I would suspect there are at least 100,000 more people just like me paying the same rates and being capped the same way. @$100/mo
Okay, two things: 1) either you're a dick for not choosing the best option - I pay $109/month for Comcast Business Internet at my home, and I get 20mbps down, 5mbps up. I get 8 static IP addresses, with customized reverse-resolving DNS. I get no port blocking. Outbound SMTP? No problem. Hosting a website? No problem. Bittorrent? No problem. AND no cap. In between work and personal use I am averaging around 1TB a month down, 300GB up.
Or, 2) you're being obtuse. Because that $100 a month you say you're paying doesn't correlate to any Internet plan that Comcast offers for personal users, and you're getting snarky about it, not factoring in the fact that that amount also covers either your TV, or Voice, or possibly both, depending on your plan. Given that Comcast charges $25 a month for 15mbps down, I'd say one of these two are highly likely to be the case.
Even if your post was true, it's 900% more revenue. Which means more than 900% more profit, except that you have to remember that their CURRENT profits reflect having this cap, which means that not having the cap means 10% of the revenue and thus a lot less profit and possibly loss (possibly huge losses). But it's worse than that.
Comcast isn't stealing from you, they are failing to sell their product as cheaply as you would like. I don't know why you think you paid for a monthly bandwidth of 2.59 TB / mo.
Also, it doesn't actually work out that they can sell to 900 000 more customers by doing that. That would only be true if all 1 million customers were saturating their bandwidth continuously. It turns out it's more like they have the bandwidth for 1000 people under your model, and by selling it this way, they can sell to 1 000 000. How many people you can sell to without unduly* affecting them all is a statistical problem: what is the probability that the demand for bandwidth at time t is > X where X is an amount that will substantially impact the experience for everybody else, given an array of people p[i] where p[i] is an upper-bound constraint on their bandwidth. So it turns out the revenue multiplier by doing it this way is more like 1000x. I got the figure 1000x in a graduate-level Internetworking class, it's a rough figure; the point is, it comes out to more than 10 because this isn't like a pie being shared by 10 people, it's more like a road. It would only be a 10x multiplier if all 10 people used their bandwidth 24/7; or alternatively, if they all used 100% of available bandwidth at exactly the same times and 0% the rest of the time with no exceptions. This is the baked-in assumption that allows the pricing model as it is today to work now. There's not one consumer ISP that's making anything close to that profit margin, and therefore none that can exist with a purely reserved-bandwidth model without SUBSTANTIALLY hiking their rates for everyone.
An analogy: how many lanes do they put on a toll road? Do they put in one lane for every car that might move across it in full traffic? After all, they paid for 60 mph road access, and that's the only way to guarantee it (I've never encountered a toll road that was cheaper in high traffic, though they may exist.). How dare they resell your highway bandwidth after selling it to you!
Except that's patently absurd. That's NOT what they sold you. If their advertising suggested that's what they sold you, then there's a problem with either you or possibly their advertising. But you don't get to decide what somebody else sells, or for what price they sell it (except in the extremely indirect manner of just not buying it).
And if they did the toll would have to be ENORMOUS to recoup the cost, which would drive people away from using it, which would mean less lanes to pay for but also fewer payesr to pay for it (thus likely increasing the cost because of reduced bulk), leading to another round of people driven away.
Comcast has a lot of things wrong with it and maybe the advertising should change. Purely reserved bandwidth, however, is a thing that will send us back to the dark ages.
*you do not get to define what unduly means by yourself; Comcast directly, and the customers as a gestalt indirectly, do.
That's a nice post that conveniently forgets that I was actually receiving my full moneys worth when I was not capped and able to pull ~2.59TB/mo. Your whole theory is flawed by Comcast capping me at 10% of what I was previously allowed, without lowering my rates. I was sold "unlimited" and when they changed the plan to "limited" they did not properly adjust the rates. They are stealing. To use my Coca-Cola Principle analogy, if I sold you a can of Coke and then the second you opened it I took 90% of the contents back to sell to 9 other people, I just stole 90% from you.
I'm not sure about your math, although I sort of suspect there is a conversion from bits to bytes that you might be missing, and then perhaps some multiply by 1000 instead of 1024s but regardless of your math, your logic is wrong.
They are not stealing anything from you. The agreement you initially had with them was changed. I suspect somewhere in that agreement there was a clause stating that the price you were paying wasn't guaranteed for all eternity. They came up with a new price, and you apparently are agreeing to pay it.
Perhaps you should consider another provider if you are that dissatisfied, or doing without the service if another acceptable provider can not be found.
8Mbps == 1MB/s, 1MB * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 should be a good enough estimate no? Perhaps I am wrong.
IANAL, and certainly not an expert in contract law, but I don't think a contract with terms that change is a legally binding contract. It's stealing because they capped my bandwidth, but did not lower the pricing. I'm paying for 90% more bandwidth than I am receiving. Therefore, my previous post is fairly accurate IMHO.
As far as considering another provider, there are none. Comcast is an effective cable monopoly in my area (but that's really a separate issue).
You did not answer my very simple question asking what this "socialist corporatism" you are writing about is.
I knew those other things you linked to more than twenty years ago.
Then you knew the answer more than twenty years ago as well. You're really terrible at trolling.
No, you can always bring your own hardware. But you could lease one for very, very cheap ($10/mo cable modem vs what was a $200 device at the time, but is now $80 and prone to last a few decent years instead of 6 months...).
You can't lease telephones. If I remember that is why the US DoJ broke up the Ma Bell monopoly. I could be wrong. I know of no home or cellphone providers that lease you the equipment.
So now you are calling me a socialist! You know nothing about me apart from my criticism of an education system that all parties admit should be better, that I'm not in the USA and that I'm calling you out on things that I see as bullshit.
I'm still waiting on an answer to the question above.
Yeah, there's like a 90% chance that unless you're a capitalist you're one of those. Are you seriously that obtuse?
Show me that I am wrong when I accuse you of using "socialist" as a meaningless swear word.
Socialist is certainly a swear word to us proud citizens of the United States of America who have enjoyed a working capitalist economy until you socialist scum started making policy. Since social security our economy has been making strides towards the shitter, and we can't tell you enough how much we wish you assholes would leave here and head overseas with the rest of the socialists, totalitarians, egalitarians, and corporatists. You probably need to read my reply to your last post before you would understand this post, since you don't seem to understand the meanings of those words or the ideas they represent.
Where I come from the education system teaches children that is is very bad form to play the man instead of the ball, and it teaches them that at an early age. Let's get back to your flawed education system or you explaining your "socialist corporatism" idea shall we instead of childish personal attacks.
I'll be intrigued if you can get the two things to relate together while preserving the meanings that all the rest of us know. We cannot read your mind so we are restricted to what is in the dictionary to communicate.
Give it a try.
Heh the rest us? I'm pretty sure this thread is old by now. I fail to see why I need to explain to you these things when you are capable of researching them yourself, but here I'll help you with some common interweb sites:
I typically begin researching topics by first looking in the dictionary, then the encyclopedia, then specific literature (books) on the subject at the library. Good luck!
I didn't make that argument; I made the argument that $20M executive pays add up to a tiny fraction of the money they need to execute those sorts of projects. If your business turns a $1M profit a year, you'll salary yourself somewhere below $1M; if it turns a $1000M profit a year, why the hell not throw $100M at the executives and throw $900M at the projects? 5 executives, $20M each, sure. Now we're talking about market-dominance telcos that turn well more than a billion a year before projects ("Operating Costs" "Expansion Costs" etc), that $20M is like... pocket change. It's NOT the spending problem.
You don't seem to understand AT ALL why these CEO's get those bonuses. Epic fail.
That is not what the above link was about - it's about the problem of getting mistaken for nearby loonies that use the same flawed terminology.
Well it's probably a good thing you read it then since you are using flawed terminology and don't seem to understand what a socialist democracy is, nor totalitarianism, nor egalitarianism, nor corporatism. Good luck, and once again, good day sir!
You don't seem to understand the flawed business model that communications providers have been running with since the beginning. They never had enough capacity for their customers. They could, but they need to pay their CEO's $20M bonuses instead of grow their infrastructure. So as it stands today, there just isn't enough network for us, which is why when there are city/county/state-wide emergencies many calls do not go through.
That's not a flawed business model. You can meet 90% of your customer's needs for X dollars, and 99% of your customer's needs for 10X dollars, and 99.9% of your customer's needs for 100X dollars, and 99.99% of your customer's needs for 1000X dollars... see the problem? Increasing capacity to a point where you can fully satisfy state-wide emergencies is incredibly expensive, and leaves half of the network unused at regular times. That is a flawed business model, which is why it's not done by any infrastructure provider - there are brownouts in summer heat waves, there are water shortages in droughts, there are network shortages in emergencies, etc. This is the trade-off we make in exchange for not having $5000/month cell phone bills.
I suppose all that is fine if you intend on stagnating until something far superior and necessary blows you right out of the competition. It's almost 2010. We're trying to globalize Earth, and part of that is building a communications network that allows for ALL 6.5 billion people to communicate at once. I think it's time these corporatist fuckwads stop thinking about their pocketbooks and start complying with real world demands or face obsolescence. The stockholders can still make money while the company grows.
So...what you are saying is that your monthly charge should cover 25 terabytes of transfer or more?
The fact of the matter is that you didn't buy ALL their bandwidth - they aren't reselling YOUR bandwidth - that's pure rubbish.
1MB * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2592000 (or 2.59 TB/mo)
Unless my math is wrong, I'm now receiving almost exactly 10% of what I was paying for before being capped at 250gb/mo and they are still charging me the same rate. That means Comcast effectively is making 900% more profit simply by stealing from me instead of growing their infrastructure. Now I know I'm not the only person in the this situation. I would suspect there are at least 100,000 more people just like me paying the same rates and being capped the same way. @$100/mo, by re-selling already paid for bandwidth Comcast "added" the ability to sell to 900,000 more customers without adding a fucking thing to their network. That's $90,000,000...
Maybe you should research some of these things before you open your mouth and remove all doubt as they say...
No, you licensed access to the network you connect to with the iPhone. Also they COULD simply lease a cell phone to you (like a cable modem).
I am not a lawyer but maybe the Antitrust case against Ma Bell makes it illegal to do that? Also, I'm fairly certain that the FCC remains the ultimate authority for disabling communications devices, as in, only the Federal Government has the authority to do what Apple is trying to do, under currently established law.
Sure the service provider can cut you off for non-payment or violations of their TOS, but for example, Motorola would face prosecution if they decided to turn off my phone.
You don't seem to understand the flawed business model that communications providers have been running with since the beginning. They never had enough capacity for their customers. They could, but they need to pay their CEO's $20M bonuses instead of grow their infrastructure.
Wow, only $20M to put in a $1.7Bn infrastructure upgrade, with $2.3Bn extra costs to implement it with strong integration to the current infrastructure and while prematurely terminating part of the current infrastructure before value's been realized on it? You must be the best business process accountant ever!
Wow nothing. You have to try really fucking hard to make it appear that these companies are spending properly. It's blatantly clear to anyone using these communications network that something is fundamentally wrong, and to make the comment you did leads me to believe you're simply a corporatist with a hidden agenda.
I don't know how much you really know about finances, but I fucking dare you to tell me that these numbers show they can't afford to grow their infrastructure to meet the demand for it.
The point about the apartment capacity may be well intentioned but it's moot. The landlord doesn't set capacity, the fire marshal does. It has nothing at all to do with the lease. So in effect, I'm right and you are wrong.
You do raise a point though about network capacities. I completely understand that certain networks may be designed for limited capacities, most notably the US Interstate Highway network. Where your argument breaks down though is where you say the phone companies (more generally, communications providers) can't provide a network that everyone can use simultaneously.
The year will soon be 2010. We are persistently barraged with articles about high technology, artificial intelligence, mass compute power, mass storage capacity, etc. I find it completely ludicrous to simply accept that we all can't communicate at once. The simple fact is that since we truly expect a real-time globally integrated communications network as part of the push toward globalization and the Singularity, we NEED a communications network that does not limit our communications. Period.
This story is tagged "defectivebydesign", but what Apple wants to do is anything but.
Operators have a hard limit on the amount of service they can actually provision. Allowing any and all devices to run willy nilly on the network would be certain death, even for the best-laid network. By throttling certain services, turning off certain capabilities, and allowing remote provisioning management, Apple is making sure that the device they are providing to users will work and continue to work on the network.
This is a very important feature not only for the NOs, but also for businesses who would provide these phones to their field teams. Though, to be honest, restriction of features doesn't seem very patentable, at least there are other implementations that already exist. WinMo has had this since WM6.1, for example.
You don't seem to understand the flawed business model that communications providers have been running with since the beginning. They never had enough capacity for their customers. They could, but they need to pay their CEO's $20M bonuses instead of grow their infrastructure. So as it stands today, there just isn't enough network for us, which is why when there are city/county/state-wide emergencies many calls do not go through.
The only analogy I've been able to come up with that paints a good picture about why it's such a flawed model is what I call the Coca-Cola Principle. If Coca-Cola was suddenly able to reclaim the soda in the can I just purchased before it hit my lips, they could in effect resell my can of Coke before I could even drink it. This is exactly what every single communications provider has done. Comcast (unfortunately my home ISP) is perhaps one of the worst offenders of this. Having resold the bandwidth I paid for multiple hundreds of times. Eventually instead of providing me with what I have been paying for (unlimited broadband, as in no bandwidth cap), they reneged on their deal and put in a hard cap of 250gb/mo.
You sound a lot like a corporatist to me. Oh noes those poor Network Operators need to cripple us to continue to be able to oversell their product/service. Well, what I say is, shitcan the CEOs taking these ridiculous sums of money and grow your infrastructure to meet YOUR promises as well as the economic DEMAND.
Look up a dictionary as per my suggestion before and find out!
Yes there are plenty of clueless fools that use anything starting with "social" purely as swear words to mean something else but you don't have to be one of them.
Hey, don't go for the man instead of the ball. You are the one that misread "socialist democracy" (like Norway) as Communism and not me. You are also the one that used "socialist country" to mean "communist dictatorship" or "authoritarian bloodstained hellhole" or whatever.
I'm merely trying to point out that whatever the "ism" is if you throw away the future of your children they would be better off elsewhere in a place that doesn't, so long as it isn't some hellhole.
I got the point about corporatism thanks the first time around. The socialist fascist bit describes a party in my country quite well which wants lots of government benefits for farmers and to leave the city dwellers and non-landowners to fend for themselves with whatever the market will give them or not give them. Of course it was mostly about being a bunch of crooks looking for bribes instead of actual ideology.
You keep thinking I called something or someone communist when I didn't, and you don't seem to have a clear grasp on what totalitarianism, egalitarianism, or corporatism are. This leads me to believe your view on this days old thread is flawed.
And you free to take your love for totalitarianism and corporatism abroad, and I encourage you to.
OK, so what DO our kids need exposure to then?
You seem to complain a lot but don't really offer up any viable options other than everyone who disagrees with you has to GTFO.
Seriously, got any plans?
Yeah I do. You've obviously missed it so I'll repeat it. REALISTIC GOALS. It's not fucking hard to know if you're a D+ student you're not going to be a neurosurgeon, so you need to stop focusing on that goal, and pick one you can actually attain.
I also said technical schools are a good enough for the vast majority of people, and they are far cheaper to attend than traditional college or university.
Of course, neither of those viable options have anything to do with you taking a hike because you prefer the European way, and I believe that is just as viable an option. So there you have three viable options.
Unless a kid is diagnosed with an acute learning disability, and unless you have a time machine that I don't know about, it's unfair and in fact immoral to tell them that their potential for success is anything less than unlimited.
What's immoral is knowing your child is average or below average, and filling their head with unattainable, hence unrealistic, goals. All it does is cause emotional, financial, and social problems for everyone.
A line needs to be drawn at some point. I will leave that up to the parents, because as a parent you should be responsible enough to recognize when your child is pursuing a pipe dream, and turn their focus toward attainable, realistic, successes.
George III was a socialist? Wow! Ok, I get your point but what your are complaining about is a lot more modern than that.
Try reading my post again, paticularly the bit about NOT NEEDING TO CHANGE THE POLITICS and instead just paying more attention to education.
As for the rest, did you read any of my post at all or just the dread word that you think means nothing but "commie"? Norway is not a communist country.
Ignore the S word in the post above then, it really doesn't have much to do with what I'm saying if you take that narrow and really completely wrong definition in English. Substitute "socialminded" or similar doubleplusgood word to get it into your head that I'm not talking about communism here.
I know it's become a mindless insult in US slang here but we are talking about education here so please stick to english as in the dictionary instead of ebonics or whatever schools are teaching due to budget cuts.
Are you blind? I never once made a reference to communism. C-O-R-P-O-R-A-T-I-S-M. FFS, I bet you wouldn't have this big a problem with reading comprehension if I used the old word, "fascism."
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, two things: 1) either you're a dick for not choosing the best option - I pay $109/month for Comcast Business Internet at my home, and I get 20mbps down, 5mbps up. I get 8 static IP addresses, with customized reverse-resolving DNS. I get no port blocking. Outbound SMTP? No problem. Hosting a website? No problem. Bittorrent? No problem. AND no cap. In between work and personal use I am averaging around 1TB a month down, 300GB up.
Or, 2) you're being obtuse. Because that $100 a month you say you're paying doesn't correlate to any Internet plan that Comcast offers for personal users, and you're getting snarky about it, not factoring in the fact that that amount also covers either your TV, or Voice, or possibly both, depending on your plan. Given that Comcast charges $25 a month for 15mbps down, I'd say one of these two are highly likely to be the case.
Study philosophy much?
Let's start with this:
Comcast effectively is making 900% more profit
Even if your post was true, it's 900% more revenue. Which means more than 900% more profit, except that you have to remember that their CURRENT profits reflect having this cap, which means that not having the cap means 10% of the revenue and thus a lot less profit and possibly loss (possibly huge losses). But it's worse than that.
Comcast isn't stealing from you, they are failing to sell their product as cheaply as you would like. I don't know why you think you paid for a monthly bandwidth of 2.59 TB / mo.
Also, it doesn't actually work out that they can sell to 900 000 more customers by doing that. That would only be true if all 1 million customers were saturating their bandwidth continuously. It turns out it's more like they have the bandwidth for 1000 people under your model, and by selling it this way, they can sell to 1 000 000. How many people you can sell to without unduly* affecting them all is a statistical problem: what is the probability that the demand for bandwidth at time t is > X where X is an amount that will substantially impact the experience for everybody else, given an array of people p[i] where p[i] is an upper-bound constraint on their bandwidth. So it turns out the revenue multiplier by doing it this way is more like 1000x. I got the figure 1000x in a graduate-level Internetworking class, it's a rough figure; the point is, it comes out to more than 10 because this isn't like a pie being shared by 10 people, it's more like a road. It would only be a 10x multiplier if all 10 people used their bandwidth 24/7; or alternatively, if they all used 100% of available bandwidth at exactly the same times and 0% the rest of the time with no exceptions. This is the baked-in assumption that allows the pricing model as it is today to work now. There's not one consumer ISP that's making anything close to that profit margin, and therefore none that can exist with a purely reserved-bandwidth model without SUBSTANTIALLY hiking their rates for everyone.
An analogy: how many lanes do they put on a toll road? Do they put in one lane for every car that might move across it in full traffic? After all, they paid for 60 mph road access, and that's the only way to guarantee it (I've never encountered a toll road that was cheaper in high traffic, though they may exist.). How dare they resell your highway bandwidth after selling it to you!
Except that's patently absurd. That's NOT what they sold you. If their advertising suggested that's what they sold you, then there's a problem with either you or possibly their advertising. But you don't get to decide what somebody else sells, or for what price they sell it (except in the extremely indirect manner of just not buying it).
And if they did the toll would have to be ENORMOUS to recoup the cost, which would drive people away from using it, which would mean less lanes to pay for but also fewer payesr to pay for it (thus likely increasing the cost because of reduced bulk), leading to another round of people driven away.
Comcast has a lot of things wrong with it and maybe the advertising should change. Purely reserved bandwidth, however, is a thing that will send us back to the dark ages.
*you do not get to define what unduly means by yourself; Comcast directly, and the customers as a gestalt indirectly, do.
That's a nice post that conveniently forgets that I was actually receiving my full moneys worth when I was not capped and able to pull ~2.59TB/mo. Your whole theory is flawed by Comcast capping me at 10% of what I was previously allowed, without lowering my rates. I was sold "unlimited" and when they changed the plan to "limited" they did not properly adjust the rates. They are stealing. To use my Coca-Cola Principle analogy, if I sold you a can of Coke and then the second you opened it I took 90% of the contents back to sell to 9 other people, I just stole 90% from you.
I'm not sure about your math, although I sort of suspect there is a conversion from bits to bytes that you might be missing, and then perhaps some multiply by 1000 instead of 1024s but regardless of your math, your logic is wrong.
They are not stealing anything from you. The agreement you initially had with them was changed. I suspect somewhere in that agreement there was a clause stating that the price you were paying wasn't guaranteed for all eternity. They came up with a new price, and you apparently are agreeing to pay it.
Perhaps you should consider another provider if you are that dissatisfied, or doing without the service if another acceptable provider can not be found.
8Mbps == 1MB/s, 1MB * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 should be a good enough estimate no? Perhaps I am wrong.
IANAL, and certainly not an expert in contract law, but I don't think a contract with terms that change is a legally binding contract. It's stealing because they capped my bandwidth, but did not lower the pricing. I'm paying for 90% more bandwidth than I am receiving. Therefore, my previous post is fairly accurate IMHO.
As far as considering another provider, there are none. Comcast is an effective cable monopoly in my area (but that's really a separate issue).
Then you knew the answer more than twenty years ago as well. You're really terrible at trolling.
I've never heard of this "socialist corporatism" thing before your post. What is it?
You're really terrible at trolling.
You did not answer my very simple question asking what this "socialist corporatism" you are writing about is. I knew those other things you linked to more than twenty years ago.
Then you knew the answer more than twenty years ago as well. You're really terrible at trolling.
No, you can always bring your own hardware. But you could lease one for very, very cheap ($10/mo cable modem vs what was a $200 device at the time, but is now $80 and prone to last a few decent years instead of 6 months...).
You can't lease telephones. If I remember that is why the US DoJ broke up the Ma Bell monopoly. I could be wrong. I know of no home or cellphone providers that lease you the equipment.
So now you are calling me a socialist! You know nothing about me apart from my criticism of an education system that all parties admit should be better, that I'm not in the USA and that I'm calling you out on things that I see as bullshit. I'm still waiting on an answer to the question above.
Yeah, there's like a 90% chance that unless you're a capitalist you're one of those. Are you seriously that obtuse?
Show me that I am wrong when I accuse you of using "socialist" as a meaningless swear word.
Socialist is certainly a swear word to us proud citizens of the United States of America who have enjoyed a working capitalist economy until you socialist scum started making policy. Since social security our economy has been making strides towards the shitter, and we can't tell you enough how much we wish you assholes would leave here and head overseas with the rest of the socialists, totalitarians, egalitarians, and corporatists. You probably need to read my reply to your last post before you would understand this post, since you don't seem to understand the meanings of those words or the ideas they represent.
Where I come from the education system teaches children that is is very bad form to play the man instead of the ball, and it teaches them that at an early age. Let's get back to your flawed education system or you explaining your "socialist corporatism" idea shall we instead of childish personal attacks. I'll be intrigued if you can get the two things to relate together while preserving the meanings that all the rest of us know. We cannot read your mind so we are restricted to what is in the dictionary to communicate. Give it a try.
Heh the rest us? I'm pretty sure this thread is old by now. I fail to see why I need to explain to you these things when you are capable of researching them yourself, but here I'll help you with some common interweb sites:
egalitarianism:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/egalitarianism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism
totalitarianism:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/totalitarianism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
fascism:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fascism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
corporatism:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/corporatisms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
I typically begin researching topics by first looking in the dictionary, then the encyclopedia, then specific literature (books) on the subject at the library. Good luck!
I didn't make that argument; I made the argument that $20M executive pays add up to a tiny fraction of the money they need to execute those sorts of projects. If your business turns a $1M profit a year, you'll salary yourself somewhere below $1M; if it turns a $1000M profit a year, why the hell not throw $100M at the executives and throw $900M at the projects? 5 executives, $20M each, sure. Now we're talking about market-dominance telcos that turn well more than a billion a year before projects ("Operating Costs" "Expansion Costs" etc), that $20M is like ... pocket change. It's NOT the spending problem.
You don't seem to understand AT ALL why these CEO's get those bonuses. Epic fail.
That is not what the above link was about - it's about the problem of getting mistaken for nearby loonies that use the same flawed terminology.
Well it's probably a good thing you read it then since you are using flawed terminology and don't seem to understand what a socialist democracy is, nor totalitarianism, nor egalitarianism, nor corporatism. Good luck, and once again, good day sir!
You don't seem to understand the flawed business model that communications providers have been running with since the beginning. They never had enough capacity for their customers. They could, but they need to pay their CEO's $20M bonuses instead of grow their infrastructure. So as it stands today, there just isn't enough network for us, which is why when there are city/county/state-wide emergencies many calls do not go through.
That's not a flawed business model. You can meet 90% of your customer's needs for X dollars, and 99% of your customer's needs for 10X dollars, and 99.9% of your customer's needs for 100X dollars, and 99.99% of your customer's needs for 1000X dollars... see the problem? Increasing capacity to a point where you can fully satisfy state-wide emergencies is incredibly expensive, and leaves half of the network unused at regular times. That is a flawed business model, which is why it's not done by any infrastructure provider - there are brownouts in summer heat waves, there are water shortages in droughts, there are network shortages in emergencies, etc. This is the trade-off we make in exchange for not having $5000/month cell phone bills.
I suppose all that is fine if you intend on stagnating until something far superior and necessary blows you right out of the competition. It's almost 2010. We're trying to globalize Earth, and part of that is building a communications network that allows for ALL 6.5 billion people to communicate at once. I think it's time these corporatist fuckwads stop thinking about their pocketbooks and start complying with real world demands or face obsolescence. The stockholders can still make money while the company grows.
So...what you are saying is that your monthly charge should cover 25 terabytes of transfer or more? The fact of the matter is that you didn't buy ALL their bandwidth - they aren't reselling YOUR bandwidth - that's pure rubbish.
1MB * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2592000 (or 2.59 TB/mo)
Unless my math is wrong, I'm now receiving almost exactly 10% of what I was paying for before being capped at 250gb/mo and they are still charging me the same rate. That means Comcast effectively is making 900% more profit simply by stealing from me instead of growing their infrastructure. Now I know I'm not the only person in the this situation. I would suspect there are at least 100,000 more people just like me paying the same rates and being capped the same way. @$100/mo, by re-selling already paid for bandwidth Comcast "added" the ability to sell to 900,000 more customers without adding a fucking thing to their network. That's $90,000,000...
Maybe you should research some of these things before you open your mouth and remove all doubt as they say...
No, you licensed access to the network you connect to with the iPhone. Also they COULD simply lease a cell phone to you (like a cable modem).
I am not a lawyer but maybe the Antitrust case against Ma Bell makes it illegal to do that? Also, I'm fairly certain that the FCC remains the ultimate authority for disabling communications devices, as in, only the Federal Government has the authority to do what Apple is trying to do, under currently established law.
Sure the service provider can cut you off for non-payment or violations of their TOS, but for example, Motorola would face prosecution if they decided to turn off my phone.
You don't seem to understand the flawed business model that communications providers have been running with since the beginning. They never had enough capacity for their customers. They could, but they need to pay their CEO's $20M bonuses instead of grow their infrastructure.
Wow, only $20M to put in a $1.7Bn infrastructure upgrade, with $2.3Bn extra costs to implement it with strong integration to the current infrastructure and while prematurely terminating part of the current infrastructure before value's been realized on it? You must be the best business process accountant ever!
Wow nothing. You have to try really fucking hard to make it appear that these companies are spending properly. It's blatantly clear to anyone using these communications network that something is fundamentally wrong, and to make the comment you did leads me to believe you're simply a corporatist with a hidden agenda.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=CMCSA
I don't know how much you really know about finances, but I fucking dare you to tell me that these numbers show they can't afford to grow their infrastructure to meet the demand for it.
The point about the apartment capacity may be well intentioned but it's moot. The landlord doesn't set capacity, the fire marshal does. It has nothing at all to do with the lease. So in effect, I'm right and you are wrong.
You do raise a point though about network capacities. I completely understand that certain networks may be designed for limited capacities, most notably the US Interstate Highway network. Where your argument breaks down though is where you say the phone companies (more generally, communications providers) can't provide a network that everyone can use simultaneously.
The year will soon be 2010. We are persistently barraged with articles about high technology, artificial intelligence, mass compute power, mass storage capacity, etc. I find it completely ludicrous to simply accept that we all can't communicate at once. The simple fact is that since we truly expect a real-time globally integrated communications network as part of the push toward globalization and the Singularity, we NEED a communications network that does not limit our communications. Period.
Are the cell phone networks really that helpless in that they cannot cap usages on cell phones?
You've obviously never heard of that little group called the Federal Communications Commission http://fcc.gov/
This story is tagged "defectivebydesign", but what Apple wants to do is anything but.
Operators have a hard limit on the amount of service they can actually provision. Allowing any and all devices to run willy nilly on the network would be certain death, even for the best-laid network. By throttling certain services, turning off certain capabilities, and allowing remote provisioning management, Apple is making sure that the device they are providing to users will work and continue to work on the network.
This is a very important feature not only for the NOs, but also for businesses who would provide these phones to their field teams. Though, to be honest, restriction of features doesn't seem very patentable, at least there are other implementations that already exist. WinMo has had this since WM6.1, for example.
You don't seem to understand the flawed business model that communications providers have been running with since the beginning. They never had enough capacity for their customers. They could, but they need to pay their CEO's $20M bonuses instead of grow their infrastructure. So as it stands today, there just isn't enough network for us, which is why when there are city/county/state-wide emergencies many calls do not go through.
The only analogy I've been able to come up with that paints a good picture about why it's such a flawed model is what I call the Coca-Cola Principle. If Coca-Cola was suddenly able to reclaim the soda in the can I just purchased before it hit my lips, they could in effect resell my can of Coke before I could even drink it. This is exactly what every single communications provider has done. Comcast (unfortunately my home ISP) is perhaps one of the worst offenders of this. Having resold the bandwidth I paid for multiple hundreds of times. Eventually instead of providing me with what I have been paying for (unlimited broadband, as in no bandwidth cap), they reneged on their deal and put in a hard cap of 250gb/mo.
You sound a lot like a corporatist to me. Oh noes those poor Network Operators need to cripple us to continue to be able to oversell their product/service. Well, what I say is, shitcan the CEOs taking these ridiculous sums of money and grow your infrastructure to meet YOUR promises as well as the economic DEMAND.
So, I didn't buy my iPieceOfShit, I iLicensed it? How is this even legal?
Try this, it's from someone with similar political views to yourself but a cool and calm head: http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2009/09/29/silence-equals-assent-why-pointing-out-conservative-lunacy-must-be-done/ Then perhaps lay off the S word except for where it really applies.
Methinks you don't know what a socialist democracy is. So again, I bid you good day, sir.
Look up a dictionary as per my suggestion before and find out! Yes there are plenty of clueless fools that use anything starting with "social" purely as swear words to mean something else but you don't have to be one of them.
Apparently you are one of them.
Hey, don't go for the man instead of the ball. You are the one that misread "socialist democracy" (like Norway) as Communism and not me. You are also the one that used "socialist country" to mean "communist dictatorship" or "authoritarian bloodstained hellhole" or whatever. I'm merely trying to point out that whatever the "ism" is if you throw away the future of your children they would be better off elsewhere in a place that doesn't, so long as it isn't some hellhole. I got the point about corporatism thanks the first time around. The socialist fascist bit describes a party in my country quite well which wants lots of government benefits for farmers and to leave the city dwellers and non-landowners to fend for themselves with whatever the market will give them or not give them. Of course it was mostly about being a bunch of crooks looking for bribes instead of actual ideology.
You keep thinking I called something or someone communist when I didn't, and you don't seem to have a clear grasp on what totalitarianism, egalitarianism, or corporatism are. This leads me to believe your view on this days old thread is flawed.
And you free to take your love for totalitarianism and corporatism abroad, and I encourage you to.
OK, so what DO our kids need exposure to then? You seem to complain a lot but don't really offer up any viable options other than everyone who disagrees with you has to GTFO. Seriously, got any plans?
Yeah I do. You've obviously missed it so I'll repeat it. REALISTIC GOALS. It's not fucking hard to know if you're a D+ student you're not going to be a neurosurgeon, so you need to stop focusing on that goal, and pick one you can actually attain.
I also said technical schools are a good enough for the vast majority of people, and they are far cheaper to attend than traditional college or university.
Of course, neither of those viable options have anything to do with you taking a hike because you prefer the European way, and I believe that is just as viable an option. So there you have three viable options.
Unless a kid is diagnosed with an acute learning disability, and unless you have a time machine that I don't know about, it's unfair and in fact immoral to tell them that their potential for success is anything less than unlimited.
What's immoral is knowing your child is average or below average, and filling their head with unattainable, hence unrealistic, goals. All it does is cause emotional, financial, and social problems for everyone.
A line needs to be drawn at some point. I will leave that up to the parents, because as a parent you should be responsible enough to recognize when your child is pursuing a pipe dream, and turn their focus toward attainable, realistic, successes.
George III was a socialist? Wow! Ok, I get your point but what your are complaining about is a lot more modern than that. Try reading my post again, paticularly the bit about NOT NEEDING TO CHANGE THE POLITICS and instead just paying more attention to education. As for the rest, did you read any of my post at all or just the dread word that you think means nothing but "commie"? Norway is not a communist country. Ignore the S word in the post above then, it really doesn't have much to do with what I'm saying if you take that narrow and really completely wrong definition in English. Substitute "socialminded" or similar doubleplusgood word to get it into your head that I'm not talking about communism here. I know it's become a mindless insult in US slang here but we are talking about education here so please stick to english as in the dictionary instead of ebonics or whatever schools are teaching due to budget cuts.
Are you blind? I never once made a reference to communism. C-O-R-P-O-R-A-T-I-S-M. FFS, I bet you wouldn't have this big a problem with reading comprehension if I used the old word, "fascism."