they must easily have over a million accounts old enough to have originally hooked-up to 'unlimited' plans.
So what? In my experience, Comcast is far less likely to use contracts longer than a year with an early termination fee than the phone company is. Most customers I imagine are on month-to-month terms. This means if Comcast wants to end unmetered plans, a customer can just choose to cancel service.
at that rate, you could watch HD content for 222 hours straight (9.25 days) before you'd hit your 300GB cap
Divide by the number of people in the house who watch Netflix. And subtract all other uses of the connection, such as operating system and application updates on all devices in the household, downloads of purchased video games, web surfing, YouTube, and video chat with relatives in another state.
Not the previous poster, but I've been struggling to understand how to answer this question
Let me explain my reasoning: Someone who drops a subscription to video on demand (VOD) in favor of OTA DTV reverts to having to schedule her life around when a program is broadcast or miss the program. To restore an experience remotely comparable to VOD, a viewer needs to use a DVR. TiVo DVRs are sold with very slim (possibly even negative) margins, hoping that people will either pay for the required monthly subscription or buy a $500 lifetime subscription for the unit.
My DVR is a Linux PC running MythTV that I bought in 2008 [...] not including my time spent assembling the computer, learning how to use MythTV, or keeping things running
Are those sold pre-assembled and pre-configured at a reasonable price? I ask because I know a lot of people who would find "not including my time" unacceptable. They choose to pay for TV because they're willing to pay extra for the reliability of an appliance as opposed to having to fiddle with keeping a big tower running and updated in the living room just to have VOD.
Get angry with the greedy studio bastards that are setting outrageous content prices for streaming rights.
How can Americans lawfully act on disapproval of Hollywood policies when Hollywood is also telling Americans whom to vote for through NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and CNN? These major TV news outlets share a parent with Universal, Disney, Paramount, Last Century Fox, and Warner Bros. respectively.
Slashdot has "lameness filters" to stop certain known vandal patterns, and vandals were using homoglyphs to evade lameness filters. In addition, Slashdot is in English. Most characters that aren't on the whitelist are more useful for what some call "ASCII art" or "Shift JIS art" than for text in English. The Slashdot administrators want to discourage ASCII art because vandals were posting pornographic ASCII art, such as an ASCII version of the goatse.cx receiver, a drawing in a similar style titled "Jack Off", and a smaller drawing called "Penis Bird". Finally, a blacklist doesn't work so well because new dangerous characters could be added to a new version of the Unicode standard and used for vandalism before the administrators can react.
I think that was Ed Tice's point: now that the servers are offline, and given that these old consoles never had an app store analogous to Wii Shop, there are no paid services that one could "steal" with a break-in.
These people are willing to rent software. [...] No sympathy at fucking all.
How are high-production-value computer games available other than through rental? Or do you likewise have "No sympathy at fucking all" for people who desire high-production-value computer games in the first place?
The difference is that you have the right to put free software on a DVD+R and put the DVD in the box. If others in your Internet-poor area want free software, you can bring your laptop into town, download it, and burn copies.
You can start with 'Indians'. 'Ol Columbus was a tad confused at times.
Columbus was right but for the wrong reason. Before European contact, the Apache were calling themselves Inde, meaning "the people". Words for "people" resembling Inde or Dene are common in the Athabaskan languages that were spoken in what are now the southwestern United States, Alaska, and the Northwest Territories of Canada.
It is a programmer's zero, a Danish letter, the math symbol for an empty set, the building industry symbol for diameter, the cursive version the Greek capital letter phi, the slanted version of the London Underground logo, and an emoji for the back view of a smiley with a hat.
And these uses largely have distinct code points in Unicode, because they're still distinct characters with distinct uses despite looking similar. Some people prefer the dotted zero because it is visually distinct from the rest.
And the used game market is dead because I can get my own copy in a year's time for less than a used copy would ever be able to go for.
Provided the game hasn't been pulled from the market. Some licensors let publishers adapt their IP on the condition that the game be sold only for a limited time. Tetris DS, for example, went out of print after two years while Nintendo's other best-selling DS games didn't, and the average selling price of used copies of Tetris DS on eBay shot up.
Did single-player or shared-screen games for Xbox 360 bug you to create an Xbox LIVE Silver account, connect to the Internet, and install multiple-hundred-megabyte patches before they would start playing in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
A 300 GB/mo cap is better than the 10 GB/mo cap of cellular or the 10 GB/mo cap of satellite.
they must easily have over a million accounts old enough to have originally hooked-up to 'unlimited' plans.
So what? In my experience, Comcast is far less likely to use contracts longer than a year with an early termination fee than the phone company is. Most customers I imagine are on month-to-month terms. This means if Comcast wants to end unmetered plans, a customer can just choose to cancel service.
at that rate, you could watch HD content for 222 hours straight (9.25 days) before you'd hit your 300GB cap
Divide by the number of people in the house who watch Netflix. And subtract all other uses of the connection, such as operating system and application updates on all devices in the household, downloads of purchased video games, web surfing, YouTube, and video chat with relatives in another state.
We're not taking questions from the audience
Why not?
your house is a pile of money that you can get back when you move
Unless you end up having to move after a real estate bubble has just burst.
I live in Seattle, and I don't know anyone with a connection fast enough to stream Netflix. [...] 160 kbps
Geez, I get 30Mbps from my T-Mobile LTE.
[How fast do you hit the cap on LTE?]
I barely use 500MB per month. Maps, email and web don't really require a lot of data.
Netflix uses a lot more data than that.
Not the previous poster, but I've been struggling to understand how to answer this question
Let me explain my reasoning: Someone who drops a subscription to video on demand (VOD) in favor of OTA DTV reverts to having to schedule her life around when a program is broadcast or miss the program. To restore an experience remotely comparable to VOD, a viewer needs to use a DVR. TiVo DVRs are sold with very slim (possibly even negative) margins, hoping that people will either pay for the required monthly subscription or buy a $500 lifetime subscription for the unit.
My DVR is a Linux PC running MythTV that I bought in 2008 [...] not including my time spent assembling the computer, learning how to use MythTV, or keeping things running
Are those sold pre-assembled and pre-configured at a reasonable price? I ask because I know a lot of people who would find "not including my time" unacceptable. They choose to pay for TV because they're willing to pay extra for the reliability of an appliance as opposed to having to fiddle with keeping a big tower running and updated in the living room just to have VOD.
Get angry with the greedy studio bastards that are setting outrageous content prices for streaming rights.
How can Americans lawfully act on disapproval of Hollywood policies when Hollywood is also telling Americans whom to vote for through NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and CNN? These major TV news outlets share a parent with Universal, Disney, Paramount, Last Century Fox, and Warner Bros. respectively.
Geez, I get 30Mbps from my T-Mobile LTE.
For how long in a given month before T-Mobile cuts you back to EDGE and its 0.05 Mbps dial-up-class speed?
Copyright is a monopoly and in any other business that would be illegal.
In any business other than entertainment there are patents.
I think the "braindead" part has something to do with the fact that dictatorships don't work that way.
I have probably 30 channels or subchannels with OTA DTV
If you're using OTA DTV, how much does your monthly DVR subscription cost?
Slashdot has "lameness filters" to stop certain known vandal patterns, and vandals were using homoglyphs to evade lameness filters. In addition, Slashdot is in English. Most characters that aren't on the whitelist are more useful for what some call "ASCII art" or "Shift JIS art" than for text in English. The Slashdot administrators want to discourage ASCII art because vandals were posting pornographic ASCII art, such as an ASCII version of the goatse.cx receiver, a drawing in a similar style titled "Jack Off", and a smaller drawing called "Penis Bird". Finally, a blacklist doesn't work so well because new dangerous characters could be added to a new version of the Unicode standard and used for vandalism before the administrators can react.
I think that was Ed Tice's point: now that the servers are offline, and given that these old consoles never had an app store analogous to Wii Shop, there are no paid services that one could "steal" with a break-in.
You can hardly expect people to anticipate technological changes 10-20 years down the road.
Which is why you can choose to rent instead of buying, so that you can react instead of anticipating.
From my experience most history books I had stopped well before 1960. Heck they almost did not get past WWII.
I wonder how much of that is due to the cost to license photographs illustrating more recent events.
Are you including Top Thrill Dragster on Cedar Point in north central Ohio?
if you surf Slashdot, how can you live somewhere that has such poor Internet?
Probably because it is even more cost-prohibitive to move somewhere with a higher cost of living.
These people are willing to rent software. [...] No sympathy at fucking all.
How are high-production-value computer games available other than through rental? Or do you likewise have "No sympathy at fucking all" for people who desire high-production-value computer games in the first place?
The difference is that you have the right to put free software on a DVD+R and put the DVD in the box. If others in your Internet-poor area want free software, you can bring your laptop into town, download it, and burn copies.
You can start with 'Indians'. 'Ol Columbus was a tad confused at times.
Columbus was right but for the wrong reason. Before European contact, the Apache were calling themselves Inde, meaning "the people". Words for "people" resembling Inde or Dene are common in the Athabaskan languages that were spoken in what are now the southwestern United States, Alaska, and the Northwest Territories of Canada.
It is a programmer's zero, a Danish letter, the math symbol for an empty set, the building industry symbol for diameter, the cursive version the Greek capital letter phi, the slanted version of the London Underground logo, and an emoji for the back view of a smiley with a hat.
And these uses largely have distinct code points in Unicode, because they're still distinct characters with distinct uses despite looking similar. Some people prefer the dotted zero because it is visually distinct from the rest.
And the used game market is dead because I can get my own copy in a year's time for less than a used copy would ever be able to go for.
Provided the game hasn't been pulled from the market. Some licensors let publishers adapt their IP on the condition that the game be sold only for a limited time. Tetris DS, for example, went out of print after two years while Nintendo's other best-selling DS games didn't, and the average selling price of used copies of Tetris DS on eBay shot up.
Did single-player or shared-screen games for Xbox 360 bug you to create an Xbox LIVE Silver account, connect to the Internet, and install multiple-hundred-megabyte patches before they would start playing in the first place?
People who rent software can pay to download it.
Not when the cost of the download payable to the user's home ISP substantially exceeds the rest of the cost of the rental payable to the publisher.