Actually, I'm Norwegian, not American. Which strengthens the point. USA has a GDP/capita of $46K or thereabouts. Norway has a GDP/capita of $80K. Even after you compensate for higher prices here, the purchasing-power-parity is still at $58K aproximately.
So depending on which number you use, something in the area of 25% to 75% richer on the average. (25% richer if you spend the money in Norway, 75% richer if you spend the money on foreign-made products, vacations abroad etc) Add in a much more even distribution of wealth, and being born in Norway starts looking a lot like winning the lottery.
I agree with the physical nonpoverty. Allthough USA has much poorer poor people than most other countries with similar GDP, due to the very uneven distribution of wealth. Still there's other factors that also play a role.
Most people would rather live for PPP $3000/month in a society where the median is $2000/month rather than one where the median is $5000/month. That is because money also has to do with nonphysical needs. The need to be -respected- in ones society. The need to attract a mate. The need for self-respect. Not being able to have your own bike as a kid IS a bigger deal if all the other children in class DO have one. Even though the physical reality of the situation is identical.
I found that strange too. They name it "IQ"-test, and include leagues of the smartes countries and thelike. But a large fraction of the questions are general-knowledge questions with a strong American tilt. Not to mention that many questions are basically english-questions so it's no wonder USA scores better than italy, say. ("venison is meat from which animal?")
Yeah. I'm perfectly well aware of that. You're missing my point completely.
It is not in the least hard to understand why an individual wishes to control land (or other resources). It is not in the least hard to understand why it can be beneficial for civilization as a whole that ownership of land is in general respected, though typically with limitations and exceptions. Beneficial enough that the resources of the community is commonly used to defend the control that an individual has over resources.
I was merely pointing out that the land you own aren't yours because it was "made" by you or the one you got it from (etcetera). It is yours because at some point someone CLAIMED it. That is, it transformed from un-owned to owned not for any reason of "fairness", but for the much more basic reason that someone, at some point, decided to use physical force to remain in control of the land.
Unimproved land is not without value by the way. Even if you put a human being down in a forest where no human has made -any- improvements for the last millenium, that human still has better access to resources if he is allowed to roam a reasonable land-area than he has if he is, say, confined to a tiny patch of land.
But even in the most equitable countries on earth the OVERWHELMING majority of resources (land and otherwise) is owned by a miniscule fraction of very rich people.
I don't have the answer either. But I find it amazingly arrogant to think that ones wealth is entirely due to oneself. That's nonsense. Most of my wealth is because I'm lucky enough to be born at the richest of all times (until now) in one of the richest countries on earth, with two well-educated parents, and am surrounded by a population that in general is well-educated.
None of this, or at best a miniscule fraction of this, is due to me. Had I been born to a single, uneducated teenage mother in Ghana, my life would've been very -VERY- different.
Yes, your own hard work makes a difference. But it's not by far the only thing that makes a difference. Infact even with the least possible own work, I'd have ended up better-off than 95% of the people in Ghana.
You miss the gps point. Did you "create" the land you own ? No ? Perhaps you bougth it from someone, but did THEY create it ?
No matter how far back you follow the chain, nobody did. It was simply there. At some point somebody stuck a flag in it and said "This is mine, for no reason whatsoever other than that I'll kick your butt if you try taking it", and made that stick.
Copyrighted works and ideas are fundamentally different from tangible property, thus I do -not- agree that they are equivalent, or that similar laws make sense for these completely different contexts.
The primary difference is the one we all know; an idea (or a copyrighted work) can be infinitely shared without diminishing the original one. This makes a huge difference. You cannot give me your bread without having less bread yourself. You CAN give me your idea without having less ideas yourself.
The practical result is that humanity gets richer by sharing ideas. Because they multiply. Sharing bread, on the other hand, does not make us any richer in sum total.
Sharing bread is a zero-sum game, sharing ideas is a positive sum game.
True enough that Brand-stores are overpriced, even if you really want precisely that Sony laptop, you get it cheaper online.
But a in excess of a -months- pay ? Dude, get a reasonable job ! You get a very good laptop for $2000, even the most expensive MacBook Air (which is overpriced) is like $3000. So yeah, aproximately one months net pay -- if you're flipping burgers.
Somehow I don't think burgerflippers are the typical buyers of top-of-the-line Macbook Airs though.
More typically, a new laptop costs something like a -weeks- pay. Double that for a good one.
The likelihood that "someone" will brute-force the encryption is zero -- or close enough to make no difference.
All the worlds banks are protected by the same encryption. If your data is REALLY more valuable than complete access to EVERY account in EVERY bank that has online banking, then you don't "ask slashdot" what to do about securing the data anyways.
I argue that scientology TODAY is more harmful for each member (and surroundings) than christianity TODAY is.
I agree that christianity (and all other religions) have fluctuated trough the decades and centuries, in some periods causing great harm, in others less.
It's also kinda obvious that a religion with a billion followes will cumulatively cause more damage than a cult with a couple of thousand adherents, I meant harmful as in for each member (and surroundings), I guess I should've specified that.
When I say "christianity" I offcourse mean what is CURRENTLY commonly called christianity as practiced by many churches who call themselves christian TODAY. What Jesus actually said any actually did is irrelevant to that. Relevant is what these *claim* that he said and did -- inshort, what christianity actually is today, not what is was 2000 years ago.
Jesus, by the way, also did not return to life after death as a zombie. That's the *absurd* part. You're correct that Hubbard doesn't claim this *particular* impossibility. My point was, they all claim a LARGE number of completly absurd things, neither belief can reasonably claim to be more "rational" than the other.
True if you analyze the -actual- content of the core teachings.
But in practice, these don't really matter to many people. My guess, is, for example, that the ritualistic cannibalism in Christianity is of importance to a miniscule portion of christians, and even less of them take it at face value.
What matters more is actual behaviour internally and externally. To which degree these groups do harm. In *practice* most people who call themselves "christian" live pretty average lives and I doubt they on the average do much more harm than people who are say nonreligious.
Scientology is demonstrably much more harmful.
So while I agree that it's kinda pointless to argue what is more absurd, DC9-alike spaceships and xenoghosts being responsible for most of the worlds problems, or flesh-eating blood-drinking zombie-jews being the only path to salvation -- it doesn't follow that all religions are equally harmful.
They're all absurd. But they're not all equally harmful.
Your cell-phone runs on a lot less than that. Have a look at the battery sometime.
My cellphone has a battery that is 3.6V, 600mah, which works out to 2.16Wh (2.16 W over a period of one hour).
It can stay in standby for aproximately 72 hours before needing recharging, so actual power-consumption should be on the order of 2.16/72 = 0.03W.
Your mileage may vary, there are certainly monster-cellphones that use a lot more power than this. But seeing as my fairly typical cellphone uses on the order of 1% of 4 watts it's probably a fair bet that most cellphones use under 4W.
That's in standby. When talking it uses a lot more, perhaps on the order of a watt or so (which would mean it's empty after 2 hours of talking)
They pay a little for Windows. But on the other hand, they get kickbacks for installing a metric shitload of crapware, adware, shareware, tryware, shovelware.
The kickbacks generally balance the cost of actually purchased software, so that net, it costs zero. (more or less, offcourse the sum total can be sligthly negative, or sligthly positive)
Working bullshit-detectors are medium-independent. It's not in -how- you hear something, it's in the -content- of that something.
Working bullshit-detectors aren't even hard to construct. Even a simpleminded variant constructed from "If something sounds too good to be true, it is." will successfully detect upwards of 90% of all money-making bullshit (93.12% if calibrated on a full moon)
The problem is, some people are unable to execute even such basic models. And some people who are in principle capable have installed a "but it'd be so neat to be RICH!", they are vulnerable to buffer-overflow if you will.
Nothing will cure this. Some people cannot avoid giving all their money to the first (and second, and third) dishonest person they run across.
I know that. I said -if- they somehow didn't evaporate.
Hawking-radiation ensures that any black hole of this size (much smaller than even an electron) would evaporate near-instantly, releasing no more energy in the process than that which went into making it. (a black hole is doesn't violate conservation of energy afterall)
Only "thousands" of files ? At my university there was two fileservers with a total of something like 10TB worth of disk, filled to capacity, and hooked directly into the ATM-backbone at 622Mbps. There was no -reason- to ever use p2p. This in -addition- to all of the thousands of windows-shares from students individual computers.
PHBs didn't know about them, or if they did, they pretended not to know. Network-admins -must- have known, but kept their mouth shut.
I have a bog-standard laptop with bog-standard linux on it. That's all. My *data* is stored encrypted online, and mounted when I enter the command to do so. Normally I only enter the password on every boot, which is seldom since I mostly just hibernate.
However when there's any risk of laptop-theft or customs-inspection I shutdown the machine completely instead.
End-result, they can boot it and do anything the like. There really is nothing interesting or personal on there. No trickery needed.
Infact when you're using TrueCrypt it WOULD. Because TrueCrypt in its default configuration overwrites the entire file/partition to be used with random data on creating the volume.
Thus a partition with one encrypted file-system looks like this:
[-encrypted-filesystem------][random noise]
And a partition with *two* encrypted filesystems looks like this:
The thing is, since you can't distinguish a encrypted filesystem from random noise without knowing the key, there is absolutely no way anyone can prove that you're having the second, if you claim to be having the first. "plausible deniability" ("no sir, I already gave you my password. What do you mean second password, I don't have any other passwords.")
If the linux-partition is encrypted, you don't CARE about later analysis. You only care about stuff that shows up at the borders and inconveniences you.
Offcourse, there's another option: Refuse point-blank to go to a country where you are subject to unreasonable search and seizure without any grounds for suspicion, where having your fingerprints taken and a metric boatload of other personal info handed over is a requirement even for ENTRY.
It's been 10 years since I visited USA, looks as if it'll be a few more. Pity really, because the country is cool and I've got good friends over there.
Actually, the energies involved are so low that a black hole created would be small enough to pass between two atoms in solid matter with huge margins, so most likely it'd just zip trough earth as if it was vacuum.
And given that the particles involved have energies equivalent to 99.999% of lightspeed or thereabouts, you'd have to be IMPOSSIBLY precise to NOT have a velocity higher than 11km/s.
In short, if the holes didn't evaporate, they'd simply zip trough earth and leave for outer space, more likely than not never swallowing even a single electron, and doing no damage whatsoever.
Yes we're different. Not perhaps, different than a MARKET earlier, the purpose of a market is, afterall, to SELL stuff. But different in the pervasiveness.
This has many reasons. One is a large selection of goods that are really quite equivalent to the buyer, where marketing tries to create incentive to select brand A over brand B on reasons other than price alone when really the differences are debatable.
Another is the rising distance (physical and otherwise) between producer and consumer. You don't -know- the guy growing your potatoes anymore. And so mass-marketing has taken over from reputation and word-of-mouth.
The worst is, though, that it is EVERYWHERE.
Walk down a street in Berlin, and the Brandenburger Tor, one of the most famous landmarks there is is under renovation, and covered with a GIGANTIC telecom-banner. Your shopping-cart has advertising on the handlebar. So does the fuel-pistol-thing when you refuel. All the products you buy are packaged in advertising. TV has more comercials than programming, radio ain't much better. The Internet is filled with banner-ads and stupid flash-crap.
Things wheren't always like this. And I'm not convinced we're better off for it.
I'm not in favour of banning advertising or anything. But I *am* in favour of having a reasoned debate about under just which rules we want it. And I don't think "anything goes" is it. There is such a thing as visual pollution.
Lesson #3: If the code you are hacking is the SECRET-KEY-GENERATOR for a piece of code that is CRITICAl to the security of a system, and normally network-exposed, apply lesson #1 and Lesson #2 in TRIPLE dosis.
Norway. Offcourse there's a reason, it's not charity or anything.
The primary reason is, they want you on their service. Though the 120 minutes and 90 SMS are free, they still hope to make money off you.
For example, the price pro minute in the 120 - 360 minute bracket is higher than by many competitors, they obviously hope that people will not manage to stay within the free minutes (and/or free SMSes), something which is probably aided by quite heavy marketing towards teens.
Also, you pay if you phone abroad, again, the prices here are somewhat higher than the best on the market.
And who knows if it stays free forever. It's quite possible that their strategy is to use "free" to build a customer-base, and then once they're reasonably priced up the price so that it's no longer free, but instead aproximately on par with the second-most-inexpensive provider. People seldom switch providers for small savings, so they could probably even up the price to be sligthly MORE expensive than the cheapest competitor, and still keep most customers.
The mobile phone market here is fiercely competitive for a country with 5 million inhabitants. There are 3 independent physical networks, all compatible, and aproximately 30 companies competing on providing services on one or more of the 3 networks.
Pricing is transparent, since there is a government-run portal that collects and publishes prices, you enter your expected usage, and up comes a sorted list of companies and offerings, sorted by price. ( www.telepriser.no )
But aslong as it lasts, I'm a happy camper. I never use more than the minutes since I've got unlimited free minutes by ip-phone in wlan-zones, so I never make long calls when I'm not in wlan-coverage. Not hard, and means it's actually over a year since I paid a single cent for telephone.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm Norwegian, not American. Which strengthens the point. USA has a GDP/capita of $46K or thereabouts. Norway has a GDP/capita of $80K. Even after you compensate for higher prices here, the purchasing-power-parity is still at $58K aproximately.
So depending on which number you use, something in the area of 25% to 75% richer on the average. (25% richer if you spend the money in Norway, 75% richer if you spend the money on foreign-made products, vacations abroad etc) Add in a much more even distribution of wealth, and being born in Norway starts looking a lot like winning the lottery.
I agree with the physical nonpoverty. Allthough USA has much poorer poor people than most other countries with similar GDP, due to the very uneven distribution of wealth. Still there's other factors that also play a role.
Most people would rather live for PPP $3000/month in a society where the median is $2000/month rather than one where the median is $5000/month. That is because money also has to do with nonphysical needs. The need to be -respected- in ones society. The need to attract a mate. The need for self-respect. Not being able to have your own bike as a kid IS a bigger deal if all the other children in class DO have one. Even though the physical reality of the situation is identical.
I found that strange too. They name it "IQ"-test, and include leagues of the smartes countries and thelike. But a large fraction of the questions are general-knowledge questions with a strong American tilt. Not to mention that many questions are basically english-questions so it's no wonder USA scores better than italy, say. ("venison is meat from which animal?")
Yeah. I'm perfectly well aware of that. You're missing my point completely.
It is not in the least hard to understand why an individual wishes to control land (or other resources). It is not in the least hard to understand why it can be beneficial for civilization as a whole that ownership of land is in general respected, though typically with limitations and exceptions. Beneficial enough that the resources of the community is commonly used to defend the control that an individual has over resources.
I was merely pointing out that the land you own aren't yours because it was "made" by you or the one you got it from (etcetera). It is yours because at some point someone CLAIMED it. That is, it transformed from un-owned to owned not for any reason of "fairness", but for the much more basic reason that someone, at some point, decided to use physical force to remain in control of the land.
Unimproved land is not without value by the way. Even if you put a human being down in a forest where no human has made -any- improvements for the last millenium, that human still has better access to resources if he is allowed to roam a reasonable land-area than he has if he is, say, confined to a tiny patch of land.
But even in the most equitable countries on earth the OVERWHELMING majority of resources (land and otherwise) is owned by a miniscule fraction of very rich people.
I don't have the answer either. But I find it amazingly arrogant to think that ones wealth is entirely due to oneself. That's nonsense. Most of my wealth is because I'm lucky enough to be born at the richest of all times (until now) in one of the richest countries on earth, with two well-educated parents, and am surrounded by a population that in general is well-educated.
None of this, or at best a miniscule fraction of this, is due to me. Had I been born to a single, uneducated teenage mother in Ghana, my life would've been very -VERY- different.
Yes, your own hard work makes a difference. But it's not by far the only thing that makes a difference. Infact even with the least possible own work, I'd have ended up better-off than 95% of the people in Ghana.
You miss the gps point. Did you "create" the land you own ? No ? Perhaps you bougth it from someone, but did THEY create it ?
No matter how far back you follow the chain, nobody did. It was simply there. At some point somebody stuck a flag in it and said "This is mine, for no reason whatsoever other than that I'll kick your butt if you try taking it", and made that stick.
Copyrighted works and ideas are fundamentally different from tangible property, thus I do -not- agree that they are equivalent, or that similar laws make sense for these completely different contexts.
The primary difference is the one we all know; an idea (or a copyrighted work) can be infinitely shared without diminishing the original one. This makes a huge difference. You cannot give me your bread without having less bread yourself. You CAN give me your idea without having less ideas yourself.
The practical result is that humanity gets richer by sharing ideas. Because they multiply. Sharing bread, on the other hand, does not make us any richer in sum total.
Sharing bread is a zero-sum game, sharing ideas is a positive sum game.
Indeed, Cure B is a complete and utter no-brainer -- even if cure A costs $10K/year and cure B costs $100K.
True enough that Brand-stores are overpriced, even if you really want precisely that Sony laptop, you get it cheaper online.
But a in excess of a -months- pay ? Dude, get a reasonable job ! You get a very good laptop for $2000, even the most expensive MacBook Air (which is overpriced) is like $3000. So yeah, aproximately one months net pay -- if you're flipping burgers.
Somehow I don't think burgerflippers are the typical buyers of top-of-the-line Macbook Airs though.
More typically, a new laptop costs something like a -weeks- pay. Double that for a good one.
The likelihood that "someone" will brute-force the encryption is zero -- or close enough to make no difference. All the worlds banks are protected by the same encryption. If your data is REALLY more valuable than complete access to EVERY account in EVERY bank that has online banking, then you don't "ask slashdot" what to do about securing the data anyways.
I argue that scientology TODAY is more harmful for each member (and surroundings) than christianity TODAY is.
I agree that christianity (and all other religions) have fluctuated trough the decades and centuries, in some periods causing great harm, in others less.
It's also kinda obvious that a religion with a billion followes will cumulatively cause more damage than a cult with a couple of thousand adherents, I meant harmful as in for each member (and surroundings), I guess I should've specified that.
When I say "christianity" I offcourse mean what is CURRENTLY commonly called christianity as practiced by many churches who call themselves christian TODAY. What Jesus actually said any actually did is irrelevant to that. Relevant is what these *claim* that he said and did -- inshort, what christianity actually is today, not what is was 2000 years ago.
Jesus, by the way, also did not return to life after death as a zombie. That's the *absurd* part. You're correct that Hubbard doesn't claim this *particular* impossibility. My point was, they all claim a LARGE number of completly absurd things, neither belief can reasonably claim to be more "rational" than the other.
True if you analyze the -actual- content of the core teachings.
But in practice, these don't really matter to many people. My guess, is, for example, that the ritualistic cannibalism in Christianity is of importance to a miniscule portion of christians, and even less of them take it at face value.
What matters more is actual behaviour internally and externally. To which degree these groups do harm. In *practice* most people who call themselves "christian" live pretty average lives and I doubt they on the average do much more harm than people who are say nonreligious.
Scientology is demonstrably much more harmful.
So while I agree that it's kinda pointless to argue what is more absurd, DC9-alike spaceships and xenoghosts being responsible for most of the worlds problems, or flesh-eating blood-drinking zombie-jews being the only path to salvation -- it doesn't follow that all religions are equally harmful.
They're all absurd. But they're not all equally harmful.
A "person belief" is something that one person believes.
A "sect" is something that a small group of people believe.
A "cult" is something that a medium group of people believe.
A "religion" is something that a large group of people believe.
Your cell-phone runs on a lot less than that. Have a look at the battery sometime.
My cellphone has a battery that is 3.6V, 600mah, which works out to 2.16Wh (2.16 W over a period of one hour).
It can stay in standby for aproximately 72 hours before needing recharging, so actual power-consumption should be on the order of 2.16/72 = 0.03W.
Your mileage may vary, there are certainly monster-cellphones that use a lot more power than this. But seeing as my fairly typical cellphone uses on the order of 1% of 4 watts it's probably a fair bet that most cellphones use under 4W.
That's in standby. When talking it uses a lot more, perhaps on the order of a watt or so (which would mean it's empty after 2 hours of talking)
It's actually in the zero range for many. In sum.
They pay a little for Windows. But on the other hand, they get kickbacks for installing a metric shitload of crapware, adware, shareware, tryware, shovelware.
The kickbacks generally balance the cost of actually purchased software, so that net, it costs zero. (more or less, offcourse the sum total can be sligthly negative, or sligthly positive)
Working bullshit-detectors are medium-independent. It's not in -how- you hear something, it's in the -content- of that something.
Working bullshit-detectors aren't even hard to construct. Even a simpleminded variant constructed from "If something sounds too good to be true, it is." will successfully detect upwards of 90% of all money-making bullshit (93.12% if calibrated on a full moon)
The problem is, some people are unable to execute even such basic models. And some people who are in principle capable have installed a "but it'd be so neat to be RICH!", they are vulnerable to buffer-overflow if you will.
Nothing will cure this. Some people cannot avoid giving all their money to the first (and second, and third) dishonest person they run across.
I know that. I said -if- they somehow didn't evaporate. Hawking-radiation ensures that any black hole of this size (much smaller than even an electron) would evaporate near-instantly, releasing no more energy in the process than that which went into making it. (a black hole is doesn't violate conservation of energy afterall)
Only "thousands" of files ? At my university there was two fileservers with a total of something like 10TB worth of disk, filled to capacity, and hooked directly into the ATM-backbone at 622Mbps. There was no -reason- to ever use p2p. This in -addition- to all of the thousands of windows-shares from students individual computers.
PHBs didn't know about them, or if they did, they pretended not to know. Network-admins -must- have known, but kept their mouth shut.
Why make it so FRIGGING complicated ?
I have a bog-standard laptop with bog-standard linux on it. That's all. My *data* is stored encrypted online, and mounted when I enter the command to do so. Normally I only enter the password on every boot, which is seldom since I mostly just hibernate.
However when there's any risk of laptop-theft or customs-inspection I shutdown the machine completely instead.
End-result, they can boot it and do anything the like. There really is nothing interesting or personal on there. No trickery needed.
Infact when you're using TrueCrypt it WOULD. Because TrueCrypt in its default configuration overwrites the entire file/partition to be used with random data on creating the volume.
Thus a partition with one encrypted file-system looks like this:
[-encrypted-filesystem------][random noise]
And a partition with *two* encrypted filesystems looks like this:
[-encrypted-filesystem------][-encrypted-filesystem-]
The thing is, since you can't distinguish a encrypted filesystem from random noise without knowing the key, there is absolutely no way anyone can prove that you're having the second, if you claim to be having the first. "plausible deniability" ("no sir, I already gave you my password. What do you mean second password, I don't have any other passwords.")
It's quite clever, really.
If the linux-partition is encrypted, you don't CARE about later analysis. You only care about stuff that shows up at the borders and inconveniences you.
Offcourse, there's another option: Refuse point-blank to go to a country where you are subject to unreasonable search and seizure without any grounds for suspicion, where having your fingerprints taken and a metric boatload of other personal info handed over is a requirement even for ENTRY.
It's been 10 years since I visited USA, looks as if it'll be a few more. Pity really, because the country is cool and I've got good friends over there.
Actually, the energies involved are so low that a black hole created would be small enough to pass between two atoms in solid matter with huge margins, so most likely it'd just zip trough earth as if it was vacuum. And given that the particles involved have energies equivalent to 99.999% of lightspeed or thereabouts, you'd have to be IMPOSSIBLY precise to NOT have a velocity higher than 11km/s. In short, if the holes didn't evaporate, they'd simply zip trough earth and leave for outer space, more likely than not never swallowing even a single electron, and doing no damage whatsoever.
Yes we're different. Not perhaps, different than a MARKET earlier, the purpose of a market is, afterall, to SELL stuff. But different in the pervasiveness. This has many reasons. One is a large selection of goods that are really quite equivalent to the buyer, where marketing tries to create incentive to select brand A over brand B on reasons other than price alone when really the differences are debatable. Another is the rising distance (physical and otherwise) between producer and consumer. You don't -know- the guy growing your potatoes anymore. And so mass-marketing has taken over from reputation and word-of-mouth. The worst is, though, that it is EVERYWHERE. Walk down a street in Berlin, and the Brandenburger Tor, one of the most famous landmarks there is is under renovation, and covered with a GIGANTIC telecom-banner. Your shopping-cart has advertising on the handlebar. So does the fuel-pistol-thing when you refuel. All the products you buy are packaged in advertising. TV has more comercials than programming, radio ain't much better. The Internet is filled with banner-ads and stupid flash-crap. Things wheren't always like this. And I'm not convinced we're better off for it. I'm not in favour of banning advertising or anything. But I *am* in favour of having a reasoned debate about under just which rules we want it. And I don't think "anything goes" is it. There is such a thing as visual pollution.
Lesson #3: If the code you are hacking is the SECRET-KEY-GENERATOR for a piece of code that is CRITICAl to the security of a system, and normally network-exposed, apply lesson #1 and Lesson #2 in TRIPLE dosis.
Norway. Offcourse there's a reason, it's not charity or anything.
The primary reason is, they want you on their service. Though the 120 minutes and 90 SMS are free, they still hope to make money off you.
For example, the price pro minute in the 120 - 360 minute bracket is higher than by many competitors, they obviously hope that people will not manage to stay within the free minutes (and/or free SMSes), something which is probably aided by quite heavy marketing towards teens.
Also, you pay if you phone abroad, again, the prices here are somewhat higher than the best on the market.
And who knows if it stays free forever. It's quite possible that their strategy is to use "free" to build a customer-base, and then once they're reasonably priced up the price so that it's no longer free, but instead aproximately on par with the second-most-inexpensive provider. People seldom switch providers for small savings, so they could probably even up the price to be sligthly MORE expensive than the cheapest competitor, and still keep most customers.
The mobile phone market here is fiercely competitive for a country with 5 million inhabitants. There are 3 independent physical networks, all compatible, and aproximately 30 companies competing on providing services on one or more of the 3 networks.
Pricing is transparent, since there is a government-run portal that collects and publishes prices, you enter your expected usage, and up comes a sorted list of companies and offerings, sorted by price. ( www.telepriser.no )
But aslong as it lasts, I'm a happy camper. I never use more than the minutes since I've got unlimited free minutes by ip-phone in wlan-zones, so I never make long calls when I'm not in wlan-coverage. Not hard, and means it's actually over a year since I paid a single cent for telephone.