Does anyone else think that $2 for a legal movie is a far more compelling pricepoint than 99 cents was for one song? Here, we're actually seeing a savings over buying the traditional disc, and a savings over most rental schemes too - and you own the movie.
This I might consider buying. Assuming, of course, it's not the $2 for the movies that are in the $1 bin at Wal-Mart, and more like $2 for the movies that are coming out on DVD. Seriously, I would pay $2 for a 650MB Divx/Xvid rip of the movie from DVD. But it would need to be unencumbered enough for me to burn that to CD and play it in my current Divx enabled DVD player.
Well, seeing as many midrange keyboards today cost $100, I'd think this one would be justified at $200-$300, especially for the professionals you hinted at that would especially use the functionality.
If you're paying X thousand dollars for Eclipse, VS, NetBeans or the other biggies - Adobe CS2, 3DS Max, Maya and the like, then $300 is chump change to increase your productivity by a decent amount (letting you actually use keyshortcuts vs hunting through menus) to do your job.
That said, with all the crazy gaming controllers, this also might have a market with hardcore gamers at that price.
Now, if they get it down to $150 or so, I'd think there might be a very large market for it.
Actually, I never disparaged you, I just stated that in my life, the choices have been: A) sit around watching sports (this happens a lot - as does watching movies. Sort of boring for sports, movies are ok, but I'd just as soon go to a theater if I'm watching a movie with a bunch of people - then we can go play pool or something afterwards too).
B) Sit around getting drunk. Maybe go cow tipping, or try driving an ATV. In college go play a prank on someone - toilet paper a tree, shaving creme a dorm room.(this isn't interesting to me at all).
C) Have a bbq - same as the described party, but outside and there's food. A big plus there, but still a lot of standing around being bored and drinking.
D) RPGs... or some other planned activity. Notice I lumped RPGs into a planned activity, I also said another example was Poker - I've also seen video game turnaments and Magic turnaments though those are usually more structured and often put on by an organization - not quite the same vibe as a bunch of friends getting together.
Look, in Upstate and Western NY, that's it in most communities. And I also love all the people who say that I'm limited - well, why don't you talk about what you do in get togethers or parties? I mean there must be all these people I don't know doing interesting things I don't know about. Please enlighten me, rather than claim I'm close minded.
Or, maybe - like in the recent story about Doom 3 - after the 10,000 full house or two pair, the damn game is repetitive, and boring. For me, it's like twiddling my thumbs - marginally better than watching the paint dry, but not something I'd plan on for any amount of entertainment.
I really fail to see why it's "normal" to sit around a table playing poker, maybe losing or winning money - but somehow childish to sit around the same table playing an RPG...
Interesting. Personally I just find RPGs as another reason to get together with people and *have something to do*. I never got into the go to a bar, or let's all get together and drink till we pass out. I mean, what do you do there? Stand around, try some small talk, hope there's some interesting conversation.
I mean I just find that unless there's some planned activity, all gatherings sputter out in about an hour - after you've either ran out of small talk with people you don't know well, or ran out of updtates for friends. Then what? Hope you're drunk by then? (A lot of this outlook may have to do with where I grew up and the fact I just graduated college - maybe in big cities outside the college lifestyle things are very different)
Aside from that there are a few reasons I prefer RPGs to say computer games. One is how limited computer games feel - it always seems to come down to one way (or if you are really lucky 2 ways) to solve that puzzle. That might be OK if it's the way to activate the gods scepter, but if it's how to get past a guard - in most situations - it's ludicrous. I mean, why can't I try climing to the roof and crawling by him? Why can't I hang off the cliffedge and see if he walks by me? etc...
Anyway - my main point is that there are lots of things you can do at a party - but one of them is play an RPG. You could also play poker, but to me it seems like after one or two games, it would get pretty repetitive.
I'm still amazed not only by how many people think the Xbox 360 will do well, but how many people plan on buying one. I really don't get it.
The X-Box so far had 1 major game - Halo. It also had some nice PC ports (I think) like Max Payne.
The X-Box 360 seems doomed to repeat the same, because they are throwing away their game library to start over again, with a totally different archetecture. So, we'll have... what at launch? And will we again have to wait 2-3 years for anything approaching a library to choose from?
Both the PS3 and Revolution will have support for their back catalog - so anyone buying their first console will have far more choices with one of those, plus new games coming out right then with the understanding of how to make those games.
For people who have a PS2 or Game Cube, you can either sell your old console for some money(not much), pass it on to a friend or just have one less console in general in the house. One less box to plug in is a benefit IMHO.
OTOH, I've been spectaularly unimpressed by consoles over the years anyway. The only time I got one was when I couldn't afford a PC.
So many games just disappoint me these days. I don't know why, but I find it more entertaining to post on slashdot than play any of the games currently on my PC - Neverwinter Nights, Max Payne II(mostly cause I'm stuck), Stronghold 2, StarFleet Command 3, and Dawn of War.
The only one I'm currently playing at all is DoW, and that's cause it's story is somewhat compelling for me, and it's a nice twist on the usual RTS games I've played - it's not just another Warcraft. In fact, it's an interesting fusion of Warcraft 3 and Rome: Total War with a design that forces rush strategies. There is no sitting on a map building up 10 bajillion zerglings to mass attack your enemy, you have to move quickly.
I'm looking forward to playing Imperial Glory soon, and I plan on playing Empire Earth 2 as well.
Doesn't that still put them at a disadvantage? I mean, maybe not - but from what I've heard the Xbox 360 is not supposed to come with a HD by default. That means for backwards compatability you have to buy an add on that is likely not cheap - I'm guessing at least $100 given average HD prices and the markup usually used in consoles for accessories.
Wheras the competition comes - by default - compatible.
Now, I don't know the market perfectly, but I do know that there is a not unsubstantial demographic who wants to know that if they buy the console, everything works. They *DO NOT* want to hear the "well, buy the console, and the extender 2 or the bundle 3 but not 2 and it all will work". The simpler the better.
I mean, if they wanted to pay attention to what bundle or specs of the game system, they'd likely be buying a PC! (this is sarcasm, but note - it's one of the main cons of PC gaming).
First I do think it's important to keep the definitions clear. What you describe is spyware - it tracks users without their permission, and steals information.
AdWare is very different IMHO - it displays ads in the program in lieu of you paying for it.
Now, I think adware can work as a business model - it works for most websites for instance, no reason it can't work for some software - like Opera for instance.
Spyware should be flat out illegial - anything that installs as part of another program, or like GAIN pops up windows to display ads is just wrong. It's one thing to have an ad that is clearly part of the program chrome, and you know what program it's associated with as well as presumebly why it's there and another to cause more pop-ups on the web.
The 6600GT needs both a certain level of power and really needs a base level of cooling in the AGP design or it crashes.
When I first got my 6600GT, it would lock up on starting a game. What I had to do was 1) move one of my PCI cards down so the fan on the card was not pressed up against that card, and 2) put in a stronger case fan. I also put in a system blower right under the card, but I don't really know if it's making any difference.
Isn't that a paradox though? I mean, part 2. If you want 2-5 years experiance with X, doesn't that mean that X likely will have needed to be around for 4-10 years for an average of people to get experiance with it? And in IT, something that is 4 years old might be outdated...
I mean, even now, I'd guess you'd just start to see people with 3 years of experiance in Win2k in large amounts (as most places don't deploy stuff right away) yet Win2k is considered rather outdated...
I mean, sure I have 3 years of experiance with WinXP *on my home computer*, but the place I work was still on NT4 and just starting to get to 2k a year ago. So, no real chance to use XP in a coporate or domain environment.
The thing I worry about is that this is only moving the pollution problem (well, maybe hydrogen is too). Right now, very few people make their own electricty, and most electricty AFAIK is being produced at coal burning plants in the US.
Either way, from everything I've read, we'll have to go nuclear because it's the only thing that can sustainably produce the amount of energy we need. And one of the newer reactor designs can produce hydrogin as part of it's process. So it seems to be 50/50 to me, though I think electricty certainly already has the infrastructure. I have yet to see any consumer devices that charge in less than 4 - 8 hours though, and that's for a consumer UPS that provides all of 900W for 45 Minutes - not really what a car would need.
Replying to myself as I can't edit - I have to say, IBM used to really suck at marketing or missed a few boats.
Lotus SmartSuite had 90% of the touted improvements of Office 2k3 in 1995 when I got it with my Aptiva 100mhz. All that team stuff/in program multi user edit with permission structure? In SmartSuite 95. And it was able to import about every file type known to man for word processing docs and do so rather well IME. It has the best spellchecker I'd used until Google came out with their suggestions for misspelled words.
And I still prefer much of it's default interface in wordprocessing - pallets are how many powerusers work, same as Adobe's products.
Also, back in 95-99 or so, Freelance Graphics did everything Powerpoint did (and imported their format) but seemed to be far more stable IME. Everytime someone in HS tried to run a powerpoint presentation there seemed to be a 60% chance it would crash at some point, and we'd have to wait for them to reload it. Freelance Graphics came with a 200k player that always worked. The first time. Never crashed - even running on the same machines. (Though, maybe I was more tech savvy that my schoolmates, but where would tech savvy make a closed source app less likely to crash?).
Really, there were two gotchas with SmartSuite - one was lack of good marketing IME, the other was the UI, while good, had some classic mistakes like using symbols for tab labels rather than text.
Now I still use Word Pro as everything is in that format, and it still works fine for me doing wordprocessing, and for more complicated things I've moved on to DTP programs.
I'm kind of sad, but 1-2-3 really doesn't cut it vs Excel 2k3 - though I'd say it holds it's own on any earlier Excel.
And does anyone else think more (sort of)P2P ought to be like NNTP or maybe Freenet, and less like bittorrent?
Cause it's real inefficient they way bittorrent works for bandwidth on the general web. Are there caching proxies for bittorrent/P2P?
Re:What drives me nuts about most sci fi
on
The Escapist
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· Score: 1
Oh, I don't know. It seems to work in real life - I mean, for a long time people called photocopies xeroxes, and we have blogs and podcasts etc...
I would think journals or even stories give more clues to non hip/techies what a blog is...
I thought podcasts were some sort of wireless thingy for iPods for a long time, till someone suggested adding it to Opera and I finally asked what the heck it was, to find out it's a radio program...
I know. While there might be some additions to be done to Access, the rest I don't see. What more could possibly be added to Word? I mean, wordprocessing is done. It is, it's a solved problem. Heck, my Lotus WordPro 9.8 from 2001 or whatever is fine. It does everything with wordprocessing (except a dashed underline, which I have only ever needed to do once in my life - I got a pen for that one underline lol).
Anything much more than what can be done in any wordprocesser today pretty much ought to be done in a DTP program, like InDesign or one of the competitors (there are even free ones, though IDK about OSS ones).
Access is itself mostly a solved problem IMHO - much more that what it does ought to use a real DBMS - there are definitely free ones's there - I think MySQL, or MS's SQL Server, or Oracle or whatever floats your boat.
It's just, MS seems to be floundering with having maxed out the functionality that can really be put into a desktop office program environment. And I still don't know anyone IRL who uses more than Word and Outlook at work. The rest seems mostly wasted for many users.
First of all I would think this is a troll statement. But anyway - let's see. Metro, an unknown format. One vendor on one platform. PDF - been around forever, everyone and their brother has Acrobat Reader and or plugin or native support... Multiple vendors providing reading and writing on multiple platforms.
I can guess which one I'll be using. There's nothing wrong with PDF, and there's a huge amount of support, and multiple vendors at all price ranges providing reading and writing of the files. Sounds like an obvious choice to me.
First, I agree, if you are going to "sub lease" the bandwidth - you should get something like speakeasy, and set up a contract allowing that.
OTOH, I disagree that there is, or should be, a hidden expectation that consumers should limit their use of a paid service. No where in my TOS does it limit the amound of data i can download or upload - so if I max it out, I don't feel like I should get a different sort of account. If ISPs want to limit the service, they should do so openly - in the contract, not hidden caps...
Does anyone think it could be seen as an attractive nuicense if you don't secure it? I mean, unsecured wireless is more like one of those 50USD walkie talkies they sell, you're broadcasting stuff all over the place on a public channel - if someone taps in to listen, no foul for them, and if your equipment follows their directions... well you're kind of stupid I would think.
This just reinforces my belief that wireless is more trouble that it's worth. Though I'm not like most people, I don't mind wires running on the floor - i just step over them.
Slashdot Mirror
How does this apply (at all?) to Opera 8's UserJS?
Does anyone else think that $2 for a legal movie is a far more compelling pricepoint than 99 cents was for one song? Here, we're actually seeing a savings over buying the traditional disc, and a savings over most rental schemes too - and you own the movie.
This I might consider buying. Assuming, of course, it's not the $2 for the movies that are in the $1 bin at Wal-Mart, and more like $2 for the movies that are coming out on DVD. Seriously, I would pay $2 for a 650MB Divx/Xvid rip of the movie from DVD. But it would need to be unencumbered enough for me to burn that to CD and play it in my current Divx enabled DVD player.
Well, seeing as many midrange keyboards today cost $100, I'd think this one would be justified at $200-$300, especially for the professionals you hinted at that would especially use the functionality.
If you're paying X thousand dollars for Eclipse, VS, NetBeans or the other biggies - Adobe CS2, 3DS Max, Maya and the like, then $300 is chump change to increase your productivity by a decent amount (letting you actually use keyshortcuts vs hunting through menus) to do your job.
That said, with all the crazy gaming controllers, this also might have a market with hardcore gamers at that price.
Now, if they get it down to $150 or so, I'd think there might be a very large market for it.
Actually, I never disparaged you, I just stated that in my life, the choices have been:
A) sit around watching sports (this happens a lot - as does watching movies. Sort of boring for sports, movies are ok, but I'd just as soon go to a theater if I'm watching a movie with a bunch of people - then we can go play pool or something afterwards too).
B) Sit around getting drunk. Maybe go cow tipping, or try driving an ATV. In college go play a prank on someone - toilet paper a tree, shaving creme a dorm room.(this isn't interesting to me at all).
C) Have a bbq - same as the described party, but outside and there's food. A big plus there, but still a lot of standing around being bored and drinking.
D) RPGs... or some other planned activity. Notice I lumped RPGs into a planned activity, I also said another example was Poker - I've also seen video game turnaments and Magic turnaments though those are usually more structured and often put on by an organization - not quite the same vibe as a bunch of friends getting together.
Look, in Upstate and Western NY, that's it in most communities. And I also love all the people who say that I'm limited - well, why don't you talk about what you do in get togethers or parties? I mean there must be all these people I don't know doing interesting things I don't know about. Please enlighten me, rather than claim I'm close minded.
I wouldn't say that having a solution is a requirement of criticizing those of others, but it certainly is a part of most constructive criticism.
Though pointing out weaknesses is better than just saying you suck.
Or, maybe - like in the recent story about Doom 3 - after the 10,000 full house or two pair, the damn game is repetitive, and boring. For me, it's like twiddling my thumbs - marginally better than watching the paint dry, but not something I'd plan on for any amount of entertainment.
I really fail to see why it's "normal" to sit around a table playing poker, maybe losing or winning money - but somehow childish to sit around the same table playing an RPG...
Wow, things have changed. When I started - players had to have played for at least a year to try DMing. Good luck with it!
I've found out 2 things over 6 years of DMing -
1) Know your players
2) Don't be afraid to change or ignore rules if it makes the game more fun.
Interesting. Personally I just find RPGs as another reason to get together with people and *have something to do*. I never got into the go to a bar, or let's all get together and drink till we pass out. I mean, what do you do there? Stand around, try some small talk, hope there's some interesting conversation.
I mean I just find that unless there's some planned activity, all gatherings sputter out in about an hour - after you've either ran out of small talk with people you don't know well, or ran out of updtates for friends. Then what? Hope you're drunk by then? (A lot of this outlook may have to do with where I grew up and the fact I just graduated college - maybe in big cities outside the college lifestyle things are very different)
Aside from that there are a few reasons I prefer RPGs to say computer games. One is how limited computer games feel - it always seems to come down to one way (or if you are really lucky 2 ways) to solve that puzzle. That might be OK if it's the way to activate the gods scepter, but if it's how to get past a guard - in most situations - it's ludicrous. I mean, why can't I try climing to the roof and crawling by him? Why can't I hang off the cliffedge and see if he walks by me? etc...
Anyway - my main point is that there are lots of things you can do at a party - but one of them is play an RPG. You could also play poker, but to me it seems like after one or two games, it would get pretty repetitive.
I'm still amazed not only by how many people think the Xbox 360 will do well, but how many people plan on buying one. I really don't get it.
... what at launch? And will we again have to wait 2-3 years for anything approaching a library to choose from?
The X-Box so far had 1 major game - Halo. It also had some nice PC ports (I think) like Max Payne.
The X-Box 360 seems doomed to repeat the same, because they are throwing away their game library to start over again, with a totally different archetecture. So, we'll have
Both the PS3 and Revolution will have support for their back catalog - so anyone buying their first console will have far more choices with one of those, plus new games coming out right then with the understanding of how to make those games.
For people who have a PS2 or Game Cube, you can either sell your old console for some money(not much), pass it on to a friend or just have one less console in general in the house. One less box to plug in is a benefit IMHO.
OTOH, I've been spectaularly unimpressed by consoles over the years anyway. The only time I got one was when I couldn't afford a PC.
So many games just disappoint me these days. I don't know why, but I find it more entertaining to post on slashdot than play any of the games currently on my PC - Neverwinter Nights, Max Payne II(mostly cause I'm stuck), Stronghold 2, StarFleet Command 3, and Dawn of War.
The only one I'm currently playing at all is DoW, and that's cause it's story is somewhat compelling for me, and it's a nice twist on the usual RTS games I've played - it's not just another Warcraft. In fact, it's an interesting fusion of Warcraft 3 and Rome: Total War with a design that forces rush strategies. There is no sitting on a map building up 10 bajillion zerglings to mass attack your enemy, you have to move quickly.
I'm looking forward to playing Imperial Glory soon, and I plan on playing Empire Earth 2 as well.
Doesn't that still put them at a disadvantage? I mean, maybe not - but from what I've heard the Xbox 360 is not supposed to come with a HD by default. That means for backwards compatability you have to buy an add on that is likely not cheap - I'm guessing at least $100 given average HD prices and the markup usually used in consoles for accessories.
Wheras the competition comes - by default - compatible.
Now, I don't know the market perfectly, but I do know that there is a not unsubstantial demographic who wants to know that if they buy the console, everything works. They *DO NOT* want to hear the "well, buy the console, and the extender 2 or the bundle 3 but not 2 and it all will work". The simpler the better.
I mean, if they wanted to pay attention to what bundle or specs of the game system, they'd likely be buying a PC! (this is sarcasm, but note - it's one of the main cons of PC gaming).
First I do think it's important to keep the definitions clear. What you describe is spyware - it tracks users without their permission, and steals information.
AdWare is very different IMHO - it displays ads in the program in lieu of you paying for it.
Now, I think adware can work as a business model - it works for most websites for instance, no reason it can't work for some software - like Opera for instance.
Spyware should be flat out illegial - anything that installs as part of another program, or like GAIN pops up windows to display ads is just wrong. It's one thing to have an ad that is clearly part of the program chrome, and you know what program it's associated with as well as presumebly why it's there and another to cause more pop-ups on the web.
The 6600GT needs both a certain level of power and really needs a base level of cooling in the AGP design or it crashes.
When I first got my 6600GT, it would lock up on starting a game. What I had to do was 1) move one of my PCI cards down so the fan on the card was not pressed up against that card, and 2) put in a stronger case fan. I also put in a system blower right under the card, but I don't really know if it's making any difference.
Except for whatever reason, nVidia's 7800GTX is supposed to be faster than their current SLI, so they might not even need SLI for the next generation.
Isn't that a paradox though? I mean, part 2. If you want 2-5 years experiance with X, doesn't that mean that X likely will have needed to be around for 4-10 years for an average of people to get experiance with it? And in IT, something that is 4 years old might be outdated...
I mean, even now, I'd guess you'd just start to see people with 3 years of experiance in Win2k in large amounts (as most places don't deploy stuff right away) yet Win2k is considered rather outdated...
I mean, sure I have 3 years of experiance with WinXP *on my home computer*, but the place I work was still on NT4 and just starting to get to 2k a year ago. So, no real chance to use XP in a coporate or domain environment.
The thing I worry about is that this is only moving the pollution problem (well, maybe hydrogen is too). Right now, very few people make their own electricty, and most electricty AFAIK is being produced at coal burning plants in the US.
Either way, from everything I've read, we'll have to go nuclear because it's the only thing that can sustainably produce the amount of energy we need. And one of the newer reactor designs can produce hydrogin as part of it's process. So it seems to be 50/50 to me, though I think electricty certainly already has the infrastructure. I have yet to see any consumer devices that charge in less than 4 - 8 hours though, and that's for a consumer UPS that provides all of 900W for 45 Minutes - not really what a car would need.
Replying to myself as I can't edit - I have to say, IBM used to really suck at marketing or missed a few boats.
Lotus SmartSuite had 90% of the touted improvements of Office 2k3 in 1995 when I got it with my Aptiva 100mhz. All that team stuff/in program multi user edit with permission structure? In SmartSuite 95. And it was able to import about every file type known to man for word processing docs and do so rather well IME. It has the best spellchecker I'd used until Google came out with their suggestions for misspelled words.
And I still prefer much of it's default interface in wordprocessing - pallets are how many powerusers work, same as Adobe's products.
Also, back in 95-99 or so, Freelance Graphics did everything Powerpoint did (and imported their format) but seemed to be far more stable IME. Everytime someone in HS tried to run a powerpoint presentation there seemed to be a 60% chance it would crash at some point, and we'd have to wait for them to reload it. Freelance Graphics came with a 200k player that always worked. The first time. Never crashed - even running on the same machines. (Though, maybe I was more tech savvy that my schoolmates, but where would tech savvy make a closed source app less likely to crash?).
Really, there were two gotchas with SmartSuite - one was lack of good marketing IME, the other was the UI, while good, had some classic mistakes like using symbols for tab labels rather than text.
Now I still use Word Pro as everything is in that format, and it still works fine for me doing wordprocessing, and for more complicated things I've moved on to DTP programs.
I'm kind of sad, but 1-2-3 really doesn't cut it vs Excel 2k3 - though I'd say it holds it's own on any earlier Excel.
I just don't use databases so...
Here Here! Damn it, either update it and sell it or OSS it for *diety's* sake.
And does anyone else think more (sort of)P2P ought to be like NNTP or maybe Freenet, and less like bittorrent?
Cause it's real inefficient they way bittorrent works for bandwidth on the general web. Are there caching proxies for bittorrent/P2P?
Oh, I don't know. It seems to work in real life - I mean, for a long time people called photocopies xeroxes, and we have blogs and podcasts etc...
I would think journals or even stories give more clues to non hip/techies what a blog is...
I thought podcasts were some sort of wireless thingy for iPods for a long time, till someone suggested adding it to Opera and I finally asked what the heck it was, to find out it's a radio program...
I really think this is the market that NetFilx can do well with.
Ok, could you explain what you mean? What are ligatures, and why would I care about them in typing up a letter?
And I'm not sure what's missing - can't you just hit that button next to the + sign on all US keyboards for a hyphen?
I mean, Word is supposed to be an enhanced typewriter, not a DTP program.
I know. While there might be some additions to be done to Access, the rest I don't see. What more could possibly be added to Word? I mean, wordprocessing is done. It is, it's a solved problem. Heck, my Lotus WordPro 9.8 from 2001 or whatever is fine. It does everything with wordprocessing (except a dashed underline, which I have only ever needed to do once in my life - I got a pen for that one underline lol).
Anything much more than what can be done in any wordprocesser today pretty much ought to be done in a DTP program, like InDesign or one of the competitors (there are even free ones, though IDK about OSS ones).
Access is itself mostly a solved problem IMHO - much more that what it does ought to use a real DBMS - there are definitely free ones's there - I think MySQL, or MS's SQL Server, or Oracle or whatever floats your boat.
It's just, MS seems to be floundering with having maxed out the functionality that can really be put into a desktop office program environment. And I still don't know anyone IRL who uses more than Word and Outlook at work. The rest seems mostly wasted for many users.
First of all I would think this is a troll statement. But anyway - let's see. Metro, an unknown format. One vendor on one platform. PDF - been around forever, everyone and their brother has Acrobat Reader and or plugin or native support... Multiple vendors providing reading and writing on multiple platforms.
I can guess which one I'll be using. There's nothing wrong with PDF, and there's a huge amount of support, and multiple vendors at all price ranges providing reading and writing of the files. Sounds like an obvious choice to me.
First, I agree, if you are going to "sub lease" the bandwidth - you should get something like speakeasy, and set up a contract allowing that.
OTOH, I disagree that there is, or should be, a hidden expectation that consumers should limit their use of a paid service. No where in my TOS does it limit the amound of data i can download or upload - so if I max it out, I don't feel like I should get a different sort of account. If ISPs want to limit the service, they should do so openly - in the contract, not hidden caps...
Does anyone think it could be seen as an attractive nuicense if you don't secure it? I mean, unsecured wireless is more like one of those 50USD walkie talkies they sell, you're broadcasting stuff all over the place on a public channel - if someone taps in to listen, no foul for them, and if your equipment follows their directions... well you're kind of stupid I would think.
This just reinforces my belief that wireless is more trouble that it's worth. Though I'm not like most people, I don't mind wires running on the floor - i just step over them.