If they aren't answering then why do they have a cell phone? If you are paying the bill tell them that answering the phone when Mom or Dad calls is not optional.
You have to pick your battles with teenagers. You're not going to win every one, at least not and keep your sanity. This is not one that's worth fighting in my book
Don't think of it as a battle. Think of it as a teaching moment. The typical unlimited text plan ranges from $14.99 (T-Mobile) to $20 (AT&T/Verizon). Show your kids how that's $240/yr that could be spent on better things. If they still insist on having it make them pay for it. Might as well educate them on how you budget in the real world.
I'm not denying the legitimacy of complaints about swapping frequencies, but I personally don't care. I've been carrying a 3G phone since 2006 and welcome the greater range for the future at the cost of the past.
The sad thing is that they have enough spectrum with the 850mhz licenses to run both but decided not to.
Verizon also did kinda screw over hundreds of thousands of OnStar customers when they turned off analog service.
Well that's kind of ironic since you just said you don't care about the past but didn't AT&T and others also shut down their AMPS networks? If there's any blame to affix here it probably belongs to the FCC.
they'll finally be compatible with a real mobile phone system
IS-2000 isn't a "real" mobile phone system? It has it's drawbacks (international roaming) but the advantages of CDMA (capacity) are so compelling that the next generation GSM standard uses it as an air interface.
but I hate a company telling me my phone isn't allowed to do something it's fully capable of doing just because it allows me to not pay them for the privilege even more.
Umm, AT&T does the exact same thing. Off the top of my head, AT&T refuses to let your phone display the actual name of the network you are on (then boots you off when you use too many roaming minutes....), disables the "network select" functionality on all of their phones and has a track record of crippling other features that's almost as bad as Verizon. If you want a carrier that doesn't play these games T-Mobile is the only (nationwide) game in town, but they aren't really an option for those who aren't city dwellers.
Verizon is a royal PITA but if your underlying concern just having a phone with the best coverage they are hard to beat. Those of us who are technically inclined can hack around their limitations -- I've had my Motorola v9m running the stock Motorola firmware since day one -- the rest of us just don't care. They also have much more expansive 3G coverage if you care about data.
But are you prepared to campaign against the Nazis if they stand for an election ? Are you prepared to expose their lies in public to ensure that no-one gets taken in again ?
That's generally what democracy requires.
If you don't support the nazis, and after a great deal of polling we discover that no-one in their right mind would support their policies, what is wrong with banning the nazi party ?
It's wrong because the minute you decide that censorship is acceptable "because of the Nazi's" it also becomes acceptable because of "fill in the blank". It's a slippery slope that leads to bad places and increased governmental power at the expense of the citizenry.
If you were hosting a government meeting and one candidate did nothing but use expletive after expletive while talking, would you allow them to continue being offensive or chuck them out ?
If I'm hosting a meeting I have the right to kick people out for whatever I want. You don't have to tolerate Nazi's on your property. What I object to is the notion of using the power of the state to squash speech because of how bad we perceive it to be.
Sometimes we have to have rules of conduct, and I think espousing racial purity, ethnic cleansing or violence against non-whites should be among those things prohibited by the rules. What is wrong with that ?
It's wrong because you put the Government in the position of deciding which speech is acceptable. Today it will be the Nazi's, tomorrow it will be some other group. To borrow a quote (that was ironically said about the Nazi's):
"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me, and by that time nobody was left to speak up."
I'm sorry but if you are advocating suppressing free speech I will fight you every step of the way, regardless of how horrible the underlying speech may be. To borrow another quote: "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
but the guy who set that in motion started his political career promising lebensraum, which necessitated war.
So now I can't advocate for something that involves war? See, this is the slippery slope. You start out intending to restrict Nazi's and you end up restricting even more speech. If I want to form a political party that advocates for war with "fill in the blank" (in the US, Pakistan would be a good bet, given the safe havens in the frontier provinces, but use your imagination) you are going to squash my free speech? Why not form your own political party that opposes me?
Give them an inch and they will take a mile.
See, I tend to think that of the people that would seek to censor speech.
we should agree that anybody whose election promises necessitate violence against others simply because they are foreign or black or jewish or whatever should not be allowed to stand.
No, we shouldn't. We should agree to oppose their efforts and vote against them but restricting their free speech or ability to run for office turns our democratic republic into the fascist state that you seek to avoid.
Cause I just envisioned someone wearing this jacket in a seedy "adult" theater.
Every new technology will first be used to find new and interesting ways of getting ourselves off. We really haven't changed all that much since we started walking upright, have we?;)
Hahaha, well, I'm from Upstate New York and while we can't compete with you on the -40 and -50 temperatures, I completely agree with you about having the last cookout before it gets cold;)
And that still haven't figured out what to do with the waste?
Amazingly enough France doesn't have this problem because they recycle the waste.
Waste, safety, weapons proliferation, and fuel sarcity make uranium/plutonium fission a dead end
The French have solved the waste problem, the "safety" issue is FUD, weapons proliferation can be dealt with through the existing channels (and seems to be happening anyway without much help from the civilian power industry) and I have yet to see any proof that we are running out of fissionable material.
does nothing but make each subscriber more expensive to provision
Wouldn't my $35 "activation fee" cover this expense? The "activation fee" that is (amazingly enough) not typically waived even when you get locked into a two year contract? Do you expect us to believe that it costs more than $35 to provision a customer when said provisioning process never seems to take more than 3-5 minutes? I guess keying an ESN/SIM card into your system is a real PITA, huh?
Believe it or not the call detail records for both voice and data are quite expensive to maintain.
Do you expect us to believe that it's harder for you to keep call detail records than it is for the landline company, who manages to sell service without contracts? You might have a few more fields in your database than they do (call origination) but I don't think that's a particularly burdensome requirement.
Also "bringing your own phone" can cause a customer service nightmare where people expect to use their POS phones they brought 10 years ago, for which Reps cannot all be fully trained to answer questions.
In my experience your reps are useless with carrier branded phones as well. In any case this problem could be solved by directing people to the manufacturer for support if they have a non-branded phone. Ya know, the same business model that the landline company has been using for decades?
This then leads to all sorts of industry analysts claiming customer satisfaction is garbage when it's really the customer's shooting themselves in the foot.
Your customer satisfaction is garbage because you lock people into long term contracts and hold them hostage when they try to leave because of shitty service. Keep drinking the kool-aid though.
If I had points, I'd mod you troll as a compliment.
Would that be a +1 troll?;)
Re:Were nerds here... use the f'ing metric system
on
The 100 Degree Data Center
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Fahrenheit is stupid.
Wow, how insightful and deep. You have to think real hard to come up with such compelling commentary?
Celsius on the other hand is much easier to remember:
0 - Water freezes
10 - Cool
20 - Nice
30 - Hot
40 - Scorching hot
50 - Burn sensation
100 - Water boils
Surely you mean water freezes and boils at one standard atmosphere, right? Which brings me back to my point about it being just as arbitrarily defined as Fahrenheit was. Fahrenheit also offers more precision without using decimals.
And slashdot.org is not an american-only site as it's domain name ends in.org and not in.us
Domain names don't mean jack. Slashdot is American owned with a largely American readership. Yet someone still managed to whine about the fucking summary using American measurements, in spite the fact that the metric measurements were also provided. Hmm.......
Yeah but below zero in Celsius loses it's special meaning when you live in an cold climate. Below zero Fahrenheit on the other hand.... that's freeze your nose hairs weather;)
WTF in my original comment was "trolling", BTW? Pointing out that/. is an American site or having the nerve to come out against one aspect of the metric system?
Pipe the cold water (which is usually somewhere between 0 and 20 degrees C) through heat exchangers in the hot data centre before heating it up to working temperature with gas or electricity.
And once your cold water reaches the same temperature as the data center, what then? Most office buildings don't use a lot of hot water (it's mostly hand washing as you pointed out) and I'd be surprised if they go through enough to absorb the BTUs from a typical data center for any meaningful amount of time.
Obviously you've never worked in the insurance or legal businesses;)
Re:Were nerds here... use the f'ing metric system
on
The 100 Degree Data Center
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, this is an American site, so use something that most Americans can intuitively relate to. I have no problem working with most metric measurements (indeed, I did so for a number of years working in machining) but temperature just doesn't compute for me unless I do the calculations in my head.
Fahrenheit just makes more sense to most of us. 30s = cold, 40s = chilly, 50s = cool, 60s = decent/might need a windbreaker, 70s = nice, 80s = warm, 90s = hot, etc, etc. Celsius is no where near that intuitive and was as arbitrarily defined as Fahrenheit was.
Most of this is because the wireless companies are heavily subsidizing the cost of the hardware to get you in as a paying customer.
Are you sure you don't work in marketing if you are repeating this line? If the contracts are all about the equipment subsidy then why does your employer charge the same ETF for my cheap candy bar with the full retail price (without contract) under $100 as they do for the $600 smart phone? Why do they lock me into the same contract as someone who got a subsidy if I'm willing to pay full price for my phone or bring my own?
Maybe one day there will be an entity that I trust to run a nuclear power plant safely and efficiently
You mean like all those entities currently running it that haven't had accidents? This guy said it better than I can.
That, and the problem of waste that's hazardous for 10,000 years....
Well, A) There's reprocessing, B) How long is all that CO2 going to remain hazardous? Is nuclear waste going to melt the polar icecaps? Is nuclear waste going to decimate our grain growing regions? Is nuclear waste going to upset the global balance of power and led to starvation/warfare/misery on a huge scale?
I make no argument either way on whether we are starving third world countries. I was only pointing out how utterly wrong the GP was when he said "Nobody credible on the subject of biofuels has seriously advocated using food crops for fuel"
Using HTTPS to transmit posts and such to any site would mean that the government cannot tie those posts to you unless you are stupid enough to use your real name
Yeah, unless that site keeps logs and/or timestamps your posts and the Government is smart enough to figure out what an IP address is......
I've been on AT&T for four years now without ever being under contract, and no I am not on a "GoPhone" prepaid
Then you got in before they changed their policy. I tried to get AT&T service without a contract using my unlocked GSM phone and was told by four different people (salesperson, store manager, CSR on the 800 number and her manager) that it couldn't be done.
or T-Mobile got a network that was worth a shit outside of cities
T-Mobile actually has a way to do it now, but you've just answered why it's hard to do business with them. Of course, IMHO AT&T is the worst of the worst. Around these parts (and others) they are in the process of moving GSM service off the 850mhz band to make room for 3G services. As a result, you have good service when you go to bed and crappy service when you wake up in the morning (1900mhz doesn't reach as far or go into buildings as well).
Say what you will about Verizon but they've never made network changes that screwed over existing customers. I hate CDMA land but Verizon's network is really tough to beat. Particularly in the Northeast. AT&T still has some pretty sizable holes around here.
Slashdot Mirror
sometimes they just don't want to answer
If they aren't answering then why do they have a cell phone? If you are paying the bill tell them that answering the phone when Mom or Dad calls is not optional.
You have to pick your battles with teenagers. You're not going to win every one, at least not and keep your sanity. This is not one that's worth fighting in my book
Don't think of it as a battle. Think of it as a teaching moment. The typical unlimited text plan ranges from $14.99 (T-Mobile) to $20 (AT&T/Verizon). Show your kids how that's $240/yr that could be spent on better things. If they still insist on having it make them pay for it. Might as well educate them on how you budget in the real world.
Downloading an 7.5 MB browser installer in 30 seconds needs a 2 Mbps connection. (7.5 MB * 8 bits/byte / 30 s = 2 Mbps.)
You forgot to factor in the IP, TCP, Ethernet and/or ATM overhead ;)
Adblock Plus is the real reason to use Firefox
I've found NoScript to be more compelling. Maybe we should say that extensions are the reasons to use Firefox?
And they are plutonium factories. Prime terrorist targets.
There goes that FUD again. OMG, the terrorists! Quick, take off your shoes or something!
You're unaware that the planet's supply of uranium is limited?
You're unaware that uranium isn't the only source of fuel for nuclear fission?
Odd gap in your education, that.
Also, fuck you.
I'm not denying the legitimacy of complaints about swapping frequencies, but I personally don't care. I've been carrying a 3G phone since 2006 and welcome the greater range for the future at the cost of the past.
The sad thing is that they have enough spectrum with the 850mhz licenses to run both but decided not to.
Verizon also did kinda screw over hundreds of thousands of OnStar customers when they turned off analog service.
Well that's kind of ironic since you just said you don't care about the past but didn't AT&T and others also shut down their AMPS networks? If there's any blame to affix here it probably belongs to the FCC.
they'll finally be compatible with a real mobile phone system
IS-2000 isn't a "real" mobile phone system? It has it's drawbacks (international roaming) but the advantages of CDMA (capacity) are so compelling that the next generation GSM standard uses it as an air interface.
but I hate a company telling me my phone isn't allowed to do something it's fully capable of doing just because it allows me to not pay them for the privilege even more.
Umm, AT&T does the exact same thing. Off the top of my head, AT&T refuses to let your phone display the actual name of the network you are on (then boots you off when you use too many roaming minutes....), disables the "network select" functionality on all of their phones and has a track record of crippling other features that's almost as bad as Verizon. If you want a carrier that doesn't play these games T-Mobile is the only (nationwide) game in town, but they aren't really an option for those who aren't city dwellers.
Verizon is a royal PITA but if your underlying concern just having a phone with the best coverage they are hard to beat. Those of us who are technically inclined can hack around their limitations -- I've had my Motorola v9m running the stock Motorola firmware since day one -- the rest of us just don't care. They also have much more expansive 3G coverage if you care about data.
There, fixed that for you.
I'm a little confused as to what you "fixed", given the fact that my post was already about what Americans are used to.
But are you prepared to campaign against the Nazis if they stand for an election ? Are you prepared to expose their lies in public to ensure that no-one gets taken in again ?
That's generally what democracy requires.
If you don't support the nazis, and after a great deal of polling we discover that no-one in their right mind would support their policies, what is wrong with banning the nazi party ?
It's wrong because the minute you decide that censorship is acceptable "because of the Nazi's" it also becomes acceptable because of "fill in the blank". It's a slippery slope that leads to bad places and increased governmental power at the expense of the citizenry.
If you were hosting a government meeting and one candidate did nothing but use expletive after expletive while talking, would you allow them to continue being offensive or chuck them out ?
If I'm hosting a meeting I have the right to kick people out for whatever I want. You don't have to tolerate Nazi's on your property. What I object to is the notion of using the power of the state to squash speech because of how bad we perceive it to be.
Sometimes we have to have rules of conduct, and I think espousing racial purity, ethnic cleansing or violence against non-whites should be among those things prohibited by the rules. What is wrong with that ?
It's wrong because you put the Government in the position of deciding which speech is acceptable. Today it will be the Nazi's, tomorrow it will be some other group. To borrow a quote (that was ironically said about the Nazi's):
"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me, and by that time nobody was left to speak up."
I'm sorry but if you are advocating suppressing free speech I will fight you every step of the way, regardless of how horrible the underlying speech may be. To borrow another quote: "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
but the guy who set that in motion started his political career promising lebensraum, which necessitated war.
So now I can't advocate for something that involves war? See, this is the slippery slope. You start out intending to restrict Nazi's and you end up restricting even more speech. If I want to form a political party that advocates for war with "fill in the blank" (in the US, Pakistan would be a good bet, given the safe havens in the frontier provinces, but use your imagination) you are going to squash my free speech? Why not form your own political party that opposes me?
Give them an inch and they will take a mile.
See, I tend to think that of the people that would seek to censor speech.
we should agree that anybody whose election promises necessitate violence against others simply because they are foreign or black or jewish or whatever should not be allowed to stand.
No, we shouldn't. We should agree to oppose their efforts and vote against them but restricting their free speech or ability to run for office turns our democratic republic into the fascist state that you seek to avoid.
What does walking upright [wikipedia.org] have to do with it?!
Well, it frees up our hands for "other" purposes ;)
Cause I just envisioned someone wearing this jacket in a seedy "adult" theater.
Every new technology will first be used to find new and interesting ways of getting ourselves off. We really haven't changed all that much since we started walking upright, have we? ;)
Hahaha, well, I'm from Upstate New York and while we can't compete with you on the -40 and -50 temperatures, I completely agree with you about having the last cookout before it gets cold ;)
And that still haven't figured out what to do with the waste?
Amazingly enough France doesn't have this problem because they recycle the waste.
Waste, safety, weapons proliferation, and fuel sarcity make uranium/plutonium fission a dead end
The French have solved the waste problem, the "safety" issue is FUD, weapons proliferation can be dealt with through the existing channels (and seems to be happening anyway without much help from the civilian power industry) and I have yet to see any proof that we are running out of fissionable material.
does nothing but make each subscriber more expensive to provision
Wouldn't my $35 "activation fee" cover this expense? The "activation fee" that is (amazingly enough) not typically waived even when you get locked into a two year contract? Do you expect us to believe that it costs more than $35 to provision a customer when said provisioning process never seems to take more than 3-5 minutes? I guess keying an ESN/SIM card into your system is a real PITA, huh?
Believe it or not the call detail records for both voice and data are quite expensive to maintain.
Do you expect us to believe that it's harder for you to keep call detail records than it is for the landline company, who manages to sell service without contracts? You might have a few more fields in your database than they do (call origination) but I don't think that's a particularly burdensome requirement.
Also "bringing your own phone" can cause a customer service nightmare where people expect to use their POS phones they brought 10 years ago, for which Reps cannot all be fully trained to answer questions.
In my experience your reps are useless with carrier branded phones as well. In any case this problem could be solved by directing people to the manufacturer for support if they have a non-branded phone. Ya know, the same business model that the landline company has been using for decades?
This then leads to all sorts of industry analysts claiming customer satisfaction is garbage when it's really the customer's shooting themselves in the foot.
Your customer satisfaction is garbage because you lock people into long term contracts and hold them hostage when they try to leave because of shitty service. Keep drinking the kool-aid though.
For the scientific community, not so much.
I need something useful for the scientific community when deciding what to wear today?
For regular humans, maybe.
I think you just proved my point.
If I had points, I'd mod you troll as a compliment.
Would that be a +1 troll? ;)
Fahrenheit is stupid.
Wow, how insightful and deep. You have to think real hard to come up with such compelling commentary?
Celsius on the other hand is much easier to remember:
0 - Water freezes
10 - Cool
20 - Nice
30 - Hot
40 - Scorching hot
50 - Burn sensation
100 - Water boils
Surely you mean water freezes and boils at one standard atmosphere, right? Which brings me back to my point about it being just as arbitrarily defined as Fahrenheit was. Fahrenheit also offers more precision without using decimals.
And slashdot.org is not an american-only site as it's domain name ends in .org and not in .us
Domain names don't mean jack. Slashdot is American owned with a largely American readership. Yet someone still managed to whine about the fucking summary using American measurements, in spite the fact that the metric measurements were also provided. Hmm.......
Yeah but below zero in Celsius loses it's special meaning when you live in an cold climate. Below zero Fahrenheit on the other hand.... that's freeze your nose hairs weather ;)
WTF in my original comment was "trolling", BTW? Pointing out that /. is an American site or having the nerve to come out against one aspect of the metric system?
Pipe the cold water (which is usually somewhere between 0 and 20 degrees C) through heat exchangers in the hot data centre before heating it up to working temperature with gas or electricity.
And once your cold water reaches the same temperature as the data center, what then? Most office buildings don't use a lot of hot water (it's mostly hand washing as you pointed out) and I'd be surprised if they go through enough to absorb the BTUs from a typical data center for any meaningful amount of time.
but you reach a limit on what you can take off.
Obviously you've never worked in the insurance or legal businesses ;)
Actually, this is an American site, so use something that most Americans can intuitively relate to. I have no problem working with most metric measurements (indeed, I did so for a number of years working in machining) but temperature just doesn't compute for me unless I do the calculations in my head.
Fahrenheit just makes more sense to most of us. 30s = cold, 40s = chilly, 50s = cool, 60s = decent/might need a windbreaker, 70s = nice, 80s = warm, 90s = hot, etc, etc. Celsius is no where near that intuitive and was as arbitrarily defined as Fahrenheit was.
That's a pretty interesting link. Thanks for sharing :) Wish I had some mod points to throw at you.
Most of this is because the wireless companies are heavily subsidizing the cost of the hardware to get you in as a paying customer.
Are you sure you don't work in marketing if you are repeating this line? If the contracts are all about the equipment subsidy then why does your employer charge the same ETF for my cheap candy bar with the full retail price (without contract) under $100 as they do for the $600 smart phone? Why do they lock me into the same contract as someone who got a subsidy if I'm willing to pay full price for my phone or bring my own?
Maybe one day there will be an entity that I trust to run a nuclear power plant safely and efficiently
You mean like all those entities currently running it that haven't had accidents? This guy said it better than I can.
That, and the problem of waste that's hazardous for 10,000 years....
Well, A) There's reprocessing, B) How long is all that CO2 going to remain hazardous? Is nuclear waste going to melt the polar icecaps? Is nuclear waste going to decimate our grain growing regions? Is nuclear waste going to upset the global balance of power and led to starvation/warfare/misery on a huge scale?
I make no argument either way on whether we are starving third world countries. I was only pointing out how utterly wrong the GP was when he said "Nobody credible on the subject of biofuels has seriously advocated using food crops for fuel"
Using HTTPS to transmit posts and such to any site would mean that the government cannot tie those posts to you unless you are stupid enough to use your real name
Yeah, unless that site keeps logs and/or timestamps your posts and the Government is smart enough to figure out what an IP address is......
I've been on AT&T for four years now without ever being under contract, and no I am not on a "GoPhone" prepaid
Then you got in before they changed their policy. I tried to get AT&T service without a contract using my unlocked GSM phone and was told by four different people (salesperson, store manager, CSR on the 800 number and her manager) that it couldn't be done.
or T-Mobile got a network that was worth a shit outside of cities
T-Mobile actually has a way to do it now, but you've just answered why it's hard to do business with them. Of course, IMHO AT&T is the worst of the worst. Around these parts (and others) they are in the process of moving GSM service off the 850mhz band to make room for 3G services. As a result, you have good service when you go to bed and crappy service when you wake up in the morning (1900mhz doesn't reach as far or go into buildings as well).
Say what you will about Verizon but they've never made network changes that screwed over existing customers. I hate CDMA land but Verizon's network is really tough to beat. Particularly in the Northeast. AT&T still has some pretty sizable holes around here.