The week in your words: China's darkened Windows

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 24 Oct 2008 at 17:22

john_sn was also in the 'computer's quite a good thing' camp.

"I'm not saying a PC in every home is the answer. You can take a horse to water and all that. But there will be parents who'd love to help their kids with their online homework but don't have a PC with internet access."

Customers still fooled by "unlimited broadband"

Words can be a tricky thing. Take the word unlimited, which suggests something without limits. Now, broadband providers like the sound of unlimited on the tongue, but how to deal with the pesky fact that they actually need it to mean "quite seriously limited in a number of ways". Well, simply explain the brand new definition in smallprint, and keep doing it until the Advertising Standards Authority forgets it used to mean anything different. Genius. Or not.

"Fair use is the key phrase here," reckons cheysuli. "The customer thinks 'as much as I want' is fair. The ISP thinks 'only as much as we decide to allow you when nobody else is using it' is fair. Unlimited refers to how far the definition of fair can be stretched by the ISP."

"No it isn't," interjects qpw3141. "They should no more be allowed to sell a product as 'unlimited' than Ford should be allowed to sell a car as having an 'unlimited' top speed and then claim that the fact that it will only do 70 is the result of a 'fair use' policy."

"As usual, the main culprit here is the ASA," says Bronven, rather wonderfully casting the ASA in the role of a pantomime villain. "In some ways you can't blame the companies; they will just keep pushing the boundaries to see how much they can get away with. They know that at worse they may receive a mild slap on the wrists from tha ASA."

However, Nicomo believes there's enough blame to go around: "That word unlimited pops up everywhere and just about everybody abuses its use, unfortunately customers are becoming more and more gullible. Unless somebody sues - there will be continued abuse. We can always have a go at the advertisers - but shouldn't something be done about the gullibility of customers?"

Something is being done about the gullibility of consumers, it's called advertising, and we're off to fall prey to those Stella Artois adverts.

See you all next week.