Unfortunately, these gag orders also make it difficult to get any sort of feel for how they are being abused.
Screw that. I don't want a "feel" for the orders... as a citizen I want hard numbers detailing how they were used, who issued them, and why. Anything less than full disclosure is unacceptable, given the nature of these things. They want power, there's supposed to be accountability. That is in the spirit of the Constitution.
The other reason for having a warrant is that, should the individual under suspicion be formally accused of a crime, the lack of judicial oversight and abuse of process should get the charges thrown out. I doubt the FBI cares much about that in the current context, since they're casting a wide net, knowing full well that few, if any, of the people they are illegally investigating will ever be accused of anything. Furthermore, should they uncover actionable evidence of criminal activity (even crimes that they would never have found without illegal surveillance) they can just go get a warrant then. In the meantime, they can do what they want and not worry about warrants.
In an absolute sense, this is pretty incredible, but when you look at the history of the FBI it's just business as usual. They got reigned in after Hoover's abuses, but most of those restrictions got removed with the Patriot act. So know we're back in fuck-the-citizen mode, with Congress seemingly unwilling to do anything about it. Worse yet, the Feds have surveillance tools that Hoover's crowd could only dream about.
I know some people that used to be in the FBI, and they said they left because they didn't like the caliber of people that have been taking over since Bush began (ahem) "restructuring" law enforcement.
In my case, I have a Linksys WRT54G V4 with the Tomato alternate firmware flashed into it. It's a phenomenal piece of work, and bandwidth monitoring is only one of the improvements it has over the stock firmware. QOS is another area where Tomato really helps, particularly if your network has multiple users behind your router and you do a lot of downloading. Helps keep everybody happy.
I have AT&T Callvantage VoIP service (which, by the way, I've been very pleased with) and it does have 911 support. Not through our local 911 center, I don't believe, but through some third-party operation. Never had to use it, but my understanding is that such support is a legal requirement for offering phone service. Well, at least in areas where first-responders use 911. If the VoIP box is disconnected from the Internet or loses power for more than a few minutes, when you pick up the receiver it won't let you make a call until you verify (by pressing "1") that you haven't moved then unit to another address.
You may seem happy with it now, but when the 250GB goes down to 150gb, then 100, then 50, then 25, you won't be so happy. This is obviously just a step in that direction for Comcast.
In Australia, you pay more for more download quota. I can only download 25GB a month, and I pay $60 for that. 250GB plans don't exist here.
Nah... that would be hard to do since people don't like being squeezed. That was the whole point of the hidden caps they had before: they could squeeze customers (or get rid of them) without giving them any metric to know if they were being bent over the table. Now we have a number to work with, so it'll be harder to try and cut us back. Plus which, now the competition has something to advertise against, which is also a good thing, "Why stick with Comcast's 250 GB/month for $80 when you can have 300 GB/month for $60 with XYZ Corp's Internet service!"
No, I think another poster hit the nail on the head: this is for the future. Right now, very few customers are going to use 250 Gb. Four or five years from now (or maybe even sooner) that 250 Gb is going to seem pretty limiting to a substantial number of users. But at that point it will be entrenched, and then they'll be able to charge more and get away with it.
Frankly, I expect that Robertson asshole to do something weaselly. We're all just guessing what it will be but, folks, remember this is Comcast. Whatever they're planning, odds are we're not going to like it.
Honestly, they can't call it unlimited anymore. Unlimited has a set definition.
Sure they can! It just means that you can be connected to the Internet for an unlimited period of time. They'll just claim that the term "Unlimited" never had anything to do with actual data transfer.
I have another request: Existing customers should not be forced over to this new policy until they either cancel or move. At least show the customers they pulled in via their advertising a little mercy.
Tough call... imaginary floating bandwidth cap, that might or might not be over 250 Gb/month at any given time, or a known quantity.
Get a compatible router and flash it with Tomato firmware. I doubt that Comcast will account for bandwidth use the same way that Tomato does, but at least it will give you a good idea when you're getting close.
Well, my router tracks my bandwidth usage, so now I'll know if I'm getting close. If nothing else, I guess that Comcast can't use the word "unlimited" in their marketing anymore. That's a good thing, I suppose.
If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use
Does that mean "given notice of termination"? I wouldn't put it past Comcast to just terminate those accounts, notice or otherwise.
Little by little the American Empire erodes, its more distant conquests taxing it more and more, its currency faltering, more of its talent having to be imported.
1. America is not an empire, not in the classical sense of the Roman, Persian, or British Empires that annexed country after country by main strength. Such comparisons to the United States are unwarranted, and serve only to confuse people. Our only "distant conquest" is Iraq, and we not only have no intention of annexing Iraq, but none of us really want to be there. It was a mistake, and one we're not likely to repeat. Furthermore, if we had any intentions of making a string of major conquests (like, oh, I don't know... the old Soviet Union?) we'd be building up our military rather than having reduced it considerably since its Cold War peak.
2. Our currency is faltering, no argument there. Whether that will prove to be a bad thing in the long run, as you presume to suppose, remains to be seen. The issue is not as simple as you would like to make out.
3. Where do you get the idea that we need to import more and more talent? What you mean is, certain large corporations feel the need to import cheap talent, instead of paying the going wage. Not the same thing, not the same thing at all. In addition, certain other nations (i.e. China and India) have felt the need to send gazillions of people here to essentially take over many of our institutional research programs. We didn't "import" them... they came here to study and take home what they've learned.
Congress has always fiddled... and the truth is, it's a goddamn good thing. I wish they'd fiddle more and stop passing so much bad and outright stupid law. It's good when your leaders aren't too efficient at doing screwing up your country: ours are way too good at it, and that's the problem.
The shareholders say, "basic research? how does that help our share value?"
More correctly, shareholders want to know how basic research helps their share price now. Everybody seems to agree that if you want to remain competitive long-term you need R&D... but nobody wants to forego guaranteed profits now for possible profits later. That's because we've turned into a shortsighted culture, and I don't know what will change that.
I dunno... fact is, the Bell System under old AT&T and the RBOCs gave us the most reliable phone service on the planet. Personally, I think that Judge Greene made a mistake in breaking up AT&T: he should have simply broken their lock on subscriber equipment, because as it turned out, we didn't need the phone company to build out the Internet and develop all the other cool stuff we have today. If you read his opinion on the breakup you'll realize that he thought that telecommunications innovation would only happen in the context of the phone system itself. He was wrong and we're still paying the price for his lack of vision.
Another fact, the original Bell System monopoly is simply not comparable to Microsoft, because AT&T was a government instituted monopoly. It was created because the Federal Government knew that the private sector would be far more efficient than the government at providing reliable, universal phone service. Furthermore, the Bell System was heavily regulated, with quality of service standards that by and large Ma Bell lived up to. Sure as hell they were more reliable and trustworthy than Comcast, SBC or any of the modern Baby Bells.
Did AT&T abuse it's position? To a certain degree I suppose, but they were a common carrier (the common carrier) with all the regulatory burden that that implies. They weren't cheap, but they were reliable, and they weren't allowed to cherry-pick customers for maximum profit.
scare americans with stories about chinese and indian basic research. forget the truth or distruth or mistruth or truthiness of those stories. just make an appeal to nationalism. in this way, you will get american funding for basic research
That's not how it works. Joe Public couldn't care less about basic research, and it doesn't really matter what country he lives in. Fact is, research is expensive, and there's no way to predict whether a given line will pay off. We only know that, in the long run, the payback is worth every penny we invest and more. Unfortunately, long-term thinking has always been in short supply.
Now, if you look at the history of basic research and the resultant leaps in technological capability, there are sharp discontinuities every time there's a major conflict. Forget "tribal chest thumping", think more about "tribal mass murder" and you'll see that nothing gets more funds directed into fundamental scientific research and applied technology than war. Hell, even when there's no active conflict, the mere threat of such serves to justify massive expenditures on all sides. World War II, the Cold War (and concomitant Space Race) are classic examples of how the military demands (and gets) untold billions of dollars (rubles, whatever) to spend on R&D. Yes, that money is primarily for military purposes, but the public benefits from (often pretty directly too) at least in the U.S. Our government has spun off a lot of military tech into the private sector over the years. Is that the most efficient way advance the state-of-the-art? No, probably not, but still a lot of good has come from it.
The net effect of all this, of course, is that Progress becomes a damned expensive proposition. Nevertheless, I'm happy to be a beneficiary of high tech that resulted from the last few big ones. I'm just hoping that I won't be a casualty in the next one.
The problem is that standards are evolving more quickly nowadays. What might have been a stable standard for a quarter century or more now might last only half that long (if that.)
Excellent idea. While you're at it, make sure to include one of the boot viruses sometimes found on those things. That way, the next generation will have some idea of what early twenty-first century Chinese malware was like.
The old saw that these alternative, renewables are whimsical, unreliable sources is purely a myth, predicated on a brain-dead dumb grid.
Well... they are whimsical and unreliable. That doesn't mean they can't be useful however. I agree with you there, but we're talking about a trillion-dollar investment for a nation that's teetering on the verge of economic collapse. I don't see it happening any time soon.
Some twenty years ago, back when those orange plasma displays were popular, a girl I used to work with said she'd gotten hold of some Compaq portables, and would I want to buy one? She was only asking a couple hundred bucks (I believe they cost several thousand new at the time.) So I stopped by to take a look, thinking I could really use a machine like that. That line of thought lasted right up until the system finished booting and a custom menu appeared with legend of a major national bank across the top. Given the price and the data on them, I figured they were hot (I asked what truck they'd fallen out of) and declined to buy one.
That was then, now we're in the Age of the World Wide Web, and there's just no excuse whatsoever for loading down a portable (read: easily stolen) computer system with vast quantities of confidential data. In fact, that really ought to be a law with few exceptions: customer and personal data must be stored on a server that is both physically and electronically protected. Period.
How many days do you think it will be before the government tries to charge him with something or the bank in question tries to sue him? I'd be pleasantly surprised if neither happened.
I dunno... it would be seriously bad PR to do that now that the story is all over the place. You can get away with screwing somebody like that if they report it to you privately: call in the gendarmes and have the Good Samaritan hauled off to the slammer. That happens more often than you might think (too many CIO/admin types that like to shift blame from themselves, and too many overzealous cops that take the easy way out.)
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Unfortunately, these gag orders also make it difficult to get any sort of feel for how they are being abused.
... as a citizen I want hard numbers detailing how they were used, who issued them, and why. Anything less than full disclosure is unacceptable, given the nature of these things. They want power, there's supposed to be accountability. That is in the spirit of the Constitution.
Screw that. I don't want a "feel" for the orders
Twinge. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Try "cringe" instead.
The other reason for having a warrant is that, should the individual under suspicion be formally accused of a crime, the lack of judicial oversight and abuse of process should get the charges thrown out. I doubt the FBI cares much about that in the current context, since they're casting a wide net, knowing full well that few, if any, of the people they are illegally investigating will ever be accused of anything. Furthermore, should they uncover actionable evidence of criminal activity (even crimes that they would never have found without illegal surveillance) they can just go get a warrant then. In the meantime, they can do what they want and not worry about warrants.
In an absolute sense, this is pretty incredible, but when you look at the history of the FBI it's just business as usual. They got reigned in after Hoover's abuses, but most of those restrictions got removed with the Patriot act. So know we're back in fuck-the-citizen mode, with Congress seemingly unwilling to do anything about it. Worse yet, the Feds have surveillance tools that Hoover's crowd could only dream about.
I know some people that used to be in the FBI, and they said they left because they didn't like the caliber of people that have been taking over since Bush began (ahem) "restructuring" law enforcement.
In my case, I have a Linksys WRT54G V4 with the Tomato alternate firmware flashed into it. It's a phenomenal piece of work, and bandwidth monitoring is only one of the improvements it has over the stock firmware. QOS is another area where Tomato really helps, particularly if your network has multiple users behind your router and you do a lot of downloading. Helps keep everybody happy.
I have AT&T Callvantage VoIP service (which, by the way, I've been very pleased with) and it does have 911 support. Not through our local 911 center, I don't believe, but through some third-party operation. Never had to use it, but my understanding is that such support is a legal requirement for offering phone service. Well, at least in areas where first-responders use 911. If the VoIP box is disconnected from the Internet or loses power for more than a few minutes, when you pick up the receiver it won't let you make a call until you verify (by pressing "1") that you haven't moved then unit to another address.
Androbuntu? Like, Ubuntu but for real men? Now that's probably an untapped market (although there is Debian).
No, Ubuntroid. Although, actually, that sounds more like some kind of medical condition.
You may seem happy with it now, but when the 250GB goes down to 150gb, then 100, then 50, then 25, you won't be so happy. This is obviously just a step in that direction for Comcast. In Australia, you pay more for more download quota. I can only download 25GB a month, and I pay $60 for that. 250GB plans don't exist here.
Nah ... that would be hard to do since people don't like being squeezed. That was the whole point of the hidden caps they had before: they could squeeze customers (or get rid of them) without giving them any metric to know if they were being bent over the table. Now we have a number to work with, so it'll be harder to try and cut us back. Plus which, now the competition has something to advertise against, which is also a good thing, "Why stick with Comcast's 250 GB/month for $80 when you can have 300 GB/month for $60 with XYZ Corp's Internet service!"
No, I think another poster hit the nail on the head: this is for the future. Right now, very few customers are going to use 250 Gb. Four or five years from now (or maybe even sooner) that 250 Gb is going to seem pretty limiting to a substantial number of users. But at that point it will be entrenched, and then they'll be able to charge more and get away with it.
Frankly, I expect that Robertson asshole to do something weaselly. We're all just guessing what it will be but, folks, remember this is Comcast. Whatever they're planning, odds are we're not going to like it.
That, actually, is a good point. I think we may see a lot of people becoming less tolerant of the crap that Web sites throw at them.
Personally, I use AdBlock and Privoxy. Between the two I don't have much of a problem with ads, and I don't see Flash unless I want it.
Honestly, they can't call it unlimited anymore. Unlimited has a set definition.
Sure they can! It just means that you can be connected to the Internet for an unlimited period of time. They'll just claim that the term "Unlimited" never had anything to do with actual data transfer.
I have another request: Existing customers should not be forced over to this new policy until they either cancel or move. At least show the customers they pulled in via their advertising a little mercy.
Tough call ... imaginary floating bandwidth cap, that might or might not be over 250 Gb/month at any given time, or a known quantity.
Comcast sucks, no doubt about it.
Get a compatible router and flash it with Tomato firmware. I doubt that Comcast will account for bandwidth use the same way that Tomato does, but at least it will give you a good idea when you're getting close.
Well, my router tracks my bandwidth usage, so now I'll know if I'm getting close. If nothing else, I guess that Comcast can't use the word "unlimited" in their marketing anymore. That's a good thing, I suppose.
If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use
Does that mean "given notice of termination"? I wouldn't put it past Comcast to just terminate those accounts, notice or otherwise.
Little by little the American Empire erodes, its more distant conquests taxing it more and more, its currency faltering, more of its talent having to be imported.
... the old Soviet Union?) we'd be building up our military rather than having reduced it considerably since its Cold War peak.
... they came here to study and take home what they've learned.
... and the truth is, it's a goddamn good thing. I wish they'd fiddle more and stop passing so much bad and outright stupid law. It's good when your leaders aren't too efficient at doing screwing up your country: ours are way too good at it, and that's the problem.
1. America is not an empire, not in the classical sense of the Roman, Persian, or British Empires that annexed country after country by main strength. Such comparisons to the United States are unwarranted, and serve only to confuse people. Our only "distant conquest" is Iraq, and we not only have no intention of annexing Iraq, but none of us really want to be there. It was a mistake, and one we're not likely to repeat. Furthermore, if we had any intentions of making a string of major conquests (like, oh, I don't know
2. Our currency is faltering, no argument there. Whether that will prove to be a bad thing in the long run, as you presume to suppose, remains to be seen. The issue is not as simple as you would like to make out.
3. Where do you get the idea that we need to import more and more talent? What you mean is, certain large corporations feel the need to import cheap talent, instead of paying the going wage. Not the same thing, not the same thing at all. In addition, certain other nations (i.e. China and India) have felt the need to send gazillions of people here to essentially take over many of our institutional research programs. We didn't "import" them
Congress has always fiddled
The shareholders say, "basic research? how does that help our share value?"
... but nobody wants to forego guaranteed profits now for possible profits later. That's because we've turned into a shortsighted culture, and I don't know what will change that.
More correctly, shareholders want to know how basic research helps their share price now. Everybody seems to agree that if you want to remain competitive long-term you need R&D
I dunno ... fact is, the Bell System under old AT&T and the RBOCs gave us the most reliable phone service on the planet. Personally, I think that Judge Greene made a mistake in breaking up AT&T: he should have simply broken their lock on subscriber equipment, because as it turned out, we didn't need the phone company to build out the Internet and develop all the other cool stuff we have today. If you read his opinion on the breakup you'll realize that he thought that telecommunications innovation would only happen in the context of the phone system itself. He was wrong and we're still paying the price for his lack of vision.
Another fact, the original Bell System monopoly is simply not comparable to Microsoft, because AT&T was a government instituted monopoly. It was created because the Federal Government knew that the private sector would be far more efficient than the government at providing reliable, universal phone service. Furthermore, the Bell System was heavily regulated, with quality of service standards that by and large Ma Bell lived up to. Sure as hell they were more reliable and trustworthy than Comcast, SBC or any of the modern Baby Bells.
Did AT&T abuse it's position? To a certain degree I suppose, but they were a common carrier (the common carrier) with all the regulatory burden that that implies. They weren't cheap, but they were reliable, and they weren't allowed to cherry-pick customers for maximum profit.
scare americans with stories about chinese and indian basic research. forget the truth or distruth or mistruth or truthiness of those stories. just make an appeal to nationalism. in this way, you will get american funding for basic research
That's not how it works. Joe Public couldn't care less about basic research, and it doesn't really matter what country he lives in. Fact is, research is expensive, and there's no way to predict whether a given line will pay off. We only know that, in the long run, the payback is worth every penny we invest and more. Unfortunately, long-term thinking has always been in short supply.
Now, if you look at the history of basic research and the resultant leaps in technological capability, there are sharp discontinuities every time there's a major conflict. Forget "tribal chest thumping", think more about "tribal mass murder" and you'll see that nothing gets more funds directed into fundamental scientific research and applied technology than war. Hell, even when there's no active conflict, the mere threat of such serves to justify massive expenditures on all sides. World War II, the Cold War (and concomitant Space Race) are classic examples of how the military demands (and gets) untold billions of dollars (rubles, whatever) to spend on R&D. Yes, that money is primarily for military purposes, but the public benefits from (often pretty directly too) at least in the U.S. Our government has spun off a lot of military tech into the private sector over the years. Is that the most efficient way advance the state-of-the-art? No, probably not, but still a lot of good has come from it.
The net effect of all this, of course, is that Progress becomes a damned expensive proposition. Nevertheless, I'm happy to be a beneficiary of high tech that resulted from the last few big ones. I'm just hoping that I won't be a casualty in the next one.
No, but what he is saying is that the public is not without recourse when these things happen.
after a few sixpacks my thirty years in the software business just goes away, and for some unaccountable reason people start calling me "Joe".
Shareware? No ... scareware, maybe.
The problem is that standards are evolving more quickly nowadays. What might have been a stable standard for a quarter century or more now might last only half that long (if that.)
Excellent idea. While you're at it, make sure to include one of the boot viruses sometimes found on those things. That way, the next generation will have some idea of what early twenty-first century Chinese malware was like.
The old saw that these alternative, renewables are whimsical, unreliable sources is purely a myth, predicated on a brain-dead dumb grid.
... they are whimsical and unreliable. That doesn't mean they can't be useful however. I agree with you there, but we're talking about a trillion-dollar investment for a nation that's teetering on the verge of economic collapse. I don't see it happening any time soon.
Well
You can't put a nuclear plant next to each village
That's not entirely true anymore.
Some twenty years ago, back when those orange plasma displays were popular, a girl I used to work with said she'd gotten hold of some Compaq portables, and would I want to buy one? She was only asking a couple hundred bucks (I believe they cost several thousand new at the time.) So I stopped by to take a look, thinking I could really use a machine like that. That line of thought lasted right up until the system finished booting and a custom menu appeared with legend of a major national bank across the top. Given the price and the data on them, I figured they were hot (I asked what truck they'd fallen out of) and declined to buy one.
That was then, now we're in the Age of the World Wide Web, and there's just no excuse whatsoever for loading down a portable (read: easily stolen) computer system with vast quantities of confidential data. In fact, that really ought to be a law with few exceptions: customer and personal data must be stored on a server that is both physically and electronically protected. Period.
How many days do you think it will be before the government tries to charge him with something or the bank in question tries to sue him? I'd be pleasantly surprised if neither happened.
... it would be seriously bad PR to do that now that the story is all over the place. You can get away with screwing somebody like that if they report it to you privately: call in the gendarmes and have the Good Samaritan hauled off to the slammer. That happens more often than you might think (too many CIO/admin types that like to shift blame from themselves, and too many overzealous cops that take the easy way out.)
I dunno