We do that as well--it's called a fscking H1-B. We also grant EB-[1-5] visas ex post facto. You also don't have to be a highly skilled professional. You can be a dish washer.
Immigration is difficult anywhere, but to claim that the United States is "the most anally retentive," especially compared to Australia and New Zealand, is just ridiculous. For Christ's sake, we've done blanket amnesties for illegal aliens. Sort of "right, lost track of all of you, can't be bothered, you're legal now." We're about to do it again this year. Oh, how anally retentive.
You can come to the United States without a long term visa, THEN find work, THEN get your visa status changed. That's pretty NON-anally retentive. Do that in Australia and not only will you find yourself back home, you can never return.
It is the fact that we are so ridiculously permissive and the rest of the world still cries that we're "generally regarded to be the most anally retentive country in the world when it comes to immigration" that pisses us off because practically nowhere else is so open.
Go try to get yourself German citizenship and get back to me on how restrictive the United States is.
New Zealand and Australia are extremely hard to get into for employment. Hell, last time I was in New Zealand was 1988 and it was hard to get in if you were black. *ahem*
Canada requires more than US$30,000 in cash and you must be highly qualified in a professional field to move. Australia and New Zealand last I checked not only require that, but they require an existing job offer to enter--and you are forbidden from changing visa status without returning home. Not many people will be recruited ahead of time. Sure, you can enter as a university student to gain contacts, but how many unemployed computer programmers have enough to pay up front for a AU/NZ degree AND all their living expenses for three years PLUS two return air tickets and six more months living expense so you can go home while the residency visa is granted, at which point you will need a full years' contingency fund that will be checked on arrival or adios muchachos--assuming you haven't been found to break the employment restriction, which in the case of Australia will bar you from ever returning again? Oh, IT'S SOOOO BLOODY EASY. Right.
The fact is, most countries are practically impossible to emmigrate to--especially commonwealth countries from anywhere but another commonwealth country and especially Australia when your departure country is the United States because too many of us have tried to change visa status while in Australia (read: illegal employment). If you're already out of work, the financial restrictions make it a complete fantasy. If you're not out of work, it's such an enormous gamble, why would you try unless you truly wanted to permanently move to the country in question for reasons other than immediate employment?
The H1-B program in the United States was not exactly par for the international course. We let in well over 600,000 people on H1-B in five years. Once I see numbers like India granting over one million residency and employment visas PER YEAR (a roughly equal proportion), I'll buy this argument that the lack of reciprocity is a myth. The same goes for Indian academics. Bangalore University has TWO SEATS per department available for international students--and they have a quarter million students. My university had less than five thousand students and we had that many seats--just for Brazil.
Myth my ass. I would _love_ to go work in a number of countries, not all of them on the economic level of Australia. However, in many countries it often isn't possible at any price--just try to get a work visa for South Africa, for instance. Oh sure, you can get a long-term residency permit if you've got $100,000 in the bank, but you won't be able to seek employment without risking deportation. Most countries are very protective of their labor markets and aren't about to dilute them with Americans who they see as not needing the work nearly as badly. This translates to a cynical lack of reciprocity that basically boils down to "you're American, ergo you're rich, ergo you don't need to take our jobs." Of course, the same voices seem to think we should give up our jobs for them when they show up at our doors.
The fact that the information is there -- and has been there for decades -- is what people should be concerned about if they are concerned, since that fact will remove the weight to any argument about the efficiency of retrieval.
Sure, it's disturbing as hell that data mining for statistical groupings of people has allowed for things like your credit rating determining your insurance premiums, thereby making insurance cheap for the rich and expensive for the poor. Tie that to mandatory insurance laws and you have a pretty regressive system. It's these types of systems that make this possible. However, it needn't be centralized to have these effects and THAT is what is scary.
Pre-Homeland Security, Pre-Patriot, Pre-9/11, this was all there. This is just variation on a long played theme.
So, when I arrived at customs in 1999, having made quite a globe-trotting tour for the past year and half, my employment history, my credit history, all of my foreign travel history, my criminal record (in this case, my LACK thereof), everything was there.
Under the circumstances, without knowing who I was or what I was up to, my behavior over the last 18 months would have appeared VERY suspicious. Having access to that information quickly determined I was who I said I was (or I knew a great deal about the benign person I was pretending to be) and that I was about as potentially dangerous as a jelly donut.
In short, this "new" system does very little that is "new." It isn't a warning sign of things to come, it's a symptom of what has already happened.
My point, as I stated in another response, is not that all is well in the union, it's that you will not win the political argument with "the sky is falling" when it happened decades ago.
The cat is already out of the bag and it's not easy to put back in. Should we roll things back to the way they were in 1978? Well, guess what, that's not that big of a change. The only real change is that the computers running the databases are faster. From the description of this project, it's just a change of venue to play the same game. At what point do you say, "yeah, it was ok back then." 1968? 1958? 1808?
Anyone? I'm listening and so are your elected representatives. However, "we don't want nothin'" isn't going to win anyone so much as a Toastmaster's award, let alone the political debate.
This argument is about absolutely nothing, apparently, but the definition of "unlimited." If you RTFContract, "unlimited" refers to time, not data. They clearly state that "excessive" use will result in some action on their part, one of those actions being termination. By stating that, they are in effect limiting the definition of "unlimited." This does not render the term "unlimited" pointless. They DO state that you may have an "always-on" connection to the internet. That is, you have no limit on the duration of your connection in a given period. They _never_ said "you can transfer an unlimited amount of data for an unlimited period of time."
This is similar to the "all you can eat" advertisements you might see at a buffet restaurant. They don't mean "dive into the steam trays thereby preventing your neighbors from eating until you're done." We all just assume they mean "all a normal, sane person would reasonably eat at one meal that does not prevent the others who have paid for the same meal to go hungry." If people started bringing in hand trucks and demanding that "all you can eat" means "all you can eat [today|this week|this month|for a lifetime]" for $8.99, surprise, the rest of us would never again find anywhere with "all you can eat."
It should be telling that 99.5% of the customers are unaffected. Those 99.5% "get it." It is the ones who would go to the all you can eat restaurant with a skip-loader that don't and THEY are the one's playing chicken-little, throwing their FUD all over everyone like it's a fscking national crisis that they aren't being allowed to stream full frame HD video to Brazil 24/7. Seeing the way this argument has gone, how the hell can anyone blame Comcast for not engaging the argument?
This kills me. The vast majority of this information has been readily available to practically anyone for ages. Twenty years ago my family ran a company that did skip tracing as part of our service, so we operated under a private investigation license which gave us access to a number of _commercial_ databases. Almost every piece of information under discussion was available from all but a few states from a single source (at that time our primary source was CDB/Infotek). I routinely would cross-reference registered property (homes, cars, airplanes, boats), voter registration address lists, social security records, whatever. It would take on average about fifteen minutes to find anyone sans tinfoil hat with the tiniest shred of information. The key here is that every piece of information is about two degrees of separation from a SSN. Once you have the SSN, you can find everything else in a massive, combined (and expensive) search that would cross-reference everything from Maine to Hawaii including your magazine subscriptions.
That was twenty years ago.
This information has been there for decades. That it is two ergs easier to do today and includes all the backwater states that used mimeographs until the 90's is pretty trivial.
At a particular university in South Africa, most of the professors were painfully aware of the racket so they did the work to put their courses together primarily from journal articles and selected chapters, usually just one or two per book, from collections on reserve (read: "fair use"). It took a lot more work and a TON of photocopying, but they basically gamed the system back.
They stated very clearly that they were dealing with less than one percent of customers and that those customers had to pass 100GB per month. That requires a minimum of 300Kb/s sustained.
People are going to get exactly what they're asking for. I don't think that it makes sense to support the less than 1% of users paying for basic service who are using bandwidth at three times the rate they are paying for if the result will very likely be that ALL users will likely begin to get punitive throttling and hard limits. They're being VERY reasonable with their soft limit of ~100GB/s as anything above ~30GB at $40/month is getting more than you're paying for.
If you want hard limits and throttling to be the norm, go ahead and bandwagon behind this guy and others like him. Just don't bitch when suddenly your cable modem maxes out at 150Kb/s and shuts off at 1Gb/day.
Yes it is. They stated point blank that it had to exceed 100GB per month. To reach that would require sustained 300Kb/s for every second of the month. That's a pretty easy calculation.
The ~$40/month rate already assumes light usage, damn it, that's the point. It costs about $500/Mb/s/month for the upstream bandwidth. If your usage is fully 300Kb/s/month as they stated this guy's usage was, you are costing your ISP over $100 in bandwidth and you're paying ~$40. It just isn't that hard to figure out.
The article clearly quoted Comcast as saying that they were dealing with less than one percent of their customers this way. 99% of their customers are left alone.
Remember, the discussion was about the future--what will be done in 10-15 years....and I'm quite aware of Tenet's history. Those hospitals probably closed after an FBI raid.
I have a cheap Comcast line in Washington, which I have ZERO complaints about and a modestly expensive Covad line in Los Angeles that has a SLA, which I also have no complaints with.
A patent is no more absolute than a bill passed by Congress. The legal muster it must pass follows its granting, not the other way around. This is just a matter of course. Sure, the PTO should do more due dilligence on these things, but since they'll be challenged in court anyway no matter how much scrutiny they receive, in the end it doesn't matter.
You could patent "a means of teleporting living beings through empty space via an invisible energy beam" or a "means of faster than light travel involving trilithium plasma" and some Star Trek nerd would claim prior art. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some crank who has already filed and been granted a patent on exactly that.
Yes, I've taken enough courses in various aspects of economics to not need a refresher course on Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
The problem with India is that in addition to the problem of reciprocity, Indian society is frightfully feudal. The United States has inequality, but we do not have Thevars and Sikkaliars. India has enormous intellectual resources, but that is held up by many orders of magnitude more underclass--far worse than anything in Europe or North America. It is that severe inequality that makes highly educated Indian labor so cheap. India is very unique in this aspect. Because of this, many Americans find it extraordinarily hypocritical for India's educated elite to prance around talking about how wonderfully socially responsible it is to use Indian labor. Until India cleans up its act, most Americans will not join you in your enthusiasm.
The problem with this theory is that EVERYTHING can be done cheaper elsewhere. Someone spends four to ten years becoming qualified in a field and then finds themselves needing to switch fields? That's not a "short-run" hit. That's life destroying. I've already spent $75,000 on my undergraduate education. That currently costs me more than my housing to pay back.
It's abusive. Bangalore University has TWO seats for international students per department. My university had hundreds and had less than 5000 students total Bangalore has several hundred thousand students. Unless they have 25,000 academic departments, what gives? TWO FUCKING SEATS? So even if I as an American decided that I could afford to get my education in India, no, I'd be competing for one of two seats--with the entire rest of the world. On the other hand, an Indian can come study in the United States and just about any university will welcome with open arms.
India needs to be taken to task on this. Have they ever heard of "reciprocity?" You want to send a couple hundred thousand people to the United States to work and as many to study? Fine. Our population is 1/5th yours. Where are our 1,000,000 long term visas for studying and working in YOUR country? If they're not forthcoming, screw you, India.
There are issues of liability in everything. Besides, most doctors don't do injections. Phlebotomists do and they're cheap. Surgery has already been done remotely. We're not talking science fiction, that's science fact.
Beyond that, don't think for a second that "telemedicine" implies a foreign doctor with limited english skills or that those two are necessarily linked. Start thinking about the research side of biotech and medicine, the lab work, manufacturing etc. Not every side of medicine is family practice. Even on the GP side of things, it is entirely possible that huge providers like Tenet and HCA would see centralized diagnosis (think of it like a medical call-center) as a great way to extend reach and contain costs.
I understand _exactly_ what they are saying on both sides. My point is be careful what you ask for. If you want your connection to cost $40 and you want your ISP to set precisely defined limits that apply to everyone with the assumption they will use every bit of it, you're going to find yourself with a 128Kbps cable modem. Assholes like this who can't just say, ok, I won't download two entire DVDs every day are going to make that happen. It's childish and it's half the reason the contracts are so shitty already. The fact that this guy is being coy about it just makes it more infuriating. Fuck him and everyone like him. They need to buy SLAs. They know it. They're just cheap bastards who are going to end up making life more difficult for everyone.
Have a quick google of "telemedicine." Then have a look at THIS
1 Lakh = 100,000. India graduates 250,000 new doctors per year. We have a total of six million medical practitioners in the United States--and that includes everything from Dental Hygenists to Neurosurgeons. How many people think India isn't going to figure this one out?
The unfortunate truth is, there is very little that cannot be automated or outsourced. Perhaps you could migrate to a career in Funeral Science or tax law, although I'm sure someone will manage to figure out how to offshore those too.
I'd recommend taking your 401k and buying a self-sufficient farm in the middle of Montana. I wish I was kidding.
A hundred bucks per month. That's what a SLA costs and it has everything you want.
It's not a big friggen mystery and all this boo-hoo I'm a poor consumer b.s. is just pathetic. Yes, they simplify the language because most consumers have limited demands. Big deal. It's as if a new Kia had to have a big blinking neon sign on it warning "this Kia is not a Rolls Royce." No shit, eh? People complain about the tedious pedantry of legalese and then demand just that by having unreasonable expectations.
So we're at a stalemate, which will be broken by ISPs establishing explicit limits and enforcing them universally. That's what everyone seems to be gunning for and you can bet it will be used to your detriment.
READ THE F*CKING CONTRACT, which states VERY clearly, "THIS IS THE ONLY AGREEMENT BETWEEN YOU AND US" and, in many cases, "WE WILL BE TAKING YOUR MONEY AND GUARANTEEING YOU NOTHING." Sure, I think it should be illegal to sell "nothing" for money, but I also think it should be illegal to so stupid as to agree to such terms. Most people have reasonable expectations of what they will be receiving and thus never have a problem with this sort of thing and happily sign away because it's only $40. Those idiotic asshats who sign these things and then go parading around demanding to use more of the service than 99.999% of the population deserve to be treated like the idiots they are. They agreed to pay for one year of NOTHING and then proceeded to use and demand the right to use 100 times more than anyone else.
If people are too lazy to read contracts before signing them, then they are the reason these contracts have gotten as absurd as some of them have. If people JUST DIDN'T SIGN THEM, the terms would be more reasonable. I shopped around and read every single contract presented. I eliminated half of them because the terms were ridiculous.
If you aren't doing the same thing, you have no business binding yourself to legal agreements and have nothing to bitch about but your own ignorance. Perhaps we should argue about the quality of education in America as that seems to be the root problem here.
I will agree that, no, they have not stated that they have maximums. However, they are stating very clearly that you are not guaranteed, well, anything, and your are EXPLICITLY not guaranteed any amount of speed or consistent service. Comcast may be acting like jerks about dealing with it, but if customers keep who transfer several gigabytes per day every single day keep acting like they have no idea why they're being singled out, residential users WILL all be throttled, providers WILL set absolute limits and WILL limit your sustained transfer rates. Is this really what people want because one tenth of one percent of susbscribers are feigning like they don't know their five machines running Kazaa 24/7 might be "hogging?" It's like the jerks who sit at coffeehouses with free WiFi who sit there with full-screen webcams open while they run a VoIP application and Kazaa in the background and then act surprised when the rest of the place can't even pull up the Drudge Report.
These contracts are written for the bottom of the barrel "Joe Blow" and guarantee NOTHING. If you're not such a person, buy the product that is actually being marketed for your purposes and has the guarantees you desire. EVERY major telco provider offers them and they're not much more expensive. FYI, here is the relevant portion of the Comcast agreement:
# Limited Warranty: THE COMCAST EQUIPMENT AND THE SERVICE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. NEITHER COMCAST NOR ITS AFFILIATES OR AGENTS WARRANT THAT ANY CONNECTION TO, TRANSMISSION OVER, OR RESULTS OF THE COMCAST EQUIPMENT OR THE SERVICE WILL MEET CUSTOMER'S REQUIREMENTS
OR WILL PROVIDE UNINTERRUPTED USE OR WILL OPERATE AS REQUIRED, UNINTERUPTED, AT ANY MINIMUM SPEED, OR ERROR FREE.
YOUR SOLE REMEDY FOR SERVICE INTERRUPTION SHALL BE LIMITED TO A PRORATED CREDIT UPON REQUEST ONLY IN THE EVENT OF COMPLETE FAILURE OF THE SERVICE DUE TO A TECHNICAL MALFUNCTION FOR TWENTY-FOUR (24) CONSECUTIVE HOURS OR MORE. TO QUALIFY FOR SUCH CREDIT, YOU MUST REQUEST THE CREDIT FROM COMCAST WITHIN THIRTY (30) DAYS OF THE FAILURE. CREDITS SHALL BE APPLIED ONLY AGAINST CURRENT AND FUTURE FEES PAYABLE BY YOU FOR THE SERVICE AND ANY CREDITS PROVIDED BY COMCAST ARE AT OUR SOLE DISCRETION AND IN NO EVENT SHALL CONSTITUTE OR BE CONSTRUED AS A COURSE OF CONDUCT BY COMCAST. NEITHER COMCAST NOR ITS AFFILIATES OR AGENTS WARRANT THAT ANY DATA OR FILES SENT BY OR TO YOU WILL BE TRANSMITTED IN UNCORRUPTED FORM OR WITHIN A REASONABLE PERIOD OF TIME. ALL REPRESENTATIONS AND WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES OF PERFORMANCE, NONINFRINGEMENT, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR MERCHANTABILITY, ARE HEREBY EXCLUDED.
No, imports from China haven't any direct effect on inflation. You're confusing the price of goods with inflation. Prices are merely a symptom. If cheaper production in China causes cheaper prices in the United States that is different than if economic activity in the United States slows down causing less demand.
The reason the Fed holds interest rates down is to encourage borrowing and spending--that is to say, to encourage economic activiy. Buy that house, that new car, hell, the money is practically free! Yet, people don't. DEflation is what we're trying to avoid right now, not inflation. As (if?) economic activity speeds up, demand for goods increases and, consequently, barring unlimited supply, prices increase. The Fed then increases interest rates to slow down the economy and bring prices down. This is basic monetary policy.
The reason inflation has been "under control" is that the economy has slowed. Money has been practically free for three years. The Fed isn't strictly controlling inflation at all. If avoiding death by drowning can be defined as "preventing flying," then, you're right, we've kept inflation under control.
There is one effect with the trade deficit that makes me wonder if it isn't deliberate. A devalued dollar will make American goods and services cheaper. As much as China is gaming the Forex market in their favor, I'm getting very suspicious that some people in this town are gaming them back.
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We do that as well--it's called a fscking H1-B. We also grant EB-[1-5] visas ex post facto. You also don't have to be a highly skilled professional. You can be a dish washer.
Immigration is difficult anywhere, but to claim that the United States is "the most anally retentive," especially compared to Australia and New Zealand, is just ridiculous. For Christ's sake, we've done blanket amnesties for illegal aliens. Sort of "right, lost track of all of you, can't be bothered, you're legal now." We're about to do it again this year. Oh, how anally retentive.
Oh, by giving them permanent representation in government like we do with our natives... oh, wait...
*cough*
Anally retentive? More difficult?
You can come to the United States without a long term visa, THEN find work, THEN get your visa status changed. That's pretty NON-anally retentive. Do that in Australia and not only will you find yourself back home, you can never return.
It is the fact that we are so ridiculously permissive and the rest of the world still cries that we're "generally regarded to be the most anally retentive country in the world when it comes to immigration" that pisses us off because practically nowhere else is so open.
Go try to get yourself German citizenship and get back to me on how restrictive the United States is.
New Zealand and Australia are extremely hard to get into for employment. Hell, last time I was in New Zealand was 1988 and it was hard to get in if you were black. *ahem*
Canada requires more than US$30,000 in cash and you must be highly qualified in a professional field to move. Australia and New Zealand last I checked not only require that, but they require an existing job offer to enter--and you are forbidden from changing visa status without returning home. Not many people will be recruited ahead of time. Sure, you can enter as a university student to gain contacts, but how many unemployed computer programmers have enough to pay up front for a AU/NZ degree AND all their living expenses for three years PLUS two return air tickets and six more months living expense so you can go home while the residency visa is granted, at which point you will need a full years' contingency fund that will be checked on arrival or adios muchachos--assuming you haven't been found to break the employment restriction, which in the case of Australia will bar you from ever returning again? Oh, IT'S SOOOO BLOODY EASY. Right.
The fact is, most countries are practically impossible to emmigrate to--especially commonwealth countries from anywhere but another commonwealth country and especially Australia when your departure country is the United States because too many of us have tried to change visa status while in Australia (read: illegal employment). If you're already out of work, the financial restrictions make it a complete fantasy. If you're not out of work, it's such an enormous gamble, why would you try unless you truly wanted to permanently move to the country in question for reasons other than immediate employment?
The H1-B program in the United States was not exactly par for the international course. We let in well over 600,000 people on H1-B in five years. Once I see numbers like India granting over one million residency and employment visas PER YEAR (a roughly equal proportion), I'll buy this argument that the lack of reciprocity is a myth. The same goes for Indian academics. Bangalore University has TWO SEATS per department available for international students--and they have a quarter million students. My university had less than five thousand students and we had that many seats--just for Brazil.
Myth my ass. I would _love_ to go work in a number of countries, not all of them on the economic level of Australia. However, in many countries it often isn't possible at any price--just try to get a work visa for South Africa, for instance. Oh sure, you can get a long-term residency permit if you've got $100,000 in the bank, but you won't be able to seek employment without risking deportation. Most countries are very protective of their labor markets and aren't about to dilute them with Americans who they see as not needing the work nearly as badly. This translates to a cynical lack of reciprocity that basically boils down to "you're American, ergo you're rich, ergo you don't need to take our jobs." Of course, the same voices seem to think we should give up our jobs for them when they show up at our doors.
The fact that the information is there -- and has been there for decades -- is what people should be concerned about if they are concerned, since that fact will remove the weight to any argument about the efficiency of retrieval.
Sure, it's disturbing as hell that data mining for statistical groupings of people has allowed for things like your credit rating determining your insurance premiums, thereby making insurance cheap for the rich and expensive for the poor. Tie that to mandatory insurance laws and you have a pretty regressive system. It's these types of systems that make this possible. However, it needn't be centralized to have these effects and THAT is what is scary.
Pre-Homeland Security, Pre-Patriot, Pre-9/11, this was all there. This is just variation on a long played theme.
So, when I arrived at customs in 1999, having made quite a globe-trotting tour for the past year and half, my employment history, my credit history, all of my foreign travel history, my criminal record (in this case, my LACK thereof), everything was there.
Under the circumstances, without knowing who I was or what I was up to, my behavior over the last 18 months would have appeared VERY suspicious. Having access to that information quickly determined I was who I said I was (or I knew a great deal about the benign person I was pretending to be) and that I was about as potentially dangerous as a jelly donut.
In short, this "new" system does very little that is "new." It isn't a warning sign of things to come, it's a symptom of what has already happened.
My point, as I stated in another response, is not that all is well in the union, it's that you will not win the political argument with "the sky is falling" when it happened decades ago.
The cat is already out of the bag and it's not easy to put back in. Should we roll things back to the way they were in 1978? Well, guess what, that's not that big of a change. The only real change is that the computers running the databases are faster. From the description of this project, it's just a change of venue to play the same game. At what point do you say, "yeah, it was ok back then." 1968? 1958? 1808?
Anyone? I'm listening and so are your elected representatives. However, "we don't want nothin'" isn't going to win anyone so much as a Toastmaster's award, let alone the political debate.
This argument is about absolutely nothing, apparently, but the definition of "unlimited." If you RTFContract, "unlimited" refers to time, not data. They clearly state that "excessive" use will result in some action on their part, one of those actions being termination. By stating that, they are in effect limiting the definition of "unlimited." This does not render the term "unlimited" pointless. They DO state that you may have an "always-on" connection to the internet. That is, you have no limit on the duration of your connection in a given period. They _never_ said "you can transfer an unlimited amount of data for an unlimited period of time."
This is similar to the "all you can eat" advertisements you might see at a buffet restaurant. They don't mean "dive into the steam trays thereby preventing your neighbors from eating until you're done." We all just assume they mean "all a normal, sane person would reasonably eat at one meal that does not prevent the others who have paid for the same meal to go hungry." If people started bringing in hand trucks and demanding that "all you can eat" means "all you can eat [today|this week|this month|for a lifetime]" for $8.99, surprise, the rest of us would never again find anywhere with "all you can eat."
It should be telling that 99.5% of the customers are unaffected. Those 99.5% "get it." It is the ones who would go to the all you can eat restaurant with a skip-loader that don't and THEY are the one's playing chicken-little, throwing their FUD all over everyone like it's a fscking national crisis that they aren't being allowed to stream full frame HD video to Brazil 24/7. Seeing the way this argument has gone, how the hell can anyone blame Comcast for not engaging the argument?
Gee..gee..geezuz... geezuz Christ.
This kills me. The vast majority of this information has been readily available to practically anyone for ages. Twenty years ago my family ran a company that did skip tracing as part of our service, so we operated under a private investigation license which gave us access to a number of _commercial_ databases. Almost every piece of information under discussion was available from all but a few states from a single source (at that time our primary source was CDB/Infotek). I routinely would cross-reference registered property (homes, cars, airplanes, boats), voter registration address lists, social security records, whatever. It would take on average about fifteen minutes to find anyone sans tinfoil hat with the tiniest shred of information. The key here is that every piece of information is about two degrees of separation from a SSN. Once you have the SSN, you can find everything else in a massive, combined (and expensive) search that would cross-reference everything from Maine to Hawaii including your magazine subscriptions.
That was twenty years ago.
This information has been there for decades. That it is two ergs easier to do today and includes all the backwater states that used mimeographs until the 90's is pretty trivial.
At a particular university in South Africa, most of the professors were painfully aware of the racket so they did the work to put their courses together primarily from journal articles and selected chapters, usually just one or two per book, from collections on reserve (read: "fair use"). It took a lot more work and a TON of photocopying, but they basically gamed the system back.
They stated very clearly that they were dealing with less than one percent of customers and that those customers had to pass 100GB per month. That requires a minimum of 300Kb/s sustained.
People are going to get exactly what they're asking for. I don't think that it makes sense to support the less than 1% of users paying for basic service who are using bandwidth at three times the rate they are paying for if the result will very likely be that ALL users will likely begin to get punitive throttling and hard limits. They're being VERY reasonable with their soft limit of ~100GB/s as anything above ~30GB at $40/month is getting more than you're paying for.
If you want hard limits and throttling to be the norm, go ahead and bandwagon behind this guy and others like him. Just don't bitch when suddenly your cable modem maxes out at 150Kb/s and shuts off at 1Gb/day.
Yes it is. They stated point blank that it had to exceed 100GB per month. To reach that would require sustained 300Kb/s for every second of the month. That's a pretty easy calculation.
The ~$40/month rate already assumes light usage, damn it, that's the point. It costs about $500/Mb/s/month for the upstream bandwidth. If your usage is fully 300Kb/s/month as they stated this guy's usage was, you are costing your ISP over $100 in bandwidth and you're paying ~$40. It just isn't that hard to figure out.
The article clearly quoted Comcast as saying that they were dealing with less than one percent of their customers this way. 99% of their customers are left alone.
Remember, the discussion was about the future--what will be done in 10-15 years. ...and I'm quite aware of Tenet's history. Those hospitals probably closed after an FBI raid.
I have a cheap Comcast line in Washington, which I have ZERO complaints about and a modestly expensive Covad line in Los Angeles that has a SLA, which I also have no complaints with.
A patent is no more absolute than a bill passed by Congress. The legal muster it must pass follows its granting, not the other way around. This is just a matter of course. Sure, the PTO should do more due dilligence on these things, but since they'll be challenged in court anyway no matter how much scrutiny they receive, in the end it doesn't matter.
You could patent "a means of teleporting living beings through empty space via an invisible energy beam" or a "means of faster than light travel involving trilithium plasma" and some Star Trek nerd would claim prior art. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some crank who has already filed and been granted a patent on exactly that.
Yes, I've taken enough courses in various aspects of economics to not need a refresher course on Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The problem with India is that in addition to the problem of reciprocity, Indian society is frightfully feudal. The United States has inequality, but we do not have Thevars and Sikkaliars. India has enormous intellectual resources, but that is held up by many orders of magnitude more underclass--far worse than anything in Europe or North America. It is that severe inequality that makes highly educated Indian labor so cheap. India is very unique in this aspect. Because of this, many Americans find it extraordinarily hypocritical for India's educated elite to prance around talking about how wonderfully socially responsible it is to use Indian labor. Until India cleans up its act, most Americans will not join you in your enthusiasm.
You could always go into federal-fsck-me-in-the-ass prison technology. I hear that's a real "up-and-comer" in this country.
Nah, we'll be sending offshore as soon as... oh wait, we already did. Never mind.
The problem with this theory is that EVERYTHING can be done cheaper elsewhere. Someone spends four to ten years becoming qualified in a field and then finds themselves needing to switch fields? That's not a "short-run" hit. That's life destroying. I've already spent $75,000 on my undergraduate education. That currently costs me more than my housing to pay back. It's abusive. Bangalore University has TWO seats for international students per department. My university had hundreds and had less than 5000 students total Bangalore has several hundred thousand students. Unless they have 25,000 academic departments, what gives? TWO FUCKING SEATS? So even if I as an American decided that I could afford to get my education in India, no, I'd be competing for one of two seats--with the entire rest of the world. On the other hand, an Indian can come study in the United States and just about any university will welcome with open arms. India needs to be taken to task on this. Have they ever heard of "reciprocity?" You want to send a couple hundred thousand people to the United States to work and as many to study? Fine. Our population is 1/5th yours. Where are our 1,000,000 long term visas for studying and working in YOUR country? If they're not forthcoming, screw you, India.
There are issues of liability in everything. Besides, most doctors don't do injections. Phlebotomists do and they're cheap. Surgery has already been done remotely. We're not talking science fiction, that's science fact. Beyond that, don't think for a second that "telemedicine" implies a foreign doctor with limited english skills or that those two are necessarily linked. Start thinking about the research side of biotech and medicine, the lab work, manufacturing etc. Not every side of medicine is family practice. Even on the GP side of things, it is entirely possible that huge providers like Tenet and HCA would see centralized diagnosis (think of it like a medical call-center) as a great way to extend reach and contain costs.
I understand _exactly_ what they are saying on both sides. My point is be careful what you ask for. If you want your connection to cost $40 and you want your ISP to set precisely defined limits that apply to everyone with the assumption they will use every bit of it, you're going to find yourself with a 128Kbps cable modem. Assholes like this who can't just say, ok, I won't download two entire DVDs every day are going to make that happen. It's childish and it's half the reason the contracts are so shitty already. The fact that this guy is being coy about it just makes it more infuriating. Fuck him and everyone like him. They need to buy SLAs. They know it. They're just cheap bastards who are going to end up making life more difficult for everyone.
1 Lakh = 100,000. India graduates 250,000 new doctors per year. We have a total of six million medical practitioners in the United States--and that includes everything from Dental Hygenists to Neurosurgeons. How many people think India isn't going to figure this one out?
The unfortunate truth is, there is very little that cannot be automated or outsourced. Perhaps you could migrate to a career in Funeral Science or tax law, although I'm sure someone will manage to figure out how to offshore those too.
I'd recommend taking your 401k and buying a self-sufficient farm in the middle of Montana. I wish I was kidding.
A hundred bucks per month. That's what a SLA costs and it has everything you want.
It's not a big friggen mystery and all this boo-hoo I'm a poor consumer b.s. is just pathetic. Yes, they simplify the language because most consumers have limited demands. Big deal. It's as if a new Kia had to have a big blinking neon sign on it warning "this Kia is not a Rolls Royce." No shit, eh? People complain about the tedious pedantry of legalese and then demand just that by having unreasonable expectations.
So we're at a stalemate, which will be broken by ISPs establishing explicit limits and enforcing them universally. That's what everyone seems to be gunning for and you can bet it will be used to your detriment.
Brilliant. F@CKING brilliant.
It's a CONTRACT. Not a product.
READ THE F*CKING CONTRACT, which states VERY clearly, "THIS IS THE ONLY AGREEMENT BETWEEN YOU AND US" and, in many cases, "WE WILL BE TAKING YOUR MONEY AND GUARANTEEING YOU NOTHING." Sure, I think it should be illegal to sell "nothing" for money, but I also think it should be illegal to so stupid as to agree to such terms. Most people have reasonable expectations of what they will be receiving and thus never have a problem with this sort of thing and happily sign away because it's only $40. Those idiotic asshats who sign these things and then go parading around demanding to use more of the service than 99.999% of the population deserve to be treated like the idiots they are. They agreed to pay for one year of NOTHING and then proceeded to use and demand the right to use 100 times more than anyone else.
If people are too lazy to read contracts before signing them, then they are the reason these contracts have gotten as absurd as some of them have. If people JUST DIDN'T SIGN THEM, the terms would be more reasonable. I shopped around and read every single contract presented. I eliminated half of them because the terms were ridiculous.
If you aren't doing the same thing, you have no business binding yourself to legal agreements and have nothing to bitch about but your own ignorance. Perhaps we should argue about the quality of education in America as that seems to be the root problem here.
These contracts are written for the bottom of the barrel "Joe Blow" and guarantee NOTHING. If you're not such a person, buy the product that is actually being marketed for your purposes and has the guarantees you desire. EVERY major telco provider offers them and they're not much more expensive. FYI, here is the relevant portion of the Comcast agreement:
http://www.comcast.net/terms/subscriber.jsp
# Limited Warranty: THE COMCAST EQUIPMENT AND THE SERVICE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. NEITHER COMCAST NOR ITS AFFILIATES OR AGENTS WARRANT THAT ANY CONNECTION TO, TRANSMISSION OVER, OR RESULTS OF THE COMCAST EQUIPMENT OR THE SERVICE WILL MEET CUSTOMER'S REQUIREMENTS
OR WILL PROVIDE UNINTERRUPTED USE OR WILL OPERATE AS REQUIRED, UNINTERUPTED, AT ANY MINIMUM SPEED, OR ERROR FREE.YOUR SOLE REMEDY FOR SERVICE INTERRUPTION SHALL BE LIMITED TO A PRORATED CREDIT UPON REQUEST ONLY IN THE EVENT OF COMPLETE FAILURE OF THE SERVICE DUE TO A TECHNICAL MALFUNCTION FOR TWENTY-FOUR (24) CONSECUTIVE HOURS OR MORE. TO QUALIFY FOR SUCH CREDIT, YOU MUST REQUEST THE CREDIT FROM COMCAST WITHIN THIRTY (30) DAYS OF THE FAILURE. CREDITS SHALL BE APPLIED ONLY AGAINST CURRENT AND FUTURE FEES PAYABLE BY YOU FOR THE SERVICE AND ANY CREDITS PROVIDED BY COMCAST ARE AT OUR SOLE DISCRETION AND IN NO EVENT SHALL CONSTITUTE OR BE CONSTRUED AS A COURSE OF CONDUCT BY COMCAST. NEITHER COMCAST NOR ITS AFFILIATES OR AGENTS WARRANT THAT ANY DATA OR FILES SENT BY OR TO YOU WILL BE TRANSMITTED IN UNCORRUPTED FORM OR WITHIN A REASONABLE PERIOD OF TIME. ALL REPRESENTATIONS AND WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES OF PERFORMANCE, NONINFRINGEMENT, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR MERCHANTABILITY, ARE HEREBY EXCLUDED.
No, imports from China haven't any direct effect on inflation. You're confusing the price of goods with inflation. Prices are merely a symptom. If cheaper production in China causes cheaper prices in the United States that is different than if economic activity in the United States slows down causing less demand.
The reason the Fed holds interest rates down is to encourage borrowing and spending--that is to say, to encourage economic activiy. Buy that house, that new car, hell, the money is practically free! Yet, people don't. DEflation is what we're trying to avoid right now, not inflation. As (if?) economic activity speeds up, demand for goods increases and, consequently, barring unlimited supply, prices increase. The Fed then increases interest rates to slow down the economy and bring prices down. This is basic monetary policy.
The reason inflation has been "under control" is that the economy has slowed. Money has been practically free for three years. The Fed isn't strictly controlling inflation at all. If avoiding death by drowning can be defined as "preventing flying," then, you're right, we've kept inflation under control.
There is one effect with the trade deficit that makes me wonder if it isn't deliberate. A devalued dollar will make American goods and services cheaper. As much as China is gaming the Forex market in their favor, I'm getting very suspicious that some people in this town are gaming them back.