From your description I absolutely wouldn't worry about it.
If you have a typical 6Mbit connection then the 250GB cap is about 1/8th utilization. In other words, if you use your connection full blast for 3 hours a day, or if you use it constantly at 1/8th of its full speed, you'll just reach the cap. Now consider, how often are you using the full capacity of your connection? SL, WoW, and streaming audio never come anywhere close. Streaming video isn't coming anywhere close unless it's streaming HD video. iTunes will depend a lot on exactly what you're doing with it but it probably comes nowhere close. I doubt your work VPNs are coming anywhere close.
Now as I said, they really need to tell people where they stand, and the fact that they don't really sucks. But on the other hand it seems that most people on this site vastly overestimate their usage. From my limited experience, most people who use the internet "heavily" are using 50GB or less per month. Most of the whining on Slashdot appears to be coming from this misconception. People apparently believe that if they spend their evenings browsing YouTube and their mornings watching video clips on CNN that they're going to hit the cap, but it takes way, way, way more than that.
Don't even have to buy it. From doing a Google News search, it looks to me like the controversy over deleting the Deletionpedia entry is going to make it notable even if it didn't start out that way.
Thanks for the information. That's much lower than I thought it would be. Are your attacks which can work through many intermediaries theoretical or practical? It seems to me that adding intermediaries would make the problem much more difficult for an attacker in a practical sense, even if he could theoretically just apply his attack many times. With 3 hops, you only need to be sniffing two machines to find out who I'm talking to, whereas increasing that number would significantly raise the challenge. But I haven't thought about the problem in depth, so there could definitely be aspects I've missed.
I'm a Comcast customer and I'm also happy with this cap.
There's no way I'm going to ever come close to it. There's very little way that anyone is going to come close to it with reasonable usage. And if they do, they can always pay more money. I see no reason why I should have to subsidize people who use far more resources than I do. Pay for what you use, that's what I say.
I'll certainly say that the way Comcast is implementing the cap is crappy. Not telling people their current usage and disconnecting users who exceed it are extremely bad policies. But neither of those is going to make me leave them, and the cap is still overall a very good idea.
I'm not aware of any broadband consumer-class connection that has ever been truly unlimited. They're always ready to give you the axe if you exceed some sort of secret limit. Comcast is just making it explicit. No real change.
I agree. The cap is a perfectly good idea. Giving users no way to see how close they are to their cap, and cutting people off for exceeding it, are terrible ideas.
I see no reason why I, a moderate internet user, should subsidize that guy down the street who downloads 1TB of torrents every month. He uses more, he should pay more.
But the way Comcast is going about it is stupid. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, essentially. An explicit cap can lead to more traffic, since now people know what the limit is and what they're really paying for, and they may decide that they should use more of what they're paying for. I think they're trying to limit the top people without causing this sort of increase, and doing this by having an explicit cap that still happens to be vague and dire.
If you were to do this right, you should really have a system where many different caps are available. You'd have a default one, probably well under 250GB, that comes with a service that's cheaper than what they offer now. Then you can pay more to increase your cap. You'd be able to monitor your usage, get a warning well before you hit the cap, and increase your account's cap at any time just by requesting it. And if you do hit your cap, then your account gets throttled to dialup speeds until your 30-day sliding window average decreases below the cap level.
Of course this would make far too much sense so Comcast won't do it, but it's what they ought to do.
Remember, Tor uses onion routing which means that every packet you send or receive goes through many nodes to get to you. This effectively multiplies your bandwidth usage by a factor of perhaps 5-10, depending on how many hops your packets travel. (I don't really know what a typical number would be.)
So, you run a node. Do you process 5-10x as much traffic as you torrent? If so, great. If you're only passing an amount of traffic equal to what you torrent, or worse less, then you are definitely abusing the system.
I don't think that "significant" has an official engineering definition. What an individual considers "significant" is certainly important to the discussion, as it is essentially a shortcut way of asking what risk level you consider high enough to make rescue preparations for to mitigate the chances of loss of human life.
Your comparisons to submarine accidents make no sense to me. Unless I'm grossly misinformed about the US Navy's frequency of operations, there have been far more submarine missions than Shuttle missions in any given period. Comparing absolute numbers is utterly meaningless in that context. You must compare the Shuttle's historic record of roughly 1/70 fatal accidents with whatever the rate is for submarines. I don't know that number, but I'd be extremely shocked if it were anywhere near 1/70.
Yes, don't bother to explain how he's wrong or anything. Just assume that he'll soon be talking about something he never mentioned, then criticize his spelling. I'm totally convinced about your point of view now!
How do you figure a 250GB/month cap is "getting up the behind"? That kind of cap is far more than most users need, and if you need more then I'm sure you can get a special subscription that has a higher limit. I don't understand why Slashdotters are so much against the idea of paying more for using more. I don't see why I, with fairly moderate usage, should pay to subsidize the guy down the street who's doing 1TB/month downloading butt porn.
Galileo lost a huge amount of data because its high-gain antenna was never usable, considerably reducing the return on the more than $1 billion invested in it. Mars Observer was simply lost, $800 million down the drain. When you put all of your eggs into one probe, a single mistake destroys an enormous amount. Using more, smaller probes reduces the risks and ultimately either costs the same or saves money. A gain in flexibility is just a bonus.
Given the histories of the Shuttle and American submarines, the Shuttle's chances of a fatal ice/tile incident are much greater than anything that would happen to a submarine, and well into the realm of what I would call significant.
Then his question was badly asked. You don't ask a question on how to do A so that you can then do B, then reject an answer that gives you B without A. It's nonsensical and antisocial, and you're being silly for defending it.
But do those submarines have relatively obvious unfixed failure modes the way the Shuttle does? It's one thing to have no protection from unknown problems and rather different to know that there's a problem with a significant chance of killing you but taking no precautions against it.
Sorry, but humor is essentially the science of the unexpected. Such an obvious response simply doesn't qualify.
As for the sig, well, I don't really give a crap. I want to tell people how horrendous it is. If people do it to me, well, I knew there were assholes on this site long before I started doing that.
And how is that related to me telling a guy feigning ignorance to use google to find out who Sarah Palin is? And why does that deserve to be told to "get real"?
Uh huh. Whether I thought of it or not is irrelevant. Fact of the matter is that this is far from the first time a moron has decided that my signature needs this particular treatment.
The trouble is that such bailouts then teach people to take even more risks next time around. When the executives of a large company such as AIG are next faced with the choice between taking a risky road with a great reward or a safe road with small rewards, why should they not choose the risky road? After all, they're too large to fail, so Uncle Sam will save them if the risk doesn't pay off.
I don't have an answer. I can see that letting them fail isn't good either. But this is just going to make it worse next time around, the way I see it.
I definitely thought they fell well into the "so bad they're good" category. But I don't think that was how they were intended to play. And while better than most of the stuff on YouTube, I doubt they were worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least) that Microsoft spent to create them. In fact, from Microsoft's perspective they probably have negative value, as they just serve to further hurt the brand. But they were at least entertaining to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks again for the explanation. It's good to know how this stuff works.
From your description I absolutely wouldn't worry about it.
If you have a typical 6Mbit connection then the 250GB cap is about 1/8th utilization. In other words, if you use your connection full blast for 3 hours a day, or if you use it constantly at 1/8th of its full speed, you'll just reach the cap. Now consider, how often are you using the full capacity of your connection? SL, WoW, and streaming audio never come anywhere close. Streaming video isn't coming anywhere close unless it's streaming HD video. iTunes will depend a lot on exactly what you're doing with it but it probably comes nowhere close. I doubt your work VPNs are coming anywhere close.
Now as I said, they really need to tell people where they stand, and the fact that they don't really sucks. But on the other hand it seems that most people on this site vastly overestimate their usage. From my limited experience, most people who use the internet "heavily" are using 50GB or less per month. Most of the whining on Slashdot appears to be coming from this misconception. People apparently believe that if they spend their evenings browsing YouTube and their mornings watching video clips on CNN that they're going to hit the cap, but it takes way, way, way more than that.
Don't even have to buy it. From doing a Google News search, it looks to me like the controversy over deleting the Deletionpedia entry is going to make it notable even if it didn't start out that way.
Thanks for the information. That's much lower than I thought it would be. Are your attacks which can work through many intermediaries theoretical or practical? It seems to me that adding intermediaries would make the problem much more difficult for an attacker in a practical sense, even if he could theoretically just apply his attack many times. With 3 hops, you only need to be sniffing two machines to find out who I'm talking to, whereas increasing that number would significantly raise the challenge. But I haven't thought about the problem in depth, so there could definitely be aspects I've missed.
I'm a Comcast customer and I'm also happy with this cap.
There's no way I'm going to ever come close to it. There's very little way that anyone is going to come close to it with reasonable usage. And if they do, they can always pay more money. I see no reason why I should have to subsidize people who use far more resources than I do. Pay for what you use, that's what I say.
I'll certainly say that the way Comcast is implementing the cap is crappy. Not telling people their current usage and disconnecting users who exceed it are extremely bad policies. But neither of those is going to make me leave them, and the cap is still overall a very good idea.
I'm not aware of any broadband consumer-class connection that has ever been truly unlimited. They're always ready to give you the axe if you exceed some sort of secret limit. Comcast is just making it explicit. No real change.
I agree. The cap is a perfectly good idea. Giving users no way to see how close they are to their cap, and cutting people off for exceeding it, are terrible ideas.
I see no reason why I, a moderate internet user, should subsidize that guy down the street who downloads 1TB of torrents every month. He uses more, he should pay more.
But the way Comcast is going about it is stupid. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, essentially. An explicit cap can lead to more traffic, since now people know what the limit is and what they're really paying for, and they may decide that they should use more of what they're paying for. I think they're trying to limit the top people without causing this sort of increase, and doing this by having an explicit cap that still happens to be vague and dire.
If you were to do this right, you should really have a system where many different caps are available. You'd have a default one, probably well under 250GB, that comes with a service that's cheaper than what they offer now. Then you can pay more to increase your cap. You'd be able to monitor your usage, get a warning well before you hit the cap, and increase your account's cap at any time just by requesting it. And if you do hit your cap, then your account gets throttled to dialup speeds until your 30-day sliding window average decreases below the cap level.
Of course this would make far too much sense so Comcast won't do it, but it's what they ought to do.
It really depends on how much you give back.
Remember, Tor uses onion routing which means that every packet you send or receive goes through many nodes to get to you. This effectively multiplies your bandwidth usage by a factor of perhaps 5-10, depending on how many hops your packets travel. (I don't really know what a typical number would be.)
So, you run a node. Do you process 5-10x as much traffic as you torrent? If so, great. If you're only passing an amount of traffic equal to what you torrent, or worse less, then you are definitely abusing the system.
I'd say it's less involved, not more. Answering a question which is a matter of public record is much easier than trying to guess someone's password.
I've always thought that those "security questions" were a giant security hole. This just goes to show that it's true.
I don't think that "significant" has an official engineering definition. What an individual considers "significant" is certainly important to the discussion, as it is essentially a shortcut way of asking what risk level you consider high enough to make rescue preparations for to mitigate the chances of loss of human life.
Your comparisons to submarine accidents make no sense to me. Unless I'm grossly misinformed about the US Navy's frequency of operations, there have been far more submarine missions than Shuttle missions in any given period. Comparing absolute numbers is utterly meaningless in that context. You must compare the Shuttle's historic record of roughly 1/70 fatal accidents with whatever the rate is for submarines. I don't know that number, but I'd be extremely shocked if it were anywhere near 1/70.
Yes, don't bother to explain how he's wrong or anything. Just assume that he'll soon be talking about something he never mentioned, then criticize his spelling. I'm totally convinced about your point of view now!
That makes no sense. It's not a 376kbit connection. It's a 6Mbit connection (or whatever it is they sell in your area) with a 250GB cap.
How do you figure a 250GB/month cap is "getting up the behind"? That kind of cap is far more than most users need, and if you need more then I'm sure you can get a special subscription that has a higher limit. I don't understand why Slashdotters are so much against the idea of paying more for using more. I don't see why I, with fairly moderate usage, should pay to subsidize the guy down the street who's doing 1TB/month downloading butt porn.
Galileo lost a huge amount of data because its high-gain antenna was never usable, considerably reducing the return on the more than $1 billion invested in it. Mars Observer was simply lost, $800 million down the drain. When you put all of your eggs into one probe, a single mistake destroys an enormous amount. Using more, smaller probes reduces the risks and ultimately either costs the same or saves money. A gain in flexibility is just a bonus.
What's your definition of "significant"?
Given the histories of the Shuttle and American submarines, the Shuttle's chances of a fatal ice/tile incident are much greater than anything that would happen to a submarine, and well into the realm of what I would call significant.
Then his question was badly asked. You don't ask a question on how to do A so that you can then do B, then reject an answer that gives you B without A. It's nonsensical and antisocial, and you're being silly for defending it.
But do those submarines have relatively obvious unfixed failure modes the way the Shuttle does? It's one thing to have no protection from unknown problems and rather different to know that there's a problem with a significant chance of killing you but taking no precautions against it.
Not a problem. I just wanted to see if I was missing some kind of hidden meaning.
Sorry, but humor is essentially the science of the unexpected. Such an obvious response simply doesn't qualify.
As for the sig, well, I don't really give a crap. I want to tell people how horrendous it is. If people do it to me, well, I knew there were assholes on this site long before I started doing that.
And how is that related to me telling a guy feigning ignorance to use google to find out who Sarah Palin is? And why does that deserve to be told to "get real"?
That's not "well played". That's "Slashdot moderators all suck balls". Which we all knew already.
Uh huh. Whether I thought of it or not is irrelevant. Fact of the matter is that this is far from the first time a moron has decided that my signature needs this particular treatment.
The trouble is that such bailouts then teach people to take even more risks next time around. When the executives of a large company such as AIG are next faced with the choice between taking a risky road with a great reward or a safe road with small rewards, why should they not choose the risky road? After all, they're too large to fail, so Uncle Sam will save them if the risk doesn't pay off.
I don't have an answer. I can see that letting them fail isn't good either. But this is just going to make it worse next time around, the way I see it.
How does it qualify as "well played" to make the same blindingly obvious "joke" that at least 30 other people have already made?
He can take $20 out of that $25,000 and buy them from the ninth grader down the street.
I definitely thought they fell well into the "so bad they're good" category. But I don't think that was how they were intended to play. And while better than most of the stuff on YouTube, I doubt they were worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least) that Microsoft spent to create them. In fact, from Microsoft's perspective they probably have negative value, as they just serve to further hurt the brand. But they were at least entertaining to watch.