Thank you Cablecom for giving the consumer this luxury!

In brief:
Cablecom are heading down the drain, in a last ditch attempt to survive (and build customer base) they offer a price reduction as well as an upgrade from 600k to 2Mb!
(backlink: http://blank.antville.org/stories/585747/)

Bluewin responds by upping their services to 600k: http://www2.bluewin.ch/services/zugang/adsl/index_d.php

Green responds by multiplying their speeds too!
02.12.2003 Massive Erhöhung der ADSL-Bandbreiten bei green.ch

Ab Februar 2004 werden die Bandbreiten der green.ch ADSL Abonnements massiv erhöht.
Die Bandbreiten des 300/50 Kbit/s und des 600/100 Kbit/s Abos werden verdoppelt und ein neues Abo mit den Bandbreiten 2400/200 Kbit/s wird eingeführt. Die Bandbreiten der Business Abos werden ebenfalls aufgerundet:

ADSL 300/50 wird neu: 600/100 Kbit/s
ADSL 600/100 wird neu: 1200/200 Kbit/s
zusätzliches Abo mit 2400/200 Kbit/s
Business 512/512 wird neu: 600/500 Kbit/s
Business 1024/512 wird neu: 1200/500 Kbit/s
Business 2048/512 wird neu: 2400/500 Kbit/s

Bring it on!!!

A good page for ascii codes....
http://www.asciitable.com/

Read this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/34216.html
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/index.html

A discrimination complaint has been filed with the county's Office of Affirmative Action Compliance after one county worker saw a video recording device with the "slave" and "master" tags, according to Reuters. The complaint was enough to call county officials into action, asking vendors to re-label their gear.

There are just too many things wrong with this.
1. They're arguing over terminology which has been in use pretty much since the time it was possible to hook up more than one device and label one as the 'controller'.
2. Affirmative Action? This is exactly the kind of thing that makes the 'fight for equality' such a completely pointless exercise. There's no equality achieved by getting rid of slave/master labels. Who exactly is that helping?
3. Americans! Only in America would this not only manage to not get laughed out of court, but actually get pushed through! The American legal system has long been a joke to the rest of the world (not to say that anyone else's is much better) but this takes the biscuit.

It's all little people trying to get money out of big corporations because they think they deserve it. In my mind this is nothing more than theft - pure and simple. The only difference is this is endorsed by US Courts.

This type of thing makes me feel sick.

/Rant

PS - Don't even get me started on the US Patent Office decision to allow patenting of integers...