If the buyer unjustly left negative feedback - eBay customer service will deal with that - especially when there is enough evidence. On the flip side - getting negative feedback removed because the seller retailiated - is nearly impossible.
Well, that's just not true at all.
I have been negged by a non paying bidder, who in the dispute console said "I can't pay due to severe heart trouble". But was then able to neg me back when I negged him saying "buyer did not pay". Apparently his heart trouble was not so severe it prevented him leaving retaliatory feedback. Only bad enough to prevent his payment.
And now, the acct is suspended and I still cannot get ebay to remove the neg. So your statement that ebay will remove negative feedback with enough evidence is preposterous.
Why, according to ebay's own written rules a neg is supposed to be removable if the acct is suspended. But still, nope.
Why the heck a non-paying bidder should be able to publicly judge my reputation, well, I have no idea. Ebay seems to think that is just fine. Ridiculous.
It's been shown over and over that people don't want measured bandwidth.
Before there was widespread DSL there was ISDN, but 144K ISDN was *always* measured by the telcos. NOBODY wanted it, and nobody (well, essentially nobody) deployed it in a home environment.
ADSL and cable modem service have been unmeasured, "unlimited", which is all people will pay for regardless of the reality that at some level *ALL* bandwidth is measured.
The ADSL and Cable modem providers have had high success in obtaining customers who want *unlimited* service. TWC will likely find that though there are some customers who don't care, some will. I expect nearly everyone who reads/. will be in the latter group. Heh.
The problem here is in many cases because of the attitude of the telcos and the uneconomic realities of trying to compete with them since they own the local copper plant there are few options for most people. You have one cable modem provider, and one ADSL provider (for most of the country AT&T). It's a near monopoly.
If we had more options it would be better but it may turn out for the fleeing TWC customers they have essentially nowhere to go. AT&T is at least as bad in their attitude and business practices as TWC, I would guess.
The establishment clause of the First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the creation of an official state church like the Church of England, not to drive religion out of public life.
And that is exactly true, even from the unfortunate source.
The doctrine of separation of church and state was always to protect the church from the state. The danger of church and state was never a problem with the church. It was always a problem with the state.
There has been much discussion of prayer in schools. But there is no actual prohibition of prayer in schools, the prohibition is against a government employee (a teacher, for instance) up there at the front of the class leading a government approved prayer.
The students are free to pray in schools as much as they like, as long as they don't force anyone to do anything there is no stopping it. There is no way to stop it.
Why, I have a double action revolver right here. Semi automatic, to be sure.
Not that many would use it that way, but if you pull the trigger it fires, no matter what.
Ron Paul is talking the normal libertarian mantra of leave everything unregulated by government and it will be alright.
Except it won't really be alright. Competition is not always able to control everything.
Libertarians always say "If only" it was like this or like that everything would be perfect. In a perfect world at least some of that is likely true.
But back to tech, AT&T built the phone infrastructure with ratepayer dollars. They don't really own it, WE DO. Remember those rate cases they did to get rate increases? They spent more money so they had to get more from us to pay for it. We had no option but to pay.
So AT&T didn't build the fiber backbone, they didn't build the copper plant, we hired them to build it. It's ours.
But Libertarians like Ron Paul would act like AT&T owns it, and AT&T would be ripping us off forever, like they are doing right now.
That said, I will likely vote for Ron Paul on Tuesday. Heh. Just to put some fear in the machine.
As to CDMA (Verizon and Sprint in the US) and GSM (Tmobile and ATT in the US), the amazing part about all that is that Verizon has spent as much as they have to build out the nationwide network, with CDMA.
I've been inside both type cellsites.
CDMA is an antiquated technology.
There is a huge concrete building to house the equipment. 2 rows of 6' high racks lining the building, maybe 15 or more racks of junk! Hundreds of batteries for the UPS. A big AC unit. All requiring constant maintenance. They have special crews from an outsourced company that just maintains and changes the batteries.
Contrast this to GSM equipment: There is a little cabinet. Some are small enough to hang on a pole with the antenna on the top. The Ericsson and Nokia GSM equipment that I saw is a 6' high cabinet about 4' wide, the door flips open and you are standing outside. Some competing equipment is much smaller.
With the pile of junk required to support a CDMA network-- it is maybe 8 or 10x what it takes for a GSM site. I can't believe the whole world isn't GSM.
How can Verizon and Sprint spend the money it has to be costing them to maintain that, when the GSM cellsites have to cost much less?
It's been said that nearly all the spam in the world is being sent by less than a couple hundred individuals or organizations.
200 Known Spam Operations responsible for 80% of your spam.
80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases and addresses, redirects, hosting locations of sites and domains, to a hard-core group of around 200 known spam operations ("spam gangs"), almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database. http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso The US government is pretty much worthless, they frittered for years with little good effect until this day.
I don't think it's out of the norm for a business in a competitive market to create artificial barriers to entry to protect their profit margins. In a capitalist system, a business must take certain steps to "get ahead" of current and would be competition to survive. These are typical tactics.
But in the US wireless market that's hardly what's going on. The carriers keep a stranglehold on the equipment supply by being essentially the only buyer of handsets from each manufacturer. Which explains why the manufacturers have been making handsets the carriers want instead of what we want, until Apple came along that is.
They keep the prices artificially high on those handsets so they can discount them (or even give you one "free") but only in exchange for signing a long contract to pay them monthly. It's cheaper to keep a customer for a long time that to have to get another one, mostly because of all the commissions, kickbacks, etc. that pervade the US cellular industry.
In fact it's gotten so egregious that in the case of ATT, if you want an Iphone, the best way to get it is to go to a phone store, get a "free" phone, sign a 2 year contract to get it, then buy your $399 Iphone at full price. You essentially get the free phone for free, and you get the Iphone too, by paying for it. The 2 year agreement is the same.
Now if you got the discount or rebate for the Iphone this wouldn't work. But you don't, and the Iphone is the first handset that has been sold at full price but you have to sign a two year deal to get it activated. The amazing part is people don't get it and have gone along with it.
If the purpose of the subsidy lock and the contract is to make sure you pay for the subsidized phone, but that's doesn't come into the Iphones since they are not subsidized, why should you have to sign a deal to get one? But you do.
Adobe used to give it's Acrobat Reader away for free.
It's no coincidence recent versions have had that ad supported Yahoo button at the top. They get paid for sending you that. And all the Yahoo toolbar installations they have packaged with Acrobat Reader for some years, they get paid for those installations too.
Not what I would call "free". Ad supported, for a few years now.
Adobe is a joke as far as I'm concerned. They have no feedback method for bugs in their "free" reader, I nearly bought the paid version to get support just to make them dance. Pretty sure they couldn't have fixed the printing problem I was having. Acrobat reader crashes on me, often.
Just because they aren't charging for a product they shouldn't ignore the value of a stream of bug reports from users. It makes the system better. But no, it was "free" they told me.
I'm really going to be testing some of the free/GPL alternate PDF readers, essentially to avoid supporting their ad servers.
FWIW, I have used the Firefox Adblock plugin for a number of years now. If you haven't tried that you really should. http://adblock.mozdev.org/ WWW without ads is a dream. Fortunately an easily realized one!
Further reading of the foxit site reveals
Commercial Usage
Generally Foxit PDF Reader is totally free for personal users worldwide for non-commercial use. But in commercial environment, we need you to send us answers to our questions listed below before we could respond to you.
Wonder why they would have those obvious pricing pages.....HMMM
How many users look at mail logs?
Not many users, but mail admins do.
The problem with spam, and the reason there's so much spam now is mostly because of all the filtering.
In the past spammers could send out 100,000 messages about fake viagra and get two or three orders.
Now, with all the filtering they have to send out 200,000,000 messages to get those same orders.
Unfortunately they have been able to do it.
Filtering is lots better, but this has necessitated a much larger volume of spam to get the same amount of orders.
It's a war, nobody is winning it. We toil on.
The state did perform the follow up test, but it showed up as negative, so they pretended they had not performed it. Somehow, her defendant did not question any of this evidence, at all despite it being scientifically unsound to pretty much any pathologist you could consult. That lawyer is still a practicing public defender.
This brings question to the way the legal system is in the US. It's an advocacy based system. The state uses your tax money to advocate for your guilt, and often hides evidence to the contrary as mentioned in the parent post- or in the Duke rape case. Your defense lawyer has to advocate for your innocence, but without the unlimited funds the state has to use against you is largely handicapped, and this goes for either a private lawyer you are paying (unless you are very rich or OJ Simpson) or a public defender paid by the taxpayers.
I read somewhere that in some countries, France was mentioned, the judge is ultimately responsible for finding out what the actual truth is. If he has to leave the court and go out in the field to determine that, he is supposed to.
Anyone who knows how it is in other countries please jump in and post, I'd love to hear it.
I for one wish someone in the US legal system was responsible for truth. As it is, there's no relation between justice and the legal system in the US.
For those that didn't the test purported to prove that the bullet fragments found at a crime scene came from the same box found in the accused perpetrator's possession by matching the lead content. One would wonder what would happen if the accused perpetrator had only a full, unused box and had only bought one box?
Why anyone in the world would think that type of test would be valid I can't imagine. Those bullets are made by an automated machine, it seems very likely the machine could make 1 or a million boxes of bullets and they would all be the same, or so close to the same that it wouldn't be usable for any sort of legal evidence.
What's incredible about this is that the defense lawyers let this go on so long. It seems you could refute the whole principle with a few declarations from bullet manufacturers.
Well, that is subterfuge.
They sell those non contract phones, sure. Ya know who buys them? People who have lost their phone and have 18 months left on their contract, without a phone they have to pay and get nothing. They are always carrier locked too.
It's hardly a competitive market for multi network non-contract phones. It's all fake.
A number of years ago they had to set a price without a contract to set the price of the phone for sales tax purposes. What the phone companies were doing was giving out free phones, or cheap phones, and paying the state of California the sales tax on the $49 you paid. They had to stop, since the phone was actually being sold for $300 but you were only paying the $49, and they were in essence paying for the rest of your phone, in exchange for you signing that contract.
That's why when you buy a $49 phone (at least in California) you get sales taxed on $299. They were cheating the state, they had to stop when they got caught.
It costs quite a bit of money for a carrier to aquire a cellular customer, for advertising, sales expenses, commissions (All those people at those phone stores are on commission, you know. A large amount, too. Some make $100,000 a year selling you your phone, or even giving it to you "free".)
It's much cheaper for them to keep you on contract than to get someone to replace you.
That's why they have those cheap phones and long contracts, and unlocked phones if available cost SO much more. Good for them. Not so good for you.
There are *no* plans like that.
I tried to get a number with Cingular, now AT&T- without a contract. There was no way.
I had my own phone, I just needed a SIM and I didn't want a 2 year deal, which since they are not subsidizing my phone I should have been able to get.
NOPE. There was no way. It was not available. I went to the local store, I called their tollfree number. Went to a reseller. NOPE.
Neither Sprint nor Verizon will activate a foreign phone, and with CDMA it's not a matter of sticking your SIM in the phone. You gotta ask "mother may I" to get activated.
The best thing that could possibly happen is the carriers become pure carriers and the phone sales are through retailers. Then there would be a whole wall full of different phones at Walmart at competitive prices. There would be price rollbacks too!
The phone carriers have all their phones marked up greatly so they can give you a giant fake discount when you sign your two year deal. That all needs to go away.
It seems from the news story the FCC is going to force the carriers to open their service to whatever device you want to put on it, and that is going to be a condition of the spectrum auction.
It can't happen soon enough!
This will absolutely increase competition.
The current status quo where the carriers keep a stranglehold on the equipment supply and use it as a method of keeping their customers signed to two year contracts is outrageous.
We should be able to buy our equipment from any reseller and use it on any compatible network. Then there would be competition and the prices of phones would decline and the features we really want would be made available.
Ya know what? Broken box field calls are very, very tough. I've been there. I avoid it.
You can't have parts for everything, you can't have any motherboards at all with you. You have no place to work.
You really can't fix things with hardware failures in the field, and if you do it SHOULD cost a lot. $120 for a 1GB dimm? With field support? That's a great deal.
It's totally unfair for them to look up on some website a cheap mailorder price for the DIMM and comment that the field service delivered price is double. It HAS to be double! It should probably be triple.
If you want your hardware at the cheapest internet price you don't get customer service with it and you should order it and be ready to install it yourself.
That show was completely unfair.
Not that we didn't see some instances of incompetence and dishonesty, we sure did and there is no excuse for that. But field service should be reserved for software issues.
If you have a hardware failure you should take it somewhere that they have parts on hand, like a computer store that DOES sell motherboards and parts- hopefully one you have some sort of relationship with. Not to Bestbuy, Staples, or another chain like that. That's just ridiculous.
Fortunately most people's computer problems are very simple, or we really couldn't fix them. Now my computer problems, I already fixed the simple ones. The ones that are left are are insurmountable. Heh.
Steve's reality is great from a business standpoint.
How much per IPhone do you think ATT is paying Apple for exclusivity? $100? $150? More? I'm pretty sure it couldn't be less than $100 and it could be much more.
So it seems likely Apple has made AT LEAST $100 million dollars in payments from ATT. Plus the profit from making and selling the Iphone, plus all the Itunes profits they make from people downloading music. Plus the money from the accessories people buy.
I'd love to see the contract between them, I have to wonder what if any Apple's liability to ATT is under their agreement for making a "locked" phone that is now hacked widely? My guess? They have no liability whatsoever.
ATT should be irritated with that, but there's not much they can do about it under the law. BTW, unlocking of cellphone subsidy locks is specifically allowed under federal law.
They could have done what other cellphone sellers do, stand there with a contract in hand and if you don't sign it you have to pay $2-300 extra for your phone before you get out of the store. But they didn't do that.
They sold the phones essentially cash and carry and depended on you activating it on Itunes, and getting a clickwrap 2-year ATT contract at that time. Seems like they lose.
Apple however wins.
Like Phillipe Kahn of Borland did, that was very decent. "Software is like a book. You can use it, or I can use it, but not at the same time." Sensible.
I've posted extensively on net neutrality. Essentially I think it's a false argument. Maybe you can look up what I posted. I have no idea how, but maybe.
"Software as Service" has been in the news for a number of years now.
It really means you are renting it.
It makes sense is some cases, like software that needs constant updating or support.
But some people don't want to rent their software. They want to pay once and that's it. I'm like that, I haven't found an instance where I am willing to keep paying forever for any software.
That could conceivably change but I doubt it. I'm too cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, I use Firefox 2x with Wellsfargo.com, and it works just fine. No problems at all.
Well, that's just not true at all.
I have been negged by a non paying bidder, who in the dispute console said "I can't pay due to severe heart trouble". But was then able to neg me back when I negged him saying "buyer did not pay".
Apparently his heart trouble was not so severe it prevented him leaving retaliatory feedback. Only bad enough to prevent his payment.
And now, the acct is suspended and I still cannot get ebay to remove the neg. So your statement that ebay will remove negative feedback with enough evidence is preposterous.
Why, according to ebay's own written rules a neg is supposed to be removable if the acct is suspended. But still, nope.
Why the heck a non-paying bidder should be able to publicly judge my reputation, well, I have no idea. Ebay seems to think that is just fine. Ridiculous.
It's been shown over and over that people don't want measured bandwidth.
/. will be in the latter group. Heh.
Before there was widespread DSL there was ISDN, but 144K ISDN was *always* measured by the telcos. NOBODY wanted it, and nobody (well, essentially nobody) deployed it in a home environment.
ADSL and cable modem service have been unmeasured, "unlimited", which is all people will pay for regardless of the reality that at some level *ALL* bandwidth is measured.
The ADSL and Cable modem providers have had high success in obtaining customers who want *unlimited* service. TWC will likely find that though there are some customers who don't care, some will. I expect nearly everyone who reads
The problem here is in many cases because of the attitude of the telcos and the uneconomic realities of trying to compete with them since they own the local copper plant there are few options for most people. You have one cable modem provider, and one ADSL provider (for most of the country AT&T). It's a near monopoly.
If we had more options it would be better but it may turn out for the fleeing TWC customers they have essentially nowhere to go. AT&T is at least as bad in their attitude and business practices as TWC, I would guess.
The doctrine of separation of church and state was always to protect the church from the state. The danger of church and state was never a problem with the church. It was always a problem with the state.
There has been much discussion of prayer in schools. But there is no actual prohibition of prayer in schools, the prohibition is against a government employee (a teacher, for instance) up there at the front of the class leading a government approved prayer.
The students are free to pray in schools as much as they like, as long as they don't force anyone to do anything there is no stopping it. There is no way to stop it.
Why, I have a double action revolver right here. Semi automatic, to be sure.
Not that many would use it that way, but if you pull the trigger it fires, no matter what.
I don't have a semi-automatic, which is what he's mostly opposed to
Semi automatic, like a revolver for instance? A semi automatic is a weapon that fires one time each pull of the trigger, like a revolver.
That's from the popular mechanics article in the first post. Both Obama and Clinton are against your having a gun. I didn't make that up.
Ron Paul is talking the normal libertarian mantra of leave everything unregulated by government and it will be alright.
Except it won't really be alright. Competition is not always able to control everything.
Libertarians always say "If only" it was like this or like that everything would be perfect. In a perfect world at least some of that is likely true.
But back to tech, AT&T built the phone infrastructure with ratepayer dollars. They don't really own it, WE DO. Remember those rate cases they did to get rate increases? They spent more money so they had to get more from us to pay for it. We had no option but to pay.
So AT&T didn't build the fiber backbone, they didn't build the copper plant, we hired them to build it. It's ours.
But Libertarians like Ron Paul would act like AT&T owns it, and AT&T would be ripping us off forever, like they are doing right now.
That said, I will likely vote for Ron Paul on Tuesday. Heh. Just to put some fear in the machine.
Yeah, except Obama would take away your gun and he IS a lawyer.
I for one am opposed to lawyers in political office.
As to CDMA (Verizon and Sprint in the US) and GSM (Tmobile and ATT in the US), the amazing part about all that is that Verizon has spent as much as they have to build out the nationwide network, with CDMA.
I've been inside both type cellsites.
CDMA is an antiquated technology. There is a huge concrete building to house the equipment. 2 rows of 6' high racks lining the building, maybe 15 or more racks of junk! Hundreds of batteries for the UPS. A big AC unit. All requiring constant maintenance. They have special crews from an outsourced company that just maintains and changes the batteries.
Contrast this to GSM equipment: There is a little cabinet. Some are small enough to hang on a pole with the antenna on the top. The Ericsson and Nokia GSM equipment that I saw is a 6' high cabinet about 4' wide, the door flips open and you are standing outside. Some competing equipment is much smaller.
With the pile of junk required to support a CDMA network-- it is maybe 8 or 10x what it takes for a GSM site. I can't believe the whole world isn't GSM.
How can Verizon and Sprint spend the money it has to be costing them to maintain that, when the GSM cellsites have to cost much less?
200 Known Spam Operations responsible for 80% of your spam.
80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases and addresses, redirects, hosting locations of sites and domains, to a hard-core group of around 200 known spam operations ("spam gangs"), almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database.
http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso
The US government is pretty much worthless, they frittered for years with little good effect until this day.
Maybe things are improving, somehow.
I don't think it's out of the norm for a business in a competitive market to create artificial barriers to entry to protect their profit margins. In a capitalist system, a business must take certain steps to "get ahead" of current and would be competition to survive. These are typical tactics.
But in the US wireless market that's hardly what's going on. The carriers keep a stranglehold on the equipment supply by being essentially the only buyer of handsets from each manufacturer. Which explains why the manufacturers have been making handsets the carriers want instead of what we want, until Apple came along that is.
They keep the prices artificially high on those handsets so they can discount them (or even give you one "free") but only in exchange for signing a long contract to pay them monthly. It's cheaper to keep a customer for a long time that to have to get another one, mostly because of all the commissions, kickbacks, etc. that pervade the US cellular industry.
In fact it's gotten so egregious that in the case of ATT, if you want an Iphone, the best way to get it is to go to a phone store, get a "free" phone, sign a 2 year contract to get it, then buy your $399 Iphone at full price. You essentially get the free phone for free, and you get the Iphone too, by paying for it. The 2 year agreement is the same.
Now if you got the discount or rebate for the Iphone this wouldn't work. But you don't, and the Iphone is the first handset that has been sold at full price but you have to sign a two year deal to get it activated. The amazing part is people don't get it and have gone along with it.
If the purpose of the subsidy lock and the contract is to make sure you pay for the subsidized phone, but that's doesn't come into the Iphones since they are not subsidized, why should you have to sign a deal to get one? But you do.
Adobe used to give it's Acrobat Reader away for free.
It's no coincidence recent versions have had that ad supported Yahoo button at the top. They get paid for sending you that. And all the Yahoo toolbar installations they have packaged with Acrobat Reader for some years, they get paid for those installations too.
Not what I would call "free". Ad supported, for a few years now.
Adobe is a joke as far as I'm concerned. They have no feedback method for bugs in their "free" reader, I nearly bought the paid version to get support just to make them dance. Pretty sure they couldn't have fixed the printing problem I was having. Acrobat reader crashes on me, often.
Just because they aren't charging for a product they shouldn't ignore the value of a stream of bug reports from users. It makes the system better. But no, it was "free" they told me.
I'm really going to be testing some of the free/GPL alternate PDF readers, essentially to avoid supporting their ad servers.
FWIW, I have used the Firefox Adblock plugin for a number of years now. If you haven't tried that you really should.
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
WWW without ads is a dream. Fortunately an easily realized one!
Further reading of the foxit site reveals
Commercial Usage
Generally Foxit PDF Reader is totally free for personal users worldwide for non-commercial use. But in commercial environment, we need you to send us answers to our questions listed below before we could respond to you.
Wonder why they would have those obvious pricing pages.....HMMM
According to the site
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader_2/pricing.htm
The foxit pdf reader is $39. per user. Hardly free.
How many users look at mail logs?
Not many users, but mail admins do.
The problem with spam, and the reason there's so much spam now is mostly because of all the filtering.
In the past spammers could send out 100,000 messages about fake viagra and get two or three orders.
Now, with all the filtering they have to send out 200,000,000 messages to get those same orders.
Unfortunately they have been able to do it.
Filtering is lots better, but this has necessitated a much larger volume of spam to get the same amount of orders.
It's a war, nobody is winning it. We toil on.
The state did perform the follow up test, but it showed up as negative, so they pretended they had not performed it. Somehow, her defendant did not question any of this evidence, at all despite it being scientifically unsound to pretty much any pathologist you could consult. That lawyer is still a practicing public defender.
This brings question to the way the legal system is in the US. It's an advocacy based system. The state uses your tax money to advocate for your guilt, and often hides evidence to the contrary as mentioned in the parent post- or in the Duke rape case. Your defense lawyer has to advocate for your innocence, but without the unlimited funds the state has to use against you is largely handicapped, and this goes for either a private lawyer you are paying (unless you are very rich or OJ Simpson) or a public defender paid by the taxpayers.
I read somewhere that in some countries, France was mentioned, the judge is ultimately responsible for finding out what the actual truth is. If he has to leave the court and go out in the field to determine that, he is supposed to.
Anyone who knows how it is in other countries please jump in and post, I'd love to hear it.
I for one wish someone in the US legal system was responsible for truth. As it is, there's no relation between justice and the legal system in the US.
I saw the 60 minutes piece.
For those that didn't the test purported to prove that the bullet fragments found at a crime scene came from the same box found in the accused perpetrator's possession by matching the lead content. One would wonder what would happen if the accused perpetrator had only a full, unused box and had only bought one box?
Why anyone in the world would think that type of test would be valid I can't imagine. Those bullets are made by an automated machine, it seems very likely the machine could make 1 or a million boxes of bullets and they would all be the same, or so close to the same that it wouldn't be usable for any sort of legal evidence.
What's incredible about this is that the defense lawyers let this go on so long. It seems you could refute the whole principle with a few declarations from bullet manufacturers.
That's the failure here
Well, that is subterfuge.
They sell those non contract phones, sure. Ya know who buys them? People who have lost their phone and have 18 months left on their contract, without a phone they have to pay and get nothing. They are always carrier locked too.
It's hardly a competitive market for multi network non-contract phones. It's all fake.
A number of years ago they had to set a price without a contract to set the price of the phone for sales tax purposes. What the phone companies were doing was giving out free phones, or cheap phones, and paying the state of California the sales tax on the $49 you paid. They had to stop, since the phone was actually being sold for $300 but you were only paying the $49, and they were in essence paying for the rest of your phone, in exchange for you signing that contract.
That's why when you buy a $49 phone (at least in California) you get sales taxed on $299. They were cheating the state, they had to stop when they got caught.
It costs quite a bit of money for a carrier to aquire a cellular customer, for advertising, sales expenses, commissions (All those people at those phone stores are on commission, you know. A large amount, too. Some make $100,000 a year selling you your phone, or even giving it to you "free".)
It's much cheaper for them to keep you on contract than to get someone to replace you. That's why they have those cheap phones and long contracts, and unlocked phones if available cost SO much more. Good for them. Not so good for you.
There are *no* plans like that.
I tried to get a number with Cingular, now AT&T- without a contract. There was no way.
I had my own phone, I just needed a SIM and I didn't want a 2 year deal, which since they are not subsidizing my phone I should have been able to get.
NOPE. There was no way. It was not available. I went to the local store, I called their tollfree number. Went to a reseller. NOPE.
Neither Sprint nor Verizon will activate a foreign phone, and with CDMA it's not a matter of sticking your SIM in the phone. You gotta ask "mother may I" to get activated.
The best thing that could possibly happen is the carriers become pure carriers and the phone sales are through retailers. Then there would be a whole wall full of different phones at Walmart at competitive prices. There would be price rollbacks too!
The phone carriers have all their phones marked up greatly so they can give you a giant fake discount when you sign your two year deal. That all needs to go away.
It seems from the news story the FCC is going to force the carriers to open their service to whatever device you want to put on it, and that is going to be a condition of the spectrum auction.
It can't happen soon enough!
This will absolutely increase competition.
The current status quo where the carriers keep a stranglehold on the equipment supply and use it as a method of keeping their customers signed to two year contracts is outrageous.
We should be able to buy our equipment from any reseller and use it on any compatible network. Then there would be competition and the prices of phones would decline and the features we really want would be made available.
Ya know what? Broken box field calls are very, very tough. I've been there. I avoid it. You can't have parts for everything, you can't have any motherboards at all with you. You have no place to work.
You really can't fix things with hardware failures in the field, and if you do it SHOULD cost a lot. $120 for a 1GB dimm? With field support? That's a great deal.
It's totally unfair for them to look up on some website a cheap mailorder price for the DIMM and comment that the field service delivered price is double. It HAS to be double! It should probably be triple.
If you want your hardware at the cheapest internet price you don't get customer service with it and you should order it and be ready to install it yourself.
That show was completely unfair.
Not that we didn't see some instances of incompetence and dishonesty, we sure did and there is no excuse for that. But field service should be reserved for software issues.
If you have a hardware failure you should take it somewhere that they have parts on hand, like a computer store that DOES sell motherboards and parts- hopefully one you have some sort of relationship with. Not to Bestbuy, Staples, or another chain like that. That's just ridiculous.
Fortunately most people's computer problems are very simple, or we really couldn't fix them. Now my computer problems, I already fixed the simple ones. The ones that are left are are insurmountable. Heh.
Steve's reality is great from a business standpoint.
How much per IPhone do you think ATT is paying Apple for exclusivity? $100? $150? More? I'm pretty sure it couldn't be less than $100 and it could be much more.
So it seems likely Apple has made AT LEAST $100 million dollars in payments from ATT. Plus the profit from making and selling the Iphone, plus all the Itunes profits they make from people downloading music. Plus the money from the accessories people buy.
I'd love to see the contract between them, I have to wonder what if any Apple's liability to ATT is under their agreement for making a "locked" phone that is now hacked widely? My guess? They have no liability whatsoever.
ATT should be irritated with that, but there's not much they can do about it under the law. BTW, unlocking of cellphone subsidy locks is specifically allowed under federal law.
They could have done what other cellphone sellers do, stand there with a contract in hand and if you don't sign it you have to pay $2-300 extra for your phone before you get out of the store. But they didn't do that.
They sold the phones essentially cash and carry and depended on you activating it on Itunes, and getting a clickwrap 2-year ATT contract at that time.
Seems like they lose.
Apple however wins.
Like Phillipe Kahn of Borland did, that was very decent. "Software is like a book. You can use it, or I can use it, but not at the same time." Sensible.
I've posted extensively on net neutrality. Essentially I think it's a false argument. Maybe you can look up what I posted. I have no idea how, but maybe.
"Software as Service" has been in the news for a number of years now.
It really means you are renting it.
It makes sense is some cases, like software that needs constant updating or support. But some people don't want to rent their software. They want to pay once and that's it. I'm like that, I haven't found an instance where I am willing to keep paying forever for any software.
That could conceivably change but I doubt it. I'm too cheap.