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What VoIP Is Actually Good For
gManZboy writes "One of the things that's bothered me about VoIP is that other than so-so quality phone service at a cheap price, what's the big deal? I mean so you can now deliver voice mail into e-mail because it's all IP packets, does that mean I should ditch my telecom investment. Well in part 3 of Queue's special report on VoIP (here's part 1, part 2) two authors from Bell Labs help explain actually useful things you might do. Now I get it."
You're stupid to have your money in anything other than precious metals, i.e. gold.
That's right kids, gold, part of the only market that will never ever crash. (Even finding a huge golden asteroid would do nothing to the price.)
Telecoms rarely beat expectations by any impressive margins, have very little future growth potential (unless they start doing the ubiquitis-service-provider thing, which is already a saturated market), and frankly I'm surprised it's even a question to a slashdotter to dump telecoms like a bad habit. You of all people know that telecoms are data-pushers and that's becoming a very hard market to stay competitive in.
Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, and if you want to diversify your portfolio plenty of cobalt and TUNGSTEN. Tungsten is in a very interesting place right now, as most economically exploitable tungsten is gonna run out by 07, but other deposits in developing countries could continue 1995 levels of use to continue well into the 21st. However in the short term as the easy supply dwindles one will see a large upward price adjustment that should be rather easy to exploit.
(My tungsten numbers from http://pubs.usgs.gov/pdf/circular/c930-o.html)