Think before you leap because the potential of VOIP is tantalizing, believe me I know, I got sucked in and, to be honest, in many ways I regret it.
I'm a home user/home worker, none of my calls are that important but the quality definitely isn't there. We humans have a great capacity to blind ourselves to minor inconveniences, such as having to alter our conversational style to accommodate slightly unsychronised conversations or drops of several seconds in which the other person can't hear us but, ultimately, these things wear you down and change your relationship with your phone - you can no longer trust your phone but, like the flaws in a new lover, you excuse these things because you're so enamoured with the promise, the potential to route around the bastarding telephone monopolies that have held us all hostage for so long.
I should mention that I'm a UK user and, obviously, that places an extra burden on a US-based service. I signed up to Broadvoice because they had the best thought out plans and their support is, well, it exists which is more than can be said for many of the others. On the whole, though, I absolutely cannot recommend them to UK users because they let me down badly with regard to 0800 (UK tollfree) and 0870 (UK region-free numbers) which, although they claim otherwise on their rates pages, they simply cannot connect to, not for any amount to money. This alone renders their service redundant because, in the UK, an increasing number of businesses only provide and 0800 and 0870 number. The best example of this is Apple's UK branch who no longer accept emails - I wanted to buy about £3000 worth of computers and emailed them with a query, received an automated reply telling me that the only way to contact them was via their 0800, with no regular number to use as an alternative. This may sound like a fairly marginal problem but you wouldn't believe the number of times I've ended up using a mobile, at 20p per minute, to wait on a "freephone" service queue. Apple, BTW, lost that sale along with the chance that I'll ever again suggest their systems to a client.
So, for home users looking to save a few quid, don't buy into the dream while it's still a dream; certainly don't replace your main phoneline.
For home workers attracted to the idea of contacting clients all over the World, ask yourself if you, as a client, would be happy dealing with a service provider who you can't hear properly or with whom conversations are arduous.
For executives eager to boost their corporate careers by manfully slashing millions from their company's telecoms bill, ask yourself if adding an extra stress to the every single employee who uses the phone might not be, in the long-term, a serious blow to the company as a whole - somehow added employee stress and customer frustration never makes it onto Powerpoint presentations, but it's smart to know what's annoying the Hell out of your rank and file.
I wanted VOIP to live up to the dream, I really did - all I'm saying is that, in my case, it didn't, be aware of that amidst all the hype.
... Mexico announces sharp rise in the National Kidnapping Index.
"The indications are positive," commented the Chairman of the Mexican Reserve, as masked men bundled his wife into the trunk of a car.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Especially when it comes to extensions - my rough recollection is that most of the best extensions seem to be by Europeans.
They're probably going to claim that they had no choice because it's tricky/expensive to ship electronics outside the States but, c'mon, how hard would it have been to arrange an alternative prize, at least to avoid rubbing the world's nose in it at a time when America isn't exactly the most popular kid in the class. If Mozcorp has a PR, he/she should probably reconsider his/her position.
It's fantastic. I supervised Episode II and III and so I was working closely with George and he is just amazing - his creativity, his vision and his ability to see the project in its completion. He knows what exactly what the film should look like so his direction is very clear and his decisions are always the right ones. They are what make the film beautiful. So it's a pleasure.
Cool, when did Irish people become a distinct race?
The Irish are a distinct race by any definition, they simply aren't color-coded and, therefore, it's easier for prejudice to disguise itself in the form of jokes and cliches that should have died out decades ago.
This a blatant rip-off of my FireMinger Project which aims to provide FireFox, Thunderbird, Half Life 2 and a host of useful extensions on a single 1.44mb floppy.
Jesus, I'd forgotten how piss-poor The Register is at conveying information. The only thing worse than an article that inflates a paragraph-worth of information into 12 is having it done by the journalistic equivalent of the pub bore: pompous, ill-informed and long-winded.
Honestly, I'm pretty easy to amuse but the hacks at the Reg have consistently failed to display anything approaching genuine wit.
Perhaps/. should add some sort of warning to all Register-bound outward links.
Half century? Kennedy is widely acknowledged as the first 'television president' and the debates iwth Nixon were certainly not prohibitively expensive.
The Nixon/Kennedy debate was programming i.e. an actual show that individual viewers chose to watch. True, Kennedy's television performance received the credit for his victory but, at that time, the scale of advertising's influence was beneath the radar of most commentators - they simply prefered to believe that their fellow countrymen had made an informed decision based on debate rather than mere advertising. The advertising industry itself has historically sought to downplay it's influence: see cigarettes, childrens toys, junk food. I have no idea what the level of media spend was during that election but you can be confident that, even by 1960, the military-industrial complex was suffiently in control to sway elections, I refer you to Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 speech on the matter as he prepared to hand over power to President elect Kennedy.
It is worth noting, too, that, in the English language, the phrase "the experience of the past half century" means that one is considering that span as a whole. You will also commonly find that people use half century units in a rather general way, not meaning to suggest that a general trend popped into existence at precisely 2:11PM on the 9th of October 1955.
One of the biggest mistakes Microsoft made was not realizing early enough that they needed to pump a substantial slice of their pie to DC. If they had had an astute lobbyist on the ground, making "campaign contributions" to both sides, there never would have been a government investigation, they wouldn't have lost momentum through having their attention diverted and their public image wouldn't have taken quite such a beating - who will ever forget the belligerent attitude of Gates' deposition, who could have failed to smile at the embarrassing memos that were trawled up?
As a side note for non-US citizens: in America corruption has been legalized in the form of campaign contributions. To get elected, politicians must spend vast sums of money on TV advertising. The airwaves that get TV to the masses nominally belong to "the people" but are sold off to major corporations such as GE for a pittance. The corportations then create programming that desperately pursues a mass audience (i.e. quality is not enough, as in the case of Firefly, cancelled before even finishing it's 1st season). The corporations then sell that mass audience back to the politicians in the form of short adverts. The adverts are extremely expensive but the experience of the past half century has consistently shown that the frequency of adverts has a vital role in winning office.
This is great for the corporations because, far more importantly than the revenue that they earn from this exploding advertising spend, it means that no politician has a realistic chance of getting into power unless he is getting lots of corporate campaign contributions (corporate contributions dwarf personal) and, therefore, no representative of the people will ever be able to truly work in the people's interests. Both of the main American parties are equally dependent on this system and, therefore, the only real differences that can exist between them are presentational.
The problem with Microsoft was that they got big so quickly that they didn't have time to take the hint and assume their role in this particular circle of corruption. One of the first things they did when the Clinton administration turned on them was to hire the most expensive lobbyists they could find and start spraying contributions in all directions., guaranteeing that next adminstration, Republican or Democrat, would step down the legal attack.
Google is making sure that they don't make the same mistake.
Hi Amy, having read both your blog post and Ning's voluminous FAQ, I see a major road-block to the series adoption of Ning as anything more than a playground, one that will see thousands of abandoned, short-lived experiments - a sort of sourceforge of social websites.
That road-block is money: the admins, who are expected to invest time energy in tailoring their Ning-based websites to their target audience and then generating enough buzz/awareness to build the necessary momentum and userbase to actually make their websites useful, are not allowed to include any adverts because Andreessen & Co will already be inserting ads and explain that "don't look warmly upon more than one person running ads on an App or a page".
The real zinger, however, is that they helpfully suggest that you integrate Paypal and charge for your service. It's not hard to see that most apps that build any traction will turn to this option as the only way to gain some reward for their efforts and, obviously, to build a wall around their service/retain exclusive value, will default to tag their data as "private", killing the whole shared data eco-system concept.
I found your Rails articles a few months ago interesting, I'm surprised that you don't considered that a much better route for anyone with the imagination to invent new Web apps.
While I don't wish to piss on anyone's parade here, Matalan are very much the Titanic of the generally begaled UK retail sector, we shouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that their choice of Linux was a particularly astute business move - they haven't shown much propensity for astuteness.
As someone who has spent most of my life living in various European capitals, I can tell you that the main reason why this guy was eventually arrested after his initial questioning and their apparent original decision to let him go is: he is French.
The single biggest bomber threat in Europe comes from French Muslims, mostly of North African descent - British Muslims are comparatively much better integrated. It is considered politically incorrect to point this out but Muslims of Algerian and Morrocan descent represent a huge social problem in many European countries but in particular France, which used to own Morroco and Algeria and to which many immigrated.
I can't find a photo of David Mery but, by his surname, he probably isn't Muslim. He may, however, like many French, be quite swarthy and it can sometimes be hard to distinguish between this and Arabic or North African looks - the innocent guy who was recently executed on a tube platform by the London police was, in fact, Brazilian.
You can't blame the police for not taking any chances although it is absolutely wrong for them to charge him with creating a public nuisance, we should all be concerned at that viscious little twist. As for stopping, searching and detaining him, however, that is just part of the price we have to pay because some Northern losers couldn't get girlfriends and decided to martyr themselves for Allah instead. All I hope is that things don't get as nuts as I saw them get at American airports in the years following 9/11, with semi-retarded airport officials pulling aside white grandmothers and frightening the bejaysus out of them. Unfortunately, for this particular problem, some intelligent racial profiling is going to be vital, let's get over ourselves and get the job done.
I second the Ikea Jerker, I actually have two of these now, side by side, loads of desk space.
I mostly stand while working but I also have an Ikea Procent chair - I checked the website but they don't seem to be listed, so, I'll describe the basic idea: a very high swivel chair with an adjustable foot rest, that allows you to sit at your standing height, meaning you don't have to adjust the Jerker desk or your monitor and can easily shift back and forth between sitting and standing.
Another must have if you spend any sort of time on the phone is a cordless phone setup that includes regular cordless handsets and a wireless hands-free earpiece. I use a top of the range Panasonic base-station/2 handsets combined with a Plantronics C65 earpiece, allowing me to continue typing while I talk.
You can, of course, stick the above cordless system on any normal phone connection but I prefer to use a VOIP device instead, allowing me to setup my office and phone numbers almost anywhere in the world.
You make it sound like no part of the transaction would occur in Germany aside from the IP connection.
If the German government wants to regulate these services, it'll continue to be able to do so, by something as minimal as, say, requiring that credit card companies refund customers who pay for services that try to bypass the regulatory system, and voiding any bills so they're not legally enforceable. A part of the transaction is occuring in Germany.
I'm not saying that the German government can't throw a spanner in the works, I'm saying that they won't.
Politically, no Western government is going to engage in a drawn-out witch-hunt, mandating the involvement of banks and credit cards companies.
To draw a relevant comparison, European companies have still not managed to universally enforce VAT collection despite threatening to sue American service providers selling to European customers. They are willing to chase that because it's huge money, potentially 15-20% of transatlantic commerce, but it hasn't been easy or very successful.
Notice that they have chosen not to pursue the simpler path of accessing their citizen's bank account and adding a VAT charge to every online service transaction. This is because there are very real blocks, both cultural and legal, that, for the most part, render bank accounts sacred - such access would force to rich to shoulder their fair share of the tax burden and that will never be allowed to happen.
In the case of pursuing the much smaller fish of premium phone services, the only electorate that actually like to see their government flying in the face of the advances that the Internet allows are the French. Every other government knows that stopping their people from benefiting from better services and lower prices is a vote loser and, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.
BTW, Paypal/Ebay will, absolutely, collect VAT on behalf of European governments, Skype already adds it to your top-ups if you don't have the foresight to say you don't live in Europe. All I'm saying is that the premium phoneline providers are going to lose their monopolies and, with their passing, the market will bloom.
I think you have the most insightful comment I have read so far, and the most plausible explanation for this purchase. That really does sound like a completely untapped market possibility. Who wouldn't want to be known as an expert in their niche field? Combine all the user ratings and feedback that eBay uses so that callers can rate these experts..... well the more I think about it, the more sense it makes! It will be interesting to see what actually shakes out in the next few months, and to see if anyone was really close to the mark of why they bought Skype.
Do you know, I hadn't even considered Ebay's expertise with user ratings, feedback and running such systems on a massive scale but, yes, you're absolutely right, this further bolsters the likelihood that this is what they are planning to do. Clearly, their initial announcement's focus on using VOIP to enhance auctions is a complete smokescreen, designed to buy them more time.
I had been incredibly cynical about all the rumors regarding various companies buying Skype but when I heard Ebay mentioned the other day, something just clicked and I knew it was going to happen. The interesting thing is that none of the newspaper pundits made the Paypal connection but, instead, suggested that ebay auctions or even craig's list would benefit from Skype integration. Ridiculous.
The most interesting thing is that Ebay's stock tanked 4% on the rumors and, unless the market has cottoned on to the Paypal possibilities, it will probably dip even more today. If I had money with a US stockbroker right now, I would definitely buy Ebay stock, this is going to be that rarest of things: a new Internet market that will generate pure profit off the back of an existing infrastructure and marketshare that it will be impossible for competitors to replicate. This is going to be huge.
A Skype/Paypal solution would be international, [...]
I don't know about that - here in Germany, premium phone services are heavily regulated (why? I don't really know; I guess just too many crooks abused them and found too many fools to pay them).
I assume Germany is not the only country in the world where this is the case.
But for the US and other less regulated economies, your idea sounds feasible.
Mikrorechner, you need to think logically about what you just said. In particular, understand that we are talking about the Internet here.
In Germany you have heavily regulated premium phone services and, you are quite right, such services are heavily regulated in almost every country. This has created a cost burden that has prevented such services from extending their reach much further than sex services for people too socially retarded to talk to real girls/boys.
The Internet, however, does an end-run around both local regulations and geographic limitations and, provided an accessible and affordable infrastructure is put in place, premium phone services of all types suddenly become viable.
It is precisely because German premium phone services are over-burdened with regulations and telco costs that Paypal are going to spark a revolution.
Local regulations are no longer relevant unless a country is willing to erect something similar to the Great Firewall of China. Do you really think that Angela Merkel is going to start blocking VOIP traffic into Germany? Do you really think that German companies won't want a slice of this new industry?
And you also got me worried. It wouldn't be surprising if eBay will now limit SkypeOut/SkypeIn charges to Paypal only. It even sounds obvious. Good for eBay/Paypal, a major step backwards from everyone else's standpoint (including mine, I have been perfectly happy using Mastercard to buy my SkypeOut credit)
Over the years, I've developed an increasingly pragmatic approach to Internet services; I've had a Paypal account pretty since it began but have never been their most enthusiastic user, mainly because I hated the sneaky way in which they hid the stealthy profit they make on currency exchange - they made it absolutely impossible to find out, via their website what their actual rates were, meaning you never knew what you would actually be paying for an item, a fairly basic requirement for commerce you would imagine. Things may have improved by now but it's not something I have any more time to waste on.
I actually decided not to buy a Flickr account about a year ago because Paypal was the only form of payment they accepted and the Flickr team's much-vaunted technical genius apparently didn't extend to being able to set up their own merchant account.
Lately, though, I have mellowed and I'm more willing to except that, in an online economy, successful business models often have to jettison customer service and human-to-human interactions. I'm not saying that this is A Good Thing, but that it is, possibly, a necessary thing; Paypal's gungho and crudely targetted freezing of some users accounts is, in a sense, the price we pay for having an online payment service available to practically everyone.
Another example is a server company I'm using, LayeredTech. I spent much of this morning banging my head against their incredibly poor customer service, opening tickets to find out why a yes-or-no question I submitted a week ago hasn't been answered, only to receive curt emails chastising me for opening duplicate tickets but still no answer to my simple original question! Phoning their support number gets you put through to a machine and, of course, that's frustrating but my point is that, ultimately, the low cost of the server makes such frustrations worthwhile. Sure, it would be great to find a place that was both cheap and had a customer server ethic but that's rarely possible. Given a choice between the two, most people go for low prices, not because they are innately cheap bastards, but because a substantially cheaper servers open up new levels of financial viability and possibility regarding the use those servers, particularly for creating free services which, in turn, create new waves of possibility for others.
If Paypal is, as I envisaged in my original post, planning to open up an entirely new market of homebrew premium phone services, allowing anyone, anywhere to sell their time/expertise on a per minute basis, well, using a Paypal account to access those services (or even become a provider myself) is a price I'm willing to pay.
Ebay's interest in Skype has nothing to do with augmenting their auctions with calls between buyers and sellers. This is about taking those (alleged) 50 million non-paying Skypers and giving them an easy, more attractive way of paying for individual calls rather then stumping up $5. Pretty much everyone has a Paypal account and this sort of tie-up would get them using both Paypal and Skype more, with people more willing to leave cash sitting in their Paypal accounts because "I might need it for calls". This would consolidate Paypal's dominant position, something Ebay are probably anxious to do in the wake of rumours of a Google e-payment service - most people will only really bother with one payment service and, if it covers their phone calls too, sticking with Paypal will be a no-brainer.
The real killer argument for the Paypal/Skype tie-up is, however, the possibilities it opens up for a whole new generation of premium phone services and the recent repositioning of PayPal, missed by many, strongly suggests that Whitman et al realize this - after years of holding back the whole idea of micro-payments, they finally decided to granularize Paypal's fee scale, making smaller transactions viable. Before, you had to pay 30c + 3% of every transaction, leaving you with 67c from a dollar sale. Now, they are willing to take 5c + 5% instead, leaving you with 90c.
This is huge news because it makes viable a whole new layer of services. I don't think the timing of that introduction is a coincidence. I believe that Paypal are preparing the ground so that anyone who wants to set up a premium number can do so via Skype - if someone fancies themselves as a fortune teller, a Windows guru, a phone psychologist, a language translator, anything at all that can be conveyed over the phone, Skype will allow them to receive calls for which they can charge whatever they want per minute, taken directly from the customers Paypal account.
The rakes that the traditional telcos cream from premium calls are obscene, resulting in unattractive overall rates, crippling a potentially huge homebrew industry before it even began. Seriously, how many of you regularly turn to premium phone-lines when you have a problem? I can definitely understand how talking to another human being, one expert at tackling my particular problem, could be useful - the current cost, however, takes that option right out of contention. Generally, too, a premium service can only serve one country, barely giving it room to breathe market-wise.
A Skype/Paypal solution would be international, meaning a techie in Bombay could build a reputation for solving computer problems for customers in Baltimore, more easily than getting the kid down the road to drop by and certainly more cheaply than phoning Compuworld or Apple. It would also allow that kid in Bombay to keep a meaningful percentage of his per-minute fee, allowing him to keep it low. You would soon have a massive market of providers, ranging from amateurs to highly experienced professionals, all promoting their services via websites and forums, all adapting their charges and services to market conditions. By building the charging mechanism right into Skype, Paypal would find itself sitting happily in the middle of a new explosion of cash transactions.
Read the article entitled "The Monoculture Hype" by the same guy, on the same website, to see him advocate several of the approaches he later castigates as being dumb.
I found the Dumb Ideas article interesting but it's tone is pure hype, designed to draw attention and, frankly, the dumbest thing is that it's so easy to reveal the author as a hypocrite by simply reading a contradicatory article listed right there on his home page.
Slashdot Mirror
Think before you leap because the potential of VOIP is tantalizing, believe me I know, I got sucked in and, to be honest, in many ways I regret it.
I'm a home user/home worker, none of my calls are that important but the quality definitely isn't there. We humans have a great capacity to blind ourselves to minor inconveniences, such as having to alter our conversational style to accommodate slightly unsychronised conversations or drops of several seconds in which the other person can't hear us but, ultimately, these things wear you down and change your relationship with your phone - you can no longer trust your phone but, like the flaws in a new lover, you excuse these things because you're so enamoured with the promise, the potential to route around the bastarding telephone monopolies that have held us all hostage for so long.
I should mention that I'm a UK user and, obviously, that places an extra burden on a US-based service. I signed up to Broadvoice because they had the best thought out plans and their support is, well, it exists which is more than can be said for many of the others. On the whole, though, I absolutely cannot recommend them to UK users because they let me down badly with regard to 0800 (UK tollfree) and 0870 (UK region-free numbers) which, although they claim otherwise on their rates pages, they simply cannot connect to, not for any amount to money. This alone renders their service redundant because, in the UK, an increasing number of businesses only provide and 0800 and 0870 number. The best example of this is Apple's UK branch who no longer accept emails - I wanted to buy about £3000 worth of computers and emailed them with a query, received an automated reply telling me that the only way to contact them was via their 0800, with no regular number to use as an alternative. This may sound like a fairly marginal problem but you wouldn't believe the number of times I've ended up using a mobile, at 20p per minute, to wait on a "freephone" service queue. Apple, BTW, lost that sale along with the chance that I'll ever again suggest their systems to a client.
So, for home users looking to save a few quid, don't buy into the dream while it's still a dream; certainly don't replace your main phoneline.
For home workers attracted to the idea of contacting clients all over the World, ask yourself if you, as a client, would be happy dealing with a service provider who you can't hear properly or with whom conversations are arduous.
For executives eager to boost their corporate careers by manfully slashing millions from their company's telecoms bill, ask yourself if adding an extra stress to the every single employee who uses the phone might not be, in the long-term, a serious blow to the company as a whole - somehow added employee stress and customer frustration never makes it onto Powerpoint presentations, but it's smart to know what's annoying the Hell out of your rank and file.
I wanted VOIP to live up to the dream, I really did - all I'm saying is that, in my case, it didn't, be aware of that amidst all the hype.
... Mexico announces sharp rise in the National Kidnapping Index. "The indications are positive," commented the Chairman of the Mexican Reserve, as masked men bundled his wife into the trunk of a car.
Cunt
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Especially when it comes to extensions - my rough recollection is that most of the best extensions seem to be by Europeans.
They're probably going to claim that they had no choice because it's tricky/expensive to ship electronics outside the States but, c'mon, how hard would it have been to arrange an alternative prize, at least to avoid rubbing the world's nose in it at a time when America isn't exactly the most popular kid in the class. If Mozcorp has a PR, he/she should probably reconsider his/her position.
Great, I guess this means I'll continue to depend upon my own virtual licensing scheme, based on the amount of warez I can download.
It hasn't been going very well.
Honestly, I'm pretty easy to amuse but the hacks at the Reg have consistently failed to display anything approaching genuine wit.
Perhaps /. should add some sort of warning to all Register-bound outward links.
One aspect of the notebooks sure to excite conspiracy theorists is the fact that 87% of the illustrations of Jesus' penis and Mary Magdelene's vagina.
As a side note for non-US citizens: in America corruption has been legalized in the form of campaign contributions. To get elected, politicians must spend vast sums of money on TV advertising. The airwaves that get TV to the masses nominally belong to "the people" but are sold off to major corporations such as GE for a pittance. The corportations then create programming that desperately pursues a mass audience (i.e. quality is not enough, as in the case of Firefly, cancelled before even finishing it's 1st season). The corporations then sell that mass audience back to the politicians in the form of short adverts. The adverts are extremely expensive but the experience of the past half century has consistently shown that the frequency of adverts has a vital role in winning office.
This is great for the corporations because, far more importantly than the revenue that they earn from this exploding advertising spend, it means that no politician has a realistic chance of getting into power unless he is getting lots of corporate campaign contributions (corporate contributions dwarf personal) and, therefore, no representative of the people will ever be able to truly work in the people's interests. Both of the main American parties are equally dependent on this system and, therefore, the only real differences that can exist between them are presentational.
The problem with Microsoft was that they got big so quickly that they didn't have time to take the hint and assume their role in this particular circle of corruption. One of the first things they did when the Clinton administration turned on them was to hire the most expensive lobbyists they could find and start spraying contributions in all directions., guaranteeing that next adminstration, Republican or Democrat, would step down the legal attack.
Google is making sure that they don't make the same mistake.
... Flock off!!
That road-block is money: the admins, who are expected to invest time energy in tailoring their Ning-based websites to their target audience and then generating enough buzz/awareness to build the necessary momentum and userbase to actually make their websites useful, are not allowed to include any adverts because Andreessen & Co will already be inserting ads and explain that "don't look warmly upon more than one person running ads on an App or a page".
The real zinger, however, is that they helpfully suggest that you integrate Paypal and charge for your service. It's not hard to see that most apps that build any traction will turn to this option as the only way to gain some reward for their efforts and, obviously, to build a wall around their service/retain exclusive value, will default to tag their data as "private", killing the whole shared data eco-system concept.
I found your Rails articles a few months ago interesting, I'm surprised that you don't considered that a much better route for anyone with the imagination to invent new Web apps.
While I don't wish to piss on anyone's parade here, Matalan are very much the Titanic of the generally begaled UK retail sector, we shouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that their choice of Linux was a particularly astute business move - they haven't shown much propensity for astuteness.
The single biggest bomber threat in Europe comes from French Muslims, mostly of North African descent - British Muslims are comparatively much better integrated. It is considered politically incorrect to point this out but Muslims of Algerian and Morrocan descent represent a huge social problem in many European countries but in particular France, which used to own Morroco and Algeria and to which many immigrated.
I can't find a photo of David Mery but, by his surname, he probably isn't Muslim. He may, however, like many French, be quite swarthy and it can sometimes be hard to distinguish between this and Arabic or North African looks - the innocent guy who was recently executed on a tube platform by the London police was, in fact, Brazilian.
You can't blame the police for not taking any chances although it is absolutely wrong for them to charge him with creating a public nuisance, we should all be concerned at that viscious little twist. As for stopping, searching and detaining him, however, that is just part of the price we have to pay because some Northern losers couldn't get girlfriends and decided to martyr themselves for Allah instead. All I hope is that things don't get as nuts as I saw them get at American airports in the years following 9/11, with semi-retarded airport officials pulling aside white grandmothers and frightening the bejaysus out of them. Unfortunately, for this particular problem, some intelligent racial profiling is going to be vital, let's get over ourselves and get the job done.
I second the Ikea Jerker, I actually have two of these now, side by side, loads of desk space. I mostly stand while working but I also have an Ikea Procent chair - I checked the website but they don't seem to be listed, so, I'll describe the basic idea: a very high swivel chair with an adjustable foot rest, that allows you to sit at your standing height, meaning you don't have to adjust the Jerker desk or your monitor and can easily shift back and forth between sitting and standing. Another must have if you spend any sort of time on the phone is a cordless phone setup that includes regular cordless handsets and a wireless hands-free earpiece. I use a top of the range Panasonic base-station/2 handsets combined with a Plantronics C65 earpiece, allowing me to continue typing while I talk. You can, of course, stick the above cordless system on any normal phone connection but I prefer to use a VOIP device instead, allowing me to setup my office and phone numbers almost anywhere in the world.
I'm not saying that the German government can't throw a spanner in the works, I'm saying that they won't.
Politically, no Western government is going to engage in a drawn-out witch-hunt, mandating the involvement of banks and credit cards companies.
To draw a relevant comparison, European companies have still not managed to universally enforce VAT collection despite threatening to sue American service providers selling to European customers. They are willing to chase that because it's huge money, potentially 15-20% of transatlantic commerce, but it hasn't been easy or very successful.
Notice that they have chosen not to pursue the simpler path of accessing their citizen's bank account and adding a VAT charge to every online service transaction. This is because there are very real blocks, both cultural and legal, that, for the most part, render bank accounts sacred - such access would force to rich to shoulder their fair share of the tax burden and that will never be allowed to happen.
In the case of pursuing the much smaller fish of premium phone services, the only electorate that actually like to see their government flying in the face of the advances that the Internet allows are the French. Every other government knows that stopping their people from benefiting from better services and lower prices is a vote loser and, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.
BTW, Paypal/Ebay will, absolutely, collect VAT on behalf of European governments, Skype already adds it to your top-ups if you don't have the foresight to say you don't live in Europe. All I'm saying is that the premium phoneline providers are going to lose their monopolies and, with their passing, the market will bloom.
I had been incredibly cynical about all the rumors regarding various companies buying Skype but when I heard Ebay mentioned the other day, something just clicked and I knew it was going to happen. The interesting thing is that none of the newspaper pundits made the Paypal connection but, instead, suggested that ebay auctions or even craig's list would benefit from Skype integration. Ridiculous.
The most interesting thing is that Ebay's stock tanked 4% on the rumors and, unless the market has cottoned on to the Paypal possibilities, it will probably dip even more today. If I had money with a US stockbroker right now, I would definitely buy Ebay stock, this is going to be that rarest of things: a new Internet market that will generate pure profit off the back of an existing infrastructure and marketshare that it will be impossible for competitors to replicate. This is going to be huge.
In Germany you have heavily regulated premium phone services and, you are quite right, such services are heavily regulated in almost every country. This has created a cost burden that has prevented such services from extending their reach much further than sex services for people too socially retarded to talk to real girls/boys.
The Internet, however, does an end-run around both local regulations and geographic limitations and, provided an accessible and affordable infrastructure is put in place, premium phone services of all types suddenly become viable.
It is precisely because German premium phone services are over-burdened with regulations and telco costs that Paypal are going to spark a revolution.
Local regulations are no longer relevant unless a country is willing to erect something similar to the Great Firewall of China. Do you really think that Angela Merkel is going to start blocking VOIP traffic into Germany? Do you really think that German companies won't want a slice of this new industry?
I actually decided not to buy a Flickr account about a year ago because Paypal was the only form of payment they accepted and the Flickr team's much-vaunted technical genius apparently didn't extend to being able to set up their own merchant account.
Lately, though, I have mellowed and I'm more willing to except that, in an online economy, successful business models often have to jettison customer service and human-to-human interactions. I'm not saying that this is A Good Thing, but that it is, possibly, a necessary thing; Paypal's gungho and crudely targetted freezing of some users accounts is, in a sense, the price we pay for having an online payment service available to practically everyone.
Another example is a server company I'm using, LayeredTech. I spent much of this morning banging my head against their incredibly poor customer service, opening tickets to find out why a yes-or-no question I submitted a week ago hasn't been answered, only to receive curt emails chastising me for opening duplicate tickets but still no answer to my simple original question! Phoning their support number gets you put through to a machine and, of course, that's frustrating but my point is that, ultimately, the low cost of the server makes such frustrations worthwhile. Sure, it would be great to find a place that was both cheap and had a customer server ethic but that's rarely possible. Given a choice between the two, most people go for low prices, not because they are innately cheap bastards, but because a substantially cheaper servers open up new levels of financial viability and possibility regarding the use those servers, particularly for creating free services which, in turn, create new waves of possibility for others.
If Paypal is, as I envisaged in my original post, planning to open up an entirely new market of homebrew premium phone services, allowing anyone, anywhere to sell their time/expertise on a per minute basis, well, using a Paypal account to access those services (or even become a provider myself) is a price I'm willing to pay.
Get ready for the iPod Mano - Man-sized storage in a Nano package.
Ebay's interest in Skype has nothing to do with augmenting their auctions with calls between buyers and sellers. This is about taking those (alleged) 50 million non-paying Skypers and giving them an easy, more attractive way of paying for individual calls rather then stumping up $5. Pretty much everyone has a Paypal account and this sort of tie-up would get them using both Paypal and Skype more, with people more willing to leave cash sitting in their Paypal accounts because "I might need it for calls". This would consolidate Paypal's dominant position, something Ebay are probably anxious to do in the wake of rumours of a Google e-payment service - most people will only really bother with one payment service and, if it covers their phone calls too, sticking with Paypal will be a no-brainer.
The real killer argument for the Paypal/Skype tie-up is, however, the possibilities it opens up for a whole new generation of premium phone services and the recent repositioning of PayPal, missed by many, strongly suggests that Whitman et al realize this - after years of holding back the whole idea of micro-payments, they finally decided to granularize Paypal's fee scale, making smaller transactions viable. Before, you had to pay 30c + 3% of every transaction, leaving you with 67c from a dollar sale. Now, they are willing to take 5c + 5% instead, leaving you with 90c.
This is huge news because it makes viable a whole new layer of services. I don't think the timing of that introduction is a coincidence. I believe that Paypal are preparing the ground so that anyone who wants to set up a premium number can do so via Skype - if someone fancies themselves as a fortune teller, a Windows guru, a phone psychologist, a language translator, anything at all that can be conveyed over the phone, Skype will allow them to receive calls for which they can charge whatever they want per minute, taken directly from the customers Paypal account.
The rakes that the traditional telcos cream from premium calls are obscene, resulting in unattractive overall rates, crippling a potentially huge homebrew industry before it even began. Seriously, how many of you regularly turn to premium phone-lines when you have a problem? I can definitely understand how talking to another human being, one expert at tackling my particular problem, could be useful - the current cost, however, takes that option right out of contention. Generally, too, a premium service can only serve one country, barely giving it room to breathe market-wise.
A Skype/Paypal solution would be international, meaning a techie in Bombay could build a reputation for solving computer problems for customers in Baltimore, more easily than getting the kid down the road to drop by and certainly more cheaply than phoning Compuworld or Apple. It would also allow that kid in Bombay to keep a meaningful percentage of his per-minute fee, allowing him to keep it low. You would soon have a massive market of providers, ranging from amateurs to highly experienced professionals, all promoting their services via websites and forums, all adapting their charges and services to market conditions. By building the charging mechanism right into Skype, Paypal would find itself sitting happily in the middle of a new explosion of cash transactions.
Just like Ebay did.
Read the article entitled "The Monoculture Hype" by the same guy, on the same website, to see him advocate several of the approaches he later castigates as being dumb.
I found the Dumb Ideas article interesting but it's tone is pure hype, designed to draw attention and, frankly, the dumbest thing is that it's so easy to reveal the author as a hypocrite by simply reading a contradicatory article listed right there on his home page.