"No," I said, after studying the matter over a little. "No, I believe not; I am going to be traveling by rail all day today. However, tomorrow I don't travel. Give me one for tomorrow."
The man looked puzzled. He said:
"But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel by rail--"
"If I am going to travel by rail I sha'n't need it. Lying at home in bed is the thing I am afraid of."
I had been looking into this matter. Last year I traveled twenty thousand miles, almost entirely by rail; the year before, I traveled over twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by rail; and the year before that I traveled in the neighborhood of ten thousand miles, exclusively by rail. I suppose if I put in all the little odd journeys here and there, I may say I have traveled sixty thousand miles during the three years I have mentioned. AND NEVER AN ACCIDENT.
For a good while I said to myself every morning: "Now I have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much increased that I shall catch it this time. I will be shrewd, and buy an accident ticket." And to a dead moral certainty I drew a blank, and went to bed that night without a joint started or a bone splintered. I got tired of that sort of daily bother, and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month. I said to myself, "A man CAN'T buy thirty blanks in one bundle."
But I was mistaken. There was never a prize in the the lot. I could read of railway accidents every day--the newspaper atmosphere was foggy with them; but somehow they never came my way.
I found I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business, and had nothing to show for it. My suspicions were aroused, and I began to hunt around for somebody that had won in this lottery. I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual that had ever had an accident or made a cent. I stopped buying accident tickets and went to ciphering. The result was astounding. THE PERIL LAY NOT IN TRAVELING, BUT IN STAYING AT HOME.
I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all the glaring newspaper headlines concerning railroad disasters, less than THREE HUNDRED people had really lost their lives by those disasters in the preceding twelve months. The Erie road was set down as the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six-- or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of any other road. But the fact straightway suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more business than any other line in the country; so the double number of killed ceased to be matter for surprise.
By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger-trains each way every day--16 altogether; and carried a daily average of 6,000 persons. That is about a million in six months--the population of New York City. Well, the Erie kills from 13 to 23 persons of ITS million in six months; and in the same time 13,000 of New York's million die in their beds! My flesh crept, my hair stood on end. "This is appalling!" I said. "The danger isn't in traveling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again."
I had figured on considerably less than one-half the length of the Erie road. It was plain that the entire road must transport at least eleven or twelve thousand people every day. There are many short roads running out of Boston that do fully half as much; a great many such roads. There are many roads scattered about the Union that do a prodigious passenger business. Therefore it was fair to presume that an average of 2,500 passengers a day for each road in the country would be almost correct. There are 846 railway lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are 2,115,000. So the railways of America move more than two millions of people every day; six hundred and fifty millions of people a year, without counting the Sundays. They do that, too--there is no question about it; though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic; for I have hunted the census through and through, and I find that there are not that many people in the United States, by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least. They must use some of the same people over again, likely.
San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York; there are 60 deaths a week in the former and 500 a week in the latter--if they have luck. That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York--say about 25,000 or 26,000. The health of the two places is the same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that consequently 25,000 out of every million of people we have must die every year. That amounts to one-fortieth of our total population. One million of us, then, die annually. Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp and hoop-skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops, breaking through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds!
You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.
And my advice to all people is, Don't stay at home any more than you can help; but when you have GOT to stay at home a while, buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious.
[One can see now why I answered that ticket-agent in the manner recorded at the top of this sketch.]
The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States. When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway-trains of various kinds, freighted with life and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is, NOT that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelvemonth, but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred!
Terrorists! All those IRC Crypto people are terrorists!
All real, patriotic citizens are more than happy to let the government see, read and catalog everything they do.
All those "Privacy" nuts have something to hide.
I'll bet this 0x90 is learning to fly a plane while building bombs, writing free encryption programs, laundering money for the mob, selling drugs to toddlers, writing a violent video game, and *gasp* TRADING MP3S while on IRC with his fellow communist baby eaters!
You still won't get the detail of a photograph, and I'd have to see it in action to know if it would look better.
A few days ago,/. linked to a story about getting more quality out of your game system. One point tehey made was that the "Sharpness" feature on TV sets caused lower quality in digital images, because the added data created sharp lines and gradients that were not there before.
National Geographic had an article a while back about the different kinds of film and photography methods used in the magazine over the years. In it they describe the limits of each technology. Much of the film today produces images that can be enlarged to an amazing degree, well past the point where digital images can be sized before pixelization sets in.
The person who posted the article confused the resolution of scanners with that of cameras. The article had the wrong title. It should have been "Digital Camera Quality Passing Scanners?"
The film still has better "resolution" than the scanned images or the digital cameras, it's just that lots of that resolution is being lost in the scanning process.
It is comparable to saying that CDs are of a low quality media because the MP3 your ripped from it is full of noise and pops. You're judging the source based on the merits of a lossy extraction of data from that source.
this article is nothing but a large serving of Buzzword Soup
Which mean my boss will be quoting it to me in the morning as a mantra, perfect and undeniable. It will take precedence over my decisions and all those who disagree with it will be fired, er, downsized.
Buy a Monster S-Video Cable. Other brands are not as good. (Supported by my experience. I tried a $10 S-Video cable and it was crap, could hardly see the screen)
Specifically: S-Video - Gamelink 300 Component Video - Gamelink 400 and Gamelink 400CVAA
Composite video is far worse than S-Video. Don't pick a Monster Composite cable over a generic S-Video cable.
Turn down the contract on your TV. Default settings have the contrast and brightness set too high. Easier to see in a store, but causes problems with bright images and scenes.
Turn down the sharpness on your TV for DVDs and games. Digital images are mangled by excessive sharpness, and reducing it will result in softer, more realistic images. Sharpness just adds data that isn't there to digital images.
You should also configure your PlayStation 2 DVD sharpening to -2. The default "+0" setting is actually adding a lot of artifacts to your picture. The -2 setting is the true "neutral" setting.
Use an optical audio cable if available. This reduces Jitter, even over a digital audio cable. Most users will not notice the difference between a decent optical audio cable and a an ultra high end one.
You know, there are just some people who WANT to be reminded, and any excuse to be reminded will do it for them.
When you lose someone you care about, everything reminds you of them, even things that make absolutely no sense as something to trigger the memory.
Personally, I would have taken as an insult to Americans and the human race if he had changed the title of The Two Towers. Why? Simple, it would have been claiming we can't heal. It would be announcing to the world that Jackson didn't think Americans could recover from tragedy.
You know what? In the grand scheme of things, 9-11 was NOT that massive a disaster. True, it killed thousands of people, and yes it changed the country, but worse things happen all over the world, and the rest of the planet recovers. The people learn to live life without the people they lost. Did you hear about the recent bout of floods in China? How about the starvation that's ravaging Africa? Hell, what about AIDS in Africa. Yes, losing over 3,000 people in one day is terrible, but it happens all over the world. Americans are just too ethnocentric to see the rest of the planet as anything other than the Disney / Hollywood sanitized tourist attraction on TV. Terrorism is nothing new, it's as old as human conflict. Human conflict has been going on since the dawn of the species itself. From the moment our ancestors first picked up a weapon in the Fertile Crescent, we've been killing each other.
Clearchannel releasing a list of songs that might offend, people being chastised for speaking out against the ongoing war and every other patronizing thing that's been going on disgusts me.
People don't heal or recover from emotional trauma if they don't face reality. Those who retreat into a shell where all traumatic stimulus is hidden wither and die.
There were times in the last year where I saw the entire country morphing into Ms. Havisham from Great Expectations. Unable to deal with the groom running away on her wedding day, she locks herself in her room and never emerges. She withers and dies in her wedding gown. The windows are shut and the curtains sealed to prevent light from entering. She froze herself and her memories at a time just before her loss, when she was still filled with the promise of marriage and a family.
Erasing the WTC from photos and movies, pretending it didn't exist, is no different than what Ms. Havisham did. It's hiding from reality, letting the wounds fester. We've been bitten by a rattlesnake and are refusing to drain the poison. Refusing to think about what has happened, the poison works its way into our blood and kills us.
We have to face reality, and that means picking up the things we enjoyed before the disaster and enjoying them again. If a man loses his wife, he can't shut himself up forever and never see the sun again.
Yes, changing the name of a movie is a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but it is one step on a road we must not take.
The saying "That which does not kill us makes us stronger" is more true than people realize. Physically, most the country is unharmed, but if we crawl into holes and let our liberties be drained away and our lives become a mass of traumatic material that must be avoided, we will wither and die. The events will not have made us stronger. We will have died inside.
Seriously though, that's below the age range where the average human is capable of reproducing. The other points are interesting, but that age guess is way out of wack.
In the first week, his research team added garage door openers and discarded pie tin plates to the mix.
When MIT announced that they would dedicate several old Apple IIs to the project, MacGyver was quoted as saying, "I'm excited, but it's still overkill for the project."
In the first week, he developed a quantum computer that can crack RSA 128 bit encryption in 0.034 seconds, predicts the weather with 97.5% accuracy up to 10 days in advance, located Jimmy Hoffa and solved the mystery of crop circles.
Perahps she could be temted now. Julie Andrews was older than McFadden is now when she did her first topless scene.
"Tonight on HBO, Dr. Crusher on Red Shoe Diaries, followed by Real Sex: Trek Edition, Gates McFadden talks about her sex life with live demonstrations"
This means all the wireless networks out there could become a revenue stream of the company hosting them!
I think this is a dangerous idea. I can name several companies that would enable this by default on all wireless connections if it were available. It would be a way to force users to help offset the cost of the wireless networks.
Slashdot Mirror
http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/lyi ng-bed.htm
THE DANGER OF LYING IN BED
by Mark Twain
The man in the ticket-office said:
"Have an accident insurance ticket, also?"
"No," I said, after studying the matter over a little. "No, I believe not; I am going to be traveling by rail all day today. However, tomorrow I don't travel. Give me one for tomorrow."
The man looked puzzled. He said:
"But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel by rail--"
"If I am going to travel by rail I sha'n't need it. Lying at home in bed is the thing I am afraid of."
I had been looking into this matter. Last year I traveled twenty thousand miles, almost entirely by rail; the year before, I traveled over twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by rail; and the year before that I traveled in the neighborhood of ten thousand miles, exclusively by rail. I suppose if I put in all the little odd journeys here and there, I may say I have traveled sixty thousand miles during the three years I have mentioned. AND NEVER AN ACCIDENT.
For a good while I said to myself every morning: "Now I have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much increased that I shall catch it this time. I will be shrewd, and buy an accident ticket." And to a dead moral certainty I drew a blank, and went to bed that night without a joint started or a bone splintered. I got tired of that sort of daily bother, and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month. I said to myself, "A man CAN'T buy thirty blanks in one bundle."
But I was mistaken. There was never a prize in the the lot. I could read of railway accidents every day--the newspaper atmosphere was foggy with them; but somehow they never came my way.
I found I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business, and had nothing to show for it. My suspicions were aroused, and I began to hunt around for somebody that had won in this lottery. I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual that had ever had an accident or made a cent. I stopped buying accident tickets and went to ciphering. The result was astounding. THE PERIL LAY NOT IN TRAVELING, BUT IN STAYING AT HOME.
I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all the glaring newspaper headlines concerning railroad disasters, less than THREE HUNDRED people had really lost their lives by those disasters in the preceding twelve months. The Erie road was set down as the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six-- or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of any other road. But the fact straightway suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more business than any other line in the country; so the double number of killed ceased to be matter for surprise.
By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger-trains each way every day--16 altogether; and carried a daily average of 6,000 persons. That is about a million in six months--the population of New York City. Well, the Erie kills from 13 to 23 persons of ITS million in six months; and in the same time 13,000 of New York's million die in their beds! My flesh crept, my hair stood on end. "This is appalling!" I said. "The danger isn't in traveling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again."
I had figured on considerably less than one-half the length of the Erie road. It was plain that the entire road must transport at least eleven or twelve thousand people every day. There are many short roads running out of Boston that do fully half as much; a great many such roads. There are many roads scattered about the Union that do a prodigious passenger business. Therefore it was fair to presume that an average of 2,500 passengers a day for each road in the country would be almost correct. There are 846 railway lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are 2,115,000. So the railways of America move more than two millions of people every day; six hundred and fifty millions of people a year, without counting the Sundays. They do that, too--there is no question about it; though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic; for I have hunted the census through and through, and I find that there are not that many people in the United States, by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least. They must use some of the same people over again, likely.
San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York; there are 60 deaths a week in the former and 500 a week in the latter--if they have luck. That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York--say about 25,000 or 26,000. The health of the two places is the same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that consequently 25,000 out of every million of people we have must die every year. That amounts to one-fortieth of our total population. One million of us, then, die annually. Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp and hoop-skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops, breaking through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds!
You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.
And my advice to all people is, Don't stay at home any more than you can help; but when you have GOT to stay at home a while, buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious.
[One can see now why I answered that ticket-agent in the manner recorded at the top of this sketch.]
The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States. When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway-trains of various kinds, freighted with life and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is, NOT that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelvemonth, but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred!
Did Coke in College? No problem. Welcome to the White House!
Caught with a Fake ID on a regular basis? You get unlimited "Get out of Jail Free" cards!
Murder your pregnant secretary (who you knocked up) by driving off a bridge - Oh wait, you only get out of that one if you're a Kennedy.
And now all the MST3K lines form the one time I saw the film are coming to mind.
"Euwww. His tongue is like a side of beef!"
"No, really, you can go. I won't miss you. Please stop kissing me goodbye."
"YES! The megaweapon killed the annoying talking bike!"
"Yeah Megaweapon!"
"How dangerous can it be. At the speed it's going they can just walk away."
Can you see this in Manhatten? in addition to the Steam Tunnels, there would be LN2 tunnels all over town.
I see a LOT of problems if the pipes are anywhere near each other and the insulation is less than perfect.
Terrorists! All those IRC Crypto people are terrorists!
All real, patriotic citizens are more than happy to let the government see, read and catalog everything they do.
All those "Privacy" nuts have something to hide.
I'll bet this 0x90 is learning to fly a plane while building bombs, writing free encryption programs, laundering money for the mob, selling drugs to toddlers, writing a violent video game, and *gasp* TRADING MP3S while on IRC with his fellow communist baby eaters!
</humor>
You still won't get the detail of a photograph, and I'd have to see it in action to know if it would look better.
/. linked to a story about getting more quality out of your game system. One point tehey made was that the "Sharpness" feature on TV sets caused lower quality in digital images, because the added data created sharp lines and gradients that were not there before.
A few days ago,
National Geographic had an article a while back about the different kinds of film and photography methods used in the magazine over the years. In it they describe the limits of each technology. Much of the film today produces images that can be enlarged to an amazing degree, well past the point where digital images can be sized before pixelization sets in.
The person who posted the article confused the resolution of scanners with that of cameras. The article had the wrong title. It should have been "Digital Camera Quality Passing Scanners?"
The film still has better "resolution" than the scanned images or the digital cameras, it's just that lots of that resolution is being lost in the scanning process.
It is comparable to saying that CDs are of a low quality media because the MP3 your ripped from it is full of noise and pops. You're judging the source based on the merits of a lossy extraction of data from that source.
this article is nothing but a large serving of Buzzword Soup
Which mean my boss will be quoting it to me in the morning as a mantra, perfect and undeniable. It will take precedence over my decisions and all those who disagree with it will be fired, er, downsized.
Buy a Monster S-Video Cable. Other brands are not as good. (Supported by my experience. I tried a $10 S-Video cable and it was crap, could hardly see the screen)
Specifically:
S-Video - Gamelink 300 Component Video - Gamelink 400 and Gamelink 400CVAA
Composite video is far worse than S-Video. Don't pick a Monster Composite cable over a generic S-Video cable.
Turn down the contract on your TV. Default settings have the contrast and brightness set too high. Easier to see in a store, but causes problems with bright images and scenes.
Turn down the sharpness on your TV for DVDs and games. Digital images are mangled by excessive sharpness, and reducing it will result in softer, more realistic images. Sharpness just adds data that isn't there to digital images.
You should also configure your PlayStation 2 DVD sharpening to -2. The default "+0" setting is actually adding a lot of artifacts to your picture. The -2 setting is the true "neutral" setting.
Use an optical audio cable if available. This reduces Jitter, even over a digital audio cable. Most users will not notice the difference between a decent optical audio cable and a an ultra high end one.
Jusp upgrade the drivers, or better yet, upgrade the graphics card and add some RAM.
Ohhh, wait. Console image quality.
OS/2 supports double drive letters, so there you can have AA:...
Yes, but can it do tripple letters like AAA:?
If yes, then I'd bet there's be a few network shares with the drive letters SEX:, and you can guess what people would PUT on those drives!
Not Offtopic at all.
Can you also mount a network share on A: if you have no floppies?
Sorry, no Dice. The drive will go unused and unmounted, unless it takes the place of another drive.
There is no AA: in Windows
Two floppies and 24 other mounted partitions is the max.
Now, more than one physical drive can be used as a single drive letter via RAID, but that's another story.
Star Wars?
Star Wars?
You know, there are just some people who WANT to be reminded, and any excuse to be reminded will do it for them.
When you lose someone you care about, everything reminds you of them, even things that make absolutely no sense as something to trigger the memory.
Personally, I would have taken as an insult to Americans and the human race if he had changed the title of The Two Towers. Why? Simple, it would have been claiming we can't heal. It would be announcing to the world that Jackson didn't think Americans could recover from tragedy.
You know what? In the grand scheme of things, 9-11 was NOT that massive a disaster. True, it killed thousands of people, and yes it changed the country, but worse things happen all over the world, and the rest of the planet recovers. The people learn to live life without the people they lost. Did you hear about the recent bout of floods in China? How about the starvation that's ravaging Africa? Hell, what about AIDS in Africa. Yes, losing over 3,000 people in one day is terrible, but it happens all over the world. Americans are just too ethnocentric to see the rest of the planet as anything other than the Disney / Hollywood sanitized tourist attraction on TV. Terrorism is nothing new, it's as old as human conflict. Human conflict has been going on since the dawn of the species itself. From the moment our ancestors first picked up a weapon in the Fertile Crescent, we've been killing each other.
Clearchannel releasing a list of songs that might offend, people being chastised for speaking out against the ongoing war and every other patronizing thing that's been going on disgusts me.
People don't heal or recover from emotional trauma if they don't face reality. Those who retreat into a shell where all traumatic stimulus is hidden wither and die.
There were times in the last year where I saw the entire country morphing into Ms. Havisham from Great Expectations. Unable to deal with the groom running away on her wedding day, she locks herself in her room and never emerges. She withers and dies in her wedding gown. The windows are shut and the curtains sealed to prevent light from entering. She froze herself and her memories at a time just before her loss, when she was still filled with the promise of marriage and a family.
Erasing the WTC from photos and movies, pretending it didn't exist, is no different than what Ms. Havisham did. It's hiding from reality, letting the wounds fester. We've been bitten by a rattlesnake and are refusing to drain the poison. Refusing to think about what has happened, the poison works its way into our blood and kills us.
We have to face reality, and that means picking up the things we enjoyed before the disaster and enjoying them again. If a man loses his wife, he can't shut himself up forever and never see the sun again.
Yes, changing the name of a movie is a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but it is one step on a road we must not take.
The saying "That which does not kill us makes us stronger" is more true than people realize. Physically, most the country is unharmed, but if we crawl into holes and let our liberties be drained away and our lives become a mass of traumatic material that must be avoided, we will wither and die. The events will not have made us stronger. We will have died inside.
That's sick.
Pervert.
Seriously though, that's below the age range where the average human is capable of reproducing. The other points are interesting, but that age guess is way out of wack.
I think I'm being mocked
The stronghold of the PC market are games and office tools.
With Star Office, Gnu Cash and other efforts this lead is being whittled away.
If the consoles take over the game market from Windows, then there will be no real reason for new users to use Windows over Linux.
YES!!!!
Now I can build patches for movies to put them thrugh a Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatement.
MWHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
This is fantastic.
MST3K fan sites will have a whole new outlet.
I can now taunt and mock all the movies I hate.
The next epic geek challenge: A Joel and the bots level treatement of Titanic.
In the first week, his research team added garage door openers and discarded pie tin plates to the mix.
When MIT announced that they would dedicate several old Apple IIs to the project, MacGyver was quoted as saying, "I'm excited, but it's still overkill for the project."
In the first week, he developed a quantum computer that can crack RSA 128 bit encryption in 0.034 seconds, predicts the weather with 97.5% accuracy up to 10 days in advance, located Jimmy Hoffa and solved the mystery of crop circles.
And then he built a beowolf cluster of them.
So, when will this baby be Available in CompUSA?
When will the Linux drivers come out?
Oh Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.
Wore out the damn rewind button AND the tape.
To bad Gates McFadden never did any nude scenes.
Perahps she could be temted now. Julie Andrews was older than McFadden is now when she did her first topless scene.
"Tonight on HBO, Dr. Crusher on Red Shoe Diaries, followed by Real Sex: Trek Edition, Gates McFadden talks about her sex life with live demonstrations"
All that red hair, and the full bosom.
Spreading gel all over the Vulcan chick.
Beverly Crusher, Queen of the MILFs
Mmmmmmm
This brings up a good point.
As wireless networks become more and more common, how long will it be before we have a lawsuit involving the content on those networks?
Can't you imagine some litigation happy jerk finding porn on a shared drive and suing for distributing the content?
"We must protect the children! My son say porn on my neighbor's hard drive over the wireless network!"
This means all the wireless networks out there could become a revenue stream of the company hosting them!
I think this is a dangerous idea. I can name several companies that would enable this by default on all wireless connections if it were available. It would be a way to force users to help offset the cost of the wireless networks.
And the Smart Rats are fleeing the ship. I wonder what he knows that we don't know.