Your basic phone fee should be covering the health and status traffic to your handset. That basic fee covers their fixed infrastructure and handset traffic costs. The advertising for metered data, and the consumer expectation, is that the 200MB (or 2GB) allotment is discretionary, whereas it appears that there may very well be a 5% or greater "overhead" you're getting charged for.
I've come close to my 200MB limit once, when I was on vacation and the hotel wifi was not free. I looked up all the "stuff" the familly was going to do on my phone, used it for maps, and generally spent a lot of time on the web while they rested between events. I didn't go over, but I would have had a bit more cushion if there were actually 10+MB of health/status transfers on top of my discretionary usage. (FWIW, I usually use about 60MB/mo; I use my phone for work so I'm constantly on email and calendars, but rarely stream anything)
Apparently, you don't observe much. Although it varies a bit from society to society, there is a small number of people who do, in fact, value work and have critical skills, and a very large majority who are basically killing time until they die. We "employ" these people not just as laborers, and wage workers, but in every job.
I suspect, though I have no proof or direct observation, that being identified and selected as exceptional in eastern Europe or China puts you on the fast track to "success" with people just like you - those driven enough to excel in such an environment.
I encountered this recently with a fellow engineer who was working in business. He was amazed how lazy and stupid all the people around him were today, whereas when he was a student everyone was smart and motivated. I pointed out that when he was a student as an Aerospace Engineer, he was in one of the most difficult curricula of a top 20 engineering school - all the chaff had been weeded out multiple times. Now that he dealt with the "average" person every day, he got to see what humans are actually like. He'd never thought of himself as special, because when compared to the top 1% he wasn't.
I find half of the quote from Men In Black very appropriate: "People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
It appears you never bothered to take economics or personal finance. A reliable vehicle with a moderate payload and (what we now believe to be standard) safety features will cost a large fraction of the average consumer's annual income. Since 2/3 of trips are greater than 3 miles, that means two vehicles. A $5000 vehicle that costs nothing to run will never pay for itself, economically, compared to your average gasoline vehicle.
Autonomous vehicles? That's a pipe dream which is going to take a lot of wacky weed to smoke. The advantage of electric vehicles is that they play nice with the installed base on the road. You've got 20 years of existing non-autonomous vehicles to contend with if you outlawed their sale today, and you will never get rid of large, commercial vehicles. To build a parallel road system (or rail) that meets the need of the average residence in the US would be economically infeasible in the very best economy.
You may think it goes to roads, but in most states there isn't a separate fund - it goes into the general fund, out of which the DOT budget gets apportioned. It's kind of like lottery money going to schools. They keep saying it does, but the school budgets don't seem to be growing as fast as lottery revenue. Why? Because as the lottery money rolls in, the contribution from the general find gets cut back. It's a tax - it goes to fund everything. It has a purpose, but not a 1:1 relationship to expenditures.
Could more electric cars mean a drop in revenue? Perhaps. Remember that there's a tax on electricity too, and that goes into the general fund as well. It's a fools argument. Governments will adjust.
Well, you've kind of proved his point. Current electric cars are in the 35-40k range, even for small ones - it's the subsidies which make them affordable to the middle class. Dumping cash we don't have in the form of subsidies probably isn't the most efficient solution, and it certainly isn't sustainable.
Good thing there zero days with snow in about 30% of the Us, and less than 10 days with snow for about 60%. For those days, stay home or buy a Subaru. I plan on the latter for my next vehicle.
Interesting. I posted this as my first note to my profile two years ago:
"I hereby reserve the right to revoke any previously granted license to any photographic content I post to Facebook. I further specifically revoke all rights to all photographic content I post to Facebook once I remove it from my profile or portion of my pages. Facebook, Inc. and its subsidiaries and affiliates ('Facebook') may maintain a copy or copies of the photos above on their servers indefinitely, but may not distribute them to any other commercial or private entity, or use them for any commercial purpose. I may modify this agreement at any time, for any reason, provided I post the updates here and/or provide said updates in writing to Facebook.
By providing continued access to my profile, Facebook agrees to the above terms. "
Call it an End User's License Agreement. I've not received a counter offer and they appear to have accepted my terms...
Let's also hope that the energy it takes to maintain and harvest an acre of bacteria byproduct is not a significant fraction of the output.
Presuming that this works over a fairly narrow range of temperatures, that means heating/cooling/shading for periods where solar flux isn't perfect. It also means you have 11,000 square miles of oil slick you have to keep from getting into the ground water. And, at a certain point, will we worry about evaporation and smell of the plants?
This would be exceptionally awesome if they can overcome the real and NIMBY hurdles.
No no no. You should have named it My Apps. That's SO much more descriptive.
Sorry, I didn't mean that outburst. It's a sore spot for an old guy who used to have everything neatly organized on his hard drive:/files/programs/temp (yes, I made them plural - almost as bad as "my", but it was my idea so I liked it:-P)
You know, I can see this as potentially useful for cad, but I can't get away from the fact the it seems to get in the way of the keyboard. So often you need to do vertical or horizontal only movements, so that might be an advantage.
Maybe one of these with a chording keyboard under the other hand, or a customized pad like an N52? (Real CAD operators use keyboards - it's much faster than the mouse; you could say the same for photo editing and painting as well, I suspect)
How does this thing do with cheetos int he trough?
I meant that if the GP was right, AT&T gave up at least $560 in revenue over the next two years. 24 months x $15 = 360, plus the $200 they could have gotten for the phone otherwise - $560.
Sure, they keep the customer, but it also sets a dangerous precedent. Have you seen the FatWallet or SlickDeals guys swarm on CS agents? It gets ugly fast.
I get 50 days (41MB/hr, though I usually stream Pandora free at 48-64kb), so if you're doing it on your commute, you can stream music for 2 hours a day, every work day, and still have 400MB for emails and casual surfing...which is about 8x what I go through in a month.
What the fuck are you "doing" on your phone that would use 4GB of data? Streaming HD video to an SD phone is about the only real use I can see, short of being stuck without a landline based network and having to tether to do the same or download entire OSes. Hell, my DSL maxes out at 1GB/hr.
If you are regularly out of wifi range and use streaming audio or similar, yeah - you can rack up the GBs quickly.
The only time I've gotten close to my 200MB "limit" on the AT&T cheap plan was when I was in NY for a week and the hotel wanted $10/day for wifi. I had the family with me, and they were tired by 6pm so we sat around the hotel and I surfed for 2-3 hours a night on my phone (which sucks on a 4" screen, no matter how you slice it).
Other than that I've never broken 100MB, but I have wifi at home and at work that I use, and there is no public transportation so I don't need to "kill" a couple hours a day. I regularly download files via Evernote and Livedrive to get work done, and I check my mail/googl voice/facebook way more than enough to be considered "working" most of the time.
Sure, usage patterns vary, but based on numbers that AT&T published last year, I'm solidly in the mainstream, and you occupy the top fraction of a percent of data users. Any carrier would be glad to see you go.
With most of my stuff in "the cloud," any time I have to look up something other than (say) a calendar date, I connect to the network to access it. Evernote, Livedrive, Dropbox, Mail (okay, not the bit that's already there, but if I have to search gmail...).
Does it happen often? Not excessively, but then again I rarely hit 500 minutes a month and 70MB in data - but usually when I need it, I really need it.
The only thing I will envy is the hotspot, though it will prbably cost so much it won't be worth it. I expect it will require the "high data" plan and a hotspot fee when the full rate sheet comes out. I'm not willing to shell out the extra $360/yr to do it on ATT ($10 extra for 2G plan plus $20 tethering fee), I wouldn't pay that much for it on Verizon.
I think you just got trolled. I seriously doubt AT&T cares enough about keeping their customers to fork over $560 to keep someone with an old 3G(S) handset.
Unlimited data and hotspot? Talking about bringing a carrier to its knees. Of course, without LTE, the speed limitation will keep the overall traffic in check, and they can weed out the "abusers" before they have an LTE handset.
CDMA or the new LTE? I haven't seen an ad which claims it can't be done on LTE, just that it can't be done on their coverage. I don't think it is possible with the current 3G CDMA network which is deployed practically everywhere, but on LTE (which is just select markets) it should be possible.
Fair enough, I suppose, though that's like 10 hours of music a day. Unless you were streaming at a pretty high data rate, and based on my experience with the iPhones, their fidelity really doesn't justify much quality need. Still, I can see music streaming if you don't have wifi. I can use WiFi at work (or *gasp* my desktop) to stream Pandora, or even tap into the 25GB of my own music.
Unless I'm stuck on public transportation for an extended period of time (which admittedly doesn't exist near me), I'm very unlikely to ever stream more than the occasional 1-3 minute youtube clip on my 3.5" screen. It's a horrible way to watch TV.
I can't imagine I'd want to really do any video work worth my iPhone and need to upload it in HD, except perhaps as a technology demo. They make much better tools for that.
As AT&T found when they looked at usage, the vast majority of people rarely crack the 100MB barrier on their iPhones. Unlimited is a bit of a niche market.
I don't know. I'm sure they'll lose people in the markets where there service is wildly oversubscribed. That will balance the traffic better, leading to better service for AT&T people who stay, and clogging more of the Verizon cells.
Neither has much magic in their plans. $15 gets you 150MB(V) or 200MB (ATT) of service - which is more than most people will ever use in a month. Low minute packages are about the same price. Phones will probably cost the same (though V's can't be resold overseas, so resale might be slightly less). I don't see much differentiation unless you live in an area with shitty service from one or the other.
Still, I'm all for a wicked price war on plans and data services!
How many people will actually use an "unlimited" amount of data every month (i.e. - more than the 2GB offered for $5 less on AT&T, for example), if you can't tether?
And, if you tether without approval and manage to use 2+ GB, how quickly do you think Verizon will point to their TOS and hand you an extra monthly tethering fee?
Depends on who you are. If you have a warehouse full of $1000 commercial APs and a box full of "Medical Grade / FDA certified" stickers in you desk drawer - it looks like you'll be retiring early!
Slashdot Mirror
Your basic phone fee should be covering the health and status traffic to your handset. That basic fee covers their fixed infrastructure and handset traffic costs. The advertising for metered data, and the consumer expectation, is that the 200MB (or 2GB) allotment is discretionary, whereas it appears that there may very well be a 5% or greater "overhead" you're getting charged for.
I've come close to my 200MB limit once, when I was on vacation and the hotel wifi was not free. I looked up all the "stuff" the familly was going to do on my phone, used it for maps, and generally spent a lot of time on the web while they rested between events. I didn't go over, but I would have had a bit more cushion if there were actually 10+MB of health/status transfers on top of my discretionary usage. (FWIW, I usually use about 60MB/mo; I use my phone for work so I'm constantly on email and calendars, but rarely stream anything)
And $18,000,000 in 40-hour-billiable-days for the lawyers!
Apparently, you don't observe much. Although it varies a bit from society to society, there is a small number of people who do, in fact, value work and have critical skills, and a very large majority who are basically killing time until they die. We "employ" these people not just as laborers, and wage workers, but in every job.
I suspect, though I have no proof or direct observation, that being identified and selected as exceptional in eastern Europe or China puts you on the fast track to "success" with people just like you - those driven enough to excel in such an environment.
I encountered this recently with a fellow engineer who was working in business. He was amazed how lazy and stupid all the people around him were today, whereas when he was a student everyone was smart and motivated. I pointed out that when he was a student as an Aerospace Engineer, he was in one of the most difficult curricula of a top 20 engineering school - all the chaff had been weeded out multiple times. Now that he dealt with the "average" person every day, he got to see what humans are actually like. He'd never thought of himself as special, because when compared to the top 1% he wasn't.
I find half of the quote from Men In Black very appropriate: "People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
I accept your compromise. Stick him in a cell with Zuckerberg for the next 100 years.
Done.
It appears you never bothered to take economics or personal finance. A reliable vehicle with a moderate payload and (what we now believe to be standard) safety features will cost a large fraction of the average consumer's annual income. Since 2/3 of trips are greater than 3 miles, that means two vehicles. A $5000 vehicle that costs nothing to run will never pay for itself, economically, compared to your average gasoline vehicle.
Autonomous vehicles? That's a pipe dream which is going to take a lot of wacky weed to smoke. The advantage of electric vehicles is that they play nice with the installed base on the road. You've got 20 years of existing non-autonomous vehicles to contend with if you outlawed their sale today, and you will never get rid of large, commercial vehicles. To build a parallel road system (or rail) that meets the need of the average residence in the US would be economically infeasible in the very best economy.
You may think it goes to roads, but in most states there isn't a separate fund - it goes into the general fund, out of which the DOT budget gets apportioned. It's kind of like lottery money going to schools. They keep saying it does, but the school budgets don't seem to be growing as fast as lottery revenue. Why? Because as the lottery money rolls in, the contribution from the general find gets cut back. It's a tax - it goes to fund everything. It has a purpose, but not a 1:1 relationship to expenditures.
Could more electric cars mean a drop in revenue? Perhaps. Remember that there's a tax on electricity too, and that goes into the general fund as well. It's a fools argument. Governments will adjust.
Well, you've kind of proved his point. Current electric cars are in the 35-40k range, even for small ones - it's the subsidies which make them affordable to the middle class. Dumping cash we don't have in the form of subsidies probably isn't the most efficient solution, and it certainly isn't sustainable.
I'm sure that nobody will be angry or suspicious about the internet going dark. I expect nothing but butterflies and rainbows from this.
Good thing there zero days with snow in about 30% of the Us, and less than 10 days with snow for about 60%. For those days, stay home or buy a Subaru. I plan on the latter for my next vehicle.
Interesting. I posted this as my first note to my profile two years ago:
"I hereby reserve the right to revoke any previously granted license to any photographic content I post to Facebook. I further specifically revoke all rights to all photographic content I post to Facebook once I remove it from my profile or portion of my pages. Facebook, Inc. and its subsidiaries and affiliates ('Facebook') may maintain a copy or copies of the photos above on their servers indefinitely, but may not distribute them to any other commercial or private entity, or use them for any commercial purpose. I may modify this agreement at any time, for any reason, provided I post the updates here and/or provide said updates in writing to Facebook.
By providing continued access to my profile, Facebook agrees to the above terms. "
Call it an End User's License Agreement. I've not received a counter offer and they appear to have accepted my terms...
Let's also hope that the energy it takes to maintain and harvest an acre of bacteria byproduct is not a significant fraction of the output.
Presuming that this works over a fairly narrow range of temperatures, that means heating/cooling/shading for periods where solar flux isn't perfect. It also means you have 11,000 square miles of oil slick you have to keep from getting into the ground water. And, at a certain point, will we worry about evaporation and smell of the plants?
This would be exceptionally awesome if they can overcome the real and NIMBY hurdles.
"Your friend James found a child wandering onto his farm!"
No no no. You should have named it My Apps. That's SO much more descriptive.
Sorry, I didn't mean that outburst. It's a sore spot for an old guy who used to have everything neatly organized on his hard drive: /files /programs /temp (yes, I made them plural - almost as bad as "my", but it was my idea so I liked it :-P)
You know, I can see this as potentially useful for cad, but I can't get away from the fact the it seems to get in the way of the keyboard. So often you need to do vertical or horizontal only movements, so that might be an advantage.
Maybe one of these with a chording keyboard under the other hand, or a customized pad like an N52? (Real CAD operators use keyboards - it's much faster than the mouse; you could say the same for photo editing and painting as well, I suspect)
How does this thing do with cheetos int he trough?
I meant that if the GP was right, AT&T gave up at least $560 in revenue over the next two years. 24 months x $15 = 360, plus the $200 they could have gotten for the phone otherwise - $560.
Sure, they keep the customer, but it also sets a dangerous precedent. Have you seen the FatWallet or SlickDeals guys swarm on CS agents? It gets ugly fast.
I get 50 days (41MB/hr, though I usually stream Pandora free at 48-64kb), so if you're doing it on your commute, you can stream music for 2 hours a day, every work day, and still have 400MB for emails and casual surfing...which is about 8x what I go through in a month.
What the fuck are you "doing" on your phone that would use 4GB of data? Streaming HD video to an SD phone is about the only real use I can see, short of being stuck without a landline based network and having to tether to do the same or download entire OSes. Hell, my DSL maxes out at 1GB/hr.
If you are regularly out of wifi range and use streaming audio or similar, yeah - you can rack up the GBs quickly.
The only time I've gotten close to my 200MB "limit" on the AT&T cheap plan was when I was in NY for a week and the hotel wanted $10/day for wifi. I had the family with me, and they were tired by 6pm so we sat around the hotel and I surfed for 2-3 hours a night on my phone (which sucks on a 4" screen, no matter how you slice it).
Other than that I've never broken 100MB, but I have wifi at home and at work that I use, and there is no public transportation so I don't need to "kill" a couple hours a day. I regularly download files via Evernote and Livedrive to get work done, and I check my mail/googl voice/facebook way more than enough to be considered "working" most of the time.
Sure, usage patterns vary, but based on numbers that AT&T published last year, I'm solidly in the mainstream, and you occupy the top fraction of a percent of data users. Any carrier would be glad to see you go.
With most of my stuff in "the cloud," any time I have to look up something other than (say) a calendar date, I connect to the network to access it. Evernote, Livedrive, Dropbox, Mail (okay, not the bit that's already there, but if I have to search gmail...).
Does it happen often? Not excessively, but then again I rarely hit 500 minutes a month and 70MB in data - but usually when I need it, I really need it.
The only thing I will envy is the hotspot, though it will prbably cost so much it won't be worth it. I expect it will require the "high data" plan and a hotspot fee when the full rate sheet comes out. I'm not willing to shell out the extra $360/yr to do it on ATT ($10 extra for 2G plan plus $20 tethering fee), I wouldn't pay that much for it on Verizon.
I think you just got trolled. I seriously doubt AT&T cares enough about keeping their customers to fork over $560 to keep someone with an old 3G(S) handset.
Unlimited data and hotspot? Talking about bringing a carrier to its knees. Of course, without LTE, the speed limitation will keep the overall traffic in check, and they can weed out the "abusers" before they have an LTE handset.
CDMA or the new LTE? I haven't seen an ad which claims it can't be done on LTE, just that it can't be done on their coverage. I don't think it is possible with the current 3G CDMA network which is deployed practically everywhere, but on LTE (which is just select markets) it should be possible.
Fair enough, I suppose, though that's like 10 hours of music a day. Unless you were streaming at a pretty high data rate, and based on my experience with the iPhones, their fidelity really doesn't justify much quality need. Still, I can see music streaming if you don't have wifi. I can use WiFi at work (or *gasp* my desktop) to stream Pandora, or even tap into the 25GB of my own music.
Unless I'm stuck on public transportation for an extended period of time (which admittedly doesn't exist near me), I'm very unlikely to ever stream more than the occasional 1-3 minute youtube clip on my 3.5" screen. It's a horrible way to watch TV.
I can't imagine I'd want to really do any video work worth my iPhone and need to upload it in HD, except perhaps as a technology demo. They make much better tools for that.
As AT&T found when they looked at usage, the vast majority of people rarely crack the 100MB barrier on their iPhones. Unlimited is a bit of a niche market.
[James Earl Jones] We said it was unlimited. I find your lack of faith is disturbing. [/James Earl Jones]
I don't know. I'm sure they'll lose people in the markets where there service is wildly oversubscribed. That will balance the traffic better, leading to better service for AT&T people who stay, and clogging more of the Verizon cells.
Neither has much magic in their plans. $15 gets you 150MB(V) or 200MB (ATT) of service - which is more than most people will ever use in a month. Low minute packages are about the same price. Phones will probably cost the same (though V's can't be resold overseas, so resale might be slightly less). I don't see much differentiation unless you live in an area with shitty service from one or the other.
Still, I'm all for a wicked price war on plans and data services!
How many people will actually use an "unlimited" amount of data every month (i.e. - more than the 2GB offered for $5 less on AT&T, for example), if you can't tether?
And, if you tether without approval and manage to use 2+ GB, how quickly do you think Verizon will point to their TOS and hand you an extra monthly tethering fee?
Depends on who you are. If you have a warehouse full of $1000 commercial APs and a box full of "Medical Grade / FDA certified" stickers in you desk drawer - it looks like you'll be retiring early!