I find that it varies a lot from company to company.
When they work well, which is about half the time for me, they're fantastic, but when they don't work well they don't work at all.
I seem to recall that Verizon's system is the worse at understanding me, and I had bad luck with American Express yesterday. On the other hand, Earthlink works well 90% of the time, and same for T-Mobile.
Except you have paid to lease that pipe with a promised level of service. XXX GB/month cap, or "unlimited" YYY MBPS means exactly what it says. Really? Your contract doesn't specify that they make no guarantee of the service, that it's only a guideline and, basically, the upper limit as to what you can get? Your contract doesn't specify that they reserve the right to adjust your traffic flows and such?
If so, wow, you have a really unusual situation. As in, 99% of customers don't have such a contract.
Chances are your contract does have these clauses, and you're right: it means exactly what it says.
Network Neutrality doesn't really mean government regulation at all. It just means that all packets have as much right to the road as any others. ...and where do those rights come from? How are they made affective?
Government regulation bringing them into existence and then giving them the force to affect the ISPs.
Yes it means government regulation, from inception to implication.
You're cheap and lazy so you want to bill all taxpayers to have the government administer a system to handle all email? As poor a job as the government does with managing things in the first place, and with coming in on budget? And you also value privacy?
It's not a unreasonable or nefarious idea that, say, an employer would give a free vacation day to anyone going to vote. They just need to bring back proof that they did. It would be convenient for people in such a situation to have a receipt from the polling place to show.
Great, your employer has intimidated you into voting a certain way. Run to the cops? It may bankrupt him, costing you your job. At the least it would spell bad blood between the employee and employer, making it real hard to continue to work there, and there's no way additional legislation can overcome that.
In short, anyone who can intimidate you into voting a certain way has some sort of influence over your life, and pissing off such a person is just not a good idea. You must never walk out of the booth with proof of your vote, except that you voted at all.
Honor our history? Jesus, the way we treat voting these days is an amazing DIShonor to our history. And I'm talking about the system as we've redesigned it, not the voter turnout and such.
In any case, I don't care: if a person can't make time in their lives to vote they don't get to. It's as simple as that. If they're spending that much effort on an inflexible job or if they simply can't organize their lives sufficiently to give them time to vote then they don't get to.
And geez, I know it's an imprudent thought, but your people living close to the poverty line probably aren't terribly informed in the first place. Again, why should society as a whole take the hit (and a mandatory holiday is a drain, mind you) because these people can't and/or refuse to get their lives together?
This notion that society must bend over backwards to make it brain-dead easy for people to vote is absurd. Society should provide the opportunity to vote (and it does) and leave it at that.
Finally somebody getting around to speaking against the amazingly widespread myth that somehow a printed ballot is more accurate, more trustworthy, or more useful than an electronic record.
It's pretty incredible to see the Slashdot crowd speak of paper trails as if they were some sort of magic talisman ready to right the evils of the election system. Slashdotters of all people should understand that the whole point of digital computation is to improve precision of calculations far beyond what could be achieved by manual counts and paper trails, and that proper application of encryption and communications technologies can entirely reverse the weaknesses of either paper or poorly implemented eVoting.
It's so blindingly simple: a paper backup cannot possibly have the precision needed to resolve a close election. It's physically impossible. So what happens when the paper disagrees with the electronics? When the backup is more flawed from the start what good is it?
I could go on, but wow... it's so refreshing to see this story posted to Slashdot. I just wish the rest of the US would stop and think for a second to demand decent electronic voting systems instead of insisting on a broken solution to the wrong problem.
If people don't care enough to make sometime for voting, then they probably don't care enough to stay informed on the issues and probably shouldn't be voting in the first place.
The pure capitalist model is only inefficient for certain goals.
Since you and I probably have different goals (judging by the rest of your comment), it's perfectly reasonable that while you complain about inefficiency I'd hail the efficiency.
Either way, that you believe it to be inefficient doesn't mean it's broken or that change is needed.
Right... so? I'm not aware that FedEx offers a "pay for people to ship anything to you for free" plan, which is required for the analogy to work. So while we're talking about improving on an imaginary situation, what does it matter that the improvement is imaginary as well?
It brings up another nonsensical piece of the NN crowd's argument: paying twice. Geez, they hammer that phrase into the ground and yet it's completely worthless. Not only is it not the case (the parties are paying for different parts of a transaction), but it's worthless anyway. What about splitting the costs among different beneficiaries makes it wrong?
Might as well point out that under network neutrality ideas the costs will be split among ALL internet users. Paying twice? Try paying millions of times.
If FedEx needs more capacity to keep up with their shipping business, then they buy more capacity.
Yes, right, exactly as I said.
It may need to increase prices to pay for this upgrade, but probably won't, since that might lose them customers to UPS.
That's not how money works.
Instead, it will probably make a capital improvement and write off the costs on its taxes
That's not how taxes work.
Seriously, once you figure out how the world works maybe you're realize how dumb this whole network neutrality argument is. Then you'll stop being a stooge for certain media companies, and you'll stop begging for higher internet bills.
Most importantly, of course, you'll stop begging to increase MY internet bills.
Most people at least claim that their ideas of network neutrality are more idealistic and "pure" than to be all about money.
They are, of course, wrong: the entire network neutrality debate is rooted in money. Telecoms need money to operate, content providers don't want to provide that funding, and customers don't either.
So you're almost correct, there is a definitional disagreement here. Most people frame network neutrality in terms of far more noble ideas of free speech and such.
Almost, because content companies HAVE been making deals with the infrastructure providers to improve their access. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that the newcomers want all customers to pay instead.
You talk like there's something wrong with that. There isn't.
FedEx, in your simplistic analogy, is having trouble. The congestion is real, and it's hurting service. In fact, you've yourself have complained about the delays. So what's the company going to do? How's it going to afford to improve service?
Well, it could raise the flat rate it's charging you for unlimited mail reception... but it knows that you're already annoyed at having to pay that much. Plus, Swiss Colony could pack their logs in smaller boxes and combine orders, and it would help the congestion, but why should it? It pays nothing either way, so it has little reason to cooperate with the shipper. Furthermore, your neighbor would be annoyed at having HIS flat rate go up just so you can get your beef logs faster.
The obvious answer is to ask the sender to pay some of the cost as well. It makes perfect sense.
What about the concept of net neutrality is incompatible with a charge?
Yes, you want internet service that has the quality of network neutrality... so you are being asked to pay for that feature. There's nothing contradictory in that.
And extortion? Yeah, the same way McDonald's "extorts" money out of me when I ask for extra cheese.
First, "preserve" net net neutrality? No, the notion that have net neutrality now (or had it recently) is a falsehood. You should say "gain" net neutrality.
Anyway, no, that's not what's being claimed at all. The way to gain net neutrality is to pay the big carriers not to intelligently shape their bandwidth, blindly shuffling it back and forth. This makes complete sense, as the blindly shuffling approach is more expensive for them (given equal quality)...so why not expect that cost to be passed along to customers?
It goes back to what I was saying before: customer satisfaction.
Billing that's a nightmare to you is acceptable to us. Features that you demand are unimportant or unknown to us. Are we wrong? Well no, we're just coming from a different place, and we expect different things from our phones.
#1, American phones do have wifi. My phone has it right now. T-Mobile offers it.
#2, and more to the point, Americans aren't demanding it. Why should the carriers offer wifi phones, which will cut into their revenues, if customers don't really care?
Of all the people I've seen arguing FOR network neutrality I've seen about twenty definitions of what it is. The pro people don't know what they're talking about either.
They only agree that the evil phone companies are after poor innocent Google's money.
There IS no neutrality, that's one of the myths you pro-NN people keep slinging about.
It's not a matter of "keeping the internet neutral"; ISPs do and have always shaped their traffic in various ways. Other threads under this story make present plenty of examples of this very thing.
So strike preserving a wondrous status quo from the reasons to support network neutrality legislation, and then ask yourself why such a blatant lie has been pushed by the corporations lobbying to have such regulation passed.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... it's precisely the same for the writer.
The writer becomes the analog of the freeware developer, in which case that is his choice.
I find that it varies a lot from company to company.
When they work well, which is about half the time for me, they're fantastic, but when they don't work well they don't work at all.
I seem to recall that Verizon's system is the worse at understanding me, and I had bad luck with American Express yesterday. On the other hand, Earthlink works well 90% of the time, and same for T-Mobile.
If so, wow, you have a really unusual situation. As in, 99% of customers don't have such a contract.
Chances are your contract does have these clauses, and you're right: it means exactly what it says.
You're absolutely right, and if consumers don't care enough about the issue to make it a significant market force then why involve regulation anyway?
Wish I had mod points; it's a shame your point of view isn't more prominent on these sites.
Government regulation bringing them into existence and then giving them the force to affect the ISPs.
Yes it means government regulation, from inception to implication.
You're cheap and lazy so you want to bill all taxpayers to have the government administer a system to handle all email? As poor a job as the government does with managing things in the first place, and with coming in on budget? And you also value privacy?
Good thinking.
*sigh*
I mean at the most that should be the output.
It's not a unreasonable or nefarious idea that, say, an employer would give a free vacation day to anyone going to vote. They just need to bring back proof that they did. It would be convenient for people in such a situation to have a receipt from the polling place to show.
An unriggable, infinitely transparent system that just plain doesn't work is of no use to anyone.
Add in the questions of precision, practicality, and affordability and you'll start to get a better view of the big picture.
In short, electronic voting has the potential to wipe the deck with paper voting on almost every test, yours and mine.
Life is not that simple.
Great, your employer has intimidated you into voting a certain way. Run to the cops? It may bankrupt him, costing you your job. At the least it would spell bad blood between the employee and employer, making it real hard to continue to work there, and there's no way additional legislation can overcome that.
In short, anyone who can intimidate you into voting a certain way has some sort of influence over your life, and pissing off such a person is just not a good idea. You must never walk out of the booth with proof of your vote, except that you voted at all.
Honor our history? Jesus, the way we treat voting these days is an amazing DIShonor to our history. And I'm talking about the system as we've redesigned it, not the voter turnout and such.
In any case, I don't care: if a person can't make time in their lives to vote they don't get to. It's as simple as that. If they're spending that much effort on an inflexible job or if they simply can't organize their lives sufficiently to give them time to vote then they don't get to.
And geez, I know it's an imprudent thought, but your people living close to the poverty line probably aren't terribly informed in the first place. Again, why should society as a whole take the hit (and a mandatory holiday is a drain, mind you) because these people can't and/or refuse to get their lives together?
This notion that society must bend over backwards to make it brain-dead easy for people to vote is absurd. Society should provide the opportunity to vote (and it does) and leave it at that.
Finally somebody getting around to speaking against the amazingly widespread myth that somehow a printed ballot is more accurate, more trustworthy, or more useful than an electronic record.
It's pretty incredible to see the Slashdot crowd speak of paper trails as if they were some sort of magic talisman ready to right the evils of the election system. Slashdotters of all people should understand that the whole point of digital computation is to improve precision of calculations far beyond what could be achieved by manual counts and paper trails, and that proper application of encryption and communications technologies can entirely reverse the weaknesses of either paper or poorly implemented eVoting.
It's so blindingly simple: a paper backup cannot possibly have the precision needed to resolve a close election. It's physically impossible. So what happens when the paper disagrees with the electronics? When the backup is more flawed from the start what good is it?
I could go on, but wow... it's so refreshing to see this story posted to Slashdot. I just wish the rest of the US would stop and think for a second to demand decent electronic voting systems instead of insisting on a broken solution to the wrong problem.
If people don't care enough to make sometime for voting, then they probably don't care enough to stay informed on the issues and probably shouldn't be voting in the first place.
The pure capitalist model is only inefficient for certain goals.
Since you and I probably have different goals (judging by the rest of your comment), it's perfectly reasonable that while you complain about inefficiency I'd hail the efficiency.
Either way, that you believe it to be inefficient doesn't mean it's broken or that change is needed.
Wow... your ignorance and delusion is just... wow.
You typed so much, and wound up with nothing but a huge mess of faulty logic, misunderstanding of the world, and parroting of corporate claims.
And yet, I know this is the level of most people who support network neutrality.
Where to begin...
At no time do both sides pay to ship a package.
Right... so? I'm not aware that FedEx offers a "pay for people to ship anything to you for free" plan, which is required for the analogy to work. So while we're talking about improving on an imaginary situation, what does it matter that the improvement is imaginary as well?
It brings up another nonsensical piece of the NN crowd's argument: paying twice. Geez, they hammer that phrase into the ground and yet it's completely worthless. Not only is it not the case (the parties are paying for different parts of a transaction), but it's worthless anyway. What about splitting the costs among different beneficiaries makes it wrong?
Might as well point out that under network neutrality ideas the costs will be split among ALL internet users. Paying twice? Try paying millions of times.
If FedEx needs more capacity to keep up with their shipping business, then they buy more capacity.
Yes, right, exactly as I said.
It may need to increase prices to pay for this upgrade, but probably won't, since that might lose them customers to UPS.
That's not how money works.
Instead, it will probably make a capital improvement and write off the costs on its taxes
That's not how taxes work.
Seriously, once you figure out how the world works maybe you're realize how dumb this whole network neutrality argument is. Then you'll stop being a stooge for certain media companies, and you'll stop begging for higher internet bills.
Most importantly, of course, you'll stop begging to increase MY internet bills.
Most people at least claim that their ideas of network neutrality are more idealistic and "pure" than to be all about money.
They are, of course, wrong: the entire network neutrality debate is rooted in money. Telecoms need money to operate, content providers don't want to provide that funding, and customers don't either.
So you're almost correct, there is a definitional disagreement here. Most people frame network neutrality in terms of far more noble ideas of free speech and such.
Almost, because content companies HAVE been making deals with the infrastructure providers to improve their access. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that the newcomers want all customers to pay instead.
You talk like there's something wrong with that. There isn't.
FedEx, in your simplistic analogy, is having trouble. The congestion is real, and it's hurting service. In fact, you've yourself have complained about the delays. So what's the company going to do? How's it going to afford to improve service?
Well, it could raise the flat rate it's charging you for unlimited mail reception... but it knows that you're already annoyed at having to pay that much. Plus, Swiss Colony could pack their logs in smaller boxes and combine orders, and it would help the congestion, but why should it? It pays nothing either way, so it has little reason to cooperate with the shipper. Furthermore, your neighbor would be annoyed at having HIS flat rate go up just so you can get your beef logs faster.
The obvious answer is to ask the sender to pay some of the cost as well. It makes perfect sense.
And, taadaa! that's how FedEx works currently.
What?
What about the concept of net neutrality is incompatible with a charge?
Yes, you want internet service that has the quality of network neutrality... so you are being asked to pay for that feature. There's nothing contradictory in that.
And extortion? Yeah, the same way McDonald's "extorts" money out of me when I ask for extra cheese.
First, "preserve" net net neutrality? No, the notion that have net neutrality now (or had it recently) is a falsehood. You should say "gain" net neutrality.
Anyway, no, that's not what's being claimed at all. The way to gain net neutrality is to pay the big carriers not to intelligently shape their bandwidth, blindly shuffling it back and forth. This makes complete sense, as the blindly shuffling approach is more expensive for them (given equal quality)...so why not expect that cost to be passed along to customers?
It goes back to what I was saying before: customer satisfaction.
Billing that's a nightmare to you is acceptable to us. Features that you demand are unimportant or unknown to us. Are we wrong? Well no, we're just coming from a different place, and we expect different things from our phones.
#1, American phones do have wifi. My phone has it right now. T-Mobile offers it.
#2, and more to the point, Americans aren't demanding it. Why should the carriers offer wifi phones, which will cut into their revenues, if customers don't really care?
I agree with your point of view 100%.
Of all the people I've seen arguing FOR network neutrality I've seen about twenty definitions of what it is. The pro people don't know what they're talking about either.
They only agree that the evil phone companies are after poor innocent Google's money.
There IS no neutrality, that's one of the myths you pro-NN people keep slinging about.
It's not a matter of "keeping the internet neutral"; ISPs do and have always shaped their traffic in various ways. Other threads under this story make present plenty of examples of this very thing.
So strike preserving a wondrous status quo from the reasons to support network neutrality legislation, and then ask yourself why such a blatant lie has been pushed by the corporations lobbying to have such regulation passed.