They are the ones advertising the connection as unlimited. Not our fault that we have a dictionary.
Well, I just went to the Comcast page where they advertise and describe cable service on the sign-up page, and nowhere does it say that the service is "unlimited".
Furthermore, when ISPs have used the term "unlimited" in the past, it has referred to "unlimited volume" (in contrast to limited volume plans).
I think the solution is simple, though: ISPs should simply get rid of the unlimited volume plans and start charging you $1 per gigabyte above, oh, 10 G/month. I think that would put a stop to all this whining and nonsense.
If your cable company gives you a 16 Mbps connection, all they can do is give you 16 Mbps peak bandwidth; they simply do not have the capacity to give everybody 16 Mbps sustained. It just isn't there. And it's not going to be there any time soon.
So, if they are forced to remove all restrictions and guarantee that they can deliver peak bandwidth as sustained bandwidth, there's only one thing they can do: lower peak bandwidth. The maximum unrestricted sustained they can support for every user is a few hundred kbps. Is that what you want? I don't think that's going to make the US economy very competitive.
and watch the US economy stagnate, and fall behind the rest of the developed world.
That's total bullshit. Cable and DSL companies in the rest of the world have high peak bandwidths, restrictions on P2P and servers, volume limits, and traffic filtering. Nobody can give you peak cable bandwidths at sustained rates and home pricing, anywhere in the world, because it just doesn't work out economically.
Me, I don't want to figure it out. I just want something that works. Click, type, compile, collect paycheck.
Well, VisualStudio should be just right for you, then.
Of course, compared to learning C++, Java, or C#, the effort of learning Eclipse is negligible. But you're probably one of those people who think that with a B.A. and three months of on-the-job training, they are a "professional programmer".
First, NASA tricks AT&T in setting up a cell phone network on the moon, then, in order to recoup their investment, AT&T must somehow get the moon colonized.
Well, okay, maybe Congress found it necessary to cut $88 million out of the high energy physics budget to pay for Bush's useless wars. Sure, I could probably that.
And the rest of the money comes from where? The tooth fairy? Bush's war probably costs a trillion dollars when all is said and done.
But if that's so, then how the hell did the same Congress find it possible to lard $19 BILLION of new earmarks (a.k.a. pork) into the budget?!?
Most of the money you call "pork" is infrastructure spending. There may be more efficient ways of funding that stuff, but by and large, if it doesn't come out of federal taxes, it comes out of state taxes.
If they could cut back the Bridge to Nowhere and other pork by just 5%, then there would be more than enough money for SLAC, Fermilab, etc.
Or, they can simply cut SLAC and give the money to other disciplines.
Its really a shame that SLAC just had to lay off something like 15% of their staff due to DOE budget cuts in the past couple of weeks.
Well, it is when you consider that the money is being wasted on useless wars.
On the other hand, given a limited overall science budget, it is doubtful to me that physics mega-projects should continue being supported in the way they have been. Biology, chemistry, math, and computer science yield a lot more useful results per dollar.
If there are lots of rocky, earth-sized planets in habitable zones, that eliminates many of the simple answers to the Fermi paradox. The alternatives get less and less pleasant from there on.
I think we need a war on this stupid "war on" meme. For music companies or journalists to suggest that the downloading of music justifies the same response as Hitler's invasion of Poland is disgusting.
The "covenant not to sue" is indeed not a particularly sound guarantee. On the other hand, if Microsoft sued over patent infringement in 10 years, I think they'd have a hard time recovering anything: any infringement wouldn't be willful and any it's hard to claim damages over something that they themselves said anybody could use.
Trouble is: they are competing against services that aren't subject to these kinds of patent trolls and they can't just increase prices arbitrarily. If they could, they already would have.
This sort of thing is good. Cable and media companies have a lot of muscle, and sooner or later, they are going to tire of this and demand that the patent system be changed so that there is some clarity.
A simple "enforce it or lose it" requirement, just like for trademarks, would eliminate a lot of this patent trolling.
Why hobble a perfectly good computer by making it pretend to be something that runs on an entirely different basis?
Because that's how one shows that a model actually works.
As per Minsky, a fish swims under water; would you say a submarine swims?
You tell me. People are building models of fish that swim in order to understand swimming better. And it's the same with brains and thinking. If some useful engineering comes out of it, all the better.
I hear this guy frequently billed as some uber-genius AI scientist...is that just a bunch of self-promoting-nonsense?
Yes.
Kurzweil has founded a bunch of moderately successful companies that have sold software vaguely related to AI.
I have to say I don't know enough about AI or CS to know what to make of that list
You don't really have to know that much; just compare what he has done to some other AI people, by searching on Scholar for Peter Norvig, Patrick Winston, Rodney Brooks, Tom Mitchell, or Terry Winograd.
Your comment is missing the point. I was simply explaining that it's reasonable to have this kind of court be secret because the GP was concerned about the existence of secret courts.
Now, we can have a separate discussion about whether this secret court is working.
Check out the denial records of that court since the 70s. That should tell you just how detailed the FISA rubber stamp looks at those warrant petitions.
OK, well, note that there is a record, and that we can actually see whether the court is working well based on that record. That's a start.
Now, the FISA court may not be working very well. Why is that? Because of the judges that make it up are quite cozy with the executive, including the president, the military, and police. And why is that? Because that's the kind of judges that get appointed at the federal level by the right-wing law-and-order politicians that Americans elect.
So, the fact that the FISA and similar courts exist in the first place is a good thing: it means that there is at least the potential for oversight and that there is a paper trail. Now, we just need to get judges with backbone in there. That will take a while, but sooner or later it's going to happen. Don't move us backwards by complaining about the institution of the FISA court simply because it happens to be staffed with the wrong people right now.
AT&T also has made big profits. That's what the market expects from these companies.
In any case, I don't get your problem. If you don't like the deal Comcast is giving you, switch. If you were too dumb to figure out that "16 Mbps top speed" doesn't mean "16 Mbps sustained rate", well, now you know and you can cancel your contract. If you like AT&T (or whoever your DSL provider is) so much, switch.
Now, one thing I'm for is forcing companies like Comcast and AT&T to make their advertising clearer and commit to a sustained speed. So, Comcast might advertise "we guarantee 16 Mbps burst rate, 1 Mbps sustained rate". But you will not get 16 Mbps sustained at current prices because it's economically impossible.
Wheras now you've got 3x the speed right up until you actually try and use it?
I have no problem using it: Comcast only promised burst speeds, but they do deliver that. I can download the latest Ubuntu CD while watching video and running a VNC connection. But if you try to max out your connection 24/7, I hope they'll disconnect you because you make other people's lives miserable.
What I was wondering is WHY THE FUCK DOES THE UNITED STATES HAVE A SECRET COURT OF ANY KIND?!?!.
This is not a "secret court" in the sense of a court that sends people to prison (the US has those, too, but they are still limited to the military and Guantanamo). Rather, it's a court that acts as an additional control for police and secret service actions.
Such a "secret court" is a good thing, because it provides judicial review for actions that would otherwise not be subject to judicial review at all.
I wouldn't buy that phone even if they put iPhone software on it and made it all open source. That's one ugly phone.
There will be iPhone killers based on Android: high resolution touch screen phones with a sleek, clean design. I doubt they'll be coming from Dell or Alienware.
Actually they are doing it because they have an outdated badly scaling last mile network and don't want to spend the nescessary capital to improve it.
Quite right. And so what?
So, what are the alternatives? They can raise prices or they can go out of business. Both are bad for users.
There is a reason that it only is cable companies talking about bandwidth caps, and not the dsl companies.
Well, if DSL is so wonderful, go subscribe to it.
I ended up with cable because the phone company wasn't even capable of connecting DSL in six weeks. I just checked: their web site is a rat's nest of dead links, but it seems like I'd still only get 1/3 the speed for the monthly fee I pay for cable.
And hopefully people will stop using Comcast if they do that.
Yes, hopefully they will, because it makes life easier for the rest of us.
Why do you think Comcast is doing that? To annoy people? Because they are evil? They're doing it because a small number of people are eating up a lot of bandwidth and degrading service for the other users.
Slashdot Mirror
They are the ones advertising the connection as unlimited. Not our fault that we have a dictionary.
Well, I just went to the Comcast page where they advertise and describe cable service on the sign-up page, and nowhere does it say that the service is "unlimited".
Furthermore, when ISPs have used the term "unlimited" in the past, it has referred to "unlimited volume" (in contrast to limited volume plans).
I think the solution is simple, though: ISPs should simply get rid of the unlimited volume plans and start charging you $1 per gigabyte above, oh, 10 G/month. I think that would put a stop to all this whining and nonsense.
Take a step towards unrestricted bandwidth
If your cable company gives you a 16 Mbps connection, all they can do is give you 16 Mbps peak bandwidth; they simply do not have the capacity to give everybody 16 Mbps sustained. It just isn't there. And it's not going to be there any time soon.
So, if they are forced to remove all restrictions and guarantee that they can deliver peak bandwidth as sustained bandwidth, there's only one thing they can do: lower peak bandwidth. The maximum unrestricted sustained they can support for every user is a few hundred kbps. Is that what you want? I don't think that's going to make the US economy very competitive.
and watch the US economy stagnate, and fall behind the rest of the developed world.
That's total bullshit. Cable and DSL companies in the rest of the world have high peak bandwidths, restrictions on P2P and servers, volume limits, and traffic filtering. Nobody can give you peak cable bandwidths at sustained rates and home pricing, anywhere in the world, because it just doesn't work out economically.
Me, I don't want to figure it out. I just want something that works. Click, type, compile, collect paycheck.
Well, VisualStudio should be just right for you, then.
Of course, compared to learning C++, Java, or C#, the effort of learning Eclipse is negligible. But you're probably one of those people who think that with a B.A. and three months of on-the-job training, they are a "professional programmer".
First, NASA tricks AT&T in setting up a cell phone network on the moon, then, in order to recoup their investment, AT&T must somehow get the moon colonized.
Well, okay, maybe Congress found it necessary to cut $88 million out of the high energy physics budget to pay for Bush's useless wars. Sure, I could probably that.
And the rest of the money comes from where? The tooth fairy? Bush's war probably costs a trillion dollars when all is said and done.
But if that's so, then how the hell did the same Congress find it possible to lard $19 BILLION of new earmarks (a.k.a. pork) into the budget?!?
Most of the money you call "pork" is infrastructure spending. There may be more efficient ways of funding that stuff, but by and large, if it doesn't come out of federal taxes, it comes out of state taxes.
If they could cut back the Bridge to Nowhere and other pork by just 5%, then there would be more than enough money for SLAC, Fermilab, etc.
Or, they can simply cut SLAC and give the money to other disciplines.
Its really a shame that SLAC just had to lay off something like 15% of their staff due to DOE budget cuts in the past couple of weeks.
Well, it is when you consider that the money is being wasted on useless wars.
On the other hand, given a limited overall science budget, it is doubtful to me that physics mega-projects should continue being supported in the way they have been. Biology, chemistry, math, and computer science yield a lot more useful results per dollar.
Not only does your ISP record your surfing data and keeps it around to give to the police, he sells it to other companies, too.
I work for a University, and we have a commercial web-filter to try to keep [...] time-wasting material off people's machines and out of labs.
:-)
It can't be working very well if you manage to connect to Slashdot
If there are lots of rocky, earth-sized planets in habitable zones, that eliminates many of the simple answers to the Fermi paradox. The alternatives get less and less pleasant from there on.
Incompetent use of a language/API doesn't equate to a bad language/API
No, but incompetent design of a language/API does, in fact, equate to a bad language/API.
I think we need a war on this stupid "war on" meme. For music companies or journalists to suggest that the downloading of music justifies the same response as Hitler's invasion of Poland is disgusting.
The "covenant not to sue" is indeed not a particularly sound guarantee. On the other hand, if Microsoft sued over patent infringement in 10 years, I think they'd have a hard time recovering anything: any infringement wouldn't be willful and any it's hard to claim damages over something that they themselves said anybody could use.
Trouble is: they are competing against services that aren't subject to these kinds of patent trolls and they can't just increase prices arbitrarily. If they could, they already would have.
Hey, what's not "Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND)" about 0.5% of all cable revenues?
This sort of thing is good. Cable and media companies have a lot of muscle, and sooner or later, they are going to tire of this and demand that the patent system be changed so that there is some clarity.
A simple "enforce it or lose it" requirement, just like for trademarks, would eliminate a lot of this patent trolling.
Why hobble a perfectly good computer by making it pretend to be something that runs on an entirely different basis?
Because that's how one shows that a model actually works.
As per Minsky, a fish swims under water; would you say a submarine swims?
You tell me. People are building models of fish that swim in order to understand swimming better. And it's the same with brains and thinking. If some useful engineering comes out of it, all the better.
I hear this guy frequently billed as some uber-genius AI scientist...is that just a bunch of self-promoting-nonsense?
Yes.
Kurzweil has founded a bunch of moderately successful companies that have sold software vaguely related to AI.
I have to say I don't know enough about AI or CS to know what to make of that list
You don't really have to know that much; just compare what he has done to some other AI people, by searching on Scholar for Peter Norvig, Patrick Winston, Rodney Brooks, Tom Mitchell, or Terry Winograd.
Your comment is missing the point. I was simply explaining that it's reasonable to have this kind of court be secret because the GP was concerned about the existence of secret courts.
Now, we can have a separate discussion about whether this secret court is working.
Check out the denial records of that court since the 70s. That should tell you just how detailed the FISA rubber stamp looks at those warrant petitions.
OK, well, note that there is a record, and that we can actually see whether the court is working well based on that record. That's a start.
Now, the FISA court may not be working very well. Why is that? Because of the judges that make it up are quite cozy with the executive, including the president, the military, and police. And why is that? Because that's the kind of judges that get appointed at the federal level by the right-wing law-and-order politicians that Americans elect.
So, the fact that the FISA and similar courts exist in the first place is a good thing: it means that there is at least the potential for oversight and that there is a paper trail. Now, we just need to get judges with backbone in there. That will take a while, but sooner or later it's going to happen. Don't move us backwards by complaining about the institution of the FISA court simply because it happens to be staffed with the wrong people right now.
The guy talks and sells a lot, but he has contributed almost nothing to Artificial Intelligence. Have a look at his publications:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sauthors=r-kurzweil&as_subj=eng
AT&T also has made big profits. That's what the market expects from these companies.
In any case, I don't get your problem. If you don't like the deal Comcast is giving you, switch. If you were too dumb to figure out that "16 Mbps top speed" doesn't mean "16 Mbps sustained rate", well, now you know and you can cancel your contract. If you like AT&T (or whoever your DSL provider is) so much, switch.
Now, one thing I'm for is forcing companies like Comcast and AT&T to make their advertising clearer and commit to a sustained speed. So, Comcast might advertise "we guarantee 16 Mbps burst rate, 1 Mbps sustained rate". But you will not get 16 Mbps sustained at current prices because it's economically impossible.
Wheras now you've got 3x the speed right up until you actually try and use it?
I have no problem using it: Comcast only promised burst speeds, but they do deliver that. I can download the latest Ubuntu CD while watching video and running a VNC connection. But if you try to max out your connection 24/7, I hope they'll disconnect you because you make other people's lives miserable.
What I was wondering is WHY THE FUCK DOES THE UNITED STATES HAVE A SECRET COURT OF ANY KIND?!?!.
This is not a "secret court" in the sense of a court that sends people to prison (the US has those, too, but they are still limited to the military and Guantanamo). Rather, it's a court that acts as an additional control for police and secret service actions.
Such a "secret court" is a good thing, because it provides judicial review for actions that would otherwise not be subject to judicial review at all.
I wouldn't buy that phone even if they put iPhone software on it and made it all open source. That's one ugly phone.
There will be iPhone killers based on Android: high resolution touch screen phones with a sleek, clean design. I doubt they'll be coming from Dell or Alienware.
Actually they are doing it because they have an outdated badly scaling last mile network and don't want to spend the nescessary capital to improve it.
Quite right. And so what?
So, what are the alternatives? They can raise prices or they can go out of business. Both are bad for users.
There is a reason that it only is cable companies talking about bandwidth caps, and not the dsl companies.
Well, if DSL is so wonderful, go subscribe to it.
I ended up with cable because the phone company wasn't even capable of connecting DSL in six weeks. I just checked: their web site is a rat's nest of dead links, but it seems like I'd still only get 1/3 the speed for the monthly fee I pay for cable.
And hopefully people will stop using Comcast if they do that.
Yes, hopefully they will, because it makes life easier for the rest of us.
Why do you think Comcast is doing that? To annoy people? Because they are evil? They're doing it because a small number of people are eating up a lot of bandwidth and degrading service for the other users.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.