I had Verizon for about 1.5 years before I moved back to an area where Comcast is the only option. I had some initial hurdles getting my service up and running. Essentially I would call up support and get connected to some foreign-staffed call-center. They would give me some bs answer about stuff that needed to be done and I would call back a couple days later for a different answer. After two weeks of this I called up and got connected to their cancellation department. The lady asked if I would stay on if they offered me a free month and I told her that a free month was useless to me as my issue is that I had not received ANY service. She put me on hold, got her supervisor, and he came on the line and told me he would personally look in to the issue and credit me with a month. Next day -- next fucking day!! -- I had service.

The initial problems really had me questioning my choice to go with dsl, but once I talked to the right people stuff happened FAST.

I've been following this topic over on Ars for a bit, and it's one of the few cases where I actually bother to read the comments. I have no background in network stuff, so please correct me where I'm wrong:

Comcast and L3 have a peering agreement, which applies to traffic that is coming from one network and moving through the other network. That is, if Comcast wants to send something to a third party and the easiest route is through L3's network, the peering agreement applies. Per the agreement, no money exchanges hands as long as the traffic sent through each network remains about equal. For data intended for a network, there is no charge.

Netflix previously was hosted through Akamai, who paid Comcast a fee to gain special access to Comcast's network. As Akamai is a straight-up CDN, they had no real network of their own -- or at least no back-bone -- so Comcast was essentially their ISP. Netflix is now contracted with L3, so traffic enters the Internet on L3's network and goes where ever it needs to go.

Now, L3 is acting as a CDN in some capacity because they are hosting Netflix's data, and they are also acting as a service provider because they are providing the connection to this hosting service. Comcast sees that L3 is now sending a lot more traffic its way and wants L3 to pay extra due to the increased bandwidth usage. Further, L3 has requested some number of extra ports so that they can send this data to Comcast further, and Comcast has given them a small number of the requested ports but is balking on the rest due to costs. They are asking L3 to pay for the additional ports, and to pay an additional monthly fee for each port.

I can see this a couple of ways. Say Netflix hosted with AT&T now, and they sent their traffic through L3 on its way to Comcast. In that situation, why would L3 be liable for extra fees to Comcast? On the other hand, if L3 is asking for additional equipment so that they and/or Comcast are more easily able to handle the load, then yes it may make some sense for L3 to foot some or all of the cost of the hardware upgrades they want Comcast to put in place. I guess my real question is whether Comcast is asking for money simply for profit's sake, or are they asking L3 to pay for the improvements to their network that they are making for L3's (and tbh, theirs as well) benefit?

My one cat can't reach the door knob, but she knows that we turn it to open the door. If she wants to get in to the basement she will stand up against the basement door and reach towards the knob and paw at the door. Likewise, when she wants us to open the window she stands up against the window and claws at the locks on the window. This cat also understands how to open drawers, though most are too heavy for her to actually move, and how to open cabinet doors. I laughed so hard the day I woke up to see her in the bathroom with a cabinet door open and hair-ties all over the floor.

On the other hand, I have a maine coon who is dumb as shit... and they are supposed to be pretty intelligent for cats.

You can't buy guns like these! *kisses biceps*

Saw a lady steal cookies once at a self-checkout. She partially filled up one bag and then removed it from the scale. Did the "I removed an item" thing for the system. Then she grabbed an item in each hand, scanned the one in her right, then turned and put that item in the bag on the scale and the other in the bag on the ground. Maybe it was accidental, dunno... didn't stick around to watch.

Off-topic...

Kompressor had a song called "We Must Destroy X10".

Even better: go to the phone and type in *#*#4636#*#*

(Certain apps basically ripped out the code which presents this view.)

I'm not sure I really understand your post. It seems like you think the numbers are inflated because some people are "on" facebook 24/7 but not actively using the site all the time. Yet 16 billion minutes among 400 million users is only 40 minutes per user. That doesn't sound too preposterous to me.

Terror Toons.

I haven't watched the sequel, but that movie is reigning low-bar and has held the title for 6-7 years for us. In an unprecedented moment, one of my friends leaned over and started punching the one who had picked it out.

I installed both ydl and gentoo at different points in time. You're right that linux on the ps3 was largely useless. I had originally wanted to play video files from over the network on my tv but the performance at full screen was horrible. I had also thought it would be cool to run some emulators and use the ps3 controllers to play games, but I never even got that far due to the performance issues with mplayer/vlc/etc.

I think there would have been a larger community around linux on the ps3 if it hadn't been gimped from the start. It's a shame, but I'll live w/o it, same as I have the past few years.

It's a sad comment on the times when my first though is, "I bet they were cheating..."

Maybe I overlooked it or I'm just slow, but I didn't really see anything talking about what platform the browsers were on. With more and more people using smart-phones, it seems like that might be an important piece of info, especially if ff is not a cinch to install.

C++ FAQ Lite

I used this site a bunch when I found myself doing some c++ work after almost exclusively working in java.

Towards the end of college, I had to take a "general" class to graduate. I ended up taking "intro to music" since I had played in concert band throughout middle- and high-school. The teacher had some hands-on activities planned for the class and figured out pretty quickly that I had a clue as to what I was doing and ended up using me as a TA for the rather large class. It was actually kind of fun helping out, and when I showed up for the final she thanked me for my help, said I had an A, and then excused me.

I don't know that removing the laptops would necessarily help. My gf is in school for nursing and she complains a lot about people who are slow to understand or ask "stupid" questions -- i.e. questions that were already covered during that class, or were covered in the readings (that were assigned to be completed before that class).