It looks awesome on my 5k imac.
Imagine a moving copy of National Geographic’s print magazine.
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I want to thank everyone for their comments. You brought up some aspects that I had not considered. And in the end, I have desided to live without limits.
My reasons for this are four-fold:
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Public WiFi in Manhattan is weak at best. Generally, tourists just suck it all up to such an extent that it might as well not exist at all. And in Brooklyn public WiFi is rarely enoutered at all. So thoughout the day, I end up using my LTE most of the time, unless I’m in a library or Pret a Merger.
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Earlier in the year I was paying approximately $75 a month for only 2GB of data.
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It will be handy to be connected when visiting my parents.
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Sure the restrictions on data usage will be annoying, but the way things are going in Washington we should all get used to the end of net neutrality. This is my most nihilistic reason.
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What’s your threat model that it’s worth going through all that trouble but not with just giving up on the internet altogether?
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As others have said, the main reasons that I wouldn’t do that are that ‘unlimited’ plans are so extremely limited and that the speed is so much slower than what I get via cable. But if you’re used to DSL speeds and don’t mind the limitations of ‘unlimited’, it may work fine for you.
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I wondered that.
The uses of Tor, AIUI, are to facilitate the work of spies and criminals, and incidentally to benefit a few investigative journalists and the like. But the assumption is that nobody can get at the ISP logs. That works if you’re somewhere like Ukraine or Kazakhstan and your target is in the US or Europe, and vice versa. But if you’re simply operating within your own country, then since proxies* and tor nodes are now well known to the authorities, ISP logs would potentially identify you as a target of interest. If somebody flags up that someone is often in coffee shop X connecting in that way, at some point someone in authority might take an interest since it’s a behaviour pattern associated with terrorists.
Anybody who has ever touched even marginally on the security services will know that someone making an effort to be anonymous sticks out like a sore thumb.
*And proxies can be poisoned with malware and MITM attacks. Who controls your proxies?
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For that sort of thing I have a special pair of glasses of short focal length (They have a secondary purpose in allowing me to read the tiny print of serial numbers and semiconductors.)
You’re sure that isn’t the accuracy of the screen and the colour depth rather than the resolution?
Nat Geo is limited to CMYK at 300 dpi, which is just under 4k, but a “dot” is bigger than a pixel. It’s the quality of printing that matters, plus the use of high-reflectance gloss paper. Modern monitors can easily exceed CMYK.
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Those are probably in my not-too-distant future! I just visited my optometrist yesterday to update my prescription. I had them measure a prescription for reading glasses for me, but I won’t really use it yet, as I don’t need it for the distance I hold books, though I can see and appreciate the difference. It’s just not significant enough yet for me to get another pair of spectacles to lose.
As for screen-viewing for pleasure, as I said I like a big, immersive experience… theatrical, if I can arrange it, with surround sound and greasy popcorn, the works. I dislike earbuds, and don’t particularly like wearing my big cans on my ears while looking at my phone, and since the phone’s speakers are wimpy and wee, I just can’t really enjoy phone-viewing for anything bigger and more important than, say, AC/DC music videos.
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it started out as an intellectual challenge in 97 or 98 when i started realizing how much information was being sent back and forth across the internet and i started looking into privacy and how to maintain it. that’s when i started using chains of proxies to surf the net. i also started working on managing the cookies websites leave on my computer. when tor became available i started using it instead of the proxies but as i got more information i started using the proxies again to get on to the tor network. i’ve been considering adding a vpn to my setup lately.
my privacy model is that my internet use is the business of no one else and i will do what i can to make it illegible to prying eyes whether those eyes are the government’s, businesses, or criminals. i’m not going to live in a glass house with loudspeakers broadcasting every sound that comes from inside it. i have walls, curtains, doors, locks, property lines, fences, etc. i can’t prevent a determined individual or group from invading my physical privacy 100% of the time but i’m going to throw up barriers such that it is only the most determined who have a chance to do it. i take a similar attitude towards my online privacy.
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As of this afterrnoon, I am the character with unlimited data.
My immediate reaction that it is not that bad. As a test, I ran a bunch of YouTube videos. They all loaded smoothly and played without any stopping for bufferring — heck it’s more reliable than some WiFi I’ve encountered. I do notice videos on my iPad now appear at a lower resolution, but I can live with it.
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So are you now badass brian?
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I’ll have to watch the show first, then I’ll let you know. 
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Captain Picard?
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Depending on your carrier you can go online and enable\disable this selection.
I leave it enabled for myself because if I am watching things on a 5" screen in the first place, image resolution and clarity are obviously not high on my list.
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Five and a half inches, so it might be a bit swanky for you.
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I’m grandfathered in on the Sprint unlimited plan, which is why I will be a Sprint customer forever and ever. I love having unlimited data. I’m not a big data hog, but it’s nice to be able to connect to the 'Net whenever wifi isn’t available. Since I’m mostly using it for browsing, not downloading, I haven’t noticed problems. Usually if I’m doing downloading I’ll do it while on a wifi network. Nowadays there are wifi networks most anywhere.
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You also need your own streaming server to get the best out of those phones.
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And I increasingly don’t trust any of them. yes, yes, I have a VPN client on my phone and I use it, but jumping on random WiFi anymore just seems wrong to me.
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Ahem. I must draw you attention to my point #1 from my post 3 days ago.
You mucst live in a civilized area.
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Sigh… I want to have the eyes it would take to see at a resolution of 2,160 horizontal lines in around 3 inches. If I ever had that kind of vision, it hasn’t been in this century.
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