Posted 04/14/2009 at 03:14:10pm

I'm not opposed to reasonable tiered service structures as long as they are (a) reasonable and (b) disclosed up front. Cell phone plans are already structured this way.  X amount of usage per month is covered in your base plan and overages are billed at Y rate.  If you know you're going to use more you pay for a plan that has a higher amount of usage included in the monthly fee, which of course costs more per month.

20GB is not reasonable. Since it is entirely possbile to monitor and record the volume of traffic going through any network pipe, the ISPs should be made to base their caps on statistical usage data for their networks and they should be required to disclose those statistics. 

I am sure that the ISP's concern is that as Internet traffic continues to grow they are going to have to expand their infrastructure to accomodate the traffic or face huge congestion issues.  (Bandwidth is not infinite as one poster suggested.  It is limited by the hardware on the network at any given time.  Once that hardware has reached its capacity, bandwitdh can only be expanded by adding hardware.)  They don't want to spend the money without being able to pass the costs on to the consumers.  Fine.  My 75 year old mother should not have her rates increased if all she does is use email and browse some websites.  I'd say it would be fairer for those who consume more bandwitdh to pay for more bandwidth.

I'm also willing to bet that the disclosures on the caps and how they are enforced are not clear.  Heck, cell phone plans require translations into plain English for most folks.

I agree with the posters who said to write your representatives in Congress.  Make your voices heard.

Posted 04/14/2009 at 02:43:36pm

All this current and ex-President bashing is entirely irrelevant as it relates to a bill that has been introduced in congress.

For all you kiddies who did not pay attention in school here is how a bill becomes law:

1.  A piece of legislation is drafted.

2.  The draft is introduced into either the House or the Senate.

3.  The bill is debated, amended, revised or whatever until it passes in both the House AND the Senate.

4.  The final version of the bill that passed both the House and the Senate is sent to the President.

5.  If the President signs it, it becomes law.  If the President does not (vetos it) it does not become law.

6.  It is possible for Congress to override a Presidential veto by a 2/3 vote.  This rarely happens, particularly on controversial legislation.

Now, from what I read the President did not draft this bill.  Therefore all the bickering about the current President or the performance of past Presidents is pretty off the mark.

The real point in question is do you think this bill is a good or a bad thing for the citizens of this country?

Personally I don't.  In my opinion the government has been given too much power already.  We, the voters in this country, have given away civil liberties in the name of security already.  It is very difficult to get them back once you give them up.  Anyone think the Patriot Act is going away?  In my book it should.  As a few people have said, write your congressman about this bill.  Make your opinions known on Capital Hill.  Then if you don't like the way this or some other issue is handled by your Representative or Senator exercise your rights as a citizen and vote for someone else.

The beauty of the Constitution of the United States of America is that it allows us to replace every single member of the house of representatives every 2 years if we, the people, vote to do so.  It allows us to replace our Senators every 6 years if we vote to do so.  It allows us to replace the President every 4 years if we vote to do so.

The sad fact is that if you do not exercise your rights under the consitution then the only person you can REALLY blame for the state of the government is yourself.  Why didn't you do something about it when you had the chance?  For those who take the view that "my one vote doesn't make that much difference" - who says your influcence in the political process is limited to your one vote?  You have influence over people you know.  If you like or don't like a particular candidate tell people!  Some may agree with you and also tell others and your one vote can become hundreds.

Posted 06/20/2008 at 08:30:11pm

At the risk of stepping on the toes of those who have been successfully using 64-bit Vista, I don't think that 64-bit Windows will suitable for widespread day-to-day use until it is more or less the only Windows version available. In my opinion Microsoft would need to follow a similar path to the one they took in going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 then to 98. Wikipedia refers to those as hybrid 16/32-bit environments and I'd agree with that label. Each iteration was a step away from DOS and 16-bit computing. XP of course was built on the NT kernel which was a 32 bit OS from its inception. An even better way they could go about it (but probably won't) is to just say, "next version of windows will be 64-bit only and will not run on 32-bit machines." They probably wouldn't lose much in terms of sales or adoption because 64-bit CPUs have already been around for years. Right now, Microsoft treats 64-bit Windows as the red-haired step-child or an experiment or both. Until that changes we won't see the widespread application and driver support necessary to make it really usable. (If it were the mainstream version of Windows and Nvidia drivers were causing crashes, I'd guess that they'd be a lot faster at finding and fixing the problem than they have been to date.)