both SI and Imperial units are pegged to arbitrary things. In the case of Imperial units it was some king's foot. In the case of SI it is the distance light travels in some amount of time. whatever.
That's beside the pont. Yes the SI units are pegged to arbitrary things but they are not arbitrarily pegged to *eachother*.
Converting from centimeters to kilometers requires dividing by 100,000. I can do that in my head. Converting from miles to inches requires dividing by 63,360. I can't do that in my head.
That's not a news flash. You said it yourself: Its par for the course.
Countries do not act out of genuine altruism. Friends, neighbors, people in general might... but countries do not--especially if doing so is harmful to that self-interest.
Of course.
However, there is a sliding scale.
When I contract out to a client, I'm obviously looking at my own self interest, but I go in there looking to genuinely solve their problem while getting paid. So I help them and I help myself.
But there are other deals that are just rip-offs... where the guy they had contracted was getting paid and not solving their problems.
Same thing happens between countries. Some deals are win-win for both parties even though self-interest is the primary motivator. Other deals aren't win-win.
40% offtopic? Normally I don't challenge the might mods, but how is this offtopic.
My argument is as follows:
'The military' is a subculture that lives, works, and exists in relative isolation. (with large numbers of people living and working on bases, in camps, etc, etc.) It qualifies as a 'society' unto itself.
Further, it is a very "well armed society". Members have combat training, weapons training,... its the fucking military...
However, it evidently not a 'polite society' with little violent crime.
Evidently the premise that a well armed society is necessarily more polite is flawed.
Moral of the story: those we help will not always repay us with kindness.
Especially when the reason we helped them had absolutely zilch to do with altruism or genuine interest in their welfare or in the principles of democracy or anything high-minded, and instead had everything to do with our own self interest with complete disregard for how things turned out for them provided we got what we wanted.
We didn't really 'help' them. We 'used' them as pawns in our game of chess with the USSR. We didn't give a shit about what happened to them.
Why? Does Apple develop all applications on the app store?
No. Because apple is preventing you from using all the applications that are not in the app store.
You can run all of those for free, either buy getting a (possibly) free app from the app store, or jailbreaking your device (in the case of bash and perl etc).
So in other words you agree with me.
Apple has blocked you from running apps that are pretty much standard utilities on BSD platforms.
Sure you might be able to get some of that functionality in blessed form on the iphone, and it might even be free if you are lucky, and sure the blocks apple has erected aren't impervious, and it is possible to break past them, but my point stands.
Not so much that its easy to write one, but that several free ones already exist for the platform.
I demand a free SSH client now, who do I speak to?
Speak to Apple.
Snap to it, it's my right to have a free SSH client on platform ${FOOBAR}
In this case ${FOOBAR} is BSD. Its not a new platform, and it already has numerous free and open sourced options for ssh clients.
Only Apple could give you a device with BSD Unix on it, and then block and make you pay extra money to run things like ssh, telnet, ftp, bash, perl, etc...
"A congresswoman said Thursday that her "jaw dropped" when military doctors told her that four in 10 women at a veterans hospital reported being sexually assaulted while in the military."
"Twenty-nine percent say they were raped during their military service."
Try having some "private time" when, at any second, a little one could come running in.
You might want to carefully inspect your bathroom door for an example of a technological solution to this problem. Further, you might be surprised that these "locking door knobs" are actually both inexpensive and widely available.
For instance, I have 2 ssh clients for less than half the price of a typical app that would run on a Blackberry.
Having to pay for even one ssh client is pretty absurd in the first place. Only in the apple ecosystem would anyone contemplate paying for an ssh client.
since mnay of these perks are not money but rather hard objects, getting caught this way is unlikely.
One way you can be caught easily is if a company that gave you the items is audited.
The auditor sees that they wrote off two $1000 laptops and a vacation each under advertising expenses to BloggerJoe and BloogerJane, etc. And then on a whim, decides to flag BloggerJoe & BloggerJane for an audit with a note to check whether a suitable amount was reported by them under income.
Yes, but the reason that health care costs are so high in America is that we have the best quality of health care in the world.
You are right, King Hussein of Jordan will come to America for surgery, because we have facilities that offer among the best available care in the world, and they will be happy to take care of King Hussein.
But to say the country has the "best quality of health care" is extremely misleading; that high quality health care may be =offered= in America, but most actual American's don't actually get it when they need it.
What exactly is the value of having high quality health care that you can't actually use?
America still produces fine crafted hardwood furniture too. But most people's homes are furnished with ikea and other particle board and plastic shit. The fact that high quality furniture is available in the country doesn't mean simply being in the country will get you some. Ditto with health care.
Now, I'm not railing against the existance of private health care. If King Hussein wants surgery, he should be able to get it, and there's no reason it shouldn't be in America. But so what? We should still have socialized care too.
Why exactly should serving the worlds rich and famous the best care in the world mean that half the country has no health care at all?
Actually, "god mode" would ruin games such as Doom for me.
What do you mean 'would'? Doom is over a decade old. Either it -did- ruin it, or it -didn't-. Its a bit late for 'would'.
My point is that it -didn't- ruin the game, even though it was there. Those of us who felt it would ruin the game to actually use it simply didn't use it. You are right, in the sense that using it will suck the life out of a game... but you knew that and didn't use it until you were tired of the game anyway and just wanted to screw around.
I got my fucking plan before anyone started bitching about tethering.
And....?
You think you can tether, right? And you have vigorously asserted that they haven't ever said anywhere that you can't. That its not excluded in your contract, in your rate plan, or in any other agreement you have with them.
So have they actually ever said ANYWHERE that =YOU= can't tether?
The terms do not exclude tethering. The terms do not mention tethering. At. All.
That great then. So what are you bitching about? Apparently you have tethering service. Why exactly do you think you might not?
Yeah, I don't use NTP on my PC at all anyway dude. (I may have it set on my router...) You keep assuming things with no basis.
I'm not assuming you use ntp, I'm merely showing you an example of how you might detect that tethering is going on. The fact that this specific example doesn't apply to you doesn't take away from the general form of the argument.
If you're system is set to download virus definitions, perform operating system updates, authenticate windows media player drm, synchronize the time, check for new versions of the Java VM / Adobe Software/ torrent client/ firefox/thunderbird, or any of a hundred other 'phone home' software... including things like the google toolbar. All these perform dns lookups and connect to servers you'd practically never ever do from a handset.
I would point out that the vast majority of senior McDonald's executives started out in a restaurant.
The ratio of McDonald's executives to Mcdonald's grill / fry / sandwich / cashier persons is pretty daunting. Ultimately only a handful can rise to executive level. Even if everyone wanted to and was capable of the job their isn't room for everyone to advance.
So let's look: I'm not violating my contract in anyway. My phone comes with this ability by default, my data plan is unlimited, and there's no clause about tethering.
Keep reading. The terms of your current rate plan form a material part of your contract/agreement with AT&T. And if the terms of your current rate plan exclude tethering, then you can't tether.
Ubuntu NTP servers? Why would I even have that when I don't run Ubuntu?...[snip]... Port monitoring? DNS? NTP? You're stretching, and you're still wrong.
Sub in the Apple NTP servers or the Microsoft NTP servers or the whatever. The point was and is that there are lots and lots of places your phone will never go, but which will pop up if you are tethering, as your tethered PC checks for updates, virus definitions, all sorts of stuff. Its pretty trivial to make a very educated guess as to whether a PC is tethered or not, unless all traffic is being vpn tunnelled. And even then you can discern that a big pile of data is being tunnelled, and deduce that its probably tethered.
And really, they don't need absolute proof you are actually tethering. They just have to observe that you are using more data than they want, and decide they don't want you as a customer anymore. They don't need to "prove" you are tethering to cut you off.
That much is in virtually every carrier contract I've ever seen. If they don't want your business. They can terminate your service pretty much at will.
You are limited to the bandwidth and usage limits set in your contract.
Ah well then, you agree you aren't allowed to tether. Perhaps you should READ your contract.
My contract says unlimited data.
You don't get to look at once clause and ignore the rest. Read the whole contract. I'll bet it also says "no tethering". Or perhaps it simply says you aren't allowed to modify the firmware of your handset which is programmed to disable tethering. Either way, one way or another, you are outside the rules of your contract.
I will do what I want within the rules of my contract.
Within the rules of your contract you can't tether. I'm glad we agree.
If you can think of a way for AT&T to know whether or not I'm tethering on my phone, let me know.
a)
Irrelevant. Why should it matter if they can technically detect it or not?
If you rent a car and agree not to go off-roading in it, guess what: you you aren't supposed to go off-roading in it. If you do go off-roading in it and they can't actually detect it 'getting away with it' doesn't somehow make it ok.
b) technically they can detect tethering lots of ways if they really want to including: i) - having the phone tell them when you are tethering. It is their custom firmware after all, (unless you've violated your contract and loaded non-approved firmware)
ii) - deep packet inspection will easily reveal it if you aren't encrypting all your traffic. hmmm... this traffic on port 80... browser is identifying itself as Mozilla/5.0/Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0... hmmm that didn't originate on the iphone.
iii) - dns/port monitoring - hmmm... why is there a lookup and traffic to the default Ubuntu NTP servers.
Now i) can be dodged with custom firmware, and ii) and iii) can be averted if you VPN into another machine, but my carrier blocks VPN traffic unless you pay for the VPN feature. Sure I might be able to bypass it by hacking my firmware and tunnelling through https or some such but if so I'm WAY outside the "rules of my contract" and have no moral leg to stand on, even if I can technically 'get away with it'.
I would count on this damaging gameplay experience.
Did idgodmode ruin Doom? Of course not. Did being able to get Castle-9 lives in Super Mario Brothers ruin it? Even today I still can't beat World 8 without a healthy stack of lives going in.
What about updownupdownleftrightleftrightabab in umpteen million other games for extra continues, ammo, whatever, etc?
How is this really any different? I mean idgodmode made you invincible with unlimited ammo.
Download caps and the price per GB we pay far exceed their costs.
for what its worth, cellular networks -- the topic at hand, are a completely different ballgame vs broadband. A few dozen people streaming movies can saturate a cell site that can normally support thousands of voice calls.
You use your phone to access the internet over the cellular network.
Thank you captain obvious.
Whether or not your phone then communicates with your PC or other devices makes no difference. At all.
Actually read my post before you reply. There is no technical difference. But in terms of the business model to support it they are worlds apart.
Take a salad-bar, its the same situation. A single person can't really eat that much food, so I can offer him unlimited food for a fixed price, and make money by pricing it above what the average person will consume.
If people walk in and start expecting to 'tether' and feed their whole family off that one price, that's a game changer. I can't run an unlimited salad bar at that price anymore. The average amount consumed per "plate sold" has gone WAY up.
Similiarly, with a data device, there's really only so much data a single handset will consume. They are still mostly used for email and small files. So you can give people lots of bandwidth for a fixed price above the average cost and make money. If people start tethering, where they suddenly are using a lot more average bandwidth than before, then the pricing is no longer valid. They need to raise the rate, or charge for tethering, or block tethering, or something in response.
Have they gotten to the point where they have actually tricked you into thinking there's a difference?
There is a difference. Its subtle, but important. But its not a technical difference it has to do with with service levels, over selling, marketing, and pricing. But that doesn't mean its any less "real.
Essentially, when they give you a 6GB data plan they are overselling their capacity. They know this. I know this. And now you know this. Its not a secret, its not 'teh evil'. If -everyone- used 6GB every month they'd be unable to deliver the service reliably at that price.
Hi end users are subsidized by low end users. Low end users are happy that they have 6GB and don't have to worry about bandwidth everytime they check their email. The carrier has a good idea what the distribution of users is, and knows that it can offer 6gb for $30 bucks, overselling what they can actually deliver at that price, but secure in the knowledge that the mathematical models of their customer's usage patterns virtually gaurantee they won't have to.
But that all assumes no tethering. Its a no brainer to sell 'unlimited data' to a blackberry user a couple product cycles back-- the thing only did email really well, and web browsing poorly. Add in tethering, and suddenly a sizeable chunk of customers on unlimited go from 'low/moderate' usage measured in the kilobytes per day to super-users in the 10s of megabytes per day. Someone that historically only checks his email on his device, getting the odd document, or mp3... well now he now downloading his operating system service pack, virus software update, while watching youtube.
The mathematical model changes. Bottom line: if they allow tethering, consumption goes up sharply for a significant group of consumers. They need to deliver more total bandwidth. That additional capacity costs more to supply and maintain. So they need to charge more for it.
And so we have 'no tethering' in some areas or 'tethering feature' charges in other areas. As as we move forward, the devices become more powerful, and its actually possible to use significant bandwidth on them, but even now, bandwidth usage per unit for untethered use is an order of magnitude lower than what tethered users use.
The carriers fear they would be unable to deliver reliable service at that level at that price point with wide spread tethering. So they're beign cautious about it, and looking to tier the service so that people who need it pay for it.
A final word out to those who despise over-selling and thing the ISP shouldn't do it. Shut the hell up. We, the/. power users, benefit from over selling the most. Its our usage that is subsidized by the low end users. Its because of overselling we can get 6GB for $30 in the first place. If they got rid of overselling the prices we'd pay would shoot sky high, and we'd all pay by the megabyte or some other metering right from the first byte. That would suck.
That's not saying that ISPs are angelic entities looking out for us, but overselling is good business that generally benefits the consumer with lower prices and services offered in a form that we like (I want a 6GB plan more than a plan that charges me 1$ per MB. Over selling and makes efficient use of the available resource...it a case of the free market actually working.
Slashdot Mirror
both SI and Imperial units are pegged to arbitrary things. In the case of Imperial units it was some king's foot. In the case of SI it is the distance light travels in some amount of time. whatever.
That's beside the pont. Yes the SI units are pegged to arbitrary things but they are not arbitrarily pegged to *eachother*.
Converting from centimeters to kilometers requires dividing by 100,000. I can do that in my head.
Converting from miles to inches requires dividing by 63,360. I can't do that in my head.
Clearly the Mods didn't watch the video.
News flash: that's all countries have ever done.
That's not a news flash. You said it yourself: Its par for the course.
Countries do not act out of genuine altruism. Friends, neighbors, people in general might... but countries do not--especially if doing so is harmful to that self-interest.
Of course.
However, there is a sliding scale.
When I contract out to a client, I'm obviously looking at my own self interest, but I go in there looking to genuinely solve their problem while getting paid. So I help them and I help myself.
But there are other deals that are just rip-offs... where the guy they had contracted was getting paid and not solving their problems.
Same thing happens between countries. Some deals are win-win for both parties even though self-interest is the primary motivator. Other deals aren't win-win.
40% offtopic? Normally I don't challenge the might mods, but how is this offtopic.
My argument is as follows:
'The military' is a subculture that lives, works, and exists in relative isolation. (with large numbers of people living and working on bases, in camps, etc, etc.) It qualifies as a 'society' unto itself.
Further, it is a very "well armed society". Members have combat training, weapons training, ... its the fucking military...
However, it evidently not a 'polite society' with little violent crime.
Evidently the premise that a well armed society is necessarily more polite is flawed.
Moral of the story: those we help will not always repay us with kindness.
Especially when the reason we helped them had absolutely zilch to do with altruism or genuine interest in their welfare or in the principles of democracy or anything high-minded, and instead had everything to do with our own self interest with complete disregard for how things turned out for them provided we got what we wanted.
We didn't really 'help' them. We 'used' them as pawns in our game of chess with the USSR. We didn't give a shit about what happened to them.
Why? Does Apple develop all applications on the app store?
No. Because apple is preventing you from using all the applications that are not in the app store.
You can run all of those for free, either buy getting a (possibly) free app from the app store, or jailbreaking your device (in the case of bash and perl etc).
So in other words you agree with me.
Apple has blocked you from running apps that are pretty much standard utilities on BSD platforms.
Sure you might be able to get some of that functionality in blessed form on the iphone, and it might even be free if you are lucky, and sure the blocks apple has erected aren't impervious, and it is possible to break past them, but my point stands.
Why, is a SSH client particularly easy to write?
Not so much that its easy to write one, but that several free ones already exist for the platform.
I demand a free SSH client now, who do I speak to?
Speak to Apple.
Snap to it, it's my right to have a free SSH client on platform ${FOOBAR}
In this case ${FOOBAR} is BSD. Its not a new platform, and it already has numerous free and open sourced options for ssh clients.
Only Apple could give you a device with BSD Unix on it, and then block and make you pay extra money to run things like ssh, telnet, ftp, bash, perl, etc...
A well armed society is a polite society.
Yep. That explains the military.
"A congresswoman said Thursday that her "jaw dropped" when military doctors told her that four in 10 women at a veterans hospital reported being sexually assaulted while in the military."
"Twenty-nine percent say they were raped during their military service."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/31/military.sexabuse/index.html
Try having some "private time" when, at any second, a little one could come running in.
You might want to carefully inspect your bathroom door for an example of a technological solution to this problem. Further, you might be surprised that these "locking door knobs" are actually both inexpensive and widely available.
Have you considered purchasing one?
For instance, I have 2 ssh clients for less than half the price of a typical app that would run on a Blackberry.
Having to pay for even one ssh client is pretty absurd in the first place. Only in the apple ecosystem would anyone contemplate paying for an ssh client.
since mnay of these perks are not money but rather hard objects, getting caught this way is unlikely.
One way you can be caught easily is if a company that gave you the items is audited.
The auditor sees that they wrote off two $1000 laptops and a vacation each under advertising expenses to BloggerJoe and BloogerJane, etc. And then on a whim, decides to flag BloggerJoe & BloggerJane for an audit with a note to check whether a suitable amount was reported by them under income.
Yes, but the reason that health care costs are so high in America is that we have the best quality of health care in the world.
You are right, King Hussein of Jordan will come to America for surgery, because we have facilities that offer among the best available care in the world, and they will be happy to take care of King Hussein.
But to say the country has the "best quality of health care" is extremely misleading; that high quality health care may be =offered= in America, but most actual American's don't actually get it when they need it.
What exactly is the value of having high quality health care that you can't actually use?
America still produces fine crafted hardwood furniture too. But most people's homes are furnished with ikea and other particle board and plastic shit. The fact that high quality furniture is available in the country doesn't mean simply being in the country will get you some. Ditto with health care.
Now, I'm not railing against the existance of private health care. If King Hussein wants surgery, he should be able to get it, and there's no reason it shouldn't be in America. But so what? We should still have socialized care too.
Why exactly should serving the worlds rich and famous the best care in the world mean that half the country has no health care at all?
Actually, "god mode" would ruin games such as Doom for me.
What do you mean 'would'? Doom is over a decade old. Either it -did- ruin it, or it -didn't-. Its a bit late for 'would'.
My point is that it -didn't- ruin the game, even though it was there. Those of us who felt it would ruin the game to actually use it simply didn't use it. You are right, in the sense that using it will suck the life out of a game... but you knew that and didn't use it until you were tired of the game anyway and just wanted to screw around.
I got my fucking plan before anyone started bitching about tethering.
And....?
You think you can tether, right? And you have vigorously asserted that they haven't ever said anywhere that you can't. That its not excluded in your contract, in your rate plan, or in any other agreement you have with them.
So have they actually ever said ANYWHERE that =YOU= can't tether?
So seriously, what are you on about?
The terms do not exclude tethering.
The terms do not mention tethering.
At. All.
That great then. So what are you bitching about? Apparently you have tethering service. Why exactly do you think you might not?
Yeah, I don't use NTP on my PC at all anyway dude. (I may have it set on my router...) You keep assuming things with no basis.
I'm not assuming you use ntp, I'm merely showing you an example of how you might detect that tethering is going on. The fact that this specific example doesn't apply to you doesn't take away from the general form of the argument.
If you're system is set to download virus definitions, perform operating system updates, authenticate windows media player drm, synchronize the time, check for new versions of the Java VM / Adobe Software/ torrent client/ firefox/thunderbird, or any of a hundred other 'phone home' software... including things like the google toolbar. All these perform dns lookups and connect to servers you'd practically never ever do from a handset.
I would point out that the vast majority of senior McDonald's executives started out in a restaurant.
The ratio of McDonald's executives to Mcdonald's grill / fry / sandwich / cashier persons is pretty daunting. Ultimately only a handful can rise to executive level. Even if everyone wanted to and was capable of the job their isn't room for everyone to advance.
So let's look:
I'm not violating my contract in anyway.
My phone comes with this ability by default, my data plan is unlimited, and there's no clause about tethering.
Keep reading. The terms of your current rate plan form a material part of your contract/agreement with AT&T. And if the terms of your current rate plan exclude tethering, then you can't tether.
Ubuntu NTP servers? Why would I even have that when I don't run Ubuntu?...[snip]... Port monitoring? DNS? NTP? You're stretching, and you're still wrong.
Sub in the Apple NTP servers or the Microsoft NTP servers or the whatever. The point was and is that there are lots and lots of places your phone will never go, but which will pop up if you are tethering, as your tethered PC checks for updates, virus definitions, all sorts of stuff. Its pretty trivial to make a very educated guess as to whether a PC is tethered or not, unless all traffic is being vpn tunnelled. And even then you can discern that a big pile of data is being tunnelled, and deduce that its probably tethered.
And really, they don't need absolute proof you are actually tethering. They just have to observe that you are using more data than they want, and decide they don't want you as a customer anymore. They don't need to "prove" you are tethering to cut you off.
That much is in virtually every carrier contract I've ever seen. If they don't want your business. They can terminate your service pretty much at will.
You are limited to the bandwidth and usage limits set in your contract.
Ah well then, you agree you aren't allowed to tether. Perhaps you should READ your contract.
My contract says unlimited data.
You don't get to look at once clause and ignore the rest. Read the whole contract. I'll bet it also says "no tethering". Or perhaps it simply says you aren't allowed to modify the firmware of your handset which is programmed to disable tethering. Either way, one way or another, you are outside the rules of your contract.
I will do what I want within the rules of my contract.
Within the rules of your contract you can't tether. I'm glad we agree.
If you can think of a way for AT&T to know whether or not I'm tethering on my phone, let me know.
a)
Irrelevant. Why should it matter if they can technically detect it or not?
If you rent a car and agree not to go off-roading in it, guess what: you you aren't supposed to go off-roading in it. If you do go off-roading in it and they can't actually detect it 'getting away with it' doesn't somehow make it ok.
b) technically they can detect tethering lots of ways if they really want to including:
i) - having the phone tell them when you are tethering. It is their custom firmware after all, (unless you've violated your contract and loaded non-approved firmware)
ii) - deep packet inspection will easily reveal it if you aren't encrypting all your traffic. hmmm ... this traffic on port 80... browser is identifying itself as Mozilla/5.0/Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0... hmmm that didn't originate on the iphone.
iii) - dns/port monitoring - hmmm ... why is there a lookup and traffic to the default Ubuntu NTP servers.
Now i) can be dodged with custom firmware, and ii) and iii) can be averted if you VPN into another machine, but my carrier blocks VPN traffic unless you pay for the VPN feature. Sure I might be able to bypass it by hacking my firmware and tunnelling through https or some such but if so I'm WAY outside the "rules of my contract" and have no moral leg to stand on, even if I can technically 'get away with it'.
I would count on this damaging gameplay experience.
Did idgodmode ruin Doom? Of course not.
Did being able to get Castle-9 lives in Super Mario Brothers ruin it? Even today I still can't beat World 8 without a healthy stack of lives going in.
What about updownupdownleftrightleftrightabab in umpteen million other games for extra continues, ammo, whatever, etc?
How is this really any different? I mean idgodmode made you invincible with unlimited ammo.
$1.9 million dollars for a few mp3's... inconceivable!
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Download caps and the price per GB we pay far exceed their costs.
for what its worth, cellular networks -- the topic at hand, are a completely different ballgame vs broadband. A few dozen people streaming movies can saturate a cell site that can normally support thousands of voice calls.
Uh, no.
Uh. Yeah.
You use your phone to access the internet over the cellular network.
Thank you captain obvious.
Whether or not your phone then communicates with your PC or other devices makes no difference. At all.
Actually read my post before you reply. There is no technical difference. But in terms of the business model to support it they are worlds apart.
Take a salad-bar, its the same situation. A single person can't really eat that much food, so I can offer him unlimited food for a fixed price, and make money by pricing it above what the average person will consume.
If people walk in and start expecting to 'tether' and feed their whole family off that one price, that's a game changer. I can't run an unlimited salad bar at that price anymore. The average amount consumed per "plate sold" has gone WAY up.
Similiarly, with a data device, there's really only so much data a single handset will consume. They are still mostly used for email and small files. So you can give people lots of bandwidth for a fixed price above the average cost and make money. If people start tethering, where they suddenly are using a lot more average bandwidth than before, then the pricing is no longer valid. They need to raise the rate, or charge for tethering, or block tethering, or something in response.
Have they gotten to the point where they have actually tricked you into thinking there's a difference?
There is a difference. Its subtle, but important. But its not a technical difference it has to do with with service levels, over selling, marketing, and pricing. But that doesn't mean its any less "real.
Essentially, when they give you a 6GB data plan they are overselling their capacity. They know this. I know this. And now you know this. Its not a secret, its not 'teh evil'. If -everyone- used 6GB every month they'd be unable to deliver the service reliably at that price.
Hi end users are subsidized by low end users. Low end users are happy that they have 6GB and don't have to worry about bandwidth everytime they check their email. The carrier has a good idea what the distribution of users is, and knows that it can offer 6gb for $30 bucks, overselling what they can actually deliver at that price, but secure in the knowledge that the mathematical models of their customer's usage patterns virtually gaurantee they won't have to.
But that all assumes no tethering. Its a no brainer to sell 'unlimited data' to a blackberry user a couple product cycles back-- the thing only did email really well, and web browsing poorly. Add in tethering, and suddenly a sizeable chunk of customers on unlimited go from 'low/moderate' usage measured in the kilobytes per day to super-users in the 10s of megabytes per day. Someone that historically only checks his email on his device, getting the odd document, or mp3... well now he now downloading his operating system service pack, virus software update, while watching youtube.
The mathematical model changes. Bottom line: if they allow tethering, consumption goes up sharply for a significant group of consumers. They need to deliver more total bandwidth. That additional capacity costs more to supply and maintain. So they need to charge more for it.
And so we have 'no tethering' in some areas or 'tethering feature' charges in other areas. As as we move forward, the devices become more powerful, and its actually possible to use significant bandwidth on them, but even now, bandwidth usage per unit for untethered use is an order of magnitude lower than what tethered users use.
The carriers fear they would be unable to deliver reliable service at that level at that price point with wide spread tethering. So they're beign cautious about it, and looking to tier the service so that people who need it pay for it.
A final word out to those who despise over-selling and thing the ISP shouldn't do it. Shut the hell up. We, the /. power users, benefit from over selling the most. Its our usage that is subsidized by the low end users. Its because of overselling we can get 6GB for $30 in the first place. If they got rid of overselling the prices we'd pay would shoot sky high, and we'd all pay by the megabyte or some other metering right from the first byte. That would suck.
That's not saying that ISPs are angelic entities looking out for us, but overselling is good business that generally benefits the consumer with lower prices and services offered in a form that we like (I want a 6GB plan more than a plan that charges me 1$ per MB. Over selling and makes efficient use of the available resource...it a case of the free market actually working.
It's a bit difficult to make an entertaining game based on bad porn, worse teeth and warm beer.
Really? I'm already entertained by the mere thought of such a game. :)
If the volume is enough, and/or it's for profit, or pre-release then maybe the state/federal prosecutor's office will go after you.
None of which applies here.
Yes, copyright infringement in certain circumstances can be criminal. This is not that.