I don't have anything the NSA is interested in. The people that are likely to try to gain from violating my privacy are likely to spend 10 times more then they gain.
There are two words that everyone should be concerned with: False Positive.
Wasn't this exactly what the USA declared to be considered an act of war, that would justify retaliation with conventional weapons?
And the people with political power are the ones who stand to get even richer if it does start another war (digital or conventional). They don't care who else dies or if the economy as a whole goes down the shitter as long as they make money. The US's defense budget is HUGE, how much of that goes to private contracts? In 2011, $374 billion went to private contracts, 15 times greater than any other US federal agency.
You mean where they're trying to start charging people for using solar power?
Yes. Already happens in some places. Where I live, you have to give the electric company $3,000 just to get approval for installing a grid-tie system. They call it an "interconnect study" and is supposedly to make sure the grid in your neighborhood can handle receiving the power. It's a smoking pile of bullshit, but our impotent PUC allows them to get a with it, and it really does prevent a lot of people from installing solar.
That would depend on whose definition of "willing" and you're using. Is it considered "willing" if the consequence of not surrendering is being detained for 48 hours? Because that would still be considered "willing" by the federal government.
Stories abound of people who have lost under the ACA, some of whom have lost big. You don't need some random/. member to tell you his story when similar stories have aired on every major news network for the last few weeks. Here's one from PBS, a relatively unbiased source that few would claim was rooting for the failure of the ACA.
And there are plenty MORE stories about people getting screwed by insurance companies BEFORE the ACA. Even with the ACA, it's still the insurance companies screwing you.
Okay,/. loves car analogies, so here's one. Let's say in the near future the technology for self-driving cars is well enough refined for the mass market. Now let's say failures in the automatic driving system will cause 1,000 deaths per year from traffic accidents, but the automatic driving system will save 10,000 deaths per year. Should we implement the system in order to save a net of 9,000 deaths per year, or should we deny it because it'll cause 1,000 deaths per year?
Extra: Why is exploiting a browser weakness an offense for a company? If I make a web page that crashes IE6, am I at fault?
Ok, since you're throwing out hypotheticals, how about if a company exploits a browser weakness to root your computer in order to track your browsing habits? How about if they root your phone in order to track your physical whereabouts? How about if they root your computer to steal your credit card info?
The fact that it was a browser weakness is irrelevant. It was the fact that they exploited it to do something the browser was clearly trying to prevent them from doing. If your door locks have a weakness, does that make it okay to exploit that weakness, open the door and enter your house even though you and the makers of the lock clearly intended me not to?
Google had $50 billion in revenues in 2012. If they use 3 significant figures, the fine rounds to $zero on their financial statements.
Exactly. $17 Million is just a small cost of doing business and really won't do anything to make them think twice next time. Change that M to a B and then it might make a difference. Or better yet, hold the C's directly responsible.
The last few chumps who took shots at US Presidents all lived to talk about it.
Every successful US presidential assassination has resulted in the assassin's death: Lincoln: The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was tracked down by Union soldiers and killed. Garfield: The assassin, Charles Guiteau, was executed by hanging. McKinley: The assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was executed by electric chair. Kennedy: The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald*, was shot in the Dallas Police Headquarters.
*There are plenty of conspiracy theorists that disagree with this. However, if you're in the "he didn't act alone," but that he was the shooter, he was still killed. If you believe he wasn't the shooter, then whoever was remains unknown and wouldn't have the opportunity to collect their bounty.
Of course, if you do it in another country you might have a chance at survival. For example, the dude who threw a grenade at GWB in the country of Georgia received a life sentence because Georgia (the country) has abolished the death penalty, even though he did kill a Georgian high ranking agent when being apprehended. Of course, if he had been successful the US may have intervened and killed the guy. Either way, at best he would have had to enjoy his bitcoins from a Georgian prison.
So how could you get away with surviving it, yet be known to have done it so you can collect your bitcoins?
Notice he only submitted his fake papers to open access journals. As a scientist, and especially as a biologist, he's perfectly aware of the importance of control groups. If he were honest, he would have submitted the same papers to closed, for-profit journals as well, even if it cost him money to do so.
Yes, his study was not scientifically valid. Now his only option will be to publish his paper in an open access journal, instead of closed, for-profit journal* that only accepts scientifically valid papers.
*The summary was based on an article in Science that simply described his experiment, not a peer reviewed scientific paper in Science.
It's not about how to run a journal, it's about how non-experts distinguish between properly run journals and shitty journals just trying to scam some money.
If I am buying a product, I distinguish the good products from the bad by reading the user reviews on Amazon. Why not just have user reviews for journals? Even better would be to have reviews and ratings for individual articles. A reader could select articles to read based on either all ratings, or only on ratings from reviewers using their real name and affiliation, to ensure the process isn't being gamed. Just like Amazon reviews, the reviews could point out flaws in the article, or provide useful feedback for the author.
While I see your point, that's pretty much exactly what the point of peer review is. The difference with peer review is that you're supposed to be an expert in order to review the paper. In your scenario, what you'll end up with is a group of people claiming to be experts doing 90% of the reviewing. The whole point of a peer reviewed journal is that somebody is verifying (to some degree at least) that the reviewer is actually an expert on the topic. This is very different than amazon reviews, where the point is simply to judge whether or not other customers were satisfied with their purchase and why.
Just look at slashdot comments on nuclear power...everybody sounds like an expert in nuclear physics and in politics. Would you want those commenters reviewing a paper on the topic of nuclear physics, or would you want somebody actually verifying that the reviewers are nuclear physicists?
Yes, before we make (implicit) claims about nuclear being able to scale, maybe we should prove that we can decommission the 300 or so ones that are due to close over the next two decades.
No, we're talking about building new plants, which means new designs, not old ones. So, we have to prove that building a plant with a new design and operating a new design and decommissioning a new design is more cost effective and environmentally friendly than coal, gas, oil, the wars we're fighting because of oil, the overall economic impacts of sending more money out of the country to buy oil, etc etc.
Meanwhile the amount of installed PV capacity on the planet is doubling each two years on average. Those are probably also going to be a recycling nightmare, but at least they allow us to kick the can another 30 years down the proverbial road.
Um, what? If new nuke plants are built, it's going to be more than 30 years before we need to go down that proverbial road...hypocrite? Don't get me wrong, PV is great, the more the better as far as I'm concerned, but why do you argue against new nuke plants by saying decommissioning will suck in the same post that you say we don't have to worry about PV decommissioning for a few decades so it doesn't matter?
He continues, 'I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior."
In theory the people of the USA still have the power to change these behaviors through the ballot box.
Mod as funny? Some states allow the public to put state laws on the ballot and vote on them, but that doesn't happen at the federal level. On the federal level, we generally just have the choice of somebody with an R next to their name and somebody with a D next to their name. In almost every case, neither one of those people, who are supposed to be our "representatives," will do a damn thing to put a stop to it.
Besides, they're already violating the constitution. Even if the people did have the ability to vote on and pass a law preventing it, what would it matter? It's already illegal, why would you think another law would put a stop to it?
The article blabs on and on about how this is a Big Brother-ish threat because the data could easily be obtained by the NSA. So why not just give the award to the NSA? Or, if it has to be an individual, then to the president or the head of the NSA? I though maybe it had to go to a company operating in the EU, since Canonical is from the UK, but then realized that we know the NSA operates in the EU too. So, maybe the company is being evil by doing this, but clearly not as evil as the US government and its TLAs.
Does this mean that the boards of these organizations will get prosecuted for membership of a criminal organization? Will all profits (including the ones made abroad) be ceased? After all, this is large scale fixing of prices (for labor) by large, evidently criminal organizations. If the Mafia bosses go to jail for stuff like this and all their money taken, why not these companies?
Because mafia bosses only give bribes at the municipal level. These large organizations give bribes ("campaign contributions") at the federal level.
If this doesn't end up like a typical class action suite Apple and the other big players could end up paying out Billions in damages, probably making it the most expensive lawsuit ever and making an ever so small dent in the mountains of cash they've managed to pile up.
That is sarcasm, right? You damn well know that this is going to end up like a typical class action suit. At worst the companies will have to pay out a few million dollars each and apologize. The lawyers will get rich, and the employees will get just enough to buy a Big Mac.
The reason for decline in income is lack of jobs because of all of the cheaper off-shore labor and increased the supply of workers in the US.
Maybe, but before all that offshoring we couldn't buy a blender the cost of 2 cheeseburgers like we can now. Really, what's more important, the economy and all that nonsense, or being able to get dirt cheap stuff made out of plastic!
You're missing the point. If the idea was primarily to sue people, then they wouldn't gloat about it. You're not gonna stop the people who are really into it, but if you get a few hundred people who are new the idea of pirating software/music/movies/whatever, and you scare them into stopping pirating, then you've just made those content creators millions upon millions if dollars, at least according to magical RIAA fantasyland accounting.
But really, even the idea behind the lawsuits isn't to make money from lawsuits, it was to scare people into paying for stuff. Because if you're the average person, and you hear Jimmy's cousin's friend's neighbor got nailed for $5k for downloading music, then damn, you better head down to Walmart and buy some CDs so you don't get sued too!
I can't seem to find anything in the article that says they're automatically blocking all orders from Tor users. It's just one tool. If they're using it like most spam filters, then it's like saying they're detecting emails with the word "Viagra." It doesn't mean it's being blocked, it means it's a red flag that should signal further scrutiny, and presumably if there are many redflags than it would warrant more detailed scrutiny by a human. Frankly, having an online retailer assess the risk of each order to determine if further scrutiny is warranted seems like a GOOD thing, but in the summary's myopia all it's seeing is the spin that this is anti-Tor and therefore evil.
All that said, why would anybody think that using Tor when placing an online order with a credit card would protect them from NSA spying? The retailer obviously knows who are because you're giving them all your credit card info, and if you think it's to protect you from the NSA knowing what you're ordering, all you're doing is redflagging yourself by going through Tor, and I'm sure they're more likely to get your purchase info from Visa or your bank than from off the wire.
But cops do try to avoid hearing "how come everyone else writes more tickets than you do?" So they make a point of writing tickets. But they really don't care about revenues, per se.
That's part of it. Another part is that it's their job to enforce the law, and so that's what they do. It's not their job to decide which laws to enforce (although obviously that happens to a degree). If a cop only enforces the laws they feel like enforcing, then they become the judge and jury too and our system generally tries to avoid that (federal agencies excepted of course). Sure, some cops are jerks that just want the opportunity to power trip on you, but for the most part that's a minority of cops, that's just the ones you notice because they're being jerks.
On the flip side of it...having autonomous cars and writing less tickets means less time spent on traffic enforcement, which means more time spent on real cop stuff. Also, for the most part, cops (at least the ones I know) really hate it when accidents happen, and especially DUIs since they're preventable accidents. Most cops are strict about drunken driving because they see the negative results first-hand. Most cops would be very, very happy if accidents from drunk or reckless driving were virtually eliminated.
Additionally, even when not on traffic enforcement, cops still spend a lot of time in their cars driving around even when they're not going all lights & sirens. If their cars were doing the driving for them, they could get stuff done like paperwork, which would free up even more of their time to bust bad guys.
Most cops didn't say "I wanna be a cop so I can drive around and write speeding tickets!" Instead, they usually think, "I wanna be a cop so I can catch bad guys that are doing bad things to people!" Self-driving cars would free them up to do more of the latter. Only the cops who get off on power tripping on everyone they pull over would be disappointed, and those are the ones who should be weeded out anyway.
They'll care if less municipal revenue means layoffs at the police department.
And how often does that actually happen? Dunno about other areas, but in the areas (and nearby areas) that I've lived, cops don't get layed off. They do, however, stop or reduce hiring new cops.
Charging for usage isn't necessarily a bad thing, the question is how much they charge for usage. If they charge anywhere near what the cell phone companies are charging, then that's ridiculous. If they can deliver high speeds I can use a ton of bandwidth and get away for less than $100/mo, that seems reasonable, and then if I'm just checking email and browsing the web I should be paying around $25.
The problem, of course, is that'll never happen. Obviously their prices for going over the caps will be ridiculous, because they want to make as much money as they can without having to spend anything upgrading their infrastructure.
When is the government going to wise-up (yeah, I couldn't keep a straight face when I typed that) and regulate it like electric and phone?
Granted, I do not know of a superior way to track people, but the amount of destruction caused by identity theft or improper billing is insane.
A superior way would at least be an organization that doesn't sell lists of everyone's info to whoever is willing to pay for it. Why is it that I had to sign a permission form for my bank to lookup my credit when I applied for a mortgage, but then I suddenly start getting all kinds of related junk mail from companies Experian sold that info to without my permission?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have anything the NSA is interested in.
The people that are likely to try to gain from violating my privacy are likely to spend 10 times more then they gain.
There are two words that everyone should be concerned with: False Positive.
AFAIK it is illegal for Finnish government agents to stage hostile operations inside foreign nations.
It is illegal for the NSA to do what they are doing too, but that doesn't seem to be stopping them.
Wasn't this exactly what the USA declared to be considered an act of war, that would justify retaliation with conventional weapons?
And the people with political power are the ones who stand to get even richer if it does start another war (digital or conventional). They don't care who else dies or if the economy as a whole goes down the shitter as long as they make money. The US's defense budget is HUGE, how much of that goes to private contracts? In 2011, $374 billion went to private contracts, 15 times greater than any other US federal agency.
You mean where they're trying to start charging people for using solar power?
Yes. Already happens in some places. Where I live, you have to give the electric company $3,000 just to get approval for installing a grid-tie system. They call it an "interconnect study" and is supposedly to make sure the grid in your neighborhood can handle receiving the power. It's a smoking pile of bullshit, but our impotent PUC allows them to get a with it, and it really does prevent a lot of people from installing solar.
That would depend on whose definition of "willing" and you're using. Is it considered "willing" if the consequence of not surrendering is being detained for 48 hours? Because that would still be considered "willing" by the federal government.
If not, pony up some details.
Stories abound of people who have lost under the ACA, some of whom have lost big. You don't need some random /. member to tell you his story when similar stories have aired on every major news network for the last few weeks. Here's one from PBS, a relatively unbiased source that few would claim was rooting for the failure of the ACA.
And there are plenty MORE stories about people getting screwed by insurance companies BEFORE the ACA. Even with the ACA, it's still the insurance companies screwing you.
Okay, /. loves car analogies, so here's one. Let's say in the near future the technology for self-driving cars is well enough refined for the mass market. Now let's say failures in the automatic driving system will cause 1,000 deaths per year from traffic accidents, but the automatic driving system will save 10,000 deaths per year. Should we implement the system in order to save a net of 9,000 deaths per year, or should we deny it because it'll cause 1,000 deaths per year?
Extra: Why is exploiting a browser weakness an offense for a company? If I make a web page that crashes IE6, am I at fault?
Ok, since you're throwing out hypotheticals, how about if a company exploits a browser weakness to root your computer in order to track your browsing habits? How about if they root your phone in order to track your physical whereabouts? How about if they root your computer to steal your credit card info?
The fact that it was a browser weakness is irrelevant. It was the fact that they exploited it to do something the browser was clearly trying to prevent them from doing. If your door locks have a weakness, does that make it okay to exploit that weakness, open the door and enter your house even though you and the makers of the lock clearly intended me not to?
Google had $50 billion in revenues in 2012. If they use 3 significant figures, the fine rounds to $zero on their financial statements.
Exactly. $17 Million is just a small cost of doing business and really won't do anything to make them think twice next time. Change that M to a B and then it might make a difference. Or better yet, hold the C's directly responsible.
The last few chumps who took shots at US Presidents all lived to talk about it.
Every successful US presidential assassination has resulted in the assassin's death:
Lincoln: The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was tracked down by Union soldiers and killed.
Garfield: The assassin, Charles Guiteau, was executed by hanging.
McKinley: The assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was executed by electric chair.
Kennedy: The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald*, was shot in the Dallas Police Headquarters.
*There are plenty of conspiracy theorists that disagree with this. However, if you're in the "he didn't act alone," but that he was the shooter, he was still killed. If you believe he wasn't the shooter, then whoever was remains unknown and wouldn't have the opportunity to collect their bounty.
Of course, if you do it in another country you might have a chance at survival. For example, the dude who threw a grenade at GWB in the country of Georgia received a life sentence because Georgia (the country) has abolished the death penalty, even though he did kill a Georgian high ranking agent when being apprehended. Of course, if he had been successful the US may have intervened and killed the guy. Either way, at best he would have had to enjoy his bitcoins from a Georgian prison.
So how could you get away with surviving it, yet be known to have done it so you can collect your bitcoins?
Notice he only submitted his fake papers to open access journals. As a scientist, and especially as a biologist, he's perfectly aware of the importance of control groups. If he were honest, he would have submitted the same papers to closed, for-profit journals as well, even if it cost him money to do so.
Yes, his study was not scientifically valid. Now his only option will be to publish his paper in an open access journal, instead of closed, for-profit journal* that only accepts scientifically valid papers.
*The summary was based on an article in Science that simply described his experiment, not a peer reviewed scientific paper in Science.
It's not about how to run a journal, it's about how non-experts distinguish between properly run journals and shitty journals just trying to scam some money.
If I am buying a product, I distinguish the good products from the bad by reading the user reviews on Amazon. Why not just have user reviews for journals? Even better would be to have reviews and ratings for individual articles. A reader could select articles to read based on either all ratings, or only on ratings from reviewers using their real name and affiliation, to ensure the process isn't being gamed. Just like Amazon reviews, the reviews could point out flaws in the article, or provide useful feedback for the author.
While I see your point, that's pretty much exactly what the point of peer review is. The difference with peer review is that you're supposed to be an expert in order to review the paper. In your scenario, what you'll end up with is a group of people claiming to be experts doing 90% of the reviewing. The whole point of a peer reviewed journal is that somebody is verifying (to some degree at least) that the reviewer is actually an expert on the topic. This is very different than amazon reviews, where the point is simply to judge whether or not other customers were satisfied with their purchase and why.
Just look at slashdot comments on nuclear power...everybody sounds like an expert in nuclear physics and in politics. Would you want those commenters reviewing a paper on the topic of nuclear physics, or would you want somebody actually verifying that the reviewers are nuclear physicists?
Yes, before we make (implicit) claims about nuclear being able to scale, maybe we should prove that we can decommission the 300 or so ones that are due to close over the next two decades.
No, we're talking about building new plants, which means new designs, not old ones. So, we have to prove that building a plant with a new design and operating a new design and decommissioning a new design is more cost effective and environmentally friendly than coal, gas, oil, the wars we're fighting because of oil, the overall economic impacts of sending more money out of the country to buy oil, etc etc.
Meanwhile the amount of installed PV capacity on the planet is doubling each two years on average. Those are probably also going to be a recycling nightmare, but at least they allow us to kick the can another 30 years down the proverbial road.
Um, what? If new nuke plants are built, it's going to be more than 30 years before we need to go down that proverbial road...hypocrite? Don't get me wrong, PV is great, the more the better as far as I'm concerned, but why do you argue against new nuke plants by saying decommissioning will suck in the same post that you say we don't have to worry about PV decommissioning for a few decades so it doesn't matter?
He continues, 'I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior."
Has he even read the stuff he leaked?
I was under the impression that Google and Yahoo! were already giving everything over to the NSA per illegal request.
FTFY.
In theory the people of the USA still have the power to change these behaviors through the ballot box.
Mod as funny? Some states allow the public to put state laws on the ballot and vote on them, but that doesn't happen at the federal level. On the federal level, we generally just have the choice of somebody with an R next to their name and somebody with a D next to their name. In almost every case, neither one of those people, who are supposed to be our "representatives," will do a damn thing to put a stop to it.
Besides, they're already violating the constitution. Even if the people did have the ability to vote on and pass a law preventing it, what would it matter? It's already illegal, why would you think another law would put a stop to it?
Is it too late to start a 'we the people' petition against this? At least to try to force some accountability in such a 'choice'.
Has a We the People petition ever made a difference, or do they all just get a press-interview style response?
The article blabs on and on about how this is a Big Brother-ish threat because the data could easily be obtained by the NSA. So why not just give the award to the NSA? Or, if it has to be an individual, then to the president or the head of the NSA? I though maybe it had to go to a company operating in the EU, since Canonical is from the UK, but then realized that we know the NSA operates in the EU too. So, maybe the company is being evil by doing this, but clearly not as evil as the US government and its TLAs.
Does this mean that the boards of these organizations will get prosecuted for membership of a criminal organization? Will all profits (including the ones made abroad) be ceased? After all, this is large scale fixing of prices (for labor) by large, evidently criminal organizations. If the Mafia bosses go to jail for stuff like this and all their money taken, why not these companies?
Because mafia bosses only give bribes at the municipal level. These large organizations give bribes ("campaign contributions") at the federal level.
If this doesn't end up like a typical class action suite Apple and the other big players could end up paying out Billions in damages, probably making it the most expensive lawsuit ever and making an ever so small dent in the mountains of cash they've managed to pile up.
That is sarcasm, right? You damn well know that this is going to end up like a typical class action suit. At worst the companies will have to pay out a few million dollars each and apologize. The lawyers will get rich, and the employees will get just enough to buy a Big Mac.
The reason for decline in income is lack of jobs because of all of the cheaper off-shore labor and increased the supply of workers in the US.
Maybe, but before all that offshoring we couldn't buy a blender the cost of 2 cheeseburgers like we can now. Really, what's more important, the economy and all that nonsense, or being able to get dirt cheap stuff made out of plastic!
You're missing the point. If the idea was primarily to sue people, then they wouldn't gloat about it. You're not gonna stop the people who are really into it, but if you get a few hundred people who are new the idea of pirating software/music/movies/whatever, and you scare them into stopping pirating, then you've just made those content creators millions upon millions if dollars, at least according to magical RIAA fantasyland accounting.
But really, even the idea behind the lawsuits isn't to make money from lawsuits, it was to scare people into paying for stuff. Because if you're the average person, and you hear Jimmy's cousin's friend's neighbor got nailed for $5k for downloading music, then damn, you better head down to Walmart and buy some CDs so you don't get sued too!
I can't seem to find anything in the article that says they're automatically blocking all orders from Tor users. It's just one tool. If they're using it like most spam filters, then it's like saying they're detecting emails with the word "Viagra." It doesn't mean it's being blocked, it means it's a red flag that should signal further scrutiny, and presumably if there are many redflags than it would warrant more detailed scrutiny by a human. Frankly, having an online retailer assess the risk of each order to determine if further scrutiny is warranted seems like a GOOD thing, but in the summary's myopia all it's seeing is the spin that this is anti-Tor and therefore evil.
All that said, why would anybody think that using Tor when placing an online order with a credit card would protect them from NSA spying? The retailer obviously knows who are because you're giving them all your credit card info, and if you think it's to protect you from the NSA knowing what you're ordering, all you're doing is redflagging yourself by going through Tor, and I'm sure they're more likely to get your purchase info from Visa or your bank than from off the wire.
But cops do try to avoid hearing "how come everyone else writes more tickets than you do?" So they make a point of writing tickets. But they really don't care about revenues, per se.
That's part of it. Another part is that it's their job to enforce the law, and so that's what they do. It's not their job to decide which laws to enforce (although obviously that happens to a degree). If a cop only enforces the laws they feel like enforcing, then they become the judge and jury too and our system generally tries to avoid that (federal agencies excepted of course). Sure, some cops are jerks that just want the opportunity to power trip on you, but for the most part that's a minority of cops, that's just the ones you notice because they're being jerks.
On the flip side of it...having autonomous cars and writing less tickets means less time spent on traffic enforcement, which means more time spent on real cop stuff. Also, for the most part, cops (at least the ones I know) really hate it when accidents happen, and especially DUIs since they're preventable accidents. Most cops are strict about drunken driving because they see the negative results first-hand. Most cops would be very, very happy if accidents from drunk or reckless driving were virtually eliminated.
Additionally, even when not on traffic enforcement, cops still spend a lot of time in their cars driving around even when they're not going all lights & sirens. If their cars were doing the driving for them, they could get stuff done like paperwork, which would free up even more of their time to bust bad guys.
Most cops didn't say "I wanna be a cop so I can drive around and write speeding tickets!" Instead, they usually think, "I wanna be a cop so I can catch bad guys that are doing bad things to people!" Self-driving cars would free them up to do more of the latter. Only the cops who get off on power tripping on everyone they pull over would be disappointed, and those are the ones who should be weeded out anyway.
They'll care if less municipal revenue means layoffs at the police department.
And how often does that actually happen? Dunno about other areas, but in the areas (and nearby areas) that I've lived, cops don't get layed off. They do, however, stop or reduce hiring new cops.
Charging for usage isn't necessarily a bad thing, the question is how much they charge for usage. If they charge anywhere near what the cell phone companies are charging, then that's ridiculous. If they can deliver high speeds I can use a ton of bandwidth and get away for less than $100/mo, that seems reasonable, and then if I'm just checking email and browsing the web I should be paying around $25.
The problem, of course, is that'll never happen. Obviously their prices for going over the caps will be ridiculous, because they want to make as much money as they can without having to spend anything upgrading their infrastructure.
When is the government going to wise-up (yeah, I couldn't keep a straight face when I typed that) and regulate it like electric and phone?
Granted, I do not know of a superior way to track people, but the amount of destruction caused by identity theft or improper billing is insane.
A superior way would at least be an organization that doesn't sell lists of everyone's info to whoever is willing to pay for it. Why is it that I had to sign a permission form for my bank to lookup my credit when I applied for a mortgage, but then I suddenly start getting all kinds of related junk mail from companies Experian sold that info to without my permission?