Trump and Clinton would both put a corporation friendly judge in place.
The Internet will never satisfy its lust for Net Neutrality and Bandwidth
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
It's almost a sure bet that the Republicans are going to vote to confirm before the election if it looks remotely like Clinton will win or if she does. The guy up for vote right now isn't as conservative as some Republicans would like, but he's a fair choice and a far better deal than they'd get from Clinton.
GasBandit
Staff member
Wouldn't it be a hoot if Obama withdrew his nomination in that eventuality, after all the squalling and rancor about getting him a confirmation vote, so that a more liberal candidate could be nominated.
I'm not entirely sure he could, but if that is the plan, he'd have to pull a quick draw contest with Congress to do it. He'd have to do it after he felt the Democrats were going to sweep congress and the white house, but before the Republicans felt the same way. Then again, he could just resubmit and rush it through in January if the Democrats retake Congress so he's not exactly losing a lot by doing it ether.
Court rules that FCC can't block laws banning municipal wifi
While I hate the end result I think it's absolutely the right call by the courts. Basically it's been ruled that the FCC doesn't have the power to ban state laws that regulate municipal broadband networks.
While I hate the end result I think it's absolutely the right call by the courts. Basically it's been ruled that the FCC doesn't have the power to ban state laws that regulate municipal broadband networks.
Ehh... it could still get kicked to a higher court.
Now newly made available in Michigan!
So assuming I upload about 1/4 of what I download, you're saying that even though I am paying you for a 100Mb/sec connection, you are going to charge me extra unless I deliberately restrict myself AND MY ENTIRE HOUSEHOLD to using less monthly than what I would get with a 3Mb/sec connection?
Thanks, Comcast. Thanks a lot. You suck.
Full disclosure: I do not have Comcast...but that's mainly because they're not available in my area (which is a bit of a shame because I could get a discount through work).
--Patrick
So assuming I upload about 1/4 of what I download, you're saying that even though I am paying you for a 100Mb/sec connection, you are going to charge me extra unless I deliberately restrict myself AND MY ENTIRE HOUSEHOLD to using less monthly than what I would get with a 3Mb/sec connection?
Thanks, Comcast. Thanks a lot. You suck.
Full disclosure: I do not have Comcast...but that's mainly because they're not available in my area (which is a bit of a shame because I could get a discount through work).
--Patrick
figmentPez
Staff member
The real problem comes in a few years when they haven't raised the cap, but data usage has increased. This a long-term strategy to find upcharges to replace cable television.
...to "encourage" you to purchase their movie/television packages instead of just going 100% Internet.
I really want to know how this is not obvious to everyone.
Phone, voice, television, radio, etc...it's all digital now! Why do we still have to pay for Data + [service]? Answer: Because then we can charge you for a separate revenue stream...nothing more.
--Patrick
OK, now, I know I'm not hip to all kind sof modern stuff and all that, but....a hundred GB in a week, on a phone, while not at home/on Wifi? The f*** do you do on your phone, man? I average about 40 GB a month on my desktop, including occasional game downloads from Steam and such.
I average 1.5GB-2GB per year on my phone.
My at-home connection is quite another story.
--Patrick
My home connection is often cluttered with other use (besides being a terrible 3mbit/second DSL connection anyway), so I've been using my phone with an HDMI converter to watch netflix and other media on my bigger screens.
My terrible home connection is one of the reasons I got a $50/mo unlimited everything plan from sprint when those were still available, and why I still hang on to the grandfathered ATT $30/mo ipad unlimited data we got with our first iPad years ago.
So, not exactly representative of normal use, but we can't even count on 720p media via our home connection, while the cellular connections are ok. They won't do 1080p, though.
Lots of tradeoffs living out in the rural area, but I wouldn't trade them for a better internet setup.
They're also regulated differently. The government needs its tentacles in every "pipe" into your house, phone, life, etc.
Dave
Staff member
I have a 700 GB cap. I can blast through the cap and I do not get downgraded or charged extra. If I do it often than they'll tell me to upgrade to the next level, but I've only broken the 700 GB once. And I game, stream, torrent, have 4+ concurrent wireless devices on, etc. I'd call myself an above-average user.
1 TB is a lot.
1 TB is a lot.
We're at 700gb a month of usage, my husband checked after he saw this. I like to watch Twitch a lot. 3 of us download a lot of games. Everyone in the house watches YouTube and Netflix and rarely watches TV, even though for some reason we pay for cable. I also blow through a 12gb data plan every month for my phone, but not so much lately since my son takes a bus this year so I don't spend as much time sitting in my car waiting for kids to come out. We're still safely within the limit... For now.
figmentPez
Staff member
Or, you know, 5 hours a day of 4k streaming. Not really a believable number now, but that's where content is headed, assuming internet providers, ya know, actually provide internet capable of such.You only have to watch 33 hours of streaming HD daily to reach a TB.
My roommate and I hit a high of 545GB in the month of August. Most moths have been below 400GB, but considering that even that would have been mind-boggling not that many years ago, I'm looking to the future with trepidation. Time will tell if Comcast will raise their data caps over time, but I'm betting they won't unless forced to.
Also, keep in mind that Comcast's data cap includes upload as well as download. People who do a lot of video conferencing, streaming, or otherwise upload a lot will eat into their cap even faster because of that.
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that upload counts against the cap, too. That's why I assumed a 4:1 ratio in my napkin calculations.
(This is the sort of thing you keep in mind when you host a Minecraft server from your home)
--Patrick
I need to look into our Comcast stuff more often, when it gets back up. The only issue is that I subscribed YEARS ago, and have since forgotten every single password I had on the account, so I can't log in online and find stuff out conveniently.
Maybe if I walked in to the office and talked to them, something could be worked out. And we could unfuck that data cap, especially since my daughter has discovered Minecraft videos...
Maybe if I walked in to the office and talked to them, something could be worked out. And we could unfuck that data cap, especially since my daughter has discovered Minecraft videos...
figmentPez
Staff member
Saw this today on Tumblr and 
Here is the response I posted:
That’s going to backfire when people who understand the purpose of toll roads get confused by such a terrible analogy. Roads and internet have to be paid for. Toll roads are paid for by the tolls they collect, if you get rid of toll roads you just have to find some other way to pay for roads (read: more of your tax money going to fund road construction). The Internet is not paid for by taxes, it’s paid for by your internet subscription. In analogy, it’s already a toll road.
And I’m not just nit-picking here. My father has asked me several times “So, who pays for the internet to get built?” He thinks of paying for internet service as like paying for your driveway. He thinks you pay to connect your home to the roads that exist, but the roads and highways still have to be maintained by other costs. He doesn’t understand that part of the monthly bill for internet is the cost of your portion of keeping the entire internet running.
This is why some conservatives actually think they’re helping make the internet better by opposing Net Neutrality. They don’t understand how the internet works, so they think that ISPs need to have this control in order to recoup the cost of building the internet.
Here is the response I posted:
That’s going to backfire when people who understand the purpose of toll roads get confused by such a terrible analogy. Roads and internet have to be paid for. Toll roads are paid for by the tolls they collect, if you get rid of toll roads you just have to find some other way to pay for roads (read: more of your tax money going to fund road construction). The Internet is not paid for by taxes, it’s paid for by your internet subscription. In analogy, it’s already a toll road.
And I’m not just nit-picking here. My father has asked me several times “So, who pays for the internet to get built?” He thinks of paying for internet service as like paying for your driveway. He thinks you pay to connect your home to the roads that exist, but the roads and highways still have to be maintained by other costs. He doesn’t understand that part of the monthly bill for internet is the cost of your portion of keeping the entire internet running.
This is why some conservatives actually think they’re helping make the internet better by opposing Net Neutrality. They don’t understand how the internet works, so they think that ISPs need to have this control in order to recoup the cost of building the internet.
Well there's also this ongoing case, where a small ISP ("Telecom Cable" with just > 200 customers) claims that Comcast moved into their service area, asked them to mark their lines, then accidentally cut their (marked) backbone, and then when told about it "accidentally" cut their other backbones as well, causing their customers to switch to Comcast and then didn't compensate them for repairs nor ultimately for the total loss of their business.
--Patrick
--Patrick
Why Net Neutrality matters.
Well, not Net Neutrality, exactly, but it's still a prime example of how one telecom will deliberately try to force out another.
--Patrick
Well, not Net Neutrality, exactly, but it's still a prime example of how one telecom will deliberately try to force out another.
--Patrick
Patrick, you're usually "on" with this type of thing, but IMO this has basically nothing to do with net neutrality, and more with the idea of "you idiots, why didn't you just implement OpenID?" rather than the proprietary crap they obviously DID implement. The way I read it, it would be like your local ISP saying "you can now log into SomeOtherWebsite with your ISP's account name and password!" They have a partnership where there's a secure authentication chain there. But then the partnership ends, and you can't use "that account" anymore for it.
This is different than (but related to) OpenID because that relies on a login to the ACTUAL person that holds the username/password, and then passes a token along to say "yep, they're this email address" whereas it sounds like the integration was MUCH closer with the AT&T/Yahoo relationship. It'd be like if one of the big providers of OpenID (google, facebook) said "ya, we're not supporting that anymore" then any service that you used that to login, you'd be in trouble. But the company that used OpenID still has your email address, so even if this went "wrong" they could still send you an actual email, and set you up with a "normal" username/password through a reset process, so you aren't hooped. This is just kind of a sub-set of this with Yahoo and AT&T specifically, and not OpenID, with them obviously not having this type of mechanism to still contact people.
It's just a bit odd really.
The way they're doing it, then, is particularly unfortunate.
What they should do is send out an email forcing those users to follow a typical account recovery process. Go to a page, request a link sent to the email, the link contains a password reset form for that email, and instead of resetting the original password it creates a user entry in the DB for the new system.
What they should do is send out an email forcing those users to follow a typical account recovery process. Go to a page, request a link sent to the email, the link contains a password reset form for that email, and instead of resetting the original password it creates a user entry in the DB for the new system.
I actually state that fact right in my post.
But it is DEFINITELY anti-competitive behavior. The only group being required to change their email address are those held by a rival telecom (and not AOL, not gmail, not rocketmail, etc.), and the deadline for the transition is egregiously short.
--Patrick
Again proving that AT&T is one of the shittiest companies ever: The Internet Ripoff You’re Not Protesting
If anyone should know how to get around anti-competition laws and regs, it should be Ma Bell.