Recordable DVDs are completely unsuitable for archiving.

I'm not *done* with my optical drive, but I'm done with an internal one that costs a fortune to fix/replace/repair if something goes wrong.

I'm basically expecting the next 15 inch Macbook Pro to have no built in optical drive, offer an option to have an SSD for the OS and a set of spinning platters to store huge amounts of data and to be compatible with Apple's $79 external superdrive.

This will let me rip a CD or a DVD when I need too, and to leave it at home when I don't. When it breaks it'll cost me $79 for a new one, and not the $150+installation (which I can do myself, but takes time) for my current MacBook Pro.

I don't expect there to be a "15-inch MacBook Air" per se, as the Airs are really focused on super portable machines, and offer a limited number of ports to connect and expand too. 15" machines are the workhorse of the laptop world, striking a balance between the desktop replacement 17" screens and the portable but squint inducing 13" screens.

I could be wrong, of course, it's been known to happen.

which is to say: your method depends on a person receiving the response, noticing it, parsing it properly for your email address, and then remembering to delete it from their address book/list of remembered email addresses.

which is to say that it doesn't really work.

Not really though. The cost of bandwidth is somewhat arbitrary, in the way that the price of automotive fuel is arbitrary: that is, there are real hard costs associated with it but they're not the major input and the price is driven quite a bit more by demand (which in both of these cases has proven to be extremely elastic) and not as much by inputs.

It doesn't cost my cable company $40 more per household in equipment to provide service to my home, which is already plumbed for cable. They didn't even have to come in to install it. Despite this, the price for "normal high speed internet" has remained at about $40 a month since my first installation, some 10 or 12 years ago.

The inputs don't nearly equate to the costs they're asking and the number of gigabytes I pull per month has nothing to do with how much pipe they have to lay, except inasmuch as they want to provide a certain *quality* or service to a give number of customers and so avoid saturating a pipe.

I just add them to a blacklist. It's a more permanent solution.

Shit. I thought we already changed everything. I'm not buying anything else until we stop changing things!

Well, that's a little bit childish when expressed that way, even if the sentiment is true.

They need revenue to pay for the upgrades. The problem is there's no direct correlation between the bandwidth used by a single customer (or even an average aggregate group of customers) and those upgrades.

No one's disputing the fact that these guys need money, it's their desire to bill you for usage which creates a situation that effectively stifles innovation and adoption of new services that's in dispute here.

To your point, though, they are exploiting a monopoly that they've historically had and that, of course, is exactly governments have historically broken up monopolies.

It's not going to change the fact that in virtually every market *except Toronto* you're buying your connection from your phone company or your cable company directly. Toronto seems to be the only city with the critical mass and regulatory structure to allow third party providers to survive and flourish. It hasn't happened here in Vancouver.

You're not expecting the CRTC to have a thorough, comprehensive technical understanding of the industry they're regulating, are you? Seriously: let me know how that works out for you.

Frankly, Usage Based Billing is a secondary concern to Net Neutrality. Every internet service provider in Canada was built on a monopoly granted to them by the Government of the day (literally or in essence) to provide services that can *now* be replaced by online IP based services. They all have a vested interest in retaining those monopolies and the additional bills you incur as a result.

I get my connection from the *only* cable provider in the mega-city I live in. They could easily start throttling streaming video and impede the technical growth of 1.7 million people.

The CRTC seems like not much more than a cabal run by the large telecoms these days. They're supposed to be an advocate FOR CANADIANS not for the businesses. When they start doing that, I'll have hope.

Apple pulled this from Mail with Lion for that reason. Spammers don't really care if your email is real or not. At least not much.

if the people who responded to this actually had some knowledge about the United Kingdom's legal structure.

Probably not going to happen.

In Canada, the Security Guard's case would be dubious. While a shopping mall is private property it's not "private" private property. They could legitimately ask you to leave, but not confiscate your property.

This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the case in the United Kingdom.

Rght..so they designed a port that has multiple charging pins, av in and out data connections for more than one bus and a variety of other features based on "make it this wide and this thin--even though that other port did none of it."

Right...

Sheesh. D people seriously just post random brain matter up here and see what sticks?

Lucas uses the Shakespearean interpretation argument on occasion. I don't buy it: it's not someone else interpreting, it's his senile mind changing.

The problem is people keep buying the damn movies. Remember when Coke changed their formula and what happened then? Yeah: if people stopped buying the releases, the originals would be back.

Never gonna happen, sadly.

Heh. Damn iPad keyboard. Sorry!

So it's OK to add things unless you think the additions are bad? Who the fuck are you: Irwin Kirshner?