If a company wants to say that there are limits on how you can use the service, or that certain services are not allowed, or the so-called unlimited Internet isn't and there are usage caps, then they should be required to be prominently disclosed such that the customer can know what will be restricted. It's the imposition of hidden rules, or of subtle throttling or packet interception or other unannounced service degradations that is the problem.

It's like some cell companies having really long-term contracts to lock customers in, with a high termination fee, then proposing to reduce the level of service, decrease the amount or quantity of services or raise prices despite the customer having a contract. But if the customer tries to change their contract or get out of it ...

Mobile phone service in the U.S. is moving toward unlimited usage per month and you can buy it that way. But in the case of cell service where you're charged for incoming and outgoing calls, you're charged the same rate no matter where in the world the call came from and outgoing calls anywhere in the U.S. (and possibly Canada) are charged at the same rate, whether it's local or long distance the rate is the same. I'm not charged extra to call a pizza place over calling an office nor is the pizza place charged extra because the pizza place sells something as part of the call and a call to an office doesn't. All traffic is treated the same and all traffic is charged that way, the quality or reason for the call doesn't affect its pricing.

The simplest argument against this is the rules against landlocking. If I own a piece of property and yours surrounds mine, you are required to grant me enough of an easement to be able to get off of my property and onto public land. One property owner cannot force another to be left in a state to where their property is landlocked.

Another reason is the common carrier rule: anyone who operates a public conveyance must take all comers who can pay within the service area (and are not a threat to your business); if you are allowed to operate a taxicab company you can't refuse to accept passengers who are white or indian, black or Jewish. You can't also refuse to pick up an employee or the owner of a competitor.

Now, it might be arguable these are private companies who are operating private networks, the only problem being that a non-customer or even competitor has no power to make a private company give access to their facilities if the provider decides not to do so; consider what it took to allow Microsoft to permit competitive web browsers as part of the system (but you still at least have the option to install a different browser if you want). If an ISP decides you can't run certain traffic - P2P networks or competitive video feeds for example - you probably can't. Maybe if there is enough outrage the ISP will back down, but maybe they won't. Plus in some cases there is either no choice or the only choice is a cable company or phone company, and if one provides really bad service and the other restricts your choice (traffic throttling) or refuses you ability outright, you may be completely denied access.

It's one thing for a company deciding not to carry something on its network for its own account, and it's another for them to decide whether you can obtain access to someone else's network and leaving you landlocked and either unable to reach it or restricted in the ability to access it.

It's all about money, here. People are using more bandwidth to do more things, and they can't raise prices on a linear basis like they used to be able to do, e.g. if you take a 40-tier of TV channels it used to be that it cost twice as much as the 20-tier. Well, they can't do the same thing with Internet access, a 100 mb connection isn't going to be able to be priced at anything near 10x a 10mb connection. Which it shouldn't, the increase in cost does justify a somewhat higher price until cost recoupment of the more expensive equipment to increase capacity has occurred, but it doesn't justify a straight-line increase. But that is the way data and voice services were sold back in the 20th Century.

It used to be that a T1, (1.5 megabits/sec.) which I think was the equivalent of 24 voice-grade circuits (56 kilobits/sec each), and cost 24 times as much as a voice-grade circuit. Now, basically, for 24x a voice-grade circuit (call a voice circuit about $25, so that's about $600 a month), you can get not 24 times as much, but 10,000 times as much, or 1/2 gigabit/second. (Hurricane Electric, for example, will sell you an interconnect at their colocation facility for a grand a month for 1 gigabit internet).

The Internet providers are compaining they don't want '1930s regulatory controls' placed over the Internet, however they do want to be able to charge that way, by the bit, practically. They want to be able to restrict how you can use the Internet unless someone pays more for 'expedited service' or 'using our pipes to reach our customers' or 'using more of our bandwidth than we think they should unless they pay more' (even though it's within the customer's service limits) It's hypocracy, pure and simple.

Bullshit! If you want the Internet to become as bad as cable tv is these days then buy into this bogus horseshit idea this guy is peddling.

Just because you disagree with the idea does not necessarily even come close to arguing the idea is invalid. There are a number of various reasons I can give right off the top of my head that can be used to logically argue against the idea. All you can do is throw insults; your ad-hominem screed actually weakens your attempt to heap scorn upon the flawed premises of the argument and ironically are more likely to bolster the argument, e,g. "it must be a really good idea because all this proponent can do is say he doesn't like it, he can't provide an actual reason it's wrong."

There's a choice quote at the end: 'Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said Internet users shouldn't worry about privacy unless they have something to hide.'"

Perhaps we should ask Eric Schmidt for his ATM card number and pin. We all have things to hide. It's called privacy. More than that, it's necessary in a civilized society

When I hear someone say that you shouldn't be afraid to talk to the police unless you're guilty or that you shouldn't be afraid to let things known unless you're doing something wrong, or similar nonsense, I say, "tell that to Richard Jewell." In case you don't know, the late Richard Jewell was a security guard at the Atlanta Olympics who found a backpack bomb and got people out of the way and prevented certain injury to many people, possibly loss of life to some. In short, he did his job admirably. For which he got crucified by the press and the FBI, as rumors spread that the planted the device. He ended up suing a number of papers and got settlements. So for those that claim someone shouldn't be secretive or silent if they're not doing something wrong, I have a response for them.

On the subject, if you think talking to the police won't hurt you when you're innocent, spend 45 minutes watching these two videos, the first by a law professor and a police detective's rebuttal, who agrees with everything he said.

Over and over again, the need to scrounge for resources has shown to improve the quality of the product, from people bootlegging resources from their company (see Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine about how an underfunded and overworked group developed Data General's Eclipse 32-bit VAX competitor), to the reports in In Search of Excellence how excellent companies encourage scrounging and "borrowing" time and resources to work on new ideas.

One writer in a book about the show told a story how the original 1966 TV show Star Trek had to develop a special effect and there was only enough money in the budget for something like $562.00, which, given what it costs to develop things in television, was I think 1/3 of what it could expect to cost, and the guy didn't think he could do it, but he figured out a way.

Over and over again, it's the companies that have to scrounge and figure way to do things cost effectively and work with low amounts of money, that, long term, figure out how to survive and grow. Creative companies do more with less; it's the ones who have "too much" money that get in trouble.

I think they're trying to rip you off. Use Google's product lookup service Froogle and do a search for "cell phone booster". There are many types of signal extenders for cell phones from the $20 ones you stick on the battery - and I have no idea if they actually work or are about as useless as Headon - to inexpensive signal retransmitters that plug into the USB port for about $90, to standalone models for maybe $110 all the way to $190 devices and lots of choices.

Wrong item; he needs a cell phone booster, not a wi-fi booster, and they're about $100 to $200.

Robert A. Heinlein pointed this out back in the 1950s; any country that gets access to the moon has the capacity to control the earth.

There is an excellent book called Space Wars by Coumatos, Scott and Birnes, it's also available in the dollar stores (which is how I bought a copy) and explains the use of tungsten rods, dropped from space. No expensive or complicated ceramics, just high-melting-point metal rods, which can withstand the heat of falling through the atmosphere, but vaporize on impact, melting anything in their path for quite a distance, and leaving no fingerprints behind (no evidence) to indicate what country dropped it on them.

Whoever started this thread misspelled "voters". :)

Your quote reminds me of the story of the late Charlie Wilson, who, in essence, was a "drunken whoring bastard" but figured out how to get the funds - plus matching funds from other countries - to allow the Afghans to have the means to force the Soviets out of their country, To mis-quote from Schlock Mercenary, "Charlie Wilson was a drunken whoring bastard, but he was our drunken whoring bastard!" And despite all his faults, he won the war, and turned Afganistan into the Russians' Vietnam.

A few years ago NASA wanted to develop some form of on-line community similar to Second Life. So it sent out requests for ideas. I even submitted a few, figuring that if they did this right it could provide a serious environment for education and entertainment. NASA eventually announced a public hearing where potential developers could go. Well, what basically happened was, NASA had no funding for this, the proponents were expected to develop this at their own expense.

I saw the point here: you'd basically have to set up something which provided an environment for developing content, you'd have to figure out how to monetize your system to cover its costs. Consider that, since, unlike games like World of Warcraft, you can get into the existing virtual worlds for free, and NASA wanted at least a minimum area you could enter for free, a monetization through admission (game kit sales charges, or monthly fees) were basically out. You'd either have to sell space or find some way to sell add-ons, and very likely NASA would have a veto on what content or user actions were there. All you'd get for your trouble was the privilege of using NASA's "meatball" logo as part of your project. As this wasn't much of an incentive - anyone who wanted to be in the Virtual World business was already there - it died on the vine.

I seriously believe a few thousand dollars could have allowed NASA to create a programmable on-line virtual-reality based system which could have started small and been built up as those who used it figured out what to do with it, sort of the way Wikipedia bloomed from its small and humble beginnings. But they wanted an unrealistic system without a means to finance it. And their unrealistic expectations got them exactly what could be expected. A nothing that went nowhere.

I tried posting the following reply on the website the original article appeared on, but their comment system kept having an error so I'll post it here and expand upon what I would have said.

There is nothing new here; the problems of electronic data deteriorating or becoming unreadable because of proprietary lock in of various closed-source applications is well-known going back more than 20 years that I'm aware of, and certainly a lot longer than that. The use of wire recorders, player piano rolls, 78-RPM records, phonorecords now, 8-track tapes, laserdiscs, 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies, Jazz discs, Zip discs, and now 3 1/2 inch floppies, (and lots of other media I know I've forgotten) are all now obsolete storage media, some of which may have data which can no-longer be retrieved because the hardware and/or software to read them is unavailable, lost or forgotten.

RMS on Digital PDP minicomputers running RSX and RSTS and VAX machines and OS . ISAM and PAM on Univac VS/9 OS on 90/60 /70 and /80. VSAM on IBM mainframes (except the few places continuing to run z-System). The Control Data Cyber systems and their data file formats. Gould, Goodyear, Harris and RCA mainframes. All of these are basically obsolete, most if not all are gone, and data stored on media from those systems, if developed by a proprietary application, is probably, for all intents and purposes, lost forever even if the data is still present. The media may have deteriorated, and the systems to read them are essentially nonexistent.

Mechanisms for regular conversion as technology changes have to be provided for. This, however, requires that as the older media ages, that there be budget and personnel available to provide the conversion while both old and new media types are available. As the case of NASA cited in the article (an employee scrounged equipment and tapes on her own in order to keep the data alive until a means to retrieve it could be found), sometimes either or both may not be available.

Libraries have mentioned how their resources are stretched thin as it is, they may not have the funds or trained personnel to export old data to new media. And at the rate media keep changing this is happening more and more frequently. 30 years ago is 1980, 250K 8" disks are still in use. The 5 1/4" 360K disc is popular because of MS DOS machines. 20 years ago is 1990, and then, the 5 1/4 was still and 3 1/2 inch floppies were becoming popular, 15 years ago a reasonable medium for high-capacity storage were 100-meg zip disks. Now I don't even have a 5 1/4" drive, my computer still has a 3 1/2 but I don't have any floppies or use them, because I have a 4 gb jump drive I wear on a lanyard around my neck, and cost ten bucks.

We've gone to digital storage because it's orders of magnitude cheaper than analog. I've pointed out in previous articles that with a digital camera and 4GB SD cards, I can take thousands of pictures at an effective cost per picture that effectively rounds to zero. A single photo might take 1/2 to 1 meg, which means, without changing media, I can take upwards of 3,500 photos. Net cost is $10 when the media is bought; nothing more unless I print an image. When I take pictures, I don't take one, I take 3, or 5, or 20 because the extra pictures are essentially free and I can delete the ones I don't want later. When I was using 35MM film, each photo, with film and developing, was about 30c. A couple hundred pictures would set you back over US$50. Today, for $50 I can take more than 20,000 images.

But my sister still has an older digital camera that uses Smartmedia, She has to be careful to copy her images to hard disc when she uses it because you basically can't buy smartmedia any more and even when you could, the maximum size was 128 meg. Her photos were in the 150K size range so she can still take more than 500 photos on a 64M chip, and also the cost is effectively zero.

And for current media it's still near-zero per image. I bought a 1 terabyte drive (1000^3, not 1024^3). On one trillion bytes I can store just a hair under 1 million 1 megabyte images. The drive cost about $110 including tax, so that means each image stored costs $0.0011, or 1/10 of one cent. Stored on 4 GB DVD that costs about 25c, 3500 images cost $0.000071 each to store. Unless printed out (which has also dropped, it's about 15c at a drug store, and the image printer can read the media directly), again, the cost of any image is basically so low as to be noise.

But there are trade-offs. Information is so much cheaper to store digitally that we have to rely on the systems being available to retrieve them. Photos can be viewed out of a shoebox in the middle of the Sahara desert as long as it's light or you have a candle or flashlight. But you'd better have a computer, a media reader if it's not on he computer's hard drive, and some software to view a digital image, or you'll never see it. Plus electric power for the computer, too.

Information having any value on non-machined media will be usable as long as human beings are around; machine-processed media is only good as long as the machines that process that media are around. Paper photos will decay to some extent, they'll still remain as photos without human intervention. While digital data will never decay as long as the media is intact, the ability to continue to read the media will regularly require human intervention and access to the machines (hardware and software).

The most important solution to this problem is to reject any software system that uses closed or undocumented proprietary storage formats over open, non-proprietary ones. But this cuts the profits of some organizations; witness Microsoft fighting so hard to force use of its proprietary and badly-documented Word file format (to lock-in users) and its fights to stop use of the openly-documented Open Document Format (ODF) such as is used by OpenOffice.org. If files are in non-proprietary formats, the vendor can't hold your data hostage, either intentionally or by default (if the vendor goes out of business or decides to stop supporting the program you're using but won't release details about the data formats in use.)

As Maureen Smith pointed out in Robert A. Heinlein's To Sail Beyond The Sunset, "Whenever someone asks, 'why do they' or 'why don't they', the answer is almost always 'money'." Keeping data in digital format either saves a lot of money or makes it possible to do things that might be impossible outside of a computer, either because of the difficulty of manipulating images in the real world or it would be exorbitantly expensive. Which is going to be cheaper: a movie rendered digitally using Blender or one made by stop-action photography of individual cel images? They had to do it that way in the 1950s - also labor was cheaper then - but today much more can be done with digital images.

But its part of all development, every improvement has drawbacks. Paper was cheaper than clay tablets but the acids in paper means anything over a couple-hundred years old is either a copy or well-preserved. Monks typically recopied manuscripts as the old ones started to decay. With acid-free paper we got spoiled by libraries that could last hundreds of years as long as the books never got wet. Electronic information has to be copied as older, less-efficient media are replaced; it's a drawback of the technology as a result of how much cheaper storage keeps becoming. It's no different than it has been, we've always had to replace things as they wore out, it's just the cost to store each item has dropped so dramatically that we have a lot more of them. Replacing media over time is a maintenance issue, and maintenance is always an issue that nobody wants to deal with or pay for. And that is the whole problem. We're not preparing for maintenance by expecting it will need to be done and providing the resources necessary, being blindsided into being unable to perform maintenance (by proprietary file formats and vendor lock-in), and not doing the maintenance. So we pay the price of our short-sightedness.

I'm not going to rise to the bait and think you were serious in believing they were referring to "CS" as Counter Strike as opposed to Computer Science. But I have my own story of people intentionally confusing others.

Over 20 years ago when I lived in Southern California, KABC radio in Los Angeles has a (white) gentleman with an English accent as one of their talk radio show hosts, whose name is Michael Jackson. So me and another guy on a BBS were going on with this back-and-forth conversation about how he sure sounds different on his show on the radio, and so on with other comments, clearly "wrong". Eventually one guy took the bait, and pointed out to us that it's two different people. That's when we pointed out we already knew this, we just wanted to see how long it would take before someone noticed.

When the much more famous singer died, people went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame to look up the star for "Michael Jackson." Unfortunately, it wasn't his; it was the one that was given to the radio personality.