The pipe is [should be] metered because you are using up a % of it at any given time. There ARE things as bandwidth hogs (I am one of them). And If I am tying up 50% of the bandwidth for a day, I should pay for 50% of the bandwidth for the day.
I fundamentally disagree with you. I think you should pay for the pipe, not the bandwidth USED in the pipe, especially when they're trying to charge such outrageous prices for that bandwidth, making it cost *more* to buy bandwidth in the end than the 'pipe' rental!
But isn't bandwidth fundamentally different from electricity and water, in that the latter 2 cost money to generate or pump? With broadband, once you lay the pipe, it doesn't cost anything to actually pull data up and down.
Heh, well said. That's close enough to the truth.
Or is there a significant overhead for the ISP in managing all these bits flying around? So that more traffic takes more computing power, and would therefore have to be supported with more money?
Virtually no product can be offered in infinite amounts with no extra overhead, if it could, i'd expect it to be free.
HOWEVER, what should dictate whether a product is metered or unmetered is *how* plentiful it is. Bandwidth is SO plentiful that is should be unmetered. Yes, the ISP has extremely small costs after laying the cable/DSL line, but these are things like staff costs, maintainance costs. Very small, very rare costs. Not costs which are being incurred for each byte that you transfer. This means bandwidth is very plentiful, and there is no excuse to meter it.
A 'burstable' 28.8kb connection? That's apalling. You should be getting a darn sight more than that when you go to broadband. You're paying more, you're using more modern technology, and there's no excuse for a 5GB monthly cap, unless you want to OPT for it in order to get a *dirt cheap* (and I mean dirt cheap) connection.
It may sound impossible, but once the idea of paying for bandwidth *usage* is commonplace for private citizens, it will migrate to the business world.
I don't see why the 'business world' (exclusing the bandwidth providers, of course) would like the idea of going from an unmetered T1/whatever to a metered T1/whatever. It's a step backwards.
Much like it was when this whole online ( non BBS ) experience firsts started.. or has everyone forgot about that? X hours a month for $ then you got cut off totally.. or paid ungodly fees per minute.
Notice the pattern? It went from metered to unmetered, because people considered unmetered *better*. Why would they suddenly want to go back to metering the internet again? 'Please switch to our service, instead of offering you a T1, we offer you a T1 complete with 100GB/mo cap!'
Hopefully, DSL won't have the same monopoly risk that cable has.
The reason cable lends itself so much to monopolies (if I have this right) is because the cable cos have to pay to get their cable installed in an area. They don't want to do this without a GUARENTEED return, so they get the local authority to guarentee them a monopoly in that area for cable. Oh dear.
However, DSL is different - the phone lines are *already installed* and almost considered public property. In the UK, at least (i'm not sure about the US), there is a requirement on the telcos that they offer the phone lines to competition when it comes to DSL - other services must have equal access to the lines as the telco themselves. This means that there is NO scope for monopolies(!) and there should be a lot more competition.
They finally told me that, yes, the netbios ports are blocked (which I consider to be a Good Thing (TM))... told them I would keep that in mind the next time a faculty member asked for my recommendation of an ISP
Two things: 1) You've contradicted yourself by saying that blocking NetBIOS is good, but then implying that it's bad in the next paragraph.
2) How in god's name is it GOOD to block ports just because it's possible for a piece of software to be taken advantage of over those ports?? Does that mean that all ports used by trojans should be blocked too? All ports used by internet programs that aren't 100% secure? I don't think you'd find yourself with a lot of choice left.
I think you meant to say, "it's the only way to be sure that we're paying for what we get." Which makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.
Wrong, it makes no sense. Water and electricity are *finite* resources - don't use them up too fast or they'll be gone. Hence metering makes some sense, in encouraging people to keep their usage as low as possible. However, internet access is fundamentally different - compared to physical resources, bandwidth is so plentiful as to almost be unlimited (or the potential for bandwidth, anyway). Therefore, it should NOT be metered, now or ever! Until recently we had a campaign in the UK to try and force BT to offer 'unmetered' temecoms to us, to not meter our internet access by the minute. Now we've got unmetered access and are very happy with it. I'm amazed to see people saying that we should *go back to* metering - it's insane!
I disagree with your view. Capping connections sucks, and it goes against the vision of the internet. Besides, it says in the article that these cable networks were designed to have almost unlimited bandwidth, there's no excuse for it, other than cable companies' profiteering. If I had a choice between 1MB/500kb with a 5GB cap, or 64kb/32kb with no cap (which is what I currently have), I'd go for the latter.
And I'll add that I live in the UK, which used to SUCK for getting internet access (we paid by the minute for dialup), but not our DSL/cable providers offer reliable connections with NO usage cap. Glad I'm not stuck with a greedy American provider.
What's so bad about PPPoE? I used it with DSL (USB modem) for close to a year - no problems whatsoever. Unless you wanna run a server or something (and frankly if you do, you should rent a T3 or something instead), it works fine.
Anyone who clicked that link didn't bother to engage their brain today. Since when do Google links not say [google.com] after them, or contain other website addresses in the middle?
Links to Google caches point to IP addresses, not the google.com domain, so they never say google.com. And they always have the URL of said cached site in the middle.
It's great that famous artists are finally developing new music distribution schemes and revenue making models for the Information Age!
Erm, music distribution scheme, yes. Revenue making model? How exactly does offering your entire album for free download make you any revenue? Unless you want to try and make money from banner ads embedded into the application?:-)
They at least defend existing civil liberties, if not new ones that some people are proposing. Fox hunting is an existing civil liberty, so they will defend it. But I'd just as much expect them to defend the right to privacy, the need for a prosecution to get evidence against you BEFORE they start monitoring your communications, rather than taking that right away, as Labour seem so keen to do.
Unfortunately, the more complicated the wording for a law, the less right the consumer seems to have WRT use of a product - we see rights being taken away from consumers hand over fist nowadays, even copying for BACKUP purposes seems to be a grey area (legally) these days. The day may come when you have to stream any music you want from a provider's website.:-\ Frankly, I wish they'd keep the damn laws at 'do not steal', and use a bit of common sense to enforce them, rather than EVERYTHING having to be specified in writing!
Indeed. The problem is that "New Labour" is now so right-wing they make the Tories look central. Even the unions are widely ranged against them -- the labour party -- much of the time now.
Nah. They're still more left-wing in many areas, the most obvious of all being taxation (raise taxes! raise taxes!). The unions are just bad mooded groups of people who will protest against any government of the day because 'they're not being paid enough'.
And if you really think the only place the Lib Dems disagree with them is on cannabis, perhaps you should do your homework before commentating on politics or exercising your right to vote. Try "War, Iraq" as a starting point. I'm no Lib Dem party member, but I try to give them at least a fair hearing, and right now, I think they probably are more effective than the Tories in opposition.
You'd hardly EXPECT the tories to oppose this kind of action, so I won't criticize them for not doing so; they tend to support American military action. And if the Lid Dems are such an effective opposition, they don't seem to have made Labour think twice about war on Iraq. Public pressure, if anything, has done that.
And by the way, Labour really don't need any help from the Lib Dems to "force this shit through", given the vast majority they have in the Commons and the Parliament Act if they don't like the Lords. This is kinda the problem.
Yes, the UK 'democratic' system is far from a democracy. But if Labour didn't have a massive majority, their first line of recourse would be coalition with the Lib Dems. Remember the days of Paddy Ashdown?
Why the hell should the government have one standard (can see all data, no reason, no limit to how much they can store, etc), and business has another (data protection act, mustn't store data for longer than necessary, etc)? This is another example of the government setting a good 'moral' standard, and completely ignoring it itself. Disgraceful.
If the Tories aren't much of an opposition, the Lib Dems are Labour's whores. Come on, HOW can you have two left-wing parties as an affective government? Answer: you can't. Whilst the Lib Dems have the odd policy which doesn't agree with Labour (ie. cannabis legalization), most of the time they do nothing but help Labour force this shit through.
They've started to recognise this - that their authoritarianism makes the country view them as the 'nasty' party - but they'll have to move very carefully to make the move effectively.
Yes and no; the conservatives are tough on crime, but have long been supporters of civil liberties. It's Labour and the Lib Dems (supporting) who have recently been pushing through these apalling laws which invade privacy in the name of aiding the police. Did Thatcher or Major do anything like this, or did they respect the laws which had been part of this country for a long time? You wouldn't see them interfering with the right to trial by jury.
The UK (or more specifically, London) is about to introduce `congenstion charging` - that is, charging drivers money to enter the centre of London in a bid to reduce unneccessary traffic. A totally ludicrous idea, which will do nothing to help the economy, or encourage people to use shit public transport.
This is being done with cameras and number plate recognition. People are complaining because they don't want to pay, not really because of any civil liberty concerns Too bloody right they are, and so should they be! It's a stupid idea dreampt up by Ken Livingstone and other lefties.
- we've generally accepted that as being a price worth paying. I never accepted that. I didn't vote for Ken Livingstone, and apparently, many other people don't like the idea either.
By the way, the congestion charge has NOTHING to do with reducing road deaths. There aint gonna be many deaths in the centre of London where the traffic rarely rises above 10mph.
Also, they're not using *existing* cameras to check the plates of cars entering London's center - they're having to spend MILLIONS on a new load of cameras, computer systems, etc, invalidating your whole point.
America was founded on these values, and back in the days of the Founding Fathers, it probably WAS the land of the free, compared to other (European) countries. But Lincoln et al would be *turning in their graves* if they saw what the government in America was doing to civil privacy rights nowadays.
Eligible small Webcasters can avoid a per-performance fee and instead may pay a $500 annual fee, starting Oct. 21, for each year or part of a year they have been in operation since 1998, SoundExchange said in a statement.
I don't understand why SoundExchange/RIAA is doing this. From what I can see, this is a much fairer (temporary) deal than what was proposed in the initial piece of legislation which was passed, and states that webcasters must begin paying large royalties on October 20th.
If the RIAA's objective is to kick most of these webcasters into touch, why are they offering them this deal and not simply requiring them to pay the larger royalties which have already been legislated for?
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Bah, typo. I meant to say water was finite.
No, I don't think you did. Re-read your post.
The pipe is [should be] metered because you are using up a % of it at any given time. There ARE things as bandwidth hogs (I am one of them). And If I am tying up 50% of the bandwidth for a day, I should pay for 50% of the bandwidth for the day.
I fundamentally disagree with you. I think you should pay for the pipe, not the bandwidth USED in the pipe, especially when they're trying to charge such outrageous prices for that bandwidth, making it cost *more* to buy bandwidth in the end than the 'pipe' rental!
Cable ISPs are kind of the 'AOL' of broadband then? Yeah, sounds about right :-)
But isn't bandwidth fundamentally different from electricity and water, in that the latter 2 cost money to generate or pump? With broadband, once you lay the pipe, it doesn't cost anything to actually pull data up and down.
Heh, well said. That's close enough to the truth.
Or is there a significant overhead for the ISP in managing all these bits flying around? So that more traffic takes more computing power, and would therefore have to be supported with more money?
Virtually no product can be offered in infinite amounts with no extra overhead, if it could, i'd expect it to be free.
HOWEVER, what should dictate whether a product is metered or unmetered is *how* plentiful it is. Bandwidth is SO plentiful that is should be unmetered. Yes, the ISP has extremely small costs after laying the cable/DSL line, but these are things like staff costs, maintainance costs. Very small, very rare costs. Not costs which are being incurred for each byte that you transfer. This means bandwidth is very plentiful, and there is no excuse to meter it.
A 'burstable' 28.8kb connection? That's apalling. You should be getting a darn sight more than that when you go to broadband. You're paying more, you're using more modern technology, and there's no excuse for a 5GB monthly cap, unless you want to OPT for it in order to get a *dirt cheap* (and I mean dirt cheap) connection.
It may sound impossible, but once the idea of paying for bandwidth *usage* is commonplace for private citizens, it will migrate to the business world.
I don't see why the 'business world' (exclusing the bandwidth providers, of course) would like the idea of going from an unmetered T1/whatever to a metered T1/whatever. It's a step backwards.
Much like it was when this whole online ( non BBS ) experience firsts started.. or has everyone forgot about that? X hours a month for $ then you got cut off totally.. or paid ungodly fees per minute.
Notice the pattern? It went from metered to unmetered, because people considered unmetered *better*. Why would they suddenly want to go back to metering the internet again? 'Please switch to our service, instead of offering you a T1, we offer you a T1 complete with 100GB/mo cap!'
Hopefully, DSL won't have the same monopoly risk that cable has.
The reason cable lends itself so much to monopolies (if I have this right) is because the cable cos have to pay to get their cable installed in an area. They don't want to do this without a GUARENTEED return, so they get the local authority to guarentee them a monopoly in that area for cable. Oh dear.
However, DSL is different - the phone lines are *already installed* and almost considered public property. In the UK, at least (i'm not sure about the US), there is a requirement on the telcos that they offer the phone lines to competition when it comes to DSL - other services must have equal access to the lines as the telco themselves. This means that there is NO scope for monopolies(!) and there should be a lot more competition.
They finally told me that, yes, the netbios ports are blocked (which I consider to be a Good Thing (TM)) ... told them I would keep that in mind the next time a faculty member asked for my recommendation of an ISP
Two things:
1) You've contradicted yourself by saying that blocking NetBIOS is good, but then implying that it's bad in the next paragraph.
2) How in god's name is it GOOD to block ports just because it's possible for a piece of software to be taken advantage of over those ports?? Does that mean that all ports used by trojans should be blocked too? All ports used by internet programs that aren't 100% secure? I don't think you'd find yourself with a lot of choice left.
Hard to do? No. A suicidal business decision resulting in the loss of all users with a brain? Yes.
I think you meant to say, "it's the only way to be sure that we're paying for what we get." Which makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.
Wrong, it makes no sense. Water and electricity are *finite* resources - don't use them up too fast or they'll be gone. Hence metering makes some sense, in encouraging people to keep their usage as low as possible. However, internet access is fundamentally different - compared to physical resources, bandwidth is so plentiful as to almost be unlimited (or the potential for bandwidth, anyway). Therefore, it should NOT be metered, now or ever! Until recently we had a campaign in the UK to try and force BT to offer 'unmetered' temecoms to us, to not meter our internet access by the minute. Now we've got unmetered access and are very happy with it. I'm amazed to see people saying that we should *go back to* metering - it's insane!
I disagree with your view. Capping connections sucks, and it goes against the vision of the internet. Besides, it says in the article that these cable networks were designed to have almost unlimited bandwidth, there's no excuse for it, other than cable companies' profiteering. If I had a choice between 1MB/500kb with a 5GB cap, or 64kb/32kb with no cap (which is what I currently have), I'd go for the latter.
And I'll add that I live in the UK, which used to SUCK for getting internet access (we paid by the minute for dialup), but not our DSL/cable providers offer reliable connections with NO usage cap. Glad I'm not stuck with a greedy American provider.
What's so bad about PPPoE? I used it with DSL (USB modem) for close to a year - no problems whatsoever. Unless you wanna run a server or something (and frankly if you do, you should rent a T3 or something instead), it works fine.
Anyone who clicked that link didn't bother to engage their brain today. Since when do Google links not say [google.com] after them, or contain other website addresses in the middle?
Links to Google caches point to IP addresses, not the google.com domain, so they never say google.com. And they always have the URL of said cached site in the middle.
It's also surprising, since almost all of the major Canadian newspapers are owned by two people.
That must be why they're 5th(2nd) on the list; almost all of the major British newspapers are owned by one man, Rupert Murdoch.
It's great that famous artists are finally developing new music distribution schemes and revenue making models for the Information Age!
:-)
Erm, music distribution scheme, yes. Revenue making model? How exactly does offering your entire album for free download make you any revenue? Unless you want to try and make money from banner ads embedded into the application?
Erm, sorry if this sounds dumb, but what is 'going indie' exactly?
They at least defend existing civil liberties, if not new ones that some people are proposing. Fox hunting is an existing civil liberty, so they will defend it. But I'd just as much expect them to defend the right to privacy, the need for a prosecution to get evidence against you BEFORE they start monitoring your communications, rather than taking that right away, as Labour seem so keen to do.
Unfortunately, the more complicated the wording for a law, the less right the consumer seems to have WRT use of a product - we see rights being taken away from consumers hand over fist nowadays, even copying for BACKUP purposes seems to be a grey area (legally) these days. The day may come when you have to stream any music you want from a provider's website. :-\ Frankly, I wish they'd keep the damn laws at 'do not steal', and use a bit of common sense to enforce them, rather than EVERYTHING having to be specified in writing!
Indeed. The problem is that "New Labour" is now so right-wing they make the Tories look central. Even the unions are widely ranged against them -- the labour party -- much of the time now.
Nah. They're still more left-wing in many areas, the most obvious of all being taxation (raise taxes! raise taxes!). The unions are just bad mooded groups of people who will protest against any government of the day because 'they're not being paid enough'.
And if you really think the only place the Lib Dems disagree with them is on cannabis, perhaps you should do your homework before commentating on politics or exercising your right to vote. Try "War, Iraq" as a starting point. I'm no Lib Dem party member, but I try to give them at least a fair hearing, and right now, I think they probably are more effective than the Tories in opposition.
You'd hardly EXPECT the tories to oppose this kind of action, so I won't criticize them for not doing so; they tend to support American military action. And if the Lid Dems are such an effective opposition, they don't seem to have made Labour think twice about war on Iraq. Public pressure, if anything, has done that.
And by the way, Labour really don't need any help from the Lib Dems to "force this shit through", given the vast majority they have in the Commons and the Parliament Act if they don't like the Lords. This is kinda the problem.
Yes, the UK 'democratic' system is far from a democracy. But if Labour didn't have a massive majority, their first line of recourse would be coalition with the Lib Dems. Remember the days of Paddy Ashdown?
Really, this is a paranoid red herring.
No, you're very naive.
Why the hell should the government have one standard (can see all data, no reason, no limit to how much they can store, etc), and business has another (data protection act, mustn't store data for longer than necessary, etc)? This is another example of the government setting a good 'moral' standard, and completely ignoring it itself. Disgraceful.
If the Tories aren't much of an opposition, the Lib Dems are Labour's whores. Come on, HOW can you have two left-wing parties as an affective government? Answer: you can't. Whilst the Lib Dems have the odd policy which doesn't agree with Labour (ie. cannabis legalization), most of the time they do nothing but help Labour force this shit through.
They've started to recognise this - that their authoritarianism makes the country view them as the 'nasty' party - but they'll have to move very carefully to make the move effectively.
Yes and no; the conservatives are tough on crime, but have long been supporters of civil liberties. It's Labour and the Lib Dems (supporting) who have recently been pushing through these apalling laws which invade privacy in the name of aiding the police. Did Thatcher or Major do anything like this, or did they respect the laws which had been part of this country for a long time? You wouldn't see them interfering with the right to trial by jury.
Your opening paragraph is laughable.
The UK (or more specifically, London) is about to introduce `congenstion charging` - that is, charging drivers money to enter the centre of London in a bid to reduce unneccessary traffic.
A totally ludicrous idea, which will do nothing to help the economy, or encourage people to use shit public transport.
This is being done with cameras and number plate recognition. People are complaining because they don't want to pay, not really because of any civil liberty concerns
Too bloody right they are, and so should they be! It's a stupid idea dreampt up by Ken Livingstone and other lefties.
- we've generally accepted that as being a price worth paying.
I never accepted that. I didn't vote for Ken Livingstone, and apparently, many other people don't like the idea either.
By the way, the congestion charge has NOTHING to do with reducing road deaths. There aint gonna be many deaths in the centre of London where the traffic rarely rises above 10mph.
Also, they're not using *existing* cameras to check the plates of cars entering London's center - they're having to spend MILLIONS on a new load of cameras, computer systems, etc, invalidating your whole point.
Or perhaps in 20 years time, only 'authorized' people will be allowed to talk uncensored on the internet. :-(
America was founded on these values, and back in the days of the Founding Fathers, it probably WAS the land of the free, compared to other (European) countries. But Lincoln et al would be *turning in their graves* if they saw what the government in America was doing to civil privacy rights nowadays.
Eligible small Webcasters can avoid a per-performance fee and instead may pay a $500 annual fee, starting Oct. 21, for each year or part of a year they have been in operation since 1998, SoundExchange said in a statement.
I don't understand why SoundExchange/RIAA is doing this. From what I can see, this is a much fairer (temporary) deal than what was proposed in the initial piece of legislation which was passed, and states that webcasters must begin paying large royalties on October 20th.
If the RIAA's objective is to kick most of these webcasters into touch, why are they offering them this deal and not simply requiring them to pay the larger royalties which have already been legislated for?