I would keep an eye on that Arris, most of those are not cable modems but 'wireless gateways' - you can put them in bridge mode and get them to pretend they are a modem but the router is still in there. They dont always stay in bridge mode very well, and it's also very easy for the ISP to factory default them whenever they want, either way you could see an xfinity wifi hotspot appear in your home without notice at any time.
His mandate is simply to get her computer attached to the modem and demonstrate that their service is working then get on to the next call. He is not there to support her home network.
You twist what I say, it is no anecdote of yesteryear, it's daily reality in much of the country. The parts where no one is in favor of gun control. We are peaceful and remain peaceful, and frankly we are in resurgence. This is why the violent crime rates are down - because we have won significant battles on shall-issue laws and other things.
The vast majority of the crime in the US occurs in the big cities and is caused by the drug war. More and more that leaks over into rural areas as well, unfortunately, but there is still a vast gulf between the two worlds. The 'blue zones' are where the second amendment is most disrespected and it's also where the great bulk of the petty criminal violence happens. The red zones where it is more respected have always been and still remain low crime areas approximately the same (in terms of crime statistics at least) as similar areas in Europe, Canada, etc. There are significant demographic and social differences between them and they have only been getting larger in recent decades.
"In case you missed it, I'm saying you blaming Hollywood is no different from the anti-gun nuts blaming guns."
Except that Hollywood teaches unsafe firearms handling as if it were their goal. If you cant yell fire in a crowded theatre how on earth is it ok to teach people firearms, both theory and practice, in a transparently incorrect manner apparently designed to ensure they become a danger to themselves and/or others?
And that is where you are fundamentally misunderstanding. The old gun culture in the US is NOT a violent culture, or a criminal one, it is actually quite the opposite. (There is a new 'gun culture' created by hollywood that is different, but I am talking about the culture of rural red-state America, where I grew up, where everyone has an 'arsenal' and violent crime is so rare people talk about it for years after an occurrence.)
"So you arbitrarily multiply double the number of firearms, because of a feeling - basically saying that 30% of Swedes are lying about possessing unregistered firearms."
It's not arbitrary, there was a researcher in Lund who studied it, as well as personal experience confirming it. And Swedes dont lie. They just get very forgetful about certain things when it makes overwhelmingly good sense to do so.
"a Swedish colleague of mine said that they don't have government issued rifles in almost every house, like they do in Switzerland. "
He's right, they dont. They do, however, just as I said, have arms caches hidden throughout the country. In event of an invasion local squads need to be able to arm and organize themselves spontaneously and quickly, so they have to know where the arms are and how to access them.
Yes, accessing them without permission is an offense but that is hardly going to stop someone that's planning a violent crime in the first place now is it?
"He did however say that he's heard of stories of weapons caches, but mainly among Hells Angels type groups who stole them during national service"
The story I was told (by a veteran of the appropriate age to know) was that back in the day many decades back, the inventory and access controls they do now were not thought of, and items from the caches had a tendency to walk off. Then they had criminal gangs fighting with weapons presumably from the caches, and it was a bit of a scandal to hush up. And as a result all the caches now have controls - that do not actually stop you from gaining access to the weapons, but just log the access and take regular inventory so that if something goes walking off someone can be held responsible.
Again, this would not prevent someone already prepared to commit a violent crime from getting whatever weapons they wanted, it only applies some after the fact accountability.
"Moose hunting is a big thing, but do you really think that 30% of the population have an illegally owner firearm for something as public as hunting?"
No, I think Moose hunters like everyone else are sensible enough to forget to do things that are against their own interest, however. A bolt-action moose gun isn't so tightly regulated - but a little.22 pistol is subjected to absurd regulations, and it's much safer to simply 'forget' you have one than to bring it to the attention of the authorities. The same is definitely true of grandads war trophies and so many other items. And just because self-defense is not legally recognised as a reason to own a weapon hardly means that people do not acquire weapons for that purpose! They simply dont report them, and it's virtually impossible for them to be caught for that.
I honestly think the numbers I suggest are significant understatements. I saw a lot of weapons there, as a foreigner, an outsider, I could still have armed myself to the teeth within a few minutes from my home. I really dont think there are any effective barriers to a native that is motivated to do the same.
"This is a list of privately owned firearms, not possession"
Not only that, it's a list of *registered* privately owned firearms. Double that to get a very conservative estimate of approximate actual numbers (these are countries with utterly absurd, though rarely enforced, firearm laws which strongly encourages owners to forget to report) of privately owned firearms, then figure in a militia system similar though certainly not identical to Switzerland, and I am confident for Sweden at least the number is higher than the US.
Anyone in Sweden that wants access, not just to hunting arms but to squad or even platoon level military weapons, could lay their hands on them easily. This is a country where Moose hunting is not only an ancient tradition, but a practical necessity, and theoretically universal military service is tempered by an eagerness to excuse anyone that does not want to be in class as quickly as possible so the rest can get on with it. For generations the military has been geared for a resistance war against the 'Eastern Foe' which means there are weapons caches scattered quite thickly and it's a practical necessity that a great many people have access to them.
The rest of Scandinavia I have less direct experience with I will admit, but my impression of Norway and Finland would lead me to expect them to be somewhat similar, particularly Finland.
I honestly think gun ownership is a secondary, in some cases almost extraneous factor.
In regards to Europe, Scandinavia (where I have lived) actually has a higher rate of firearm ownership than the US. Yet very little violence. And why? It's cultural.
The US is home to the most violent at least of the more developed cultures on earth, if not absolutely. We have been at war constantly since WWII. We have set ourselves up unilaterally as the world policeman, and we are constantly bombarded with propaganda to justify it. The ultimate result of that is a constant increase in militarism, and in the fundamentally mistaken belief that violence is the proper and appropriate way to sole problems of all sorts. And that in turn means that we will have high and climbing rates of violent crime regardless of material circumstance.
Take away all the guns and all you will do is disadvantage the older people and empower the young thugs with knives and blunt objects. Reverse the underlying rot, and violence will decline, even if every person in the country were issued an 'assault rifle.'
There is no difference between what you said and what he said, except that you clearly present what you said as a rebuttal. Most confusing. Did not rebut at all.
I would love to hear someone dispute this with logic. That I would know how to deal with. No one does that. They only dispute it with emotion, and with blind assertion, and refuse to believe it, but they can give me no rational reason to follow them.
Now sometimes it's more concrete. Sometimes you know the crackhead idiot down the road has wanted nothing more than to beat you to death with a blunt object for over a year, but will never get the stones up to try it, solely because he knows your family are gun people and he figures there's a good chance that you kill him if he tries. Sometimes, you know. The rest of the time, you dont know, but either way, it helps society in general, by lowering the crime rate, without doing anything, simply as an intimidation factor.
You see it even more clearly in the crime statistics when you break it down by type of crime and area. Rural areas have major economic problems that can definitely see some crime. But in areas where the typical household has what our pseudoliberal press would describe as an 'armory' the types of crimes committed are different. You see very few crimes that risk confrontation. People will sneak in and rob you when they are sure you are gone, but home invasions, muggings, etc are still unheard of. Old Grandad sleeping with a 12 gauge full of 00 next to his bed is not something the typical criminal wants to take any risks of dealing with.
Yeah it's actually pretty well established Washoe could do nothing of the kind. She had a functional vocabulary of ~300-350 words IIRC, between half to a third of the basic vocabulary needed to function at the same level as a severely retarded human. This is a vocabulary consisting entirely of concrete referents with abstraction present only at a very basic level. Her accomplishments were significant, and Chimpanzees (like all of us Apes) are quite intelligent in comparison to most animals, but she never showed any ability to "grasp ethical concepts" - and, btw, your link does not claim otherwise.
"After all, ethical behavior makes a large group work and be strong together while unethical behavior breaks it apart. There is a clear advantage to being ethical and promoting it in others."
That's not at all true - ethical behaviour is more likely to have the opposite effect, since large groups are almost invariably organized around unethical (but profitable) behaviour in the first place, ethics is usually seen as a disruptive influence and resisted with all available force.
"Unconscionable? I reserve that word for things like murder, rape, or slavery, not mundane nonsense like slow internet service."
Fortunately the law does not agree with your usage.
They advertise in big letters Internet Service! Xmb per second - then in the fine print it says there is no warranty of any service at all. It's very established law, even in the US, that such a term is unconscionable and if your case relies on it your only hope is to bluff and settle. Companies throw them into their boilerplate anyway on the theory that it cant hurt, after all a LOT of cases go down the bluff and settle route.
"What, you expected dedicated internet access for $30 to $60/mo?"
What I expect is what they advertise (and I do pay significantly more than you posit, btw, not that the exact amount matters.) Internet Access. If they say they are throttling me to a certain pipe-width, they should never throttle me any tighter than that. If their network needs maintenance, that is their responsibility. Backbone transit is also their responsibility. I dont expect 3-9s reliability out of a consumer service but I also do expect them to maintain it in good faith and to maintain the necessary infrastructure and transit arrangements. I expect an occasional outage that is repaired in a timely fashion, but not a deliberate degradation of my service as a lever against a third party.
A business account with SLAs can be required for specific guarantees but consumer service without it still has an implied warranty, that the service provided will be suitable for the purpose for which it was marketed, that it will be maintained approximately as needed. I cant sue them for a single outage, sure. If network congestion degrades my connection occasionally, that's probably not actionable. It would have to be a clear pattern over a period of time before a legal remedy would become available. But it would come available - at least for anyone with the money and the will to plonk down a retainer and play that game.
If they quit providing the service at all, or alter it to such a degree that it is no longer what I signed up for, well, the clause you quoted says they can do that and keep sending me bills as well, and there is no judge in the country that would enforce it. That clause you quoted is a perfect example of the legal meaning of 'unconscionable' btw - similar clauses in contracts in other areas of business have been labeled with that word by the courts repeatedly.
PS - I have no control over the fonts on your computer. If you dont like the one your browser is using, you can change it. I cannot, so complaining to me about it is particularly pointless.
See the other reply for why this is not a panacea BUT;
The VPNs he mentions are encrypted channels, but they are more than that, as they also force a route through the VPN provider. They are inefficient for general use because as long as the networks are being administrated properly the VPN will actually degrade your performance - when it solves performance problems instead that is a smoking gun showing that your ISP is so badly misconfigured it makes sense to assume malice.
It's not a cure-all but encrypting everything whenever possible should be considered minimal best practice anyway. Since the early 90s I have said that everything should be encrypted, it is and always was ridiculous that internet traffic carrying all sorts of sensitive data (starting with usernames and passwords of course) just gets passed around in plain text, like if we were using snailmail and everything went out on a postcard, no envelopes in site. But encryption is hard, and cycles were short back then, and everyone said oh dont worry about it we can always tack that on in the application layer later. Which almost never happens.
Well at least today a lot more people are thinking about security, and we'll probably see more and more traffic incorporating encryption at one level or another, and the more that happens the less of a moral hazard the internet will be for those who administer and control the networks.
If you dont have it already, go get this: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Unconscionable terms hidden deep in a contract that no one is encouraged to read and very few have ever seen, 'agreed to' under the duress of a monopoly market. I'll refer you and anyone else with the chutzpah to play that card to the reply in Arkell v. Pressdram.
I pay for internet access and the people I pay have a responsibility to provide it, at the speeds they have promised. I did not ask for and will not accept the substitution of their intranet for the internet, as you apparently think I should be forced to do. If they are not able to provide the service they promise me at this price they should be honest and raise the price, not play disrespectful and fraudulent tricks with my service in attempts to extort third parties.
"The quibble is Netflix expecting that someone else absorb the cost of delivering their product."
Only to the degree that they are expecting someone else to live up their obligations to mutual customers.
Let me explain to you how the internet works in a nutshell, from a business perspective. I pay my ISP. You pay yours. When we talk, we dont have to pay anyone else. (Transit provisions are the responsibility of our providers - they may need to pay someone a portion of what we paid them, but this is not our concern.)
Now if you are an ISP and you want to stand on principle and refuse to colocate Netflix for free, you are within your rights. But the point is you are only hurting yourself, and your own customers, as the cost of carrying the content to your customers, how have already paid you for this service and have a contractual right to see it delivered, would only be lowered by agreeing to it. If you refuse, that's your right, *but it does not excuse you from your obligations to your own customers to transport the bits they request.*
"Verizon is asking customers to buy something like 10Mbps download speed and an order of magnitude less of upload speed. Now Verizon gets "congested", and they claim a surplus of content generated by upload to its network being responsible for that and want to get paid extra for that upload content."
You got it. Nice scam huh?
I got nominal 4gb up, that's the max available in my area, and it's not always delivered. In a lot of larger markets I have researched even this is not available - I see people with 50+ down and only 1 or at most 2 up. This is because ISPs in this company are typically NOT really ISPs, they lack the knowledge or the culture to be one, they do not understand the internet in some cases and when they do, they dont like it. They do not WANT to be in the business, frankly, and are quite uncomfortable with it. That's why you see them advertise the crap out of high download speeds but flat out refuse to offer any significant upload. Their mental model is not that of an ISP but of a cable company, and they dont want their customers to be internet nodes, but passive 'consumers' only.
Then, having condemned their customers to a second-class imitation internet from the start, they then turn around and complain that their backbone connections are not utilised symmetrically? Well of course they are not. The conditions imposed guarantee they will not be. The gall to turn around and use that as an excuse to shake down their upstreams... unbelievable.
The worst part is there is no effective competition most places and customers are trapped. If the rest of the internet simply cut off peering to ISPs that do this instead of dealing with them... most of the US would no longer have access to the internet. A few would have a choice... between Comcasts walled-garden and Verizons.
"Really, you can serve millions of Verizon DSL and hundreds of thousands of FIOS customers with one caching box? That only uses a few ports, RUs, and a few hundred watts of power? At approximately zero cost? "
Millions would obviously require more than one box, but it's still by far the most efficient way to deliver the service the customers already paid you to deliver so why quibble?
"Can I have free co-location services at the local central office too, or do I have to get to Netflix size before that happens?"
You just need to be serving the bits that their customers want in sufficient quantities that it makes economic sense. Probably not quite netflix-sized would be enough. Smaller could certainly work if by some quirk you have a very high percentage of users on a single ISP.
"That means even a rat is more ethical/honorable than former U.S. president George W. Bush."
I have to disagree. There is no ethics or honor demonstrated here, simply regret over not getting a particular treat.
In order to be ethical or unethical you first must have the mental capability to frame ethical questions and grasp ethical concepts, and all evidence indicates rats and most if not all other animals on the planet cannot do that, so they can be neither ethical nor unethical. There is no point in accusing a rat of acting unethically, he is simply being a rat and if you expected anything else you are a fool.
Your post is disappointing, you are quite correct that sea level is not completely uniform (and we have some understanding of the reasons why) but when it gets to the question that is actually important here you have nothing but a hand-wave and expression of certainty.
The sea level differences are explainable in terms of fluid dynamics, but that does nothing to explain how adding water to the global ocean could raise the sea level by more in one area than another (Except on an inappropriately short timescale, perhaps - obviously dumping a massive amount of water off Greenland, for example, would in the short term raise the sea levels most closes to it, but after a short delay it should even back out, and it's hard to see how it could raise the sea around the Marshalls instead.)
"If space is a premium like it is in New York or other urban areas, a smart tv isn't bad value."
If this article is to be believed it's a horrible value. The only way I would take one is if you were paying me to dispose of it.
The article focuses on the idea of some random low-budget cracker using this, but that's missing the point entirely. It's *designed* to give the TV stations/Advertisers/Broadcasting and Marketing complex pwnership of your system from the start. Anything they send, your "smart" tv will run blindly. The side affect of some third party being able to hijack it is a minor point next to the *planned* and *intentional* compromise this was DESIGNED to allow!
"If government couldn't do a better job, then why are corporations working so hard to keep them out?"
Because it's unfair competition. These guys whine like you are proposing to waterboard them at the hint of *fair* competition, so you can imagine how they feel about unfair competition.
And it really is unfair competition. The private ISP has to charge enough to cover their costs, a government has options to subsidize the service and charge less than they are actually spending on it, among other advantages.
The US currently outspends all other military powers combined, and that budget has NOT been cut in many decades. All the announced 'cuts' were actually increases, albeit smaller increases than someone had hoped for. To suggest that there is not plenty that could be truly cut from that budget is absurd.
"It's no wonder of all brands Android generally ranks worst in customer satisfaction which says a lot when win phone people are happier having a phone with no apps than those in the android ghetto"
Android and iOS are both trash, and phones dont need apps.
Slashdot Mirror
I would keep an eye on that Arris, most of those are not cable modems but 'wireless gateways' - you can put them in bridge mode and get them to pretend they are a modem but the router is still in there. They dont always stay in bridge mode very well, and it's also very easy for the ISP to factory default them whenever they want, either way you could see an xfinity wifi hotspot appear in your home without notice at any time.
Eh, sorry, the cable guy is right.
His mandate is simply to get her computer attached to the modem and demonstrate that their service is working then get on to the next call. He is not there to support her home network.
You twist what I say, it is no anecdote of yesteryear, it's daily reality in much of the country. The parts where no one is in favor of gun control. We are peaceful and remain peaceful, and frankly we are in resurgence. This is why the violent crime rates are down - because we have won significant battles on shall-issue laws and other things.
The vast majority of the crime in the US occurs in the big cities and is caused by the drug war. More and more that leaks over into rural areas as well, unfortunately, but there is still a vast gulf between the two worlds. The 'blue zones' are where the second amendment is most disrespected and it's also where the great bulk of the petty criminal violence happens. The red zones where it is more respected have always been and still remain low crime areas approximately the same (in terms of crime statistics at least) as similar areas in Europe, Canada, etc. There are significant demographic and social differences between them and they have only been getting larger in recent decades.
"In case you missed it, I'm saying you blaming Hollywood is no different from the anti-gun nuts blaming guns."
Except that Hollywood teaches unsafe firearms handling as if it were their goal. If you cant yell fire in a crowded theatre how on earth is it ok to teach people firearms, both theory and practice, in a transparently incorrect manner apparently designed to ensure they become a danger to themselves and/or others?
And that is where you are fundamentally misunderstanding. The old gun culture in the US is NOT a violent culture, or a criminal one, it is actually quite the opposite. (There is a new 'gun culture' created by hollywood that is different, but I am talking about the culture of rural red-state America, where I grew up, where everyone has an 'arsenal' and violent crime is so rare people talk about it for years after an occurrence.)
"So you arbitrarily multiply double the number of firearms, because of a feeling - basically saying that 30% of Swedes are lying about possessing unregistered firearms."
.22 pistol is subjected to absurd regulations, and it's much safer to simply 'forget' you have one than to bring it to the attention of the authorities. The same is definitely true of grandads war trophies and so many other items. And just because self-defense is not legally recognised as a reason to own a weapon hardly means that people do not acquire weapons for that purpose! They simply dont report them, and it's virtually impossible for them to be caught for that.
It's not arbitrary, there was a researcher in Lund who studied it, as well as personal experience confirming it. And Swedes dont lie. They just get very forgetful about certain things when it makes overwhelmingly good sense to do so.
"a Swedish colleague of mine said that they don't have government issued rifles in almost every house, like they do in Switzerland. "
He's right, they dont. They do, however, just as I said, have arms caches hidden throughout the country. In event of an invasion local squads need to be able to arm and organize themselves spontaneously and quickly, so they have to know where the arms are and how to access them.
Yes, accessing them without permission is an offense but that is hardly going to stop someone that's planning a violent crime in the first place now is it?
"He did however say that he's heard of stories of weapons caches, but mainly among Hells Angels type groups who stole them during national service"
The story I was told (by a veteran of the appropriate age to know) was that back in the day many decades back, the inventory and access controls they do now were not thought of, and items from the caches had a tendency to walk off. Then they had criminal gangs fighting with weapons presumably from the caches, and it was a bit of a scandal to hush up. And as a result all the caches now have controls - that do not actually stop you from gaining access to the weapons, but just log the access and take regular inventory so that if something goes walking off someone can be held responsible.
Again, this would not prevent someone already prepared to commit a violent crime from getting whatever weapons they wanted, it only applies some after the fact accountability.
"Moose hunting is a big thing, but do you really think that 30% of the population have an illegally owner firearm for something as public as hunting?"
No, I think Moose hunters like everyone else are sensible enough to forget to do things that are against their own interest, however. A bolt-action moose gun isn't so tightly regulated - but a little
I honestly think the numbers I suggest are significant understatements. I saw a lot of weapons there, as a foreigner, an outsider, I could still have armed myself to the teeth within a few minutes from my home. I really dont think there are any effective barriers to a native that is motivated to do the same.
"This is a list of privately owned firearms, not possession"
Not only that, it's a list of *registered* privately owned firearms. Double that to get a very conservative estimate of approximate actual numbers (these are countries with utterly absurd, though rarely enforced, firearm laws which strongly encourages owners to forget to report) of privately owned firearms, then figure in a militia system similar though certainly not identical to Switzerland, and I am confident for Sweden at least the number is higher than the US.
Anyone in Sweden that wants access, not just to hunting arms but to squad or even platoon level military weapons, could lay their hands on them easily. This is a country where Moose hunting is not only an ancient tradition, but a practical necessity, and theoretically universal military service is tempered by an eagerness to excuse anyone that does not want to be in class as quickly as possible so the rest can get on with it. For generations the military has been geared for a resistance war against the 'Eastern Foe' which means there are weapons caches scattered quite thickly and it's a practical necessity that a great many people have access to them.
The rest of Scandinavia I have less direct experience with I will admit, but my impression of Norway and Finland would lead me to expect them to be somewhat similar, particularly Finland.
I honestly think gun ownership is a secondary, in some cases almost extraneous factor.
In regards to Europe, Scandinavia (where I have lived) actually has a higher rate of firearm ownership than the US. Yet very little violence. And why? It's cultural.
The US is home to the most violent at least of the more developed cultures on earth, if not absolutely. We have been at war constantly since WWII. We have set ourselves up unilaterally as the world policeman, and we are constantly bombarded with propaganda to justify it. The ultimate result of that is a constant increase in militarism, and in the fundamentally mistaken belief that violence is the proper and appropriate way to sole problems of all sorts. And that in turn means that we will have high and climbing rates of violent crime regardless of material circumstance.
Take away all the guns and all you will do is disadvantage the older people and empower the young thugs with knives and blunt objects. Reverse the underlying rot, and violence will decline, even if every person in the country were issued an 'assault rifle.'
There is no difference between what you said and what he said, except that you clearly present what you said as a rebuttal. Most confusing. Did not rebut at all.
Your logic is also impeccable!
I would love to hear someone dispute this with logic. That I would know how to deal with. No one does that. They only dispute it with emotion, and with blind assertion, and refuse to believe it, but they can give me no rational reason to follow them.
Now sometimes it's more concrete. Sometimes you know the crackhead idiot down the road has wanted nothing more than to beat you to death with a blunt object for over a year, but will never get the stones up to try it, solely because he knows your family are gun people and he figures there's a good chance that you kill him if he tries. Sometimes, you know. The rest of the time, you dont know, but either way, it helps society in general, by lowering the crime rate, without doing anything, simply as an intimidation factor.
You see it even more clearly in the crime statistics when you break it down by type of crime and area. Rural areas have major economic problems that can definitely see some crime. But in areas where the typical household has what our pseudoliberal press would describe as an 'armory' the types of crimes committed are different. You see very few crimes that risk confrontation. People will sneak in and rob you when they are sure you are gone, but home invasions, muggings, etc are still unheard of. Old Grandad sleeping with a 12 gauge full of 00 next to his bed is not something the typical criminal wants to take any risks of dealing with.
Yeah it's actually pretty well established Washoe could do nothing of the kind. She had a functional vocabulary of ~300-350 words IIRC, between half to a third of the basic vocabulary needed to function at the same level as a severely retarded human. This is a vocabulary consisting entirely of concrete referents with abstraction present only at a very basic level. Her accomplishments were significant, and Chimpanzees (like all of us Apes) are quite intelligent in comparison to most animals, but she never showed any ability to "grasp ethical concepts" - and, btw, your link does not claim otherwise.
"After all, ethical behavior makes a large group work and be strong together while unethical behavior breaks it apart. There is a clear advantage to being ethical and promoting it in others."
That's not at all true - ethical behaviour is more likely to have the opposite effect, since large groups are almost invariably organized around unethical (but profitable) behaviour in the first place, ethics is usually seen as a disruptive influence and resisted with all available force.
"Unconscionable? I reserve that word for things like murder, rape, or slavery, not mundane nonsense like slow internet service."
Fortunately the law does not agree with your usage.
They advertise in big letters Internet Service! Xmb per second - then in the fine print it says there is no warranty of any service at all. It's very established law, even in the US, that such a term is unconscionable and if your case relies on it your only hope is to bluff and settle. Companies throw them into their boilerplate anyway on the theory that it cant hurt, after all a LOT of cases go down the bluff and settle route.
"What, you expected dedicated internet access for $30 to $60/mo?"
What I expect is what they advertise (and I do pay significantly more than you posit, btw, not that the exact amount matters.) Internet Access. If they say they are throttling me to a certain pipe-width, they should never throttle me any tighter than that. If their network needs maintenance, that is their responsibility. Backbone transit is also their responsibility. I dont expect 3-9s reliability out of a consumer service but I also do expect them to maintain it in good faith and to maintain the necessary infrastructure and transit arrangements. I expect an occasional outage that is repaired in a timely fashion, but not a deliberate degradation of my service as a lever against a third party.
A business account with SLAs can be required for specific guarantees but consumer service without it still has an implied warranty, that the service provided will be suitable for the purpose for which it was marketed, that it will be maintained approximately as needed. I cant sue them for a single outage, sure. If network congestion degrades my connection occasionally, that's probably not actionable. It would have to be a clear pattern over a period of time before a legal remedy would become available. But it would come available - at least for anyone with the money and the will to plonk down a retainer and play that game.
If they quit providing the service at all, or alter it to such a degree that it is no longer what I signed up for, well, the clause you quoted says they can do that and keep sending me bills as well, and there is no judge in the country that would enforce it. That clause you quoted is a perfect example of the legal meaning of 'unconscionable' btw - similar clauses in contracts in other areas of business have been labeled with that word by the courts repeatedly.
PS - I have no control over the fonts on your computer. If you dont like the one your browser is using, you can change it. I cannot, so complaining to me about it is particularly pointless.
See the other reply for why this is not a panacea BUT;
The VPNs he mentions are encrypted channels, but they are more than that, as they also force a route through the VPN provider. They are inefficient for general use because as long as the networks are being administrated properly the VPN will actually degrade your performance - when it solves performance problems instead that is a smoking gun showing that your ISP is so badly misconfigured it makes sense to assume malice.
It's not a cure-all but encrypting everything whenever possible should be considered minimal best practice anyway. Since the early 90s I have said that everything should be encrypted, it is and always was ridiculous that internet traffic carrying all sorts of sensitive data (starting with usernames and passwords of course) just gets passed around in plain text, like if we were using snailmail and everything went out on a postcard, no envelopes in site. But encryption is hard, and cycles were short back then, and everyone said oh dont worry about it we can always tack that on in the application layer later. Which almost never happens.
Well at least today a lot more people are thinking about security, and we'll probably see more and more traffic incorporating encryption at one level or another, and the more that happens the less of a moral hazard the internet will be for those who administer and control the networks.
If you dont have it already, go get this:
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Unconscionable terms hidden deep in a contract that no one is encouraged to read and very few have ever seen, 'agreed to' under the duress of a monopoly market. I'll refer you and anyone else with the chutzpah to play that card to the reply in Arkell v. Pressdram.
I pay for internet access and the people I pay have a responsibility to provide it, at the speeds they have promised. I did not ask for and will not accept the substitution of their intranet for the internet, as you apparently think I should be forced to do. If they are not able to provide the service they promise me at this price they should be honest and raise the price, not play disrespectful and fraudulent tricks with my service in attempts to extort third parties.
Just how much Verizon stock do you own again?
"The quibble is Netflix expecting that someone else absorb the cost of delivering their product."
Only to the degree that they are expecting someone else to live up their obligations to mutual customers.
Let me explain to you how the internet works in a nutshell, from a business perspective. I pay my ISP. You pay yours. When we talk, we dont have to pay anyone else. (Transit provisions are the responsibility of our providers - they may need to pay someone a portion of what we paid them, but this is not our concern.)
Now if you are an ISP and you want to stand on principle and refuse to colocate Netflix for free, you are within your rights. But the point is you are only hurting yourself, and your own customers, as the cost of carrying the content to your customers, how have already paid you for this service and have a contractual right to see it delivered, would only be lowered by agreeing to it. If you refuse, that's your right, *but it does not excuse you from your obligations to your own customers to transport the bits they request.*
"Verizon is asking customers to buy something like 10Mbps download speed and an order of magnitude less of upload speed. Now Verizon gets "congested", and they claim a surplus of content generated by upload to its network being responsible for that and want to get paid extra for that upload content."
You got it. Nice scam huh?
I got nominal 4gb up, that's the max available in my area, and it's not always delivered. In a lot of larger markets I have researched even this is not available - I see people with 50+ down and only 1 or at most 2 up. This is because ISPs in this company are typically NOT really ISPs, they lack the knowledge or the culture to be one, they do not understand the internet in some cases and when they do, they dont like it. They do not WANT to be in the business, frankly, and are quite uncomfortable with it. That's why you see them advertise the crap out of high download speeds but flat out refuse to offer any significant upload. Their mental model is not that of an ISP but of a cable company, and they dont want their customers to be internet nodes, but passive 'consumers' only.
Then, having condemned their customers to a second-class imitation internet from the start, they then turn around and complain that their backbone connections are not utilised symmetrically? Well of course they are not. The conditions imposed guarantee they will not be. The gall to turn around and use that as an excuse to shake down their upstreams... unbelievable.
The worst part is there is no effective competition most places and customers are trapped. If the rest of the internet simply cut off peering to ISPs that do this instead of dealing with them... most of the US would no longer have access to the internet. A few would have a choice... between Comcasts walled-garden and Verizons.
"Really, you can serve millions of Verizon DSL and hundreds of thousands of FIOS customers with one caching box? That only uses a few ports, RUs, and a few hundred watts of power? At approximately zero cost? "
Millions would obviously require more than one box, but it's still by far the most efficient way to deliver the service the customers already paid you to deliver so why quibble?
"Can I have free co-location services at the local central office too, or do I have to get to Netflix size before that happens?"
You just need to be serving the bits that their customers want in sufficient quantities that it makes economic sense. Probably not quite netflix-sized would be enough. Smaller could certainly work if by some quirk you have a very high percentage of users on a single ISP.
"Many websites have gone so far as blocking you if you didn't have an "approved" browser."
I am sorry, but that is NOT a website, by definition.
"That means even a rat is more ethical/honorable than former U.S. president George W. Bush."
I have to disagree. There is no ethics or honor demonstrated here, simply regret over not getting a particular treat.
In order to be ethical or unethical you first must have the mental capability to frame ethical questions and grasp ethical concepts, and all evidence indicates rats and most if not all other animals on the planet cannot do that, so they can be neither ethical nor unethical. There is no point in accusing a rat of acting unethically, he is simply being a rat and if you expected anything else you are a fool.
Some would say the same is true of politicians.
What, did we miraculously evolve past the need for video drivers while I was sleeping?
"It's relevant, but if you install a video card, you are going to use the vendor's OpenGL stack"
No, in fact, that's one thing I definitely will NOT be using.
"that's probably the majority of users."
Gnu/linux has indeed gotten 'easy' enough to attract some clueless noobs, but I really doubt they are the majority.
Your post is disappointing, you are quite correct that sea level is not completely uniform (and we have some understanding of the reasons why) but when it gets to the question that is actually important here you have nothing but a hand-wave and expression of certainty.
The sea level differences are explainable in terms of fluid dynamics, but that does nothing to explain how adding water to the global ocean could raise the sea level by more in one area than another (Except on an inappropriately short timescale, perhaps - obviously dumping a massive amount of water off Greenland, for example, would in the short term raise the sea levels most closes to it, but after a short delay it should even back out, and it's hard to see how it could raise the sea around the Marshalls instead.)
"If space is a premium like it is in New York or other urban areas, a smart tv isn't bad value."
If this article is to be believed it's a horrible value. The only way I would take one is if you were paying me to dispose of it.
The article focuses on the idea of some random low-budget cracker using this, but that's missing the point entirely. It's *designed* to give the TV stations/Advertisers/Broadcasting and Marketing complex pwnership of your system from the start. Anything they send, your "smart" tv will run blindly. The side affect of some third party being able to hijack it is a minor point next to the *planned* and *intentional* compromise this was DESIGNED to allow!
"If government couldn't do a better job, then why are corporations working so hard to keep them out?"
Because it's unfair competition. These guys whine like you are proposing to waterboard them at the hint of *fair* competition, so you can imagine how they feel about unfair competition.
And it really is unfair competition. The private ISP has to charge enough to cover their costs, a government has options to subsidize the service and charge less than they are actually spending on it, among other advantages.
The US currently outspends all other military powers combined, and that budget has NOT been cut in many decades. All the announced 'cuts' were actually increases, albeit smaller increases than someone had hoped for. To suggest that there is not plenty that could be truly cut from that budget is absurd.
"It's no wonder of all brands Android generally ranks worst in customer satisfaction which says a lot when win phone people are happier having a phone with no apps than those in the android ghetto"
Android and iOS are both trash, and phones dont need apps.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.