T-Mobile is very much inverse. Not-so-great coverage and actual service, but customer service itself has been nothing but great.
Exactly. I'm fortunate that where I happen to use my phone I've never had a problem. Well, that and my plan gives me unlimited voice roaming and long distance, so even if I am outside T-Mobile's coverage area I don't care. Data, of course, is a different story and I keep roaming turned off by default in that case. Even there, I haven't been anywhere where I couldn't get coverage (some places wouldn't get 3G, but for basic stuff EDGE speeds are okay.)
Keep in mind though, that T-Mobile is really Deutsche Telekom, Germany's resident entrenched monopoly. They're pretty open here, because they're the underdog and they want to take market share away from the big boys. In Germany... well, these are the guys that just went to court there, and won an injunction against Truphone's VoIP app. If T-Mobile ever succeeds in becoming as big as AT&T or Sprint, they probably won't be any better in terms of customer service.
But for now, let's just enjoy the fruits of a competitive marketplace. I enjoy my rooted G1, I'm not being nickeled-and-dimed to death like I was under Sprint (I mean, cripes, just to get my own camera images off the phone I had to have a data plan and email them to myself. I hate Sprint.) Sprint also has serious billing issues: dunno if they were deliberate or just the result of incompetence, but month after month I'd have an extra thirty-odd bucks of erroneous charges I'd have to call and have removed. Oh, they'd take them off with no question, but still. I had unlimited text messaging as well, and the bastards would spam me and then charge me for the privilege. Cingular pulled that stunt too, back when I had them. Sprint frequently billed me for video downloads on an older phone that didn't support video playback! Did I mention that I hate Sprint? They had great coverage compared to T-Mobile, at least in my experience, but other than that I was glad to be rid of them.
he will exceed the speed of sound — the first person to do so without the aid of a machine.
He's using a machine. It's a balloon that sends him up 120,000 ft.
Gah. The basic assumption here is that he's not using powered flight to get him up there... the fact that a balloon can be considered a mechanical device is irrelevant. And even if he were using a rocket or other such machine to get him there, it would hardly detract from the feat itself, that of falling almost 28 miles. Why the summary even bothered to state that he's not using the aid of a machine is stupid anyway... of course he's using a machine of some kind to get that far off the planet. What else would he use... teleportation?
Of course, having said that, I still think he's completely nuts.
I was a customer with sprint for 4 years. I left them specifically due to how awful their customer service is. It's like wrestling a... very difficult thing to wrestle with every time you need a small thing changed or adjusted. And there's usually a fee for that small adjustment. T-mobile has bent over backwards to help me out in every situation, and has never charged me an additional fee for something. I won't go into details here but here's what I wrote about them last week.
I agree one hundred percent, and I went over to T-Mobile at the recommendation of some of my coworkers. I haven't looked back. To be fair, I never had a problem with Sprint's phone service... their customer service however, was another issue entirely.
You should calm down, it's really not that big of a deal.
You should wake up. It is a very big deal. This child was harmed (to what degree, only a psych eval could fully determine) by those who are in loco parentis and charged with his well-being. That assistant principal abrogated his responsibilities, and should certainly be removed from any position of authority over the students. I agree 100% with the GP: at the very least that prick should have to stand up in front of the entire student body and apologize to the student. Won't happen here, of course, but in a just world it most certainly would.
Some redress is in order. I haven't been that young since the sixties, but if it had happened to me, believe me, my family would have made damn sure there were consequences to that school and the arrogant fools who apparently "administer" it. You really need to acquire a little empathy for the kid: he suffered a terrifying experience through no fault of his own whatsoever, at the hands of someone who would better serve the school by slapping burgers in the lunchroom. You think that boy is going to walk away from this unscathed?
That everyone should stick some coloured wires into cardboard tubes, then leave them lying about all over the place. The more the merrier.
That's not a bad idea. Maybe it will desensitize us to such stupidity.
charges aren't being laid against the youth,
Well, good, but that shouldn't excuse a brainless bureaucrat from some consequences for the damage he's caused. How do you think that student is feeling right about now? That assistant principal took a promising future engineer or scientist and probably turned him into a lawyer. That happened to one of my uncles: he got similarly screwed early in his life, and became an attorney because "that is never, ever, going to happen to me again." Pointlessly fucking people over is, in fact, a great way to manufacture terrorists. I wouldn't be surprised if someone who was treated this badly came back at some point with a real IED.
but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.
Well, if they didn't need counseling before, I'm sure they could use some now. Incredible. When I was that age, I put together plenty of school projects that, by the standards of this institution, would have had me arrested on the spot (think electrolysis setup with a bank of a half-dozen Eveready IGNITOR dry cells and six-inch carbon rods as just one example.) At a minimum, that student and his family are owed an abject, and very public apology (and if they have any sense, will immediately move their son to another school.)
Truly makes one wish to throw up. If the administration of our schools is this ignorant, I'm not surprised that they're unable to maintain reasonable standards of education.
JAMES LEWIS: I don't, because we have tried letting the Internet community solve this. We have tried seeing if it was a self-organizing global commons. It hasn't worked. It's just like the Wild West. Time to move in the marshals.
One of the more frightening things I've read in awhile. It's something you would have expected to hear from an official in a totalitarian government. Matter of fact, Mr. Dipstick (not you, I mean this Lewis character), it has worked, and has worked better than anyone could possibly have dreamed when the Internet first went public. The man is either completely ignorant of the ongoing multi-trillion-dollar global economic benefits resulting from advanced communications, or he's dissembling. Either way, holding such opinions should automatically disqualify him from any position where he could influence the government's Internet policy-making.
So, this is just another powermonger offering solutions to problems that simply don't exist in order to extend government authority into yet another area where it isn't needed. This presumption that the Internet is somehow "broken", and consequently must be locked down completely China-fashion just because of mass copyright infringement is insane. Honestly, this is one of the most dangerous rationalizations to come along in recent memory. I mean, my GOD, these people seem to believe that the Internet's only purpose is enable copyright infringement and this idiot is going right along with that defective worldview. Fact is, the Internet, wild is it may be, has done more good for more people than anything else since the dawn of the Industrial Age, and if you truly care about your fellow man, Mr. Lewis, you'll not mess with success. Furthermore it's people like Mr. Lewis who see nothing wrong with taking the Internet's incredible power and utility away from us, so long as everything is properly controlled and monitored by the appropriate government agency. Where do they find these people?
What's even more ironic is his choice of the Wild West as a metaphor for the Internet. The old west was nowhere near as violent as Hollywood makes it out to be... it was just largely uncontrolled and unmonitored by big government. Matter of fact, at that point in U.S. history there was no such thing as "big government", and we were arguably a lot better off. Unfortunately for us, the lack of overt centralized government control, regardless of its necessity, bothers some people to no end. Seriously, it does (it's an emotional thing, a kind of mental illness that really should require appropriate psychiatric treatment) and it's people like that who need to be kept far, far away from the reins of government.
Dilbert: Don't you think you're abusing your power?
Wally: What would be the other reasons to have power?
I don't think highway operators in this country have ever been compelled or encouraged to stop grand theft auto, or interstate smuggling of stolen goods
The RIAA (meaning: the large copyright holders they represent) want a high-tech, private police force beholden to no-one but big media, ideally one funded by US (either by having the ISP pay for it, or via government funding.) Private police forces are scary stuff, and our lawmakers should be leery of ever empowering such organizations. Heck, Congress can't be trusted to behave responsibly with the ridiculous amount of power they already have... can we really expect the private sector (in this case, corporations that aren't even based in the U.S. for the most part) to be any better? Rhetorical question.
We're all for net neutrality, except that we hate the concept and it should be changed to reflect this.
No kidding. They want limits on net neutrality, I want limits on their access to the Federal Government. These are the kind of people that drive the need for election reform.
I like your idea of bounties! That would be something that interests me greatly.
Yes, it would be a nice way to supplement one's income, and would have the additional benefit of distracting resident computer criminals from attacking U.S. interests. Who knows... maybe we'll uncover some of China's state secrets for once.
But I was just responsible for a state web site, not a federal web site. So no harm, no foul.
And even if you were responsible for a Federal-level site... where is it written that every site operated by a U.S. entity must be visible to people in other countries?
Some years ago AT&T cut its trunk lines to China, because of all the spam coming out of open relays there. The State Department got involved after the Chinese government complained, and AT&T backed off. But this problem is not new, and China's government apparently has no intention of doing anything about it. Why should they? It's just a drain on our economy. Definite plus for them. Personally, I think our government should offer a bounty to U.S. crackers for verified hacks of any computer within Chinese address space.
Somehow I doubt that you lived during the Cold War. This is nothing compared to what used to happen.
No kidding. Google trash-talking the PRC is not the same as the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or any of a number of other brink-walking scenarios. The fact that China and the U.S. are entangled economically makes for a far more complex situation than the "we won't shoot first but launch on us and we'll fucking BURY you" relationship we had with the Soviets.
Yes, but when that behavior holds over into adulthood you have a problem (or rather, people are going to have a big problem with you.)
That may well be, but we don't know if that is going to be the case, because most of these people haven't reached adulthood yet. I think you're just making assumptions based on teenage/early 20s behavior.
Don't assume that changing technology will automatically force changes in fundamental human behaviors. Sometimes it does, but in this case I don't think it will.
I'm saying that the world runs on the principle of hierarchies. They're as much a part of our lives as breathing, and people who are higher up in a given pecking order do not appreciate having underlings attempting to monopolize their time. That's the way it is, and the way it will always be so far as human beings are concerned. That a young person's peer group accepts (or even revels in) this form of instantaneous query/response is irrelevant: those peers don't pay the bills. What those entering the job market are going to find out is that their employers make the rules when it comes to communication, and those aren't going to be anything like the behavior the article refers to. Furthermore, as we gain responsibilities, our time becomes more valuable, we have less free time to devote to casual communication, and we have to prioritize. So do our peers. That's called growing up, really, and has nothing to do with changing social norms.
So yes, our communications systems are faster and more efficient than ever before, but this in no way changes the fact that some people's time is more valuable than others. Children have virtually unlimited time to socialize, text each other and run up their cellular bills. Those are trying to survive in the real world usually do not.
I'm in my early thirties and I avoid multitasking like the plague.
I'm in my late forties and I feel the same way. Well, I'm also a software developer and multitasking doesn't really help much there... a little concentration helps get the job done. An old girlfriend once called me "completion oriented", and I would drive her nuts because I would rather finish something right rather than do it halfway and skip to the next thing, and then try to come back to the first thing having forgotten what the hell I was trying to do. I've also found that the majority of multitaskers are nowhere near as good at it as they think they are. Fact is, the human brain has certain limitations, and no amount of shifting mental gears can overcome that, and unless you're performing trivial tasks multitasking doesn't really buy you anything.
Slashdot Mirror
T-Mobile is very much inverse. Not-so-great coverage and actual service, but customer service itself has been nothing but great.
Exactly. I'm fortunate that where I happen to use my phone I've never had a problem. Well, that and my plan gives me unlimited voice roaming and long distance, so even if I am outside T-Mobile's coverage area I don't care. Data, of course, is a different story and I keep roaming turned off by default in that case. Even there, I haven't been anywhere where I couldn't get coverage (some places wouldn't get 3G, but for basic stuff EDGE speeds are okay.)
... well, these are the guys that just went to court there, and won an injunction against Truphone's VoIP app. If T-Mobile ever succeeds in becoming as big as AT&T or Sprint, they probably won't be any better in terms of customer service.
Keep in mind though, that T-Mobile is really Deutsche Telekom, Germany's resident entrenched monopoly. They're pretty open here, because they're the underdog and they want to take market share away from the big boys. In Germany
But for now, let's just enjoy the fruits of a competitive marketplace. I enjoy my rooted G1, I'm not being nickeled-and-dimed to death like I was under Sprint (I mean, cripes, just to get my own camera images off the phone I had to have a data plan and email them to myself. I hate Sprint.) Sprint also has serious billing issues: dunno if they were deliberate or just the result of incompetence, but month after month I'd have an extra thirty-odd bucks of erroneous charges I'd have to call and have removed. Oh, they'd take them off with no question, but still. I had unlimited text messaging as well, and the bastards would spam me and then charge me for the privilege. Cingular pulled that stunt too, back when I had them. Sprint frequently billed me for video downloads on an older phone that didn't support video playback! Did I mention that I hate Sprint? They had great coverage compared to T-Mobile, at least in my experience, but other than that I was glad to be rid of them.
he will exceed the speed of sound — the first person to do so without the aid of a machine.
He's using a machine. It's a balloon that sends him up 120,000 ft.
Gah. The basic assumption here is that he's not using powered flight to get him up there ... the fact that a balloon can be considered a mechanical device is irrelevant. And even if he were using a rocket or other such machine to get him there, it would hardly detract from the feat itself, that of falling almost 28 miles. Why the summary even bothered to state that he's not using the aid of a machine is stupid anyway ... of course he's using a machine of some kind to get that far off the planet. What else would he use ... teleportation?
Of course, having said that, I still think he's completely nuts.
This is the internet. There is no such thing as "like-minded individuals".
Yes but this is Slashdot.
I was a customer with sprint for 4 years. I left them specifically due to how awful their customer service is. It's like wrestling a... very difficult thing to wrestle with every time you need a small thing changed or adjusted. And there's usually a fee for that small adjustment. T-mobile has bent over backwards to help me out in every situation, and has never charged me an additional fee for something. I won't go into details here but here's what I wrote about them last week.
I agree one hundred percent, and I went over to T-Mobile at the recommendation of some of my coworkers. I haven't looked back. To be fair, I never had a problem with Sprint's phone service ... their customer service however, was another issue entirely.
Apple can and will do anything they stick their mind too.
Except write an operating system with preemptive multitasking.
What do you mean by that?
You should calm down, it's really not that big of a deal.
You should wake up. It is a very big deal. This child was harmed (to what degree, only a psych eval could fully determine) by those who are in loco parentis and charged with his well-being. That assistant principal abrogated his responsibilities, and should certainly be removed from any position of authority over the students. I agree 100% with the GP: at the very least that prick should have to stand up in front of the entire student body and apologize to the student. Won't happen here, of course, but in a just world it most certainly would.
Some redress is in order. I haven't been that young since the sixties, but if it had happened to me, believe me, my family would have made damn sure there were consequences to that school and the arrogant fools who apparently "administer" it. You really need to acquire a little empathy for the kid: he suffered a terrifying experience through no fault of his own whatsoever, at the hands of someone who would better serve the school by slapping burgers in the lunchroom. You think that boy is going to walk away from this unscathed?
That everyone should stick some coloured wires into cardboard tubes, then leave them lying about all over the place. The more the merrier.
That's not a bad idea. Maybe it will desensitize us to such stupidity.
charges aren't being laid against the youth,
Well, good, but that shouldn't excuse a brainless bureaucrat from some consequences for the damage he's caused. How do you think that student is feeling right about now? That assistant principal took a promising future engineer or scientist and probably turned him into a lawyer. That happened to one of my uncles: he got similarly screwed early in his life, and became an attorney because "that is never, ever, going to happen to me again." Pointlessly fucking people over is, in fact, a great way to manufacture terrorists. I wouldn't be surprised if someone who was treated this badly came back at some point with a real IED.
but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.
Well, if they didn't need counseling before, I'm sure they could use some now. Incredible. When I was that age, I put together plenty of school projects that, by the standards of this institution, would have had me arrested on the spot (think electrolysis setup with a bank of a half-dozen Eveready IGNITOR dry cells and six-inch carbon rods as just one example.) At a minimum, that student and his family are owed an abject, and very public apology (and if they have any sense, will immediately move their son to another school.)
Truly makes one wish to throw up. If the administration of our schools is this ignorant, I'm not surprised that they're unable to maintain reasonable standards of education.
JAMES LEWIS: I don't, because we have tried letting the Internet community solve this. We have tried seeing if it was a self-organizing global commons. It hasn't worked. It's just like the Wild West. Time to move in the marshals.
One of the more frightening things I've read in awhile. It's something you would have expected to hear from an official in a totalitarian government. Matter of fact, Mr. Dipstick (not you, I mean this Lewis character), it has worked, and has worked better than anyone could possibly have dreamed when the Internet first went public. The man is either completely ignorant of the ongoing multi-trillion-dollar global economic benefits resulting from advanced communications, or he's dissembling. Either way, holding such opinions should automatically disqualify him from any position where he could influence the government's Internet policy-making.
... it was just largely uncontrolled and unmonitored by big government. Matter of fact, at that point in U.S. history there was no such thing as "big government", and we were arguably a lot better off. Unfortunately for us, the lack of overt centralized government control, regardless of its necessity, bothers some people to no end. Seriously, it does (it's an emotional thing, a kind of mental illness that really should require appropriate psychiatric treatment) and it's people like that who need to be kept far, far away from the reins of government.
So, this is just another powermonger offering solutions to problems that simply don't exist in order to extend government authority into yet another area where it isn't needed. This presumption that the Internet is somehow "broken", and consequently must be locked down completely China-fashion just because of mass copyright infringement is insane. Honestly, this is one of the most dangerous rationalizations to come along in recent memory. I mean, my GOD, these people seem to believe that the Internet's only purpose is enable copyright infringement and this idiot is going right along with that defective worldview. Fact is, the Internet, wild is it may be, has done more good for more people than anything else since the dawn of the Industrial Age, and if you truly care about your fellow man, Mr. Lewis, you'll not mess with success. Furthermore it's people like Mr. Lewis who see nothing wrong with taking the Internet's incredible power and utility away from us, so long as everything is properly controlled and monitored by the appropriate government agency. Where do they find these people?
What's even more ironic is his choice of the Wild West as a metaphor for the Internet. The old west was nowhere near as violent as Hollywood makes it out to be
Dilbert: Don't you think you're abusing your power?
Wally: What would be the other reasons to have power?
I don't think highway operators in this country have ever been compelled or encouraged to stop grand theft auto, or interstate smuggling of stolen goods
The RIAA (meaning: the large copyright holders they represent) want a high-tech, private police force beholden to no-one but big media, ideally one funded by US (either by having the ISP pay for it, or via government funding.) Private police forces are scary stuff, and our lawmakers should be leery of ever empowering such organizations. Heck, Congress can't be trusted to behave responsibly with the ridiculous amount of power they already have ... can we really expect the private sector (in this case, corporations that aren't even based in the U.S. for the most part) to be any better? Rhetorical question.
We're all for net neutrality, except that we hate the concept and it should be changed to reflect this.
No kidding. They want limits on net neutrality, I want limits on their access to the Federal Government. These are the kind of people that drive the need for election reform.
The riaa wants to own all music and make un singed band be
About the only bands that escape the music industry unsinged are the indies. Most of the rest get their fingers burnt.
And when the lawyers keep getting returned as balls of charcoal?
Yes. I believe that they've selected Briquette Bardot as their new female spokesperson.
I like your idea of bounties! That would be something that interests me greatly.
Yes, it would be a nice way to supplement one's income, and would have the additional benefit of distracting resident computer criminals from attacking U.S. interests. Who knows ... maybe we'll uncover some of China's state secrets for once.
Are you sure? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126272143898416853.html
Come on dude, don't make me have to cut & paste.
But I was just responsible for a state web site, not a federal web site. So no harm, no foul.
And even if you were responsible for a Federal-level site ... where is it written that every site operated by a U.S. entity must be visible to people in other countries?
Some years ago AT&T cut its trunk lines to China, because of all the spam coming out of open relays there. The State Department got involved after the Chinese government complained, and AT&T backed off. But this problem is not new, and China's government apparently has no intention of doing anything about it. Why should they? It's just a drain on our economy. Definite plus for them. Personally, I think our government should offer a bounty to U.S. crackers for verified hacks of any computer within Chinese address space.
Somehow I doubt that you lived during the Cold War. This is nothing compared to what used to happen.
No kidding. Google trash-talking the PRC is not the same as the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or any of a number of other brink-walking scenarios. The fact that China and the U.S. are entangled economically makes for a far more complex situation than the "we won't shoot first but launch on us and we'll fucking BURY you" relationship we had with the Soviets.
they are altering the deal. pray they do not alter it further.
Actually, I think most of us are praying that they do. Alter it further, that is.
But what if they have a mole in your counter-espionage research department? ;-)
That's obvious. You drop the Cone of Silence!
well they are more guidelines realy :-)
Parlay! Took me a second to get that one.
The difference is no one in their right mind would admit to sleeping with her.
I would.
To quote Captain James T. Kirk from The Trouble with Tribbles, "Well ... there's no accounting for taste."
If you want full control, then treat your phone like a laptop and buy it yourself.
I agree, but unfortunately that's only viable if carriers allow phones on their network that they don't provide.
Yes, but when that behavior holds over into adulthood you have a problem (or rather, people are going to have a big problem with you.)
That may well be, but we don't know if that is going to be the case, because most of these people haven't reached adulthood yet. I think you're just making assumptions based on teenage/early 20s behavior.
Don't assume that changing technology will automatically force changes in fundamental human behaviors. Sometimes it does, but in this case I don't think it will.
I'm saying that the world runs on the principle of hierarchies. They're as much a part of our lives as breathing, and people who are higher up in a given pecking order do not appreciate having underlings attempting to monopolize their time. That's the way it is, and the way it will always be so far as human beings are concerned. That a young person's peer group accepts (or even revels in) this form of instantaneous query/response is irrelevant: those peers don't pay the bills. What those entering the job market are going to find out is that their employers make the rules when it comes to communication, and those aren't going to be anything like the behavior the article refers to. Furthermore, as we gain responsibilities, our time becomes more valuable, we have less free time to devote to casual communication, and we have to prioritize. So do our peers. That's called growing up, really, and has nothing to do with changing social norms.
So yes, our communications systems are faster and more efficient than ever before, but this in no way changes the fact that some people's time is more valuable than others. Children have virtually unlimited time to socialize, text each other and run up their cellular bills. Those are trying to survive in the real world usually do not.
I for one welcome our new tubular overlords.
...and I am right behind you with Tubular Bells on.
Dude, that is totally tubular.
Many of these people born in the 1990s feel that the entire world should instantly respond to them and they get extremely impatient when it doesn't.
Sounds like how teenagers have always been.
Yes, but when that behavior holds over into adulthood you have a problem (or rather, people are going to have a big problem with you.)
I'm in my early thirties and I avoid multitasking like the plague.
I'm in my late forties and I feel the same way. Well, I'm also a software developer and multitasking doesn't really help much there ... a little concentration helps get the job done. An old girlfriend once called me "completion oriented", and I would drive her nuts because I would rather finish something right rather than do it halfway and skip to the next thing, and then try to come back to the first thing having forgotten what the hell I was trying to do. I've also found that the majority of multitaskers are nowhere near as good at it as they think they are. Fact is, the human brain has certain limitations, and no amount of shifting mental gears can overcome that, and unless you're performing trivial tasks multitasking doesn't really buy you anything.