Wouldn't have been any better with McCain and the bimbette. Probably worse, in fact. But this was a point that I was trying to get across when Obama was elected: do not get your fucking hopes up, because he's going to be as subject to the beltway brigade as anyone else, and he's going to get run by the corporations as much as anyone else. Lo and behold...big win for the banks, the multinationals, the copyright mafia, health insurance providers, and even that biggest of fuckups, BP. The main difference if McCain won is that the winners list is shorter with Obama.

IMHO Cox's Usenet sucked before they outsourced it to Highwinds too.

Actually, it costs Cox to have Usenet on tap, because their Usenet implementation has been outsourced to Highwinds for years. It's moderately annoying to lose it, especially as the overall price won't drop, but what's been lost here is actually no great shakes -- there's low caps on both connections (4) and speed, and the retention is 30 days if you're lucky. No SSL either, which has become pretty standard. Yes, it means paying for an alternative...although it doesn't have to be Giganews. Astraweb works very well, and is fairly low cost on their unlimited plans, and if Astraweb is too costly and you don't care about posting access, there's Cheaper, which has plans starting at $4 a month the last I looked.

+5 Godwined! It always comes down to Nazis, real or implied....

I guess it took Cox some time to come up with an almost friendly, harmless-sounding name for throttling, considering that they've been throttling users in all of their markets for better than a year now. Day or night P2P and other users can expect to see a lot of jiggering of throughput.

Curiously enough, I'm only a buyer, and the loss of seller ability to leave negative feedback pisses me off -- partly because it means more sellers than ever just don't bother leaving ANY feedback. Why should they? It's a joke. While I don't miss the possibility of revenge feedback from bad sellers (and just had one rip-off artist who would have done just that), I'm annoyed that eBay pretty much set it up so that buyers can screw up sellers very easily -- mess with the DSR to get it under 4.6, and a seller gets a thirty day suspension; leave negative feedback and once it hits a certain point, suspension. Selelrs can cover their asses by using tracking -- it comes automatically with UPS and similar shippers, and it's 45 cents at the USPS. Other buyer scams are easily foiled too. Hell, legitimate buyer complaints are easily foiled -- I've been rooked by scam artists using PayPal. In the short term eBay's apparently boneheaded moves are going to cost them...but if their plan is to become a huge shopping portal instead of an auction site, then making moves to dump all the smaller guys is exactly what they would do. It's entirely possible, however, that they're simply just screwed up.