither does my T-Mobile G2 running Cyanogenmod.
I pick the third option, fix the OS for that phone. I am running 2.3.3 on a Droid. WP7 won't be like that, it will be as locked down as apple without any of the upside.
I agree with you 100% except for the upside.
So much better than Android.
Yah. Right
This is beside the fact that its not really common to expect any updates at all from your mobile phone manufacturer.
Sure. That's because Samsung has a habit of abandoning their OS releases and their customers. That's not the case for, well, pretty much everyone else. And so far as I'm concerned, I run a third-party Android ROM and get better support from an open-source group than any of the big boys including Microsoft.
...in a country where you're charged for incoming calls! And the most outrageous/hilarious thing about it is, USians think that's completely normal.
Get your facts straight. A. if you're talking about cell phones, it's not that you're charged for incoming calls, it's that you're charged for airtime. B., we're Americans, not "USians" whatever the Hell that means, and C. no, we don't think it's "normal", it's always pissed us off. Also, I might add that you can't make such sweeping claims, it just demonstrates your ignorance. For example, many cellular providers offer completely free calling to all phones on their network, all offer some kind of more-expensive unlimited plan, and my particular provider allows me to use Skype on my Android device all I want. I can also pick ten numbers (on any network, including landlines) that I can call for free, no limits on airtime. Different providers have different options, of course, but there are plenty to choose from.
What was it you were saying again?
I'd say "welcome back to the 90s" ... but my network worked a lot better back then. So I guess... welcome to the future!
My first high-speed connection (after I got through with dial-up) was a 4 mbit/sec symmetric service from @Home. Fast, it worked, and I had it during the heyday of Napster. That 4 meg backchannel was great: I'm on U-Verse now and I get at best 2 mbit/sec up. Too bad that @Home's management was so bad (in fact, it changed constantly) because they really had an awesome service for the time (late nineties.)
Yes, but
1 - People rip DVDs to files around 700MB / 1GB that's 2 hours. And that's good enough for TV 2 - Do people really watch almost 7h of TV per day?
I'm thinking 150GB is more than enough.
Personally, I think that 640G should be enough for anyone. But that's just my opinion.
It's not like they didn't know years ago that video streaming was on the upswing and would become a dominant use of bandwidth so surely they've had time to come up with advertising collateral that accurately describes what their product can do.
They were paid in tax breaks to deliver that network, but they stole that money and delivered DSL instead. Bloodsuckers.
You can get a used Android phone and put Cyanogen on it for about $130.
Well. More correctly, you can get a used Android phone for about $130 and put Cyanogen on it for free. And yeah, I'm a big fan of Cyanogen. I'm on T-Mobile here in the U.S. and frankly I like my plan. I get a 5 Gb per month soft cap (they throttle you if you go above it, but no extra charges) and they don't care about tethering.
Interestingly, T-Mo recently announced that Skype will now be allowed to make calls over Wi-Fi and 3/4G. It works very, very well, and it's going to be a hard pill to swallow for millions of subscribers when AT&T takes over and does what I think they're going to do.
Woah, U-Verse is a Cable modem,
No. U-Verse is a modified form of DSL called VDSL. Fiber to the VRAD box, and then a short-haul loop to your home. That's why it's so fast compared to DSL: the signal isn't traveling very far. In either case, whether it be standard DSL or U-Verse, your standard twisted-pair phone wiring is providing the connection to your DSL modem / residential gateway.
he explained that the rising cost of fuel was effecting the price of delivering the bits to my home, hence the need for the limits on bandwidth.
That's hysterical.
Ah the classic "but we are bigger than you" argument.
And tell me, why wouldn't the problem scale linearly?
Untold thousands of miles of fiber that have to be laid across the whole country, for one. I remember the AT&T cable trucks that came around my area a few years ago, laying bright orange fiber optics all over the place. The amount of infrastructure required per consumer is much, much greater. You probably also don't face level of corruption, malfeasance and naked corporatism that we do. The GP was wrong about one thing: our telcos did get substantial help from the Federal Government: about a hundred billion in tax breaks (because that's what they claimed it would take to build out a national FTTH network.) What we got for that money was DSL. So yeah, the situations are simply not comparable. Our government does a lot of things well, but regulating our communications industry is no longer one of them.
I sit here, 90 miles above the polar circle in the northernmost city in Sweden...Bask in my smugness, etc.
I thought that was just the reflection off your eternally vampire-pale skin.
Nowadays, the vampires actually work for AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. I know when I pay my Internet bill every month I feel like I just lost a pint.
Thanks for enlightening me... I had been under the impression that dollar bills change their physical form when travelling across borders!
They don't, actually. It's the people that get bigger and smaller depending upon the economics of the region they are in.
And this kinda shit is exactly what the ISPs who are starting to implement caps and throttling want you to think. They've realized they can make a ton more money off you by charging you by usage just like the cellphone industry has been doing for years. If you honestly believe this then clearly they're winning and you're hopeless.
It's called an artificial scarcity. Just like what the record labels have been doing for a long, long time.