You're practically answering your own question. The next economic boom will be about leveraging those newfangled 'open source' technologies in order to gain unprecedented profits (because after all, that's what defines an economic boom). In the downturn after that we will both have a very good open source ecosystem and on the other hand a lot of people blaming open source because they couldn't get their profit out of it.
The only problems are going to be patents which, if not eliminated by or during the next economic boom will cause the next economic downturn. Of course then maybe patents will be overturned OR all patents will slowly start to expire causing the next boom (an open-source-like environment without having encumbering patents)
Bing isn't really gaining that much market share. Remember back in the day when Google came out? They practically killed their competitors (Yahoo, Altavista, MSN) in 2 years. In 2005 they gained over 20% in 6 months, much better than Bing which is a rebranded MSN, Live, etc. Only because of their marketing and practically paying people to use their engine are they gaining a few percentage points. Even MSN Search had higher market shares in the past.
Either way, I don't like Bing - even if it wasn't from Microsoft, it's a bit too heavy and a bit too slow (237k and 2.26s for all those stupid javascripts and images to load while google comes in at 75k at 690ms)
When even the Supreme Court doesn't hold up the constitution as a valid basis there is not much that we can do except for revolt - but even if you get a critical mass to do that, they'll just stick the army on you or use near-lethal weaponry.
They've fixed that in the mean time with auto-termination and minimum requirements in the specs. Currently it's all Serial from Serial ATA over Serial Attached SCSI to PCI-Express and DisplayPort.
The speeds are way too fast to have multiple parallel lines with different hardware and lane or cord lengths synchronized against a single clock.
$300 mil revenue is not all that much for a large company. But here are the downsides of staying in China:
- They could get sued by those Human Rights Activists or others who had their e-mail accounts breached, which would probably come with several millions in lawyers and payout especially when somebody got killed over it. - People leaving because they can't trust Google - China's government could decide to declare Google illegal, take over all it's servers located in China and execute all their employees. Google.cn would then literally become PRC Search without them having any recourse. - Once infiltrated by corporate spies, somebody could copy and/or reverse engineer the algorithms that run on Google's servers and have been secret for years (PageRank etc.)
You got miles and miles of sea, much more than land and you don't have any 'streets' to worry about - it's like a big open field. 200m is a small tanker length. For any closer you have radar and eyesight.
Probably only for Windows. The problem on Windows (at least XP) that OpenGL is not natively supported by the drivers provided from Microsoft and before that (Windows 95 -> ME) OpenGL was not supported and later supported but boggled/expanded with proprietary calls by Microsoft.
I never heard the story but you might be confusing MRI with X-Ray machines. You might also remember the stories about X-Rays in shoe stores and why that wasn't a good idea.
But either way, the costs are not unrealistically high, you can pick up a used MRI machine for about a 100k. GE doesn't have a monopoly on MRI's, Siemens, Hitachi and a few others make them as well. The simple physics alone however would not allow an MRI machine for most people though. The magnets involved are just too strong that they become dangerous when any metal is brought in the room (see MRI safety videos for examples of the missile effect). The higher powered machines (1.5T and up) require high-power, supercooled magnets which draws a lot of power from the grid (about 100A or the maximum capacity of the average house installation). Of course afterwards you might need to be able to interpret them so you'll still need a doctor familiar with your MRI system as even the simplest images can have artifacts that are easily misinterpreted.
Of course. And since companies won't like this they will either get an exemption or they will move out of state which will leave you without jobs (and thus no money) to pay for said electricity - see, problem solved, Minnesota will no longer have any carbon emissions, only methane emissions from their subjects rotting away.
My question is, why the f*** so many systems have issues with their clocks. In just about any language (C, Java,.NET, Perl, PHP, SQL...) there are (built-in) libraries available that do time correctly. If you're unsure on how to store time, Unix epoch is just about the simplest way to store it (it's a freakin' integer), it's universally recognizable and accepted and very easy to calculate with and if you need more precision just make it a floating point number and add numbers after the comma.
I see way too many implementations where people build their own libraries to convert a string into a date format, calculate with it and back. On embedded systems it's even worse. Some hope to save some storage space and speed by building custom functions to store a time format (eg. 2010-01-07 10:50:59 pm) into an integer (201001071050591) and back simply by stripping some characters and implementing the storage part in assembler. When they decide to export to other states/countries however they now have to implement a conversion for timezones and daylight savings time and the code becomes hopelessly buggy and bloated - usually too late to fix it since they already have it out in the field. While they could've just saved time (and storage space) by just storing it as 1278024659 using an (initially) somewhat larger library.
I believe that EA purchased the exclusive rights to use the NFL/NHL logo's in video games. You can make a football/hockey/baseball/basketball game but I don't believe you will ever be able to use the official logo's, players and outfits.
Sorry, but European-style airports really wouldn't have fixed this. I like European airports better because they look and work exactly like any other airport in the world but they have less of a security theatre and are easier and faster to process through.
Actually, for US-bound planes most airports in Europe (except for the really big ones like BRU, AMS and CDG) have to implement a make-shift corridor for American-style #ITA security screenings. If you ever have the opportunity to go to eg. Crete or an ex-Soviet Bloc country by plane you'll see what I mean. The only security there is a beeping metal detector and a military/police officer waving you through looking really annoyed that you actually stopped because of the beeping.
Applying your reasoning the military-industrial complex that is the US government could easily start up a company to make eg. these or these and sell them well below their actual value to anyone who wants (say $20 or $50) and subsequently use them everywhere to make a real-time map of anyone's location.
Anybody who buys anything from Best Buy deserves what they get. If you really need it right then and there go to Wal-Mart or so, they have the same stuff at least 50% cheaper and you can actually return your shit if it doesn't work as advertised. They also don't have Tweek trying to sell you gold connector USB cables because 'they go faster'.
Mac systems are most like Unix systems. With a good set of restrictions (no local admins) you can manage about 100-300 Mac systems with a single admin. Above 100 users you might want to invest in a redundant admin just in case one gets sick.
I manage about 250 users with 100 computers and 5 servers including mail, web, dns, network home and a few TB of imaging data + backup by myself and I am not really all that busy. I just make sure I have either a network or site license for most software and deploy it to all machines as software licensing is where most of your time gets to be for individual licenses and activations.
I try not to deal with Microsoft as much as possible although we have a couple of Windows machines and virtual machines because of it's license restrictions, management and upkeep. Especially when you try to get central management capabilities (like SMS, AD and Exchange) you have to start figuring out how many CAL's you need etc.
I really hate the 4-way stop in the USA. In Europe there is no such thing as a 4-way stop, you have 2 stop signs in one direction and 2 yield signs in the other direction.
If 4 cars (or 2 or 3 for that matter) come to the intersection at the same time, who goes first? Unless you have a very precise clock you can't really figure out who goes first. The rules get really complicated at that point, you have to give priority to the right (2 cars), you have to give priority to the direction with the most cars (3 cars) or use hand signs and other forms of communication (4 cars). The latter off course is the main cause of accidents. The hand signs don't really get communicated well (especially if your windows are frosted or snow covered) and in court nobody can prove anything about who did the right thing. Also, I have never had any driving school, class, book or test that even covers these rules.
But the brick-and-mortar companies also seek out the best tax rates for their shops. If you go look at the border towns of 2 states you'll see that the town in the state with the least tax burden gets the Wal-Mart and a mall while the other town has absolutely nothing but a restaurant and a few bars. Where I live in NYS we have a mall that's right outside the city's borders (it starts right where the sign says "Welcome to...") in order to profit from the 4% sales tax instead of the 8%.
Usually the company doesn't really care how much it costs to keep their shop open as long as it doesn't exceed the cost for income. Since Facebook is a web-company it makes sense that they use a web language. After all, Slashdot runs on Perl too, Microsoft runs on ASP.NET. Now if Facebook was making desktop apps, I would expect them to use a language that optimized the code they wrote into bytecode.
PHP is fairly good and simple enough for running and programming most linear solutions and can be accelerated quite a bit using the right tools (Zend, eAccelerator, bcompiler). I don't think any management would be happy if their website was down due after running happily for months due to a missed asterisk in int* or because a string couldn't be cast into a float or that their system was hacked due to a missed buffer overflow.
In the beginning (heh) the iPhone only had the possibilities to use HTML and JS for custom applications and many, many people complained about it. There wasn't even a healthy application landscape until Apple decided to give an API to (most of) the guts of the system and create a central, affordable and (in return) possibly profitable repository of apps.
That nobody even cares that Palm Pre development can only be done in HTML should be an indicator of the amount of coders that care about the Palm Pre.
What I was getting at was that ISP's (AT&T, TWC, Comcast...) are selling connections with a certain level of service (say unlimited 10Mbps) to their customers while not having the capabilities of even servicing a single customer at the end point with what they sell - the distribution point in most areas are not connected with 10Mbps. So if you are the only person on your block using the Internet at a certain point in time, you cannot get the bandwidth promised because it's simply not there and that is so in 90% of the cases.
Same goes for '3G' connections. AT&T promises HDSPA and while the tower might accept HDSPA connections from the customer, from the tower on, everybody shares a bandwidth similar to dial-up. If then you are in a very populated area (like say San Francisco) and you have to share 64k with 300 users at a time you can see where the problem is.
On the other hand, companies (large office buildings or apartment complexes) can get a dedicated line (including laying a few miles of fresh fiber) for 1/2 the price per customer while offering way better service.
What I want companies to do is be more honest about their packages. They can sell me 3Mbps and they can sell me 10Mbps which is 1000 times overbooked but if they can't offer 10Mbps because they do not have the physical infrastructure to support 10Mbps in my area, then they shouldn't try to sell it.
What TWC and them is trying to do is put up a download limit so I am more careful what I download in order for them not to have to expand while still charging the same or more for a worse service. However the same problems remains that if everybody decides to use their limit on the first day of the month, they still do not have the infrastructure for it.
The thing is, with electronics and the Internet, there is such a thing called 'unlimited'. Once the infrastructure is in place and you have fleshed out the support and maintenance costs there is nothing further that gets consumed - whether you use it or not, the switches, the routers and the firewalls all have to stay in place and they all keep moving bits in their silicon substance, a transistor doesn't break because it's being used.
It might not be unlimited 10Mbps which is what they try to upsell but there is definitely unlimited x-bps for x-connections per second. The problem is that the providers have been overselling beyond their capacity and when even just a handful of users actually uses what they have been sold, they flood the network and the network slows down to a crawl. When you see that most cell towers are connected to the "Internet" with a single 64kbps line or that DSLAM's have 1Mbps connections for a whole neighborhood (while selling 3Mbps connections) then there is a problem when you try to offer 100 customers the capacity you have x 10. I used to work for a large ISP troubleshooting DSLAM's and street-level connections so I know what I'm talking about.
In the apartment complex I used to live management started selling internet in the units (capped at 2Mbps, 10Mbps peak). There were 500 units for which they installed a redundant 10Mbps dedicated line straight to the backbones of AT&T, Time Warner and Level3 with the expansion capacity to 100Mbps. The service was excellent - downloading usually went at 2 or 3Mbps at the worst, no downtime. They did this for under $30 per subscriber while not every unit wanted this service and while having a 3rd party handle the hardware, support, installations etc. Is there a reason AT&T, TWC or any of them can't do that? I pay TWC double that for 3Mbps at my house but can hardly get 800kbps through.
The thing is, most extended warranties are not worth the cost.
I recently got a microwave from Wal-Mart. The cashier asked me if I wanted a one-year warranty on the frackin' thing - I declined. I came home and opened the box, first page: This device has a 1 year warranty, if you have problems call this number.
The same happened to me at Staples and a few other places. Some even gave me a choice between 1, 2 and 3 year warranties when the box said in big letters: "5 year warranty". I swore never to set foot in Best Buy again after they claimed the gold USB cables were faster than the 'normal' ones (I almost punched the guy) but I would like to find out what they're offering.
Even though the Scandinavian countries are less densely populated than many states in the US, they all have massive broadband infrastructure (100Mbps in some remote places). I live in a well-off, densely populated, city with a couple of Universities and a handful of colleges. I myself make a good dollar and I spend almost $150 with TWC every month. Yet, the best broadband I can get is 3Mbps which at most times has only 1Mbps available even though specific taxes are levied on my cable bill in order to expand their networks. The biggest problem is that VoIP, BitTorrent and streaming traffic gets throttled to about 300kbps and that this has been the case for the last 6 years I have been paying for their expansions with no notion of either costs going down or speeds going up or anybody I know that live in a rural area not so far away getting broadband any time soon.
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You're practically answering your own question. The next economic boom will be about leveraging those newfangled 'open source' technologies in order to gain unprecedented profits (because after all, that's what defines an economic boom). In the downturn after that we will both have a very good open source ecosystem and on the other hand a lot of people blaming open source because they couldn't get their profit out of it.
The only problems are going to be patents which, if not eliminated by or during the next economic boom will cause the next economic downturn. Of course then maybe patents will be overturned OR all patents will slowly start to expire causing the next boom (an open-source-like environment without having encumbering patents)
Bing isn't really gaining that much market share. Remember back in the day when Google came out? They practically killed their competitors (Yahoo, Altavista, MSN) in 2 years. In 2005 they gained over 20% in 6 months, much better than Bing which is a rebranded MSN, Live, etc. Only because of their marketing and practically paying people to use their engine are they gaining a few percentage points. Even MSN Search had higher market shares in the past.
Either way, I don't like Bing - even if it wasn't from Microsoft, it's a bit too heavy and a bit too slow (237k and 2.26s for all those stupid javascripts and images to load while google comes in at 75k at 690ms)
When even the Supreme Court doesn't hold up the constitution as a valid basis there is not much that we can do except for revolt - but even if you get a critical mass to do that, they'll just stick the army on you or use near-lethal weaponry.
They've fixed that in the mean time with auto-termination and minimum requirements in the specs. Currently it's all Serial from Serial ATA over Serial Attached SCSI to PCI-Express and DisplayPort.
The speeds are way too fast to have multiple parallel lines with different hardware and lane or cord lengths synchronized against a single clock.
$300 mil revenue is not all that much for a large company. But here are the downsides of staying in China:
- They could get sued by those Human Rights Activists or others who had their e-mail accounts breached, which would probably come with several millions in lawyers and payout especially when somebody got killed over it.
- People leaving because they can't trust Google
- China's government could decide to declare Google illegal, take over all it's servers located in China and execute all their employees. Google.cn would then literally become PRC Search without them having any recourse.
- Once infiltrated by corporate spies, somebody could copy and/or reverse engineer the algorithms that run on Google's servers and have been secret for years (PageRank etc.)
You got miles and miles of sea, much more than land and you don't have any 'streets' to worry about - it's like a big open field. 200m is a small tanker length. For any closer you have radar and eyesight.
Probably only for Windows. The problem on Windows (at least XP) that OpenGL is not natively supported by the drivers provided from Microsoft and before that (Windows 95 -> ME) OpenGL was not supported and later supported but boggled/expanded with proprietary calls by Microsoft.
You mean like the Modbook?
I never heard the story but you might be confusing MRI with X-Ray machines. You might also remember the stories about X-Rays in shoe stores and why that wasn't a good idea.
But either way, the costs are not unrealistically high, you can pick up a used MRI machine for about a 100k. GE doesn't have a monopoly on MRI's, Siemens, Hitachi and a few others make them as well. The simple physics alone however would not allow an MRI machine for most people though. The magnets involved are just too strong that they become dangerous when any metal is brought in the room (see MRI safety videos for examples of the missile effect). The higher powered machines (1.5T and up) require high-power, supercooled magnets which draws a lot of power from the grid (about 100A or the maximum capacity of the average house installation). Of course afterwards you might need to be able to interpret them so you'll still need a doctor familiar with your MRI system as even the simplest images can have artifacts that are easily misinterpreted.
Of course. And since companies won't like this they will either get an exemption or they will move out of state which will leave you without jobs (and thus no money) to pay for said electricity - see, problem solved, Minnesota will no longer have any carbon emissions, only methane emissions from their subjects rotting away.
My question is, why the f*** so many systems have issues with their clocks. In just about any language (C, Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, SQL...) there are (built-in) libraries available that do time correctly. If you're unsure on how to store time, Unix epoch is just about the simplest way to store it (it's a freakin' integer), it's universally recognizable and accepted and very easy to calculate with and if you need more precision just make it a floating point number and add numbers after the comma.
I see way too many implementations where people build their own libraries to convert a string into a date format, calculate with it and back. On embedded systems it's even worse. Some hope to save some storage space and speed by building custom functions to store a time format (eg. 2010-01-07 10:50:59 pm) into an integer (201001071050591) and back simply by stripping some characters and implementing the storage part in assembler. When they decide to export to other states/countries however they now have to implement a conversion for timezones and daylight savings time and the code becomes hopelessly buggy and bloated - usually too late to fix it since they already have it out in the field. While they could've just saved time (and storage space) by just storing it as 1278024659 using an (initially) somewhat larger library.
I believe that EA purchased the exclusive rights to use the NFL/NHL logo's in video games. You can make a football/hockey/baseball/basketball game but I don't believe you will ever be able to use the official logo's, players and outfits.
Sorry, but European-style airports really wouldn't have fixed this. I like European airports better because they look and work exactly like any other airport in the world but they have less of a security theatre and are easier and faster to process through.
Actually, for US-bound planes most airports in Europe (except for the really big ones like BRU, AMS and CDG) have to implement a make-shift corridor for American-style #ITA security screenings. If you ever have the opportunity to go to eg. Crete or an ex-Soviet Bloc country by plane you'll see what I mean. The only security there is a beeping metal detector and a military/police officer waving you through looking really annoyed that you actually stopped because of the beeping.
Applying your reasoning the military-industrial complex that is the US government could easily start up a company to make eg. these or these and sell them well below their actual value to anyone who wants (say $20 or $50) and subsequently use them everywhere to make a real-time map of anyone's location.
Anybody who buys anything from Best Buy deserves what they get. If you really need it right then and there go to Wal-Mart or so, they have the same stuff at least 50% cheaper and you can actually return your shit if it doesn't work as advertised. They also don't have Tweek trying to sell you gold connector USB cables because 'they go faster'.
Mac systems are most like Unix systems. With a good set of restrictions (no local admins) you can manage about 100-300 Mac systems with a single admin. Above 100 users you might want to invest in a redundant admin just in case one gets sick.
I manage about 250 users with 100 computers and 5 servers including mail, web, dns, network home and a few TB of imaging data + backup by myself and I am not really all that busy. I just make sure I have either a network or site license for most software and deploy it to all machines as software licensing is where most of your time gets to be for individual licenses and activations.
I try not to deal with Microsoft as much as possible although we have a couple of Windows machines and virtual machines because of it's license restrictions, management and upkeep. Especially when you try to get central management capabilities (like SMS, AD and Exchange) you have to start figuring out how many CAL's you need etc.
How much energy savings do these lights add up to? How many lives will be saved by not having to produce the energy for the old light bulbs?
How much would Lisa Richter pay in taxes or add to society? How many babies would she produce?
It might be mean and sad but that's the bitter truth and that's how a corporation/government would calculate the cost/benefits of their installation.
I really hate the 4-way stop in the USA. In Europe there is no such thing as a 4-way stop, you have 2 stop signs in one direction and 2 yield signs in the other direction.
If 4 cars (or 2 or 3 for that matter) come to the intersection at the same time, who goes first? Unless you have a very precise clock you can't really figure out who goes first. The rules get really complicated at that point, you have to give priority to the right (2 cars), you have to give priority to the direction with the most cars (3 cars) or use hand signs and other forms of communication (4 cars). The latter off course is the main cause of accidents. The hand signs don't really get communicated well (especially if your windows are frosted or snow covered) and in court nobody can prove anything about who did the right thing. Also, I have never had any driving school, class, book or test that even covers these rules.
But the brick-and-mortar companies also seek out the best tax rates for their shops. If you go look at the border towns of 2 states you'll see that the town in the state with the least tax burden gets the Wal-Mart and a mall while the other town has absolutely nothing but a restaurant and a few bars. Where I live in NYS we have a mall that's right outside the city's borders (it starts right where the sign says "Welcome to...") in order to profit from the 4% sales tax instead of the 8%.
Usually the company doesn't really care how much it costs to keep their shop open as long as it doesn't exceed the cost for income. Since Facebook is a web-company it makes sense that they use a web language. After all, Slashdot runs on Perl too, Microsoft runs on ASP.NET. Now if Facebook was making desktop apps, I would expect them to use a language that optimized the code they wrote into bytecode.
PHP is fairly good and simple enough for running and programming most linear solutions and can be accelerated quite a bit using the right tools (Zend, eAccelerator, bcompiler). I don't think any management would be happy if their website was down due after running happily for months due to a missed asterisk in int* or because a string couldn't be cast into a float or that their system was hacked due to a missed buffer overflow.
In the beginning (heh) the iPhone only had the possibilities to use HTML and JS for custom applications and many, many people complained about it. There wasn't even a healthy application landscape until Apple decided to give an API to (most of) the guts of the system and create a central, affordable and (in return) possibly profitable repository of apps.
That nobody even cares that Palm Pre development can only be done in HTML should be an indicator of the amount of coders that care about the Palm Pre.
What I was getting at was that ISP's (AT&T, TWC, Comcast...) are selling connections with a certain level of service (say unlimited 10Mbps) to their customers while not having the capabilities of even servicing a single customer at the end point with what they sell - the distribution point in most areas are not connected with 10Mbps. So if you are the only person on your block using the Internet at a certain point in time, you cannot get the bandwidth promised because it's simply not there and that is so in 90% of the cases.
Same goes for '3G' connections. AT&T promises HDSPA and while the tower might accept HDSPA connections from the customer, from the tower on, everybody shares a bandwidth similar to dial-up. If then you are in a very populated area (like say San Francisco) and you have to share 64k with 300 users at a time you can see where the problem is.
On the other hand, companies (large office buildings or apartment complexes) can get a dedicated line (including laying a few miles of fresh fiber) for 1/2 the price per customer while offering way better service.
What I want companies to do is be more honest about their packages. They can sell me 3Mbps and they can sell me 10Mbps which is 1000 times overbooked but if they can't offer 10Mbps because they do not have the physical infrastructure to support 10Mbps in my area, then they shouldn't try to sell it.
What TWC and them is trying to do is put up a download limit so I am more careful what I download in order for them not to have to expand while still charging the same or more for a worse service. However the same problems remains that if everybody decides to use their limit on the first day of the month, they still do not have the infrastructure for it.
The thing is, with electronics and the Internet, there is such a thing called 'unlimited'. Once the infrastructure is in place and you have fleshed out the support and maintenance costs there is nothing further that gets consumed - whether you use it or not, the switches, the routers and the firewalls all have to stay in place and they all keep moving bits in their silicon substance, a transistor doesn't break because it's being used.
It might not be unlimited 10Mbps which is what they try to upsell but there is definitely unlimited x-bps for x-connections per second. The problem is that the providers have been overselling beyond their capacity and when even just a handful of users actually uses what they have been sold, they flood the network and the network slows down to a crawl. When you see that most cell towers are connected to the "Internet" with a single 64kbps line or that DSLAM's have 1Mbps connections for a whole neighborhood (while selling 3Mbps connections) then there is a problem when you try to offer 100 customers the capacity you have x 10. I used to work for a large ISP troubleshooting DSLAM's and street-level connections so I know what I'm talking about.
In the apartment complex I used to live management started selling internet in the units (capped at 2Mbps, 10Mbps peak). There were 500 units for which they installed a redundant 10Mbps dedicated line straight to the backbones of AT&T, Time Warner and Level3 with the expansion capacity to 100Mbps. The service was excellent - downloading usually went at 2 or 3Mbps at the worst, no downtime. They did this for under $30 per subscriber while not every unit wanted this service and while having a 3rd party handle the hardware, support, installations etc. Is there a reason AT&T, TWC or any of them can't do that? I pay TWC double that for 3Mbps at my house but can hardly get 800kbps through.
The thing is, most extended warranties are not worth the cost.
I recently got a microwave from Wal-Mart. The cashier asked me if I wanted a one-year warranty on the frackin' thing - I declined. I came home and opened the box, first page: This device has a 1 year warranty, if you have problems call this number.
The same happened to me at Staples and a few other places. Some even gave me a choice between 1, 2 and 3 year warranties when the box said in big letters: "5 year warranty". I swore never to set foot in Best Buy again after they claimed the gold USB cables were faster than the 'normal' ones (I almost punched the guy) but I would like to find out what they're offering.
Even though the Scandinavian countries are less densely populated than many states in the US, they all have massive broadband infrastructure (100Mbps in some remote places). I live in a well-off, densely populated, city with a couple of Universities and a handful of colleges. I myself make a good dollar and I spend almost $150 with TWC every month. Yet, the best broadband I can get is 3Mbps which at most times has only 1Mbps available even though specific taxes are levied on my cable bill in order to expand their networks. The biggest problem is that VoIP, BitTorrent and streaming traffic gets throttled to about 300kbps and that this has been the case for the last 6 years I have been paying for their expansions with no notion of either costs going down or speeds going up or anybody I know that live in a rural area not so far away getting broadband any time soon.