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Requiem for the Disappearing Pay Phone
StarEmperor writes "This Washington Post article describes the steady disappearance of pay phones as cell phones become more commonplace. Many pay phones, which used to generate hundreds of dollars per month in revenue, are now used so infrequently that they cost money to operate. I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?"
What if I, say, want to buy these payphones they're throwing out? I'd love to have an ACTUAL payphone in my house or something.
Without pay phones pictures the back cover of 2600 will seem sooooo boring.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
That's interesting. I myself haven't used a pay phone in....wel...I can't remember the last time
they cost less. $.50 cents for one phone call is ridiculous
Sell them for people in their homes. The Brady Bunch did this one time to teach the kids a valuable lesson. Even though Mike almost lost a contract because of it, once he explained the situation, he got the contract.
Where will Clark Kent change into his Superman costume?!
... all the spilled oil, gas, antifreeze and other automotive gook from the accidents caused by people using their cell phones while driving...
-RickTheWizKid
..."Just hang up and DRIVE!"
yay im early.
Remember the episode of the brady bunch where they had to buy a pay phone because the kids were always talking and they couldnt share the phone?
Our school just dumped the last of our payphones recently. I didn't know this, but they were actually costing US money!
With everyone using cell phones now, I guess the call for an occasional pizza wasn't paying for the upkeep of those things.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
They are useful for emergencies.
There like a part of history! I want one in my room. I'd pay a little for one... Anyone else?
Maybe they could replace them with Suicide Booths :)
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
As development of cell phones got outsourced to India, wits its cheap and skilled labor force, the prices dropped!
Didn't she take her husband's last name? Shouldn't it be Kathleen Taco?
... payphones are great to have in an emergency - and there are tens of millions of people in the US w/o a cellphone.
The real question is: are they going to keep operating those phones that lose them money? Should payphones be thought of as something essential like public transportation, and possibly subsidized by the govt?
I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?
Ummmm. How about approximately 0? How many pay phones per person? Like 1/100 at best. Now think about all of the diapers and soda bottles and old tires and other crap that people throw out without thinking. There are things worth worrying about and then there is the noise.
As for getting rid of pay phones, I'm fine with it. I mean, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone?
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
When I recently opened the Back to the Future DVD trilogy and watched the second movie, there was one scene where Marty Jr. was using some kind of futuristic-looking pay phone. I laughed to myself and said, "I guess they didn't see the end of that one coming!"
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
A lot of the young kids here on /. will be saying - 'I'm old enough to remember payphones'...
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Pay phones still have some use... doesn't anyone watch The Sopranos?
-Berj
It's called a Cheese Box. L33t Phr34k0rz
How come this always gets brought up on slashdot?
How is junking old phones any different then any other waste? Are there uranium pay phones out there? Admit it the u.s. wastes tons pay phone is a tiny tiny part of a very larger picture
***I GOT NUTHIN***
>I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones
Probably not worse than the millions of home phones that break down or are replaced by newer models. And DEFINITELY not worse than the millions of cell phones - and proprietary batteries - that are starting to be thrown out (what was the statistic I read? Kids in Japan who keep up with "fashion" replace their cell phone every 3 months, and in North America every 18 months? I know, I know, no link, no proof, etc... whatever.)
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
the payphone out in the Middle of Nowhere already disappeared. Here is a link to the going-away of it and why. Basically, the National Park Service and the Mojave National Preserve thought that there would be too much environmental impact if the booth remained too much longer.
--Fuzz
I only agree if the cell user is not using a headset and using a phone with special hands free dialing features. Otherwise, we might as well ban conversation between 2 or more occupants of a car.
They got married in a Las Vegas chapel and she had to make her way there in a taxi cab. What do YOU think. Her mother was probably like: "Look, if the dipshit has any VA Software money leftover, take him for it but christ, don't go all the way into changing your name when you know you're just going to get divorced."
Is there a use for all that wiring that will be left behind by removing lots of payphones? I know eventually it just becomes a phone co. trunk line... Is there any value to these access lines to the trunk? How about pay-per-use DSL?
Am I just dreaming?
I'd bet that all those cell phones people junk every year or two are far, far worse for the environment.
the last time I used a payphone I was playing quarter tones into it trying to trick the operator into giving me a free phone call. Also stuffing the coin returns. What else are you supposed to do in high school?
For the phone phreaker on your list this holiday season.
I guess that might have something to do with the sharp decline in Superhero's.. I meant if we take away their natural habitat.....
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I'm thinking that payphone operators are making it harder to get a call thru, and subsequently lose your 50 cents. I came across a phone that took 1.50 from me on busy signals! No other phone was to be found (this was a half mile from the U of MN)
I was pissed. If I had been driving my big shitty van, I would've GTA'd the fucker in a heartbeat. Enjoy my illgotten buck fifty, phone bastards.
Bell Canada has announced that they are converting some of their thousands of pay phones into 802.11 access points to extend their new WiFi service offering. WiFi-only companies like FatPort would be wise to follow suit. PayPhones are in the best possible locations for WiFi -- think AirPorts, hotel lobbies, train stations...
No more of a threat than everyone having to buy a new cell phone every freakin' year.
-Milinar
Think about it, that's 25 cents a minute, most cellular phone contractual plans are LOWER than this price.
Here's the irony of the story, I didn't have any change either, so I stopped a gentleman to ask him for some change to use the phone, he said he was on his lunch break and had no problem with me using his phone.
I think the saying "everyone has a cell phone" is wrong, but not so untrue, like the computer most people have at least one in their family, if not three or four.
Moral of the story, I got a car charger now and don't try to see if the lithium ion battery can hold a charge for more than 4 days. Totally off topic but motorolla's new phones with a Lithium Ion battery are hella nice and last a rather long time (just not longer than 4 days).
In closing of a long post, it's the price of the payphone that has made them less appealing, and what gets me even more is most of these phone companies who supply payphones ALSO have a division that supply celluar phones. So they really aren't "losing" money as a whole, just certain departments.
I say more emergency solar based Cell Phones Stations on Highways, Interstates, and Rest Stops because technically Cell Phones have to be free when dialing emergency numbers, and being solar you can put them anywhere.
I'm sure "phreakers" and 2600 will be upset though...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Why not just turn them into toilets, and handy pinboards for ladies of the night to ply their wares? Oh wait...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
If everyone's using cell phones and nobody is using pay phones any more, why not just put cell phones at every street corner instead?
:) :)
They should convert them into WiFi hotspots.
How will we make anonymous calls without a payphone?
Rather than throw out all those pay phones, I think it would be much more interesting to see them reused. Perhaps as 802.11 access points or something. Just replace the phone with a digital pay box with an antenna on top. Simply swipe your credit card, hook into the network, and roam around with 20 or 30 minutes of wireless access.
I started reading from the bottom, and when you said junking pay phones I thought you meant people were making spam calls to payphones (hoping people would pick up I guess). Gosh, I hope I didn't give anyone any ideas with that. I need sleep...
And who gives a shit if you haven't ? Go back wanking your weeny little thing, moron.
There are still vast regions of the country that have limited cell phone coverage, especially for newer networks that provide high(er)-speed wireless data services.
I recently switched cell phone providers from Verizon to T-Mobile so I could utilize their GPRS/GSM-based wireless internet service on my laptop (~115Kbps) using my new bluetooth-enabled phone. While CDMA coverage in the U.S. is rather extensive, the GPRS networks that AT&T and T-Mobile have deployed are still very much confined to highly-populated regions of the country.
There I was in Westchester County, NY (about 50 miles N of Manhattan) trying to locate a client's office and imagine my frustration when my brand new GPRS-based phone was out of range. I had to stop at a supermarket and find enough change to call from a payphone - it saved my day.
I don't really use the telephone a whole lot. I've never seen a need for a mobile phone, and part of the argument against one went kind of like this: Well, if I'm stuck somewhere and I really need to get in touch with someone, I can always use a pay phone. And if its not important enough to spend 35 cents I really don't need to make the call anyway. I guess not eh? At some point in the future I might have to spend $(minimum cell phone cost) every month just to get the same service I would have formerly gotten from the once-ubiquitous (and free if I don't actually have to use them) public pay phones.
The same thing happened to rail transit in most American cities about 40-50 years ago as road systems improved and more people bought automobiles.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
This is bad news for all the people who can't justify paying $30+/month for a cell phone. With ubiquitous pay phones in case of emergency, knowing you could find a near by pay phone. From this article, it could soon become very hard to find a pay-phone when one is needed. This will be big problem for the lower middle class, who can't justify paying for a cell phone, but live areas, where cell toting yuppies, have caused most of the pat phones to be removed. The poor may be less effected, as, according to the article, phones in poorer areas are still profitable.
are slashdot running out of questions?
You must be new here.
aren't the best way to win the support of the administration.
It isn't hard to replace the handset with one that has a sereo jack for a pda/ipod red box. I know, I know, I know: it isn't really a red box unless you solder it from scratch, but still a cool idea.
Disclaimer: This is neither a confession nor a suggestion. I am not admitting to any wrongdoing, accompliship in wrongdoing or premeditation of wrongoing.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
What happens when people have an accident and want to call emergency services ? Most people have a cellphone but shouldn't there be some sort of police phone boxes for people who don't have one ? Will emergency services be restricted to white upper class families ?
Well that may be, people voted for a stupid redneck called W.Bush, so that's what they deserve anyway. Isn't it ?
How can the government ensure your security if you use public pay phones?
Use your cell phone, or get one! That way your phone records are just a computer away from the people protecting your safety.
Do not assist the Terrorists!
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
In general, pay phones were mandated by public safety regulations, not profit motive. Problems ranging from smashed handsets to stolen phone books to smashed window glass plagued public phones constantly.
If pay phones were profitable, why did the Baby Bells allow anyone to start running them? It would have been a very strange business decision given their history of profiteering in the post Ma Bell era.
--Gus
I could go on and on... it will be sad to see the payphone go. I swear I could strangle the jackass who actually took a call in the theater during the Two Towers last week.
I can't stand cell phones, I don't need or want one, and I don't plan on getting one now. Maybe I have become truly die hard cynical, but this smacks of another case where I am being herded into buying something I don't need, because the public (read free or optional) alternative was taken away from me. I am so moving to Canada or Australia.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
If you're looking to pay for it... I mean they are getting rid of the current pay phones because they aren't making them money.
Now think up a business plan for the WiFi hotspots to "4. Profit"
Maybe it's time for a new topic for mods to vote on "How appropriate, in the slashdot tradition, do you think this article/news item is?" Meaningless and/or uninteressting stuff are more and more frequent on the slashdot frontpage (or maybe I should change my profile to display less entries?).
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Do the telcos own the land the payphones are on, or do they have some sort of special right/agreement on it? If they owned the land they could make some money from selling the land the payphones are on (possible buyer: advertisers), and use that money to dispose of the payphones in a safe manner. I'm probably completely wrong here, as no-one is likely to want a two-foot square piece of land, even if it is in a prime location.
jasp
this is bushs new policy against terrorism ...
he thinks they will have to steal cellphones to stay anonymous
because of this he hopes nobody will argue if he starts executing any suspects
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
They may be unprofitable if you actually pay $30 a month for it. Verizon doesn't have to do anything, except stop by once in a blue moon to make sure the thing works. Especially if they make no money, why bother collecting nothing ...
You mean I've been putting my money into them for all this time for nothing?!
Seriously though, perhaps if phone companies want to perpetuate the phone booth they should do more stuff like this.
Sure, it can't be that good for profit, but it's bound to increase the popularity. But if you want to increase profit, there was a scheme a few years back where people listened to an advertisement at the start of a call to increase telco revenue. I've never seen (or heard) this done. Why not?
Hmm. I've never seen a payphone equipped automobile. Is that part of GM's On* offering?
Look to Bell Canada, they're installing WiFi hotspots with a DSL backend off of the copper pair.
Great way to evolve the tech.
I'm still a little bitter that I can't pop in a quarter and call when I need to.
Honestly the only time I really ever used payphones was from high school to call mom to pick me up after sporting events.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
1. Terrorists and other street criminals don't use public telephones -- mostly they don't work, it's inconvenient and there's no privacy.
2. Criminals use stolen cell phones to make their calls and throw them away every couple of days.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Time to use all of that wiring. POPs? Internet access? Wireless POP?
Let's not let it go to waste! How about monitoring stations? There must be a good geographic distribution to those payphones.
This is not a consequence of removing payphones. This is a consequence of using mobile phones in cars.
I can't believe some moron actually modded this up to 3...
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
What about people who don't want/can't afford/totally despise cellphones? I'm sure people carrying them on the street don't want to be bothered and certainly won't let people use them to make a call. But if there are no payphones around, will there be an alternative? I understand the monetary problem, but some people rely on pay phones regularly. So what will they be forced to do?
Skal! AMS
When I was a kid (1980's) we carried a quarter in our shoe or in the pocket of our Roo's in case we needed to make an "emergency" call home.
Then they made it $0.35 in the 1990's, and now you had to educate your children to carry a quarter *and* a dime.
Now, it's $0.50, they don't take half dollar pieces, so you have to have your child take two quarters (one in each shoe?) and then hope that wherever they get lost or need to call home, the pay phone hasn't been ripped out of the wall.
As for calling the operator or 911: operators don't often know how to handle a child's pleading phone call, and 911 is for life threatening emergencies. I'd sure educate MY kid to call 911, but do we really want every kid to know it's okay to dial 911 even if it's not a real emergency?
Hooray for progress. What are we to do, buy every three year old a cell phone?
Payphones have all but disappeared around London, since so few calls are made on them and almost everyone has a cell phone. This trend started years ago. When I was last in London cellphones even worked down in the Tube.
One thing disappearing payphones would mean: One more parking place available at finer gas stations and 7-11's everywhere.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I say give them to 2600 magazine as payback time!
Most ANY cellular phone that's properly charged and within range of a compatible tower may be used to call 911...NO service plan of any kind is required...none!
:;
There are even various organizations that collect old cell phones and distribute them for emergency 911 use.
In fact it's against the law for a carrier to knowingly block any 911 cellular call regardless of the tower(s) (assuming it's compatible with the phone being used) it's routed through nor the phone its dialed from.
Bottom line is that absolutely NO service plan of any kind is necessary for 911 access and thus the "we need to save pay phones for 911 use" is a mute argument...now in regards to Clark Kent/Superman...not sure what he'll do now
San Jose Mercury story: hundreds of mailboxes removed from San Francisco bay area, due to low usage, garbage thrown in mailboxes, fear of more anthrax attacks, etc. etc. I can't help worrying about all anonymous means of communication shutting down.
How about the environmental hazards of thousands of discarded cell phones?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
That's really what was missing from that show "Lois and Clark".
Not ONCE In a phone booth!
I mean they went at it on the ceiling, in outer space, on clouds above the city, but not ONCE In a phone booth!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
One word. That is all.
Many municipalities require that telcos provide payphones within the region they serve as an understood cost of having control of the local area. NYC is a good example of this; Verizon is required to provide a certain number of payphones within a certain area, etc.
Additionally, the cost is offset greatly by the advertising revenue generated by payphones. The REAL issue isn't the telcos killing off Payphones, but putting up booths with no phones IN them for months at a time. Verizon got nailed for doing this in an NYT articlea while back.
Either the WP post is totally off base, or other municipalities andthe baby bells that serve them are friggin' morons.
-rt
Like this one.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Does anyone here remenber Antitrack?
And probably even his misery resulting from old-scool (but nonetheless impressive) phone phreaking?
as for me, I bow for you, antitrack.
my
I disagree, as long as you're paying attention to two things at the same time, you're still at a greater risk of an accident. Maybe it's just me, but I can't multi-task when I'm driving. Then again, I'm the only American that drives a stick.
cell phones are being removed due to citizens using payphones!
I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?
How about junking hundreds of thousands or millions of cellphones. Plus the batteries each unit may go through in a lifetime. There's no way those things last as long as a nice clunky pay phone. I know we have a couple of dead ones around here somewhere, and a lot of people upgrade simply for fashion or features.
Yes, people are looking into recycling the phones. It's difficult because the materials are so heterogeneous, and though a few like tantalum are quite valuable, the labor to break up the phones can outweigh that. A nicer idea -- hand-me-downs to less wealthy developing countries, for sale or parts. Cellular phones have a disproportionate value in countries that never got the telephone line infrastructure in the first place.
Can't get out of the Matrix with a cell phone, it has to be a land line or Tank can't get me out of here!
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
What? Are they spammers now?
Phillip
I make an average of 1-3 calls a week on payphones (and have for the past couple of years). My entire life I have never come across a payphone that didn't work.
Pay phones would make more money if they, like, accepted lots of it, in large denominations, when being begged to.
Oh, do I have a rant for y'all.
===
Gather 'round the pixels, folks, and let a still green traveller relate a story from the olden days...
End of September, actually. Toorcon -- I flew out to San Diego to join Hikari's bad ass hackfest. Was so excited that I'd actually gotten my degree three days previous (not -- but that's another story entirely) that I didn't even think to check *where* in San Diego I was going.
Lesson #1: For f*ck's sake, know where you're going after the airport.
Figured I'd just check the net when I got there. *laughs*
Lesson #2: For f*ck's sake, KNOW you'll never get a net connection when you really, really need one. (Reference: "The Inverse Square Law vs. The Presence of Microsoft Powerpoint: May The Enemy Never Discover The Network Cloaking Power of Talking To People When Powerpoint Is On")
So. Rumor has it San Diego's Airport got a new water fountain once...it's talked about in hushed whispers, the emergency budget excess of 1983 brought a quenched thirst upon every traveler since. According to legend, other plumbing amenities relating to the invention of running water shall someday visit themselves upon this fine structure.
No friendly arrows, no Internet Cafe's -- and though the Starbucks served coffee, it came in Disass only. There wasn't even a poorly secured baggage handling network waiting to provide me with my next stop (not that I'd ever poke around an airport network; for God sakes lad, they have guns! And Latex Gloves! I plead Joey's Soverignty!)
So what could I do? Went to call my apartment.
On a Pay Phone.
Lesson #3: For f*ck's sake, buy a cell phone. Seven Eleven has them. They're FREE(after many rebates you'll never recieve). There's a REASON they're so profitable -- because PAY PHONES NOW SUCK.
Proof:
You want proof? My previous ranting is insufficient to show that I indeed know large scale suckitude when I recognize it in my cold, not quite dead flesh?
Got some overpriced food. Requested change in quarters -- I was off to the telephone to get fully ripped off, but there's a LOT of hotels in SD and I didn't much prefer to check each one.
"Bzzzzzz. I'm sorry, this phone doesn't accept coins for long distance calls."
Lesson #4: Remember how you heard that pay phones weren't making money? They mispelled "taking".
After bitching and moaning, I remembered I could charge my card to my credit card. Yes! Maybe my legal tender, unconstitutional to refuse (but we'll ignore that) couldn't get me moving, but surely the mighty power of Visa -- it's everywhere I want to be, and I want to be in a nice bed, and in that bed...er, anyway.
"Thank you for calling 1-800-CALL-ATT. For a credit card call, press this number or we'll sic Carrot Top on you."
"Thank you for selecting a credit card call. If you have a Mastercard, press 1. If you have an American Express, press 2. If you have a Discover Card, press 3. If you have a Visa, get a very strange look on your face."
"Thank you for getting a very strange look on your face. An operator will be with you shortly to further refuse payment for services."
You have to understand. I just graduated, I've got a LONG trip ahead of me -- this is right before the Singapore trip -- of all the problems I imagined possible, not having enough to pay for a single phone call was rather disconcerting.
I briefly considered my options for having myself placed under arrest. I hear those guys get a phone call. But then I realized their call is on a pay phone too. Oops.
Ended up calling my mother's company on their 800 number, tail between my legs, begging for info off a single web page. You'd THINK it ends here...
'cept the person I reach, despite the net connection on her desk, doesn't particularly know what to do with it. So she calls her husband. To access the net. For me.
Ever browsed the web through a listener that doesn't know what she's hearing but has to translate it into something she's saying? You Will, and the company that will bring it to you...
Anyway, no reason to rant further -- it was one heck of a trip, an absolute blast -- but indeed, no matter what country I ended up in, the pay phones were as spastic as an epiliptic monkey with a broken pacemaker.
I did like the 90 second pay phones, that took 75 seconds to establish a call. talkfastdoesn'tevenbegintocoverit
Needless to say, I am now vastly more knowledgable about that which is GSM.
--Dan
Recently, the authorities forced Bell Canada to keep one lone payphone located in an isolated village, so to insure that someone stranded there could call for help. Doubtlessly, one will see this scenario repeat itself more and more.
Whoooooo! Now THAT was a great laugh.
You, sir are a magnificent bastard! If you're not making money as a writer, try to. Your bitter tirade had me howling, and at the same time managed to perfectly express what you were feeling as you actually lived through this.
Beautiful, just beautiful!
...of mine owns his own "Communications" company. He installs, maintains, and manages payphones. He used to make a fortune on his phones and was so busy, I'd help him throw payphones up on the weekends in some of the highest class and some of the most ghetto neighborhoods all over the county (needless to say, he paid me well). He had a great life when he wasn't working and he probably would have been a millionaire within probably about 10 years.
I say probably because he was making so much money 5 years ago he was on track to NET his first million within the next 5 years. He made huge money on long distance customers and calling cards, but being it's in San Diego, he made bank on international calls to Mexico. Unfortunately, cellular phones have reduced him to making his first million... never. He still makes good money but he has had to remove probably 100 of his 500+ payphones he had up and more will come down. It's sort of like monopoly. He bought and/or leased as many viable locations as he could, put up his phones, upgraded them, now he has to sell them off. He has no trouble selling his removed payphones to various people and businesses in the U.S. and abroad, so far, but cellular phones are now the bane of his existence.
If it keeps up and keeps spreading, as we all know it will, he won't be self-employed much longer... at least not in the payphone business.
"It is essential that justice be done
I could go on and on too. I swear I could strangle the jackasses who confuse the tools people use with the stupid things they do with the tools. I could also strangle the jackasses who have cellphone envy and try to mask it as some kind of superiority.
I work hard to make sure I have the resources to live the kind of life I want to live. I want the ability to stay in touch with people I go shopping with so we don't have to agree to meet at the food court. If my girlfriend is in a car accident again, I want her to be able to reach me as soon as possible. If there's an earthquake and I'm trapped in a building, I want to be able to call for help and tell them I'm alive but bleeding and running out of air. If I'm on an airplane and hostages take over with box cutters, I want to say goodbye to my girlfriend before the plane runs into a building.
I'm tired of anti-cellphone BS. There are no legitimate complaints against the phones themselves, and the complaints about the users have nothing to do with the phones.
Grow up, people.
Payphones use YOU!
P
for some strange reason people have a hard time concentrating on driving when using any kind of phone while driving, handset or hands free. They make more poor decisions and take more risks while engaged in a phone conversation. Same effect doesn't happen when conv. partner is in the car.
I remember some of the monkey-wrenching articles you could find back in the BBS days.
There was one in particular I remember called "Phone Phun", written by an individual named "Mr. Death" who lived in NYC. The article gave ruthless and detailed instructions on all kinds of things to do with pay phones... ripping them off, blowing them up, etc.
It was an amusing read, despite the incredibly antisocial behavior it espoused. Still... I sometimes wonder what cellblock "Mr Death" might be inhabiting today.
Heh... It's a wonder any of us survive to adulthood.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I hate to say it, but I'm on the board of directors for a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization... we have a clubhouse downtown that members have the use of (and we have functions there on a regular basis). To keep us from having to pay a significant phone bill (we barely scrape every year), we put a pay phone in...
We have to *pay* the phone company $25/month to have a payphone... and *they* keep all the money the phone makes. Still cheaper than forking over money for long-distance phone calls to Florida (from CT), but it seems insane.
How about pay-per-use DSL?
"Please deposit 75 cents for another 5 megabytes."
The environmental aspect of payphones is a stupid thing to consider. They are out there now in the 'environment' and we aren't all dying.
I have a cell phone that serves me rather well, but it doesn't do much good if i forget it at home. I needed to get in touch with somebody while I was wandering around downtown Chicago and was looking for a payphone. After trying several L stations and finding the payphones there either behind the revolving gates (and not wanting to pay $1.50 just to use the phone) or not working, I ended up wandering to the one place that I knew had phones.
Would have been nice to find one on a street corner or something
Just because a cat has four legs doesn't mean that all four-legged animals are cats.
The environmental hazard assoicated with payphone removal is that which results from the disposal of the payphones. The prolific use of cell phones are what's causing the revenue drought for the payphone companies. Decreased revenue equalls decreased reason to keep the phones in service. Thus some of the payphones are taken out of service.
To reiterate: People will not be obliged to use cell phones instead of the now non-existent payphones. They already are using the cell phones. That's why the companies are digging up the payphones.
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
> the accidents caused by people using their cell phones while driving...
You anti-cell phone activists make me laugh. There are two types of people in the world: those who enjoy the convenience of a cell phone, and those who bitch about how dangerous they are in traffic.
It's the same with anything: those who like hunting, and those who preech about gun control. Those who like cigarettes and those who can't fathom why someone would want to pay to kill themselves (it's an entertainment expense, just like anything else).
It seems the only thing that makes a person for or against something is whether they use it or not. How about just being neutral and allowing those who enjoy it use their phone.
Ok, now bring on the sob stories about how your relative was killed by a drunk, rabid cell-phone user but the evil cell-phone user lived and your relative (who, incidentally, was 3 months away from graduation and pregnant with her 6th child) did not.
ahhh, yeah. I'd like to make a collect call?
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
Does that mean you wouldnt have use for these fine products? ;-)
;-) Hehehe..
Based on your statement, is it fair to assume you have a sign like on a Greyhound bus that says not to talk to the driver while the vehicle is in motion?
Seriously though, of course, paying attention to anything in addition to your driving when you are moving is hazardous. But you know that occasionally, you *will* have something else you are giving some attention to- talking to passenger, turning off Rush Limbaugh, scratching itchy balls, swatting an errant bee, whatever. You can't always have 100% attention to your driving no matter how much you try. I think laws trying to totally ban cell phone use in a car are way overboard. Ban CB and 2-way radios in cars then. "Must cleanse ourselves- save us from ourselves!"
let moo-ahh teacheth you a lessont.
take a korter and swallow it. do lay same evuh-wee hour. when you need to shit, you will have enough moo-lah to make a fone call. after veceiving ecoli foisoning, stop usink lay fone. Yah?
People who smoke damn well better not do so in my presence, because I value my health. And people who feel compelled to chat with their significant other on their cellphones at any given time can stay the fuck off the road when I'm trying to get from point A to point B.
--sdem
a drunk driver...runs off the street and smashes the payphone.
a wet road under speeding traffic...a car runs off the road and smashes the payphone (or respective callbox).
a robbery...the crooks hide inside the payphone and direct to the police what the get-away car and robbers looked like and lead the police away from them for a clean get-away.
a building on fire...the fire-department must shutdown electricity and gas in the surrounding area and that includes payphones because the common modern payphone requires power for all of its "features" and will not operate with mere line voltage.
a tornado...payphones are first to be ripped out of the ground and crushed under chickens, eggs, and toaster ovens.
a flood...phone circuits are shorted and no longer work.
a lightning storm...phone circuit operators must hide in a special room or else the lightning will run through their patch pannel and zap anyone who has fillings in their teeth (everyone).
a hurricane...there is no payphone.
the matrix...only good for a secure phone call less than 10 seconds, else some guy in a tuxedo drives a cement truck into the same booth you are occupying.
Can you hear me now? Ahhhhhh!
CONCLUSION: PAYPHONES ARE DANGEROUS AND CONTRIBUTE TO DANGER AROUND THEM. THEY SHOULD BE REMOVED!
(this post sponsored by dialpad.co !@#$ Ahhhhhhh!)
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Perhaps base phone service is so cheap this days it has to be subsidized by or sold together with something else. Good quality video payphones that can call each other or a DSL-connected PC: priceless.
Actually, there's a third type: the people like you who will loudly defend their right to use a cell phone wherever and whenever - in a theater, in their car, etc.
Some people can multitask safely with a phone and a car. Many others can't. I, for one, get quite annoyed when someone sits in a green light, not moving, 'cause they're yakking on their phone.
There were three tornados in some town in Idaho instead of two, are we destroying the environment? A piece of ice fell off the south pole, is it global warming? Oh my God, people are buying new computers, are we contaminating China with our old ones?
Fake concern for enviroment = lack of any other real argument. Throwing in an environmental angle is just Slashdot's way of being in the "in crowd." It's silly.
check out virgin mobile US for pay as you go....
Let us face the facts...the Line-driven phone system is surprisingly obsolete.
.com people back into a profitable battle. A phone booth today gives me no reason to visit it...unless I can download the latest linux kernel in less than 100 seconds for $1.00. With such a more efficient data network, membership would be based on unlimited use, bandwidth/quality that you desire, congestion status of the network, and/or a random non-member use that is payable at the node (aka receptacle/phone).
In Poland, and many other countries I don't remember, the Phone system consists of a cellular network! Many people disagree with cellular systems, out of fear of medical influences; that is reasonable. Yet ther is no other ethical wireless alternative to microwave other than what? Pick somthing that doesn't need to be ran through a medium; fiber optice need not apply, infrared could imply somthing good, wire is back to stage1. The total cost of ownership of modern phone booths on an out-dated phone system is the problem. They take too much space, too much maintenance, and are generally not reliable in all situations of elemental emergency (vehicles that smash into them, storms, vandelism,etc). What they need is a more ethical data-networked system. Future phone booths may as well be a service provided by a local internet cafe, that is the technology I think will reserect the layed-off
Total cost of ownership of computer hardware is much lower than qualified line installers running around an area creating ground loops and phucking with a phreaking system of accousticly line-driven phones. Can you imagine, maybe membership of your internet service provider could provide access to such a future communication booth. That is worth the clustered effort for such as wireless system!
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Payfones arent quite dead yet, i have a cell fone, but i still carry around a keychain recorder with red-box tones on it. A free fone call is cheaper than my pre-payed cellular. ^_^
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I realize that it's all the rage to worry about the environment everytime someone sneezes. But......
Why would these things be a threat. I thought the would contain all sorts of valuable metal that would be recycled. I guess my thought was that would make sense for financial reasons (recover some $$$) if not for feel good enviro whacko reasons.
Am I missing something here?
.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Small annoyances like cell phones or crying children do not bother me. It's much worse to have a bozo making a big deal of those things. Like a neighbor who threatens to talk to my manager because I use a dance pad at 8pm.
It's no fun to live if you have to be polite and considerate all the time, in every aspect. I do set my phone to vibrate, but sometimes have to explain some scene in the movie to my english-challenged girlfriend. Sometimes needs of a few or one outweigh the needs of the many.
After Ameritech opened up the market to other providers of pay phones in Chicago, there was an epidemic of pay phones installed in the city. Most of them from out of state companies, and there was a lot of confusion on how to obtain refunds when problems occured. There was also a question of whether or not the phones were being targeted to low-rent districts, and being used for drug operations. In response to this, Chicago created a crew that drove around and ripped out these fly-by-night payphones. Perhaps the market is adjusting to the influx, although this would seem to have happened in prior years.
Another thought is that after Ameritech released it's stranglehold on the payphone business, the quality of the phones themselves seems to have suffered greatly. I remember a store I worked for back in the 80's had two Ameritech payphones out front. The manager decided to pull them, and replace them with phones from another vendor, to make more money. The phones would need service on a monthly basis for repairs due to vandalism, where the Ameritech phones worked for years without a problem. Needless to say the new phones that were supposed to make money didn't, in fact they cost money. The payphones were removed permanently a year later.
Watching the community around me, I can't help but wonder if people decided to quit using payphones simply because of their unreliability. It seems that payphones have become a target for aggression for every person looking to settle a domestic dispute in public. Anytime I see someone using a payphone around my house, half the time the person is on the phone screaming at someone, and ends the call by trying to break off the claw that hold the receiver by slamming the phone down. Perhaps if the phones had been made better over the years, people would actually use one when necessary. I don't like Ameritech, but their payphones were bombproof in comparison to the stuff you find hanging on the walls nowadays.
i disagree. When you have the occupants sitting inside the car its easier for both of you to adjust your conversation level depending on how tight the traffic is or how much of attention level is required. It would be difficult to expect the person on the other end of the phone to have similar understanding.
Besides that the difference between using a headset and talking to someone beside you is same as that between listening to your favourite song using a headphone and listening to it on a stereo. Which of the two do you think has a easier chance of having you preoccupied ?
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
"I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?"
That's a truly stupid question, because all those payphones would hardly be a drop in the bucket compared to everything else in terms of the environment.
Repeal the DMCA!
Good luck implementing all that.
Is the hired a thinly veiled euphemism for prostitutes?
That's a choice demographic for payphone operators, I guess.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
If pay phones don't make money for anyone, why do AT&T and MCI both spend millions and millions of dollars on those horrible TV commercials for 1-800-CALLATT and 1-800-COLLECT? Every one of those commercials features a pay phone.
Like others here, I assumed that the cell phone industry was killing the pay phone, but AT&T and MCI are fighting hard to get the long distance business for these dinosaurs. They seem to spend far more on advertising those services than advertising their regular long distance services.
Obviously, these companies have identified significant amounts of profit to be made here and they are willing to spend mammath amounts of money to get a piece of it.
I have a feeling that it is the local phone companies that are taking a bath here. It looks like the long distance companies still see serious money from pay phones.
Actually it's very different. People inside the car can shut up if they see you're getting into a difficult situation on the road, but people on the phone can't and will keep on talking like nothing's happening. This is a big added distraction... Maybe video phones would work, but not dash-mounted TV screens... Like a fisheye view of traffic around the car... And you and me both know that's never going to catch on :-)
I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?
Umm, discontinuing to build pay phones decreases the total number of pay phones junked over a sufficiently long period of time, because all pay phones will eventually die.
The shareholder is always right.
There is another big difference between talking to a passenger and talking to someone on the phone. If I'm talking to a passenger, there is some chance that they will cause me to look at them, to make eye contact. My wife often complains that I don't look at her when I talk to her enough, but even once while driving is too many times.
I also have often wondered about how the laws about cellphones are written such that they cover cell phones but not cb's. And for some reason it really bothers me that there is almost certainly an explicit or implicit exclusion for police.
But, in a vain effort to swerve this post from its current tangent back towards on-topicness, the one thing that seems to bother me the most about the disappearance of payphones is that they're often very usefull in emergencies. Not everyone has a cellphone, and there are often circumstances which render them useless (bad signal reception, low battery, etc...) It's nice to have a hardline here and there where 911 can be dialed with ease, if you happen to see an accident or a fire, or a lynch mob, or perhaps if you're experiencing a heart attack or just went into labor. Granted, these are not common occurences, and the telco's certainly shouldn't be forced to maintain costly infrastructure at a loss, but at the same time that payphones are being pulled down, local and state governments are erecting emergency call boxes. Would it be all that hard to have the government agencies that are erecting the call boxes just use that money to pay the telco's to maintain their payphones? It seems like there should be a middle ground here....
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Oh c'mon, is the Slashdot crowd so young that it doesn't know the Jolly Roger or Anarchist cookbooks? The more "well read" of us all know what thermite is said to be capable of, regarding payphones... plenty of good use, there!;)
Even the birds...
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
A guy showed up at my work the day after christmas and ripped the pay phone out of the lunch room. Said we weren't generating enough revenue for it anymore. So I gotta wonder: how is it that revenue was a problem? The company paid for the line and it's inside the building so only our relatively responsible employees used it (IE it didn't get broken.) So I figure whatever little usage was on it was profit for the carrier. Granted everyone uses their cell phones pretty much now but a few people would still use the pay phone. It may not have been much but it was in theory pure profit. I am starting to suspect that the carriers are viewing the whole thing as a lost cause and are systematically taking them all out reguardless of if they are still generating a little revenue or not...
Payphones are crucial infrastructure in low-income neighborhoods, where often people can't afford landlines in their homes, let alone mobile phones.
There's one down the street from me in front of a little autoshop; it gets pretty much constant use throughout the day. Yes, I know the stereotype that you are all going to bring to this, and no, it's not about drug dealing or whatever. These are normal neighborhood folks who have no other option at the moment.
If you work on some sort of project requiring a power source, you could use your old phone and battery as a power source. The phone becomes a very fancy charger. The cell battery itself is pretty nifty, and it's basically free since you were going to throw it out anyway.
Ok, you guys have some good points. I will send the subject back to brain for further tests. :-)
Here's my theory;
When talking to a passenger, the passenger is actually there with you. They know when you're not paying attention because you need to focus elsewhere. When you're on a cellphone the other person will keep talking at times when a passenger would know to stop. They'll ask "are you still there?" when you're trying to concentrate on something else and don't reply to them.
Handsfree phones don't solve this problem. After a while you learn to just ignore the phone when you need to focus elsewhere; some people never learn; some people have a few accidents in the process.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
That's what the guy at sprint so rudely interrupted me with and crammed down my neck. I kept saying "HA...I know...HA...yes let me say...HAM FUCKING RADIO"
Most cell phones are not usable in airplanes that are 20,000+ feet in the air, due to the lack of available high-speed switching cell towers. From what I heard, the people in the hijacked jets of 9-11 were allowed to make phone calls from the jet-phones. One guy was able to sneak into the toilette and make a cell phone call; maybe because the plane's altitude was optimal for skipping through the cells or simply excellent cell service coverage...we can only speculate, especially when the lower the plane goes the geographical features can skew the signal. As for earthquakes, a bad earthquake puts everything out of service...communication towers are damaged, the loop is disconnected, and the power that allowed operation to all the utilities usually has its ground lines severed in a major earthquake; I'm talking about the elusive Californian 8.0+, not a common Alaskan 12.0+, but a simple 4.0 to 5.0 magnitude earthquake in a given area. Most Communication lines that go near a fault in the ground are kept well above ground, yet how did I get to this subject? Oh yeah, anything can happen and a swiss-army-knife of Cell Phone technology is just as prone to defect durring an emergency as toilette paper in a bathroom at a mexican restaurant durring the refried bean festival.
The only tool that is self-sufficient in operation is a *drum roll please* HAM Radio. CB Radio is no good because the signal is too low of frequency to spread through dense walls and buildings at ground level of a city, then again same happens a bit with the average amateur's No-Code qualified priviliges. Also, CB Radio is near-never monitored in a city by emergency/enforcment personel due to the dis-organized and vulgar state of its users; count me in! There is no public service communication technology that is self-sufficient other than personal tranceivers such as Ham. The Communication Skills the average Amateur Radio operator provides durring the event of an emergency is priceless and is why it is always successful; they are educated. I am not licensed by the FCC, so don't make any assumptions about my knowledge
I'd agree with this EXCEPT that a person talking to the driver knows when the driver has to concentrate on something coming up and instinctively SHUTS UP.
:)
Concentrating on Talking while driving actually distracts people from driving well. Bad drivers can often be seen doing all the talking while driving. Basic natural instinct, you cannot devote concentration power to upcoming events (getting cut off and allowing the extra space) and hold a full blown 2 way all out conversation.
Drivers do their best thinking/working shit out because the mind is alive with activity while driving, just don't ask them to concentrate on a conversation with someone else.
Think about it the next time you're driving
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering.
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Places:
1. Large parts of the world where there is no cell-phone coverage, and where people live and travel
2. Places where a particular cell-phone may not work, even though there is coverage. Like when you take a CDMA phone to a GSM only area or vice-versa. Or when you don't have roaming. (eg. Airports)
3. Places where people make long calls, don't have land-lines of their own, and pay-phones are significantly cheaper than cell-phones. ( eg. University towns in the developing world)
4. Places where most people don't have cell-phones.
5. Places where most people don't have phones.
This sounds like a large part of the earth to me. Guess pay-phones will be around for a long time, even if they are not on every street-corner in the developed world.
more about me
what about us folk who cant afford a cell phone?
When they were both shooting people, I was trying to make a phone call...deciding whether I should dare to attempt to use the feces-covered phone. I was afraid of disease afterwards. Why would you do such a thing? Immoral and illogical. You are evil!
:)
I'm just the guy that installs the needle in the coin return slot just for that cheap bastard to stick his anti-AT&T probe into the slot and receive HIV courteous of me. I'm logical...survival of the fittest...yet I'm immoral. That makes me what, the Anti-Christ? Ecoli would make a nice subject.
Oooh - autonomous ground vehicles! Who needs Superman?
DARPA intends to conduct a race of autonomous ground vehicles from the vicinity of Los Angeles to Las Vegas in 2004. A cash prize will be awarded to the winner. The purpose of the race is to encourage the accelerated development of autonomous vehicle technologies that could be applied to military requirements. Many of the details of the race are being developed. New details will be posted to this web site as soon as possible.
The main reason why CB's and Ham radio users are exempt from this is mainly because they lobby a lot so their interests are reflected in the legislation. Really. I am a member of the ARRL (National Ham Radio Organization) and they have people in Washington who prevent legislation like the cell phone bans applying to them. Another reason is that most Ham users are involved in one sort of community service utilizing their radio and their vehicle, so it would be pretty detrimental to prevent that. Also, if you ban two way radios, what will the cops do?
"Must cleanse ourselves- save us from ourselves!"
I think the idea is more like "save us from the distracted driver in the vehicle barreling towards us at 80 MPH."
Here in Texas junkyard fortress phones sell for about $50, which is mostly for the aluminium. At one scrapyard I frequent, the pile is truly enormous.
I bodged up a phreaky mailbox to dissuade my neighbours from stealing my mail every other day. It's actually not that hard to do, just add a door, a lock, and a mailslot. You can't beat it for style... a mailbox Captain Crunch would be proud to call his own.
In my case I chose an old psuedo-victorian pedestal phone booth and set the thing in 400 lbs of black dyed concrete, even covering the bolts. It looks very cool, and nobody steals my mail anymore.
None. Just auction them online, and whatever is left send to Third World countries. When even them have no use for them, junkyard and recycling. After all, what's bad about iron?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Who the hell says we love the XBOX????
;-)
It's a piece of crap.. buy a Playstation 2 if you're going to blow that kinda money on games
Look it up.
And no, I'm not the original poster.
Both distracted driving and driving 80 are both already illegal in most states, so there's clearly no need for an anti-phone law.
Talking on a phone has been proven to be no more distracting than talking to a passenger. When doing either, you should be careful to keep your eyes on the road, avoid getting too worked up, and always disengage the conversation in dicey situations.
As for the loss of pay phones making things tough for emergencies, I would be all for the idea of putting up emergency call boxes, like they used to have in England... as long as it was done by local municipalities, so people could vote in local referrenda whether they wanted them. Some neighborhoods should probably have one on nearly every corner, IMHO.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
IMO, the cause is obvious: most pay phones these days do not permit incoming calls.
...about as well as the airport security being raised made it so the armed officers didn't need to come onto American Airlines flight 1731 out of Dallas/Forth Worth last Saturday, and yank people off the plane after it returned to the gate. Yeah, those rights we've given up have really bought us something, haven't they?
This is to stop drug trafficing. Looks like it's really working...
It seems to me that the only thing it has done is make pay phones less useful to legitimate callers (for example, I needed to call someone from a pay phone recently, and talk to them for an extended period, but the inability to give them the payphone number so I could call them, give the number, and be called back, made it impossible).
-- Terry
Like hell they do. Every woman who I have ever let ride shotgun with me just goes right on no matter how important watching the road gets. I even had one girl decide it would be really sexy to whip out my crank while I was negotiating a winding narrow highway. Now, most guys fantasize about getting a blowjob or handjob from his date while driving on the open road, but only a sick freak who gets off on near-death experiences would have let a situation like mine continue.
(BTW: Ettiquite demands only one solution to my dilemma. I pulled over and let her know that we could continue driving after we got our rocks off. Safty first. You would think that this cautious attitude would turn her off, but it actually give you a chance to be the firm, resolute Alpha Male, which most chicks seem to dig, as long as you are not a perpetual asshole.)
"Not only were people able to buy cell phones that were now competitive with pay phones, but lower income people only had come up with around $50 or so to get a phone. "
If so? Then why haven't disposable cellphones taken off?
Personally, I'd be happy if they just put a phone jack there, and required you to use a calling card on whatever you plugged in.
Camping in Yellowstone, I bought an acoustic coupler thinking I could use it to get email for the 2 weeks I was gone. While the coupler worked fine (about 14.4) on any modern phone, the microphone on the payphones is only clear enough for about 2400bps. This means that in order to dial my ISP, I had to dial my house first, and then out from my house, as my ISP rejects connections that slow. If I'd had a direct jack to plug into, I probably would have been able to get reasonable speeds.
"I own a cell phone and know damn well that I'd better use it while I'm not driving"
Wow - okay okay, you can use your phone while not driving. Will you use it while you are driving tho?
I've noticed this trend too, and I'm beginning to suspect that it's the latest Editor Troll of choice.
Complaining about Apple computers having only one mouse button is the old busted. The new hotness is expressing vague concerns about environmental impact.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"A lot of the young kids here on /. will be saying - 'I'm old enough to remember payphones'..."
Pffftt! I'm old enough to remember the two tin cans and a string.
My point was that the primary motivation behind laws regulating motor vehicle use is not so much saving us from ourselves as it is saving innocent bystanders from us.
Nowhere did I attempt to say that the anti-cell-phone laws are a good way to fulfill that motivation or that I think cell phone use is dangerous. If I have meant to say either of those things, I would have.
....they made blue boxing work again! Infact, I guarantee payphone use will dramatically rise! ;-)
-psy
They are called Call Boxes. They are lined up down the freeway in bright yellow boxes with a sign. They are for emergency use only. Maybe that's all we need anymore.
Many pay phones, which used to generate hundreds of dollars per month in revenue, are now used so infrequently that they cost money to operate
As opposed to the phones in the past that were free to operate?
-v
Mobile phone roaming is 2 to 5 dollars a minute, and i know more and more people that prefer to use phone cards for 3c per min on public phone cards, well at least in australia and europe there are PP everywhere.
Okay, increasing to 35, then 50 cents. That sucked, a lot. But every pay-as-you-go wireless plan I've seen was an insult. They're even more convoluted and expensive. I imagine they're designed more for people with poor credit than infrequent users.
But this month (Dec) Virgin Mobile was selling their pay-as-you-go phone for only $60 (afaik it's going back up to $100 in Jan.).
The plan is really simple and pretty affoardable. $.25 the first 10 minutes of the day (cheaper than a payphone right there), $.10 after the first 10 minutes. $.10 to send a text message, free to receive. You have to add money to the phone 90 days from the last time you added money (which kinda sucks, but all the other companies have even stricter limits).
It's just too bad that they almost exclusively market it to teens. The Internet browser goes to VH1 and MTV branded features (I dig the Spongebob Squarepants wake-up call though). Even the TOS has cheesy language. Under the area where it says you can't make unsolicited phone calls it quips, "Spam is bad!"
Speaking of spam, sorry that this is sounding like one, but AT&T, Verizon, et. all are committing highway robbery compared to VM's pre-pay. Hopefully they'll get more competitive.
Because they're the most idiotic idea ever dreampt up. Why buy a NEW phone each time you need more credit when you can keep a higher quality phone, and merely buy credit at the store?? Can you think of the waste caused by 'disposable cellphones'?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
What do you do with the huge adress book in your cell phone? I fill it with pay phone numbers. See, sometimes I want to dial a person. Other times I want to dial a place, and the person is not important.
...And some more... ..and some from the airport in my hometown, Vigra
I have collected about a hundred or so I suppose. Shared them with my friends of course. We sometimes dial them to ask some stranger what the weather is like there, whether the bakery has some nice offers etc. Sometimes we play music at them.
Responses have been entirely positive (it's not harassement, after all, if you actually take a pay phone that's ringing, you're expecting to be suprised).
Wardriving sounds fun, and a lot more useful than this, but hey, not everyone can afford a wireless card...
Want to try? I'll share some of my numbers with you. They're in norway. so it's expensive for most of you, but... just remeber to put 047 in front of them to get out of your own country.
Some boxes near Bislett stadium in Oslo:
22565586
22607202
Box near (a duious) pub in my hometown. Call it at midnight on a friday for an interesting chat.
70132334
A mall in Oslo, Byporten:
22171821
Airports are full of bored travelers. Here are some numbers for Gardermoen, Oslo:
63975924
63983701
63982832
63983706
63983703
63982831
70183623
70183622
Karl Johan is the main street in Oslo, always a busy place:
22834080
22834978
22835775
22835777
A subway station in Oslo, Grønland:
22174166
22175106
22175563
22175567
The school where I'm trying to become a software engineer (phone boxes outside the toilets):
70126928
70128975
OK, that's it for now. I can't guarantee no typos, or that some boxes may have been taken down. If someone could post numbers for boxes in their surroundings, I'd be grateful (preferrably in a more relevant/permanent forum than this slashdot thread)
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
US payphones, European payphones and UK payphones.
Good riddance.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
"I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?"
I don't know about other things in pay phones, but I've heard that quite a few kinds of birds can easily choke while eating quarters.
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
How about offering unlimited free calls? The catch would be that you play advertisements in the background as the two parties talk. As long as they are on the phone they are exposed to advertisements playing in the background.
:) - Hell, it seems to be working for netzero - why not?
This is the same idea behind those annoying banner ads that we have all learned to block out
X
And where am I supposed to sleep when I get drunk and can't find my way home?
I had mine turned off after wanting to be LESS accessable.. No PDA, no PAGER, nothin..
So if i need a WORKING booth, they are hard to find..
A lot that are still out there are in dis-repair.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
First, I believe that humans (in general) are capable of multitasking, and can do a couple of things at the same time. Personally I can eat a Big Mac, Drink a Coke, Smoke, and drive a stick all at the same time. Haven't killed anyone yet, or even come close..
Driving a car is not terribly difficult. Shit, I bet they could teach monkeys to do it. I was a master at Pole Position when I was six.
Third, shit happens!!! Sometimes accidents just happen and someone happens to be on a cell phone, Can you say 'coincidence'. Or maybe you prefer to believe that the sun sets every evening because the street lights come on...
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." - Dostoevsky
You get a nice correlation between money and intelligence. Whether this is due to growing p in a crap neighbourhood with crap schools, or social darwinism (the dumb end up with crap jobs, earning nothing) is a point I leave for discussion elsewhere.
How pathetic is it that the first thought the original poster had was what kind of environmental impact this would have. He assumes they were not recycled (I scanned the article, didn't see that). This is non-impacting for me. I suffer from OCD, so frankly using pay phones were always a source of anxiety. >
And ban stereos in cars also. Don't know how people can pay attention to the road when listening to the radio. And CD players. Don't get me started.... And Big thumping bass. Them damn young kids.
Oh yea while you are at it, little kids in cars should be banned. The little brats asking questions while I am trying to drive.
How about we just start holding people responsible?
"If Diet Coke did not exist it would have been neccessary to invent it." -- Karl Lehenbauer
I would imagine not nearly the environmental hazard posed by all the cell-phone people who upgrade their phones each time a new plan comes out with a free phone. Pay phones do not, that I know of, have batteries in them, and are fairly recyclable. (Aluminum, or in older cases, cast iron cases, which translate nicely to melting down). The plastics are recyclable as well.
The fact that large companies (like phone companies or even large corporations) are now being watched closely when disposing of potentially dangerous materials (including computers) means they will probably be stripped, recycled, or waste-reclaimed in China somewhere.
Not many of these phones would hit landfills as "phones" at any rate, unlike the thousands of Cell Phones that people tend to toss out like household garbage, complete with batteries, etc.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
The design specs for payphones are histerically funny to read. If I remember correctly, the coin boxes need to be able to withstand repeated blows from a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. Many that are used in "high risk" areas also have the ET function. They "phone home" when jostled too much or when they have been damaged (failing certain diagnostics) and alert the company that they are in need of service.
My aunt was a switch technician for a while back in the early nineties and the red light district of her town generated a ton of calls for service from "customers." It seems when a payphone was having problems, it affected business and people needed it fixed pronto. They were also some of the most abused phones around. The stuff they would hear during a line test would melt your ears, supposedly.
Then we won't have to sit through any more terrible commercials like 10-10-220 and the most heinous of all: Carrot-Top's 1-800-CALL-ATT ads. The Al Bundy ones sucked really badly too.
:-)
Not that it matters anymore since I just skip through all my commercials anyway with ReplayTV.
[figz@figz figz]$ kill -9 `ps -ef | awk '$1=="figz" { print $2 }'`
We used to have lots of pay phones everywhere, in cabins. Very convenient when it's raining or snowing and you'd like to ask someone to pick you up from the train station ;-) For some time now (I guess two years) they have completely disappeared and were sometimes (if you're lucky) replaced with what I call "phones-on-a-stick"... and try to find one that accepts coins instead of pre-paid phone cards. Very annoying if you refuse to buy a handy ;-)
I just remembered that 10-10-220 is probably just for home lines. But they really suck too. So there.
[figz@figz figz]$ kill -9 `ps -ef | awk '$1=="figz" { print $2 }'`
This is the logical endpoint.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Seriously, am I missing something here? A bunch of phonelines sitting in high traffic areas...How much could a powersupply, a DSL modem, and a cheap web appliance cost?
well, I know I'd pay 50 cents...hell sometimes a lot more than that, for a few minutes of web access. I've found myself in situations where I *need* access to the web and my cell phone doesn't have that kind of access. What other goodies could they put in these booths to make them more useful and get their revenue back?
Actually, they are the problem, according to carefully designed scientific* studies:
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/08/16/cell.phone.drivin g/index.html
I see your point, that rude, stupid people wil continue to do rude, stupid things with or without cell phones, but to say that cell phones are not a problem is simply wrong.
* - Oh, I'm sorry, are you one of those conservatives who circumvents science when it doesn't support your personal opinions and the political process has failed you?
To quote Jenny Holzer, "the future is stupid".
One simple rule for its versus it's
Why does this class envy exist when cell phones are cheap enough for even homeless people to afford?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Resell the phones, and use the existing housings to create (install) WAPs.. there have to be enough 7-11's and gas stations that all have phones to make most Metropolitan areas almost entirely wireless
People are responsible, but holding music in esteem with an actual conversation is a bit off the mark. Music tends to be passive listening; we do it but it doesn't require concentration. Talking to someone on the otherhand requires some sort of thought. And it might be that one instant that you're paying more attention to the conversation than the road when you get into an accident.
How am I gonna call in my bomb threats and how am I gonna make anonymous tips to the police about crimes I committed? How am I gonna be a criminal mastermind when I grow up without a staple like the friendly payphone!
Eat at Joe's.
[I cannot say about any research, but can only report what is in my own mind.]
Along a similar vein, I find speaking on a cell phone to be a very bad influence in my driving. (To the point that my wife thought I am pissed at her the first few times she spoke to me while I was driving, "yes, no, get to the point.") I do not like doing it at all.
Speaking on a phone to a distant person requires holding two contexts in one's head; one for the conversation on the phone and one for the driving environment. Speaking to someone sitting in the car requires a single context to be held in the mind, and appears to be easier to do (and therefore safer) because the person sitting in the care is part of one big context, not two separate ones.
It is the dual context that causes the problem, where the driver has to build the "meatspace" to manipulate ideas in two places at once. I even find that if someone is sitting in the back seat (requiring a bigger context) that my driving gets worse, even if there is no-one in the front seat at the time.
I found that a very similar thing happens when I do online presentations, with audio on phone, on-screen presentation (local and remote), as well as controls to manipulate the environment. It is VERY tricky to set up the parallel threads in my brain to focus on all of it at once, it took several months to do it well. Some of my co-workers have never gotten the hang of it, and still cannot present well with online learning tools because they cannot run both contexts in parallel without making mistakes or forgetting to speak.
I believe the cell phones are similar, the average person just is not wired to deal with the context of driving and the context of the conversation at the same time. (Though I bet people would get less dangerous if they set out to learn how to drive and speak on a cell phone safely.)
Unfortunately, this means that the "hands-free" stuff will not make driving while talking any safer. (I remember some research that said that hands-free and handheld cell conversations had about the same distraction level.)
Though I think the average person will not get good at speaking on a cell phone and will remain a road hazard, bans are likely to get ignored or repealed. I'd probably try something like doubling the fine or penalty for any road violation that occurs while the driver is on a phone, something to make people weigh the risks involved more carefully. (I see my neighbors use driving time as "talk time", always making calls as soon as they get in the car. Why not talk on the front porch for a minute?)
Anyway, enough rambling about my brain.
The MC option probably would have worked just fine.
The damn thing still should have taken quarters, though, but we'll assume it didn't because you would've needed $20 worth of them or some crap like that.
In addition, a passenger might actually PREFER that you don't pay attention to them. I know more than a couple people who are really poor at talking and driving. More often than not I just try to avoid talking and end up saying "just watch the F*ing road" more than conversing anyway. Many people also tend to miss the point that a passenger is often an additional pair of eyes to warn the driver of some sort of danger.
Keep in mind that not all people who have money are intelligent. And by this I mean more than just a few.
There are 5 ways to come into money/wealth.
1. Earn it by working for it. This includes starting your own business, or inventing something that sells well. Good money management is necessary here.
2. Inherit it. Nuff said.
3. Marry into it. Nuff said.
4. Win it. Either from a lottery or a court settlement.
5. Steal it or gain it via fraud.
If there are any other ways please let me know. In my opinion which is in no way professional I would say that the bulk of rich folks are in categories 1, 3 and 5 with intelligence being a big factor in those categories. Number 2 would come in second but requires no intelligence and number 4 would come in last requiring very little intelligence.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
To me, the biggest problem with payphones was a bad user interface.
To use them you need change. If payphones had a credit card slot on them, I think they would be a lot more useful. Of course the industry trys to convince me that prepaid calling cards are the answer, but then I have to juggle multiple incompatible cards, each one with some time on them.
If payphones could accept some form of credit or rechargeable debit card, it would eliminate another expense of running them, the cost of removing the change from them. Of course, I'm sure that repairing them is also a major expense.
Similarly, who still uses the outragously priced phones in hotels (other than to call 800 numbers)? The hotels priced the "service" out of usefullness with their 500% mark up. In fact, running phone lines to each room, having a phone in each room, and having a computerized switchboard is probably much less expensive than providing television and cable services to each room, yet those services are almost always free.
Cell phones solve both problems quite nicely.
It looks like Virgin Mobile's plan is available to the very occasional user (i.e. me) for about $7 per month. Thanks for the pointer!
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
I'll talk on the phone in the car while I'm driving, but I tell people "hold on" when I need to do anything requiring full concentration (change lanes, turn, etc)...
We could do with the payphone boxes what the Albanians have done with the hundreds of concrete-and-steel bunkers that former dictator Enver Hoxha littered all over the countryside (including the beaches). Make them works of art. People have painted flowers, murals, etc. on them, and have converted them from laughingstock outhouses into artworks. Payphone boxes, protecting their own insides from the elements, could be filled with art, murals, essays, community events, ads, etc. Maybe even an old-fashioned "speaker's corner," where free speech is encouraged on issues of the day. Post your paper.
Empirically, it seems to me that the majority of those who use cell phones while driving are -not- using headsets, hands free dialing, et al. they use the same tiny little crappy phone they also use in restaurants, movie theaters, and other public venues.
All hail pay phones.
--
Look ma, I'm a
Without payphones, is there any way an anonymous call can be made?
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Hands-free sets do not make driving while talking on a cell-phone any safer. See this paper from the New England Journal of Medicine for details. Basically, they cross-correlated traffic accident reports with cell phone logs and found that talking on a cell phone while driving quadruples the risk of getting in an accident, regardless of whether or not the phone is hands-free. This increased risk of accident is comparable to the increased risk of accident while driving drunk.
The difference between talking on a cell phone and talking with a passenger is that the passenger is aware of the driving situation and can halt the conversation and/or call the driver's attention to the road in case of emergency.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
has been stealing them...
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Wait! How will Keanu Reeves get out of the Matrix if he can't get to a pay phone????
And who is this Rama person, anyway?
But I guess since it's a new era, it'd be how many college students can you stuff into the server room.
I'm only posting as an AC cuz I'm too lazy to fill out webforms.
I think (gasp) Bell Canada is Getting It... use payphone locations for 802.11b access points. We talked about this a while ago but didn't focus on the payphone-subsidizing aspect...
http://www.bell.ca/accesszone
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
If you want to see payphones, go to a convienience store in the ghetto. Some have like 4 or 5 payphones right next to each other. I wouldn't suggest using them though. :-)
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
sooo i pay 30 bucks a month to have something in my car that is turned off, and doesnt get used for months on end.. ya.. im made of money.. good idea... I think ill keep looking for to occasional phonebooth.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Because stereotypes are hard to break. I know a lot of people who would never consider buying a mobile phone at any price, simply because they want to avoid the stigma of becoming one of those cell phone owners they hate so much.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
*I* can remember the last time I used a pay phone.
Or TRIED to, that is. Unless you are dragging
around deep pockets full of change they are totally
useless. The chances of finding one that would
honor your call card is miniscule, the operators
are unhelpful, the connection quality is lousy,
the service totally non-existent. That last
miserable, unsuccessful, money and time-wasting
experience drove me to cell phones, and I'm not
looking back. Let them join the other Bad Things
of ancient history like bubonic plague and
President Clinton.
I guarantee that more people than those "right next" to you are aware when your phone vibrates (say, during a meaningful quiet point in any movie), let alone when you pull it out to check the caller ID. Conservatively, I'd say five seats in any direction are bloody well aware when you do that - you do the math and tell me how many people you just distracted from their $8 ($10 in NY/LA) movie.
But you go further, depending on the call's "importance" (to you and the caller only) and, by your own admission, answer some calls. Odds are you're not a heart surgeon or in an equivalent emergency response/life-saving profession, though you clearly believe you are important enough to take certain calls during a movie. If you were actually considerate, instead of merely under the impression that you are, EVERY call would go to voicemail, because your phone would be off. It's two friggin' hours without a phone; if you're that busy/needed how do you have time for movies?
You condemn the woman for being "above any petty social convention", but then proceed act virtually identically, ignoring the "Cellphone Free Zone" sign yourself, to answer a call if you "absolutely need to speak" to that caller. Wha...? What part of "No Cellphones" did you not understand?
"... insert the Windows NT Workstation 4.0 compact disc with your computer turned off." - NT installation manual
Of course, eating fast food in cars is actually more dangerous than talking on a cell phone, and no one is talking about banning *that*.
I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?
Not to be a troll or anything, but what a piggish, excessive, truly American thing to say. What about the environmental impact of building thousands of pay phones?
We don't worry about cool stuff when we're making it, we worry about cleaning it up later. Or we let the next generation worry about it.
social engineering is stupid:
Years ago they started taking pay phones out of poor neighborhoods. Why? Because drug dealers were using them to take orders and sell drugs. Advocates for the poor said removing pay phones would not stop drug dealing and would only hurt poor folk who could not afford phones in their homes and used pay phones instead.
Now everyone uses cell phones to buy and sell drugs. And the poor folk STILL don't have pay phones because now there is not money in maintaining them.
Oh wait...this just in...local governments are now taking down cell towers in and around poor neighborhoods so drug dealers cannot use cell phones to take orders and sell drugs. Advocates for the poor are claiming this will only hurt poor people, who cannot afford phones in their home and instead buy prepaid throw away cell phones.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
I wonder what environmental hazard is posed by your existence? Suggest you go hang yourself and donate your remains for feeding endangered California condors.
I guarantee that more people than those "right next" to you are aware when your phone vibrates (say, during a meaningful quiet point in any movie), let alone when you pull it out to check the caller ID.
No, it really is very quiet. I've been standing around having a conversation with someone before and the phone rang, and they looked surprised when I pulled it out to answer it, because they never heard it go off. Now, there was one time when I happened to be leaning against a plate glass window when it went off, and a lot of people heard that. In fact, that's a real difficult noise to explain...
Now, the backlit LCD might be a distraction, but it's pretty dim, and sometimes a little hard to read in the dark. I can't imagine anyone except those to my immediate left or right even noticing it if I pulled it out of my jacket pocket.
But you go further, depending on the call's "importance" (to you and the caller only) and, by your own admission, answer some calls.
It would have to be a pretty important call from someone I was expecting a call from (ie my doctor with lab results or something). I've had a cellphone for about 8 or 9 years, and I think the total number of times I have answered the phone in a theatre was two. One was to hear whether a relative 1000 miles away made it through surgery okay, and the other was from a client who was calling to tell me whether or not I got a big contract. And my idea of "answering a call" is to pick up the phone, quietly say, "Hi. Hold on just a second, okay.." and then step out of the theatre to take the call. That is no more disturbing than quietly saying to your wife, "I'll be right back" and then stepping out to use the restroom.
You condemn the woman for being "above any petty social convention", but then proceed act virtually identically, ignoring the "Cellphone Free Zone" sign yourself, to answer a call if you "absolutely need to speak" to that caller. Wha...? What part of "No Cellphones" did you not understand?
Actually, I said I "often" carry my cellphone at a theatre, but I don't always do it. That time, I DID turn off my cellphone and even reminded my wife to turn off hers, BECAUSE they had actually posted a sign (and that's the first time I've ever seen a sign like that at a theatre, although I expect they'll probably become a lot more common). If they hadn't had a sign, I probably would have left it on vibrate, if I had even brought it in to the theatre in the first place.
if you go to the rundown section of my city, they have special payphones there, which cost three times more to make a call, dont have free directory listings, and are bright yellow in color and usually covered in puke
advertise in 2600. those guys would love to take one of these apart, or just have it for decoration. they have payphones displayed like centerfolds in that mag.
god knows what they'll do with one if they get it alone.
Evil is the money of all root....
I was being a bit of a smartass, but I was thinking of people playing with their radios. Searching for stations, playing with the bass, looking for and switching CDs. Not to mention listening to music so loud that you can't hear what's going on around you.
"If Diet Coke did not exist it would have been neccessary to invent it." -- Karl Lehenbauer
Try setting up a webpage that carries information about the cult of scientology, of course, with YOUR name proudly displayed, and count the minutes until a firestorm of legal activity shuts YOU down.
Charles Briscoe-Smith :
:
After all, the gzip package is called `gzip', not `libz-bin'...
James Troup
Uh, probably because the gzip binary doesn't come from the
non-existent libz package or the existent zlib package.
-- debian-bugs-dist
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