> Your notion of fairness is like someone standing in line at McDonalds being asked to move to the back of the line because they already bought a dozen hamburgers last week and McDonalds is really busy right now.

FYI, I'm not Verizon. I didn't make this policy. I only explained it.
Interestingly, sit-down restaurants actually DO de-prioritize regulars when they get too busy. Customers who are not regulars (yet) get priority.

> Please, drop the notion of "fair" and "heavy user".

Considering that this story is about the company giving lower priority to heavy users in order to be fair to customers who don't demand as much, it would be pretty tough to have any meaningful discussion about it without discussing the major concepts involved.

His name US Ellison, not Ellis. He's one of the top money men for the democrat party. Look it up.

http://www.opensecrets.org/ind...

> What has carbon dating to do with backround radiation?

If you looked up how carbon dating works, you'd know the answer to that.

> The theory is that a lot of political rancor has taken place in the aerospace community because of the space agency's limited budget. If the budget were to be increased to pay for everything on the space wish list, the rancor will cease.

That will definitely work. Government agencies can never find more ways to spend money.
I bet if we handed 43% of everything we produce to the federal government, they'd stop having budget problems.

Carbon dating is a very interesting technique. I think you'll be amazed at how it works. Or, you'll deny the existence of carbon dating in order to preserve your misconceptions.

Iodine is most dangerous because it releases all of it's radiation quickly. With a half-Life of just eight days, it releases enough energy, quickly enough, to do real harm. After a few weeks, the radiation is pretty much gone. You can visualize that as being like gunpowder, it releases its energy quickly, and that's dangerous.

Other substances release energy very slowly, over the course of hundreds of years. That's like the heat energy released from from iron rusting - it takes a long time to release the energy, so it would take a LONG time to be affected by it. You wouldn't want to keep a piece of plutonium in your pocket for 800 years, because after 200 years or so you might start to notice some affects. Except of course you'll die of other causes in about 50 years, so you'd never notice any affects from plutonium.

Iodine and other isotopes with a short half-life ARE dangerous for a little while, until they "burn up".

> It hardly seems late if it is a report requested by congress

It's been said that one sure sign that an event is over is when Congress finally gets around to doing something about it.

> We don't let car manufacturers advertise MPG

I understand the sentiment. Phone companies sometimes act like jerks. In this case, they are lying by using the word "unlimited". Data transfer is ALWAYS limited,on any media.

Mbps is a measure of speed, though. Technically, looking at how very large networks work, "up to 30 Mbps" is more like saying a Porsche can go "up to 150 MPH".

It's important information for consumers, too. I want to know how quickly my cat video will load - will I have to wait while it buffers? That's actually a completely separate measurement from how many cat videos I can download in a month. Unless of course you assume I'm downloading videos 24/7. I buy bandwidth that way - 24 / 7 dedicated bandwidth. It's VERY A expensive that way because you're not sharing the cost since you're not sharing the bandwidth.

In the long run, yes decreased cost results in decreased prices TO THE EXTENT THAT COMPETITION IS ALLOWED.
If, say Cricket wireless can provide the same service at half the cost, they'll charge less in order to get market share. On the macro level, it puts downward pressure on prices.

Here's a concrete example for you. In the web hosting business, like many others, 20% of the customers result in 80% of the cost. Most customers never require much attention, the servers just run, the bill goes out, and their credit card is charged. A few customers run opt-in mailing lists, and while those are legitimate, they cause some spam complaints that needed to be handled, they need DKIM set up, etc. Other customers feel they need to install a new script every week, so they need a lot of support, and since they do everything ad-hoc rather than settling into a pattern they miss paying their bull sometimes and you have to call them a couple of times to get them to pay. Many years ago, I started a very small invitation-only web hosting service. We only hostprofessional webmasters who know what they are doing, so they don't bug support with stupid questions. Their invoice is billed to their business credit card every month. I have customers I haven't heard from in years. Because of this, our costs are low, and so are our prices. We can provide excellent service at an excellent price because we're not spending our time and money dealing with spam and DMCA complaints, or chasing down past-due accounts. Our costs are low, therefore our prices are low.

* no, we won't host your site. Not unless we know you, or people we know vouch for you. We don't want new customers unless we know those new customers won't bring DMCA, spam, billing, or support problems.

I know it's not fashionable to read the article, but you didn't even read the title?
This is about wireless. I pointed out that the platform of the Green party is to give the FCC new powers to do a, b, c, and d. Which in effect means giving Wheeler those powers. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Or in your case, milk in China.

If you for some reason want to make a comparison between the US and China on the topic of "big government", you might notice that China isn't exactly an example of small government. In China, the milk producers report directly to the government bureaucrats, more or less exactly what the Greens want to do here. Yes, that system results in melamine in milk.

Here's what you're missing. The article is about what happens when a tower hits maximum capacity for a moment.
Suppose the hardware on the tower is capable of serving 1,000 people per second*. There are 1,050 people who want to download this second. Sorry, 50 people are going to have to wait one second. The tower can only handle 1,000. That's just a fact. They aren't "messing with" anything, that's just what the hardware is capable of.

What Verizon has decided is that when there is an overload and somebody will have to wait a second, it'll be the heaviest users who have to wait. After all, they've already used "more than their fair share".

* it's actually how many packets and bytes the tower can serve per second / millisecond, not customer count. The person who uses a lot will wait milliseconds.