Google Voice isn't Voice-over-IP *for the most part*, but it does have some limited VoIP capabilities.
1. Google Voice allows you to make calls directly from your computer over Voice Over IP. I know this, because a friend of mine used this feature when his cell phone service got shut off because he was delinquent on his bill.
2. Google Voice allows you to check your voice mail over your computer. I think that would also qualify as a form Voice-Over-IP, since normally AT&T charges you twice for voice mail, it deducts the time it takes someone to leave you a message, and it deducts the time it takes you to check that same voice mail message (it obviously doesn't charge you per say for these things, but let's say if you're one of those people that goes over his/her minute allocations, then AT&T may lose some revenue because of Google Voice).
Now I do agree that the issue gets muddy pretty quickly, because technically when the VoIP features are used -- they're not technically used over the AT&T network (they're in fact directly used from the Google Voice number). But when you take into account that Google Voice has announced that it plans to support number portability eventually, that means you'll be able to route all your phone calls through Google Voice, and use Voice-over-IP as an alternative over your computer whenever you feel like it (or whenever you're low on minutes).
You actually can't make calls to/from the GV number.
Again, that's just incorrect. I don't know about receiving calls, but I do know for sure that you can make calls from Google Voice -- I saw my friend do it -- and I've also received calls directly from his google voice number (while he was on his computer-only, in fact the connection kept on going out because his computer was overloaded with too many programs running at the same time).
Do you have pointy hair by any chance? Regression analysis may sound super cool, but it is nothing new, and it is often very poorly implemented. So before you say those guys are badasses, which they may be (that I don't know), at least make sure that their application works as intended. For all you know, it may not even work properly.
Farecast.com for example is one such super cool showcase concept that simply doesn't work (and that probably never will -- except may be to advertise its coolness factor). Farecast uses regression analysis to predict if the particular price of airline tickets is going to increase or decrease over time (It's mentioned in glowing terms by the idiot who wrote the book 'Super Crunchers'). It uses past historical pricing information, which it combines with various other historical factors such as fuel cost, weather information, holidays, etc. to predict future increases/decreases. And don't get me wrong, regression analysis does work (and in many cases, it's just a matter of cutting and pasting the code you've gotten from an O'Reilly book).
That being said, Farecast suffers from a fundamental problem, and that's: garbage in, garbage out. And please you don't have to take my word that it doesn't really work, you can just try it yourself with real data (just do not try it with the contrived examples provided to you by their site). The main problem is that they're getting bad data, or that they're having trouble scraping that pricing data in real-time. The thing is that airlines have no intention of sharing reliable comparable pricing information with Farecast. Farecast can scrape the web sites of the airlines all they want, but the airlines are trying everything they can to obfuscate that information and make it so that these prices can not easily be compared across the board (or even compared with previous historical information).
Now in the case of Flightcaster, it may not be in the interest of airlines to share on-time performance information, but in that case at least, Flightcaster may be able to get this info from other sources, like the FAA, or whomever, so at least it stands a better chance than Farecast in my opinion to make live reliable predictions. But before we can say anything about Flightcaster and their badass-ness we really need to test the reliability of their predictions. It's easy enough to put up a web site these days (especially on heroku), and pretend to be working on a really cool application, but it's another thing entirely to make it work truly as intended.
* The voice mail transcripts are my favorite thing. Perfectly accurate so far.
It sounds like you have normal friends. The voice mail transcripts I receive look like total gibberish to me (not that listening to the voice version is that much better, I think the problem is that many of my friends have ADD).
Then how come on of my local citizens, who spied a thief trying to steal his car, and hit said thief over the head with a bat to stop him, was arrested by the police *on his own property*? Why is the thief now suing the homeowner for medical damages?
I don't know. Why are you even asking us this? Most likely, the story you heard from your neighbor/friend/local-news is going to be one-sided. That's why we have judges and juries for. That's why we have lawsuits. We can't prejudge a case, just based on what one side says (or based on what you heard someone else, some third party, say about it). That's what a lynch mob would do.
Also, Google Voice allows you to get around this limitation by mimicking an answering machine (for certain callers). It's the equivalent of letting your answering machine pick up the call, and then answering the call midway while the message is being left, and still continue to record the call after you've already picked it up.
Google Voice also allows you to do it the other way around too. For instance, you could say the standard bs "This call is being recorded for quality purposes." Of you could even say, "Because my caller id is not recognizing your phone number, I'm about to record this phone call. Etc."
...in that there's no history of violence. Are you claiming that past performance is no indicator?
Verizon didn't say there was no history of violence. Verizon specifically said that "In the months since this incident, his conduct has been blameless." In other words, this is basically legal weasel-talk for avoiding the subject of his history *before* the day of the incident.
Also, note they didn't used the word "violence", they used the word "unethical" and "illegal". This particular choice of words is leading me to believe they're probably hiding something else as well (not just the fact that this guy hasn't been convicted in this one incident). PR departments of large corporations don't leave anything to chance. They control their communications regarding pending litigation very carefully. And there must be a reason that they're going off-script.
So what happens when a workstation dies a unrecoverable death? Do you replace the computer with one the same name For licensing and AD purposes, or a new name so it has a new record tied to its purchase, virus scanning history, and support?
You'd allow for multiple records to be tied to the same computer id, but you'd sort your view by reverse chronological order. This way, the latest receipts would refer to the most current hardware.
Even the old support history, the old software licenses, and the old virus history could be useful to know for a new machine. After all, the user of a replacement machine is probably going to be the same person (or the same department). It would be useful to know what kind of odd problems keep on coming up -- after you've replaced everything but the user (or his environment).
Google Wave is like subethaedit and etherpad, whereas subethaedit and etherpad are just applications that can't even talk to each other, Google is banking on the idea that these kinds of applications will one day become ubiquitous, and at the very least, it's trying to set itself up as the new leader of the pack in that area.
Now Google Wave is not going to replace email (thought, it may help decrease the actual number of emails in some situations). And Google Wave may not even be the final winner in this area (it's still way too early to tell in my opinion). But you've got to admit, Google Wave is much more lightweight, open, and cheaper, in that area than anything that Microsoft might have come up with -- thus far.
When you're invited to an existing wave, nothing in the existing text appears highlighted. You only get to see the highlighted diffs in different colors if you hit the rewind/replay button and flip through the previous versions. I think that's probably what you saw. Also, when people are contributing to the wave at the exact same time, only their cursor (with different colors and with their names on it) appear ahead of the text they're typing. It doesn't actually highlight the entire contribution like it does in Word tracking, or like it does on etherpad.
That being said, if you've previously read a wave, and come back to it later on after someone made some changes, it shows you all the changed text in yellow. But here, it assumes you're not interested in who made the changes, but just in the fact that some changes were made (that's why it only uses only one color in that scenario). But frankly, the yellow doesn't really bother me, it seems to disappear pretty quickly (either when you reload the wave, press the 'mark read' button, or when you start editing the wave).
Google Wave works fine off-line (with google gears or html5-compliant browsers). Once all the browsers are html5-compliant, there won't even be a need to use Google Gears as a workaround.
...whereas I'm guessing the OP wants to write his to, like, you know, pay the rent and stuff.
The technical authors I've met didn't do it for the rent (even the ones with big publishers). They did it for the reputation, and the promise of money that reputation might get them. For the kind of work that's expected of you, you're actually paid very little (although, I'm sure there can be exceptions, for instance if you're already semi-famous in the open source world -- you might be able to negotiate a better deal and/or achieve higher sales because of your name-recognition).
What website? Do you even know what this topic is about? Are you even on the right planet?
The Second Life creators themselves keep on making that same comparison. They see virtual real estate on their servers just like a hosting company would see a web site that one of their customers uploaded on there. The customers who upload virtual real estate retain all rights to their intellectual property, Second Life makes absolutely no claim over it. Those customers just have to rent the virtual land that's occupied by their virtual real estate, that's it. If you don't believe me, you can hear it straight from their mouth -- in oopsla's podcast #18.
Soon it'll be flooded with debates about virtual property...
[...]
I can solidly say that at least half the population of Slashdot will *make* it about that, somehow.
This debate isn't about virtual property, it's about stolen credit.
This guy basically negotiated the fact that he would get credit for his work. The original client resold his work (erasing all traces of his authorship). And adding insult to insult, the original client is telling people that the author's original work was so bad for its purpose, that it was purposefully destroyed (this isn't what I'd call a great reference by the way). If I was that original artist, I would certainly be pissed.
Liken it to Rembrandt or some other painter having been commissioned to paint an artwork (or in this case; a painting of an artwork), then seeing the painting get sold by the party that commissioned it.
Except in this case, the original signature was replaced, the original painter lost all the credit to his work, and the original client is pretending that the original work was so bad -- it had to be destroyed.
I think that's because you were probably buying a phone with a contract (in other words, you were expecting them to subsidize the purchase of your phone in exchange for a one year or a two year commitment. In the US, even some pre-paid phones can be subsidized since they may not easily be switched to another network).
In any case, the next time you need a cell phone, I recommend you buy a GSM unlocked model from the internet (you can get some very nice models directly from Asia), it will cost you significantly more upfront, but it should save you quite a bit of money in the long-run (Just be aware that in the United States, this move will probably limit you to only three or four GSM cell phone companies in your area, so be sure to check them out first and add up all the numbers -- before you invest in an unlocked phone).
In the case of work, they don't want the possibility of any portable device having personal or otherwise comprimising data being stolen.
But that's the entire point of this law. The bugs on Air France are located in the first class section and the business class section of their planes. They don't freaking care about listening to the people who fly coach. And when crossing the border into the UK, only journalists or business men seem to get their laptops scanned (or perhaps even completely recorded). Government-sponsored industrial espionage is a real problem in Europe.
Sure, but getting an apartment in a metropolitan area during a rental crunch might be a problem. And/or getting treated properly in an emergency room might also be a problem too (if you talk to anyone who works in an emergency room, they'll tell you about it).
That being said, if you have a plausible explanation for not having a credit history, like you've just turned 18 years old, or you've just immigrated to this country recently. That's enough for many landlords (although personally, I wouldn't recommend telling them that in an emergency room. Hospital triage nurses are ruthless. If you don't have good credit, you better have medical insurance, or have a huge wad of cash, otherwise they'll just let you die in front of them -- doing the absolute minimum rock-bottom necessary which is required by law to treat you).
Thankfully, the law protects most of us from being credit checked for getting a job (although, this really depends on your job function and/or on your pay grade).
Microsoft rose to dominance at a time when software was not patentable. That's one of the reasons why Embrace, Extend, Extinguish worked so well:
As opposed to now? I've got news for you, most software companies are still very wary of Microsoft. That's one of the reasons there is so much push to develop for the web using open standards, so as not to get extinguished by Microsoft.
That's true, but then the public would never find out about the invention.
That's a pretty absolute assertion you're making. Do you really believe that software patents are the only way knowledge of software inventions gets transferred/created in our society? And do you really believe that the only thing protecting Google or Amazon from being copied by Microsoft and everybody else is their patent portfolio? Somehow, I doubt that. I really doubt that.
This is all true in software just as it is in more traditional fields of invention. Software is not special...
You're speaking to the wrong crowd. Most of us believe patents in general are a very bad idea (not just patents on one-click buttons, and not just patents on math formulas, although there are various degrees of differences even between software patents).
Uh.. those perks have been available in England for years.
You're missing the point. In communist US, it's mandated by law that when someone calls a cell phone in the United States, they can not get a surcharge for it (it has to be the same price as if you're calling a landline). This forces the person being called on his cell phone to bear the entire cost of those calls.
This law was intended to protect the US consumer, and it does protect us -- it's just that few people notice it (and just like most commie laws, the law has some unintended consequences as well). In the UK, there is no such regulation, so you have either option, but almost everyone chooses the mobile option that makes the other party pay (just like we have 900 numbers in the US, calling a mobile in the UK that's prefixed with the number (7) will incur a surcharge). And on average, the Europeans (or the Americans calling European mobiles) are the *ones* that are getting screwed on their bill, it's just that no one in Europe really talks about the outrageous cost it takes to *call* mobile phones over there.
And the nuisance calls.. I bought a brand new phone and gave my number to maybe three people. I've received over a dozen calls from unknown numbers, all of which Google has identified as scam callers. And I've been charged for being called by these so-and-so's.
Hmmm... I'm assuming that you're talking about "Google" Search (or something like whocalled.us), not Google Voice. If you used Google Voice to filter/screen your calls, you wouldn't be charged for them. I'd suggest you try to get your own google voice number (right now, since you're in the US, you should be able to register for one. Google Voice isn't opened to Europe, but even if it was, it wouldn't make as much sense over there -- since spamming millions of mobile phones with recorded messages in Europe isn't really free for the spammer).
Slashdot Mirror
GV isn't VoIP.
Google Voice isn't Voice-over-IP *for the most part*, but it does have some limited VoIP capabilities.
1. Google Voice allows you to make calls directly from your computer over Voice Over IP. I know this, because a friend of mine used this feature when his cell phone service got shut off because he was delinquent on his bill.
2. Google Voice allows you to check your voice mail over your computer. I think that would also qualify as a form Voice-Over-IP, since normally AT&T charges you twice for voice mail, it deducts the time it takes someone to leave you a message, and it deducts the time it takes you to check that same voice mail message (it obviously doesn't charge you per say for these things, but let's say if you're one of those people that goes over his/her minute allocations, then AT&T may lose some revenue because of Google Voice).
Now I do agree that the issue gets muddy pretty quickly, because technically when the VoIP features are used -- they're not technically used over the AT&T network (they're in fact directly used from the Google Voice number). But when you take into account that Google Voice has announced that it plans to support number portability eventually, that means you'll be able to route all your phone calls through Google Voice, and use Voice-over-IP as an alternative over your computer whenever you feel like it (or whenever you're low on minutes).
You actually can't make calls to/from the GV number.
Again, that's just incorrect. I don't know about receiving calls, but I do know for sure that you can make calls from Google Voice -- I saw my friend do it -- and I've also received calls directly from his google voice number (while he was on his computer-only, in fact the connection kept on going out because his computer was overloaded with too many programs running at the same time).
Do you have pointy hair by any chance? Regression analysis may sound super cool, but it is nothing new, and it is often very poorly implemented. So before you say those guys are badasses, which they may be (that I don't know), at least make sure that their application works as intended. For all you know, it may not even work properly.
Farecast.com for example is one such super cool showcase concept that simply doesn't work (and that probably never will -- except may be to advertise its coolness factor). Farecast uses regression analysis to predict if the particular price of airline tickets is going to increase or decrease over time (It's mentioned in glowing terms by the idiot who wrote the book 'Super Crunchers'). It uses past historical pricing information, which it combines with various other historical factors such as fuel cost, weather information, holidays, etc. to predict future increases/decreases. And don't get me wrong, regression analysis does work (and in many cases, it's just a matter of cutting and pasting the code you've gotten from an O'Reilly book).
That being said, Farecast suffers from a fundamental problem, and that's: garbage in, garbage out. And please you don't have to take my word that it doesn't really work, you can just try it yourself with real data (just do not try it with the contrived examples provided to you by their site). The main problem is that they're getting bad data, or that they're having trouble scraping that pricing data in real-time. The thing is that airlines have no intention of sharing reliable comparable pricing information with Farecast. Farecast can scrape the web sites of the airlines all they want, but the airlines are trying everything they can to obfuscate that information and make it so that these prices can not easily be compared across the board (or even compared with previous historical information).
Now in the case of Flightcaster, it may not be in the interest of airlines to share on-time performance information, but in that case at least, Flightcaster may be able to get this info from other sources, like the FAA, or whomever, so at least it stands a better chance than Farecast in my opinion to make live reliable predictions. But before we can say anything about Flightcaster and their badass-ness we really need to test the reliability of their predictions. It's easy enough to put up a web site these days (especially on heroku), and pretend to be working on a really cool application, but it's another thing entirely to make it work truly as intended.
* The voice mail transcripts are my favorite thing. Perfectly accurate so far.
It sounds like you have normal friends. The voice mail transcripts I receive look like total gibberish to me (not that listening to the voice version is that much better, I think the problem is that many of my friends have ADD).
This is why we need the power to compel referendums for city or county wide issues
May be, we could copyright the referendum results too.
Then how come on of my local citizens, who spied a thief trying to steal his car, and hit said thief over the head with a bat to stop him, was arrested by the police *on his own property*? Why is the thief now suing the homeowner for medical damages?
I don't know. Why are you even asking us this? Most likely, the story you heard from your neighbor/friend/local-news is going to be one-sided. That's why we have judges and juries for. That's why we have lawsuits. We can't prejudge a case, just based on what one side says (or based on what you heard someone else, some third party, say about it). That's what a lynch mob would do.
Also, Google Voice allows you to get around this limitation by mimicking an answering machine (for certain callers). It's the equivalent of letting your answering machine pick up the call, and then answering the call midway while the message is being left, and still continue to record the call after you've already picked it up.
Google Voice also allows you to do it the other way around too. For instance, you could say the standard bs "This call is being recorded for quality purposes." Of you could even say, "Because my caller id is not recognizing your phone number, I'm about to record this phone call. Etc."
The royalties were nice, but, frankly, the bigger money came from the boost in my professional standing (I'm a practicing engineer, not a professor).
...in that there's no history of violence. Are you claiming that past performance is no indicator?
Verizon didn't say there was no history of violence. Verizon specifically said that "In the months since this incident, his conduct has been blameless." In other words, this is basically legal weasel-talk for avoiding the subject of his history *before* the day of the incident.
Also, note they didn't used the word "violence", they used the word "unethical" and "illegal". This particular choice of words is leading me to believe they're probably hiding something else as well (not just the fact that this guy hasn't been convicted in this one incident). PR departments of large corporations don't leave anything to chance. They control their communications regarding pending litigation very carefully. And there must be a reason that they're going off-script.
So what happens when a workstation dies a unrecoverable death? Do you replace the computer with one the same name For licensing and AD purposes, or a new name so it has a new record tied to its purchase, virus scanning history, and support?
You'd allow for multiple records to be tied to the same computer id, but you'd sort your view by reverse chronological order. This way, the latest receipts would refer to the most current hardware.
Even the old support history, the old software licenses, and the old virus history could be useful to know for a new machine. After all, the user of a replacement machine is probably going to be the same person (or the same department). It would be useful to know what kind of odd problems keep on coming up -- after you've replaced everything but the user (or his environment).
Protesting against rules that a private business sets for behavior on their own property is a ridiculous idea.
Except in this case, 11 out of the 12 Universities belonging to the SEC are public schools, and only one is private.
Google Wave is like subethaedit and etherpad, whereas subethaedit and etherpad are just applications that can't even talk to each other, Google is banking on the idea that these kinds of applications will one day become ubiquitous, and at the very least, it's trying to set itself up as the new leader of the pack in that area.
Now Google Wave is not going to replace email (thought, it may help decrease the actual number of emails in some situations). And Google Wave may not even be the final winner in this area (it's still way too early to tell in my opinion). But you've got to admit, Google Wave is much more lightweight, open, and cheaper, in that area than anything that Microsoft might have come up with -- thus far.
In that sense, it's more like a wiki.
When you're invited to an existing wave, nothing in the existing text appears highlighted. You only get to see the highlighted diffs in different colors if you hit the rewind/replay button and flip through the previous versions. I think that's probably what you saw. Also, when people are contributing to the wave at the exact same time, only their cursor (with different colors and with their names on it) appear ahead of the text they're typing. It doesn't actually highlight the entire contribution like it does in Word tracking, or like it does on etherpad.
That being said, if you've previously read a wave, and come back to it later on after someone made some changes, it shows you all the changed text in yellow. But here, it assumes you're not interested in who made the changes, but just in the fact that some changes were made (that's why it only uses only one color in that scenario). But frankly, the yellow doesn't really bother me, it seems to disappear pretty quickly (either when you reload the wave, press the 'mark read' button, or when you start editing the wave).
Google Wave works fine off-line (with google gears or html5-compliant browsers). Once all the browsers are html5-compliant, there won't even be a need to use Google Gears as a workaround.
...whereas I'm guessing the OP wants to write his to, like, you know, pay the rent and stuff.
The technical authors I've met didn't do it for the rent (even the ones with big publishers). They did it for the reputation, and the promise of money that reputation might get them. For the kind of work that's expected of you, you're actually paid very little (although, I'm sure there can be exceptions, for instance if you're already semi-famous in the open source world -- you might be able to negotiate a better deal and/or achieve higher sales because of your name-recognition).
Warning: that link was not work safe.
What website? Do you even know what this topic is about? Are you even on the right planet?
The Second Life creators themselves keep on making that same comparison. They see virtual real estate on their servers just like a hosting company would see a web site that one of their customers uploaded on there. The customers who upload virtual real estate retain all rights to their intellectual property, Second Life makes absolutely no claim over it. Those customers just have to rent the virtual land that's occupied by their virtual real estate, that's it. If you don't believe me, you can hear it straight from their mouth -- in oopsla's podcast #18.
Soon it'll be flooded with debates about virtual property...
[...]
I can solidly say that at least half the population of Slashdot will *make* it about that, somehow.
This debate isn't about virtual property, it's about stolen credit.
This guy basically negotiated the fact that he would get credit for his work. The original client resold his work (erasing all traces of his authorship). And adding insult to insult, the original client is telling people that the author's original work was so bad for its purpose, that it was purposefully destroyed (this isn't what I'd call a great reference by the way). If I was that original artist, I would certainly be pissed.
Liken it to Rembrandt or some other painter having been commissioned to paint an artwork (or in this case; a painting of an artwork), then seeing the painting get sold by the party that commissioned it.
Except in this case, the original signature was replaced, the original painter lost all the credit to his work, and the original client is pretending that the original work was so bad -- it had to be destroyed.
I think that's because you were probably buying a phone with a contract (in other words, you were expecting them to subsidize the purchase of your phone in exchange for a one year or a two year commitment. In the US, even some pre-paid phones can be subsidized since they may not easily be switched to another network).
In any case, the next time you need a cell phone, I recommend you buy a GSM unlocked model from the internet (you can get some very nice models directly from Asia), it will cost you significantly more upfront, but it should save you quite a bit of money in the long-run (Just be aware that in the United States, this move will probably limit you to only three or four GSM cell phone companies in your area, so be sure to check them out first and add up all the numbers -- before you invest in an unlocked phone).
In the case of work, they don't want the possibility of any portable device having personal or otherwise comprimising data being stolen.
But that's the entire point of this law. The bugs on Air France are located in the first class section and the business class section of their planes. They don't freaking care about listening to the people who fly coach. And when crossing the border into the UK, only journalists or business men seem to get their laptops scanned (or perhaps even completely recorded). Government-sponsored industrial espionage is a real problem in Europe.
Can you go through life without one ?
Sure, but getting an apartment in a metropolitan area during a rental crunch might be a problem. And/or getting treated properly in an emergency room might also be a problem too (if you talk to anyone who works in an emergency room, they'll tell you about it).
That being said, if you have a plausible explanation for not having a credit history, like you've just turned 18 years old, or you've just immigrated to this country recently. That's enough for many landlords (although personally, I wouldn't recommend telling them that in an emergency room. Hospital triage nurses are ruthless. If you don't have good credit, you better have medical insurance, or have a huge wad of cash, otherwise they'll just let you die in front of them -- doing the absolute minimum rock-bottom necessary which is required by law to treat you).
Thankfully, the law protects most of us from being credit checked for getting a job (although, this really depends on your job function and/or on your pay grade).
Yes, but then the phrase would read "more generous [proprietary] terms than GPL", and that just wouldn't sound good.
Microsoft rose to dominance at a time when software was not patentable. That's one of the reasons why Embrace, Extend, Extinguish worked so well:
As opposed to now? I've got news for you, most software companies are still very wary of Microsoft. That's one of the reasons there is so much push to develop for the web using open standards, so as not to get extinguished by Microsoft.
That's true, but then the public would never find out about the invention.
That's a pretty absolute assertion you're making. Do you really believe that software patents are the only way knowledge of software inventions gets transferred/created in our society? And do you really believe that the only thing protecting Google or Amazon from being copied by Microsoft and everybody else is their patent portfolio? Somehow, I doubt that. I really doubt that.
This is all true in software just as it is in more traditional fields of invention. Software is not special...
You're speaking to the wrong crowd. Most of us believe patents in general are a very bad idea (not just patents on one-click buttons, and not just patents on math formulas, although there are various degrees of differences even between software patents).
Uh.. those perks have been available in England for years.
You're missing the point. In communist US, it's mandated by law that when someone calls a cell phone in the United States, they can not get a surcharge for it (it has to be the same price as if you're calling a landline). This forces the person being called on his cell phone to bear the entire cost of those calls.
This law was intended to protect the US consumer, and it does protect us -- it's just that few people notice it (and just like most commie laws, the law has some unintended consequences as well). In the UK, there is no such regulation, so you have either option, but almost everyone chooses the mobile option that makes the other party pay (just like we have 900 numbers in the US, calling a mobile in the UK that's prefixed with the number (7) will incur a surcharge). And on average, the Europeans (or the Americans calling European mobiles) are the *ones* that are getting screwed on their bill, it's just that no one in Europe really talks about the outrageous cost it takes to *call* mobile phones over there.
And the nuisance calls.. I bought a brand new phone and gave my number to maybe three people. I've received over a dozen calls from unknown numbers, all of which Google has identified as scam callers. And I've been charged for being called by these so-and-so's.
Hmmm... I'm assuming that you're talking about "Google" Search (or something like whocalled.us), not Google Voice. If you used Google Voice to filter/screen your calls, you wouldn't be charged for them. I'd suggest you try to get your own google voice number (right now, since you're in the US, you should be able to register for one. Google Voice isn't opened to Europe, but even if it was, it wouldn't make as much sense over there -- since spamming millions of mobile phones with recorded messages in Europe isn't really free for the spammer).
Please, when did a corporation last value principles over profits?
When they found out they could be sued over it.