As it has been pointed out above, and despite being modded redundand I want to stress it again, the FSF relies on copyright law. One of its cornerstones is the GPL, and like all licenses it does depend on enforcable copyright law or code protected by it could deliberately be used in proprietary software and neither the FSF nor anyone else could do anything about it.
Except that we could then decompile/reverse-engineer the "proprietary" software and recover any modifications they made to the free code, not to mention all their other code too, and there's nothing the proprietary vendor could do about it. It would be harder to modify "proprietary" code than Free code, but all code would ultimately be Free. Plus, without the ability to restrict copying or usage, the proprietary vendor would be unable to charge for shrink-wrapped copies or for license fees, destroying their entire business model and the reason for being proprietary in the first place.
The FSF depends on copyright law to achieve their goals in the current environment, but proprietary software depends on it much, much more. And without proprietary software, we wouldn't need the GPL.
Plus, talking about what would happen if copyright law suddenly vanished is kinda like talking about what would have happened if the 13th and 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act had all been passed in 1790, but nothing else was different. Maybe an interesting thought experiment, but ultimately pointless because that could never have happened.
If copyright law were actually being stricken from the books, this would have been the result of a sea change in attitudes regarding "IP". It would mean the FSF had won by convincing people of the importance of the right to be free to share and modify software. Sure nobody would be legally required to make this easier for you by providing source code, but by the time this came to pass customers would be demanding it as a matter of course. ISVs could no longer demand money for individual copies, meaning they'd be charging for either writing the code to begin with or for support, and in either case customers would want the source. Makers of "proprietary" software would be pariahs of no import.
The FSF's ultimate goals are about giving people the Freedom to share and tinker, and this involves educating people about why these things are important freedoms. If copyright law is abolished due to the success of their outreach, then they will have won the ultimate victory, and will happily "disarm" by losing the GPL.
So it wouldn't work very well for the blind and its not pulling the letters out of the brain, its just a more sophisticated eye tracking device, similar to the goggles in apache helicopters? Why not just fit patients with those for a faster input method?
Because Apache helicopters are prohibitively expensive even for patients with the best insurance, aside from being illegal for civilians to own. Duh.
It also seems quite ironic that they have a fair use right to the full work for the goal in enforcing that no one else can reuse even the smallest snippet.
No, ironic is students trying to use copyright law to prevent their plagiarism from being detected. I.e. accusing the university of stealing copyrighted works when that's what the students were doing.
I find nothing ironic about the university using the fair use provision of copyright to prevent students from violating the rule that submissions must be entirely original work. That rule has nothing to do with copyright and fair use.
What do you think it takes to power a private hotline to God ?!
I don't know, but 1.21 Gigawatts is enough to send you back in time to when he would talk to people face-to-face.
Just set your DeLorean for when Moses goes up the mountain, and you can get clarification on that whole "thou shalt not covet they neighbor's wife" thing. I mean, is occasionally having cheap meaningless sex really coveting?
Like how the hopi supposedly said that the sun used to rise in the west.....
LOL, assuming they hadn't discovered lodestones and magnetic compasses, what reference for east/west did they have -other- than the position of the sun? Sounds to me like an ancient hopi cartographer just got their directions reversed, and a later correction was thought to be an actual change in reality.:)
A fairly common interpretation of that story is that Onan was killed because he refused to fulfill his obligation to give his brother an heir, having nothing to do with the "spilling his seed" part.
Or that it did have something to do with the "spilling his seed" part, in the sense that he refused to fulfill his obligation to give his brother an heir, but he was willing to fuck his brother's wife for his own pleasure.
I can easily see that as being considered especially wicked, without it being a general condemnation of sex-without-procreation.
And it's essentially a matter of physics. It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it.
Don't forget Part 3, where this turned out to be wrong when the CEO of the company who makes the armor kits said that they had ample capacity to increase production, but that the military had never asked.
Interesting. I see it as a willing enslavement. The government could only use those tools if they work. They will only work if people willingly partake. So I see it as a personal choice. The goal for controlling people is selfishness. If all that matters to you is your personal happiness your are easier to control.
Yes, though the lesson that you should willingly accept your enslavement was drilled into you from before "birth". "Better a gram than a damn," "I'm so glad that I'm a Beta, I'm so lucky not to be an Alpha," and so on. The protagonist rebelled against these ideas in large part because he was part of the process of programming the unborn with them. "42 times a day between weeks 6 and 7" (or whatever) he'd mutter bitterly when the lead female reflexively uttered the pro-Soma slogan.
So while technically a choice, people weren't given a choice not to be programmed, and weren't told they had an option to not accept the status quo of society. It wasn't an informed, free choice. It was a choice with the whole of society pressuring them what to choose. The lead female's friend chastizing her for not being promiscuous enough. The threat of banishment for those who did not conform was portrayed as the most horrible thing that could happen -- even if it turned out that was simply where all the "interesting" people (as in independent thinkers) were sent to not disrupt society. If it was a choice, why weren't people told they had a choice?
So yes, it was a form of control based on "willing" participation, but the word "willing" definitely belongs in quotes.
1984 had this same theme of "willing" acceptance of totalitarianism too. When the war changed from being against Eurasia to Eastasia, or the chocolate ration went down but the papers said it went up, the people were expected to do their part to truly believe that this was true and had always been true. Now it was a much more brutal authoritarianism, where the non-conformists were tortured until their minds broke and they accepted Big Brother rather than being shipped off to an island with their peers, but similar in some respects.
BNW also had the Reservation where the old family structures and morality were in effect. It had its own fair share of problems, though I'd wager they were amplified by being an ostracized and contained segment of the population. Still it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of that way of life.
Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all, if by "rational" you mean "economically rational." There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.
Are these economists the same morons like Alan Greenspan who didn't predict the financial crisis, because they assumed that the interests of a political entity like a company or nation are necessarily the same as the interests of the leaders of said entity? Or are they the same morons who said the invasion of Iraq couldn't possibly have been over oil because the price of oil went up 400% after the invasion?
Just because war never makes economically rational sense for a nation as a whole does not in any way mean it can't be extremely rational for the people pulling the strings. You can make phat bank by overleveraging your bank and purchasing then reselling shady packaged debt securities, even if it eventually destroys your company. You can make insane loot selling oil that is no more difficult to sell when the price skyrockets due to middle east instability, even if your countrymen are gagging at the pump. And so on.
Maybe I need to have a chat with some of these economists.
Heinlein tries to pretty up various completely irrational ideas as to why people fight to make it seem inevitable
News flash: Humans are fundamentally emotional creatures. Rationality and logic are clever tricks that we've learned, not aspects of our nature. Forget this, and the only result is that you will fail to see when you have ceased being rational.
I've always liked the idea of a tattoo, but the thing with a tattoo is that you always have to think "Oh sure I may think this is awesome now, but what will I think in twenty years?" I have yet to find a tattoo where I imagine twenty-years-senior-me isn't looking back on present-day me and shaking his head, sadly, as if ashamed to be the same person and saddled with their choices.
You'd think this would be the answer. And hey, maybe it is, if there are very careful and deliberate controls. But as a general purpose display device that could as part of its function be a changeable tattoo? No way. You know how once you saw goatse, you could never un-see it, and now it's part of your psyche forever? Well the first time I see goatse on my body, it would permanently ruin my self image and I'd either turn into a self-mutilating head case, or simply blow my brains out. I'm not willing to risk it.
Please don't give me 'the tech wasn't available' or 'the tech was too expensive at the time'
Okay I won't tell you the uncomfortable truth that you don't want to accept. Unless that sentence counts.
Firstly, Nintendo was making a profit on the Wii hardware from the get go! They should've put it in even if it reduced that margin, other manufacturers make a loss out of the gate.
Up until this generation, no they didn't. Microsoft lost money on the XBOX, because they believed the urban legend that all console makers used the console itself as a loss leader. Halfway through the generation, both Sony and Nintendo revealed that no, they didn't, but were happy to have Microsoft design their console strategy around it. This generation, both Sony and Microsoft decided to go balls-out on the hardware necessitating their per-unit losses. They do this by subsidizing their games business with profits from other business units.
Nintendo can't subsidize their game consoles. You're basically saying they should have risked going out of business if the "lose money on the console and make money on games" model, which hasn't worked out for Microsoft yet, didn't work out for them.
But yeah, those greedy bastards wanting to sell their only product at a profit!
Secondly, the Wii motion plus is rumoured to be a 20$ item or included with several upcoming Wii motion plus games, so how can it go from being 'too expensive' only a few years ago to being a 'throwaway item' now?
[Insert any of a thousand graphs showing price decreases in technology over time]
States don't have views. Information does not want to be free. Abstract entities don't feel human emotions, and when people pretend they do, I have to ask what point they'd like to make that they can't support with more objective arguments.
And by the same token, "the state" cannot do anything as it has no volition or motive force.
"The state" is a collection of people, people are the ones who do things in the name of the state, and people most certainly can have emotions and views.
Therefore people who say "it's to lock up people the state does not like", they are using "the state" to mean the collection of people that comprise it, and in particular those who wield power within it. This is the obvious connection between the abstraction of the state and the "views" attributed to the state. Thus you miss the larger and more significant point in an attempt to be pointlessly pedantic.
Objective != blindly literal. For goodness sake, folks.
You pay for water by volume and electricity by Watt-hour because when you use either of them, the utility has to treat/create and provide more. They have a bunch of static equipment and pipes/wires that are capable of providing a fixed maximum flow/power, but they also have real incremental costs for every unit consumed.
Bits aren't like that. The ISP buys a bunch of routers and switches and fiber capable of providing some amount of bandwidth, but if that bandwidth isn't capped then whether you use the pipe or not makes very little difference. The next bit costs the same amount to send regardless of whether or not you used the bit before. At the link level, bits are being sent back and forth regardless of whether or not any valid application data packets are contained therein. Peering arrangements are based on outbound traffic, so your downloads don't cost them anything that way. So outside of the tiny amount of extra electricity needed to process a packet which wouldn't even be worth charging for, the number of bits you consume has no effect on their costs.
In short, bandwidth costs lots of money, but once you have it, each bit of data costs virtually nothing. Therefore charging for bits makes no sense.
The only way in which your usage of the existing bandwidth costs them more money is if that bandwidth is saturated such that they cannot provide their customers with decent service, or accept new customers, and they have to buy more equipment/pipes etc. The only time that's going to come close to happening is during Internet Prime Time. Outside of that, and you can peg your bandwidth all you want and it's not going to saturate your ISP's link.
A person who downloads 2 TB of data a month, but does it all in the middle of the night, is much less likely to cause any problems than a person who downloads 20GB a month, but does it all at 8pm. It's the latter one who is going to force the ISP to go buy more equipment.
That's part of why this scheme was so transparent -- it didn't even attempt to address the peak usage issue.
You want equitable? Here's equitable: You pay for bandwidth, however you want, at a per-month rate. You can use your bandwidth as much as you want. However, during peak hours if the ISP is saturated they throttle everyone's connection speeds proportionally to their purchased bandwidth. Then, heavy users have an incentive to download off-peak for better download speeds, and light users who are under-utilizing their bandwidth don't even notice except that their ISP is no longer gagging.
Oh and if this happens too much, the ISP goes out and uses some of their profits to buy more equipment like any business trying to serve expanding customer needs.:P
But instead we get some BS about how it's the number of bits you download that is the problem. Which it is, of course, from their scheming perspective. If you download lots of large files, and those large files happen to be TV shows and movies, then you might not need your $60-100/mo cable TV. That is the "cost" that they're worried about wrt large downloaders.
Well not to mention the "we would have to spend some of our $billions of profit on infrastructure if everyone uses their connection fully wah wah!" argument only applies to prime-time, yet the plan they put forward in no way targeted peak usage hours. Download from 2am - 6am, you'd still hit the cap even though the cost to them for providing that bandwidth is marginal enough to be effectively zero.
Leaving PC's on when they are not used is most probably a terrible waste, but I suspect that numbers about losses due to this are probably not very accurate. At least I have never seen evidence that those calculations take into account the simple fact that energy never dissapears, it only changes nature:
Actually I'm pretty sure that AC is the reason that Performance/Watt and Performance/Watt/m^3 (or per rack unit or whatever units they want to get power density) have become the driving forces behind purchases in the data center. AC to remove the heat is more expensive than the electricity to create it (run the data center), and for a given installation there may only be a fixed amount of AC, and thus a fixed amount of allowable heat output.
Maybe this isn't the case for desktops. But nobody in IT today would forget the cost of removing all that heat from the data center... I can only assume they're likely to have thought of it for desktop energy savings as well.
When it breaks will I have the same problem, oh it's not us it is the phone company?
Yes, and even if it's not just an excuse, you're still screwed. The company selling you DSL would like to keep you as a customer, but the phone company has zero incentive to help a competitor's customer out so they'll drag their feet like its going out of style. Happened to me when I had a third party (can't remember the name, this was in 1999 and it started with C I think?) DSL provider, but Ameritech owned the phone lines. It took my DSL provider a day to get it installed, but they discovered that a piece of equipment in the apartment complex was very old and worn and would only allow a trickle of data through. It took two months of harassment before Ameritech would fix it. If I'd been paying for their (shitty shitty shitty) DSL, they'd have fixed it right away.
But hey, end result was better than letting Ameritech have exclusive use of the lines and do whatever they want to their captive customers!
Your 3rd option of heavy regulation of price etc (and in a way that isn't just a regulatory blowjob to the company anyway) is sadly much less likely than either of the other two.
Slashdot Mirror
As it has been pointed out above, and despite being modded redundand I want to stress it again, the FSF relies on copyright law. One of its cornerstones is the GPL, and like all licenses it does depend on enforcable copyright law or code protected by it could deliberately be used in proprietary software and neither the FSF nor anyone else could do anything about it.
Except that we could then decompile/reverse-engineer the "proprietary" software and recover any modifications they made to the free code, not to mention all their other code too, and there's nothing the proprietary vendor could do about it. It would be harder to modify "proprietary" code than Free code, but all code would ultimately be Free. Plus, without the ability to restrict copying or usage, the proprietary vendor would be unable to charge for shrink-wrapped copies or for license fees, destroying their entire business model and the reason for being proprietary in the first place.
The FSF depends on copyright law to achieve their goals in the current environment, but proprietary software depends on it much, much more. And without proprietary software, we wouldn't need the GPL.
Plus, talking about what would happen if copyright law suddenly vanished is kinda like talking about what would have happened if the 13th and 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act had all been passed in 1790, but nothing else was different. Maybe an interesting thought experiment, but ultimately pointless because that could never have happened.
If copyright law were actually being stricken from the books, this would have been the result of a sea change in attitudes regarding "IP". It would mean the FSF had won by convincing people of the importance of the right to be free to share and modify software. Sure nobody would be legally required to make this easier for you by providing source code, but by the time this came to pass customers would be demanding it as a matter of course. ISVs could no longer demand money for individual copies, meaning they'd be charging for either writing the code to begin with or for support, and in either case customers would want the source. Makers of "proprietary" software would be pariahs of no import.
The FSF's ultimate goals are about giving people the Freedom to share and tinker, and this involves educating people about why these things are important freedoms. If copyright law is abolished due to the success of their outreach, then they will have won the ultimate victory, and will happily "disarm" by losing the GPL.
So it wouldn't work very well for the blind and its not pulling the letters out of the brain, its just a more sophisticated eye tracking device, similar to the goggles in apache helicopters? Why not just fit patients with those for a faster input method?
Because Apache helicopters are prohibitively expensive even for patients with the best insurance, aside from being illegal for civilians to own. Duh.
It also seems quite ironic that they have a fair use right to the full work for the goal in enforcing that no one else can reuse even the smallest snippet.
No, ironic is students trying to use copyright law to prevent their plagiarism from being detected. I.e. accusing the university of stealing copyrighted works when that's what the students were doing.
I find nothing ironic about the university using the fair use provision of copyright to prevent students from violating the rule that submissions must be entirely original work. That rule has nothing to do with copyright and fair use.
AntiHawking fell into a black hole, and we're recovering Hawking.
Wait a minute... Stephen Hawking didn't used to have a goatee... We saved the wrong one!
What do you think it takes to power a private hotline to God ?!
I don't know, but 1.21 Gigawatts is enough to send you back in time to when he would talk to people face-to-face.
Just set your DeLorean for when Moses goes up the mountain, and you can get clarification on that whole "thou shalt not covet they neighbor's wife" thing. I mean, is occasionally having cheap meaningless sex really coveting?
Like how the hopi supposedly said that the sun used to rise in the west.....
LOL, assuming they hadn't discovered lodestones and magnetic compasses, what reference for east/west did they have -other- than the position of the sun? Sounds to me like an ancient hopi cartographer just got their directions reversed, and a later correction was thought to be an actual change in reality. :)
A fairly common interpretation of that story is that Onan was killed because he refused to fulfill his obligation to give his brother an heir, having nothing to do with the "spilling his seed" part.
Or that it did have something to do with the "spilling his seed" part, in the sense that he refused to fulfill his obligation to give his brother an heir, but he was willing to fuck his brother's wife for his own pleasure.
I can easily see that as being considered especially wicked, without it being a general condemnation of sex-without-procreation.
And it's essentially a matter of physics. It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it.
Don't forget Part 3, where this turned out to be wrong when the CEO of the company who makes the armor kits said that they had ample capacity to increase production, but that the military had never asked.
Interesting. I see it as a willing enslavement. The government could only use those tools if they work. They will only work if people willingly partake. So I see it as a personal choice. The goal for controlling people is selfishness. If all that matters to you is your personal happiness your are easier to control.
Yes, though the lesson that you should willingly accept your enslavement was drilled into you from before "birth". "Better a gram than a damn," "I'm so glad that I'm a Beta, I'm so lucky not to be an Alpha," and so on. The protagonist rebelled against these ideas in large part because he was part of the process of programming the unborn with them. "42 times a day between weeks 6 and 7" (or whatever) he'd mutter bitterly when the lead female reflexively uttered the pro-Soma slogan.
So while technically a choice, people weren't given a choice not to be programmed, and weren't told they had an option to not accept the status quo of society. It wasn't an informed, free choice. It was a choice with the whole of society pressuring them what to choose. The lead female's friend chastizing her for not being promiscuous enough. The threat of banishment for those who did not conform was portrayed as the most horrible thing that could happen -- even if it turned out that was simply where all the "interesting" people (as in independent thinkers) were sent to not disrupt society. If it was a choice, why weren't people told they had a choice?
So yes, it was a form of control based on "willing" participation, but the word "willing" definitely belongs in quotes.
1984 had this same theme of "willing" acceptance of totalitarianism too. When the war changed from being against Eurasia to Eastasia, or the chocolate ration went down but the papers said it went up, the people were expected to do their part to truly believe that this was true and had always been true. Now it was a much more brutal authoritarianism, where the non-conformists were tortured until their minds broke and they accepted Big Brother rather than being shipped off to an island with their peers, but similar in some respects.
BNW also had the Reservation where the old family structures and morality were in effect. It had its own fair share of problems, though I'd wager they were amplified by being an ostracized and contained segment of the population. Still it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of that way of life.
Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all, if by "rational" you mean "economically rational." There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.
Are these economists the same morons like Alan Greenspan who didn't predict the financial crisis, because they assumed that the interests of a political entity like a company or nation are necessarily the same as the interests of the leaders of said entity? Or are they the same morons who said the invasion of Iraq couldn't possibly have been over oil because the price of oil went up 400% after the invasion?
Just because war never makes economically rational sense for a nation as a whole does not in any way mean it can't be extremely rational for the people pulling the strings. You can make phat bank by overleveraging your bank and purchasing then reselling shady packaged debt securities, even if it eventually destroys your company. You can make insane loot selling oil that is no more difficult to sell when the price skyrockets due to middle east instability, even if your countrymen are gagging at the pump. And so on.
Maybe I need to have a chat with some of these economists.
Heinlein tries to pretty up various completely irrational ideas as to why people fight to make it seem inevitable
News flash: Humans are fundamentally emotional creatures. Rationality and logic are clever tricks that we've learned, not aspects of our nature. Forget this, and the only result is that you will fail to see when you have ceased being rational.
Maybe "couch" is the author's euphemism for one of those specialized pieces of padded sex furniture. I'm just sayin'!
...John Travolta singing to me, wearing nothing but a thong and a bottle of baby oil...
What, like, as a hat?
I've always liked the idea of a tattoo, but the thing with a tattoo is that you always have to think "Oh sure I may think this is awesome now, but what will I think in twenty years?" I have yet to find a tattoo where I imagine twenty-years-senior-me isn't looking back on present-day me and shaking his head, sadly, as if ashamed to be the same person and saddled with their choices.
You'd think this would be the answer. And hey, maybe it is, if there are very careful and deliberate controls. But as a general purpose display device that could as part of its function be a changeable tattoo? No way. You know how once you saw goatse, you could never un-see it, and now it's part of your psyche forever? Well the first time I see goatse on my body, it would permanently ruin my self image and I'd either turn into a self-mutilating head case, or simply blow my brains out. I'm not willing to risk it.
Please don't give me 'the tech wasn't available' or 'the tech was too expensive at the time'
Okay I won't tell you the uncomfortable truth that you don't want to accept. Unless that sentence counts.
Firstly, Nintendo was making a profit on the Wii hardware from the get go! They should've put it in even if it reduced that margin, other manufacturers make a loss out of the gate.
Up until this generation, no they didn't. Microsoft lost money on the XBOX, because they believed the urban legend that all console makers used the console itself as a loss leader. Halfway through the generation, both Sony and Nintendo revealed that no, they didn't, but were happy to have Microsoft design their console strategy around it. This generation, both Sony and Microsoft decided to go balls-out on the hardware necessitating their per-unit losses. They do this by subsidizing their games business with profits from other business units.
Nintendo can't subsidize their game consoles. You're basically saying they should have risked going out of business if the "lose money on the console and make money on games" model, which hasn't worked out for Microsoft yet, didn't work out for them.
But yeah, those greedy bastards wanting to sell their only product at a profit!
Secondly, the Wii motion plus is rumoured to be a 20$ item or included with several upcoming Wii motion plus games, so how can it go from being 'too expensive' only a few years ago to being a 'throwaway item' now?
[Insert any of a thousand graphs showing price decreases in technology over time]
I bet Dallas-Austin-San Antonio-Houston would be a profitable loop. Connecting just those cities is how Southwest got their start.
States don't have views. Information does not want to be free. Abstract entities don't feel human emotions, and when people pretend they do, I have to ask what point they'd like to make that they can't support with more objective arguments.
And by the same token, "the state" cannot do anything as it has no volition or motive force.
"The state" is a collection of people, people are the ones who do things in the name of the state, and people most certainly can have emotions and views.
Therefore people who say "it's to lock up people the state does not like", they are using "the state" to mean the collection of people that comprise it, and in particular those who wield power within it. This is the obvious connection between the abstraction of the state and the "views" attributed to the state. Thus you miss the larger and more significant point in an attempt to be pointlessly pedantic.
Objective != blindly literal. For goodness sake, folks.
You pay for water by volume and electricity by Watt-hour because when you use either of them, the utility has to treat/create and provide more. They have a bunch of static equipment and pipes/wires that are capable of providing a fixed maximum flow/power, but they also have real incremental costs for every unit consumed.
Bits aren't like that. The ISP buys a bunch of routers and switches and fiber capable of providing some amount of bandwidth, but if that bandwidth isn't capped then whether you use the pipe or not makes very little difference. The next bit costs the same amount to send regardless of whether or not you used the bit before. At the link level, bits are being sent back and forth regardless of whether or not any valid application data packets are contained therein. Peering arrangements are based on outbound traffic, so your downloads don't cost them anything that way. So outside of the tiny amount of extra electricity needed to process a packet which wouldn't even be worth charging for, the number of bits you consume has no effect on their costs.
In short, bandwidth costs lots of money, but once you have it, each bit of data costs virtually nothing. Therefore charging for bits makes no sense.
The only way in which your usage of the existing bandwidth costs them more money is if that bandwidth is saturated such that they cannot provide their customers with decent service, or accept new customers, and they have to buy more equipment/pipes etc. The only time that's going to come close to happening is during Internet Prime Time. Outside of that, and you can peg your bandwidth all you want and it's not going to saturate your ISP's link.
A person who downloads 2 TB of data a month, but does it all in the middle of the night, is much less likely to cause any problems than a person who downloads 20GB a month, but does it all at 8pm. It's the latter one who is going to force the ISP to go buy more equipment.
That's part of why this scheme was so transparent -- it didn't even attempt to address the peak usage issue.
You want equitable? Here's equitable: You pay for bandwidth, however you want, at a per-month rate. You can use your bandwidth as much as you want. However, during peak hours if the ISP is saturated they throttle everyone's connection speeds proportionally to their purchased bandwidth. Then, heavy users have an incentive to download off-peak for better download speeds, and light users who are under-utilizing their bandwidth don't even notice except that their ISP is no longer gagging.
Oh and if this happens too much, the ISP goes out and uses some of their profits to buy more equipment like any business trying to serve expanding customer needs. :P
But instead we get some BS about how it's the number of bits you download that is the problem. Which it is, of course, from their scheming perspective. If you download lots of large files, and those large files happen to be TV shows and movies, then you might not need your $60-100/mo cable TV. That is the "cost" that they're worried about wrt large downloaders.
Well not to mention the "we would have to spend some of our $billions of profit on infrastructure if everyone uses their connection fully wah wah!" argument only applies to prime-time, yet the plan they put forward in no way targeted peak usage hours. Download from 2am - 6am, you'd still hit the cap even though the cost to them for providing that bandwidth is marginal enough to be effectively zero.
Leaving PC's on when they are not used is most probably a terrible waste, but I suspect that numbers about losses due to this are probably not very accurate. At least I have never seen evidence that those calculations take into account the simple fact that energy never dissapears, it only changes nature:
Actually I'm pretty sure that AC is the reason that Performance/Watt and Performance/Watt/m^3 (or per rack unit or whatever units they want to get power density) have become the driving forces behind purchases in the data center. AC to remove the heat is more expensive than the electricity to create it (run the data center), and for a given installation there may only be a fixed amount of AC, and thus a fixed amount of allowable heat output.
Maybe this isn't the case for desktops. But nobody in IT today would forget the cost of removing all that heat from the data center... I can only assume they're likely to have thought of it for desktop energy savings as well.
Well if I was going to wipe a cow's ass with a phone, a flexible phone would make the most sense.
I suppose. Really though I was just shocked that 11% of IT managers stated they "hate the Earth" as their reason for not powering down...
God, I'm so sick of these companies with their Trojan patents...
When it breaks will I have the same problem, oh it's not us it is the phone company?
Yes, and even if it's not just an excuse, you're still screwed. The company selling you DSL would like to keep you as a customer, but the phone company has zero incentive to help a competitor's customer out so they'll drag their feet like its going out of style. Happened to me when I had a third party (can't remember the name, this was in 1999 and it started with C I think?) DSL provider, but Ameritech owned the phone lines. It took my DSL provider a day to get it installed, but they discovered that a piece of equipment in the apartment complex was very old and worn and would only allow a trickle of data through. It took two months of harassment before Ameritech would fix it. If I'd been paying for their (shitty shitty shitty) DSL, they'd have fixed it right away.
But hey, end result was better than letting Ameritech have exclusive use of the lines and do whatever they want to their captive customers!
Your 3rd option of heavy regulation of price etc (and in a way that isn't just a regulatory blowjob to the company anyway) is sadly much less likely than either of the other two.
(You can do it too, kids!)
Bionic Commando Commando... wait...
Because I suck at spelling, especially German. :P
Oh and old Beetle of course. Harder to find a reference, but it's kept for historical comparisons.