I think most of the grumbling here is due to intelligent people holding common sense to be universal. IANAL, but I've spent a lot of time in court with my divorce and custody battles. I've had good and bad lawyers. The universal constant in the legal system is that you NEVER know what the judge will do. A judge can do whatever they want, and they don't have to measure their actions by common sense.
That seems to be the disparity here and what many slashdotters have trouble with. People can editorialize on what makes sense, and what seems reasonable in a case, but no one EVER knows what a judge will really end up doing.
My personal experience in this is that I have an iron clad case against my ex for custody. My lawyers repeatedly advised me to reach an agreement rather then take it to a trial. The main reason is that coming to an agreement gives us some control over what happens. A trial completely leaves it up to the judge, and you never know what they'll do.
BTW, the lawyers make A LOT more money by going to trial, so their advice isn't motivated by financial gain.
"Today, Mr. Rector, Paul, and I went out to Radioworld and purchased a transceiver. After much research, we decided to go with the ICOM Ic-V8000. For the cost, it has exactly what we need. On Friday, we're going to be integrating it into our setup, and doing all the necessary testing."
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
OK, so these guys BOUGHT a radio OFF THE SHELF and then made contact through a scheduled program for the ISS to contact schools?
Scheduled contact
The ARISS program is a program to schedule the ISS to make contact with your school via amateur radio. Roughly half a dozen schools are contacted every week in this manner.
This is even more non-news than it seemed before. The fact that this is college students trying to claim this is a major project for graduation is absurd. Sounds like they did too much partying and needed to come up with something quick.
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
It seems that there is a specific burden of efficacy for the DRM implementer. 'Effective' would seem to imply that if no one legitimately entitled to use the work can, circumventing the DRM is perfectly legal, since only a drunken monkey would call this effective.
It's kinda both. Back in the day, there were only a couple companies doing the "free" phone with a 2 year contract. Sprint even used to sell you the phone at full price and you didn't have to be in a contract. The old AT&T wireless did this too for awhile. When the Telco wireless companies combined to form Cingular, that's where the idea of a "free" phone became popular. Of course, they locked you into a 2 year contract and charged high rates and, at the time, provided ridiculously horrible service, but the phone was "FREE!"
I think it was because of the high quarterly profits that Cingular managed to pull off that other companies started going the same direction. There are some, mostly regional, companies that still do the "buy the phone and no contract" thing. Cricket is one of them. Helio has a one year contract I think.
Cricket is completely unlimited for a flat fee. $50 gets you unlimited calls, texts, picture messages, and mobile web. But there's a catch. You can really only use it in a Cricket area. If you're in a big one and don't travel, it's great. For the people that travel a lot, it's not a good idea.
I think it's because of the trend of the big cell phone companies giving away "free" phones with a 15 year contract and ridiculous fees for even thinking about extra features that has caused a lot of the sticker shock. If companies aren't happy about everyone wanting free phones, they have no one to blame but themselves. I remember many years ago when people weren't at all surprised by paying $200 for a basic cell phone. It was the norm that you buy the phone and could cancel the service whenever you wanted. The cell phone companies did it to themselves and to the rest of us. We all got screwed in a model that was solely designed to dupe people into getting stuck with sub-par service for 2 years or more.
Consumer trends in computers seem to cycle similar to cars. There's always the ones that want the big expensive power. (gaming machines and SUVs) But the bult seems to go to different trends every so often. About 6 or 7 years ago the consumer PC market was fixated on CHEAP computers. Everyone wanted a new computer as cheap as they could possibly get it. Intel is partly to blame with the focus on clock speed at the time, but that's another topic for another time. It didn't matter if it had a terrible integrated graphics chip with no AGP slot for expansion and was a nightmare to get a PCI video card working in it, or if it was a Celeron with bare minimum RAM in it. If it was cheap, people bought it.
My opinion on consumer perception at the time is that most people didn't know there was a difference in computers apart from the CPU clock speed. They thought that they were all the same. This was also during the time of growth where most people were finally seeing the need for home computers. So, you have people rushing out to get new computers and they wanted them cheap. Now, you have this huge user base that has bought the cheapest computers and is starting to realize that it DOES make a difference in performance. So, more people are spending a little more for the better computers. I believe the trend will come back around to people wanting computers CHEAP again. It will be a cycle.
This is similar to the trend in cars for fuel economy. Every so often everyone wants fuel efficient cars. After awhile the market shifts toward larger cars. Either luxury, sports, or SUV. Eventually it comes back around to economy.
So, the trend has been toward better performing computers in recent years, but I think it will shift back to the cheapest computer the manufacturers can put out. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is the same person that said there was "too much reading" in Star Wars Galaxies which is why they had to rip the game apart and target the ADD crowd. I would go on another SWG rant, but it's been said. Just a reminder that she's the PR person that helped kill the game.
Re:This guy has staying power!
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You just messed up the title of a Weird Al song about Star Wars.
Well, since I LIVE in Douglas County, Colorado, I think I have a valid opinion.
The Douglas County Sheriff's Department has NOTHING better to do. Seriously. There's a lot of them for a county that's not very big. They also have a reputation for being... shall we say... a little over zealous. (the earlier/. story from NH would fit right in here) This is the type of law enforcement that WOULD take this too far.
Also, there's TONS of open APs in town. Almost the entire county residents are middle class or higher. One time I loaded up Netstumbler and drove half a mile away. I think I saw 30 some APs, 20 some of which were open.
I'm glad that my AP is secured, but I also know the sheriff's department. I'm sure many people I know will end up being harassed over this. Looks like I've got some work to do in getting everyone's APs secure.
This is a good point. The only reason given for this tax is to reduce debt.
It's generally bad for a government to openly say "Here's something that lots of people do, let's tax it!"
While it may be true that this is what they really do, it's never presented that way. New tax proposals are always made with some reason to need it. "Save the children! Think of the children!(TM)" or "war on terror" or whatever other reasons they come up with.
My point is, that they have an excuse to create a new tax to pay for some new thing. This is just a tax to get more money. TFA doesn't even mention spamming. That would be at least SOME kind of excuse for it, at least it would be better than, "Lots of people do this so we'll tax it"
Here's a concept. You and the person using lots of bandwidth both signed up for unlimited bandwidth. The other person is getting his value out of his $XX per month. It's not his fault that you don't use your connection as much.
The whole "not fair" thing is lame. It IS fair, that seems to be what you don't like about it. The ISP offers unlimited bandwidth for $X per month at Y/kbps. You and the other guy both signed up for it. You're not "subsidizing his usage." If you were really subsidizing others usage, then it would be something like everyone is alloted a certain amount of bandwidth per month. Anything over that is spread out among the subscribers. That is not the case. Everyone is paying a flat fee for service.
Someone else using more bandwidth than you should not matter in the least. It doesn't affect you in any way. Your bill does not go up if your neighbor uses more bandwidth this month. Your bandwidth is not reduced if another neighbor uses more next month.
Pay-per-bit pricing only seems "fair" to the people who use their connection very little and aren't getting as much value out of it as the people who use it a lot.
Yeah, yeah... markets can work where markets exist. The vast majority of individuals have 1 (or if they are really lucky 2) choices. If the local telco and cable provider are net biased, then tho only individual choice available is to not have internet access.
Lets stop pretending that home internet access can be influenced by market forces. That would require a market.
This is the big point that so many people don't seem to get. In almost every discussion on/. that has to do with this, there's the uninformed, self-righteous idealists that spout the same gibberish about "the market" sorting it out.
These people don't realize that for many many people in the US, there IS NO market. Most people CAN'T just switch broadband ISPs. The local phone company has a monopoly on the phone wires into the house and one cable company has the monopoly on the coax going into the house. Add to that, many places can only get broadband through one or the other depending on location.
Right now, I have Comcast cable internet. That is my ONLY option for broadband. The limit for DSL is half a block away.
My situation is not that unusual either. Some of the confusion could be coming from people in other countries whose governments don't grant monopolies on infrastructure to a single company. In the US, we have that problem.
While it's true that many things in the world do have defects, that's not really the issue.
That whole article sounds more like "We, in group one, are the cool kids. All the cool kids accept bugs. Why aren't you a cool kid?" It is loaded with the underlying tone of "I'm smarter than you because I accept bugs as normal"
After the condescending beginning, which assumes that every single person in the world has an opinion on software bugs, the loser then goes on to make excuses.
"Bugs are inevitable, so why bother fixing them?"
The idea of fixing bugs is NOT a binary one: Fix all or fix none.
There should be a point where an effort is made to fix as many bugs as possible, or at least the ones that cause major problems. Minor bugs can be acceptable, but the current trend is for show stopper bugs to be left in for whatever reasons.
Then there's the excuse of "fixing a bug may introduce new ones!" TEH NOES!
"It might not work so I won't even try." Seriously, if I had this kind of attitude where I work, I'd be looking for a new job pretty quick.
The entire thing just sounds like a condescending pile of excuses from a lazy, incompetent developer. Maybe he's trying to get a job writing technobabble articles since he probably won't be a developer much longer.
While I agree that one should get paid for a work, the statement must be used with care. Remember, the RIAA thinks that they "deserve" to get paid just on GPs.
While I understand that the point was for people to get paid for their work being sold as opposed to their copyright being infringed on, the statement that someone DESERVES to get paid is a tricky one.
here's an easy way to find out. Can you find the Compact Disc logo ? If so, it's not crippled. If I'm not mistaken, it's due to Phillips, the co-owner of the Compact Disc trademark refusing that their trademark appear on non-red book compliant discs.
Basically, yeah. Flip the case over and look at the back. If you don't see the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo, look for an asterisk followed by a disclaimer that says something like, "This disc does not meet the technical standards for an audio CD." I don't remember exactly what it says, but I've seen it enough on CDs that there's VERY little mainstream music I'll buy (or listen to) now.
How is that different from the "free" cell phones that most providers hand out? They're not really free since to get it they lock you in to a (usually) 2 year contract with their service. You do end up paying for it because you have to keep that service for a period of time.
Personally, I'd rather pay a one time $250 (according to TFA) for a tranciever that can connect me to the internet almost everywhere I go with no recurring fees. So many people have gotten used to the pseudo-free idea of cell phones that they don't realize it's not that great of a deal.
Many years ago Sprint used to do things this way. You'd buy a phone at a retailer for market price and take it home and activate it at your leisure. This had the effect of higher quality phones than the other providers at the time, and no contracts so you could cancel your service any time if you weren't happy. How often does one get a new cell service only to find the coverage is terrible and they almost never get a signal? If they don't jump through the cancel hoops in the first 15 days, they're stuck with it for 2 years. The "free" cell phone model isn't really that good of a thing to compare to.
I totally agree with you - but at least this set a precedent that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable. Imagine if the root kit had not *fucked* up you computer so royally. If it had only infringed your rights then they may have got away with it, what with stupid license agreements within the case.
At least this will put record companies off this kind of behaviour.
I agree it sets a precedent. However, it's not the kind of precedent it should have set. It sets the precedent that a large corporation can do things that are completely illegal and cause widespread damage to the public and they'll just get a slap on the wrist.
A replacement CD, and a few DRM's music files doesn't exactly make up for the huge amounts of time it has taken and will take to fix their damage.
I know of a few computers just in my family that had this rootkit on it. My youngest brother is in college and the school provides a laptop to every student that the school maintains through an IT dept. They had to reimage his system when things got screwed up. My dad has a couple computers at work that got this thing. He had to reload everything on one and IT had to reload the other one. That was just from one CD that had been played on those computers.
There are countless people that have had to spend many many hours fixing what Sony did. What they did was illegal and very damaging. All they have to do is replace some CDs.
Your hardware problem was your DSL modem?
I haven't seen an internal DSL modem since about 2000 when AOL gave out free Compaq systems for signing up for AOL's new High speed internet. The crappy Compaq came with an internal PCI DSL modem.
Lately I've been throwing Linux Live CDs into almost anything to see what would and wouldn't work. The only hardware issues I've seen on the liveCDs are the wireless cards. For many computers that don't depend on wireless for connectivity, most people can just throw in the CD and go.
The high memory is to keep cheap computer makers from trying to sell underperforming systems as the latest and greatest. Think Windows ME being sold with 64MB.
As I recall, 64MB wasn't generally the problem on a PC with Win ME.
Remember kids, Win ME was the first OS I saw to crash if you put TOO MUCH RAM in it. I personally saw Win ME machines crash if you went over 512MB.
While many people do use digital pictures to print, this really isn't as common as you may think.
Most commonly people take pictures with their new digital camera that they just bought for the vacation to email them to friends/family.
There's a major disinformation in education happening in retailers where they are saying that more pixels = better. It is useful to start with a high pixel count so you have the flexibility to do stuff, but the big problem comes in emailing and power point.
Right now, most people will take that 6MP photo and email it to everyone and their cousin and then take that photo and the 642 others and put them right into Power Point for one of those classically boring Family Vacation(TM) slideshows. They then wonder why it takes 5 minutes to load the power point and why it won't fit on a blank CD.
What is lacking is a way to scale down photos for such uses that Joe Winblows User/Best Buy Shopper can understand.
shhhhhh.... don't tell that to the people going in to Best Buy for a camera. Best Buy may sue you for declining profits. (The RIAA seems to think it's a viable business model)
While you may technically be correct, this has nothing to do with the point.
The point is that most people have one choice for broadband. The fortunate ones have two.
Where I live, I have one choice. Comcast. The limit for DSL from Qwest is one building over. For satellite, your dish needs to be pointed south. My apartment faces north.
That is the main problem with this tiering crap. Most people that say "the market will sort it out" don't seem to understand this. There IS NO market when the government granted monopolies control the access. What am I supposed to do if Comcast starts throttling access?
Dial up. Either dial up or move.
As a random thought, how could this affect housing prices? This has the potential to affect selling prices for houses. Houses where there's one choice for broadband may not sell as well as other houses in the area with a couple choices. It's possible.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems to be the disparity here and what many slashdotters have trouble with. People can editorialize on what makes sense, and what seems reasonable in a case, but no one EVER knows what a judge will really end up doing.
My personal experience in this is that I have an iron clad case against my ex for custody. My lawyers repeatedly advised me to reach an agreement rather then take it to a trial. The main reason is that coming to an agreement gives us some control over what happens. A trial completely leaves it up to the judge, and you never know what they'll do.
BTW, the lawyers make A LOT more money by going to trial, so their advice isn't motivated by financial gain.
What happened to all the wankers who hooted and hollered about boycotting them after that?
They're playing WoW...
If anyone is interested, you can read their blog which details their project.
http://www.operationfirstcontact.com/blog.htm
Sadly the Globe and Mail got the story very wrong. They didn't even build the equipment, they bought much of it off the shelf.
As you can see in this entry they bought a common commercially made 2m mobile transceiver.
http://www.operationfirstcontact.com/blog/episode16.htm
"Today, Mr. Rector, Paul, and I went out to Radioworld and purchased a transceiver. After much research, we decided to go with the ICOM Ic-V8000. For the cost, it has exactly what we need. On Friday, we're going to be integrating it into our setup, and doing all the necessary testing."
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? OK, so these guys BOUGHT a radio OFF THE SHELF and then made contact through a scheduled program for the ISS to contact schools? Scheduled contact
The ARISS program is a program to schedule the ISS to make contact with your school via amateur radio. Roughly half a dozen schools are contacted every week in this manner. This is even more non-news than it seemed before. The fact that this is college students trying to claim this is a major project for graduation is absurd. Sounds like they did too much partying and needed to come up with something quick.
Does it count as circumvention if the DRM fails?
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00001201----000-.html
It seems that there is a specific burden of efficacy for the DRM implementer. 'Effective' would seem to imply that if no one legitimately entitled to use the work can, circumventing the DRM is perfectly legal, since only a drunken monkey would call this effective.
Clearly you haven't spent much time with lawyers.
I think it was because of the high quarterly profits that Cingular managed to pull off that other companies started going the same direction. There are some, mostly regional, companies that still do the "buy the phone and no contract" thing. Cricket is one of them. Helio has a one year contract I think. Cricket is completely unlimited for a flat fee. $50 gets you unlimited calls, texts, picture messages, and mobile web. But there's a catch. You can really only use it in a Cricket area. If you're in a big one and don't travel, it's great. For the people that travel a lot, it's not a good idea.
I think it's because of the trend of the big cell phone companies giving away "free" phones with a 15 year contract and ridiculous fees for even thinking about extra features that has caused a lot of the sticker shock. If companies aren't happy about everyone wanting free phones, they have no one to blame but themselves. I remember many years ago when people weren't at all surprised by paying $200 for a basic cell phone. It was the norm that you buy the phone and could cancel the service whenever you wanted. The cell phone companies did it to themselves and to the rest of us. We all got screwed in a model that was solely designed to dupe people into getting stuck with sub-par service for 2 years or more.
My opinion on consumer perception at the time is that most people didn't know there was a difference in computers apart from the CPU clock speed. They thought that they were all the same. This was also during the time of growth where most people were finally seeing the need for home computers. So, you have people rushing out to get new computers and they wanted them cheap. Now, you have this huge user base that has bought the cheapest computers and is starting to realize that it DOES make a difference in performance. So, more people are spending a little more for the better computers. I believe the trend will come back around to people wanting computers CHEAP again. It will be a cycle.
This is similar to the trend in cars for fuel economy. Every so often everyone wants fuel efficient cars. After awhile the market shifts toward larger cars. Either luxury, sports, or SUV. Eventually it comes back around to economy.
So, the trend has been toward better performing computers in recent years, but I think it will shift back to the cheapest computer the manufacturers can put out. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is the same person that said there was "too much reading" in Star Wars Galaxies which is why they had to rip the game apart and target the ADD crowd. I would go on another SWG rant, but it's been said. Just a reminder that she's the PR person that helped kill the game.
Please turn in your geek card on your way out.
Yeah... like a rootkit...
The Douglas County Sheriff's Department has NOTHING better to do. Seriously. There's a lot of them for a county that's not very big. They also have a reputation for being... shall we say... a little over zealous. (the earlier
Also, there's TONS of open APs in town. Almost the entire county residents are middle class or higher. One time I loaded up Netstumbler and drove half a mile away. I think I saw 30 some APs, 20 some of which were open.
I'm glad that my AP is secured, but I also know the sheriff's department. I'm sure many people I know will end up being harassed over this. Looks like I've got some work to do in getting everyone's APs secure.
It's generally bad for a government to openly say "Here's something that lots of people do, let's tax it!"
While it may be true that this is what they really do, it's never presented that way. New tax proposals are always made with some reason to need it. "Save the children! Think of the children!(TM)" or "war on terror" or whatever other reasons they come up with.
My point is, that they have an excuse to create a new tax to pay for some new thing. This is just a tax to get more money. TFA doesn't even mention spamming. That would be at least SOME kind of excuse for it, at least it would be better than, "Lots of people do this so we'll tax it"
The whole "not fair" thing is lame. It IS fair, that seems to be what you don't like about it. The ISP offers unlimited bandwidth for $X per month at Y/kbps. You and the other guy both signed up for it. You're not "subsidizing his usage." If you were really subsidizing others usage, then it would be something like everyone is alloted a certain amount of bandwidth per month. Anything over that is spread out among the subscribers. That is not the case. Everyone is paying a flat fee for service.
Someone else using more bandwidth than you should not matter in the least. It doesn't affect you in any way. Your bill does not go up if your neighbor uses more bandwidth this month. Your bandwidth is not reduced if another neighbor uses more next month.
Pay-per-bit pricing only seems "fair" to the people who use their connection very little and aren't getting as much value out of it as the people who use it a lot.
This is the big point that so many people don't seem to get. In almost every discussion on /. that has to do with this, there's the uninformed, self-righteous idealists that spout the same gibberish about "the market" sorting it out.
These people don't realize that for many many people in the US, there IS NO market. Most people CAN'T just switch broadband ISPs. The local phone company has a monopoly on the phone wires into the house and one cable company has the monopoly on the coax going into the house. Add to that, many places can only get broadband through one or the other depending on location.
Right now, I have Comcast cable internet. That is my ONLY option for broadband. The limit for DSL is half a block away.
My situation is not that unusual either. Some of the confusion could be coming from people in other countries whose governments don't grant monopolies on infrastructure to a single company. In the US, we have that problem.
I think Xscreensaver even has a windows BSOD screen saver.
That whole article sounds more like "We, in group one, are the cool kids. All the cool kids accept bugs. Why aren't you a cool kid?" It is loaded with the underlying tone of "I'm smarter than you because I accept bugs as normal"
After the condescending beginning, which assumes that every single person in the world has an opinion on software bugs, the loser then goes on to make excuses.
"Bugs are inevitable, so why bother fixing them?"
The idea of fixing bugs is NOT a binary one: Fix all or fix none.
There should be a point where an effort is made to fix as many bugs as possible, or at least the ones that cause major problems. Minor bugs can be acceptable, but the current trend is for show stopper bugs to be left in for whatever reasons.
Then there's the excuse of "fixing a bug may introduce new ones!" TEH NOES!
"It might not work so I won't even try." Seriously, if I had this kind of attitude where I work, I'd be looking for a new job pretty quick.
The entire thing just sounds like a condescending pile of excuses from a lazy, incompetent developer. Maybe he's trying to get a job writing technobabble articles since he probably won't be a developer much longer.
While I agree that one should get paid for a work, the statement must be used with care. Remember, the RIAA thinks that they "deserve" to get paid just on GPs.
While I understand that the point was for people to get paid for their work being sold as opposed to their copyright being infringed on, the statement that someone DESERVES to get paid is a tricky one.
Basically, yeah. Flip the case over and look at the back. If you don't see the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo, look for an asterisk followed by a disclaimer that says something like, "This disc does not meet the technical standards for an audio CD." I don't remember exactly what it says, but I've seen it enough on CDs that there's VERY little mainstream music I'll buy (or listen to) now.
How is that different from the "free" cell phones that most providers hand out? They're not really free since to get it they lock you in to a (usually) 2 year contract with their service. You do end up paying for it because you have to keep that service for a period of time.
Personally, I'd rather pay a one time $250 (according to TFA) for a tranciever that can connect me to the internet almost everywhere I go with no recurring fees. So many people have gotten used to the pseudo-free idea of cell phones that they don't realize it's not that great of a deal.
Many years ago Sprint used to do things this way. You'd buy a phone at a retailer for market price and take it home and activate it at your leisure. This had the effect of higher quality phones than the other providers at the time, and no contracts so you could cancel your service any time if you weren't happy. How often does one get a new cell service only to find the coverage is terrible and they almost never get a signal? If they don't jump through the cancel hoops in the first 15 days, they're stuck with it for 2 years. The "free" cell phone model isn't really that good of a thing to compare to.
I agree it sets a precedent. However, it's not the kind of precedent it should have set. It sets the precedent that a large corporation can do things that are completely illegal and cause widespread damage to the public and they'll just get a slap on the wrist.
A replacement CD, and a few DRM's music files doesn't exactly make up for the huge amounts of time it has taken and will take to fix their damage.
I know of a few computers just in my family that had this rootkit on it. My youngest brother is in college and the school provides a laptop to every student that the school maintains through an IT dept. They had to reimage his system when things got screwed up. My dad has a couple computers at work that got this thing. He had to reload everything on one and IT had to reload the other one. That was just from one CD that had been played on those computers.
There are countless people that have had to spend many many hours fixing what Sony did. What they did was illegal and very damaging. All they have to do is replace some CDs.
Your hardware problem was your DSL modem?
I haven't seen an internal DSL modem since about 2000 when AOL gave out free Compaq systems for signing up for AOL's new High speed internet. The crappy Compaq came with an internal PCI DSL modem.
Lately I've been throwing Linux Live CDs into almost anything to see what would and wouldn't work. The only hardware issues I've seen on the liveCDs are the wireless cards. For many computers that don't depend on wireless for connectivity, most people can just throw in the CD and go.
Does this mean that they WON'T be outsourcing their network management to India?
As I recall, 64MB wasn't generally the problem on a PC with Win ME.
Remember kids, Win ME was the first OS I saw to crash if you put TOO MUCH RAM in it. I personally saw Win ME machines crash if you went over 512MB.
Most commonly people take pictures with their new digital camera that they just bought for the vacation to email them to friends/family.
There's a major disinformation in education happening in retailers where they are saying that more pixels = better. It is useful to start with a high pixel count so you have the flexibility to do stuff, but the big problem comes in emailing and power point.
Right now, most people will take that 6MP photo and email it to everyone and their cousin and then take that photo and the 642 others and put them right into Power Point for one of those classically boring Family Vacation(TM) slideshows. They then wonder why it takes 5 minutes to load the power point and why it won't fit on a blank CD.
What is lacking is a way to scale down photos for such uses that Joe Winblows User/Best Buy Shopper can understand.
shhhhhh.... don't tell that to the people going in to Best Buy for a camera. Best Buy may sue you for declining profits. (The RIAA seems to think it's a viable business model)
The point is that most people have one choice for broadband. The fortunate ones have two.
Where I live, I have one choice. Comcast. The limit for DSL from Qwest is one building over. For satellite, your dish needs to be pointed south. My apartment faces north.
That is the main problem with this tiering crap. Most people that say "the market will sort it out" don't seem to understand this. There IS NO market when the government granted monopolies control the access. What am I supposed to do if Comcast starts throttling access?
Dial up. Either dial up or move.
As a random thought, how could this affect housing prices? This has the potential to affect selling prices for houses. Houses where there's one choice for broadband may not sell as well as other houses in the area with a couple choices. It's possible.