It's really too bad the blogger is taking this so personally, continuing to blog about it, and cannot spell. None of these make him a sympathetic defendant.
What proportion of lawsuits, in your expert opinion, are decided based on the quality of spelling on the defendant's blog?
Anyway, keep some perspective, there are no lawyers and no court cases here. It's just some moron at a web radio station who doesn't grasp the technology and is trying to frighten reality into conforming with his silly understanding.
Given that one company provides a better fee (and assuming that both companies are identical in every other way), one company is going to lose market share. When this company loses it's market share, it not only loses the 2/3 cents, it also loses the 10cents from the competitions companies calls. Additionally when you call a TelAzul to TelAzul that company keeps all of the profit.
Thanks for the only coherent response so far.
However, in this situation there is still no reason to lower termination rates. In fact, as one company consolidates market share, it becomes advantageous for them to increase the rates.
So there are pro's and con's to both business models.
Sure, but the problem is that few if any of the pros of the caller-pays model accrue to the consumer. People enjoy the idea of not having to pay for incoming calls, but they still end up paying more per minute overall to use the phone, so it's a false economy for them.
WTF? In a caller pays situation the caller has market power because if the call is too expensive they can swicth provider. They can do something about it because it is their subscription.
You don't understand how the telephone market works. I'll try to explain it another way.
Let's say you are in caller-pays Spain. There are two companies: TelAzul (your phone) and BlancoTel (your friend's phone).
Both companies are charging a termination rate (what they make other operators pay to call their customers) of 10 cents per minute. The raw cost of termination is 1 cent per minute, so this is a 9 cent profit.
TelAzul's markup on outgoing calls is 2 cents per minute. BlancoTel's markup on outgoing calls is 3 cents per minute.
When you turn on your TelAzul phone and dial your friend who has a BlancoTel phone, you pay 12 cents per minute: 2 cents goes to TelAzul and 10 cents goes to BlancoTel.
When your friend turns on his BlancoTel phone and dials you, he pays 13 cents per minute: 3 cents to BlancoTel and 10 cents to TelAzul.
Of the 12 cents per minute that you are paying, you only have market power over 2 cents. In fact, almost all of the money you are paying in your TelAzul bill is actually profit for BlancoTel, with whom you have no business relationship. It doesn't matter how many times you switch carriers, you never have the ability to switch away from paying that 10 cent charge. And for that reason, neither company ever has an incentive to decrease it. All you can to is switch between paying 3 cents markup or paying 2 cents markup.
Now you go to Canada. There are two companies: PoutineComm and Tim Hortons. Canada works on the called-party-pays system. PoutineComm charges 10 cents a minute for incoming calls and Tim Hortons charges 8 cents a minute. So you switch from PoutineComm to Tim Hortons. Then PoutineComm sees that they are losing customers, and start charging 7 cents instead. This continues, as it does in a normally functioning competitive marketplace, until both companies are just skimming their marginal cost of 1 cent per minute.
But it does not completely work like that. There is competition in the telecom provider market. The caller can choose another provider that charges less for calls to a mobile.
But the problem is that there is an absolute floor to the cost of calls to a mobile. That is the termination rate they are able to get from the called party's company. Outside of special promotions, no company will ever charge you less than that amount for a call, because they will be losing money every minute you talk.
And in caller-pays systems, there is no inventive for operators to lower the termination rate. Only regulators can bring it town (sometimes mobile operators get together and negotiate lower rates, in a benevolent form of price fixing, but this is rare).
So no mobile company, no matter how discount-minded, can provide you with calls that approach the marginal cost of operating the service, which is what should happen in a truly competitive environment.
And again, the evidence speaks for itself - Look at how much it costs to land a call on a mobile in a rich, expensive country with called-party-pays (e.g., US, Singapore, Hong Kong) vs in a rich, expensive country with caller-pays (e.g., UK or Australia): some cheap retail voip termination costs.
The EU is currently having fits trying to iron some of the grotesque profit-taking out of the mobile market there, but they really have only two choices: (1) mandate called-party-pays, or (2) explicitly set price caps at the point where they wish competition would bring them. One of these choices allows the market to do its work, the other is the kind of state control that stifles innovation and dramatically slows market response to changed conditions. It will be interesting to see which way they go. Personally, I suspect they'll just impose price caps for intra-EU roaming and then declare victory and call it a day, leaving the market fundamentally distorted.
Or he can get a mobile himself, preferably at the same mobile provider, and pay a lot less for calls to that number.
This is vendor lock-in, which is specifically anti-competitive.
What? A model where the person performing the action pays for it. I call that logical and consider the US system anti-competitive.
In caller-pays, the person who is paying for the service has no market power. If they do not like being charged 25 cents a minute for the call, there's nothing they can do about it, because it's someone else's subscription. There is no price competition for call termination, and consequently rates are as high as regulators will allow.
In called-party-pays, the person who is paying for the service can switch to a different provider if they find the charge is too high. This is why total costs (origination plus termination) are so much lower on a purchasing-power-parity basis in called-party-pays markets. Competition has driven termination rates to marginal costs; wholesale termination is priced at or below US$0.01/minute in all called-party-pays countries.
Calls to cellphones must be cheaper wherever you are than here in Australia. Particularly if you have relatives regularly calling you from OS, it's pretty rude to give them a cellphone number and expect them to pay 10x as much to call you.
He's probably in the US.
Like China and Singapore, the US has a competition-enabling pricing model wherein mobile phone owners are charged for incoming calls. This drives down the cost of making calls to mobile phones, and drives down prices in the market in general. Unfortunately many countries, including Australia (though I understand Austel is looking into remedying this) are stuck on an anti-consumer caller-pays model in which there is no competitive pressure on mobile termination rates.
On another note, what's up with Australian mobile operators quoting rates in 30-second increments? Is that just downright deceptive or what?
Kinda bizarre. If the key was 1, would noone ever be able to type 1 again?
It's a very good question.
At what point does the number become sufficiently obscure that they have a reasonable case to prevent its publication in conjunction with discussions of HD-DVD?
Posters above have pointed out that the number itself is not "copyrighted", it's simply that it's illegal to distribute it because it forms an intrinsic part of a circumvention mechanism. But what if - rather than 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 - the number had been 13,256,278,887, which is the number of people living in Zimbabwe as of September 21, 2006? Or 13,256, which is the number of seconds I spent painting my apartment yesterday? Or 13? Would they still have a leg to stand on?
Because at some point the number is just a reusable component for expression, just like a word. There are some words without which (assuming synonyms, such as "first-byte-first, as God intended it" for "big-endian" or "26/2" for "13") it would not be possible to describe the circumvention procedure. If I publish one of these words on its own (say, "big-endian"), am I liable to prosecution? Just like that word, the number alone is insufficient to decode the encryption on the DVD. So is there a threshold? A 38-digit number is sufficiently obscure but a 37-digit number is fair game?
If the number as a whole is sufficiently obscure, what about parts of it? The numbers 13, 256, 278, and so on, are all used for a million things every day. How many of them do I have to publish before I have become a Violator?
It's also my PIN code, hence a circumvention device for the protection mechanism on my bank account. I better not find out that anyone's been using my PIN to encrypt DVDs and distribute them worldwide.
Satellites are line-of-sight, so you can theoretically have every satellite in the sky broadcasting across the entire GHz spectrum, and all of them will work just fine.
Before you embark on this plan, make sure to first shoot down all the satellites that communicate with more than one earth station at a time, callously spraying their radio waves across wide swathes of our fair planet.
Dude, WTF? There are no prayer calls at 2.30 am anywhere.
I'm sure if you found the right mosque in Sweden in the winter...
Are you sure you're in Dubai?
This afternoon I saw a guy in full bedouin headgear sitting at Starbucks with his fully veiled wife, one table over from a woman in a miniskirt. Where else could I be?
Another potential factor: They had a lot to prove. The power vacuum in northern Iraq provided them with their first opportunity at autonomy in modern times, and it's no doubt important for them to demonstrate that the Kurdish people can run a unified and viable state given the opportunity.
Americans abroad: taking cultural sensitivity to new highs.
Yeah, yeah.
1. Who said I was American?
2. I've been living in Muslim countries for many years. Just never had the call to prayer at 2:30 before; the rhythm of the normal times is deeply ingrained by now so it seemed very weird to me. As someone else correctly deduced, I had messed up my clock and was totally off on the time.
Certainly, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the facts are wrong.
At least some of the facts are wrong.
For instance, the claim of 75 net cafes nationwide prewar is bogus, there were more than that in Iraqi Kurdistan alone. They say the Erbil office failed because there's not enough business. Closer to the truth would be to say it failed because there was already an entrenched network of trusted local operators.
South of the Kurdish line, there were (and are) huge numbers of little ISPs. They arrange for satellite service from Jordan, then bring the dishes into Iraq. In the old days, when banking was still a total catastrophe, they paid their bills by sending people with cash strapped to their bodies overland into Jordan, where they'd wire the money to their upstream provider. These days it's a little easier.
Ultimately, I think this article - like so many others about Iraq - is written from the perspective of someone who is hiding in the green zone behind soldiers and armoured cars and doesn't have a great idea of what's really going on.
P.S. Just arrived in Dubai for a little R&R. It's 2:30am and they're blasting the call to prayer at my hotel balcony while I'm trying to sit out here peacefully and post to Slashdot. What the hell?
The majority of the Turks never wanted to be secular and are still very much opposed to it.
Which just goes to show how stupid religious people are.
Turkey has an economy that - despite its flaws - is the envy of the Muslim world, with comparatively high standard of living. And they are free to practice their religion, with the exception of forcing their daughters and wives to cover their sinful female faces while in government schools and jobs.
Yet there are millions in Turkey who would gladly throw away that prosperity, if only they could once again have a caliph to force them to practise the same religious observations they are already practising anyway.
For the important stuff, I use Rackspace. Starts at about $300/month for a decently-specced linux/freebsd box. Network, reliability, and support are top-notch. In the case of major problems like hard drive failures (which are going to happen eventually when you have enough boxes for enough time), they have been incredibly responsive and done everything I could have hoped for in order to get me back up and running ASAP.
For everything else, I use 1and1. Starts at about $100/month for a decent linux/freebsd box. I haven't had any real problems (network outages or hardware failures) in all the years I've been with them, but their support is pretty slow to respond to minor stuff so I'm not sure how they'd be with major issues. They provide remote serial console connections so you can even reboot your machine and run it in single-user mode, nice for doing upgrades and recovering from stupid firewall misconfigurations.
If they're still afraid of the dark at that age, they should be in therapy, not in school.
Starting when I was 6, I had to walk to school for half an hour in the dark in wintertime. I survived. And that was back when abductions and other violent crimes against children were at a higher rate than they are now.
Uhmm clearly you don't get up very early in the morning, especially in the winter... That hour you so blissfully go on about is stolen from the beginning of the day so in mid winter in oh say Seattle the sun won't fekking come up till after 8 AM or later which trust me adds a big quality of life deficit to many many peoples lives...
No matter how you look at it, there are more people awake at 5pm than at 8am - more people benefit from the late afternoon sun.
Where I live, it never gets light before about 7:15am. I don't see anyone depressed about it, they're all just brushing their teeth and getting ready for work anyway. The number of people out jogging or walking their dogs in the morning is miniscule compared to the number in the evening.
Some tiny number of people had to wrestle with Windows inanity (and that's a self-selected group of people who voluntarily took jobs that require wrestling with Windows inanity).
Meanwhile, a huge number of people get a quality-of-life boost from the extra daylight in the evening, which makes it more pleasant to walk home from work, to run late-afternoon errands, or just to enjoy some time outdoors on nice spring and autumn days.
In an ideal world they'd keep pushing it back until the start and end finally met, and then abolish it entirely, leaving the clocks on summer time all year round. But until that time, at least things are a bit better. And next time they change it, you Windows-wrestlers will know what to do.
Slashdot Mirror
What proportion of lawsuits, in your expert opinion, are decided based on the quality of spelling on the defendant's blog?
Anyway, keep some perspective, there are no lawyers and no court cases here. It's just some moron at a web radio station who doesn't grasp the technology and is trying to frighten reality into conforming with his silly understanding.
I believe the word you're looking for is "Asymmetric".
A remarkable number of Koreans are huge into games. That can eat up a lot of bandwidth.
Thanks for the only coherent response so far.
However, in this situation there is still no reason to lower termination rates. In fact, as one company consolidates market share, it becomes advantageous for them to increase the rates.
Sure, but the problem is that few if any of the pros of the caller-pays model accrue to the consumer. People enjoy the idea of not having to pay for incoming calls, but they still end up paying more per minute overall to use the phone, so it's a false economy for them.
You don't understand how the telephone market works. I'll try to explain it another way.
Let's say you are in caller-pays Spain. There are two companies: TelAzul (your phone) and BlancoTel (your friend's phone).
Both companies are charging a termination rate (what they make other operators pay to call their customers) of 10 cents per minute. The raw cost of termination is 1 cent per minute, so this is a 9 cent profit.
TelAzul's markup on outgoing calls is 2 cents per minute. BlancoTel's markup on outgoing calls is 3 cents per minute.
When you turn on your TelAzul phone and dial your friend who has a BlancoTel phone, you pay 12 cents per minute: 2 cents goes to TelAzul and 10 cents goes to BlancoTel.
When your friend turns on his BlancoTel phone and dials you, he pays 13 cents per minute: 3 cents to BlancoTel and 10 cents to TelAzul.
Of the 12 cents per minute that you are paying, you only have market power over 2 cents. In fact, almost all of the money you are paying in your TelAzul bill is actually profit for BlancoTel, with whom you have no business relationship. It doesn't matter how many times you switch carriers, you never have the ability to switch away from paying that 10 cent charge. And for that reason, neither company ever has an incentive to decrease it. All you can to is switch between paying 3 cents markup or paying 2 cents markup.
Now you go to Canada. There are two companies: PoutineComm and Tim Hortons. Canada works on the called-party-pays system. PoutineComm charges 10 cents a minute for incoming calls and Tim Hortons charges 8 cents a minute. So you switch from PoutineComm to Tim Hortons. Then PoutineComm sees that they are losing customers, and start charging 7 cents instead. This continues, as it does in a normally functioning competitive marketplace, until both companies are just skimming their marginal cost of 1 cent per minute.
But the problem is that there is an absolute floor to the cost of calls to a mobile. That is the termination rate they are able to get from the called party's company. Outside of special promotions, no company will ever charge you less than that amount for a call, because they will be losing money every minute you talk.
And in caller-pays systems, there is no inventive for operators to lower the termination rate. Only regulators can bring it town (sometimes mobile operators get together and negotiate lower rates, in a benevolent form of price fixing, but this is rare).
So no mobile company, no matter how discount-minded, can provide you with calls that approach the marginal cost of operating the service, which is what should happen in a truly competitive environment.
And again, the evidence speaks for itself - Look at how much it costs to land a call on a mobile in a rich, expensive country with called-party-pays (e.g., US, Singapore, Hong Kong) vs in a rich, expensive country with caller-pays (e.g., UK or Australia): some cheap retail voip termination costs.
The EU is currently having fits trying to iron some of the grotesque profit-taking out of the mobile market there, but they really have only two choices: (1) mandate called-party-pays, or (2) explicitly set price caps at the point where they wish competition would bring them. One of these choices allows the market to do its work, the other is the kind of state control that stifles innovation and dramatically slows market response to changed conditions. It will be interesting to see which way they go. Personally, I suspect they'll just impose price caps for intra-EU roaming and then declare victory and call it a day, leaving the market fundamentally distorted.
This is vendor lock-in, which is specifically anti-competitive.
In caller-pays, the person who is paying for the service has no market power. If they do not like being charged 25 cents a minute for the call, there's nothing they can do about it, because it's someone else's subscription. There is no price competition for call termination, and consequently rates are as high as regulators will allow.
In called-party-pays, the person who is paying for the service can switch to a different provider if they find the charge is too high. This is why total costs (origination plus termination) are so much lower on a purchasing-power-parity basis in called-party-pays markets. Competition has driven termination rates to marginal costs; wholesale termination is priced at or below US$0.01/minute in all called-party-pays countries.
He's probably in the US.
Like China and Singapore, the US has a competition-enabling pricing model wherein mobile phone owners are charged for incoming calls. This drives down the cost of making calls to mobile phones, and drives down prices in the market in general. Unfortunately many countries, including Australia (though I understand Austel is looking into remedying this) are stuck on an anti-consumer caller-pays model in which there is no competitive pressure on mobile termination rates.
On another note, what's up with Australian mobile operators quoting rates in 30-second increments? Is that just downright deceptive or what?
It's a very good question.
At what point does the number become sufficiently obscure that they have a reasonable case to prevent its publication in conjunction with discussions of HD-DVD?
Posters above have pointed out that the number itself is not "copyrighted", it's simply that it's illegal to distribute it because it forms an intrinsic part of a circumvention mechanism. But what if - rather than 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 - the number had been 13,256,278,887, which is the number of people living in Zimbabwe as of September 21, 2006? Or 13,256, which is the number of seconds I spent painting my apartment yesterday? Or 13? Would they still have a leg to stand on?
Because at some point the number is just a reusable component for expression, just like a word. There are some words without which (assuming synonyms, such as "first-byte-first, as God intended it" for "big-endian" or "26/2" for "13") it would not be possible to describe the circumvention procedure. If I publish one of these words on its own (say, "big-endian"), am I liable to prosecution? Just like that word, the number alone is insufficient to decode the encryption on the DVD. So is there a threshold? A 38-digit number is sufficiently obscure but a 37-digit number is fair game?
If the number as a whole is sufficiently obscure, what about parts of it? The numbers 13, 256, 278, and so on, are all used for a million things every day. How many of them do I have to publish before I have become a Violator?
I'm not sure, but you will definitely be busted for passing this around:
13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,6 39 + 1
That's my own invention, copyright by me.
It's also my PIN code, hence a circumvention device for the protection mechanism on my bank account. I better not find out that anyone's been using my PIN to encrypt DVDs and distribute them worldwide.
Before you embark on this plan, make sure to first shoot down all the satellites that communicate with more than one earth station at a time, callously spraying their radio waves across wide swathes of our fair planet.
I'm sure if you found the right mosque in Sweden in the winter...
This afternoon I saw a guy in full bedouin headgear sitting at Starbucks with his fully veiled wife, one table over from a woman in a miniskirt. Where else could I be?
Another potential factor: They had a lot to prove. The power vacuum in northern Iraq provided them with their first opportunity at autonomy in modern times, and it's no doubt important for them to demonstrate that the Kurdish people can run a unified and viable state given the opportunity.
Yeah, yeah.
1. Who said I was American?
2. I've been living in Muslim countries for many years. Just never had the call to prayer at 2:30 before; the rhythm of the normal times is deeply ingrained by now so it seemed very weird to me. As someone else correctly deduced, I had messed up my clock and was totally off on the time.
Duh, yep, it was screwed up. Flew through Egypt and changed my clock there. Spent the entire evening thinking it was 2 hours earlier than it was.
At least some of the facts are wrong.
For instance, the claim of 75 net cafes nationwide prewar is bogus, there were more than that in Iraqi Kurdistan alone. They say the Erbil office failed because there's not enough business. Closer to the truth would be to say it failed because there was already an entrenched network of trusted local operators.
South of the Kurdish line, there were (and are) huge numbers of little ISPs. They arrange for satellite service from Jordan, then bring the dishes into Iraq. In the old days, when banking was still a total catastrophe, they paid their bills by sending people with cash strapped to their bodies overland into Jordan, where they'd wire the money to their upstream provider. These days it's a little easier.
Ultimately, I think this article - like so many others about Iraq - is written from the perspective of someone who is hiding in the green zone behind soldiers and armoured cars and doesn't have a great idea of what's really going on.
P.S. Just arrived in Dubai for a little R&R. It's 2:30am and they're blasting the call to prayer at my hotel balcony while I'm trying to sit out here peacefully and post to Slashdot. What the hell?
That's like saying, "When I used to play for the Knicks, only 25% of our team were professional athletes."
Which just goes to show how stupid religious people are.
Turkey has an economy that - despite its flaws - is the envy of the Muslim world, with comparatively high standard of living. And they are free to practice their religion, with the exception of forcing their daughters and wives to cover their sinful female faces while in government schools and jobs.
Yet there are millions in Turkey who would gladly throw away that prosperity, if only they could once again have a caliph to force them to practise the same religious observations they are already practising anyway.
Maybe that's because they're on the wrong side of the EU's protectionist agriculture tariffs.
For the important stuff, I use Rackspace. Starts at about $300/month for a decently-specced linux/freebsd box. Network, reliability, and support are top-notch. In the case of major problems like hard drive failures (which are going to happen eventually when you have enough boxes for enough time), they have been incredibly responsive and done everything I could have hoped for in order to get me back up and running ASAP.
For everything else, I use 1and1. Starts at about $100/month for a decent linux/freebsd box. I haven't had any real problems (network outages or hardware failures) in all the years I've been with them, but their support is pretty slow to respond to minor stuff so I'm not sure how they'd be with major issues. They provide remote serial console connections so you can even reboot your machine and run it in single-user mode, nice for doing upgrades and recovering from stupid firewall misconfigurations.
If they're still afraid of the dark at that age, they should be in therapy, not in school.
Starting when I was 6, I had to walk to school for half an hour in the dark in wintertime. I survived. And that was back when abductions and other violent crimes against children were at a higher rate than they are now.
No matter how you look at it, there are more people awake at 5pm than at 8am - more people benefit from the late afternoon sun.
Where I live, it never gets light before about 7:15am. I don't see anyone depressed about it, they're all just brushing their teeth and getting ready for work anyway. The number of people out jogging or walking their dogs in the morning is miniscule compared to the number in the evening.
You people have no vision. When I make a Slashdot comment, I want it to stand the test of time. We'll see who's laughing in 2050.
There are almost 400 million people in the USA. A tiny number of those are Windows sysadmins.
Some tiny number of people had to wrestle with Windows inanity (and that's a self-selected group of people who voluntarily took jobs that require wrestling with Windows inanity).
Meanwhile, a huge number of people get a quality-of-life boost from the extra daylight in the evening, which makes it more pleasant to walk home from work, to run late-afternoon errands, or just to enjoy some time outdoors on nice spring and autumn days.
In an ideal world they'd keep pushing it back until the start and end finally met, and then abolish it entirely, leaving the clocks on summer time all year round. But until that time, at least things are a bit better. And next time they change it, you Windows-wrestlers will know what to do.