The people charged with our defense and national security are *supposed* to be uneasy,...lay awake nights,... constantly wonder if all they've done is enough. That way, the rest of us don't have to.
Haven't you been paying attention, especially in the last week? It's now reversed! Those charged with our defense and national security are making the citizens of this country uneasy by laying on thick and heavy the guilt trip bullshit and scare tactics so that they can sleep easier at night knowing that they did what they could to get us one step closer to a complete police state.
Certainly not by going through Google. Free listing services like Elephantlist, The Hun and Sublime Directory along with pussy.org (which has gone severely downhill recently) or Empornium (torrents and lots of them).
Sorry about that, that is from a pop-up virus I have on my computer. What we were talking about again?
But then there is this issue where the entire setup of the shop is changed and people are coming in just to leech the wifi. While chains can handle that, the small guys are getting fucked.
If you want to skip the blog post, go straight to the Flickr pic here.
Just want to let you know that I had to get a new keyboard from an unused workstation because the one I had was ruined when water came spraying out of my nose and mouth after reading that post.
I don't disagree that she deserves more than a few thousand dollars and gift cards from Best Buy, but the woman herself said:
I will agree with you on one point: $54 million dollars is not a reasonable amount to request for a stolen computer and related expenses. However, I want to make clear that this lawsuit is not simply about compensation for the expenses and time I have had to expend as a result of Best Buy's negligence and irresponsible practices. It is about motivating Best Buy to do what it should have felt compelled to do on its own, i.e., address the blatant, company-wide breakdown of privacy protection policies that I experienced, so that future customers do not have to endure what I have - or worse.
I'm sorry but suing for an incredibly large amount of money just to make a point is a bit ridiculous and when you publicly admit that you're doing it mostly out of spite, it makes you look like an ass.
Perhaps Comcast will experience a 'slowdown' in its profits...
You're hysterical! When people don't have much of a choice about what provider to get they're going to choose what's available and unfortunately for about 25 million people (and ~8 million of those for broadband), that's Comcast.
Nothing will come of any of this and just like the telecom immunity bullshit, this too will pass over Comcast w/o much more than a few news articles and possibly a rebate for one month at $5/subscriber while they continue to control their network as they see fit.
I remember when Firefox first started it was meant to be a faster and more secure replacement for IE. Well, the longer I have been running it (many of you know that I was probably the last Slashdot IE6 holdout for various reasons) the more I realize how slow and awful it can be -- especially the last few versions.
Now, I haven't run the new beta but I looked through the article and some of the past ones that have come up and noticed all this crap about theming, new features, etc, etc, etc but nothing really talks about how much faster it is and how much less memory the program consumes -- especially when it's been open for more than 24 hours on XP.
So, are they going to go back to light, tight, and fast instead of this feature bloat that seems to have prevailed? Yes, it's nice to have bells and whistles but I think that it's just as important to have a browser that doesn't require me to close it and reopen it so that my machine doesn't grind to a halt every other day if I don't.
Particularly as most of the users of mapping are businesses--this doesn't apply quite as much to tax maps, but our GIS layers are pretty expensive to produce and when 90% of your requests for GIS maps are from business who would otherwise need to do the survey work themselves, it's a fine line between public access and corporate welfare.
As long as the taxpayers can get it for free, I don't see how anyone can be concerned with it costing too much money to produce. I use a lot of the state's GIS data (park boundaries mostly) for geocaching. It's in a strange coordinate system that they use internally but using some open source software I am able to bring it over to WGS84 and then convert to KML/KMZ for Google Earth. This information isn't free from everyone, however, and while working with Dakota County (my county) to help them determine if they wanted a policy (I don't believe anyone needs a geocaching policy) to be developed, I asked for the GIS boundaries to help me see exactly how many geocaches were located within their park boundaries. Their GIS department doesn't release that information for free so I had to go about creating the boundaries myself using Google Earth and some other tools.
It's really unfortunate that as a taxpayer I am required to pay for something twice. I see your (and their) point to doing so as everyone wants to be fiscally conservative but when you're trying to do honest work, for those that have the data, it's a little silly not to let it go out.
Now, once you pay for it, it should be able to be freely released into the public domain especially if the laws governing that area permit it (and I'm sure they do).
It takes a few weeks/months to "decompress" from the frenetic need to have some sort of constant visual stimulus to occupy your spare time, but afterwards, you'll both be much better off. Read, play cards, listen to music, or, you know, *talk* with each other.:)
You're talking to the wrong person. I read a book a week, listen to plenty of music, do homework towards a Masters I won't obtain for at least 20 years at this rate, surf the web, play with my dog and actually do stuff outside (yes, even in Minnesota, in the winter). It's my wife that's interested in constant visual stimulation from the TV, not me -- unfortunately while we have more than on TV in the house only one has a DVD player and that same one has the Tivo, thus she gets control of what is on and I have to do my own thing somewhere else.
While many people here might be single, some of us have wives that like to watch garbage TV and w/o the normal dreck that is shown on TV she had to find something else to occupy her TV watching time. Unfortunately for me that included such highlights as America's Ballroom Challenge and Masterpiece on PBS. If you think Dancing with the Stars was bad, well, Ballroom Challenge is a completely new level of horrendous bullshit that no human should ever have to see (ballroom dancing to rap is surprisingly worse than to horribly outdated music). I won't even get into the Masterpiece bullshit because, well, no one should give a shit less about Jane Austen.
Believe me, even though I don't watch all that much TV (I have been obsessing over BBC America's Kitchen Nightmares and Last Restaurant Standing) it has been fucking hell for me.
Reading up a bit: "The FISA Court did not reject a single warrant application from its beginning in 1979 through 2002. In 2003 it rejected four applications. In 2004, the number was again zero."
Why did it reject four in 2003 is what I want to know. Who was being investigated that it would decide to deny the application after 23 years?
I hate being called by the Salvation Army at 12:30 PM on a vacation day to listen to back-to-back identical messages (I suppose one is in case your answering machine picked up) about a new drop-off center in Burnsville, MN. I gave money every year but that stops as of Tuesday afternoon because they are using it to flood me with phone spam. Fuck em.
Then, I hang up from that, mildly annoyed and the phone rings again. Figuring I can't be getting back-to-back douchebag calls, I pick it up to get a message that I should hit "1" to leave a message for the carpet cleaning fuckers. They hide their number, name, etc so I can't even file a formal complaint. I whistle into the message and tell them to fuck themselves with a rusty iron pipe. Even that didn't make me feel better:(
Which are you going to think about and more carefully consider before sending to me?
Actually, we send out far more snail mail than we do e-mail and being that *I* am the determiner of what and how much gets sent, I do my best to limit it to a single communication at the start and less than 5 (currently) for the rest of the year.
The cost of the snail mail isn't so bad and it's not like we're not used to the volume. In our case we don't recruit quite like other schools do as our budget is smaller but we still do send out many tens of thousands of dollars worth of mail. I do take my time with e-mail and make sure that the communications are important and not "spammish" (even though they opted into communicating with us that way) so we don't have to deal with ISP bans, etc.
I work in Higher Education and we're just starting to get on the ball with recruiting via Social Networking (we're always years behind the curve -- I'm surprised we're this current actually) and just as with anything that you provide to a third party, you should really think about what that group needs to have from you in order for you to get what you need in return.
Higher Education is still generally based on paper marketing. Yes, we have a mass of information available on the web but it's not enough honestly and from some Noell-Levitz studies it has been found that the majority of students still want to be communicated by traditional mail marketing in addition to everything else. In fact, in the focus groups I have conducted on the topic, 89% of those that responded (pool of ~350) wanted no communication other than direct mail -- that was shocking to me, especially because they were traditional aged students (18 - 24). I have found that most students will give you their name and address (which is more than I normally will give anyone until I actually apply to the college) and not much else (no birthdate, prior education, and especially no phone number or e-mail address).
So, why are these people giving it to Facebook? Why would they trust that site more than an institution of higher education that is actually mandated by law to protect the privacy of those it deals with? I can't turn around and release any part of a student database to any third party unless its cleansed and has no identifiable information.
Personally, while Facebook is the "new big thing" in Higher Education, it's not worth it for our institution to spend all that much time recruiting by it. Our traditional data works just fine to increase enrollment through the traditional mail, phone and e-communication programs I have developed and redeveloped. That said, I really do believe that people should be very careful about what they put out on any social networking site. Contrary to the belief that there are no automated programs allowed to scour the site, they do and the data that comes back is some really interesting stuff to wade through.
Why when you can view everything you need to know about Drupal themes (including version 6+) here. You basically unpack the theme, put it in the themes directory, and go into the admin panel to enable it.
There, I just condensed 260 pages that costs money into something free and easy to do. As far as modifying your CSS to find your custom needs, well, that's for a completely different book and one that I would actually read -- if it helped more than what I've been able to learn myself online.
But this is just stupid. I'm ok with you putting it behind a counter so a meth head doesn't come in and clear the shelf, stealing it all. but the limits on the amount make it rought if you have a >3 day long cold sometimes.
As a graying 29 year old I don't feel the need to show proof of anything when I buy a two or less boxes of medication that's supposed to be over the counter medication.
I realize I live in a nanny state that attempts to dictate everything we do while appearing to be liberal (yay for Minnesota) but stopping me from buying beer and liquor on Sundays and keeping that dangerous single box of Sudafed behind the counter is just dumb. If someone wants to make meth, they're going to get the stuff they need to do it and putting it behind the counter isn't going to stop anyone except those that really want to use the medication for what it's intended for.
Is it that it just doesn't work sometimes? I've had that happen.
It never works, thus why I chose what I did -- to see if it would work. Yes, I tried to tag one on Monday (it didn't appear) and that's why this discussion was continued on by me.
It's probably because you're in the "too active" segment of the Slashdot population. Do most of your browsing while logged out and let many of your comments stay anon and after a long enough "retirement" you'll probably slip into the mod pool like I eventually did.
That's a completely backwards and retarded way of handing out mod points. Why should those that are active not be able to moderate? An active contributer is more likely to keep up with the discussions and care about the outcome of the site not those that are continuously not logged in (which I refuse to be because of the completely worthless "new discussion system" that doesn't work on my mobile device worth a fucking shit and looks like shit on any other browser IMHO).
Or, in other words--lighten up, man. Not everything's serious.
I'm seriously annoyed about the tags. I've been a frequent Slashdot contributer for 10 years and for some fucking reason not only can I not moderate, I cannot add tags. Why the fuck not? I'm good enough to continuously post comments that the other moderators feel are worth of +5 Foo but the "editors" don't feel I'm worthy of bestowing that or tags for others to see?
Personally, I find the majority of tags being used are pointless (like the one referenced above). They need to stop fucking around with the ability to moderate and tag content or do away with it all together -- especially for those that really deserve it.
We trust Google's 'review' enough to not bother how it is achieved.
No, we don't "trust" them with anything. We search for something and obviously relevant results are returned. It's immediately noticeable when Google starts returning not-so-relevant results and thus we don't need to know their methodology. When Universities publish their methods it's because they are sometimes drawing conclusions that aren't obvious to the naked eye, especially for the lay person. Google doesn't need to do that IMHO.
But the people, tabulating them in a centralized location, can and will lie just as bad as the machine that is hiding your voting record from you. Remember, it only takes one person to fuck with a e-voting machine but it only takes a few more people to fuck with centralized vote counting. Money works people.
Keep it decentralized and get over this "instantaneous statistics" bullshit that everyone is so fucking hyped up about. Who cares if you have to wait till the next day to find out who won? You have to put up with the bastard for at least four years, what's the difference if it takes a little longer to find out which one you are slowly going to learn to despise?
I have specifically chosen an ISP who promise they don't use any kind of throttling. On the other hand I did'nt go with the cheapest ISP I could find. My ISP has a "true flatrate" policy. No maximum usage and no throttling. The price is accordingly a little higher.
I did too, this time, because I had the ability to do so (I live in an area where we have a choice between Frontier DSL lines and Charter cable) and was pretty much forced because Charter blocks ports here so I couldn't run my website, host DNS and SMTP or SSH to my machine from work.
I pay quite a bit more for my DSL than I would with a Charter connection because I have to pay for a landline (which I fucking hate as it's pointless), the DSL line and then the ISP connection (through VISI). My ISP doesn't give a shit what we do. They offer reverse DNS, hosting is fully permitted, and I get 2x the speed that Frontier advertises probably because I'm located 835 feet from the DSLAM (I get 4100/500 as opposed to the 2000/256 they advertise).
But, aside from all of that geek stroking, I still have a choice -- something which most people out there really don't have anymore. I didn't have it when I lived 5 miles away in Burnsville, MN and my only option was ATTBI and then Comcast. I'm sure there are plenty of people, if they even knew about choice or the fact that they could pay just a tiny bit more for some "security" of speed, etc, they would. Problem is that most wouldn't know anything other than what fliers appear in their mailbox or the fact that Comcast advertises on every known TV and billboard medium known to man.
I feel bad for people that are getting fucked by Comcast and other ISPs that they are forced to use because I used to be one of those people.
Slashdot Mirror
Disappointing. We need to LASER it.
The ill-tempered sea bass have a limited range, sorry.
The people charged with our defense and national security are *supposed* to be uneasy, ...lay awake nights, ... constantly wonder if all they've done is enough. That way, the rest of us don't have to.
Haven't you been paying attention, especially in the last week? It's now reversed! Those charged with our defense and national security are making the citizens of this country uneasy by laying on thick and heavy the guilt trip bullshit and scare tactics so that they can sleep easier at night knowing that they did what they could to get us one step closer to a complete police state.
Certainly not by going through Google. Free listing services like Elephantlist, The Hun and Sublime Directory along with pussy.org (which has gone severely downhill recently) or Empornium (torrents and lots of them).
Sorry about that, that is from a pop-up virus I have on my computer. What we were talking about again?
But then there is this issue where the entire setup of the shop is changed and people are coming in just to leech the wifi. While chains can handle that, the small guys are getting fucked.
If you want to skip the blog post, go straight to the Flickr pic here.
Just want to let you know that I had to get a new keyboard from an unused workstation because the one I had was ruined when water came spraying out of my nose and mouth after reading that post.
Thanks for making my day.
I don't disagree that she deserves more than a few thousand dollars and gift cards from Best Buy, but the woman herself said:
I will agree with you on one point: $54 million dollars is not a reasonable amount to request for a stolen computer and related expenses. However, I want to make clear that this lawsuit is not simply about compensation for the expenses and time I have had to expend as a result of Best Buy's negligence and irresponsible practices. It is about motivating Best Buy to do what it should have felt compelled to do on its own, i.e., address the blatant, company-wide breakdown of privacy protection policies that I experienced, so that future customers do not have to endure what I have - or worse.
I'm sorry but suing for an incredibly large amount of money just to make a point is a bit ridiculous and when you publicly admit that you're doing it mostly out of spite, it makes you look like an ass.
Perhaps Comcast will experience a 'slowdown' in its profits...
You're hysterical! When people don't have much of a choice about what provider to get they're going to choose what's available and unfortunately for about 25 million people (and ~8 million of those for broadband), that's Comcast.
Nothing will come of any of this and just like the telecom immunity bullshit, this too will pass over Comcast w/o much more than a few news articles and possibly a rebate for one month at $5/subscriber while they continue to control their network as they see fit.
I remember when Firefox first started it was meant to be a faster and more secure replacement for IE. Well, the longer I have been running it (many of you know that I was probably the last Slashdot IE6 holdout for various reasons) the more I realize how slow and awful it can be -- especially the last few versions.
Now, I haven't run the new beta but I looked through the article and some of the past ones that have come up and noticed all this crap about theming, new features, etc, etc, etc but nothing really talks about how much faster it is and how much less memory the program consumes -- especially when it's been open for more than 24 hours on XP.
So, are they going to go back to light, tight, and fast instead of this feature bloat that seems to have prevailed? Yes, it's nice to have bells and whistles but I think that it's just as important to have a browser that doesn't require me to close it and reopen it so that my machine doesn't grind to a halt every other day if I don't.
Particularly as most of the users of mapping are businesses--this doesn't apply quite as much to tax maps, but our GIS layers are pretty expensive to produce and when 90% of your requests for GIS maps are from business who would otherwise need to do the survey work themselves, it's a fine line between public access and corporate welfare.
As long as the taxpayers can get it for free, I don't see how anyone can be concerned with it costing too much money to produce. I use a lot of the state's GIS data (park boundaries mostly) for geocaching. It's in a strange coordinate system that they use internally but using some open source software I am able to bring it over to WGS84 and then convert to KML/KMZ for Google Earth. This information isn't free from everyone, however, and while working with Dakota County (my county) to help them determine if they wanted a policy (I don't believe anyone needs a geocaching policy) to be developed, I asked for the GIS boundaries to help me see exactly how many geocaches were located within their park boundaries. Their GIS department doesn't release that information for free so I had to go about creating the boundaries myself using Google Earth and some other tools.
It's really unfortunate that as a taxpayer I am required to pay for something twice. I see your (and their) point to doing so as everyone wants to be fiscally conservative but when you're trying to do honest work, for those that have the data, it's a little silly not to let it go out.
Now, once you pay for it, it should be able to be freely released into the public domain especially if the laws governing that area permit it (and I'm sure they do).
It takes a few weeks/months to "decompress" from the frenetic need to have some sort of constant visual stimulus to occupy your spare time, but afterwards, you'll both be much better off. Read, play cards, listen to music, or, you know, *talk* with each other. :)
You're talking to the wrong person. I read a book a week, listen to plenty of music, do homework towards a Masters I won't obtain for at least 20 years at this rate, surf the web, play with my dog and actually do stuff outside (yes, even in Minnesota, in the winter). It's my wife that's interested in constant visual stimulation from the TV, not me -- unfortunately while we have more than on TV in the house only one has a DVD player and that same one has the Tivo, thus she gets control of what is on and I have to do my own thing somewhere else.
Could they have just STAYED on strike?
No, please fucking God no, seriously!
While many people here might be single, some of us have wives that like to watch garbage TV and w/o the normal dreck that is shown on TV she had to find something else to occupy her TV watching time. Unfortunately for me that included such highlights as America's Ballroom Challenge and Masterpiece on PBS. If you think Dancing with the Stars was bad, well, Ballroom Challenge is a completely new level of horrendous bullshit that no human should ever have to see (ballroom dancing to rap is surprisingly worse than to horribly outdated music). I won't even get into the Masterpiece bullshit because, well, no one should give a shit less about Jane Austen.
Believe me, even though I don't watch all that much TV (I have been obsessing over BBC America's Kitchen Nightmares and Last Restaurant Standing) it has been fucking hell for me.
Reading up a bit: "The FISA Court did not reject a single warrant application from its beginning in 1979 through 2002. In 2003 it rejected four applications. In 2004, the number was again zero."
Why did it reject four in 2003 is what I want to know. Who was being investigated that it would decide to deny the application after 23 years?
Why do you hate freedom?
:(
I hate being called by the Salvation Army at 12:30 PM on a vacation day to listen to back-to-back identical messages (I suppose one is in case your answering machine picked up) about a new drop-off center in Burnsville, MN. I gave money every year but that stops as of Tuesday afternoon because they are using it to flood me with phone spam. Fuck em.
Then, I hang up from that, mildly annoyed and the phone rings again. Figuring I can't be getting back-to-back douchebag calls, I pick it up to get a message that I should hit "1" to leave a message for the carpet cleaning fuckers. They hide their number, name, etc so I can't even file a formal complaint. I whistle into the message and tell them to fuck themselves with a rusty iron pipe. Even that didn't make me feel better
Which are you going to think about and more carefully consider before sending to me?
Actually, we send out far more snail mail than we do e-mail and being that *I* am the determiner of what and how much gets sent, I do my best to limit it to a single communication at the start and less than 5 (currently) for the rest of the year.
The cost of the snail mail isn't so bad and it's not like we're not used to the volume. In our case we don't recruit quite like other schools do as our budget is smaller but we still do send out many tens of thousands of dollars worth of mail. I do take my time with e-mail and make sure that the communications are important and not "spammish" (even though they opted into communicating with us that way) so we don't have to deal with ISP bans, etc.
I work in Higher Education and we're just starting to get on the ball with recruiting via Social Networking (we're always years behind the curve -- I'm surprised we're this current actually) and just as with anything that you provide to a third party, you should really think about what that group needs to have from you in order for you to get what you need in return.
Higher Education is still generally based on paper marketing. Yes, we have a mass of information available on the web but it's not enough honestly and from some Noell-Levitz studies it has been found that the majority of students still want to be communicated by traditional mail marketing in addition to everything else. In fact, in the focus groups I have conducted on the topic, 89% of those that responded (pool of ~350) wanted no communication other than direct mail -- that was shocking to me, especially because they were traditional aged students (18 - 24). I have found that most students will give you their name and address (which is more than I normally will give anyone until I actually apply to the college) and not much else (no birthdate, prior education, and especially no phone number or e-mail address).
So, why are these people giving it to Facebook? Why would they trust that site more than an institution of higher education that is actually mandated by law to protect the privacy of those it deals with? I can't turn around and release any part of a student database to any third party unless its cleansed and has no identifiable information.
Personally, while Facebook is the "new big thing" in Higher Education, it's not worth it for our institution to spend all that much time recruiting by it. Our traditional data works just fine to increase enrollment through the traditional mail, phone and e-communication programs I have developed and redeveloped. That said, I really do believe that people should be very careful about what they put out on any social networking site. Contrary to the belief that there are no automated programs allowed to scour the site, they do and the data that comes back is some really interesting stuff to wade through.
Why when you can view everything you need to know about Drupal themes (including version 6+) here. You basically unpack the theme, put it in the themes directory, and go into the admin panel to enable it.
There, I just condensed 260 pages that costs money into something free and easy to do. As far as modifying your CSS to find your custom needs, well, that's for a completely different book and one that I would actually read -- if it helped more than what I've been able to learn myself online.
But this is just stupid. I'm ok with you putting it behind a counter so a meth head doesn't come in and clear the shelf, stealing it all. but the limits on the amount make it rought if you have a >3 day long cold sometimes.
As a graying 29 year old I don't feel the need to show proof of anything when I buy a two or less boxes of medication that's supposed to be over the counter medication.
I realize I live in a nanny state that attempts to dictate everything we do while appearing to be liberal (yay for Minnesota) but stopping me from buying beer and liquor on Sundays and keeping that dangerous single box of Sudafed behind the counter is just dumb. If someone wants to make meth, they're going to get the stuff they need to do it and putting it behind the counter isn't going to stop anyone except those that really want to use the medication for what it's intended for.
Considering that internet search and online advertising are exactly the places they don't dominate, I don't see why regulators would object.
Especially that Yahoo doesn't dominate that area either and with the addition of Microsoft it's only going sink further.
How about we stop buying their shit?
You can do that, and I suggest that you do, but they will just use it against us by saying that the decline in sales proves that people are pirating.
Win/lose situation?
Is it that it just doesn't work sometimes? I've had that happen.
It never works, thus why I chose what I did -- to see if it would work. Yes, I tried to tag one on Monday (it didn't appear) and that's why this discussion was continued on by me.
It's probably because you're in the "too active" segment of the Slashdot population. Do most of your browsing while logged out and let many of your comments stay anon and after a long enough "retirement" you'll probably slip into the mod pool like I eventually did.
That's a completely backwards and retarded way of handing out mod points. Why should those that are active not be able to moderate? An active contributer is more likely to keep up with the discussions and care about the outcome of the site not those that are continuously not logged in (which I refuse to be because of the completely worthless "new discussion system" that doesn't work on my mobile device worth a fucking shit and looks like shit on any other browser IMHO).
Or, in other words--lighten up, man. Not everything's serious.
I'm seriously annoyed about the tags. I've been a frequent Slashdot contributer for 10 years and for some fucking reason not only can I not moderate, I cannot add tags. Why the fuck not? I'm good enough to continuously post comments that the other moderators feel are worth of +5 Foo but the "editors" don't feel I'm worthy of bestowing that or tags for others to see?
Personally, I find the majority of tags being used are pointless (like the one referenced above). They need to stop fucking around with the ability to moderate and tag content or do away with it all together -- especially for those that really deserve it.
We trust Google's 'review' enough to not bother how it is achieved.
No, we don't "trust" them with anything. We search for something and obviously relevant results are returned. It's immediately noticeable when Google starts returning not-so-relevant results and thus we don't need to know their methodology. When Universities publish their methods it's because they are sometimes drawing conclusions that aren't obvious to the naked eye, especially for the lay person. Google doesn't need to do that IMHO.
But the people, tabulating them in a centralized location, can and will lie just as bad as the machine that is hiding your voting record from you. Remember, it only takes one person to fuck with a e-voting machine but it only takes a few more people to fuck with centralized vote counting. Money works people.
Keep it decentralized and get over this "instantaneous statistics" bullshit that everyone is so fucking hyped up about. Who cares if you have to wait till the next day to find out who won? You have to put up with the bastard for at least four years, what's the difference if it takes a little longer to find out which one you are slowly going to learn to despise?
I have specifically chosen an ISP who promise they don't use any kind of throttling. On the other hand I did'nt go with the cheapest ISP I could find. My ISP has a "true flatrate" policy. No maximum usage and no throttling. The price is accordingly a little higher.
I did too, this time, because I had the ability to do so (I live in an area where we have a choice between Frontier DSL lines and Charter cable) and was pretty much forced because Charter blocks ports here so I couldn't run my website, host DNS and SMTP or SSH to my machine from work.
I pay quite a bit more for my DSL than I would with a Charter connection because I have to pay for a landline (which I fucking hate as it's pointless), the DSL line and then the ISP connection (through VISI). My ISP doesn't give a shit what we do. They offer reverse DNS, hosting is fully permitted, and I get 2x the speed that Frontier advertises probably because I'm located 835 feet from the DSLAM (I get 4100/500 as opposed to the 2000/256 they advertise).
But, aside from all of that geek stroking, I still have a choice -- something which most people out there really don't have anymore. I didn't have it when I lived 5 miles away in Burnsville, MN and my only option was ATTBI and then Comcast. I'm sure there are plenty of people, if they even knew about choice or the fact that they could pay just a tiny bit more for some "security" of speed, etc, they would. Problem is that most wouldn't know anything other than what fliers appear in their mailbox or the fact that Comcast advertises on every known TV and billboard medium known to man.
I feel bad for people that are getting fucked by Comcast and other ISPs that they are forced to use because I used to be one of those people.