I say that unless your mail server meets a minimal set of criteria, including proper delegation and RDNS...
RDNS is in many cases exceedingly difficult to set up since many ISPs (including the one I am on) refuse to cooperate unless you are going to host all your mail servers on their, pay-per-user, mail system. Note that for RDNS you have to get the server authoritative to an IP block to respond to the lookup requests, and that is the ISP's server. And before you go off to sugest that I should switch to another ISP, the choices in my area are very, very limited.
Subsequently many companies around here do not have proper RDNS records and resolve to something like "static-ipxxxx.isp.net" instead to "mail.company.com".
Actually it is very true. The profitability of shareholders is in fact in the law governing publically traded corporations.
OTOH if your majority shareholders are pacifists your corporate goals may not include war-profeteering, etc.
That is a silly illusion. And do you know why? One of the fundamental principles of modern capitalist economy is that one can sell/buy a stake in a company on an open market, i.e. a stock exchange. Ever hear of those? And you cannot trade shares on an open market if there are extra strings attached. That is a company cannot be listed on a stock exchange if what you say is true: ergo it would only apply to privately held companies, or family businesses, which indeed can be governed by principles other then pure profit, unlike the publically traded corporations. Essentially as soon as you get a VC involved or you do an IPO, all bets are off, you no longer are in control of what the corporation can behave like.
Also believe it or not, people can make money and not screw over everyone in the process.
That is true, but increasingly unlikely as the size of the business and a number of large and insititutional shareholders increase. Also as a corporation grows its managment usually ceases to be that of "principled" individuals and becomes that of career CEOs and executives who have only one common thread on their CVs: making more profit wherever they go. In an environment like that the company will become an amoral entity I described. It a virtual inevitability. Its in the rules of the game. The very mechanics of the thing make it so. All the "do gooders" within the corporation are simply powerless to stop this juggernaut of increasingly callous profit-taking once it gets rolling.
Google comes as close to this as a comnpany of their size can at the moment.
Really? How come they are hiring slimeball political manipulators then?
I have news for you: the only reason Google appears to fit your criteria is because a situation has not occured before that forced them to make a choice between their "principles" and a large amount of money. Now it has. And they are choosing the way a corporation would: political corruption peddling to make more dough for themselves.
They aren't about firing large amounts of staff just to make quarterly expectations.
That stage of corporate life-cycle is down the path. Google is too young for this yet.
Google has done a decent job managing both sides of the PR spectrum.
And that is all: PR. Not to be confused with reality.
Smile a little. When they merge with MS then come back and complain
They do not have to merge with MS to behave like all the other behemoth corporations. Also, who is complaining? You confuse simple pointing out of some basic facts of life with complaining. If I say that heavy objects fall down hard on my foot when I drop them, does it mean I am complaining about gravity?
Actually, according to the terms of their incorporation, they promise to uphold certain principles above
shareholder value, and they have no legal responsibility to reneg on this promise.
Except, of course, that this a fairy tale. No such "terms" exist which are in any way enforceable. The only laws governing corporations which apply to corporate activities are that which the Federal Securities Commission enforces. In which profits of the shareholders are always to be put before any other "principles".
Principles can be put in motion in a business but only in the rare cases when the business is privately held, family owned or in some other special way enjoys the complete concensus of its shareholders, which usually implies small organizations.
I really fail to understand this irrational love affair some Slashdotters have with Google The Corporation.
Let me refresh your memory on some basic principles of large corporations:
The only purpose of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders (and/or CEOs in case of badly broken business communities such as the USA)
Large corporations are artificial "persons", whose "personality" is 100% amoral, their "life's" purpose being point #1 but any "humanizing" influence which some of their staff might once had on them is long since overpowered by the sheer size and the amounts of money and investments involved.
In fact, should large corporations be real people, their behaviour would fall into the category of a "perfect sociopath" as for the purpose of achieving their main goal, they will attempt to rob their customers of all of their money (if they can get away with it) and drive their suppliers and workers into indentured slavery (if they can get away with it).
Based on these rather basic points, people who believe corporate propaganda about "doing no evil" or "being ethical" can only be described as naive dolts. All of the corprate policies are a mere device put in place at any particular moment by the CEO for the sole purpose of making money and can be changed or revoked as soon as they become invonvenient or a more profitable way is found.
In other words: why won't you people wake up and realize that you are giving your trust and allegiance to someone else's way of making money? How brainwashed and inane can you get?
The question really is a different one: does a country have a right to demand apprehension of individuals abroad who "break" that country's law while being abroad. In other words, are we subject to laws of every country on the planet, just because we do something in a globally accessible medium, and if that is the case, aren't we truly to be judged by the most restrictive of laws of the most restrictive of countries who happen to be connected to the Internet?
Soo... by this logic an owner of a website selling lipstick to women over the internet should be subject to extradition for violation of some wacko Islamic law in, say, Iran should he ship any over there?
Second, you missed my point, that the PSTN is a very limited access network in every way *except* that it's usually available for use 24/7, but that the internet is a very open network that allows end-users a great depth and breadth of access and flexibility to create and run all sorts of applications--and is also mostly available 24/7. It is precisely this difference that you're either blind to or ignoring that makes the PSTN so much more straightforward relative to managing capacity.
And you missed mine that the modern PSTN networks and the Internet are both fundamentally the same: packet switching networks. And in both cases the measurement is drastically simplified when one uses the maximum transfer unit and only concerns himself with peak capacity which is really the only thing that matters in this discussion. Yes, the range of variation in a PSTN network is far lesser on per unit of time basis then the Internet, and the types of data contents are far more diverse in the Internet, but all of that is utterly irrelevant to esitmating peak capacity, which again, is the only thing that matters here.
Third, the PSTN is *not* packet-switched. It's circuit switched. That means for each call a complete end-to-end circuit is built upon connection that stays up for the duration, and then is torn down.
Dude, the 1960s called and want their obsolete PSTN topologies back. Look up some aging tech such as the ATM, which has been obsoleted these days by VoIP traffic. Most modern PSTN systems either ATM or VoIP internally. Circuit switching networks exist in places like Botswana and Uzbekistan (and even that is not quite true as cellular phones are getting very popular there and cellular networks are also either fully digital packet switching or older, analog radio phone-to-tower and digital packet switching backbone.
It does *not* matter a tinker's damn whether there's complete silence in both directions or if there's a constant din of chatter. The circuit size, bandwidth required, and network resources consumed never, ever changes during a call. This includes faxes and data modem calls, too BTW.
See above.
Fourth, rather than meaning "dick", Erlangs are still the ubiquitous method by which PSTN network capacity is engineered, and again faxes and modems are just normal calls from the PSTN perspective. Systemically, they both look and act exactly like a call to Mom on Mother's Day.
How are those polyester leisure suits working out for you, back there in the 1980s?
Fifth, to all your rants about promises and advertising, I can speak for the network I operate and say that customers are free to fill their connections with whatever traffic they want in either direction, and if they fill it completely I'm happy to sell them and support a larger connection. On the backend, there is no congestion internal to my network and no congestion to peers and upstreams. I fail to see the problem in this picture.
I fail to see how are you are planning to accomplish this when 300 x 5Mb/s = 1500Mb/s and your uptsream is mere 800MB/s, not counting your "thousands" of T1s, OC3s and what not also competing for this bandwith. Should even 50% of these DSL customers of yours discover joys of Bittorrent, you would be in deep trouble already.
You have no clue. In fact telephone companies do this. No telephone network on this world would be able to cope with all customers calling at the same time.
You have no reading comprehension skills. I never denied that the telephone companies do this. I only emphasised the fact that they provide sufficient capacity to accomodate teenagers and 24/7 dialup customers, instead of whining about how these people "unfairly" dare to use their telephones, which is what the strategy of the ISPs is. Next time try to read the whole post before spewing garbage.
Same goes for ISPs. In favor of cheap DSL i happily try to not saturate my line 24/7.
No it does not. ISPs, unlike the phone companies, operate far below the minimum required switching capacity expected for normal operation of the type of connections they've promised their consumers. And instead if doing what the phone companies did, i.e. increasing capacity, they whine about how all of these users demand impossible and attempt to censor and throttle their customers.
That is the case today, but it was not the case in the boom days of dot-com era when all of these turkeys used to advetise "unlimited" and "unmetered" access with speeds of "x times 56k modem" with no qualifiers. They got smarter these days and are careful to merely talk about "fast access". But many, many customers signed up based on the old ads, not the new, more carefully worded ones.
NO RESIDENTIAL ISP GUARANTEES THEIR SPEED IN THEIR ADS.
Most of the ads for ISPs during the hayday of the dot-com era did not have any qualifications as to speeds "up to" or any mention of additional conditions. As a matter of fact they used to advertise their service in absolute terms of "20 x faster then 56k modem!" etc. Only today, after having gotten in trouble for doing so, they are more careful. But many, many people who are getting "throttled" now are the customers who signed up during the dot-com era.
If you thought you were getting guaranteed speed and connectivity from your residential ISP for $30-50, you didn't pay attention to what you were buying.
What is it with these rabid corporate appologists who believe that no matter how misleading, downright crooked the ad is, it is always the consumer's fault for getting conned?! Businessmen as some sort of new saints who can do no wrong? Is this some sort of new religion?
Telephone companies routinely oversell their own networks. I've had busy signals before I've even finished dialling the number.
The point being of course that they do so at levels which do not cause routine disruption as soon as teenagers start calling their pals. That is they were forced to expand their capacity until the busy signals are not a major hindrance to their customers. Which is clearly not the case with the ISPs.
No. They took advantage of what was clearly a broken contract.
They did not violate the contract and did what the contract allowed them to do. Ergo, what was perfectly within their rights. The insurance company is the one which designed the contract and had full control over it. And it was their design to sell something they could not deliver in a gamble to get rich quick, that is why they promoted the plan to the university, clearly hoping that the young and healthy opt for it in large numbers. And they got caught.
The insurance company made a foolish mistake.
That is one way to describe a failed con job.
They DID abide by their end of the contract (no doubt spreading the cost to people in other plans not at that university) and the next year, that option was not offered again.
And that is what makes the insurance company less of a crook then the ISPs, who have no intention to obide by their end of the deal.
One plan for all that made financial sense.
You must be kidding. If that plan made sense, there would be no way for it to get "abused" by all those elderly. A plan that made sense would be a single-payer insurance system where a comprehensive effort is being made to minimize expenditures on administration, insurance company profits and what not, where prevention is well financed to minimize the expenses at the later date, etc and so on. And only then you can expect a low cost per person. Private insurance is interested in one thing only: maximum profit achieved by any means they can get away with.
The phone companies *do* operate that way, you idiot, and have operated that way practically forever. Haven't you heard how landlines and cell tower get jammed up during a disaster?
I am perfectly aware that the phone companies do not have capacities to connect everybody with everybody at once. And neither would I expect them to do so. That is because that is not how the system is used under normal conditions every day. "Disaster" does not constitute normal use within the advertised parameters. Bittorrent does. Unless of course you are going to claim that bittorrent and terrorism are one and the same and various nations suffer once in a decade "bittorrent tragedies" involving burning buildings and planes falling out of the sky.
It truly amazes me what these appologists for crooked businessmen will go to excuse the pure greed and sneering contempt the ISPs have for their "customers".
What do you think a guarantee is? All guarantees are qualified with something. They either give you what they said they would or they give it to you for free or give you an alternative.
Are you this dense normally, or are you making a special effort for me? Conditional guarantees are qualifed as opposed to absolute, unqualified ones, which is why one cannot make such claims in advertising and which is the reason why all those car ads have fine print on them or the fast talking dudes at the end mumbling the conditions as fast as they can. Otherwise the guarantee becomes unconditional and the consumer has all the expectation and right to hold the advertiser to it. And that is the fraud the ISPs have committed, by offering unconditional "unlimited access", in their advertising. If they had advertised "part time" access, with speeds "up to 3mb/s" in the open, no one would be able to accuse them of lying. But in their greed and zeal to take over the market in the dot-com boom days they did not do so and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
And lobby for laws preventing radio stations from running promotions such as "tenth caller wins ten grand". I can remember those contests bringing entire metro areas phone systems down for several minutes.
That would be the true-blue capitalist telcos, the stalwarts of "unrestricted free markets", I assume. The "socialist" ones around here just upgraded their systems. And radiostations still have their silly call-in contests nearly daily.
Hardly. They offer very limited access to the telephone network--you can make and receive phone calls with a limited finite set of optional features such as caller-id and voicemail. They offer unlimited use of that application within, well, limits, including geographical toll boundries and pay-per-use products such as directory assistance and three-way calling.
The unlimited access is for the bulk, most common, practical part of the service. All of the other features are optional and non-essential to the basic function of the telephone network. The "limits" are such that they do not interfere in any conceivable practical use of the system, even going as far as including many 24/7 dialup connections to Internet.
The geographical area restrictions are for the far less common usage, and historically originate from the fact that various telephone companies used to be restricted only to the sets of wires within their corresponding geographical areas, thus nessecitating peering agreements and fees/contracts associated with those. At least that was the original excuse.
IP networks offer an ever-expanding variety of access, limited only by the contractual terms of service that each customer agrees to at the time of purchase. In practice, those terms are most often loosely enforced, if at all, and usually only in response to some operational problem caused by a violation. New network applications are developed and widely adopted as time passes.
And this mumbo-jumbo has any bearing on the topic of discussion how precisely?
Actually, telephony capacity is engineered to some threshold of dropped calls per 100 at the network's "busy hour". This threshold is either dictated by regulatory bodies or is left to the telco. Either way, few--if any--telcos build to "zero drops per 100 at busy hour".
And despite of all these mighty efforts at obfuscation, you still did not manage to hide the fact that the telephone networks are required to sustain a reasonable level of service, even at a peak hour, sufficent to allow a vast majority of calls to be serviced, and the remainder merely with a small delay. And all of that without the need of snooping on conversations and terminating those deemed "unfairly" using the system.
Telephony networks are a smidge easier to engineer from a capacity perspective because there's fewer variables to address.
Total hogwash. They are both packet switching networks. The only unit of capacity that has any bearing on both is full-size data packets switched per second. Additionally, PSTN systems suffer from added complexities of having to sample, encode, and decode analog voice data, which pure data networks do not have to deal with.
A PSTN/TDM phone call takes a discrete unit of bandwidth per call, either 56K or 64K depending on the underlying transport technology.
Right, and a broadband connection takes a discrete unit of bandwith per connection, either 1mb/s, 5mb/s or 100mb/s depending on the underlying transport technology. The fact that it can take less is as relevant to the discussion as the fact that the PSTN connection can take less then 56k when silence is being transmitted. According to your genius reasoning, the PSTN network should be designed to handle mostly silence and croak when all of the people start "unfairly" chit-chatting at the same time.
The only variables are start time and duration. Erlang modeling, based on queue theory, addresses this quite well; it isolates start time by normalizing duration to 3600 seconds/call and provides useful, realistic measurements.
All of which meant dick when people use faxes, dial-up connections, and what not. Face it, the only analysis feasible is practical masurement of the network usage and expanding it to meet capacity. Demanding that people start calling
I would be interested to hear what you think happens to the pizza place that doesn't get your pizza to you in 30 minutes or the mechanic who doesn't get your car done in 10 minutes.
A pizza place which does advertise in absolute terms a delivery in 30 minutes, with no qualifications, such as a mechanic who advertises delviery of service in 10 minutes, without qualifications, are both doing what amounts to "false advertising". Which is a form of fraud. An offense recognized and punishable by law. They might get away with it if they manage to mollify a customer by offering him something in exchange for him not suing their asses off, but they might also not succeed in doing so. That is why all pizza places advertise "in 30 minutes or free". Note the difference.
Guare=anteed just means he will have to give you something extra on top of your oil change or give you the oil change for free. But anyway, nice try.
Aparently in the funky universe where you live, time is malleable and "10 minutes" might mean "100 days" as long as one gets a key-chain or something free. In this universe on the other hand, an inability to perform some promised action within a previously specified time limit constitutes not being able to deliver.
You have the right to use 1/10th this vacation property when you need it.
Okay- most folks have 2 weeks a year vacation.
Fraudulent sale if the "2 weeks max" was not part of the contract. As simple as that. If someone tried to use the property for 40 weeks it would be his right to do so. Whomever sold the "1/10th" use of the vacation property without that explicit and bold contractual provision that the time is limited to 2 weeks is a slimey crook who counted on usage patterns pulled out of his ass and not getting caught. Plain and simple. Furthermore, your analogy would be more accurately corresponding to what the ISPs do if the "expected" vacation time was 2 and half hours or somesuch: ISPs oversell their bandwithd by orders of magnitude.
$150 a month - GREAT health care- covered everything, $10 deductable.
$50 a month - OKAY health care- covered everything after a $2k yearly deductable and $25 deductable per office visit.
Everyone old chose $150 and used it to death.
Everyone young chose $50 and barely used it.
Clearly the insurance company is a bunch of crooks. The elderly did simply what they have an unquestionable right to do, i.e. obided by their end of the deal. The insurance company did not. Again, this is similar with the ISPs, they want to conduct fraudulent sales of a service they cannot deliver.
In a situation like that, it seems to me like it would make sense to have two distinct tiers of traffic: local traffic that wasn't going to leave the country (and thus wouldn't have to go through expensive undersea cables and be subject to peering agreements), and international traffic. The latter is what's expensive, the former ought to be free or close to free
Trouble is, as I explained to the other poster above, that in case of the Internet, unlike the telephone network, the bulk of normal usage is non-local. A huge number of sites being accessed by Australians is overseas, in USA primarily. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Blogger, MySpace, etc and so on. While some of those companies can have local "beachheads" with some sort of caching and data replication capabilities, and while the ISPs can cache some contents, this is only a very partial remedy because of the highly dynamic nature of the content of those sites. Also ISPs can get in legal hot water for caching, running afoul various wacko laws, such as anti-"piracy" or anti-"hate"-speech ones.
Again, the only way ouy of this jam is for ISPs to do what they were supposed to do in the first place: invest in the backbone infrastructure until it is capable of handling the bandwith they sold to their customers.
Except that it is impractical. In the case of Internet, unlike telephone conversations, the bulk of regular usage is non-local. That is most of the websites people access are not local from their perspective, and furthermore, they contain dynamic content. While caching can indeed speed things up and remove some of the load, it is only a partial remedy. Also by caching, ISPs expose themselves to various insane laws, be it anti-"piracy" or anti-"hate"-speech.
Subsequently the only sane repsonse is an increase in switching capacity until it is matching the bandwith being sold to individual users.
Some people will cancel the fight, some people won't show up for the flight, and sometimes they won't be able to sell all the seats in first class and can bump overbooked coach passengers to first class. In the event that they can't put you on your purchased flight, they will put you on the next one, or refund your ticket.
The key word being refund. Also, airlines have many other reasons for bumping flights, such as weather and what not. In other words, while they can be sleazy, the level of their machinations is insignificant to what the crooks, otherwise known as the ISPs, are up to.
It may be abstract and not quite as apt, but clearly the pipes and the elctrons being served are discrete units that can be measured for each user. So yes, there is a physical object here - it's just not as easy to see as an acre of land.
This made me realize that there is even a better way of visualisng the problem: think traditional telephone companies. They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network. If they operated on the same principle as the ISPs, you would get nothing but busy signals if more then 0.1% of people decided to call each other. Furthermore, if their response to the problem was like that of the ISPs, you would see people's calls being monitored and those made by teenagers would be terminated prematurely, because they make the system too busy for Grandma to call her grandkids. In other words: total nonsense. Instead the telcos of old did the only sane thing: expanded the switching capability until the odds of the system reaching its capacity were so small as not to impede its normal use.
ISPs simply believe that no sane rules apply to them because they operate in this magical, fantastic, cosmic, new wonder medium of Internet. Its time someone hit them with a sizeable clue bat and made their noses contact the firm ground of common sense, violently.
Slashdot Mirror
RDNS is in many cases exceedingly difficult to set up since many ISPs (including the one I am on) refuse to cooperate unless you are going to host all your mail servers on their, pay-per-user, mail system. Note that for RDNS you have to get the server authoritative to an IP block to respond to the lookup requests, and that is the ISP's server. And before you go off to sugest that I should switch to another ISP, the choices in my area are very, very limited.
Subsequently many companies around here do not have proper RDNS records and resolve to something like "static-ipxxxx.isp.net" instead to "mail.company.com".
Actually it is very true. The profitability of shareholders is in fact in the law governing publically traded corporations.
That is a silly illusion. And do you know why? One of the fundamental principles of modern capitalist economy is that one can sell/buy a stake in a company on an open market, i.e. a stock exchange. Ever hear of those? And you cannot trade shares on an open market if there are extra strings attached. That is a company cannot be listed on a stock exchange if what you say is true: ergo it would only apply to privately held companies, or family businesses, which indeed can be governed by principles other then pure profit, unlike the publically traded corporations. Essentially as soon as you get a VC involved or you do an IPO, all bets are off, you no longer are in control of what the corporation can behave like.
That is true, but increasingly unlikely as the size of the business and a number of large and insititutional shareholders increase. Also as a corporation grows its managment usually ceases to be that of "principled" individuals and becomes that of career CEOs and executives who have only one common thread on their CVs: making more profit wherever they go. In an environment like that the company will become an amoral entity I described. It a virtual inevitability. Its in the rules of the game. The very mechanics of the thing make it so. All the "do gooders" within the corporation are simply powerless to stop this juggernaut of increasingly callous profit-taking once it gets rolling.
Really? How come they are hiring slimeball political manipulators then?
I have news for you: the only reason Google appears to fit your criteria is because a situation has not occured before that forced them to make a choice between their "principles" and a large amount of money. Now it has. And they are choosing the way a corporation would: political corruption peddling to make more dough for themselves.
That stage of corporate life-cycle is down the path. Google is too young for this yet.
And that is all: PR. Not to be confused with reality.
They do not have to merge with MS to behave like all the other behemoth corporations. Also, who is complaining? You confuse simple pointing out of some basic facts of life with complaining. If I say that heavy objects fall down hard on my foot when I drop them, does it mean I am complaining about gravity?
Except, of course, that this a fairy tale. No such "terms" exist which are in any way enforceable. The only laws governing corporations which apply to corporate activities are that which the Federal Securities Commission enforces. In which profits of the shareholders are always to be put before any other "principles".
Principles can be put in motion in a business but only in the rare cases when the business is privately held, family owned or in some other special way enjoys the complete concensus of its shareholders, which usually implies small organizations.
I really fail to understand this irrational love affair some Slashdotters have with Google The Corporation.
Let me refresh your memory on some basic principles of large corporations:
Based on these rather basic points, people who believe corporate propaganda about "doing no evil" or "being ethical" can only be described as naive dolts. All of the corprate policies are a mere device put in place at any particular moment by the CEO for the sole purpose of making money and can be changed or revoked as soon as they become invonvenient or a more profitable way is found.
In other words: why won't you people wake up and realize that you are giving your trust and allegiance to someone else's way of making money? How brainwashed and inane can you get?
The question really is a different one: does a country have a right to demand apprehension of individuals abroad who "break" that country's law while being abroad. In other words, are we subject to laws of every country on the planet, just because we do something in a globally accessible medium, and if that is the case, aren't we truly to be judged by the most restrictive of laws of the most restrictive of countries who happen to be connected to the Internet?
Soo ... by this logic an owner of a website selling lipstick to women over the internet should be subject to extradition for violation of some wacko Islamic law in, say, Iran should he ship any over there?
And you missed mine that the modern PSTN networks and the Internet are both fundamentally the same: packet switching networks. And in both cases the measurement is drastically simplified when one uses the maximum transfer unit and only concerns himself with peak capacity which is really the only thing that matters in this discussion. Yes, the range of variation in a PSTN network is far lesser on per unit of time basis then the Internet, and the types of data contents are far more diverse in the Internet, but all of that is utterly irrelevant to esitmating peak capacity, which again, is the only thing that matters here.
Dude, the 1960s called and want their obsolete PSTN topologies back. Look up some aging tech such as the ATM, which has been obsoleted these days by VoIP traffic. Most modern PSTN systems either ATM or VoIP internally. Circuit switching networks exist in places like Botswana and Uzbekistan (and even that is not quite true as cellular phones are getting very popular there and cellular networks are also either fully digital packet switching or older, analog radio phone-to-tower and digital packet switching backbone.
See above.
How are those polyester leisure suits working out for you, back there in the 1980s?
I fail to see how are you are planning to accomplish this when 300 x 5Mb/s = 1500Mb/s and your uptsream is mere 800MB/s, not counting your "thousands" of T1s, OC3s and what not also competing for this bandwith. Should even 50% of these DSL customers of yours discover joys of Bittorrent, you would be in deep trouble already.You have no reading comprehension skills. I never denied that the telephone companies do this. I only emphasised the fact that they provide sufficient capacity to accomodate teenagers and 24/7 dialup customers, instead of whining about how these people "unfairly" dare to use their telephones, which is what the strategy of the ISPs is. Next time try to read the whole post before spewing garbage.
No it does not. ISPs, unlike the phone companies, operate far below the minimum required switching capacity expected for normal operation of the type of connections they've promised their consumers. And instead if doing what the phone companies did, i.e. increasing capacity, they whine about how all of these users demand impossible and attempt to censor and throttle their customers.
That is the case today, but it was not the case in the boom days of dot-com era when all of these turkeys used to advetise "unlimited" and "unmetered" access with speeds of "x times 56k modem" with no qualifiers. They got smarter these days and are careful to merely talk about "fast access". But many, many customers signed up based on the old ads, not the new, more carefully worded ones.
Most of the ads for ISPs during the hayday of the dot-com era did not have any qualifications as to speeds "up to" or any mention of additional conditions. As a matter of fact they used to advertise their service in absolute terms of "20 x faster then 56k modem!" etc. Only today, after having gotten in trouble for doing so, they are more careful. But many, many people who are getting "throttled" now are the customers who signed up during the dot-com era.
What is it with these rabid corporate appologists who believe that no matter how misleading, downright crooked the ad is, it is always the consumer's fault for getting conned?! Businessmen as some sort of new saints who can do no wrong? Is this some sort of new religion?
The point being of course that they do so at levels which do not cause routine disruption as soon as teenagers start calling their pals. That is they were forced to expand their capacity until the busy signals are not a major hindrance to their customers. Which is clearly not the case with the ISPs.
They did not violate the contract and did what the contract allowed them to do. Ergo, what was perfectly within their rights. The insurance company is the one which designed the contract and had full control over it. And it was their design to sell something they could not deliver in a gamble to get rich quick, that is why they promoted the plan to the university, clearly hoping that the young and healthy opt for it in large numbers. And they got caught.
That is one way to describe a failed con job.
And that is what makes the insurance company less of a crook then the ISPs, who have no intention to obide by their end of the deal.
You must be kidding. If that plan made sense, there would be no way for it to get "abused" by all those elderly. A plan that made sense would be a single-payer insurance system where a comprehensive effort is being made to minimize expenditures on administration, insurance company profits and what not, where prevention is well financed to minimize the expenses at the later date, etc and so on. And only then you can expect a low cost per person. Private insurance is interested in one thing only: maximum profit achieved by any means they can get away with.I am perfectly aware that the phone companies do not have capacities to connect everybody with everybody at once. And neither would I expect them to do so. That is because that is not how the system is used under normal conditions every day. "Disaster" does not constitute normal use within the advertised parameters. Bittorrent does. Unless of course you are going to claim that bittorrent and terrorism are one and the same and various nations suffer once in a decade "bittorrent tragedies" involving burning buildings and planes falling out of the sky.
It truly amazes me what these appologists for crooked businessmen will go to excuse the pure greed and sneering contempt the ISPs have for their "customers".
Are you this dense normally, or are you making a special effort for me? Conditional guarantees are qualifed as opposed to absolute, unqualified ones, which is why one cannot make such claims in advertising and which is the reason why all those car ads have fine print on them or the fast talking dudes at the end mumbling the conditions as fast as they can. Otherwise the guarantee becomes unconditional and the consumer has all the expectation and right to hold the advertiser to it. And that is the fraud the ISPs have committed, by offering unconditional "unlimited access", in their advertising. If they had advertised "part time" access, with speeds "up to 3mb/s" in the open, no one would be able to accuse them of lying. But in their greed and zeal to take over the market in the dot-com boom days they did not do so and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
That would be the true-blue capitalist telcos, the stalwarts of "unrestricted free markets", I assume. The "socialist" ones around here just upgraded their systems. And radiostations still have their silly call-in contests nearly daily.
The unlimited access is for the bulk, most common, practical part of the service. All of the other features are optional and non-essential to the basic function of the telephone network. The "limits" are such that they do not interfere in any conceivable practical use of the system, even going as far as including many 24/7 dialup connections to Internet.
The geographical area restrictions are for the far less common usage, and historically originate from the fact that various telephone companies used to be restricted only to the sets of wires within their corresponding geographical areas, thus nessecitating peering agreements and fees/contracts associated with those. At least that was the original excuse.
And this mumbo-jumbo has any bearing on the topic of discussion how precisely?
And despite of all these mighty efforts at obfuscation, you still did not manage to hide the fact that the telephone networks are required to sustain a reasonable level of service, even at a peak hour, sufficent to allow a vast majority of calls to be serviced, and the remainder merely with a small delay. And all of that without the need of snooping on conversations and terminating those deemed "unfairly" using the system.
Total hogwash. They are both packet switching networks. The only unit of capacity that has any bearing on both is full-size data packets switched per second. Additionally, PSTN systems suffer from added complexities of having to sample, encode, and decode analog voice data, which pure data networks do not have to deal with.
Right, and a broadband connection takes a discrete unit of bandwith per connection, either 1mb/s, 5mb/s or 100mb/s depending on the underlying transport technology. The fact that it can take less is as relevant to the discussion as the fact that the PSTN connection can take less then 56k when silence is being transmitted. According to your genius reasoning, the PSTN network should be designed to handle mostly silence and croak when all of the people start "unfairly" chit-chatting at the same time.
All of which meant dick when people use faxes, dial-up connections, and what not. Face it, the only analysis feasible is practical masurement of the network usage and expanding it to meet capacity. Demanding that people start calling
A pizza place which does advertise in absolute terms a delivery in 30 minutes, with no qualifications, such as a mechanic who advertises delviery of service in 10 minutes, without qualifications, are both doing what amounts to "false advertising". Which is a form of fraud. An offense recognized and punishable by law. They might get away with it if they manage to mollify a customer by offering him something in exchange for him not suing their asses off, but they might also not succeed in doing so. That is why all pizza places advertise "in 30 minutes or free". Note the difference.
Aparently in the funky universe where you live, time is malleable and "10 minutes" might mean "100 days" as long as one gets a key-chain or something free. In this universe on the other hand, an inability to perform some promised action within a previously specified time limit constitutes not being able to deliver.
Fraudulent sale if the "2 weeks max" was not part of the contract. As simple as that. If someone tried to use the property for 40 weeks it would be his right to do so. Whomever sold the "1/10th" use of the vacation property without that explicit and bold contractual provision that the time is limited to 2 weeks is a slimey crook who counted on usage patterns pulled out of his ass and not getting caught. Plain and simple. Furthermore, your analogy would be more accurately corresponding to what the ISPs do if the "expected" vacation time was 2 and half hours or somesuch: ISPs oversell their bandwithd by orders of magnitude.
Clearly the insurance company is a bunch of crooks. The elderly did simply what they have an unquestionable right to do, i.e. obided by their end of the deal. The insurance company did not. Again, this is similar with the ISPs, they want to conduct fraudulent sales of a service they cannot deliver.
Trouble is, as I explained to the other poster above, that in case of the Internet, unlike the telephone network, the bulk of normal usage is non-local. A huge number of sites being accessed by Australians is overseas, in USA primarily. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Blogger, MySpace, etc and so on. While some of those companies can have local "beachheads" with some sort of caching and data replication capabilities, and while the ISPs can cache some contents, this is only a very partial remedy because of the highly dynamic nature of the content of those sites. Also ISPs can get in legal hot water for caching, running afoul various wacko laws, such as anti-"piracy" or anti-"hate"-speech ones.
Again, the only way ouy of this jam is for ISPs to do what they were supposed to do in the first place: invest in the backbone infrastructure until it is capable of handling the bandwith they sold to their customers.
Except that it is impractical. In the case of Internet, unlike telephone conversations, the bulk of regular usage is non-local. That is most of the websites people access are not local from their perspective, and furthermore, they contain dynamic content. While caching can indeed speed things up and remove some of the load, it is only a partial remedy. Also by caching, ISPs expose themselves to various insane laws, be it anti-"piracy" or anti-"hate"-speech.
Subsequently the only sane repsonse is an increase in switching capacity until it is matching the bandwith being sold to individual users.
The key word being refund. Also, airlines have many other reasons for bumping flights, such as weather and what not. In other words, while they can be sleazy, the level of their machinations is insignificant to what the crooks, otherwise known as the ISPs, are up to.
This made me realize that there is even a better way of visualisng the problem: think traditional telephone companies. They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network. If they operated on the same principle as the ISPs, you would get nothing but busy signals if more then 0.1% of people decided to call each other. Furthermore, if their response to the problem was like that of the ISPs, you would see people's calls being monitored and those made by teenagers would be terminated prematurely, because they make the system too busy for Grandma to call her grandkids. In other words: total nonsense. Instead the telcos of old did the only sane thing: expanded the switching capability until the odds of the system reaching its capacity were so small as not to impede its normal use.
ISPs simply believe that no sane rules apply to them because they operate in this magical, fantastic, cosmic, new wonder medium of Internet. Its time someone hit them with a sizeable clue bat and made their noses contact the firm ground of common sense, violently.