I'm in fairly affluent Howard County, MD, next door to fairly affluent Montgomery County, MD. While we have 'competition', it definitely smacks of collusion with both sides taking advantage of this being a heavily moneyed area. Our options:

Comcast internet only:
low tier $59.99 ($76.95 after month 12)
high tier $89.99 ($114.95 after month 12)
(i've seen cheaper comcast existing elsewhere, but those are prices here)

Comcast bundle:
low tier $79.99 ($144.95 after month 12, 2 yr contract requires 12 months at this price)
high tier $89.99 ($155.49 after month 12, 2 yr contract requires 12 months at this price)

FIOS only bundles (tv, phone, internet) in our area. You can't get just internet.
low tier $89.99 ($124.99 after month 24)
high tier $144.99 ($179.99 after month 24)
both also mandatory 1 time $70 activation fee, monthly $5 rental fee (can't provide your own equipment) and 1 time mandatory $230 ETF deposit (total BS charge - refunded as *credit* after month 24)

Also used to have Cavalier DSL but they no longer provide residential access.

Garbage options designed to fleece IMO.

I'm tired of this 'bandwidth isn't free' point being thrown around. Once the infrastructure is there, it is a fixed cost, essentially free. Traffic to point A is the same as traffic to point B, or no traffic at all. The only reason for different pricing is human nature.

The simplest (indirect) analogy I can think of.. once I have the infrastructure (in this case, cable boxes per TV) I'll pay the same monthly price for my TV bill if I have 10 TVs in my house running channels 24/7 vs a single TV viewing 2 hours 5 days a week. I don't get charged more for more simultaneous TV channels, conversely, I don't get a discount if I happen to leave the TV off the entire month. The signal already exists. It's a fixed cost.

A couple things..

1) Your Fascism is bungled with Capitalism. Fascism has fuckall to do with big business controlling government. There is no big business under fascism.
2) Socialism and Fascism are the same thing, one is left wing, the other is right wing. In either case, government controls both (Soc: regulate, Fas: nationalize).
3) Capitalism is the monopoly game where one big business ends up with everything and can control government.

Once built, bandwidth is unlimited and free. The problem comes down to human nature and everyone wanting to make their buck off it.

what exactly is this topic saying?

and awesomey.

http://www.lwks.com/

During World War 2 Germany was counterfeiting British currency (pounds, but not sure what the paper is called (notes?)) to destabilize what little power the British economy had left. IIRC they were still in circulation through the 50s. Germany also started printing US dollars towards the end of the war but I think by that point it was too late for anything to really come of it.

(i vaguely remember something about this in highschool world history class, but I could very well be pulling this out of my ass faik)

does this make South Carolina the bottom 2%?

VLC doesn't compress output when you increase gain and setting the volume in VLC above 100% is increasing gain. Increasing gain introduces clipping. Clipping starts hitting an amplifiers peak wattage (vs rated) and peak wattage will damage speakers. Paraphrasing the developer, it's embiggening the waveform which can easily destroy hardware.

Turn up some music in VLC above 100% and you'll start getting crackling and awful digital distortion. That clipping pushed out through any speakers (let alone tiny laptop speakers) will start damaging sooner or later.

Garageband is (at least up to 2010ish - not sure if recent? versions have robbed anything) a surprisingly powerful music program. Logic (& other daws) add a lot of editing specific features that really enable you to get extremely anal with your work, but all of the underlying 'record/punch/trim/level/etcetc' concepts are there and do what you expect them to do. Garageband does notation along with midi / wave substitution and add in the JamPacks (all included free with MainStage on app store iirc) to replace stock GM sounds and everything the topic poster wants is there.

A better analogy would be telling a Photoshop user to try GetPaint.net / Paint.NET. Not the same as Photoshop, but all of the essentials and editing concepts are nearly identical. You can easily accomplish whatever it is your trying to do.

$.02 As much as I love and try to solely OSS, there are no options for this specific case. Ardour and Rosegarden are nice enough, but in much the same way Gimp isn't Photoshop, neither are those suitable alternatives. (primarily, asio-ish low latency audio/hardware isn't reliable ime, and there are no real options for upgraded GM soundbanks short of creating them yourself (which will end up consuming easily 88x more time and energy than the music being written in the first place))

I'd consider the argument that 'may teach' mumbo-jumbo is exactly the same as 'do teach' mumbo-jumbo. The threshold of accepting mumbo-jumbo has already been crossed. The implementation is secondary at that point.

Earlier this week I purchased a california king bedroom set (mattress/frame/bedinabagset/headboard/nighttables), new dressers, a 39" lcd tv, some moderately nice jewelry including a very nice watch (kid dropped mine) and an ipad mini for my wife's upcoming birthday, solely using BTC (~1.7btc) through Overstock.com.

[ upgrading the bedroom ;) ]

Outside of actual cash, every valuable asset you own also needs to be converted to cash before you can use it. You can't buy groceries with a paid off car. You can't pay for parking with equity in your house. You can't pay for a car with jewelry. You can't go see a movie in a theater with organic vegetables you grew yourself.

All of those things have $cashvalue$, but you have to convert to cash first. It's no different than BTC.

Nobody (for most quantities of everybody) upgrades computers. Some of us may replace a component occasionally, but the bulk of us [people in general] replace everything all at once. I don't remember ever having an employer that upgraded systems piecemeal, just the entire systems. In my college years (late 90s, height of the .com boom and the era of the nerdnik computer show) everyone bought prebuilt local mom and pop shop systems. A few of us may have sprung for fancy Plextor burners, but again, we were rare.

Also, I lean towards the mindset that every time you replace a motherboard you're starting a fresh system even if you're reusing other older components. I had an Antec 900 case that housed an Intel 945 something, a C2D, a C2Q, an FX and at least as many GPU revisions (nv8600, nv9800, ati4890, ati6950, nv760),

Was ATX even a thing 13 years ago?

[just nitpickery, i wanted to cancel out your anecdote with mine]

We still ban books? JFC, that's embarrassing. Aliens are laughing at us.

This is the Christmas equivalent of April 1 Slashdot. Was wondering if the site would make an appearance again this year.