Actual promo image from the online version of one of the New York tabloids yesterday. Frankly, considering the story includes Tom Brady, I’m a little surprised that this wasn’t the lead story on Channel 7’s 11:00 newscast last night as well.

DSL Reports broke the story earlier this week that Comcast is planning on testing using bandwidth caps and overage fees to try to rein in what they feel is a problem with P2P downloaders. The cap that they are apparently considering is 250GB/month, with a $1.50/GB fee for every gig over the limit. Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider offers a very good explanation that puts a 250GB limit into perspective:

In practical terms, 250 gigabytes is:

- A LOT of Web usage. Your typical daily Web/email/IM usage is probably somewhere between 10-50 megabytes — maybe 100-200 if you’re watching some low-quality YouTube, or 300-500 if you’re watching a few hours of Hulu every day. So normal Web users won’t have any problems. (1000 megabytes = roughly 1 gigabyte.)

- A LOT of World of Warcraft. Downloading game patches uses a bunch of bandwidth once in a while, but normal game play tops out around 30-60 kilobytes/second, or maybe a 100-200 megabytes an hour run rate, according to one blog. Another user says normal usage is closer to 1-5 megabytes per hour. Continue to play until your eyes bleed.

- 2500-4000 MP3 albums, or 50,000 3-minute songs. Depending on quality/length, an MP3 album is somewhere between 60 and 100 megabytes. Amazon says its 3-minute MP3s are about 5 megabytes. There are only 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month, or enough time to listen to 14,400 3-minute songs. So you’ll be ok.

- 170-250 iTunes movie downloads. Digital movies in standard-def run between 1 and 1.5 gigabytes. “No Country For Old Men” is about 1.3 gigs, friend-o.

- 50-60 HD movie downloads. These run closer to 4-5 gigabytes each. So theoretically, this could be a problem, one day, for people who download more than 2 movies a day. Do you know any of those folks?

So: If you download one HD movie a week, six standard-def movies a week, 5 albums a week, play a ton of WoW, and surf a lot of YouTube and Hulu, you’ll still struggle to use 100 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. We think you’ll also struggle to listen to all that music and watch all those movies. Also, you should get out more. It’s nice outside! Go for a walk.

In other words, 250GB/month is A LOT for your average user, and still pretty generous for all but the most hardcore downloader. Ars Technica suggests that Comcast is trying to get the FCC off its back about a variety of complaints by offering a much more transparent way of determining “bandwidth hogs”, since there have been many customer complaints about being abruptly shut off by Comcast without prior warning or disclosure of how much is “too much”.

Meanwhile, today at DSL Reports, “Karl”, the writer who broke the story on Tuesday, has a lengthy list of criticisms and concerns about the implications of this plan, including the eventual moving to billing customers for their Internet usage on a “per-byte” basis.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the name given to all those unpopular and generally ineffective technologies used to try to prevent people from doing whatever they want with their digital content (movies, games, music, etc.). Security guru Bruce Schneier wrote this piece all the way back in 2001 entitled “The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention”, which pointed out that all DRM schemes can and will be broken, and the only thing imposing DRM on customers does is to treat them like criminals. Nevertheless, DRM technologies continued to be a way of life with digital content until last year, when Apple went out on a limb and offered DRM-free music downloads from a major record label (EMI). Shortly thereafter, Wal-Mart demanded DRM-free music from their suppliers, and before you could say “Metallica Sucks” DRM was virtually gone from every record label.

But while the labels acquiesced on DRM, the RIAA has not stopped their witch hunt for “pirates”, and this Ars Technica post quotes the technical chief at the RIAA as saying that DRM will rear its ugly head yet again, especially as people stop buying single track downloads and/or CDs and move to subscription services. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow didn’t mince words about this:

The RIAA believes in “intellectual property,” which is a fancy way of saying: they believe that they get to own property, and you have to rent it. The bits on your hard-drive belong to them, and that means you have to install DRM that lets them control your PC so that you don’t do bad things with their bits. In the information age, “property” is the exclusive preserve of giant companies that can afford to register copyrights and sue to defend them, while the rest of us get to sharecrop all our embodiments of their property, from furniture to t-shirts to music to games to cars to PCs.

Meanwhile, on the software-and-games front, BioWare, the producers of the game Mass Effect said that the PC version of the game will use a DRM technology called SecuROM (which is well-known and despised by gamers everywhere for causing their games not to run) AND an activation system that will require the computer to validate itself online every ten days. But what really has people shooting steam out of their ears is that the guy who said this also claims that the very highly-anticipated game Spore will feature the same activation/validation scheme.. Les, who blogs as “Stupid Evil Bastard”, is so pissed off that he says he might not even buy Spore as a result, and my friend Solonor isn’t pleased that if he goes on a long business trip and shuts off his PC, his game won’t work anymore.

My online friend Art Wells said it best over at The Site Which Must Not Be Named:

You don’t buy software. You rent the right not to be sued or prosecuted for using it.

Poor Beauty the Bald Eagle…the top of her beak was severely damaged by a shotgun blast from a hunter, leaving her unable to eat prey. She was found in 2005 and turned over to a bird recovery center in Anchorage, Alaska, then eventually to a center in Idaho called Birds Of Prey Northwest that specializes in raptor birds. Without a beak to tear her food with, Beauty must be hand-fed strips of meat and has difficulty drinking and preening. The linked article says that the director of the center met a mechanical engineer, who, moved by the bird’s plight, has offered to design a prosthetic beak made out of nylon composite material. The prosthetic, which will be glued onto the remnants of her upper beak, would allow her to eat more normally, but would not restore her to a point where she could be released to fend for herself in the wild. More pictures of Beauty and other raptors being cared for by the center here.