If I needed faster, I'd install one of the half dozen 3Com NICs I have in a box about 5' away from me. I run a DSL connection, so I'm not exactly going to saturate the NIC. If I switched to FIOS then I'd worry about a 10BT card still being in my box. Until then, it's faster than the DLS line so why sweat it?
A licensed investigator is allowed to do about anything that any private person is allowed to do, nothing more and nothing less. The difference between a licensed investigator and a private person is that the licensed investigator gets paid for it.
The other difference is that a licensed investigator has an oversite group breathing down his neck & checking up that he's doing his job according to court approved standards.
there is some justification for the lifetime+x years on copyright. e.g. if an unethical firm wants to make a film out of your book they can't just hire a hitman and then claim Public Domain, even if they get caught.
How about 14 with a 14 year renew. Or how about 28 years from publish.
You want to know the insane thing? Almost 50% of the original Dr Who series doesn't exist anymore. The masters & copies in the BBC vaults were taking up to much space so they threw them out. Radio shows from the 50s? Good luck finding them. Records from the 30s? Good luck, most are so many scraps of lacquer piled in the bottom of the sleeve.
Most copyrighted material that's over 40 years old is completely unavailable in any form, and yet it's treated as a moral obscenity that some of us are infuriated about copyrights now lasting 4 generations.
The 4chan kiddies (or more likely, their mommies and daddies) should also be subject to civil suits. Just because the internet exists, doesn't give you the right to be a sick fuck.
Here Here!. The anonymity of the internet creates a barrier between you and the consequences of your actions but it doesn't absolve you of those consequences. Personally, I think the person who sent the first Email should beaten with a baseball bat until their DNA is too scrambled to be processed. You have got to be a complete sociopath to think that that kind of behavior is acceptable under any circumstances.
This comes up again and again, as if the population were evenly distributed. I don't know how this meme got started, but it's foolish and needs to stop.
It's actually fairly accurate. The densest population centers in the US are a far cry from the population centers of Japan, Hong Kong, or Korea.
The US population is principally located in 2 locations - the Boston - DC corridor and the Seattle - LA corridor. Between them, they comprise over 60% of the US population. When it comes to population density, you're talking approximately 85% of the US population lives in 15% of the land mass.
Even under those conditions, US Broadband providers average a customer/mile of less than 10% of what their Japanese & Korean counterparts see. To some degree that does explain why rural areas are so poorly wired, however there is currently almost 3X as much dark fiber in the US as there is lit fiber so any urban area that is underserviced isn't the result of lack of fiber but rather poor execution.
if the tech support drones knew he'd been disconnected, they'd happily tell him and make him someone else's problem over in customer service.
Having spent time in a call center, most people feel that things like looking up account status is too much work if it's not in 72 pt font using the [blink] tag. I took a call from a guy who'd been through at least a half dozen people about his non-working modem. The fucking thing had never been provisioned for the account. A half dozen people can't figure out that a modem that shows on the UBR with good signal & rejection notices on the DHCP server indicates a provisioning problem?
Absolutely, and Mediasentry's evidence should be thoroughly examined and disputed, but rejecting it out of hand because the person is unlicensed is wrong IMO.
Why? There is a clearly defined way of getting information into the court system. Media Sentry & the RIAA don't follow those rules, so why should they be allowed to present their information? The alternative is to have to preface every case with a hearing on each piece of evidence to determine if it was obtained in a valid manner.
Why should the court allow a company to waste it's time with hundreds of hearings that do nothing except increase the cost of the litigation for the defendant, when it could all be reduced to 2 questions:
Are you a licensed investigator?
Did you follow the peer reviewed guidelines in obtaining this information?
Unlicensed investigator? It's a civil trial, "illegal evidence" applies only to criminal cases, and by government agents, not by civil parties.
I think that you mean "impermissible evidence" not "illegal evidence". And yes, it does apply to civil parties. If Bob breaks into my house and steals the daily diary in which I lay out my plan to defame him, he still can't use it in court. First of all, if he shows up in court with it, he'll be arrested for theft or receiving stolen property. Secondly, allowing him to use it would undermine the very rule of law which the court is attempting to enforce.
In most states only a licensed investigator is permitted to procure evidence to be used in court. Why? Because if you license investigators you can create oversite for them and ensure that they follow a set of pre-defined and pre-approved methodologies. Otherwise, each and every case has to be prefaced with a hearing on the accuracy and legitimacy of the information collected by the investigator.
Shouldn't the cops or fbi be shutting down the company?
It really depends on the exact statutes you're working with. Since they technically do nothing except monitor public information, it's not illegal anywhere I am aware of. Now, the question is "Is the evidence acquired suitable for presentation in court?" Since MediaSentry (Or whatever their name is this week) isn't licensed, has no oversite, and doesn't use standardized & validated procedures to obtain it's information, the answer should be no.
Essentially, the RIAA obtains questionable information & takes it to court. In a normal case, you could show up & tell them to get stuffed & the court should toss it because MediaSentry isn't allowed to present anything to the court & the RIAA's request for the information from the ISP boils down to "Because we want it!"
My box runs an antique JVEC 10BT NIC card (I've had it for almost 10 years & it was used when I got it) - guess what happened in 8.10. Seems someone either reused the PCI identifier or screwed it up in the lookup table because it kept trying to use a different driver. It was... interesting... to try & fix with no network connection.
The CAN-Spam act sort of provides that they actually take you off of mailing lists. The reality is that they only have to take you off the list they just mailed you from. If I run Spam-Everyone & e-mail you regarding buying an additional 3" for your inadequate male anatomy (mailing plan1), when you click on "remove me" you do 2 things, you confirm that your Email address is valid & that you take the time to at least glance at what I'm pushing. The way the law is written, I only have to remove you from plan1. I can however happily add you to plans 2-15,000 and push all of it to you. Additionally, I can then add your name to a premium list of verified addresses which I can sell to other spammers.
Let's all take a moment of reverent silence in which we honor well crafted legislation.
Do you want private companies having to compete with the government?
The local government isn't competing with anyone. They are offering a separate class of service not available through the incumbent carriers. The local duopoly members were requested to provide a level of service (equivalent to the service they took 9+billion in tax breaks to provide) and they refused. If TW were willing to provide an equivalent service, then your argument may have some relevance.
Because then you'll never really know how much money you're paying for the project.
Read the article, the books are open for audit & all the management meetings are open to the community. If you want to find out how much it's costing there isn't anything in your way. From the sounds of it, the buildout was financed by a bond not taxes, with the bond being paid off by the subscriptions.
It seems (like with many freebies from the government) that there aren't many stipulations on what they can charge to people wanting to lease space on the lines, as the price is extremely high and still prohibits smaller companies from trying to offer some type of alternative to the local monopolies.
I have a friend who runs a business reselling Verizon DSL. At one point the 3 month intro rate was cheaper than the wholesale cost of the line. It's not the first time they've pulled crap like that either - their idea of leasing their lines to competition is to try and sell it with their normal profit margin minus the extra fees they can charge.
The federal government trips over it's own feet & is inefficient almost by design - the checks & balances are supposed to prevent abuse, but that much oversight also ingrains inefficiency. On the other end, it's all about popularity and personalities.
In my town, there have been at least 2 instances where occupancy certificates for businesses have been denied by the zoning board after initial approval and after completing 2-3 rounds of new requirements. For adult entertainment sites you might reasonably ask, but no, a gym that would compete with one of the board members family members gym and a small business center in a building that a board members friend was outbid on.
I've kept my ears out for the last 14 years here & this type of behavior is relatively common in the small town around here. Annoy a board member or an influential town citizen & your life becomes a living hell. If you could measure all the pissing contests that go on in little towns, the EPA would shut them all down for untreated waste water.
If I had spent 2-3 years creating a novel, I certainly don't want somebody taking my labor without pay... it can go into the public domain after I'm dead, but not before.
Why is a creative writing more important than actual inventions? Do you really think that your "Great American Novel" is more important than the Heart/Lung Machine or a cure for AIDS?
As an inventor, I can get a max of 20 years out of a patent, and it costs me close to 40K to do that. Copyright is currently set at your lifetime plus 70 years, for free. Why should an artists work be valued so much higher than an inventors? Let's not forget that as a scientist, I can't get any form of protection for my work - raw science is neither patentable nor copywriteable.
So, why exactly is your story or painting so important to the world that you can demand payment for it for the rest of your life - and the life of your children most likely - with no added effort or cost while scientists aren't allowed to demand any payment and inventors are limited to 20 years for which they have to pay substantial sums of money?
I have never heard a good answer to that one. If you can't answer it, then you might want to reconsider your position. If copyright was structured like patents you would see 90% of the material going to public domain within 10 years because it's not profitable to pay to keep the copyright viable. Because it's free as in beer, people hang on to the copyright because it might make them a nickel some day down the line.
I don't download music, but it annoys the fuck out of me when people like you prattle on about some mystical god given right to profit forever for writing some drivel while people that actually make significant contributions to society are either denied any protection or are forced to pay repeatedly for the right that usually ends just as the demand for it peaks.
Yeah, but screwing your customers because you can't (or won't) adapt has never been a good business model.
It usually is when you have a monopoly. Until/unless a good substitute for Cable/DSL for the last mile comes along, they can get away with screwing us over because we don't have any real choice in the matter.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that I needed to spell out that what I meant by "lower prices" was "prices in the long run that will be lower than what they otherwise would be without the tiered system."
Again, won't happen under a duopoly. There is no competition and no shortage of available bandwidth. There is a shortage of purchased bandwidth. Tiered or untiered, bandwidth is the cheapest part of the service.
Charging additional fees to cover "high volume" users isn't going to produce lower prices, because the service isn't scarce to begin with. The bandwidth expense to TW is constant - they have to purchase for peak usage with arrangements for burst rates, which translates to roughly 10-20X oversell. Limiting usage/month isn't going to have any effect on the amount of bandwidth they have to purchase. If they've sold 100 customers 6Mb/s lines, they need to have between 30 & 60 Mb/s of bandwidth available to handle peak volume. Tiers that don't address the peak volume rate aren't going to alter TW's monthly bandwidth costs and consequently don't accurately pass the costs onto the people who are creating the cost.
Neither tiered pricing nor your pipe dream of truly unlimited bandwidth for a flat rate speak to the problem of the monopoly..
First, I'm not against tiers. Tiered usage is fine with me as long as the tier cost has some vague resemblance to the actual cost. Currently, bandwidth costs around $40/Mbps (Reference) retail for an OC48. That roughly translates to 320GB/month or 12 cents per GB or a 580% profit margin on the $55/40GB package. Remember, that's retail - TW is certainly moving their bits a lot cheaper than that.
Second, a tier should have some resemblance to the bandwidth I'm contracted for. I certainly shouldn't be charged extra starting at a 0.25% usage (5GB on a 6Mb/s cable modem).
Third, a tiering structure should resolve the actual issue of peak bandwidth consumption. The TW plan does nothing to resolve that issue as it remains just as expensive for me the customer to stream music & videos @ 6PM M-F as it is to pre-download them @ 2:30AM - whereas my 6PM usage increases the required minimum bandwidth and the 2:30AM usage is simply consuming already paid for bandwidth.
Sure monopolies will treat the customers like shit, but that doesn't make the flat rate "unlimited" plan sensible
Price gouging is certainly a favored tactic of a monopoly, and price gouging while creating an artificial need to purchase additional products is a monopolies wet dream. Given the fact that TW's tiering system doesn't solve the perceived problem, it only puts more cash in their pocket for doing nothing, it doesn't exactly fall under the heading of sensible either.
I don't want to be raped by TW and need to run a server so I'm stuck for now.
I gave up & went with a VPS over @ Tektonic, $15/ month for a 2.2GHz processor slice w/ guaranteed 100Mb/s pipe & 300GB transfer/month. My Asterisk server certainly runs better there than it ever did inside my DSL network. Upgrades to the cap, processor, and memory are relatively cheap as well.
For me, it's cheaper to have the server off site like that than it was going to be to switch from 1.5Mb/768Kb DSL to the 6Mb/1.5Mb cable offering. As a bonus, I got to drop hosting fees for my websites.
For everyone else, it should mean lower prices and more stable service.
Can I have whatever it is that you're taking that's making the sky such a pretty rosy color? Check their tiering structure, they didn't drop prices when they put caps on it. They won't in the future either.
If this were truly a competitive market, then you might actually see that. The problem is you're looking at a monopoly marketplace for the last mile. With Cable & DSL being the only 2 viable broadband technologies in place for 90% of the people who can get them, there isn't significant enough market pressure to force any price lowering.
Why do you think they are taking the Chicago suburbs to court over community laid last mile? If the Cable/Telco companies have to actually compete on price & service quality, then you would see low tier service at a lowered price. Until then, expect them to make low end tiers out of their normal price & rape you for using enough bandwidth to actually use anyones VOIP or Video service but theirs.
LVM is a nightmare when you cross drives with it - it's like having a striped drive - any problem to either one will destroy the entire volume.
Right now I'm configured with:
/boot (as it says)
/ (duh)
/home (yep)
/shared (file sharing, web, music/video server files)
/swap (duh)
The separate/boot partition should tell you how old my system started. I had to rebuild the drive because the 8.10 installer required more space than the/boot partition had. Moving & growing the first partition on the drive was a bit nerve wracking.
The/shared and/home partitions are on a second drive that I disconnect prior to doing any updates. That way, if something goes horribly wrong, I just wipe & reinstall. Once it works, I edit fstab to map them back in.
It's just not the same as Nero signing a deal with an OEM to have their app preloaded.
The point is, that if I as a vendor get to load XP/Vista/CE onto a box for $25, and can get MS to kick in $Millions in advertising and 15 companies to pay me $1 for each computer I preload with their app, it really costs me $15 to load Windows onto each box, plus MS will pick up the tab for 10, 20, 50% of my advertising budget. That's the kind of deal that makes marketing droids drool.
If I preload Linux, I get... nothing. Sure it doesn't cost me that net $15 to load Windows, but MS won't help me advertise. How many thousands of extra systems do I have to sell to break even again? Is it worth it? From the standard PC market the answer is generally - no.
On the other hand, in specialty markets the answer is often "yes". The original netbooks and OLPC project both were ideal for Linux inclusion - because MS wasn't able to play in the marketspace. With the bumped specs, they can play & more importantly, they can bring their advertising dollars with them.
Not every OEM is going to stand up against MS and not take the kickbacks when it means increased profits as long as the product sells.
It's not just MS. Yahoo, AOL, and a half dozen other companies also pay HP & Dell to preload their products on the computers. Why do you think Dell charges $30 to ship you a clean system without the added crap? Because they loose money by not shipping the crap on that particular machine.
It's free marketing money - they build a custom install image for every line anyway, adding the crap once to the image and then making extra profit for every machine they sell is just about a perfect way to boost the bottom line.
Warner is asking universities to give money to prevent students being sued.
This only protects against being sued by Warner.
Why would anybody have thought any differently?
Well, if it were an actual license from Warner - then students couldn't be sued for distributing Warner material - they would be covered against the bands & writers by Warner's license. As a covenant not to sue, well, it's really just extortion.
I can certainly patent sexwidget and have a perfectly legal monopoly as the only company in the world producing them. Only if I try to force people to do other things not directly related to my sexwidget in order to get access to them is it considered abusing my monopoly status. In other words, if I try to force retailers to purchase other products like sexfoo & sexbar as a requirement for being able to sell sexwidgets, I'm abusing my monopoly.
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If I needed faster, I'd install one of the half dozen 3Com NICs I have in a box about 5' away from me. I run a DSL connection, so I'm not exactly going to saturate the NIC. If I switched to FIOS then I'd worry about a 10BT card still being in my box. Until then, it's faster than the DLS line so why sweat it?
The other difference is that a licensed investigator has an oversite group breathing down his neck & checking up that he's doing his job according to court approved standards.
How about 14 with a 14 year renew. Or how about 28 years from publish.
You want to know the insane thing? Almost 50% of the original Dr Who series doesn't exist anymore. The masters & copies in the BBC vaults were taking up to much space so they threw them out. Radio shows from the 50s? Good luck finding them. Records from the 30s? Good luck, most are so many scraps of lacquer piled in the bottom of the sleeve.
Most copyrighted material that's over 40 years old is completely unavailable in any form, and yet it's treated as a moral obscenity that some of us are infuriated about copyrights now lasting 4 generations.
Here Here!. The anonymity of the internet creates a barrier between you and the consequences of your actions but it doesn't absolve you of those consequences. Personally, I think the person who sent the first Email should beaten with a baseball bat until their DNA is too scrambled to be processed. You have got to be a complete sociopath to think that that kind of behavior is acceptable under any circumstances.
It's actually fairly accurate. The densest population centers in the US are a far cry from the population centers of Japan, Hong Kong, or Korea.
The US population is principally located in 2 locations - the Boston - DC corridor and the Seattle - LA corridor. Between them, they comprise over 60% of the US population. When it comes to population density, you're talking approximately 85% of the US population lives in 15% of the land mass.
Even under those conditions, US Broadband providers average a customer/mile of less than 10% of what their Japanese & Korean counterparts see. To some degree that does explain why rural areas are so poorly wired, however there is currently almost 3X as much dark fiber in the US as there is lit fiber so any urban area that is underserviced isn't the result of lack of fiber but rather poor execution.
Having spent time in a call center, most people feel that things like looking up account status is too much work if it's not in 72 pt font using the [blink] tag. I took a call from a guy who'd been through at least a half dozen people about his non-working modem. The fucking thing had never been provisioned for the account. A half dozen people can't figure out that a modem that shows on the UBR with good signal & rejection notices on the DHCP server indicates a provisioning problem?
Why? There is a clearly defined way of getting information into the court system. Media Sentry & the RIAA don't follow those rules, so why should they be allowed to present their information? The alternative is to have to preface every case with a hearing on each piece of evidence to determine if it was obtained in a valid manner.
Why should the court allow a company to waste it's time with hundreds of hearings that do nothing except increase the cost of the litigation for the defendant, when it could all be reduced to 2 questions:
I think that you mean "impermissible evidence" not "illegal evidence". And yes, it does apply to civil parties. If Bob breaks into my house and steals the daily diary in which I lay out my plan to defame him, he still can't use it in court. First of all, if he shows up in court with it, he'll be arrested for theft or receiving stolen property. Secondly, allowing him to use it would undermine the very rule of law which the court is attempting to enforce.
In most states only a licensed investigator is permitted to procure evidence to be used in court. Why? Because if you license investigators you can create oversite for them and ensure that they follow a set of pre-defined and pre-approved methodologies. Otherwise, each and every case has to be prefaced with a hearing on the accuracy and legitimacy of the information collected by the investigator.
It really depends on the exact statutes you're working with. Since they technically do nothing except monitor public information, it's not illegal anywhere I am aware of. Now, the question is "Is the evidence acquired suitable for presentation in court?" Since MediaSentry (Or whatever their name is this week) isn't licensed, has no oversite, and doesn't use standardized & validated procedures to obtain it's information, the answer should be no.
Essentially, the RIAA obtains questionable information & takes it to court. In a normal case, you could show up & tell them to get stuffed & the court should toss it because MediaSentry isn't allowed to present anything to the court & the RIAA's request for the information from the ISP boils down to "Because we want it!"
My box runs an antique JVEC 10BT NIC card (I've had it for almost 10 years & it was used when I got it) - guess what happened in 8.10. Seems someone either reused the PCI identifier or screwed it up in the lookup table because it kept trying to use a different driver. It was ... interesting ... to try & fix with no network connection.
Let's all take a moment of reverent silence in which we honor well crafted legislation.
The local government isn't competing with anyone. They are offering a separate class of service not available through the incumbent carriers. The local duopoly members were requested to provide a level of service (equivalent to the service they took 9+billion in tax breaks to provide) and they refused. If TW were willing to provide an equivalent service, then your argument may have some relevance.
Read the article, the books are open for audit & all the management meetings are open to the community. If you want to find out how much it's costing there isn't anything in your way. From the sounds of it, the buildout was financed by a bond not taxes, with the bond being paid off by the subscriptions.
I have a friend who runs a business reselling Verizon DSL. At one point the 3 month intro rate was cheaper than the wholesale cost of the line. It's not the first time they've pulled crap like that either - their idea of leasing their lines to competition is to try and sell it with their normal profit margin minus the extra fees they can charge.
The federal government trips over it's own feet & is inefficient almost by design - the checks & balances are supposed to prevent abuse, but that much oversight also ingrains inefficiency. On the other end, it's all about popularity and personalities.
In my town, there have been at least 2 instances where occupancy certificates for businesses have been denied by the zoning board after initial approval and after completing 2-3 rounds of new requirements. For adult entertainment sites you might reasonably ask, but no, a gym that would compete with one of the board members family members gym and a small business center in a building that a board members friend was outbid on.
I've kept my ears out for the last 14 years here & this type of behavior is relatively common in the small town around here. Annoy a board member or an influential town citizen & your life becomes a living hell. If you could measure all the pissing contests that go on in little towns, the EPA would shut them all down for untreated waste water.
Why is a creative writing more important than actual inventions? Do you really think that your "Great American Novel" is more important than the Heart/Lung Machine or a cure for AIDS?
As an inventor, I can get a max of 20 years out of a patent, and it costs me close to 40K to do that. Copyright is currently set at your lifetime plus 70 years, for free. Why should an artists work be valued so much higher than an inventors? Let's not forget that as a scientist, I can't get any form of protection for my work - raw science is neither patentable nor copywriteable.
So, why exactly is your story or painting so important to the world that you can demand payment for it for the rest of your life - and the life of your children most likely - with no added effort or cost while scientists aren't allowed to demand any payment and inventors are limited to 20 years for which they have to pay substantial sums of money?
I have never heard a good answer to that one. If you can't answer it, then you might want to reconsider your position. If copyright was structured like patents you would see 90% of the material going to public domain within 10 years because it's not profitable to pay to keep the copyright viable. Because it's free as in beer, people hang on to the copyright because it might make them a nickel some day down the line.
I don't download music, but it annoys the fuck out of me when people like you prattle on about some mystical god given right to profit forever for writing some drivel while people that actually make significant contributions to society are either denied any protection or are forced to pay repeatedly for the right that usually ends just as the demand for it peaks.
It usually is when you have a monopoly. Until/unless a good substitute for Cable/DSL for the last mile comes along, they can get away with screwing us over because we don't have any real choice in the matter.
Again, won't happen under a duopoly. There is no competition and no shortage of available bandwidth. There is a shortage of purchased bandwidth. Tiered or untiered, bandwidth is the cheapest part of the service.
Charging additional fees to cover "high volume" users isn't going to produce lower prices, because the service isn't scarce to begin with. The bandwidth expense to TW is constant - they have to purchase for peak usage with arrangements for burst rates, which translates to roughly 10-20X oversell. Limiting usage/month isn't going to have any effect on the amount of bandwidth they have to purchase. If they've sold 100 customers 6Mb/s lines, they need to have between 30 & 60 Mb/s of bandwidth available to handle peak volume. Tiers that don't address the peak volume rate aren't going to alter TW's monthly bandwidth costs and consequently don't accurately pass the costs onto the people who are creating the cost.
First, I'm not against tiers. Tiered usage is fine with me as long as the tier cost has some vague resemblance to the actual cost. Currently, bandwidth costs around $40/Mbps (Reference) retail for an OC48. That roughly translates to 320GB/month or 12 cents per GB or a 580% profit margin on the $55/40GB package. Remember, that's retail - TW is certainly moving their bits a lot cheaper than that.
Second, a tier should have some resemblance to the bandwidth I'm contracted for. I certainly shouldn't be charged extra starting at a 0.25% usage (5GB on a 6Mb/s cable modem).
Third, a tiering structure should resolve the actual issue of peak bandwidth consumption. The TW plan does nothing to resolve that issue as it remains just as expensive for me the customer to stream music & videos @ 6PM M-F as it is to pre-download them @ 2:30AM - whereas my 6PM usage increases the required minimum bandwidth and the 2:30AM usage is simply consuming already paid for bandwidth.
Price gouging is certainly a favored tactic of a monopoly, and price gouging while creating an artificial need to purchase additional products is a monopolies wet dream. Given the fact that TW's tiering system doesn't solve the perceived problem, it only puts more cash in their pocket for doing nothing, it doesn't exactly fall under the heading of sensible either.
I gave up & went with a VPS over @ Tektonic, $15/ month for a 2.2GHz processor slice w/ guaranteed 100Mb/s pipe & 300GB transfer/month. My Asterisk server certainly runs better there than it ever did inside my DSL network. Upgrades to the cap, processor, and memory are relatively cheap as well.
For me, it's cheaper to have the server off site like that than it was going to be to switch from 1.5Mb/768Kb DSL to the 6Mb/1.5Mb cable offering. As a bonus, I got to drop hosting fees for my websites.
Can I have whatever it is that you're taking that's making the sky such a pretty rosy color? Check their tiering structure, they didn't drop prices when they put caps on it. They won't in the future either.
If this were truly a competitive market, then you might actually see that. The problem is you're looking at a monopoly marketplace for the last mile. With Cable & DSL being the only 2 viable broadband technologies in place for 90% of the people who can get them, there isn't significant enough market pressure to force any price lowering.
Why do you think they are taking the Chicago suburbs to court over community laid last mile? If the Cable/Telco companies have to actually compete on price & service quality, then you would see low tier service at a lowered price. Until then, expect them to make low end tiers out of their normal price & rape you for using enough bandwidth to actually use anyones VOIP or Video service but theirs.
LVM is a nightmare when you cross drives with it - it's like having a striped drive - any problem to either one will destroy the entire volume.
Right now I'm configured with:
The separate /boot partition should tell you how old my system started. I had to rebuild the drive because the 8.10 installer required more space than the /boot partition had. Moving & growing the first partition on the drive was a bit nerve wracking.
The /shared and /home partitions are on a second drive that I disconnect prior to doing any updates. That way, if something goes horribly wrong, I just wipe & reinstall. Once it works, I edit fstab to map them back in.
The point is, that if I as a vendor get to load XP/Vista/CE onto a box for $25, and can get MS to kick in $Millions in advertising and 15 companies to pay me $1 for each computer I preload with their app, it really costs me $15 to load Windows onto each box, plus MS will pick up the tab for 10, 20, 50% of my advertising budget. That's the kind of deal that makes marketing droids drool.
If I preload Linux, I get ... nothing. Sure it doesn't cost me that net $15 to load Windows, but MS won't help me advertise. How many thousands of extra systems do I have to sell to break even again? Is it worth it? From the standard PC market the answer is generally - no.
On the other hand, in specialty markets the answer is often "yes". The original netbooks and OLPC project both were ideal for Linux inclusion - because MS wasn't able to play in the marketspace. With the bumped specs, they can play & more importantly, they can bring their advertising dollars with them.
It's not just MS. Yahoo, AOL, and a half dozen other companies also pay HP & Dell to preload their products on the computers. Why do you think Dell charges $30 to ship you a clean system without the added crap? Because they loose money by not shipping the crap on that particular machine.
It's free marketing money - they build a custom install image for every line anyway, adding the crap once to the image and then making extra profit for every machine they sell is just about a perfect way to boost the bottom line.
Well, if it were an actual license from Warner - then students couldn't be sued for distributing Warner material - they would be covered against the bands & writers by Warner's license. As a covenant not to sue, well, it's really just extortion.
No, their not. Abusing a monopoly position is.
I can certainly patent sexwidget and have a perfectly legal monopoly as the only company in the world producing them. Only if I try to force people to do other things not directly related to my sexwidget in order to get access to them is it considered abusing my monopoly status. In other words, if I try to force retailers to purchase other products like sexfoo & sexbar as a requirement for being able to sell sexwidgets, I'm abusing my monopoly.