And should the receiver pay for a long distance call?
The receiver isn't the one choosing the long distance service. Since the receiver IS the one choosing which cellular service to use, they're the only one in a position to shop for a better deal.
Look, I'm happy you like your system. But it really, truly, seems just as stupid to us as ours seems to you. I think it's perfectly reasonable for *me* to pay for *my* desired level of mobility. I would consider myself a jerk to ask my friends to pay extra to call me just because I decided to go to a museum in the afternoon rather than stay at home or the office. To me, that just seems like an incredibly rude and arrogant thing to do, to expect someone to pay extra to talk to me because *I* chose to step out for a bit.
I'd personally like to know if I'm calling a mobile so I can know how likely they are to answer it.
That's precisely part of the reason we *didn't* allow cell phones to get stuck on a different prefix, we didn't want people to be treated differently because they were using a cell number (whether good different or bad different). We wanted cell service to be a transparent addition to the existing phone network, and only the cell customers would have to worry about any adaptations that were necessary or extra expenses.
So area codes in America aren't geographically based then? Do you always have to dial all ten digits of a number every time you call?
In any case, in Australia most adults who've always had a land line also have a mobile phone, so they actually have two numbers, whereas younger people tend to only have a mobile phone and if they have their own home they might have a landline but not generally use it. (What good is switching your number from a mobile to a landline if you can only receive calls then when you're at home?) The mobile number works just as well in Hobart as in Darwin, and the landline number can be moved to any landline in the same local area.
Area codes are created based on geography, but they're not limited to that geography. I think at this point, most of the US does have to use 10 digit dialing, I vaguely remember hearing that over 50% of the population was in a ten-digit area as of a few years ago, because every major city has had to add new codes that are much more loosely defined.
The historical difference is that in Europe (and much of the rest of the world, presumably Australia though my apologies if not:D ), land lines were relatively expensive and bureaucratic hassles, but in the US they were pretty cheap, so we didn't adopt the cell phone as a form of regular communication. Many people here only had a cell phone "for emergencies" or occasional use, it was never a part of their daily life and the number wasn't important. Their home phone number was, so being able to transfer that important number to the cell and get rid of the landline entirely is a big deal.
If you want to look at it another way, you could switch your landline to a VOIP service for home and keep the number, keeping your cell as it always has been. The idea is that having certain numbers tied to certain devices or services is inherently limiting -- nobody could have predicted VOIP twenty years ago, but it's a more practical choice when it isn't restricted to some specific number block that may stigmatize it.
On the other hand I presume that you have to change your cell phone number if you move (out of the local area). Or does your phone number also not have a regional prefix?
You don't have to (any more), though most people do like a local area code if they're planning on staying in the new area. Our geographic area code system is slowly dying, everything is still allocated that way but we keep adding overlays and allowing newer services that are flexible in code allocation (like VOIP).
Can you keep the same landline number in different geographic regions? Didn't think so. How is that any worse than having a different number for landline or mobile?
If you change from a landline phone, which is provided by a regional company, to a phone provider that isn't regional, then yes, you can keep the old regional part of the number. And people change phone companies and technologies a little more frequently than they move thousands of miles, so even without that, it's still an advantage.
You consider our billing system stupid, I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay extra for what device someone else is using.
I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive. I read somewhere that it had to do with technical limitations around billing systems and that it just became like that by tradition (or because US law made it impossible to reverse it)
Clearly, who makes the call is the party who has the necessity to communicate, not the receiving end. Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???
Because it's the person receiving who has chosen to use a more expensive device for his communication needs. The caller has no control over what kind of a phone the person has, and it shouldn't be their responsibility to have to figure it out.
The legal history also requires that phone numbers not be allocated based on devices, because when they were we had a lot of trouble with people spamming fax machines -- giving out numbers based on devices just makes it easier to wardial. SMS spam is nonexistent in the US because it's impossible to know what numbers are cell numbers. Ultimately the number nondiscrimination law ended up making something far more important very easy, which is number portability. Here in the US, we can take any number with us from a landline to a cell or vice-versa, and between companies without restriction. We couldn't do that if we had special prefixes for different devices or networks.
Ultimately it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Folks under both billing systems have some advantages and some disadvantages. Americans pay some of the lowest amounts for cell phone air time, so it's not as if the system we have is ripping us off for airtime. We have a lot of other problems in our cell industry, but the billing allocation system isn't really one of them.
In Australia we have this amazing system where mobile phone numbers start with different numbers to land line numbers.
In America we have this amazing system where we can keep our phone numbers regardless of what device we're using. We don't have to tell everyone we've ever met to update their phone books when we change from a land line to a cell phone or from one company to another.
Maybe the problem with batons is that they can cause permanent damage. You are trying to subdue someone and hit them, but crack their skull and cause permanent brain damage. Maybe the good police want tasers because it gives a less lethal, means of subduing someone
That's absolutely true, tasers are devices with a very valid purpose. Don't assume people criticizing how they're used are anarchist tree-huggers. Too many people and organizations do seem to forget what less lethal means -- it means they're still dangerous devices that should only be used when absolutely necessary. Firing a taser should be treated like firing a gun in terms of procedure -- in many places it would immediately remove the officer from the street while a civilian review board looks at the case. We've seen cases here in Texas where it was clear that the officers basically used the tasers as a form of entertainment because they were annoyed by someone talking back to them. A taser isn't meant to make up for a small penis.
That said, I think you underestimate how many police and military organizations outside the first world genuinely do seek means to actively assault people without leaving evidence. It's not an accident that our friends in Central and South America switched to using electrical torture and other evidence-less means of persuasion in the 80s, when we wanted to support them but found images of mangled dissidents or dead relatives politically troublesome on the evening news. I suspect the UN is a little more concerned about how tasers and similar devices are used in those places than they are about how they're used in Akron, Ohio.
That's a form of torture too and the kind of "non-lethal force" the police used to turn to. The only difference between beating someone with a baton and tasering them is that the officer using a taser doesn't have to be physically stronger than the victim (err, suspect), and suspects don't think they can fight back like they do against police using batons.
The critical difference is that when you beat someone with a baton, you leave bruises and other evidence of abuse. The reason police and militaries love tasers (and microwave radiation, electrical shocks, waterboarding, etc) is that they can go to town on anyone and it is the suspects' word against the cops' about how harshly they were treated. Perfectly healthy looking people are a lot less interesting to show on the news than folks with black eyes and broken arms.
There's a big difference between actual competition (which is great) and competition that exists only long enough to bankrupt a competitor so that your primary market is extended (if only for a few more months).
If MS and Intel want to seriously get -- and STAY -- in the game of providing system for the developing world, that's great. The concern is that they'll produce just enough press releases for the XO to stop getting orders it needs to stay viable, then once the XO is basically dead, MS/Intel say "oh, well now that we look at the market, we really think tour new $500 design is more appropriate". Then it would take another year or three for the XO or something similar to get back into production. Anyone with more than a few months of experience in the computer industry is familiar with this pattern.
As a side note, I was shocked when my sister, who is about as technical as "my computer's cupholder is broken!" actually mentioned the "buy one get one" promotion over Thanksgiving. They've done a great job marketing, even if my sister didn't have any idea what the program was about or what made the computer unusual, she just knew about it as the $150 laptop.
I...like...using iLike, because they have an iTunes plugin for mac and windows that automatically goes through your tracks, your ratings, etc and recommends Garageband artists with similar music. You can click and download free tracks (sometimes entire free albums!) right there from the recommendations drawer that it adds to iTunes, no browser windows or extra program interfaces to deal with. it's retty much ideal if you actually use itunes as your music player.
last.fm is older and more established on the social networking side, but I think it's a little less convenient for the actual music part.
The Touch is perfectly readable with decent ambient light, the only time you'd NEED the backlight are times when you wouldn't be able to read an e-ink device at all. So i guess i don't see that as a drawback of the touch (or another decent, modern handheld LCD device).
I'm sure the people who designed this feature were bright enough to consider how it might be used, and when. I suspect that there is a great body of evidence showing that attracting attention to a bad situation is a very good strategy:
Yeah, I'm sure verizon hired a team of criminologists to evaluate their software.
No self-defense instructor teaches that one single response is best for every situation. Having one imposed on an unwitting victim is a recipe for disaster.
Some of the prepaid services are stupid that way, charging you a bit out of your pool every month and then an extra per-call fee on top of the per-minute fees. It's basically their way of saying "we really don't want to provide prepaid service, but someone in a meeting thought it would be a good idea".
Go with T-mobile for prepaid, there's nothing but paying the 10 cents per minute. the minutes do expire based on how may you buy, but if you buy $100 in minutes (total, over the lifetime of the account, it doesn't have to be all at once) then your minutes will last for a year from whenever the last time you bought some. So buy a $10 card on day 364 if you still have a bunch left over and all your minutes last for another year. It's the best system in the US for emergency/temporary use, they don't seem to view prepaid customers as a bunch of drug dealing homeless people like other US carriers.
the ipod touch while having a better screen, has a fraction of the battery life of all those units who can go hundreds of pages between charges.
It's certainly true you get more page views out of an e-ink device, but if you just used an iPod touch for reading text, it would last 24+ hours on a single charge. That's a week or two of use for even a fairly avid reader, hardly a huge battery inconvenience. I think anyone who finds the screen size acceptable will be quite happy with the rest of the feautures and performance of something like a Touch (or Palm, or WinCE).
You trust a site.. on the internet. You are an idiot.
The luddites from 1997 called and want their paranoia back.
I, and many millions of others, trust some web sites with huge quantities of personal financial information. We call them "banks" here on the surface world. That information can do far more personal damage to our lives than any virus could. The idea that I should be more afraid of running a Java applet from my bank than I should be of say, providing them with root access to my retirement fund, is absurd.
If I offer you a virus and you happily run it because you think it will give you more security, I think that's a reasonable test to see whether or not you're likely already infected with a virus (because even if you weren't, you are now).
I think if your bank web site offers you a virus, the problem is not with the user accepting it.
the idea of Apple relying on someone else to provide the content goes against Apple's business plan
Since when did Apple dislike selling other people's content? I'm pretty sure they don't own any record companies or TV networks or movie companies, but that's all the content they sell.
The above would have made sense if they threw the words "consumer" and "choice". But, oh, that would be too much to ask. Who gives a heck about the consumer?
You're criticizing the word choice of the (ridiculously brief) article, not the lawsuit or the laws the suit is based on.
Let me get this straight, if I want to sell a product, I have to follow the law? You're right, that's horrible, no wonder Germany is such a third-world country known for hating modern technology.
Next thing you know, some litigious bastard will suggest that AT&T should have to let us choose which phones to use on our landlines! You knew the deal when you signed up for service, it's only whiners who want to stop competition who suggest that renting your princess phone is too expensive.
Are you sure your SATA stuff isn't set in the BIOS to use the legacy settings, which provide for precisely that kind of behavior? yes, it will work, but then you just pissed away all the advantages of SATA. or is this an OEM system with slipstreamed drivers?
I've installed hundreds of XP SP2 systems in the past several years on generic Intel, NVidia and Promise SATA chipsets, and never had it capable of using a SATA hard drive as a primary drive using stock retail, corporate, or generic OEM discs.
By all means report that "the mother of one of the girl's friends" has been accused of this, but personally identifying information should rightly be prevented from being published in any medium whether it be a newspaper or a blog until the accusation has been found to be true.
So you're okay with it being published, now that you've read the article and found out that the woman being accused actually detailed her involvement to the police herself, right? There's no question of her identity or actions, the accused woman called the police and volunteered all of this information to explain why her foosball table was damaged by the dead girls' family.
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The receiver isn't the one choosing the long distance service. Since the receiver IS the one choosing which cellular service to use, they're the only one in a position to shop for a better deal.
Look, I'm happy you like your system. But it really, truly, seems just as stupid to us as ours seems to you. I think it's perfectly reasonable for *me* to pay for *my* desired level of mobility. I would consider myself a jerk to ask my friends to pay extra to call me just because I decided to go to a museum in the afternoon rather than stay at home or the office. To me, that just seems like an incredibly rude and arrogant thing to do, to expect someone to pay extra to talk to me because *I* chose to step out for a bit.
That's precisely part of the reason we *didn't* allow cell phones to get stuck on a different prefix, we didn't want people to be treated differently because they were using a cell number (whether good different or bad different). We wanted cell service to be a transparent addition to the existing phone network, and only the cell customers would have to worry about any adaptations that were necessary or extra expenses.
Area codes are created based on geography, but they're not limited to that geography. I think at this point, most of the US does have to use 10 digit dialing, I vaguely remember hearing that over 50% of the population was in a ten-digit area as of a few years ago, because every major city has had to add new codes that are much more loosely defined.
The historical difference is that in Europe (and much of the rest of the world, presumably Australia though my apologies if not
If you want to look at it another way, you could switch your landline to a VOIP service for home and keep the number, keeping your cell as it always has been. The idea is that having certain numbers tied to certain devices or services is inherently limiting -- nobody could have predicted VOIP twenty years ago, but it's a more practical choice when it isn't restricted to some specific number block that may stigmatize it.
You don't have to (any more), though most people do like a local area code if they're planning on staying in the new area. Our geographic area code system is slowly dying, everything is still allocated that way but we keep adding overlays and allowing newer services that are flexible in code allocation (like VOIP).
If you change from a landline phone, which is provided by a regional company, to a phone provider that isn't regional, then yes, you can keep the old regional part of the number. And people change phone companies and technologies a little more frequently than they move thousands of miles, so even without that, it's still an advantage.
You consider our billing system stupid, I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay extra for what device someone else is using.
Because it's the person receiving who has chosen to use a more expensive device for his communication needs. The caller has no control over what kind of a phone the person has, and it shouldn't be their responsibility to have to figure it out.
The legal history also requires that phone numbers not be allocated based on devices, because when they were we had a lot of trouble with people spamming fax machines -- giving out numbers based on devices just makes it easier to wardial. SMS spam is nonexistent in the US because it's impossible to know what numbers are cell numbers. Ultimately the number nondiscrimination law ended up making something far more important very easy, which is number portability. Here in the US, we can take any number with us from a landline to a cell or vice-versa, and between companies without restriction. We couldn't do that if we had special prefixes for different devices or networks.
Ultimately it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Folks under both billing systems have some advantages and some disadvantages. Americans pay some of the lowest amounts for cell phone air time, so it's not as if the system we have is ripping us off for airtime. We have a lot of other problems in our cell industry, but the billing allocation system isn't really one of them.
In America we have this amazing system where we can keep our phone numbers regardless of what device we're using. We don't have to tell everyone we've ever met to update their phone books when we change from a land line to a cell phone or from one company to another.
Maybe the problem with batons is that they can cause permanent damage. You are trying to subdue someone and hit them, but crack their skull and cause permanent brain damage. Maybe the good police want tasers because it gives a less lethal, means of subduing someone
That's absolutely true, tasers are devices with a very valid purpose. Don't assume people criticizing how they're used are anarchist tree-huggers. Too many people and organizations do seem to forget what less lethal means -- it means they're still dangerous devices that should only be used when absolutely necessary. Firing a taser should be treated like firing a gun in terms of procedure -- in many places it would immediately remove the officer from the street while a civilian review board looks at the case. We've seen cases here in Texas where it was clear that the officers basically used the tasers as a form of entertainment because they were annoyed by someone talking back to them. A taser isn't meant to make up for a small penis.
That said, I think you underestimate how many police and military organizations outside the first world genuinely do seek means to actively assault people without leaving evidence. It's not an accident that our friends in Central and South America switched to using electrical torture and other evidence-less means of persuasion in the 80s, when we wanted to support them but found images of mangled dissidents or dead relatives politically troublesome on the evening news. I suspect the UN is a little more concerned about how tasers and similar devices are used in those places than they are about how they're used in Akron, Ohio.
That's a form of torture too and the kind of "non-lethal force" the police used to turn to. The only difference between beating someone with a baton and tasering them is that the officer using a taser doesn't have to be physically stronger than the victim (err, suspect), and suspects don't think they can fight back like they do against police using batons.
The critical difference is that when you beat someone with a baton, you leave bruises and other evidence of abuse. The reason police and militaries love tasers (and microwave radiation, electrical shocks, waterboarding, etc) is that they can go to town on anyone and it is the suspects' word against the cops' about how harshly they were treated. Perfectly healthy looking people are a lot less interesting to show on the news than folks with black eyes and broken arms.
There's a big difference between actual competition (which is great) and competition that exists only long enough to bankrupt a competitor so that your primary market is extended (if only for a few more months).
If MS and Intel want to seriously get -- and STAY -- in the game of providing system for the developing world, that's great. The concern is that they'll produce just enough press releases for the XO to stop getting orders it needs to stay viable, then once the XO is basically dead, MS/Intel say "oh, well now that we look at the market, we really think tour new $500 design is more appropriate". Then it would take another year or three for the XO or something similar to get back into production. Anyone with more than a few months of experience in the computer industry is familiar with this pattern.
As a side note, I was shocked when my sister, who is about as technical as "my computer's cupholder is broken!" actually mentioned the "buy one get one" promotion over Thanksgiving. They've done a great job marketing, even if my sister didn't have any idea what the program was about or what made the computer unusual, she just knew about it as the $150 laptop.
Let me guess, you finally get up the nerve to ask out that cute girl in marketing and got turned down?
I...like...using iLike, because they have an iTunes plugin for mac and windows that automatically goes through your tracks, your ratings, etc and recommends Garageband artists with similar music. You can click and download free tracks (sometimes entire free albums!) right there from the recommendations drawer that it adds to iTunes, no browser windows or extra program interfaces to deal with. it's retty much ideal if you actually use itunes as your music player.
last.fm is older and more established on the social networking side, but I think it's a little less convenient for the actual music part.
The Touch is perfectly readable with decent ambient light, the only time you'd NEED the backlight are times when you wouldn't be able to read an e-ink device at all. So i guess i don't see that as a drawback of the touch (or another decent, modern handheld LCD device).
I'm sure the people who designed this feature were bright enough to consider how it might be used, and when. I suspect that there is a great body of evidence showing that attracting attention to a bad situation is a very good strategy:
Yeah, I'm sure verizon hired a team of criminologists to evaluate their software.
No self-defense instructor teaches that one single response is best for every situation. Having one imposed on an unwitting victim is a recipe for disaster.
Some of the prepaid services are stupid that way, charging you a bit out of your pool every month and then an extra per-call fee on top of the per-minute fees. It's basically their way of saying "we really don't want to provide prepaid service, but someone in a meeting thought it would be a good idea".
Go with T-mobile for prepaid, there's nothing but paying the 10 cents per minute. the minutes do expire based on how may you buy, but if you buy $100 in minutes (total, over the lifetime of the account, it doesn't have to be all at once) then your minutes will last for a year from whenever the last time you bought some. So buy a $10 card on day 364 if you still have a bunch left over and all your minutes last for another year. It's the best system in the US for emergency/temporary use, they don't seem to view prepaid customers as a bunch of drug dealing homeless people like other US carriers.
I used to have a phone which would dial 911 if you held down the 1 key for a couple seconds, and there was no way to change that.
Wow, that's quite a feature, considering most phones use holding down the "1" key as the shortcut to access voice mail!
the ipod touch while having a better screen, has a fraction of the battery life of all those units who can go hundreds of pages between charges.
It's certainly true you get more page views out of an e-ink device, but if you just used an iPod touch for reading text, it would last 24+ hours on a single charge. That's a week or two of use for even a fairly avid reader, hardly a huge battery inconvenience. I think anyone who finds the screen size acceptable will be quite happy with the rest of the feautures and performance of something like a Touch (or Palm, or WinCE).
You trust a site.. on the internet. You are an idiot.
The luddites from 1997 called and want their paranoia back.
I, and many millions of others, trust some web sites with huge quantities of personal financial information. We call them "banks" here on the surface world. That information can do far more personal damage to our lives than any virus could. The idea that I should be more afraid of running a Java applet from my bank than I should be of say, providing them with root access to my retirement fund, is absurd.
If I offer you a virus and you happily run it because you think it will give you more security, I think that's a reasonable test to see whether or not you're likely already infected with a virus (because even if you weren't, you are now).
I think if your bank web site offers you a virus, the problem is not with the user accepting it.
Since when did Apple dislike selling other people's content? I'm pretty sure they don't own any record companies or TV networks or movie companies, but that's all the content they sell.
time clod insensitive, live some of in nonlinear us you!
You're criticizing the word choice of the (ridiculously brief) article, not the lawsuit or the laws the suit is based on.
Let me get this straight, if I want to sell a product, I have to follow the law? You're right, that's horrible, no wonder Germany is such a third-world country known for hating modern technology.
Next thing you know, some litigious bastard will suggest that AT&T should have to let us choose which phones to use on our landlines! You knew the deal when you signed up for service, it's only whiners who want to stop competition who suggest that renting your princess phone is too expensive.
Are you sure your SATA stuff isn't set in the BIOS to use the legacy settings, which provide for precisely that kind of behavior? yes, it will work, but then you just pissed away all the advantages of SATA. or is this an OEM system with slipstreamed drivers?
I've installed hundreds of XP SP2 systems in the past several years on generic Intel, NVidia and Promise SATA chipsets, and never had it capable of using a SATA hard drive as a primary drive using stock retail, corporate, or generic OEM discs.
By all means report that "the mother of one of the girl's friends" has been accused of this, but personally identifying information should rightly be prevented from being published in any medium whether it be a newspaper or a blog until the accusation has been found to be true.
So you're okay with it being published, now that you've read the article and found out that the woman being accused actually detailed her involvement to the police herself, right? There's no question of her identity or actions, the accused woman called the police and volunteered all of this information to explain why her foosball table was damaged by the dead girls' family.