This debate has of course happened before.In addition to the Franklin quote that many have posted I believe
Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death seems most apropriate.
This country was founded on the priciples of personal liberties being of the utmost importance, and to give up this 225+ year history because of one attack seems to me to be a little short sighted. Don't get me wrong, the attack was horrible beyond my comprehension, and I'm all for the tightening of our national security, but we need to remember that our liberties are what differentiate us from everywhere else on earth.
I think the problem here is that people don't understand how isps price their offerings.
When you pay residential/consumer rates for service, (i.e. $20-50 a month) don't expect to get any large amount of customer service, or fast speeds, or unlimited bandwidth. The reason for this is simple. Contention. These plans are priced for Mom and Pop to be able to connect and get their email and view a few web sites. The speed is there to make those pages come up quickly, not for large file downloads or servers. To be able to price that low isps have to make assumptions:
How much bandwidth the customers are going to use.(little to none)
How often they will need technical support.(almost never)
How much providing that support will cost.(get a bunch of college students/high schoolers) How quickly they will get a response on problems.(within a couple days)
How much profit they need to make to keep investors/market happy.(given the market, alot)
Often people sell this service as more than what it really is, mainly because marketing types think it's necessary or because it's what's needed to compete with competitors offerings. Also people still view many things *only* on price, then complain when it's the service is poor or the features are lacking etc.
I work for a Middle/Western US CLEC/ISP/Telco which primarily has business customers. We charge much more than the Verizon's Qwest's and @Homes of the world because we (attempt to) provide business class service to our customers. i.e. we expect the customers to be using many times more bandwidth than a residential customer, we expect them to need more ips, to have much more complex configurations, to need much more responsive customer service etc. To provide all this we need to charge more.
My recommendation for people is this:
If you want business class service, i.e. one without bandwidth caps, one with more available ips, one with better customer service go to an isp that specializes in that type of service and pay the additional cost. You'll get what you pay for, and if you don't then demand a refund and find a different isp.
Taken from the Dartmouth Introductory Writing Class Web Page:
Watch your gendered pronouns. When you write, you'll want to make sure that you don't do anything to make your readers feel excluded. If you use "he" and "him" all the time, you are excluding half of your potential readership. We'll acknowledge that the he/she solution is a bit cumbersome in writing. However, you might solve the problem as we have done in this document: by alternating "he" and "she" throughout. Other writers advocate always using "she" instead of "he" as a way of acknowledging a long-standing exclusion of women from texts. Whatever decision you make in the end, be sensitive to its effect on your readers.
Lots of writers use this now. It's not really new anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
This debate has of course happened before.In addition to the Franklin quote that many have posted I believe Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death seems most apropriate.
This country was founded on the priciples of personal liberties being of the utmost importance, and to give up this 225+ year history because of one attack seems to me to be a little short sighted. Don't get me wrong, the attack was horrible beyond my comprehension, and I'm all for the tightening of our national security, but we need to remember that our liberties are what differentiate us from everywhere else on earth.
I think the problem here is that people don't understand how isps price their offerings.
When you pay residential/consumer rates for service, (i.e. $20-50 a month) don't expect to get any large amount of customer service, or fast speeds, or unlimited bandwidth. The reason for this is simple. Contention. These plans are priced for Mom and Pop to be able to connect and get their email and view a few web sites. The speed is there to make those pages come up quickly, not for large file downloads or servers. To be able to price that low isps have to make assumptions:
How much bandwidth the customers are going to use.(little to none)
How often they will need technical support.(almost never)
How much providing that support will cost.(get a bunch of college students/high schoolers)
How quickly they will get a response on problems.(within a couple days)
How much profit they need to make to keep investors/market happy.(given the market, alot)
Often people sell this service as more than what it really is, mainly because marketing types think it's necessary or because it's what's needed to compete with competitors offerings. Also people still view many things *only* on price, then complain when it's the service is poor or the features are lacking etc.
I work for a Middle/Western US CLEC/ISP/Telco which primarily has business customers. We charge much more than the Verizon's Qwest's and @Homes of the world because we (attempt to) provide business class service to our customers. i.e. we expect the customers to be using many times more bandwidth than a residential customer, we expect them to need more ips, to have much more complex configurations, to need much more responsive customer service etc. To provide all this we need to charge more.
My recommendation for people is this:
If you want business class service, i.e. one without bandwidth caps, one with more available ips, one with better customer service go to an isp that specializes in that type of service and pay the additional cost. You'll get what you pay for, and if you don't then demand a refund and find a different isp.