Between my girlfriend and I we used 180GB last month and that didn't include a drop of piracy. A few hours of hd streaming per day, both of us streaming spotify all day, online backup from four computers and that's most of our quota gone. At the rate we're ramping up, I expect we'll hit the comcast 250G limit before the end of the year.

Where does the notion that nobody wants to live near a wind farm?

I can see windmills from my house and I can see a coal fired power station (well i could if i could get above the treeline), I would *far* rather see more windmills. As an engineer I find them beautiful.

The thing I don't understand is why they don't have a "free" period.

If an ISP didn't count traffic from 10pm - 8am against your quota, and perhaps even bumped up your upload cap for that period, then the heavy downloaders would run all that stuff at night.

I know I already have my online backup service and my podcast updates queued to run in the middle of the night because it seems like the courteous thing to do (and it impacts my own connection less) - why not provide a real incentive to do that?

Bandwidth (like electricity) doesn't have a fixed effective cost, it's much more expensive at peak hours.

I'm not sure why that's been missed! Don't you guys want to see me there?

Actually last CES I went to was such a zoo that I think we mostly hung out and gambled with my boss' money.

I concur. I put damn near everything on credit cards and have only ever carried a balance in a couple of instances (and mostly because it was easier than moving funds out of other investments to settle it).

Depending on what promotions I'm on, I usually end up with something in the region of $1500 in cashback or rewards in a given year. Then there are extended warranty benefits, I dropped an expensive pair of sunglasses and Amex covered it. Had a paypal purchase go wrong and visa took care of the appeal for me. Then I have Amex's premium rental car coverage which gives me primary coverage for rental cars when state farm wont. The Visa concierge service is handy in a pinch, if you find yourself stuck somewhere they'll happily arrange hotels and such.

Sure you can misuse credit cards, but that doesn't make them evil.

Clearly the public still buy it.

He's going to eliminate Obamacare on day 1? It's going to be an uphill battle to do it at all unless the gop take the senate too. Doing it on day 1? Dream on.

He's also going to label China as a currency manipulator on day 1 - except that only the treasury secretary can do that.

There's loads of local interest stuff missing. I'm not sure exactly where it could be acquired from, but I know when I take local tours of historical sites there are lots of interesting stories and ties with historical figures that are almost entirely uncaptured online.

Presumably it would require citing actual history books and the likes but it would require a reasonable effort to get that all online.

That's mostly based on extrapolation of buying a needle source from somewhere like united nuclear. I suspect whoever carried out the poisoning had a more wholesale source for the material.

I've had some exposure to the hard disk industry and the same sort of thing happened there.

What ends up happening is that all the large players effectively collude to cross-license each other's portfolios and then the fact that someone has a patent on making the disk round and 3.5" doesn't really cause problems for the rest.

Of course what that does is makes it very hard for anyone new to break into the industry. I'd really love to see google do the right thing here and crush a bunch of the "obvious" patents (both on their side and apple's) and leave the licensing to things that are genuine innovation.

They've taken that away. Works on my G2, it worked on my girlfriend's old phone but when she upgraded to a Galaxy S, tmobile started charging her to tether.

It's a shame, makes me rethink staying with them

Yeah I get lots of them. They seem to come in waves, I'll get 2-3 calls a day for a few days then nothing for a while.

I've filed quite a few FTC complaints but it doesn't seem to help anything.

I've also had quite a few from someone claiming to be Wells Fargo but who can't confirm any account details of mine. I tried calling the main wf number and they didn't know anything about who called me. I'm not even sure what to do with that sort of thing.

Part of the way the middle class reduce their tax burden here is by running businesses. I hardly know anyone here that doesn't have some kind of business operation because it allows them to get various tax advantages.

Similarly the US likes to incetivize things through the tax code. I'm getting $53 because I put in an energy efficient door - in any other part of the world they'd just give that credit to the manufacturer and let the free market pass that through to the consumer, but for some reason that's not popular here.

I lived most of my life in the UK, and it simply astounded me to land here. It also allows americans to bitch about how high nominal tax rates are when many people pay less than them.

There's a reasonable summary from our co-defendant, a Mr. Tarrant Eightyfour

A site I run is allegedly on the complaint (see sig) and our user population seem to be competing to see who can get their names added to it.

I'm part of the team that run banniNation.com which is a news aggregation site with a fairly similar model to slashhdot.

While we haven't been officially served, our site and business are listed in the original complaint along with the handle of a user who mentioned Mr. Rakofsky.

We've got an official statement of sort at http://www.bannination.com/s/lawsuit and there's a link from there to a very level headed discussion about it. This definitely doesn't just affect bloggers and has further implications around the right to anonymous speech and the liability of service providers.