Last time I heard there weren't any martyrs being jailed for growing hemp for paper. At least not in the US.
That's right, because you can't legally grow it for paper in the US without the approval of the DEA. Because somebody decided that a fucking plant that makes you dumb for a few hours is a threat to humanity and needs to be stopped at all costs, civil liberties and constitution be damned.
"Some" does not translate into the sweeping generalization that you made about blocking UDP traffic. And such an ISP (that forced a proxy on you and disallowed you from sending your own traffic without it) would not have very many customers if any other option existed, as a proxy-only setup is going to disallow several applications (gaming and VPN come to mind) by nature.
and especially some corporate network providers
And this is a problem, why? I'm not overly worried about my ability to seed that torrent from work......
I.e. you have to let some of the bandwidth you have being used as a pass through for other people's traffic. In an open source client, it would be trivial for anyone to remove this and thus increase the bandwidth "useful" for you only (by not accepting any pass through traffic), thus rendering the whole model useless. If there's nobody willing to donate his bandwidth for anonymity, nobody gets anything.
Uhh, even if your theory is right (you have a lot more faith in them then I do) it's still a BS argument. The whole point to open source software is being able to do what you want with your computer. If somebody doesn't want to use his internet connection to provide anonymity to others then that's his choice. I would make the argument that the community would be quite willing to run tor-like nodes on their own without being forced to by their closed-source bittorrent client.
No, I'm sorry, but I can't help but look at the fact that his company has signed deals with the *AAs of the World and wonder just why they are so eager to switch to a closed-source model. Could it be that the software is going to phone home? If he tries to pull something like that (and he'll be caught fairly quickly, since it doesn't exactly like a rocket scientist to run WireShark) then he deserves the ever lasting scorn of the internet community.
I know many VoIP programs use UDP and so do lots of online games
Add lots of VPN systems to your list. IPSec (behind NAT) is the first one that comes to mind....
I haven't figured out if the GP is a fucking moron or a troll yet. One would think that somebody posting to/. would realize that UDP is used for a lot more stuff then just DNS.....
I have personally yet to meet a drug dealer where selling drugs was not their primary, if not only, source of income
Drug dealer or pot dealer? Because I can't think of a single pot dealer in my area that doesn't hold a day job. And most of them have fairly serious day jobs, not supermarket-type positions.
Also, it wouldn't surprise me if there are back room secret deals going on where the big media corps are telling Comcast that they have to do their best to make illegal file sharing on their networks unusable and in return they get access to the channels & content from the big media corps at better rates
This is the most insightful post in this entire discussion, IMHO. Too bad you made it too late to get any real + moderation. Too bad I've already posted about three hundred times or you'd get my mod points.
I find it interesting that none of the DSL providers feel the need to interfere with bittorrent. Could it be that they don't have a vested business interest in preventing piracy?
What people seem to be missing is that Comcast oversells the crap out of their services. It's the only way any ISP of any kind or size can remain in the least bit competitive.
[snipped]
Most people are using either a small percentage of their bandwidth at a time (TF2 doesn't eat up that much, it just likes low latency) or use it in bursts. A 30MB driver here, 1.5MB worth of email there, with long periods of very little activity in between. ISPs base their profits and their very survival as a business on this type of usage pattern.
I don't know if I'd agree with your logic. If that was my usage pattern then I'd be just happy with dial-up -- especially knowing that if I really wanted that 30MB driver ASAP I could download it at the office and burn a CD. Somebody earlier said that p2p is really the killer app for broadband and the ISPs have to know that.
Bittorrent (and other bandwidth/transfer-heavy applications) don't conform to this usage pattern. They tend to monopolize as much as they can get for long periods of time, which drives up the total amount of bandwidth in use at a time. Comcast (et al) only has so much pipe to go around, and if everyone's using as much as they can get, the network suffers.
Again, I've said this a few times now, but which pipe? The shared last-mile pipe or the pipe to the internet? Because it's highly unlikely that the pipe to the internet is the problem. That's a comparatively cheap expense compared to the expense of maintaining that huge network. The shared last-mile is the problem they have. And on the shared last-mile there is no reason why traffic shaping wouldn't solve the problem. What do I care if the node I'm on is running at 100% of capacity as long as I still have a low RTT time for my ssh/voip/gaming packets?
Hell, right now at work I've maxed out our T-1 seeding a torrent. But I have a shaping policy in effect that prioritizes all other traffic ahead of this -- so nobody even notices, not even the VOIP users in our remote offices over the VPN. A well designed shaping policy would be a fair way to solve the problem and would largely be transparent to end-users.
Despite what you may think, all ISPs oversubscribe
Yeah, I worked in the business. What's your point?
People don't get any room to complain that they can't suck down 300Gb of data monthly for only $40
I think they do. And regardless, Comcast isn't stopping you from DOWNLOADING (with this technology, n/m the other stuff they are doing), they are stopping you from UPLOADING, by interfering with your ability to seed a torrent. This makes even LESS sense to me, because the return-path is a lot less likely to max out on a DOCSIS network then the download-path. In fact I have 11.6% of the download bandwidth (5.0Mbps out of 42.88Mbps) on my node, but only 3.6% of the upload (384Kbps out of 10.24Mbps). So why the hell is Comcast worrying about seeders again?
I also believe their major problem is with leeches on the network who are like porkers who sit at a buffet all day long.
No, their major problem is that they'd rather lie to their customers and forge packets then take any of the above mentioned honest steps to curb the problem. I find the packet forgery particularly ironic, since the AUP of virtually every single ISP (including mine, Roadrunner) says that forging any TCP/IP packet is grounds for instant termination.
You tell me why a traffic shaping setup that prioritized bulk file transfers BELOW everything else wouldn't be a workable solution to this problem.
That would keep their Internet customers from using expensive bandwidth from outside the Comcast backbone
I'll grant you that traffic to the internet costs "more" then traffic within their network (which is basically free), but is an overloaded backbone/edge connection really the problem that the cableco's face?
I've always thought the problem had more to do with the shared last-mile nature of DOCSIS. They are basically splitting up 42 megabits between dozens to hundreds of houses. Max out that node and (without a good traffic shaping policy) everyones performance suffers, regardless of how free the backbone links may be.
Given that, I don't think your idea would solve their problem. Which isn't to say that it's a bad idea -- they could use the money from such a service to split their network into smaller and smaller nodes, which (short of switching to dedicated fiber or copper pairs) is really the only solution to the problem in the long run.
would probably eat or attack humans without hesitation.
I dunno. It really doesn't take that many shock events for an animal (even a "dumb" one) to learn. Would I want to go up against a T-Rex with a cattle-prod? Hell no! But why would you be any more afraid of one in a controlled setting then you would be afraid of a tiger or lion in the same setting? Either one can kill you if it catches you without weapons or technology.
Most predators also won't bother to hunt if they aren't hungry -- it's a waste of energy -- they never did explain (in either the book or the movie) why the presumably well-fed dinosaurs felt the need to go to such lengths to hunt humans. Ever been to an aquarium and seen the pray fish in the same tank with the sharks? The sharks completely ignore them because they are well fed by their handlers. Sharks have been around since the dinosaurs, largely unchanged from the present day, and if they can suppress their predatory instinct when not hungry, why wouldn't dinosaurs?
A lone wolf is usually not at all that efficient in the wild.
That doesn't mean they aren't smart creatures though. That just means they are social creatures that do better in packs. How well do human beings cope with extended solitude? All/. relationship jokes aside, think about it. Why else would solitary confinement be considered punishment and extended solitary cruel and unusual?
We only got them because we were being stomped on, chased, mauled and eaten by almost anything else alive
And amazingly enough we survived in spite of all the disadvantages that our large brains bring. Like the complications of childbirth. How many other animals have birthing problems like we do? Or the fact that our young are completely helpless at birth, which while not exactly rare in the animal kingdom (common among mammals) is hardly an advantage.
but how many truly smart top predators are there?
Eh, off the top of my head, orcas and wolves both stand out as apex predators that are fairly intelligent. I could probably throw human beings onto that list, but that's probably cheating;)
That part of the movie was a crock of shit though. The book was at least somewhat more realistic on this. When the fences went down, the game warden guy wasn't even worried about it at first, because most of the animals had already been shocked a few times and it only takes a handful of shock events to condition an animal to avoid the fences, whether or not they are energized.
But let's look at the modern world. You know you can take a safari and get to within meters of apex predators without being attacked? You know that a lot of people go swimming in shark-infested waters all the time and you can count the number of annual shark attacks with your fingers.
For an animal to attack you it either has to perceive you as pray or feel threatened by you. Most animals are justifiably leery of human beings and don't consider them as suitable pray under normal circumstances. I see no reason why dinosaurs would be any less controllable with modern technology then any of the other dangerous animals that we interact with.
And before anyone complains that they shouldn't be over-selling, stop and think what it costs to get dedicated bandwidth and compare that with what you pay for cable internet. Yes, over-selling makes them a lot more money, but it also saves money for customers who don't abuse the system.
I don't complain about them over-selling because it's a fact of life with the technology that they are using. Short of limiting each DOCSIS node to only a few houses, or reducing the bandwidth that each customer gets, they have to over-sell it.
Over-selling is not a new concept. My house has a 200amp service. If I max that out I'm using 48,000 watts of power. Somehow I doubt the electric company's grid could support every single house pegging the connection, even if they had the generation capacity to back it up, which they don't (or we wouldn't have brown/blackouts in the summer....).
The difference between the power company and Comcast however, is that the power company will upgrade their grid if it can't support the load on a regular basis, the power company has a simple to understand billing structure (use X number of kWh, pay Y dollars to us) and can actually meter for usage. The flip-side is, that Comcast can order another OC-48 or segment that overloaded neighborhood into two nodes a hellva lot cheaper then the power company can build another plant or string more wires....
Anyway, I went off on a tirade. I don't complain about over-selling. I do complain about lying. Selling me "unlimited" service and then cutting me off when I use it as such is lying and ought to be considered fraud, regardless of what "fine print" they have.
The basic re-hash is that they don't tell you what it is because there isn't a set number. The warn users who over-use bandwidth ad peak hours. If you max out your connection at off-peak hours, they're fine with it.
If that's actually the case, then perhaps they should adopt the pricing model of the wireless industry. Sell connections with X gigabytes of data during peak hours (overages apply if you exceed it) and unlimited data during off-peak hours. Provide a website that allows people to track their usage and be done with it. None of this ad-hoc, hidden limit bullshit.
It's fun to mess with them sometimes though. My favorite past-time is to ensure that I get a fresh order of fries by specifically requesting them without salt. Nine of ten times they will grant this request, which requires a new batch to be made. Then when you hit the drive-thru window you ask them for salt packets;)
He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, say... no no. He slashes at you here... or here... or maybe across the belly, spilling your intestines
I've always said that we mammals don't really have it that bad. Yeah, being eaten by a lion probably sucks, but at least he makes a halfway clean kill (closes the airway or bites into an artery and you bleed out) before him and his buds start to eat you.
Go a little lower on the chain then mammals and you'll find out just how much of a raving bitch mother nature truly is. The lion doesn't cripple you, lay his eggs inside you, to eventually hatch and consume you from the inside out while your are still alive. The lion doesn't dissolve your insides and suck them out while you lay there paralyzed from his venom.
Wow, I'm glad I'm on the top of the food chain.......
Now all we need to find is some evidence of raptors being able to open up doors, and we'll have proof that Hollywood knows more about Dinosaurs than Science.
Eh, Hollywood sucks, but who is to say that they WOULDN'T have been able to figure out how to open a door, given the right motivation? My dog can open doors. Ever watch squirrels figure out "squirrel-proof" bird feeders? Ever seen a cat that was toilet trained?
Granted, the mammalian brain has tens of millions of years of evolution over the dinos, but who is to say what they would have been capable of? Imagine if we actually were able to somehow obtain an intact DNA strand, clone them and observe their behavior? It's probably not possible, because the science behind Jurassic Park was flawed in this area, but just imagine if it was?
Can you honestly say that you WOULDN'T go to a Jurassic Park if someone managed to pull it off?
The said part is I could tell more stories like that.
A buddy of mine and I went through the local McDonald's drive-thru once. Ordered some stuff off the dollar menu. Came to $3 and change. Gave them a $5. Got change back for a $20. Tried to bring it up with her when she came back to the window and got "I DIDN'T MESS UP YOUR ORDER, SIR!".
"No, you didn't, have a nice day" and we drove off. Let the little bitch deal with her drawer being short at the end of the shift. *sigh*, whatever happened to customer service?
The only problem is you can't really get into the ISP business at this day in age because in order to serve broadband you have to have an extensive network at the edge where the clients are and that's all owned by local monopolies. Then the regulator agencies passed a motion that allows the monopolies to deny others from leasing their lines.
Don't worry, soon the FCC will auction off the 700mhz band, which will be perfect for WISPs and will finally provide a third-pipe into our homes. I mean, it's not as if they are going to let Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, other-companies-who-already-own-the-bulk-of-the-spectrum gobble it all up just because they have the biggest checkbook..... oh wait....
Why is it if I order IP addresses from ARIN I have to justify why I need them but our limited RF spectrum is just auctioned off to the highest bidder, who probably already has sufficient spectrum for their needs?
Shaping hundreds of gigabits of traffic for hundreds of thousands of broadband-speed users is nothing at all like shaping traffic for 400 dial-in users with a hacked-together Linux box and a pair of T1s.
Hey, thanks for pointing out the bleeding obvious, Mr. 4 digit UID. Where did I suggest that a hacked-together Linux box could solve a cable-co's bandwidth issues or shape traffic for them? I do recall saying that "If we could manage to pull it off, then why can't they?"
There is NOTHING stopping them from implementing a similar traffic shaping arrangement for the last-mile, which, unless they are too broke to afford more uplinks (not likely) is where the bottleneck is. In fact, I seem to recall a story awhile ago about Time Warner doing something like this with Roadrunner. It doesn't come until play until the node you are on maxes out. Then they prioritize interactive traffic ahead of file transfer (http, nntp, bittorrent, etc).
Bittorrent does have the ability to severely break their network due to asymmetric bandwidth (lots of download, not so much upload available).
Uhh, how do you figure that bittorrent has the ability to "severely break" their network?
Comcast is a cable operator. So they have a shared last mile. So there are basically two areas where a bottleneck can occur. The last mile on DOCSIS 1.x provides 42.88Mbps/10.24Mbps, shared by a group of customers (how large of a group depends on their network design). The other area for a bottleneck is the network edge to the internet.
I find it hard to believe that the bottleneck is happening at the edge. They can afford to turn up as many OC-48s as they need. So you are faced with the last mile as the bottleneck. This would seem to fit with what we have observed -- how many DSL providers (who don't have a shared last mile) are trying to limit bandwidth consumption in the US?
Well, there are solutions to the last mile problem. They can segment their network into smaller nodes. They can add more DOCSIS channels to the cable plant. They can upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0. They could traffic shape file transfers down to a low priority and put VoIP/ssh/etc at the front of the queue. They could do a lot of things that don't involve lying to their customers and interfering with their traffic.
A person downloading boatloads of torrents pays the same as a grandma who checks her mail and browses quilting sites, and a person working from home who uses VPN, and VOIP all day pays the same as grandma. It would be nice if they said, "hey, if you download more than a hundred gigs, we're gonna cut you off"... But it would probably encourage many people to push that limit, stressing an oversold service.
I have to say, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the whole "We can't publish our limit because people will max it out" argument. Somehow the wireless industry is able to publish their limits (i.e: 900 minutes included, $0.45/min after that) and still make money. What do you think is a more limited resource? Bandwidth on a DOCSIS node or a slot on the cellular network?
Regardless of the justification, I have a serious problem with a company advertising something as "unlimited" when in fact there is a secret limit that will get you terminated. There are a bunch of solutions to this problem that don't involve lying to your customers:
Publish the hard limit and charge overages. Works ok for the wireless industry.
Continue to allow unlimited bandwidth but shape the traffic on overloaded nodes to prioritize interactive traffic (ssh, vpn, voip, gaming) over file transfers (p2p, http, ftp). This is the solution we did when I was in the ISP business.
Sell a 'bursting' service. You get full speed for quick intervals but sustained transfers are throttled down to a lower speed.
Invest in new technologies that provide more last-mile bandwidth (DOCSIS 3.0 for the cableco, FIOS for the telco).
Split off your DOCSIS nodes into smaller ones to provide more last-mile bandwidth.
Devote more channels on the cable plant for DOCSIS. If bandwidth is an issue then maybe they need to convert some of the useless channels (like the 15 home shopping network channels on standard cable here) into digital cable to gain more bandwidth for data.
I understand the problems they face but they are not trying to solve them in a logical fashion. And if they think p2p is the only problem then think again. Bandwidth needs are only going to keep rising. I spent a few hours the other week browsing old Daily Show video clips. Completely legal activity. Burned though over a gig of bandwidth in under two hours.
Interfering with my packets or lying to me about an "unlimited" service should both be illegal, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
That's right, because you can't legally grow it for paper in the US without the approval of the DEA. Because somebody decided that a fucking plant that makes you dumb for a few hours is a threat to humanity and needs to be stopped at all costs, civil liberties and constitution be damned.
"Some" does not translate into the sweeping generalization that you made about blocking UDP traffic. And such an ISP (that forced a proxy on you and disallowed you from sending your own traffic without it) would not have very many customers if any other option existed, as a proxy-only setup is going to disallow several applications (gaming and VPN come to mind) by nature.
and especially some corporate network providersAnd this is a problem, why? I'm not overly worried about my ability to seed that torrent from work......
Uhh, even if your theory is right (you have a lot more faith in them then I do) it's still a BS argument. The whole point to open source software is being able to do what you want with your computer. If somebody doesn't want to use his internet connection to provide anonymity to others then that's his choice. I would make the argument that the community would be quite willing to run tor-like nodes on their own without being forced to by their closed-source bittorrent client.
No, I'm sorry, but I can't help but look at the fact that his company has signed deals with the *AAs of the World and wonder just why they are so eager to switch to a closed-source model. Could it be that the software is going to phone home? If he tries to pull something like that (and he'll be caught fairly quickly, since it doesn't exactly like a rocket scientist to run WireShark) then he deserves the ever lasting scorn of the internet community.
Add lots of VPN systems to your list. IPSec (behind NAT) is the first one that comes to mind....
I haven't figured out if the GP is a fucking moron or a troll yet. One would think that somebody posting to /. would realize that UDP is used for a lot more stuff then just DNS.....
Not including patches or updates, exactly which game are you playing thats "relatively high bandwidth"?
Drug dealer or pot dealer? Because I can't think of a single pot dealer in my area that doesn't hold a day job. And most of them have fairly serious day jobs, not supermarket-type positions.
His name is Albus Dumbledore.
*duck*
Might wanna worry more about the Big Rip. Yes, we're all going to die.... in 50 billion years.
This is the most insightful post in this entire discussion, IMHO. Too bad you made it too late to get any real + moderation. Too bad I've already posted about three hundred times or you'd get my mod points.
I find it interesting that none of the DSL providers feel the need to interfere with bittorrent. Could it be that they don't have a vested business interest in preventing piracy?
[snipped]
Most people are using either a small percentage of their bandwidth at a time (TF2 doesn't eat up that much, it just likes low latency) or use it in bursts. A 30MB driver here, 1.5MB worth of email there, with long periods of very little activity in between. ISPs base their profits and their very survival as a business on this type of usage pattern.I don't know if I'd agree with your logic. If that was my usage pattern then I'd be just happy with dial-up -- especially knowing that if I really wanted that 30MB driver ASAP I could download it at the office and burn a CD. Somebody earlier said that p2p is really the killer app for broadband and the ISPs have to know that.
Bittorrent (and other bandwidth/transfer-heavy applications) don't conform to this usage pattern. They tend to monopolize as much as they can get for long periods of time, which drives up the total amount of bandwidth in use at a time. Comcast (et al) only has so much pipe to go around, and if everyone's using as much as they can get, the network suffers.Again, I've said this a few times now, but which pipe? The shared last-mile pipe or the pipe to the internet? Because it's highly unlikely that the pipe to the internet is the problem. That's a comparatively cheap expense compared to the expense of maintaining that huge network. The shared last-mile is the problem they have. And on the shared last-mile there is no reason why traffic shaping wouldn't solve the problem. What do I care if the node I'm on is running at 100% of capacity as long as I still have a low RTT time for my ssh/voip/gaming packets?
Hell, right now at work I've maxed out our T-1 seeding a torrent. But I have a shaping policy in effect that prioritizes all other traffic ahead of this -- so nobody even notices, not even the VOIP users in our remote offices over the VPN. A well designed shaping policy would be a fair way to solve the problem and would largely be transparent to end-users.
Yeah, I worked in the business. What's your point?
People don't get any room to complain that they can't suck down 300Gb of data monthly for only $40I think they do. And regardless, Comcast isn't stopping you from DOWNLOADING (with this technology, n/m the other stuff they are doing), they are stopping you from UPLOADING, by interfering with your ability to seed a torrent. This makes even LESS sense to me, because the return-path is a lot less likely to max out on a DOCSIS network then the download-path. In fact I have 11.6% of the download bandwidth (5.0Mbps out of 42.88Mbps) on my node, but only 3.6% of the upload (384Kbps out of 10.24Mbps). So why the hell is Comcast worrying about seeders again?
I also believe their major problem is with leeches on the network who are like porkers who sit at a buffet all day long.No, their major problem is that they'd rather lie to their customers and forge packets then take any of the above mentioned honest steps to curb the problem. I find the packet forgery particularly ironic, since the AUP of virtually every single ISP (including mine, Roadrunner) says that forging any TCP/IP packet is grounds for instant termination.
You tell me why a traffic shaping setup that prioritized bulk file transfers BELOW everything else wouldn't be a workable solution to this problem.
I'll grant you that traffic to the internet costs "more" then traffic within their network (which is basically free), but is an overloaded backbone/edge connection really the problem that the cableco's face?
I've always thought the problem had more to do with the shared last-mile nature of DOCSIS. They are basically splitting up 42 megabits between dozens to hundreds of houses. Max out that node and (without a good traffic shaping policy) everyones performance suffers, regardless of how free the backbone links may be.
Given that, I don't think your idea would solve their problem. Which isn't to say that it's a bad idea -- they could use the money from such a service to split their network into smaller and smaller nodes, which (short of switching to dedicated fiber or copper pairs) is really the only solution to the problem in the long run.
I dunno. It really doesn't take that many shock events for an animal (even a "dumb" one) to learn. Would I want to go up against a T-Rex with a cattle-prod? Hell no! But why would you be any more afraid of one in a controlled setting then you would be afraid of a tiger or lion in the same setting? Either one can kill you if it catches you without weapons or technology.
Most predators also won't bother to hunt if they aren't hungry -- it's a waste of energy -- they never did explain (in either the book or the movie) why the presumably well-fed dinosaurs felt the need to go to such lengths to hunt humans. Ever been to an aquarium and seen the pray fish in the same tank with the sharks? The sharks completely ignore them because they are well fed by their handlers. Sharks have been around since the dinosaurs, largely unchanged from the present day, and if they can suppress their predatory instinct when not hungry, why wouldn't dinosaurs?
That doesn't mean they aren't smart creatures though. That just means they are social creatures that do better in packs. How well do human beings cope with extended solitude? All /. relationship jokes aside, think about it. Why else would solitary confinement be considered punishment and extended solitary cruel and unusual?
And amazingly enough we survived in spite of all the disadvantages that our large brains bring. Like the complications of childbirth. How many other animals have birthing problems like we do? Or the fact that our young are completely helpless at birth, which while not exactly rare in the animal kingdom (common among mammals) is hardly an advantage.
but how many truly smart top predators are there?Eh, off the top of my head, orcas and wolves both stand out as apex predators that are fairly intelligent. I could probably throw human beings onto that list, but that's probably cheating ;)
That part of the movie was a crock of shit though. The book was at least somewhat more realistic on this. When the fences went down, the game warden guy wasn't even worried about it at first, because most of the animals had already been shocked a few times and it only takes a handful of shock events to condition an animal to avoid the fences, whether or not they are energized.
But let's look at the modern world. You know you can take a safari and get to within meters of apex predators without being attacked? You know that a lot of people go swimming in shark-infested waters all the time and you can count the number of annual shark attacks with your fingers.
For an animal to attack you it either has to perceive you as pray or feel threatened by you. Most animals are justifiably leery of human beings and don't consider them as suitable pray under normal circumstances. I see no reason why dinosaurs would be any less controllable with modern technology then any of the other dangerous animals that we interact with.
I don't complain about them over-selling because it's a fact of life with the technology that they are using. Short of limiting each DOCSIS node to only a few houses, or reducing the bandwidth that each customer gets, they have to over-sell it.
Over-selling is not a new concept. My house has a 200amp service. If I max that out I'm using 48,000 watts of power. Somehow I doubt the electric company's grid could support every single house pegging the connection, even if they had the generation capacity to back it up, which they don't (or we wouldn't have brown/blackouts in the summer....).
The difference between the power company and Comcast however, is that the power company will upgrade their grid if it can't support the load on a regular basis, the power company has a simple to understand billing structure (use X number of kWh, pay Y dollars to us) and can actually meter for usage. The flip-side is, that Comcast can order another OC-48 or segment that overloaded neighborhood into two nodes a hellva lot cheaper then the power company can build another plant or string more wires....
Anyway, I went off on a tirade. I don't complain about over-selling. I do complain about lying. Selling me "unlimited" service and then cutting me off when I use it as such is lying and ought to be considered fraud, regardless of what "fine print" they have.
The basic re-hash is that they don't tell you what it is because there isn't a set number. The warn users who over-use bandwidth ad peak hours. If you max out your connection at off-peak hours, they're fine with it.If that's actually the case, then perhaps they should adopt the pricing model of the wireless industry. Sell connections with X gigabytes of data during peak hours (overages apply if you exceed it) and unlimited data during off-peak hours. Provide a website that allows people to track their usage and be done with it. None of this ad-hoc, hidden limit bullshit.
It's fun to mess with them sometimes though. My favorite past-time is to ensure that I get a fresh order of fries by specifically requesting them without salt. Nine of ten times they will grant this request, which requires a new batch to be made. Then when you hit the drive-thru window you ask them for salt packets ;)
Yeah, that's probably evil. But it works.
I've always said that we mammals don't really have it that bad. Yeah, being eaten by a lion probably sucks, but at least he makes a halfway clean kill (closes the airway or bites into an artery and you bleed out) before him and his buds start to eat you.
Go a little lower on the chain then mammals and you'll find out just how much of a raving bitch mother nature truly is. The lion doesn't cripple you, lay his eggs inside you, to eventually hatch and consume you from the inside out while your are still alive. The lion doesn't dissolve your insides and suck them out while you lay there paralyzed from his venom.
Wow, I'm glad I'm on the top of the food chain.......
Eh, Hollywood sucks, but who is to say that they WOULDN'T have been able to figure out how to open a door, given the right motivation? My dog can open doors. Ever watch squirrels figure out "squirrel-proof" bird feeders? Ever seen a cat that was toilet trained?
Granted, the mammalian brain has tens of millions of years of evolution over the dinos, but who is to say what they would have been capable of? Imagine if we actually were able to somehow obtain an intact DNA strand, clone them and observe their behavior? It's probably not possible, because the science behind Jurassic Park was flawed in this area, but just imagine if it was?
Can you honestly say that you WOULDN'T go to a Jurassic Park if someone managed to pull it off?
The said part is I could tell more stories like that.
A buddy of mine and I went through the local McDonald's drive-thru once. Ordered some stuff off the dollar menu. Came to $3 and change. Gave them a $5. Got change back for a $20. Tried to bring it up with her when she came back to the window and got "I DIDN'T MESS UP YOUR ORDER, SIR!".
"No, you didn't, have a nice day" and we drove off. Let the little bitch deal with her drawer being short at the end of the shift. *sigh*, whatever happened to customer service?
Don't worry, soon the FCC will auction off the 700mhz band, which will be perfect for WISPs and will finally provide a third-pipe into our homes. I mean, it's not as if they are going to let Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, other-companies-who-already-own-the-bulk-of-the-spectrum gobble it all up just because they have the biggest checkbook..... oh wait....
Why is it if I order IP addresses from ARIN I have to justify why I need them but our limited RF spectrum is just auctioned off to the highest bidder, who probably already has sufficient spectrum for their needs?
*sigh*
Hey, thanks for pointing out the bleeding obvious, Mr. 4 digit UID. Where did I suggest that a hacked-together Linux box could solve a cable-co's bandwidth issues or shape traffic for them? I do recall saying that "If we could manage to pull it off, then why can't they?"
There is NOTHING stopping them from implementing a similar traffic shaping arrangement for the last-mile, which, unless they are too broke to afford more uplinks (not likely) is where the bottleneck is. In fact, I seem to recall a story awhile ago about Time Warner doing something like this with Roadrunner. It doesn't come until play until the node you are on maxes out. Then they prioritize interactive traffic ahead of file transfer (http, nntp, bittorrent, etc).
Uhh, how do you figure that bittorrent has the ability to "severely break" their network?
Comcast is a cable operator. So they have a shared last mile. So there are basically two areas where a bottleneck can occur. The last mile on DOCSIS 1.x provides 42.88Mbps/10.24Mbps, shared by a group of customers (how large of a group depends on their network design). The other area for a bottleneck is the network edge to the internet.
I find it hard to believe that the bottleneck is happening at the edge. They can afford to turn up as many OC-48s as they need. So you are faced with the last mile as the bottleneck. This would seem to fit with what we have observed -- how many DSL providers (who don't have a shared last mile) are trying to limit bandwidth consumption in the US?
Well, there are solutions to the last mile problem. They can segment their network into smaller nodes. They can add more DOCSIS channels to the cable plant. They can upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0. They could traffic shape file transfers down to a low priority and put VoIP/ssh/etc at the front of the queue. They could do a lot of things that don't involve lying to their customers and interfering with their traffic.
I have to say, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the whole "We can't publish our limit because people will max it out" argument. Somehow the wireless industry is able to publish their limits (i.e: 900 minutes included, $0.45/min after that) and still make money. What do you think is a more limited resource? Bandwidth on a DOCSIS node or a slot on the cellular network?
Regardless of the justification, I have a serious problem with a company advertising something as "unlimited" when in fact there is a secret limit that will get you terminated. There are a bunch of solutions to this problem that don't involve lying to your customers:
I understand the problems they face but they are not trying to solve them in a logical fashion. And if they think p2p is the only problem then think again. Bandwidth needs are only going to keep rising. I spent a few hours the other week browsing old Daily Show video clips. Completely legal activity. Burned though over a gig of bandwidth in under two hours.
Interfering with my packets or lying to me about an "unlimited" service should both be illegal, IMHO.