no multiple choice?

Balmer .. is that you?

Good luck also untangling the dependency mess in software, I doubt it would be difficult to pin down who is really at fault.

Think of the mess when people start suing developers of web applications!

App Developer: Its the browser!
Browser developer: its the JavaScript library!
JavaScript library Dev: its the VM developers!
user again: Yeah lets sue Sun!
Javascript developer: JavaScript is not ...you know what ..your absolutely right! go for it

User can't find Sun and sues Microsoft for VBScript because its the closest thing to it.

Microsoft: Oracle bought Sun.
Oracle: Hell I knew I shouldn't have bought Sun, anyway, Java is OpenSourced so I have no control over it.
Java developers: JavaScript is not Java!
User: Why am I here?
Java developers: I don't know, but if there is anything wrong, its usually Microsoft's fault.
Microsoft: .... [chairs start to fly and hit user on the head]
Microsoft Lawyer: Lets counter suit the chair manufacturers for not anticipating our use case.

Fast forward to court date after every software and furniture manufacturer under the sun gets involved in the case....

User's lawyer: What do you mean you got windows off of pirate bay? You could have mentioned this small detail before I took on your case!
RIAA Lawyer: Don't worry, you can plead insanity, and I can take it from here.
TPB: Argh! We be hosting the tracker only mate! not the software! the software be hosted in china.

After a very long court proceeding which involved everybody under the sun and caused three world wars, two nuclear stand-offs, and countless bus parties... a strange group of people came crashing into the courthouse

Guys in red:Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

and it starts to go downhill from here!

fp after first on topic post

I sure hopey that people checky their grammary more ofteny in the future.
There, fixedy that for you.

Just to say I told you so:
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=4049959

Now let me tell you about MySQL's future. It is safe, its Open Source. It survived before the SUN buyout and its going to survive after it. There is no way oracle can kill it.
At the very least, MySQL forks will live on (e.g., Drizzle).

So please stop whining about MySQL dieing. The competition between the big tech companies is just going to heat up, which might be a good thing for open source overall.

hurrah?

I'm also positive some will find a dark side to this, being /.

hey /. overlords, "/." should be replaced by /. icon every time it occurs in posts.

I stand corrected
the real question is, will pr0n be censored?

wireless,wired it really doesnt matter.
the real question is will they cap or throttle?

Thats what ebay said when they bought skype

I can see it clearly now, a few years from now when bandwidth is cheap, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim offer google $.5 billion to acquire YouTube.

seems like there is a key difference between US and your country
Competition

ok im not following you, you want ISPs to meter based on total bits transfered, which they are arguing for because they claim it will reduce congestion on their network, but you say its easy to upgrade?
If it is easy to upgrade then they should just do it and stick with the current flat monthly rate and no one would have a problem. I don't think ISPs will ever switch to metering if it means users would pay less overall.

mod parent up
Metering will have far reaching effects on how we use the net.
Think of all the auto updates services, DRM activation, registration, are we supposed to pay for all of this? What if content providers provide unnecessarily rich web pages? Why would some providers user HTTP requests to update client with all the overhead that comes with an HTTP request instead of using customized and efficient protocol? I think we are opening a whole can of worms with metering, and the consumer is the one who will end up being screwed in all cases.

If what your describing is indeed a problem, then I'm not convinced that "metering" based on bits is the only solution or even "a solution" for that matter. Because we would still have the same capacity problems in terms of bits/sec that can pass through ISP network!

For example, f we all pay for 10GB total transfer per month, and all of us decided to watch hulu at the exact point in time, the ISP would face the same problems they are complaining from now and they cannot guarantee good service to the users. Therefore, metering is not the solution, it is indeed a solution however for ISPs to extract more income from the users

What ISPs need to do is keep the same monthly flat payment rate plan, but vary prices on QoS. This way at times of congestion they can reduce the bit/sec throughput for users based on how much they pay. Customers would pay for a "range" of throughput where the minimum is guaranteed, and at times of congestion, the ISPs are within their rights to scale down the service for some of the users. Even those who overuse the network can learn to change their patterns of usage to off peek times. Metering will have far reaching consequences on the way we use the net which might not all be beneficial.