Fios isn't available here, yet. Fios isn't even available to 90% of the US yet.
Personally, I look forward to increased bandwidth and lower prices, and while its popular to rail against the ISPs here and in most places, things are generally actually improving. Perhaps not as fast or as dramatically as elsewhere, but the trend is in the right direction.
Ok, I'll bite. Boohoo... you use a ton of data, you have to pay for it. If you want to start a hydroponics garden in your basement you'll pay a premium for electricity. You want to stream 100's of GB of data you'll pay a premium for bandwidth. I find it really hard to get upset.
Shaw's plans in particular are pretty consumer friendly. You actually get a warning the first couple times you exceed the limit, so there is no 'suprise mega bill'. And if you want a lot of data, their nitro service is $150/mo, gives you 100mbps download speed, and a $350/gb cap.
Not enough? and you think $1GB/mo beyond that is too much? Add on a data plan... 250GB / $50 brings the price down to 20 cents / GB.
Seriously. $200/mo for 100mbps/5mbps with 600GB of transfer is pretty good.
You can whine that $30 bucks a month for unlimited high speed use is even better, but that pricing was made when the internet was predominantly text, and the vast majority of people didn't need a lot of data, but wanted it fast when they did. Anyone who thought that pricing would persist while peoples usage changed and grew exponentially is living in denial.
And in my opinion, you can't have net neutrality without metered internet.
Correct. When someone makes a mistake, they are then destined to make mistakes forever, and will never again able to be right about something.
Correct. They may be even often be right about guessing which way the stock market will go over any given single event. But a magic 8 ball can make the same claim.
If you don't like Steams method than you shouldn't have any issues sharing it around the family on the moral principles of the matter
Moral principles dictate taht if you don't like a contract don't enter into it. There is no moral principle of "if you find the contract unacceptable but think you won't get busted, sign it anyway and then do what you want..."
I would like to live in an ideal world where I only had to buy one copy of Total Annihilation and all my friends could join me on a LAN, but those days are over.
See, I don't. I never had a problem with the idea that you'd need x copies to play. (Although I appreciated games that specifically allowed multi-player installs from a single key, etc.)
I just expect to be able to give my brother Portal, now that I'm long finished with it. Especially seeing as I bought it in a box at the store.
If you wait for the Good deals to come around, Steam is essentially the same price as Renting games from a local blockbuster, and thats the kind of mentality you need when using it.
Yes, that's precisely how I do look at it. I picked up a number of steam titles over the holiday sale because they were priced fairly for a "non-transferrable subscription".
The way to get around the whole "Family sharing" thing is to have every family member have their own Steam account, and when you want a game for your 7 year old, you gift it to your 7 year old's account.
Your missing the point. I bought it for my -kids-. Plural.
He has access to it, you have access to his account (being his parent), and he has some material to learn how to share with brothers and sisters.
Except that Steam forbids him from sharing it with his brothers and sisters. Of course we can do so anyway and "get away with it". (What a great lesson to be teaching...) And I find it offensive that this is even against the rules in the first place.
Insisting on physical media now where you can't share the game because you have to login to the publisher's site anyways is ridiculous. What do you gain by that?
That's something of a strawman. I'm insisting on solutions where you do own and can transfer the game. Old-school physical media had that. GoG.com and drm free indie games have that. Even Wii console games still have that. New-school defective media systems with DRM and publisher accounts tied to the game for PC do not. And Steam does NOT.
The point is that Steam is worse than what we used to have. It might well be better than what some "physical media" has become, but its still a step in the WRONG direction.
As someone else said here on/., the real solution is creating one account per game on Steam.
1) That is itself a violation of steams ToS. Of course, you can get away with it, but one shouldn't need to violate the rules to make something usable.
2) While that approach does give you some flexibility with managing your titles, it makes the community aspects of steam almost unusable. If I'm playing left4dead and my brother fires up left4dead2, I'd like to connect with him... so if we have one account per game, I need to 'friend' every one of my brothers games, and vice versa. That rapidly leads to ridiculousness if you have a bunch of friends all taking this approach.
I wanted to play Half Life 1 the other day... so I fired up Steam, downloaded it and fired it up minutes later. Took all of 5 minutes. That's how it is with games, even new games (provided your connection is fast enough).
Sure, the games that I've bought through them are stuck on Steam but I knew that when I signed up for it, so who cares?
For me being stuck on steam isn't so much the issue, as being stuck to an account. I don't really care that a given game is stuck to steam's intaller/manager instead of a physical disk. I care that I have no approved way to lend a game I'm not playing to my brother. Apparently he has to buy his own copy.
That isn't going to happen with something like Steam.
Steam has its own set of problems. It needs to fix the issues it has with "families", and how they want to use games. I want to buy a game and let my 7 year old play it without giving him my steam account. When he eventually moves out, he should be able to take it with him. When I pass on... does it just go poof?
Suddenly, simply having to take good care of your CDs doesn't seen all that awful. They can be passed around to who you want, when you want, and they don't disappear on you.
Of course, defective games infested with disc-checks and nasty DRM and anti-copying technology have eroded away so much of the convenience of physical media that people like you actually prefer to be locked into steams model.
I was in the mood to play privateer yesterday... so I dug up the CD, imaged it, and put it away, and fired it up minutes later (in dosbox). Took all of 5 minutes. That's how it -should- be, even with new games.
If there is such a thing as wavefunction collapse, then there is only one universe and hence no branching. Likewise, if the universe branches, then there is no such thing as wavefunction collapse (the different outcomes simply occur in different universes).
To be fair, if universe A branches into A' and A'' then to the inhabitants in each of A' and A'' it looks exactly like the wavefunction collapsed and settled on 'their' universe.
Contracts that aren't signed are one thing, but if both parties have signed it, then it is a "Breach of contract", and definitely a crime in the US.
Breach of contract is NEVER a crime in the US.
When you borrow money from the bank, and then miss a payment, you are in breach of contract. That's not illegal. You aren't a criminal. Its not a crime.
The contract may spell out consequences when you are in breach that you may be subject to (such as having the full loan amount being immediately repayable...) and the bank can sue you for damages caused by you not making your payment... and so forth.
Indeed it does. And I hear where you are coming from... if you company is so cheap that it won't give you even a half decent PC to use at work, there is no way they are going to pay anyone to make sure you are even running antivirus at home, or to check that you are taking care of your customers data... or anything else.
And you are right. Until you aren't right.
Indeed, such a company seems particularly ripe for the "getting sued for screwing up its customers data privacy", and resulting in your PC being seized for evidence, complete with your home made pr0n, your family christmas photos, your correspondance with your bank and doctor and insurance company... and getting it all pored over by god-knows-who and stuck in legal limbo for years.
I am far more productive at home with cscope, nvi and CVS than I'll ever be with the authorized tools that crash all the time and were obsolete by the time they were developed, which is far into the past. We need XP to test the stuff we produce, but we could have an off-net build and test computer for that. As far as customers' data is concerned, our workstations running XP while on-line with weak passwords and full unrestricted access to our "server" are enough of a threat that letting me install a trusted open source OS with a tiny attack surface can hardly worsen it.
Agreed and understood. But if you are going to supply your own PC to use for work... have a completely separate PC to use for your private life.
If an employee develops code entirely using his own equipment, it is possible for the employee to contend that the development was done on his own time hence all of the code is his sole property.
In most states it will be a short lived case that the employee will rapidly lose.
In fact if you want to develop private code while employed to develop code, the more separation you establish from any "corporate coding" the BETTER.
I know an engineer who seriously suggested (albeit briefly) putting a cooling fan on an electronic component for a satellite.
Ironically, solving a satellite component cooling problem actually IS an engineering problem, one that should be solved by engineers.
I mean, do you think a physicist working on the detecting neutrinos via the thermoacoustic effect has the domain specific knowledge to define the best solution to a satellite component cooling issue?
However, as soon as you enter into an agreement with the company wherein you are expected to provide your own computer for work, they are likely going to require that they have SOME control over it. And odds are that 'some control' may prove to be close to 'total control'.
They may need to audit that you have up to date antivirus, they may feel they need to scan it for sensitive documents, licensing compliance, and other company IT/security related stuff. If the company gets sued, they may need to turn YOUR computer over as evidence.
that YOU pay for Often if they have you using your equipment, you get some sort of compensation. This is usually spelled out in a contract. That contract may contain all kinds of terms and conditions...
1 in a billion, methinks you don't understand statistics.
Maybe he lives in a small town in alaska and works from home... who knows? I know I'd estimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack where I am to be up around 1 in a billion too.
In any case, I don't worry about it... the odds of breaking your neck on a flight of stairs or drowning in a bathtub or being run over by a car are several times higher than the odds of tying in a terrorist attack, even if you live in a major city and work in an iconic building.
I think it's slightly different. Once Ford sells a car...
So then its more like a rental car, if I'm a white hat cracker.
And I expect it will be like a stolen rental car if I'm black hat and steal someone elses amazon account / credit card to get access.
After all crooks typically use "fraudulently obtained" getaway cars too. So even if meticulous records are made for each car they aren't generally all that useful.
I hadn't heard of orthokeratology, I'll have to look that up. But it wouldn't help age-related presbyopia, that is caused by the normal process of the eye's focusing lens (not the cornea, the focusing lens sits behind the iris) becoming hard, which is a normal part of the aging process.
I agree. You don't sound like a candidate at all, I only mentioned it as a point of general interest.
I probably couldn't have gone through orthokeratology at any rate, I tried contacts back in 1970 before they'd come up with soft lenses, and they were far too painful. This sounds even worse.
Heh, modern 'hard lenses' are all made of RGP (rigid gas permeable) materials instead of 'glass' now and the comfort characteristics are MUCH better. It isn't as good as soft lenses of course, but its not the 70s any more.:)
Because the auto industry got bad enough at a time we still cared about protecting consumers that we actually passed laws targeted at automotive companies abusing them.
I think we should pass similiar laws protecting consumers of other items, and in general. But lately all we pass are laws protecting corporate interests.
The downsides are that the CrystaLens is a surgical implant...
That means a lot of risks, and potential future complications. Glancing at your journal, you were probably a good candidate, and it was clearly worth it to you.
But I'd recommend most people stick to glasses, contact lenses, or orthokeratology. That last is the use of contact lenses that reshape your cornea while you sleep* (so its still reversible and non-surgical)
(* in much the same way sitting on a textured chair will imprint itself on your skin. You stand up, and the pattern is still there... for a short while. These lenses do much the same thing resting on the liquid in your eye ("tears") to create the necessary fluid pressures to squeeze your cornea into the desired shape. You wake up, remove the lenses, and your cornea gradually returns to its original shape, but while it does you can see normally. An ideal ortho-k candidate can get it down to wearing the lenses a couple nights a week.)
Slashdot Mirror
Fios isn't available here, yet. Fios isn't even available to 90% of the US yet.
Personally, I look forward to increased bandwidth and lower prices, and while its popular to rail against the ISPs here and in most places, things are generally actually improving. Perhaps not as fast or as dramatically as elsewhere, but the trend is in the right direction.
Ok, I'll bite. Boohoo... you use a ton of data, you have to pay for it. If you want to start a hydroponics garden in your basement you'll pay a premium for electricity. You want to stream 100's of GB of data you'll pay a premium for bandwidth. I find it really hard to get upset.
Shaw's plans in particular are pretty consumer friendly. You actually get a warning the first couple times you exceed the limit, so there is no 'suprise mega bill'. And if you want a lot of data, their nitro service is $150/mo, gives you 100mbps download speed, and a $350/gb cap.
Not enough? and you think $1GB/mo beyond that is too much? Add on a data plan... 250GB / $50 brings the price down to 20 cents / GB.
Seriously. $200/mo for 100mbps/5mbps with 600GB of transfer is pretty good.
You can whine that $30 bucks a month for unlimited high speed use is even better, but that pricing was made when the internet was predominantly text, and the vast majority of people didn't need a lot of data, but wanted it fast when they did. Anyone who thought that pricing would persist while peoples usage changed and grew exponentially is living in denial.
And in my opinion, you can't have net neutrality without metered internet.
Correct. When someone makes a mistake, they are then destined to make mistakes forever, and will never again able to be right about something.
Correct. They may be even often be right about guessing which way the stock market will go over any given single event. But a magic 8 ball can make the same claim.
Sure, being able to do that would be nice but then no-one would buy new games, they'd just share them between friends.
And yet the entire games industry went from non-existant to a multi-billion dollar industry while people were able to do just that.
iTunes is doing just fine too.
Being able to share between friends is not a problem.
If you don't like Steams method than you shouldn't have any issues sharing it around the family on the moral principles of the matter
Moral principles dictate taht if you don't like a contract don't enter into it. There is no moral principle of "if you find the contract unacceptable but think you won't get busted, sign it anyway and then do what you want..."
I would like to live in an ideal world where I only had to buy one copy of Total Annihilation and all my friends could join me on a LAN, but those days are over.
See, I don't. I never had a problem with the idea that you'd need x copies to play. (Although I appreciated games that specifically allowed multi-player installs from a single key, etc.)
I just expect to be able to give my brother Portal, now that I'm long finished with it. Especially seeing as I bought it in a box at the store.
If you wait for the Good deals to come around, Steam is essentially the same price as Renting games from a local blockbuster, and thats the kind of mentality you need when using it.
Yes, that's precisely how I do look at it. I picked up a number of steam titles over the holiday sale because they were priced fairly for a "non-transferrable subscription".
Um, yeah. Some folks might beg to differ.
The same folks that were in denial about the housing bubble right up until it burst?
The way to get around the whole "Family sharing" thing is to have every family member have their own Steam account, and when you want a game for your 7 year old, you gift it to your 7 year old's account.
Your missing the point. I bought it for my -kids-. Plural.
He has access to it, you have access to his account (being his parent), and he has some material to learn how to share with brothers and sisters.
Except that Steam forbids him from sharing it with his brothers and sisters. Of course we can do so anyway and "get away with it". (What a great lesson to be teaching...) And I find it offensive that this is even against the rules in the first place.
Insisting on physical media now where you can't share the game because you have to login to the publisher's site anyways is ridiculous. What do you gain by that?
That's something of a strawman. I'm insisting on solutions where you do own and can transfer the game. Old-school physical media had that. GoG.com and drm free indie games have that. Even Wii console games still have that. New-school defective media systems with DRM and publisher accounts tied to the game for PC do not. And Steam does NOT.
The point is that Steam is worse than what we used to have. It might well be better than what some "physical media" has become, but its still a step in the WRONG direction.
As someone else said here on /., the real solution is creating one account per game on Steam.
1) That is itself a violation of steams ToS. Of course, you can get away with it, but one shouldn't need to violate the rules to make something usable.
2) While that approach does give you some flexibility with managing your titles, it makes the community aspects of steam almost unusable. If I'm playing left4dead and my brother fires up left4dead2, I'd like to connect with him... so if we have one account per game, I need to 'friend' every one of my brothers games, and vice versa. That rapidly leads to ridiculousness if you have a bunch of friends all taking this approach.
I wanted to play Half Life 1 the other day... so I fired up Steam, downloaded it and fired it up minutes later. Took all of 5 minutes. That's how it is with games, even new games (provided your connection is fast enough).
Sure, the games that I've bought through them are stuck on Steam but I knew that when I signed up for it, so who cares?
For me being stuck on steam isn't so much the issue, as being stuck to an account. I don't really care that a given game is stuck to steam's intaller/manager instead of a physical disk. I care that I have no approved way to lend a game I'm not playing to my brother. Apparently he has to buy his own copy.
That isn't going to happen with something like Steam.
Steam has its own set of problems. It needs to fix the issues it has with "families", and how they want to use games. I want to buy a game and let my 7 year old play it without giving him my steam account. When he eventually moves out, he should be able to take it with him. When I pass on... does it just go poof?
Suddenly, simply having to take good care of your CDs doesn't seen all that awful. They can be passed around to who you want, when you want, and they don't disappear on you.
Of course, defective games infested with disc-checks and nasty DRM and anti-copying technology have eroded away so much of the convenience of physical media that people like you actually prefer to be locked into steams model.
I was in the mood to play privateer yesterday... so I dug up the CD, imaged it, and put it away, and fired it up minutes later (in dosbox). Took all of 5 minutes. That's how it -should- be, even with new games.
If there is such a thing as wavefunction collapse, then there is only one universe and hence no branching. Likewise, if the universe branches, then there is no such thing as wavefunction collapse (the different outcomes simply occur in different universes).
To be fair, if universe A branches into A' and A'' then to the inhabitants in each of A' and A'' it looks exactly like the wavefunction collapsed and settled on 'their' universe.
Social sites are great if you have friends. Obviously you don't.
Odd, I have friends; its one of the reasons why I have little time for social sites.
And my friends all know that one of the quickest ways to piss me off when we're hanging out together is to be constantly checking/updating facebook.
Contracts that aren't signed are one thing, but if both parties have signed it, then it is a "Breach of contract", and definitely a crime in the US.
Breach of contract is NEVER a crime in the US.
When you borrow money from the bank, and then miss a payment, you are in breach of contract. That's not illegal. You aren't a criminal. Its not a crime.
The contract may spell out consequences when you are in breach that you may be subject to (such as having the full loan amount being immediately repayable...) and the bank can sue you for damages caused by you not making your payment... and so forth.
That sort of control costs my company money.
Indeed it does. And I hear where you are coming from... if you company is so cheap that it won't give you even a half decent PC to use at work, there is no way they are going to pay anyone to make sure you are even running antivirus at home, or to check that you are taking care of your customers data ... or anything else.
And you are right. Until you aren't right.
Indeed, such a company seems particularly ripe for the "getting sued for screwing up its customers data privacy", and resulting in your PC being seized for evidence, complete with your home made pr0n, your family christmas photos, your correspondance with your bank and doctor and insurance company... and getting it all pored over by god-knows-who and stuck in legal limbo for years.
I am far more productive at home with cscope, nvi and CVS than I'll ever be with the authorized tools that crash all the time and were obsolete by the time they were developed, which is far into the past.
We need XP to test the stuff we produce, but we could have an off-net build and test computer for that.
As far as customers' data is concerned, our workstations running XP while on-line with weak passwords and full unrestricted access to our "server" are enough of a threat that letting me install a trusted open source OS with a tiny attack surface can hardly worsen it.
Agreed and understood. But if you are going to supply your own PC to use for work... have a completely separate PC to use for your private life.
If an employee develops code entirely using his own equipment, it is possible for the employee to contend that the development was done on his own time hence all of the code is his sole property.
In most states it will be a short lived case that the employee will rapidly lose.
In fact if you want to develop private code while employed to develop code, the more separation you establish from any "corporate coding" the BETTER.
I know an engineer who seriously suggested (albeit briefly) putting a cooling fan on an electronic component for a satellite.
Ironically, solving a satellite component cooling problem actually IS an engineering problem, one that should be solved by engineers.
I mean, do you think a physicist working on the detecting neutrinos via the thermoacoustic effect has the domain specific knowledge to define the best solution to a satellite component cooling issue?
huh... not if it's YOUR property
Agreed.
However, as soon as you enter into an agreement with the company wherein you are expected to provide your own computer for work, they are likely going to require that they have SOME control over it. And odds are that 'some control' may prove to be close to 'total control'.
They may need to audit that you have up to date antivirus, they may feel they need to scan it for sensitive documents, licensing compliance, and other company IT/security related stuff. If the company gets sued, they may need to turn YOUR computer over as evidence.
that YOU pay for
Often if they have you using your equipment, you get some sort of compensation. This is usually spelled out in a contract. That contract may contain all kinds of terms and conditions...
1 in a billion, methinks you don't understand statistics.
Maybe he lives in a small town in alaska and works from home... who knows? I know I'd estimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack where I am to be up around 1 in a billion too.
In any case, I don't worry about it... the odds of breaking your neck on a flight of stairs or drowning in a bathtub or being run over by a car are several times higher than the odds of tying in a terrorist attack, even if you live in a major city and work in an iconic building.
Really? So Bing is better for pr0n? Time to invest in Microsoft. :)
I think it's slightly different. Once Ford sells a car...
So then its more like a rental car, if I'm a white hat cracker.
And I expect it will be like a stolen rental car if I'm black hat and steal someone elses amazon account / credit card to get access.
After all crooks typically use "fraudulently obtained" getaway cars too. So even if meticulous records are made for each car they aren't generally all that useful.
I hadn't heard of orthokeratology, I'll have to look that up. But it wouldn't help age-related presbyopia, that is caused by the normal process of the eye's focusing lens (not the cornea, the focusing lens sits behind the iris) becoming hard, which is a normal part of the aging process.
I agree. You don't sound like a candidate at all, I only mentioned it as a point of general interest.
I probably couldn't have gone through orthokeratology at any rate, I tried contacts back in 1970 before they'd come up with soft lenses, and they were far too painful. This sounds even worse.
Heh, modern 'hard lenses' are all made of RGP (rigid gas permeable) materials instead of 'glass' now and the comfort characteristics are MUCH better. It isn't as good as soft lenses of course, but its not the 70s any more. :)
Because the auto industry got bad enough at a time we still cared about protecting consumers that we actually passed laws targeted at automotive companies abusing them.
I think we should pass similiar laws protecting consumers of other items, and in general. But lately all we pass are laws protecting corporate interests.
Whenever I give an example that refutes what you say, you just say the feds broke the law.
Are you saying they didn't?
http://www.charityandsecurity.org/news/Judge_Rules_Warrantless_Wiretap_of_US_Charity_Unconstitutional ... ad nauseum
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/8/17/120536.shtml
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/law/09/26/patriot.act/index.html
http://www.erowid.org/freedom/courts/supreme/supreme_case2_comment1.shtml
If that were the case they really are a bunch of criminals aren't they?
You have a better word for it?
What about the law that says you have the right to unlock your own phone?
You still have that right. But there's no law that says the manufacturer has to make it easy for you.
The downsides are that the CrystaLens is a surgical implant...
That means a lot of risks, and potential future complications. Glancing at your journal, you were probably a good candidate, and it was clearly worth it to you.
But I'd recommend most people stick to glasses, contact lenses, or orthokeratology. That last is the use of contact lenses that reshape your cornea while you sleep* (so its still reversible and non-surgical)
(* in much the same way sitting on a textured chair will imprint itself on your skin. You stand up, and the pattern is still there... for a short while. These lenses do much the same thing resting on the liquid in your eye ("tears") to create the necessary fluid pressures to squeeze your cornea into the desired shape. You wake up, remove the lenses, and your cornea gradually returns to its original shape, but while it does you can see normally. An ideal ortho-k candidate can get it down to wearing the lenses a couple nights a week.)