I say let's have it all: proprietary ISPs and municipal networks side by side, neutral networks and filtered networks, fiber and coax and copper and wireless. Any network, proprietary or municipal, can implement any network service level as long as a neutral network of equal or better bandwidth is available at an equal or lower price and equal service reliability.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? In almost every local area, the last-mile solutions (cable and phone lines) weren't built with public funds and then leased to whoever wanted to provide service and compete amongst one another, the exclusive rights were sold out-right to the highest bidder who gets to keep them in perpetuity. Sometimes, taxpayer money even subsidized the for-profit monopoly. Most people believe their only options for broadband are either cable or DSL from the incumbent providers. In some places, these *are* their only options. In others, they don't even get to choose between the two.
The whole idea of almost every municipality in the U.S. giving a single company permanent, exclusive control over the telecommunications infrastructure of an entire area was a huge mistake. One that we're paying for by falling behind the rest of the developed world in terms of broadband adoption. Unfortunately, it's too late to change this because you have to do it on a local level in every single city. The companies that profited so heavily on their legal monopolies have politicians in their pocket, so no grassroots effort is really going to make much headway.
This is why, a decade ago, I had great hope that wireless broadband technologies like WiMax would let any entrepreneur set up an antenna on a tower or building and start competing with other last-mile providers, driving broadband adoption up while driving prices down. Unfortunately, none of that seems to have taken off partly due to technical reasons and partly due to fierce opposition from the cellular giants who knew that cheap VoIP would eventually obliterate their business model. Remember all the analog TV spectrum that was auctioned off awhile back? Know who bought most of it?
When you consider that way back in the 1980's, people were shelling out upwards of $2000 for a new computer, what makes you think it's so "shocking" that people would still pay over $1000 for a new system in today's dollars?
Way back in the 1980's, a new computer that cost $2000 wasn't useful (to the average person) for much more than spreadsheet applications and the occasional Pac-Man knock-off.
Today, a $500 computer will let you store/edit/manage an enormous quantity of photos/music/videos, play most games, run any full-fledged office suite, and access any website, communicate with anyone across the world, and so on. Only users with rather specialized needs (read: gaming or professional use) would want to shell out any more than that for a decent new workstation. Part of this price reduction is due to the improvement of technology and manufacturing processes, part of it is due to the economies of scale. There was a time where selling 1 million computers was a considered a massively improbable success. Now, a computer which doesn't sell a million units is considered a failure.
I can remember when you could pull a power supply out of one of the original IBM AT machines and it might say something really low, by today's standards, like an 85 watt rating. Yet you could add a bunch of power splitters to the thing and hook it up to a FAR more modern system that needed at least a 250 watt power supply to run, and it would still power it!
Unless you you have more than one or two hard drives, most desktop computers will consume under 100 watts. This has pretty much always been the case. The reason you see power supplies now with ratings of 450W and up is more due to marketing wonks trying to push the numbers on their features bullet-list. A desktop computer which actually consumes anywhere near that amount is more appropriately referred to as a "space heater".
These days, you get power supplies with a 450 or 500 watt rating that conk out if they're asked to output more than about HALF of that rating!
These days, you still need to pay attention to what you buy and take/send it back to where you bought it if it doesn't work.
But I've had practically NO headaches or hardware issues. (My first Macbook Pro portable did arrive DOA, but it was swapped immediately and its replacement worked great.
I love this. I read it so often on Slashdot: "My $preferred_corporation always makes perfect devices! Except for that one time I bought one and it wouldn't power on straight from the factory. But other than that, they're sooo reliable!"
Even there though, the things were shipping direct from a factory in China. Back when people were conditioned to pay more for computers, all the way around, these things would have still been assembled and QA tested here in the USA.)
And nobody would buy them because they cost too much. I'll tell you right now there wouldn't be much of an I.T. industry if an average desktop computer was still priced at $4000. (Today's equivalent of $2000 in 1985.)
Moreover, it is generally acknowledged that moving the Linux kernel to any other license (including GPLv2) is impossible on a practical level, since they would need the permission of every developer who has ever contributed code to the kernel. Unlike many open source projects, the author of a patch retains the copyright to his/her code rather than assigning it to the project's organization. You're talking about thousands upon thousands of developers, many of whom cannot even be tracked down.
When did having the program you're using running on your own computer become a prerequisite for obtaining GPL rights?
Different people want to license their code under different terms, and this is why there are several different kinds of free/open software licenses. Even the GPL series of licenses give you varying levels of freedom. It's not "GPL or nothing," as you imply. I believe the grandparent is talking about the GNU Affero GPL version 3 which has an additional clause stating that users interacting with a remote program licensed under the Affero GPLv3 are entitled to the full source code (including modifications) of the software.
It's not a license that I would ever use (I *always* want the ability to legally make changes even I chose not to redistribute the program containing those changes), but there apparently are software authors who want that level of restriction.
They decided that their improvements to the base software (open) plus their hardware, will sell more phones than competitors.
Exactly. They get more hobbyists to hack on their code, more community interest, applications, code contributions, testing, bug fixes, and visibility.
Most companies are afraid to open source their code because there's this fear that competitors will either use it and sell it in their product, or will "steal" ideas from it. The reality is that NIH (not invented here) syndrome almost always assures this is not likely to happen. Nokia's major competitors are not going to replace their software stack with Symbian or Qt, for the same reasons you'll never see Microsoft building their next OS upon Darwin or Linux.
Well, WWW was the acronym for his project, "World-Wide Web". He shouldn't feel any remorse for choosing that name as there is really nothing that forces an administrator to use "www.example.com" for the hostname of their web server. They can just as easily call it "web.example.com". I always assumed that the first web admins simply used "www" when setting up their systems because it was convention at the time. They didn't realize what a bad idea it was until they had to speak their URL out loud. (I've done that lots of times with various project/file/function names.) By the time the web went global and became a household name, everyone was using "www" to indicate the web server hostnames because that was the de facto standard.
It's far from the worst technology mistake that's ever been propagated, though. Maybe 30 years from now something else will make the web obsolete and we'll be talking fondly of all the "http://" and "www" quirks that our old web used to have.
'h' alone isn't really very descriptive, though. The thinking was that the protocol identifier should match the protocol's actual name or acronym so that people knew what kind of service they were connecting to. In the early days of the web, it was envisioned that the web would "live" on all kinds of protocols and services and that web browsers would be a common interface to that content. There were URLs like ftp://example.com and gopher://example.com. I can recall some "web" sites being served via FTP because that's all that some ISPs offered at the time.
Had Berners-Lee known that HTTP would eventually become the only protocol that anyone really used for hosting web content, he might have opted to omit it from the URI specification altogether and just let browser developers worry about how to support other services if they so wished.
I can tell right away that at best you are a pathetic hack if that.
While it is certainly admirable to be able to properly execute a masterpiece, it's quite another thing to concieve it. Plus, most musicians (even professionals) aren't up to the task of even adequately executing someone else's masterpiece.
A lot of drek is passed off as competence (or more).
You seem to really have some sort of grudge against musicians. Especially those who don't also happen to be composers of "masterpiece" material. (For your subjective definition of the word.) Did it ever occur to you that even the most brilliant composer in the world is worth nothing if there are no musicians who want to play--and even interpret--her music?
No, I am not a professional musician and do not ever aspire to be. I have different priorities, music is just a hobby. But neither am I one who goes around bitterly insulting others' abilities over the Interweb for kicks. Back to your cave, troll.
(What's with the line breaks, anyway? You know your web browser can do that for you, right?)
Performing is not "creating music". All of the "creation" is being done by the guy that wrote the original bit of sheet music.
I can tell right away that you've never bothered to learn a musical instrument. Yes, there is value and reward in composing great music, but there is also value and reward, of a different kind, in learning how to play someone else's great music.
Call me old-fashioned but I've always believed that one of the pre-requisites of calling something a "game" is that it should challenge you. Give you something to learn and get better at. There was no adaptive difficulty on Mario, Zelda, or Metroid. If you wanted to advance in the game (or even beat it), your only choice was to practice, explore, learn from your mistakes, and hopefully get better. A game that automatically makes itself easier when you do poorer isn't a game, it's just a time-waster. In the same class as the click-on-the-pretty-pictures web games and every board game that boils down to sheer chance.
I'm no DNS expert, but I can't fathom why negative responses are cached at all. You have many, many more requests for valid domains than you do for invalid ones and the vast majority of the invalid ones are one-off typos. I just don't see what the benefit is. We could do away with an entire class of sysadmin headaches if all resolver software configuration and network policies defaulted to not caching negative responses.
With ubiquitous cellular broadband practically everywhere (that matters) and phones with good web browsers in them, this is a solution looking for a problem.
Ah, no. This one:
* Costs a teeny-tiny fraction of what you pay over the lifetime of a single cell phone * Can't play a fucking hip-hop ringtone in the library or movie theater
I don't think ignoring the technology in movies and shows like Star Trek altogether is a good idea. The fact is that a lot of the technology in Star Trek was plausibly extrapolated. When TOS (or even TNG) was written, people could only dream of personal communicators, computing devices that automagically talked to each other, or a high-speed data network that spanned an entire planet. To a nerd, imagining that those things could exist, and that they might exist in his/her lifetime, that's a pretty moving idea.
But the technology *has* to be mostly separate from the plot. If you try to wrap the story too much around the technology, you A) have to go through the tedious process of explaining it to the audience and B) lose all of your mainstream viewers. Think about what would happen if you tried to write a sit-com around a snippet of C++ code. That's pretty much how it would turn out. In Sci-Fi, the fiction has to come before the science, otherwise it stops being a genre of entertainment and more like a genre of documentation. Even Gene Roddenberry didn't beat around the bush about his vision of Star Trek: he saw it as a western in space. His train just used a warp drive instead of a steam engine.
If you want entertainment, drama, and a smidge or two of comedy, watch Star Trek.
If you want science, read a journal.
Complaining that contemporary sci-fi is either too technical or too little is just a waste of time.
I wish I would be around 75-80 years from now, because it would be fun to look back on this research and shake my head in much the same manner people do when they read articles saying that by 1980, the world will be so over-populated that all of mankind will starve to death and become extinct.
It's easy to imagine various hypothetical ways that current technological advances could cease. It's much more difficult to predict ways that technology (and indeed, society) will continue to evolve and progress.
We have engineered intelligence into our 4 series graphics driver such that when a workload saturates graphics engine with pixel and vertex processing, the CPU can assist with DX10 geometry processing to enhance overall performance. 3DMarkVantage is one of those workloads, as are Call of Juarez, Crysis, Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions, and Company of Heroes. We have used similar techniques with DX9 in previous products and drivers. The benefit to users is optimized performance based on best use of the hardware available in the system. Our driver is currently in the certification process with Futuremark and we fully expect it will pass their certification as did our previous DX9 drivers.
And the rest of page 2 indicates that offloading some of the work to the CPU does, for certain games, improve performance significantly. Offhand, this doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing. Intel is just trying to make the most out of the hardware of the whole machine. Also, one would also do well to bear in mind that the GPU in question is an integrated graphics chipset: they're not out to compete against a modern gaming video adapter and thus have little incentive to pump their numbers in a synthetic benchmark. Nobody buys a motherboard based on the capabilities of the integrated graphics.
The question that should be asked is: What is the technical reason for the drivers singling out only a handful of games and one benchmark utility instead of performing these optimizations on all 3D scenes that the chipset renders?
Parent is correct. I hate to sound like the tinfoil hat type, but many people don't realize that it is 100% impossible to sell second-hand software bearing the Microsoft logo on eBay. Even if you have the CD, the manual, the original packaging, the COA. Even if the package is completely unopened and not tampered with. Microsoft has a team that literally sits around all day looking for people trying to sell MS software online. They make no distinction between legitimate sales and bootlegs. Any sales that they find, they send both a DMCA notice to the service provider and a Cease and Desist to the seller. To add further insult, eBay terminates your account permanently and keeps the seller fees. eBay and PayPal in particular have a special arrangement with Microsoft where they provide the complete account information (including email address, phone number, and residential address) to Microsoft simply upon request. Few other content producers have the same privilege. In fact, I've tried to report blatantly bootleg software on eBay and they completely ignore the request every single time.
So according to eBay:
Selling legitimate second-hand software as permitted by the law on eBay will result in the threat of legal action and will get your account terminated
Pirating not-well-known software from independent developers and small software shops is perfectly fine
While humans would clearly be killed and conventional satellites crushed by the gun's huge g-forces, it could lift robust payloads such as rocket fuel. Finding cheap ways to transport fuel into space will lower the cost of keeping the International Space Station in orbit, and in future it may be needed to supply a crewed mission to Mars.
Once you strip it off any extra hardware (which with today's motherboards, with pretty much everything integrated, might not be an option) you are left with CPU, motherboard, graphics card, RAM, and HDD
Think about what you're asking here. A basic desktop computer needs four things in order to run (not be useful, but just run):
1. Power supply 2. Motherboard 3. CPU 4. RAM
Of these, the only one that can be cordoned off for a special test is the RAM. That's because the program testing the RAM can move itself out of the way to test a particular area. And even then, a failed RAM test does not always indicate bad RAM. All of these components are required in order to execute a single software instruction. To use a car analogy, you can't test an engine for proper performance without some minimum subset of its parts. If you suspect flaky hardware, you have to do what millions of others have done before you: start swapping parts or take the machine to someone who can.
And the bit about windows crashing "too often to blame Microsoft," is just laughable. A buggy device driver can easily make any software problem look like a hardware one. I hope you've at least fired up an Ubuntu or Knoppix live CD before firmly blaming the hardware in this case.
This is not the government encouraging citizens to snitch on each other. This is a private company called Internet Eyes soliciting private businesses to send their CCTV streams to Internet Eyes at the same time they solicit citizens to go and watch the cameras for points and rewards. Although its a little frightening that anyone would go for this (I'm betting it will embarrass the businesses more than it will catch criminals), there's nothing untoward going on here.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? In almost every local area, the last-mile solutions (cable and phone lines) weren't built with public funds and then leased to whoever wanted to provide service and compete amongst one another, the exclusive rights were sold out-right to the highest bidder who gets to keep them in perpetuity. Sometimes, taxpayer money even subsidized the for-profit monopoly. Most people believe their only options for broadband are either cable or DSL from the incumbent providers. In some places, these *are* their only options. In others, they don't even get to choose between the two.
The whole idea of almost every municipality in the U.S. giving a single company permanent, exclusive control over the telecommunications infrastructure of an entire area was a huge mistake. One that we're paying for by falling behind the rest of the developed world in terms of broadband adoption. Unfortunately, it's too late to change this because you have to do it on a local level in every single city. The companies that profited so heavily on their legal monopolies have politicians in their pocket, so no grassroots effort is really going to make much headway.
This is why, a decade ago, I had great hope that wireless broadband technologies like WiMax would let any entrepreneur set up an antenna on a tower or building and start competing with other last-mile providers, driving broadband adoption up while driving prices down. Unfortunately, none of that seems to have taken off partly due to technical reasons and partly due to fierce opposition from the cellular giants who knew that cheap VoIP would eventually obliterate their business model. Remember all the analog TV spectrum that was auctioned off awhile back? Know who bought most of it?
1. Buy a Dell machine with Ubuntu pre-installed
2. Love it.
3. Profit. (Well, not for Microsoft, anyway.)
Way back in the 1980's, a new computer that cost $2000 wasn't useful (to the average person) for much more than spreadsheet applications and the occasional Pac-Man knock-off.
Today, a $500 computer will let you store/edit/manage an enormous quantity of photos/music/videos, play most games, run any full-fledged office suite, and access any website, communicate with anyone across the world, and so on. Only users with rather specialized needs (read: gaming or professional use) would want to shell out any more than that for a decent new workstation. Part of this price reduction is due to the improvement of technology and manufacturing processes, part of it is due to the economies of scale. There was a time where selling 1 million computers was a considered a massively improbable success. Now, a computer which doesn't sell a million units is considered a failure.
Unless you you have more than one or two hard drives, most desktop computers will consume under 100 watts. This has pretty much always been the case. The reason you see power supplies now with ratings of 450W and up is more due to marketing wonks trying to push the numbers on their features bullet-list. A desktop computer which actually consumes anywhere near that amount is more appropriately referred to as a "space heater".
These days, you still need to pay attention to what you buy and take/send it back to where you bought it if it doesn't work.
I love this. I read it so often on Slashdot: "My $preferred_corporation always makes perfect devices! Except for that one time I bought one and it wouldn't power on straight from the factory. But other than that, they're sooo reliable!"
And nobody would buy them because they cost too much. I'll tell you right now there wouldn't be much of an I.T. industry if an average desktop computer was still priced at $4000. (Today's equivalent of $2000 in 1985.)
Okay, okay, I'll get off your lawn now.
Moreover, it is generally acknowledged that moving the Linux kernel to any other license (including GPLv2) is impossible on a practical level, since they would need the permission of every developer who has ever contributed code to the kernel. Unlike many open source projects, the author of a patch retains the copyright to his/her code rather than assigning it to the project's organization. You're talking about thousands upon thousands of developers, many of whom cannot even be tracked down.
Different people want to license their code under different terms, and this is why there are several different kinds of free/open software licenses. Even the GPL series of licenses give you varying levels of freedom. It's not "GPL or nothing," as you imply. I believe the grandparent is talking about the GNU Affero GPL version 3 which has an additional clause stating that users interacting with a remote program licensed under the Affero GPLv3 are entitled to the full source code (including modifications) of the software.
It's not a license that I would ever use (I *always* want the ability to legally make changes even I chose not to redistribute the program containing those changes), but there apparently are software authors who want that level of restriction.
Exactly. They get more hobbyists to hack on their code, more community interest, applications, code contributions, testing, bug fixes, and visibility.
Most companies are afraid to open source their code because there's this fear that competitors will either use it and sell it in their product, or will "steal" ideas from it. The reality is that NIH (not invented here) syndrome almost always assures this is not likely to happen. Nokia's major competitors are not going to replace their software stack with Symbian or Qt, for the same reasons you'll never see Microsoft building their next OS upon Darwin or Linux.
Well, WWW was the acronym for his project, "World-Wide Web". He shouldn't feel any remorse for choosing that name as there is really nothing that forces an administrator to use "www.example.com" for the hostname of their web server. They can just as easily call it "web.example.com". I always assumed that the first web admins simply used "www" when setting up their systems because it was convention at the time. They didn't realize what a bad idea it was until they had to speak their URL out loud. (I've done that lots of times with various project/file/function names.) By the time the web went global and became a household name, everyone was using "www" to indicate the web server hostnames because that was the de facto standard.
It's far from the worst technology mistake that's ever been propagated, though. Maybe 30 years from now something else will make the web obsolete and we'll be talking fondly of all the "http://" and "www" quirks that our old web used to have.
'h' alone isn't really very descriptive, though. The thinking was that the protocol identifier should match the protocol's actual name or acronym so that people knew what kind of service they were connecting to. In the early days of the web, it was envisioned that the web would "live" on all kinds of protocols and services and that web browsers would be a common interface to that content. There were URLs like ftp://example.com and gopher://example.com. I can recall some "web" sites being served via FTP because that's all that some ISPs offered at the time.
Had Berners-Lee known that HTTP would eventually become the only protocol that anyone really used for hosting web content, he might have opted to omit it from the URI specification altogether and just let browser developers worry about how to support other services if they so wished.
This is heresy! This is madness!
You seem to really have some sort of grudge against musicians. Especially those who don't also happen to be composers of "masterpiece" material. (For your subjective definition of the word.) Did it ever occur to you that even the most brilliant composer in the world is worth nothing if there are no musicians who want to play--and even interpret--her music?
No, I am not a professional musician and do not ever aspire to be. I have different priorities, music is just a hobby. But neither am I one who goes around bitterly insulting others' abilities over the Interweb for kicks. Back to your cave, troll.
(What's with the line breaks, anyway? You know your web browser can do that for you, right?)
I can tell right away that you've never bothered to learn a musical instrument. Yes, there is value and reward in composing great music, but there is also value and reward, of a different kind, in learning how to play someone else's great music.
Call me old-fashioned but I've always believed that one of the pre-requisites of calling something a "game" is that it should challenge you. Give you something to learn and get better at. There was no adaptive difficulty on Mario, Zelda, or Metroid. If you wanted to advance in the game (or even beat it), your only choice was to practice, explore, learn from your mistakes, and hopefully get better. A game that automatically makes itself easier when you do poorer isn't a game, it's just a time-waster. In the same class as the click-on-the-pretty-pictures web games and every board game that boils down to sheer chance.
I'm no DNS expert, but I can't fathom why negative responses are cached at all. You have many, many more requests for valid domains than you do for invalid ones and the vast majority of the invalid ones are one-off typos. I just don't see what the benefit is. We could do away with an entire class of sysadmin headaches if all resolver software configuration and network policies defaulted to not caching negative responses.
Dude, you have to tell me where you bought a smart phone with Internet access for $99 and no monthly subscription.
Ah, no. This one:
* Costs a teeny-tiny fraction of what you pay over the lifetime of a single cell phone
* Can't play a fucking hip-hop ringtone in the library or movie theater
I don't think ignoring the technology in movies and shows like Star Trek altogether is a good idea. The fact is that a lot of the technology in Star Trek was plausibly extrapolated. When TOS (or even TNG) was written, people could only dream of personal communicators, computing devices that automagically talked to each other, or a high-speed data network that spanned an entire planet. To a nerd, imagining that those things could exist, and that they might exist in his/her lifetime, that's a pretty moving idea.
But the technology *has* to be mostly separate from the plot. If you try to wrap the story too much around the technology, you A) have to go through the tedious process of explaining it to the audience and B) lose all of your mainstream viewers. Think about what would happen if you tried to write a sit-com around a snippet of C++ code. That's pretty much how it would turn out. In Sci-Fi, the fiction has to come before the science, otherwise it stops being a genre of entertainment and more like a genre of documentation. Even Gene Roddenberry didn't beat around the bush about his vision of Star Trek: he saw it as a western in space. His train just used a warp drive instead of a steam engine.
If you want entertainment, drama, and a smidge or two of comedy, watch Star Trek.
If you want science, read a journal.
Complaining that contemporary sci-fi is either too technical or too little is just a waste of time.
I wish I would be around 75-80 years from now, because it would be fun to look back on this research and shake my head in much the same manner people do when they read articles saying that by 1980, the world will be so over-populated that all of mankind will starve to death and become extinct.
It's easy to imagine various hypothetical ways that current technological advances could cease. It's much more difficult to predict ways that technology (and indeed, society) will continue to evolve and progress.
But see also Intel's response on page 2:
And the rest of page 2 indicates that offloading some of the work to the CPU does, for certain games, improve performance significantly. Offhand, this doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing. Intel is just trying to make the most out of the hardware of the whole machine. Also, one would also do well to bear in mind that the GPU in question is an integrated graphics chipset: they're not out to compete against a modern gaming video adapter and thus have little incentive to pump their numbers in a synthetic benchmark. Nobody buys a motherboard based on the capabilities of the integrated graphics.
The question that should be asked is: What is the technical reason for the drivers singling out only a handful of games and one benchmark utility instead of performing these optimizations on all 3D scenes that the chipset renders?
Parent is correct. I hate to sound like the tinfoil hat type, but many people don't realize that it is 100% impossible to sell second-hand software bearing the Microsoft logo on eBay. Even if you have the CD, the manual, the original packaging, the COA. Even if the package is completely unopened and not tampered with. Microsoft has a team that literally sits around all day looking for people trying to sell MS software online. They make no distinction between legitimate sales and bootlegs. Any sales that they find, they send both a DMCA notice to the service provider and a Cease and Desist to the seller. To add further insult, eBay terminates your account permanently and keeps the seller fees. eBay and PayPal in particular have a special arrangement with Microsoft where they provide the complete account information (including email address, phone number, and residential address) to Microsoft simply upon request. Few other content producers have the same privilege. In fact, I've tried to report blatantly bootleg software on eBay and they completely ignore the request every single time.
So according to eBay:
Keeping it classy, guys. Keeping it classy.
The Microsoft way: Damn if you do, damned if you don't.
(It's why I use Linux. You aren't damned either way.)
Slashdot submissions don't write themselves!
Think about what you're asking here. A basic desktop computer needs four things in order to run (not be useful, but just run):
1. Power supply
2. Motherboard
3. CPU
4. RAM
Of these, the only one that can be cordoned off for a special test is the RAM. That's because the program testing the RAM can move itself out of the way to test a particular area. And even then, a failed RAM test does not always indicate bad RAM. All of these components are required in order to execute a single software instruction. To use a car analogy, you can't test an engine for proper performance without some minimum subset of its parts. If you suspect flaky hardware, you have to do what millions of others have done before you: start swapping parts or take the machine to someone who can.
And the bit about windows crashing "too often to blame Microsoft," is just laughable. A buggy device driver can easily make any software problem look like a hardware one. I hope you've at least fired up an Ubuntu or Knoppix live CD before firmly blaming the hardware in this case.
Which is not as bad as a few gigabytes a month. But definitely far, far worse than millions of kilobytes per month.
To everyone who has commented so far: RTFA.
This is not the government encouraging citizens to snitch on each other. This is a private company called Internet Eyes soliciting private businesses to send their CCTV streams to Internet Eyes at the same time they solicit citizens to go and watch the cameras for points and rewards. Although its a little frightening that anyone would go for this (I'm betting it will embarrass the businesses more than it will catch criminals), there's nothing untoward going on here.