My friend stole a few hundred trillion dollars from me the other day, as that's what I had valued my favourite pencil at had anyone wanted to purchase it from me.

The only difference between our situations and the ones in the article is that there are actual transactions taking place, right now, for such items. With so many of them going on, they have a bit of a competitive market, which forces them to be roughly equal in price. This means that, in practice, this virtual currency DOES have a value, as much as one could say a chocolate bar is worth anywhere between 1 and 2 dollars.

Stop being so smug with the whole "omg virtual currency has no value" bit because it obviously does - people spend their money on it. They're just 1's and 0's on a database somewhere, but then again, so is your bank account.

I would too, if thats what would happen.

What would happen is you pay $40 a month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit and most of the time you'll get 3-5Mbps because of high network usage. Right now, the caps they set are too low, which would encourage even the medium and light users to watch their bandwidth. 10Mbps all the time for the 20GB limit they set... That's like 4and a half hours a month you can use the speed you were promised! Some activities that would require that speed are playing games, streaming movies. I would not want to kill half my monthly alotted amount just by using netflix once. If they set it to 100GB, That's a little better around 22 hours, but that still means if I want 1 solid hour of gaming a night, I'm STILL going over my cap.

So ISP's that currently preform the Technical ITMP's SHOULD be able to provide that solid 10Mbps connection right now, right? Because they've effectively employed the technical solution over the economic one. How come everyone at Shaw is still bitching they don't get the full speed they paid for? Because they are not equipped to handle a 100GB cap at 10Mbps. How many of the heavy users, who download 1TB a month, are ACTUALLY going to be curbed? Little Johnny Jimmy who downloads movies for all his friends 1 months, gets scolded by mom and dad, then teachs his friends to do it instead... and it just goes around.

Let's face it, the caps in theory would work incredibly well, the problem is that the ISP's aren't equipped to handle the caps. They've been employing the technical solution and they still aren't up to snuff, so I doubt the more flexible and lenient economic plan would be any better whatsoever.

It's going to be more expensive, that 30% profit loss will be passed onto you as a user.

They'll notice an increase in the price of ebooks, or they'll notice less ebooks available.

Do you mean that in the "These shops will lose revenue from lost tourist sales" kind of way or the "Advertising is annoying, why are they linking me to the shop between every image" kind of way?

I'm always pissed off when people say that.

For Pete's sake... We didn't come from MONKEYS!

We came from a similar ancestor! Could they at least acknowledge the relationship between us and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis?

This is like saying "I am not part of my family because I wasn't born from my brother!"

Also ironic that stopping people's ability to hinder that business could be considered protecting free speech... It goes both ways, really.

I personally don't think free speech has anything to do with it. Supporting Wikileaks does not necessarily mean that you banner behind the motto "Free speech". If thats what the 15 year olds were shouting, well, all the power to them.

Woah now - there's a difference between a fake and Malware.

Essentially, a photoshop keygen that works while stealing your password isn't a fake, even though its malware.

Poster might very well have a bot on his machine - but he still hasn't come across any fakes.

I can't say it better, so I won't even try.

Welcome to every bit of Japanese Culture, EVER.

More like, "Cold Fusion? Another overpriced Adobe Product!" Jokes.

No really, just reading the full summary, what they're doing could totally be done with 1/3rd the specs but its all due to some sloppy programming practices, I'm sure.

It would be far easier if Wikileaks was in on it, not that I'm suggesting something like that, but they're in a position where they could almost fabricate any kind of information they'd want and how many people would bother checking the source if wikileaks "verifies" it?

Quite.

I also felt the need to express how this was

an interesting and fresh account, my male sibling.

Oh Come on Google, with all your money you couldn't eve pay a disinterested third party to... oh... nevermind.

Also, they're no good in the outer rim.