I think after awhile with enough uproar from consumers
How many people are going to call up Dell and complain about Indian programmers in Bangalore using == to compare Strings in java or not commenting their code?
I think everyone on/. starts off with the assumption that there is NOTHING americans do better and ALL jobs will eventually go to India or China or wherever.
As you should be...And the guy who says he is proud to be American is right too...You don't stop loving your mother just because she makes a real bad lasangna..
You are confusing envy with hatred. Sure most people outside the US thinks America is arrogant and has double standards...but MOST people in the world aren't about to hijack a plane and fly it into an American building full of civilians. Speaking as someone who wasn't born in America, i think America isn't perfect but i'm glad America is the strongest country in the world as opposed to Russia/Britain/China/France/Germany etc etc.
There is a middle ground between "Rah rah America" and "great Satan"..And most people in the world are closer to the "rah-rah America" than "great satan"..they prove that everytime they dress like American teenagers, watch American movies and television..
Is there any technical problem providing a service using Wireless in Local Loop(basically a cordless phone with the base unit at the telco)? They could provide phone service and wireless internet service. Are there any bandwidth restrictions in the US? It seems like a simple concept and i've seen WLL phones in India.
Meanwhile, competing manufacturers have shipped a series of MP3 players with iPod-esque capacities and sizes but lower prices: Creative's Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, Dell's Digital Jukebox, Rio's Karma and Samsung's YP-910GS Napster.
All four sounded great when playing MP3 or WMA files (including copy-controlled versions sold by major music stores, but not Apple's AAC downloads), provided excellent battery life (from 10 to 16 hours) and allowed fast transfers of music from Windows PCs via USB 2.0 connections. All employ wheel or rocker-switch controls to navigate through the thousands of songs stored on their hard drives but less elegant up/down buttons for volume.
How much longer can we be a land of managers-only?
That would be true if ALL programming jobs were outsourced. Even with all this hoopla about outsourcing, less than 10% of work is outsourced to India. Indian IT exports are currently around 10billion$, a drop in the bucket..
Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communications Inc. are being touted as net winners after one week of local number portability, though analysts have noted the process is in many cases taking much longer than the two and a half hours carriers were originally shooting for despite lower than expected porting volume.
Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and AT&T Wireless Services Inc. are being reported as net losers after one week of number freedom, with analysts noting AT&T Wireless' GSM activation problems are apparently contributing to its LNP-related customer losses. Sprint PCS and T-Mobile USA Inc. are being viewed as net neutral after a week.
What's interesting is AT&T wireless is actually losing customers to WNP. ATW and T-Mobile are the losers, Cingular and Sprint are neutral and Verizon and Nextel are winners.
Following the publication of this article, these letters appeared in BW
As a state government attorney representing Maine's telecommunications consumers, I regularly hear from customers who are furious about the number of indecipherable surcharges on their phone bills. While you mentioned that fees typically add 15% to the cost of long-distance service, you neglected to mention that fees and hidden rate components on local phone bills typically add over 50% to the total price. "Anatomy of a phone bill" on our Web site has an explanation of each phone surcharge (http://state.me.us/meopa/phoneanatomy.htm).
Wayne R. Jortner
Senior Counsel, Maine Public Advocate
Augusta, Me.
When Fees Become Abuse
Fees, charges, penalties? I can top that. How about being whacked when the vendor cannot provide the service? I recently moved two blocks away, and Earthlink, (ELNK ), my DSL supplier, claimed that it could not provide service at my new place, so they socked me $150 for "early termination." No amount of reason or abuse would shake them from this shakedown. Happy coda: I signed up with my local cable monopoly. No complaints so far.
Fees! Fees! Fees!
Companies can't raise prices, so they're socking
consumers with hundreds of hidden charges--and that's creating stealth inflation
and fueling a popular backlash
America used to be the land of the free. Now, it's
the land of the fee. Companies, hard-pressed for money, are taking every
possible opportunity to nickel-and-dime people to death. Need a monthly
brokerage account statement mailed to you? Ameritrade (AMTD ) may charge you $2 per
statement. Want your hotel room cleaned? The Alexander Hotel in Miami Beach,
Fla., will bill you an extra $2.50 daily for housekeeping. Have to return a new
camcorder? Best Buy (BBY ) Co.
will dock you 15% as a "restocking fee." Want to buy a season ticket for pro
football? The New York Jets will make you pay $50 for the privilege of getting
on their waiting list.
The U.S. economy has become sneaky. Inflation is
officially low, but Americans face an ever-growing mountain of extra charges
that are pushing up the true cost of purchases. No area is safe, from retail to
finance to travel to sports. "You have companies charging fees for things that
were free on an unprecedented scale," says Claes G. Fornell, marketing professor
at the University of Michigan Business School.
The extra hits -- each one
typically small by itself -- add up to big money. AT&T (T ) could bring in as much as $475
million by charging its long-distance customers a new 99 cents monthly
"regulatory assessment fee." Fresh fees for services such as housekeeping will
generate $100 million for hotels this year, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Fees on consumers who pay bills online bring banks an estimated $2 billion. And
credit-card late-payment fees -- up by 11% over the past year, on average --
could reach an astonishing $11 billion this year, estimates investment bank R.K.
Hammer.
The fee frenzy is mainly an attempt by Corporate America to
escape the brutal price wars of the past few years. Companies can't raise list
prices without losing business, so they are burying higher charges in the fine
print instead. "It's much easier to raise a price through obscure fees and
surcharges than it is to raise a sales price," says Stephen Brobeck, executive
director of the Consumer Federation of America.
The plethora of stealth
charges makes it much harder for consumers to use the Internet to do comparison
shopping, as they started to do in the late 1990s. The result is that apparently
simple buying decisions are turning into a hopeless and discouraging labyrinth.
In response, frustrated consumers are fueling a backlash, including the creation
of new vigilante organizations to pressure companies to roll back
fees.
The growing significance of extra fees means that inflation is
understated. Surprisingly, many add-on charges are not reflected in the Bureau
of Labor Statistics consumer price index. One reason is that many companies,
especially in airlines and telecom, haven't provided the BLS with a full
breakdown of their charges. In addition, fees for such things as credit-card
late payments and airline-ticket changes -- both rising -- are not included in
the government's figures. The implication: Fears of deflation may be overblown.
Instead, the true rate of inflation, so important for setting monetary policy,
is probably higher than the 2% or so that the BLS is reporting.
State and
local governments are also willing participants in the fee game. Rather than
hike taxes, politicians are hitting up Americans with a bewildering array of
fees, fines, and penalties. Cash-strapped states will pull in $2.6 billion in
new revenues this year by raising more than 200 different fees on everything
from fishing licenses to fingerprint processing to driving with new tires. On
Aug. 15, the fine for driving without possession of a driver's license in New
Jersey jumped to $173, up from $44. Some of the charges are ridiculous: With
some exceptions, blind Massachusetts residents will now have to shell out $10
once, and $15 every five years, for certification that pro
You don't have to change carriers to benefit from WNP. Have you tried calling your current carrier threatening to leave unless he sweetens the deal for your current plan. Cingular and AT&T are losing customer to porting, Verizon and Nextel have gained customers while T-mobile and Sprint are neutral. If your current carrier is Cingular or ATT, you can bargain for a better rate.
The point was that the approach that MIT took would not have put food on the table of any CS grad in the US.
If MIT had to repair a wall on its campus, would it make more sense to hire an outside contractor or get the students from the civil engineering department to do the work?
It'd be like a medical school outsourcing it's health department.
Apples and oranges...What would you say about MIT hiring an outside contractor to repair a wall on its campus when it has a civil engineering department? Hey...the poor graduate students in the civil engineering department could use the extra money..and it's related to their field, right?
Indian officials said New Delhi would soon pick up a 350-million-dollar (300-million-euro) stake in the 3.2 billion euro European satellite project, meant to rival the Global Positioning System run by the US Defence Department.
How much money do we spend fighting crime? A huge sum, i'd think..Compared to that, the criminals spend almost nothing or actually end up with a tidy profit. Should we just stop fighting crime?
hopefully Verizon and other carriers can start providing internet access over wireless connections. Don't know how this would work in sparsely populated areas..don't most of these areas have a problem with DSL service anyway?
One caveat: The wired phone you want to switch must be in the wireless carrier's local calling area, as is typically the case.
If you are moving, port over your wireline number over to your cell phone before you move. This way you get to keep your old phone number even if you move outside the callign area. Of course: this means people in your new area will have to make a long distance call when they call you.
On a side note: The wireless industry expects 5-6 million numbers to be ported between Nov 24 and the end of the year.
Slashdot Mirror
That would explain why Microsoft is losing....umm..nevermind..
How many people are going to call up Dell and complain about Indian programmers in Bangalore using == to compare Strings in java or not commenting their code? I think everyone on /. starts off with the assumption that there is NOTHING americans do better and ALL jobs will eventually go to India or China or wherever.
Have YOU travelled to Iraq?
There is a middle ground between "Rah rah America" and "great Satan"..And most people in the world are closer to the "rah-rah America" than "great satan"..they prove that everytime they dress like American teenagers, watch American movies and television..
The US army trained Tim McVeigh too...should they have let him go too? Your point is what again?
that makes you qualified to use the automated spam to send out an email saying "Size doesn't matter". Remember: An educated customer..
WIth a cell phone, you are automatically "passed on" the next cell when you move. With WLL, you are locked into your service area.
Is there any technical problem providing a service using Wireless in Local Loop(basically a cordless phone with the base unit at the telco)? They could provide phone service and wireless internet service. Are there any bandwidth restrictions in the US? It seems like a simple concept and i've seen WLL phones in India.
A Closer Look : MP3 Players to Rival Pricier iPod
Meanwhile, competing manufacturers have shipped a series of MP3 players with iPod-esque capacities and sizes but lower prices: Creative's Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, Dell's Digital Jukebox, Rio's Karma and Samsung's YP-910GS Napster.
All four sounded great when playing MP3 or WMA files (including copy-controlled versions sold by major music stores, but not Apple's AAC downloads), provided excellent battery life (from 10 to 16 hours) and allowed fast transfers of music from Windows PCs via USB 2.0 connections. All employ wheel or rocker-switch controls to navigate through the thousands of songs stored on their hard drives but less elegant up/down buttons for volume.
That would be true if ALL programming jobs were outsourced. Even with all this hoopla about outsourcing, less than 10% of work is outsourced to India. Indian IT exports are currently around 10billion$, a drop in the bucket..
Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communications Inc. are being touted as net winners after one week of local number portability, though analysts have noted the process is in many cases taking much longer than the two and a half hours carriers were originally shooting for despite lower than expected porting volume.
Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and AT&T Wireless Services Inc. are being reported as net losers after one week of number freedom, with analysts noting AT&T Wireless' GSM activation problems are apparently contributing to its LNP-related customer losses. Sprint PCS and T-Mobile USA Inc. are being viewed as net neutral after a week.
What's interesting is AT&T wireless is actually losing customers to WNP. ATW and T-Mobile are the losers, Cingular and Sprint are neutral and Verizon and Nextel are winners.
As a state government attorney representing Maine's telecommunications consumers, I regularly hear from customers who are furious about the number of indecipherable surcharges on their phone bills. While you mentioned that fees typically add 15% to the cost of long-distance service, you neglected to mention that fees and hidden rate components on local phone bills typically add over 50% to the total price. "Anatomy of a phone bill" on our Web site has an explanation of each phone surcharge (http://state.me.us/meopa/phoneanatomy.htm).
Wayne R. Jortner Senior Counsel, Maine Public Advocate Augusta, Me.
When Fees Become Abuse
Fees, charges, penalties? I can top that. How about being whacked when the vendor cannot provide the service? I recently moved two blocks away, and Earthlink, (ELNK ), my DSL supplier, claimed that it could not provide service at my new place, so they socked me $150 for "early termination." No amount of reason or abuse would shake them from this shakedown. Happy coda: I signed up with my local cable monopoly. No complaints so far.
Ian Keay Palo Alto, Calif.
Fees! Fees! Fees! Companies can't raise prices, so they're socking consumers with hundreds of hidden charges--and that's creating stealth inflation and fueling a popular backlash
America used to be the land of the free. Now, it's the land of the fee. Companies, hard-pressed for money, are taking every possible opportunity to nickel-and-dime people to death. Need a monthly brokerage account statement mailed to you? Ameritrade (AMTD ) may charge you $2 per statement. Want your hotel room cleaned? The Alexander Hotel in Miami Beach, Fla., will bill you an extra $2.50 daily for housekeeping. Have to return a new camcorder? Best Buy (BBY ) Co. will dock you 15% as a "restocking fee." Want to buy a season ticket for pro football? The New York Jets will make you pay $50 for the privilege of getting on their waiting list.
The U.S. economy has become sneaky. Inflation is officially low, but Americans face an ever-growing mountain of extra charges that are pushing up the true cost of purchases. No area is safe, from retail to finance to travel to sports. "You have companies charging fees for things that were free on an unprecedented scale," says Claes G. Fornell, marketing professor at the University of Michigan Business School.
The extra hits -- each one typically small by itself -- add up to big money. AT&T (T ) could bring in as much as $475 million by charging its long-distance customers a new 99 cents monthly "regulatory assessment fee." Fresh fees for services such as housekeeping will generate $100 million for hotels this year, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Fees on consumers who pay bills online bring banks an estimated $2 billion. And credit-card late-payment fees -- up by 11% over the past year, on average -- could reach an astonishing $11 billion this year, estimates investment bank R.K. Hammer.
The fee frenzy is mainly an attempt by Corporate America to escape the brutal price wars of the past few years. Companies can't raise list prices without losing business, so they are burying higher charges in the fine print instead. "It's much easier to raise a price through obscure fees and surcharges than it is to raise a sales price," says Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America.
The plethora of stealth charges makes it much harder for consumers to use the Internet to do comparison shopping, as they started to do in the late 1990s. The result is that apparently simple buying decisions are turning into a hopeless and discouraging labyrinth. In response, frustrated consumers are fueling a backlash, including the creation of new vigilante organizations to pressure companies to roll back fees.
The growing significance of extra fees means that inflation is understated. Surprisingly, many add-on charges are not reflected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index. One reason is that many companies, especially in airlines and telecom, haven't provided the BLS with a full breakdown of their charges. In addition, fees for such things as credit-card late payments and airline-ticket changes -- both rising -- are not included in the government's figures. The implication: Fears of deflation may be overblown. Instead, the true rate of inflation, so important for setting monetary policy, is probably higher than the 2% or so that the BLS is reporting.
State and local governments are also willing participants in the fee game. Rather than hike taxes, politicians are hitting up Americans with a bewildering array of fees, fines, and penalties. Cash-strapped states will pull in $2.6 billion in new revenues this year by raising more than 200 different fees on everything from fishing licenses to fingerprint processing to driving with new tires. On Aug. 15, the fine for driving without possession of a driver's license in New Jersey jumped to $173, up from $44. Some of the charges are ridiculous: With some exceptions, blind Massachusetts residents will now have to shell out $10 once, and $15 every five years, for certification that pro
You don't have to change carriers to benefit from WNP. Have you tried calling your current carrier threatening to leave unless he sweetens the deal for your current plan. Cingular and AT&T are losing customer to porting, Verizon and Nextel have gained customers while T-mobile and Sprint are neutral. If your current carrier is Cingular or ATT, you can bargain for a better rate.
If MIT had to repair a wall on its campus, would it make more sense to hire an outside contractor or get the students from the civil engineering department to do the work?
Apples and oranges...What would you say about MIT hiring an outside contractor to repair a wall on its campus when it has a civil engineering department? Hey...the poor graduate students in the civil engineering department could use the extra money..and it's related to their field, right?
Indian officials said New Delhi would soon pick up a 350-million-dollar (300-million-euro) stake in the 3.2 billion euro European satellite project, meant to rival the Global Positioning System run by the US Defence Department.
How much money do we spend fighting crime? A huge sum, i'd think..Compared to that, the criminals spend almost nothing or actually end up with a tidy profit. Should we just stop fighting crime?
hopefully Verizon and other carriers can start providing internet access over wireless connections. Don't know how this would work in sparsely populated areas..don't most of these areas have a problem with DSL service anyway?
The WLNP rules say you should be able to do that. The usual portability rules will apply.
If you are moving, port over your wireline number over to your cell phone before you move. This way you get to keep your old phone number even if you move outside the callign area. Of course: this means people in your new area will have to make a long distance call when they call you.
On a side note: The wireless industry expects 5-6 million numbers to be ported between Nov 24 and the end of the year.
Lethal weapon 2, Superman 2.....
More free(almost) publicity for Fox news and the Simpsons show.