Does your agreement with them specify a CIR or a MIR?

You see, when you are willing to pay for these things, you will get these things. When you aren't, you get to share resources with other people. Imagine that, pooling resources so everyone can share something a little better than you could have on your own without any help.

That's really the gist of what residential ISPs are about: Pooling resources so people can share a higher bandwidth connection than any one of them could buy individually.

56k modems did exist back in 1996, as two different standards: K56Flex and X2. It wasn't until later that v.90 spec united both standards into one universal 56k standard.

Sure it is. It's a double-negative meaning "regarding". Sort of like ((-1 * 1) * -1), which ends up being 1. Just most people don't understand the concept of multi-negative words actually being positive instead of extra-negative.

Is this just a problem with FVWM? I know I've been doing it for years in both FreeBSD and Linux. I've done it with FreeBSD running Windowmaker as early as 2002-2003, iirc. And I've done it on Linux with KDE and Gnome.

I've done it with Matrox, ATI, and Nvidia cards. I guess I'm not really sure what the submitter is talking about, because it works for me just as he's asking for without any special hardware.

In fact, in linux running Ubuntu, this was the default configuration as I recall, and I've actually got this working on the Ubuntu 9.10 right here.

Residential connections usually have either NO CIR or a very very low CIR.

What people who are trying to download 10 DVD's a day are doing is NOT typical use, and it does impact not just their local ISP, but the remote end as well as the whole internet, really.

As a small ISP myself, I don't care if my commercial customer who has the foresight to know they want to use more bandwidth, and buy a higher CIR from me use what they paid for. I have a problem with people paying $30 a month for a residential connection with no/low CIR and expecting me to give them the equivilant of a 100% CIR on the advertised speed.

It just doesn't work that way. If that's what you want, go buy your own 10MB line from Level3, Qwest, etc. I'm sure the $300+ you're going to be paying will give you an even greater feeling of entitlement. And, hey. People will still care that you're doing illegal things with your connection, by the way. I get letters all the time (And the occasional Subpeona from some law enforcement of another) about p2p users. Unless, of course, you're trying to say you like saturating consumer-level circuits by hosting massive amounts of F/OSS torrents?

Well, another small ISP here. Couple of things. First off, customers are NOT paying for what's called a CIR. So, of course the service is "oversold". Every service provider industry is "oversold". Landlines, Cell Phones, Car Mechanics, TV Repairmen, Satellite TV, even Tech Support. You think there's one guy in India sitting there waiting for you to call about your Dell? No, of course not. By definition, service providers HAVE to oversell to survive.

Secondly, it's really not about just one person doing something like this as a small ISP. Yes, one person doing such can have a seriously negative impact on the rest of the users, but it's when you get multiple people doing it that really compounds the problem. One torrent user generally isn't too much of a problem. Get two or three with high connection limits, and up/down set to unlimited, and you have a serious problem on your hands.

Finally, equipment is expensive, commercial connections are expensive. If you don't believe me, go price out some comparable commercial internet connections from Cogent, Level3, any of the baby bells (Verizon, Qwest, AT&T/Cingular, etc), and you'll see that you'll easily be paying 10x more than what a cable/FiOS user is going to pay for a residential connection. There's a reason, and it's up in the first point.

You're misreading the contract between you and the ISP. It's unlimited in that it's not metered. They're not going to charge you any more for downloading 20GB as 100GB. But, it's not unlimited in the Download at max speed 24/7 unlimited.

What you want is what's called a CIR/MIR (Committed Information Rate, or Minimum Information Rate). Those are usually offered with commercial connectivity contracts after some form of negotiation. Residential connections DO NOT usually have a CIR. Thus, they are cheap.

Go read your agreement you signed with your ISP if you don't believe me.

It would be better if the laws were changed to say that any businesses which may possibly cause pollution must be held liable both on the corporate entity level and the officers and management personally held responsible.

It could be instituted similar to how contractors must be bonded and insured. Maybe the bond amount is based on the amount of damage that is expected to be caused assuming all safe, legal precautions are taken.

But I think something along those lines is going to be the only way to hold these entities liable. Hold the people behind them personally responsible and you'll see that they'll make every effort they possibly can to do what they do safely.

As for them outsourcing toxic industrial jobs - so? If they care that little for the people, or the environment, I personally wouldn't want them anywhere near me. Let them go pollute someplace else and get the irresponsible government over there to clean it up instead.

I take it you have never used the app store. I could see it working beautifully.

It doesn't allow you to reflash your PSP with CFW, but it does exploit a vulnerability which lets it temporarily boot a customized version, which does allow you all the benefits you'd normally have. The best part from a warranty standpoint is that there really isn't anything left behind on the PSP itself that could be used as evidence of doing something which voids it. Ie, it doesn't actually reflash the system so without a specially formatted memory stick, it boots up clean.

Are you seriously trying to say that as a geek you couldn't figure out how to get FreeBSD installed on a system? Or that other geeks attempting to benchmark various *nix distros somehow can't figure it out?

It's really not rocket science here. The installer for FreeBSD is more or less a text (curses) based equivalent of Ubuntu's installer. Just (off the top of my head, the specifics I'm sure have changed over time) "express -> "A" for use entire disk" -> standard -> "A" for auto defaults -> "All" for install all the base packages (personally I usually do with just the bare minimum) -> choose CD or FTP install -> let it do it's thing.

You don't get much more hand-holding than that without using a GUI-centric *nix distro like Ubuntu, FC or SuSe.