And much like the airwaves, there's the ham bands and the CBers. Besides, I've heard my fair share of idiocy on HF from licensed amateurs. You can't change human nature, you can just change the channel.

73 de N8VNR

Ya know, you had me... right up until "the end user, need to die." In the end it is ALL about the user, without whom all you have is SkyNet, or the MCP. Do you want to write code for your machine overlord, or for a fellow human being?

Ultimately that end user wants his/her computer to _just work_, which would happen if the tenets you laid out in your diatribe were followed. I find it strange that you would contradict yourself so vehemently right at the very end.

I think I know what you're actually trying to say here, but it would be foolhardy for me to infer that you contradicted yourself _again_ by being an elitist (self-righteous) BOFH who is better than the "end user".

The cable companies do their throttling at the cable modem. It turns out this cap can be bypassed. There were some guys back in my hometown that got caught doing just this. The cable company threw the book at them.

It would make more technical sense to do this at the headend, since they could keep the control closer to them. It would also allow customers who wanted to exchange data locally to do so at the full loop speed without chewing through upstream bandwidth. Instead, I'm stuck talking to my neighbor two apartment buildings away at 384kbit/sec. Obviously what makes the most technical sense does not necessarily mesh with what makes the most business sense.