Net Neutrality ("NN") is the idea that a service provider does not give preferential treatment, or penalize, any network traffic based on any financial interests they have in said traffic.
This has nothing to do with NN, since it is not the financial interests of the service provider at work, but the whims of the users themselves.
Sure, Verizon may make more money, but this is *equal* opportunity to any application out there to incorporate this new feature. The feature itself is simply a choice to go faster. I fail to see how that is any different than temporarily purchasing a faster connection.
If Verizon chooses what applications can benefit, and has deals favoring specific content providers with "strategic business relationships" or with its own content, than that would be violating the principles of NN.
That does not seem to be the case since they will be publishing an API that is seemingly available to all software developers.
You pay 3-5% on your purchases, and depending on where and how, you might be paying considerably more. You just see it as wrapped up in the price.
It's true that you are already ahead, but you would be surprised what happens when you deal with businesses and ask for a "cash discount".
I get them all the time. On medical co-pays, parts purchases, etc. Of course with big name faceless places like major grocery stores you can forget it.
All of my experience is in deep wells in southern Texas.
You say it was not a spill? These wells have fluid coming off them for years afterwards. The wells in Texas still require a service to come out every so often and take away the fluid. It is above ground in a steel container that is inspected regularly. Not related to fraccing alone, there have been instances in which pollution has occurred from retaining pools above ground.
Other than that, the only two possible ways it can happen are if the fractures split upwards towards the surface and created a path for the gas to flow from the production zone into the water table, or the casing on the well was substandard and is now leaking gas and fluids into the water table. Same thing really.
I just have a hard time understanding why a frac would occur so close to a water table in the first place. Not just laterally, but vertically. Vertically is okay. We were literally 10k feet below the water table. Casing is still intact, so there is no way we are leaking anything into the water table. The fracture would have been about 2 miles long. That's a huge amount of energy to do so. It would be a big deal too, since there is a preserve near these wells.
The other thing to keep in mind... is that fraccing is not permanent. The pressure in the ground will close the fractures right back up and your permeability (how easy it is for gas to flow through the strata) is right back down to nothing.
What makes a frac permanent is the proppant. It varies, but just think of it as sand. On the high end you have ceramic coated beads that can withstand immense heat and pressures, and the low end literally sand. When you have forced the fractures open you pump all the "sand" down and this is what now keeps the fracture open and allows the gas to flow through these man made channels more efficiently than the surrounding strata to the well bore.
I bring that up because if the fractures went out much farther than what was anticipated, they still have a finite amount of proppant to pump. It can get expensive, let me tell you. A couple millions dollars per well of proppant is not unusual. If you put more proppant in then you were expecting, in a case like I outlined above, it would not go unnoticed.
That's the part that just does not sit right with me. All the technology that is involved here would seem to preclude this from happening. There are geologists and paleontologists on staff just to figure out exactly where you are. They take samples from the "mud truck" looking for clues to where they are geologically speaking to confirm what they want to do exactly.
In order for those wells to have been poisoned, it would have been a very shallow gas well, or very shoddy and careless practices during the drilling, casing, perforating, and fraccing. It is not in their best interests anyways. Why would they want all the oil & gas leaking into the water table instead of up their pipe and into the refineries? Environmental is a concern with them, but the bottom line is always what drives them. Both of these factor in here and would seemingly inhibit these kinds of outcomes.
To be completely honest, if you are within 2,000 feet of a water table where you are trying to frac, that is just irresponsible. I have a hard time believing that all of petro engineers, geologists, etc. would go along with something so completely nuts. They more than anybody would know what could very well happen.
That's my biggest problem with believing this... is that what is required to get there is just so stupid. They would have to be "aiming" for the water table. Why????
It's highly unlikely that a frac thousands of feet below the water table would force anything up into it. Even under ideal conditions with an A+ plus frac, you normally don't get more than a couple thousand feet in any direction anyways. It will follow the weakest points too, which 3D seismic tells you. In short, you would have a pretty good idea beforehand where the fractures will go.
Add to that the cement lining the pipe. You do know that they have to perforate before they frac right? How else do you think they can frak at just the right spots? They are putting the pressure in very specific places and a single well can be frac'd many times. Every layman out there brings up the fact you have to poke a whole through all the strata, but does not take into account that the hole itself is sealed and reinforced. It has to be for one, and two it is crucial to operations such as fraccing and efficient gas transfer to the surface.
The earthquakes are ridiculous. That energy was stored in the Earth already. If fraccing could actually do that, it would be a tool to mitigate earthquakes. If you could identify the pressures and release them at 2-3 scale quakes before they go off at 7's, we would not be vilifying anything, but saying, "Oh that's cool". 3.0 quakes rarely damage anything, and are not felt at great distances. I sincerely doubt there is that much energy during a frac, and I have been at several "big ones" personally and experienced nothing but a slight vibration in the truck.
What may cause earthquakes is geothermal energy sources. That is actually real and needs to be understood before widespread use of the technology is acceptable. Reno, NV does quite a bit of it and has had unusual seismic activity ever since.
I don't trust companies right now to have our best interests at heart, but I have been exposed to these operations firsthand and spoken to engineers and I don't see how the quakes are involved, and poisoning water tables would have to involve a chain of events that include gross negligence, and in some cases, the laws of physics being broken.
Until somebody with a degree and experience in that field explains to me how it is so easy to do that, I am going to go with that natural gas fraccing (responsibly) is not a major cause of water table pollution. That is from my experience and knowledge directly. I just don't see how it is possible given what I understand about it.
So I am a dissenting voice here, but please, give me some actual data to change my mind other than propaganda (from either side) and emotional diatribes.
I think I understand what you are trying to say, but it does not apply to a secondary layer or DNS.
DNS is just name resolution. It does not imply splitting into many pieces at all, and in fact, would more than likely be redundant. I can see DNS resolution becoming more granular, and its set up and operation more than just a few dialog boxes in a control interface.
You can have DNS networks that forward their questions to other networks. That's not new. Using it in a way to create a separate infrastructure and preferred resolution with other networks depending on the TLDs, etc. would be. I don't see that as far fetched either.
As for the secondary layer, that is not affecting the primary layer at all as far as divisions, peer and transit agreements, etc. There could be multiple secondary layers, which is highly likely, and would be more like protected communities. The secondary layer that delivers the most popular features with the highest level of service will win.
In any case, I don't think it will have an outcome as dreary as the one you portray. It's going to happen eventually, and some people might get left behind for awhile. Right now we live in a idealistic paradise compared to what content companies, carriers, and governments want us to have. Even if it is like you say, we are headed for it.
The Internet will fork. That's my post 2012 prediction.
I wonder why nobody else is considering the alternate explanation here?
It's possible that the Mexican drug cartels backed down or paid Anonymous off handsomely. Which is more pragmatic in the short run? Antagonize a bunch of people that do have information that can hurt you and your revenue.... or just pay them off and use them?
The Mexican drug cartels strike me as very very ruthless, and yet pragmatic in some cases. A more ordered evil than one might think. These are the same people that are probably gathering intelligence through common means as Anonymous does, or even better means. Same people that continually construct more and more complex distribution systems such as tunnels and submarines.
I don't think it is too far fetched that they just flashed a couple million dollars and Anonymous reconsidered pretty damn fast. It's either that or everyone thinks that Anonymous group members are all idealists fighting for just causes and not soldiers of fortune. It will take an awful lot of idealism from everyone involved to turn down millions of dollars.
help you explain the issues to those that won't be able to get around the poisoned DNS entries that this bill will allow
When Pakistan screwed up, according to their own internal policies, and altered the routing (BGP) and effectively caused youtube.com to be/dev/null'd for a half a day, the rest of the world responded. They fixed the routes, and Pakistan lost a lot of credibility and respect from other IT people. Were Pakistan to continue affecting the rest of the world with its internal policies, the rest of the world would respond more and more stringently, to the point that Pakistan would not have access to such systems anymore.
This is no different. If the US decides to mess around with DNS in accordance with its own internal policies, the rest of the world will respond by taking that control away. Either through a EU sanctioned DNS infrastructure, or some sort of p2p infrastructure.
The alternative is the rest of the world dealing with clearly incorrect DNS entries and businesses having to deal with US control.
This problem does not need to be further explained, and the ones that do understand it, will work around it. This is a good thing. It will push DNS beyond US control, and might actually start a decentralized/fractured DNS system where those that care can resolve host names the way they see fit.
In short, this only provides more motivation to "solving" our problem of a monitored Internet. Create a secondary Internet on top of it that is not monitored and cannot be interfered with. Several projects in the works, and this only puts more fuel on the fire so to speak.
Because they want to be able to trust that what they ship will behave the way they want it to ship (think patches) without having to test on anyone else's OS components. That is not unreasonable. If you are so damned clever, you can probably patch your own rendering engine in anyway. And if you really wanted the freedom to do that, you would have been running Free Software anyway, so this is a silly argument at best.
Free Software can be a choice when it is just you. In business environments, often the choice is made for you already.
As for silly argument.....
You mean that their patches and updates cannot patch and test their rendering engine directly? There is no disclosure from 3rd party rendering engines or MS that replacing their built-in rendering engine means they are not the responsible ones?
I don't find my argument to be that silly at all, and updates and patches are not a good excuse when it is so easy to work around it. I never even mentioned removing the complete removal of their rendering engine. Just calling a different one.
As for the closed-source OS, that is what is starting to kill them already. Making the OS to be flexible enough so that 3rd party components can be swapped in and out only makes their platform, and product, better. IT people like me could get behind it a lot faster if we knew how easy it was to replace core components.
MS could always make better components you know..... thereby making the whole argument moot.
Since Microsoft is using their HTML engine to render all kinds of stuff including, on occasion, dialog boxes, they would have to be complete tools to allow you to replace it.
But why would they be complete tools?
Anybody that would be replacing the rendering engine more than likely knows what they are doing. What would be replacing the rendering engine would have more features, better performance, etc.
I don't see why they would have to be complete idiots to do it. Actually, I see them being complete idiots to not make it easy to do.
Same mentality behind IE. They thought they were so *big* and so *dominant* that the whole world had to fall in line and just take what they dish out. They could *dictate* the standards.
In the last 10 years it has become abundantly apparent to everyone including MS that they were wrong. Cooperation with open standards is the only way to move forward. MS, especially with IE, will only dominate again *if* the product can stand up on its own merits. Which it is starting to do against FireFox right now. My preference is Chrome, IE, then FireFox. I never thought I would say that either.
So in that spirit, I ask again, why would they be complete tools to allow you to do this?
However, as I stated elsewhere, it would have been very nice if the Trident engine could have been replaced with a 3rd party alternative.
HTML5 and JavaScript will require a rendering engine. I don't have much faith that MS will provide a top notch rendering engine. So concern #3 really should be, "can it be replaced?".
I'm tired of MS not rendering a page the same way all the other browsers would. If they just cooperated and competed solely on the merits of how well theirs performs this truly would be a non-issue just as you say it is.
Only reason why people want to make it an issue is because MS is not as good as the others. Plain and Simple.
Only problem I have with it is the rendering engine itself should be able to be replaced. MS has always been piss poor on rendering anything correctly. Probably has a lot to do with their attitude, and that is only *very* recently starting to change.
So if the rendering engine is top notch, adheres to standards, cooperative with the global communities, and responsive to needed changes... great. That has not been MS behavior in the past though.
In a way I do take this personally. I have to deal with way too many 3rd party applications that use core parts of the MS OS, that are just outdated and downright crappy. If there was a way to swap out those core pieces with other code, my life would be so much easier.
You have a great point, but ultimately the problem remains..... IE can't render anything for shit. IE9 is getting better, but is still too young. The day MS can actually render something according to standards I won't care that I am using their rendering engine.
P.S - In MS defense... the current IE8 has better performance than Firefox, even while not rendering things correctly. Talk about a major disappointment. Firefox......
As I was saying, I was using _your_ numbers, just to illustrate a point; the actual cost structure is much more complicated.
You pulled the 3G bandwidth out yourself; those were not my numbers.
The cost structure is not more complicated at all. Just different.
The point is that cell service is fundamentally limited by radio bandwidth, tower density, and peak usage. If your infrastructure is maxed out, then if people start using twice as much data, you need twice as many towers. That's fundamentally different from wired.
Nooo. It is exactly the same as wired.
A fiber optical cable is fundamentally limited by physics just as much as as radio bandwidth is limited by physics. Once the cable is laid in the ground, there is a fixed amount of bandwidth that will flow across it. The most you could ever do is swap out the technology that is pushing the light across for something more efficient. However, many technological improvements in bandwidth also involve different fiber optical cables.
There is NO difference between wireless and wired networks till you reach a certain point. You could refer to it as the "last mile" if you want. It is just smaller pipes feeding into bigger ones and then ultimately huge bridges in between networks. You would understand that as the network hand offs, which are governed by peer and transit agreements.
Wired infrastructure can max out just as much as wireless.
There should be NO IMPACT from people using twice as much data on a wired network, or a wireless network. The only reason why there is comes back to my original point.... they are overselling bandwidth which should be illegal.
Of course you are going to point out that without "sharing" the bandwidth it would be impossible to deliver a connection to as many people as we do. That is not true. What would have to happen is a greater level of transparency and honesty about costs. Just as I mentioned previously with my metered bandwidth plan at my datacenter, it is possible to do this in a way that the consumer could understand.
What will happen when unlimited disappears completely and the costs are transparent is that the consumer will be able to figure out that Netflix costs them $20 per month, but streaming a single 2 hour HD movie will cost them $0.35. I am pulling that number out of my butt, but the point is that it will be a known cost. I can calculate all my costs at the datacenter.
As for wireless, the costs are not that difficult to figure out. Since the "last mile" is wireless that means you are not spending any money at all with extra cable runs in the streets, routers, and connections to individual houses. We are more than likely talking about a diameter of 6 miles per tower, if we are talking about normal traditional spacing in between towers. That is more space than you are seemingly willing to acknowledge. That's about 30 square miles of coverage. I don't think you realize how much money it costs to do cable runs under the street, or how much a single router in the ground costs, the maintenance, etc.
Having your infrastructure, with the exceptions of the major "arteries", above ground reduces costs. Even with more towers per area, we are not talking about 20x the costs of bringing broadband to individual homes in a wired fashion.
You're confusing limits with actual performance. WiMAX and 4G increase the limits of the technology, but they don't use bandwidth a lot more efficiently. If you replaced all 3G towers and phones with 4G, nothing much would change or get faster. 4G just allows companies to put in more towers, support faster rates, and and support more users, but they still need to make the investments to actually do so.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Limits vs Real World Performance applies to everything. Gigabit Ethernet has limits on paper, but actual performance depends on numerous factors, including
You just don't understand how cellular technology works.
Well then you don't understand it either. All of the numbers you pulled were either out of your ass, or for 3G.
You keep coming back an argument that I don't understand wireless, when I do.
There is a limited amount of spectrum. You use different technologies to use that spectrum to the greatest efficiency you can. That includes working around interference, signal range, signal penetration, etc.
In that regard, a wireless tower is no different than a Wireless N access point. What you think I don't understand, is that there is a limited number of connections that can be made, and a limited amount of bandwidth provided to all connections at any one time.
What you are wrong about, is the number of connections and total bandwidth per cell tower. They have a much greater range than your standard access point, up to 20 miles or so, but I am not sure off the top of my head what the range for a LTE tower would be. Standard spacing I think is a couple of miles per mast, regardless of technology used on the tower. Multiple spectrums and technologies can co-exist on a single tower.
Obviously... the more towers you have means the greater number of connections per area covered, and greater amount of total bandwidth to deliver.
What I said about wired and wireless being no different is accurate. Planning for wireless cell towers is no different than planning for wireless access points in a large building. The bandwidth is already being run under the ground and distributed. Those costs *will* be roughly comparable to cablemodem/DSL. The difference is going to be that a single tower can service far more connections in a given area and will offset all the equipment you need to distribute cablemodem/DSL into neighborhoods and into each individual house.
When looking at the cost of a tower versus the costs of the additional fiber runs, routers, street to the MPOE, etc. I don't think you are going to get that dramatic of a difference.
So if you understand "cellular" as well as you say you do... then tell me the specs for an LTE (4G) tower. What is the total number of connections per tower? Is it flexible? Meaning, can the number of connections grow past a certain point while degrading the existing connections, or is there a fixed amount that cannot be passed (GSM vs CDMA)? What is the total bandwidth that can be delivered to wireless connections from a single tower (single spectrum)?
I think you don't know what you are talking about because the literature puts your numbers off by an order at least. Even 1st gen WiMAX exceeds the numbers you put out.
Distance is irrelevant, the limit on cells is the size of the radio band available (hence "bandwidth") and how much of that users are using. Verizon has 10 MHz 3G bandwidth, probably corresponding to about 10 Mbps that's shared between all users of that cell site at all times.
We are talking about 4G.
Let's use your numbers, shall we? If you actually use 400kbps steady stream, that's about 1/20th of Verizon's bandwidth per tower. Let's say the tower costs $1 million (low end of your estimate). If you and 20 other people like you use 400kbps, the tower is full and can't do anything else. So, just to pay for the tower, Verizon needs to recover $50000 from each user like you. In addition, they actually still need to run a network infrastructure, pay for Internet access, etc. $1000/month seems quite reasonable for that. But it's worse than that: if you use 400kbps on average, but only use the device during working hours, that's about 1.6Mbps or 1/6th of the tower, so now they need to make $160000 from you just to recover your portion of the cost of the tower.
Still talking about 3G huh?
Sounds to me like it stopped because you didn't have any idea of what you were doing.
Sounds like you are predisposed to throwing around insults instead of cogent arguments. I would imagine cogent arguments are difficult when you have a reading comprehension problem such as yours.
By all means continue to support the carriers when they are overselling their bandwidth, price fixing, and gouging the consumer.
If you knew at all what you were talking about you would know that it is possible to deliver the bandwidth and 15GB does not need to cost $200 per month. Clear is using WiMAX and that has the bandwidth to deliver (although not in my city anymore due to overselling) and that technology falls short of LTE, by a large margin.
LTE has the ability to deliver more bandwidth currently. WiMAX will ultimately evolve to be roughly comparable to LTE in terms of capacity and bandwidth.
All of this scarcity that you think exists is ARTIFICIAL.
There is not enough competition. The players are price fixing. Period.
It is not really my stones either. I spoke with all of the major carriers, even Sprint, who I hate with a passion. After getting specific details on their business offerings, how many accounts were needed to qualify, etc. I presented my research to the owner of a large business.
His words, essentially, "Are they on crack?".
Not only would it be incredibly difficult and involve vigilant policing of the devices to ensure no overage fees, I calculated the average amount of data transmitted for a single transaction. I pointed out that the standard cap would not cover them, and the larger cap barely could do so.
It was not economically viable to do so. Therefore, I have no wireless options to present to businesses at this point. Certainly not in this economy.
I also stand by my statement that the bandwidth is being oversold and the carriers are price fixing.
They don't need to be reasonable either. In fact, telecoms have a sordid history of being unreasonable. Only through increased competition did the prices lower at all for long distance calling.
Just like Apple says it is not interested in business clients, the wireless carriers are not interested in providing data to business clients either at fair rates.
The sad thing is that we are not talking about bandwidth hogs either. 3GB is an extremely small cap that anyone can exceed in a very short period of time. This can happen without their knowledge. WIndows updates? Anti-virus updates? That can be considerable. Downloading a 50MB program adds up.
You say we would pay the price if it was worth it to us, but you also need to factor in ignorance. The carriers get away with these super premium charges because of the personal consumers and they oversell and play the averages games.
The last people they want participating are businesses. They usually have CTO's that can read contracts and calculate bandwidth costs.
Who said I was in real estate? Your emotional response is clouding your reading comprehension skills.
I consult and develop solutions for companies. In real estate I mainly deal with communications between those companies and sometimes mobile. However, that actually stopped after the collapse.
Subsidize what? That is a fucking myth. First off, I have a mobile hotspot, not a smartphone plan. I was paying $50 per month, not $30. My provider cannot sue me for breach of contract. Federal prevents them from doing so since they made a material change to the contract.
I don't know where you get those prices, but they are outrageous. It does not actually cost that much at all.
That is the subsidy myth. You get so mad because you believe you are paying for other people's bandwidth and not getting your fair share. My turn to make an assumption about you.... bet you are Republican huh?:)
lol
Moving on though..... all of the carriers, including landlines, oversell their bandwidth. That is the biggest fraud imaginable. It is akin to a Ponzi scheme. So your complaint about not having enough bandwidth is not my fucking fault. Look to the carriers. They both sold us "unlimited", but the reality is that even if it were unlimited 3mb/s connections to our homes the carriers are not actually delivering enough bandwidth if everybody decided to use their connection to full capacity at any one moment.
I love metered bandwidth plans.... when they are reasonable and not designed to fuck you. I have an excellent plan at my datacenter, where it seems that bandwidth is much better understood by all parties and a hell of lot less bullshit gets to pass. I pay for ceiling and floor. My floor is guaranteed, but up to the ceiling is based on current usage from everyone else. I pay a rate dependent upon the *average* rate I transmitted at, which is calculated by total bandwidth consumed over time. My rate goes DOWN, not up. If I consistently have my average at over half the difference between my floor and ceiling it is agreed that I need to raise my floor. Raising my floor is what actually makes it fair for everybody. We have a shared pool of bandwidth that allows us to burst to much higher speeds for short periods of time. The burst capacity is around 3-4 times the floor. This allows the entire datacenter to easily plan for how much bandwidth they actually need to support everybody there.
It may sound complicated at first, but is actually quite transparent and fair.
What we are talking about with Sprint is anything but fair. I don't know where you get this idea that 15GB is unreasonable.
They claim that 4G is capable of 10Mb/s. Let's just say it is only around 2.5 Mb/s, which is what I actually tested. The fact is that 15GB represents only ~400Kb/s average transfer rate for the month. At 2.5 Mb/s you will reach the 3GB cap in just a few hours, and any of the caps within the day.
It's ridiculous to sell a connection that you reach your cap on within 1 day of a 30 day billing period.
It's called price gouging and fucking the consumer, yet you still want to stick to this idea that I am somehow taking away from you. That is laughable at best. If they did not oversell it, there would be no problems at all getting enough bandwidth to the towers and making reasonable contracts.
They won't do it though. They will just repeat what Clear did, oversell the fuck out of it, piss you off, and then you will be raving like a lunatic how it is other people hogging the bandwidth that are causing the problems.
Put your thinking cap on for one fucking second.....
If a 10Mb/s connection on a landline costs you around $50-$60 per month, and you have no caps, or let's say a reasonable cap of 250GB then what the wireless carriers are *really* saying is that their wireless internet costs nearly $1000 per month to give you the landline equivalent.
Do you really think that is anywhere near true? All the fiber optic cables and route
Eating the dead is fine I guess.... if you want to start picking up diseases. Prions are the greatest concern. Google "kuru". Staying away from human brains will not help you either. There are a large number of parasites and diseases that are transmissible by eating the corpse. Even monkeys and apes are dangerous because how close they are to us genetically unless you believe in the Jeebus, in which case we are not even close to monkeys and apes... at all.
All the animals we consume now are killed while healthy. The only way your Soylent Teriyaki program will work is if you kill perfectly healthy humans that pass a physical before hand.
It gives a new meaning to organic-no-hormones-no-antibiotics-gmo labels on food though.
The same people that are saying unlimited text messaging needs to be $10-20 a month can be trusted to tell me that 10-15GB on 4G (true 4g) is $150 month.
Believe that and I have a bridge to sell you. Text messaging has markups in the hundreds of thousands of percent. Probably more. You don't know why, you are just one of the reasons why text messaging was artificially inflated in costs without a revolt. I was one that revolted and continues to do so because I know it costs them next to nothing to "send" a message.
My use is not unreasonable at all. Business class would actually need to be business class. Meaning, I would expect for $150 per month a much larger cap, preferred access to bandwidth, performance guarantees, escalation lists, etc. All normal stuff you receive in business class offerings. They are trying to pass of personal plans, at unreasonable caps anyways, as business. That's just bullshit.
It is not unreasonable either to ask for a shared pool of bandwidth for all devices.
Their infrastructure can handle way more than what I am trying to pull out of it. What it really comes down to is how much they are trying to oversell their bandwidth and deliberately creating overusage fees from customers because they know they have set the caps too low.
Why would they create a hotspot capable of 8 devices connected to it if their infrastructure could not handle the load? Streaming music (not Netflix), and just regular usage from a laptop can exceed the caps quite easily. Selling you a device where you can allow 8 times the load just allows them to encourage these fees.
The companies I consult for, and the industries I am involved in cannot afford $150 per mobile link in this economy. If you just stupidly spend it the only thing you have done is raise costs up (quite considerably). If you actually care at all about the company and are thinking more than 1 year in the future, you don't commit to such stupidity.
If the carriers want to oversell their bandwidth, price fix, and gouge consumers I am not obligated to pay for it. I cannot in good conscience advise anyone to pay those prices. I know it is a rip off.
You can't see what they are doing, fine. I don't know how they convinced you that normal usage was so low.
It's that kind of mentality that leads to "bailouts". If you are in a small-medium sized business paying $150 per month per mobile location is just inefficient and wasteful. 10-15GB per month is not actually worth that much. The carriers are just taking you for a ride.
So in the end all you end up doing is greatly increasing costs and then trying to pass those costs off to the consumers. Now you are less competitive. That's how other people come in with different solutions and less overhead and eat your lunch. Next thing you now company is going down the tubes.
The price points they come up with for this crap is just egregious. I can get dual bonded T1 connections for around $500 month with equipment lease and a service contract. How on Earth can Sprint have the balls to tell me that it costs me $150 per month to send 15 fucking gigs on their LTE network?
At a minimum of $7500 per month I would sooner look into other solutions involving mesh networking and some sort of cooperative between businesses running long range wi-fi out of each business. Present the idea to the local Chamber of Commerce and a couple of business councils and you might just create a pretty robust network.
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Uh, have you seen a gecko's tongue?
Look... I know there is a LOT of porn out there, but I have not yet had time to get to it all yet.
If that is true, then does the same logic apply to the gecko's feet?
What keeps their feet free of dust, dirt, hair, and all that other crap? They seem to deal with it just fine.
Perhaps there are other properties at work here that would allow you clean it. Clearly the geckos have evolved a way to deal with those issues.
That's wrong.
Net Neutrality ("NN") is the idea that a service provider does not give preferential treatment, or penalize, any network traffic based on any financial interests they have in said traffic.
This has nothing to do with NN, since it is not the financial interests of the service provider at work, but the whims of the users themselves.
Sure, Verizon may make more money, but this is *equal* opportunity to any application out there to incorporate this new feature. The feature itself is simply a choice to go faster. I fail to see how that is any different than temporarily purchasing a faster connection.
If Verizon chooses what applications can benefit, and has deals favoring specific content providers with "strategic business relationships" or with its own content, than that would be violating the principles of NN.
That does not seem to be the case since they will be publishing an API that is seemingly available to all software developers.
You pay 3-5% on your purchases, and depending on where and how, you might be paying considerably more. You just see it as wrapped up in the price.
It's true that you are already ahead, but you would be surprised what happens when you deal with businesses and ask for a "cash discount".
I get them all the time. On medical co-pays, parts purchases, etc. Of course with big name faceless places like major grocery stores you can forget it.
All of my experience is in deep wells in southern Texas.
You say it was not a spill? These wells have fluid coming off them for years afterwards. The wells in Texas still require a service to come out every so often and take away the fluid. It is above ground in a steel container that is inspected regularly. Not related to fraccing alone, there have been instances in which pollution has occurred from retaining pools above ground.
Other than that, the only two possible ways it can happen are if the fractures split upwards towards the surface and created a path for the gas to flow from the production zone into the water table, or the casing on the well was substandard and is now leaking gas and fluids into the water table. Same thing really.
I just have a hard time understanding why a frac would occur so close to a water table in the first place. Not just laterally, but vertically. Vertically is okay. We were literally 10k feet below the water table. Casing is still intact, so there is no way we are leaking anything into the water table. The fracture would have been about 2 miles long. That's a huge amount of energy to do so. It would be a big deal too, since there is a preserve near these wells.
The other thing to keep in mind... is that fraccing is not permanent. The pressure in the ground will close the fractures right back up and your permeability (how easy it is for gas to flow through the strata) is right back down to nothing.
What makes a frac permanent is the proppant. It varies, but just think of it as sand. On the high end you have ceramic coated beads that can withstand immense heat and pressures, and the low end literally sand. When you have forced the fractures open you pump all the "sand" down and this is what now keeps the fracture open and allows the gas to flow through these man made channels more efficiently than the surrounding strata to the well bore.
I bring that up because if the fractures went out much farther than what was anticipated, they still have a finite amount of proppant to pump. It can get expensive, let me tell you. A couple millions dollars per well of proppant is not unusual. If you put more proppant in then you were expecting, in a case like I outlined above, it would not go unnoticed.
That's the part that just does not sit right with me. All the technology that is involved here would seem to preclude this from happening. There are geologists and paleontologists on staff just to figure out exactly where you are. They take samples from the "mud truck" looking for clues to where they are geologically speaking to confirm what they want to do exactly.
In order for those wells to have been poisoned, it would have been a very shallow gas well, or very shoddy and careless practices during the drilling, casing, perforating, and fraccing. It is not in their best interests anyways. Why would they want all the oil & gas leaking into the water table instead of up their pipe and into the refineries? Environmental is a concern with them, but the bottom line is always what drives them. Both of these factor in here and would seemingly inhibit these kinds of outcomes.
To be completely honest, if you are within 2,000 feet of a water table where you are trying to frac, that is just irresponsible. I have a hard time believing that all of petro engineers, geologists, etc. would go along with something so completely nuts. They more than anybody would know what could very well happen.
That's my biggest problem with believing this... is that what is required to get there is just so stupid. They would have to be "aiming" for the water table. Why????
It's highly unlikely that a frac thousands of feet below the water table would force anything up into it. Even under ideal conditions with an A+ plus frac, you normally don't get more than a couple thousand feet in any direction anyways. It will follow the weakest points too, which 3D seismic tells you. In short, you would have a pretty good idea beforehand where the fractures will go.
Add to that the cement lining the pipe. You do know that they have to perforate before they frac right? How else do you think they can frak at just the right spots? They are putting the pressure in very specific places and a single well can be frac'd many times. Every layman out there brings up the fact you have to poke a whole through all the strata, but does not take into account that the hole itself is sealed and reinforced. It has to be for one, and two it is crucial to operations such as fraccing and efficient gas transfer to the surface.
The earthquakes are ridiculous. That energy was stored in the Earth already. If fraccing could actually do that, it would be a tool to mitigate earthquakes. If you could identify the pressures and release them at 2-3 scale quakes before they go off at 7's, we would not be vilifying anything, but saying, "Oh that's cool". 3.0 quakes rarely damage anything, and are not felt at great distances. I sincerely doubt there is that much energy during a frac, and I have been at several "big ones" personally and experienced nothing but a slight vibration in the truck.
What may cause earthquakes is geothermal energy sources. That is actually real and needs to be understood before widespread use of the technology is acceptable. Reno, NV does quite a bit of it and has had unusual seismic activity ever since.
I don't trust companies right now to have our best interests at heart, but I have been exposed to these operations firsthand and spoken to engineers and I don't see how the quakes are involved, and poisoning water tables would have to involve a chain of events that include gross negligence, and in some cases, the laws of physics being broken.
Until somebody with a degree and experience in that field explains to me how it is so easy to do that, I am going to go with that natural gas fraccing (responsibly) is not a major cause of water table pollution. That is from my experience and knowledge directly. I just don't see how it is possible given what I understand about it.
So I am a dissenting voice here, but please, give me some actual data to change my mind other than propaganda (from either side) and emotional diatribes.
I think I understand what you are trying to say, but it does not apply to a secondary layer or DNS.
DNS is just name resolution. It does not imply splitting into many pieces at all, and in fact, would more than likely be redundant. I can see DNS resolution becoming more granular, and its set up and operation more than just a few dialog boxes in a control interface.
You can have DNS networks that forward their questions to other networks. That's not new. Using it in a way to create a separate infrastructure and preferred resolution with other networks depending on the TLDs, etc. would be. I don't see that as far fetched either.
As for the secondary layer, that is not affecting the primary layer at all as far as divisions, peer and transit agreements, etc. There could be multiple secondary layers, which is highly likely, and would be more like protected communities. The secondary layer that delivers the most popular features with the highest level of service will win.
In any case, I don't think it will have an outcome as dreary as the one you portray. It's going to happen eventually, and some people might get left behind for awhile. Right now we live in a idealistic paradise compared to what content companies, carriers, and governments want us to have. Even if it is like you say, we are headed for it.
The Internet will fork. That's my post 2012 prediction.
I wonder why nobody else is considering the alternate explanation here?
It's possible that the Mexican drug cartels backed down or paid Anonymous off handsomely. Which is more pragmatic in the short run? Antagonize a bunch of people that do have information that can hurt you and your revenue.... or just pay them off and use them?
The Mexican drug cartels strike me as very very ruthless, and yet pragmatic in some cases. A more ordered evil than one might think. These are the same people that are probably gathering intelligence through common means as Anonymous does, or even better means. Same people that continually construct more and more complex distribution systems such as tunnels and submarines.
I don't think it is too far fetched that they just flashed a couple million dollars and Anonymous reconsidered pretty damn fast. It's either that or everyone thinks that Anonymous group members are all idealists fighting for just causes and not soldiers of fortune. It will take an awful lot of idealism from everyone involved to turn down millions of dollars.
help you explain the issues to those that won't be able to get around the poisoned DNS entries that this bill will allow
When Pakistan screwed up, according to their own internal policies, and altered the routing (BGP) and effectively caused youtube.com to be /dev/null'd for a half a day, the rest of the world responded. They fixed the routes, and Pakistan lost a lot of credibility and respect from other IT people. Were Pakistan to continue affecting the rest of the world with its internal policies, the rest of the world would respond more and more stringently, to the point that Pakistan would not have access to such systems anymore.
This is no different. If the US decides to mess around with DNS in accordance with its own internal policies, the rest of the world will respond by taking that control away. Either through a EU sanctioned DNS infrastructure, or some sort of p2p infrastructure.
The alternative is the rest of the world dealing with clearly incorrect DNS entries and businesses having to deal with US control.
This problem does not need to be further explained, and the ones that do understand it, will work around it. This is a good thing. It will push DNS beyond US control, and might actually start a decentralized/fractured DNS system where those that care can resolve host names the way they see fit.
In short, this only provides more motivation to "solving" our problem of a monitored Internet. Create a secondary Internet on top of it that is not monitored and cannot be interfered with. Several projects in the works, and this only puts more fuel on the fire so to speak.
Laser light is VERY different to light coming from a torch
I quite agree. In addition to the difference in light, torches give off a lot of smoke too.
Because they want to be able to trust that what they ship will behave the way they want it to ship (think patches) without having to test on anyone else's OS components. That is not unreasonable. If you are so damned clever, you can probably patch your own rendering engine in anyway. And if you really wanted the freedom to do that, you would have been running Free Software anyway, so this is a silly argument at best.
Free Software can be a choice when it is just you. In business environments, often the choice is made for you already.
As for silly argument.....
You mean that their patches and updates cannot patch and test their rendering engine directly? There is no disclosure from 3rd party rendering engines or MS that replacing their built-in rendering engine means they are not the responsible ones?
I don't find my argument to be that silly at all, and updates and patches are not a good excuse when it is so easy to work around it. I never even mentioned removing the complete removal of their rendering engine. Just calling a different one.
As for the closed-source OS, that is what is starting to kill them already. Making the OS to be flexible enough so that 3rd party components can be swapped in and out only makes their platform, and product, better. IT people like me could get behind it a lot faster if we knew how easy it was to replace core components.
MS could always make better components you know..... thereby making the whole argument moot.
Since Microsoft is using their HTML engine to render all kinds of stuff including, on occasion, dialog boxes, they would have to be complete tools to allow you to replace it.
But why would they be complete tools?
Anybody that would be replacing the rendering engine more than likely knows what they are doing. What would be replacing the rendering engine would have more features, better performance, etc.
I don't see why they would have to be complete idiots to do it. Actually, I see them being complete idiots to not make it easy to do.
Same mentality behind IE. They thought they were so *big* and so *dominant* that the whole world had to fall in line and just take what they dish out. They could *dictate* the standards.
In the last 10 years it has become abundantly apparent to everyone including MS that they were wrong. Cooperation with open standards is the only way to move forward. MS, especially with IE, will only dominate again *if* the product can stand up on its own merits. Which it is starting to do against FireFox right now. My preference is Chrome, IE, then FireFox. I never thought I would say that either.
So in that spirit, I ask again, why would they be complete tools to allow you to do this?
I can't wait for it.
Right now with Social Media and all the bullshit you have less privacy and anonymity than ever before. People don't understand the danger.
Anything that motivates people to participate heavily in darknets is a good thing in the long run for freedom.
Very well put.
However, as I stated elsewhere, it would have been very nice if the Trident engine could have been replaced with a 3rd party alternative.
HTML5 and JavaScript will require a rendering engine. I don't have much faith that MS will provide a top notch rendering engine. So concern #3 really should be, "can it be replaced?".
I'm tired of MS not rendering a page the same way all the other browsers would. If they just cooperated and competed solely on the merits of how well theirs performs this truly would be a non-issue just as you say it is.
Only reason why people want to make it an issue is because MS is not as good as the others. Plain and Simple.
Only problem I have with it is the rendering engine itself should be able to be replaced. MS has always been piss poor on rendering anything correctly. Probably has a lot to do with their attitude, and that is only *very* recently starting to change.
So if the rendering engine is top notch, adheres to standards, cooperative with the global communities, and responsive to needed changes... great. That has not been MS behavior in the past though.
In a way I do take this personally. I have to deal with way too many 3rd party applications that use core parts of the MS OS, that are just outdated and downright crappy. If there was a way to swap out those core pieces with other code, my life would be so much easier.
You have a great point, but ultimately the problem remains..... IE can't render anything for shit. IE9 is getting better, but is still too young. The day MS can actually render something according to standards I won't care that I am using their rendering engine.
P.S - In MS defense... the current IE8 has better performance than Firefox, even while not rendering things correctly. Talk about a major disappointment. Firefox......
Mortal software?
I think somebody has been watching Tron.
As I was saying, I was using _your_ numbers, just to illustrate a point; the actual cost structure is much more complicated.
You pulled the 3G bandwidth out yourself; those were not my numbers.
The cost structure is not more complicated at all. Just different.
The point is that cell service is fundamentally limited by radio bandwidth, tower density, and peak usage. If your infrastructure is maxed out, then if people start using twice as much data, you need twice as many towers. That's fundamentally different from wired.
Nooo. It is exactly the same as wired.
A fiber optical cable is fundamentally limited by physics just as much as as radio bandwidth is limited by physics. Once the cable is laid in the ground, there is a fixed amount of bandwidth that will flow across it. The most you could ever do is swap out the technology that is pushing the light across for something more efficient. However, many technological improvements in bandwidth also involve different fiber optical cables.
There is NO difference between wireless and wired networks till you reach a certain point. You could refer to it as the "last mile" if you want. It is just smaller pipes feeding into bigger ones and then ultimately huge bridges in between networks. You would understand that as the network hand offs, which are governed by peer and transit agreements.
Wired infrastructure can max out just as much as wireless.
There should be NO IMPACT from people using twice as much data on a wired network, or a wireless network. The only reason why there is comes back to my original point.... they are overselling bandwidth which should be illegal.
Of course you are going to point out that without "sharing" the bandwidth it would be impossible to deliver a connection to as many people as we do. That is not true. What would have to happen is a greater level of transparency and honesty about costs. Just as I mentioned previously with my metered bandwidth plan at my datacenter, it is possible to do this in a way that the consumer could understand.
What will happen when unlimited disappears completely and the costs are transparent is that the consumer will be able to figure out that Netflix costs them $20 per month, but streaming a single 2 hour HD movie will cost them $0.35. I am pulling that number out of my butt, but the point is that it will be a known cost. I can calculate all my costs at the datacenter.
As for wireless, the costs are not that difficult to figure out. Since the "last mile" is wireless that means you are not spending any money at all with extra cable runs in the streets, routers, and connections to individual houses. We are more than likely talking about a diameter of 6 miles per tower, if we are talking about normal traditional spacing in between towers. That is more space than you are seemingly willing to acknowledge. That's about 30 square miles of coverage. I don't think you realize how much money it costs to do cable runs under the street, or how much a single router in the ground costs, the maintenance, etc.
Having your infrastructure, with the exceptions of the major "arteries", above ground reduces costs. Even with more towers per area, we are not talking about 20x the costs of bringing broadband to individual homes in a wired fashion.
You're confusing limits with actual performance. WiMAX and 4G increase the limits of the technology, but they don't use bandwidth a lot more efficiently. If you replaced all 3G towers and phones with 4G, nothing much would change or get faster. 4G just allows companies to put in more towers, support faster rates, and and support more users, but they still need to make the investments to actually do so.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Limits vs Real World Performance applies to everything. Gigabit Ethernet has limits on paper, but actual performance depends on numerous factors, including
You just don't understand how cellular technology works.
Well then you don't understand it either. All of the numbers you pulled were either out of your ass, or for 3G.
You keep coming back an argument that I don't understand wireless, when I do.
There is a limited amount of spectrum. You use different technologies to use that spectrum to the greatest efficiency you can. That includes working around interference, signal range, signal penetration, etc.
In that regard, a wireless tower is no different than a Wireless N access point. What you think I don't understand, is that there is a limited number of connections that can be made, and a limited amount of bandwidth provided to all connections at any one time.
What you are wrong about, is the number of connections and total bandwidth per cell tower. They have a much greater range than your standard access point, up to 20 miles or so, but I am not sure off the top of my head what the range for a LTE tower would be. Standard spacing I think is a couple of miles per mast, regardless of technology used on the tower. Multiple spectrums and technologies can co-exist on a single tower.
Obviously... the more towers you have means the greater number of connections per area covered, and greater amount of total bandwidth to deliver.
What I said about wired and wireless being no different is accurate. Planning for wireless cell towers is no different than planning for wireless access points in a large building. The bandwidth is already being run under the ground and distributed. Those costs *will* be roughly comparable to cablemodem/DSL. The difference is going to be that a single tower can service far more connections in a given area and will offset all the equipment you need to distribute cablemodem/DSL into neighborhoods and into each individual house.
When looking at the cost of a tower versus the costs of the additional fiber runs, routers, street to the MPOE, etc. I don't think you are going to get that dramatic of a difference.
So if you understand "cellular" as well as you say you do... then tell me the specs for an LTE (4G) tower. What is the total number of connections per tower? Is it flexible? Meaning, can the number of connections grow past a certain point while degrading the existing connections, or is there a fixed amount that cannot be passed (GSM vs CDMA)? What is the total bandwidth that can be delivered to wireless connections from a single tower (single spectrum)?
I think you don't know what you are talking about because the literature puts your numbers off by an order at least. Even 1st gen WiMAX exceeds the numbers you put out.
Distance is irrelevant, the limit on cells is the size of the radio band available (hence "bandwidth") and how much of that users are using. Verizon has 10 MHz 3G bandwidth, probably corresponding to about 10 Mbps that's shared between all users of that cell site at all times.
We are talking about 4G.
Let's use your numbers, shall we? If you actually use 400kbps steady stream, that's about 1/20th of Verizon's bandwidth per tower. Let's say the tower costs $1 million (low end of your estimate). If you and 20 other people like you use 400kbps, the tower is full and can't do anything else. So, just to pay for the tower, Verizon needs to recover $50000 from each user like you. In addition, they actually still need to run a network infrastructure, pay for Internet access, etc. $1000/month seems quite reasonable for that. But it's worse than that: if you use 400kbps on average, but only use the device during working hours, that's about 1.6Mbps or 1/6th of the tower, so now they need to make $160000 from you just to recover your portion of the cost of the tower.
Still talking about 3G huh?
Sounds to me like it stopped because you didn't have any idea of what you were doing.
Sounds like you are predisposed to throwing around insults instead of cogent arguments. I would imagine cogent arguments are difficult when you have a reading comprehension problem such as yours.
By all means continue to support the carriers when they are overselling their bandwidth, price fixing, and gouging the consumer.
If you knew at all what you were talking about you would know that it is possible to deliver the bandwidth and 15GB does not need to cost $200 per month. Clear is using WiMAX and that has the bandwidth to deliver (although not in my city anymore due to overselling) and that technology falls short of LTE, by a large margin.
LTE has the ability to deliver more bandwidth currently. WiMAX will ultimately evolve to be roughly comparable to LTE in terms of capacity and bandwidth.
All of this scarcity that you think exists is ARTIFICIAL.
There is not enough competition. The players are price fixing. Period.
Well, I got the stones.
It is not really my stones either. I spoke with all of the major carriers, even Sprint, who I hate with a passion. After getting specific details on their business offerings, how many accounts were needed to qualify, etc. I presented my research to the owner of a large business.
His words, essentially, "Are they on crack?".
Not only would it be incredibly difficult and involve vigilant policing of the devices to ensure no overage fees, I calculated the average amount of data transmitted for a single transaction. I pointed out that the standard cap would not cover them, and the larger cap barely could do so.
It was not economically viable to do so. Therefore, I have no wireless options to present to businesses at this point. Certainly not in this economy.
I also stand by my statement that the bandwidth is being oversold and the carriers are price fixing.
They don't need to be reasonable either. In fact, telecoms have a sordid history of being unreasonable. Only through increased competition did the prices lower at all for long distance calling.
Just like Apple says it is not interested in business clients, the wireless carriers are not interested in providing data to business clients either at fair rates.
The sad thing is that we are not talking about bandwidth hogs either. 3GB is an extremely small cap that anyone can exceed in a very short period of time. This can happen without their knowledge. WIndows updates? Anti-virus updates? That can be considerable. Downloading a 50MB program adds up.
You say we would pay the price if it was worth it to us, but you also need to factor in ignorance. The carriers get away with these super premium charges because of the personal consumers and they oversell and play the averages games.
The last people they want participating are businesses. They usually have CTO's that can read contracts and calculate bandwidth costs.
Who said I was in real estate? Your emotional response is clouding your reading comprehension skills.
I consult and develop solutions for companies. In real estate I mainly deal with communications between those companies and sometimes mobile. However, that actually stopped after the collapse.
Subsidize what? That is a fucking myth. First off, I have a mobile hotspot, not a smartphone plan. I was paying $50 per month, not $30. My provider cannot sue me for breach of contract. Federal prevents them from doing so since they made a material change to the contract.
I don't know where you get those prices, but they are outrageous. It does not actually cost that much at all.
That is the subsidy myth. You get so mad because you believe you are paying for other people's bandwidth and not getting your fair share. My turn to make an assumption about you.... bet you are Republican huh? :)
lol
Moving on though..... all of the carriers, including landlines, oversell their bandwidth. That is the biggest fraud imaginable. It is akin to a Ponzi scheme. So your complaint about not having enough bandwidth is not my fucking fault. Look to the carriers. They both sold us "unlimited", but the reality is that even if it were unlimited 3mb/s connections to our homes the carriers are not actually delivering enough bandwidth if everybody decided to use their connection to full capacity at any one moment.
I love metered bandwidth plans.... when they are reasonable and not designed to fuck you. I have an excellent plan at my datacenter, where it seems that bandwidth is much better understood by all parties and a hell of lot less bullshit gets to pass. I pay for ceiling and floor. My floor is guaranteed, but up to the ceiling is based on current usage from everyone else. I pay a rate dependent upon the *average* rate I transmitted at, which is calculated by total bandwidth consumed over time. My rate goes DOWN, not up. If I consistently have my average at over half the difference between my floor and ceiling it is agreed that I need to raise my floor. Raising my floor is what actually makes it fair for everybody. We have a shared pool of bandwidth that allows us to burst to much higher speeds for short periods of time. The burst capacity is around 3-4 times the floor. This allows the entire datacenter to easily plan for how much bandwidth they actually need to support everybody there.
It may sound complicated at first, but is actually quite transparent and fair.
What we are talking about with Sprint is anything but fair. I don't know where you get this idea that 15GB is unreasonable.
They claim that 4G is capable of 10Mb/s. Let's just say it is only around 2.5 Mb/s, which is what I actually tested. The fact is that 15GB represents only ~400Kb/s average transfer rate for the month. At 2.5 Mb/s you will reach the 3GB cap in just a few hours, and any of the caps within the day.
It's ridiculous to sell a connection that you reach your cap on within 1 day of a 30 day billing period.
It's called price gouging and fucking the consumer, yet you still want to stick to this idea that I am somehow taking away from you. That is laughable at best. If they did not oversell it, there would be no problems at all getting enough bandwidth to the towers and making reasonable contracts.
They won't do it though. They will just repeat what Clear did, oversell the fuck out of it, piss you off, and then you will be raving like a lunatic how it is other people hogging the bandwidth that are causing the problems.
Put your thinking cap on for one fucking second.....
If a 10Mb/s connection on a landline costs you around $50-$60 per month, and you have no caps, or let's say a reasonable cap of 250GB then what the wireless carriers are *really* saying is that their wireless internet costs nearly $1000 per month to give you the landline equivalent.
Do you really think that is anywhere near true? All the fiber optic cables and route
Yeah.... okay.
Eating the dead is fine I guess.... if you want to start picking up diseases. Prions are the greatest concern. Google "kuru". Staying away from human brains will not help you either. There are a large number of parasites and diseases that are transmissible by eating the corpse. Even monkeys and apes are dangerous because how close they are to us genetically unless you believe in the Jeebus, in which case we are not even close to monkeys and apes... at all.
All the animals we consume now are killed while healthy. The only way your Soylent Teriyaki program will work is if you kill perfectly healthy humans that pass a physical before hand.
It gives a new meaning to organic-no-hormones-no-antibiotics-gmo labels on food though.
release the plague that will force us all to live underground...
I thought that was already released.
It was a combination of Moms, HotPockets, WoW, and Basements.
Yeah.... riiiiiggghhhhtt.
The same people that are saying unlimited text messaging needs to be $10-20 a month can be trusted to tell me that 10-15GB on 4G (true 4g) is $150 month.
Believe that and I have a bridge to sell you. Text messaging has markups in the hundreds of thousands of percent. Probably more. You don't know why, you are just one of the reasons why text messaging was artificially inflated in costs without a revolt. I was one that revolted and continues to do so because I know it costs them next to nothing to "send" a message.
My use is not unreasonable at all. Business class would actually need to be business class. Meaning, I would expect for $150 per month a much larger cap, preferred access to bandwidth, performance guarantees, escalation lists, etc. All normal stuff you receive in business class offerings. They are trying to pass of personal plans, at unreasonable caps anyways, as business. That's just bullshit.
It is not unreasonable either to ask for a shared pool of bandwidth for all devices.
Their infrastructure can handle way more than what I am trying to pull out of it. What it really comes down to is how much they are trying to oversell their bandwidth and deliberately creating overusage fees from customers because they know they have set the caps too low.
Why would they create a hotspot capable of 8 devices connected to it if their infrastructure could not handle the load? Streaming music (not Netflix), and just regular usage from a laptop can exceed the caps quite easily. Selling you a device where you can allow 8 times the load just allows them to encourage these fees.
The companies I consult for, and the industries I am involved in cannot afford $150 per mobile link in this economy. If you just stupidly spend it the only thing you have done is raise costs up (quite considerably). If you actually care at all about the company and are thinking more than 1 year in the future, you don't commit to such stupidity.
If the carriers want to oversell their bandwidth, price fix, and gouge consumers I am not obligated to pay for it. I cannot in good conscience advise anyone to pay those prices. I know it is a rip off.
You can't see what they are doing, fine. I don't know how they convinced you that normal usage was so low.
"Affording it" is just being stupid. Sorry.
It's that kind of mentality that leads to "bailouts". If you are in a small-medium sized business paying $150 per month per mobile location is just inefficient and wasteful. 10-15GB per month is not actually worth that much. The carriers are just taking you for a ride.
So in the end all you end up doing is greatly increasing costs and then trying to pass those costs off to the consumers. Now you are less competitive. That's how other people come in with different solutions and less overhead and eat your lunch. Next thing you now company is going down the tubes.
The price points they come up with for this crap is just egregious. I can get dual bonded T1 connections for around $500 month with equipment lease and a service contract. How on Earth can Sprint have the balls to tell me that it costs me $150 per month to send 15 fucking gigs on their LTE network?
At a minimum of $7500 per month I would sooner look into other solutions involving mesh networking and some sort of cooperative between businesses running long range wi-fi out of each business. Present the idea to the local Chamber of Commerce and a couple of business councils and you might just create a pretty robust network.
$150 for such a pitiful cap is highway robbery.