Re: Re: Re: Re: You forgot to mention that broadband in the USA is WORTHLESS if..
gah. the 'you' in quotes refers to the origional post by RD, not nasch's response. sorry 'bout that.
point was, even if you have a cap, 50 gig cap at decent speed isn't 'worthless'. it's actually pretty good. coverage and bandwidth/data/plan price are additional issues not considered in my arguments, of course.
Re: Re: Re: You forgot to mention that broadband in the USA is WORTHLESS if..
yes. yes i did. it's called a typo. something an edit button would fix if we had them, but we don't.
... and the summery is more like 'most of your complaints are wrong' and 'the rest, while true, mostly require an (apparently? hopefully?) unusual degree of silliness/laziness/obsessiveness to legitimise'. plus added bonus 'price-gouging sucks'. oh, and also 'streaming is dumb if you don't live right on top of the source, and may be silly from an economic standpoint also'
this is, of course, all assuming we are referring to normal residential household end users. it makes no sense at All otherwise.
i read things like this and think 'yay state regulation of infrastructure! woo!'
it'd probably get slammed in the US as 'socialist', but NZ's broadband system developed directly from it's telecommunications system... which already went everywhere due to starting off as part of the government run post office and then getting spun off as a private company... with actual Laws passed mandating that it must provide connections to, well, everywhere... though they are allowed to charge for the excessive cost of running lines up to one random house way off in the mountains, if the owners are willing to pay, they Must build it. they Must provide free local and emergency services calls. (cellphones have to provide emergency services calls even if there's no money on them and no way to bill 'em. if the battery's charged and they can get reception on the network they're programmed for, they'll do it, near enough.)
there's been competition introduced, and all sorts of other developments, but basically at the end of the day it goes everywhere and works Well Enough because the government beats the telecommunications companies over the head with laws and regulations every time it doesn't. (in the modern environment, competition between different entities at different levels, combined with breaking the old main company, which started of as a monopoly, into seperate bits in it's retail and wholesale capacities (the latter basically owning most of the cable in the country, though there is competition there too... and the competition is much more free with the use of fiber rather than copper :D) serves to drive improvement in quality so 'good enough' is only a base line, rather than the norm...)
i mean, there's practical problems with doing something like this in the USA (not least that your telcos and cable companies didn't start off as a government owned monopoly :D) but still, you'd think there'd be a lesson to learn there.
('course, places with the population of NZ get run by mayors and city councils (or equivilants) in most places... probably not a proper city in the USA that's not bigger than this country in terms of population... which Should, one would think, make it easier... but whatever...)
Re: You forgot to mention that broadband in the USA is WORTHLESS if..
come live in New Zealand for a while then.
I'm having trouble expressing my point coherantly in ways that don't require explanation of a decade and a half or so's worth of experience, but the general lesson learned is that streaming is an idiotic proposition, websites with region locks cause rage, and that a 20mb cap will see you through a whole month quite easily if you actually stop to think about your data use.
simple rule is: pace your downloads. the only way you're Ever going to hit that cap is through movie and game downloads. in the case of games, there's not much you can do but pace yourself and put more effort into making sure it's something you want before getting it. (the sites of publishers/developers you know make stuff you like are good places to start. well, usually.)
as for movies: even on your PC they're the same as TV. this is using less energy than Sleeping. if you're hitting 20gig in movies a month you're either A: using a Crap method of getting them which provides insufficient compression, B: watching an excessive amount of 'tv'. download less and get another hobby to fill the space in between, or C: downloading Massively more than you will ever get to watching, and thus should just pay more attention to what you're Getting, or finally D: some combination of the above.
i'll tell you this, also: online games? cap is meaningless, they don't shift enough data. you could play WoW, CoH, EVEonline, anything like that 24/7 for the whole month, plus patches etc, and still not hit a 20gig cap. badly designed shooters might be a different story. on the other hand, speed is a Huge Deal. lag kills (in game avatars :P )
360 dlc and demos is typically fairly small. dunno about the PS3. rule for consoles: for the games? buy the disks. that's the whole point in the arrangement in the first place. buy disk, insert, run.
PC demos and patches are typically highly compressed, and have content cut out of them in the first place. for 'a couple' read 'more than you're ever going to bother playing'
if your cap is 20 gig, the only way Youtube is going to hit it is if you use it obsessively.
your logic fails in many places.
that said, Smart ISPs who set caps for actual reasons have two ways of dealing with you going over: one: you pay extra and gain another chunk of data. two: you get your speed throttled back to whatever the network will handle at the time (that is, people who haven't yet get priority).
come to think of it, smart ISPs who set caps purely for profit would do it this way also. and it does help that the whole industry is well regulated to avoid price gouging.
basically, you're complaining about a whole list of problems with caps... that aren't true for caps significantly smaller than the one's you're talking about.
all of the above said: there is no call for data caps inside the USA other than pure profit making. unlike NZ, the resources Do exist there... the companies just don't want you to think they do :-S
... the difference depends on how EA is running their scheam. mass effect 2 was simply 'pay extra once to get bonus stuff'. however, other instances of the same system (not sure if it was EA or not) were 'pay extra or miss out on core stuff that should have been in the game right from the get go'. the entire point in the exercise is to eat into the used game market, which is detrimental to customer satisfaction and budget, And EA's long term bottom line, And the shops who serve as the hub for said market.
in the case of these Indie games, they are making the content more accessible, not less.
it has nothing to do with the size of the company, and everything to do with the dubious logic behind the actions and the positive and negative effects of said actions.
EA's actions are, at best, neutral and irrelevant. a nice bonus, but not going to bring them any extra attention (has the number of games that provide extra, 'pay to get this via the console's network' stuff exceeded those that don't yet?) as it's been done before. at worst it is equivilant to 'you bought this software and now we'll sue you if you ever install it on a second machine or have a second user use it on the same machine, ever' ... which has already been shown to be stupid.
the indie bundle, at least as presented here, is 'hey, guys, you know that cool, hassle free stuff we were offering before, which you payed us for? well, now there's more of it, and, bonus, if you want to we're going to give you the tools you need to make it more awesome if you so desire' which is to say, at worst, it does nothing (roughly analogous to EA's best result) and at best... ok, i've no got a complete grasp on the possiblities here, but it would Seem to be that other people can make more games, or mods, or whatever, to the games, adding value at 0 cost.
hopefully someone a bit more knowledgeable than i in that department can clarify the last bit. I'm not a programmer.
that said, if you can't understand the distinction, that's a problem with your thinking, because the two situations are quite different.
... *shrugs* my mother has three sons of various ages and only just barely knows how to get a music cd to play on a playstation. plenty of girls have no interest in such things at all. it's not That surprising...
it gets better: geographically Australia's actually about the same size as the USA. (ok, a Little smaller, but not much.) some of that 'fiber to the home'? (probably the 7% who miss out, but whatever) are further away from the nearest exchange than any town in the USA is from the next one over.
plus, if all else fails, if the government builds the thing they can have... oh, wait, the US doesn't have publicly owned utilities in most places does it? heh. i was about to suggest simply adding it to the rates. (local government taxes that cover things such as the water supply, maintenance of roads other than state highways, public libraries, public swimming pools, and all manner of other such things)
but yeah, if it costs so much to lay out, there's a number of ways to recover that money without breaking things, and, as the AC above me points out, it's always possible to do it a bit at a time.
of course, the US government (or is it the nation as a whole? i'm not entirely clear on that) is functionally broke... i mean, how many trillions of dollars of debt are we talking now? :S
is it even Possible to pay that off? wow.
i wandered off topic. but yeah, if the national government can't pay for it, then orginise local government to do the actual work for your 'last mile' or whatever it's called (and naturally it would also eat/pass on the costs.) still has the same result. (am i correct in thinking that current telco/cable monopoly systems keep getting in the way of attempts to do this on local initiative? I seem to remember reading something like that.)
'course, then you get NZ, which has competition and privately owned infrastructure (ok, Heavily Regulated privately owned infrastructure, but still) where in we have spy devices (or was it software?) installed at the exchanges... which the FBI claims was it's idea... great.
private ownership is, sadly, no guarantee of greater protections, nor of lesser ones. it's simply that the alignment patterns of the interests of the parties involved are different.
meaning, in this case, 'possessing the trait of being irresponsible, unthinking, feeble or ineffective', to paraphrase the NZ Oxford English dictionary.
... because obvious TAM post is obvious to the point where Everyone knows who it is?
that or 'incredibly good at pretending to be TAM person is incredibly good at pretending to be TAM to the point where everyone is fooled'
heck, one could take the scattershot method and just claim every AC who objects to the post without actually engaging any of the points was TAM... and be right 50% of the time or better (and get it regularly confirmed because TAM can't resist the temptation of taking yet Another shot at Mike, even if it's self defeating...)
seriously, you expose your identity every time you say anything here, IP address access or no.
On the post: Lessons From The US's First Broadband Plan... In 1808
Re: Re: Re: Re: You forgot to mention that broadband in the USA is WORTHLESS if..
point was, even if you have a cap, 50 gig cap at decent speed isn't 'worthless'. it's actually pretty good. coverage and bandwidth/data/plan price are additional issues not considered in my arguments, of course.
On the post: Lessons From The US's First Broadband Plan... In 1808
Re: Re: Re: You forgot to mention that broadband in the USA is WORTHLESS if..
... and the summery is more like 'most of your complaints are wrong' and 'the rest, while true, mostly require an (apparently? hopefully?) unusual degree of silliness/laziness/obsessiveness to legitimise'. plus added bonus 'price-gouging sucks'. oh, and also 'streaming is dumb if you don't live right on top of the source, and may be silly from an economic standpoint also'
this is, of course, all assuming we are referring to normal residential household end users. it makes no sense at All otherwise.
On the post: Lessons From The US's First Broadband Plan... In 1808
Re: Huh?
it'd probably get slammed in the US as 'socialist', but NZ's broadband system developed directly from it's telecommunications system... which already went everywhere due to starting off as part of the government run post office and then getting spun off as a private company... with actual Laws passed mandating that it must provide connections to, well, everywhere... though they are allowed to charge for the excessive cost of running lines up to one random house way off in the mountains, if the owners are willing to pay, they Must build it. they Must provide free local and emergency services calls. (cellphones have to provide emergency services calls even if there's no money on them and no way to bill 'em. if the battery's charged and they can get reception on the network they're programmed for, they'll do it, near enough.)
there's been competition introduced, and all sorts of other developments, but basically at the end of the day it goes everywhere and works Well Enough because the government beats the telecommunications companies over the head with laws and regulations every time it doesn't. (in the modern environment, competition between different entities at different levels, combined with breaking the old main company, which started of as a monopoly, into seperate bits in it's retail and wholesale capacities (the latter basically owning most of the cable in the country, though there is competition there too... and the competition is much more free with the use of fiber rather than copper :D) serves to drive improvement in quality so 'good enough' is only a base line, rather than the norm...)
i mean, there's practical problems with doing something like this in the USA (not least that your telcos and cable companies didn't start off as a government owned monopoly :D) but still, you'd think there'd be a lesson to learn there.
('course, places with the population of NZ get run by mayors and city councils (or equivilants) in most places... probably not a proper city in the USA that's not bigger than this country in terms of population... which Should, one would think, make it easier... but whatever...)
On the post: Lessons From The US's First Broadband Plan... In 1808
Re: You forgot to mention that broadband in the USA is WORTHLESS if..
I'm having trouble expressing my point coherantly in ways that don't require explanation of a decade and a half or so's worth of experience, but the general lesson learned is that streaming is an idiotic proposition, websites with region locks cause rage, and that a 20mb cap will see you through a whole month quite easily if you actually stop to think about your data use.
simple rule is: pace your downloads. the only way you're Ever going to hit that cap is through movie and game downloads. in the case of games, there's not much you can do but pace yourself and put more effort into making sure it's something you want before getting it. (the sites of publishers/developers you know make stuff you like are good places to start. well, usually.)
as for movies: even on your PC they're the same as TV. this is using less energy than Sleeping. if you're hitting 20gig in movies a month you're either A: using a Crap method of getting them which provides insufficient compression, B: watching an excessive amount of 'tv'. download less and get another hobby to fill the space in between, or C: downloading Massively more than you will ever get to watching, and thus should just pay more attention to what you're Getting, or finally D: some combination of the above.
i'll tell you this, also: online games? cap is meaningless, they don't shift enough data. you could play WoW, CoH, EVEonline, anything like that 24/7 for the whole month, plus patches etc, and still not hit a 20gig cap. badly designed shooters might be a different story. on the other hand, speed is a Huge Deal. lag kills (in game avatars :P )
360 dlc and demos is typically fairly small. dunno about the PS3. rule for consoles: for the games? buy the disks. that's the whole point in the arrangement in the first place. buy disk, insert, run.
PC demos and patches are typically highly compressed, and have content cut out of them in the first place. for 'a couple' read 'more than you're ever going to bother playing'
if your cap is 20 gig, the only way Youtube is going to hit it is if you use it obsessively.
your logic fails in many places.
that said, Smart ISPs who set caps for actual reasons have two ways of dealing with you going over: one: you pay extra and gain another chunk of data. two: you get your speed throttled back to whatever the network will handle at the time (that is, people who haven't yet get priority).
come to think of it, smart ISPs who set caps purely for profit would do it this way also. and it does help that the whole industry is well regulated to avoid price gouging.
basically, you're complaining about a whole list of problems with caps... that aren't true for caps significantly smaller than the one's you're talking about.
all of the above said: there is no call for data caps inside the USA other than pure profit making. unlike NZ, the resources Do exist there... the companies just don't want you to think they do :-S
On the post: Paper Industry Wishes You'd Ignore Environmentalists, Print More
Re: W.T.F....
On the post: Net Neutrality Battle Gets Silly... Astroturfers, Sock Puppets, Student Projects, Overwritten Word Docs... Oh My
Re: Who do you trust least?
(well, that varies by country, but it seems very questionable in the USA...)
On the post: Forbes Recognizes That There Are Better Business Models Than Pure Advertising
Re: Wow
for taken values of 'you', the answer is likely to be 'pancakes'
On the post: Humble Indie Bundle Hits One Million In Sales... Goes Open Source
Re:
in the case of these Indie games, they are making the content more accessible, not less.
it has nothing to do with the size of the company, and everything to do with the dubious logic behind the actions and the positive and negative effects of said actions.
EA's actions are, at best, neutral and irrelevant. a nice bonus, but not going to bring them any extra attention (has the number of games that provide extra, 'pay to get this via the console's network' stuff exceeded those that don't yet?) as it's been done before. at worst it is equivilant to 'you bought this software and now we'll sue you if you ever install it on a second machine or have a second user use it on the same machine, ever' ... which has already been shown to be stupid.
the indie bundle, at least as presented here, is 'hey, guys, you know that cool, hassle free stuff we were offering before, which you payed us for? well, now there's more of it, and, bonus, if you want to we're going to give you the tools you need to make it more awesome if you so desire' which is to say, at worst, it does nothing (roughly analogous to EA's best result) and at best... ok, i've no got a complete grasp on the possiblities here, but it would Seem to be that other people can make more games, or mods, or whatever, to the games, adding value at 0 cost.
hopefully someone a bit more knowledgeable than i in that department can clarify the last bit. I'm not a programmer.
that said, if you can't understand the distinction, that's a problem with your thinking, because the two situations are quite different.
On the post: EA Continues To Piss Off Lots Of Customers By Trying To Block Used Market With Single Use Codes
Except for Mass Effect, because i already have a significant ...err... intellectual? investment in the series... which started out 'not EA'
On the post: Obama Complains About iPads And Xboxes As Diversions
Re: Young Children
you point is, however, valid to some extent :D
On the post: As US Still Argues Over Semantics, Australia Expands Its Ambitious Broadband Plan
Re: Re:
plus, if all else fails, if the government builds the thing they can have... oh, wait, the US doesn't have publicly owned utilities in most places does it? heh. i was about to suggest simply adding it to the rates. (local government taxes that cover things such as the water supply, maintenance of roads other than state highways, public libraries, public swimming pools, and all manner of other such things)
but yeah, if it costs so much to lay out, there's a number of ways to recover that money without breaking things, and, as the AC above me points out, it's always possible to do it a bit at a time.
of course, the US government (or is it the nation as a whole? i'm not entirely clear on that) is functionally broke... i mean, how many trillions of dollars of debt are we talking now? :S
is it even Possible to pay that off? wow.
i wandered off topic. but yeah, if the national government can't pay for it, then orginise local government to do the actual work for your 'last mile' or whatever it's called (and naturally it would also eat/pass on the costs.) still has the same result. (am i correct in thinking that current telco/cable monopoly systems keep getting in the way of attempts to do this on local initiative? I seem to remember reading something like that.)
parentheses ftw!
On the post: As US Still Argues Over Semantics, Australia Expands Its Ambitious Broadband Plan
Re: I spy with my little FBI�
private ownership is, sadly, no guarantee of greater protections, nor of lesser ones. it's simply that the alignment patterns of the interests of the parties involved are different.
On the post: Students Who Caught Gym Teacher Stealing Money From Lockers May Get Punished
Re: Re: The end does not justify the means
On the post: Oh Look, Another Completely Ridiculous Wireless Broadband Bill
Re: Re: Re: Ah, yes
meaning, in this case, 'possessing the trait of being irresponsible, unthinking, feeble or ineffective', to paraphrase the NZ Oxford English dictionary.
On the post: Yet Another Study Suggests File Sharers Are Frustrated Buyers
Re:
On the post: Yet Another Study Suggests File Sharers Are Frustrated Buyers
Re: Re: Re: Being Legal is Sometime Near Impossible
'course, the tapes are harder to come by these days, and exactly how it interacts with all the encryption rubbish that gets used...
ahh, the joys of multi-channel, national and regional, free to air tv. *grins*
On the post: Songwriters Guild Claims The Internet Makes It Impossible To Create Content
Re: Re: Re:
that or 'incredibly good at pretending to be TAM person is incredibly good at pretending to be TAM to the point where everyone is fooled'
heck, one could take the scattershot method and just claim every AC who objects to the post without actually engaging any of the points was TAM... and be right 50% of the time or better (and get it regularly confirmed because TAM can't resist the temptation of taking yet Another shot at Mike, even if it's self defeating...)
seriously, you expose your identity every time you say anything here, IP address access or no.
On the post: Australian Gov't Delays Vote On Latest Censorship Proposal
Re: Australia's unofficial motto:
On the post: Why Do We Need Warrantless Wiretapping If Not A Single Wiretap Warrant Request Gets Rejected?
Re: Re: Answer
On the post: Court Says File Sharers Have No Right To Anonymity... Mostly
Re:
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