Wrong. I called the recruiter, and he said they make no changes, no exceptions. I pointed out that they would be effectively stealing from me, as by this point the book was actually done, and just waiting to hit the printers. No flexibility.
Your copyright exists from the time you type the words on the page. That it had not hit the street in book form yet had no bearing on the case.
So your CURRENT employer may have had a claim against your book, but your prospective employer wouldn't.
If you still had wanted to work for that prospective employer, you would have won any court case. But why the hell would you want to work there?
Bringing it back around to my post to which you were applying, perhaps point 5 should have been:
5) the invention must have been created wholly during your time of employment
I forgot to mention in my post (above) that ALL the rules had to be met for your employer to claim the invention.
So they pay you for 40 hours, and you develop the same damn product at home working nights and evenings, and manage (oddly enough) to sneak your's into the patent office one day ahead of finishing your work assignment.
He beats you to market with YOUR invention, that you PAID him to produce.
How fair is that? How would you feel if you were paying that guy's salary.
If someone pays you to make something, it's theirs. If you do it on your own it's yours.
No, its not yours.
If I hire you to design a boats, and you go home and design boats in your spare time, I'm going to win that law suit 100 % of the time.
If you have boat designs already when you get hired, you better have proof somewhere, or better yet disclose them under a NDA agreement. And you better give up your hobby of designing boats from then on, even if you do it at home.
That is what this topic is all about. Its not as simple as your time vs employer time.
You know as well as I do that a burner has a much heavier head (comparatively speaking) laser unit than a simple rom. It's the primary reason most RW drives are slower than read only DVD drives.
I know no such thing. Like I said, most units have a single laser for both burning and reading these days. So it is not heavier.
And the slowness has more to do with the power requirements needed to actually burn a dvd, rather than simply read it. The faster you burn, the the more power needed by the laser. Your laser has to live within its rating, it can't use unlimited power.
Further when you burn, you have to burn more data than you have to read. About a third more. Readers don't have to read the redundant recovery information unless the disk is damaged. But writers have to write all of it.
But you have to admit, You are also in the distinct minority.
As I said, "Cooperatives generally don't make a good business model,".
That you can find an example of some that do only proves the rule. It is still unusual to find the co-op model in vary many medium to large scale industrial undertakings.
If you've invented this on your own time, money, and resources there is no way in the shady side of hell that your employer should have any ownership of it. If you did this while being compensated by your employer, the situation is different. If you've used your employer's money and resources, then it is fair.
Well that depends...
Most people can't compartmentalize their lives that completely. This is especially so when engaged in intellectual work (as opposed to factory drone work where you can simply flip a switch in your brain as you walk out the door).
So if I hire you to develop a left handed corner scraper and in the process you create a patentable piece of work, you might claim (truthfully) that the idea came to you while sitting on the throne in your house on a sunday afternoon when you saw the reflection of the light switch in the mirror.
Still, had you not been working for me explicitly on this project, you would, in all probability, never have had that spark of intuition.
Its too easy for you to claim you had the idea after work hours. Every body mulls over work problems at home.
Similarly, if you are employed to handle billing for your company and you stumble upon a totally unrelated idea, say for a new fishhook, on your day off or even on the job, its too easy for the company to claim it.
Fishhooks have nothing to do with billing. Everybody mulls over recreational problems while at work.
There needs to be a rational separation, such that your employer can only claim and idea when: 1) the invention must have some relevance to your work duties 2) you must be employed specifically to design/build/invent stuff 3) you must have made some use of your employers facilities or time to develop, build, and test the invention 4) you had access to some of your employer's proprietary information that helped you 5) ??
The night watchman at the Boeing plant plant that invents a new nose gear part after years of watching planes take off from his post in the guard station should still get to keep his design. The engineer or mechanic working on nose gear installation: Not so much.
There is still a lot of grey areas, but at least rules like the above would eliminate a lot of patent grabbing. (From both sides).
I've used iTunes on a Mac. Its just as much a design clusterfuck on Mac as it is on windows. Its a total mess.
This software was never designed. It was just programmed incrementally. When they came out with a phone, they looked around for anything they could hammer-to-fit and hung more code on it without a thought to usability.
If Apple built roads, they would saw down a couple trees to get across a creek. As traffic increased, they would add cross members, then add gravel, then pave it, then cement over that, then add side rails. But under that mess the logs would still be there rotting away.
iTunes is a professional embarrassment. That you need a music player to manage a phone is like needing a fish to maintain your motor-cycle.
In that case you are still wrong, since it doesn't have heads in the normal sense that disk drives have heads.
It has a laser that slides along a rail. It has a lense that jumps up and down to focus. You still need both of those even in a Read-only drive.
Recording is serially located along the disk. Nobody records movies with random placement of blocks. Therefore, there is no rapid back and forth seeking involved on CD playing or burning to induce wear on the mechanism.
The difference in weight of read lasers vs read and write lasers is negligible. The laser is tiny. In fact many devices only have a single laser, and they use higher power to write than to read.
The only devices I am aware of having more than one Laser+Lens pair are some Blu Ray drives, which have a separate lens+laser pair for backward compatibility with CDs.
I've had lasers fail, but never the mechanism. Even on the cheapest drives.
I would love to have winamp back. now if they supported something other than windows.
I hate itunes. I firmly believe it should be three pieces(media player, Media Store and Media Sync). but I have yet find another music player on the mac that actually works.
I can't believe how terrible iTunes for Windows has always been. When I bought my iPod Touch 4g, I finally reached the cold day in hell where I intentionally installed iTunes on my computer (only to activate, and upgrade the iOS version)
I can't believe you need this software AT ALL. Getting away from iTunes was one of the principal things that drove me to Android, and I've never looked back.
You can actually own android devices and not even have a computer. And even if you do have a computer there is never a need to cable your device to it.
How can the richest company on earth be so clueless when it comes to software design?
Apparently, most of these are basically voip to pots gateways. You need an internet connection and a few trunks from the local phone company you want to serve. Easy and cheap to set up and get into business.
I have no problem with them making profit, that's what the monthly fees are for.
Well, that's not how I read your prior post where you said: The carriers are trying to increase profits by making that fund a profit,
By and large the carriers don't benefit much from USF. Over all, they are net PAYERS. Its the small local/rural phone companies that receive this money, as well as schools, hospitals, and the poor (via government subsidized life line service connections. (And,...running and ducking... Obama Phones).
You said:
The USF is for building and maintaining the infrastructure, or helping to build and maintain it - it should not be used to pay for that infrastructure building and maintenance in full. Nor should the USF in any way be used to pay anyone's salary, other than those maintaining the lines and poles, and again, not in full. It's supposed to help not provide.
Check again what the Goals of the USF are. Offsetting higher operational costs, including salary, are certainly a central part of those goals. Quoting linked article:
advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas
Profit is merely one component of costs. Its the cost of borrowing money. The fund was never envisioned as only providing initial investment for infrastructure. It Always had the goal of supporting operational costs.
As for your idea of charging a bit more for calls into such regions, NO, this was a conscious decision that we as a society made when the USF was set up. We chose, wisely or unwisely, to level the playing field with respect to communications cost. Undoing that now would return us to the 1940's where the cost of a call to a town 40 miles away could exceed the cost of a call across country. What we have now allows local and long distance prices to be so cheap that its not worth the phone company even billing for it any more.
In a perfectly free market driven society, differing fees would be the normal expectation. But telephone services, rural electrification, water, sewer, have never lent themselves to a competitive free market model. (Even if they did, nobody wants six water companies and four phone companies trenching through neighborhoods simply to provide competition.) We, as a society, devised other means to substitute for the lack of competition as a means of regulating profit. Public Utility Commissions are the result where pure market economics don't quite fit easily.
Cooperatives generally don't make a good business model, except among relatively small groups of co-dependent people. They succumb too easily to the "Tragedy of the Commons", neglect, and resistance of the membership to new investment. Too often the turn into declining organizations, with disintegrating physical plant, due to neglect or under-funding, and most end up being sold to some for-profit company.
But even co-ops have to find investors to fund new infrastructure. You can't wait till everyone in the community ponies up their dues when the main water pump dies. So they borrow money, usually at usurious rates, and externalize the profit to the banks.
Its a myth that co-ops don't seek profits. They do, but not for themselves or the membership, they just hand all profits to some one else.
There is nothing wrong with making money on water utilities, It guarantees there will be interest and funds available to keep the system up to standards, expand as needed, pay the initial investors, and generally take care of business.
Don't fear profit. Doing so is simplistic and short sighted.
No... with a currency tied to gold; there tends to be deflation, when economic activity increases, due to increased demand for currency. And an insufficient supply of currency to generate further business, resulting in economic growth being depressed.
The scarcity of the gold-based currency essentially dampens economic growth.
And economic growth is necessary for the government to pay for all those expensive government programs,
cover its debt, and increase the wealth and quality of life of its people.
And that is the reason for fiat currencies.
That is nonsense. Money is is divisible. If your gold coin is worth too much to by a pair of boots, you exchange it for a smaller denomination. Deflation doesn't matter. (it actually rewards frugality).
But deflation is not a characteristic of a currency tied to a gold standard. Several will try to tell you it is, but these are people who live in an era where they could always expect government induced inflation. You can not increase the wealth and quality of life by inducing inflation.
If there's a bad harvest, bread will become more expensive. If there's an increase in the amount of gold, there'll be inflation. This isn't theory, it happened in Europe when the Spanish stole loads of it from the Incas and the English stole it from them.
A bad harvest raising the price of bread has nothing at all to do with the gold standard (or lack there of).
Its not inflation. It is simply the market allocating scarce resources, the way it is supposed to work.
If you mine more gold, you could theoretically induce a small amount of inflation. However, there isn't enough gold in the world, which, (not coincidentally) is precisely why it was chosen as the standard. You simply can't increase gold production enough.
A currency tied to a fixed commodity is the very foundation of money. After all, would you barter a day's labor painting my house in exchange for something I could pull out of thin air, such as plastic bags filled with air? If something isn't scarce or hard to get, it isn't worth anything.
Yeah, as long as you can sit directly in front, they do work pretty great. Had one for years. Too big to haul away, so I sold it with the house when I moved.
But its nice to actually be able to see what you are eating and drinking in a Sports Pub these days without them having to dim the lights just so that people can see the rear projections screens mounted like a sword of Damocles over the bar. The modern bright LED screens do so much better in such places.
There's an asymmetry of power when the establishment has the ability to cut off a major form of communication that they and the rest of the world retain the advantage of using.
I actually view cutting off the internet as an act of desperation. When viewed with hindsight, in the middle east at least, it has always signaled a fall of government.
Government power was used to shut down the internet in the first place. Probably because they were not powerful enough to force Skype (Microsoft) to let them in said back door, and could not monitor rebel coms.
Never the less, and regardless of any preference for one side over the other, the very act of a government shutting down the internet has become something of a sign of imminent government failure. Its proven to be a desperation move in middle eastern countries, and an unsuccessful move in every case.
So if that provider is Verizon, and they save the.01 cents say, 100,000,000 times, that means they're saving about $1,000,000.00. Right?
RTFA.
The provider is not Verizon. If Verizon had a presence in these small towns there wouldn't be a problem. Its precisely because Verizon has no direct route to these small rural companies that this problem has developed. Verizon hands off said calls to contract carriers who accept the call, calculate the price, and promptly drop the call. Verizon is none the wiser. The receiving party never gets the call, and is none the wiser. The calling party is left wondering WTF?
From TFA:
Least-cost routing can lead to dropped calls. What happens essentially is when one dials into Shoreham the call may be routed through, for instance, a Verizon router, and is then handed off to one of the hundreds of discount long-distance carriers. When this carrier’s computers quickly calculate that the call is a money loser because Shoreham Tel is allowed to charge a fraction more to access its lines, the secondary carrier simply drops the call.
They don't have to. You and I are paying for it with the Universal Service Fund, or Connect America Fund, as TIL it's called. The carriers are trying to increase profits by making that fund a profit, instead of using it for what it was originally designed for - to bring affordable phone service to those living out in rural areas. To me, this should be handled the same as a tax evasion or fraud case. It is a government enforced "tax" after all, and if one penny of that fund goes to anything other than to provide service to the rural community, someone should go to jail.
Lets just get over the fact that there is going to be a profit, OK? Nobody builds a telephone company to break even or run at a loss. Get over it.
You are basically saying that these rural phone companies can't take any profit unless they forego the fund.
The fund is there to level the playing field so that rural customers can afford telephone service, because without it the customer to infrastructure ratio would make it unprofitable to provide service at all. The fund is there PRECISELY to make it possible to provide the service to these areas AND a profit to the phone company owners. It is working as intended.
Universal Service Fund isn't even directly involved here.
I suggest you RTFA again.
Least-cost routing can lead to dropped calls. What happens essentially is when one dials into Shoreham the call may be routed through, for instance, an ATT router, and is then handed off to one of the hundreds of discount long-distance carriers. When this carrier’s computers quickly calculate that the call is a money loser because Shoreham Tel is allowed to charge a fraction more to access its lines, the secondary carrier simply drops the call.
The problem is unscrupulous call routing services that do not fulfill their contractual obligation to route the call if the only route available has a slightly higher cost. They simply drop the call, and notify the carrier that the call ended. (They lie).
These call routing services are middle men, responsible only to the carriers with which they contract. They are virtually unregulated.
This is strictly a contract law problem. The big carriers need to hold those call routing services feet to the fire, or use their own call routing facilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. I called the recruiter, and he said they make no changes, no exceptions. I pointed out that they would be effectively stealing from me, as by this point the book was actually done, and just waiting to hit the printers. No flexibility.
Your copyright exists from the time you type the words on the page. That it had not hit the street in book form yet had no bearing on the case.
So your CURRENT employer may have had a claim against your book, but your prospective employer wouldn't.
If you still had wanted to work for that prospective employer, you would have won any court case. But why the hell would you want to work there?
Bringing it back around to my post to which you were applying, perhaps point 5 should have been:
5) the invention must have been created wholly during your time of employment
I forgot to mention in my post (above) that ALL the rules had to be met for your employer to claim the invention.
So they pay you for 40 hours, and you develop the same damn product at home working nights and evenings, and manage (oddly enough) to sneak your's into the patent office one day ahead of finishing your work assignment.
He beats you to market with YOUR invention, that you PAID him to produce.
How fair is that?
How would you feel if you were paying that guy's salary.
If someone pays you to make something, it's theirs. If you do it on your own it's yours.
No, its not yours.
If I hire you to design a boats, and you go home and design boats in your spare time, I'm going to win that law suit 100 % of the time.
If you have boat designs already when you get hired, you better have proof somewhere, or better yet disclose them under a NDA agreement.
And you better give up your hobby of designing boats from then on, even if you do it at home.
That is what this topic is all about. Its not as simple as your time vs employer time.
You know as well as I do that a burner has a much heavier head (comparatively speaking) laser unit than a simple rom. It's the primary reason most RW drives are slower than read only DVD drives.
I know no such thing. Like I said, most units have a single laser for both burning and reading these days. So it is not heavier.
And the slowness has more to do with the power requirements needed to actually burn a dvd, rather than simply read it. The faster you burn, the the more power needed by the laser. Your laser has to live within its rating, it can't use unlimited power.
Further when you burn, you have to burn more data than you have to read. About a third more. Readers don't have to read the redundant recovery information unless the disk is damaged. But writers have to write all of it.
Credit Unions are another obvious example.
But you have to admit, You are also in the distinct minority.
As I said, "Cooperatives generally don't make a good business model,".
That you can find an example of some that do only proves the rule.
It is still unusual to find the co-op model in vary many medium to large scale industrial undertakings.
If you've invented this on your own time, money, and resources there is no way in the shady side of hell that your employer should have any ownership of it. If you did this while being compensated by your employer, the situation is different. If you've used your employer's money and resources, then it is fair.
Well that depends...
Most people can't compartmentalize their lives that completely. This is especially so when engaged in intellectual work (as opposed to factory drone work where you can simply flip a switch in your brain as you walk out the door).
So if I hire you to develop a left handed corner scraper and in the process you create a patentable piece of work, you might claim (truthfully) that the idea came to you while sitting on the throne in your house on a sunday afternoon when you saw the reflection of the light switch in the mirror.
Still, had you not been working for me explicitly on this project, you would, in all probability, never have had that spark of intuition.
Its too easy for you to claim you had the idea after work hours. Every body mulls over work problems at home.
Similarly, if you are employed to handle billing for your company and you stumble upon a totally unrelated idea, say for a new fishhook, on your day off or even on the job, its too easy for the company to claim it.
Fishhooks have nothing to do with billing. Everybody mulls over recreational problems while at work.
There needs to be a rational separation, such that your employer can only claim and idea when:
1) the invention must have some relevance to your work duties
2) you must be employed specifically to design/build/invent stuff
3) you must have made some use of your employers facilities or time to develop, build, and test the invention
4) you had access to some of your employer's proprietary information that helped you
5) ??
The night watchman at the Boeing plant plant that invents a new nose gear part after years of watching planes
take off from his post in the guard station should still get to keep his design.
The engineer or mechanic working on nose gear installation: Not so much.
There is still a lot of grey areas, but at least rules like the above would eliminate a lot of patent grabbing. (From both sides).
I've used iTunes on a Mac.
Its just as much a design clusterfuck on Mac as it is on windows. Its a total mess.
This software was never designed. It was just programmed incrementally. When they came out with a phone, they looked around for anything they could hammer-to-fit and hung more code on it without a thought to usability.
If Apple built roads, they would saw down a couple trees to get across a creek. As traffic increased, they would add cross members, then add gravel, then pave it, then cement over that, then add side rails. But under that mess the logs would still be there rotting away.
iTunes is a professional embarrassment. That you need a music player to manage a phone is like needing a fish to maintain your motor-cycle.
In that case you are still wrong, since it doesn't have heads in the normal sense that disk drives have heads.
It has a laser that slides along a rail. It has a lense that jumps up and down to focus. You still need both of those even in a Read-only drive.
Recording is serially located along the disk. Nobody records movies with random placement of blocks.
Therefore, there is no rapid back and forth seeking involved on CD playing or burning to induce wear on
the mechanism.
The difference in weight of read lasers vs read and write lasers is negligible. The laser is tiny.
In fact many devices only have a single laser, and they use higher power to write than to read.
The only devices I am aware of having more than one Laser+Lens pair are some Blu Ray drives, which have a separate
lens+laser pair for backward compatibility with CDs.
I've had lasers fail, but never the mechanism. Even on the cheapest drives.
I would love to have winamp back. now if they supported something other than windows.
I hate itunes. I firmly believe it should be three pieces(media player, Media Store and Media Sync). but I have yet find another music player on the mac that actually works.
Winamp for Mac.
Winamp for Android.
Winamp for Windows.
Stop buying your music from Apple and you don't need the store portion of iTunes.
I can't believe how terrible iTunes for Windows has always been. When I bought my iPod Touch 4g, I finally reached the cold day in hell where I intentionally installed iTunes on my computer (only to activate, and upgrade the iOS version)
I can't believe you need this software AT ALL. Getting away from iTunes was one of the principal things that drove me to Android, and I've never looked back.
You can actually own android devices and not even have a computer. And even if you do have a computer there is never a need to cable your device to it.
How can the richest company on earth be so clueless when it comes to software design?
No, your lack of reading comprehension suggests you're an idiot. Lighter heads = less wear and tear on the DRIVE. It's called context.
No your lack of reading ability precludes you from seeing what he actually wrote.
the lighter heads (Read Only) for ripping will give you a longer life on your DVD-Rom.
DVD-Rom = disk.
DVD Drive = equipment.
He said nothing about the drive lasting longer. He said the disk lasts longer.
Your apology is accepted in advance.
And "lighter heads" making his disks last longer suggests he's still thinking turn-tables and needles.
How so? Have you been aware of the saudi regime internet censure all this years?,
So you are saying Saudi Arabia has been totally cut off from the internet for a year? I beg to differ.
You're confusing shutting down the net entirely with simple censorship.
Yup, but Google will find scads of them for you.
Apparently, most of these are basically voip to pots gateways. You need an internet connection and a few trunks from the local phone company you want to serve.
Easy and cheap to set up and get into business.
I have no problem with them making profit, that's what the monthly fees are for.
Well, that's not how I read your prior post where you said: The carriers are trying to increase profits by making that fund a profit,
By and large the carriers don't benefit much from USF. Over all, they are net PAYERS. Its the small local/rural phone companies that receive this money, as well as schools, hospitals, and the poor (via government subsidized life line service connections. (And, ...running and ducking... Obama Phones).
You said:
The USF is for building and maintaining the infrastructure, or helping to build and maintain it - it should not be used to pay for that infrastructure building and maintenance in full. Nor should the USF in any way be used to pay anyone's salary, other than those maintaining the lines and poles, and again, not in full. It's supposed to help not provide.
Check again what the Goals of the USF are.
Offsetting higher operational costs, including salary, are certainly a central part of those goals.
Quoting linked article:
advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas
Profit is merely one component of costs. Its the cost of borrowing money. The fund was never envisioned as only providing initial investment for infrastructure. It Always had the goal of supporting operational costs.
As for your idea of charging a bit more for calls into such regions, NO, this was a conscious decision that we as a society made when the USF was set up. We chose, wisely or unwisely, to level the playing field with respect to communications cost. Undoing that now would return us to the 1940's where the cost of a call to a town 40 miles away could exceed the cost of a call across country. What we have now allows local and long distance prices to be so cheap that its not worth the phone company even billing for it any more.
In a perfectly free market driven society, differing fees would be the normal expectation. But telephone services, rural electrification, water, sewer, have never lent themselves to a competitive free market model. (Even if they did, nobody wants six water companies and four phone companies trenching through neighborhoods simply to provide competition.) We, as a society, devised other means to substitute for the lack of competition as a means of regulating profit. Public Utility Commissions are the result where pure market economics don't quite fit easily.
Cooperatives generally don't make a good business model, except among relatively small groups of co-dependent people. They succumb too easily to the "Tragedy of the Commons", neglect, and resistance of the membership to new investment. Too often the turn into declining organizations, with disintegrating physical plant, due to neglect or under-funding, and most end up being sold to some for-profit company.
But even co-ops have to find investors to fund new infrastructure. You can't wait till everyone in the community ponies up their dues when the main water pump dies. So they borrow money, usually at usurious rates, and externalize the profit to the banks.
Its a myth that co-ops don't seek profits. They do, but not for themselves or the membership, they just hand all profits to some one else.
There is nothing wrong with making money on water utilities, It guarantees there will be interest and funds available to keep the system up to standards, expand as needed, pay the initial investors, and generally take care of business.
Don't fear profit. Doing so is simplistic and short sighted.
No... with a currency tied to gold; there tends to be deflation, when economic activity increases, due to increased demand for currency. And an insufficient supply of currency to generate further business, resulting in economic growth being depressed.
The scarcity of the gold-based currency essentially dampens economic growth.
And economic growth is necessary for the government to pay for all those expensive government programs,
cover its debt, and increase the wealth and quality of life of its people.
And that is the reason for fiat currencies.
That is nonsense.
Money is is divisible. If your gold coin is worth too much to by a pair of boots, you exchange it for a smaller denomination.
Deflation doesn't matter. (it actually rewards frugality).
But deflation is not a characteristic of a currency tied to a gold standard. Several will try to tell you it is, but these are
people who live in an era where they could always expect government induced inflation.
You can not increase the wealth and quality of life by inducing inflation.
But gold is scares. You simply can't find enough to hurt the market.
If there's a bad harvest, bread will become more expensive. If there's an increase in the amount of gold, there'll be inflation. This isn't theory, it happened in Europe when the Spanish stole loads of it from the Incas and the English stole it from them.
A bad harvest raising the price of bread has nothing at all to do with the gold standard (or lack there of).
Its not inflation. It is simply the market allocating scarce resources, the way it is supposed to work.
If you mine more gold, you could theoretically induce a small amount of inflation. However, there isn't enough gold in the world, which, (not coincidentally) is precisely why it was chosen as the standard. You simply can't increase gold production enough.
A currency tied to a fixed commodity is the very foundation of money. After all, would you barter a day's labor painting my house in exchange for something I could pull out of thin air, such as plastic bags filled with air? If something isn't scarce or hard to get, it isn't worth anything.
Yeah, as long as you can sit directly in front, they do work pretty great. Had one for years. Too big to haul away, so I sold it with the house when I moved.
But its nice to actually be able to see what you are eating and drinking in a Sports Pub these days without them having to dim the lights just so that people can see the rear projections screens mounted like a sword of Damocles over the bar. The modern bright LED screens do so much better in such places.
There's an asymmetry of power when the establishment has the ability to cut off a major form of communication that they and the rest of the world retain the advantage of using.
I actually view cutting off the internet as an act of desperation. When viewed with hindsight, in the middle east at least, it has always signaled a fall of government.
Government power was used to shut down the internet in the first place.
Probably because they were not powerful enough to force Skype (Microsoft) to let them in said back door, and could not monitor rebel coms.
Never the less, and regardless of any preference for one side over the other, the very act of a government shutting down the internet has become something of a sign of imminent government failure. Its proven to be a desperation move in middle eastern countries, and an unsuccessful move in every case.
So if that provider is Verizon, and they save the .01 cents say, 100,000,000 times, that means they're saving about $1,000,000.00. Right?
RTFA.
The provider is not Verizon. If Verizon had a presence in these small towns there wouldn't be a problem. Its precisely because Verizon has no direct
route to these small rural companies that this problem has developed. Verizon hands off said calls to contract carriers who accept the call, calculate the price, and promptly drop the call. Verizon is none the wiser. The receiving party never gets the call, and is none the wiser. The calling party is left wondering WTF?
From TFA:
Least-cost routing can lead to dropped calls. What happens essentially is when one dials into Shoreham the call may be routed through, for instance, a Verizon router, and is then handed off to one of the hundreds of discount long-distance carriers. When this carrier’s computers quickly calculate that the call is a money loser because Shoreham Tel is allowed to charge a fraction more to access its lines, the secondary carrier simply drops the call.
They don't have to. You and I are paying for it with the Universal Service Fund, or Connect America Fund, as TIL it's called. The carriers are trying to increase profits by making that fund a profit, instead of using it for what it was originally designed for - to bring affordable phone service to those living out in rural areas. To me, this should be handled the same as a tax evasion or fraud case. It is a government enforced "tax" after all, and if one penny of that fund goes to anything other than to provide service to the rural community, someone should go to jail.
Lets just get over the fact that there is going to be a profit, OK?
Nobody builds a telephone company to break even or run at a loss. Get over it.
You are basically saying that these rural phone companies can't take any profit unless they forego the fund.
The fund is there to level the playing field so that rural customers can afford telephone service, because without it the customer to infrastructure ratio would make it unprofitable to provide service at all. The fund is there PRECISELY to make it possible to provide the service to these areas AND a profit to the phone company owners. It is working as intended.
Universal Service Fund isn't even directly involved here.
I suggest you RTFA again.
Least-cost routing can lead to dropped calls. What happens essentially is when one dials into Shoreham the call may be routed through, for instance, an ATT router, and is then handed off to one of the hundreds of discount long-distance carriers. When this carrier’s computers quickly calculate that the call is a money loser because Shoreham Tel is allowed to charge a fraction more to access its lines, the secondary carrier simply drops the call.
The problem is unscrupulous call routing services that do not fulfill their contractual obligation to route the call if the only route available has a slightly higher cost.
They simply drop the call, and notify the carrier that the call ended. (They lie).
These call routing services are middle men, responsible only to the carriers with which they contract. They are virtually unregulated.
This is strictly a contract law problem. The big carriers need to hold those call routing services feet to the fire, or use their own call routing facilities.
Swoosh...