In the U.S. Comcast will "fine" users who exceed 250 gigabyte, and permanently remove users who do it a second time. I agree this is outrageous. The proper solution is just like what you have in New Zealand: Let the customer choose if they want to pay $2 more per gigabyte, or surf at a limited 64kbit/s.
And yeah 64k is not bad at all. I could live with that, although I'd probably still use my backup 50k dialup. I use it a lot when traveling, and since it uses image compression, the effective speed is 600k. It's almost as fast as my DSL home connection.
I'm sure Bill Clinton would agree whole-heartedly. For CE/Engineering majors, in order to have busts you need women, and as I recall from my classes there were no women present.:-( ----- Now the Health & Human Development courses - exact opposite. Every time I walked past those classes, it was all 50 women and maybe one guy. I knew I picked the wrong major!
>>> "From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS."
If this is true, I wonder if they would accept an electrical engineer for a IT job? I'm kinda sick of hardware and would welcome a change, especially since most of the jobs in my area (Washington D.C.) are computer programming.
Well I disagree about limiting the gatekeepers. Imagine if every home had 10 different ISPs he could choose from. It would mean "buying" an ISP is like buying a TV - it's just a commodity, and the only real difference is price. You'd have true competition.
I'm saying I believe in the First Amendment (free speech and free access to that speech). NOTHING on the internet gets censored. Ever. If you don't like what you see on some Webpage (like playboy.com), add it to your personal block list, so you never have to see it again.
The government should not censor my & everybody else's access to it.
"The leaders are corrupted with two great sins - ambition and avarice. Love of power and love of money." - Benjamin Franklin.
It was true 250 years ago, and it's still true today. That's why Franklin and his peers developed a federal government that was all but impotent, and left most of the true power in the hands of the States. (Somewhat similar to the European Union today.) And then they rewrote State Constitutions to make them limited in power as well, so the true power was in the hands of private citizens.
Unfortunately the U.S. didn't remain impotent long, and now it effectively runs all affairs using the "everything affects interstate commerce & we regulate commerce" argument. That's why I can't grow potatoes in my own backyard without Congress' permission (potato farming is strictly regulated). Stupid tyrants.
My main complaint about "public schools, law enforcement, fire departments, public libraries, roads, post offices, etc. are all socialized public infrastructure....." is that they are not pro-choice. They are anti-choice. They are a monopoly. While some of those activities like police can't be converted to a "multiple choice" plan, a lot of those things can be:
- Just as colleges compete with one another for students, so too can K-12 schools. If University of Phoenix is lousy (it is), go to Penn State instead. If Baltimore High is lousy, take your money and send your kids to Johns Hopkins High instead. Vote with your dollar.
- Libraries, like video rental stores, should operate as private business. Charge $1 per book rental and eliminate the need for taxes to prop them up. (In recent years, a lot of U.S. libraries have started doing exactly that; charging for new releases.)
- Post offices can be competitive. The U.S. Post Office should (and does) compete against other businesses like UPS and Federal Express so that citizens have CHOICE in where they spend their money.
- Likewise internet service providers should be competitive in nature. I don't have an Uncle Sam ISP Monopoly; I have multiple choices - Netscape, Verizon, Comcast, Dish, Directv, FiOS.
- I even have choice in my electrical providers. I choose GreenEnergy which is solar and wind power.
Government socialism is just another form of monopoly that takes-away people's freedom to choose for themselves where they will spend (or not spend) their dollars. It's no more desirable than the monopoly that Microsoft holds over Wintel PCs.
>>>We have similar net connections in NZ and I don't see the problem. It is never a case of not being able to get what you want, it is a case of having to pay for it. >>>
Precisely. I wouldn't mind paying $50 a month with a 100 gigabyte cap. I'd just download smaller files (70 megabyte tv shows) instead of the larger stuff. And if I hit my cap such that my access was cut-off for the rest of the month, I'd just use my backup 50k dialup account until October 1st came back around.
My fellow Americans do tend to make a big deal about small things, but I think that's a flaw with this entire "entitlement generation". I've heard a lot of university professors complain that young adults walk into a college classroom and expect to get an A just because they showed-up, and then they get yell at the prof, because he gave them a B. Likewise they expect to be able to download 1000 gigs while only paying $50 a month.
The world just doesn't work that way. You don't get something for nothing; you have to do the work and/or pay the cost.
Jeez.
I'm only 35 years old, and already I sound like my grandpa.;-) Well at least I didn't have to walk to school in a snowstorm.
Back in the 1980s some of my friends paid for calls to European BBSes with stolen calling cards or credit cards. (One of them almost got arrested by the FBI.)
Let's please not go back to those bad old days. I prefer the flat rate fee regardless of how far the packet traveled.
>>>Come on. The United States is still the largest democracy.
I'm sure you posted this just to demonstrate how bad the Government Monopoly Schooling is in America. Right?
Or maybe you were demonstrating how Americans tend to think the whole world revolved around them. Right? Hello???;-) As already mentioned India is the largest, with the European Union being the second largest at 450 million citizens. I'm not sure who's third... is the Russian Federation more populous than the U.S.? I don't know without looking it up. In any case the U.S. is not the largest. (However if we annexed Canada we'd be number two again; maybe Obama will pursue that goal in 2010.)
>>>The problem is that this idea undermines one of the main points of net neutrality, to make as many parts of the Internet as free and easily accessible as others
I disagree. My understanding of "net neutrality" is that all packets will be treated identically, regardless of where they came from, or where they are going. It has nothing to do with providing cheap service. It's about not censoring access (such as Comcast giving nbc.com packets low priority).
>>> "The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity isn't the only way to live."
I agree. IMHO internet should be just like phone calls or electricity usage or gasoline purchases. The more you use, the more you pay. If grandma downloads 1 gigabyte of emails, charge her $7 a month (current rate on Netscape dialup). If a younger person watches 100 gigabytes of Internet TV, charge them $50 a month (Comcast's lowest rate). And if someone like me goes nuts & downloads 500 gigabytes a month, then charge me $150 a month.
There's no need to prioritize or deprioritize packets based-upon application (example: comcast.com gets highest priority, while nbc.com gets lowest priority). Just vary the prices according to each user's demand, and then use the excess funds to purchase extra T1 lines as needed to avoid congestion.
Sometime in the future, when iPods are no longer fashionable (as happened to Sony Walkmans), the average Joe or Jill on the sreet will be incensed to discover their Itunes songs no longer work on their 2015-era device.
But for now they remain blissfully unaware of this hidden timebomb.
>>>Remo recommends against a trend of overreaction - "-look how many people buy music through iTunes, whose DRM mechanics are hardly lenient."
Over-react? I still play games that are nearly 25 years old (Pirates, Silent Service, and Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising). Any system that effectively makes the game unusable after just 5 years is not acceptable in any way, shape, or form.
Itunes? How about Google or Walmart? When they deactivate their services, and make my rather-expensive music suddenly stop working, I think I have a right to act peeved about it.
>>>All of the stations around here will be increasing power as they move back to their main transmitter
I think you're misreading the data. One of the main reasons the FCC pushed DTV is because it enables stations to use *lower* power levels and save money. In my area, every station that is returning to its original channel (like WBAL-11 becoming WGAL-11-DT on February 18), the broadcast power decreases to just a fraction of previous levels.
Here's just a small sample of my local stations (analog versus post-transition digital) (in kilowatts). Some of these are going down to only 2% of their previous values!
Cameras are best used for retroactive analysis. If somebody is suspected [of being part of the French Resistance], and you know they [bombed a Nazi munitions factory], you can find out everywhere they've ever been, everyone they've ever talked to, and possibly uncover their [secret meeting place to eradicate the French Patriots once and for all.]
Cameras are simple spying, the tool of control freak politicians, and they make the fight for liberty nearly-impossible. We should not give the government the power to spy on its own citizens.
History shows that all governments eventually become tyrannical in nature. (For example Rome started as a Republic, devolved into an Imperium, and finally ended as a dictatorship.) More recently, we have our own President spying on us with the US PATRIOT Act giving him power to tap all phone conversations everywhere.
Why give some future tyrant the tools to abuse his power & track all travel? We should limit government power every chance we get, to guard against that future tyrant *before* he arrives on the scene.
Which reminds me of the unrelated, but similar Quantum Link (Q-Link) for the Commodore 64: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link - It started in 1984 and eventually evolved into America Online which still operates the AOL and Netscape Dialup ISPs.
Q-Link charged 6 cents per minute of online time.
I'm glad services today offer "unlimited time", because that 6 cents per minute added up fast! My parents hated me for running-up their bills, but I justified it by saying, "it's educational".;-)
Some people mistaking think the World Wide Web is "the internet". Therefore anything pre-WWW is "leading up to" the the internet's birth (in their view).
Ooops. Excuse me while I extricate my foot from my mouth. They discuss email and usenet on pages 5 and 6. My bad!:-(
Still, they did neglect BBSes and Modems in my opinion. Hobbyist BBSes created most of the standards upon which the web is built, and how successful would the internet be if we all still used 0.3k modems?
- Where's the discussion about email's invention? - Or Usenet? - Or Fidonet (similar to usenet)? - And he completely ignored Electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) which were the precursor to modern web forums. From 1980 to circa 1995, the BBS was how people communicated online. - Another important facet is the gradually increasing speeds from 0.3k up to 56k modems, without which we'd still be using just pure text scrolling on screen at a snail's pace.
This article is not a history of the internet, but just a history of the World Wide Web (1990 onward) and its technologies.
I disagree. Anything you do to yourself, since nobody else is harmed, is not a crime.
The only reason certain "self" activities like masturbation, smoking dope, or committing suicide are outlawed is because we got a bunch of petit-dictators (aka control freaks) who want to control everybody else. There's no justifiable reason to outlaw these activities as long as the only person I am harming.... is myself.
"No person has a right to harm another. And that's all the government should restrain him." - Thomas Jefferson
I don't understand why people insist upon putting cameras everywhere. The terrorists that struck on 9/11 walked past several security cameras, and not one of them was flagged. They still boarded the plane & committed their crime.
Cameras are worthless, except for very simplistic uses like issuing automatic speeding tickets.
Even if Australians used American-made toilets (with swirling motion), they still wouldn't spin backwards. How water spins down a drain is related to the design of the unit, not the earth's rotation. (urban legend).
BACK TO ARTICLE:
"Only criminals need fear tracking of their cars," is the most common defense to this proposal. My response: "And what if the government makes travel a crime? Then we ALL become criminals." Why would government make travel a crime? Well besides the obvious case of dictatorship, there's also the possibility a government might outlaw travel for environmental reasons. Or because oil is scarce.
A person is not truly free unless he has the right to travel whereever he wishes without restraint or monitoring.
>>>URL was mistakenly entered into the Federal Police's censor database.
Someday a new president will rise-up in Finland, and this new president will start adding W3C.org, constitution.org, freespeech.com, and other legitimate websites. And it won't be a mistake.
Government should NEVER be allowed to censor anything, because some future leader might abuse the censorship to limit liberty.
Precisely. When I worked at JCPenney and Sears, as long as we were still selling the item, we would accept a "return with receipt" even if it was a year later. We gave the customer a gift card, and sold the unused, unopened item to somebody else. Walmart should have similar policies, rather than stubbornly refuse and risk losing a customer for life.
As for credit card chargebacks, mine warranties all items up to one year. If I return it, and provide proof-of-delivery (via mail), they will reverse the charge.
BTW I was only returning 3 packages at $10 each. It's not as though I was driving billion-dollar Walmart into bankruptcy with my tiny return, and since they sold those lightbulbs to somebody else, they lost nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay so half the Itunes will play on a non-apple device, and half won't. Still bad IMHO.
In the U.S. Comcast will "fine" users who exceed 250 gigabyte, and permanently remove users who do it a second time. I agree this is outrageous. The proper solution is just like what you have in New Zealand: Let the customer choose if they want to pay $2 more per gigabyte, or surf at a limited 64kbit/s.
And yeah 64k is not bad at all. I could live with that, although I'd probably still use my backup 50k dialup. I use it a lot when traveling, and since it uses image compression, the effective speed is 600k. It's almost as fast as my DSL home connection.
I'm sure Bill Clinton would agree whole-heartedly. For CE/Engineering majors, in order to have busts you need women, and as I recall from my classes there were no women present. :-( ----- Now the Health & Human Development courses - exact opposite. Every time I walked past those classes, it was all 50 women and maybe one guy. I knew I picked the wrong major!
>>> "From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS."
If this is true, I wonder if they would accept an electrical engineer for a IT job? I'm kinda sick of hardware and would welcome a change, especially since most of the jobs in my area (Washington D.C.) are computer programming.
Well I disagree about limiting the gatekeepers. Imagine if every home had 10 different ISPs he could choose from. It would mean "buying" an ISP is like buying a TV - it's just a commodity, and the only real difference is price. You'd have true competition.
I'm saying I believe in the First Amendment (free speech and free access to that speech). NOTHING on the internet gets censored. Ever. If you don't like what you see on some Webpage (like playboy.com), add it to your personal block list, so you never have to see it again.
The government should not censor my & everybody else's access to it.
"The leaders are corrupted with two great sins - ambition and avarice. Love of power and love of money." - Benjamin Franklin.
It was true 250 years ago, and it's still true today. That's why Franklin and his peers developed a federal government that was all but impotent, and left most of the true power in the hands of the States. (Somewhat similar to the European Union today.) And then they rewrote State Constitutions to make them limited in power as well, so the true power was in the hands of private citizens.
Unfortunately the U.S. didn't remain impotent long, and now it effectively runs all affairs using the "everything affects interstate commerce & we regulate commerce" argument. That's why I can't grow potatoes in my own backyard without Congress' permission (potato farming is strictly regulated). Stupid tyrants.
My main complaint about "public schools, law enforcement, fire departments, public libraries, roads, post offices, etc. are all socialized public infrastructure....." is that they are not pro-choice. They are anti-choice. They are a monopoly. While some of those activities like police can't be converted to a "multiple choice" plan, a lot of those things can be:
- Just as colleges compete with one another for students, so too can K-12 schools. If University of Phoenix is lousy (it is), go to Penn State instead. If Baltimore High is lousy, take your money and send your kids to Johns Hopkins High instead. Vote with your dollar.
- Libraries, like video rental stores, should operate as private business. Charge $1 per book rental and eliminate the need for taxes to prop them up. (In recent years, a lot of U.S. libraries have started doing exactly that; charging for new releases.)
- Post offices can be competitive. The U.S. Post Office should (and does) compete against other businesses like UPS and Federal Express so that citizens have CHOICE in where they spend their money.
- Likewise internet service providers should be competitive in nature. I don't have an Uncle Sam ISP Monopoly; I have multiple choices - Netscape, Verizon, Comcast, Dish, Directv, FiOS.
- I even have choice in my electrical providers. I choose GreenEnergy which is solar and wind power.
Government socialism is just another form of monopoly that takes-away people's freedom to choose for themselves where they will spend (or not spend) their dollars. It's no more desirable than the monopoly that Microsoft holds over Wintel PCs.
>>>We have similar net connections in NZ and I don't see the problem. It is never a case of not being able to get what you want, it is a case of having to pay for it.
>>>
Precisely. I wouldn't mind paying $50 a month with a 100 gigabyte cap. I'd just download smaller files (70 megabyte tv shows) instead of the larger stuff. And if I hit my cap such that my access was cut-off for the rest of the month, I'd just use my backup 50k dialup account until October 1st came back around.
My fellow Americans do tend to make a big deal about small things, but I think that's a flaw with this entire "entitlement generation". I've heard a lot of university professors complain that young adults walk into a college classroom and expect to get an A just because they showed-up, and then they get yell at the prof, because he gave them a B. Likewise they expect to be able to download 1000 gigs while only paying $50 a month.
The world just doesn't work that way. You don't get something for nothing; you have to do the work and/or pay the cost.
Jeez.
I'm only 35 years old, and already I sound like my grandpa. ;-) Well at least I didn't have to walk to school in a snowstorm.
Back in the 1980s some of my friends paid for calls to European BBSes with stolen calling cards or credit cards. (One of them almost got arrested by the FBI.)
Let's please not go back to those bad old days. I prefer the flat rate fee regardless of how far the packet traveled.
>>>Come on. The United States is still the largest democracy.
I'm sure you posted this just to demonstrate how bad the Government Monopoly Schooling is in America. Right?
Or maybe you were demonstrating how Americans tend to think the whole world revolved around them. Right? Hello??? ;-) As already mentioned India is the largest, with the European Union being the second largest at 450 million citizens. I'm not sure who's third... is the Russian Federation more populous than the U.S.? I don't know without looking it up. In any case the U.S. is not the largest. (However if we annexed Canada we'd be number two again; maybe Obama will pursue that goal in 2010.)
>>>The problem is that this idea undermines one of the main points of net neutrality, to make as many parts of the Internet as free and easily accessible as others
I disagree. My understanding of "net neutrality" is that all packets will be treated identically, regardless of where they came from, or where they are going. It has nothing to do with providing cheap service. It's about not censoring access (such as Comcast giving nbc.com packets low priority).
>>> "The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity isn't the only way to live."
I agree. IMHO internet should be just like phone calls or electricity usage or gasoline purchases. The more you use, the more you pay. If grandma downloads 1 gigabyte of emails, charge her $7 a month (current rate on Netscape dialup). If a younger person watches 100 gigabytes of Internet TV, charge them $50 a month (Comcast's lowest rate). And if someone like me goes nuts & downloads 500 gigabytes a month, then charge me $150 a month.
There's no need to prioritize or deprioritize packets based-upon application (example: comcast.com gets highest priority, while nbc.com gets lowest priority). Just vary the prices according to each user's demand, and then use the excess funds to purchase extra T1 lines as needed to avoid congestion.
Sometime in the future, when iPods are no longer fashionable (as happened to Sony Walkmans), the average Joe or Jill on the sreet will be incensed to discover their Itunes songs no longer work on their 2015-era device.
But for now they remain blissfully unaware of this hidden timebomb.
>>>Remo recommends against a trend of overreaction - "-look how many people buy music through iTunes, whose DRM mechanics are hardly lenient."
Over-react? I still play games that are nearly 25 years old (Pirates, Silent Service, and Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising). Any system that effectively makes the game unusable after just 5 years is not acceptable in any way, shape, or form.
Itunes? How about Google or Walmart? When they deactivate their services, and make my rather-expensive music suddenly stop working, I think I have a right to act peeved about it.
>>>All of the stations around here will be increasing power as they move back to their main transmitter
I think you're misreading the data. One of the main reasons the FCC pushed DTV is because it enables stations to use *lower* power levels and save money. In my area, every station that is returning to its original channel (like WBAL-11 becoming WGAL-11-DT on February 18), the broadcast power decreases to just a fraction of previous levels.
Here's just a small sample of my local stations (analog versus post-transition digital) (in kilowatts). Some of these are going down to only 2% of their previous values!
NAME-__ analog - digital
WPVI-06 74 downto 8
WGAL-08 110 downto 8
WCAU-10 137 downto 5
WBAL-11 316 downto 5
WHYY-12 219 downto 6
-WJZ-13 316 downto 28
WLYH-15 1050 downto 206
-WHP-21 1200 downto 177
WTXF-29 5000 downto 270
WPMT-43 2140 downto 933
Cameras are best used for retroactive analysis. If somebody is suspected [of being part of the French Resistance], and you know they [bombed a Nazi munitions factory], you can find out everywhere they've ever been, everyone they've ever talked to, and possibly uncover their [secret meeting place to eradicate the French Patriots once and for all.]
Cameras are simple spying, the tool of control freak politicians, and they make the fight for liberty nearly-impossible.
We should not give the government the power to spy on its own citizens.
History shows that all governments eventually become tyrannical in nature. (For example Rome started as a Republic, devolved into an Imperium, and finally ended as a dictatorship.) More recently, we have our own President spying on us with the US PATRIOT Act giving him power to tap all phone conversations everywhere.
Why give some future tyrant the tools to abuse his power & track all travel? We should limit government power every chance we get, to guard against that future tyrant *before* he arrives on the scene.
Which reminds me of the unrelated, but similar Quantum Link (Q-Link) for the Commodore 64: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link - It started in 1984 and eventually evolved into America Online which still operates the AOL and Netscape Dialup ISPs.
Q-Link charged 6 cents per minute of online time.
I'm glad services today offer "unlimited time", because that 6 cents per minute added up fast! My parents hated me for running-up their bills, but I justified it by saying, "it's educational". ;-)
Some people mistaking think the World Wide Web is "the internet". Therefore anything pre-WWW is "leading up to" the the internet's birth (in their view).
Ooops. Excuse me while I extricate my foot from my mouth. They discuss email and usenet on pages 5 and 6. My bad! :-(
Still, they did neglect BBSes and Modems in my opinion. Hobbyist BBSes created most of the standards upon which the web is built, and how successful would the internet be if we all still used 0.3k modems?
The article is woefully inadequate.
- Where's the discussion about email's invention?
- Or Usenet?
- Or Fidonet (similar to usenet)?
- And he completely ignored Electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) which were the precursor to modern web forums. From 1980 to circa 1995, the BBS was how people communicated online.
- Another important facet is the gradually increasing speeds from 0.3k up to 56k modems, without which we'd still be using just pure text scrolling on screen at a snail's pace.
This article is not a history of the internet, but just a history of the World Wide Web (1990 onward) and its technologies.
I disagree. Anything you do to yourself, since nobody else is harmed, is not a crime.
The only reason certain "self" activities like masturbation, smoking dope, or committing suicide are outlawed is because we got a bunch of petit-dictators (aka control freaks) who want to control everybody else. There's no justifiable reason to outlaw these activities as long as the only person I am harming.... is myself.
"No person has a right to harm another. And that's all the government should restrain him." - Thomas Jefferson
I don't understand why people insist upon putting cameras everywhere. The terrorists that struck on 9/11 walked past several security cameras, and not one of them was flagged. They still boarded the plane & committed their crime.
Cameras are worthless, except for very simplistic uses like issuing automatic speeding tickets.
Even if Australians used American-made toilets (with swirling motion), they still wouldn't spin backwards. How water spins down a drain is related to the design of the unit, not the earth's rotation. (urban legend).
BACK TO ARTICLE:
"Only criminals need fear tracking of their cars," is the most common defense to this proposal. My response: "And what if the government makes travel a crime? Then we ALL become criminals." Why would government make travel a crime? Well besides the obvious case of dictatorship, there's also the possibility a government might outlaw travel for environmental reasons. Or because oil is scarce.
A person is not truly free unless he has the right to travel whereever he wishes without restraint or monitoring.
>>>URL was mistakenly entered into the Federal Police's censor database.
Someday a new president will rise-up in Finland, and this new president will start adding W3C.org, constitution.org, freespeech.com, and other legitimate websites. And it won't be a mistake.
Government should NEVER be allowed to censor anything, because some future leader might abuse the censorship to limit liberty.
Precisely. When I worked at JCPenney and Sears, as long as we were still selling the item, we would accept a "return with receipt" even if it was a year later. We gave the customer a gift card, and sold the unused, unopened item to somebody else. Walmart should have similar policies, rather than stubbornly refuse and risk losing a customer for life.
As for credit card chargebacks, mine warranties all items up to one year. If I return it, and provide proof-of-delivery (via mail), they will reverse the charge.
BTW I was only returning 3 packages at $10 each. It's not as though I was driving billion-dollar Walmart into bankruptcy with my tiny return, and since they sold those lightbulbs to somebody else, they lost nothing.