about 5 years ago, I was living in NC and was using road runner cable. Up until june of that year, I had always heard road runner as one of the internet providers to use if you wanted to do a lot of downloading as they had better speeds than DSL and didn't have any limits. At the begining of July, I got a letter from them saying that I was was using too much bandwidth on my 5mb down/512kb up cable connection. How much was I using? In 3 months, about 80gb a month. I was helping distro for anime fansubs.
When they sent the letter, they decided that people in NC only needed 20gb a month (yes, they actually stated it). For some people this was plenty, like all the rednecks who just surfed pron sites and checked their email. I was one of the few geeks in the area and was downloading fansubbed anime everyday and getting into linux, so I was downloading all the favorite flavors of linux, not to mention all the betas I was downloading. When I talked with roadrunner, they had 3 options for me. Use less than 20gb a month (for me and 2 other family members), upgrade to their premium connection which was $80 a month (as opposed to the $35 I was paying) to get a 8mb down/1mb up and 60gb limit, or switch to business class which started at $120 a month.
Since I was still in college at the time and had no job and living with my parents, I had no option but to limit my bandwidth since we didn't have DSL as a option, and dialup was also not going to happen. 3 months after I got the letter, they changed their ToS to up the limit to 60gb a month, and after new years they removed the "limit" completely replacing it with "abusers will be dropped".
I used to be in the same situation. I worked at a YWCA (like a YMCA, but mostly for women) and I most of the people I had to work with were older women. Now, when I first got there, I tried to be nice and helpful, even to the people who did really stupid things. As I continued working with them, the users got put into one of 2 catagories. Group one were the people that had real problems that they either had never seen before and were nice and tried to learn from what happend so next time they knew how to solve it the next time, or atleast know what to tell me what broke so I can fix it faster. Group 2 were the people who were illiterate not because they didn't know, but because they didn't want to know. These people tended to be alot more angry with me for their own mistakes. I had one person who wanted me to make this huge website (not part of my job description, but I was trying to be helpful), but rather than help me design it the way she wanted it to look, she just told me to make it, and then got upset when it didn't look the way she wanted it to look. There was another person who always had problems printing. Her printer just needed to be turned off then on again and it would work, but when it didn't work, she would keep hitting the print button over and over until the computer just stopped working all together. I had told her repeatidly how to solve the problem, but she never listened to a word I said and was always upset with me and her machine because of it.
I quit working there about a year and a half ago when it got to the point where my boss, who fell into group 2, felt that while I kept everything working smoothly as could be, I wasn't needed as much and wanted me to only work 3 days a week for 4 hours a day because the rest of my time wasn't being used "creativly", ie, doing other people's jobs for them. I quit shortly after that to a new career as I had gotten to the point where I couldn't stand being pushed around by people who didn't understand what it was I did. Now I work for the military doing work dealing with nuclear physics, and the IT guys in my building love me as I solve most of their problems for them, at is after they had given me admin rights to actually fix things.
Re:I've had this in my office for years
on
Sunlight in a Tube
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· Score: 1
Actually, this would be great for tall office buildings. I've seen something like this several years ago where they collect the sunlight and using fiber optics, they channel the light into a room. They were also saying that a plant grown using this light turns out healthier due to the lack of UV radiation.
The difference between downloading a song off the internet and stealing a candy bar is that they are 2 completely different crimes. If you steal a candy bar, that store now has 1 less candy bar to sell. If I download a song off the internet without buying it, the song is still in the same place where I got it.
Also, that fine for stealing that candy bar? Let's say it's $500. If I steal a box of candy bars, or even several, it's still a $500 fine. It is not, as someone before be posted, $500 per candy bar. The law, as it's written allows for the RIAA to sue you for as little as $750 per song, to as much as $250,000 IIRC. Last time I checked, a copy of a song is not worth $750, let alone a quarter of a million. Granted, that upper limit is supposed to be used on the pirates in Asia selling copied cd's, but there is nothing in the law that restricts them from suing Joe Blow for that much.
And again, as someone pointed out before, the RIAA isn't putting alot of effort into making sure they sue the correct people. I remember a story a few months back about the RIAA suing a grandmother who owned a Mac and a MIT student that didn't even own a computer and was overseas at the time they said he was downloading music. If they were to sue you, could you afford to pay a lawyer to fight them even though you didn't actually download any music?
Oh, and for the record, I don't buy cd's and don't download music that belongs to the RIAA.
Slashdot Mirror
about 5 years ago, I was living in NC and was using road runner cable. Up until june of that year, I had always heard road runner as one of the internet providers to use if you wanted to do a lot of downloading as they had better speeds than DSL and didn't have any limits. At the begining of July, I got a letter from them saying that I was was using too much bandwidth on my 5mb down/512kb up cable connection. How much was I using? In 3 months, about 80gb a month. I was helping distro for anime fansubs. When they sent the letter, they decided that people in NC only needed 20gb a month (yes, they actually stated it). For some people this was plenty, like all the rednecks who just surfed pron sites and checked their email. I was one of the few geeks in the area and was downloading fansubbed anime everyday and getting into linux, so I was downloading all the favorite flavors of linux, not to mention all the betas I was downloading. When I talked with roadrunner, they had 3 options for me. Use less than 20gb a month (for me and 2 other family members), upgrade to their premium connection which was $80 a month (as opposed to the $35 I was paying) to get a 8mb down/1mb up and 60gb limit, or switch to business class which started at $120 a month. Since I was still in college at the time and had no job and living with my parents, I had no option but to limit my bandwidth since we didn't have DSL as a option, and dialup was also not going to happen. 3 months after I got the letter, they changed their ToS to up the limit to 60gb a month, and after new years they removed the "limit" completely replacing it with "abusers will be dropped".
I used to be in the same situation. I worked at a YWCA (like a YMCA, but mostly for women) and I most of the people I had to work with were older women. Now, when I first got there, I tried to be nice and helpful, even to the people who did really stupid things. As I continued working with them, the users got put into one of 2 catagories. Group one were the people that had real problems that they either had never seen before and were nice and tried to learn from what happend so next time they knew how to solve it the next time, or atleast know what to tell me what broke so I can fix it faster. Group 2 were the people who were illiterate not because they didn't know, but because they didn't want to know. These people tended to be alot more angry with me for their own mistakes. I had one person who wanted me to make this huge website (not part of my job description, but I was trying to be helpful), but rather than help me design it the way she wanted it to look, she just told me to make it, and then got upset when it didn't look the way she wanted it to look. There was another person who always had problems printing. Her printer just needed to be turned off then on again and it would work, but when it didn't work, she would keep hitting the print button over and over until the computer just stopped working all together. I had told her repeatidly how to solve the problem, but she never listened to a word I said and was always upset with me and her machine because of it. I quit working there about a year and a half ago when it got to the point where my boss, who fell into group 2, felt that while I kept everything working smoothly as could be, I wasn't needed as much and wanted me to only work 3 days a week for 4 hours a day because the rest of my time wasn't being used "creativly", ie, doing other people's jobs for them. I quit shortly after that to a new career as I had gotten to the point where I couldn't stand being pushed around by people who didn't understand what it was I did. Now I work for the military doing work dealing with nuclear physics, and the IT guys in my building love me as I solve most of their problems for them, at is after they had given me admin rights to actually fix things.
Actually, this would be great for tall office buildings. I've seen something like this several years ago where they collect the sunlight and using fiber optics, they channel the light into a room. They were also saying that a plant grown using this light turns out healthier due to the lack of UV radiation.
The difference between downloading a song off the internet and stealing a candy bar is that they are 2 completely different crimes. If you steal a candy bar, that store now has 1 less candy bar to sell. If I download a song off the internet without buying it, the song is still in the same place where I got it. Also, that fine for stealing that candy bar? Let's say it's $500. If I steal a box of candy bars, or even several, it's still a $500 fine. It is not, as someone before be posted, $500 per candy bar. The law, as it's written allows for the RIAA to sue you for as little as $750 per song, to as much as $250,000 IIRC. Last time I checked, a copy of a song is not worth $750, let alone a quarter of a million. Granted, that upper limit is supposed to be used on the pirates in Asia selling copied cd's, but there is nothing in the law that restricts them from suing Joe Blow for that much. And again, as someone pointed out before, the RIAA isn't putting alot of effort into making sure they sue the correct people. I remember a story a few months back about the RIAA suing a grandmother who owned a Mac and a MIT student that didn't even own a computer and was overseas at the time they said he was downloading music. If they were to sue you, could you afford to pay a lawyer to fight them even though you didn't actually download any music? Oh, and for the record, I don't buy cd's and don't download music that belongs to the RIAA.