And just whose fault is it that the thermostat is set to "cool" in the middle of winter? I don't know anyplace on the planet where things change so fast that you have to cool one day and then heat to keep from freezing to death the next. And if you live in such a place, you better have a thermostat that can switch by itself.
Sounds like she needs to be in a nursing home, or have live in family or room mate to take care of her.
I think setting the thermostat so it maintains a livable temperature is something the host would do when taking granny in as a houseguest. At least I think that would be a reasonable task.
If the only thing the thermostat lets you do is micromanage the temperature then what the hell is the point of spending all that money on it?
There are valid use cases. You travel on sudden notice and want to turn the temp down to 60F for the week while you are gone, and turn it back up to 69F when you get close to home so you'll walk into a warm house. Or you want to reset it back to a normal temperature when your kids play with it. Or your wife turns it all the way down during a hot flash. None of those uses would result in anyone freezing to death because it couldn't be operated remotely. Even the wife can figure out eventually to turn the heat back up if she was able to turn it down.
They are praying on the ignorance of any customer unforunately forced to use them as an ISP. This Company is poison and extremely unethical to scare their customers that do not understand current tech!
I see you didn't read the letter that the summary linked to. Here's the relevant part, copied by hand since the link was an image:
Please be advised that this may affect other services which you may have connected to your internet service, such as the ability to control your thermostat remotely or video monitoring services.
This is a pretty straight-forward statement that if they turn your internet off due to TOS violations (and this letter is pretty clear that this is not the first contact about the problem) it will impact other stuff you use the internet for. How is this "praying" [SIC] on fear or unethical? It's a statement of fact, and technically quite accurate. If you don't have internet no more, you also don't get to control your internet-controlled stuff remotely neither no more, and any remote video monitoring you used to be able to do won't work neither no more, either, too.
If they just put you on the lowest service tier, that will affect your use of these things, too, especially video monitoring. "Affect the use of" doesn't mean "we're going to fuck with your thermostat so you die" or even "we're going to take control of your cameras and broadcast the video to everyone on the internet". It means the change will affect YOUR use of those devices remotely.
If you have set your thermostat so everyone in your house dies from the cold, then that is YOUR fault. I advise you not to do it.
This has nothing to do with NN. Disconnecting someone for a violation of terms of service means ALL the packets stop, no matter from what source. Putting someone on a low rate internet connection (insufficient to continue pirating effectively) means ALL the packets slow down, no matter from what source.
Stop trying to paint this as an NN issue when it is clearly not.
Then it is YOUR responsibility to manage the thermostat, and if you set it at a level where she will freeze to death it will be your responsbility, not the ISPs. If you leave her alone in the house and set it so she will freeze, and then depend on being able to get in from the external internet to turn it back up so she doesn't (ha ha granny, feel how cold it is? where's my inheritance? Put me back in the will. Ok, now you get heat again!) then don't blame the ISP when your plot is foiled by a network outage.
Maybe just leave the thermostat set at a livable temperature and you won't have to worry about network failures from any source or reason.
In practice temperatures change slowly enough that even getting a single packet every half hour would probably be adequate for keeping a temperature entirely livable.
I don't have an internet-connected thermostat because I see no need for it. However, I do have a "thermostat". The job of a thermostat is to turn heating devices (or cooling devices) on and off in a way that it maintains the temperature that it is instructed to maintain.
As the outside temperature goes down, the heat flux increases outwards and the heating devices need to remain on longer to keep the same temperature. (I.e., pump heat INTO the house so it balances the heat flow going out.)
At the point where the outside temperature is so low that the heating device needs to be on 100% of the time to keep up with the outflow, not even turning the temperature setting up will fix the problem. If your furnace is on 100% of the time to keep your internal temperature at 62F with an outside temperature of -10F, then no amount of changing the thermostat setting will get it warmer than that. You cannot get more than 100% out of your furnace, unlike the warp drives that Scotty could get to produce 110% (or nuclear reactors that can produce 110% by exceeding safety limits).
In other words, you need 0 packets per hour to "keep up with" changing temperatures. That's the job of the thermostat itself. You only need "packets per hour" (and few of those) if you want to change the settings, and again, if your furnace already cannot keep up with the demand for heat then no amount of changing the settings will solve that problem.
The only use for an internet thermostat is so you can modify the settings from outside the house so you can turn the heat down when you know you can't make it home, or turn it up to warm things up as you are on your way home. Or, in the very extreme case where penny-wise but pound-foolish planning has you turning your thermostat off (thus no heat at all) and needing to turn it back on when a cold snap threatens to freeze all the pipes. That's your fault, because you should have just set the thermostat at 60F, say, so it will be off until the outside temps get cold enough to be a problem, but the furnace will be off otherwise. I spent the entire last summer with a thermostat set at 65F and I paid no heating bills because the furnace never came on, and yet when the temps dropped late this fall the furnace popped on just like it should to keep the house above 64F.
If the you've set the temperature on your thermostat so the inside of the house is "livable", then the thermostat will keep it that way unless 1) it is broken and cannot do its job anyway, or 2) you're exceeding the heating capacity of your furnace and the thermostat won't be able to succeed it doing its job anyway. Note that neither failure mode has anything to do with a throttled internet connection.
This is a nonsense article, meant to scare people and create fear over a failure of "net neutrality" by the ISP. Poppycock. The ISP was correct to warn user who face potential loss of service for violation of TOS that their IoT things may not be controllable when their service goes away, but that doesn't mean the ISP is "messing with" anything.
If the ISP messes with your thermostat it is their fault.
Stand still and think for a minute. If an ISP throttles or shuts off your internet connection for any reason, what effect will that have on your internet-controlled thermostat?
1. It will turn the temperature setting down.
2. It will turn the temperature setting up.
3. It will turn your furnace off completely.
4. You will not be able to change your temperature setting using the external internet, but can still operate it on the local internal network, and otherwise nothing is different including the manual controls.
The correct answer is "4". The setting you had in place before the network interruption takes place will continue.
Answers 1-3 are all what could be considered "messing with your thermostat", but only if the ISP actually makes the changes to the settings and not the stupid thermostat changes how it works when it loses a network connection. "Turn all heat off unless there is a constant network connection to some server in China" is a stupid and dangerous operating mode, and you need to blame the thermostat maker for that, not the ISP.
For the person whose grandmother cannot operate a thermostat unless it is internet connected, then I suggest you get her a locally controlled thermostat instead of relying on the external internet. It is quite possible that the external internet will fail during a severe weather event and she'll be dead even if the ISP had nothing to do with it. Even just a local power failure could take out the wireless access point that the thermostat connects to, as well as the internet modem. This is not a case of the ISP turning something into a "matter of life or death", it's a case of poor planning on how to deal with common modes of failure resulting in a "matter of life or death."
Bandwidth throttling for customers in those areas who have connected thermostats could mean the difference between sickness and health, or even life and death.
If you are needing to adjust your thermostat using the network, that means you aren't at home to do it manually. You are not where the thermostat controls the temperature. I.e., if you freeze to death because you didn't walk across the room to turn the thermostat up, it ain't the ISPs fault.
Yeah, maybe death of your pet fish if you aren't home to turn it up and the tank gets too cold, but "difference between... life and death" is not something you usually hear with reference to fish.
Or are people facing death from the cold really so lazy that they'd rather freeze than walk across the room?
USB key can be cleanly erased after last protected access is needed and prior to customs activity
If you don' t need access to that hidden partition anymore, why not just remove it?
just format and load with vacation pictures to overwrite previous data.
Just load a partition on the USB stick with vacation pictures and leave the boot stuff alone. It is unlikely customs is going to try to boot from your USB stick, so all they'll see is vacation pictures. Or make the default boot on the USB be the plain windows partition on your hard drive, and if you want to use the hidden one stop the boot and edit the command line to boot it. Or just use grub and stop the normal boot on the laptop to edit it to boot the hidden partition. When customs turns on the laptop they'll boot into the vanilla windows.
Or they may be smarter than you think and know to look for hidden partitions and apparently unallocated space on a disk. One of the digital forensics books I read a few years ago talked about that trick to hide data, so I expect the forensic toolset it recommended would raise a red flag even if they couldn't immediately boot into the sensitive information.
No. It's not "difficult" for Comcast, Verizon, etc to know where their property is and under what jurisdiction it is. It's not "difficult" at all.
When the "property" being regulated is internet packets, yes, it is certainly hard to know what jurisdiction they fall under. I can be standing in the middle of Kansas and have an IP address from Mexico, for example. Are my outgoing packets subject to Kansas law regarding NN, and how do you tell just by looking at them? If I am providing a service you pay for and the ISP in Mexico throttles them, how do you tell the difference between the throttling being done in Mexico or by your local ISP? And how do your state laws on NN deal with Mexico? And how does Kansas deal with enforcing their NN laws against a company based in Mexico?
it's your local ISP slowing you down. Regulation on intrastate traffic is sufficient to get basic net neutrality.
I just did a traceroute on netflix.com. Packets travel from a network in my state to a network in a neighboring state before icmp is blocked. If the network in my neighboring state decides to throttle netflix packets, then yes, indeed, they will be throttled in my state too, even if my "local ISP" isn't doing anything to cause it.
ISPs would really have to go out of their way to screw you over which is just asking for trouble.
If by "going out of their way" you mean "operate the border gateway in a state with lax NN laws", I agree. Maybe throw in the already existing "corporate structuring so that your local ISP isn't the same company as the one that runs the border gateway, so any laws covering your local ISP don't actually mean anything".
For example, your startup video streaming service competes with Verizon's video on demand?
You are paying for Verizon's VOD as part of your Verizon bill. You aren't paying for Netflix data as part of your Verizon bill. That service requires bandwidth, and thus to provide the service you have paid Verizon for, they can't count that bandwidth against you. You aren't paying Verizon for the Netflix service, so the data that happens does count against your data service cap.
and *your* traffic in particular will be throttled or interrupted unless you pay extra.
Sorry, but a data cap doesn't automatically mean your data is interrupted. Only after you reach the cap. But you got all the data you paid for.
This is the counter to your argument.
Instead, by opposing Net Neutrality, you are advocating that corporations be allowed to censor whenever it benefits them.
Explain how a NN law in California stops Comcast of Iowa from not letting packets from an Iowa company on the net, thus effectively blocking subscribers to Comcast of California from getting access to them. Here's the secret you might not know. Comcast is already split up into separate companies to deal with state regulation.
This is why NN is an interstate issue and needs to be dealt with at that level.
It's also a bit disingenuous to claim that a federal agency is supposed to deal with this and then demand that states do it instead. Pick one.
You're odd, to say the least. Most people would want lies stopped before they are sold, since it is impossible to retract a book once it is in the hands of the public. Unless it's a Kindle edition, but that's a different issue.
and then later sue their arses off for a large payday.
You can still sue their asses off after trying to stop the sale. What you will never be able to stop, if you don't stop the sale, is that book showing up in a used bookstore and another group of people reading lies about you that they don't know you got paid for.
Can we ask Trump to quit for all the blatantly false things he has said?
You can ask Trump to quit for any reason you desire, or for no reason at all. You can ask him to quit because you don't like the color of his hair, even. Just don't expect him to do it.
Because it's not terminating at both LAX and JFK, it's actually JFK to AUS (whatever the Melbourne code is)
MEL. Thanks for correcting the direction information. It's not an LAX-JFK flight, it's QF12 from JFK to LAX. It does not depart from the JFK international terminal, it departs from terminal 7. It arrives at LAX terminal B, which is Bradley International.
If it offloads pax for the west coast, then it is, indeed, carrying people domestically, starting at JFK and ending at LAX. Since you allegedly cannot mix domestic and international pax, they must all be domestic if any of them are.
For the direct flights listed to MEL there is a plane change, as the aircraft going to MEL is not a 747. Everyone off in LAX, please. QF12 terminates there. Domestic. If you want to fly in a 747 in the US, then one way of doing it is to book QF12/QF94 to Melbourne from JFK and get off at LAX. You're paying for the full flight, just exiting the building instead of changing planes, and you are, indeed, flying in a 747 in the US domestically.
There are two different routes to MEL that go either through Sydney or Brisbane on 747s. Since you can't send the same airplane to two different places, there must be a plane change for that, too. It's a two hour layover so there's time to boot everyone and have them come back. All domestic pax, then.
The only reason to use Bradley is because whatever flight (QF16 or QF18) does use that plane is departing internationally and LAX cannot handle international departures from any other terminal. Poor planning. ORD does it, from both C and F concourses, so it can't be a legal problem.
If it was all fiction Trump would not be so desperate to get it discredited and blocked from sale.
If someone wrote a book of fiction about you, you wouldn't try to discredit it and block it from sale, because doing that would mean it is true? I think your logic is flawed.
Why would a flight operating entirely within the US depart or arrive at an international terminal, increasing costs and wasting resources? Use whatever gate the aircraft will fit at. If you have to arrive at an international terminal because that's the only place your airplane will fit, you just route the passengers around the incoming immigration and customs steps. This is a known problem with a trivial solution. Avoid the international terminal costs for departure, since you don't need an international terminal gate for domestic departures. You don't even need an international terminal gate for international departures, I've gone out C gates at ORD lots of times.
The value of a communication network is that everyone is networked. Not only is a monopoly natural and inevitable, it is DESIRABLE.
While the goal of "everyone is networked" is laudable, it does not take having a monopoly to achieve that. It also doesn't take internet to everyone's home to achieve reasonable approximation. Those who don't want to pay for internet (in taxes, for example, so that "everyone is networked") should be able to avoid that, while still going to the library to use a public terminal. (And yes, the goal of "everyone is networked" is a fine argument for taxing everyone to pay for it. Our city uses that argument -- everyone can ride the bus -- to tax all of us to pay for the "free" city bus service. That's also the argument for single payer -- "everyone is healthcared".)
These are the sort of problems that the government should be responsible for.
It is not the government's job to give us everything we want.
but from the private business who decided it was their role to try and tell the people what their government should or shouldn't do.
A private business who is being regulated by that government and will be in direct competition with it, after entering a ten year contract for services to and with that government.
My objection to government internet is not a blanket "government shouldn't do it", but that "government should do it on a level playing field, without taking advantage of their status as a government." That's what's missing in municipal ISP services -- costs that the company is required to pay don't apply to the city, and some of those costs are mandated by that city (and state, and feds). The municipality is in the position of being able to regulate their competitors out of business. Why should they be able to do that?
If a city wants to compete with Comcast, then the city ought to go through the franchise process and agree to the same things they forced Comcast to agree to to get their franchise. They should be required to provide the same services -- all of them -- and pay the franchise fees and corporate taxes. They should have no ability to dip into the general fund to pay for any of the ISP services, even if they would otherwise be operating at a loss.
You may think the voters are misguided, but that is none of your damned business if you're not one of the citizens.
OK! If some southern town decides to vote that blacks must use "separate but equal" facilities, it's none of my damn business and I'll just go on about my life as if nothing were wrong. Heck, even if the "equal" facilities aren't equal, that ain't no nevermind for me. All them furners in Washington, DC don't live there either, so they ain't got no right to say nuthin', neither. Majority rules! Democracy da bomb.
And if a city blocked access then it would be extremely easy to sue for restricting free speech (which a corporation can do, but a government cannot).
Wow. Yes, after someone has sued to get religious sites blocked, someone else can sue to get them back. Will you step up and sue to get access back to CP sites when they are blocked as "illegal"? Hey, pedophile, why do you want access to kiddy porn? And don't even start trying to claim that commercial speech can't be blocked. Commercial speech has all kinds of limits.
but the citizens of this city voted and decided on a different approach.
This changes nothing about the issues. The tyranny of the masses is still tyranny even though everyone voted for it. The protections you seem to rely on are eroding -- which is a pretty basic reason why the government isn't trusted. But for cheap internet, we'll swallow anything government says.
The hypocrisy is that some of these people who are opposed to any municipality being allowed to do anything will turn around and appeal to the state legislature to overturn the will of the "misguided" voters.
That's not hypocrisy, that's the proper resolution of the problem. If a city does something they shouldn't be doing, it is quite proper to take some action to try to stop them. Courts and the legislature are two avenues for redress of grievances. The "misguided voters" cannot vote to approve something they cannot legally do. Would you accept a vote of the "voters" to order mosques shut down because they host "them nasty terrists"? Of course not -- that vote is invalid on its face. Your "voters" don't get to do everything you can find a majority to approve.
See that's where you have it all wrong. Comcast, AT&T, et al have shown that they cannot be trusted.
They haven't shown that to me, and I don't accept the argument that they are no longer promising something they don't need to promise means they're going to do the opposite. But that's a personal decision.
Also irrelevant. The question is not whether to trust Comcast, but trusting government. "Government" is the one that spies on our phone calls, can't manage NN regulation, and a host of other things. Civil forfeiture which charges objects with criminal violations and then confiscates them, while the government claims that this is not a penalty to the person who used to own that nice boat or car or stack of money. Local government agencies that bring in Stingray. Or attach GPS trackers to people's cars. Or use IR cameras to look through the walls of homes. Or any of a large number of other things that they would do were it not for the courts to stop some of it.
So the question remains: who do people who exhibit a complete distrust of the government suddenly accept promises at face value from the same government?
You think we're looking around going, "where's the government?"
Yes, I've seen exactly that sentiment from many people who post to this forum. "Government's job is to provide what monopolies will not" is just one recent example.
I am delighted to say you misread the proceedings.
In the summary, a "new planning document" that is dated Jan. 9, 2018 -- five days from now -- contains a clear outline of remaining steps. Wait a minute! Why the FUCK is the summary pointing to a BOULDER planning document when the story is about Fort Collins? Wow. I missed that. Fine. The rest of the points are still valid.
First, Fort Collins has pledged to uphold net neutrality as an ISP.
That's nice. I've heard governments pledge to do all kinds of things. It's naive to trust "pledges" when the courts have jurisdiction over those pledges, as well as the city council who can change their minds at any time. My fair city "pledged" that a new tax ON THE WATER BILL, to pay for the repair of a specific street, would go away when the money was collected and the repairs complete. It never did. They decided that the method of taxes on the bill for water worked so well, they kept that road tax and added tree trimming, bus service, and a couple of others. That's what their pledge was worth. We had a tax levy that the government pledged would be used for building maintenance and city pool repairs, and the money went to build a really fancy new building and the "best outdoor water park in the valley".
Pledges from governments aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on.
Second, we can argue whether Comcast is a de facto mopnopoly or a de jure monopoly in Fort Collins,
No, we have no possible argument about whether Comcast as an ISP is a monopoly of any kind. If you actually look at the situation, you'll find 8 different ISPs that serve Fort Collins. A couple of them offer 1000Mbps (gigabit) fiber service. One of them is Level 3, a major backbone provider. So no, there is no monopoly ISP status for Comcast either in law or in fact.
Comcast has exclusive access to the cable through which they provide internet
Big deal. Comcast has exclusive access to something they own. So what?
The notion that Comcast cannot compete is ludicrous. Their profits are too high for them to leave town,
Right now their profits are probably good. You do realize that profits rely on having customers, right? That when the city that regulates Comcast starts undercutting Comcast, do you imagine that nobody will switch? If nobody will switch, then why build the city service? If everyone needs it and thus switches, Comcast's profits go away. This is pretty simple, basic stuff.
Other companies have gone out of business when a undercutting competitor comes to town, and the only reason Comcast would not is because it would be subsidized by other parts of the company. Comcast as a whole will not shutter their doors, but the local company might. Will they stay in a place where they consistently lose money? Would you?
You do realize that there are regular protests and efforts to keep Walmart out of a location because it can mean local stores go out of business. Walmart undercuts the competition, and sometimes that means the competition goes away. Borders, another example, came to our fair city and we lost the one really good magazine dealer because of it. Then Borders couldn't make a profit here and they folded. This is not rocket science.
I hope things work out well for you, but trusting government only because they are giving you something you want is pretty naive. Hatred of Comcast will get you only so far. I understand you have a vested interest in getting cheap internet so you will argue in favor of a government solution to what you think is a problem, but when the eggs wind up in one basket and you realize the government did not keep yet another "pledge" that they weren't legally bound to keep, it will be too late.
I guess the takeaway from this moderation is that we should trust the government when they promise us cheap internet, but otherwise they are untrustable, bought-and-paid for corrupt appendages of the corporate megaliths. Ok.
People may protest, but it ain't gonna happen (note that the banners are still hanging up).
There have been an untold number of monuments or other items removed from public spaces because those who oppose the concepts don't want to make use of the same process that allowed the monuments to be installed to install their own, they'd rather get the ones they don't like banned. It is also not a given that the banner system will survive this year's protests. I know if I was in charge of that program I'd get bloody well tired of people whining about it. I wouldn't care if it was legal or not, I'd just not do it anymore. (I'd be a city worker, I don't get paid enough to deal with all the crap, and my job is secure whether I do this one program or not. Ta' to that!)
It's nice to believe that it won't happen, but as I ended last time, utopia is a dream.
I'd much rather have the government, with restrictions from checks and balancing and the bill of rights,
It will be those very "Bill of Rights" that will be used to enable the government to control in ways you won't like. Freedom of speech? Well, do you notice that there are abridgements of commercial speech? There's no mention of "commercial" or "noncommercial" in our Bill of Rights, but the government has read such a limitation into it. The government has consistently read "freedom FROM religion" where it says "freedom OF religion", as if the government allowing a religious agency to exist is somehow promoting a state religion. (And some people think that the government NOT taxing something is a "tax rebate" to both the producer and consumer.)
than a company that just does whatever is most profitable.
It is most profitable for a company to not alienate any customers, including those who visit religious websites. None of the anti-theists who oppose religion at all appearances will drop their subscriptions to an ISP, but they'll turn Heaven and Earth to get others blocked -- if the government with "freedom from religion" ensconced in the Bill of Rights becomes in charge of the internet.
And is far more likely to give in to public opinion than the government is.
Hardly. The Ninth Circuit would never order Comcast to block religious websites on their network. It isn't such a given that they wouldn't tell Wapakanko City that they much install such a block. It is very unlikely that any "alleged CP site" is going to go to court to challenge a city block on their site, and when people start being accused of being pedophiles if they oppose their city's blocking of such sites on general principles they'll not be very vocal about it, either.
No, it is absurd to be untrusting of government but then accept everything they do at face value just because it is something you want them to do and it means cheap internet for you. I might also point out, when the government becomes the internet it will be because they can undercut any competition and you won't have any choice anymore. It will be a true monopoly. If the government decides to block pornhub.com you will have no option.
Maybe I should make it my sig -- Utopia is a dream, but reality can be a nightmare.
I almost mentioned it last time, but I will now. Fox had a very short lived TV series called "Utopia" where a band of hardy folks were set up in a place where they got to set all their rules. I think it was based on a British show. Anyway, the series lasted just a few episodes when it turned out that the "Utopians" were just as fickle and spiteful and capitalistic (including profit driven) and selfish as all the rest of us. They were booting fellow Utopians out of the compound, and punishing them for not working hard enough. Fun to watch, a good lesson about human nature and societies. It proves, Utopia is a dream, reality is a nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
If the thermostat is in the cooling setting
And just whose fault is it that the thermostat is set to "cool" in the middle of winter? I don't know anyplace on the planet where things change so fast that you have to cool one day and then heat to keep from freezing to death the next. And if you live in such a place, you better have a thermostat that can switch by itself.
Sounds like she needs to be in a nursing home, or have live in family or room mate to take care of her.
I think setting the thermostat so it maintains a livable temperature is something the host would do when taking granny in as a houseguest. At least I think that would be a reasonable task.
If the only thing the thermostat lets you do is micromanage the temperature then what the hell is the point of spending all that money on it?
There are valid use cases. You travel on sudden notice and want to turn the temp down to 60F for the week while you are gone, and turn it back up to 69F when you get close to home so you'll walk into a warm house. Or you want to reset it back to a normal temperature when your kids play with it. Or your wife turns it all the way down during a hot flash. None of those uses would result in anyone freezing to death because it couldn't be operated remotely. Even the wife can figure out eventually to turn the heat back up if she was able to turn it down.
They are praying on the ignorance of any customer unforunately forced to use them as an ISP. This Company is poison and extremely unethical to scare their customers that do not understand current tech!
I see you didn't read the letter that the summary linked to. Here's the relevant part, copied by hand since the link was an image:
This is a pretty straight-forward statement that if they turn your internet off due to TOS violations (and this letter is pretty clear that this is not the first contact about the problem) it will impact other stuff you use the internet for. How is this "praying" [SIC] on fear or unethical? It's a statement of fact, and technically quite accurate. If you don't have internet no more, you also don't get to control your internet-controlled stuff remotely neither no more, and any remote video monitoring you used to be able to do won't work neither no more, either, too.
If they just put you on the lowest service tier, that will affect your use of these things, too, especially video monitoring. "Affect the use of" doesn't mean "we're going to fuck with your thermostat so you die" or even "we're going to take control of your cameras and broadcast the video to everyone on the internet". It means the change will affect YOUR use of those devices remotely.
If you have set your thermostat so everyone in your house dies from the cold, then that is YOUR fault. I advise you not to do it.
Fuck, is this what /. has devolved to?
Stop trying to paint this as an NN issue when it is clearly not.
i taken my mother in as a house guest
Then it is YOUR responsibility to manage the thermostat, and if you set it at a level where she will freeze to death it will be your responsbility, not the ISPs. If you leave her alone in the house and set it so she will freeze, and then depend on being able to get in from the external internet to turn it back up so she doesn't (ha ha granny, feel how cold it is? where's my inheritance? Put me back in the will. Ok, now you get heat again!) then don't blame the ISP when your plot is foiled by a network outage.
Maybe just leave the thermostat set at a livable temperature and you won't have to worry about network failures from any source or reason.
In practice temperatures change slowly enough that even getting a single packet every half hour would probably be adequate for keeping a temperature entirely livable.
I don't have an internet-connected thermostat because I see no need for it. However, I do have a "thermostat". The job of a thermostat is to turn heating devices (or cooling devices) on and off in a way that it maintains the temperature that it is instructed to maintain.
As the outside temperature goes down, the heat flux increases outwards and the heating devices need to remain on longer to keep the same temperature. (I.e., pump heat INTO the house so it balances the heat flow going out.)
At the point where the outside temperature is so low that the heating device needs to be on 100% of the time to keep up with the outflow, not even turning the temperature setting up will fix the problem. If your furnace is on 100% of the time to keep your internal temperature at 62F with an outside temperature of -10F, then no amount of changing the thermostat setting will get it warmer than that. You cannot get more than 100% out of your furnace, unlike the warp drives that Scotty could get to produce 110% (or nuclear reactors that can produce 110% by exceeding safety limits).
In other words, you need 0 packets per hour to "keep up with" changing temperatures. That's the job of the thermostat itself. You only need "packets per hour" (and few of those) if you want to change the settings, and again, if your furnace already cannot keep up with the demand for heat then no amount of changing the settings will solve that problem.
The only use for an internet thermostat is so you can modify the settings from outside the house so you can turn the heat down when you know you can't make it home, or turn it up to warm things up as you are on your way home. Or, in the very extreme case where penny-wise but pound-foolish planning has you turning your thermostat off (thus no heat at all) and needing to turn it back on when a cold snap threatens to freeze all the pipes. That's your fault, because you should have just set the thermostat at 60F, say, so it will be off until the outside temps get cold enough to be a problem, but the furnace will be off otherwise. I spent the entire last summer with a thermostat set at 65F and I paid no heating bills because the furnace never came on, and yet when the temps dropped late this fall the furnace popped on just like it should to keep the house above 64F.
If the you've set the temperature on your thermostat so the inside of the house is "livable", then the thermostat will keep it that way unless 1) it is broken and cannot do its job anyway, or 2) you're exceeding the heating capacity of your furnace and the thermostat won't be able to succeed it doing its job anyway. Note that neither failure mode has anything to do with a throttled internet connection.
This is a nonsense article, meant to scare people and create fear over a failure of "net neutrality" by the ISP. Poppycock. The ISP was correct to warn user who face potential loss of service for violation of TOS that their IoT things may not be controllable when their service goes away, but that doesn't mean the ISP is "messing with" anything.
If the ISP messes with your thermostat it is their fault.
Stand still and think for a minute. If an ISP throttles or shuts off your internet connection for any reason, what effect will that have on your internet-controlled thermostat?
The correct answer is "4". The setting you had in place before the network interruption takes place will continue.
Answers 1-3 are all what could be considered "messing with your thermostat", but only if the ISP actually makes the changes to the settings and not the stupid thermostat changes how it works when it loses a network connection. "Turn all heat off unless there is a constant network connection to some server in China" is a stupid and dangerous operating mode, and you need to blame the thermostat maker for that, not the ISP.
For the person whose grandmother cannot operate a thermostat unless it is internet connected, then I suggest you get her a locally controlled thermostat instead of relying on the external internet. It is quite possible that the external internet will fail during a severe weather event and she'll be dead even if the ISP had nothing to do with it. Even just a local power failure could take out the wireless access point that the thermostat connects to, as well as the internet modem. This is not a case of the ISP turning something into a "matter of life or death", it's a case of poor planning on how to deal with common modes of failure resulting in a "matter of life or death."
Bandwidth throttling for customers in those areas who have connected thermostats could mean the difference between sickness and health, or even life and death.
If you are needing to adjust your thermostat using the network, that means you aren't at home to do it manually. You are not where the thermostat controls the temperature. I.e., if you freeze to death because you didn't walk across the room to turn the thermostat up, it ain't the ISPs fault.
Yeah, maybe death of your pet fish if you aren't home to turn it up and the tank gets too cold, but "difference between ... life and death" is not something you usually hear with reference to fish.
Or are people facing death from the cold really so lazy that they'd rather freeze than walk across the room?
USB key can be cleanly erased after last protected access is needed and prior to customs activity
If you don' t need access to that hidden partition anymore, why not just remove it?
just format and load with vacation pictures to overwrite previous data.
Just load a partition on the USB stick with vacation pictures and leave the boot stuff alone. It is unlikely customs is going to try to boot from your USB stick, so all they'll see is vacation pictures. Or make the default boot on the USB be the plain windows partition on your hard drive, and if you want to use the hidden one stop the boot and edit the command line to boot it. Or just use grub and stop the normal boot on the laptop to edit it to boot the hidden partition. When customs turns on the laptop they'll boot into the vanilla windows.
Or they may be smarter than you think and know to look for hidden partitions and apparently unallocated space on a disk. One of the digital forensics books I read a few years ago talked about that trick to hide data, so I expect the forensic toolset it recommended would raise a red flag even if they couldn't immediately boot into the sensitive information.
I'll be in favor of a state level Paris Accord the day CO2 stops at state borders.
Are you in favor of a national level Paris Accord even though CO2 doesn't stop at national borders?
No. It's not "difficult" for Comcast, Verizon, etc to know where their property is and under what jurisdiction it is. It's not "difficult" at all.
When the "property" being regulated is internet packets, yes, it is certainly hard to know what jurisdiction they fall under. I can be standing in the middle of Kansas and have an IP address from Mexico, for example. Are my outgoing packets subject to Kansas law regarding NN, and how do you tell just by looking at them? If I am providing a service you pay for and the ISP in Mexico throttles them, how do you tell the difference between the throttling being done in Mexico or by your local ISP? And how do your state laws on NN deal with Mexico? And how does Kansas deal with enforcing their NN laws against a company based in Mexico?
it's your local ISP slowing you down. Regulation on intrastate traffic is sufficient to get basic net neutrality.
I just did a traceroute on netflix.com. Packets travel from a network in my state to a network in a neighboring state before icmp is blocked. If the network in my neighboring state decides to throttle netflix packets, then yes, indeed, they will be throttled in my state too, even if my "local ISP" isn't doing anything to cause it.
ISPs would really have to go out of their way to screw you over which is just asking for trouble.
If by "going out of their way" you mean "operate the border gateway in a state with lax NN laws", I agree. Maybe throw in the already existing "corporate structuring so that your local ISP isn't the same company as the one that runs the border gateway, so any laws covering your local ISP don't actually mean anything".
For example, your startup video streaming service competes with Verizon's video on demand?
You are paying for Verizon's VOD as part of your Verizon bill. You aren't paying for Netflix data as part of your Verizon bill. That service requires bandwidth, and thus to provide the service you have paid Verizon for, they can't count that bandwidth against you. You aren't paying Verizon for the Netflix service, so the data that happens does count against your data service cap.
and *your* traffic in particular will be throttled or interrupted unless you pay extra.
Sorry, but a data cap doesn't automatically mean your data is interrupted. Only after you reach the cap. But you got all the data you paid for.
This is the counter to your argument.
Instead, by opposing Net Neutrality, you are advocating that corporations be allowed to censor whenever it benefits them.
Explain how a NN law in California stops Comcast of Iowa from not letting packets from an Iowa company on the net, thus effectively blocking subscribers to Comcast of California from getting access to them. Here's the secret you might not know. Comcast is already split up into separate companies to deal with state regulation.
This is why NN is an interstate issue and needs to be dealt with at that level.
It's also a bit disingenuous to claim that a federal agency is supposed to deal with this and then demand that states do it instead. Pick one.
ummm no, I would be thrilled,
You're odd, to say the least. Most people would want lies stopped before they are sold, since it is impossible to retract a book once it is in the hands of the public. Unless it's a Kindle edition, but that's a different issue.
and then later sue their arses off for a large payday.
You can still sue their asses off after trying to stop the sale. What you will never be able to stop, if you don't stop the sale, is that book showing up in a used bookstore and another group of people reading lies about you that they don't know you got paid for.
Can we ask Trump to quit for all the blatantly false things he has said?
You can ask Trump to quit for any reason you desire, or for no reason at all. You can ask him to quit because you don't like the color of his hair, even. Just don't expect him to do it.
Because it's not terminating at both LAX and JFK, it's actually JFK to AUS (whatever the Melbourne code is)
MEL. Thanks for correcting the direction information. It's not an LAX-JFK flight, it's QF12 from JFK to LAX. It does not depart from the JFK international terminal, it departs from terminal 7. It arrives at LAX terminal B, which is Bradley International.
If it offloads pax for the west coast, then it is, indeed, carrying people domestically, starting at JFK and ending at LAX. Since you allegedly cannot mix domestic and international pax, they must all be domestic if any of them are.
For the direct flights listed to MEL there is a plane change, as the aircraft going to MEL is not a 747. Everyone off in LAX, please. QF12 terminates there. Domestic. If you want to fly in a 747 in the US, then one way of doing it is to book QF12/QF94 to Melbourne from JFK and get off at LAX. You're paying for the full flight, just exiting the building instead of changing planes, and you are, indeed, flying in a 747 in the US domestically.
There are two different routes to MEL that go either through Sydney or Brisbane on 747s. Since you can't send the same airplane to two different places, there must be a plane change for that, too. It's a two hour layover so there's time to boot everyone and have them come back. All domestic pax, then.
The only reason to use Bradley is because whatever flight (QF16 or QF18) does use that plane is departing internationally and LAX cannot handle international departures from any other terminal. Poor planning. ORD does it, from both C and F concourses, so it can't be a legal problem.
If it was all fiction Trump would not be so desperate to get it discredited and blocked from sale.
If someone wrote a book of fiction about you, you wouldn't try to discredit it and block it from sale, because doing that would mean it is true? I think your logic is flawed.
Why would a flight operating entirely within the US depart or arrive at an international terminal, increasing costs and wasting resources? Use whatever gate the aircraft will fit at. If you have to arrive at an international terminal because that's the only place your airplane will fit, you just route the passengers around the incoming immigration and customs steps. This is a known problem with a trivial solution. Avoid the international terminal costs for departure, since you don't need an international terminal gate for domestic departures. You don't even need an international terminal gate for international departures, I've gone out C gates at ORD lots of times.
The value of a communication network is that everyone is networked. Not only is a monopoly natural and inevitable, it is DESIRABLE.
While the goal of "everyone is networked" is laudable, it does not take having a monopoly to achieve that. It also doesn't take internet to everyone's home to achieve reasonable approximation. Those who don't want to pay for internet (in taxes, for example, so that "everyone is networked") should be able to avoid that, while still going to the library to use a public terminal. (And yes, the goal of "everyone is networked" is a fine argument for taxing everyone to pay for it. Our city uses that argument -- everyone can ride the bus -- to tax all of us to pay for the "free" city bus service. That's also the argument for single payer -- "everyone is healthcared".)
These are the sort of problems that the government should be responsible for.
It is not the government's job to give us everything we want.
but from the private business who decided it was their role to try and tell the people what their government should or shouldn't do.
A private business who is being regulated by that government and will be in direct competition with it, after entering a ten year contract for services to and with that government.
My objection to government internet is not a blanket "government shouldn't do it", but that "government should do it on a level playing field, without taking advantage of their status as a government." That's what's missing in municipal ISP services -- costs that the company is required to pay don't apply to the city, and some of those costs are mandated by that city (and state, and feds). The municipality is in the position of being able to regulate their competitors out of business. Why should they be able to do that?
If a city wants to compete with Comcast, then the city ought to go through the franchise process and agree to the same things they forced Comcast to agree to to get their franchise. They should be required to provide the same services -- all of them -- and pay the franchise fees and corporate taxes. They should have no ability to dip into the general fund to pay for any of the ISP services, even if they would otherwise be operating at a loss.
But that's not how municipal broadband works.
You may think the voters are misguided, but that is none of your damned business if you're not one of the citizens.
OK! If some southern town decides to vote that blacks must use "separate but equal" facilities, it's none of my damn business and I'll just go on about my life as if nothing were wrong. Heck, even if the "equal" facilities aren't equal, that ain't no nevermind for me. All them furners in Washington, DC don't live there either, so they ain't got no right to say nuthin', neither. Majority rules! Democracy da bomb.
And if a city blocked access then it would be extremely easy to sue for restricting free speech (which a corporation can do, but a government cannot).
Wow. Yes, after someone has sued to get religious sites blocked, someone else can sue to get them back. Will you step up and sue to get access back to CP sites when they are blocked as "illegal"? Hey, pedophile, why do you want access to kiddy porn? And don't even start trying to claim that commercial speech can't be blocked. Commercial speech has all kinds of limits.
but the citizens of this city voted and decided on a different approach.
This changes nothing about the issues. The tyranny of the masses is still tyranny even though everyone voted for it. The protections you seem to rely on are eroding -- which is a pretty basic reason why the government isn't trusted. But for cheap internet, we'll swallow anything government says.
The hypocrisy is that some of these people who are opposed to any municipality being allowed to do anything will turn around and appeal to the state legislature to overturn the will of the "misguided" voters.
That's not hypocrisy, that's the proper resolution of the problem. If a city does something they shouldn't be doing, it is quite proper to take some action to try to stop them. Courts and the legislature are two avenues for redress of grievances. The "misguided voters" cannot vote to approve something they cannot legally do. Would you accept a vote of the "voters" to order mosques shut down because they host "them nasty terrists"? Of course not -- that vote is invalid on its face. Your "voters" don't get to do everything you can find a majority to approve.
See that's where you have it all wrong. Comcast, AT&T, et al have shown that they cannot be trusted.
They haven't shown that to me, and I don't accept the argument that they are no longer promising something they don't need to promise means they're going to do the opposite. But that's a personal decision.
Also irrelevant. The question is not whether to trust Comcast, but trusting government. "Government" is the one that spies on our phone calls, can't manage NN regulation, and a host of other things. Civil forfeiture which charges objects with criminal violations and then confiscates them, while the government claims that this is not a penalty to the person who used to own that nice boat or car or stack of money. Local government agencies that bring in Stingray. Or attach GPS trackers to people's cars. Or use IR cameras to look through the walls of homes. Or any of a large number of other things that they would do were it not for the courts to stop some of it.
So the question remains: who do people who exhibit a complete distrust of the government suddenly accept promises at face value from the same government?
You think we're looking around going, "where's the government?"
Yes, I've seen exactly that sentiment from many people who post to this forum. "Government's job is to provide what monopolies will not" is just one recent example.
I am delighted to say you misread the proceedings.
In the summary, a "new planning document" that is dated Jan. 9, 2018 -- five days from now -- contains a clear outline of remaining steps. Wait a minute! Why the FUCK is the summary pointing to a BOULDER planning document when the story is about Fort Collins? Wow. I missed that. Fine. The rest of the points are still valid.
First, Fort Collins has pledged to uphold net neutrality as an ISP.
That's nice. I've heard governments pledge to do all kinds of things. It's naive to trust "pledges" when the courts have jurisdiction over those pledges, as well as the city council who can change their minds at any time. My fair city "pledged" that a new tax ON THE WATER BILL, to pay for the repair of a specific street, would go away when the money was collected and the repairs complete. It never did. They decided that the method of taxes on the bill for water worked so well, they kept that road tax and added tree trimming, bus service, and a couple of others. That's what their pledge was worth. We had a tax levy that the government pledged would be used for building maintenance and city pool repairs, and the money went to build a really fancy new building and the "best outdoor water park in the valley".
Pledges from governments aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on.
Second, we can argue whether Comcast is a de facto mopnopoly or a de jure monopoly in Fort Collins,
No, we have no possible argument about whether Comcast as an ISP is a monopoly of any kind. If you actually look at the situation, you'll find 8 different ISPs that serve Fort Collins. A couple of them offer 1000Mbps (gigabit) fiber service. One of them is Level 3, a major backbone provider. So no, there is no monopoly ISP status for Comcast either in law or in fact.
Comcast has exclusive access to the cable through which they provide internet
Big deal. Comcast has exclusive access to something they own. So what?
The notion that Comcast cannot compete is ludicrous. Their profits are too high for them to leave town,
Right now their profits are probably good. You do realize that profits rely on having customers, right? That when the city that regulates Comcast starts undercutting Comcast, do you imagine that nobody will switch? If nobody will switch, then why build the city service? If everyone needs it and thus switches, Comcast's profits go away. This is pretty simple, basic stuff.
Other companies have gone out of business when a undercutting competitor comes to town, and the only reason Comcast would not is because it would be subsidized by other parts of the company. Comcast as a whole will not shutter their doors, but the local company might. Will they stay in a place where they consistently lose money? Would you?
You do realize that there are regular protests and efforts to keep Walmart out of a location because it can mean local stores go out of business. Walmart undercuts the competition, and sometimes that means the competition goes away. Borders, another example, came to our fair city and we lost the one really good magazine dealer because of it. Then Borders couldn't make a profit here and they folded. This is not rocket science.
I hope things work out well for you, but trusting government only because they are giving you something you want is pretty naive. Hatred of Comcast will get you only so far. I understand you have a vested interest in getting cheap internet so you will argue in favor of a government solution to what you think is a problem, but when the eggs wind up in one basket and you realize the government did not keep yet another "pledge" that they weren't legally bound to keep, it will be too late.
I guess the takeaway from this moderation is that we should trust the government when they promise us cheap internet, but otherwise they are untrustable, bought-and-paid for corrupt appendages of the corporate megaliths. Ok.
People may protest, but it ain't gonna happen (note that the banners are still hanging up).
There have been an untold number of monuments or other items removed from public spaces because those who oppose the concepts don't want to make use of the same process that allowed the monuments to be installed to install their own, they'd rather get the ones they don't like banned. It is also not a given that the banner system will survive this year's protests. I know if I was in charge of that program I'd get bloody well tired of people whining about it. I wouldn't care if it was legal or not, I'd just not do it anymore. (I'd be a city worker, I don't get paid enough to deal with all the crap, and my job is secure whether I do this one program or not. Ta' to that!)
It's nice to believe that it won't happen, but as I ended last time, utopia is a dream.
I'd much rather have the government, with restrictions from checks and balancing and the bill of rights,
It will be those very "Bill of Rights" that will be used to enable the government to control in ways you won't like. Freedom of speech? Well, do you notice that there are abridgements of commercial speech? There's no mention of "commercial" or "noncommercial" in our Bill of Rights, but the government has read such a limitation into it. The government has consistently read "freedom FROM religion" where it says "freedom OF religion", as if the government allowing a religious agency to exist is somehow promoting a state religion. (And some people think that the government NOT taxing something is a "tax rebate" to both the producer and consumer.)
than a company that just does whatever is most profitable.
It is most profitable for a company to not alienate any customers, including those who visit religious websites. None of the anti-theists who oppose religion at all appearances will drop their subscriptions to an ISP, but they'll turn Heaven and Earth to get others blocked -- if the government with "freedom from religion" ensconced in the Bill of Rights becomes in charge of the internet.
And is far more likely to give in to public opinion than the government is.
Hardly. The Ninth Circuit would never order Comcast to block religious websites on their network. It isn't such a given that they wouldn't tell Wapakanko City that they much install such a block. It is very unlikely that any "alleged CP site" is going to go to court to challenge a city block on their site, and when people start being accused of being pedophiles if they oppose their city's blocking of such sites on general principles they'll not be very vocal about it, either.
No, it is absurd to be untrusting of government but then accept everything they do at face value just because it is something you want them to do and it means cheap internet for you. I might also point out, when the government becomes the internet it will be because they can undercut any competition and you won't have any choice anymore. It will be a true monopoly. If the government decides to block pornhub.com you will have no option.
Maybe I should make it my sig -- Utopia is a dream, but reality can be a nightmare.
I almost mentioned it last time, but I will now. Fox had a very short lived TV series called "Utopia" where a band of hardy folks were set up in a place where they got to set all their rules. I think it was based on a British show. Anyway, the series lasted just a few episodes when it turned out that the "Utopians" were just as fickle and spiteful and capitalistic (including profit driven) and selfish as all the rest of us. They were booting fellow Utopians out of the compound, and punishing them for not working hard enough. Fun to watch, a good lesson about human nature and societies. It proves, Utopia is a dream, reality is a nightmare.