🚀 go-pugleaf

In <3CED85C4.DFBD4478@sympatico.ca>
   Dave Smith <adavid.smith@sympatico.ca> wrote:

| > | Thats the way a network works.  Bandwidth is shared.
| >
| > What do you mean, "that's the way a network works?"  Is
| > there some built in essence to a "network" that necessitates
| > that it "works" in the way you describe, i.e., that everyone
| > pays the same flat rate for unlimited access to it no matter
| > how much of a load they put on it?  I don't think so.  Since
| > you portray yourself as some kind of expert, can you please
| > point me to some references that will enable me to learn
| > about "the way a network works"?
| 
| Think of it as an all you can eat buffet.

Restaurants do not generally offer all-you-can-eat 
buffets to people in perpetuity, regardless of what it
might cost them.  If they start to offer such a thing
("all you can eat buffet, all day, every day") and find
out that the higher price required to subsidize the
heavy eaters drives away the light eaters, then they
will retract the offer.  I don't see a lot of
restaurants around making such an offer.  And those
that do, I suspect, don't have such a varying rate
of usage as do high-speed internet providers.  Finally,
restaurants are not *required* to offer unlimited
all-you-can-eat buffets.  They can change their menus
as they see fit.  You have been ranting for days about
how Bell cannot do this because they agreed to 
offer you unlimited service, and now they are not
allowed, ever, no matter what, it seems, to 
alter that offer.

| > I have not studied them yet, and perhaps they are biased in
| > one direction.  So, where are *your* references that argue
| > that an "unlimited" model for pricing makes more sense,
| > contrary to what most of these seem to be arguing?  There must
| > be some careful, well-thought out, writing on the opposite
| > side of this issue, no?
| 
| Some people find unlimited access to be too expensive and figure that they
| don't need it because they don't use it enough.  Others find that they spend a
| lot of time on the net and are willing to pay more for the unlimited access.

How does this reply to my quoted passage above?  Do you
have any references on the matter? 

In any case, why go on and on about unlimited access?  Bell is
not required to provide unlimited access, are they?  Are 
they required to provide it forever because they offered
you a service agreement at one time that has no explicit
termination, yet reserved the right to change the
agreement at any time?

| > My demands are a lot closer to the norm, as opposed to
| > being "minimal". And everyone else is *not* being limited.
| > The few who want to use a lot more are still going to be
| > allowed to use a lot more.  It's just that they are going
| > to have to pay for their extra usage, as they already do with
| > many other adsl isps in Toronto such as eol and i-stop.
| 
| They were offered "unlimited access". I don't consider being hooked up to the
| net 24/7 but not being able to transfer data (over a set limit) to be
| unlimited.

They *got* unlimited access, (according to your definition of
it -- I don't know that it was carefully defined anywhere), but
in the *future* they won't.  Nobody is saying that the future
of HSE is going to be correctly described as unlimited.  At
least I am not.  If Bell describes the *future* (as opposed
to what you have currently) as "unlimited", I would agree
that is somewhat misleading (it is still unlimited in
some sense, since you can pay more and get more -- compare
sales where they say "limited to five per customer" or
something like that).  But it is nothing worthy of getting
so terribly indignant about.

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Calvin Ostrum                                       cbo@interlog.com
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 To say altruism and morality are possible in virtue of something 
 basic to human nature is not to say that men are basically good.  
 Men are basically complicated; how good they are depends on whether 
 certain conceptions and ways of thinking have achieved dominance, a 
 dominance which is precarious in any case.  The manner in which 
 human beings have conducted themselves so far does not encourage 
 optimism about the moral future of the species.   
      -- Thomas Nagel, "The possibility of altruism"
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