The music companies basically took the entire inventory that they had been unable to give away for the last 20 years and dumped it on the state attorneys general as "settlement" for the millions of dollars ripped off from consumers during the course of the price fixing fiasco. Nobody can honestly say that the CDs distributed as part of the settlement had a fair market value equal to the amount that was swindled from consumers. I mean look at the list of artists: Michael Bolton, Stone Temple Pilots, and other equally obscure junk. The recording industry laughed all the way to the bank on this one.
I say this with some sorrow, because I enjoyed the original series when I was in grade school, but Galactica has suffered a number of indignities over the years and between rewriting, editing, and corporations that were more concerned about cashing in on the nostalgia than producing a good quality science fiction series the series has lost much of its luster for me. Now, to be fair to the Sci-Fi channel and some of the original cast members the recent miniseries was a good intentioned attempt to recapture some of what made the Galactica concept so compelling. However, Galactica has always, even during the original run, suffered from lack of budget. The original series for example, cost $1,000,000 per episode in 1978 and it was cancelled even though it was the number one show that year. The hard truth is that advertisers, even if your show is number one in ratings, will only pay so much for a 30 second commercial spot. Thus, in order to make the show profitable there have always been compromises. I really wanted to like the new miniseries...I really did. I watched it in its entirety, even though I winced at some of acting and most of the dialog. Perhaps the series will prove me wrong...I hope so...but I am not getting my hopes up.
A lot of product insurance contracts, notably cell phone replacement plans, require the filing of a police report but one can usually get past this by simply being stubborn and simply demanding your refund/replacement. I find that the long pause on the phone after they remind you of the police report requirement is often effective in getting them to drop the troublesome requirement in the name of "better customer service". After all if they get a reputation for hassling claimants then nobody will buy those warranty replacement plans anymore because "it isn't worth the hassle." With warranty replacement plans everything can be negotiated if you are persistent enough.
Hollywood was founded on Infringement
on
Guerrilla Drive-Ins
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In the early days of the film industry the movie studios selected Hollywood for a couple of reasons: the climate was mild, there was a wide variety of terrain and locales, and the poor roads and isolated conditions ment that they could dodge Thomas Edisdon and his movie projector patents. Early studios like "Flying 'A' Studios" weren't called flying for nothing. They would pick up their operations and move around to stay one step ahead of the patent police. Isn't it ironic that an industry which decries the infringement of intellectual property was founded on that very infringement?
There are some rumors that the prions which cause mad cow disease were developed as part of the extensive biological and chemical weapons programs of the former Soviet Union. Agencies such as: Biopreparat, the FSB (formerly the KGB), and the Soviet Military were all involved.
In another chilling development, Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, where much testing of biological agents including anthrax, bubonic plague, glanders, and other extremely infectious agents occurred supposedly contains massive amounts of anthrax hastily buried by Russian scientists amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. More fodder for the conspiracy theorists out there...
I was thinking that if I stopped supporting RIAA attatched bands that I respect, that they might get a clue, and start some independant release scheme, but them realized that that is dumb.
They cannot start an independent release scheme because they are bound by contract to produce music exclusively for the label that they signed with for a long period of time (typically 7+ years). If that is not bad enough the costs of producing the albums, including recording studio time, promotion (er..payola), and marketing fees are paid for by the label, but charged to the artist as a LOAN. Thus, many of the bands are trapped in their contracts with the labels until they can pay off all the money that they owe. If an album doesn't sell well then the artist can be left with little to show for months or years of work other than a six figure debt.
The Newton Community is a very interesting case of users continuing to support a product which for all intents and purposes should have died years ago. Is there a good reason, other than 'I hate everything that Microsoft does no matter what and nobody will ever change my mind', why these users would not be satisified with a shinny new TabletPC or Pocket PC? On the other hand why does Apple continue to shun these users when there is clearly a market for an new Apple handheld computing device? Strange that Apple would not wish to compete with Microsoft by offering their own version of the TabletPC. Perhaps some Newton users could comment on these issues.
As the article so aptly pointed out some things which are annoying to one person simply breeze by another. The corollary of this statement is that no matter what you do it is guaranteed that someone somewhere will be annoyed by it.
The Republican party is already in hot water in two different states for funding and backing Nader to try to weaken the Democrat vote.
Why shouldn't registered Republicans be able to give money to any political party or candidate that they want? People can spend their money on whatever they damn well please and if it pleases me to give money to a third party candidate so that he can make trouble for the Democrats then who is to say that it is not my right to spend MY money in that way?
I am not so sure about that. The advertising revenue for 50.4 days of programming is potentially very lucrative and major networks such as NBC are very good at providing efficient coverage of major live events. They are most definitely making money on the games.
and why is Slashdot scanning my ports right now?
Your computer's TCP ports: 80, 1080, 3128, 8000 and 8080 have been scanned from 66.35.250.150
Millions of Canadian tax dollars are used to train RN's and MD's who take work south of the border every year. Canadian healthcare workers are a rare breed who get paid peanuts compared to their US counterparts because they believe in equal access for all.
Those who are willing to pay get the goods. Why should it be any surprise that Canadian medical professionals, the smartest and most talented ones anyway, would seek the highest possible salary? If that level of pay and benefits cannot be found in Canada then they will go somewhere else. Would you want to go to school for 20 years and work your butt off so that you could earn peanuts? You cannot pay the garbage man and the doctor the same...the communists tried it but it just doesn't work.
The statement, "From each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs," upon which liberal societies like Canada are based sounds great, but in practice it is a terrible way to organize an economy and actually results in a lower quality of life for everyone. People should be more concerned about the size of the total pie rather than the equality of its distribution.
What a massive sense of entitlement you have. Either that or a severe cookie-phobia...
The man has a right to chose not to read any newspaper online that he must register for and you cannot begrudge him that right. You may not agree, you may even think he is nuts to expect that he should receive free ad-free access. Fortunately the marketplace exists to solve such disputes. If he is willing to pay nothing then he will probably get nothing, but presumably he is not very disappointed because he obviously did not value the content enough to pay for it anyway. If however you believe that $3 per article is a fair price then presumably you are happy to pay and the newspaper is happy to provide you with access. Everyone was satisfied with these arrangements and the choices that they made: you, the man who was not willing to pay, and the newspaper. That is the power of markets.
The EFF, while admittedly left leaning, often takes positions which are contrary to the leading members of the Democratic Party when the issues in question involve restriction or misuse of technology. That is why I have an EFF membership even though I am a registered Republican and generally hold conservative viewpoints. I want the EFF to make trouble for the RIAA, MPAA, Hollywood, and their lobbyists. This is the exact same reason why some Republicans give money to Ralph Nader...because he makes trouble for the Democratic Party. You are quite correct however, in your supposition that Hollywood is a major contributor to the Democratic Party. You may also be interested to learn that the largest and most consistent contributor to the Democratic Party is the Trial Lawyers Association. So, if you want your technology crippled, your health and auto insurance rates sky high, and you believe that the government knows best how to spend your money then by all means vote Democratic. If, on the other hand, you believe that you know best how to spend your own hard earned money, that the marketplace should decide which technologies succeed and not the courts, and that the associated trial lawyers are not really your friends (they want the unwashed masses to think that they are looking out for the little guy, but what they are really looking out for is their own pocketbook) then by all means vote Republican.
The technology and the cost benefit ratios just aren't there for a manned mission to Mars right now. If we are serious about going and are willing to be patient and work on the technological advancements that are necessary to make the mission worthwhile then I agree with you. However, a space cowboy style, flag and boots on the ground mission at this time would be prohibitively expensive and of dubious scientific value. Inspiring public interest in science and engineering is a noble goal, but one which is probably not worth 100 billion dollars of public money (and with NASA running the show it will cost at least that much). We would be much wiser to work on the technology, gather more data, and plan the mission more carefully so that our children or perhaps our grandchildren can make Mars a worthwhile endeavor. What we really need to be working on is better interplanetary propulsion systems for our spacecraft such as the ION engines currently in development at JPL.
NASA did nearly the same thing towards the end of the Apollo program...They scrapped the last two lunar landings, even though ALL of the hardware was already built and ready to go, because they didn't want to staff the control room and fuel the rockets. It has been said that this was equivalent to crushing a brand new Rolls Royce which has never been driven simply because one does not want to pay for a tank of gas.
The astronauts have already said that they are willing to accept the very reasonable level of risk to fly the mission and repair the Hubble. It is terribly ironic that one of the few worthwhile shuttle missions of the last decade is scrapped because something MIGHT go wrong. They seemed perfectly willing to risk human lives to fly loads of fairly useless experiments just a couple of years ago. Nobody would argue that the shuttle has lived up to the lofty promises that NASA administrators made to Congress in order to get the funding for all of this in the first place. The shuttle, despite that fact the shuttle itself is reusable, has cost billions more dollars than equivalent rocket missions would have. In fact, one of the main selling points of the shuttle, that it could carry 20 tons into low earth orbit, is moot because the shuttle almost never flies with the maximum payload for safety reasons. The decision not to save one of the best scientific investments ever made is a slap in the face after all of the money which NASA has sunk into the shuttle program. The Hubble Space telescope has added tremendously to our knowledge of the universe and inspired a generation of young scientists and engineers. If any further proof was needed of the impotence and wrong headed thinking at NASA then this is surely among the most damning pieces of evidence. Let us hope that they make the right decision before it is too late.
Because ActiveX controls do provide some useful programatic functionality when combined with the browser. The Windows Update service, which scans the registry and coordinates downloads with the patch servers at Microsoft is a good example. This is why I allow signed ActiveX controls from sources which I have allowed to be trusted to run. People get into trouble by allowing unsigned ActiveX controlls to run and clicking the OK button whenever the warning dialogs come up. Instead of taking the time to read whatever was in the dialog box the simply click OK so that it "just works". Linux is based upon a similar presumption that the administrator knows what he is doing when he overrides a security warning. You cannot blame the operating system for allowing the administrator to shoot himself in the foot.
A "trusted source" would have an X509 Code Signing Certificate signed with the private key of a known third party verification service such as VeriSign or Thawte. Thus, the author of the ActiveX control is verified by public key cryptography. Now, whether or not you want to trust OptInRealBig LLC of Buffalo, New York is up to you, but at least you would know that ActiveX control comes from OptInRealBig LLC of Buffalo, New York. code signing authorities, such as VeriSign and Thawte, will not issue a code signing certificate without legal proof of identity. In the example case they would verify that the corporation exists by checking with the state's records and that the person making the request is a registered officer of the corporation in question. The company that I work for had to get one recently and we had to pay a fee of several hundred dollars and jump through many hoops to get it (obviously designed to discourage the average miscreant). I hope that this answers your question.
You don't know what you are talking about. The developers at Microsoft are most definitely not idiots. The fact is that Microsoft has thousands of developers working on thousands of projects and they simply cannot assign the "A" team to every project. I don't know for certain but I would suppose that the best developers at Microsoft are not working on Internet Explorer. Even so, if you were a developer you would understand that regardless of how skilled you are (or think you are); when you write enough code you are almost guaranteed to have bugs. Steps can be taken to minimize bugs and mitigate their impact but in the end some bugs are inevitable. Microsoft, to its credit, is addressing these problems and taking steps to avoid them in the future. Be careful who you call stupid...when you point the finger remember that there are three other fingers pointing right back at you.
A great many problems can be avoided simply by setting ActiveX controls to prompt for download, allow only ActiveX controls digitally signed by a trusted source to run (you can check the signature before you accept), and turn off active scripting. Yes, IE has problems, but in all fairness it probably has the dubious distinction of being the most analyzed, probed, and maliciously scrutinized software on the planet. Mod me down if you wish, but someone has to play devil's advocate.
If someone could find enough storage space then those old machines could probably be combined into a fairly powerful grid computing array or linux cluster. The main problem that I forsee is that at some point the really old x86 machines take up more physical space then they are worth in terms of additional computing power made available to the cluster. However, if someone had some wherehouse space that they were not using then it would be an interesting project and it just might convert machines that are now useless by themselves into a worthwhile computing resource.
Perhaps someone could modify the symbol bar code reader gun (the type used in cash registers) for use in the laser tag game. It would not be very realistic I suppose but it would be pretty funny.
Most of the phone traffic in the first world is already carried on digital networks with digital switches. Only in the most backward parts of Africa, India, and remote third world locales will you find completely analog phone networks still in use.
Slashdot Mirror
The music companies basically took the entire inventory that they had been unable to give away for the last 20 years and dumped it on the state attorneys general as "settlement" for the millions of dollars ripped off from consumers during the course of the price fixing fiasco. Nobody can honestly say that the CDs distributed as part of the settlement had a fair market value equal to the amount that was swindled from consumers. I mean look at the list of artists: Michael Bolton, Stone Temple Pilots, and other equally obscure junk. The recording industry laughed all the way to the bank on this one.
I say this with some sorrow, because I enjoyed the original series when I was in grade school, but Galactica has suffered a number of indignities over the years and between rewriting, editing, and corporations that were more concerned about cashing in on the nostalgia than producing a good quality science fiction series the series has lost much of its luster for me. Now, to be fair to the Sci-Fi channel and some of the original cast members the recent miniseries was a good intentioned attempt to recapture some of what made the Galactica concept so compelling. However, Galactica has always, even during the original run, suffered from lack of budget. The original series for example, cost $1,000,000 per episode in 1978 and it was cancelled even though it was the number one show that year. The hard truth is that advertisers, even if your show is number one in ratings, will only pay so much for a 30 second commercial spot. Thus, in order to make the show profitable there have always been compromises. I really wanted to like the new miniseries...I really did. I watched it in its entirety, even though I winced at some of acting and most of the dialog. Perhaps the series will prove me wrong...I hope so...but I am not getting my hopes up.
A lot of product insurance contracts, notably cell phone replacement plans, require the filing of a police report but one can usually get past this by simply being stubborn and simply demanding your refund/replacement. I find that the long pause on the phone after they remind you of the police report requirement is often effective in getting them to drop the troublesome requirement in the name of "better customer service". After all if they get a reputation for hassling claimants then nobody will buy those warranty replacement plans anymore because "it isn't worth the hassle." With warranty replacement plans everything can be negotiated if you are persistent enough.
In the early days of the film industry the movie studios selected Hollywood for a couple of reasons: the climate was mild, there was a wide variety of terrain and locales, and the poor roads and isolated conditions ment that they could dodge Thomas Edisdon and his movie projector patents. Early studios like "Flying 'A' Studios" weren't called flying for nothing. They would pick up their operations and move around to stay one step ahead of the patent police. Isn't it ironic that an industry which decries the infringement of intellectual property was founded on that very infringement?
There are some rumors that the prions which cause mad cow disease were developed as part of the extensive biological and chemical weapons programs of the former Soviet Union. Agencies such as: Biopreparat, the FSB (formerly the KGB), and the Soviet Military were all involved.
In another chilling development, Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, where much testing of biological agents including anthrax, bubonic plague, glanders, and other extremely infectious agents occurred supposedly contains massive amounts of anthrax hastily buried by Russian scientists amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. More fodder for the conspiracy theorists out there...
I was thinking that if I stopped supporting RIAA attatched bands that I respect, that they might get a clue, and start some independant release scheme, but them realized that that is dumb.
They cannot start an independent release scheme because they are bound by contract to produce music exclusively for the label that they signed with for a long period of time (typically 7+ years). If that is not bad enough the costs of producing the albums, including recording studio time, promotion (er..payola), and marketing fees are paid for by the label, but charged to the artist as a LOAN. Thus, many of the bands are trapped in their contracts with the labels until they can pay off all the money that they owe. If an album doesn't sell well then the artist can be left with little to show for months or years of work other than a six figure debt.
The Newton Community is a very interesting case of users continuing to support a product which for all intents and purposes should have died years ago. Is there a good reason, other than 'I hate everything that Microsoft does no matter what and nobody will ever change my mind', why these users would not be satisified with a shinny new TabletPC or Pocket PC? On the other hand why does Apple continue to shun these users when there is clearly a market for an new Apple handheld computing device? Strange that Apple would not wish to compete with Microsoft by offering their own version of the TabletPC. Perhaps some Newton users could comment on these issues.
As the article so aptly pointed out some things which are annoying to one person simply breeze by another. The corollary of this statement is that no matter what you do it is guaranteed that someone somewhere will be annoyed by it.
The Republican party is already in hot water in two different states for funding and backing Nader to try to weaken the Democrat vote.
Why shouldn't registered Republicans be able to give money to any political party or candidate that they want? People can spend their money on whatever they damn well please and if it pleases me to give money to a third party candidate so that he can make trouble for the Democrats then who is to say that it is not my right to spend MY money in that way?
I am not so sure about that. The advertising revenue for 50.4 days of programming is potentially very lucrative and major networks such as NBC are very good at providing efficient coverage of major live events. They are most definitely making money on the games.
and why is Slashdot scanning my ports right now?
Your computer's TCP ports:
80, 1080, 3128, 8000 and 8080 have been scanned from 66.35.250.150
Millions of Canadian tax dollars are used to train RN's and MD's who take work south of the border every year. Canadian healthcare workers are a rare breed who get paid peanuts compared to their US counterparts because they believe in equal access for all.
Those who are willing to pay get the goods. Why should it be any surprise that Canadian medical professionals, the smartest and most talented ones anyway, would seek the highest possible salary? If that level of pay and benefits cannot be found in Canada then they will go somewhere else. Would you want to go to school for 20 years and work your butt off so that you could earn peanuts? You cannot pay the garbage man and the doctor the same...the communists tried it but it just doesn't work.
The statement, "From each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs," upon which liberal societies like Canada are based sounds great, but in practice it is a terrible way to organize an economy and actually results in a lower quality of life for everyone. People should be more concerned about the size of the total pie rather than the equality of its distribution.
As Gordon Gecko said, "Greed is Good"
What a massive sense of entitlement you have. Either that or a severe cookie-phobia...
The man has a right to chose not to read any newspaper online that he must register for and you cannot begrudge him that right. You may not agree, you may even think he is nuts to expect that he should receive free ad-free access. Fortunately the marketplace exists to solve such disputes. If he is willing to pay nothing then he will probably get nothing, but presumably he is not very disappointed because he obviously did not value the content enough to pay for it anyway. If however you believe that $3 per article is a fair price then presumably you are happy to pay and the newspaper is happy to provide you with access. Everyone was satisfied with these arrangements and the choices that they made: you, the man who was not willing to pay, and the newspaper. That is the power of markets.
The EFF, while admittedly left leaning, often takes positions which are contrary to the leading members of the Democratic Party when the issues in question involve restriction or misuse of technology. That is why I have an EFF membership even though I am a registered Republican and generally hold conservative viewpoints. I want the EFF to make trouble for the RIAA, MPAA, Hollywood, and their lobbyists. This is the exact same reason why some Republicans give money to Ralph Nader...because he makes trouble for the Democratic Party. You are quite correct however, in your supposition that Hollywood is a major contributor to the Democratic Party. You may also be interested to learn that the largest and most consistent contributor to the Democratic Party is the Trial Lawyers Association. So, if you want your technology crippled, your health and auto insurance rates sky high, and you believe that the government knows best how to spend your money then by all means vote Democratic. If, on the other hand, you believe that you know best how to spend your own hard earned money, that the marketplace should decide which technologies succeed and not the courts, and that the associated trial lawyers are not really your friends (they want the unwashed masses to think that they are looking out for the little guy, but what they are really looking out for is their own pocketbook) then by all means vote Republican.
The Trabant also featured a very dirty two-stroke engine which belched clouds of noxious blue smoke out the tailpipe as it drove down the road.
Strange that the Poly Play would not include one of the best known games to come out of the Soviet Union...Tetris (now that would be cool)
The technology and the cost benefit ratios just aren't there for a manned mission to Mars right now. If we are serious about going and are willing to be patient and work on the technological advancements that are necessary to make the mission worthwhile then I agree with you. However, a space cowboy style, flag and boots on the ground mission at this time would be prohibitively expensive and of dubious scientific value. Inspiring public interest in science and engineering is a noble goal, but one which is probably not worth 100 billion dollars of public money (and with NASA running the show it will cost at least that much). We would be much wiser to work on the technology, gather more data, and plan the mission more carefully so that our children or perhaps our grandchildren can make Mars a worthwhile endeavor. What we really need to be working on is better interplanetary propulsion systems for our spacecraft such as the ION engines currently in development at JPL.
I want those smaller error bars!
NASA did nearly the same thing towards the end of the Apollo program...They scrapped the last two lunar landings, even though ALL of the hardware was already built and ready to go, because they didn't want to staff the control room and fuel the rockets. It has been said that this was equivalent to crushing a brand new Rolls Royce which has never been driven simply because one does not want to pay for a tank of gas.
The astronauts have already said that they are willing to accept the very reasonable level of risk to fly the mission and repair the Hubble. It is terribly ironic that one of the few worthwhile shuttle missions of the last decade is scrapped because something MIGHT go wrong. They seemed perfectly willing to risk human lives to fly loads of fairly useless experiments just a couple of years ago. Nobody would argue that the shuttle has lived up to the lofty promises that NASA administrators made to Congress in order to get the funding for all of this in the first place. The shuttle, despite that fact the shuttle itself is reusable, has cost billions more dollars than equivalent rocket missions would have. In fact, one of the main selling points of the shuttle, that it could carry 20 tons into low earth orbit, is moot because the shuttle almost never flies with the maximum payload for safety reasons. The decision not to save one of the best scientific investments ever made is a slap in the face after all of the money which NASA has sunk into the shuttle program. The Hubble Space telescope has added tremendously to our knowledge of the universe and inspired a generation of young scientists and engineers. If any further proof was needed of the impotence and wrong headed thinking at NASA then this is surely among the most damning pieces of evidence. Let us hope that they make the right decision before it is too late.
Because ActiveX controls do provide some useful programatic functionality when combined with the browser. The Windows Update service, which scans the registry and coordinates downloads with the patch servers at Microsoft is a good example. This is why I allow signed ActiveX controls from sources which I have allowed to be trusted to run. People get into trouble by allowing unsigned ActiveX controlls to run and clicking the OK button whenever the warning dialogs come up. Instead of taking the time to read whatever was in the dialog box the simply click OK so that it "just works". Linux is based upon a similar presumption that the administrator knows what he is doing when he overrides a security warning. You cannot blame the operating system for allowing the administrator to shoot himself in the foot.
A "trusted source" would have an X509 Code Signing Certificate signed with the private key of a known third party verification service such as VeriSign or Thawte. Thus, the author of the ActiveX control is verified by public key cryptography. Now, whether or not you want to trust OptInRealBig LLC of Buffalo, New York is up to you, but at least you would know that ActiveX control comes from OptInRealBig LLC of Buffalo, New York. code signing authorities, such as VeriSign and Thawte, will not issue a code signing certificate without legal proof of identity. In the example case they would verify that the corporation exists by checking with the state's records and that the person making the request is a registered officer of the corporation in question. The company that I work for had to get one recently and we had to pay a fee of several hundred dollars and jump through many hoops to get it (obviously designed to discourage the average miscreant). I hope that this answers your question.
You don't know what you are talking about. The developers at Microsoft are most definitely not idiots. The fact is that Microsoft has thousands of developers working on thousands of projects and they simply cannot assign the "A" team to every project. I don't know for certain but I would suppose that the best developers at Microsoft are not working on Internet Explorer. Even so, if you were a developer you would understand that regardless of how skilled you are (or think you are); when you write enough code you are almost guaranteed to have bugs. Steps can be taken to minimize bugs and mitigate their impact but in the end some bugs are inevitable. Microsoft, to its credit, is addressing these problems and taking steps to avoid them in the future. Be careful who you call stupid...when you point the finger remember that there are three other fingers pointing right back at you.
A great many problems can be avoided simply by setting ActiveX controls to prompt for download, allow only ActiveX controls digitally signed by a trusted source to run (you can check the signature before you accept), and turn off active scripting. Yes, IE has problems, but in all fairness it probably has the dubious distinction of being the most analyzed, probed, and maliciously scrutinized software on the planet. Mod me down if you wish, but someone has to play devil's advocate.
If someone could find enough storage space then those old machines could probably be combined into a fairly powerful grid computing array or linux cluster. The main problem that I forsee is that at some point the really old x86 machines take up more physical space then they are worth in terms of additional computing power made available to the cluster. However, if someone had some wherehouse space that they were not using then it would be an interesting project and it just might convert machines that are now useless by themselves into a worthwhile computing resource.
Perhaps someone could modify the symbol bar code reader gun (the type used in cash registers) for use in the laser tag game. It would not be very realistic I suppose but it would be pretty funny.
Can you name a few other naked assassin movies which involve a female heroine?
Most of the phone traffic in the first world is already carried on digital networks with digital switches. Only in the most backward parts of Africa, India, and remote third world locales will you find completely analog phone networks still in use.