I have also lived in Israel for the last 4.5 months and have subscribed to the DSL service provided by Bezeq. They only offer DSL in this part of Jerusalem, it's beyond me why they do not allow us cable connections despite having cable outlets in every single room of the apartments (there are hundreds where I live). BitTorrent is actually relatively stable. I regularly max out my connection which is a measly 2.5mbit/.3mbit with bit torrent. Whereas with SFTP and FTP/S/ES, I regularly get speeds fractions of what I should be getting. Skype has been decent to me as well, but making calls to my family 4000 miles away has brought video lag and sometimes low-quality audio. I cannot diagnose if this is the ISPs fault or bandwidth shortage in conjunction with the extreme distance the data must travel (my latency/ping is about ~230ms [http://www.pingtest.net/result/5689614.png]). Israel is a bit lacking when it comes to internet service. My university here is also locked down even though they offer about a 70.5mbit/20.5mbit connection they have managed to restrict just about every port so AIM is out of the question in addition to FTP, FTP/S/ES. SFTP still works. I'm not sure what the security concern is. And I'm definitely not sure why the Israeli ISPs overtly care to p2p traffic. The Israeli government does not care about anything except its military.

It's not the ideas, per se - except within their own domain of political power/structure/ideology/practice. Take socialist/communist ideas into the arena of voluntary cooperation, and you've got the possibility of a good thing - provided everyone contributes willingly and anyone can leave at any time. Take away the "willing" part, and what you have is totalitarian slavery.

Unfortunately, since it's somewhat difficult to leave your state for another, what amounts from Marxist-derived ideas applied at the state level is just that: totalitarian slavery.

Really? According to Duverger, majoritarian systems will always lead to 2-party systems, and Downs has shown that, in majoritarian systems, the 2 parties inevitably gravitate towards the center of the political spectrum in terms of ideology. G. Bingham Powell shows that majoritarian systems have greater levels of accountability, because in the lack of coalition governments it is easy to identify who made what decisions. He also shows that majoritarian systems are more representative of the values of the median voter. And, as long as the state utilizing the 2-party system has universal suffrage (as the US does), and has a large number of government positions that are open to competition (again, as the US has), then it in fact IS a democracy (or to use the technical term developed by Dahl, a polyarchy). Sure, you may sound all hip, cool, and so "against the system" by saying that 2-parties systems as democracy is "propaganda", but when you are put up against scholars who have studied and written on this subject for decades, your assertion falls completely apart. The sad part is that it was modded +5 Insightful when everything about your response was completely wrong.

Agree with the sarcasm. Loss of revenue or decrease in sales =/= industry is dying.

And yes, BOTH M$ and Sony lost a lot of money in the format war, and the PS3 coming equipped with a BluRay drive certainly helped make the technology more common to consumers. But the BluRay technology was developed by a committee of electronics companies of which Sony was part, Sony putting a large financial stake in the propagation of BluRay. But BluRay won for two reasons. Because it's a superior technology to HD-DVD and always was from the start, except for price; and because many large studios such as Warner Brothers officially backed BluRay and sold their video releases in BluRay format only.

BluRay has a much, much higher maximum data storage capacity than does HD-DVD. It will be ideal for the future disposable data disc next in line in as were CDs and DVDs before it, as well as for increasingly complex and visually stunning games. It just cost a ton to produce at first, as most technologies using a new manufacturing process do. Typically, companies pioneering a new tech do a much better job of eating the initial investment and selling hardware, etc. at a loss to foster a new 'need' in the consumer market. This wasn't done with BluRay, and most of the development cost was passed onto consumers for the first few years. BluRay drives for PC and players for entertainment centers cost $1000 for the first few months after release, and have only slowly gone down in price over the years.

Once the cost of BluRay drives decreased to $650 and less with burnable media becoming cheaper, with the trend looking to continue and movie studios selling their major releases in Blu Ray format, the format war was over, won in favor of BluRay.

Sony's not even close to breaking even on the PS3...

TFTFY...

Breaking even means that Sony has made a profit overall, this simply means that Sony is getting close to not making as much of a loss on each hardware sale. Sony's business model with the PS3 was to sell the hardware at a loss and make up for it with license fee's (via game sales, this is why PS3 and Xbox360 games are more expensive then PC games). Sony has been failing to meet that quota with less then stellar sales. In addition to making a profit on each console in order to break even Sony must make a profit overall, including the losses incurred up until now and development costs.