The link between person and drivers license isn't only held by the DMV or similar agencies - if you've ever used a driver's license as an ID card, well...
Which is why god invented passport cards. I never use my driver's license as an ID for precisely this reason.
See... why we should require the manufacturer of every firearm to include microstamping technology, where the serial number will be imprinted on the cartridge of every round fired.
As long as you believe in fairy tale technology like microstamping, why not just require every crime lab have a CSI-type "enhancing" microscope? That way you could code a GUI in Visual Basic and then have the computer tell you who committed the crime.
For those who are uninformed, read about how cartridge microstamping (doesn't) work in practice, and even if it *did* work, think about how trivial it is to defeat. The microstamping system is supposed to use a rather weak force to stamp a tiny serial number? Nope, I can't see how that could ever be trivially defeated, even if it *did* work in the first place.
As long as you have a tax-collecting state, the tender used for taxing will keep value.
Don't be autistic. Yes, technically the value of these hyperinflating currencies is infinitesimally above zero. That does not count as "keeping value" when practically speaking it takes wheelbarrows full of currency notes to buy a loaf of bread.
So, no, you're wrong. History has repeatedly shown that simply having a government insist on taxation in the form of a currency they issue is an insufficient backstop for value in the face of loss of confidence in the populace.
People aren't stupid: they exit the currency in favor of other, more stable stores of value (other currencies, land, tampons, whatever), get paid in kind, or simply resort to barter. They convert into the worthless government currency later to pay taxes. They don't ride the sinking ship.
So you are saying guarantee of US laws and belief of bitcoin fans are the same thing?
You posed the question incorrectly.
What we're saying is that US laws mandating the value of the USD are only worth as much as people believe. There were laws mandating the value of the Mark in the Weimar Republic. There are laws mandating the value of the Zimbabwean Dollar. Obviously, those laws weren't/aren't sufficient to make people trust the currency and they collapsed.
Now, asking whether people *should* find the BTC to be as trustworthy as the USD is an appropriate question. The answer to that is obviously "no".
What we take issue with is the perspective that there is some divine providence conferred on national currencies that make them trustworthy, when clearly there is no such intrinsic property like that.
The 4th and 5th amendments are not enough to assure personal freedom from search in the digital & wireless age. Only an amendment to the constitution that spells out this freedom can prevent it's continued abuse.
So what you're saying is that the federal government refuses to abide by the Constitution. Okay, I agree that is what they do. Your argument is that we will get them to stop breaking the rules by making a rule that says that they can't break the rules?
The federal government has been wiping its ass with the Constitution ever since FDR. Trying to constrain or restrain the federal government via written law is a fool's errand.
If I could burn down every data center facebook owned I'd do it in a second, no hesitation.
Hm, I wouldn't. I'd auction off the hardware, then I would invest half of the proceeds in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities...
Telling your bank, no, but placing a free 1-year freeze on your credit with the credit reporting agencies does work. Rinse and repeat each year, and turn it off before you apply for credit.
...or just place a permanent freeze on your credit, like I did a decade ago. When you want to apply for credit you temporarily lift the freeze for a few days whereupon it reverts to frozen. It works much like making your Bluetooth device discoverable.
It doesn't track road miles (and people will claim they don't drive on roads, and demand exceptions!), or vehicle weight (see the ratio of road wear per vehicle weight and cringe).
Sorry, but the odometer won't be enough.
Hard to believe statistical models couldn't be employed to arrive at essentially the same figures detailed big-brother GPS tracks would provide.
It is unnecessary to be hyper fair in collection or distribution of tax revenues nor is it necessary to consider behavior of outliers.
Exactly. How many of these pedants would have their mind blown when they consider that use tax is supposed to be paid based on tax jurisdiction they are in. Okay, perhaps that's not mind blowing, but now consider you bought a pizza and are eating it while driving in a car passing through various tax jurisdictions while doing so. What counts as "putting to use" in terms of eating pizza? Chewing, digesting, extracting the food energy for biological processes? If it's the last one, what happens when the pizza is vomited out in a different jurisdiction? Does one apply for a tax credit?
Uh oh, our sales/use tax system has boundary conditions! Therefore sales tax is completely inviable! Herp derp.
Aren't guys like you tired of bitching about Microsoft... for fucks sake, they are in the process of releasing their entire toolchain (from the bottom up) under the MIT licence.
Parent is actually insightful. Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but the summary should have mentioned the license. I assumed this was yet another MS "open source" release under one of their shitty proprietary licenses (you know, the kind of "open source" that is so restrictive it practically comes with an NDA).
Using a Free license like MIT actually makes this more than an empty gesture. Yes, I actually confirmed the LICENSE.txt on the github project is MIT License.
I suggest the multipart (fully cited) writeup on Eating Academy. Dr. Attia is a physician with degrees in aeronautical engineering and applied math, so his style communicates well to our demographic: http://eatingacademy.com/nutri...
The larger point is that this corroborates the main issue in this topic: that for years the "science" advocated for improper (sometimes harmful) "optimizations" for health. The ignominious list of failures is quite long.
What I have learned in biochemistry is that one should always ask for explicit evidence and never presume... the LDL line of reasoning was "so obvious" to the scientists that they never bothered testing their assumptions ("Plaques in blood vessels have cholesterol, blood has cholesterol and some of it is from food. Therefore, high cholesterol foods cause plaques! Let's ignore the fact that half of patients presenting with CHD have normal LDL-c levels. We *know* it's the LDL-c that's the risk factor!" Fail.)
Yes, pretty much everyone who is paying attention to nutritional science is arguing with that.
Yes. I get the sense around here that people need to understand the concept of "confounders" in scientific studies.
Take hypercholesterolemia, for example. For years it's been thought that LDL concentrations in the blood are a risk factor and there have been multiple studies attempting to establish the relationship. The confounder? LDL isn't just floating sludge... it's "packetized". These "packets"/particles can come in varying particle sizes. They didn't think of that when doing the initial studies (over a period of decades!). Evidence now seems to show that it's the LDL particle concentration that has the dose-response relationship to CHD while the LDL concentration measurement that everyone uses today is a confounded proxy measurement that does *not* correlate to risk.
Similarly, HDL being beneficial is essentially debunked now. It's suspected that it is confounded by other factors. Some of the most telling evidence is that drugs designed to increase HDL failed clinical trials due to *increased* mortality.
In the olden days, I wore an onion on my belt and everything was better.
God damn Slashdot.
See? Here we have a poster who claimed superior performance using a belt-onion—as everyone who knows anything would expect—but failed to give us an explanation of our upgrade options!
Who are the major players in the allicin-rich pants suspension market segment? Have you tried garlic suspenders? Any recent startups coming out of stealth mode with something like leek garters? What's disruptive here?!
Also, that post is worthless without at least an unboxing video.
In the larger context of the Constitution, most of these debates miss the fact that the Constitution is explicitly constructed as a whitelist of powers for the government. Everything else is reserved for the states and people. As for those Founders who opposed the Bill of Rights on the principle that it might mislead people into thinking the Constitution enshrines and delimits the people's rights... well, it seems they were correct after all.
The fact that the federal government has used a few privilege exploits ("general welfare" and commerce clause) to redefine the document does not change the fact that—the concept of civil rights not withstanding—the federal government simply does not have this power whitelisted.
I understand what the definition of IoT is. My comment was about the specious "1 in 5 developers works on IoT projects" stat. That's patently false by the definition of IoT.
Given that IoT is rapidly achieving buzzword status, you'll likely be dismayed to find that the term will become coopted and the definition distorted in order to enable claims like in this article.
...much like any single server in a datacenter is now "the cloud", even if you own and maintain the server yourself.
I suspect that the mania will be tempered by the fact that it will be fairly easy to classify all sorts of projects, that you were already doing, as "IoT" if you wish to seem super cutting edge and so on without actually making any changes.
That was my initial reaction to the "1 in 5" stat: "I guess the definition of IoT now includes all mobile platform development."
A) No one here uses emoji B) No one here gives a fuck if you can enter emoji into a text field. C) Why the fuck is the fact that you cant put emoji in a TEXT field considered a bug. Its a fucking TEXT field.
It will seem ironic to the community when Dice rolls out emoji support in Slashcode while still forbidding most Unicode characters.
It turns out you guessed correctly. We do in fact wear a lot of pants without pockets, which we'd have to throw out.
I don't think I own a pair of pants, shorts, or a swimsuit without pockets. Where do you put your keys and wallet when you're out? Do you carry a purse or something? Regardless, put your phone where you put your keys/wallet and so forth, and consider discovering the magic of pockets.
What should I have said to make my intent clearer?
Many of the questions you posed seemed like they had obvious answers (especially the hands/carrying down the stairs thing). Sometimes trolls act deliberately obtuse to try to goad people. Unfortunately, the presence of these people means that the possibility lurks in the back of one's mind. I prefer to presume people are asking in good faith.
Landline: Varies from Frontier. The actual monthly price depends on how many outgoing long-distance calls we make. (Local, toll-free, and incoming calls are unmetered.) Flip phone: $5/mo each from Virgin Mobile, which includes 20 minutes per month that roll over. When I priced Virgin's smartphone offering a couple years ago (2013, not 1995 as you mention), smartphone service started at $35/mo.
Like I said, look at ting rates, and realize there is no contract or commitment, and you are only billed for the amount you use each month (no stupid estimates, overages, or gimmicks). Note that everyone sharing the account pulls from the same bucket. There's no nonsense like rollover minutes or whatever. 1,000 text messages in a month costs $5. If you use Google Voice like I do, then that's $0 for text messages.
Presumably you already have internet at home, so you associate your smartphone with your WiFi and it automatically routes packets through that when in range. Our three smartphones together use less than 500 MB of mobile data a month, so that's $12 per month on Ting total for the whole family. You can set limits in the Ting control panel to prevent lines from using too much; however, this really isn't a concern... mobile browsing, IM, email, etc don't really add up to much. Streaming music *will* for example.
Used smartphones are inexpensive. Once you have one you will find it indispensable to have instant ubiquitous internet access, email, and easy text input.
Which cable company in which area?
Cox in the Midwest. Netflix costs $8.55/month anywhere in the US. We got a free cable modem from Cox, but even a high end DOCSIS 3 modem costs under $100. You are getting gouged if you are agreeing to pay $8/month to rent a modem. Buy a modem on Amazon and put the monthly savings toward your Ting bill.
When you're carrying something upstairs or downstairs with both hands, how do you carry the phone as well?
Well, my family doesn't lounge around the house in the nude. In many circumstances I am carrying my phone in a pocket. Pockets are an ideal solution for carrying keys, wallets, phones, etc, and they also allow you to free your hands for necessary tasks. I would be more likely to miss a phone call on a landline because I would have to hear the ring on the other side of the house, travel to another room to answer it before the person hangs up, etc. Conversely, I am rarely more than 2 meters from my smartphone at any point during the day... I reach down into my pocket, look at the number, and decide whether to answer or to send the caller to "fuck you voicemail" (i.e. voicemail that picks up in under 4 rings, implicitly letting the caller know you have rejected their call).
To preempt your next predictable objection: if your phone falls out of your pocket on a regular basis or your pants lack pockets, then get different pants. If your family lounges in the nude, then change that policy for sanity's sake.
I have a flip phone that I use for occasional calls out of the house. I tried texting with T9 and found it slower and more painful than voice.
Yes, that is painful. Don't do that. Get a smartphone... typing is far better on a smartphone. It's not like smartphones are expensive if you are willing to take a hand-me-down from a friend, buy a used phone off eBay, or pick up a previous generation phone from Walmart or something like that.
Until you're away from home and public Wi-Fi. Or until you need to call your ISP to troubleshoot why the Internet is not working.
Now I'm trying to decide if you're trolling. Go to ting.com and look at the rates they charge. Our family's total monthly bill from Ting for three smartphones with data plans is $44 plus tax. What is your family paying for your landline and your flip phone plans?
Phone calls or Skyping are scheduled affairs.
Unless you're, say, trying to get a ride from a family member on Sunday, when public transit has the day off.
No, even then. We send each other a text message or an IM. You send them a text, IM, or email because they have their phones with them or within earshot. They are more likely to respond to a text, IM, or email because you can do that even when they can't speak on the phone and would otherwise send you to voicemail they might not listen to for hours or a day. Conversely, they will receive a notification of these text-based messages' delivery within seconds.
And trouble calls to your ISP aren't scheduled; prepare to pay dearly to your carrier to hear "Your call is important to us and will be answered in the order it was received" for half an hour.
Um, okay? I refer you once again to ting.com for an example of what competitive cell phone rates are these days. Other providers offer similar rates if you are savvy enough not to be exploited. It's not 1995 anymore.
If your kid is old enough to be home alone, they are old enough to have an inexpensive cell phone.
I'm not sure what you mean by "inexpensive", and I don't know anything about the law where you live, but where I live, there are a few years between the age at which a child is old enough to be home alone and the age at which a child is old enough to have a job to earn the money to pay for a cell phone. I must be missing something fundamental.
$6/month is the marginal cost for a kid's cell line on Ting... I said this in my last post. The fundamental aspect you
Slashdot Mirror
The link between person and drivers license isn't only held by the DMV or similar agencies - if you've ever used a driver's license as an ID card, well...
Which is why god invented passport cards. I never use my driver's license as an ID for precisely this reason.
How about we stop at the top of the kelvin scale then?
So, around 10^32 kelvin?
We might be able to work with that, in principle...
Ever see a rabbit /mouse plague?
You mean like this cyclic rat plague? If so, then no, I missed the last one and the next one isn't due for another 30-40 years.
Considering there have been over 2000 nuclear tests
We stopped at 2000 nuclear tests, we can stop at a 2000 degree Celsius increase in temperature.
I don't know if I can commit to that. I mean, I'm trying to taper off, but setting fixed targets just stresses me out.
See... why we should require the manufacturer of every firearm to include microstamping technology, where the serial number will be imprinted on the cartridge of every round fired.
As long as you believe in fairy tale technology like microstamping, why not just require every crime lab have a CSI-type "enhancing" microscope? That way you could code a GUI in Visual Basic and then have the computer tell you who committed the crime.
For those who are uninformed, read about how cartridge microstamping (doesn't) work in practice, and even if it *did* work, think about how trivial it is to defeat. The microstamping system is supposed to use a rather weak force to stamp a tiny serial number? Nope, I can't see how that could ever be trivially defeated, even if it *did* work in the first place.
So, you mean to say that the negative reciprocal of the risk of nonextinction is rapidly diminishing?
Odds that we won't be around in 100 years are not low, and they only will keep increasing with time.
You worded that confusingly. Did you mean to say, "the risk we won't not be extinct is not diminishing?"
All the EU parties except the Greens are in favor.
If that's true, then "WTF, Pirate Party?"
As long as you have a tax-collecting state, the tender used for taxing will keep value.
Don't be autistic. Yes, technically the value of these hyperinflating currencies is infinitesimally above zero. That does not count as "keeping value" when practically speaking it takes wheelbarrows full of currency notes to buy a loaf of bread.
So, no, you're wrong. History has repeatedly shown that simply having a government insist on taxation in the form of a currency they issue is an insufficient backstop for value in the face of loss of confidence in the populace.
People aren't stupid: they exit the currency in favor of other, more stable stores of value (other currencies, land, tampons, whatever), get paid in kind, or simply resort to barter. They convert into the worthless government currency later to pay taxes. They don't ride the sinking ship.
So you are saying guarantee of US laws and belief of bitcoin fans are the same thing?
You posed the question incorrectly.
What we're saying is that US laws mandating the value of the USD are only worth as much as people believe. There were laws mandating the value of the Mark in the Weimar Republic. There are laws mandating the value of the Zimbabwean Dollar. Obviously, those laws weren't/aren't sufficient to make people trust the currency and they collapsed.
Now, asking whether people *should* find the BTC to be as trustworthy as the USD is an appropriate question. The answer to that is obviously "no".
What we take issue with is the perspective that there is some divine providence conferred on national currencies that make them trustworthy, when clearly there is no such intrinsic property like that.
The 4th and 5th amendments are not enough to assure personal freedom from search in the digital & wireless age. Only an amendment to the constitution that spells out this freedom can prevent it's continued abuse.
So what you're saying is that the federal government refuses to abide by the Constitution. Okay, I agree that is what they do. Your argument is that we will get them to stop breaking the rules by making a rule that says that they can't break the rules?
The federal government has been wiping its ass with the Constitution ever since FDR. Trying to constrain or restrain the federal government via written law is a fool's errand.
If I could burn down every data center facebook owned I'd do it in a second, no hesitation.
Hm, I wouldn't. I'd auction off the hardware, then I would invest half of the proceeds in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities...
Telling your bank, no, but placing a free 1-year freeze on your credit with the credit reporting agencies does work. Rinse and repeat each year, and turn it off before you apply for credit.
...or just place a permanent freeze on your credit, like I did a decade ago. When you want to apply for credit you temporarily lift the freeze for a few days whereupon it reverts to frozen. It works much like making your Bluetooth device discoverable.
It doesn't track road miles (and people will claim they don't drive on roads, and demand exceptions!), or vehicle weight (see the ratio of road wear per vehicle weight and cringe).
Sorry, but the odometer won't be enough.
Hard to believe statistical models couldn't be employed to arrive at essentially the same figures detailed big-brother GPS tracks would provide.
It is unnecessary to be hyper fair in collection or distribution of tax revenues nor is it necessary to consider behavior of outliers.
Exactly. How many of these pedants would have their mind blown when they consider that use tax is supposed to be paid based on tax jurisdiction they are in. Okay, perhaps that's not mind blowing, but now consider you bought a pizza and are eating it while driving in a car passing through various tax jurisdictions while doing so. What counts as "putting to use" in terms of eating pizza? Chewing, digesting, extracting the food energy for biological processes? If it's the last one, what happens when the pizza is vomited out in a different jurisdiction? Does one apply for a tax credit?
Uh oh, our sales/use tax system has boundary conditions! Therefore sales tax is completely inviable! Herp derp.
The odometer approach is a good, workable idea.
Aren't guys like you tired of bitching about Microsoft... for fucks sake, they are in the process of releasing their entire toolchain (from the bottom up) under the MIT licence.
Parent is actually insightful. Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but the summary should have mentioned the license. I assumed this was yet another MS "open source" release under one of their shitty proprietary licenses (you know, the kind of "open source" that is so restrictive it practically comes with an NDA).
Using a Free license like MIT actually makes this more than an empty gesture. Yes, I actually confirmed the LICENSE.txt on the github project is MIT License.
I suggest the multipart (fully cited) writeup on Eating Academy. Dr. Attia is a physician with degrees in aeronautical engineering and applied math, so his style communicates well to our demographic:
http://eatingacademy.com/nutri...
The larger point is that this corroborates the main issue in this topic: that for years the "science" advocated for improper (sometimes harmful) "optimizations" for health. The ignominious list of failures is quite long.
What I have learned in biochemistry is that one should always ask for explicit evidence and never presume... the LDL line of reasoning was "so obvious" to the scientists that they never bothered testing their assumptions ("Plaques in blood vessels have cholesterol, blood has cholesterol and some of it is from food. Therefore, high cholesterol foods cause plaques! Let's ignore the fact that half of patients presenting with CHD have normal LDL-c levels. We *know* it's the LDL-c that's the risk factor!" Fail.)
"Oops, confounders."
Yes, pretty much everyone who is paying attention to nutritional science is arguing with that.
Yes. I get the sense around here that people need to understand the concept of "confounders" in scientific studies.
Take hypercholesterolemia, for example. For years it's been thought that LDL concentrations in the blood are a risk factor and there have been multiple studies attempting to establish the relationship. The confounder? LDL isn't just floating sludge... it's "packetized". These "packets"/particles can come in varying particle sizes. They didn't think of that when doing the initial studies (over a period of decades!). Evidence now seems to show that it's the LDL particle concentration that has the dose-response relationship to CHD while the LDL concentration measurement that everyone uses today is a confounded proxy measurement that does *not* correlate to risk.
Similarly, HDL being beneficial is essentially debunked now. It's suspected that it is confounded by other factors. Some of the most telling evidence is that drugs designed to increase HDL failed clinical trials due to *increased* mortality.
Stop complaining about slashdot.
In the olden days, I wore an onion on my belt and everything was better.
God damn Slashdot.
See? Here we have a poster who claimed superior performance using a belt-onion—as everyone who knows anything would expect—but failed to give us an explanation of our upgrade options!
Who are the major players in the allicin-rich pants suspension market segment? Have you tried garlic suspenders? Any recent startups coming out of stealth mode with something like leek garters? What's disruptive here?!
Also, that post is worthless without at least an unboxing video.
I feel so very sorry.
Heh. You, sir, are a good sport.
In the larger context of the Constitution, most of these debates miss the fact that the Constitution is explicitly constructed as a whitelist of powers for the government. Everything else is reserved for the states and people. As for those Founders who opposed the Bill of Rights on the principle that it might mislead people into thinking the Constitution enshrines and delimits the people's rights... well, it seems they were correct after all.
The fact that the federal government has used a few privilege exploits ("general welfare" and commerce clause) to redefine the document does not change the fact that—the concept of civil rights not withstanding—the federal government simply does not have this power whitelisted.
I understand what the definition of IoT is. My comment was about the specious "1 in 5 developers works on IoT projects" stat. That's patently false by the definition of IoT.
Given that IoT is rapidly achieving buzzword status, you'll likely be dismayed to find that the term will become coopted and the definition distorted in order to enable claims like in this article.
I suspect that the mania will be tempered by the fact that it will be fairly easy to classify all sorts of projects, that you were already doing, as "IoT" if you wish to seem super cutting edge and so on without actually making any changes.
That was my initial reaction to the "1 in 5" stat: "I guess the definition of IoT now includes all mobile platform development."
A) No one here uses emoji
B) No one here gives a fuck if you can enter emoji into a text field.
C) Why the fuck is the fact that you cant put emoji in a TEXT field considered a bug. Its a fucking TEXT field.
It will seem ironic to the community when Dice rolls out emoji support in Slashcode while still forbidding most Unicode characters.
You know it's coming.
Time to put my flame suit on.
Done.
You want to know why they hate us? *THIS* is why they hate us. $100K for an effing OLD VIDEO GAME?
Well, given this has been bid up to this level by a troll eBay account, they likely hate us for nothing because that's what this will amount to.
Then again, maybe they *should* hate us because we have so many trolls that we can no longer have nice things.
PS. Did you happen to bite your tongue when your knee jerked so hard? I'm guessing it hit your chin. Hope you're okay!
It turns out you guessed correctly. We do in fact wear a lot of pants without pockets, which we'd have to throw out.
I don't think I own a pair of pants, shorts, or a swimsuit without pockets. Where do you put your keys and wallet when you're out? Do you carry a purse or something? Regardless, put your phone where you put your keys/wallet and so forth, and consider discovering the magic of pockets.
What should I have said to make my intent clearer?
Many of the questions you posed seemed like they had obvious answers (especially the hands/carrying down the stairs thing). Sometimes trolls act deliberately obtuse to try to goad people. Unfortunately, the presence of these people means that the possibility lurks in the back of one's mind. I prefer to presume people are asking in good faith.
Landline: Varies from Frontier. The actual monthly price depends on how many outgoing long-distance calls we make. (Local, toll-free, and incoming calls are unmetered.) Flip phone: $5/mo each from Virgin Mobile, which includes 20 minutes per month that roll over. When I priced Virgin's smartphone offering a couple years ago (2013, not 1995 as you mention), smartphone service started at $35/mo.
Like I said, look at ting rates, and realize there is no contract or commitment, and you are only billed for the amount you use each month (no stupid estimates, overages, or gimmicks). Note that everyone sharing the account pulls from the same bucket. There's no nonsense like rollover minutes or whatever. 1,000 text messages in a month costs $5. If you use Google Voice like I do, then that's $0 for text messages.
Presumably you already have internet at home, so you associate your smartphone with your WiFi and it automatically routes packets through that when in range. Our three smartphones together use less than 500 MB of mobile data a month, so that's $12 per month on Ting total for the whole family. You can set limits in the Ting control panel to prevent lines from using too much; however, this really isn't a concern... mobile browsing, IM, email, etc don't really add up to much. Streaming music *will* for example.
Used smartphones are inexpensive. Once you have one you will find it indispensable to have instant ubiquitous internet access, email, and easy text input.
Which cable company in which area?
Cox in the Midwest. Netflix costs $8.55/month anywhere in the US. We got a free cable modem from Cox, but even a high end DOCSIS 3 modem costs under $100. You are getting gouged if you are agreeing to pay $8/month to rent a modem. Buy a modem on Amazon and put the monthly savings toward your Ting bill.
When you're carrying something upstairs or downstairs with both hands, how do you carry the phone as well?
Well, my family doesn't lounge around the house in the nude. In many circumstances I am carrying my phone in a pocket. Pockets are an ideal solution for carrying keys, wallets, phones, etc, and they also allow you to free your hands for necessary tasks. I would be more likely to miss a phone call on a landline because I would have to hear the ring on the other side of the house, travel to another room to answer it before the person hangs up, etc. Conversely, I am rarely more than 2 meters from my smartphone at any point during the day... I reach down into my pocket, look at the number, and decide whether to answer or to send the caller to "fuck you voicemail" (i.e. voicemail that picks up in under 4 rings, implicitly letting the caller know you have rejected their call).
To preempt your next predictable objection: if your phone falls out of your pocket on a regular basis or your pants lack pockets, then get different pants. If your family lounges in the nude, then change that policy for sanity's sake.
I have a flip phone that I use for occasional calls out of the house. I tried texting with T9 and found it slower and more painful than voice.
Yes, that is painful. Don't do that. Get a smartphone... typing is far better on a smartphone. It's not like smartphones are expensive if you are willing to take a hand-me-down from a friend, buy a used phone off eBay, or pick up a previous generation phone from Walmart or something like that.
Until you're away from home and public Wi-Fi. Or until you need to call your ISP to troubleshoot why the Internet is not working.
Now I'm trying to decide if you're trolling. Go to ting.com and look at the rates they charge. Our family's total monthly bill from Ting for three smartphones with data plans is $44 plus tax. What is your family paying for your landline and your flip phone plans?
Phone calls or Skyping are scheduled affairs.
Unless you're, say, trying to get a ride from a family member on Sunday, when public transit has the day off.
No, even then. We send each other a text message or an IM. You send them a text, IM, or email because they have their phones with them or within earshot. They are more likely to respond to a text, IM, or email because you can do that even when they can't speak on the phone and would otherwise send you to voicemail they might not listen to for hours or a day. Conversely, they will receive a notification of these text-based messages' delivery within seconds.
And trouble calls to your ISP aren't scheduled; prepare to pay dearly to your carrier to hear "Your call is important to us and will be answered in the order it was received" for half an hour.
Um, okay? I refer you once again to ting.com for an example of what competitive cell phone rates are these days. Other providers offer similar rates if you are savvy enough not to be exploited. It's not 1995 anymore.
If your kid is old enough to be home alone, they are old enough to have an inexpensive cell phone.
I'm not sure what you mean by "inexpensive", and I don't know anything about the law where you live, but where I live, there are a few years between the age at which a child is old enough to be home alone and the age at which a child is old enough to have a job to earn the money to pay for a cell phone. I must be missing something fundamental.
$6/month is the marginal cost for a kid's cell line on Ting... I said this in my last post. The fundamental aspect you