We used to have something like that in the US in the late 90s, even if it wasn't advertised or easy to get set up. I recall having some spirited conversations with phone company representatives when trying to set up my DSL connection with a third party ISP.

I'm not sure how or when comcast/verizon/att/whoever managed to get this squashed.

Logically, that makes complete sense. However, police officers and District Attorneys, and the legal system in general, do not operate on a purely logical basis.

"Resisting arrest" should probably be renamed "Contempt of Cop"

No, they are not. Do you think it's any different with Verizon, CenturyLink, or any other regional or national ISP? Every one of them has received the tax breaks that started with the Telecom Act of 1996, and instead of using that additional money to build infrastructure as mandated in the law, have generally used it to line the pockets of they executives with cash.

This is the beginning of turning the internet into Cable TV 2.0. In a few years you will be buying an internet plan based on whether you get high speed access to Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, or whatever hot new web service shows up. You want to use "old school" internet tools that run on ports other than 80, 443, 25, 465/587? That'll be extra, or maybe you'll have to get the "Business" package.

I'm no Obama fan, nor did I vote for him, but for the first few years of his presidency, he seemed to be trying to get the FCC to enforce net neutrality. This was met with resistance from every major national ISP. Some examples include Verizon arguing that "it had a first amendment right to block content on its network." and "like a newspaper, it provides you with news but has a right to cover whatever it wants and say whatever it wants." Another would be Comcast suing the FCC to overturn the FCC order censuring Comcast from interfering with subscribers' use of peer-to-peer software

The part of the 1996 Telecom Act that excludes ISPs from being covered under common carrier rules would seem to support this. I think amending the law to remove this restriction would then give the FCC more legal ability to actually implement some form of net neutrality, and keep us from having to "get out our pitchforks and torches over it."

I love how they tase the passenger, which causes loss of voluntary muscle control. This is then written up as "resisting arrest" for not putting your hands behind your back or not following whatever other orders are given. Now they have "justification" for further beating. You could spend all day on youtube watching similar examples.

In the years 2010-2013, Comcast has seen net income, after taxes and expenses, of between $3.6B and $6.8B. Part of this was earned by operating a service that is delivered over physical infrastructure that they didn't build and have effective monopoly control over. Tell me again how they haven't had enough cash to do any upgrades.

What I see happening is more extortion of the content providers like we saw with Netflix.

• Comcast: "That's a nice data stream you're sending to our customer. It'd be a shame if something were to throttle it. You should buy some of our data transmission insurance. Then we'll make sure nothing like that happens"

All the while, they'll be complaining about how their customers are trying to actually use the bandwidth they purchased and how streaming services (other than those sold by comcast) continue to put stress on the comcast network.

Simple answer to their unreasonable inspection of your data, Virtual Private Network. Route your entire connection through a VPN, and let them try their deep packet inspection on that link.

Have you tried routing your traffic through a VPN? I hear Netflix works a lot better when your ISP isn't able to identify and throttle their traffic.

If you have an Android phone, you can already do this with XtraSec.

Via txt message you can disable the phone, wipe the phone and/or SD card, trigger the camera, turn on/off mobile data, and more.

If you don't want to worry about what the comcast firmware might be up to, you could also use a third party modem from Motorola, Cisco, Netgear, or some others. Comcast has a site that lists compatible modems, based on your service type, and what level of level of testing they did with those modems.

I paid more than $21 for my motorola modem. But 9 months later I've recouped that cost and don't have to worry about what shenanegins Comcast might be playing with the firmware. I know that doesn't do any thing to stop their traffic shaping/throttling and deep packet inspection, but that what pointing the internal routers at a VPN is for.

It takes time to decrypt those packets, figure out if they are going to netflix, piratebay, etc; decide how much delay and replacement advertising to introduce; and implement the decision.

Using some of their giant stream of incoming cash to bribe top govt and military officials means the cartel leaders don't have to worry about this. I expect they just consider bribes as one of the costs of doing business.

The sender in the transaction specifies the transaction fee. The wiki has more info.

"the person attempting to make a transaction can include any fee or none at all in the transaction. On the other hand, nobody mining new bitcoins necessarily needs to accept the transactions and include them in the new block being created. The transaction fee is therefore an incentive on the part of the bitcoin user to make sure that a particular transaction will get included into the next block which is generated. It is envisioned that over time the cumulative effect of collecting transaction fees will allow somebody creating new blocks to "earn" more bitcoins than will be mined from new bitcoins created by the new block itself. This is also an incentive to keep trying to create new blocks even if the value of the newly created block from the mining activity is zero in the far future. "

Does that make it a little more clear for you?

Personally that may be true. On a bigger scale, we (the United States) provided helped them deploy the chemical weapons.

We certainly should have known what Saddam had and was capable of. First, we helped put the Ba'ath party in to power. During the Iran / Iraq war, we helped them financially and with intelligence information. Then, we sold the precursors of chemical weapons to them and provided reconnaissance intelligence that was used in their deployment. Why else would Donald Rumsfeld be smiling as he shook Saddams hand in 1983?

And here is more evidence supporting that supposition.

This can also be seen as the ever-decreasing value of the USD. The Federal Reserve has been been buying $80+billion in Treasury Bonds every month since the third round of Quantitative Easing started in September 2012. Lets see if they follow through on the tapering program this time.