Slashdot Mirror
Recycling Pay Phones into Terminals
Roland Piquepaille writes "Two weeks ago, The Washington Post published a story about the death of the pay phone. It was aptly named "Requiem for the Pay Phone." Basically, it argued that as cell phones use increase, pay phones are retired from the streets. Now, according to Fortune in "Making Pay Phones Pay," Bell Canada is trying to change this situation. "Bell Canada recently started converting public pay phones in Toronto, Montreal, and Kingston into terminals for 'Wi-Fi' Internet connections. Some U.S. phone companies may soon follow suit." Check this column for more details and concerns or visit the Bell Canada's AccessZone page for details on the program and pilot locations."
Could it be a point of argument that removing pay phones reduces access to 911 emergency services for those economically disadvantaged who don't have cell phones?
'round here, the only people who use pay-phones are the local drug dealers. I've had visions of smashing all the pay-phones with a sledge hammer and forcing the local bastards into getting a real job.
It's always the same crowd: Oil-spewing '70's car, with a crack-baby or two in the back seat, pulled up close to the pay-phone at the local kwicky-mart. Just stiiting there, waiting for a call. Oh, and their fucking car isen't even in a parking space. And get this, the fuckers bread like crazy. According to Darwin, there more fit for their environment. And I get stuck with the bills for their Section-8 housing and 'gubment cheese.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Modify slashcode so that if a user submits a dupe, he/she is banned from submitting a story for X amount of days. This would still leave a gaping hole because anonymous users could post dupes, but it would be better than the current situation. Perhaps slashcode should have automatic duplication checking? Some code that would check stories from say the past 2 weeks and look for inordinate amount of matching words and/or phrases? I would do it myself, but I'm not a PERL haxor. Anyone here know PERL? Slashcode is an open source project, fix it! If we took the gross of the amount of hours spent writing about duplicate slashdot posts and put it in to slashcode development for duplicate story checking, dups would be nonexistent.