Deprioritized packets = inferior quality usage to what one would otherwise have received at the time. So yes... somebody's usage suffers, even if that suffering is for the good of the many, it is caused by a policy that the ISP decided upon rather than by the physical demands that are being placed upon the network at the time.
And, without it, you're limited to only being able to use the service in the absence of contention over bandwidth.
That is a limit.
True... but that is not a limit that is determined by the provider, that is a limit created only by whatever threshold the current demand exists on the service is as it approaches its own limitations to provide that service. It is limited in the sense of "limited" being an adjective, but it is not "limited" in sense of it being a verb because the provider is not actually limiting anything... the only limits that apply are physical limitations that the provider themselves is just as subject to as any of their customers. If a provider does not have the capacity to cope with the threshold of so-called unlimited bandwidth users without affecting everybody's ability to use the service, and if continued quality service for the largest number of their customers is genuinely important to that company to the point that they will deprioritize packets of particular customers based on their historical patterns of usage rather than only on whatever current demands they are placing on their network, then that company should not call the service unlimited in the first place. And even if everyone's usage suffers during periods of high congestion, nobody suffers during periods of lower congestion, so it is genuinely possible for companies to offer unlimited packages if they wanted.
What you seem to be missing is that deprioritization of users who have already downloaded more than some threshold in the current billing cycle is still a *limit* on the level of service that those heavy users pay for. That they wouldn't be able to continue to get such service during periods of heavy congestion anyways is irrelevant because all users are affected equally at those times, and that is not a limit imposed directly by the provider but by the underlying physical architecture and the real-time demand for it.
You suggest that deprioritization increases your ability to use the service, but it does so by explicitly *limiting* the amount that you are allowed to use the service without deprioritization.
My objection is not that providers do this... my objection is only that they call a package "unlimited" when they have actually set a real limit on how much you can use it without deprioritization before they start deprioritizing your packets.
If they are deprioritizing your traffic only after you exceed some threshold then that threshold is certainly and quite literally a *LIMIT* on that level of service, and they are relegating you to a different level of service after that point. While physical limits to usage will always exist, those limits apply to everybody equally, regardless of what level of service they have paid for, and are not artificially imposed upon you by a policy that the company has chosen to follow, even if that policy only exists to maximize the overall throughput of the greatest number of subscribers.
I have a cell phone plan with unlimited nation-wide calling anytime... I pay extra for this service, and I regularly make use of it. if the company decided to change my terms of service so that if should make too many long distance calls that month because they determine that they don't have the capacity to allow me to make the number of calls that I am and still provide acceptable service to other customers, and so they started limiting the quality of service for my phone calls for the remainder of that billing period, as reasonable as it might be for my cell phone service provider to do this, they aren't offering me the same package that I signed up for, are they? How could they continue to call it unlimited when they are imposing a hard limit on it
Usually nothing, because my wife can drop me off and drive the car home. If self-driving cars get sophisticated enough to do what GeLaTo was talkiing about, however, my car could drive itself home and I still wouldn't have to pay for parking at the airport.
You can have a country that the boat is registered to... that doesn't mean you are paying property taxes. For boats that you live on, the closest thing to property taxes is mooring fees, (the marina pays property tax though), and if you not not keep your boat docked most of the time, then you only pay mooring fees for the times that you are docked, and not when you are using your boat on open water.
Insurance, registration, and maintenance fees are not property taxes, which was the issue I was addressing Property taxes are paid to the municipality for permission simply to use the land for the housing that you *do* own. If you do not live on the land, then you do not pay property taxes, period. You may pay mooring fees, but if you should keep your boat undocked most of the time, and far enough away from the coast, then you only pay such fees when you are docked, and not for all of the time that you are using the boat on the open water.
But waxing a bit scifi here... what if you built a structure at the bottom of the sea, and lived there? I seem to recall there was a James Bond movie where the villain had some sort of set-up like that, actually.
Using self-driving taxis will be much cheaper than owning a car.
Just how cheap are you thinking it will get? Right now, when I take a cab to the airport from my place, I'm looking at it being about $50, while my car, which is not even particularly fuel economical by the way, uses about $3 for the same trip. Uber is cheaper than cabs, but not anywhere close that much.
If that contention control is implemented after your usage exceeds some threshold, then they are limiting the amount of your usage without any contention control. They should be allowed to do this, but they shouldn't say that it is unlimited, when they are, in fact, putting a limit on how much you can transfer without contention control, which is a different level of service than what another subscriber would have received at the exact same time on the exact same plan as you if they had simply not previously downloaded as much data as you had.
No company is allowed to use genetic information in their hiring practices
While I agree that is almost certainly the intent... I actually looked at the exact wording of the act before I posted above, and it does not actually say that. All that it says is that the employer must not refuse to hire, promote, or determine job placement for someone based on their genetic information. If you, as an employer, already have a specific job available before you start collecting resumes for it, and you are looking for someone with particular genetic criteria to fill it, then the hiree's genetic information is not determining their job placement because the specific job was decided upon even before you saw their genetic information, and they are not being *refused* hiring or promotion, so the prohibitions in GINA would appear to not be applicable. The only people that are being refused are not being turned away because you found anything undesirable about *THEIR* genetic information, but because you found something more desireable in the HIREE's genetic information. While this would almost certainly create the initial appearance of being illegally discriminatory, by a certain highly literal interpretation of how the act is worded, it does not actually seem to be.
When that network management is being used only for subscribers that have exceeded certain thresholds, then those thresholds are, in fact, limits on the levels of service offered by the plan that they paid for, and the subscribers whose packets have been deprioritized have been relegated to an alternate plan while others are unaffected. I have no problem with companies that want to do this, what I take exception to, however, is when the companies call them "unlimited" when they do, in fact, set some limit on how much someone can actually utilize such a plan before they relegate that subscriber to a a different level of service than what others who might be paying the exact same amount for the same service might enjoy at the exact same time.
If two people are paying a particular rate for a particular service, as long as they are operate within the parameters that the service allows, they should always be receiving identical (or nearly identical) levels of service at any given time. If there are parameters that can be exceeded by a given userr such that the level of service is altered for that user only, then those parameters are limits on that service, and the service cannot reasonably be called unlimited.
I have no issue with companies that impose limitations on usage of their services on anyone for any reason they see fit to impose them on. I have an issue with companies that call services "unlimited", when they *do* impose limitations on the usage of their services over and above whatever limits may have physically existed in the first place to support the infrastructure. Those limits are nothing but a policy decision, and I again have no dispute with companies that wish to implement such policies, but by the exact same reasoning that any so-called "limited" plan has limits imposed on it by virtue of policies decided by the company, any plan that they can fairly call "unlimited" should be entirely unencumbered by *any* such policies. If it has policies that create limits (even if they are only speed limits and not time or usage limits) on what they would otherwise call a limited plan, how can they continue to call that plan unlimited in the first place?
I'm not suggesting that it's not necessarily an essential thing for the ISP to do for the good of the largest number of people, but the choice to throttle high capacity users beyond what their network could have otherwise handled at the time based only on the amount of prior usage by those subscribers is still a choice of the provider to *limit* the activity for those people to certain levels. In that sense, throttling cannot be considered unlimited because the provider is actively choosing to limit its usage, even if they are only doing so by imposing speed limits on it, those limits are an artifact of a *policy* that the company chooses that is outside of the parameters of the service that it offers, in the same sense that any limit that the ISP would have on an expressly limited plan is likewise only an implementation of a similar policy.
It is absolutely no different than an electric company raising rates at certain times of day to discourage people from using too much electricity.
Companies are perfectly entitled to do this, of course...and I'm not saying that they shouldn't be. What I'm saying is that they shouldn't be calling something "unlimited" when they are actively choosing to limit it, even if what they are limiting is not affecting when they could use the service or how often... it is affecting how much they will be able to utilize out of the service that would not have otherwise applied to anyone else, and so in that sense, it is most definitely a limit.
Phone numbers are only as portable as the phone companies that govern them allow them to be. If you have a land line, try moving to another city in the same area code and see if they let you keep the same phone number.
Sort of like how my physical street address is property of the municipality, my phone number is property of the phone company... etc.
I do not own any of the information that could potentially be used to track me down unless I can live entirely independently of using property that belongs to other people.
It depends on whether you take "unlimited" to mean that it has no limits, or whether you take it to mean only that no limits have been imposed by the provider. In a notion of a "limited" plan, the provider decides what those limits are, and either directly limits usage to within those limits, or else charges the subscriber a larger fee for exceeding them. Note, in this case, it is not physical infrastructure that is imposing any limit, but rather, it is a particular policy that is being used by the service provider. "Unlimited" therefore, should reasonably mean only that no such policies are utilized by the provider, and that the provider is not taking any action to actually "limit" the subscirber's usage beyond what provider's infrastructure could have otherwise provided for an arbitrary user.
The difference depends on whether you take the words "limited" or "unlimited" to be adjectives describing a plan, or transitive verbs that operate on a plan.
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act prohibits employers from refusing to hire someone because of their genetics... but what if the reason to refusing to hire someone in particular is because they didn't submit their genetic information at all? How can they be said to refuse to hire someone based on their genetics if they don't have the genetic information in the first place?
Further, it seems that the refusal to hire someone who did submit such information would not necessarily be because of *their* genetics but because the employer has since filled the position they were seeking with someone else who *did* have the genetic qualifications they were seeking. In this case, the employer may be choosing to *hire*, not refusing to hire, somebody based on their genetics, but this does not appear to be prohibited by GINA.
I don't know if this has already been tried and shot down in court, or if this kind of reasoning would actually work. While it's entirely unethical in terms of the spirit of the law, it seems like it still ought to be technically legal.
Unlike the PS3 rebate, it's very easy for these people to prove they did indeed own a S7 and length of time they suffered.
I would refute the notion that it is difficult to prove that one purchased a PS3 at the requisite time to qualify for their rebate. While I didn't ever buy a PS3, I do still have purchase receipts from some products that date that far back, and if I were to have bought a PS3 during that time period, I'd definitely be able to still prove it today To keep the receipts from fading, I keep all of my receipts for purchases of any appliance or electronic device in a zip-lock bag that I keep stored in the freezer, which seems to do the trick quite nicely. I discard old receipts for devices only after I have replaced an older device with a newer one.
Maybe I might be a tad OCD, but it's not a particularly hard thing to do. It's saved us money more than a few times in the past, so it's worth the trouble IMO.
Now I probably would have used the other OS feature of the device to install Linux on it because I'm kind of a geek that way. Every PC I've ever owned since 1994 has had Linux installed on it, I installed OpenWRT on my router the day I bought it, and even installed another OS on my ti calculator.
When it comes to proving I would have wanted to use the Other OS feature on the PS/3 as well, however, I'm not entirely sure how I could have really done that. I somehow don't think they'd take my mere word for it, but I can't begin to imagine how I would have proved it.
... something like "large", you know.... like an open field or an open office plan, or something.
I'd suggest that somebody sit Nadella down to explain what "open platform" ordinarily means, but I am unfortunately skeptical that somebody who would make a statement like this is likely to ever admit they were wrong.
Now that you mention it, I wonder if any prospective student has ever accused a university of being racist because of the English competency exam they would have to take just to get in?
I know people here in Canada who use a vpn to get around the blocks netflix uses because American Netflix has more choices than here... when the subject came up just a few weeks ago about something like this, he has, in about as many words, plainly admitted that he will torrent the shows he watches if they ever make it otherwise impossible for him to watch.
The performer does want the music heard, the performer does not want the music recorded.
Then the performer asks people to not record. How hard is that? Heck, it's what they do at movie theatres... if you are caught using it to record, you get kicked out and may even have criminal charges filed in the bargain. Pretty steep costs that tend to discourage all but the people with the most sincere intent to do something that they know perfectly well they aren't supposed to be doing in the first place. Such people are not, in general, likely to respect a performer enough to pay to see a live performance of that person in the first place.
It implies that Trump opponents are somehow getting desperate to find ways to discredit him in the eyes of the public. Which is bizarre, IMO, since it seems like there is plenty right here and now that they should have to work with.
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Deprioritized packets = inferior quality usage to what one would otherwise have received at the time. So yes... somebody's usage suffers, even if that suffering is for the good of the many, it is caused by a policy that the ISP decided upon rather than by the physical demands that are being placed upon the network at the time.
True... but that is not a limit that is determined by the provider, that is a limit created only by whatever threshold the current demand exists on the service is as it approaches its own limitations to provide that service. It is limited in the sense of "limited" being an adjective, but it is not "limited" in sense of it being a verb because the provider is not actually limiting anything... the only limits that apply are physical limitations that the provider themselves is just as subject to as any of their customers. If a provider does not have the capacity to cope with the threshold of so-called unlimited bandwidth users without affecting everybody's ability to use the service, and if continued quality service for the largest number of their customers is genuinely important to that company to the point that they will deprioritize packets of particular customers based on their historical patterns of usage rather than only on whatever current demands they are placing on their network, then that company should not call the service unlimited in the first place. And even if everyone's usage suffers during periods of high congestion, nobody suffers during periods of lower congestion, so it is genuinely possible for companies to offer unlimited packages if they wanted.
What you seem to be missing is that deprioritization of users who have already downloaded more than some threshold in the current billing cycle is still a *limit* on the level of service that those heavy users pay for. That they wouldn't be able to continue to get such service during periods of heavy congestion anyways is irrelevant because all users are affected equally at those times, and that is not a limit imposed directly by the provider but by the underlying physical architecture and the real-time demand for it.
You suggest that deprioritization increases your ability to use the service, but it does so by explicitly *limiting* the amount that you are allowed to use the service without deprioritization.
My objection is not that providers do this... my objection is only that they call a package "unlimited" when they have actually set a real limit on how much you can use it without deprioritization before they start deprioritizing your packets.
If they are deprioritizing your traffic only after you exceed some threshold then that threshold is certainly and quite literally a *LIMIT* on that level of service, and they are relegating you to a different level of service after that point. While physical limits to usage will always exist, those limits apply to everybody equally, regardless of what level of service they have paid for, and are not artificially imposed upon you by a policy that the company has chosen to follow, even if that policy only exists to maximize the overall throughput of the greatest number of subscribers.
I have a cell phone plan with unlimited nation-wide calling anytime... I pay extra for this service, and I regularly make use of it. if the company decided to change my terms of service so that if should make too many long distance calls that month because they determine that they don't have the capacity to allow me to make the number of calls that I am and still provide acceptable service to other customers, and so they started limiting the quality of service for my phone calls for the remainder of that billing period, as reasonable as it might be for my cell phone service provider to do this, they aren't offering me the same package that I signed up for, are they? How could they continue to call it unlimited when they are imposing a hard limit on it
Usually nothing, because my wife can drop me off and drive the car home. If self-driving cars get sophisticated enough to do what GeLaTo was talkiing about, however, my car could drive itself home and I still wouldn't have to pay for parking at the airport.
You can have a country that the boat is registered to... that doesn't mean you are paying property taxes. For boats that you live on, the closest thing to property taxes is mooring fees, (the marina pays property tax though), and if you not not keep your boat docked most of the time, then you only pay mooring fees for the times that you are docked, and not when you are using your boat on open water.
Insurance, registration, and maintenance fees are not property taxes, which was the issue I was addressing Property taxes are paid to the municipality for permission simply to use the land for the housing that you *do* own. If you do not live on the land, then you do not pay property taxes, period. You may pay mooring fees, but if you should keep your boat undocked most of the time, and far enough away from the coast, then you only pay such fees when you are docked, and not for all of the time that you are using the boat on the open water.
But waxing a bit scifi here... what if you built a structure at the bottom of the sea, and lived there? I seem to recall there was a James Bond movie where the villain had some sort of set-up like that, actually.
Just how cheap are you thinking it will get? Right now, when I take a cab to the airport from my place, I'm looking at it being about $50, while my car, which is not even particularly fuel economical by the way, uses about $3 for the same trip. Uber is cheaper than cabs, but not anywhere close that much.
If that contention control is implemented after your usage exceeds some threshold, then they are limiting the amount of your usage without any contention control. They should be allowed to do this, but they shouldn't say that it is unlimited, when they are, in fact, putting a limit on how much you can transfer without contention control, which is a different level of service than what another subscriber would have received at the exact same time on the exact same plan as you if they had simply not previously downloaded as much data as you had.
It depends on where your house is.
Which county do you pay property taxes to if your house is on international waters?
You only need to pay mooring fees when you dock.
While I agree that is almost certainly the intent... I actually looked at the exact wording of the act before I posted above, and it does not actually say that. All that it says is that the employer must not refuse to hire, promote, or determine job placement for someone based on their genetic information. If you, as an employer, already have a specific job available before you start collecting resumes for it, and you are looking for someone with particular genetic criteria to fill it, then the hiree's genetic information is not determining their job placement because the specific job was decided upon even before you saw their genetic information, and they are not being *refused* hiring or promotion, so the prohibitions in GINA would appear to not be applicable. The only people that are being refused are not being turned away because you found anything undesirable about *THEIR* genetic information, but because you found something more desireable in the HIREE's genetic information. While this would almost certainly create the initial appearance of being illegally discriminatory, by a certain highly literal interpretation of how the act is worded, it does not actually seem to be.
When that network management is being used only for subscribers that have exceeded certain thresholds, then those thresholds are, in fact, limits on the levels of service offered by the plan that they paid for, and the subscribers whose packets have been deprioritized have been relegated to an alternate plan while others are unaffected. I have no problem with companies that want to do this, what I take exception to, however, is when the companies call them "unlimited" when they do, in fact, set some limit on how much someone can actually utilize such a plan before they relegate that subscriber to a a different level of service than what others who might be paying the exact same amount for the same service might enjoy at the exact same time.
If two people are paying a particular rate for a particular service, as long as they are operate within the parameters that the service allows, they should always be receiving identical (or nearly identical) levels of service at any given time. If there are parameters that can be exceeded by a given userr such that the level of service is altered for that user only, then those parameters are limits on that service, and the service cannot reasonably be called unlimited.
I have no issue with companies that impose limitations on usage of their services on anyone for any reason they see fit to impose them on. I have an issue with companies that call services "unlimited", when they *do* impose limitations on the usage of their services over and above whatever limits may have physically existed in the first place to support the infrastructure. Those limits are nothing but a policy decision, and I again have no dispute with companies that wish to implement such policies, but by the exact same reasoning that any so-called "limited" plan has limits imposed on it by virtue of policies decided by the company, any plan that they can fairly call "unlimited" should be entirely unencumbered by *any* such policies. If it has policies that create limits (even if they are only speed limits and not time or usage limits) on what they would otherwise call a limited plan, how can they continue to call that plan unlimited in the first place?
I'm not suggesting that it's not necessarily an essential thing for the ISP to do for the good of the largest number of people, but the choice to throttle high capacity users beyond what their network could have otherwise handled at the time based only on the amount of prior usage by those subscribers is still a choice of the provider to *limit* the activity for those people to certain levels. In that sense, throttling cannot be considered unlimited because the provider is actively choosing to limit its usage, even if they are only doing so by imposing speed limits on it, those limits are an artifact of a *policy* that the company chooses that is outside of the parameters of the service that it offers, in the same sense that any limit that the ISP would have on an expressly limited plan is likewise only an implementation of a similar policy.
It is absolutely no different than an electric company raising rates at certain times of day to discourage people from using too much electricity.
Companies are perfectly entitled to do this, of course...and I'm not saying that they shouldn't be. What I'm saying is that they shouldn't be calling something "unlimited" when they are actively choosing to limit it, even if what they are limiting is not affecting when they could use the service or how often... it is affecting how much they will be able to utilize out of the service that would not have otherwise applied to anyone else, and so in that sense, it is most definitely a limit.
Phone numbers are only as portable as the phone companies that govern them allow them to be. If you have a land line, try moving to another city in the same area code and see if they let you keep the same phone number.
Sort of like how my physical street address is property of the municipality, my phone number is property of the phone company... etc.
I do not own any of the information that could potentially be used to track me down unless I can live entirely independently of using property that belongs to other people.
The difference depends on whether you take the words "limited" or "unlimited" to be adjectives describing a plan, or transitive verbs that operate on a plan.
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act prohibits employers from refusing to hire someone because of their genetics... but what if the reason to refusing to hire someone in particular is because they didn't submit their genetic information at all? How can they be said to refuse to hire someone based on their genetics if they don't have the genetic information in the first place?
Further, it seems that the refusal to hire someone who did submit such information would not necessarily be because of *their* genetics but because the employer has since filled the position they were seeking with someone else who *did* have the genetic qualifications they were seeking. In this case, the employer may be choosing to *hire*, not refusing to hire, somebody based on their genetics, but this does not appear to be prohibited by GINA.
I don't know if this has already been tried and shot down in court, or if this kind of reasoning would actually work. While it's entirely unethical in terms of the spirit of the law, it seems like it still ought to be technically legal.
I would refute the notion that it is difficult to prove that one purchased a PS3 at the requisite time to qualify for their rebate. While I didn't ever buy a PS3, I do still have purchase receipts from some products that date that far back, and if I were to have bought a PS3 during that time period, I'd definitely be able to still prove it today To keep the receipts from fading, I keep all of my receipts for purchases of any appliance or electronic device in a zip-lock bag that I keep stored in the freezer, which seems to do the trick quite nicely. I discard old receipts for devices only after I have replaced an older device with a newer one.
Maybe I might be a tad OCD, but it's not a particularly hard thing to do. It's saved us money more than a few times in the past, so it's worth the trouble IMO.
Now I probably would have used the other OS feature of the device to install Linux on it because I'm kind of a geek that way. Every PC I've ever owned since 1994 has had Linux installed on it, I installed OpenWRT on my router the day I bought it, and even installed another OS on my ti calculator.
When it comes to proving I would have wanted to use the Other OS feature on the PS/3 as well, however, I'm not entirely sure how I could have really done that. I somehow don't think they'd take my mere word for it, but I can't begin to imagine how I would have proved it.
I'd suggest that somebody sit Nadella down to explain what "open platform" ordinarily means, but I am unfortunately skeptical that somebody who would make a statement like this is likely to ever admit they were wrong.
Now that you mention it, I wonder if any prospective student has ever accused a university of being racist because of the English competency exam they would have to take just to get in?
I know people here in Canada who use a vpn to get around the blocks netflix uses because American Netflix has more choices than here... when the subject came up just a few weeks ago about something like this, he has, in about as many words, plainly admitted that he will torrent the shows he watches if they ever make it otherwise impossible for him to watch.
Then the performer asks people to not record. How hard is that? Heck, it's what they do at movie theatres... if you are caught using it to record, you get kicked out and may even have criminal charges filed in the bargain. Pretty steep costs that tend to discourage all but the people with the most sincere intent to do something that they know perfectly well they aren't supposed to be doing in the first place. Such people are not, in general, likely to respect a performer enough to pay to see a live performance of that person in the first place.
It implies that Trump opponents are somehow getting desperate to find ways to discredit him in the eyes of the public. Which is bizarre, IMO, since it seems like there is plenty right here and now that they should have to work with.