Well, maybe not right off the bat. First, see if you can get it on the local version of Bite Back with Kent Brockman and his Channel 6 Consumer Watchdog Unit. Generally, the cable company's monopoly contract generally requires that they service every household in [specified_area]. If there's cable in the ground, it's because your neighborhood is part of that area and the cable company is required to service it. The city can't require them to provide service then deny them the ability to do it. There's probably some bureaucratic clog that needs to be flushed out with the plunger of public outrage. Shine a light on it and embarrass the relevant parties into fixing it.
As usual, I'm ahead of my time. Human hibernation is still in its infancy so I had no practical way to "just wait" for communications infrastructure to catch up.
I just bought my forever house and had a few beautiful places picked out but had to change my search area because internet access sucked balls everywhere in that area. At best, I could get "up to" 3mbps DSL at a couple locations. Now I know why prices were so much lower in that area. And the realtors I talked to said "What kind of internet is available?" is one of the first questions people ask these days. Of course, when I asked that question, none of them could answer it.
So I shifted my search closer to The Big City where I got cable internet and almost as much privacy.
As for the value of internet, I was ready to spend up to 10 grand to improve infrastructure to the right property so figure that into the equation however you will.
The point of my system is to stop throwing around account information. My system doesn't involve transmitting (or even having) any valuable information where it can be stolen. Not even in encrypted form. Don't process payments from numbers at all.
USB dongle with a little computer, display, fingerprint/pulse scanner, and a few buttons. Dongle plugs into a port on the POS payment terminal. You authenticate with an authenticated fingerprint from a finger with a pulse. Dongle makes its own secure connection to the payment clearinghouse and indicates to the clearinghouse that a transaction with [Merchant_ID] is imminent. [Merchant_ID]'s payment terminal makes its own connection to the clearinghouse and says [Your_Public_ID] owes $112.96. The clearinghouse sends a message to your dongle (snicker) saying [Merchant_ID_Common_Name] says you owe them $112.96. Do you want to [P]ay from Primary account, pay from [O]ther account, or [D]ecline payment. Your dongle sends your response to the clearinghouse which sends your response to the merchant. If you opted to pay from one of your linked accounts, the money is transferred to the merchant's account, confirmation of the transfer is sent to the merchant, and the transaction is concluded.
At no time is your account information shown, transmitted, stored, or even provided. You don't even have your account information to provide.
Same system can be used for online purchases, online identity verification, building access, home access, car access, and pretty much any kind of authentication where internet access is available.
Hell, I'll bet a lot of people would even pay for the device after being on their 2nd or 3rd round of replacement credit cards in the last two years. Shouldn't cost more than $25 to make a keychain-dangler.
I just flew across the country last week so I'm getting a kick out of your reply. When I bought my ticket, I picked a good aisle seat so I wouldn't have to deal with the ass/crotch conundrum. (I forgot that seats are so close now it's more of a "can you please get up so I can go take a leak?" conundrum because there's no way you can fit past a seated person in steerage these days.) So the night before departure I go to print my boarding passes. My assigned seat on the long leg of the trip had been unassigned and would be reassigned at the gate after they bribed enough people to take later flights. Why do they even bother teasing me with the idea that I've selected a good seat if they're just going to take it away? I ended up riding bitch. I loathe sitting in the middle seat. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have flown a different time/day/airline or upgraded to first class. But they made sure I was already committed to the trip before telling me I'd be stuck in the middle between a clown and a joker.
I don't know how AT&T does it but Verizon won't start a new 2 year contract with unlimited customers. They make you pay full price for equipment and you continue the month-to-month arrangement that you were on when your last contract expired in 2013 or earlier. (2 years after they stopped offering subsidized equipment on 2 year contracts to unlimited customers.) If AT&T really is still giving out 2 year renewal contracts on unlimited service, they're pretty dumb. If all their customers are month-to-month, that would kill this lawsuit pretty quick because the argument is that people are locked in and face termination fees if they terminate their contracts. Also, I'd bet up to and including $1.83 that AT&T will say that they're willing to waive ETFs for unlimited customers that are in contracts if there really are such people. That would also kill the lawsuit.
Verizon has other restrictions which prevent them from throttling unlimited LTE service. AT&T doesn't have the same restrictions in place. They're pretty much free to bend you over and have their way while you squeal like a piggy.
These days, the measure of being a success is being able to lose staggering amounts of money while continuing to exist. The bonus round is where the government bails it out because it's too big to fail and the whole cycle repeats on a larger scale.
I didn't learn critical thinking in school. I learned it from my family. Mostly my grandparents. That's also how I learned things like budgeting, project planning, vehicle maintenance, home repair, laundry, cooking, landscaping, electrical repairs, etc. All the day-to-day things a person needs to function. Gramps taught me how to replace a water heater. School taught me how to determine how long it'll take that new water heater to heat 50 gallons of water enough that I can take a warm shower.
One of the games on my PS4 had a 14 gig update recently. Update, not the entire game. I'm glad I didn't have to wait until next week to play it. The pre-load for the new Halo on my XBone is 45 gigs and it's supposed to have a 20 gig day-one update. Unlike streaming video, I can't "consume" the product as it's delivered. I have to wait for delivery to finish before I can consume so the faster it's delivered, the faster I can enjoy the product.
I learned not to believe anything Frontier says regarding their ability to serve specific locations. I was recently home shopping in one of their territories and was excited to see 24mbps service available at many of the locations I was considering. I was looking at places out in the sticks where I figured I'd be lucky to get any kind of internet beyond 1-3 meg DSL. I started getting suspicious when all but one address was eligible for fiber so I put in an address down 15 miles of dirt roads. They claimed fiber was available there. Riiiiight.
I ended up shifting my search to Charter territory and made sure I saw a Charter box on the side of the house before I put it on the short list. They were a little clownshoes about getting me set up but I get 65-80mbps down (60 is the advertised speed) every time I check.
As for what's a livable speed, it depends on the location. I'll take a speed hit to live on a chunk of land out in the country where I can't see a single neighbor and live with the lower image quality of satellite TV. If I'm going to give up that privacy, it'll need to be balanced by improvement in services. Higher internet speed, cable TV, city water/sewer, etc. At my ideal location, 20mbps would have been livable. A place with a private lake, I could go down to 10. At my current, slightly-below-ideal location, 60mbps and cable TV make up for not being quite as private as I'd like. (Fortunately, the neighbors are great.)
That's bullshit. If you're operating a site that serves an entire nation, this kind of load should be expected any time there is a reason for people to be accessing your site. This shouldn't be a "holy shit, that many people own cars???" moment. This load should be completely expected. It's a peak load, not an unexpected load. Your system needs to be able to handle peak load.
And it's not limited to government sites. When the Nexus 10 was launched, it took me all day to place my order and I ended up with 2 orders because one that looked like it had died actually went thru. When the PS4 was launched, I got one at midnight. Couldn't connect to the PS Store or get my codes accepted for a couple of days. These are two big players with many years of experience who had all the time in the world to anticipate the increased load and they failed miserably.
Heh. I just bought a house in Charter territory. None of their customer service people have a clue about anything. At all. The day before I closed on my house, I stopped by the local office hoping I could get my cablemodem registered so I could just plug it in when I got the keys. "Sorry, we can only activate it once you're in the house. But it's just a quick phone call."
The next day, I called from the house. "You were given incorrect information. We have to send an installer to your house to connect you." "But I have the modem and there's a Charter box on the side of the house." "You have to have one of our modems." "No, I don't." "You don't have to use our modem but you have to have it in the house. There's no charge. I can have an installer out there between 3 and 5 today." I decided to just roll with it since it was such a short wait. The guy shows up, connects my cable down at the road (apparently they physically disconnect it for some dumb reason), plugs in my modem, provisions it, and admires how quickly it locks on. I didn't bother asking him why he wasn't leaving me an extra modem.
Over the weekend, I set up my ancient S3 Tivo which hadn't been plugged in for 2 years. Still worked so I called to add TV service and get cablecards. "Oh, you ended up at the wrong office but that will be really easy. They'll add it to your account and you can get the cablecards from the local office and set it up yourself. I'll transfer you to the right department." "I don't know what she was talking about. We have to send out an installer to do cablecards. I can have an installer out between 8 and 10 tomorrow." "Okay. Make sure he brings two cablecards because this old Tivo needs one per tuner." "No problem."
So the guy comes out and notices my modem. "You must have been grandfathered in or something. Charter doesn't let people use their own modems any more." "I just had service turned on Friday with no issues." "Weird. They make a lot of money on the rentals." "I was told they don't charge rental fees any more." "Weird. I'll go take the band pass filter off your connection at the road." Why on earth would there be a filter? Everything's digital now. The connection is useless without an authorized receiver. So after telling him he needs to provision one card at a time (he's never seen an S3 before) and he figures out he had the wires backwards on the tuning adapter, my Tivo's eventually up and running. A few hours later, I noticed he never connected the USB cable from the tuning adapter to the Tivo. [sigh] Fortunately, the tuning adapter had been configured properly and it seems to be working after I plugged it in.
I think it's a small miracle that I ended up with internet working on my modem and TV working on my DVR when it seems like nobody I dealt with has the slighted clue how any of their services work.
Ditto. I just checked my last 100 messages and every one of them is legit. And I've had my gmail address and used it as my primary contact for a long time. And my previous email address that dates back to the mid-90s forwards to my gmail account so they're filtering that, too.
I've had a few spells where a spam or three gets thru in a day but it stops pretty quickly after I flag them.
I guess you missed the part where it's the payment systems that are being compromised in recent hacks. The way our credit/debit system works, the retailer must have your account information for as long as it takes to process the transaction. When it's the terminal where you swipe your card that's compromised and passing a copy of your data to thieves, what can you (the consumer) do?
I wrote up a description of a payment system which never gives account information to retailers a while back but can't find it now. Basically a USB doohickey with biometric authentication (fingerprint scanner with pulse check), a small display, and a couple-three buttons. You plug it into the payment terminal (no wireless, goddamnit!) and, it makes a secure connection to the payment processor and indicates that you are conducting a transaction with Retailer XYZ. Retailer XYZ's payment terminal connects to the payment processor and says it's conducting a transaction with and you owe $119.37. The payment processor communicates the total to your doohickey via its secure connection which shows you the amount requested and asks if you for authorization to transfer $119.37 to Retailer XYZ from your primary payment account. You say yes/other account/no and the transaction either continues or is cancelled.
As long as the payment processor is secure, you're good. While that's still an issue, it reduces the points of failure significantly. It could also be used for all your authentication needs. Computers, online accounts, game consoles, secure buildings, etc. Secondary verification could also be added with SMS or a smartphone app.
Gotta do something because individual retailers all being responsible for their own security clearly isn't working. I lost my account number of 15 years thanks to the Home Depot crap.:P
I'm sure glad the world doesn't rely on your imagination.
Maybe I just bought NBA 2K15 on my PS4 and I don't want to wait until next Tuesday for the 46 gigabyte download to finish and I want to be able to stream an HD movie from Netflix at full quality while that's happening. And Steam's downloading 10 gigs of game updates on my computer while working on 12 gigs on the kid's computer. And my kid's streaming some educational video. And the wife is taking an online course in underwater basket weaving and she's in a video conference with the rest of the class.
Just because you have a limited imagination doesn't mean anyone who could make good use of a gigabit connection is a pirate.
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I wonder how long it will be before Ristic is disappeared. My money's on 110 days.
The military needs ditch diggers, too. How many Air Force personnel are pilots? 1%? I guess I could look it up. There we go...
324,820 Active Duty
13,811 pilots
A little over 4%. So good luck with that pilot path.
Sue the realtor and the city.
Well, maybe not right off the bat. First, see if you can get it on the local version of Bite Back with Kent Brockman and his Channel 6 Consumer Watchdog Unit. Generally, the cable company's monopoly contract generally requires that they service every household in [specified_area]. If there's cable in the ground, it's because your neighborhood is part of that area and the cable company is required to service it. The city can't require them to provide service then deny them the ability to do it. There's probably some bureaucratic clog that needs to be flushed out with the plunger of public outrage. Shine a light on it and embarrass the relevant parties into fixing it.
As usual, I'm ahead of my time. Human hibernation is still in its infancy so I had no practical way to "just wait" for communications infrastructure to catch up.
I just bought my forever house and had a few beautiful places picked out but had to change my search area because internet access sucked balls everywhere in that area. At best, I could get "up to" 3mbps DSL at a couple locations. Now I know why prices were so much lower in that area. And the realtors I talked to said "What kind of internet is available?" is one of the first questions people ask these days. Of course, when I asked that question, none of them could answer it.
So I shifted my search closer to The Big City where I got cable internet and almost as much privacy.
As for the value of internet, I was ready to spend up to 10 grand to improve infrastructure to the right property so figure that into the equation however you will.
Yep. Replicators and a holodeck. A self-cleaning holodeck.
The point of my system is to stop throwing around account information. My system doesn't involve transmitting (or even having) any valuable information where it can be stolen. Not even in encrypted form. Don't process payments from numbers at all .
Please implement it immediately.
USB dongle with a little computer, display, fingerprint/pulse scanner, and a few buttons. Dongle plugs into a port on the POS payment terminal. You authenticate with an authenticated fingerprint from a finger with a pulse. Dongle makes its own secure connection to the payment clearinghouse and indicates to the clearinghouse that a transaction with [Merchant_ID] is imminent. [Merchant_ID]'s payment terminal makes its own connection to the clearinghouse and says [Your_Public_ID] owes $112.96. The clearinghouse sends a message to your dongle (snicker) saying [Merchant_ID_Common_Name] says you owe them $112.96. Do you want to [P]ay from Primary account, pay from [O]ther account, or [D]ecline payment. Your dongle sends your response to the clearinghouse which sends your response to the merchant. If you opted to pay from one of your linked accounts, the money is transferred to the merchant's account, confirmation of the transfer is sent to the merchant, and the transaction is concluded.
At no time is your account information shown, transmitted, stored, or even provided. You don't even have your account information to provide.
Same system can be used for online purchases, online identity verification, building access, home access, car access, and pretty much any kind of authentication where internet access is available.
Hell, I'll bet a lot of people would even pay for the device after being on their 2nd or 3rd round of replacement credit cards in the last two years. Shouldn't cost more than $25 to make a keychain-dangler.
Well that fixes everything. :)
Maybe people who couldn't get anything better than "shift work" had duller brains to start with.
I just flew across the country last week so I'm getting a kick out of your reply. When I bought my ticket, I picked a good aisle seat so I wouldn't have to deal with the ass/crotch conundrum. (I forgot that seats are so close now it's more of a "can you please get up so I can go take a leak?" conundrum because there's no way you can fit past a seated person in steerage these days.) So the night before departure I go to print my boarding passes. My assigned seat on the long leg of the trip had been unassigned and would be reassigned at the gate after they bribed enough people to take later flights. Why do they even bother teasing me with the idea that I've selected a good seat if they're just going to take it away? I ended up riding bitch. I loathe sitting in the middle seat. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have flown a different time/day/airline or upgraded to first class. But they made sure I was already committed to the trip before telling me I'd be stuck in the middle between a clown and a joker.
A better solution would have been to NOT SELL TICKETS TO MORE PEOPLE THAN YOUR VENUE CAN ACCOMMODATE.
I know it's a wild and crazy idea but it just might be crazy enough to work.
Set the whole darn world to Zulu time and leave it alone. No more of this "my time or your time?" or dateline hassles.
I don't know how AT&T does it but Verizon won't start a new 2 year contract with unlimited customers. They make you pay full price for equipment and you continue the month-to-month arrangement that you were on when your last contract expired in 2013 or earlier. (2 years after they stopped offering subsidized equipment on 2 year contracts to unlimited customers.) If AT&T really is still giving out 2 year renewal contracts on unlimited service, they're pretty dumb. If all their customers are month-to-month, that would kill this lawsuit pretty quick because the argument is that people are locked in and face termination fees if they terminate their contracts. Also, I'd bet up to and including $1.83 that AT&T will say that they're willing to waive ETFs for unlimited customers that are in contracts if there really are such people. That would also kill the lawsuit.
Verizon has other restrictions which prevent them from throttling unlimited LTE service. AT&T doesn't have the same restrictions in place. They're pretty much free to bend you over and have their way while you squeal like a piggy.
These days, the measure of being a success is being able to lose staggering amounts of money while continuing to exist. The bonus round is where the government bails it out because it's too big to fail and the whole cycle repeats on a larger scale.
I didn't learn critical thinking in school. I learned it from my family. Mostly my grandparents. That's also how I learned things like budgeting, project planning, vehicle maintenance, home repair, laundry, cooking, landscaping, electrical repairs, etc. All the day-to-day things a person needs to function. Gramps taught me how to replace a water heater. School taught me how to determine how long it'll take that new water heater to heat 50 gallons of water enough that I can take a warm shower.
It's called "peak demand".
One of the games on my PS4 had a 14 gig update recently. Update, not the entire game. I'm glad I didn't have to wait until next week to play it. The pre-load for the new Halo on my XBone is 45 gigs and it's supposed to have a 20 gig day-one update. Unlike streaming video, I can't "consume" the product as it's delivered. I have to wait for delivery to finish before I can consume so the faster it's delivered, the faster I can enjoy the product.
I learned not to believe anything Frontier says regarding their ability to serve specific locations. I was recently home shopping in one of their territories and was excited to see 24mbps service available at many of the locations I was considering. I was looking at places out in the sticks where I figured I'd be lucky to get any kind of internet beyond 1-3 meg DSL. I started getting suspicious when all but one address was eligible for fiber so I put in an address down 15 miles of dirt roads. They claimed fiber was available there. Riiiiight.
I ended up shifting my search to Charter territory and made sure I saw a Charter box on the side of the house before I put it on the short list. They were a little clownshoes about getting me set up but I get 65-80mbps down (60 is the advertised speed) every time I check.
As for what's a livable speed, it depends on the location. I'll take a speed hit to live on a chunk of land out in the country where I can't see a single neighbor and live with the lower image quality of satellite TV. If I'm going to give up that privacy, it'll need to be balanced by improvement in services. Higher internet speed, cable TV, city water/sewer, etc. At my ideal location, 20mbps would have been livable. A place with a private lake, I could go down to 10. At my current, slightly-below-ideal location, 60mbps and cable TV make up for not being quite as private as I'd like. (Fortunately, the neighbors are great.)
Fiber is also shared. Everything is shared at some point unless you're leasing a dedicated connection between locations.
Stop calling it an "unexpected load".
That's bullshit. If you're operating a site that serves an entire nation, this kind of load should be expected any time there is a reason for people to be accessing your site. This shouldn't be a "holy shit, that many people own cars???" moment. This load should be completely expected. It's a peak load, not an unexpected load. Your system needs to be able to handle peak load.
And it's not limited to government sites. When the Nexus 10 was launched, it took me all day to place my order and I ended up with 2 orders because one that looked like it had died actually went thru. When the PS4 was launched, I got one at midnight. Couldn't connect to the PS Store or get my codes accepted for a couple of days. These are two big players with many years of experience who had all the time in the world to anticipate the increased load and they failed miserably.
How the Hell are the consumers supposed to decide? "You guys are terrible! I'm getting my internet service from another cable company!"
Heh. I just bought a house in Charter territory. None of their customer service people have a clue about anything. At all. The day before I closed on my house, I stopped by the local office hoping I could get my cablemodem registered so I could just plug it in when I got the keys. "Sorry, we can only activate it once you're in the house. But it's just a quick phone call."
The next day, I called from the house. "You were given incorrect information. We have to send an installer to your house to connect you." "But I have the modem and there's a Charter box on the side of the house." "You have to have one of our modems." "No, I don't." "You don't have to use our modem but you have to have it in the house. There's no charge. I can have an installer out there between 3 and 5 today." I decided to just roll with it since it was such a short wait. The guy shows up, connects my cable down at the road (apparently they physically disconnect it for some dumb reason), plugs in my modem, provisions it, and admires how quickly it locks on. I didn't bother asking him why he wasn't leaving me an extra modem.
Over the weekend, I set up my ancient S3 Tivo which hadn't been plugged in for 2 years. Still worked so I called to add TV service and get cablecards. "Oh, you ended up at the wrong office but that will be really easy. They'll add it to your account and you can get the cablecards from the local office and set it up yourself. I'll transfer you to the right department." "I don't know what she was talking about. We have to send out an installer to do cablecards. I can have an installer out between 8 and 10 tomorrow." "Okay. Make sure he brings two cablecards because this old Tivo needs one per tuner." "No problem."
So the guy comes out and notices my modem. "You must have been grandfathered in or something. Charter doesn't let people use their own modems any more." "I just had service turned on Friday with no issues." "Weird. They make a lot of money on the rentals." "I was told they don't charge rental fees any more." "Weird. I'll go take the band pass filter off your connection at the road." Why on earth would there be a filter? Everything's digital now. The connection is useless without an authorized receiver. So after telling him he needs to provision one card at a time (he's never seen an S3 before) and he figures out he had the wires backwards on the tuning adapter, my Tivo's eventually up and running. A few hours later, I noticed he never connected the USB cable from the tuning adapter to the Tivo. [sigh] Fortunately, the tuning adapter had been configured properly and it seems to be working after I plugged it in.
I think it's a small miracle that I ended up with internet working on my modem and TV working on my DVR when it seems like nobody I dealt with has the slighted clue how any of their services work.
Ditto. I just checked my last 100 messages and every one of them is legit. And I've had my gmail address and used it as my primary contact for a long time. And my previous email address that dates back to the mid-90s forwards to my gmail account so they're filtering that, too.
I've had a few spells where a spam or three gets thru in a day but it stops pretty quickly after I flag them.
I guess you missed the part where it's the payment systems that are being compromised in recent hacks. The way our credit/debit system works, the retailer must have your account information for as long as it takes to process the transaction. When it's the terminal where you swipe your card that's compromised and passing a copy of your data to thieves, what can you (the consumer) do?
I wrote up a description of a payment system which never gives account information to retailers a while back but can't find it now. Basically a USB doohickey with biometric authentication (fingerprint scanner with pulse check), a small display, and a couple-three buttons. You plug it into the payment terminal (no wireless, goddamnit!) and, it makes a secure connection to the payment processor and indicates that you are conducting a transaction with Retailer XYZ. Retailer XYZ's payment terminal connects to the payment processor and says it's conducting a transaction with and you owe $119.37. The payment processor communicates the total to your doohickey via its secure connection which shows you the amount requested and asks if you for authorization to transfer $119.37 to Retailer XYZ from your primary payment account. You say yes/other account/no and the transaction either continues or is cancelled.
As long as the payment processor is secure, you're good. While that's still an issue, it reduces the points of failure significantly. It could also be used for all your authentication needs. Computers, online accounts, game consoles, secure buildings, etc. Secondary verification could also be added with SMS or a smartphone app.
Gotta do something because individual retailers all being responsible for their own security clearly isn't working. I lost my account number of 15 years thanks to the Home Depot crap. :P
I'm sure glad the world doesn't rely on your imagination.
Maybe I just bought NBA 2K15 on my PS4 and I don't want to wait until next Tuesday for the 46 gigabyte download to finish and I want to be able to stream an HD movie from Netflix at full quality while that's happening. And Steam's downloading 10 gigs of game updates on my computer while working on 12 gigs on the kid's computer. And my kid's streaming some educational video. And the wife is taking an online course in underwater basket weaving and she's in a video conference with the rest of the class.
Just because you have a limited imagination doesn't mean anyone who could make good use of a gigabit connection is a pirate.