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Permalink Reply by Jason on January 20, 2008 at 3:27pm

I had a thought on the walk home from uni.

Surely Time Warner are shooting themselves in the foot? I dont know the exact details of this pay per use program but it doesn't sound like it would work. Surely by making people pay for using their internet services they are going to prevent the majority of customers from using the internet very much. Sure they'd clamp down on that 5% of abusers but the rest of the users would limit their time on the internet. I know I for one wouldn't spend as much time on forums, or watching things on youtube, reading webcomics, news articles on the web, etc. etc. if I had to pay for every minute of usage.

If other ISPs followed Time Warners footsteps surely the internet would decline in popularity. The internet wouldn't be as free as it is. Which is why I like the internet. Because I can do what I want, I can visit the sites I want, I can read what I want, watch and hear what I want. I can create a website dedicated to pictures of dust particles in light beams if I dam well please haha. But If I had to pay per use for that, I would probably start using the internet more as a tool. Ill be efficient in using it. Pay per use would prevent many people from generally fucking about and watsing time on the web which when you're an ISP isn't the kind of attitude you'd want surely.

I think at the end of this, Time Warner is going to prevent that 5% of people from using half the bandwidth, but will also prevent the other 95% of people using the other half, leaving them with a lot of wasted equipment.

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Permalink Reply by RychlewC on January 21, 2008 at 8:23am

I don't really use Bit Torrent...I actually haven't really downloaded music for years. I find it easier to find movies online. And I live on a college campus that restricts uploads to a stand still and downloads to a crawl. I can understand it here, although it is quiet annoying. But now that Fios and other super fast pipe lines are becoming accessible, what is the point of limiting them? Typical of big business to restrict it's customers, in my opinion...

As far as law suits, we all saw the scare a few years back when all the law suits hit. It was a scare tactic. You really think that "the man" will stop us all?

Although if they keep up the limiting of speed the worst outcome would be paying for a higher bandwidth for a limited period of time, like buying time shares...Wow that would suck!

At this point I don't think we can say there would be a "best" outcome besides big business backing off....Year right...

p.s. I like the "campfire" feel to the opening video haha

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Permalink Reply by Jamie on January 21, 2008 at 4:40pm

Interesting. I guess I am what you might call a poweruser from the torrenting point of view. I live in Japan you see, and my internet (according to speedtest.net), is faster than 99.9% of the rest of the world. It is sold as 100mbit for about $50/month, completely unlimited. In reality, this means I can download up to about 2mb/sec on torrents, while playing over xBox Live and video chatting on Skype. Yes, its sweet. Looking at my purely for downloading pc right now, I see about 25gb downloaded since I last restarted (which was yesterday morning~).

I download for a number of reasons.
(1) I cant see the American shows any other way here in Japan, at least not until they have been either dubbed or subbed for Japanese viewers, and I dont own a mind-rotting TV. (Seriously, TV in Japan consists of cooking show after show with braindead actresses screaming "its so delicious, i cant believe it". Meh)
(2) I download good Japanese shows and anime with fansubs in English~ which you dont normally get in a native Japanese speaking country, obviously...
(3) I download movies that I really wouldn't pay to go see, but if its free then what the hell.

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Permalink Reply by Jason on January 21, 2008 at 5:30pm

WHAT?!

I was lead to believe that Japanese TV was full of wacky and weird game shows where people get ejected off chairs into pools for wrong answers, and contestants are made to wear seal-looking headgear and paraded in front of polar bears at the zoo. I thought Japan was like Utopia for cool tv :(

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Permalink Reply by Jamie on January 21, 2008 at 5:48pm

rare~

seal looking headgear and polar bears eh?! Sounds like you been watch some strange idol fetish DVD or something!

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Permalink Reply by Markie on January 21, 2008 at 8:49pm

Jamie i hate you!!! i pay like 50 to 60 bucks for a 2mb connection. if im lucky i will get DL at 150 to 200kb/s, but i cannot do anything more at the same time! a 100mb connection here would cost me like 200 or 300 bucks

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Permalink Reply by Jamie on January 21, 2008 at 9:19pm

Muwahahahahaahahahah. HA! Maybe I should post a screenshot of my speedtest.net results just to rub a little lemon juice into those gaping wounds~ let's see, does mix allow pictures??



BTW, I didn't bother stopping my downloads while I did that test, so it might be a lil slow.

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Permalink Reply by Markie on January 21, 2008 at 11:34pm

BTW, I did bother stopping my downloads while I did that test!
i hate you jamie! lol

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Permalink Reply by Jamie on January 21, 2008 at 11:50pm

ROFL. That's the first time I've laughed out loud in my boring little office all day!

Thank you Markie!

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Permalink Reply by Derek on January 26, 2008 at 6:12am

Just to throw some other results in the fire. This is from home.

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Permalink Reply by JPBluesyGuitar on January 23, 2008 at 4:06am

ok i just wanted to put up my 2 cents on the whole thing. i'm a youtube subscriber that got hooked on the channel but anyways here goes xD

i'm not sure if there is any way to define a P2P user in a good way but the majority of what i do with bittorrent is usually grabbing missed TV episodes, award shows, and whatnot.

i find bittorrent awesome since it has almost everything you can think of wanting O_o i kid you not, i've got the ENTIRE series of the OLD 60s twilight zone xD or what about those movies that are still stuck on vhs? of course, depending if someone out there already has it. i mean most of the old stuff you try to find around are...well...gone. the next best bet is having to get it off ebay where some guy thinks one box set of the twilight zone would cost well into the couple hundreds =\

the old stuff goes for my music as well. but me being someone who really appreciates their music, i TOTALLY support my fave artists and buy as many of their cds as possible =) hell some artists put out special editions with extended album art or a 2 disc special. those you'll never find on torrent.

it really isn't that over exploitive. i still prefer to buy my dvds over downloading b/c i love my commentaries, features, interviews, and what have you. the only places you'll ever spot a "making of" vid is on youtube xD

so i guess it really all depends on the type of user. sure it'll get ppl pissed with having to charge more for "internet time" but at least it'll get them to buying dvds/cds. maybe spend some of it on a movie you plan to buy. but that kind of charge isn't going to work with people like me who search for the "antiques" of the interweb.

there's nothing better than watching Capt Kirk freak out in an airplane just b/c he saw something "on the wing" xD priceless.

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Permalink Reply by Piers Millett on January 23, 2008 at 5:35am

Living here in Switzerland seems to have some advantages - we seem to be outside of the region settings for most dvds. My local dvd rental store has about 50/50 dvd region 1 (US) and 2 (Europe & Aus) discs - so we get pretty much all new releases as soon as they are available anywhere. Unfortunatly this does not seem to extend to the online filtering 0 which seems to have no problem realising that I am not in the US. As a result my bittorrent usage is almost exclusively for TV series.

I agree with so many of the other posts - if there was a legit way to get new content at the same time it is released I would defintely use it. (Like thousands of others I have tried tricking itunes into believeing I was in the US to be able to access the store there). I thought the whole point of the internet was that we are a homogenous global community and that in this day and age we live in a global society. How come then we don't have global releases of media?

I have a solution for this. I think it is an environmental issue. On the basis that the only way for me to get the programmes I want is to hop on to a plane, fly to the US & buy the DVD or back up the TV onto my laptop, then the companies that do not release things globally (thereby depriving me of all that lovely airline food) should be hit with an environmental tax for the carbon footprints of, say, a couple of thousand people. Not only would this be good for viewers but it would be good for the environment too!

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