Personal mobility is a consumer freedoms thing, I suspect the law requiring it has much more to do with protecting consumer freedoms and preventing anti-competitive behaviour than it does supporting GSM. After all, Qualcomm does ship a version of IS-95 that supports personal mobility too.
The fact that US CDMA phones can interoperate with AMPS networks is ultimately both its advantage and its crux. Qualcomm could have made IS-95 interoperable with GSM. They could have, as the UMTS people did, produced IS-95 as GSM with a different air interface. That would have made it a genuine upgrade for virtually everyone, and the debates between the two camps would have been non-existant. Qualcomm, however, felt they needed to make CDMA more attractive to US cellular operators, who were after a drop-in replacement for AMPS, and most of whom were looking at D-AMPS (IS-136) as that replacement. As a result, they built this system that, essentially, uses a network model only fractionally more advanced and just as limited as the 1970s AMPS model. The results were pretty horrible for end users, and GSM remains a superior solution for most mobile users (even if not necessarily network operators), giving them far more freedom and far more advanced features.
Qualcomm's complaints that GSM gets special treatment are generally misleading. You can point to what you heard from a GSMA rep, but frankly, it doesn't make any sense on any level. The types of CDMA that are used where such governments are making such mandates do support personal mobility. So the rep is plain wrong. And Qualcomm's lying if it's claiming this is evidence of a giant conspiracy against it. Qualcomm, of course, has lobbied the US government to lobby for, and sometimes even mandate, IS-95 in various places. It's largely been unsuccessful, though some of our current political problems with China date back to the Clinton administration trying to push IS-95 on the Chinese, who in turn would use it as a bargaining chip for numerous unrelated issues.
I really wish the FUD and shilling campaigns would stop, and Qualcomm and ETSI would work together on a common standard. I think most US operators, right now, with their networks the way they are, would be delighted if they could run UMTS with a CDMA (rather than WCDMA) air interface layer. I think most users would be better off with this too. The CDMA air interface is a nice thing, the IS-95 network isn't. GSM/UMTS is a wonderful thing, but the air interface technology could do with improvement. It's difficult to see why this hasn't happened yet.
Well, with a two hour DVD using about 4 gigs, I would assume a 40 gig iPod Video could store ten movies at DVD quality, without doing any recompression or stripping out any special features (eg keeping all three English soundtracks - PCM, AC3, and the Director's commentary.) In practice, systems like MPEG4 coupled with removing unnecessary stuff you wouldn't want to carry around with you, could easily quadrupal that number without any noticable quality reduction.
40 gig iPod with 40 full length movies, or 160 episodes of "Family Guy." Not impractical really, is it?
Whether it's useful is another issue. Personally I think the idea's crap because movies already are portable in their "Can take to a friend's house and play on friend's TV" form, and most of us don't really do that that often. It's not like music where the ability to have your entire music collection at your finger tips whereever you are is genuinely a life improver.
GSM is available in the US, but for all practical purposes is a new thing. T-Mobile USA is a merger of various GSM carriers around the US that used to operate in specific markets and nowhere else (imagine if Orange only worked in Wales, Cellnet in Southern England, Vodafone in Scotland, and one2one in Northern Ireland, and people in Northern England were out of luck - that's how the situation used to be in the US from a GSM user's point of view.); Cingular is a merger of several old Bell cellphone divisions and AT&T's mobile division, and they've manually been switching over to GSM, poorly and crappily, for the last four years.
As a result, relatively few Americans are used to the concept or the full ramifications of GSM. In my experience, relatively few realise you can use the SIM card in other phones, and even fewer realise you can go outside of the carriers themselves to buy compatable phones.
To make matters worse, there's been a FUD campaign against GSM for the last ten years by Qualcomm, the patent holders for CDMA. Qualcomm's complaints vary from a somewhat misleading (and hypocritical) set of claims that the EU forced GSM upon European carriers to deliberate obscufication of the differences between standards and air-interface technologies. Many Americans think that GSM is a version of IS-136, because they both use a TDMA air interface. IS-136, needless to say, is relatively poor in features (until recently, it pretty much resembled IS-95, the Qualcomm CDMA telephony standard, from an end-user standpoint), or that GSM is being replaced by CDMA, because UMTS (3G GSM) uses a "WCDMA" air interface.
Qualcomm, allegedly, has a version of IS-95 that supports SIM-like cards, that they sell in other countries. No US carriers actually support these versions. It'll be interesting to see what the consequences of Cingular's adoption of GSM, and eventually UMTS, will do to spur Verizon, Sprint, and others, into adopting this enhanced version or switching to UMTS. I'm guessing, ultimately, it'll depend on how whether a significant number of Cingular and T-Mobile users simply find the loss of freedom in switching to the IS-95 carriers so unacceptable they're no longer willing to do it, or if they do, they switch back in large numbers.
Highly amusing really, in many ways. This is actually a consumer-relations fiasco, not a legal fiasco, but as many businesses purposefully make their products and services more complex, as they try to squeeze more revenues while hoping the customer will not know better, they lose sight of the whole "keeping your customers happy" thing. It's not always deliberate on their part, it's just if your primary attitude is "How can we squeeze a little more money from a supposedly "extra" service without our customers realising until they've signed up", then you already have a customer-hostile attitude and it's going to be obvious however much money you invest in feel-good advertising, friendly corporate logos, and determining whether to have your sales and CS reps greet customers with "MobileMegaCom, how can I help you?" or "On behalf of MobileMegaCom, I'd like to wish you a very fine morning, what can WE do to make YOUR life more pleasurable, right now?"
Money that used to be spent on marketing and customer service gurus is now being spent, ten fold, on lawyers to handle extremely disgruntled customers, who are rarely, in their entirety, the complete techno-illiterates these companies assume they are.
Unfortunately, with so many companies either ex-monopolies or attempting to work in such a mode, for the most part legal threats are becoming the only real way customers can voice their dissatisfaction and expect changes.
I hate telephone companies, or at least I hate their marketing departments. They're all dishonest. They all lie about charges, and they lobby the FCC to give them get-outs when they do. They always try to push contracts that are absurdly long. They pretend they're selling one thing (as in this case) when they're actually selling something lesser. They push contracts that are inherently unfair and one-sided. (No, it doesn't take two years to recover a phone subsidy, indeed with tariffs usually around $50 a month, it usually barely takes two months. More to the point, if the issue is subsidies, why don't you just let early cancellers return their subsidized phones, in working condition, if they want to cancel before the end of the contract? And why not make it easy for those who already have compatable equipment to sign up on a month-to-month basis, maybe even with - *gasp* a discounted talk plan given they've just saved you your precious subsidy - I'll tell you why, because the idea the two year contracts have anything to do with subsidies is complete and total bullshit.)
I'd like to think some kind of free-market darwinism will fix this. It's hard to tell. Mobile carriers are so varied in quality that people will shun the best, most reasonable, because, for example, it has 1900MHz licenses and thus, through no fault of its own, has poorer indoor coverage. So, ultimately, people are going to resort to lawsuits to fix these issues. In this case, I say good luck to the lawyers. Once the operators start acting decently again, maybe I'll start whining about frivilous lawsuits, but the big operators are not doing so, so screw 'em, and throw every complaint they're not prepared to deal with honourably back at 'em in court.
And if it makes a few lawyers rich, that's great. If someone's doing a public service, I don't have a problem with them earning money from it.
You can buy unlocked GSM phones from various sources (try eBay, shopping.yahoo.com, and others.) As long as the phone supports 1900 and 850MHz you'll not have any problem with any US carrier.
Just buy the cheapest you-must-buy-a-phone-to-initiate-service phone you can get (assuming you can't get a SIM-only deal by contacting the carrier directly) (you're looking at around $30 at the moment), and then select from the myriad of unlocked phones on the Internet. The phone you buy, as long as it's unlocked, will be transferable between both major US GSM operators (and the smaller ones, if there are any left.)
FYI, it's only a potential copyright violation to copy "2" if you're copying "2" (besides which, I suspect 2 is in the public domain right now. Ok, let's start again: It's only a potential copyright violation if you copy 100010100101101000110100010100100011100111 if you're actually copying it from someone else. If you independently come up with 100010100101101000110100010100100011100111, say, by doing a mathematical sum, where you're not aiming to come up with 100010100101101000110100010100100011100111 in the first place, then no copyright infringment is occuring.
That's why the "mindless masses" aren't up in arms. They know more than you do. You can't deprive anyone of a mathematical number. You can only deprive people of the right to copy that number from a work you've done (or work derived from that work you've done) Copyright works the way people think it does, not the way people trying to be clever assume it must.
Now, patents are different. There's no need to copy anything to violate a patent. But, then, they don't let you patent numbers either. Not yet, anyway.
Well, the good news is that from now on, if you try to complete a Paypal transaction with an invalid credit card number, Paypal will redirect you to a search of millions of available credit card numbers you can use instead.
The one thing to remember is that PayPal is not a bank. If you don't treat it like one, you're going to be ok.
That's good advice. As long as you don't use Paypal as a bank, for example by using it for transfering money between people or storing such transfered money temporarily in holding accounts, you should be set. That's the critical thing: don't use Paypal for anything involving money. Paypal's great for non-bank stuff, I assume, but if you use it for anything involving money you're just asking for trouble.
Ok, one 69c sprinkle doughnut, and a $1.20 coffee... that's $12.
What do you mean that doesn't add up? It's quite simple: 6% sales tax, $5.75 Kitchen Hygene Upgrade surcharge, plus a few dollars in miscellaneous fees. You want to leave the restaurant and not buy this doughnut? I'm sorry, that'll be $250. What do you mean half the doughnut's missing? That's just a fault of the technology Sir, sometimes the dough just doesn't all stick together when we throw it in the frier, you're certainly not getting a discount or getting out of your contact because you've been dealt a bad one.
Look, you don't have to agree to a fucking CONTRACT to buy a doughnut. It's not normal business practice in the doughnut industry to lie about pricing and costs. It's not a complicated business for which the answers are often simply not available until you actually try to use the service. It's something that requires a voluntary outlay of a few dollars, when you can spare them. And if you don't like the local doughnut shops, you have a right to start your own if you think you can do better.
Besides which, since when has consumer protection laws, relevent to the products and services being regulated, been considered bad?
So what you're saying is that Cingular, Verizon, etc, are so reliant upon consumers screwing up and signing contracts that are not in the best interests, that if they were forced to play fair, they'd be unable to make a profit?
I mean, that's the only reason to withdraw from an area, right?
Or could they (*gasp*) make a profit in MA even if "limited" to one year contracts, if they were forced to honestly report pricing, and were required to provide coverage in exchange for consumer dollars, but they should act like a bunch of whiny crybabies if required to do all of these things?
Couple of options, ignoring the prepaid pay-by-the-minute deals.
I believe T-Mobile will sell you a SIM-only, no-contract deal if you deal with them directly. You'll need to buy the phone, separately, and the rate plans are usually not quite as good as their contract plans (usually no free nights, etc.) They're also testing a service in some select markets that includes the phone called Take Control that's also contract free.
Cingular has the GoPhone deal which is a monthly prepaid package structured similar to their normal tariffs but doesn't have any kind of contract associated with it. You get fewer minutes, but the higher monthly tariffs include free nights and weekends, and free mobile to mobile calls. You can't get this SIM only, but they usually will sell you a reconditioned phone for $30 if you want to go down that route, and you can then go off and get the phone you actually want from eBay, etc.
I have a spare GoPhone SIM which I use with a slightly different prepaid plan ($1 a day if the phone is used that day, unlimited M2M) and wasn't terribly impressed by the call quality, but I haven't used it much (it's there as a back-up to my T-Mobile account.) I'd recommend T-Mobile.
I don't believe Verizon does anything similar though they do the usual gaggle of prepaid pay-by-the-minute plans. Sprint PCS used to (in fact, they originally didn't have contracts), but you had to use a Sprint PCS locked phone.
That would be a wierd way of stating "Excellent quality right now at a price barely different, in practice, especially when talking about one-off prints" as opposed to "Waiting for a week, more if we have to do reprints to get exactly what we wanted, or having to drive into town and thus adding to the expense and still taking much longer than doing it myself, at a quality that might be better than what my Epson inkjet achieves but not in any way I'd ever notice"
Yeah, I think people who buy an unnoticably better product that's actively inconvenient to save a few pennies, at most, are probably idiots.
When you say, "Two year contracts are an absurdity," you are second-guessing the market. If you are right that two year contracts are foolish, then consumers will not agree to the contracts and no harm will be done.
That's false. There is no reason to believe that because two year contracts are foolish, consumers will not adopt them. Consumers are adopting them.
Two year contracts are inherently foolish. There is no practical way for a consumer to predict their usage is unchanged 12 months from now. Mobile networks improve and deteriorate and unless you're a savvy, experienced consumer, you really have no idea what to expect and what the time scales are to expect them in. If, as AT&T tried to do a year and a half ago, I'd signed up for two years to get the slightly better offer (free M2M), I'd be fucked right now because since the Cingular take-over, AT&T service has reduced massively in quality around here.
Now, I didn't because I knew what I was doing. I don't think anyone, at the time I made my decision, should have gone for the two year contract. People did, not because they should have done, but because they weren't aware of the consequences of doing so. I'm a mobile phone geek. I'm thoroughly interested in the industry. Most people aren't. They'll make various assumptions, assumptions that are reasonable if you're ignorant of the situation, that are simply plain false. Those assumptions are reasonable because most people assume, rightly, that mobile phone service shouldn't get worse.
Two year contracts are rapidly becoming the norm because service providers are well aware they don't need to offer better terms and conditions for 90% of the people who come to them. That 90% will not know that they're about to be screwed. For the rest of us, if the Big 2 are the only two that actually have the coverage needed, we're increasingly going to be in a position of either massively overpaying for services, signing up for two years, or doing without. And the service providers will not care, either way, because that 10% isn't worth fighting about.
The free market is only good when it's a solution. When it's a problem, it's a problem. Those who act as its apologists under all circumstances, ignoring the basic realities of whether people are better or worse off when the market's doing its thing, instead relying upon the largely false premise that the market will always deliver what's best because of some faith in mass consumer behaviour that has never, ever, been justified, do themselves and the markets they justify a grave injustice. A little bit of regulation to level playing fields and ensure fairness has never been a bad thing. Nothing proposed by MA in this story is a bad thing, consumers will be better off, and the honest operators will benefit from a leveled playing field anyway.
I think THE reason why people print at home is because they can. All of this handwaving about how remote shops are somehow better simply because they're cheaper (cheaper, that is, than using the most expensive Lexmark) or technically superior in a way unnoticable to 99% of end users is bollocks.
If I use my Epson to print off a photo, on Epson photo paper 'natch, I get something that, to me, is indistingishable from a "professional" job. Only I don't have to drive to the pharamicist to do it. I don't have one shot at it, if it doesn't come out the way I wanted because of a problem with red-eye or something similar, I don't have to reprocess it using an unfamiliar machine or go home, do it, and come back. That's assuming I go to Walgreens, if I send off for it, as the article suggests, it's going to take a week between prints.
Sure, it probably cost me 10c per photo more to do it this way. And, you know what? That 3c was worth it. I probably saved more than that in gas alone.
Not everything is about money. If you rely upon print/photo shops to print every single photo you have, you're either cheap, or a snob with eyesight far beyond the norm. For the rest of us, inkjets do what we want. Give me the tyranny of slightly overpriced ink cartridges over the tyranny of relying upon third parties to print my photos any day.
The economics of the industry are not taken care of by allowing carriers to obscuficate their costs using increasingly bizarre tariff and contract systems.
Two year contracts, right now, are about decreasing churn, not better amortizing phone subsidies. Phone subsidies are generally paid back within a couple of months of the user buying the phone. Usual subsidies are in the $100 range. With $50 being about normal as a monthly charge, you can probably figure out that phone subsidies are not, actually, that massive a proportion of your two year contract's revenue.
Why are carriers worried about churn? Because they have an interest in reducing competition. If users can simply skip from one carrier to the next, they'll do exactly that, jumping to whoever does the best deal, and jumping from one carrier to another as their needs change. That creates uncertainty, and it also creates an environment in which mobile telephony is likely to become a commodity service. Nobody wants to be in a commodity industry.
Two year contracts are an absurdity. Most people's needs change more frequently than that. If the cellular companies are able to get away with such things right now, it proves the system isn't working. People can come up with whatever free-market-solves-everything BS they want, the fact is that if the majority of people are doing something dumb, and the people persuading them to do so are doing so largely for the wrong reasons, then the free market is not being a "solution", it's exhibiting a problem. Laws that level playing fields are a good idea, and this is a good proposal.
That's great advice, but kind of missing the point. Like I said, it was a combination of factors that caused this to happen. If I'd been on the ball, then it wouldn't have happened. Period. Nobody is on the ball 100% of the time. Remember, the email looked like a generic text email, not HTML, so it wasn't obvious I wasn't going to Amazon.com. Could I have caught that? Probably, but first thing in the morning, when I'm already of the mind to believe Amazon might be contacting me about an order?
The phisher that nearly got me caught me at the right time. There's a right time to get anyone.
That's great. However, it only has to fool you once, and under the right circumstances you will be fooled.
Case in point: I ordered something from Amazon Marketplace one Saturday evening. Went to bed. Following morning, there's an email from Amazon explaining that there's a problem with my credit card. It appears to be a plain text email, that Mail.app has helpfully highlighted the URL for, and it's not until I've entered my username and password that I realise the questions being asked are all wrong and seriously question what I've clicked on. Needless to say, I don't answer any more questions, and I immediately (a) log in to Amazon and change my password and (b) send Amazon a copy of the email for them to investigate.
Consider the circumstances: it's first thing in the morning and I'm not fully awake. I know that Amazon has just tried to charge my credit card. The email was sent to an address used exclusively for Amazon-related email (so it was probably a marketplace seller, or an Amazon employee, or someone connected with either, that actually sold the address to phishers.) It all looks pretty credible. Yes, if I'd had a few coffees and been up for a couple of hours, then I might have double checked the message. Likewise if the email hadn't been sent to my Amazon mailbox, or if I hadn't just ordered something from Amazon marketplace. But, as it was, it wasn't until I saw the "Confirm your name, address, and credit card details, etc" form that alarm bells began to ring.
And when that happened, I seriously asked the question: if I can get hoodwinked, at least to that extent, a computer professional who regularly sees these scams and laughs at them, how is my mother supposed to avoid them?
Oh, bullshit. Illegal and unconstitutional because they violated their constitution. They modified their constitution without allowing in the At-Large members as they should have done. And you can pretty much define anything as an "internal company matter", but the fact is this is a corporation that receives US government subsidies to do what it does, and removing representation from the users of the Internet certainly doesn't constitute "internal" to anything but the Internet.
The fact is ICANN's not trustworthy, and they're in charge of a significant part of the Internet's infrastructure. They haven't managed it in the interests of Internet users, and they've shown a blatant, and illegal, disregard for the views of Internet users. The fact the US Government refuses to act against them only adds to the argument the US should not be sole arbitor of who runs DNS.
Give it to the ITU. They've been doing this kind of work for decades. They're not political. They're answerable to the telecommunications industry and users. If you're going to put an organization in charge of DNS (and if it were totally up to me, I'd find some other way of doing this), they're the right people.
ICANN isn't. Sorry. The very fact they're a private, unaccountable, out-of-control, organization may be wonderful in your eyes, but it isn't to me, and it shouldn't be to anyone else with any common sense.
Are you really talking about ICANN or is there some other private company involved here?
ICANN right now arguably is illegal. They unconstitutionally removed the "At Large" members of their board, and the decisions they've made since then really have had little or no mandate. Meanwhile they sat on proposals to expand the range of DNS domains for years, announcing new TLDs without doing anything about it, and they continue to allow Verisign to run.COM despite well documented abuses of their position.
Your description of the UN situation is ludicrous too. The ITU, for example, has a stellar record of fair, reasonable, standardization of telecommunication standards. And right now, the position of non-US companies is that they want such a body in charge of the type of thing ICANN is, because ICANN is both a US-body and a body that's proven repeatedly it cannot be trusted. ICANN isn't even answerable to US law, it's proven that by the At Large fiasco. How is it reasonable to put any trust in it? And why are so many so dead set against independent, accountable, bodies being put in charge of some of the most important consensus-driven decision making activities currently decided by unaccountable, anti-democratic, elitist, dysfunctional, body, answerable only slightly to one of the governments whose citizens access the net, with a track record of fucking things up?
Nope. The obvious solution is to have all ISPs outside America switch to a different set of DNS root servers. Short term, this'll result in a significant fragmentation of the Internet. Long term, the consequences will depend on whether the US government gives in, whether it mandates similar laws against US-based ISPs, or whether it takes a hands-off approach. For all but the second solution, the International DNS would seem likely to end up the default.
Slashdot Mirror
150 hours is pretty respectable.
The fact that US CDMA phones can interoperate with AMPS networks is ultimately both its advantage and its crux. Qualcomm could have made IS-95 interoperable with GSM. They could have, as the UMTS people did, produced IS-95 as GSM with a different air interface. That would have made it a genuine upgrade for virtually everyone, and the debates between the two camps would have been non-existant. Qualcomm, however, felt they needed to make CDMA more attractive to US cellular operators, who were after a drop-in replacement for AMPS, and most of whom were looking at D-AMPS (IS-136) as that replacement. As a result, they built this system that, essentially, uses a network model only fractionally more advanced and just as limited as the 1970s AMPS model. The results were pretty horrible for end users, and GSM remains a superior solution for most mobile users (even if not necessarily network operators), giving them far more freedom and far more advanced features.
Qualcomm's complaints that GSM gets special treatment are generally misleading. You can point to what you heard from a GSMA rep, but frankly, it doesn't make any sense on any level. The types of CDMA that are used where such governments are making such mandates do support personal mobility. So the rep is plain wrong. And Qualcomm's lying if it's claiming this is evidence of a giant conspiracy against it. Qualcomm, of course, has lobbied the US government to lobby for, and sometimes even mandate, IS-95 in various places. It's largely been unsuccessful, though some of our current political problems with China date back to the Clinton administration trying to push IS-95 on the Chinese, who in turn would use it as a bargaining chip for numerous unrelated issues.
I really wish the FUD and shilling campaigns would stop, and Qualcomm and ETSI would work together on a common standard. I think most US operators, right now, with their networks the way they are, would be delighted if they could run UMTS with a CDMA (rather than WCDMA) air interface layer. I think most users would be better off with this too. The CDMA air interface is a nice thing, the IS-95 network isn't. GSM/UMTS is a wonderful thing, but the air interface technology could do with improvement. It's difficult to see why this hasn't happened yet.
Well, with a two hour DVD using about 4 gigs, I would assume a 40 gig iPod Video could store ten movies at DVD quality, without doing any recompression or stripping out any special features (eg keeping all three English soundtracks - PCM, AC3, and the Director's commentary.) In practice, systems like MPEG4 coupled with removing unnecessary stuff you wouldn't want to carry around with you, could easily quadrupal that number without any noticable quality reduction.
40 gig iPod with 40 full length movies, or 160 episodes of "Family Guy." Not impractical really, is it?
Whether it's useful is another issue. Personally I think the idea's crap because movies already are portable in their "Can take to a friend's house and play on friend's TV" form, and most of us don't really do that that often. It's not like music where the ability to have your entire music collection at your finger tips whereever you are is genuinely a life improver.
As a result, relatively few Americans are used to the concept or the full ramifications of GSM. In my experience, relatively few realise you can use the SIM card in other phones, and even fewer realise you can go outside of the carriers themselves to buy compatable phones.
To make matters worse, there's been a FUD campaign against GSM for the last ten years by Qualcomm, the patent holders for CDMA. Qualcomm's complaints vary from a somewhat misleading (and hypocritical) set of claims that the EU forced GSM upon European carriers to deliberate obscufication of the differences between standards and air-interface technologies. Many Americans think that GSM is a version of IS-136, because they both use a TDMA air interface. IS-136, needless to say, is relatively poor in features (until recently, it pretty much resembled IS-95, the Qualcomm CDMA telephony standard, from an end-user standpoint), or that GSM is being replaced by CDMA, because UMTS (3G GSM) uses a "WCDMA" air interface.
Qualcomm, allegedly, has a version of IS-95 that supports SIM-like cards, that they sell in other countries. No US carriers actually support these versions. It'll be interesting to see what the consequences of Cingular's adoption of GSM, and eventually UMTS, will do to spur Verizon, Sprint, and others, into adopting this enhanced version or switching to UMTS. I'm guessing, ultimately, it'll depend on how whether a significant number of Cingular and T-Mobile users simply find the loss of freedom in switching to the IS-95 carriers so unacceptable they're no longer willing to do it, or if they do, they switch back in large numbers.
Money that used to be spent on marketing and customer service gurus is now being spent, ten fold, on lawyers to handle extremely disgruntled customers, who are rarely, in their entirety, the complete techno-illiterates these companies assume they are.
Unfortunately, with so many companies either ex-monopolies or attempting to work in such a mode, for the most part legal threats are becoming the only real way customers can voice their dissatisfaction and expect changes.
I hate telephone companies, or at least I hate their marketing departments. They're all dishonest. They all lie about charges, and they lobby the FCC to give them get-outs when they do. They always try to push contracts that are absurdly long. They pretend they're selling one thing (as in this case) when they're actually selling something lesser. They push contracts that are inherently unfair and one-sided. (No, it doesn't take two years to recover a phone subsidy, indeed with tariffs usually around $50 a month, it usually barely takes two months. More to the point, if the issue is subsidies, why don't you just let early cancellers return their subsidized phones, in working condition, if they want to cancel before the end of the contract? And why not make it easy for those who already have compatable equipment to sign up on a month-to-month basis, maybe even with - *gasp* a discounted talk plan given they've just saved you your precious subsidy - I'll tell you why, because the idea the two year contracts have anything to do with subsidies is complete and total bullshit.)
I'd like to think some kind of free-market darwinism will fix this. It's hard to tell. Mobile carriers are so varied in quality that people will shun the best, most reasonable, because, for example, it has 1900MHz licenses and thus, through no fault of its own, has poorer indoor coverage. So, ultimately, people are going to resort to lawsuits to fix these issues. In this case, I say good luck to the lawyers. Once the operators start acting decently again, maybe I'll start whining about frivilous lawsuits, but the big operators are not doing so, so screw 'em, and throw every complaint they're not prepared to deal with honourably back at 'em in court.
And if it makes a few lawyers rich, that's great. If someone's doing a public service, I don't have a problem with them earning money from it.
Just buy the cheapest you-must-buy-a-phone-to-initiate-service phone you can get (assuming you can't get a SIM-only deal by contacting the carrier directly) (you're looking at around $30 at the moment), and then select from the myriad of unlocked phones on the Internet. The phone you buy, as long as it's unlocked, will be transferable between both major US GSM operators (and the smaller ones, if there are any left.)
That's why the "mindless masses" aren't up in arms. They know more than you do. You can't deprive anyone of a mathematical number. You can only deprive people of the right to copy that number from a work you've done (or work derived from that work you've done) Copyright works the way people think it does, not the way people trying to be clever assume it must.
Now, patents are different. There's no need to copy anything to violate a patent. But, then, they don't let you patent numbers either. Not yet, anyway.
Well, the good news is that from now on, if you try to complete a Paypal transaction with an invalid credit card number, Paypal will redirect you to a search of millions of available credit card numbers you can use instead.
What do you mean that doesn't add up? It's quite simple: 6% sales tax, $5.75 Kitchen Hygene Upgrade surcharge, plus a few dollars in miscellaneous fees. You want to leave the restaurant and not buy this doughnut? I'm sorry, that'll be $250. What do you mean half the doughnut's missing? That's just a fault of the technology Sir, sometimes the dough just doesn't all stick together when we throw it in the frier, you're certainly not getting a discount or getting out of your contact because you've been dealt a bad one.
Look, you don't have to agree to a fucking CONTRACT to buy a doughnut. It's not normal business practice in the doughnut industry to lie about pricing and costs. It's not a complicated business for which the answers are often simply not available until you actually try to use the service. It's something that requires a voluntary outlay of a few dollars, when you can spare them. And if you don't like the local doughnut shops, you have a right to start your own if you think you can do better.
Besides which, since when has consumer protection laws, relevent to the products and services being regulated, been considered bad?
I mean, that's the only reason to withdraw from an area, right?
Or could they (*gasp*) make a profit in MA even if "limited" to one year contracts, if they were forced to honestly report pricing, and were required to provide coverage in exchange for consumer dollars, but they should act like a bunch of whiny crybabies if required to do all of these things?
I believe T-Mobile will sell you a SIM-only, no-contract deal if you deal with them directly. You'll need to buy the phone, separately, and the rate plans are usually not quite as good as their contract plans (usually no free nights, etc.) They're also testing a service in some select markets that includes the phone called Take Control that's also contract free.
Cingular has the GoPhone deal which is a monthly prepaid package structured similar to their normal tariffs but doesn't have any kind of contract associated with it. You get fewer minutes, but the higher monthly tariffs include free nights and weekends, and free mobile to mobile calls. You can't get this SIM only, but they usually will sell you a reconditioned phone for $30 if you want to go down that route, and you can then go off and get the phone you actually want from eBay, etc.
I have a spare GoPhone SIM which I use with a slightly different prepaid plan ($1 a day if the phone is used that day, unlimited M2M) and wasn't terribly impressed by the call quality, but I haven't used it much (it's there as a back-up to my T-Mobile account.) I'd recommend T-Mobile.
I don't believe Verizon does anything similar though they do the usual gaggle of prepaid pay-by-the-minute plans. Sprint PCS used to (in fact, they originally didn't have contracts), but you had to use a Sprint PCS locked phone.
Yeah, I think people who buy an unnoticably better product that's actively inconvenient to save a few pennies, at most, are probably idiots.
Two year contracts are inherently foolish. There is no practical way for a consumer to predict their usage is unchanged 12 months from now. Mobile networks improve and deteriorate and unless you're a savvy, experienced consumer, you really have no idea what to expect and what the time scales are to expect them in. If, as AT&T tried to do a year and a half ago, I'd signed up for two years to get the slightly better offer (free M2M), I'd be fucked right now because since the Cingular take-over, AT&T service has reduced massively in quality around here.
Now, I didn't because I knew what I was doing. I don't think anyone, at the time I made my decision, should have gone for the two year contract. People did, not because they should have done, but because they weren't aware of the consequences of doing so. I'm a mobile phone geek. I'm thoroughly interested in the industry. Most people aren't. They'll make various assumptions, assumptions that are reasonable if you're ignorant of the situation, that are simply plain false. Those assumptions are reasonable because most people assume, rightly, that mobile phone service shouldn't get worse.
Two year contracts are rapidly becoming the norm because service providers are well aware they don't need to offer better terms and conditions for 90% of the people who come to them. That 90% will not know that they're about to be screwed. For the rest of us, if the Big 2 are the only two that actually have the coverage needed, we're increasingly going to be in a position of either massively overpaying for services, signing up for two years, or doing without. And the service providers will not care, either way, because that 10% isn't worth fighting about.
The free market is only good when it's a solution. When it's a problem, it's a problem. Those who act as its apologists under all circumstances, ignoring the basic realities of whether people are better or worse off when the market's doing its thing, instead relying upon the largely false premise that the market will always deliver what's best because of some faith in mass consumer behaviour that has never, ever, been justified, do themselves and the markets they justify a grave injustice. A little bit of regulation to level playing fields and ensure fairness has never been a bad thing. Nothing proposed by MA in this story is a bad thing, consumers will be better off, and the honest operators will benefit from a leveled playing field anyway.
If I use my Epson to print off a photo, on Epson photo paper 'natch, I get something that, to me, is indistingishable from a "professional" job. Only I don't have to drive to the pharamicist to do it. I don't have one shot at it, if it doesn't come out the way I wanted because of a problem with red-eye or something similar, I don't have to reprocess it using an unfamiliar machine or go home, do it, and come back. That's assuming I go to Walgreens, if I send off for it, as the article suggests, it's going to take a week between prints.
Sure, it probably cost me 10c per photo more to do it this way. And, you know what? That 3c was worth it. I probably saved more than that in gas alone.
Not everything is about money. If you rely upon print/photo shops to print every single photo you have, you're either cheap, or a snob with eyesight far beyond the norm. For the rest of us, inkjets do what we want. Give me the tyranny of slightly overpriced ink cartridges over the tyranny of relying upon third parties to print my photos any day.
While I haven't RTFA, I seriously doubt RIM is being forced track down every Blackberry in existance and take it from the owner.
Two year contracts, right now, are about decreasing churn, not better amortizing phone subsidies. Phone subsidies are generally paid back within a couple of months of the user buying the phone. Usual subsidies are in the $100 range. With $50 being about normal as a monthly charge, you can probably figure out that phone subsidies are not, actually, that massive a proportion of your two year contract's revenue.
Why are carriers worried about churn? Because they have an interest in reducing competition. If users can simply skip from one carrier to the next, they'll do exactly that, jumping to whoever does the best deal, and jumping from one carrier to another as their needs change. That creates uncertainty, and it also creates an environment in which mobile telephony is likely to become a commodity service. Nobody wants to be in a commodity industry.
Two year contracts are an absurdity. Most people's needs change more frequently than that. If the cellular companies are able to get away with such things right now, it proves the system isn't working. People can come up with whatever free-market-solves-everything BS they want, the fact is that if the majority of people are doing something dumb, and the people persuading them to do so are doing so largely for the wrong reasons, then the free market is not being a "solution", it's exhibiting a problem. Laws that level playing fields are a good idea, and this is a good proposal.
The phisher that nearly got me caught me at the right time. There's a right time to get anyone.
Case in point: I ordered something from Amazon Marketplace one Saturday evening. Went to bed. Following morning, there's an email from Amazon explaining that there's a problem with my credit card. It appears to be a plain text email, that Mail.app has helpfully highlighted the URL for, and it's not until I've entered my username and password that I realise the questions being asked are all wrong and seriously question what I've clicked on. Needless to say, I don't answer any more questions, and I immediately (a) log in to Amazon and change my password and (b) send Amazon a copy of the email for them to investigate.
Consider the circumstances: it's first thing in the morning and I'm not fully awake. I know that Amazon has just tried to charge my credit card. The email was sent to an address used exclusively for Amazon-related email (so it was probably a marketplace seller, or an Amazon employee, or someone connected with either, that actually sold the address to phishers.) It all looks pretty credible. Yes, if I'd had a few coffees and been up for a couple of hours, then I might have double checked the message. Likewise if the email hadn't been sent to my Amazon mailbox, or if I hadn't just ordered something from Amazon marketplace. But, as it was, it wasn't until I saw the "Confirm your name, address, and credit card details, etc" form that alarm bells began to ring.
And when that happened, I seriously asked the question: if I can get hoodwinked, at least to that extent, a computer professional who regularly sees these scams and laughs at them, how is my mother supposed to avoid them?
Not sure what that program's supposed to do that's so bad. I got this when I ran it:
Is that what it's supposed to do?
On the downside, I didn't get any new free screensavers :-(
The fact is ICANN's not trustworthy, and they're in charge of a significant part of the Internet's infrastructure. They haven't managed it in the interests of Internet users, and they've shown a blatant, and illegal, disregard for the views of Internet users. The fact the US Government refuses to act against them only adds to the argument the US should not be sole arbitor of who runs DNS.
Give it to the ITU. They've been doing this kind of work for decades. They're not political. They're answerable to the telecommunications industry and users. If you're going to put an organization in charge of DNS (and if it were totally up to me, I'd find some other way of doing this), they're the right people.
ICANN isn't. Sorry. The very fact they're a private, unaccountable, out-of-control, organization may be wonderful in your eyes, but it isn't to me, and it shouldn't be to anyone else with any common sense.
ICANN right now arguably is illegal. They unconstitutionally removed the "At Large" members of their board, and the decisions they've made since then really have had little or no mandate. Meanwhile they sat on proposals to expand the range of DNS domains for years, announcing new TLDs without doing anything about it, and they continue to allow Verisign to run .COM despite well documented abuses of their position.
Your description of the UN situation is ludicrous too. The ITU, for example, has a stellar record of fair, reasonable, standardization of telecommunication standards. And right now, the position of non-US companies is that they want such a body in charge of the type of thing ICANN is, because ICANN is both a US-body and a body that's proven repeatedly it cannot be trusted. ICANN isn't even answerable to US law, it's proven that by the At Large fiasco. How is it reasonable to put any trust in it? And why are so many so dead set against independent, accountable, bodies being put in charge of some of the most important consensus-driven decision making activities currently decided by unaccountable, anti-democratic, elitist, dysfunctional, body, answerable only slightly to one of the governments whose citizens access the net, with a track record of fucking things up?
The AIM of the EU and others is to change that initial I to "International", but right now it stands for "Internet".
Nope. The obvious solution is to have all ISPs outside America switch to a different set of DNS root servers. Short term, this'll result in a significant fragmentation of the Internet. Long term, the consequences will depend on whether the US government gives in, whether it mandates similar laws against US-based ISPs, or whether it takes a hands-off approach. For all but the second solution, the International DNS would seem likely to end up the default.