I have a Linux server that has been running without reboot for 679 days. Yes, I do update content, and I admit that there has been network maintenance that has made it unreachable twice during that time. However, I spend almost no money on the network, so that's what I get.
One company I worked for once upon a time, ConXioN Corp, has a very real statement on their opening page from a major customer:
"ConXioN has not been down in 5 years."And that was in 2001, they still haven't had a hit.
This is simply a matter of consideration and design. No $19.95/month mom&pop ISP is going to put the effort needed into ensuring such uptimes, things like that take redundancy and forward thinking, and that costs money.
While I was at NASA, the network and servers there also had better than 5-9's availability, because the people who ran those servers and that network took the time to care. For us it wasn't a matter of profit, it was a matter of pride.
So while I agree with those who poo-poo that "nothing is so important" that it needs to be up 100% of the time, and I also agree with the reality that there will be downtime of any system at some point, really impressive uptimes are not just possible, they can and do happen anywhere that uptime is a prioroty.
Ludwig von Mises documented, and Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize for espousing, the "Business Cycle".
When lending is lose, when governments print money for instance, there is over-investment in factors of production, in large scale investment. Look at the postings here, you see comments about "excess of bandwidth", and that's a perfect example of the business cycle in action.
Now, as exemplified with the collapse of the ".COM bubble", there is a contraction in the supply of capital. The Federal Reserve tightens control, and there is a shake-out of unprofitable businesses. Worldcomm is just a symptom, it is not a cause. All their creative accounting did was hide the problem, it neither caused it nor prevented it.
However, when the business cycle is on the "down" side, there is an excess of factors of production available. The "bandwidth glut" is ready and waiting to be picked up and utilized more efficiently to the benefit of consumers.
Without this artificial expansion and contraction of the money supply, business would still come and go but not in large waves. Factors of production would be created at a more conservative and sustainable rate.
Industry, both business and personal, flourishes when external factors, such as money supply, are stable. That is why a hard currency standard is a good thing, and prevents the boom/bust cycle that fiat currencies foster.
Worldcomm's customers still want service, Worldcomm's cables are in the ground, their routers and workers still exist. I don't care if the name of the owner changes, so long as they are allowed to fail if they cannot supply the wants of the consumers more efficiently than Worldcomm did.
Bob-
Global Warming Models Labeled 'Fairy Tale' By Team of Scientists By Marc Morano CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer May 14, 2002
Washington (CNSNews.com) - A team of international scientists Monday said climate models showing global warming are based on a "fairy tale" of computer projections. The scientists met on Capitol Hill to expose what they see as a dearth of scientific evidence about global warming.
Hartwig Volz, a geophysicist with the RWE Research Lab in Germany questioned the merit of the climate projections coming from the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC.) The IPCC climate projections have fueled worldwide support for the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to restrict the greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming.
Volz noted that the IPCC does not even call the climate models "predictions" and instead refers to them as "projections" or "story lines." Volz said the projections might be more aptly termed "fairy tales."
Monday's luncheon was sponsored by the Frontiers of Freedom Institute and titled "Whatever Happened to Global Warming? Climate Science Does Not Support the Kyoto Protocol."
S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist with the University of Virginia and the Environmental Policy Project, called the IPCC's global warming projections "completely unrealistic."
----------------
You can read the rest yourself. I enjoyed it greatly I've often said exactly what these scientists are saying, and I get flamed for it. Bring on the flame-throwers, oh Chicken Littles!
This is an absolute lie. Deforestation is one of the most serious...
And when people leave the area, the forests grow back. It's not the same forest, and I believe it is this that the extremist environmentalists cannot stand.
Where did you get the idea that nitrates are fixed by internal combustion engines?
70% of the atmosphere is nitrogen. When combustion occurs, nitrogen compounds are also created. The fact of the nitrate fertilizer from car exhaust was explained to me by the California Department of Forestry.
I'm not going to tell you a lie, the sulphurs and acids produced are really nasty. It would be nice if they didn't happen, but no such luck. It would be nice for you if your doom-and-gloom all bad extremism were true, but again no such luck.
I was speaking of the detonation of Mt. St. Helens, and the massive polutants injected all at once. I was not speaking about it today. So much for your absolute lie.
I know you don't consider yourself an extremist. Another sign that you cannot face the facts about your beliefs.
You didn't destroy the other authors statement about water being a greenhouse gas, you proved it. You yourself stated that variations in water vapor content directly effect retained heat levels.
The funny thing is that I'm not even trying to say you're fundimentally wrong, only that your extreme reaction does not follow from the effects. It is your "the sky is falling" unsupported disaster claims, and the vast changes you would force on others because of your terror, that I object to.
A couple degrees warmer would do wonders for the English wine industry.
How can you say all that and still say the following:
[T]his is creating a change that causes a long term (and even permanent if we don't reduce emmisions) temperature increase.
The sin of pride, again. Human beings cannot have a "permanent" effect on Earth. We're an aberation, a short-term species. Anything we could do, including total nuclear war, would be cleaned up and erased in less time than it took horses to go from three toes to one.
I'm pretty sure that the people 14,000 years ago at the end of the last ice-age, as their ice-caps were melting, were terrified of the global warming going on. Just like you are.
And with just as much of an attachment to reality.
Yes, I am aware that CO2 is a naturally occurring substance, required for plants to crack in order to produce carbohydrates, etc.
The point I was trying to make is that the "global warming" extremists cannot comprehend that the earths natural temperature has fluxuated greatly over time, far colder and far warmer. It is the sin of pride to assume that what has been normal for the last 50 years must be normal for everywhere through all time.
The extremists decry how human action is by definition bad, invasive, destructive. Point out that Mt. St. Hellens dumped far more crap into the atmosphere than humanity, they ignore it.
Point out that the nitrates being "fixed" by internal combustion engines, and the CO2 they produce at the same time, is acting as fertilizer for plant groath, they ignore it.
Point out that the forests are now far more pleantiful than they were 100 years ago, that the mid-atmosphere temp has been very stable for as long as it's been measured, or woe be it that humans making the earth unlivable for *humans* is a temporary effect at best, and they treat you as if you were the extremist.
That is why I phrased my statement as I did. The extremists decry how CO2 content is going up, and demand that this "human interference" stop, by force of arms against individuals.
It is not their motivation I call into question, it is the extremism of their conviction that they must inflict their judgement on others, but oh no never let anyone else effect themselves.
You could address the fallacy. Does water vapor trap heat, yes or no? Do clouds trap heat, yes or no?
If they are not "greenhouse gasses", can you create a definition of such compounds which excludes them?
Or, do you consider human interaction by definition "bad"? Since water vapor and clouds are not human creations (unlike CO2?), they therefore cannot be bad?
If someone's livelihood depends on a certain animal doing well, than they have a great deal of incentive to protect it.
That is exactly the point. People protect and defend that which belongs to them. By monopolizing the market in parks, for instance, and charging property taxes, governments punish the very large-scale ecology we're discussing. I canot keep large tracts of land in their un-touched condition if I have to pay rent on it every year.
I don't consider the push-me-pull-you of property taxes and tax-funded parks to have been a deliberate act on the part of the governments to put private efforts out of reach, but it is a beneficial (for government) outcome.
Not just keystone species, it's a good idea to study why any species would become extinct. A change in the inanimate environment, or in competition, is a good thing to know.
When the "remote kill switch" is mandated in all new cars sold, it will not longer be "worthwhile technology".
The comment about "entrapment" wouldn't be so laughable if theives hadn't already tried, and I believe succeeded, in using the fact that the homeowner had a "Welcome" mat as a defense. "They invited me in!"
Lastly, on the stacking of charges, just what is a "theft tool"? ViceGrips? Hammer? Screwdriver?
Which begs the question, what are "hacking tools"? Keyboard? ADSL?
Prosecutor: Your honor, the defendant is guilty of 27 counts of having been in posession of criminal tools: Books.
I'm still using a machine with just a CD drive, so I have not been able to test this myself.
Is the region encoding a matter of hardware or software? I'm an international traveler, and if I get a DVD drive for my machine I would want it to be able to read different region codes.
If this is software based, then I'm certain that the OpenSource decoders already ignore this little detail.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase could possibly warm the earth, but it is only about 3.5 percent of all greenhouse gases. Water vapor and clouds make up over 95 percent of greenhouse gases.
Funny thing is, if you "warm the earth", there's more white clouds which reflect sunlight. So is water vapor a "green house" gas, or an "umbrella" gas?
Wow! We need to restrict water vapor! It's a greenhouse gas! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
All environmental problems occur in open-access commons -- areas like rivers, airsheds,
and fisheries -- that no one owns and no one has a responsibility to protect. Political
management has generally been the way we have tried to handle the problems caused by
the institution of open-access commons. The CPC is pointing to how private property can
effectively deal with environmental problems. "An owner who neglects or harms what he
owns is soon out of business and is replaced by somebody better," noted Smith.
I think it's a wonderful idea to study and document the fall, and rise (I hope), of these species.
However, it is not "bad" that species die off. It's normal. Adaptation is normal too. The falcons nesting on the sides of tall buildings, returning to prey on pidgeons in the place that pidgeons flourish (human cities) is a really neat thing.
It would ease lots of minds if something would prey on the Tokyo crow, I can tell you. Training 12 year olds with.22 rifles would do it, but the Japanese have removed that as a legal option.
Darwin's discoveries drive rational ecology, not radical ecology. "Global Warming" scares and "human effects are by definition negative" are examples of radical ecology that treats humans as invaders instead of integral to the environment itself.
I'm all for Condors. I'm for saving them by the same methods that have saved cows, ducks, chickens, rhinos and emu have been "saved": Private enterprise.
(background: the most successful rhino breeding is being done for profit, for sale to zoos and hunters. elsewhere, rhino are in really deep trouble)
Wine grapes were grown in England through early recorded history. It's too cold now to grow wine grapes in England, therefore "global warming" would be merely the return to the prior normal temperatures.
That is, if "global warming" exists as a human effect at all.
This is the sin of pride, that what you have experienced in your lifetime must therefore be "normal".
Simple fact: The better adapted, or better able to adapt, survive. Weak perish. If you cannot understand that, no wonder "global warming" is still being touted as "science".
I also find your blending of fields interesting. Darwin and ecology? Cause and effect. When ecological parameters change, that which can adapt to the changes survive and those which cannot die out.
Funny how your attempts at argument merely prove my point.
I would love to see how you would demonstrate that the singular cause of the Condor's demise has been industrial man.
In your office, install a VoIP gateway. Use a VoIP phone at home, and log into the office gateway with it.
If your office network is integrated into the same switch, your own office extention will ring your VoIP phone when ever you're logged in with it. Conversely, calls you make are made from your office number for caller ID and billing purposes.
Does this answer all your questions?
Caviat: Any services reachable from the outside world can be hacked. Encrypt your VoIP traffic, use secure tunnels between firewalled LANs.
Bob-
It's easier to get a wiretap for an IP link
on
VoIP for the Masses!
·
· Score: 2
Lots of ISP's cave in to pressure to put sniffers on their systems without court orders.
But remember that the 1995 law required a system that could re-route any POTS call anywhere in the country back to the FBI in Virginia for monitoring. Provided a court order, of course. Hahaha.
Here's the rub: There are specific judges whos job it is to issue wiretap warrants. They don't turn the requests down, so having a "warrant" is merely an issue of paperwork and has nothing to do with the validity of the case anyway.
If the FBI or other Fed.Gov agency wants your data, nothing will stop them from getting it. John Gotti's PGP keys were trapped by a keyboard logger they installed on his PC in a black-bag op. His lawyer tried to say that it should have had a wiretap warrant, but that argument didn't impress the trial judge.
I think VoIP makes great sense as a home phone, with the understanding that for emergencies you have a cell phone.
The cost savings of the VoIP for normal use well offset the cost of a cell, especially if you buy the "pay for every minute of use" options and then only use it when you actually need it.
For "emergencies" a cell phone is far smarter anyway, since your "emergency" can happen anywhere and not just at home, near a phone.
Put a cheap cell phone in your safe-room, and that should be pleanty.
Slashdot Mirror
One company I worked for once upon a time, ConXioN Corp, has a very real statement on their opening page from a major customer:
"ConXioN has not been down in 5 years." And that was in 2001, they still haven't had a hit.
This is simply a matter of consideration and design. No $19.95/month mom&pop ISP is going to put the effort needed into ensuring such uptimes, things like that take redundancy and forward thinking, and that costs money.
While I was at NASA, the network and servers there also had better than 5-9's availability, because the people who ran those servers and that network took the time to care. For us it wasn't a matter of profit, it was a matter of pride.
So while I agree with those who poo-poo that "nothing is so important" that it needs to be up 100% of the time, and I also agree with the reality that there will be downtime of any system at some point, really impressive uptimes are not just possible, they can and do happen anywhere that uptime is a prioroty.
Long Uptimes are simply a matter of design.
Bob-
Ludwig von Mises documented, and Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize for espousing, the "Business Cycle".
When lending is lose, when governments print money for instance, there is over-investment in factors of production, in large scale investment. Look at the postings here, you see comments about "excess of bandwidth", and that's a perfect example of the business cycle in action.
Now, as exemplified with the collapse of the ".COM bubble", there is a contraction in the supply of capital. The Federal Reserve tightens control, and there is a shake-out of unprofitable businesses. Worldcomm is just a symptom, it is not a cause. All their creative accounting did was hide the problem, it neither caused it nor prevented it.
However, when the business cycle is on the "down" side, there is an excess of factors of production available. The "bandwidth glut" is ready and waiting to be picked up and utilized more efficiently to the benefit of consumers.
Without this artificial expansion and contraction of the money supply, business would still come and go but not in large waves. Factors of production would be created at a more conservative and sustainable rate.
Industry, both business and personal, flourishes when external factors, such as money supply, are stable. That is why a hard currency standard is a good thing, and prevents the boom/bust cycle that fiat currencies foster.
Worldcomm's customers still want service, Worldcomm's cables are in the ground, their routers and workers still exist. I don't care if the name of the owner changes, so long as they are allowed to fail if they cannot supply the wants of the consumers more efficiently than Worldcomm did.
Bob-
Global Warming Models Labeled 'Fairy Tale' By Team of Scientists
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
May 14, 2002
Washington (CNSNews.com) - A team of international scientists Monday said climate models showing global warming are based on a "fairy tale" of computer projections. The scientists met on Capitol Hill to expose what they see as a dearth of scientific evidence about global warming.
Hartwig Volz, a geophysicist with the RWE Research Lab in Germany questioned the merit of the climate projections coming from the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC.) The IPCC climate projections have fueled worldwide support for the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to restrict the greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming.
Volz noted that the IPCC does not even call the climate models "predictions" and instead refers to them as "projections" or "story lines." Volz said the projections might be more aptly termed "fairy tales."
Monday's luncheon was sponsored by the Frontiers of Freedom Institute and titled "Whatever Happened to Global Warming? Climate Science Does Not Support the Kyoto Protocol."
S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist with the University of Virginia and the Environmental Policy Project, called the IPCC's global warming projections "completely unrealistic."
----------------
You can read the rest yourself. I enjoyed it greatly I've often said exactly what these scientists are saying, and I get flamed for it. Bring on the flame-throwers, oh Chicken Littles!
Bob-
Like I said, I am double majoring in ecology and chemistry.
And this somehow counters the idea that you are and extremist....how?
I consider your focus on the subject to be further supporting evidence.
I understand these concepts infinitely better than you.
Obviously you're not majoring in mathmatics, or history.
Bob-
Do some research. Of course it's going to go away, when the next ice age hits if not sooner.
Why do you keep putting these things in terms of your lifetime? Do you really think you are that important?
Bob-
This is an absolute lie. Deforestation is one of the most serious...
And when people leave the area, the forests grow back. It's not the same forest, and I believe it is this that the extremist environmentalists cannot stand.
Where did you get the idea that nitrates are fixed by internal combustion engines?
70% of the atmosphere is nitrogen. When combustion occurs, nitrogen compounds are also created. The fact of the nitrate fertilizer from car exhaust was explained to me by the California Department of Forestry.
I'm not going to tell you a lie, the sulphurs and acids produced are really nasty. It would be nice if they didn't happen, but no such luck. It would be nice for you if your doom-and-gloom all bad extremism were true, but again no such luck.
I was speaking of the detonation of Mt. St. Helens, and the massive polutants injected all at once. I was not speaking about it today. So much for your absolute lie.
I know you don't consider yourself an extremist. Another sign that you cannot face the facts about your beliefs.
You didn't destroy the other authors statement about water being a greenhouse gas, you proved it. You yourself stated that variations in water vapor content directly effect retained heat levels.
The funny thing is that I'm not even trying to say you're fundimentally wrong, only that your extreme reaction does not follow from the effects. It is your "the sky is falling" unsupported disaster claims, and the vast changes you would force on others because of your terror, that I object to.
A couple degrees warmer would do wonders for the English wine industry.
Bob-
How can you say all that and still say the following:
[T]his is creating a change that causes a long term (and even permanent if we don't reduce emmisions) temperature increase.
The sin of pride, again. Human beings cannot have a "permanent" effect on Earth. We're an aberation, a short-term species. Anything we could do, including total nuclear war, would be cleaned up and erased in less time than it took horses to go from three toes to one.
I'm pretty sure that the people 14,000 years ago at the end of the last ice-age, as their ice-caps were melting, were terrified of the global warming going on. Just like you are.
And with just as much of an attachment to reality.
Bob-
Yes, I am aware that CO2 is a naturally occurring substance, required for plants to crack in order to produce carbohydrates, etc.
The point I was trying to make is that the "global warming" extremists cannot comprehend that the earths natural temperature has fluxuated greatly over time, far colder and far warmer. It is the sin of pride to assume that what has been normal for the last 50 years must be normal for everywhere through all time.
The extremists decry how human action is by definition bad, invasive, destructive. Point out that Mt. St. Hellens dumped far more crap into the atmosphere than humanity, they ignore it.
Point out that the nitrates being "fixed" by internal combustion engines, and the CO2 they produce at the same time, is acting as fertilizer for plant groath, they ignore it.
Point out that the forests are now far more pleantiful than they were 100 years ago, that the mid-atmosphere temp has been very stable for as long as it's been measured, or woe be it that humans making the earth unlivable for *humans* is a temporary effect at best, and they treat you as if you were the extremist.
That is why I phrased my statement as I did. The extremists decry how CO2 content is going up, and demand that this "human interference" stop, by force of arms against individuals.
It is not their motivation I call into question, it is the extremism of their conviction that they must inflict their judgement on others, but oh no never let anyone else effect themselves.
Bob-
You could address the fallacy. Does water vapor trap heat, yes or no? Do clouds trap heat, yes or no?
If they are not "greenhouse gasses", can you create a definition of such compounds which excludes them?
Or, do you consider human interaction by definition "bad"? Since water vapor and clouds are not human creations (unlike CO2?), they therefore cannot be bad?
Bob-
Good sir, you yourself just stated:
If someone's livelihood depends on a certain animal doing well, than they have a great deal of incentive to protect it.
That is exactly the point. People protect and defend that which belongs to them. By monopolizing the market in parks, for instance, and charging property taxes, governments punish the very large-scale ecology we're discussing. I canot keep large tracts of land in their un-touched condition if I have to pay rent on it every year.
I don't consider the push-me-pull-you of property taxes and tax-funded parks to have been a deliberate act on the part of the governments to put private efforts out of reach, but it is a beneficial (for government) outcome.
Bob-
Not just keystone species, it's a good idea to study why any species would become extinct. A change in the inanimate environment, or in competition, is a good thing to know.
At least I'll never have to worry about it for my kids.
http://www.sepschool.org/
When the "remote kill switch" is mandated in all new cars sold, it will not longer be "worthwhile technology".
The comment about "entrapment" wouldn't be so laughable if theives hadn't already tried, and I believe succeeded, in using the fact that the homeowner had a "Welcome" mat as a defense. "They invited me in!"
Lastly, on the stacking of charges, just what is a "theft tool"? ViceGrips? Hammer? Screwdriver?
Which begs the question, what are "hacking tools"? Keyboard? ADSL?
Prosecutor: Your honor, the defendant is guilty of 27 counts of having been in posession of criminal tools: Books.
I'm still using a machine with just a CD drive, so I have not been able to test this myself.
Is the region encoding a matter of hardware or software? I'm an international traveler, and if I get a DVD drive for my machine I would want it to be able to read different region codes.
If this is software based, then I'm certain that the OpenSource decoders already ignore this little detail.
Bob-
I wave my hand and a car goes by. Did my waving my hand cause the car to go by? Gee, by your logic it does.
You might try this article for some actual science instead of "The CO2 Is Rising! Oh No!"
The particular part I like:
CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase could possibly warm the earth, but it is only about 3.5 percent of all greenhouse gases. Water vapor and clouds make up over 95 percent of greenhouse gases.
Funny thing is, if you "warm the earth", there's more white clouds which reflect sunlight. So is water vapor a "green house" gas, or an "umbrella" gas?
Wow! We need to restrict water vapor! It's a greenhouse gas! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Bob-
This article from Reason comes to mind:
All environmental problems occur in open-access commons -- areas like rivers, airsheds,
and fisheries -- that no one owns and no one has a responsibility to protect. Political
management has generally been the way we have tried to handle the problems caused by
the institution of open-access commons. The CPC is pointing to how private property can
effectively deal with environmental problems. "An owner who neglects or harms what he
owns is soon out of business and is replaced by somebody better," noted Smith.
I think it's a wonderful idea to study and document the fall, and rise (I hope), of these species.
.22 rifles would do it, but the Japanese have removed that as a legal option.
However, it is not "bad" that species die off. It's normal. Adaptation is normal too. The falcons nesting on the sides of tall buildings, returning to prey on pidgeons in the place that pidgeons flourish (human cities) is a really neat thing.
It would ease lots of minds if something would prey on the Tokyo crow, I can tell you. Training 12 year olds with
Darwin's discoveries drive rational ecology, not radical ecology. "Global Warming" scares and "human effects are by definition negative" are examples of radical ecology that treats humans as invaders instead of integral to the environment itself.
I'm all for Condors. I'm for saving them by the same methods that have saved cows, ducks, chickens, rhinos and emu have been "saved": Private enterprise.
(background: the most successful rhino breeding is being done for profit, for sale to zoos and hunters. elsewhere, rhino are in really deep trouble)
Bob-
Wine grapes were grown in England through early recorded history. It's too cold now to grow wine grapes in England, therefore "global warming" would be merely the return to the prior normal temperatures.
That is, if "global warming" exists as a human effect at all.
This is the sin of pride, that what you have experienced in your lifetime must therefore be "normal".
Bob-
Simple fact: The better adapted, or better able to adapt, survive. Weak perish. If you cannot understand that, no wonder "global warming" is still being touted as "science".
I also find your blending of fields interesting. Darwin and ecology? Cause and effect. When ecological parameters change, that which can adapt to the changes survive and those which cannot die out.
Funny how your attempts at argument merely prove my point.
I would love to see how you would demonstrate that the singular cause of the Condor's demise has been industrial man.
Bob-
The "Unconstitutional" hammer should be applied to 95% of what comes from Congresses sphincter.
Bob-
In your office, install a VoIP gateway. Use a VoIP phone at home, and log into the office gateway with it.
If your office network is integrated into the same switch, your own office extention will ring your VoIP phone when ever you're logged in with it. Conversely, calls you make are made from your office number for caller ID and billing purposes.
Does this answer all your questions?
Caviat: Any services reachable from the outside world can be hacked. Encrypt your VoIP traffic, use secure tunnels between firewalled LANs.
Bob-
Lots of ISP's cave in to pressure to put sniffers on their systems without court orders.
But remember that the 1995 law required a system that could re-route any POTS call anywhere in the country back to the FBI in Virginia for monitoring. Provided a court order, of course. Hahaha.
Here's the rub: There are specific judges whos job it is to issue wiretap warrants. They don't turn the requests down, so having a "warrant" is merely an issue of paperwork and has nothing to do with the validity of the case anyway.
If the FBI or other Fed.Gov agency wants your data, nothing will stop them from getting it. John Gotti's PGP keys were trapped by a keyboard logger they installed on his PC in a black-bag op. His lawyer tried to say that it should have had a wiretap warrant, but that argument didn't impress the trial judge.
Have a nice day.
Bob-
Since it's just IP, you "connect" from anywhere to your VoIP gateway. It doesn't matter where your gateway is.
And for cheaper service, some cut-rate mom&pop VoIP-ISP will put in extention numbers and put ten thousand different people on the same "number".
"If you want to get in touch with me, call my office in Washington DC, extension #1218."
You could have lots of different numbers this way too, just subscribe to multiple services.
Gee, just like voice-based IRC. Yep.
Bob-
I think VoIP makes great sense as a home phone, with the understanding that for emergencies you have a cell phone.
The cost savings of the VoIP for normal use well offset the cost of a cell, especially if you buy the "pay for every minute of use" options and then only use it when you actually need it.
For "emergencies" a cell phone is far smarter anyway, since your "emergency" can happen anywhere and not just at home, near a phone.
Put a cheap cell phone in your safe-room, and that should be pleanty.
Bob-
Speak Freely is voice over IP software that runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME, Unix and Linux and interoperates between them seamlessly.
It uses encryption if you want it, too.
There's also VoicePGP if you want to talk to Mac's, and who knows what other software out there that I don't know about.
Bob-