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Comcast Tells Government That Its Data Caps Aren't Actually "Data Caps"
mpicpp (3454017) writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica about Comcast's data caps that aren't data caps:Customers must pay more if they exceed limits — but it's not a cap, Comcast says. For the past couple of years, Comcast has been trying to convince journalists and the general public that it doesn't impose any "data caps" on its Internet service. ... That's despite the fact that Comcast in some cities enforces limits on the amount of data customers can use and issues financial penalties for using more than the allotment. Comcast has said this type of billing will probably roll out to its entire national footprint within five years, perhaps alongside a pricier option to buy unlimited data. ... Comcast's then-new approach was touted to "effectively offer unlimited usage of our services because customers will have the ability to buy as much data as they want."
For me it goes like this:
Electric company - thug
Water company - thug
Gas company - ok
Cable company - thug
Wireless company - thug
Phone company - thug (stopped using 8 years ago because they wouldn't repair their lines)
Trash company - ok
So there are 7 private companies I deal with for important services. FIVE of them are monopolistic thugs that do things like sending bills without reading the meters and fail to keep their infrastructure in reasonable repair (try having to boil water for two weeks because the water company didn't repair their treatment facility after a storm damaged it years ago and see what your opinion on this is).
These state sanctioned monopolies are the children of Satan. Or maybe Eris. They get into the regulators knickers and generally then do anything they please.
Comcast is now bidding to own the interwebs. Tell whoever you can that this would be a disaster for America.
Chuckle.
Considering Congress convinced itself that the Affordable Health Care Act was a financial penalty and not a Tax, ( though declared a Tax by the SCOTUS ) I'm right there with you on that :)
It's like car insurance. We don't penalize you for being single, we just give the married folks a better rate :D
Is there anyone here who is using Google Fiber?
I would be curious to know how well home servers (www, email, SSH) perform when on this, especially given Google Fiber's original prohibitive TOS and Google's desire for you to keep everything on their servers. I see they have updated their TOS since the EFF kicked up a stink, but would like to hear from anyone who is actually using it.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
no it isn't bullshit. I live in canada where we even have stricter rules than the US and it still happens here. My dad owns a business and whenever he bids on government jobs his main competitor always wins the contract. Anyways when the owner of the compitor sold the company and retired my dad asked him how did he keep winning the contracts even though the bids were the same. The guy said easy, he would go to whoever is awarding the contract and say "how would your wife like a new washing machine?" and then magically a top of the line washing machine would show up at their house a couple days later (completely off the books of course, he would pay for it out of his own pocket, then just take a bonus out of the company to reimburse himself).
We ALL know how Politicians get bought and sold so let's cut the "total" bullshit here.
Yes, they do. But not all of them and certainly not in the manner that the GP presented. One needs to actually understand how the system works before one condemns it and/or proposes fixes for it. Incidentally, most of the people in politics hate the system as much as you do. You think they enjoy spending so much of their day begging people for money so they can fund their campaigns? The real world isn't House of Cards, most people actually enter public service for noble reasons, ranging from the mundane fixing of potholes to the desire to advance a social cause. The problem is two fold:
1) Campaign finance reform is inherently suspect because it's passed by people who have an incentive to make it harder for incumbents to lose elections. There's a reason why opponents frequently referred to McCain-Feingold as the "Incumbent Protection Act"
2) Meaningful campaign finance reform would require a Constitutional Amendment; the idea I most liked was the notion of precluding private donations but giving every American citizen X dollars to allocate as they see fit. It's an awesome idea but one that's utterly unconstitutional. Perhaps you should start building a network for this concept rather than spouting talking points about money going into Senators pockets?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This is done in Australia with virtually every single ISP with one tiny exception.
The quota you have is in big print right next to the price.
If you don't tell people what the quota is (in a fair way) then blatant lie does cover it quite nicely.
No. Netflix looks like crap at 7PM every night because they ditched Akamai and started their own CDN which is typically backhauled by Cogent, and Cogent tends to have terrible connectivity.
Kid-proof tablet..
You are attempting to mince terms to ignore the bribery since it does not come from 1 person/company as opposed to looking at the recipient of the bribe.
40 years ago the rules were different and sure it was called bribery. Today, no such thing. Campaign contributions can be used for clothing if said clothing is used on the campaign trail, it can be used for food, lodging, travel expenses, etc.. etc.. and this is all over the table. People holding offices receive regular "all expenses paid" trips to "seminars" regularly (even though the seminar may actually consist of a couple hour meeting which many don't attend).
So over the table, you can pay for just about all living expenses on "contributions", but we don't call that bribery because it's not directly stuffing wads of cash into someone's pocket. Makes no difference in the long run, because if I don't have to pay for food, clothing, travel, "entertainment", laptops, email, web hosting, and all the other shit I can put on my "contribution" fund I bank a huge sum of money that everyone else would have to pay for living expenses.
Why do you think one of the fastest ways to become a millionaire in the US is to be elected to Congress or the Senate? But of course you will probably claim that facts are fud since it harms your asinine opinion. Make sure you are ignoring the fact that members of the House and Senate can legally use insider trading knowledge to make sacks full of money that you and I would go to jail for (and have repeatedly refused to change the law).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
So, in China, a 20mbit fibre package can cost you approx. $12 USD (varies by city). Electricity, for me, in Chengdu, costs about $20-$30 per month for a family of 3 in a reasonable size place with a lot of appliances, computers, and gratuitous 24/7 air purifiers running. Water is far less at maybe $15/month, and gas is also quite low around $15/month.
Internet is extremely cheap. There is an option to bump it up to a 100mbit fibre connection in most areas, which runs a whopping $45 or so per month.
Those are fixed prices, because traffic is unlimited - and speed tests from everyone I know who runs the various speeds actually come in at close to the advertised speeds for downstream traffic (although upstream is usually like, 2mbit in comparison).
Unlimited. Oh, and no DMCA, nobody gives a FUCK what you download - as long as you don't need a VPN to connect to the content (which is like 99.9% of the torrents in the world) in which case make sure you get a VPN provider that ignores DMCA :D
Meaningful campaign finance reform would require a Constitutional Amendment;
Sez you.
Lessig has already proposed two methods don't require an amendment.
(1) Require that all donations go into a "black box" and are anonymously revocable. You can give all the money you want to a politician. He can even watch you write the check. But then you can chose to take some or all of the money back without telling the candidate that you reneged. You can even tell the candidate you took the money back if you want to. But you don't have to. So there is absolutely no restriction of speech in the system, but it totally disrupts the incentive for quid-pro-quo because the candidate can never know for sure if you took your money back. Consequently the incentive flips from giving as much as possible to the campaign to reneging and ultimately giving nothing.
(2) Every citizen gets a voucher to "spend" on campaigns, but if a candidate wants to take vouchers they have to forgo private donations. That actually is utterly constitutional because nobody is stopping a candidate from accepting private money aka "speech." They just have to decide if they want to listen to "private" speech or to "public" speech.