I think you are over-generalizing. Yes, for those of us who were very bright and went to top schools and learned and loved CS and thought that the software/internet industries were the shit when we were in college in the late 90s, watching people earn millions and just chomping at the bit to get out of college and join them, the real world post 2000 was quite a shocker. The thing is I still love programming, and I don't mean to be immodest, but I'm one of the best problem solvers, domain mappers and programmers I've ever seen or met. Nonetheless, I don't do it professionally - I discovered within 6 months of graduation that writing boring code for unappreciative companies sucks.
The point is that you and I may have left those jobs for that reason, but I don't think we (or most active Slashdotters) are representative of the average programmers out there, based on my experiences in the software industry. I mean, when I graduated from college in 2000 I was shocked to discover just how mediocre many programmers are in the "real world" - these aren't the same people that post on developers.slashdot.org about multithreaded design techniques or OS scheduling algorithms. These people were genuinely overpaid mediocre thinkers and shitty programmers. And they everywhere a few years back. Not saying you'll do so much better in India, and my personal experiences are that outsourcing anything other than truly rote programming projects just produces really sucky results.
Incidentally, if you're interested in the much-talked-about DJ Danger Mouse "Grey Album" (the "illegal" mix album created using material from the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album), it's available on the Illegal Art site as well here.
Yeah, just pack it up and throw it in the freezer (which has no power either).... uhh... that really sounds like a massively inadequate response to me for a facility with the kinds of devastating failure modes possible for such a place. I mean, air pressure differentials, freezers, all that crap depends on being on multiple semi-separated power grids and having serious backup power systems in place capable of supplying at least 5-6 days worth of emergency power if not more without any human intervention. Hell, it shouldn't even rely on a human to flip the system over to backup power, that should be a manual failsafe required only in the event that the automated switchover fails.
If your average server colo facility (the major places I've been at do this at least, like the old Exodus data center in Waltham) can auto-failover to backup power in under a second, and can test their backup power systems on a monthly basis, why on God's green earth can't a place like this do AT LEAST the same?
A more useful question is why on earth is striking allowed at this kind of facility? I mean, I appreciate the right to collective bargaining and unionization, but that right has certain bounds in facilities of national security importance like this.
I think the public's right to safety from level 4 biohazard's trumps the right of facilities engineers at this place to strike, any day. Whoever let such a situation occur in the first place should be held personally responsible for any injuries or deaths caused by inadequate, incompetent maintenance at this place.
And that article's rejection of ethanol is based on a complete misconception, which I just explained in my post. It is discussing the net energy loss involved in corn ethanol production. If you want to read more about the net energy production from cellulosic biomass-derived ethanol, there are LOTS of studies available for download from the DOE site I already referred to (see my post here on this topic).
I agree with the author of that article's sentiment, that there is the potential for serious crisis when the supply of easily extracted oil reserves diminishes and costs start to rise seriously, but I also disagree strongly with his takes on the value of the possible solutions available. I am fairly certain that the importance of coal as an energy source will increase, and ethanol-from-biomass is the best available transportation fuel alternative we have. Also, little infrastructure change is required to distribute and use it - existing engines can be easily retrofitted to burn E85 fuel (and plenty of FFV vehicles that can burn gas or ethanol/E85 are already on the roads and could be made in much greater numbers if demand were there).
The oil gap can be filled with existing technologies. I think it may take a serious economic crisis to get us to face the issue and deal with it though.
No, slippery slope arguments are logical fallacies. This is an observation about numerics and marketing. If both Intel and AMD have decoupled their processor speed ratings from MHz ratings, there is essentially nothing to stop inflation of numbers by both parties when it suits their marketing needs.
Unlike a "slippery slope" argument, I am not starting from the proposal of a small but reasonable compromise or exception to the rules and then concluding that all the rules might be thrown out next. I am starting with the proposal that "the rules" (in the context of our discussion) are being thrown out and simply observing the likely outcome when the motivations of the involved parties are taken into account.
It's pretty simple - they've realized that our society today is more individualistic, less communitarian, than it was 40 or 50 years ago, and that to successfully recruit young people, they should emphasize the "personal betterment" aspect of the Army, and focus on specific individuals and their accomplishments to overcome exactly the rep that you are discussing.
You do realize of course that the Army just hires high priced marketing agencies to come up with campaigns that will be successful in increasing recruiting numbers and that these slogans don't have anything to do with training, doctrine or actual practices in the military, right? It's not like the training process has changed just because they have tried to make more fuzzy advertising that will appeal to today's 16-17 year old kids.
No, they didn't. My good friend works in the Pentagon in the Force Development group for the Army, and they certainly don't have an overrecruitment problem. Apparently, the hot joke around the office these days is "An Army of One: that's how many soldiers we have left for future deployments".
The Army is experiencing a serious manpower crunch. Probably because military careers don't have as much prestige as they once did and pay so damn poorly. And deals like the Army Reserve don't seem so hot any more now that they are pretty much brought into every active conflict in large numbers to bolster the ranks of the regular forces.
Payback? No, acknowledgement that the numeric marketing angle works and that they are getting beat out on price/performance by AMD.
My fear is that this could start an inflationary "speed rating" arms race where the baseline keeps getting changed to pump numbers higher and higher. The AMD system was all good and well when it was more-or-less anchored to Intel processor MHz ratings for comparable performing processors, but what happens when Intel releases the P-IV 4800 "It's twice as fast as the old 2.4 GHz model!". Then AMD comes out with the Athlon XP 6000+, then we have the P-IV 7500 "this is really much faster than AMD's new processor, we swear" model. And so on ad nauseum.
EULAs do deny responsibility for pretty much anything. But a court could still throw that disclaimer away in egregious cases, and there's a profitable company to suck money from in a civil case. That's missing in most Open Source projects.
But what really bothers me is that people seem to want somebody to hold liable and yet don't want to pay. There is no "contract" of purchase under which somebody should be held liable with Open Source. If you want somebody to hold liable, you need to pay. If you paid for Red Hat Linux, you should be able to hold Red Hat liable for problems with their OS (at least to the same extent you hold MS liable for their problems).
This is really an enterprise server issue, if anything. I've never really heard of a desktop software company successfully being sued for damaging somebody's data, hardware, etc. despite lots of barely working products on the market. Big companies want somebody to point a finger at. I think that's completely fine, but they need to pay an IBM, Red Hat, or somebody else to assume that liability, since without a big chunk of cash in the bank, such guarantees mean nothing. Expecting anybody to assume liability for free and in absence of the formation of a contract by purchase is absurd. Once you've executed a standard purchase, there is a whole bunch of torte and product liability law to back you up, and you should feel just as comfortable if not more so with Open Source as you would with closed source software.
This issue has been extensively analyzed by years of DOE and NREL projects on bioethanol and other biofuels. Since bioethanol is produced from cellulosic feedstock, much of which can be cultivated in lands that aren't really arable for grains and other food crops, there isn't necessarily much competition. Additionally, there are lots of substantial sources of waste cellulose available that can be built into the production pipeline at a scaled up bioethanol plant. Like I said, don't listen to me, listen to the Department of Energy.
I don't deny that it's possible for crop prices to fluctuate, but generally I'd say that food prices are more stable in first world countries than gas prices. And the kinds of crops you are thinking of are mostly premium fruits and vegetables which are substantially more weather sensitive that what we are talking about here. Weeds, grasses and other low production cost cellulose sources can grow pretty much anywhere, barring serious dryness or "dustbowl" phenomena.
Sorry, that's not bioethanol. You are talking about traditional corn ethanol, which is produced from a high production cost feedstock, corn. Bioethanol usually refers to ethanol produced from cellulosic feedstocks (and that's the sense I meant it in), which is broken down to glucose by preprocessing (acid hydrolysis, enzymatic hydrolysis or one of several other methods) prior to fermentation. The major difference is that cellulose is relatively cheap and plentiful, available from many sources, including sources that are normally considered waste from other industrial processes. I've posted a lot more detail on this before, but I encourage you to read more at the DOE OTT site.
Baystar did a PIPE deal with SCO. See here for an explanation of PIPEs. This is when a private equity firm infuses capital to a publicly traded company by acquiring newly issued securities directly from the company at a discount to the current market price - not buying them on the open market. So the Baystar deal DID infuse money directly to SCO, though you're correct that the market price and open market transactions don't directly affect day to day operations of the company and don't directly feed cash into the company's coffers.
Of course, a good market price makes it much easier to raise more money in a follow-on public offering, PIPE or other kinds of transactions.
I sometimes feel like a broken record on Slashdot, since I have a history of discussing this issue here and elsewhere. But in my opinion, the end of cheap oil is not necessarily a bad thing. You see, there are economic substitutes for oil. They are not as cheap as oil currently is, it's true. However, they are not orders of magnitude more expensive.
If the extraction price of oil came up by a factor of 5, we'd finally have a situation where renewable fuels like bioethanol would become more economically feasible to produce and use than fossil fuel oils. Would the price of operating your car go up? A bit, perhaps 20-30% on average, maybe more. But in fact, a bioethanol-based fuel economy would likely have more stable long term fuel prices than the crazy market we have now, and I'm pretty sure that would be better for the economy then the insanity that's gone on over the last 5 years with fuel prices up and down by more than a factor of 2.
Beyond basic automotive uses, there are still a lot of other uses for oil in the form of petroleum-derived products like plastics. I don't know the actual breakdown of uses, but I suspect that most of these products could be adapted to production from other forms of hydrocarbons as oil becomes more expensive. Or perhaps there would continue to be a sufficient supply of oil to make these products if the automotive uses were eliminated.
In short, I don't think the world economy would crash overnight since I don't think the supply will run dry overnight - prices will start rising, and people will adapt to the technologies that have already been developed. Some serious legislative intervention may be required to speed things up when that does happen. But a lot of us would be happy indeed to see an end to the privileged role the oil-producing countries play on the world political scene.
Right, and you'll surely sell a whole lot of them. Unfortunately, my experience with consumer products is that it takes a combination of word-of-mouth endorsement and advertising to get a product in front of people. And some products, by their nature, are more likely to benefit from pure word-of-mouth. Nonetheless, the fact is that people don't buy stuff they don't know about and that will continue to drive the market for new and creative ways to advertise products.
That being said, I think these kinds of terribly intrusive public ads are so clearly not a public good that they should be banned outright. It pretty much goes without saying that putting an ad in space is like turning the Grand Canyon into a massive ad, only about a million times worse. Communities should be able to set standards about things like public billboards. In the same way that a community doesn't want their public parks and nature reserves crapped up with ads, none of us want space crapped up with ads.
No, your vote does NOT carry more weight in a state like Massachusetts that has a clear supermajority of one party. That was my entire point in my original post. In a state where there is a near-equality of two parties, your vote is statistically far more relevant. This means that a person voting in Florida gets a lot more voting power than I do in Massachusetts - the only way I can have much of a voice in the relevant issues is to give money to my candidate of choice (I have given 100 dollars to Kerry already - more will be forthcoming).
That was what I was complaining about, and that is why the electoral college ought to be thoroughly abolished. And yes, I agree with you, the only thing more b0rked than the electoral college system is the primary election system (which isn't even much of a system at all - it's just pure insanity if you ask me).
I don't remember NaBob specifically but I remember a nearly identical program that made the rounds sometime around 1992-3. It reduced every set of files to a few dozens of bytes - I believe it was doing what another poster said, storing the file's cluster/sector location on the drive for magical restoration even if you deleted the originals. Of course if you copied the archive over to another computer it would always give some obscure error message. It was pretty obvious as soon as you saw the file sizes that it was just playing games of some sort and not really compressing anything.
I also seem to recall that this was used as a vector for transmission of a virus/trojan of some sort.:)
Huh? This is not the ACLUs fault. The ACLU didn't put Diebold forward as a company to provide a well-run, secure electronic voting system - I'm pretty certain given the well-documented ties between Diebold management and the GOP that blaming the ACLU for their selection is pretty ludicrous. Hell, I doubt the ACLU even proposed electronic voting.
The ACLU is supposed to be looking out for our voting rights. They didn't CAUSE the problems in Florida, or elsewhere, they just pointed them out. Hell, I've been downright disgusted with how poorly run our polls are here in Massachusetts - imagine my surprise when I voted for the first time at the age of 20 only to discover that you walk up to a table manned by two half-blind 70 year olds who have all the names of residents in the district here taped out onto the table, sorted by address. And they ask you "What's your address?" whereupon they find it listed and then ask you "what's your name?" and then they check you off on the list.
You could literally come in at the end of the day and claim to be fucking anybody. No ID required, no nothing. I mean, I know my vote for president (and in the democratic primaries this year) doesn't count for shit thanks to the electoral college system, but couldn't we at least pretend that it does?
I doubt there is a mass exodus going on. Rather, I think the problem is more likely to be in their new business, which they are relying on to fill up their new data center - which they surely laid out a ton of capital for.
Don't get me wrong, plenty of people will still buy, but in the long term the negative publicity will definitely slow what has been fairly massive growth. But this probably couldn't come at a worse time for them.
No, it's most likely true. I know companies engage in astroturfing regularly - I've seen it happen before. I don't specifically know that SCO does, but it's not unreasonable to assume the high profile nature of their legal cases and PR campaign that they would. As for Microsoft, they have engaged in astroturfing many times - probably not organized at a company-wide level, perhaps sponsored by certain executives who think they are doing their job. In any massive company like Microsoft you get the whole range of talent, skill and ethics in your managers.
Also, note how you lose credibility by posting your denial as AC in a thread about AC astroturfing? Next time, log in.
That's a mighty narrowminded take. You do realize that every dollar they paid to SCO is a dollar that will be used to sue other companies, including perhaps other companies you also do business with in different areas. Lawsuits can drive prices up - it's a reality of our economy and legal system. That's not an excuse for this kind of unethical business decision, however. Furthermore, as an EV1Servers customer, you should realize that the company is actually in a substantially WORSE position now, losing a lot of potential new business (and some existing business, though that's likely to be less pronounced), right as they open up a large new data center.
You should want to do business with a hosting company that sticks with sustainable business practices and keeps their customers happy. And EV1Servers has failed to do that here.
Riiight, because a software industry that looks like the automobile industry sounds really appealing. Don't get me wrong, I think the idea of holding commercial software developers responsible for the software they develop to a certain extent is interesting, and has some potential merits. That is, if a piece of software causes substantial physical or financial harm to a company or end user, and the cause is provably not user fault, failure to read directions, etc., then some kind of liability is reasonable. However, most software products are thousands of times more complex in terms of user interaction than home appliances, electronics, cars, and so on, and the potential for user error is thus far greater.
If you want somebody to be liable for a piece of Open Source software, though, you should absolutely have to pay them. You can't impose liability on the copyright holder of a piece of software without the formation of a business contract - in exchange for fair consideration, you are guaranteeing and supporting this product. If I just downloaded the source tarball and built it myself, there was no formation of a contract whatsoever (if I want to redistribute source code, binaries or derived works, then I usually have to agree to a copyright license, but that's still not precisely the same thing as a contract).
Of course there would still be still problems for companies like Red Hat that aggregate and sell lots of Open Source software - if they had to assume liability for every piece of software shipped with a system, you'd expect to see MUCH more bare-bones distributions being shipped. On the whole, I think the value of cheap software to the market is probably higher than this kind of liability law. If I were running a business that depended on a piece mission-critical software, I'd want contractual guarantees of quality from the developer, but the idea of suing Microsoft every time Word loses a document you were working on is pretty ridiculous.
I pay for premium razor blades too (Mach 3 Turbo) because I've found they last longer and do a much better job at shaving without slicing and dicing my face. But what I put on my face is a different ball game from what I use to print - toner is a commodity product, and assuming it doesn't gum up or otherwise not meet the basic physical standards of toner, I really don't care who made my toner cartridge.
Also, with respect to budget brands, your description is a massive oversimplification. In fact, budget brands are a technique of market segmentation. Usually the margins are better with the top part of the market but the volume is bigger in the bottom - sometimes, the budget brands are nearly identical, just a different label slapped on them (look for example at FridGEMore washer/dryer units, sold under several brands at rather different price points). The point is that budget-branding is a marketing driven process, and often there is plenty of room in the margins to sell the high end product under a budget brand. Sometimes the product is intentionally "cheapified", not because the manufacturer needs more room to price the product down, but because they don't want to cannibalize the market of their premium branded products.
Three in twenty? Are you nuts? It's a heck of a lot higher than that. I'm away from home for a few weeks, I come back and discover my roommate's girlfriend used my computer - guess what? Spyware. Roommmate complains IE is behaving strangely - what do ya know, spyware. Mom's computer is running slow again a few weeks ago - spyware (strike two, now she has been taught to use AdAware for herself).
In business environments where people's computers are locked down or there are policies against installing software yourself, the rates are much lower. But in the general university/home/small business user community, I'm more surprised when I find that somebody is aware enough to NOT have spyware than when they do.
Sorry, but there is definitely somebody being blatantly dishonest here. There is NO WAY in HELL that some podunk sheriff's office web site gets 3.5 million visitors per month. HITS, maybe (and I believe the article says hits, not visitors). Just maybe. The old macombsheriff.com site isn't showing up on Alexa, but the new macomb-sheriff.com site does, and it's "reach" factor is 0.1. That tells me they get somewhere between 10 and 100 visitors per day, I'd guess, based on similar site stats that I've seen. Even if they used to get 500 visitors a day on their old site (unlikely), that would be 15,000 visitors a month, which could definitely generate 3 million hits with a decent per-visit page view count.
But even if it was a complex, graphically intensive site, the bandwidth bill for such a site would be tiny. I host several similar sized sites on a 10 dollar a month shared hosting account without the slightest problem. In short, the idea of this level of traffic generating a $300,000 bandwidth bill is laughable.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that you and I may have left those jobs for that reason, but I don't think we (or most active Slashdotters) are representative of the average programmers out there, based on my experiences in the software industry. I mean, when I graduated from college in 2000 I was shocked to discover just how mediocre many programmers are in the "real world" - these aren't the same people that post on developers.slashdot.org about multithreaded design techniques or OS scheduling algorithms. These people were genuinely overpaid mediocre thinkers and shitty programmers. And they everywhere a few years back. Not saying you'll do so much better in India, and my personal experiences are that outsourcing anything other than truly rote programming projects just produces really sucky results.
Incidentally, if you're interested in the much-talked-about DJ Danger Mouse "Grey Album" (the "illegal" mix album created using material from the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album), it's available on the Illegal Art site as well here.
If your average server colo facility (the major places I've been at do this at least, like the old Exodus data center in Waltham) can auto-failover to backup power in under a second, and can test their backup power systems on a monthly basis, why on God's green earth can't a place like this do AT LEAST the same?
I think the public's right to safety from level 4 biohazard's trumps the right of facilities engineers at this place to strike, any day. Whoever let such a situation occur in the first place should be held personally responsible for any injuries or deaths caused by inadequate, incompetent maintenance at this place.
I agree with the author of that article's sentiment, that there is the potential for serious crisis when the supply of easily extracted oil reserves diminishes and costs start to rise seriously, but I also disagree strongly with his takes on the value of the possible solutions available. I am fairly certain that the importance of coal as an energy source will increase, and ethanol-from-biomass is the best available transportation fuel alternative we have. Also, little infrastructure change is required to distribute and use it - existing engines can be easily retrofitted to burn E85 fuel (and plenty of FFV vehicles that can burn gas or ethanol/E85 are already on the roads and could be made in much greater numbers if demand were there).
The oil gap can be filled with existing technologies. I think it may take a serious economic crisis to get us to face the issue and deal with it though.
Unlike a "slippery slope" argument, I am not starting from the proposal of a small but reasonable compromise or exception to the rules and then concluding that all the rules might be thrown out next. I am starting with the proposal that "the rules" (in the context of our discussion) are being thrown out and simply observing the likely outcome when the motivations of the involved parties are taken into account.
You do realize of course that the Army just hires high priced marketing agencies to come up with campaigns that will be successful in increasing recruiting numbers and that these slogans don't have anything to do with training, doctrine or actual practices in the military, right? It's not like the training process has changed just because they have tried to make more fuzzy advertising that will appeal to today's 16-17 year old kids.
The Army is experiencing a serious manpower crunch. Probably because military careers don't have as much prestige as they once did and pay so damn poorly. And deals like the Army Reserve don't seem so hot any more now that they are pretty much brought into every active conflict in large numbers to bolster the ranks of the regular forces.
My fear is that this could start an inflationary "speed rating" arms race where the baseline keeps getting changed to pump numbers higher and higher. The AMD system was all good and well when it was more-or-less anchored to Intel processor MHz ratings for comparable performing processors, but what happens when Intel releases the P-IV 4800 "It's twice as fast as the old 2.4 GHz model!". Then AMD comes out with the Athlon XP 6000+, then we have the P-IV 7500 "this is really much faster than AMD's new processor, we swear" model. And so on ad nauseum.
But what really bothers me is that people seem to want somebody to hold liable and yet don't want to pay. There is no "contract" of purchase under which somebody should be held liable with Open Source. If you want somebody to hold liable, you need to pay. If you paid for Red Hat Linux, you should be able to hold Red Hat liable for problems with their OS (at least to the same extent you hold MS liable for their problems).
This is really an enterprise server issue, if anything. I've never really heard of a desktop software company successfully being sued for damaging somebody's data, hardware, etc. despite lots of barely working products on the market. Big companies want somebody to point a finger at. I think that's completely fine, but they need to pay an IBM, Red Hat, or somebody else to assume that liability, since without a big chunk of cash in the bank, such guarantees mean nothing. Expecting anybody to assume liability for free and in absence of the formation of a contract by purchase is absurd. Once you've executed a standard purchase, there is a whole bunch of torte and product liability law to back you up, and you should feel just as comfortable if not more so with Open Source as you would with closed source software.
I don't deny that it's possible for crop prices to fluctuate, but generally I'd say that food prices are more stable in first world countries than gas prices. And the kinds of crops you are thinking of are mostly premium fruits and vegetables which are substantially more weather sensitive that what we are talking about here. Weeds, grasses and other low production cost cellulose sources can grow pretty much anywhere, barring serious dryness or "dustbowl" phenomena.
Sorry, that's not bioethanol. You are talking about traditional corn ethanol, which is produced from a high production cost feedstock, corn. Bioethanol usually refers to ethanol produced from cellulosic feedstocks (and that's the sense I meant it in), which is broken down to glucose by preprocessing (acid hydrolysis, enzymatic hydrolysis or one of several other methods) prior to fermentation. The major difference is that cellulose is relatively cheap and plentiful, available from many sources, including sources that are normally considered waste from other industrial processes. I've posted a lot more detail on this before, but I encourage you to read more at the DOE OTT site.
Of course, a good market price makes it much easier to raise more money in a follow-on public offering, PIPE or other kinds of transactions.
If the extraction price of oil came up by a factor of 5, we'd finally have a situation where renewable fuels like bioethanol would become more economically feasible to produce and use than fossil fuel oils. Would the price of operating your car go up? A bit, perhaps 20-30% on average, maybe more. But in fact, a bioethanol-based fuel economy would likely have more stable long term fuel prices than the crazy market we have now, and I'm pretty sure that would be better for the economy then the insanity that's gone on over the last 5 years with fuel prices up and down by more than a factor of 2.
Beyond basic automotive uses, there are still a lot of other uses for oil in the form of petroleum-derived products like plastics. I don't know the actual breakdown of uses, but I suspect that most of these products could be adapted to production from other forms of hydrocarbons as oil becomes more expensive. Or perhaps there would continue to be a sufficient supply of oil to make these products if the automotive uses were eliminated.
In short, I don't think the world economy would crash overnight since I don't think the supply will run dry overnight - prices will start rising, and people will adapt to the technologies that have already been developed. Some serious legislative intervention may be required to speed things up when that does happen. But a lot of us would be happy indeed to see an end to the privileged role the oil-producing countries play on the world political scene.
That being said, I think these kinds of terribly intrusive public ads are so clearly not a public good that they should be banned outright. It pretty much goes without saying that putting an ad in space is like turning the Grand Canyon into a massive ad, only about a million times worse. Communities should be able to set standards about things like public billboards. In the same way that a community doesn't want their public parks and nature reserves crapped up with ads, none of us want space crapped up with ads.
That was what I was complaining about, and that is why the electoral college ought to be thoroughly abolished. And yes, I agree with you, the only thing more b0rked than the electoral college system is the primary election system (which isn't even much of a system at all - it's just pure insanity if you ask me).
I also seem to recall that this was used as a vector for transmission of a virus/trojan of some sort.
The ACLU is supposed to be looking out for our voting rights. They didn't CAUSE the problems in Florida, or elsewhere, they just pointed them out. Hell, I've been downright disgusted with how poorly run our polls are here in Massachusetts - imagine my surprise when I voted for the first time at the age of 20 only to discover that you walk up to a table manned by two half-blind 70 year olds who have all the names of residents in the district here taped out onto the table, sorted by address. And they ask you "What's your address?" whereupon they find it listed and then ask you "what's your name?" and then they check you off on the list.
You could literally come in at the end of the day and claim to be fucking anybody. No ID required, no nothing. I mean, I know my vote for president (and in the democratic primaries this year) doesn't count for shit thanks to the electoral college system, but couldn't we at least pretend that it does?
Don't get me wrong, plenty of people will still buy, but in the long term the negative publicity will definitely slow what has been fairly massive growth. But this probably couldn't come at a worse time for them.
Also, note how you lose credibility by posting your denial as AC in a thread about AC astroturfing? Next time, log in.
You should want to do business with a hosting company that sticks with sustainable business practices and keeps their customers happy. And EV1Servers has failed to do that here.
If you want somebody to be liable for a piece of Open Source software, though, you should absolutely have to pay them. You can't impose liability on the copyright holder of a piece of software without the formation of a business contract - in exchange for fair consideration, you are guaranteeing and supporting this product. If I just downloaded the source tarball and built it myself, there was no formation of a contract whatsoever (if I want to redistribute source code, binaries or derived works, then I usually have to agree to a copyright license, but that's still not precisely the same thing as a contract).
Of course there would still be still problems for companies like Red Hat that aggregate and sell lots of Open Source software - if they had to assume liability for every piece of software shipped with a system, you'd expect to see MUCH more bare-bones distributions being shipped. On the whole, I think the value of cheap software to the market is probably higher than this kind of liability law. If I were running a business that depended on a piece mission-critical software, I'd want contractual guarantees of quality from the developer, but the idea of suing Microsoft every time Word loses a document you were working on is pretty ridiculous.
Also, with respect to budget brands, your description is a massive oversimplification. In fact, budget brands are a technique of market segmentation. Usually the margins are better with the top part of the market but the volume is bigger in the bottom - sometimes, the budget brands are nearly identical, just a different label slapped on them (look for example at FridGEMore washer/dryer units, sold under several brands at rather different price points). The point is that budget-branding is a marketing driven process, and often there is plenty of room in the margins to sell the high end product under a budget brand. Sometimes the product is intentionally "cheapified", not because the manufacturer needs more room to price the product down, but because they don't want to cannibalize the market of their premium branded products.
In business environments where people's computers are locked down or there are policies against installing software yourself, the rates are much lower. But in the general university/home/small business user community, I'm more surprised when I find that somebody is aware enough to NOT have spyware than when they do.
But even if it was a complex, graphically intensive site, the bandwidth bill for such a site would be tiny. I host several similar sized sites on a 10 dollar a month shared hosting account without the slightest problem. In short, the idea of this level of traffic generating a $300,000 bandwidth bill is laughable.