*ahem*

And if you bothered to read what Qt was about, then you'd realize that Qt is in fact a platform independent lib covering Windows and Linux variants to handle sockets, IPC and threads abstractions (as well as a whole lotta other things.)

Classes that Qt offers:
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.5/classes.html

I've been with Tekksavvy for a few years as well. Great ISP. But notice how they changed the pricing scheme? What was before unlimited had a bandwidth cap put on it. If you did want to go the unlimited route, you now had to pay more. Even though they were getting more customers.

I'm not going to deny that Rogers and Bell charge prices that don't seem all that competitive. What I am trying to do is explain their logic, and that of most ISPs.

I think this illustrates how few people understand how consumer broadband works.

The reason consumer broadband is so cheap is that bandwidth is actually shared in pools of people. It's not like having a business-class connection where you have dedicated lines, a guaranteed speed (ie. 1.5MB/s per person), and the price to reflect it.

Consumer broadband is different. Allocate 50MBs to a pool of people, and cap each person at 5MB/s. With casual net usage, that's not a problem. Games are low in bandwidth, and web surfing produces sporadic spikes of intense bandwidth usage. At 50MB/s, you could get maybe a thousand simultaneous users. They all download their pages at blazing speeds, and have low latency on their games. Because its shared, the price is cheap too.

But if you introduce something like bittorrent into that consumer broadband usage model, then we have a problem. Because now, it only takes a relative few to clog up the entire allocated 50MB/s.

ISPs like Rogers who used pool resources are now faced with a dilemma: how you maintain speeds for everyone, while keeping the price low - for everyone? They've chosen to throttle connections. Is it right? Perhaps not.

But it's important to understand that the issue is just not as black and white as some would like it to be. I'm for net neutrality, in terms of being blind to who the end IP is. I don't want Site X to be slower because they didn't pay Rogers a premium. However, I'm not against traffic shaping high-bandwidth services. If you want the bandwidth so bad, then pay for a line with guaranteed speeds.

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air - that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
-H. L. Mencken

The way I see it, if terrorists with the determination of those that committed the 9/11 attacks wanted to strike - they still would have even with these measures in place. The core of Al-Qaeda had a strong technical arm, one which has sufficient knowledge to bypass government wiretaps (ie. use encrypted VoIP), and other such technical measures. Let's also not forget that the 9/11 terrorists had legitimate passports. The problem wasn't that they stuck out of the system, it was that they knew how to be part of it. The FBI's failure is separate to this whole issue of warrantless wiretaps.

We should not blame those that wanted to remove police-state like behaviour from our system. Wiretaps to any citizen, without due cause, is one such instance. Rather, we should blame those that didn't seek to target the cause. If you are to associate those that seek to better American lives with terrorists, than it is not they which are most detrimental to American society - but you. You who scaremonger. You, who has such a black and white perspective of the world that it can only be broken down into associating pro-American populace with pro-terrorist.