My home Internet service is provided by Comcast who also provides our CATV. Even so, I rarely ever log into my Comcast account online. But earlier this week I read news about some changes in service so I logged in to check and sure enough, there was email waiting for me from Comcast.

The first bit of news was that our unlimited Internet service will begin to be limited to 250Gb of data per month. Comcast says that’s more than generous when you figure it equates to:

• Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
• Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
• Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).

It seems like a lot of bandwidth, but how am I supposed to keep track of how much I have used?

That little nugget wasn’t the only bad news. There was this:

As of October 25, 2008, the complimentary Comcast Newsgroups service, powered by Giganews, will be discontinued. This feature provided customers access to 2 gigabytes of newsgroup information on a monthly basis. After this date, these customers will no longer be able to access the Comcast Newsgroups service through Comcast.

After telling me that my bandwidth was going to get a limit, and my access to Usenet would be terminated, Comcast sent me yet another email offering to give me faster service for just $10 more a month.

Gee, I can’t wait to pay extra so I can exceed the bandwidth limit even faster.

Pat Condell lives in the UK and he offers his opinions on religion via his YouTube channel.

He has done so for about a year and I personally enjoy his opinions though religious people won’t like what he has to say or how he says it – so consider yourself warned.

His most recent video commentary, Welcome to Saudi Britain, was a complaint about the rise of Sharia Law in Great Britain. But it was a bit more than that – it urged watchers to sign a petition to the Prime Minister to stop Islamic Sharia Law from being used in the UK.

You can probably guess what happened next — it was banned by YouTube shortly after having been released based on “community feedback” from Muslim groups.

After some cajoling and further review, the Google folks decided to reinstate this latest video.