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F**K the 8th amendment argument.

I think it is well past time that we started excluding the bad actors from this community

Exactly why are you so concerned about the scope of the remedy

If somebody were to steal your princess phone, I imagine you'd sue and ask for the judge to prohibit them from ever using a phone too?

Yes, people can make a living without computers. The Amish seem to do OK, for example. But it wouldn't surprise me if your garbage man example can't really avoid them entirely. After all, there may be a computer in the garbage truck that keeps track of people who need extra billing (around here, if you put out extra trash, you get billed extra.) Or perhaps he has to use a timeclock, but his timeclock is computerized? My car has a computer in it too ...

Perhaps part of the probation/parole system that the criminal has to use involves logging into a computer somehow?

(In the post I originally responded to, you explicitly said ban them from INTERNET ACCESS, but in this post, you seem to be going for `ban them from using computers at all'.)

Like it or not, computers (and to a lesser degree, the Internet) are pretty much now ubiquious, and I don't see the judge prohibiting somebody from using one for life just because they stole something once. And if a judge did, I can see it getting overturned on appeal.

Two teens are barred from the Internet for life

But if not, congratulations! You've personally helped make the Internet better for everybody, by reducing the number of myspace pages by two!

So what did these two teens do, anyways? Stealing a laptop would be the logical guess, but it's just a guess ...

You time will be better spent teaching them the basics of programming that will give them something concrete upon which to build abstractions.

I suggest using an elementary teaching aid such as the Cardiac Cardboard Computer. You can still buy them or you can download pdf's and make your own. I don't know about the legality of the downloads.

Seriously.

You haven't really lived until you've run a multiplication (by repetitive addition) manually on a cardboard computer simulator.

Soooooooo will they rename themselves Western Electric and merge with AT&T?

Soooooooo is this another Titanic top heavy Bell System toppling echoing the Western Electric close to shore Eastland picnic tragedy: 844+ excursioners perishing with 3 crew while one line was still fast to the river dock :-(

It's not a "ludacrious"[sic] statement. A simple Google search gives you leads to find the Bell System Memorial site which has a page on the very subject. There you can read fliers advertising the changes to allow you to buy your phone and see the old rates of between $1.00-3.25 per phone.

Next time, take the word of someone who is old enough to have actually been there. I'm also barely old enough to remember rented phones and the Bell System Property tag on them. My grandmother kept hers for years.

Did they introduce a way to transmit television quality pictures over regular 300 Hz to 3,000 Hz phone lines at the same time?

I am not sure. You can read more about it at http://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/telephones-pictu rephone.html

Alexander Graham Bell and the invented the telephone.

He and several partners formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.

Management from Bell Telephone Company started another independent company called AT&T Long Lines.

In 1899 AT&T bought American Bell Telephone Company (formerly Bell Telephone Company )

In 1974 the Department of Justice broke up AT&T into the many 'Baby Bells' that are now rejoining.

That's where the "Bell" came from. As far as the "Ma" part...

According to bellsystemmemorial.com:

Where did the phrase, "Ma Bell" originate as a slang name for the Bell System or AT&T? Well, nobody seems to know for sure, but here are some possibilities submitted by members of the ATCA and TCI clubs:

"One apocryphal version is that employees of the Bell System acquired an umbilical cord effect. That is why there are very few people who ever quit the Bell System, and so many of the employees who stayed for the duration." - submitted by A. P. Bloom

"Another version is that the stock of AT&T (symbol 'T' on the New York Stock Exchange) was purchased by or for widows and orphans as a long-term investment, since its reputation for reliabilty during recessions was its selling point." - submitted by A. P. Bloom

"I worked for 'Ma Bell' for 34 yrs. Many, many years ago I was told that the term 'Ma Bell' came from a corruption of Alex Bell's wife's name, Mabel, which is pronounced May Belle, and that the company was run as a family business. The first employees were treated very well and thus referred to the company in a friendly way as Ma Bell. I also read that at the 109 Court Street, Boston location (where Bell and Watson did their earliest work on the phone in the 1870's) there was no division of labor. No us against them, managment vs labor division. Every employee was treated as an equal and listened to for ideas. A family atmosphere, thus the term "Ma Bell". True or not? I really don't know."
"When I got married in 1971 I was given one more day of vacation (for the honeymoon) than I was due. When I went to my foreman "Pop" to straighten out the mistake, I told him there was a mistake and I wasn't due the extra day. 'Pop' put his arm around my shoulder and took me aside and told me, 'the same thing happened to me when I got married; you are now part of the family and will be treated as part of the family. The flip side of the coin is that when you go out and do telephone work, you will do it like it's the family business'. I worked that way for many years. Poor craftsmanship was simply not tolerated. Your biggest critics were not the customer or your foreman, it was your coworkers. I remember several times in the 1970's being told, 'the greatest asset of our company is the goodwill of the employees'. I never heard that said again after the breakup of the company on Jan 1, 1984. If it is a family now, it certainly is a disfunctional family!" - Retired and enjoying it, Walter Smith

I haven't seen what AT&T's new logo will be yet, but the only natural progression seems to be:

Darth Vader (1969)
Death Star (1984)
Jar Jar Binks (2005)

I haven't seen what AT&T's new logo will be yet, but the only natural progression seems to be:

Darth Vader (1969)
Death Star (1984)
Jar Jar Binks (2005)

Mr. Gates writes "We have a research lab in Cambridge, we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems in computer science are going to be solved."

Really ?

Here's some of the top problems in CS.

Here's the research lab in India - working on technology implementations, certainly not top CS problems.

Here are the 10 innovations that will blow you away - coming out of Beijing. Again, some very sound implementations, but not exactly top 10 CS problems.

But yes, Cambridge is looking at some of the top 10 CS problems. However, MS is no Bell Labs when it comes to taking on research problems. They end up successfully monetizing tech solutions, but that is quite different from pioneering fundamental breakthroughs like inventing a transistor or laser.

One of my favorite early computer toys was the CARDIAC, the Bell Labs "Cardboard Aid to Computation," and I was hoping that this board game might re-create some of that excitement for today's kids. I liked the concept, but was a little dismayed by the attention to syntax. I'm more of the "Syntactic sugar leads to cancer of the semicolon" school of thought.

I worked on the Logo implementations for the Apple ][ at the MIT Logo lab, and at Terrapin did the Commodore 64 (and other ill-fated Commodore computers), Macintosh. (I also various implementations and translations for Japan, Spain, France, and Germany.)

Those who are curious about the nifty little cardboard illustrative aid to computation can download the emulator.

The deal is goin' down, shoobee-doo-down-down!
The rates are goin' up, uppee-up-up-up!

Why do companies like AT&T collapse after investing time, money and brains into this kind of innovation

In this case because the US government decided to kill it. Read the history of it here That's why you don't have your innovative AT&T anymore, the feds killed it pretty much out of spite. Then they killed it some more by allowing the Baby Bells to raise the rates they charged AT&T for connecting calls into what is essentially the network AT&T built in the first place! Which is why AT&T had to pull out of the residential market a few months ago and is now about to become a part of SBC. Which is very unfortunate, given my past experiences with SBC.

Intel, the pioneers of the transistor.

Bell Labs made CARDIAC a cardboard computer similar to the one you describe. I actually bought one just a couple of years ago. Here's the contact info I used:
Comspace Corporation
117 Engineers Drive
Hicksville, NY 11801
Phone:516-942-8191
Fax:516-942-8193
Email :comspace@aol.com
Webpage (hadn't been updated for a while):
http://hometown.aol.com/comspace/

As of 2003, CARDIAC was 19.95 or a plastic version (for overhead use) was 22.95 + shipping

by AT&T to remain relevant. First they were broken up by the Reagan administration. Then they tried to enter the wireless world by buying up McCaw Cellular for $14 billion. They did great for awhile with things like One Rate, but then they got a jackass for a CEO. Later, AT&T sold off wireless properties (!) in their bid to buy TCI which was a disaster. Finally, too late and many dollars too short, they switched to GSM, but it didn't work worth a damn. Finally, number portability did them in.

What's AT&T got left? Long distance? A dying industry if there ever was one! Once again, AT&T is a year or too late to jump on this bandwagon. As has happened many times before, a once-venerable company has been run into the ground by stupid management. Don't worry, though, Zeglis will get a golden parachute and find a new company to run into the ground.

Ahh, life in these United States . . .

Thoolie asks...

"Just wondering, 20 years ago all you could get was ATT, now they are selling off their arms and legs left and right. Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend? (I think we all know about the anti monoploy suit and the baby bells, but there must be more?)"

There's a couple of pretty good books available that will give you some excellent ideas as to What Went Wrong with the Bell System, and much of it can be blamed on the U.S. legal system.

For starters, I recommend 'The Rape of Ma Bell: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World' by Alfred Duerig and Constantine Kraus. It will give you divestiture and breakup from an engineer's perspective. You can find an excerpt from the book here.

Another good one is 'A Voice in the Wilderness' by Alfred Duerig. That one's more of a dedication and autobiography for Constantine Kraus, but it will also give you some more insights into divestiture and What Really Happened.

Both books are out of print, BTW, but you should be able to find them either through Abebooks online, or from Ebay. I got my pair through finding used booksellers with copies on Abebooks.

While I'm thinking about it, the Bell System Memorial site is a wonderful resource for both historical and technical info on the once-great Ma Bell.

From my perspective: The divestiture and breakup of the Bell System was utterly unnecessary, along the lines of using an antiaircraft gun to kill mosquitoes. There had to have been other (and better) ways to go about allowing consumers to connect their own goodies to the lines, encourage development of alternative services, etc.

Happy hunting.

Thoolie asks...

"Just wondering, 20 years ago all you could get was ATT, now they are selling off their arms and legs left and right. Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend? (I think we all know about the anti monoploy suit and the baby bells, but there must be more?)"

There's a couple of pretty good books available that will give you some excellent ideas as to What Went Wrong with the Bell System, and much of it can be blamed on the U.S. legal system.

For starters, I recommend 'The Rape of Ma Bell: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World' by Alfred Duerig and Constantine Kraus. It will give you divestiture and breakup from an engineer's perspective. You can find an excerpt from the book here.

Another good one is 'A Voice in the Wilderness' by Alfred Duerig. That one's more of a dedication and autobiography for Constantine Kraus, but it will also give you some more insights into divestiture and What Really Happened.

Both books are out of print, BTW, but you should be able to find them either through Abebooks online, or from Ebay. I got my pair through finding used booksellers with copies on Abebooks.

While I'm thinking about it, the Bell System Memorial site is a wonderful resource for both historical and technical info on the once-great Ma Bell.

From my perspective: The divestiture and breakup of the Bell System was utterly unnecessary, along the lines of using an antiaircraft gun to kill mosquitoes. There had to have been other (and better) ways to go about allowing consumers to connect their own goodies to the lines, encourage development of alternative services, etc.

Happy hunting.

Thoolie asks...

"Just wondering, 20 years ago all you could get was ATT, now they are selling off their arms and legs left and right. Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend? (I think we all know about the anti monoploy suit and the baby bells, but there must be more?)"

There's a couple of pretty good books available that will give you some excellent ideas as to What Went Wrong with the Bell System, and much of it can be blamed on the U.S. legal system.

For starters, I recommend 'The Rape of Ma Bell: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World' by Alfred Duerig and Constantine Kraus. It will give you divestiture and breakup from an engineer's perspective. You can find an excerpt from the book here.

Another good one is 'A Voice in the Wilderness' by Alfred Duerig. That one's more of a dedication and autobiography for Constantine Kraus, but it will also give you some more insights into divestiture and What Really Happened.

Both books are out of print, BTW, but you should be able to find them either through Abebooks online, or from Ebay. I got my pair through finding used booksellers with copies on Abebooks.

While I'm thinking about it, the Bell System Memorial site is a wonderful resource for both historical and technical info on the once-great Ma Bell.

From my perspective: The divestiture and breakup of the Bell System was utterly unnecessary, along the lines of using an antiaircraft gun to kill mosquitoes. There had to have been other (and better) ways to go about allowing consumers to connect their own goodies to the lines, encourage development of alternative services, etc.

Happy hunting.

I agree that electric deregulation probably had a lot to do with California's rolling blackouts and the giant blackout last year, but the only thing bad thing about AT&T's breakup is that operators are no longer useful.

As a matter of fact, modems weren't even allowed by AT&T because you could only plug in equipment that you rented from them (that's why acoustic couplers were invented). I remember having to pay for each extension, and you had to be pretty rich to get an additional phone line. Lord only knows if we would have fax machines or cordless phones by now. But the most important thing is that it used to cost an arm and a leg to call long-distance, such that it was a big deal ("Shhh...Aunt Martha's on the phone long-distance!"). Now I can call any state I want for any length of time, whenever I want, and my phone bill is always $50. See http://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/images/sb_rates_ 4.gif for Florida's peak LD rates 6 months before the breakup. Breaking up AT&T was the best thing that has happened to telecom in the US since the transistor was invented.

As for airlines, I would probably only be able to fly for business purposes if it was never deregulated. Considering how rarely I do that, I don't mind deregulation. While I hate the crowding and crappy service, there are probably many routes that wouldn't even be available because they wouldn't be viable without all the tourists riding cheap.

aQazaQa

Sherwin Gooch's Account of John Bardeen's Lecture (Score:1)
by Baldrson (jabowery@netcom.com) on Tuesday December 28, @08:58AM EST
(User Info) http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery

In any case, I'll check with Sherwin Gooch to see if he has any more direct evidence from Bardeen himself to support the controversial account of the hide-away experimental stand.

I did, and here is Sherwin's response:

Jim,

Thank you for alerting me to your discussion.

To provide a more solid foundation, one should be aware that I heard this story from the horse's mouth.

John Bardeen himself gave a talk one evening at Altgeld Hall on the University of Illinois campus, circa 1978, in which he related various experiences surrounding his inventing the transistor. At the time, people suspected that the scheduling of this presentation may have been related to Bardeen's health.

Professor Bardeen showed us the B&W 16mm film BB&S had made at Bell Labs immediately after they got the first transistor to work (and, presumably, before Bardeen's boss got to work the next morning...) I have seen individual frames and out-takes of this film since, but I don't know if the entire film still exists. The "rolly-cart" with their experimental set-up is plainly in evidence on the film.

It was John Bardeen himself, at Altgeld Hall, who related that his boss had said that the "solid-state amplifying device" which they wanted to develop was "not feasible," and that, "even if it were possible, it would have no practical application." Dr. Bardeen related that sometimes, when his boss stayed at work past 5 p.m., the three of them would become very impatient waiting for him to leave so they could roll their setup out of the coat-closet, and get busy on what they, apparently, thought was the greatest "cool hack" of the day.

I wonder who Bardeen's boss was. His boss should be immortalized in history next to the NASA manager who advised the last engineer withholding approval of the Challenger launch to "put on your management hat!"

One of the anecdotes John Bardeen related was how he had left his set of photographic slides in the taxi which took him to the ceremony to collect his Nobel prize, and all the trouble to which he and the Swedish government had gone in trying to recover them. But their efforts were unsuccessful; the slides were never recovered. Professor Bardeen was extremely apologetic that he didn't have them to use in his presentation, and so we would just have to make-do with his relating the incidents to us.

With my background in computer music, I found one of the pieces of supporting paraphernalia that Dr. Bardeen didn't lose in Sweden quite interesting. He brought along a transparent plexiglas box, approximately the shape of a 6" cube, with randomly distributed 3/4" or so holes (apparently for cooling?) in the sides. On the top were a number (6 or so) of black SPST N.O. push buttons. A small loudspeaker was mounted inside. (There must have also been a battery of some kind, but I don't recall it.) The box contained a collection of electronic components, their leads soldered to one-another ("tacked together"), and hanging in "free space." (He hadn't bothered to use a prototyping board or connecting strip.) There were resistors, capacitors, possibly some coils, and these ~1" long bar things (which were the transistors), of which there were 3. Dr. Bardeen explained that he had had chosen to build this device because it em

On the site I saw thosein this picture. Anyone here has a clue what kind of phone that is and who made it? Those or very similar ones are often seen as decoration in the IKEA catalogue and I always wondered where to get it.

Pierce (with nosering/earrings/cell): Great my phone battery is dead!
Dude1: Dude! Do you want to call from my house Pierce?
Pierce: Yeah, okay. Dude1: It's too bad technology today is so limited.
Pierce: I know. There should be some kind of system in place which wouldn't require people to carry phones around wherever they go. Dude1: Yeah! Like communication centers placed in areas where people congregate.
Dude2: And there would be individual glass enclosures where people could make calls in privacy.
Dad (coming in): Like a phone booth?
Dude1: Catchy term!
Dude2: I can't believe nobody's thought of this before.
Pierce: Progress moves so slowly!

:) That page has a couple of pictures of nice chicks talking on payphones too...wonder who they're calling.

Worth a look after the slashdotting's through.

Now that is a funny 403 message...

I know that this dates me, but I had my very own disposable cardboard computer way back in 1966. Sure, it only had about 100 bits memory, but it didn't require any batteries either!Here are some pics.

Fundamental Algorithms, volume 1 of Knuth's well-known series, handled nearly all of the programming exercises in MIX, his "virtual" assembly language that modeled capabilities on a variety of real processors. There were and are a variety of simulators for it.

Another one is this relic I have on my bookshelf: cardiac, "A cardboard illustrative aid to computation", by David Hagelbarger and Saul Fingerman of Bell Telephone Laboratories. It's literally a cardboard "computer" on which you write decimal instructions, move sliders around for addressing and opcodes, and use a cardboard "bug" (a ladybug) as the PC.

My very first exposure to a "computer" was with Bell Labs' CARDIAC in the early 1970s. This was an instructional tool designed to teach young people (ages 12 and up, I suppose) the fundamentals of computing using cardboard sliders to simulate operations. It was a gift from my uncle, who later worked on software development for the space shuttle, so he really knew where computing was headed.

However, I wasn't even 7 years old at that time, so imagine how weird and scary this was to a kid who hadn't learned his times tables yet! Predictably, I never touched a real computer until more than a decade after that vaguely traumatic experience.

I still remember the CARDIAC with the appropriate awe, nevertheless.

No, I'd say that Bob is pretty obviously a concept that is fundamentally and irrevocably flawed. Bob attempted to translate the vast realm of symbolic-information-manipulation tasks down to the narrow realm of interaction-with-everyday-mechanical-artifacts.

Computers are hard. We can do a lot to make them more accessible, but Bob isn't it. You know what else is hard? Learning to read and write. We have all trained for many years to become profficent with this general-purpose communications tool. We haven't tried to invent cuter, more graphical hieroglyphics to tell our stories. We like photographs and diagrams, but text is the predominant encoding for anything serious. When graphics are used for expressing ideas, they tend to become more symbolic and less literal as their design is refined (examples here and here... human writing systems uniformly follow a simliar progression).

Primitive man could doodle a picture of himself spearing a bear. That was sufficent for documenting his exploits, and it was a lot simpler than "learn to read and write". But today, we're willing to pay that price because cave paintings are useless for conveying philosophical insights, complex narratives, and technological explications.

Computers are still very new, but they have opened up for us the world of Turing-complete computation. It is the most generalized tool that mankind has ever invented. You can't reduce it to a set of hyper-literal programs.

BTW my vote for the best X utility--Launchbar.

Regards, Matt

Yeah, and the nice thing was, they were good phones. They're built solid. I've still got a Western Electric 500 series sitting on my desk. Works like a charm. Nowadays you pay $50 every two years to buy a new phone because they're cheap and they break.

You had to lease your phones from them -- you couldn't buy them. You had to pay extra for DTMF (Touch-Tone [TM]). Your monthly bill was based on the base rate times the number of phones plus the base local call charge plus the incredibly overpriced long distance calls, which themselves worked on a minimum of three minutes and charges were rounded up to the next whole minute.

No, you paid per phone, but they didn't multiply that into your bill. Long distance wasn't incredibly overpriced. The rates had consistently gone down. You failed to mention that long distance calls used to be based on how far you were calling, simply because you tied up more circuits the farther you called. AT&T's rates were always based on what it cost them to complete the call, they weren't incredibly overpriced. Prices have gone down since because of bandwidth increases, allowing them to put more calls through.

They stifled technology much more so than IBM, even when it hurt them. It became cheaper and easier for them to have customers using DTMF, but because people wanted it rather than the damned dialing wheels, they kept on charging premiums, which meant they had to keep those old number nine crossbars in the COs rather than (or in addition to) the electronic switches.

The claim that AT&T stifled technology is absolutely ridiculous. Have you heard of Bell Laboratories?? Bell Labs was responsible for the invention of the transistor, for digital signalling rather than analog, for pioneering optical signalling. Just about any advance in communications this century was made at Bell Labs. People seem to think that Ma Bell stifled technology, but this was mainly because Uncle Sam forced them too. Since AT&T was the telecom monopoly, the government wouldn't allow them to start other services. Cell phones for instance, were invented decades ago at AT&T, but haven't gotten popular until now, because the government prohibited AT&T from getting into them. Your argument seems to be based on "AT&T stifled technology since they charged for touch tone service" which isn't very strong. Since you obviously used to phreak, that obviously sets up AT&T as your enemy, and your bias is obvious.

AT&T also had a great service record. Sure you had to pay extra for two phones, but if something went wrong, the lineman was out to fix it ASAP. Now with the Baby Bells you have a local monopoly with bad service, rather than one big monopoly with good service. You mentioned in later posts the Bell System Memorial but you seem to have learned little from that site. Ma Bell was a mostly benevolent monopoly, full of technical advances, but stifled by the government because of the position it was in. Good equipment and good service, that's unheard of these days.

Another sick side of the stifling of technology was number tracing. It became a hackneyed device for all mysteries and thrillers, but the real-life side of it really did cause a lot of headaches. Ma Bell claimed they couldn't internally check connections. The police would have to call to prepare for a trace on a known line and Bell would send some poor schlub into the pits to physically trace a number.

A really good lineman with a lot of luck on certain equipment might have been able to find the line in question and track its connection within four minutes, hence the ubiquitous three minute minimum trace times in both film and reality. A lot of kidnappers and other criminals could have been caught were it not for Bell's refusal to acknowledge that they had the means to to immediately identify a call's path.

I forgot the obligatory link before: Bell System Property - Not For Sale". Surf around that site for lots of other information and neat stuff.

I haven't been able to find the Orders and Decrees from the actual case, but I'm pretty sure they're on-line somewhere.

woof.