Competition is the ideal solution, but it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. Failing competition, this would be my solution:
1) Separate the business lines: ISPs should be dumb pipes and not offer services (TV, Phone, etc) across the lines. They definitely shouldn't own content that goes across said lines. Separate companies like Comcast into Internet, TV/Phone, and Content companies. Let these companies survive or fail on their own.
2a) Require access to lines: Now that "Comcast Internet" only manages the Network, require them to open up to allow other companies fairly priced access to their networks. Those companies can then sell services to the users.
---- or ----
2b) Regulate ISPs as utilities. The government can set fair rates the ISPs can charge (the same way that your water company can't charge $50 per gallon because they're the only game in town) and ensure that any caps/overage fees come with fair metering.
Is this as good as having 10 other wired, high-speed ISPs in the area? Of course not. Perhaps you could also implement measures to encourage other ISPs to come into the areas, but the steps above would be a good short-term solution.
Comcast did have "undisclosed soft caps" at one point. If you hit against this, you might find yourself slowed down for the rest of the month. Like AT&T, they refused to say what the cap was and insisted only a very tiny group would ever encounter it. Yet, it was applied and inconsistently too. Some people would hit into it and slow down while others used more data and kept moving quickly. There was no rhyme or reason.
People told Comcast that non-transparent caps like this were bad so they've moved to "we're setting a hard cap and charging you for every byte over you go."
Count yourself lucky that you have an alternative. Where I live, my choice is Time Warner Cable or nobody else. Right now, TWC isn't capping but if they decided to institute a 50GB cap tomorrow with $10 per GB overage fees tomorrow, I'd have no choice but to keep paying or do without high speed Internet access. (The latter's not really a choice for me - a web developer without Internet access at home? Unthinkable!)
Comcast was saying at one point that caps/overage fees were needed to reign in bandwidth hogs who were clogging the network. Since then, they've admitted what we all knew from the beginning: This isn't about network management/congestion.
The reason reason for caps and overage fees is simple: Cable TV. Cable TV revenues are declining as people move from watching Cable TV to getting video entertainment from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and other online sources. The cable companies don't like this because it means money flows to other companies instead of to them.
Now, cable companies tend to have a monopoly for wired, high-speed Internet access in their areas. (If not a monopoly, then likely a duopoly with the phone company.) They are using their monopoly control over Internet access to prop up their Cable TV business. By establishing caps and overages, they can ensure that people: a) Are limited in what they can stream and b) wind up paying the cable company if they stream too much. The overages raise the price of streaming videos. Instead of paying under $20 for Netflix and Hulu, you might wind up paying $40 or more. Suddenly, streaming "costs more" than cable TV would and (Comcast hopes) people will abandon streaming and come back to the cable company.
The big problem (for Comcast) in all of this is that it's illegal for a company to use their monopoly position in one market to squash competition in another market. That's exactly what Comcast is doing here and the FTC/DOJ needs to investigate and stop them.
This won't be the case for everything. Things I feel I need to have access to at all times, I'll buy the disc versions for. For everything else, I'll watch via Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. However, there are times when I'd like to watch a show/movie and realize that it's been taken off of streaming. When that happens, it's nice to have my own copy to play.
I've considered this, but doing that costs money we don't have and wouldn't really help me or my son. (I already have my own coping methods and my son is already getting help developing his own.) So until money isn't an issue, I'm fine saying that I'm undiagnosed. People who know me recognize the traits in me. (It's harder seeing it online because I communicate so much better via online text communications than I do via in-person voice communications.)
Exactly this. I was recently asked why I still buy DVDs when you can just get everything from Netflix, Amazon, etc. While I do like and use those services, there isn't a guarantee that what is on them today will always be on them*. Case in point: Back To The Future was free to Amazon Prime members a few weeks ago. Now there's a charge for it. Meanwhile, I have the DVDs and can copy the videos to a local hard drive to stream within my network.
* I was also asked why I don't just download my videos from torrent sites. While this would be getting videos permanently, I also consider this an illegal method and prefer to stick to legal methods of obtaining my video entertainment. If there is no legal method - or if the legal method is too expensive/restrictive/etc - then I'll just do without. There's plenty of other video entertainment out there.
Back when my kids were in diapers, they would always flag the diaper cream and require it to be swabbed to make sure it wasn't some kind of explosive crammed into a diaper cream tube.
Hey, that water bottle might really be explosive liquid... so they need to throw it into the bin right in the middle of the security area with all the other potentially dangerous stuff. That's the only safe way of disposing of said items, right?
I'll agree that US foreign policy could definitely be improved in ways that would reduce instances of terrorism, but there are also factions that hate us simply because we aren't them or because of past misdeeds (for which they won't accept any reparations except our deaths).
Also, there's more than just Flight 93. The underwear bomber and shoe bomber we both stopped by passengers, not airport security. Security needs to be a multi-layered approach, but the level of "security" in airports is mainly for show, not for effectiveness. If we went back to pre-911 levels of security but kept the reinforced airplane cabin doors and increased passenger awareness, we'd be fine.
This test definitely isn't a be-all-end-all determinant and shouldn't be used as a "diagnosis." It's more of a general indicator of "the higher you score the greater the likelihood you are on the autism spectrum." When my son was diagnosed, he went through 3 hours of observation in the class and 3 hours of one-on-one observation before the doctor came up with the diagnosis. The test does have some usefulness in a casual sense, though. I've often wondered if I could take out any mentions of "autism" in the test, give it to my family, and see how they score. My parents have been slow to accept the autism diagnosis (keep saying things like "he'll grow out of it") and I'm pretty sure my father might be on the spectrum as well.
That's why the online quiz isn't a diagnostic tool that will definitively tell you that you have autism. If you score high on the test, you are more likely to have autism, but you could also have other conditions that result in a high test score. An actual diagnosis (like I got for my son) takes hours and is performed by a trained medical professional.
One of the things I learned when we found out our son has autism, is that people with autism tend to think in an If-Then manner. "If this happens THEN do that." This works out great for programming - which can essentially be boiled down to "if this happens, then the computer should do that" - and other STEM-type careers. It doesn't work so well for social interactions which are a mess of shades of grey.
People with autism can "emulate" neurotypical by building up tons of social "if-then" rules that they follow, but (like computer emulation) it's not as fast as "running native neurotypical" and it can be tiring. I can get by in an office environment, but stick me in a party and I freeze up and don't know what rules to follow.
To use the expression common in the autism community: "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism." In other words, every person is different and will have differing characteristics. Some will overlap but then others will have no overlap at all. What helps me get through my days doesn't always help my son.
When we were first getting our son's diagnosis, we were scared of labeling him - thinking, as many do, that sticking a label on him would harm him. Instead, getting that diagnosis let us get access to supports that have helped him to thrive in school when he would otherwise have floundered.
21.9 isn't the maximum. I just took the quiz online and I scored a 36. The quiz I took said that anything 34 or above meant that Autism was likely. (My son was diagnosed with high functioning autism and we're sure I'm undiagnosed autistic as well.) When my wife (who is definitely not on the spectrum) took the test once, she scored about 10 or 11.
Torture isn't effective as a means of getting reliable information OUT of a person. When you're being tortured, you'll say anything to make it stop - even if what you say isn't true.
However, torture (or the threat of it) is a very good way of keeping information IN a person. Especially if said torture is directed at those you care about. (e.g. "Don't tell anyone what you know or your wife/husband/child/parents will die a slow and painful death.")
If you say "John Smith is a member of the KKK" and you actually have no reason to believe that John Smith is a member, you can be charged with defamation in the US. Now, if John Smith actually was a member of the KKK and you had proof, you couldn't be sued for defamation in the US (well, you could but it'd be tossed out quickly) but in the British courts truth isn't a defense against defamation.
I actually like this argument. Sort of turns the "copyright is still a limited time even if it's 120 years long" argument on its head. If waiting 20 years to crack a phone's encryption makes the encryption "unbreakable" then why is a 120 year long copyright "limited"?
I haven't had that many ads using Hulu. Was this their "Hulu Plus" service (which has since dropped the "Plus" in the name)? Maybe they had different ad lengths for Hulu (free) and Hulu Plus.
Yup. I can actually deal with Hulu's ads as they seem minimal, but CBS has a ton of ads. I'm not going to watch 6 minutes of ads for a 22 minute program. If I wanted to do that, I'd go back to live TV.
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Competition is the ideal solution, but it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. Failing competition, this would be my solution:
1) Separate the business lines: ISPs should be dumb pipes and not offer services (TV, Phone, etc) across the lines. They definitely shouldn't own content that goes across said lines. Separate companies like Comcast into Internet, TV/Phone, and Content companies. Let these companies survive or fail on their own.
2a) Require access to lines: Now that "Comcast Internet" only manages the Network, require them to open up to allow other companies fairly priced access to their networks. Those companies can then sell services to the users.
---- or ----
2b) Regulate ISPs as utilities. The government can set fair rates the ISPs can charge (the same way that your water company can't charge $50 per gallon because they're the only game in town) and ensure that any caps/overage fees come with fair metering.
Is this as good as having 10 other wired, high-speed ISPs in the area? Of course not. Perhaps you could also implement measures to encourage other ISPs to come into the areas, but the steps above would be a good short-term solution.
Comcast did have "undisclosed soft caps" at one point. If you hit against this, you might find yourself slowed down for the rest of the month. Like AT&T, they refused to say what the cap was and insisted only a very tiny group would ever encounter it. Yet, it was applied and inconsistently too. Some people would hit into it and slow down while others used more data and kept moving quickly. There was no rhyme or reason.
People told Comcast that non-transparent caps like this were bad so they've moved to "we're setting a hard cap and charging you for every byte over you go."
Count yourself lucky that you have an alternative. Where I live, my choice is Time Warner Cable or nobody else. Right now, TWC isn't capping but if they decided to institute a 50GB cap tomorrow with $10 per GB overage fees tomorrow, I'd have no choice but to keep paying or do without high speed Internet access. (The latter's not really a choice for me - a web developer without Internet access at home? Unthinkable!)
Comcast was saying at one point that caps/overage fees were needed to reign in bandwidth hogs who were clogging the network. Since then, they've admitted what we all knew from the beginning: This isn't about network management/congestion.
The reason reason for caps and overage fees is simple: Cable TV. Cable TV revenues are declining as people move from watching Cable TV to getting video entertainment from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and other online sources. The cable companies don't like this because it means money flows to other companies instead of to them.
Now, cable companies tend to have a monopoly for wired, high-speed Internet access in their areas. (If not a monopoly, then likely a duopoly with the phone company.) They are using their monopoly control over Internet access to prop up their Cable TV business. By establishing caps and overages, they can ensure that people: a) Are limited in what they can stream and b) wind up paying the cable company if they stream too much. The overages raise the price of streaming videos. Instead of paying under $20 for Netflix and Hulu, you might wind up paying $40 or more. Suddenly, streaming "costs more" than cable TV would and (Comcast hopes) people will abandon streaming and come back to the cable company.
The big problem (for Comcast) in all of this is that it's illegal for a company to use their monopoly position in one market to squash competition in another market. That's exactly what Comcast is doing here and the FTC/DOJ needs to investigate and stop them.
This won't be the case for everything. Things I feel I need to have access to at all times, I'll buy the disc versions for. For everything else, I'll watch via Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. However, there are times when I'd like to watch a show/movie and realize that it's been taken off of streaming. When that happens, it's nice to have my own copy to play.
I've considered this, but doing that costs money we don't have and wouldn't really help me or my son. (I already have my own coping methods and my son is already getting help developing his own.) So until money isn't an issue, I'm fine saying that I'm undiagnosed. People who know me recognize the traits in me. (It's harder seeing it online because I communicate so much better via online text communications than I do via in-person voice communications.)
Exactly this. I was recently asked why I still buy DVDs when you can just get everything from Netflix, Amazon, etc. While I do like and use those services, there isn't a guarantee that what is on them today will always be on them*. Case in point: Back To The Future was free to Amazon Prime members a few weeks ago. Now there's a charge for it. Meanwhile, I have the DVDs and can copy the videos to a local hard drive to stream within my network.
* I was also asked why I don't just download my videos from torrent sites. While this would be getting videos permanently, I also consider this an illegal method and prefer to stick to legal methods of obtaining my video entertainment. If there is no legal method - or if the legal method is too expensive/restrictive/etc - then I'll just do without. There's plenty of other video entertainment out there.
Back when my kids were in diapers, they would always flag the diaper cream and require it to be swabbed to make sure it wasn't some kind of explosive crammed into a diaper cream tube.
We could replace the TSA with "home security system" style stickers and would get just as much security at a greatly reduced cost.
Hey, that water bottle might really be explosive liquid... so they need to throw it into the bin right in the middle of the security area with all the other potentially dangerous stuff. That's the only safe way of disposing of said items, right?
I'll agree that US foreign policy could definitely be improved in ways that would reduce instances of terrorism, but there are also factions that hate us simply because we aren't them or because of past misdeeds (for which they won't accept any reparations except our deaths).
Also, there's more than just Flight 93. The underwear bomber and shoe bomber we both stopped by passengers, not airport security. Security needs to be a multi-layered approach, but the level of "security" in airports is mainly for show, not for effectiveness. If we went back to pre-911 levels of security but kept the reinforced airplane cabin doors and increased passenger awareness, we'd be fine.
Also, "drunk guy on plane becomes belligerent" is more common than terrorism. I'd hate to make that "armed, belligerent drunk guy on plane."
This test definitely isn't a be-all-end-all determinant and shouldn't be used as a "diagnosis." It's more of a general indicator of "the higher you score the greater the likelihood you are on the autism spectrum." When my son was diagnosed, he went through 3 hours of observation in the class and 3 hours of one-on-one observation before the doctor came up with the diagnosis. The test does have some usefulness in a casual sense, though. I've often wondered if I could take out any mentions of "autism" in the test, give it to my family, and see how they score. My parents have been slow to accept the autism diagnosis (keep saying things like "he'll grow out of it") and I'm pretty sure my father might be on the spectrum as well.
Number of people surprised that the TSA is completely ineffective: 0.
Not coincidentally, that's also the number of terrorists that the TSA has caught.
They have saved us from the scourge of water bottles and decent sized toothpaste tubes, though.
That's why the online quiz isn't a diagnostic tool that will definitively tell you that you have autism. If you score high on the test, you are more likely to have autism, but you could also have other conditions that result in a high test score. An actual diagnosis (like I got for my son) takes hours and is performed by a trained medical professional.
One of the things I learned when we found out our son has autism, is that people with autism tend to think in an If-Then manner. "If this happens THEN do that." This works out great for programming - which can essentially be boiled down to "if this happens, then the computer should do that" - and other STEM-type careers. It doesn't work so well for social interactions which are a mess of shades of grey.
People with autism can "emulate" neurotypical by building up tons of social "if-then" rules that they follow, but (like computer emulation) it's not as fast as "running native neurotypical" and it can be tiring. I can get by in an office environment, but stick me in a party and I freeze up and don't know what rules to follow.
To use the expression common in the autism community: "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism." In other words, every person is different and will have differing characteristics. Some will overlap but then others will have no overlap at all. What helps me get through my days doesn't always help my son.
When we were first getting our son's diagnosis, we were scared of labeling him - thinking, as many do, that sticking a label on him would harm him. Instead, getting that diagnosis let us get access to supports that have helped him to thrive in school when he would otherwise have floundered.
21.9 isn't the maximum. I just took the quiz online and I scored a 36. The quiz I took said that anything 34 or above meant that Autism was likely. (My son was diagnosed with high functioning autism and we're sure I'm undiagnosed autistic as well.) When my wife (who is definitely not on the spectrum) took the test once, she scored about 10 or 11.
Torture isn't effective as a means of getting reliable information OUT of a person. When you're being tortured, you'll say anything to make it stop - even if what you say isn't true.
However, torture (or the threat of it) is a very good way of keeping information IN a person. Especially if said torture is directed at those you care about. (e.g. "Don't tell anyone what you know or your wife/husband/child/parents will die a slow and painful death.")
If you say "John Smith is a member of the KKK" and you actually have no reason to believe that John Smith is a member, you can be charged with defamation in the US. Now, if John Smith actually was a member of the KKK and you had proof, you couldn't be sued for defamation in the US (well, you could but it'd be tossed out quickly) but in the British courts truth isn't a defense against defamation.
I actually like this argument. Sort of turns the "copyright is still a limited time even if it's 120 years long" argument on its head. If waiting 20 years to crack a phone's encryption makes the encryption "unbreakable" then why is a 120 year long copyright "limited"?
Don't worry. They'll just make it against the law for any hackers to take advantage of the police back doors thus solving the problem forever.
"But..."
FOREVER!!!!
I haven't had that many ads using Hulu. Was this their "Hulu Plus" service (which has since dropped the "Plus" in the name)? Maybe they had different ad lengths for Hulu (free) and Hulu Plus.
Yup. I can actually deal with Hulu's ads as they seem minimal, but CBS has a ton of ads. I'm not going to watch 6 minutes of ads for a 22 minute program. If I wanted to do that, I'd go back to live TV.