I like the quote from Stratton about, "the bewidering air," he experienced. I have the feeling that this is what happens when you are faced with the prospect that your perceptions are manufactured by your intellectual apparatuses, and these may be suspect. The next step is to realize that you have the opportunity to question the way you 'see' the rest of the world around you, as well.
This is not unlike what happens when people realize their existence is not tethered to the Tao or the Dow.
This differs completely from the adaptation of expectation that takes place when lens of propaganda driven public education is promoted, a priori, then erased over time by continual exposure to reality. You don't just wake up one day and figure out that the American Dream should be referred to as the Grand Illusion. It takes much longer to figure out that your government, and other 'fiduciaries', might not be up to the task of reflecting your expectations. Your intellectual habits suffer from confirmation bias.
Posse Comitatus limits the use of military personnel for domestic law enforcement except... when insurrection is involved. What's a domestic terrorist, in not an insurrectionist?
Let it rain!! Think of it as karma. We need to start over, why wait?
The U.S., like Israel, has become that which we claimed to revile. We allow corporate industrialists to become the architects of a society that values financial wealth and superficial consumption over the western ideals that we claimed to promote. We use the most advanced technology we can develop to kill our enemies at a distance. Our government tortures and imprisons people while hiding from our own courts and creating new artificial legal justifications that we sequester from public scrutiny.
The Israelis can't see how Nazi-like their government has become in their treatment of the Palestinians any more than U.S. power elites will acknowledge how immoral, dictatorial and neo-feudal their policies have rendered the U.S. domestic life or our treatment of people outside the country through our foreign policies.
The build out of the transportation infrastructure necessary to import and process Canadian tar sands, the extraction of which could never take place within U.S. national boundaries without rewriting our environmental law, should serve as a case study. The corporate cleptocracy can always find the means to profit, regardless of the best efforts of legitimate leadership to require industry to live up to the ideals promoted by responsible people seeking reasonable levels of safe healthy economic activity. Industry frames this issue in terms that can be used to justify their desires while denying the obvious contraindications and reasonable warnings about the health and environmental consequences.
IF you want to talk about metaphorical box cutters or dangerous tools in the hand of unreasonable people, you should start by paying closer attention to those closest to you. And if you wanted to see ethically challenged people change, you should require that they live in direct contract with that which they are responsible for creating. Gas company execs should have the emissions and effluents from their plants pumped right through their living rooms, oil company and coal mining execs should drink the same water they pollute and bankers should have been required to invest their entire retirement savings in the same toxic assets they marketed to the world at large.
Karma isn't optional but we could make it a whole lot more immediate.
If I were Kim Jong-un, I'd think twice about threatening China's biggest debtor. The very thought that the U.S. might not be able to repay its debt to China with its overvalued dollars, the velocity of which depends on the rate at which U.S. consumers purchase cheap plastic crap and consumer electronics from the newly crowned king of knock-offs and outsourced labor, seems unfathomable.
China would squash N. Korea like a bug, right after we loosed the drones of war, into the breach... again.
".. a ban on all forms of pornography in the media and on the advertising of sex tourism."
The language in the explanation is broad enough to suggest that all pornography could be banned, unless you can deliver it through something other than, "the media."
I'd love to see a comparative economic analysis of the value of those things delivered over the net versus their historical equivalent and the value of anything new offered as a result of Internet based tech. It seems to me that the price the consumer is asked to pay for bandwidth is going up, even though the cost to the provider remains the same of shrinks. After all, most consumers don't exercise control over the advertising that piggybacks on the content they request, and it's the flash-crap, embedded ads, surveys and cross-site scripting that account for the ten-fold increase in page size that's occurred as a result of Adobe and Macromedia's success peddling their products to advertizers.
The dynamics of internet use and business costs seem weighted in favor of content providers, the supply side. The end user is asked to pay more and more, most of it to subsidize bandwidth the average user never uses. (Up until recently no one had ever heard of caps on "Unlimited" bandwidth). We're asked to be responsible for the geometric increase in bandwidth use, primarily for the benefit of advertizers and video consumption. What if I don't want my Internet connection to become what my TV used to be? Why should I subsidize the build out of high speed connections so Comcast, Time Warner and the like can pump my brain full of industrial waste?
Before the internet became common, all you needed to receive TV and Radio was a device, and if you wanted print media, you purchased a book or a periodical. News junkies subscribed. Direct mail was expensive and ineffective.
Now you need a computer and you pay for broadcast bandwidth. Everything has a price except periodicals )most of which ran to the cliff's edge like jihadists convinced they'd die if they didn't commit suicide first). Now you pay for video because televsion is worthless given the dilution and interruption of broadcast advertising. Advertising over the net has become ubiquitous and cheap, though no one can convince me it's any more effective than bulk mail, notwithstanding that fact it's more environmentally sound. Also, Internet use has nearly killed off the U.S. Post Office, and it's indirectly responsible for the concentration of ownership in the recording industry.
Interactivity has definitely changed the landscape. I don't have to leave my house to shop, and you can play with your neighbor without leaving the house, meeting up or worrying about washing your clothes afterward. But it's not without eventual cost. The shopping part may be a benefit, unless except to those in rural areas which are both starved for bandwidth AND your universal postal service cost is escalating because of so-called competition from UPS and FedEx, which aren't required to keep prices the same for those who live in the boonies, like the USPS is.
I could go on, but I'd be curious where the Internet-chair economists on Slashdot weigh in on this.... (I think).
It's differentiation based on values, interuser traffic going down is less consequential than metauser traffic going up. The value system in place is obviously corporate. Has there ever been any doubt in your mind? If so, then consider yourself slow or idealistic. At least you can decide that for yourself.
If you were posting buy/sell offers on eBray of CraigsHotList, I could see the value of easily tracking your ID. If you're using a free service and the provider just wants to enhance their own market value, not so much.
You mean like casting a ballot in an election? I agree. Profit and the extinction of a reasonable expectation for privacy are the only 2 reasons for requiring your legal name.
from TFA: "Analysis shows that general-purpose computer workstations and UAS GCSes are up to 98% similar. "
There's your problem, right there. Flying a desk is not the same thing as flying a computer.
There's a reason that certain cockpit controls have different shapes. For example, tactile feedback, as long as you're trained to pay attention to it, can spare you the embarrassment of mistaking your flaps from your landing gear. Just in case you've never flown, retracting the gear when you're "going around" is a good idea (it reduces drag and increases your rate of climb) but retracting your flaps at the wrong time can kill you during the same procedure.
And where are the software designers in all of this? Flying without any sort of contextually accurate or appropriate sensory feedback creates a deficit. As a pilot, if you can't hear the engine or feel the effects of flight control inputs, you're at a disadvantage. Pilots are taught to pay attention to more than flight gauges and readouts. Software designers have the luxury of setting up AI algorithms that could cross check parameters, provide feedback and require verification before allowing a desk jockey to shut down an engine while an aircraft is at-or-below some critical elevation.
It's nice to know that there are standards for ergonomics and all, but there are reasons that the pilots of commercial aviation operations are still in the plane. Yes, one of them is so the passengers feel better about the experience, but the rest of them have more to do with controlling safety than anything else. It amazes me that to know that software exists target and intercept an incoming ICBM, but the military isn't using software to control its drones (the aircraft, not the 'pilots') more effectively?
Me thinks someone's having too much very expensive fun.
There seems to be this common misconception that a network can be broken into without causing any damage. Tell that to the IT department that has to re-flash and re-image every damn machine on the network to make sure no backdoors were left behind.
There seems to be this common misconception that having to fix a network to remove holes and backdoors is somehow worse than having lived with it for some time without knowing it Not to mention the fact that your second sentence does not substantiate the first, also known as the non sequitur fallacy: not having caused any damage and being under suspicion for having caused some are two completely independent things.
It IS sort of funny to think that re-imaging an insecure system in order to bring it back to it's former state of brokenness constitutes repair or implies that damage was done.
Perhaps the perpetrator should should have been tracked down and awarded a consulting fee or offered a job.
I used to get calls from Rachel on my cell, so I called AT&T, multiple times, to let them know I was receiving illegal commercial solicitations and ask that they reverse the charges AND block calls from that number. AT&T's response was to offer me the 'opportunity' to upgrade my service that would allow me the option of paying an extra monthly recurring service fee for software that would allow me to maintain my own list of blocked CID's. The nice Indian CSR from AT&T explained 'their' system did not include any means (he knew of) by which the company would/could block such calls for me, their legal customer, from receiving incoming illegally placed calls. I got the same explanation regarding illegal commercial solicitations via text services.
Apparently, even though these are common, illegal problems, AT&T and other 'service' providers are under absolutely no obligation to do anything whatsoever about providing a solution (for free). I consider their offer an upgrade which will accomplish the task an example of corporate extortion. I say this with all sincerity because the service provider in the U.S. charges both parties, originating and receiving parties, for the privilege of using the system. To me this indicates a certain level of responsibility, to legitimate customers and the law. And if you're profiting from the illegal use of your network, then you have funds to devote to the solution. (You don't really believe the FCC regulators or your elected representatives and staff don't understand this, do you?)
Unfortunately, it seems to take 3 things for a corporation the size of AT&T to rise to the occasion and do the right thing, a law, an adequately funded, responsible agency and lots of consumer feedback directed at the right ears in government AND the companies executive staff. Otherwise it's too easy for the bloodsuckers and the bean counters to chalk the revenue up to the bottom line and cry poor when the FCC representative happens to mention the problem over drinks at some well funded D.C. junket.
And lest we forget, there's an entirely under served class of people who suffer disproportionately, the non-contract customer who isn't even given the option of paying for the extortive, web-based call-blocking solution. My bet is that most of these folks fall into at least 1 of 3 categories; poor, fixed income and/or immigrant. The poor can get subsidized service, paid for with tax dollars. Most of those a fixed income don't understand the issue. And the immigrants who buy no-contract phones? Do you really think the people who run AT&T or the FCC really care about such folks? I don't, and I don't see much emphasis on such matters in our illustrious press.
The reporting piece at NY Times is one of the very few that covers an issue that must generate hundreds of thousands in revenue for carriers and an adequate opportunity for scammers that the scams keep on being marketed via wire fraud.
Well, so far I haven't found something that beats the sound of the Kindle HD, but it is tempting to buy this thing just because it runs stock Android.
I don't relish turning control of my device or experience over to Amazon whose goal is to dominate the world's retail sales without regard for quality or the ramifications or source, process or politics. In short I don't trust Amazon's motivations because they don't seem to think beyond the common trappings of capitalism. That being said, neither HP or Google has yet to earn the right to claim a higher level of overall responsibility or accountability to much other than the bottom line.
The microSD card slot is a welcome improvement but a 3 mega-pixel camera... really?
Yeah, right, break them up. We like to talk a lot about education, but if you don't have access to the data necessary to understand just how a system works, then its general academic treatment isn't really adequate to allow you the freedom to discuss it intelligently. This is a great example.
U.S. based cell companies came up with a way to control their 'customers' using 'subsidies' that require a 2-year 'commitment' for service in exchange for a what appears to a be a lower price. Everyone comes out ahead, right? Well if that's true, then why don't you know how much your phone actually cost you? And why, at the end of your 2-year commitment, doesn't the service provider offer you a lower rate to reflect that fact that you've paid off the phone? And if you've paid off your phone, why should you even have to ask to have it unlocked?
In the EU, you buy phones and service from different companies. That requires the financial details be made explicit. They know how much they're phone costs, and if there's financing involved, it's explicitly arranged and documented. And guess what? Cell service companies have to compete, and service by the minute is 1/2 what it costs here. Consumers get to the actual choices about what hardware succeeds in the market, because their choices, not cell those of cell company executives, govern what sells. And since you can't be locked into accepting crappy service from the likes of AT&T, the service providers have a greater incentive to improve service before the spend millions of euros lying about how much better their network performs so their captive (sheeple) customers don't have to feel quite so bad if they ever read Consumer Reports.
Our government allows cell companies here to serve up whatever pile of hot dog shit they can dream up, and we leave it to consumers, who aren't educated enough to care whether the sell-companies require their sales agents to tell the truth much less wear a condom before they fuck you. And most everyone I see with the latest and greatest Smart(r) phone has no idea what it actually costs them because they're so enamored with their Angry Birdlike 1st person centripetal bumble-pootie that they can hardly look another human being in the face.
So that kinda leaves out the relevance of a question like, "does anyone know why an elected representative would care enough, let alone understand whether it's even possible, to ask cell carriers to change their business model?"
U.S. cell companies suck for the same reason dogs lick their balls... because they can. So ask yourself, if you live in a Capitalist society, but your markets aren't actually free because your government doesn't require open access or honest and fair treatment of you, let alone accountability when they screw you blind. Are you free?
This could easily be used as a sort of blanket hold-harmless statute, absolving online commerce providers from liability in the event their users violate ToS. That way Facebook et al can't be held liable for libel committed by a user of someone else's nom de plum, pseudonym or legitimately acquired moniker.
In that context it would cut off nuisance lawsuits and cut down on digital second-life ambulance chasers.
"I am a somewhat experienced software developer who is pretty much an office drone.
With this description of your status, it seems to me that you lack not just an acceptable environment in which to play code monkey but a purpose from which you can derive some satisfaction. I agree with those that would have you avoid confronting, 'the manipulative jerks,' because the fish rots from the head. It sounds like you need to involve yourself in something more meaningful. Something more directly tied to your value system, thereby allowing you to take some satisfaction from the belief that your efforts connect you to the purpose your efforts facilitate.
1st of all, the premise that manufacturers sell to users is incorrect. Manufacturers sell to carriers. Carriers market to users. And the carriers don't care what approved phone you buy. Their selection is based on business concerns well outside the user experience.
Penultimately, the only thing the carriers actually care about is the monthly recurring services fees generated by the use of voice, text, data and the revenue share generated by music, video, and app sales. They do impose standards or operation that manufacturers have to meet in order to be considered for branding and sales through the company store, but they don't give a rats ass about usability. And the term reliability is reserved for the description of phones' performance as a network device.
As to the crux of marketing to the consumer, I've been around enough marketing and sales people to understand that most of them hold a low opinion of the consumer. Computer sales and marketing campaigns have rarely if ever provided meaningful or reliable metrics to the end user. Users are inundated with basic specs, processor speed and memory and storage capacity. Winmark and Winstone got some play in the rags that pass for consumer oriented periodicals, but I don't know anyone who considers these publications to provide much more than paid advertising, pretty pictures and hype. I mean, when's the last time any Slashdotterer read Walter Mossberg's column when seriously investigating a purchase decision?
Geriatrician Muriel R. Gillick, in her book "The Denial of Aging, emphasizes the social consequences of faith in an ageless old age: “If we assume that Alzheimer’s disease will be cured and disability abolished in the near term,” she writes, “we will have no incentive to develop long-term-care facilities that focus on enabling residents to lead satisfying lives despite their disabilities.”
Aside from which, currently there is nowhere in the world where society is adequately planning for an economic transition to a generally sustainable model for life that will protect the biosphere, the ecosphere or develop a politisphere capable of allowing 'humanity' to achieve the dubious goal of for average lifespan. The competitive model of economics and politics won't allow for it, and the wealthy who promote the concept that enough gated sanctuaries might survive the turmoil that will occur if mankind continues pushing the envelope to determine the actual carrying capacity of the earth are already delusional or just nihilistic enough to believe that The Tau and the DOW are synonymous.
Whatever New Age drivel was cited in TFA should be ignored because the evidence is clear, a globalized, competitive economically will collapse long before the average lifespan grows by another 10%. And even though your grandparents aren't talking about, assuming they're able, the quality of life beyond 80 exists on a graph defined by a decreasing curvilinear function. If you want to consider your mortality you should really think of it in terms of your legacy, not your longevity.
Of course if you live in a consumer society, that's a bit like encouraging a fish to think about space travel.
Didn't you mean to POST this information at FCC.gov where it might do some good, or were you just trying to be ironic by posting it here where no one really cares if you didn't research you purchase before you signed the contract?
Slashdot Mirror
I like the quote from Stratton about, "the bewidering air," he experienced. I have the feeling that this is what happens when you are faced with the prospect that your perceptions are manufactured by your intellectual apparatuses, and these may be suspect. The next step is to realize that you have the opportunity to question the way you 'see' the rest of the world around you, as well.
This is not unlike what happens when people realize their existence is not tethered to the Tao or the Dow.
[citation provided]
George Stratton did an experiment on perceptual adaptation in the 1980's.
This differs completely from the adaptation of expectation that takes place when lens of propaganda driven public education is promoted, a priori, then erased over time by continual exposure to reality. You don't just wake up one day and figure out that the American Dream should be referred to as the Grand Illusion. It takes much longer to figure out that your government, and other 'fiduciaries', might not be up to the task of reflecting your expectations. Your intellectual habits suffer from confirmation bias .
What if the question had been, "Does the President have the authority to order...?
Posse Comitatus limits the use of military personnel for domestic law enforcement except... when insurrection is involved. What's a domestic terrorist, in not an insurrectionist?
Let it rain!! Think of it as karma. We need to start over, why wait?
The U.S., like Israel, has become that which we claimed to revile. We allow corporate industrialists to become the architects of a society that values financial wealth and superficial consumption over the western ideals that we claimed to promote. We use the most advanced technology we can develop to kill our enemies at a distance. Our government tortures and imprisons people while hiding from our own courts and creating new artificial legal justifications that we sequester from public scrutiny.
The Israelis can't see how Nazi-like their government has become in their treatment of the Palestinians any more than U.S. power elites will acknowledge how immoral, dictatorial and neo-feudal their policies have rendered the U.S. domestic life or our treatment of people outside the country through our foreign policies.
The build out of the transportation infrastructure necessary to import and process Canadian tar sands, the extraction of which could never take place within U.S. national boundaries without rewriting our environmental law, should serve as a case study. The corporate cleptocracy can always find the means to profit, regardless of the best efforts of legitimate leadership to require industry to live up to the ideals promoted by responsible people seeking reasonable levels of safe healthy economic activity. Industry frames this issue in terms that can be used to justify their desires while denying the obvious contraindications and reasonable warnings about the health and environmental consequences.
IF you want to talk about metaphorical box cutters or dangerous tools in the hand of unreasonable people, you should start by paying closer attention to those closest to you. And if you wanted to see ethically challenged people change, you should require that they live in direct contract with that which they are responsible for creating. Gas company execs should have the emissions and effluents from their plants pumped right through their living rooms, oil company and coal mining execs should drink the same water they pollute and bankers should have been required to invest their entire retirement savings in the same toxic assets they marketed to the world at large.
Karma isn't optional but we could make it a whole lot more immediate.
If I were Kim Jong-un, I'd think twice about threatening China's biggest debtor. The very thought that the U.S. might not be able to repay its debt to China with its overvalued dollars, the velocity of which depends on the rate at which U.S. consumers purchase cheap plastic crap and consumer electronics from the newly crowned king of knock-offs and outsourced labor, seems unfathomable. China would squash N. Korea like a bug, right after we loosed the drones of war, into the breach... again.
Your average airline is running on razor-thin margins.
You must have on tough beard.
".. a ban on all forms of pornography in the media and on the advertising of sex tourism."
The language in the explanation is broad enough to suggest that all pornography could be banned, unless you can deliver it through something other than, "the media."
I'd love to see a comparative economic analysis of the value of those things delivered over the net versus their historical equivalent and the value of anything new offered as a result of Internet based tech. It seems to me that the price the consumer is asked to pay for bandwidth is going up, even though the cost to the provider remains the same of shrinks. After all, most consumers don't exercise control over the advertising that piggybacks on the content they request, and it's the flash-crap, embedded ads, surveys and cross-site scripting that account for the ten-fold increase in page size that's occurred as a result of Adobe and Macromedia's success peddling their products to advertizers.
The dynamics of internet use and business costs seem weighted in favor of content providers, the supply side. The end user is asked to pay more and more, most of it to subsidize bandwidth the average user never uses. (Up until recently no one had ever heard of caps on "Unlimited" bandwidth). We're asked to be responsible for the geometric increase in bandwidth use, primarily for the benefit of advertizers and video consumption. What if I don't want my Internet connection to become what my TV used to be? Why should I subsidize the build out of high speed connections so Comcast, Time Warner and the like can pump my brain full of industrial waste?
Before the internet became common, all you needed to receive TV and Radio was a device, and if you wanted print media, you purchased a book or a periodical. News junkies subscribed. Direct mail was expensive and ineffective.
Now you need a computer and you pay for broadcast bandwidth. Everything has a price except periodicals )most of which ran to the cliff's edge like jihadists convinced they'd die if they didn't commit suicide first). Now you pay for video because televsion is worthless given the dilution and interruption of broadcast advertising. Advertising over the net has become ubiquitous and cheap, though no one can convince me it's any more effective than bulk mail, notwithstanding that fact it's more environmentally sound. Also, Internet use has nearly killed off the U.S. Post Office, and it's indirectly responsible for the concentration of ownership in the recording industry.
Interactivity has definitely changed the landscape. I don't have to leave my house to shop, and you can play with your neighbor without leaving the house, meeting up or worrying about washing your clothes afterward. But it's not without eventual cost. The shopping part may be a benefit, unless except to those in rural areas which are both starved for bandwidth AND your universal postal service cost is escalating because of so-called competition from UPS and FedEx, which aren't required to keep prices the same for those who live in the boonies, like the USPS is.
I could go on, but I'd be curious where the Internet-chair economists on Slashdot weigh in on this.... (I think).
It's differentiation based on values, interuser traffic going down is less consequential than metauser traffic going up. The value system in place is obviously corporate. Has there ever been any doubt in your mind? If so, then consider yourself slow or idealistic. At least you can decide that for yourself.
If you were posting buy/sell offers on eBray of CraigsHotList, I could see the value of easily tracking your ID. If you're using a free service and the provider just wants to enhance their own market value, not so much.
You mean like casting a ballot in an election? I agree. Profit and the extinction of a reasonable expectation for privacy are the only 2 reasons for requiring your legal name.
from TFA: "Analysis shows that general-purpose computer workstations and UAS GCSes are up to 98% similar. "
There's your problem, right there. Flying a desk is not the same thing as flying a computer.
There's a reason that certain cockpit controls have different shapes. For example, tactile feedback, as long as you're trained to pay attention to it, can spare you the embarrassment of mistaking your flaps from your landing gear. Just in case you've never flown, retracting the gear when you're "going around" is a good idea (it reduces drag and increases your rate of climb) but retracting your flaps at the wrong time can kill you during the same procedure.
And where are the software designers in all of this? Flying without any sort of contextually accurate or appropriate sensory feedback creates a deficit. As a pilot, if you can't hear the engine or feel the effects of flight control inputs, you're at a disadvantage. Pilots are taught to pay attention to more than flight gauges and readouts. Software designers have the luxury of setting up AI algorithms that could cross check parameters, provide feedback and require verification before allowing a desk jockey to shut down an engine while an aircraft is at-or-below some critical elevation.
It's nice to know that there are standards for ergonomics and all, but there are reasons that the pilots of commercial aviation operations are still in the plane. Yes, one of them is so the passengers feel better about the experience, but the rest of them have more to do with controlling safety than anything else. It amazes me that to know that software exists target and intercept an incoming ICBM, but the military isn't using software to control its drones (the aircraft, not the 'pilots') more effectively? Me thinks someone's having too much very expensive fun.
There seems to be this common misconception that a network can be broken into without causing any damage. Tell that to the IT department that has to re-flash and re-image every damn machine on the network to make sure no backdoors were left behind.
There seems to be this common misconception that having to fix a network to remove holes and backdoors is somehow worse than having lived with it for some time without knowing it Not to mention the fact that your second sentence does not substantiate the first, also known as the non sequitur fallacy: not having caused any damage and being under suspicion for having caused some are two completely independent things.
It IS sort of funny to think that re-imaging an insecure system in order to bring it back to it's former state of brokenness constitutes repair or implies that damage was done. Perhaps the perpetrator should should have been tracked down and awarded a consulting fee or offered a job.
Just HOW is this INSIGHTFUL when it wasn't Slashdot that made the assessment being characterized as such?
I used to get calls from Rachel on my cell, so I called AT&T, multiple times, to let them know I was receiving illegal commercial solicitations and ask that they reverse the charges AND block calls from that number. AT&T's response was to offer me the 'opportunity' to upgrade my service that would allow me the option of paying an extra monthly recurring service fee for software that would allow me to maintain my own list of blocked CID's. The nice Indian CSR from AT&T explained 'their' system did not include any means (he knew of) by which the company would/could block such calls for me, their legal customer, from receiving incoming illegally placed calls. I got the same explanation regarding illegal commercial solicitations via text services.
Apparently, even though these are common, illegal problems, AT&T and other 'service' providers are under absolutely no obligation to do anything whatsoever about providing a solution (for free). I consider their offer an upgrade which will accomplish the task an example of corporate extortion. I say this with all sincerity because the service provider in the U.S. charges both parties, originating and receiving parties, for the privilege of using the system. To me this indicates a certain level of responsibility, to legitimate customers and the law. And if you're profiting from the illegal use of your network, then you have funds to devote to the solution. (You don't really believe the FCC regulators or your elected representatives and staff don't understand this, do you?)
Unfortunately, it seems to take 3 things for a corporation the size of AT&T to rise to the occasion and do the right thing, a law, an adequately funded, responsible agency and lots of consumer feedback directed at the right ears in government AND the companies executive staff. Otherwise it's too easy for the bloodsuckers and the bean counters to chalk the revenue up to the bottom line and cry poor when the FCC representative happens to mention the problem over drinks at some well funded D.C. junket.
And lest we forget, there's an entirely under served class of people who suffer disproportionately, the non-contract customer who isn't even given the option of paying for the extortive, web-based call-blocking solution. My bet is that most of these folks fall into at least 1 of 3 categories; poor, fixed income and/or immigrant. The poor can get subsidized service, paid for with tax dollars. Most of those a fixed income don't understand the issue. And the immigrants who buy no-contract phones? Do you really think the people who run AT&T or the FCC really care about such folks? I don't, and I don't see much emphasis on such matters in our illustrious press.
The reporting piece at NY Times is one of the very few that covers an issue that must generate hundreds of thousands in revenue for carriers and an adequate opportunity for scammers that the scams keep on being marketed via wire fraud.
Well, so far I haven't found something that beats the sound of the Kindle HD, but it is tempting to buy this thing just because it runs stock Android.
I don't relish turning control of my device or experience over to Amazon whose goal is to dominate the world's retail sales without regard for quality or the ramifications or source, process or politics. In short I don't trust Amazon's motivations because they don't seem to think beyond the common trappings of capitalism. That being said, neither HP or Google has yet to earn the right to claim a higher level of overall responsibility or accountability to much other than the bottom line. The microSD card slot is a welcome improvement but a 3 mega-pixel camera... really?
Yeah, right, break them up. We like to talk a lot about education, but if you don't have access to the data necessary to understand just how a system works, then its general academic treatment isn't really adequate to allow you the freedom to discuss it intelligently. This is a great example.
U.S. based cell companies came up with a way to control their 'customers' using 'subsidies' that require a 2-year 'commitment' for service in exchange for a what appears to a be a lower price. Everyone comes out ahead, right? Well if that's true, then why don't you know how much your phone actually cost you? And why, at the end of your 2-year commitment, doesn't the service provider offer you a lower rate to reflect that fact that you've paid off the phone? And if you've paid off your phone, why should you even have to ask to have it unlocked?
In the EU, you buy phones and service from different companies. That requires the financial details be made explicit. They know how much they're phone costs, and if there's financing involved, it's explicitly arranged and documented. And guess what? Cell service companies have to compete, and service by the minute is 1/2 what it costs here. Consumers get to the actual choices about what hardware succeeds in the market, because their choices, not cell those of cell company executives, govern what sells. And since you can't be locked into accepting crappy service from the likes of AT&T, the service providers have a greater incentive to improve service before the spend millions of euros lying about how much better their network performs so their captive (sheeple) customers don't have to feel quite so bad if they ever read Consumer Reports.
Our government allows cell companies here to serve up whatever pile of hot dog shit they can dream up, and we leave it to consumers, who aren't educated enough to care whether the sell-companies require their sales agents to tell the truth much less wear a condom before they fuck you. And most everyone I see with the latest and greatest Smart(r) phone has no idea what it actually costs them because they're so enamored with their Angry Birdlike 1st person centripetal bumble-pootie that they can hardly look another human being in the face.
So that kinda leaves out the relevance of a question like, "does anyone know why an elected representative would care enough, let alone understand whether it's even possible, to ask cell carriers to change their business model?"
U.S. cell companies suck for the same reason dogs lick their balls... because they can. So ask yourself, if you live in a Capitalist society, but your markets aren't actually free because your government doesn't require open access or honest and fair treatment of you, let alone accountability when they screw you blind. Are you free?
Qui Bono, Brutus?
This could easily be used as a sort of blanket hold-harmless statute, absolving online commerce providers from liability in the event their users violate ToS. That way Facebook et al can't be held liable for libel committed by a user of someone else's nom de plum, pseudonym or legitimately acquired moniker.
In that context it would cut off nuisance lawsuits and cut down on digital second-life ambulance chasers.
"I am a somewhat experienced software developer who is pretty much an office drone.
With this description of your status, it seems to me that you lack not just an acceptable environment in which to play code monkey but a purpose from which you can derive some satisfaction. I agree with those that would have you avoid confronting, 'the manipulative jerks,' because the fish rots from the head. It sounds like you need to involve yourself in something more meaningful. Something more directly tied to your value system, thereby allowing you to take some satisfaction from the belief that your efforts connect you to the purpose your efforts facilitate.
The Buddhists call this, "right living."
1st of all, the premise that manufacturers sell to users is incorrect. Manufacturers sell to carriers. Carriers market to users. And the carriers don't care what approved phone you buy. Their selection is based on business concerns well outside the user experience.
Penultimately, the only thing the carriers actually care about is the monthly recurring services fees generated by the use of voice, text, data and the revenue share generated by music, video, and app sales. They do impose standards or operation that manufacturers have to meet in order to be considered for branding and sales through the company store, but they don't give a rats ass about usability. And the term reliability is reserved for the description of phones' performance as a network device.
As to the crux of marketing to the consumer, I've been around enough marketing and sales people to understand that most of them hold a low opinion of the consumer. Computer sales and marketing campaigns have rarely if ever provided meaningful or reliable metrics to the end user. Users are inundated with basic specs, processor speed and memory and storage capacity. Winmark and Winstone got some play in the rags that pass for consumer oriented periodicals, but I don't know anyone who considers these publications to provide much more than paid advertising, pretty pictures and hype. I mean, when's the last time any Slashdotterer read Walter Mossberg's column when seriously investigating a purchase decision?
It's not just your heart.
Geriatrician Muriel R. Gillick, in her book "The Denial of Aging, emphasizes the social consequences of faith in an ageless old age: “If we assume that Alzheimer’s disease will be cured and disability abolished in the near term,” she writes, “we will have no incentive to develop long-term-care facilities that focus on enabling residents to lead satisfying lives despite their disabilities.”
Aside from which, currently there is nowhere in the world where society is adequately planning for an economic transition to a generally sustainable model for life that will protect the biosphere, the ecosphere or develop a politisphere capable of allowing 'humanity' to achieve the dubious goal of for average lifespan. The competitive model of economics and politics won't allow for it, and the wealthy who promote the concept that enough gated sanctuaries might survive the turmoil that will occur if mankind continues pushing the envelope to determine the actual carrying capacity of the earth are already delusional or just nihilistic enough to believe that The Tau and the DOW are synonymous.
Whatever New Age drivel was cited in TFA should be ignored because the evidence is clear, a globalized, competitive economically will collapse long before the average lifespan grows by another 10%. And even though your grandparents aren't talking about, assuming they're able, the quality of life beyond 80 exists on a graph defined by a decreasing curvilinear function. If you want to consider your mortality you should really think of it in terms of your legacy, not your longevity.
Of course if you live in a consumer society, that's a bit like encouraging a fish to think about space travel.
Didn't you mean to POST this information at FCC.gov where it might do some good, or were you just trying to be ironic by posting it here where no one really cares if you didn't research you purchase before you signed the contract?