Does Not Piss Me Off » Zakhar

Still A Fan Of Netflix

Zakhar — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:21:56 +0000

I have been a Netflix customer for a long time. I’m so glad they decided to keep “partitioned accounts” after announcing they were going to get rid of them. In the past, they reversed a price increase. Recently, they did not back down after splitting disc and streaming plans (but that one didn’t bother me even though it costs me more). Today, I found out their plan to turn the disc plan into Quickster has been abandoned. This is the third major reversal that I have been happy to watch Netflix make. Read the Netflix blog post announcement.

Ad-free site to check my IP address

Zakhar — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 02:56:28 +0000

check my IP address at address.cat

Piracy Is Lending, Not Theft

Zakhar — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:00:48 +0000

I’ve said this for a long time, but my audience is very small, so I’m glad someone with a bigger audience agrees (video below). I’m not ripping off artists if I download their works for free. I don’t think (m)any are. The way I look at it, I give as much as I can. Does that mean I should be barred from the rest? No. Frankly, if the completely legitimate practices of lending and time-shifting are combined, then what we’re doing is totally fine. There’s no way that all of us listening to our collections all at once can add up to the amount of playtime that accumulates from the CDs that have been bought and are just sitting on shelves somewhere. File sharing isn’t theft; it’s (the high tech version of) lending plus time shifting — both of which have been vindicated in U.S. courts.

Neil Gaiman talks to the Open Rights Group about how the internet affects the books and publishing industry

Now if only we could get people to realize copyright (and intellectual property rights) are a big deal. It affects starvation, disease, war, etc., and needs to be reasonable.

ps.mu noise music iec5010

Zakhar — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 20:47:57 +0000

ps.mu IEC5010 (noise) Music

A project from more than a few years ago finally surfaces on the web.

A “Real” Artist Gets It

Zakhar — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 13:54:44 +0000

The bit about being inspired by those artists that step before you was interesting, but I’m glad to see Francis Ford Coppola pondering the same idea (of artists making a living) I wrote about a couple years ago:

Francis Ford Coppola On Art, Copying And File Sharing: We Want You To Take From Us

… who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

How to login to the Magnatune app for iPhone iOS

Zakhar — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:13:26 +0000

Magnatune: We Are Not Evil

I’m a Magnatune lifetime member. First thing I wanted to know was how to login to the iPhone app, so I don’t have to hear the spoken message at the end of each track (placed there because every song is free to hear for non-members). It took me a bit, but it’s mentioned on a blog post about the iPhone app: Magnatune iPhone app (but not on Magnatunes page for the app).

Bandwidth Caps Are Deceptive

Zakhar — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:43:15 +0000

Data Caps Are A Scam. We paid for big trucks, but we have to drive them nearly empty. (photo by Jean-Etienne Poirrier)

Time to revisit my post, “Dramatically Lower Bandwidth Cap” from May 30. It turns out it sparked a mini debate. I am disappointed with joetron2030′s suggestion to “leave” the offending ISP. It seems that Clear does offer uncapped service (but for how long: “… there is pretty strong language in Clear’s Acceptable Use Policy about not hogging bandwidth …“), but there are no other cap-less broadband providers where I live. And Clear is a wireless broadband which doesn’t reach into every home. But more importantly, Earthlink is the alternative ISP — that’s why I signed up with them instead of using (TimeWarner when I signed up, but now) Comcast.

joetron2030′s suggested that this may lead to tiered service. This could be a step in the right direction–but not with data caps. I understand the ISP wanting to manage the network, but they shouldn’t advertise 10+ Mb/s as the speed when we’re really only allowed 0.761 Mb/s to stay within the cap for the month.

It’s okay with me if they offer different speeds, not different caps (and they better not even think about metering per bit). With the 250 gigabyte cap, that’s a less-than-1-megabit-per-second connection. Advertising 10+ is very deceptive. With a 10-megabit-per-second connection, we’ve paid for over three thousand gigabytes per month (edit 8/3: even if it’s 5-megabit, that’s over 1,500 gigabytes per month). 250 is less than 1% of 3,000.

If ISPs really want to worry about network congestion, then they should limit the speed of the “more than 99% of customers” who stay within the 250 gigabyte cap. Otherwise those customers are bursting at high speed at random intervals. I doubt that’s good for the health of the network. It’d be better to trickle spread their data use evenly through the month. But let them know they are getting a (less than) 1 megabit connection, and charge them far less than you’re charging now.

I think the price now is still too high for the (about) 10-megabit connection, but if ISPs introduced the lower priced 1-megabit connection, then I could see them keeping the current price for the current speed (but repeal the data cap!).

Edit (8/1) with this waking thought: You should make me an ally instead trying to squeeze me out because I am an example of your future customers. Soon we’ll all stream audio and video, back up our media collections to the cloud, download apps, patches, and even OS ISOs, and other yet-to-be-thought-of innovative uses of the internet. If you want us to pick you as our ISP for this (instead of completely abandoning you, so you go out of business), then it’s time to start showing you value all 100% of your customers.

negative income tax

Zakhar — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:01:19 +0000

Even though I’d prefer to go to a capitalistic system which only has sales tax, if we’re stuck with income tax, negative income tax (Wikipedia) seems a reasonable idea.