I can almost see a standard-sized camcorder with lens, viewfinder, and other assorted buttons and a hole in it that you plug your iPod into.
The problem is that the camera would still need a lot of internal logic and power and at the end of the day a slot-in portable firewire HDD would probably be a lot cheaper than an iPod.
I believe you are correct -- "legal tender for all debts public and private" means that if you have a debt that is denominated in dollars, you cannot reject dollars as payment.
I'd guess this historically dates to an era when someone may have incurred a debt and tried to pay in paper money and the debtee wouldn't accept paper but instead wanted gold or silver coinage instead.
IANAMusician, but I could have sworn that Gibson had been put into the same category as Harley-Davidson by the American business media -- "an icon of American business & manufacturing that almost died but was resurrected and on a newfound path to glory, thanks to its innovative, dedicated and insightful management team."
The way you describe them, it sounds like they're headed back to the same gutter!
What makes it seem that way is that there's a better product that's a lot cheaper than the current product that provides all of its benefits plus more, but they won't give it to us because we haven't bought enough of what the current product is.
It just feels conspiratorial -- although what it feels more like is a well-run planned economy. "We're not making the new Ladas because we haven't finished paying off the old Lada models yet." I know it makes sense, but it seems kind of frustrating -- I want a big LCD TV *today* and I don't want to pay $10k.
Re:"Counterfeit" pound notes
on
Review: Illegal Art
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't remember him being British or doing it with Pound notes, but there was a fairly long New Yorker article about his run-ins with the US Dept. of Treasury for doing the same thing with the dollar notes. Essentially making his own money and bartering for goods and services with it.
If I remember right, the long-haired speculation was that the Treasury wasn't keen on this not so much because of the counterfeiting aspect of it but because they're more afraid of people using something other than dollars as a medium of exchange.
I'm not sure what the law is about this. Is it specifically illegal for me to print up a 10,000 Flugelbucks and then convince everyone in my community that they should accept and use my Flugelbucks as a form of payment?
I'm not even sure what the tax ramifications are of this. I suppose you're supposed to keep track of even direct barter (painting for plumbing) transactions above a certain amount -- but what if I start say painting houses and have only *ever* done it for Flugelbucks? If I do all of my other transactions in them, how do I know what the dollar value of the transactions is?
It's kind of surreal path and I can understand where it would give people who like to keep economic transactions in neat and tidy dollar amounts a big headache.
I always assumed it was the other way around. I've known tons of professionals that either put up with something substandard because they know how to deal with it (eg, mechanic with a car with a chronic problem), computer people that put up with crappy homebrew software simply because they know how to work around it, painters that cut all kinds of corners at home but don't for clients, and so on.
I wonder if maybe EBay isn't just interested in having their cake and eating it too. One of the reasons Ebay is so monumentally successful as a business is that they have all the margin and none of the responsibility. Get ripped off? Not our problem. Get untrue feedback? Not our problem. Not our problem. Not our problem. We didn't get our cut of your sale? Now its our problem, and our only problem.
I've bought only 2-3 things off of Ebay, primarily because I don't want to get ripped off and I'm a little disgusted with their willingness to create a marketplace but not enforce any rules of fairness or any kind of justice.
I'm not naive -- I know that the more they get involved in sales, the less profitable it is for them. But because their sole interest is making a percentage off of sellers they seem to have every incentive to just generate sales of any kind, regardless of the integrity of the sale.
I'd have more faith in Ebay if they didn't just create a market, but created a market that did more than just pay lip service to honesty and justice.
I was annoyed by the power-fail-open requirement of the door because the electronic strikeplate activated by the card reader doesn't impact the door's lockset characteristics -- it's always "open" from the inside, regardless of the power state or lock state of the strikeplate. In other words, its physically impossible to lock yourself in with the lock hardware the door has, whether the card reader activated strike plate works or not.
I'm presuming that if the fire inspector were to understand this, he wouldn't require the lame power-fail open requirement, but its a dumb building management requirement masquerading as a fire requirement.
A music video, a self-contained commercial for the album costs a LOT of money ($100k up to $500k), without actually bringing any money in by itself (except for the growing trend of musicvid DVD's).
I work in advertising, and the "golden rule" is that a decent TV commercial costs around $200k. It can go way up if you're paying some big-name talent to shill for you, but this is the typical cost for a 30 second TV spot -- and this is with clients and other non-entertainment money types breathing down everyone's neck to keep it profitable and on budget, and a lot of rank-and-file types who seldom make more than $200k/year involved, and even then that's maybe a *couple* of clowns at the agency and the director.
I can see even a pretty basic music video running $500k (just the extra run time compared to a:30), and most have a ton of camera angles, sets, extras, costumes, and so on. It can only go up from there, especially considering that everyone's in the entertainment industry and there isn't a client or agency money man lording over the process to keep it profitable.
I wonder if some of the music industry's pricing problems (why a physical disk that can be recorded and produced for $1.50 per in 10k lots) isn't because the most expensive part of the whole process is the video aspect of it that doesn't have a dedicated revenue stream, it has to leech off the CD sales, along with every other aspect of the 'biz.
I often wonder what would happen if the video channels were seperate pay channels (ala HBO) and the only way to see a 'free' video was in a music store or at a friend's house. The videos would then be more paid for than they are now, and perhaps the cost of the CD itself could drop under $10, which would probably go a long way towards improving at least one part of the industry's PR image.
I built my own desk for that very reason. I have a ViewSonic 21" and a Sony 17" side by side and I still have a third of the center portion of the desk left, not to mention two 5' by 30" wings free (er, free to collect shit).
Other solutions I've seen work well are buying a door blank and a couple of filing cabinets. Most doors are easily 7' x 36", which is more than deep enough. Plus it comes apart easy for moves.
The lost key thing never worked for anyone else that tried it. They charged you $50 and actually changed the cylinder out, giving you a new lock and a new key (which was really the only safe thing to do).
I actually got a duplicate sometime later when I found out that the boyfriend of a coworker worked in the key shop. He just cut me a copy.
Sure, socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us!
None of the political systems outlined in academic terms in the dusty books I still have from "PoliSci 30xx -- Modern Political Ideologies" have ever been implemented as designed on paper. Usually they have transition issues (say, going from capitalism to socialism), ethnic conflict or external problems that turn them into something far less pleasant than a book said they'd be.
What you'll get is a whole bunch of people who claim that those places didn't represent socialism or communism, but instead were either:
(A) Totalitarian governments using the rhetoric of socialism and communism as a cover for their totalitarian goals
-or-
(B) Well-intentioned socialists and communists that were forced to turn to a totalitarian leadership style to prevent greedy capitalists from overthrowing their nascent workers' paradises.
Either way, you're not allowed to hold up every communist government that ever existed as an example of what happens, since one or both of the above 'outs' will be used.
I'm not saying its impossible, but I am wondering how 'easy' it is to buy a patented part sold explicitly as restricted availability.
Sure, with the right sheet stock and dies you can stamp 'em out by the millions, but the patterns and dies would be awkward and expensive for campus kids to do, if a machine shop would even do the work -- I'm not sure they'd just crank out key blanks like that without asking a couple of questions, lest an expensive patent suit and criminal charges of burglary, aiding-and-abetting, and so on.
Some blanks you can order off the internet, but I'd be kind of surprised if restricted keyway hardware was available off the internet that easily -- there's a lot at stake for the company that makes the parts -- the security they're supposedly selling, as well as the business relationship with their vendors.
When I replaced the locks on my house, the lock company advertised a series of locks with a restricted keyway, which meant according to the locksmith that their company was the only one in the region where you could get key blanks, cyliners or other hardware associated with this series of locks.
I ran into this phenomenon in college; I tried to make a copy of my girlfriend's dorm room key at several hardware stores. I actually milled off and polished the head of the key where the "DO NOT COPY" and "UNIVERISTY AABBCC" info was on it so it looked like an ordinary key.
The last place I went to the guy looked at me and laughed and said, "Nice job, but its a university key -- the blanks and hardware are sold directly by to the University key shop. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't make a copy of it, I have no blanks that will work."
Anyway, the technique described here requires a bunch of blank keys, which if you can't get or are extremely hard to get makes you wonder if this technique would work in places that employ limited keyway hardware.
Server rooms and now even wiring closets should have controlled card key access at a minimum.
Our server room was cardkey only until the cardkey system crashed and we needed into the computer room. Since there was no key, we had to actually power off a whole circuit to get the lock open -- which is a whole other weakness, the fire dept. requires that the locks fail open in the even of a power outage, in spite of the fact that the door is no more inhibited from opening internally than my lock-less office door.
Anyway, we had to go back to having a key lock on there so that in the event that something happened to the card key system we weren't totally shut out.
In an ideal world, a datacenter would require biometric authentication with some kind of multi-key override involving a third party escrow of a needed override key in cases of total biometric failure. The trouble is the fire department (and often building security) gets hinky when it comes to rooms people work in that you can't simply and easily get in/out of.
Like many other security mechanisms, you can get good security but getting the next linear security level requires an exponential increase in cost and complexity.
Couldn't there be an automated mechanism in place to have the browser check the signature of the site you're visiting against a list of sigs fetched from somewhere else, like a keyserver?
A bad match would throw a dialog up that says "this site's key xyz doesn't match its key abc registered at keyserver.org".
From what we've read about what Verisign does when handing out certs to begin with, a submit-your-own-key authority is at least as reliable as what they deliver. A submit-your-own authority could even charge and go through some of the same validity motions that Verisign does.
When the cops do a car theft sting and make it easy for someone to steal a car, isn't that authorized borrowing, since the cops are deliberately leaving it out for your to borrow?
I think the answer is "no".
If the RIAA really thinks that P2P is about stealing music, I strongly encourage them to gather a ton of evidence, and sue people in civil court. I have no problem with them going after people with their own resources, so long as they don't try to get law enforcement involved -- it should be the RIAAs problem to fix with their own money.
I'd think that after a while they'd realize that the money they spend going after customers would be better spent creating new customers instead.
I don't think the RIAA would even know this was happening. Now if you just blew away your MP3s and redownloaded them from a host controlled by RIAA and they could gather that traffic data, then you might have a problem.
But that assumes that all of the spam comes from hijacked mail systems. We've seen several recent stories about pro spammers that use DSL or other purchased ISP accounts for sending spam.
I think that if there were enough pressure on people who dealt with fraudsters (spammers, banks, etc) that it'd be tough to be in business and sending email would be the last of your concerns.
Hmm, I don't think that's what I mean. If I want extension 5000 to ring at 3 stations, and those three stations already have extensionos, I waste one port, AND it's a paind to setup (I just gave up, and had the vendor do it - and it took him an hour to do it) I don't understand that.
Not how our system (with 2000 series phones) works at all. A "TN" (which is essentially a phone) is defined. All of our 2008 phones have 8 buttons, 5 of which can have numbers assigned to them. Adding an additional extension to those is a single line edit of the TN:
key 02 scr 1234 -- makes ringing button
key 02 scn 1234 -- makes silent but blinking button
That's all there is to it. You can get around some of the phone-centered (as opposed to extension-centered) behavior by building ACDs, but it'd be better if most behavior was LINE centric not phone centric (since people call lines, not phones). Oh well, I'm sure if it were this way I'd bitch about how I have to define 4 lines to get a phone to act a certain way.
Fraud is the cause of spam. If the FTC/FBI/Attorneys General would see Spam not as a problem of unwanted mail, but as a problem of people committing fraud on a widespread basis and enforce those laws, we'd be fine.
Chances are the fraud, deception and other similar laws are far more severe than any penalties for sending spam -- if spammers had to think about a trip to a federal, pound-me-in-the-ass prison for getting caught for perpetuating interstate fraud because the government was making an effort to find and prosecute these people, they might choose a different line of work.
Spam laws in and of themselves will only lead to an awful bureaucratization of email and they won't be enforceable anyway.
Setting up a phone is a huge drag, and having multiple numbers ring at one station royally sucks.
It's not that bad. We have model TNs that we just copy to make new phones. Takes longer to punch the TNs to the destination that it does in the switch. Adding additional lines to an existing TN is trivial, KEY XX SC{R|N} 1234.
What drives me nuts about it isn't the complexity, its that you define a phone more so than a *number*. I'd like a number to have a set of HUNT and FDN and other behaviors that are unique to the number regardless of the TN they appear on. Right now the MARP TN controls that behavior, which is a huge nuisance if you have a number that needs to appear on a phone with other numbers but needs unique HUNT/FDN behavior. You basically need to build a different TN, which means you need to either place an additional phone or find a place for all those "extra" phones.
I'm sure the next leap if we make one will be IP based, but I figure that standard needs another 5 years (in this economy, 3 in a good one) to stabilize and have good vendor interoperability.
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I can almost see a standard-sized camcorder with lens, viewfinder, and other assorted buttons and a hole in it that you plug your iPod into.
The problem is that the camera would still need a lot of internal logic and power and at the end of the day a slot-in portable firewire HDD would probably be a lot cheaper than an iPod.
I believe you are correct -- "legal tender for all debts public and private" means that if you have a debt that is denominated in dollars, you cannot reject dollars as payment.
I'd guess this historically dates to an era when someone may have incurred a debt and tried to pay in paper money and the debtee wouldn't accept paper but instead wanted gold or silver coinage instead.
IANAMusician, but I could have sworn that Gibson had been put into the same category as Harley-Davidson by the American business media -- "an icon of American business & manufacturing that almost died but was resurrected and on a newfound path to glory, thanks to its innovative, dedicated and insightful management team."
The way you describe them, it sounds like they're headed back to the same gutter!
Heh, I liked conspiracy better.
What makes it seem that way is that there's a better product that's a lot cheaper than the current product that provides all of its benefits plus more, but they won't give it to us because we haven't bought enough of what the current product is.
It just feels conspiratorial -- although what it feels more like is a well-run planned economy. "We're not making the new Ladas because we haven't finished paying off the old Lada models yet." I know it makes sense, but it seems kind of frustrating -- I want a big LCD TV *today* and I don't want to pay $10k.
I don't remember him being British or doing it with Pound notes, but there was a fairly long New Yorker article about his run-ins with the US Dept. of Treasury for doing the same thing with the dollar notes. Essentially making his own money and bartering for goods and services with it.
If I remember right, the long-haired speculation was that the Treasury wasn't keen on this not so much because of the counterfeiting aspect of it but because they're more afraid of people using something other than dollars as a medium of exchange.
I'm not sure what the law is about this. Is it specifically illegal for me to print up a 10,000 Flugelbucks and then convince everyone in my community that they should accept and use my Flugelbucks as a form of payment?
I'm not even sure what the tax ramifications are of this. I suppose you're supposed to keep track of even direct barter (painting for plumbing) transactions above a certain amount -- but what if I start say painting houses and have only *ever* done it for Flugelbucks? If I do all of my other transactions in them, how do I know what the dollar value of the transactions is?
It's kind of surreal path and I can understand where it would give people who like to keep economic transactions in neat and tidy dollar amounts a big headache.
I always assumed it was the other way around. I've known tons of professionals that either put up with something substandard because they know how to deal with it (eg, mechanic with a car with a chronic problem), computer people that put up with crappy homebrew software simply because they know how to work around it, painters that cut all kinds of corners at home but don't for clients, and so on.
I wonder if maybe EBay isn't just interested in having their cake and eating it too. One of the reasons Ebay is so monumentally successful as a business is that they have all the margin and none of the responsibility. Get ripped off? Not our problem. Get untrue feedback? Not our problem. Not our problem. Not our problem. We didn't get our cut of your sale? Now its our problem, and our only problem.
I've bought only 2-3 things off of Ebay, primarily because I don't want to get ripped off and I'm a little disgusted with their willingness to create a marketplace but not enforce any rules of fairness or any kind of justice.
I'm not naive -- I know that the more they get involved in sales, the less profitable it is for them. But because their sole interest is making a percentage off of sellers they seem to have every incentive to just generate sales of any kind, regardless of the integrity of the sale.
I'd have more faith in Ebay if they didn't just create a market, but created a market that did more than just pay lip service to honesty and justice.
I was annoyed by the power-fail-open requirement of the door because the electronic strikeplate activated by the card reader doesn't impact the door's lockset characteristics -- it's always "open" from the inside, regardless of the power state or lock state of the strikeplate. In other words, its physically impossible to lock yourself in with the lock hardware the door has, whether the card reader activated strike plate works or not.
I'm presuming that if the fire inspector were to understand this, he wouldn't require the lame power-fail open requirement, but its a dumb building management requirement masquerading as a fire requirement.
A music video, a self-contained commercial for the album costs a LOT of money ($100k up to $500k), without actually bringing any money in by itself (except for the growing trend of musicvid DVD's).
:30), and most have a ton of camera angles, sets, extras, costumes, and so on. It can only go up from there, especially considering that everyone's in the entertainment industry and there isn't a client or agency money man lording over the process to keep it profitable.
I work in advertising, and the "golden rule" is that a decent TV commercial costs around $200k. It can go way up if you're paying some big-name talent to shill for you, but this is the typical cost for a 30 second TV spot -- and this is with clients and other non-entertainment money types breathing down everyone's neck to keep it profitable and on budget, and a lot of rank-and-file types who seldom make more than $200k/year involved, and even then that's maybe a *couple* of clowns at the agency and the director.
I can see even a pretty basic music video running $500k (just the extra run time compared to a
I wonder if some of the music industry's pricing problems (why a physical disk that can be recorded and produced for $1.50 per in 10k lots) isn't because the most expensive part of the whole process is the video aspect of it that doesn't have a dedicated revenue stream, it has to leech off the CD sales, along with every other aspect of the 'biz.
I often wonder what would happen if the video channels were seperate pay channels (ala HBO) and the only way to see a 'free' video was in a music store or at a friend's house. The videos would then be more paid for than they are now, and perhaps the cost of the CD itself could drop under $10, which would probably go a long way towards improving at least one part of the industry's PR image.
I built my own desk for that very reason. I have a ViewSonic 21" and a Sony 17" side by side and I still have a third of the center portion of the desk left, not to mention two 5' by 30" wings free (er, free to collect shit).
Other solutions I've seen work well are buying a door blank and a couple of filing cabinets. Most doors are easily 7' x 36", which is more than deep enough. Plus it comes apart easy for moves.
The lost key thing never worked for anyone else that tried it. They charged you $50 and actually changed the cylinder out, giving you a new lock and a new key (which was really the only safe thing to do).
I actually got a duplicate sometime later when I found out that the boyfriend of a coworker worked in the key shop. He just cut me a copy.
Sure, socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us!
None of the political systems outlined in academic terms in the dusty books I still have from "PoliSci 30xx -- Modern Political Ideologies" have ever been implemented as designed on paper. Usually they have transition issues (say, going from capitalism to socialism), ethnic conflict or external problems that turn them into something far less pleasant than a book said they'd be.
Our data center and all of our wiring closets go deck-to-deck. If you go above the false ceiling you get just more sheetrock.
What you'll get is a whole bunch of people who claim that those places didn't represent socialism or communism, but instead were either:
(A) Totalitarian governments using the rhetoric of socialism and communism as a cover for their totalitarian goals
-or-
(B) Well-intentioned socialists and communists that were forced to turn to a totalitarian leadership style to prevent greedy capitalists from overthrowing their nascent workers' paradises.
Either way, you're not allowed to hold up every communist government that ever existed as an example of what happens, since one or both of the above 'outs' will be used.
I'm not saying its impossible, but I am wondering how 'easy' it is to buy a patented part sold explicitly as restricted availability.
Sure, with the right sheet stock and dies you can stamp 'em out by the millions, but the patterns and dies would be awkward and expensive for campus kids to do, if a machine shop would even do the work -- I'm not sure they'd just crank out key blanks like that without asking a couple of questions, lest an expensive patent suit and criminal charges of burglary, aiding-and-abetting, and so on.
Some blanks you can order off the internet, but I'd be kind of surprised if restricted keyway hardware was available off the internet that easily -- there's a lot at stake for the company that makes the parts -- the security they're supposedly selling, as well as the business relationship with their vendors.
When I replaced the locks on my house, the lock company advertised a series of locks with a restricted keyway, which meant according to the locksmith that their company was the only one in the region where you could get key blanks, cyliners or other hardware associated with this series of locks.
I ran into this phenomenon in college; I tried to make a copy of my girlfriend's dorm room key at several hardware stores. I actually milled off and polished the head of the key where the "DO NOT COPY" and "UNIVERISTY AABBCC" info was on it so it looked like an ordinary key.
The last place I went to the guy looked at me and laughed and said, "Nice job, but its a university key -- the blanks and hardware are sold directly by to the University key shop. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't make a copy of it, I have no blanks that will work."
Anyway, the technique described here requires a bunch of blank keys, which if you can't get or are extremely hard to get makes you wonder if this technique would work in places that employ limited keyway hardware.
Server rooms and now even wiring closets should have controlled card key access at a minimum.
Our server room was cardkey only until the cardkey system crashed and we needed into the computer room. Since there was no key, we had to actually power off a whole circuit to get the lock open -- which is a whole other weakness, the fire dept. requires that the locks fail open in the even of a power outage, in spite of the fact that the door is no more inhibited from opening internally than my lock-less office door.
Anyway, we had to go back to having a key lock on there so that in the event that something happened to the card key system we weren't totally shut out.
In an ideal world, a datacenter would require biometric authentication with some kind of multi-key override involving a third party escrow of a needed override key in cases of total biometric failure. The trouble is the fire department (and often building security) gets hinky when it comes to rooms people work in that you can't simply and easily get in/out of.
Like many other security mechanisms, you can get good security but getting the next linear security level requires an exponential increase in cost and complexity.
Couldn't there be an automated mechanism in place to have the browser check the signature of the site you're visiting against a list of sigs fetched from somewhere else, like a keyserver?
A bad match would throw a dialog up that says "this site's key xyz doesn't match its key abc registered at keyserver.org".
From what we've read about what Verisign does when handing out certs to begin with, a submit-your-own-key authority is at least as reliable as what they deliver. A submit-your-own authority could even charge and go through some of the same validity motions that Verisign does.
When the cops do a car theft sting and make it easy for someone to steal a car, isn't that authorized borrowing, since the cops are deliberately leaving it out for your to borrow?
I think the answer is "no".
If the RIAA really thinks that P2P is about stealing music, I strongly encourage them to gather a ton of evidence, and sue people in civil court. I have no problem with them going after people with their own resources, so long as they don't try to get law enforcement involved -- it should be the RIAAs problem to fix with their own money.
I'd think that after a while they'd realize that the money they spend going after customers would be better spent creating new customers instead.
I don't think the RIAA would even know this was happening. Now if you just blew away your MP3s and redownloaded them from a host controlled by RIAA and they could gather that traffic data, then you might have a problem.
But that assumes that all of the spam comes from hijacked mail systems. We've seen several recent stories about pro spammers that use DSL or other purchased ISP accounts for sending spam.
I think that if there were enough pressure on people who dealt with fraudsters (spammers, banks, etc) that it'd be tough to be in business and sending email would be the last of your concerns.
Hmm, I don't think that's what I mean. If I want extension 5000 to ring at 3 stations, and those three stations already have extensionos, I waste one port, AND it's a paind to setup (I just gave up, and had the vendor do it - and it took him an hour to do it) I don't understand that.
Not how our system (with 2000 series phones) works at all. A "TN" (which is essentially a phone) is defined. All of our 2008 phones have 8 buttons, 5 of which can have numbers assigned to them. Adding an additional extension to those is a single line edit of the TN:
key 02 scr 1234 -- makes ringing button
key 02 scn 1234 -- makes silent but blinking button
That's all there is to it. You can get around some of the phone-centered (as opposed to extension-centered) behavior by building ACDs, but it'd be better if most behavior was LINE centric not phone centric (since people call lines, not phones). Oh well, I'm sure if it were this way I'd bitch about how I have to define 4 lines to get a phone to act a certain way.
Fraud is the cause of spam. If the FTC/FBI/Attorneys General would see Spam not as a problem of unwanted mail, but as a problem of people committing fraud on a widespread basis and enforce those laws, we'd be fine.
Chances are the fraud, deception and other similar laws are far more severe than any penalties for sending spam -- if spammers had to think about a trip to a federal, pound-me-in-the-ass prison for getting caught for perpetuating interstate fraud because the government was making an effort to find and prosecute these people, they might choose a different line of work.
Spam laws in and of themselves will only lead to an awful bureaucratization of email and they won't be enforceable anyway.
Setting up a phone is a huge drag, and having multiple numbers ring at one station royally sucks.
It's not that bad. We have model TNs that we just copy to make new phones. Takes longer to punch the TNs to the destination that it does in the switch. Adding additional lines to an existing TN is trivial, KEY XX SC{R|N} 1234.
What drives me nuts about it isn't the complexity, its that you define a phone more so than a *number*. I'd like a number to have a set of HUNT and FDN and other behaviors that are unique to the number regardless of the TN they appear on. Right now the MARP TN controls that behavior, which is a huge nuisance if you have a number that needs to appear on a phone with other numbers but needs unique HUNT/FDN behavior. You basically need to build a different TN, which means you need to either place an additional phone or find a place for all those "extra" phones.
I'm sure the next leap if we make one will be IP based, but I figure that standard needs another 5 years (in this economy, 3 in a good one) to stabilize and have good vendor interoperability.