Google for "tyranny of the majority". Your argument is not at all sound. It's basically, "We're a bigger group, nyah nyah." Yeah, and only 54% of people in Alabama voted to legalize interracial marriage. HINT: Majority rule doesn't mean jack shit. BIGGER HINT: George W. Bush.
So , if you want to skip all the health threat stuff, and make a nyah nyah argument, by all means do so (you did). But it really doesn't mean squat. You could just as easily be someone from the confederate states (assume: internet in 1860) arguing that slavery is good, because "there are more pro-slavers than you. So take a hike, nigger."
So you just admitted that poisons in smaller amounts create less harm. As far as I'm concerned, you utterly proved my point. Nobody lingers in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Not against their will. But we ALL *do* in fact linger in a pool of car pollution. Unless you live in the country, you are breathing automobile pollutants in every breath you take. These do far greater harm that cigarettes which you can WALK AWAY FROM.
I laugh at your diminished lung capacity (not really; I just said that to annoy you). It sounds to me like you have a personal problem and a predictable emotional response based on your personal experiences. Hint: Lung cancer existed before smoking tobacco, not everyone is you, your mileage may vary, and your lack of objectivism says to me that you would make a very poor judge.
If smokers actually caused it, then you should have followed my original advice and WALKED AWAY. If you lack the common sense to realize "I have pussy lungs and should avoid things normal people can handle", well -- your inferior genetic code will hopefully remove you from the gene pool, which would be fitting justice as far as I am concerned.
Ironically.... I don't actually buy cigarettes. I smoke them if they are offered. And I would vote to criminalize cigarettes, if given the opportunity. But only because I want to group tobacco smokers in the same group as marijuana smokers, in an attempt to strengthen smokers' rights grassroots politics.:)
to read my reply to the other post in the thread, because it basically responded to everything you just said, and I'm not going to make the points twice.
It's not a role of the dice. One person's single cigarette is negligible. Nobody in history or any study has ever gotten cancer from secondhand smoke from a single cigarette. If you're that scared of carcinogens, stop eating fast food, stop contributing to corporations that pollute, move away from all active volcanoes, don't go out in the sun (sun gives you skin cancer far faster than walking through smoke will give you lung cancer), and leave the public to those of us "adventurous" enough to deal with reality.
But seriously, I did not put any effort into this response. My other response, I put a bit of effort in. Read that one. Don't read this one. (Too late? Muahha.)
No single smoker is going to give you cancer in via incidental exposure.
Show me the public place that you go to every day, where you are blown smoke in the face of every day, for 40 years... And I'll say that's the only place where you'd have an inkling of an argument. But it would still be invalid, because if such a place existed (I'm sure there are a few), then the fact of the matter is that the majority of people in that place WANT IT TO BE A SMOKING PLACE. The only public place where you could receive any significant harm would in fact be one where you share the minority belief of not wanting to smoke AND try to force it on all the people around [smokers] you.
Lung cancer is survivable -- even more than 50% of *active smokers* who get it survive. We are not killing you. No single smoker is killing you, and the aggregate of all smokers is not killing you. If you are so scared of a one in a million chance of getting cancer; if you want fresh air SO BAD you are willing to legislate away what has been perfectly acceptible human behavior for millina; you're far better off moving to the country, then trying to force your choice of not smoking onto others who really don't give a fuck.
It's my body and I'll do what I want. You can do what you want with your body too: Leave. And no, using mace is not a valid analogy at all. It's laughably bad. If I was actually physically harming you in a way where the harm could be measured that instant, then mace would be an acceptible response.
You get more cancer from what you eat and what you breathe; lung cancer has been a cuase of death for a long time, and people who don't smoke in the slighest get lung cancer ALL THE TIME. Every day.
You want to talk about waitresses working in a smokey bar for 40 years? That's a different story. Me sitting on a park bench and smoking a cig, with you nearby on another bench, and being annoyed by it, is in no way, shape, or form, at all the same degree as that. YOU WONT GET CANCER FROM ME.
And what you moralists don't realize is degrees. You have no concept of the word "negligible". Everything is a 0 or 1 with you, like a robot.
Did you know the government has an accepted level of arsenic in the water? But what about your right to not drink arsenic? Well guess what -- poisons in low amounts don't kill you every time, or even most of the time. There are acceptible levels.
If your threshold for acceptance is lower than the prevailing humans around you, then burden is squarely on YOU to go leave and go somewhere that meets your criterion. I shouldn't have to hide, or smoke in 30 degree weather, simply because you think that I, personally, Clint L, will give You, personally, cancer, by smoking this 1 cigarette that annoys you. That's a fucking load of bullshit. If you're so concerned, 10 paces in the oppositte direction should literally save your life. But no, *I'm* supposed to go somewhere else because *you're* paranoid and don't understand degrees of difference.
Meanwhile, your neighbors with SUVs will do far more to actually give you cancer, and the corporations that feed & clothe you will do far more to pollute the air than all smokers combined. You will continue to pay for these corporations to pollute the environment, but you will get a warm fuzzy feeling that somehow you've "made a difference" by harassing people that aren't the true source of the problem. (Hint: Marijuana prohibition is bad.)
Now into "joke mode":
one more thing -- A single large volcanic eruption can pollute the atmosphere more than mankind has in its entire history. So you better make sure volcanos can only erupt in private places. We wouldn't want them "forcing their choices" on you.
Your allergy has nothing to do with it and is a total red herring. If I was allergic to dogs, would that be justification to pass a law banning public walking of dogs? NO. So strike that comment.
And I could just as easily characterize what you are saying the exact same way: You like to force your choice [of not smoking] on others. Strike that comment as well. Most actions can be characterized that way. For a bad example: My bumperstickers could be called "Forcing someone to have to read about my ideals against their will". It's a load of crap. Nobody is forcing you to do anything because you have the freedom to LEAVE.
No, it's not assault. And your post is utter crap.
Assault is harm. If I pass you in the park one day smoking, I am in no way giving you enough smoke to cause you cancer. Look up the word "negligible" and learn its definition. If you're allergic, it shouldn't be an issue; your allergies should get to you long before any cancer does.
Lung cancer is survivable 60% of the time, by smokers, if they quit smoking when diagnosed. Nobody is killing you. Put your tinfoil hat on; those cosmic rays might be giving you cancer too. And the moon men.
Unfortunately, cigarette smoke is not the same as metal-tipped darts, or physical assault. I hope your mom's vagina isn't as stretched as your metaphors.
You breath far more carcniogens from factory and automobile pollution than you do from cigarette smoke. But do you tell people not to idle their car near you? What is the difference? Smoking and idling your car are both legal.
The difference is moral. Your moral obsession with a negligible contributor (compared to everything else) smacks of both ignorance and a non-rational, emotional response. Go sing it to your church choir; they're much more likely to swallow your half-truths.
So it's only bad to put carcinogens that are addictive into your body. Non-addictive ones are okay. It's nice how conveniently flexible your moral code is.
Nice, but ultimately pathetic. You have no guarantee to clean air. Don't like my smoke in a public place? Leave. There are plenty of private places you can go to if you can't face the fucking reality of being in public. Crybaby. Next thing you're going to require that restaurants stop serving Trans Fats.. Oh wait.
I was very much into the northern virginia messageboard scene. Why, I was the first person in Prince William County, VA, to get kicked off a multi-line chat BBS. There was only one. They really don't like it when you run "jive.com com2:". It sorta jives up the whole chatroom to a level of unusability, haha.
Speaking of which -- remember when ".com" meant "executable program" and not "company website"? I almost forgot.
I ran a BBS, WWIV heavily modded, which was telnet-accessible and thus had about 800 users. It got up to over 250 messages a day. This is a lot for a single-access BBS. Offline readers helped multi-task things by allowing multiple people to be typing up their messages at once, because they were offline.
Anyway, I actually started on a dumb terminal with a NON-Hayes compatible 2400bps modem. This was government issued [Dad was an analyst at the postal service headquarters -- I grew up on money earned from coding in BASIC, for chrissakes!]. DEC VT-220 terminal. Most of the BBSes were 300bps or 2400bps and plenty of Commodore BBSes were around.
The damn modem could store only 10 numbers, so you had to manually type in a lot of BBS numbers to dial. And it wasn't "ATDT", it was "Control-T". Non-Hayes, remember? Of course, I couldn't download because THERE WAS NO OPERATING SYSTEM OR DISK DRIVE. Just a monitor, keyboard, a modem.
A friendly sysop of the RE BBS gave me a free 1200bps modem for the PC, and the downloading started. It never stopped. (Seriously.. Not a day goes by that I don't download at least 2 gigs.)
I ultimately met my wife that way, by determining via local BBS that we went to the same school, and meeting and hooking up in a semi-normal way: I invited her over to see how much better Telemate is than Q-Modem. 14.5 yrs later, we're still happy, except now our 2 computers are in the same room, and I run a blog instead of a BBS.
In fact, a blog with RSS comment feeds and active reader-participants is the closest feeling I've had since running a BBS; it took us 13 years to get back to where we started.
Mike Focke was the Google of 1990. His BBS list was the only way to KNOW where to start (assuming you had the list . ..) And the phonenumber file used by Telemate? It was flat text. I started putting personal numbers in it. I still use it today. It no longer obeys the telemate.FON file format, BUT IT IS THE SAME FILE I'VE BEEN EDITING SINCE THE 1980S. And thus, I even have the phone numbers of girls I knew in middle school. Quite useless, but it's on my thumbdrive and on a [password-proteced] webpage, of course. I don't have a cellphone so this is useful for me.
I fucking love technology. It's the politics related to technology that scares the crap out of me. I talk about these various issues, sometimes, at my blog . . . [shameless plug]
My point is -- if america is eventually culturally shifted to this new "paradigm", people will end up paying MORE to corporations, and receiving LESS.
This is part of a broader trend where, quite simply, everybody is getting progressively more fucked in the ass than they were 10 or 20 years ago. I remember when TV was free, and watching more TV than someone else did not incurr extra costs.
King Of The Hill, Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, Boondocks, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Minoriteam, Moral Orel, 24, Smallville, South Park, Drawn Together...... I also watched all 265 episodes of Frasier this year [all TV is watched with the wife; never alone].
Okay, maybe not all of those are running at all times... But I don't sit there thirsty for the next new release. I watch shows I choose at a pace I choose. Currently working through Season 1 of The Boondocks uncensored versions. Must watch the uncensored Striperellas. My video agenda (Text file of what i plan to watch next) is multiple pages....
The point is, they want to move everyone to a new model where they actually pay more for less. And people are falling for it, hook line & sinker, becuase the cable companies have jacked up the prices so high that it "seems" cheaper. It is not.
Imagine cancelling your cable and only doing it this way -- it would cost $2 just to "flip channels" to TRY a new show.
I certainly don't consider downloading a show I've already paid access to watch on cable via bittorrent "pure illegal". It is perfectly legal for me to record a show on VHS, and let a friend watch it. I can even sell it for a modest copying fee (1982 act), as long as the recipient has paid their cable bill and is licensed to view it.
So this is only for shows we miss? Sounds like a losing business model if they want to "dominate the living room". If it's just for shows we miss, that implies that everyone still has to buy their cable.
So now.. we're paying more money because we're too lazy to program our VCR / TIVO / video capture card? Sheesh. Americans will buy anything. Bottled water and the swiffer are perfect examples.
How many shows does a $50 cable bill get me? 48 half-hour shows a day multiplied by 30 days = 1440 or so. That's 3.4 cents a show.
Yes, I realize that I don't watch every show that is on, but here's my point:
I watch 1-3 shows a day. Let's call it 2. 30 days times 2 shows = 60 shows, times $2 = $120.
How is paying $120/month helping me? If it's more expensive than my cable (which I've downgraded to $20/month), why would I not just download it via bittorrent?
This is pure greed. This is not as cool as everyone thinks it is.
I think dropping out of T.J. was the best decision I ever made in my life.
I actually made an outline of the reasons why, before leaving. It was 4 pages long I believe. I also never would have met my wife (well maybe, it was a local BBS, but we actually met face to face in highschool, of course I already recognized her by sight before I met her). Or had time to have a part-time job during high-school. And the AP classes which got you college credit at a "normal" highschool were easier than the non-AP classes at T.J. that didn't get you college credit.
And then there were all my T.J. friend graduates who went to the exact same school as I (virginia tech computer science class of 1996 or 1997 if you're hanging around for an extra year, like me, to decrease time away from wife).
I now own a home within eyesight of T.J., am 32 and have been in a relationship for 14 yrs, outlasting everyone I know, and am constantly reminded me of the fact that the current T.J. graduates would not be able to afford a $500,000 house (I bought it for $141,000 in 1998), so they are going through greater efforts than I did, and still could not enjoy what I enjoy.
The girls were MUCH hotter at my base school. And I could walk there. And get home at 2PM instead of 5PM. I do miss, however, the long bus rides where Hal would bring "The Ejaculator" (ear-cleaning syringe) and spray it at people on the bus, and nearby truckers. And the pissing incident was hilarious (Thank you Ravi). I didn't like getting blamed for putting a trashcan on the bus driver's head as she drove down I-395, though. It wasn't me, goddamnit!
I don't think anyone is debating that certain protocols, such as VOIP, not get priority. It is more about denying service from others. For instance, your company sells a VOIP product, but throttles down VOIP traffic coming if it is coming from other VOIP products.
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So , if you want to skip all the health threat stuff, and make a nyah nyah argument, by all means do so (you did). But it really doesn't mean squat. You could just as easily be someone from the confederate states (assume: internet in 1860) arguing that slavery is good, because "there are more pro-slavers than you. So take a hike, nigger."
Yes. Very logically sound.
I laugh at your diminished lung capacity (not really; I just said that to annoy you). It sounds to me like you have a personal problem and a predictable emotional response based on your personal experiences. Hint: Lung cancer existed before smoking tobacco, not everyone is you, your mileage may vary, and your lack of objectivism says to me that you would make a very poor judge.
If smokers actually caused it, then you should have followed my original advice and WALKED AWAY. If you lack the common sense to realize "I have pussy lungs and should avoid things normal people can handle", well -- your inferior genetic code will hopefully remove you from the gene pool, which would be fitting justice as far as I am concerned.
Ironically.... I don't actually buy cigarettes. I smoke them if they are offered. And I would vote to criminalize cigarettes, if given the opportunity. But only because I want to group tobacco smokers in the same group as marijuana smokers, in an attempt to strengthen smokers' rights grassroots politics. :)
It's not a role of the dice. One person's single cigarette is negligible. Nobody in history or any study has ever gotten cancer from secondhand smoke from a single cigarette. If you're that scared of carcinogens, stop eating fast food, stop contributing to corporations that pollute, move away from all active volcanoes, don't go out in the sun (sun gives you skin cancer far faster than walking through smoke will give you lung cancer), and leave the public to those of us "adventurous" enough to deal with reality.
But seriously, I did not put any effort into this response. My other response, I put a bit of effort in. Read that one. Don't read this one. (Too late? Muahha.)
Show me the public place that you go to every day, where you are blown smoke in the face of every day, for 40 years... And I'll say that's the only place where you'd have an inkling of an argument. But it would still be invalid, because if such a place existed (I'm sure there are a few), then the fact of the matter is that the majority of people in that place WANT IT TO BE A SMOKING PLACE. The only public place where you could receive any significant harm would in fact be one where you share the minority belief of not wanting to smoke AND try to force it on all the people around [smokers] you.
Lung cancer is survivable -- even more than 50% of *active smokers* who get it survive. We are not killing you. No single smoker is killing you, and the aggregate of all smokers is not killing you. If you are so scared of a one in a million chance of getting cancer; if you want fresh air SO BAD you are willing to legislate away what has been perfectly acceptible human behavior for millina; you're far better off moving to the country, then trying to force your choice of not smoking onto others who really don't give a fuck.
It's my body and I'll do what I want. You can do what you want with your body too: Leave. And no, using mace is not a valid analogy at all. It's laughably bad. If I was actually physically harming you in a way where the harm could be measured that instant, then mace would be an acceptible response.
You get more cancer from what you eat and what you breathe; lung cancer has been a cuase of death for a long time, and people who don't smoke in the slighest get lung cancer ALL THE TIME. Every day.
You want to talk about waitresses working in a smokey bar for 40 years? That's a different story. Me sitting on a park bench and smoking a cig, with you nearby on another bench, and being annoyed by it, is in no way, shape, or form, at all the same degree as that. YOU WONT GET CANCER FROM ME.
And what you moralists don't realize is degrees. You have no concept of the word "negligible". Everything is a 0 or 1 with you, like a robot.
Did you know the government has an accepted level of arsenic in the water? But what about your right to not drink arsenic? Well guess what -- poisons in low amounts don't kill you every time, or even most of the time. There are acceptible levels.
If your threshold for acceptance is lower than the prevailing humans around you, then burden is squarely on YOU to go leave and go somewhere that meets your criterion. I shouldn't have to hide, or smoke in 30 degree weather, simply because you think that I, personally, Clint L, will give You, personally, cancer, by smoking this 1 cigarette that annoys you. That's a fucking load of bullshit. If you're so concerned, 10 paces in the oppositte direction should literally save your life. But no, *I'm* supposed to go somewhere else because *you're* paranoid and don't understand degrees of difference.
Meanwhile, your neighbors with SUVs will do far more to actually give you cancer, and the corporations that feed & clothe you will do far more to pollute the air than all smokers combined. You will continue to pay for these corporations to pollute the environment, but you will get a warm fuzzy feeling that somehow you've "made a difference" by harassing people that aren't the true source of the problem. (Hint: Marijuana prohibition is bad.)
Now into "joke mode":
one more thing -- A single large volcanic eruption can pollute the atmosphere more than mankind has in its entire history. So you better make sure volcanos can only erupt in private places. We wouldn't want them "forcing their choices" on you.
And I could just as easily characterize what you are saying the exact same way: You like to force your choice [of not smoking] on others. Strike that comment as well. Most actions can be characterized that way. For a bad example: My bumperstickers could be called "Forcing someone to have to read about my ideals against their will". It's a load of crap. Nobody is forcing you to do anything because you have the freedom to LEAVE.
No, it's not assault. And your post is utter crap.
Assault is harm. If I pass you in the park one day smoking, I am in no way giving you enough smoke to cause you cancer. Look up the word "negligible" and learn its definition. If you're allergic, it shouldn't be an issue; your allergies should get to you long before any cancer does.
Lung cancer is survivable 60% of the time, by smokers, if they quit smoking when diagnosed. Nobody is killing you. Put your tinfoil hat on; those cosmic rays might be giving you cancer too. And the moon men.
You breath far more carcniogens from factory and automobile pollution than you do from cigarette smoke. But do you tell people not to idle their car near you? What is the difference? Smoking and idling your car are both legal.
The difference is moral. Your moral obsession with a negligible contributor (compared to everything else) smacks of both ignorance and a non-rational, emotional response. Go sing it to your church choir; they're much more likely to swallow your half-truths.
Nice, but ultimately pathetic. You have no guarantee to clean air. Don't like my smoke in a public place? Leave. There are plenty of private places you can go to if you can't face the fucking reality of being in public. Crybaby. Next thing you're going to require that restaurants stop serving Trans Fats.. Oh wait.
I, too, am wondering just what the "threat" was.
Since they count running BitTorrent as a server... And have a "no servers" policy for residential -- I kindly kicked them out the door.
Hopefully I'll get the chance to do the same someday, but I don't fly often.
Speaking of which -- remember when ".com" meant "executable program" and not "company website"? I almost forgot.
I ran a BBS, WWIV heavily modded, which was telnet-accessible and thus had about 800 users. It got up to over 250 messages a day. This is a lot for a single-access BBS. Offline readers helped multi-task things by allowing multiple people to be typing up their messages at once, because they were offline.
Find the last state of the BBS here: On Earth As It Is In Hell ... As It Is On The Internet.
Also, I have some BBS-related links saved: http://del.icio.us/ClintJCL/BBS. BBSMates is truly the best.
Anyway, I actually started on a dumb terminal with a NON-Hayes compatible 2400bps modem. This was government issued [Dad was an analyst at the postal service headquarters -- I grew up on money earned from coding in BASIC, for chrissakes!]. DEC VT-220 terminal. Most of the BBSes were 300bps or 2400bps and plenty of Commodore BBSes were around.
The damn modem could store only 10 numbers, so you had to manually type in a lot of BBS numbers to dial. And it wasn't "ATDT", it was "Control-T". Non-Hayes, remember? Of course, I couldn't download because THERE WAS NO OPERATING SYSTEM OR DISK DRIVE. Just a monitor, keyboard, a modem.
A friendly sysop of the RE BBS gave me a free 1200bps modem for the PC, and the downloading started. It never stopped. (Seriously.. Not a day goes by that I don't download at least 2 gigs.)
I ultimately met my wife that way, by determining via local BBS that we went to the same school, and meeting and hooking up in a semi-normal way: I invited her over to see how much better Telemate is than Q-Modem. 14.5 yrs later, we're still happy, except now our 2 computers are in the same room, and I run a blog instead of a BBS. In fact, a blog with RSS comment feeds and active reader-participants is the closest feeling I've had since running a BBS; it took us 13 years to get back to where we started.
Mike Focke was the Google of 1990. His BBS list was the only way to KNOW where to start (assuming you had the list . . .) And the phonenumber file used by Telemate? It was flat text. I started putting personal numbers in it. I still use it today. It no longer obeys the telemate .FON file format, BUT IT IS THE SAME FILE I'VE BEEN EDITING SINCE THE 1980S. And thus, I even have the phone numbers of girls I knew in middle school. Quite useless, but it's on my thumbdrive and on a [password-proteced] webpage, of course. I don't have a cellphone so this is useful for me.
I fucking love technology. It's the politics related to technology that scares the crap out of me. I talk about these various issues, sometimes, at my blog . . . [shameless plug]
Your list was my equivalent of "Google" from 1988-1993. Thank you for your excellent work!!
Me too. So I started a group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/ansi/
$410. Catch up on your news. :)
That it will only be $410, not $600.
That's not really your choice to make for people -- and money wasted is a bad thing no matter what...
My point is -- if america is eventually culturally shifted to this new "paradigm", people will end up paying MORE to corporations, and receiving LESS.
This is part of a broader trend where, quite simply, everybody is getting progressively more fucked in the ass than they were 10 or 20 years ago. I remember when TV was free, and watching more TV than someone else did not incurr extra costs.
Previously, people would pay $50 for 50-100 channels. Oooh, look at sattelite, I have 500 channels now!! I'll pay $75 for that!
Now we're being persuaded to pay equal money for less selection. It's crap.
People like you should just get a season dvd.
how much are season passes, then?
Okay, maybe not all of those are running at all times... But I don't sit there thirsty for the next new release. I watch shows I choose at a pace I choose. Currently working through Season 1 of The Boondocks uncensored versions. Must watch the uncensored Striperellas. My video agenda (Text file of what i plan to watch next) is multiple pages....
The point is, they want to move everyone to a new model where they actually pay more for less. And people are falling for it, hook line & sinker, becuase the cable companies have jacked up the prices so high that it "seems" cheaper. It is not.
Imagine cancelling your cable and only doing it this way -- it would cost $2 just to "flip channels" to TRY a new show.
So this is only for shows we miss? Sounds like a losing business model if they want to "dominate the living room". If it's just for shows we miss, that implies that everyone still has to buy their cable.
So now.. we're paying more money because we're too lazy to program our VCR / TIVO / video capture card? Sheesh. Americans will buy anything. Bottled water and the swiffer are perfect examples.
Yes, I realize that I don't watch every show that is on, but here's my point:
I watch 1-3 shows a day. Let's call it 2. 30 days times 2 shows = 60 shows, times $2 = $120.
How is paying $120/month helping me? If it's more expensive than my cable (which I've downgraded to $20/month), why would I not just download it via bittorrent?
This is pure greed. This is not as cool as everyone thinks it is.
I still have all of mine.
I actually made an outline of the reasons why, before leaving. It was 4 pages long I believe. I also never would have met my wife (well maybe, it was a local BBS, but we actually met face to face in highschool, of course I already recognized her by sight before I met her). Or had time to have a part-time job during high-school. And the AP classes which got you college credit at a "normal" highschool were easier than the non-AP classes at T.J. that didn't get you college credit.
And then there were all my T.J. friend graduates who went to the exact same school as I (virginia tech computer science class of 1996 or 1997 if you're hanging around for an extra year, like me, to decrease time away from wife).
I now own a home within eyesight of T.J., am 32 and have been in a relationship for 14 yrs, outlasting everyone I know, and am constantly reminded me of the fact that the current T.J. graduates would not be able to afford a $500,000 house (I bought it for $141,000 in 1998), so they are going through greater efforts than I did, and still could not enjoy what I enjoy.
The girls were MUCH hotter at my base school. And I could walk there. And get home at 2PM instead of 5PM. I do miss, however, the long bus rides where Hal would bring "The Ejaculator" (ear-cleaning syringe) and spray it at people on the bus, and nearby truckers. And the pissing incident was hilarious (Thank you Ravi). I didn't like getting blamed for putting a trashcan on the bus driver's head as she drove down I-395, though. It wasn't me, goddamnit!
I don't think anyone is debating that certain protocols, such as VOIP, not get priority. It is more about denying service from others. For instance, your company sells a VOIP product, but throttles down VOIP traffic coming if it is coming from other VOIP products.