This is something TiVo invented, these were indeed novel ideas,
I looked up the patents listed in the Variety article, and not a single one of them were novel, and many of them were prior art and should never have been granted. I mean, one of them is looking up stuff using a limited number of words. One deals with partitioning video or "content" into sections and allowing users to access sections directly without seeking through the whole content. Just like the "chapter" mode on every DVD produced in the last twenty years allows.
I had, many years ago, an ATI TV tuner that did much of what a couple of these patents claim rights to. They were issued in 2016. Scheduling from a program guide, reminders to watch, etc. Prior art.
None of it is novel. It is common sense and obvious to practitioners familiar in the subject. Tivo is being a patent troll.
This is exactly what the patent system is supposed to do
You better be careful. The next time you play a DVD in a DVD player and it shows you a chapter list, you're violating a TiVo patent. No, this is not what the patent system is supposed to do.
Oh, I forgot this. Fifth, this has nothing to do with broadcasting, so the summary is patent nonsense. Nobody is going to be licensed to broadcast nothing in this band.
First of all, this is a relatively small piece of spectrum. There is already wireless internet using other bands.
Second, this has nothing to do with cell phones, so the comment about how someone's phone doesn't cover this band and there will be no phone that do is irrelevant.
Third, it is under consideration, not a done deal. The headline is flamebait -- "FCC Undoing" is wrong. They might.
And fourth, yes, licensing small areas creates a lot more work for everyone involved than licenses for large areas. It's called "coordination", and the work goes up exponentially with the number of parties that need to be coordinated. Someone has to make sure that the licensee for Backwater, IA doesn't interfere with the licensee for South Backwater, IA. That's harder than telling T-Mobile in IA not to interfere with AT&T in the next state over.
All of that doesn't mean I support the change. It's just not that earth shattering to begin with.
We are talking about a body of people who feel they are exempt from the very laws they pass.
We're talking about reporting that says stuff like ""Would love to see some more," someone connecting from the U.S. Senate IP address wrote last August." Really? The US Senate has one IP address? (Cf: definite vs. indefinite articles). That's a pretty big red flag as to the accuracy of the story.
Whatever you think about Art Bell personally, he was a master of the craft of late night talk radio, covering the off-beat and odd. His program wasn't carried on just about every AM station (okay, a lot of them) if it weren't successful. There were nights I could scan the AM band at 2AM and find ten stations carrying Coast To Coast AM.
He had (has) the ability to draw out his guests by pretending to be listening and accepting what they say, while making it hard for the listeners to know if he's promoting the ideas or secretly pulling the guest's leg.
He is also an amateur radio guy who is sticking to the AM format there, who puts out an amateur signal that sounds better than AM broadcast stations.
There are several ways to push a short wire into low frequency resonance,
Antennas don't need to be resonant to receive a signal. They work better when they are, but they can still work without.
The ability to have an ultra high-impedance load that still is quiet and provides significant gain allows antenna impedances that are not typically low to still perform well enough for many use cases.
If that is what you meant by "push[ing] a short wire into... resonance", well, that's not what the high impedance input stage is doing. The antenna is still not resonant.
You miss my point I guess.. AM's wave length is soooo long that the sizes of the necessary wire to collect enough of it for your receiver to actually receive it at a reasonable signal to noise ratio is pretty big.
Yeah, really big. Like three feet. Like the wire on the radio in my office, or the old whips on cars.
but you are not going to get the same kind of reception of say the radio in your car.
You mean the car radio which has, at best, a three foot whip, and newer models have small wire things in one of the windows?
The whip antennas were for FM coverage. Inside the head unit of the car radio is one of those bar-type AM radio antennas. I'm 100% sure
I'm 100% sure you are 100% wrong, because like I said I have an old car radio that relied on one of those whip antennas. It's an AM ONLY RADIO. Gee, it had a whip to do FM? Really?
And just to drive the nail further into your coffin -- an AM ferrite bar antenna INSIDE A METAL CAR isn't going to pick up jack shit. A car makes a pretty good Faraday cage for AM BC signals, and the chassis of the radio along with the dash helps kill anything that does get through.
Impedance doesn't matter.
You really don' t know what you're talking about. You should study up on what happens to RF signals when they attempt to cross an impedance mismatch. Even DC. I've seen a very interesting explanation of DC signals on open and shorted wires that fit with reflections from discontinuities.
For AM it's several hundred feet.
Bullshit. I've got three feet of antenna here in the office and it works just fine. That's because the radio was designed to work with that size antenna and the impedance it presents.
Dan Quayle's solution was to increase the size of the gallon.
You know, when Leno or Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert say completely outrageous insulting nonsense everyone assumes that it is supposed to be a joke. (Kathy Griffin had to go completely bonkers before she got called on the "joke" she made, but she expected we would all assume it was a joke to start with.) When a Republican politician says what is obviously a joke, everyone has a hissy fit and thinks he's serious.
I think "increase the size of the gallon" is a perfect joke answer to a complicated question that would take more time than Leno allows his guests to answer seriously. Given that Leno's show is supposed to be humor, responding humorously to one of his questions is to be expected.
I would reach my data cap in a single transaction if I was forced to do my hobby through cellular internet.
Good thing the FCC isn't trying to force you to use just cellular networking, huh? This request for comments has nothing to do with that.
That said, I didn't think I was living in the 1980s so I assumed I'd be able to pursue whatever hobby and job I wanted in the supposed "richest country in the world".
The FCC isn't telling you that you cannot pursue your hobby or job.
we might as well nationalize the infrastructure
I think the point is that where cellular is the best option, there IS no fixed infrastructure to nationalize. It's not there because it costs money to put it there, with few customers to repay the costs.
And the secondary point is, if you need gigabit speeds for your hobby or job, then picking someplace to live where you can't get that is a bad idea. If you want the peaceful surroundings of wilderness then gigabit internet isn't going to be a priority, or at least you should know you might have to drive into the next town to get access to it.
Walkman-type radios used the earphone wire as an antenna, which is probably what the phones are going to have to do.
That's what they already do, if they have FM radio.
The smallest workable AM antenna is a ~5 inch bar of iron with a super thin wire wound around it hundreds of times.
Am I the only one old enough to remember car radios and the whip antennas they had, which provided AM coverage? I have an old car radio in my office right now that works fine with nothing more than a 3' piece of wire.
The "magic" is that the impedance is very high with such a short antenna, so the radio has to be designed to deal with that.
IF there were an AM radio chip that matched the size of the FM chips they have for cell phones, the earphone wire would work for that, too.
Previous candidates for the origin of the fleeting blasts of radiation -- known as fast radio bursts, or FRBs -- have included exploding stars, the reverberations of weird objects called cosmic strings or even distant beacons from interstellar alien spaceships.
You forgot to list the microwave oven that was in the break room in the next building. That was at the radio observatory in West Virginia, if I recall correctly.
the Republicans can't seem to find anybody to run who isn't either racist, xenophobic, homophobic, or some combination of the above. All they would have to do is find one single fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republican to run,
and the next day the Democrats would be running ads accusing him of being racist, xenophobic, homophobic, or some other similar thing, and your initial statement would still be true.
Push-polling is a wonderful perversion of the political process. If you don't know the specific questions, then you don't know what a poll means. I've had push-pollers call me and I've heard what kinds of leading questions they ask for myself.
Mostly if you are trying to create a symbolic issue that you can disparage your opposition over. Like "Senator Foo voted NO on NET NEUTRALITY! He wants you to pay more for Netflix and let the greedy ISPs charge you more! He's not on your side! I am."
The truth is, this is not the way to go about it, and voting "no" doesn't mean you don't support NN anymore than it means you hate kittens.
Let them vote no, and then hammer them with it relentlessly for the next 10 months,
In other words, let's turn NN into a hotbutton political issue with lots of heat and very little light.
but 4 out of 5 voters' interests
Citation required. I doubt that 80% of the public knows what NN is, much less in going to worry about how Senator Foo votes on it -- until they're told how to think about it by talking points.
No, this is not a law about NN, it is a law ordering the FCC to continue an Obama policy, which was a proclamation from an unelected regulatory body. Kicking the can, so to speak, instead of doing what they should.
But this is just gonna be a gimme to the fine people at Comcast and AT&T.
And everyone else who already does or wants to do broadband.
You know that "easier" doesn't mean "free", it means "it can happen". As in, previously forbidden access to federal buildings or sites can now be granted."
Because their decisions and skills make a hundred to a thousand times more impact on the company as a whole.
CEO botches a deal, it may cost the company a million dollars. Joe bungles the widget he's working on, maybe it costs a hundred dollars to fix, if that.
Thank God there are no deserts in the northeastern US where this ISP is.
Those who live in such places either boil during the day, freeze to death at night, live in buildings with enough thermal mass that the inside temps don't change much, or have a thermostat that knows how to cool when it is hot and heat when it is cold -- like I said.
An excellent argument (as if we needed another) of why the "Internet of Things" is and was a terrible idea.
It is not a generic argument against IoT devices, only stupidly programmed life-critical devices. If your IoT thermostat does the sensible thing of "maintain current settings" when losing internet connectivity, then losing internet connectivity won't result in anyone freezing to death. Only if your IoT thermostat dumps all settings and reverts to "off" when it cannot communicate with a remote server would it be an excellent argument against IoT.
any network failure could just as easily cripple everybody's Echos and Nests.
Echos require internet to send your audio back for voice recognition, and if a failing Echo could cost a life, then you should reconsider how you are using the Echo. The company that makes the Nest would be liable for any damages if they programmed the device so negligently that an internet outage caused a death, but only after you justified creating a life-critical situation based on that device.
And I wouldn't use an internet service that said they might mess with thermostats.
Any ISP that tells you that termination of your internet service would NOT affect your ability to remotely control your internet-controlled thermostat would be LYING TO YOU.
You wouldn't use an ISP that is honest enough to tell you up-front that termination of your service would affect how you use IoT devices?
Well, isn't it nice that this ISP did not tell anyone they would mess with anyone's thermostats, huh?
And if they did, and someone dies, I would want them to go to jail for murder.
If you've created an environment where an internet outage results in someone dying, then that's YOUR fault for being stupid enough to do that. You need to reconsider how you use the internet in that case.
Because they are doing it out of pure malice.
They're forcing you to turn your thermostat down so people freeze to death just to punish you for disobeying their TOS? You're looney.
That's the way it is, so that's a reasonable way to look at it. You're buying a service. Just like buying a bus ticket to Las Vegas is buying a service, and you expect the bus to go all the way to the destination. A data cap on the Verizon VoD service would be like a bus ticket that includes only a limited amount of gas for the bus. The gas required to get there is part of the service you bought from the bus company.
Contrast that with buying a hypothetical "bus pass" that includes a set number of miles but no set destination. You get on the bus to Las Vegas but oops, you run out of miles before you get there. That's what buying a service from Netflix for video but only data service (with a cap) from Verizon is like.
I pay my ISP service fee and that covers the cost of bandwidth with Verizon on my end.
That's right. With a cap. And you pay Netflix for the service of streaming video, which does not include the data from Verizon to get it to you. You've paid Verizon for a limited amount of bandwidth.
and VoD will suddenly not be free anymore.
It never was free. You either pay Verizon for the service, or you pay Netflix for the service. How can it "not be free anymore" when it has never been free?
Reminds me of how the major selling point of Cable TV was that it was commercial free.
This fucking nonsense again. No, cable TV was never sold as "commercial free". Cable TV began life as and has always included the retransmission of OTA broadcast services, which contain commercials. (The only OTA that has ever promised "no commercials" was PBS, and they now carry a lot of them.) Very few specific and limited cable-delivered networks (such as HBO) could promise "commercial free" because they controlled the content. The local cable company does not control the content of the cable networks it carries. If that content provider has commercials, you get commercials. What do you expect the cable company to do when a content provider inserts a commercial, go to black for four minutes or more? Really?
Please, stop spreading this nonsense.
Never said anything about data caps.
You said:
Well your traffic will count towards Verizon's data caps
If they break the law it is up to the authorities to punish them NOT the ISP.
The ISP is not enforcing any law. They are deciding not to sell someone a service that they have reason to believe (due to complaints from other people) is being used outside the terms of service. Laws are irrelevant. This is also after multiple attempts at contact with the customer have failed to get a response.
If your automobile warranty had a clause that it became invalid if the vehicle is used for illegal purposes, then the dealership is within their rights for refusing to honor the warranty when the illegal use is detected. Just like insurance companies are within their rights not to pay out when the terms of the insurance are not met.
The other take I see here is they are threating their customers a good lawyer could sue them and win for threating to kill them. Just saying!
Just saying bullshit is what. You'd need a really good lawyer to win such a lawsuit, and a really greedy one to take your money for trying. And a really stupid judge not to throw the suit out in the first 30 seconds of it being on his desk. Where's the threat to kill anyone?
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This is something TiVo invented, these were indeed novel ideas,
I looked up the patents listed in the Variety article, and not a single one of them were novel, and many of them were prior art and should never have been granted. I mean, one of them is looking up stuff using a limited number of words. One deals with partitioning video or "content" into sections and allowing users to access sections directly without seeking through the whole content. Just like the "chapter" mode on every DVD produced in the last twenty years allows.
I had, many years ago, an ATI TV tuner that did much of what a couple of these patents claim rights to. They were issued in 2016. Scheduling from a program guide, reminders to watch, etc. Prior art.
None of it is novel. It is common sense and obvious to practitioners familiar in the subject. Tivo is being a patent troll.
This is exactly what the patent system is supposed to do
You better be careful. The next time you play a DVD in a DVD player and it shows you a chapter list, you're violating a TiVo patent. No, this is not what the patent system is supposed to do.
Oh, I forgot this. Fifth, this has nothing to do with broadcasting, so the summary is patent nonsense. Nobody is going to be licensed to broadcast nothing in this band.
Second, this has nothing to do with cell phones, so the comment about how someone's phone doesn't cover this band and there will be no phone that do is irrelevant.
Third, it is under consideration, not a done deal. The headline is flamebait -- "FCC Undoing" is wrong. They might.
And fourth, yes, licensing small areas creates a lot more work for everyone involved than licenses for large areas. It's called "coordination", and the work goes up exponentially with the number of parties that need to be coordinated. Someone has to make sure that the licensee for Backwater, IA doesn't interfere with the licensee for South Backwater, IA. That's harder than telling T-Mobile in IA not to interfere with AT&T in the next state over.
All of that doesn't mean I support the change. It's just not that earth shattering to begin with.
We are talking about a body of people who feel they are exempt from the very laws they pass.
We're talking about reporting that says stuff like ""Would love to see some more," someone connecting from the U.S. Senate IP address wrote last August." Really? The US Senate has one IP address? (Cf: definite vs. indefinite articles). That's a pretty big red flag as to the accuracy of the story.
Ah yes, good old Art Bell
Whatever you think about Art Bell personally, he was a master of the craft of late night talk radio, covering the off-beat and odd. His program wasn't carried on just about every AM station (okay, a lot of them) if it weren't successful. There were nights I could scan the AM band at 2AM and find ten stations carrying Coast To Coast AM.
He had (has) the ability to draw out his guests by pretending to be listening and accepting what they say, while making it hard for the listeners to know if he's promoting the ideas or secretly pulling the guest's leg.
He is also an amateur radio guy who is sticking to the AM format there, who puts out an amateur signal that sounds better than AM broadcast stations.
There are several ways to push a short wire into low frequency resonance,
Antennas don't need to be resonant to receive a signal. They work better when they are, but they can still work without.
The ability to have an ultra high-impedance load that still is quiet and provides significant gain allows antenna impedances that are not typically low to still perform well enough for many use cases.
If that is what you meant by "push[ing] a short wire into ... resonance", well, that's not what the high impedance input stage is doing. The antenna is still not resonant.
You miss my point I guess.. AM's wave length is soooo long that the sizes of the necessary wire to collect enough of it for your receiver to actually receive it at a reasonable signal to noise ratio is pretty big.
Yeah, really big. Like three feet. Like the wire on the radio in my office, or the old whips on cars.
but you are not going to get the same kind of reception of say the radio in your car.
You mean the car radio which has, at best, a three foot whip, and newer models have small wire things in one of the windows?
The whip antennas were for FM coverage. Inside the head unit of the car radio is one of those bar-type AM radio antennas. I'm 100% sure
I'm 100% sure you are 100% wrong, because like I said I have an old car radio that relied on one of those whip antennas. It's an AM ONLY RADIO. Gee, it had a whip to do FM? Really?
And just to drive the nail further into your coffin -- an AM ferrite bar antenna INSIDE A METAL CAR isn't going to pick up jack shit. A car makes a pretty good Faraday cage for AM BC signals, and the chassis of the radio along with the dash helps kill anything that does get through.
Impedance doesn't matter.
You really don' t know what you're talking about. You should study up on what happens to RF signals when they attempt to cross an impedance mismatch. Even DC. I've seen a very interesting explanation of DC signals on open and shorted wires that fit with reflections from discontinuities.
For AM it's several hundred feet.
Bullshit. I've got three feet of antenna here in the office and it works just fine. That's because the radio was designed to work with that size antenna and the impedance it presents.
Dan Quayle's solution was to increase the size of the gallon.
You know, when Leno or Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert say completely outrageous insulting nonsense everyone assumes that it is supposed to be a joke. (Kathy Griffin had to go completely bonkers before she got called on the "joke" she made, but she expected we would all assume it was a joke to start with.) When a Republican politician says what is obviously a joke, everyone has a hissy fit and thinks he's serious.
I think "increase the size of the gallon" is a perfect joke answer to a complicated question that would take more time than Leno allows his guests to answer seriously. Given that Leno's show is supposed to be humor, responding humorously to one of his questions is to be expected.
I would reach my data cap in a single transaction if I was forced to do my hobby through cellular internet.
Good thing the FCC isn't trying to force you to use just cellular networking, huh? This request for comments has nothing to do with that.
That said, I didn't think I was living in the 1980s so I assumed I'd be able to pursue whatever hobby and job I wanted in the supposed "richest country in the world".
The FCC isn't telling you that you cannot pursue your hobby or job.
we might as well nationalize the infrastructure
I think the point is that where cellular is the best option, there IS no fixed infrastructure to nationalize. It's not there because it costs money to put it there, with few customers to repay the costs.
And the secondary point is, if you need gigabit speeds for your hobby or job, then picking someplace to live where you can't get that is a bad idea. If you want the peaceful surroundings of wilderness then gigabit internet isn't going to be a priority, or at least you should know you might have to drive into the next town to get access to it.
Walkman-type radios used the earphone wire as an antenna, which is probably what the phones are going to have to do.
That's what they already do, if they have FM radio.
The smallest workable AM antenna is a ~5 inch bar of iron with a super thin wire wound around it hundreds of times.
Am I the only one old enough to remember car radios and the whip antennas they had, which provided AM coverage? I have an old car radio in my office right now that works fine with nothing more than a 3' piece of wire.
The "magic" is that the impedance is very high with such a short antenna, so the radio has to be designed to deal with that.
IF there were an AM radio chip that matched the size of the FM chips they have for cell phones, the earphone wire would work for that, too.
The FM radio chip will have a hard time getting to 2m, if it could even do narrowband. You're thinking of maybe this?
Previous candidates for the origin of the fleeting blasts of radiation -- known as fast radio bursts, or FRBs -- have included exploding stars, the reverberations of weird objects called cosmic strings or even distant beacons from interstellar alien spaceships.
You forgot to list the microwave oven that was in the break room in the next building. That was at the radio observatory in West Virginia, if I recall correctly.
the Republicans can't seem to find anybody to run who isn't either racist, xenophobic, homophobic, or some combination of the above. All they would have to do is find one single fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republican to run,
and the next day the Democrats would be running ads accusing him of being racist, xenophobic, homophobic, or some other similar thing, and your initial statement would still be true.
Actually, Americans have spoken to the Pollsters
"Dewey beats Truman!"
Push-polling is a wonderful perversion of the political process. If you don't know the specific questions, then you don't know what a poll means. I've had push-pollers call me and I've heard what kinds of leading questions they ask for myself.
Sometimes it's worth it to get a vote on record.
Mostly if you are trying to create a symbolic issue that you can disparage your opposition over. Like "Senator Foo voted NO on NET NEUTRALITY! He wants you to pay more for Netflix and let the greedy ISPs charge you more! He's not on your side! I am."
The truth is, this is not the way to go about it, and voting "no" doesn't mean you don't support NN anymore than it means you hate kittens.
Let them vote no, and then hammer them with it relentlessly for the next 10 months,
In other words, let's turn NN into a hotbutton political issue with lots of heat and very little light.
but 4 out of 5 voters' interests
Citation required. I doubt that 80% of the public knows what NN is, much less in going to worry about how Senator Foo votes on it -- until they're told how to think about it by talking points.
So, they are actually making a law about it,
No, this is not a law about NN, it is a law ordering the FCC to continue an Obama policy, which was a proclamation from an unelected regulatory body. Kicking the can, so to speak, instead of doing what they should.
The recent tax bill also tilts toward red states in that state and local taxes cannot be deducted as much as before from the total taxed.
The only reason you can say it "tilts" is because the state and local taxes are tilted by state color, too. Fascinating correlation there, yes?
But this is just gonna be a gimme to the fine people at Comcast and AT&T.
And everyone else who already does or wants to do broadband.
You know that "easier" doesn't mean "free", it means "it can happen". As in, previously forbidden access to federal buildings or sites can now be granted."
CEO botches a deal, it may cost the company a million dollars. Joe bungles the widget he's working on, maybe it costs a hundred dollars to fix, if that.
They are usually called deserts.
Thank God there are no deserts in the northeastern US where this ISP is.
Those who live in such places either boil during the day, freeze to death at night, live in buildings with enough thermal mass that the inside temps don't change much, or have a thermostat that knows how to cool when it is hot and heat when it is cold -- like I said.
An excellent argument (as if we needed another) of why the "Internet of Things" is and was a terrible idea.
It is not a generic argument against IoT devices, only stupidly programmed life-critical devices. If your IoT thermostat does the sensible thing of "maintain current settings" when losing internet connectivity, then losing internet connectivity won't result in anyone freezing to death. Only if your IoT thermostat dumps all settings and reverts to "off" when it cannot communicate with a remote server would it be an excellent argument against IoT.
any network failure could just as easily cripple everybody's Echos and Nests.
Echos require internet to send your audio back for voice recognition, and if a failing Echo could cost a life, then you should reconsider how you are using the Echo. The company that makes the Nest would be liable for any damages if they programmed the device so negligently that an internet outage caused a death, but only after you justified creating a life-critical situation based on that device.
And I wouldn't use an internet service that said they might mess with thermostats.
Any ISP that tells you that termination of your internet service would NOT affect your ability to remotely control your internet-controlled thermostat would be LYING TO YOU.
You wouldn't use an ISP that is honest enough to tell you up-front that termination of your service would affect how you use IoT devices?
Well, isn't it nice that this ISP did not tell anyone they would mess with anyone's thermostats, huh?
And if they did, and someone dies, I would want them to go to jail for murder.
If you've created an environment where an internet outage results in someone dying, then that's YOUR fault for being stupid enough to do that. You need to reconsider how you use the internet in that case.
Because they are doing it out of pure malice.
They're forcing you to turn your thermostat down so people freeze to death just to punish you for disobeying their TOS? You're looney.
That's one way to look at it, I suppose.
That's the way it is, so that's a reasonable way to look at it. You're buying a service. Just like buying a bus ticket to Las Vegas is buying a service, and you expect the bus to go all the way to the destination. A data cap on the Verizon VoD service would be like a bus ticket that includes only a limited amount of gas for the bus. The gas required to get there is part of the service you bought from the bus company.
Contrast that with buying a hypothetical "bus pass" that includes a set number of miles but no set destination. You get on the bus to Las Vegas but oops, you run out of miles before you get there. That's what buying a service from Netflix for video but only data service (with a cap) from Verizon is like.
I pay my ISP service fee and that covers the cost of bandwidth with Verizon on my end.
That's right. With a cap. And you pay Netflix for the service of streaming video, which does not include the data from Verizon to get it to you. You've paid Verizon for a limited amount of bandwidth.
and VoD will suddenly not be free anymore.
It never was free. You either pay Verizon for the service, or you pay Netflix for the service. How can it "not be free anymore" when it has never been free?
Reminds me of how the major selling point of Cable TV was that it was commercial free.
This fucking nonsense again. No, cable TV was never sold as "commercial free". Cable TV began life as and has always included the retransmission of OTA broadcast services, which contain commercials. (The only OTA that has ever promised "no commercials" was PBS, and they now carry a lot of them.) Very few specific and limited cable-delivered networks (such as HBO) could promise "commercial free" because they controlled the content. The local cable company does not control the content of the cable networks it carries. If that content provider has commercials, you get commercials. What do you expect the cable company to do when a content provider inserts a commercial, go to black for four minutes or more? Really?
Please, stop spreading this nonsense.
Never said anything about data caps.
You said:
That's not referring to data caps?
If they break the law it is up to the authorities to punish them NOT the ISP.
The ISP is not enforcing any law. They are deciding not to sell someone a service that they have reason to believe (due to complaints from other people) is being used outside the terms of service. Laws are irrelevant. This is also after multiple attempts at contact with the customer have failed to get a response.
If your automobile warranty had a clause that it became invalid if the vehicle is used for illegal purposes, then the dealership is within their rights for refusing to honor the warranty when the illegal use is detected. Just like insurance companies are within their rights not to pay out when the terms of the insurance are not met.
The other take I see here is they are threating their customers a good lawyer could sue them and win for threating to kill them. Just saying!
Just saying bullshit is what. You'd need a really good lawyer to win such a lawsuit, and a really greedy one to take your money for trying. And a really stupid judge not to throw the suit out in the first 30 seconds of it being on his desk. Where's the threat to kill anyone?