That was back in the day when 1) the cheap IBM-compatible computer started becoming mainstream and Windows 95 was OEM installed on just about any hardware (loose hard drives came preinstalled with Windows 95, it even came free with video cards) and the alternative was MS-DOS with Windows 3.0 2) Apple was going down the drain and MacOS was just as unstable 3) Linux was in the early kernel stages - way before KDE or Gnome 4) Unix was too expensive and deemed too difficult. DR-DOS/Novell DOS (the only DOS versions with decent memory management) were literally being sabotaged by Microsoft so it couldn't install Windows 3 (which was fairly stable and fast) 5) IBM-compatible computer hardware wasn't stable enough to run any server type system - heck anything really mission critical was still implemented by electronics engineers instead of software engineers. 6) OS/2 was a good OS but price and Microsoft killed it.
Things have changed since then. Linux has matured to a full desktop, server and embedded system alternative, Mac OS has gotten Unix/BSD underpinnings and is now rock-solid, Windows 2000 came by and was fairly stable. OS/2 has died, BeOS has come and gone. After nearly 15 years, people have come to expect a certain stability from their OS. If it keeps crashing or is too slow or doesn't do what it's supposed to do, people won't accept it. There are plenty of alternatives right now that are stable and cheaper, why bother waiting on Microsoft to release something acceptable?
SFTP should do since the communications are encrypted, if something changes along the way it should be rejected by the other end. HTTPS and any other protocol-over-SSL should do.
FTP is a plain-text protocol so if something changes along the way it won't give you any issues.
Why would I or Amazon have to pay taxes twice or more for something? First Amazon would need to pay taxes at whatever locale they're at, then I would need to pay taxes on the same product in my home state, then also every state it goes through as it is getting shipped from Florida to Rhode Island?
There is a reason intra-state purchases are not taxed. Read the constitution or so, you know the part where it says: The Congress shall have power . . . To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes
They are immune from RICO because they are not the recording companies themselves. The RIAA is similar to any consortium body like the ISO consortium or the Bluetooth consortium. It's just that their industry standard is to regulate prices and annoy/persecute their customers.
It's already being done the way you descibe. Read any of these cases:
Lava Records v. Amurao Capitol v. Thomas UMG v. Lindor Atlantic Recording v. Brennan
The RIAA is just a consortium where those big labels have deposited and combined their moneys in order to eradicate this internet thingy once and for all. The RIAA just hires a bunch of lawyers to do it and shares the information among the parties. From a laymen's perspective: it's kinda like several mob bosses outsourcing their harassing/collecting to the same company. From a legal/business perspective: It's the colluding of several large businesses in order to secure their respective monopolies and keep other smaller players away from the market. The RIAA also does other things besides lawyering like fixing prices between those large businesses - legally those businesses can't collude to fix the prices on their products (they offer products to both the artists and the artists' customers). They just all happen to have the same 'market research' agency that advices them a certain price point and specific contract outlines.
The RIAA needs to be disbanded and all of the assets returned to their owners (after the victims have been repaid) and then let each of them fight their own fights - let the recording agencies fight between each other for artists and let the market decide who to give the most business.
is by biting them where it hurts: their pockets. You can add all the sales tax on out-of-state purchases you want (whether that is federally allowed -- I'm not sure), if you don't sell anything, you don't have anything to tax so revenue will remain 0.
They probably saw what happened in NY and they don't want it to happen everywhere. Amazon decided to add tax to NY purchases and me and a lot of other people stopped purchasing from them because other stores (like NewEgg, TigerDirect and Geeks) were undercutting them by about 8%. Even though my organization is tax exempt I don't purchase at Amazon simply because they don't have the provision for me to state that I am tax exempt.
Just very slowly. In the pictures it looks like features are developing but it's on a very, very slow pace. Maybe she might live to be 400 or 800 if her bone structure will remain supportive over time and her cells don't stop dividing like they do with 'normal' aging. I think the parents might already have tried it but she could probably learn to speak or at least communicate over the years - the brain of a toddler is very open to it (unless her brain plasticity has been aging).
The mainframe of old - the single room-size unit with hundreds of CPU's, drives and memory is indeed dead. These days a 'mainframe' is nothing more but a clustered Linux environment that runs virtualized instances of an Operating System. Some mainframes still resemble the old mainframes (eg. the zSeries) but they take up about the size of a rack.
I need to write something and I technically know how to do it, just don't feel like it since it's going to be boring and tedious. What I have found out works well: learn a new language and while you're doing that make the program in that new language and tell yourself you are practicing the new language through the program.
I'm learning ObjC and after about a week it's going pretty well, I read the book while in the company gym and then I go back do some other stuff and then do the books' exercise. I would be comfortable enough to start off with a small number of classes for the core functionality already.
I don't know how they will play it out but as far as I know, not giving informed consent for images would be a civil case brought on by the parents or if the children are now old enough and the statutes haven't expired they could do it. It wouldn't be a criminal case like the RIAA makes their cases look.
I don't get it? You want a netbook that has the features of a $999 laptop but would cost $400? There is a reason there is a $500 discrepancy. There are netbook-size devices that are light, fairly fast and have decent batteries but they're in the upper 1000 range and they're usually called Tablet PC's
1) If I look outside my office window, I can see about 48 office windows (without standing up) and all of them have the lights on and it's dusk outside. Give me a dSLR and a decent set of long distance lenses and I'll prove you wrong.
2) How many times have you typed in your password while somebody was looking at your screen eg. to show somebody something on a protected website. This happens a lot to tech people as we have to authenticate to solve an issue while somebody is standing next to me waiting for me to fix it.
3) How many times have you given a presentation where your screen view (but not your keyboard input) goes worldwide (eg. teleconference) or over a set of wires that you know haven't been tampered with (conference room) - again, logging in to your webmail or so to find a copy of your presentation.
4) How difficult is it to create a script that takes screenshots - how difficult is it to create a script that captures keyboard entry as well. Answer: the first can be done in userspace (and in the hands of an experienced script kiddie would be unnoticed), the latter usually has to go as a request to a driver, kernel or other layer that requires admin rights. This is true for Windows, Mac and (depending on your GUI) Linux
Apparently they have noticed their pricing was too ridiculous compared to other systems. Vista was the pinnacle of it, a crappy system that was sold for what... $499 retail?
Mac OS X starts off at $129 as well for new releases (and goes down from there) and $199 for a 5 license pack and I believe that Apple has been eating Microsoft for lunch on the home desktop market and is making inroads on the business as well.
The issue is that most people can't even troubleshoot to that point - they don't know who to blame if something happens. We geeks know where to put the blame and usually we can guess the problem on the other end as well and usually it doesn't matter what type of device we're talking to - we abstract it away. Most people don't know that an iPhone is a computer just as much as their DVR or their laptop so when 'the magic disappears' they are lost and have to get a 'sorcerer' to make it come back.
When you spend several billions (thousands of millions) on delaying bankruptcy of a few companies, 400k doesn't seem that much, heck it isn't even a very large study. We got a 2 million grant 5 years ago just to get a run-of-the-mill fMRI machine, we got a million this year to upgrade it and we're getting another 2m this year (hopefully) to get another MRI machine that only fits rodents.
NIH spends our tax money on interesting things at least (sciency-stuff) not on some whack-job military stuff like already disproven exo-skeletons or already commercially possible robot cars (DARPA)
Mac OS X does have 10% market share - because it runs on all Apple products regardless of purpose (embedded, desktop) Linux does have 50% market share - in embedded products because it's the most stable and has the best performance for those purposes and it's cheap for integrators Apache does have 90% market share - on web servers because again, it's the most compatible and best known solution out there and since most Apache run Linux you could say Linux has about the same market share. Cisco runs 60% of the Internet - because Cisco products simply have the best routers a million dollars will buy HD-DVD is in more households than Blu-Ray - because they are being resold as upconverting DVD players for $99 - half the people probably don't even know they can play HD-DVD movies (as if you can get any)
I have worked for small companies with a tight-fisted CEO as you describe (as most dotcom's were) who didn't have to answer to nobody and the results were disastrous. You get somebody with a business degree filtering all decisions through him resulting in horrendous long meetings where you have to educate a CEO about your technical systems and issues and all-in-all the customer gets to be put on the back burner and the company fails. Look at Cuba under Fidel for a dictator that rules like that.
The more moderate CEO has to report to the board or to somebody else (shareholders), usually has CxO's that cooperate but do not report directly to him. It's more of a democracy by the oligarchy (like Iran). Ahmed is just a sock puppet of the religious oligarchy and is there for PR purposes. The other one however threatens the current ruling class since the other one wants to be more liberal and have less to do with the higher ups (kinda like a CEO wanting to buy out the company) - that's why he 'lost'.
Eventually Iran is going to get sick of it (either now or next election) and their religious class will have to step down (probably at the hands of a bloody revolution) - I would say all of the countries where currently religious entities (including leaders and followers) have most of the (elective) power will eventually get 'liberated' by the incoming younger generation and there are going to be some big changes. Similar to the US - the younger generation keeps getting disenfranchised by the religious 'old & faithful' voting for the same party (The Republicrat party) - eventually (I would say within the next 3-5 elections) there will be a shift to something else.
I'm starting to believe this lady was paid off by the RIAA to set an example by letting it go through the justice system with a bad defense and keep pushing their luck for the amounts awarded and setting precedents. In the back room she just gets paid everything back in double.
Really, how difficult is it to punch through the RIAA's statements? The average helpdesk technician would punch holes in their statements if called as an 'expert witness'. I'm really starting to doubt the value of lawyers in these type of cases. The Chewbacca defense might even stand.
The goals of Universal Service are: To promote the availability of quality services at just, reasonable, and affordable rates, To increase access to advanced telecommunications services throughout the Nation, To advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas.
None of those phones are very popular. The Blackberries are either too expensive or only for business people (who don't mind paying a lot) and are too large for most people. The Motorola's are a pain in the butt so nobody uses them, the Samsungs, Sanyo's and LG's have been reflashed with provider-specific firmware which cripples usage of the phone and makes tethering all but impossible since the Bluetooth connection is very, very slow (My Samsung did 10s for 1MB).
The Palm Pre and the iPhone is (going to be) very popular, have fast Bluetooth and raw processing power and have the ability for user-level programs and firmware which the provider doesn't control. The iPhone can already get up to 100kbps on the average over EDGE and has promised to deliver us HDSPA (Mbit range) something the providers in the US simply aren't and really don't want to get prepared for.
It goes something like this: Police officer - sheriff - state trooper and then it gets split up to the US Marshalls, FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, ATF, DEA, RIAA, MPAA, Interpol, BCBP, USCIS all whom apparently can arrest you for various reasons.
Special phones as in the average consumer has to buy an expensive plan to get any type of data on an unlocked phone. The only 'cheap' data plans are on locked phones (Blackberries) with the idea that you only use the browser and e-mail very limited (because most phones are very limited in power). Even my Nokia N800's browser is freakin' slow and annoying on larger pages. I limit my data use to absolutely necessary. And there might be some options for geeks in some locations but if you need country/worldwide coverage as a professional you're kinda stuck with AT&T (because they support GSM) or if you're only in the US you got Verizon too.
I think AT&T simply doesn't have the capacity. The iPhone is the best selling smartphone in the US and is selling like hot cakes simply because we don't have anything like it in the market (except maybe the Android, but it's still far behind as far as functionality and only on T-Mobile which doesn't have decent coverage in many areas in the countries). This has already put a large strain on AT&T and MMS support and tethering is going to add to that. Being able to tether your phone used to cost you practically another plan and special phones (although my Nokia can technically do it, it doesn't have the software capabilities). But the iPhone is not controlled by AT&T so AT&T can't control who's tethering since it's going to look like you're just using your iPhone. If they block it, users will just download another providers' firmware or unlock it.
I believe that AT&T thought in the beginning: whatever, another smartphone for that niche group of Mac fans, no big deal but it has really changed the market and AT&T wasn't prepared. Since the iPhone everybody wants to surf the internet, their e-mails, cheap music downloads, now movie, in-app game and e-book downloads as well and they never had the capacity to begin with and many other vendors have followed with their own take on iPhone-knockoffs. We're supposed to have 3G on AT&T but in many areas this means less than 100 kbit/s which is only slightly faster than dial up simply because they only wired in about 1 Mbps (carrying compressed voice and GSM control) on your average pole . Now we want 7 Mbps HDSPA - you expect them to wire in something akin to Ethernet?
What they have to advertise is not 'we have iPlayer' but 'we don't have restrictions'. If you start advertising 'we have iPlayer', what will be next; 'we have Google', 'we have Wikipedia? After a while you just start getting a channel lineup much like current cable/satellite which the ISP's would love; you just cache the daily version of your channels or propose to have certain media hosted in your own data centers and they won't have to pay for the upkeep of pipes that create the Internet anymore.
For most consumers this won't make a lot of difference, they will pay the same, they will be persuaded to believe that this is actually a 'good thing' -- filtered for the children and (initially) cheaper -- and you'll end up with a bunch of local networks connected to a BBS where the ISP has a monopoly over content.
Slashdot Mirror
That was back in the day when
1) the cheap IBM-compatible computer started becoming mainstream and Windows 95 was OEM installed on just about any hardware (loose hard drives came preinstalled with Windows 95, it even came free with video cards) and the alternative was MS-DOS with Windows 3.0
2) Apple was going down the drain and MacOS was just as unstable
3) Linux was in the early kernel stages - way before KDE or Gnome
4) Unix was too expensive and deemed too difficult. DR-DOS/Novell DOS (the only DOS versions with decent memory management) were literally being sabotaged by Microsoft so it couldn't install Windows 3 (which was fairly stable and fast)
5) IBM-compatible computer hardware wasn't stable enough to run any server type system - heck anything really mission critical was still implemented by electronics engineers instead of software engineers.
6) OS/2 was a good OS but price and Microsoft killed it.
Things have changed since then. Linux has matured to a full desktop, server and embedded system alternative, Mac OS has gotten Unix/BSD underpinnings and is now rock-solid, Windows 2000 came by and was fairly stable. OS/2 has died, BeOS has come and gone. After nearly 15 years, people have come to expect a certain stability from their OS. If it keeps crashing or is too slow or doesn't do what it's supposed to do, people won't accept it. There are plenty of alternatives right now that are stable and cheaper, why bother waiting on Microsoft to release something acceptable?
SFTP should do since the communications are encrypted, if something changes along the way it should be rejected by the other end. HTTPS and any other protocol-over-SSL should do.
FTP is a plain-text protocol so if something changes along the way it won't give you any issues.
Why would I or Amazon have to pay taxes twice or more for something? First Amazon would need to pay taxes at whatever locale they're at, then I would need to pay taxes on the same product in my home state, then also every state it goes through as it is getting shipped from Florida to Rhode Island?
There is a reason intra-state purchases are not taxed. Read the constitution or so, you know the part where it says: The Congress shall have power . . . To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes
They are immune from RICO because they are not the recording companies themselves. The RIAA is similar to any consortium body like the ISO consortium or the Bluetooth consortium. It's just that their industry standard is to regulate prices and annoy/persecute their customers.
It's already being done the way you descibe. Read any of these cases:
Lava Records v. Amurao
Capitol v. Thomas
UMG v. Lindor
Atlantic Recording v. Brennan
The RIAA is just a consortium where those big labels have deposited and combined their moneys in order to eradicate this internet thingy once and for all. The RIAA just hires a bunch of lawyers to do it and shares the information among the parties. From a laymen's perspective: it's kinda like several mob bosses outsourcing their harassing/collecting to the same company. From a legal/business perspective: It's the colluding of several large businesses in order to secure their respective monopolies and keep other smaller players away from the market. The RIAA also does other things besides lawyering like fixing prices between those large businesses - legally those businesses can't collude to fix the prices on their products (they offer products to both the artists and the artists' customers). They just all happen to have the same 'market research' agency that advices them a certain price point and specific contract outlines.
The RIAA needs to be disbanded and all of the assets returned to their owners (after the victims have been repaid) and then let each of them fight their own fights - let the recording agencies fight between each other for artists and let the market decide who to give the most business.
Next time I'm under the covers with my wife and she asks where that smells come from, I can now say: a wind event.
is by biting them where it hurts: their pockets. You can add all the sales tax on out-of-state purchases you want (whether that is federally allowed -- I'm not sure), if you don't sell anything, you don't have anything to tax so revenue will remain 0.
They probably saw what happened in NY and they don't want it to happen everywhere. Amazon decided to add tax to NY purchases and me and a lot of other people stopped purchasing from them because other stores (like NewEgg, TigerDirect and Geeks) were undercutting them by about 8%. Even though my organization is tax exempt I don't purchase at Amazon simply because they don't have the provision for me to state that I am tax exempt.
Just very slowly. In the pictures it looks like features are developing but it's on a very, very slow pace. Maybe she might live to be 400 or 800 if her bone structure will remain supportive over time and her cells don't stop dividing like they do with 'normal' aging. I think the parents might already have tried it but she could probably learn to speak or at least communicate over the years - the brain of a toddler is very open to it (unless her brain plasticity has been aging).
The mainframe of old - the single room-size unit with hundreds of CPU's, drives and memory is indeed dead. These days a 'mainframe' is nothing more but a clustered Linux environment that runs virtualized instances of an Operating System. Some mainframes still resemble the old mainframes (eg. the zSeries) but they take up about the size of a rack.
I need to write something and I technically know how to do it, just don't feel like it since it's going to be boring and tedious. What I have found out works well: learn a new language and while you're doing that make the program in that new language and tell yourself you are practicing the new language through the program.
I'm learning ObjC and after about a week it's going pretty well, I read the book while in the company gym and then I go back do some other stuff and then do the books' exercise. I would be comfortable enough to start off with a small number of classes for the core functionality already.
I don't know how they will play it out but as far as I know, not giving informed consent for images would be a civil case brought on by the parents or if the children are now old enough and the statutes haven't expired they could do it. It wouldn't be a criminal case like the RIAA makes their cases look.
I don't get it? You want a netbook that has the features of a $999 laptop but would cost $400? There is a reason there is a $500 discrepancy. There are netbook-size devices that are light, fairly fast and have decent batteries but they're in the upper 1000 range and they're usually called Tablet PC's
1) If I look outside my office window, I can see about 48 office windows (without standing up) and all of them have the lights on and it's dusk outside. Give me a dSLR and a decent set of long distance lenses and I'll prove you wrong.
2) How many times have you typed in your password while somebody was looking at your screen eg. to show somebody something on a protected website. This happens a lot to tech people as we have to authenticate to solve an issue while somebody is standing next to me waiting for me to fix it.
3) How many times have you given a presentation where your screen view (but not your keyboard input) goes worldwide (eg. teleconference) or over a set of wires that you know haven't been tampered with (conference room) - again, logging in to your webmail or so to find a copy of your presentation.
4) How difficult is it to create a script that takes screenshots - how difficult is it to create a script that captures keyboard entry as well. Answer: the first can be done in userspace (and in the hands of an experienced script kiddie would be unnoticed), the latter usually has to go as a request to a driver, kernel or other layer that requires admin rights. This is true for Windows, Mac and (depending on your GUI) Linux
Apparently they have noticed their pricing was too ridiculous compared to other systems. Vista was the pinnacle of it, a crappy system that was sold for what... $499 retail?
Mac OS X starts off at $129 as well for new releases (and goes down from there) and $199 for a 5 license pack and I believe that Apple has been eating Microsoft for lunch on the home desktop market and is making inroads on the business as well.
The issue is that most people can't even troubleshoot to that point - they don't know who to blame if something happens. We geeks know where to put the blame and usually we can guess the problem on the other end as well and usually it doesn't matter what type of device we're talking to - we abstract it away. Most people don't know that an iPhone is a computer just as much as their DVR or their laptop so when 'the magic disappears' they are lost and have to get a 'sorcerer' to make it come back.
When you spend several billions (thousands of millions) on delaying bankruptcy of a few companies, 400k doesn't seem that much, heck it isn't even a very large study. We got a 2 million grant 5 years ago just to get a run-of-the-mill fMRI machine, we got a million this year to upgrade it and we're getting another 2m this year (hopefully) to get another MRI machine that only fits rodents.
NIH spends our tax money on interesting things at least (sciency-stuff) not on some whack-job military stuff like already disproven exo-skeletons or already commercially possible robot cars (DARPA)
It's STATISTICS.
Mac OS X does have 10% market share - because it runs on all Apple products regardless of purpose (embedded, desktop)
Linux does have 50% market share - in embedded products because it's the most stable and has the best performance for those purposes and it's cheap for integrators
Apache does have 90% market share - on web servers because again, it's the most compatible and best known solution out there and since most Apache run Linux you could say Linux has about the same market share.
Cisco runs 60% of the Internet - because Cisco products simply have the best routers a million dollars will buy
HD-DVD is in more households than Blu-Ray - because they are being resold as upconverting DVD players for $99 - half the people probably don't even know they can play HD-DVD movies (as if you can get any)
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have worked for small companies with a tight-fisted CEO as you describe (as most dotcom's were) who didn't have to answer to nobody and the results were disastrous. You get somebody with a business degree filtering all decisions through him resulting in horrendous long meetings where you have to educate a CEO about your technical systems and issues and all-in-all the customer gets to be put on the back burner and the company fails. Look at Cuba under Fidel for a dictator that rules like that.
The more moderate CEO has to report to the board or to somebody else (shareholders), usually has CxO's that cooperate but do not report directly to him. It's more of a democracy by the oligarchy (like Iran). Ahmed is just a sock puppet of the religious oligarchy and is there for PR purposes. The other one however threatens the current ruling class since the other one wants to be more liberal and have less to do with the higher ups (kinda like a CEO wanting to buy out the company) - that's why he 'lost'.
Eventually Iran is going to get sick of it (either now or next election) and their religious class will have to step down (probably at the hands of a bloody revolution) - I would say all of the countries where currently religious entities (including leaders and followers) have most of the (elective) power will eventually get 'liberated' by the incoming younger generation and there are going to be some big changes. Similar to the US - the younger generation keeps getting disenfranchised by the religious 'old & faithful' voting for the same party (The Republicrat party) - eventually (I would say within the next 3-5 elections) there will be a shift to something else.
I'm starting to believe this lady was paid off by the RIAA to set an example by letting it go through the justice system with a bad defense and keep pushing their luck for the amounts awarded and setting precedents. In the back room she just gets paid everything back in double.
Really, how difficult is it to punch through the RIAA's statements? The average helpdesk technician would punch holes in their statements if called as an 'expert witness'. I'm really starting to doubt the value of lawyers in these type of cases. The Chewbacca defense might even stand.
Oh yeah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund
The goals of Universal Service are:
To promote the availability of quality services at just, reasonable, and affordable rates,
To increase access to advanced telecommunications services throughout the Nation,
To advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas.
We saw where that went.
None of those phones are very popular. The Blackberries are either too expensive or only for business people (who don't mind paying a lot) and are too large for most people. The Motorola's are a pain in the butt so nobody uses them, the Samsungs, Sanyo's and LG's have been reflashed with provider-specific firmware which cripples usage of the phone and makes tethering all but impossible since the Bluetooth connection is very, very slow (My Samsung did 10s for 1MB).
The Palm Pre and the iPhone is (going to be) very popular, have fast Bluetooth and raw processing power and have the ability for user-level programs and firmware which the provider doesn't control. The iPhone can already get up to 100kbps on the average over EDGE and has promised to deliver us HDSPA (Mbit range) something the providers in the US simply aren't and really don't want to get prepared for.
It goes something like this: Police officer - sheriff - state trooper and then it gets split up to the US Marshalls, FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, ATF, DEA, RIAA, MPAA, Interpol, BCBP, USCIS all whom apparently can arrest you for various reasons.
Special phones as in the average consumer has to buy an expensive plan to get any type of data on an unlocked phone. The only 'cheap' data plans are on locked phones (Blackberries) with the idea that you only use the browser and e-mail very limited (because most phones are very limited in power). Even my Nokia N800's browser is freakin' slow and annoying on larger pages. I limit my data use to absolutely necessary. And there might be some options for geeks in some locations but if you need country/worldwide coverage as a professional you're kinda stuck with AT&T (because they support GSM) or if you're only in the US you got Verizon too.
I think AT&T simply doesn't have the capacity. The iPhone is the best selling smartphone in the US and is selling like hot cakes simply because we don't have anything like it in the market (except maybe the Android, but it's still far behind as far as functionality and only on T-Mobile which doesn't have decent coverage in many areas in the countries). This has already put a large strain on AT&T and MMS support and tethering is going to add to that. Being able to tether your phone used to cost you practically another plan and special phones (although my Nokia can technically do it, it doesn't have the software capabilities). But the iPhone is not controlled by AT&T so AT&T can't control who's tethering since it's going to look like you're just using your iPhone. If they block it, users will just download another providers' firmware or unlock it.
I believe that AT&T thought in the beginning: whatever, another smartphone for that niche group of Mac fans, no big deal but it has really changed the market and AT&T wasn't prepared. Since the iPhone everybody wants to surf the internet, their e-mails, cheap music downloads, now movie, in-app game and e-book downloads as well and they never had the capacity to begin with and many other vendors have followed with their own take on iPhone-knockoffs. We're supposed to have 3G on AT&T but in many areas this means less than 100 kbit/s which is only slightly faster than dial up simply because they only wired in about 1 Mbps (carrying compressed voice and GSM control) on your average pole . Now we want 7 Mbps HDSPA - you expect them to wire in something akin to Ethernet?
What they have to advertise is not 'we have iPlayer' but 'we don't have restrictions'. If you start advertising 'we have iPlayer', what will be next; 'we have Google', 'we have Wikipedia? After a while you just start getting a channel lineup much like current cable/satellite which the ISP's would love; you just cache the daily version of your channels or propose to have certain media hosted in your own data centers and they won't have to pay for the upkeep of pipes that create the Internet anymore.
For most consumers this won't make a lot of difference, they will pay the same, they will be persuaded to believe that this is actually a 'good thing' -- filtered for the children and (initially) cheaper -- and you'll end up with a bunch of local networks connected to a BBS where the ISP has a monopoly over content.