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Is there a special prize for 1st post and karma whore in one?

Here goes my entry:

These folks are some of the same great people who are supposed to be working for you anyway, plus a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.

Tridge (defined here and here), the smartest man in Australian IT, obviously qualifies and Bill Gates does not (except in his own humble eyes). The only problem remaining is, where does Tridge fit in Howard's categories? Is he your employee? No. Is he a teenager, albeit a smattered one? Not for a long time, to Susan's immense relief. I must mention in defense of teenagers, though, that at least one well-known project has been managed by a 13-year-old, and managed well. A hacker? Since Howard evidently means "cracker", that's a resounding "no". Virus creators? No, although I'm sure SaMBa has transported and safely stored quite a few viruses in its day. I guess he fits in "menagerie of others", which is to say, no category at all. I could run up a list of another hundred or so such people in one day.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Howard Strauss is talking out of his rear, so has evidently forgotten that magic rule: "'tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Got home to find my clocks flashing 12:00... Realized my DSL is out (problems connecting to the PPPoE server), so my ISP still has equipment out.

Tried to call a friend in Manhattan on her Verizon cell phone before I realized everything that was happening and kept getting "all circuits down", so obviously lots of things are messed up.

Watching some CNBC and CNN on the news, people seem to be going a bit insane here, wandering the streets in mobs, etc.

As a lot of posters have pointed out, this is standard legalese boilerplate for a TOS. It looks a lot like the one for @Home or for any of the big telco DSL providers (SNET, Verizon, BA, PacBell, etc).

I find it interesting that most of those others try to ban multiple computers using the connection at one time. SNET in particular (I used to have their service) goes as far as to say that they don't mind you having their DSL modem hooked into a home LAN, so long as you only use the internet from one PC on that LAN at one time. They are, of course, happy to provide additional IPs for an additional fee...

Anyway, this particular TOS doesn't address that. Apparently they do offer additional IP's, but they don't forbid things like DSL routers or IP Masquerade.

So basically they're doing what all the other big ISPs are doing. Which is why I'm with a small one.