I would like to remind everyone here that NASA is NOT a civilian space agency, it a branch of the Department of Defense and if you read the charter you shouldn't be surprised at all about this.
Why do people apply for jobs at a organization, and yet have NO CLUE about who they are working for?
This is why I won't work for the government or military anymore. After over two years working as a civilian contractor, I drove in, sat down at my desk and ready to get working when my supervisor said I was no longer employed as of that moment. Several of us were let go that day. Not because of poor performance as my review from only two months prior was excellent and I was asked not to quit even! We were doing excellent work!
The problem I had was the military wanted to save a few bucks for some war on the other side of the world, so they were eliminating positions. You would think at least two weeks notice as common courtesy. Oh well... It was a great learning experience but never again.
I have a FiOS 20MB down/5MB up pipe. If I and my neighbors started consuming all that bandwdith 24x7x365, we would easily over run the uplink capacity and you can bet VZ would come knocking. ISP's will continue to punish bandwidth hogs until the ISP are sued for unfair business practices or the press gets bad enough. For example, Verizon Wireless just recently started telling their EVDO customers that there was a 5GB/mo limit where they used to market unlimited access. My original contract said nohting out a bandwidth limit.
If they are going to limit bandwidth usage, they should state such up front and in no uncertain terms. But they don't.
I used P2P, Internet Radio and TV, downloaded movies from various services including Amazon and Wallmart.com and so on. Whatever their limit is, I'm sure I'm not the only one hitting it. I've spoken with people from all over including friends down the street who have been been terminated (like me) by Concast for using the Internet too much.
> Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license?
Of course it is. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Frankly, I'm glad you don't work for us. The fact that you would consider "rewriting" code that works well just because it was written by someone external to your company doesn't speak well for your sense of business priorities or usage of time.
The RIAA probably holds the position that a filesharer is responsible not only for the direct downloads he generates, but for subsequent distribution of the file as well. 10 * 10 * 10 gets you over 750 pretty fast.
But wouldn't the RIAA have to prove the songs were pulled down that many times to get that number?
After all, we don't convict people because we think they might have done something like this... Yeah, I realize that sounds a bit naive but that's the America I was taught about in grade school:D
"As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders.",
This has been a point of contention between me and Comcast this last year. When people say P2P is bad and impairs the other customers experience. What exactly does that include then? Are we at the point where we have to state what services are available over the Internet and all other's are "bad"?
Do we need a "Internet Bill of Rights"? I thought the FCC already had made a statement on what customers are entitled to from ISP's. Which means Comcast (and other's filtering P2P) are in violation of the FCC's declaration.
The doom and gloom Internet bandwidth projections I've read assume that many of us start sharing videos and watch on-demand HD, not cached locally with our service providers, but downloaded at random. That's a bunch of crock. Our ISPs will be quite happy to cache this data locally, easing the burden on the backbone. All we need is a few simple strategies to help enable it. I'm doing my part. We geeks will overcome.
If we have plenty of bandwidth then I wonder why companies (like Comcast) are terminating user's who use it too much and blocking applications such as Lotus Notes and P2P
I've been using Linux on my work Desktop / Laptop since 1999 so I'm very familiar with what my OS / Software needs are.
While I liked using Windows apps since 3.0 came out, I think I'm finished with them unless they pull a 180.
I've never been a great fan of any version of Windows (At home I used DOS until I upgraded to a computer that was preloaded with Windows 98SE), I simply use them because I've had to. Now, based on what I've been reading, I see Vista as a good reason to leave the Windows world for other OSes.
Not Windows. The applications written for Windows.
Windows started out being crap and unstable. It's improved but it still has that same unstable crap hanging around.
I used to work for Gupta Corp in the 90's and was amused to learn they hired a Windows OS programmer to re-write Windows to stabilize the darn thing so their programs will run cleanly under it. Windows was that bad.:D
In the end Vista will be inevitable. Drivers not available anymore except for Vista, important programs that are Vista-only. Security updates not being made available for XP anymore. (Look at how the support for Win2k went downhill once WinXP was released. For NT 4.0, they stopped giving patches before the official end-of-line) Believe me, it will happen, eventually. Give it another year or two. I didn't switch to WinXP before SP2 was very mature (Fall 2005). Before I was Win2k all the way, and before that NT 4.0....
Try running NT 4.0 these days... Won't get you very far. That's the future of Windows XP. They are going to drop it like a hot potato.
I'm already making plans to drop Windows completely from my home computers. The only thing I do on Windows these days is gaming. Everything else is running Linux from firewall to my MythTV box.
I'll probably go to a PS3 for gaming or Wii. I figure I can purchase several for the price of a single Wintendo PC and network them.
My biggest beef with Microsoft has been their DRM and other Gestapo controls placed into Vista. I will not support them and encourage everyone else to look for alternatives.
I've been using Linux on my work Desktop / Laptop since 1999 so I'm very familiar with what my OS / Software needs are.
While I liked using Windows apps since 3.0 came out, I think I'm finished with them unless they pull a 180.
Now, since I'm a business class user, they expect traffic levels they would see from a business that has anywhere from a few computers to fifty computers. Now 300 Gb/mo doesn't seem so high when you compare it to one of the sites I do contracting for--they have 40 workstations, 3 servers, and are constantly transferring high res x-rays to other sites.
The only part that pissed me off about Comcast calling was that they simply never told me of their magical cap, and they refused to tell me what it was--just that I had run over it.
I would have had no problem if they flat out told me their rates and caps--like 500 Gb for $80/mo.
I upgraded to their business class also but they shut it down saying I needed to upgrade to their enterprise class (think that's what they called it). Oh and that's cheap for only $10,000 to install the line and about $2,000 a month.
Yeah, I had the same response and asked if they were on crack when they quoted me that price.
I'm going for Fiber to the home when it comes... someday.
Comcast will simply come out and say "Hey, we gave you users a chance. Now, we throttle Australian-ISP style". You'll get unlimited Internet. It'll just be at 6-8Mbps in short bursts, and the rest throttled down to 256kbps.
It comes down to people wanting champagne internet connectivity on a beer budget. Want 10Mbps up and down? Pay for a real internet connection.
It's interesting you mention this. Other countries including Australia provide faster speeds at a fraction of the prices here in America.
ISP's have every right to throttle, limit, block traffic as they so desire. As either a method of protecting their user base or ensuring a quality of service.
You might want to complain to the FCC about that as they have stated that ISP's are required to provide certain things as part of the ISP's service to you the customer. Which doesn't allow for limiting or blocking traffic as they desire.
You're paying for the use of their network. It's not yours. No part of it is yours. When you rent a car, you pay for it's use. It. is. not. yours.
Ahh but with renting a car, if the renter allows you to only drive in residential roads and NOT use the freeway (since we all know freeways are dangerous... they go very very fast), you can choose to go with another company providing similar services.
And in the words of Brian Roberts (Comcast CEO), "We have no Competition".
I agree. DSL is slower and wireless options are even slower. No competition is good... for one side.
Which once again goes back to my "it's all in your head" comment. Comcast didn't make such promises and even if they did? Anyone who has even a glimmer of technical knowledge (supposedly everyone on this forum) could tell you how impossible that is on a shared network.* I can only conclude that in the face of such a fact that those repeating it hope that constant usage will make it come true.
Huh?
I do it all the time. It's called QoS.
Perhaps Comcast should hire somebody who knows how to use it:D
Can you point me to the fraudulent advertising? If you believe that subscribing to broadband means "maximum possible bandwith all of the time" then you are an idiot. No one pretends to offer that, and the big ol' words "up to" are in every add ever seen.
Comcast is the id10t for advertising unlimited use for a flat monthly fee. Sure they don't do that anymore. But then again I didn't receive the memo that THEY changed the terms of service when I was a customer.
And while some people are more than willing to sell everyone's rights up the river for fist full of gold, there is also a good community of people who have morals and are willing to refuse to obey bad laws.
Fist full of gold? WoW!
The last guy who did this got a small bag of silver for his work. Inflation??
It is depressingly cynical to look at a field of candidates that include men like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and then turn around and say "yep, all the candidates are the same old thing, not worth a damn, believe in nothing but power for its own sake, care only about themselves, etc.". The right to vote is important and useful to use, and if there are men like that in the field, to use that vote to support them. Unelectability is a buzzword to convince people to not use their vote to matter; Abraham Lincoln was an "unelectable" nobody from the boondocks, and look how that turned out.
Agreed however I think it's sad we have to go back 200 years to find an example of this. Looking back I'm not sure other's would make as great an example.
Throttling the network is fine to accomplish QoS goals.
Comcast, however, is forging RST packets. They're taking the traffic and altering the content of it.
No legitimate QoS solution does this. Delay the content, fine. Slow the transmission rate of the content, fine.
Discard the traffic and generate a forged reply? Not fine.
Excellent point!
If Comcast was managing their network as they "claim" they are, they would be using QoS as defined by the Industry long ago. I've been arguing that they are not "slowing" it down as they stated. RST packets don't do that. They terminate the connection abruptly with no further communication after that. That's what a Reset packet does.
And forging traffic could be a criminal offense. I'm very curious where this is going. I've also wondered if this is just the latest goofy scheme of theirs since terminating user accounts for using the Internet has worked out soo well.
They simply point to the TOS/AUP and say "see, they are bad because we told them not to do the following...". Which is a load of crap. Those documents would make a lawyer crazy.
Do the users of comcast have a limited amount of bandwidth usage per account and do these 'hidden' messages count towards this bandwidth usuage? I think these are important questions as it would result in the customer being charged for a service they did not receive.
they do and it's variable (depends where you live).
In some area's people I've spoken with have downloaded 800 Gigs a month with no problems from the company (no nasty calls from their abuse department). Other's have downloaded as little as 70 Gigs and have been terminated. Go figure.
If it's charged to the service they didn't receive then they won't tell you and there is no way to resolve it. They will simply call you and terminate within 30 days if they feel you are a bad customer.
Essentially "cherry picking". Here in the State of Utah it's ok if companies like Comcast do that but not Utopia. They are bad if they "cherry pick" at all.
That's an issue which has recently been brought up by Senator Stephenson and Rep. Craig Frank from the Telecommunications subcommittee. Not very found of Utopia but they love companies like comcast.
Well, when they get 100% of the money for all the services they claim to provide, they better back it up by providing 100% service for all the services they contracted to provide me. Because, if they don't i can sue them for False Advertising, Mis-representation of merchandise involved, delibrate intent to defraud, and a raft of state laws.
The problem is they believe they can get away with it. If it's in their TOS/AUP (no matter how grey it might be), they are willing to push and see if they can get away with it. They won't actually break the law. Heaven forbid. But they will push it to the edge. They've been doing stuff like that for years apparently.
They can't claim to police my activities in the same way Walmart can't question a buyer of handguns in its Keene, NH store just because its store clerk felt like it.
They did that once and was slapped hard in court in 2002 I believe. I did a google for "Comcast" and "1984 privacy act" and found they were monitoring what you did but it's ok they told the court, it was only in specific areas. they claim they have since stopped.
If i were the person who sues comcast, i would send out a subpoena demanding ALL emails relating to this PLUS pull network administrators on oath to say it.
I bet Comcast would settle before going to court.
Perhaps. They have it in the TOS/AUP however that you can't run a server and since uploading it considered a server activity....
I guess nobody taught Comcast that POST operations in a browser is also uploading... but I digress:D
Yeah, now all the terrorists have to do to bring down the US government is to send lots of emails with really big attachments to vice_president@whitehouse.gov.
Remind them it's whitehouse.gov and NOT whitehouse.com;-)
Correct me if I'm wrong but I understood that while the Jury found her guilty, she is now claiming the fines are not consistent with damages the RIAA experience. That since the songs in question are around 99 cents from iTunes (for example) and the RIAA receives around 70 cents from the sale, that the judgment should come down to reflect real damages not some made up number.
Basically that the fine was unconstitutionally excessive.
But they're the ones who have f*cked up, and want to have their cake and eat it too. They're the ones who still have "Unlimited Bandwidth!!!" ads at the malls still today.
I'd love to see one. You can post it on my blog or send a note there where I can find it and post it.
I was one of the original customers in my area when they came four years ago. They advertised "Unlimited use for a flat monthly fee". I still have the advertisement and have posted a link on my blog so people can see it's true. Unlimited use means All You Can Eat:D
I'm though with the company and have been pushing for Network Neutrality and Utopia fiber to the home in Utah. I'm glad Concast did this actually. Nothing like the company validating their own arrogance.
You know they aren't too concerned with QoS because they would shape *all* your bandwidth instead of just torrent traffic if you are using "too much," whatever that means. I say if I pay for X amount of bandwidth DAMN YOU if you say I can't use it all.
I've been wondering if this is why Comcast is terminating user's internet accounts all over the place. I was terminated in Janaury, 30 days later another family down my street was terminated along with several other friends in my neighborhood. Then I find more through the Salt Lake Valley, googling I found more and more and.... well... you get the point.
It's becoming a serious issue. I understand the company needs to make money. They however are taking this way over board. What's unfortunate is they claim people are using too much bandwidth and yet refuse to provide ANY guidelines on what is acceptable. The argument they use is "well.. if we tell then people will use up to that much". I don't understand what's wrong with that. The Government posts speed limit signs to give people a maximum speed limit so they can (hopefully) make good decisions. If the Government didn't provide guidelines then we'd have an awful lot more problems on the roads beyond what we experience today:D
This has less to do with Net neutrality and more to do with not spoofing (fraudulent) packets. You can still shape traffic, you just can't fraudulently send packets to people.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to remind everyone here that NASA is NOT a civilian space agency, it a branch of the Department of Defense and if you read the charter you shouldn't be surprised at all about this.
Why do people apply for jobs at a organization, and yet have NO CLUE about who they are working for?
This is why I won't work for the government or military anymore. After over two years working as a civilian contractor, I drove in, sat down at my desk and ready to get working when my supervisor said I was no longer employed as of that moment. Several of us were let go that day. Not because of poor performance as my review from only two months prior was excellent and I was asked not to quit even! We were doing excellent work!
The problem I had was the military wanted to save a few bucks for some war on the other side of the world, so they were eliminating positions. You would think at least two weeks notice as common courtesy. Oh well... It was a great learning experience but never again.
When I decided to by mine, I just set up a script that checked Amazon every minute or two.
I'm doing the same thing for Duke Nukem Forever - no sign of it yet though.
Rumor has it, you missed the release. It's available for download right now!
Yeah, I know, it was a joke. Programming it in Perl was enough to convince me
I have a FiOS 20MB down/5MB up pipe. If I and my neighbors started consuming all that bandwdith 24x7x365, we would easily over run the uplink capacity and you can bet VZ would come knocking. ISP's will continue to punish bandwidth hogs until the ISP are sued for unfair business practices or the press gets bad enough. For example, Verizon Wireless just recently started telling their EVDO customers that there was a 5GB/mo limit where they used to market unlimited access. My original contract said nohting out a bandwidth limit.
:-)
If they are going to limit bandwidth usage, they should state such up front and in no uncertain terms. But they don't.
I had that experience with . I still don't know what their bandwidth limit it and they won't tell you either. I've spoken with reporter after report. they called and couldn't find out either Comcast's PR department worked for their money this year
I used P2P, Internet Radio and TV, downloaded movies from various services including Amazon and Wallmart.com and so on. Whatever their limit is, I'm sure I'm not the only one hitting it. I've spoken with people from all over including friends down the street who have been been terminated (like me) by Concast for using the Internet too much.
But there is no limit.
Of course. We understand.
> Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license?
;-)
Of course it is. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Frankly, I'm glad you don't work for us. The fact that you would consider "rewriting" code that works well just because it was written by someone external to your company doesn't speak well for your sense of business priorities or usage of time.
Let me guess. You work for Microsoft Corp?
The RIAA probably holds the position that a filesharer is responsible not only for the direct downloads he generates, but for subsequent distribution of the file as well. 10 * 10 * 10 gets you over 750 pretty fast.
:D
But wouldn't the RIAA have to prove the songs were pulled down that many times to get that number?
After all, we don't convict people because we think they might have done something like this... Yeah, I realize that sounds a bit naive but that's the America I was taught about in grade school
"As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders.",
This has been a point of contention between me and Comcast this last year. When people say P2P is bad and impairs the other customers experience. What exactly does that include then? Are we at the point where we have to state what services are available over the Internet and all other's are "bad"?
Do we need a "Internet Bill of Rights"? I thought the FCC already had made a statement on what customers are entitled to from ISP's. Which means Comcast (and other's filtering P2P) are in violation of the FCC's declaration.
The doom and gloom Internet bandwidth projections I've read assume that many of us start sharing videos and watch on-demand HD, not cached locally with our service providers, but downloaded at random. That's a bunch of crock. Our ISPs will be quite happy to cache this data locally, easing the burden on the backbone. All we need is a few simple strategies to help enable it. I'm doing my part. We geeks will overcome.
If we have plenty of bandwidth then I wonder why companies (like Comcast) are terminating user's who use it too much and blocking applications such as Lotus Notes and P2P
I've been using Linux on my work Desktop / Laptop since 1999 so I'm very familiar with what my OS / Software needs are.
While I liked using Windows apps since 3.0 came out, I think I'm finished with them unless they pull a 180.
I've never been a great fan of any version of Windows (At home I used DOS until I upgraded to a computer that was preloaded with Windows 98SE), I simply use them because I've had to. Now, based on what I've been reading, I see Vista as a good reason to leave the Windows world for other OSes.
Not Windows. The applications written for Windows.
Windows started out being crap and unstable. It's improved but it still has that same unstable crap hanging around.
I used to work for Gupta Corp in the 90's and was amused to learn they hired a Windows OS programmer to re-write Windows to stabilize the darn thing so their programs will run cleanly under it. Windows was that bad.
In the end Vista will be inevitable. Drivers not available anymore except for Vista, important programs that are Vista-only. Security updates not being made available for XP anymore. (Look at how the support for Win2k went downhill once WinXP was released. For NT 4.0, they stopped giving patches before the official end-of-line) Believe me, it will happen, eventually. Give it another year or two. I didn't switch to WinXP before SP2 was very mature (Fall 2005). Before I was Win2k all the way, and before that NT 4.0....
Try running NT 4.0 these days... Won't get you very far. That's the future of Windows XP. They are going to drop it like a hot potato.
I'm already making plans to drop Windows completely from my home computers. The only thing I do on Windows these days is gaming. Everything else is running Linux from firewall to my MythTV box.
I'll probably go to a PS3 for gaming or Wii. I figure I can purchase several for the price of a single Wintendo PC and network them.
My biggest beef with Microsoft has been their DRM and other Gestapo controls placed into Vista. I will not support them and encourage everyone else to look for alternatives.
I've been using Linux on my work Desktop / Laptop since 1999 so I'm very familiar with what my OS / Software needs are.
While I liked using Windows apps since 3.0 came out, I think I'm finished with them unless they pull a 180.
Now, since I'm a business class user, they expect traffic levels they would see from a business that has anywhere from a few computers to fifty computers. Now 300 Gb/mo doesn't seem so high when you compare it to one of the sites I do contracting for--they have 40 workstations, 3 servers, and are constantly transferring high res x-rays to other sites.
The only part that pissed me off about Comcast calling was that they simply never told me of their magical cap, and they refused to tell me what it was--just that I had run over it.
I would have had no problem if they flat out told me their rates and caps--like 500 Gb for $80/mo.
I upgraded to their business class also but they shut it down saying I needed to upgrade to their enterprise class (think that's what they called it). Oh and that's cheap for only $10,000 to install the line and about $2,000 a month.
Yeah, I had the same response and asked if they were on crack when they quoted me that price.
I'm going for Fiber to the home when it comes... someday.
Comcast will simply come out and say "Hey, we gave you users a chance. Now, we throttle Australian-ISP style". You'll get unlimited Internet. It'll just be at 6-8Mbps in short bursts, and the rest throttled down to 256kbps.
It comes down to people wanting champagne internet connectivity on a beer budget. Want 10Mbps up and down? Pay for a real internet connection.
It's interesting you mention this. Other countries including Australia provide faster speeds at a fraction of the prices here in America.
ISP's have every right to throttle, limit, block traffic as they so desire. As either a method of protecting their user base or ensuring a quality of service.
You might want to complain to the FCC about that as they have stated that ISP's are required to provide certain things as part of the ISP's service to you the customer. Which doesn't allow for limiting or blocking traffic as they desire.
The link has been posted here several times.
You're paying for the use of their network. It's not yours. No part of it is yours. When you rent a car, you pay for it's use. It. is. not. yours.
Ahh but with renting a car, if the renter allows you to only drive in residential roads and NOT use the freeway (since we all know freeways are dangerous... they go very very fast), you can choose to go with another company providing similar services.
And in the words of Brian Roberts (Comcast CEO), "We have no Competition".
I agree. DSL is slower and wireless options are even slower. No competition is good... for one side.
Which once again goes back to my "it's all in your head" comment. Comcast didn't make such promises and even if they did? Anyone who has even a glimmer of technical knowledge (supposedly everyone on this forum) could tell you how impossible that is on a shared network.* I can only conclude that in the face of such a fact that those repeating it hope that constant usage will make it come true.
:D
Huh?
I do it all the time. It's called QoS.
Perhaps Comcast should hire somebody who knows how to use it
Can you point me to the fraudulent advertising? If you believe that subscribing to broadband means "maximum possible bandwith all of the time" then you are an idiot. No one pretends to offer that, and the big ol' words "up to" are in every add ever seen.
Comcast is the id10t for advertising unlimited use for a flat monthly fee. Sure they don't do that anymore. But then again I didn't receive the memo that THEY changed the terms of service when I was a customer.
Some people call it bait and switch.
And while some people are more than willing to sell everyone's rights up the river for fist full of gold, there is also a good community of people who have morals and are willing to refuse to obey bad laws.
Fist full of gold? WoW!
The last guy who did this got a small bag of silver for his work. Inflation??
It is depressingly cynical to look at a field of candidates that include men like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and then turn around and say "yep, all the candidates are the same old thing, not worth a damn, believe in nothing but power for its own sake, care only about themselves, etc.". The right to vote is important and useful to use, and if there are men like that in the field, to use that vote to support them. Unelectability is a buzzword to convince people to not use their vote to matter; Abraham Lincoln was an "unelectable" nobody from the boondocks, and look how that turned out.
Agreed however I think it's sad we have to go back 200 years to find an example of this. Looking back I'm not sure other's would make as great an example.
Throttling the network is fine to accomplish QoS goals.
Comcast, however, is forging RST packets. They're taking the traffic and altering the content of it.
No legitimate QoS solution does this. Delay the content, fine. Slow the transmission rate of the content, fine.
Discard the traffic and generate a forged reply? Not fine.
Excellent point!
If Comcast was managing their network as they "claim" they are, they would be using QoS as defined by the Industry long ago. I've been arguing that they are not "slowing" it down as they stated. RST packets don't do that. They terminate the connection abruptly with no further communication after that. That's what a Reset packet does.
And forging traffic could be a criminal offense. I'm very curious where this is going. I've also wondered if this is just the latest goofy scheme of theirs since terminating user accounts for using the Internet has worked out soo well.
They simply point to the TOS/AUP and say "see, they are bad because we told them not to do the following...". Which is a load of crap. Those documents would make a lawyer crazy.
Do the users of comcast have a limited amount of bandwidth usage per account and do these 'hidden' messages count towards this bandwidth usuage? I think these are important questions as it would result in the customer being charged for a service they did not receive.
they do and it's variable (depends where you live).
In some area's people I've spoken with have downloaded 800 Gigs a month with no problems from the company (no nasty calls from their abuse department). Other's have downloaded as little as 70 Gigs and have been terminated. Go figure.
If it's charged to the service they didn't receive then they won't tell you and there is no way to resolve it. They will simply call you and terminate within 30 days if they feel you are a bad customer.
Essentially "cherry picking". Here in the State of Utah it's ok if companies like Comcast do that but not Utopia. They are bad if they "cherry pick" at all.
That's an issue which has recently been brought up by Senator Stephenson and Rep. Craig Frank from the Telecommunications subcommittee. Not very found of Utopia but they love companies like comcast.
Politicians... Go figure.
Well, when they get 100% of the money for all the services they claim to provide, they better back it up by providing 100% service for all the services they contracted to provide me.
:D
Because, if they don't i can sue them for False Advertising, Mis-representation of merchandise involved, delibrate intent to defraud, and a raft of state laws.
The problem is they believe they can get away with it. If it's in their TOS/AUP (no matter how grey it might be), they are willing to push and see if they can get away with it. They won't actually break the law. Heaven forbid. But they will push it to the edge. They've been doing stuff like that for years apparently.
They can't claim to police my activities in the same way Walmart can't question a buyer of handguns in its Keene, NH store just because its store clerk felt like it.
They did that once and was slapped hard in court in 2002 I believe. I did a google for "Comcast" and "1984 privacy act" and found they were monitoring what you did but it's ok they told the court, it was only in specific areas. they claim they have since stopped.
If i were the person who sues comcast, i would send out a subpoena demanding ALL emails relating to this PLUS pull network administrators on oath to say it.
I bet Comcast would settle before going to court.
Perhaps. They have it in the TOS/AUP however that you can't run a server and since uploading it considered a server activity....
I guess nobody taught Comcast that POST operations in a browser is also uploading... but I digress
Yeah, now all the terrorists have to do to bring down the US government is to send lots of emails with really big attachments to vice_president@whitehouse.gov.
;-)
Remind them it's whitehouse.gov and NOT whitehouse.com
3. The Capitol v. Thomas case is far from over.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I understood that while the Jury found her guilty, she is now claiming the fines are not consistent with damages the RIAA experience. That since the songs in question are around 99 cents from iTunes (for example) and the RIAA receives around 70 cents from the sale, that the judgment should come down to reflect real damages not some made up number.
Basically that the fine was unconstitutionally excessive.
But they're the ones who have f*cked up, and want to have their cake and eat it too. They're the ones who still have "Unlimited Bandwidth!!!" ads at the malls still today.
:D
I'd love to see one. You can post it on my blog or send a note there where I can find it and post it.
I was one of the original customers in my area when they came four years ago. They advertised "Unlimited use for a flat monthly fee". I still have the advertisement and have posted a link on my blog so people can see it's true. Unlimited use means All You Can Eat
I'm though with the company and have been pushing for Network Neutrality and Utopia fiber to the home in Utah. I'm glad Concast did this actually. Nothing like the company validating their own arrogance.
You know they aren't too concerned with QoS because they would shape *all* your bandwidth instead of just torrent traffic if you are using "too much," whatever that means. I say if I pay for X amount of bandwidth DAMN YOU if you say I can't use it all.
.... well... you get the point.
:D
I've been wondering if this is why Comcast is terminating user's internet accounts all over the place. I was terminated in Janaury, 30 days later another family down my street was terminated along with several other friends in my neighborhood. Then I find more through the Salt Lake Valley, googling I found more and more and
It's becoming a serious issue. I understand the company needs to make money. They however are taking this way over board. What's unfortunate is they claim people are using too much bandwidth and yet refuse to provide ANY guidelines on what is acceptable. The argument they use is "well.. if we tell then people will use up to that much". I don't understand what's wrong with that. The Government posts speed limit signs to give people a maximum speed limit so they can (hopefully) make good decisions. If the Government didn't provide guidelines then we'd have an awful lot more problems on the roads beyond what we experience today
This has less to do with Net neutrality and more to do with not spoofing (fraudulent) packets. You can still shape traffic, you just can't fraudulently send packets to people.
:D
sure you can. Comcast does it all the time