Standing one hour in Texas sun on the open road can be life-threatening. If needed, feign dehydration and sunstroke some time before you actually dehydrate and collapse, so you'll stay in control of what happens instead of passing out. Sue in any case.
Here's the argument from the article again, we all break the laws several times a day without knowing, but the police know and will put us all in prison or worse for crimes we didn't commit or for things that shouldn't be "crimes" in any non-fascist society.
This accusation of unjust incrimination for everyone and everything is the crucial difference between the Police and the Gestapo, yet no one bothered to name a single situation, example or proof, where this could happen.
If there are 10.000 laws in the US which everyone is breaking 5 times a day without knowing, it shouldn't be that hard to name a few so us average Joes can learn to avoid breaking that law in the first place and/or organize a petition to get rid of them.
How do you think apps and OSes for smartphones get developed? Reflashing ROMs with every new nightly build, hoping you didn't brick the phone *this* time? That way, even RIM themselves would run out of spares fast...
The article was painting a scary image about unjust searches, average Joes getting in PMITA prison for something on their cellphone that was found in conjunction with a petty little arrest, so basically poor alsmost-innocent citizens crushed under the heels of totally corrupt, jackbooted officers.
What I missed is even a single plausible example situation that fulfills the three basic requirements the entire article and scare is built upon:
The first two I can understand: - "being arrested fpr a petty crime with the smartphone searched in the process" (Side question: which "petty" infractions lead to actual arrests?) - "getting a heavy sentence for something they found on the smartphone" (Side question: what "crimes" can proven beyond the reasonable doubt of judge and jury from smartphone data only - emails, photos, browser logs, GPS, apps?)
Until here, I would still call it "good work in reducing crime, thank you officer for keeping us safe".
But I have a hard time wrapping my head around the third requirement, but which is needed for this act to become actual oppression: - "not having done anything wrong, at least so you know, because there's so many criminal laws that no average Joe knows them"
What conceivable situation would fulfill all three, ie. being oppression rather than good police work?
This is is a serious trust issue, on how much you trust your partner or your partner trusts you. There are many shades of gray there and speaking from recent experience, there can be a particular point in time, where past events, suspicions and violations of trust accumulate in a way that even the tiniest little doubt on top of them can be the final straw that breaks the camels back.
If your partner has lied to you on N previous times and you found out, how likely will you believe they are innocent *this* time?
VDI is perfect when you need to roll out 1000 clients at the drop of a hat, when you had not a single client before.
We did it and it's great. All notebooks are can be changed, replaced, rebuilt in seconds. Lost notebooks contain no information, no data, nothing. Newly needed applications can be deployed overnight for everyone without a glitch. If it works for the testers on the VDI terminal server, it will work for all others. No company data leaves the data center except for the screen the employee is actually looking at, which means exporting databases and stealing excel files full of stuff is much less likely and needs circumventing email protections only the admins in the data center far away can control. have In a leak, you at least have the email logfiles, which would help a lot in the following lawsuits.
Deploying stuff to a thousand client machines with probably a hundred tiny little differences and a thousand possible failure scenarios is causing much more of a headache than not being able to work at all when the network connection is down, since the amount of work that CAN be done without the net is small enough and getting smaller.
As much as I would love you being right here, but I don't think it's true. Children, even newborn, are not a blank sheet of paper and they do have prejudices, likenesses and preferences of their own.
I also take offense from hatred being portrayed as a sin committed primarily by white children vs. brown people. This color of skin thing is pretty universal between different skin colors. If in doubt, as a European, take a walk somewhere in rural Africa, ask Vietnamese about Indians, or Indians about Russians or Russians about Chinese. No one is innocent, just some slightly more than others - some prejudices are pretty much ubiquitous.
Anyway, I would think even with a group of robot-educated orphan kids in symmetric racial proportions, we would see some kind of prejudice within them, some group(s) forming that hate the other group(s). A class of Black robot-educated orphan kids will taunt and tease a single White robot-educated orphan kid and vice versa. I don't know why, but I know they'll do. Even dividing otherwise identical people into groups with blue and red overcoats will incite some hatred of red vs. blue, even without a Football match.
They are compensated by their employers. But people complained about feeling guilty by buying goods and services from people on holidays. Tipping well works quite okay in not only relieving that guilt but increasing the profit those workers gain from working these shifts.
Feeling guilty about having more money and a better life than someone else is usually unwarranted, because having more money usually means having made wiser choices or other sacrifices, but in any case there's no easier way to relieve than that.
Clock and alarms from the cheapest thrift stores work incredibly accurate. People were expecting the same from iPhone iOS and were bitterly disappointed. I used to be expecting this from my Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, but this being Windows, I have no one to blame but me for relying on it.
But yes, I think programming related to time and date is simple. Not because because it actually is trivial - which it is not - but because it is probably the best known *non*-trivial subject. It is rubbed in in every course on programming that is worth its merits. All teachers and professors and books never cease to preach to their students on how difficult programming on sorting, searching, time and encryption is, no matter how deceivingly trivial they may seem at first to a naive beginner.
Most programs will have *something* to do with time and date, sorting or searching, which is the reason they are taught so extensively. Messing up these known-hard but well-researched subjects is a tell-tale sign that even a faintest hint from all these exhaustive material in academic and educational teaching has been ignored, forgotten or never heard or read.
Which means the programmer has blissfully ignored all the warnings he should have received in education or not received any education at all.
Either way, it marks an amateur who should not code production quality software for the flagship device of the largest publicly-traded consumer electronics company in the US.
A lazy tester and a broken testing process is just the icing on the cake here.
None of them should ever be allowed within five miles of companies who produce software for autopilots and nuclear plants.
There are uncounted numbers of extremely crappy jobs where people get up for on the weekends. Especially in aviation, power generation, medical and law enforcement. Pilots, policemen, doctors, nurses, power plant managers - all extremely crappy?
Not to mention people needing to get up to reach the flight to their extremely expensive vacation.
Phone alarms have proven to be extremely reliable for more than a decade. Only smartphones of either OS flavor have ever ever failed something as dumb as the alarm function.
A normal alarm clock runs on whatever voltage it was designed for. Usually, they are designed for the national grids of the countries where they are to be sold. Clocks to be sold in the US run on 110V, clocks to be sold in most other locations run on 220-230V.
Since the advent of switching power supplies, this distinction is usually moot as most electronics are now designed to accept any voltage between 110v and 230v with either 50 or 60Hz line frequency. Eliminates the logistics hassle.
Not to mention there's no way to reliably determine if the battery is still working or not. Without the alarm clock blinking like they used to, it's very hard to tell if there were daily short blackouts when you and everyone else were at work that drained the 9v battery. Depending on the reliability of your power supply, replacing the battery on fixed, pre-set intervals wouldn't guarantee a thing.
The only ways to know the battery is dead is by either checking it regularly with a voltmeter and replacing it much before the critical voltage or live with a remaining risk of x% where x can only be guessed after you sleep-in.
Probably unsuitable for people working in transportation, medical, law enforcement, power generation. How do these people ensure their wake-up on odd schedules, different changing locations with harsh consequences for ever being a minute late?
Simply because it works reasonably well, is always on hand and works the same way at home, on business trips and vacations. And has a battery backup.
People simply assume the alarm function to be much too simple to allow even the stupidest developers to not get them right. Nobody expects people to mess up simple functions like that. And nobody expects the device itself to report the wrong time. For that reason, developers who can't get an alarm app working should be fired straight away. And OS developers who can't get their OS to report the correct time for each and every case should not only not be developing OS'es, but only be allowed to develop static HTML web pages for the rest of their careers.
In my defintion, tough control on all workers, attempted extinction of individuality and free enterprise - or even personal property no matter how small - could very well be called "Communism". The one-party rule, the forced labor camps, the singular appointed chairman ruling the rabble with an iron fist are very much like the other "Communism" we've seen before, including the ubiquitous display of hammer, sickle and the chairman. Troop parades and countless faceless mooks goose-stepping before The Party adds a final touch, although we've seen these from a number of other rather unpleasant regimes.
If you want to define it further, call it National Communism. Just like National Socialism, but with even less individuality, less private property and more hive-mindedness.
Assuming for a while that profit reports from state-sponsored companies in at least partially Communist countries can be trusted, the reasons behind a successful metro systems usually have something to do with a high or extreme population density.
Outside of SE Asian culture, population density cannot reach these heights without extreme adverse effects like countless social norm infractions, violence and generally high crime rates. Contrasted with a guilt-society like the West, a shame-society like SE Asia would probably be the exact opposite: less and minor infractions happening in high density areas because of a higher shame-exposure, where in guilt-societies, the least crime would happen in lower density areas, because of a much higher guilt-exposure when potential offenders would know their victims by name.
Probably related: metro stations in SE Asia are not always clean, but always clean of graffiti. metro stations in the West, no matter how clean they are, always have some graffiti somewhere.
So in short, packing people like in Hong Kong works well if the people have a SE Asian cultural background. Other people and other cultural backgrounds yield different results.
Well-designed light rails or metro systems lead to even higher population densities in the areas they service. This is especially noticeable in crowded cities like Moscow, Beijing etc. where the prices of apartments drop off beyond the last metro ring, dramatically as in "orders of magnitude", because without the metro, tenants cannot reach anything in these otherwise gridlocked cities, making it uninteresting for "urbanite"-minded people.
Problem is: some 10-40% of all people will try to escape urban areas of high population density if they can somehow afford it, because that's what they ultimately and strongly want. These "pioneer"-minded people (for lack of a better word) are not abandoning the city because of bad metro systems, traffic jams, but fleeing noise and their fellow humans when there's too many of them close by. A high population density means a rapid decrease in effectiveness of police, law and social norms enforcement, which is the reason people are fleeing away from it. A metro system coming to them is simply iterating the cycle of "urbanites" flowing in and "pioneers" moving out.
Except that image based backups will by definition include malware and config errors if present.
Unless there's enough disk space for saving one initial and maybe hundreds of incremental images and at some point even the oldest backup on disk may already contain the root kit or serious config error you only detected yesterday.
The wonders of image-based backups are well-known and of course well deserved.
But it doesn't change a thing about the fundamental problem: a system evolves, with new software or new versions of old software coming in every other week. Backups, image or file based, need to accommodate for the new data.
No matter if this is done incrementally or with full new images, there will be a fuzzy variable called "known-good state" that is slowly and irreversibly decreasing with every configuration or software change. After several months and dozens of new versions, the system may be running smoothly, but is it free of a root kit? Or is there a root kit that's just very very well hidden?
Whatever way the Chrome OS chooses for its backups, it will either back up installed malware and b0rken config files or a rollback is like a complete reinstall. Can't have your cake and eat it.
If a system can store any amount of personal configuration, programs and data, it can by definition be broken by user mistakes and malware. Broken because of infected software or a configuration that renders the software or the entire system inoperable.
Just mix up two different configuration files from two different major versions of any software. Run the software. Feel the pain.
Neither Bill Gates nor the Cloud will help you there, you'll have to start fresh. Which mean reinstalling that thing.
I can already replace my Windows installation and when the OS is infected by a virus or something, it's very, very easy to restore. Just hit a BIOS switch, reinstall from a truly hidden (and BIOS-protected) partition - or recovery DVD - and reinstall without destroying user data. (All user data is on D:, while reinstall will bomb C:)
It doesn't work that well, let me tell you. User data is there, but programs need to be reinstalled to access it. System comes back squeaky clean, but everything needs to be changed to my personal liking.
What it boils down is that a computer will be either vulnerable to users, useless for them or anything in between these extremes. Can't install programs? Useless but secure. Can install any program? Useful, but vulnerable.
Without settings and mail saved *somewhere*, a mail client is useless. With settings and mail saved *anywhere*, a mail client is potentially vulnerable.
Replacing the OS with a known-good image only works if someone can truly produce an image that is more useful than say a Windows default installation and still known to be good. Which gets increasingly doubtful the older the OS image is, the more programs are installed and the more data/configuration/specifics are kept in program installations somewhere.
That the price for an SMS has doubled or tripled in the last 10 years while all other phone costs dropped dramatically means there's a huge market for that and people will bear these prices.
Frequent person-to-person communication by SMS is the one true hallmark of the true lower stratums of society. It's probably mall rats, chavs and other welfare zombies behind 90% of all SMS traffic.
Except that VOIP is against most TOS'es, sometimes heavily blocked, usually sandvined.
Changing SIM cards is a workaround, but a crappy one. T-Mobile A, T-Mobile B and T-Mobile C could very well get together and abandon roaming charges between them. It is one network and they don't have any higher costs in doing so, they're just shafting their customers, hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Standing one hour in Texas sun on the open road can be life-threatening. If needed, feign dehydration and sunstroke some time before you actually dehydrate and collapse, so you'll stay in control of what happens instead of passing out. Sue in any case.
Nice material for events like these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDJrQBwJpqk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaCe6nQUX5c
Here's the argument from the article again, we all break the laws several times a day without knowing, but the police know and will put us all in prison or worse for crimes we didn't commit or for things that shouldn't be "crimes" in any non-fascist society.
This accusation of unjust incrimination for everyone and everything is the crucial difference between the Police and the Gestapo, yet no one bothered to name a single situation, example or proof, where this could happen.
If there are 10.000 laws in the US which everyone is breaking 5 times a day without knowing, it shouldn't be that hard to name a few so us average Joes can learn to avoid breaking that law in the first place and/or organize a petition to get rid of them.
Virtual machines. Virtual images.
How do you think apps and OSes for smartphones get developed? Reflashing ROMs with every new nightly build, hoping you didn't brick the phone *this* time? That way, even RIM themselves would run out of spares fast...
The article was painting a scary image about unjust searches, average Joes getting in PMITA prison for something on their cellphone that was found in conjunction with a petty little arrest, so basically poor alsmost-innocent citizens crushed under the heels of totally corrupt, jackbooted officers.
What I missed is even a single plausible example situation that fulfills the three basic requirements the entire article and scare is built upon:
The first two I can understand:
- "being arrested fpr a petty crime with the smartphone searched in the process" (Side question: which "petty" infractions lead to actual arrests?)
- "getting a heavy sentence for something they found on the smartphone" (Side question: what "crimes" can proven beyond the reasonable doubt of judge and jury from smartphone data only - emails, photos, browser logs, GPS, apps?)
Until here, I would still call it "good work in reducing crime, thank you officer for keeping us safe".
But I have a hard time wrapping my head around the third requirement, but which is needed for this act to become actual oppression:
- "not having done anything wrong, at least so you know, because there's so many criminal laws that no average Joe knows them"
What conceivable situation would fulfill all three, ie. being oppression rather than good police work?
This is is a serious trust issue, on how much you trust your partner or your partner trusts you. There are many shades of gray there and speaking from recent experience, there can be a particular point in time, where past events, suspicions and violations of trust accumulate in a way that even the tiniest little doubt on top of them can be the final straw that breaks the camels back.
If your partner has lied to you on N previous times and you found out, how likely will you believe they are innocent *this* time?
VDI is perfect when you need to roll out 1000 clients at the drop of a hat, when you had not a single client before.
We did it and it's great. All notebooks are can be changed, replaced, rebuilt in seconds. Lost notebooks contain no information, no data, nothing. Newly needed applications can be deployed overnight for everyone without a glitch. If it works for the testers on the VDI terminal server, it will work for all others. No company data leaves the data center except for the screen the employee is actually looking at, which means exporting databases and stealing excel files full of stuff is much less likely and needs circumventing email protections only the admins in the data center far away can control. have In a leak, you at least have the email logfiles, which would help a lot in the following lawsuits.
Deploying stuff to a thousand client machines with probably a hundred tiny little differences and a thousand possible failure scenarios is causing much more of a headache than not being able to work at all when the network connection is down, since the amount of work that CAN be done without the net is small enough and getting smaller.
It all boils down to "Who watches the watchers". Which is a question that hasn't been completely solved since the dawn of man.
Maybe "Checks and Balances" would be the right thing, but it's a difficult thing to implement.
As much as I would love you being right here, but I don't think it's true. Children, even newborn, are not a blank sheet of paper and they do have prejudices, likenesses and preferences of their own.
I also take offense from hatred being portrayed as a sin committed primarily by white children vs. brown people. This color of skin thing is pretty universal between different skin colors. If in doubt, as a European, take a walk somewhere in rural Africa, ask Vietnamese about Indians, or Indians about Russians or Russians about Chinese. No one is innocent, just some slightly more than others - some prejudices are pretty much ubiquitous.
Anyway, I would think even with a group of robot-educated orphan kids in symmetric racial proportions, we would see some kind of prejudice within them, some group(s) forming that hate the other group(s). A class of Black robot-educated orphan kids will taunt and tease a single White robot-educated orphan kid and vice versa. I don't know why, but I know they'll do. Even dividing otherwise identical people into groups with blue and red overcoats will incite some hatred of red vs. blue, even without a Football match.
They are compensated by their employers. But people complained about feeling guilty by buying goods and services from people on holidays. Tipping well works quite okay in not only relieving that guilt but increasing the profit those workers gain from working these shifts.
Feeling guilty about having more money and a better life than someone else is usually unwarranted, because having more money usually means having made wiser choices or other sacrifices, but in any case there's no easier way to relieve than that.
Clock and alarms from the cheapest thrift stores work incredibly accurate. People were expecting the same from iPhone iOS and were bitterly disappointed. I used to be expecting this from my Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, but this being Windows, I have no one to blame but me for relying on it.
But yes, I think programming related to time and date is simple. Not because because it actually is trivial - which it is not - but because it is probably the best known *non*-trivial subject. It is rubbed in in every course on programming that is worth its merits. All teachers and professors and books never cease to preach to their students on how difficult programming on sorting, searching, time and encryption is, no matter how deceivingly trivial they may seem at first to a naive beginner.
Most programs will have *something* to do with time and date, sorting or searching, which is the reason they are taught so extensively. Messing up these known-hard but well-researched subjects is a tell-tale sign that even a faintest hint from all these exhaustive material in academic and educational teaching has been ignored, forgotten or never heard or read.
Which means the programmer has blissfully ignored all the warnings he should have received in education or not received any education at all.
Either way, it marks an amateur who should not code production quality software for the flagship device of the largest publicly-traded consumer electronics company in the US.
A lazy tester and a broken testing process is just the icing on the cake here.
None of them should ever be allowed within five miles of companies who produce software for autopilots and nuclear plants.
If you feel a twinge of guilt when you allow good, honest and diligent people to work and earn a living from your money, feel again.
Without anyone patronizing these restaurants and stores on weekends, those workers would earn less or even nothing.
Tip well and respect their efforts.
There are uncounted numbers of extremely crappy jobs where people get up for on the weekends. Especially in aviation, power generation, medical and law enforcement. Pilots, policemen, doctors, nurses, power plant managers - all extremely crappy?
Not to mention people needing to get up to reach the flight to their extremely expensive vacation.
Phone alarms have proven to be extremely reliable for more than a decade. Only smartphones of either OS flavor have ever ever failed something as dumb as the alarm function.
A normal alarm clock runs on whatever voltage it was designed for. Usually, they are designed for the national grids of the countries where they are to be sold. Clocks to be sold in the US run on 110V, clocks to be sold in most other locations run on 220-230V.
Since the advent of switching power supplies, this distinction is usually moot as most electronics are now designed to accept any voltage between 110v and 230v with either 50 or 60Hz line frequency. Eliminates the logistics hassle.
Not to mention there's no way to reliably determine if the battery is still working or not. Without the alarm clock blinking like they used to, it's very hard to tell if there were daily short blackouts when you and everyone else were at work that drained the 9v battery. Depending on the reliability of your power supply, replacing the battery on fixed, pre-set intervals wouldn't guarantee a thing.
The only ways to know the battery is dead is by either checking it regularly with a voltmeter and replacing it much before the critical voltage or live with a remaining risk of x% where x can only be guessed after you sleep-in.
Probably unsuitable for people working in transportation, medical, law enforcement, power generation. How do these people ensure their wake-up on odd schedules, different changing locations with harsh consequences for ever being a minute late?
Everybody uses their phones as alarm clocks now.
Simply because it works reasonably well, is always on hand and works the same way at home, on business trips and vacations. And has a battery backup.
People simply assume the alarm function to be much too simple to allow even the stupidest developers to not get them right. Nobody expects people to mess up simple functions like that. And nobody expects the device itself to report the wrong time. For that reason, developers who can't get an alarm app working should be fired straight away. And OS developers who can't get their OS to report the correct time for each and every case should not only not be developing OS'es, but only be allowed to develop static HTML web pages for the rest of their careers.
In my defintion, tough control on all workers, attempted extinction of individuality and free enterprise - or even personal property no matter how small - could very well be called "Communism". The one-party rule, the forced labor camps, the singular appointed chairman ruling the rabble with an iron fist are very much like the other "Communism" we've seen before, including the ubiquitous display of hammer, sickle and the chairman. Troop parades and countless faceless mooks goose-stepping before The Party adds a final touch, although we've seen these from a number of other rather unpleasant regimes.
If you want to define it further, call it National Communism. Just like National Socialism, but with even less individuality, less private property and more hive-mindedness.
Assuming for a while that profit reports from state-sponsored companies in at least partially Communist countries can be trusted, the reasons behind a successful metro systems usually have something to do with a high or extreme population density.
Outside of SE Asian culture, population density cannot reach these heights without extreme adverse effects like countless social norm infractions, violence and generally high crime rates. Contrasted with a guilt-society like the West, a shame-society like SE Asia would probably be the exact opposite: less and minor infractions happening in high density areas because of a higher shame-exposure, where in guilt-societies, the least crime would happen in lower density areas, because of a much higher guilt-exposure when potential offenders would know their victims by name.
Probably related: metro stations in SE Asia are not always clean, but always clean of graffiti. metro stations in the West, no matter how clean they are, always have some graffiti somewhere.
So in short, packing people like in Hong Kong works well if the people have a SE Asian cultural background. Other people and other cultural backgrounds yield different results.
Well-designed light rails or metro systems lead to even higher population densities in the areas they service. This is especially noticeable in crowded cities like Moscow, Beijing etc. where the prices of apartments drop off beyond the last metro ring, dramatically as in "orders of magnitude", because without the metro, tenants cannot reach anything in these otherwise gridlocked cities, making it uninteresting for "urbanite"-minded people.
Problem is: some 10-40% of all people will try to escape urban areas of high population density if they can somehow afford it, because that's what they ultimately and strongly want. These "pioneer"-minded people (for lack of a better word) are not abandoning the city because of bad metro systems, traffic jams, but fleeing noise and their fellow humans when there's too many of them close by. A high population density means a rapid decrease in effectiveness of police, law and social norms enforcement, which is the reason people are fleeing away from it. A metro system coming to them is simply iterating the cycle of "urbanites" flowing in and "pioneers" moving out.
Except that image based backups will by definition include malware and config errors if present.
Unless there's enough disk space for saving one initial and maybe hundreds of incremental images and at some point even the oldest backup on disk may already contain the root kit or serious config error you only detected yesterday.
The wonders of image-based backups are well-known and of course well deserved.
But it doesn't change a thing about the fundamental problem: a system evolves, with new software or new versions of old software coming in every other week. Backups, image or file based, need to accommodate for the new data.
No matter if this is done incrementally or with full new images, there will be a fuzzy variable called "known-good state" that is slowly and irreversibly decreasing with every configuration or software change. After several months and dozens of new versions, the system may be running smoothly, but is it free of a root kit? Or is there a root kit that's just very very well hidden?
Whatever way the Chrome OS chooses for its backups, it will either back up installed malware and b0rken config files or a rollback is like a complete reinstall. Can't have your cake and eat it.
If a system can store any amount of personal configuration, programs and data, it can by definition be broken by user mistakes and malware. Broken because of infected software or a configuration that renders the software or the entire system inoperable.
Just mix up two different configuration files from two different major versions of any software. Run the software. Feel the pain.
Neither Bill Gates nor the Cloud will help you there, you'll have to start fresh. Which mean reinstalling that thing.
I can already replace my Windows installation and when the OS is infected by a virus or something, it's very, very easy to restore. Just hit a BIOS switch, reinstall from a truly hidden (and BIOS-protected) partition - or recovery DVD - and reinstall without destroying user data. (All user data is on D:, while reinstall will bomb C:)
It doesn't work that well, let me tell you. User data is there, but programs need to be reinstalled to access it. System comes back squeaky clean, but everything needs to be changed to my personal liking.
What it boils down is that a computer will be either vulnerable to users, useless for them or anything in between these extremes. Can't install programs? Useless but secure. Can install any program? Useful, but vulnerable.
Without settings and mail saved *somewhere*, a mail client is useless. With settings and mail saved *anywhere*, a mail client is potentially vulnerable.
Replacing the OS with a known-good image only works if someone can truly produce an image that is more useful than say a Windows default installation and still known to be good. Which gets increasingly doubtful the older the OS image is, the more programs are installed and the more data/configuration/specifics are kept in program installations somewhere.
That the price for an SMS has doubled or tripled in the last 10 years while all other phone costs dropped dramatically means there's a huge market for that and people will bear these prices.
Frequent person-to-person communication by SMS is the one true hallmark of the true lower stratums of society. It's probably mall rats, chavs and other welfare zombies behind 90% of all SMS traffic.
Except that VOIP is against most TOS'es, sometimes heavily blocked, usually sandvined.
Changing SIM cards is a workaround, but a crappy one. T-Mobile A, T-Mobile B and T-Mobile C could very well get together and abandon roaming charges between them. It is one network and they don't have any higher costs in doing so, they're just shafting their customers, hard.