I wanted background on what all this is. The AC above explained it clearly without being an ass about it. I'd just as soon not go digging around to find some wiki article or website that explains it all on five different pages when I was pretty sure someone familiar with the game could give a better description here.
I was not disappointed. That and I got a bunch of ACs (and you) to get angry that I don't particularly care about the game enough to spend more than 5 minutes reading about it. -1 Troll?
CCP? ISK? PLEX? Can someone maybe translate this into English? Or at least give some sort of three line tutorial so those of us who've never ventured into the game can at least know what's going on. That article is clearly written for people who play the game regularly. If you want me to be indignant, angry, belligerent, uncaring, etc. about it I'd like to at least understand what's going on.
This section, 18 USC 701, has it's origins in the Act June 29, 1932, ch 306, 47 Stat. 342. The text as passed in 1932 is essentially the same as we have it today with some minor modifications. The bill was H.R. 10590 of the 72d Congress and the accompanying House Report was H. Rept. 72-1044. It's only a single page but it quotes an informative letter from the Attorney General from December 7, 1931:
It has come to the notice of the department that it is possible for any unauthorized person to procure from certain merchants or manufacturers badges and other insignia similar to or identical with those prescribed for the use of officers of the United States. You can readily appreciate the prejudice to the public occasioned by the use and possession of such badges and insignia by unauthorized persons.
That would indicate to me, along with the opinion in United States v Goeltz 513 F2d 193 (1975, CA10 Utah), cert. den. 423 US 830 (1975), that the FBI is overstepping the intent of the law here.
IANAL but a quick review of case law brings up United States v Goeltz (1975, CA10 Utah), cert den (1975) 423 US 830 which basically said Enactment of 18 USCS 701 was intended to protect public against use of recognizable assertion of authority with intent to deceive.
Of course how a judge in another jurisdiction would look at this 35 years later is hard to say.
If Wikipedia is actually forced to remove the offending image it could be applied to insignias of any other government agency. I wonder if it would apply to the Great Seal of the United States.
When I decide a new computer (usually because the current one is out of warranty) I just buy whatever the newest Mac laptop is that seems to fit my use case. I might look at the specs a bit but frankly I couldn't tell you what processor is in the one I currently have.
I used to care a lot about this. When I was in high school. I have a lot more interesting things to care about and I think 99% of the public does too. I'm not trying to diss anyone here. If being a processor geek is your thing, more power to you. But I think people decide for whatever reason that at some point they need a new computer and just buy whatever fits their price bracket and feature needs.
If I was say, building a huge server farm, or spec'ing out computers for a big group of people I'd obviously do a lot more homework. But those are edge cases in the grand scheme of things.
I'm trying to figure out if "Provenge" is the most awesome or terrifying name for a drug I've ever heard. Also from the wikipedia page it "consists of a mixture of the patient's own blood cells" and their special "fusion protein".
He's been pretty active on Twitter lately. Doesn't seem like the thing one would do if they're "dropping out of public life". http://twitter.com/therealNimoy
Years ago (circa 1999 I guess) I discovered that many of the campus printers at my university were wide open to telnet. One could log in to any of them without a password and change multiple settings. I worked for one of the departments that had a lot of computers that we administered so ours were pretty locked down. But most departments relied on the campus-wide organization for pretty much everything. I e-mailed their security people about the problem and pretty much got blown off with "we don't think it's a real concern". It was very tempting to password protect them all and change the IP addresses to random octets but I figured my job and future career possibilities were worth a lot more. I wonder if they ever fixed it.
There's an iPad stylus. Or I should say, someone makes a stylus that works on the iPad/iPod/iPhone touch screens. You can buy it at the Apple brick and mortar stores. Though I suppose you wouldn't know it from the Apple online store. Doesn't seem to be there. But I promise you someone is making them. My wife bought one the day the iPads were released. It works quite well. Amazon lists a number of them.
By this argument we should just scrap Caller ID altogether because no one wants to know who's calling them. If I have Caller ID as a feature (something I personally want) it's completely useless to me if the information it provides is usually inaccurate.
Also to say that it's the same system that toll free numbers and 911 use it to grossly simplify things. 911 gets a lot more than just your billing number. And toll free numbers that go to anything more complicated than a POTS line can be configured to get many different types of data. A common configuration is called "Preferred SID" which means you will get the Station ID (SID, Caller ID, Calling Party Number, etc. It has a lot of names) if it's available and the Billing Number otherwise.
One thing that's true though is that if someone calls a toll free number and prefixes *67 to the dial string, the called party will still get identifying information. In many cases it's the billing number, not the calling party number. But that's starting to get pedantic.
Using ANI (Billing Number) for all calls would probably be a bad idea. Say you're calling someone you have a business relationship with from your phone at work (technology type doesn't matter here). If billing number was the only thing available, every single call from your company would show up with the same number. Probably your main line that goes to a receptionist. In some situations this is what people want (telemarketers for instance) but in what many view as more legitimate business it would be annoying.
I'd hate it if every time various vendors that I have multiple account managers called my cell phone it just said "AT&T employee" etc. I like knowing who I'm going to be talking to.
Also, this completely ignores some of the other valid reasons for setting a caller ID value that most people outside of the telecom industry probably aren't aware of or care much about. Let's just say it's very useful for testing purposes and it's a great way to send a small amount of data to the entity you're calling if you're not using something like UUI.
IANAL but I have a lot of experience with telephony and telephony policy. So take this with as many grains of salt as you want.
The key phrase in the House bill is "with the intent to defraud or deceive". There is similar language in Senate bill. There's a lot of reasons to legitimately set your caller ID to something. With ISDN PRI service it's up to the calling party equipment to set the Caller ID. So for something like Google Voice, if they're bridging SIP to the PSTN, you absolutely don't want your caller ID showing up as the trunk identifier or billing number for their equipment. My reading of these bills doesn't outlaw it.
The bills in question are H.R. 1258 and S. 30. I made a comparison document that highlights the differences in each bill the other day. It's located here:
By the headline I thought this might be about people using IM during meetings killing things. I tend to agree that having multi-hour meetings usually is pretty useless. If you really have that much information that needs to be shared chances are no one in your audience can absorb it all in a long tedious non-interactive meeting.
OTOH, I hope people don't try to take this as "we can do everything without face to face interaction!" This is also problematic. I work with a number of people who live far away and only come into the office every few weeks. We work pretty well over the interwebs but the couple days we get for face to face interaction is invaluable.
Back to my first thought, when you do have to be in a meeting and bring a laptop, just don't bury yourself in IMing with other people, checking e-mail, etc. It's distracting and I really hate it when someone has to repeat a question because someone was reading the latest Slashdot headlines. It's a level of inconsiderateness that shouldn't be found in a professional environment. That said, if I called a meeting and it seems useless to you, tell me!
Perhaps Slashdot should be included. But as a counter example.
I keed I keed. You guys are all great! Except for the ones who aren't.
Actually I got suckered into reading user comments on CNN.com the other day. Makes Slashdot look like powerful scholars who by all rights should be in charge of the playground. Not mopping up the melting snow with their ratty jackets.
All the anti-nuke people make claims of thousands of years of nuclear waste storage blah blah. Does anyone take into account the speed at which science accelerates? Isn't it likely that in 20-50 years we'll have tech that can just deal with the waste? Or hell, even 200 years if you want to take a pessimistic view of tech growth. Even if it was 1000 years I'd be pretty happy to have nuclear power than nasty coal that is actively poisoning things.
If you want to really get to know your coworkers, organize some sort of event with alcohol. (Caveat being make sure HR / CEO / Managers are cool with this first.)
This doesn't have to be a big formal thing or anything. Just send off an e-mail saying "There'll be a bunch of beers and some wine over in [common area] at 3:30pm this [good day of the week when people are actually around]! Come hang out and get to know your co-workers!" Maybe set up a big TV with Guitar Hero or some sort of video game that is both enjoyable to watch and to play.
One of two things will happen. If you're lucky you'll get a few people to show up and have a good time. Others might hear people laughing and chatting and go over to join. Have a few of these, once a month perhaps or more often if it seems appropriate, and hopefully more and more people will show up. It helps if your common area is a place that's a bit removed from the working area so people can't easily slip back to their desks.
If you're unlucky, you'll find out that you work with a bunch of boring people / former alcoholics who want nothing to do with it and you might be SOL. Years ago when my company was a much smaller start up, most Fridays someone would come around with a keg or a few cases of cold beers on a wagon. Was a great way to get people to have a bit of fun. We also did wine tasting events fairly regularly where people could sign up to bring either cheese or wine and would get paired up a day ahead of time to try to match things up. You need to make sure you have at least a few people who are willing to spend a few bucks on decent bottles for this to work. Or hell, drop a bit on your own and see if people show up. For the more hardcore offices, whiskey tastings work too.
I'm sure there's a lot of other great ideas out there, but I've had great success over the last decade with plying my co-workers with booze. Try it!
I'm not a DeBeers shill and I actually am disgusted by the diamond trade. However, I have yet to see a manufactured diamond that can at all compare to a high quality natural diamond. Take a 1.5 cd manufactured diamond and put it next to a 1.5 cd natural diamond of any decent quality. You will see the difference if that natural diamond is even down as low as G or H on the color scale. You get a VS-1 E or F and it's like night and day.
The problem with the manufactured diamonds is they're full of impurities which generally impart a yellow tinge. I would guess down into the M, O, or P range if you're lucky. A lot of them would be considered light fancy.
I guess it's all about what you're going for. Most people probably can't tell. I have a few friends with manufactured diamond engagement rings though and it's pretty obvious if you've ever spent any time looking at natural diamonds. I always thought the fascination with diamonds was silly until I actually came into possession of high quality ones. There is a certain quality about them that manufactured or cubic zirconia just doesn't reach.
If someone can start making colorless flawless diamonds of 1 cd or larger they will be very rich, or very dead if DeBeers has any say in the matter.
I wonder if there's any ongoing studies associating or not, as the case may be, having a cell phone in your pants pocket with testicular cancer. Or issues with sperm. Chances are there aren't any correlations, but I do sometimes feel a bit uneasy having an RF emitter a few inches from the boys pretty much every waking hour.
This goes to the core of digital telephony. Analog circuits have a bandwidth of about 4 kHz since human voice falls into a pretty narrow band of audible frequencies between 300 and 3400 Hz. The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem (usually just called the Nyquist Theorem) states that sampling rate needs to be at least twice the highest frequency, hence an 8 kHz sample rate (note, I'm summarizing here big time). The original digital voice circuits used an 8-bit sample. 8000 * 8 = 64,000.
ITU-T G.711 is the codec standard for all of this. There's a lot of other codecs out there that can be used in the VOIP world, however they are generally at a cost of quality. Some are better than others though. All TDM telephony is 64 kbps though.
Except of course when it's not. Historically some voice circuits were 56 kbps due to an encoding system called Robbed-bit signaling (RBS). RBS is well beyond the scope of this discussion though. I'd suggest picking up an introductory book on digital telephony or reading some easy to find webpages if you want further information.
The article submitter seems skeptical of 4.8 Tbps being 75 million simultaneous calls.
So is 4.8 Tbps really 75 million simultaneous phone calls? Let's do some simple calculations. If we want to go with exactly 4.8 Tbps we can say that's 480 OC-192 circuits. An OC-192 is equivalent to 192 DS3s. So that gives us 92,160 DS3s. Each DS3 carries 28 T1s. So that's 2,580,480 T1 circuits. Ignoring signaling channels and going with a standard DS0 signal of 64 kbps you have 24 channels per T1. Uh oh, that only gets us 61,931,520 voice circuits.
So where do we get 75 million from? Bad math actually, at least as far as any telecom geek is concerned. If you take 4,800,000,000,000 bps and divide that by 64,000 bps you get exactly 75,000,000. This is very simplified though no matter what the technology being used is. It ignores any overhead in framing and other signaling. Be it traditional telecom circuits like DS3s or packet type networks, you're always going to have overhead. You also need signaling channels to control your voice traffic (unless you want to be old school and use in-band MF or DTMF or something, but I digress). If that's SIP or SS7 or Q.931 ISDN D-channels, you're still taking up space with it.
I guess all this says is what most people on Slashdot probably already know. Bandwidth is just a number. What you can do with it is an entirely different question.
Instead of sitting around on Slashdot crying like a bunch of babies who can't open a bottle of milk, put your comments in the official record. Tell the FCC what you think. Maybe it won't have any impact, but at least your message will be out there for someone to potentially see. And who knows, if the public actually cares about this maybe the FCC will actually listen.
There isn't an official docket for this at the FCC yet. It's contained in a rule making proceeding, RM-11361. You can file comments into the official record here:
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to what eleventybillion other people would have you think, this was quite useful and appreciated. Thanks!
I wanted background on what all this is. The AC above explained it clearly without being an ass about it. I'd just as soon not go digging around to find some wiki article or website that explains it all on five different pages when I was pretty sure someone familiar with the game could give a better description here.
I was not disappointed. That and I got a bunch of ACs (and you) to get angry that I don't particularly care about the game enough to spend more than 5 minutes reading about it. -1 Troll?
CCP? ISK? PLEX? Can someone maybe translate this into English? Or at least give some sort of three line tutorial so those of us who've never ventured into the game can at least know what's going on. That article is clearly written for people who play the game regularly. If you want me to be indignant, angry, belligerent, uncaring, etc. about it I'd like to at least understand what's going on.
Help?
This section, 18 USC 701, has it's origins in the Act June 29, 1932, ch 306, 47 Stat. 342. The text as passed in 1932 is essentially the same as we have it today with some minor modifications. The bill was H.R. 10590 of the 72d Congress and the accompanying House Report was H. Rept. 72-1044. It's only a single page but it quotes an informative letter from the Attorney General from December 7, 1931:
It has come to the notice of the department that it is possible for any unauthorized person to procure from certain merchants or manufacturers badges and other insignia similar to or identical with those prescribed for the use of officers of the United States. You can readily appreciate the prejudice to the public occasioned by the use and possession of such badges and insignia by unauthorized persons.
That would indicate to me, along with the opinion in United States v Goeltz 513 F2d 193 (1975, CA10 Utah), cert. den. 423 US 830 (1975), that the FBI is overstepping the intent of the law here.
IANAL but a quick review of case law brings up United States v Goeltz (1975, CA10 Utah), cert den (1975) 423 US 830 which basically said Enactment of 18 USCS 701 was intended to protect public against use of recognizable assertion of authority with intent to deceive.
Of course how a judge in another jurisdiction would look at this 35 years later is hard to say.
If Wikipedia is actually forced to remove the offending image it could be applied to insignias of any other government agency. I wonder if it would apply to the Great Seal of the United States.
When I decide a new computer (usually because the current one is out of warranty) I just buy whatever the newest Mac laptop is that seems to fit my use case. I might look at the specs a bit but frankly I couldn't tell you what processor is in the one I currently have.
I used to care a lot about this. When I was in high school. I have a lot more interesting things to care about and I think 99% of the public does too. I'm not trying to diss anyone here. If being a processor geek is your thing, more power to you. But I think people decide for whatever reason that at some point they need a new computer and just buy whatever fits their price bracket and feature needs.
If I was say, building a huge server farm, or spec'ing out computers for a big group of people I'd obviously do a lot more homework. But those are edge cases in the grand scheme of things.
They also risk ruining the site if they go out of business because they couldn't find a way to make money.
I'm trying to figure out if "Provenge" is the most awesome or terrifying name for a drug I've ever heard. Also from the wikipedia page it "consists of a mixture of the patient's own blood cells" and their special "fusion protein".
I'm going with terrifyingly awesome!
I just hope the commercials feature Chuck Norris.
Perhaps their new name should be HPalm3Compaq.
He's been pretty active on Twitter lately. Doesn't seem like the thing one would do if they're "dropping out of public life". http://twitter.com/therealNimoy
Years ago (circa 1999 I guess) I discovered that many of the campus printers at my university were wide open to telnet. One could log in to any of them without a password and change multiple settings. I worked for one of the departments that had a lot of computers that we administered so ours were pretty locked down. But most departments relied on the campus-wide organization for pretty much everything. I e-mailed their security people about the problem and pretty much got blown off with "we don't think it's a real concern". It was very tempting to password protect them all and change the IP addresses to random octets but I figured my job and future career possibilities were worth a lot more. I wonder if they ever fixed it.
There's an iPad stylus. Or I should say, someone makes a stylus that works on the iPad/iPod/iPhone touch screens. You can buy it at the Apple brick and mortar stores. Though I suppose you wouldn't know it from the Apple online store. Doesn't seem to be there. But I promise you someone is making them. My wife bought one the day the iPads were released. It works quite well. Amazon lists a number of them.
By this argument we should just scrap Caller ID altogether because no one wants to know who's calling them. If I have Caller ID as a feature (something I personally want) it's completely useless to me if the information it provides is usually inaccurate.
Also to say that it's the same system that toll free numbers and 911 use it to grossly simplify things. 911 gets a lot more than just your billing number. And toll free numbers that go to anything more complicated than a POTS line can be configured to get many different types of data. A common configuration is called "Preferred SID" which means you will get the Station ID (SID, Caller ID, Calling Party Number, etc. It has a lot of names) if it's available and the Billing Number otherwise.
One thing that's true though is that if someone calls a toll free number and prefixes *67 to the dial string, the called party will still get identifying information. In many cases it's the billing number, not the calling party number. But that's starting to get pedantic.
Using ANI (Billing Number) for all calls would probably be a bad idea. Say you're calling someone you have a business relationship with from your phone at work (technology type doesn't matter here). If billing number was the only thing available, every single call from your company would show up with the same number. Probably your main line that goes to a receptionist. In some situations this is what people want (telemarketers for instance) but in what many view as more legitimate business it would be annoying.
I'd hate it if every time various vendors that I have multiple account managers called my cell phone it just said "AT&T employee" etc. I like knowing who I'm going to be talking to.
Also, this completely ignores some of the other valid reasons for setting a caller ID value that most people outside of the telecom industry probably aren't aware of or care much about. Let's just say it's very useful for testing purposes and it's a great way to send a small amount of data to the entity you're calling if you're not using something like UUI.
IANAL but I have a lot of experience with telephony and telephony policy. So take this with as many grains of salt as you want.
The key phrase in the House bill is "with the intent to defraud or deceive". There is similar language in Senate bill. There's a lot of reasons to legitimately set your caller ID to something. With ISDN PRI service it's up to the calling party equipment to set the Caller ID. So for something like Google Voice, if they're bridging SIP to the PSTN, you absolutely don't want your caller ID showing up as the trunk identifier or billing number for their equipment. My reading of these bills doesn't outlaw it.
The bills in question are H.R. 1258 and S. 30. I made a comparison document that highlights the differences in each bill the other day. It's located here:
http://dfs.org/comparison.pdf
By the headline I thought this might be about people using IM during meetings killing things. I tend to agree that having multi-hour meetings usually is pretty useless. If you really have that much information that needs to be shared chances are no one in your audience can absorb it all in a long tedious non-interactive meeting.
OTOH, I hope people don't try to take this as "we can do everything without face to face interaction!" This is also problematic. I work with a number of people who live far away and only come into the office every few weeks. We work pretty well over the interwebs but the couple days we get for face to face interaction is invaluable.
Back to my first thought, when you do have to be in a meeting and bring a laptop, just don't bury yourself in IMing with other people, checking e-mail, etc. It's distracting and I really hate it when someone has to repeat a question because someone was reading the latest Slashdot headlines. It's a level of inconsiderateness that shouldn't be found in a professional environment. That said, if I called a meeting and it seems useless to you, tell me!
Perhaps Slashdot should be included. But as a counter example.
I keed I keed. You guys are all great! Except for the ones who aren't.
Actually I got suckered into reading user comments on CNN.com the other day. Makes Slashdot look like powerful scholars who by all rights should be in charge of the playground. Not mopping up the melting snow with their ratty jackets.
Damnit. I really do love you guys!
All the anti-nuke people make claims of thousands of years of nuclear waste storage blah blah. Does anyone take into account the speed at which science accelerates? Isn't it likely that in 20-50 years we'll have tech that can just deal with the waste? Or hell, even 200 years if you want to take a pessimistic view of tech growth. Even if it was 1000 years I'd be pretty happy to have nuclear power than nasty coal that is actively poisoning things.
If you want to really get to know your coworkers, organize some sort of event with alcohol. (Caveat being make sure HR / CEO / Managers are cool with this first.)
This doesn't have to be a big formal thing or anything. Just send off an e-mail saying "There'll be a bunch of beers and some wine over in [common area] at 3:30pm this [good day of the week when people are actually around]! Come hang out and get to know your co-workers!" Maybe set up a big TV with Guitar Hero or some sort of video game that is both enjoyable to watch and to play.
One of two things will happen. If you're lucky you'll get a few people to show up and have a good time. Others might hear people laughing and chatting and go over to join. Have a few of these, once a month perhaps or more often if it seems appropriate, and hopefully more and more people will show up. It helps if your common area is a place that's a bit removed from the working area so people can't easily slip back to their desks.
If you're unlucky, you'll find out that you work with a bunch of boring people / former alcoholics who want nothing to do with it and you might be SOL. Years ago when my company was a much smaller start up, most Fridays someone would come around with a keg or a few cases of cold beers on a wagon. Was a great way to get people to have a bit of fun. We also did wine tasting events fairly regularly where people could sign up to bring either cheese or wine and would get paired up a day ahead of time to try to match things up. You need to make sure you have at least a few people who are willing to spend a few bucks on decent bottles for this to work. Or hell, drop a bit on your own and see if people show up. For the more hardcore offices, whiskey tastings work too.
I'm sure there's a lot of other great ideas out there, but I've had great success over the last decade with plying my co-workers with booze. Try it!
I'm not a DeBeers shill and I actually am disgusted by the diamond trade. However, I have yet to see a manufactured diamond that can at all compare to a high quality natural diamond. Take a 1.5 cd manufactured diamond and put it next to a 1.5 cd natural diamond of any decent quality. You will see the difference if that natural diamond is even down as low as G or H on the color scale. You get a VS-1 E or F and it's like night and day.
The problem with the manufactured diamonds is they're full of impurities which generally impart a yellow tinge. I would guess down into the M, O, or P range if you're lucky. A lot of them would be considered light fancy.
I guess it's all about what you're going for. Most people probably can't tell. I have a few friends with manufactured diamond engagement rings though and it's pretty obvious if you've ever spent any time looking at natural diamonds. I always thought the fascination with diamonds was silly until I actually came into possession of high quality ones. There is a certain quality about them that manufactured or cubic zirconia just doesn't reach.
If someone can start making colorless flawless diamonds of 1 cd or larger they will be very rich, or very dead if DeBeers has any say in the matter.
I wonder if there's any ongoing studies associating or not, as the case may be, having a cell phone in your pants pocket with testicular cancer. Or issues with sperm. Chances are there aren't any correlations, but I do sometimes feel a bit uneasy having an RF emitter a few inches from the boys pretty much every waking hour.
This goes to the core of digital telephony. Analog circuits have a bandwidth of about 4 kHz since human voice falls into a pretty narrow band of audible frequencies between 300 and 3400 Hz. The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem (usually just called the Nyquist Theorem) states that sampling rate needs to be at least twice the highest frequency, hence an 8 kHz sample rate (note, I'm summarizing here big time). The original digital voice circuits used an 8-bit sample. 8000 * 8 = 64,000.
ITU-T G.711 is the codec standard for all of this. There's a lot of other codecs out there that can be used in the VOIP world, however they are generally at a cost of quality. Some are better than others though. All TDM telephony is 64 kbps though.
Except of course when it's not. Historically some voice circuits were 56 kbps due to an encoding system called Robbed-bit signaling (RBS). RBS is well beyond the scope of this discussion though. I'd suggest picking up an introductory book on digital telephony or reading some easy to find webpages if you want further information.
The article submitter seems skeptical of 4.8 Tbps being 75 million simultaneous calls.
So is 4.8 Tbps really 75 million simultaneous phone calls? Let's do some simple calculations. If we want to go with exactly 4.8 Tbps we can say that's 480 OC-192 circuits. An OC-192 is equivalent to 192 DS3s. So that gives us 92,160 DS3s. Each DS3 carries 28 T1s. So that's 2,580,480 T1 circuits. Ignoring signaling channels and going with a standard DS0 signal of 64 kbps you have 24 channels per T1. Uh oh, that only gets us 61,931,520 voice circuits.
So where do we get 75 million from? Bad math actually, at least as far as any telecom geek is concerned. If you take 4,800,000,000,000 bps and divide that by 64,000 bps you get exactly 75,000,000. This is very simplified though no matter what the technology being used is. It ignores any overhead in framing and other signaling. Be it traditional telecom circuits like DS3s or packet type networks, you're always going to have overhead. You also need signaling channels to control your voice traffic (unless you want to be old school and use in-band MF or DTMF or something, but I digress). If that's SIP or SS7 or Q.931 ISDN D-channels, you're still taking up space with it.
I guess all this says is what most people on Slashdot probably already know. Bandwidth is just a number. What you can do with it is an entirely different question.
Instead of sitting around on Slashdot crying like a bunch of babies who can't open a bottle of milk, put your comments in the official record. Tell the FCC what you think. Maybe it won't have any impact, but at least your message will be out there for someone to potentially see. And who knows, if the public actually cares about this maybe the FCC will actually listen.
There isn't an official docket for this at the FCC yet. It's contained in a rule making proceeding, RM-11361. You can file comments into the official record here:
http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/upload_v2.cgi
As usual, try to be civil. But let the FCC know what you think. Complaining on Slashdot won't do you any good.