Things are rarely ever so clear-cut as to guarantee a particular result.
For example, say the employee has a 5-year old signed/notarized/whatever document that says "You now have 10% of the shares of the company". What if the board (most likely the owner/founder in a small co.) in the interim issued 10 times more shares and diluted her stake of the outstanding shares to 1%? Or issued 100 times more and diluted her stake to.1%?
...statistically you have a MUCH better chance of being killed by a falling vending machine than terrorism.
Maybe the situation here is more dire in the UK, but I don't think your claim holds true for the US (and, absent statistics, it makes me doubt that it holds true for the UK):
"... Moreover, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission there were 37 known vending machine fatalities between 1978 and 1995, for an average of 2.18 deaths per year...."
...Being your own boss isn't sleeping in till noon and taking days off when you want...
From my experience it's even worse than that.
When I was contracting I didn't take *any* vacation days. I found it hard to let billable hours slip through my fingers, mostly because I was never quite sure how long the current situation would last, when the next contract contracting opportunity would arise, etc.
Speaking of Windows NT beta versions, best I saw was a Q/A lab with over 100 Windows boxes. All the boxes were mistakenly installed/configured over the course of a few days with a beta (or trial) version of Windows 4.0 which timed-out after 180 days (I think) with a "blue screen of death" (no licensing issue, the tech just grabbed the wrong CD and kept using it) . All was fine for quite some time until boxes stared BSOD-ing one-by-one -- once we realized what happened it was kind of humorous to watch them fail one after the other.
Now, how's this different from a face-to-face study session? The most obvious way is that there are potentially "leechers" in this situation who benefit from the exchange without contributing anything of value in exchange. Now, we've probably all met that person in the "real" study session who takes without giving, but they're seldom invited to the next session. In this online example, there are potentially many more leeches than not.
That's reminiscent of the RIAA's "making available" argument re on-line music sharing.
Let's look at the numbers: 99.9% uptime translates to about 9 hours of unscheduled downtime a year. That can be one 9-hour block once a year, 36 minutes per day, 1.5 minutes per hour, 1.5 seconds per minute,...
Aren't your numbers quite a bit off, i.e. isn't 99.9% uptime equal to 1 part in 1,000 downtime?
What you got right:
hours/yr=8766, 99.9% uptime=8.76 hours/yr of downtime
What you got wrong:
min/day=1440, 99.9% uptime=1.44 min/day of downtime
min/hr=60, 99.9% uptime=.06 min/hr of downtime
sec/min=60, 99.9% uptime=.06 sec/min of downtime
My understanding is that Vonage does not own the TNs, so there is no valuable asset for them to "let go" or "cash in".
AFAIK, the gist of the process is that LECs request blocks of TNs from a regulatory body (NANPA or the FCC?) along with justification of why they need the TNs. Further, on a quarterly basis the LECs have to justify their retention of previously-allocated blocks by reporting on TN usage (e.g. those in service, aging, etc.). Also, as service areas grow TNs are added (through allocation of unused blocks, creation/splitting of area codes, etc.) so there really isn't a fixed supply of numbers to be fought over (or bid up in price).
As for LNP, I understand it as a "pull" process initiated by the subscriber, e.g. if you're currently a Verizon subscriber and want to port to Sprint, you'd contact Sprint and authorize them to port your number from Verizon and they'd take it from there (here's a so-so Wikipedia article on the topic). I'm not clear on the financial aspects of this, though -- my weak guess is that in that case Sprint would pay a one-time fee to Verizon for the port, along with a nominal monthly recurring cost (MRC) for continued use of the ported number (not sure if this is capped by regulation, how much MRC Verizon pays to the regulatory body for continued use of TN, etc.).
The phone#, though, is a major cost if lost. Which is exactly why we have the elaborate Local Number Portability system. I bet Vonage is exempt, or will act like it, on their typical scam basis that "we're an info service, not a phone company", which is the basis they used to keep their phone#s, which helped them keep customers. Probably Vonage will sell the phone#s, as several million of them is a substantial asset, especially in popular places like UK, NYC and other large cities with "brand name" area/country codes. But probably in bulk, to some other telco - like Verizon. Which could indeed be a way for Vonage to "help" their customers keep service, if Vonage dies.
At least in the US, Vonage doesn't "own" the TNs. If they go out of business (or, for that matter, lose most of their customers) the number blocks would get returned to the pool and would be assigned to another carrier as demand requires.
Judging from this and your previous posts, it looks like you have a lot of reading to do if you really want to understand the POTS infrastructure.
"Our expectations were not very high. Many experienced
administrators told us to expect many disk failures and
problems with our inexpensive, "white-box" PC
configurations. Typical advice was "SATA drives will
fail all the time", "SATA is not SCSI and can't keep up
with the I./O demands", etc. We had previously
experienced excellent reliability from our Compaq Cluster
and SAN [Barclay04]. We practically never visited the
data center to perform maintenance work. We were
advised to be prepared to be in the data center frequently
to service the bricks, disks, or other components. The
advice we received was so severe that we made a
substantial investment, over 5% of the total system cost,
in remote management capabilities provided by the
Advocent KVM/IP and ServerTech IP PDUs fearing that
we would be living at the data center.
Our experience has been the exact opposite. The storage
bricks and the SATA disk drives have been every bit as
reliable as the Compaq Cluster and SAN containing SCSI
disks. In three years, approximately thirty-two SCSI
drives failed in the Compaq SAN and web farm. Due to
triple-disk mirroring, we never experienced any data loss.
To date, a total of nine SATA drives have failed and been
replaced. Due to dual-disk mirroring, we have not
experienced any data loss and have not had to put our
"just-in-time-backup" process into action."
There were NOT 439,000 requests to tap phones. There were 439,000 requests for "communications information". This includes requests for lists of e-mail addresses, lists of numbers called, etc, in addition to taps.
I'm not saying that is a good or bad thing, just that the headline is incorrect and sensationalist.
Since you're complaining about someone pulling numbers out of their ass, care to share the basis of your "incorrect and sensationalist" judgment?
Where in the article does it break down the 439k by type of requests?
Do you concede the possibility that the numbers were quoted just that way to downplay them, i.e. the number might actually reflect 439k tap requests and zero requests of the other types?
FWIW, I ran into a similar situation while flying back to the US from Germany on Lufthansa a few years back. The guy across the aisle from me leafed through some very graphic porno mags at different times during the flight. I found it odd, but wrote it off to different societal norms (I assume from his speech and the context of the flight that he was German). I didn't notice anyone else reacting to it, either.
Of course the police "can" arrest anybody they can actually put handcuffs on. Heck, I "can" arrest anybody also.
The only thing that restrains (1) is the judiciary, either actively through their say over what is "probable cause" or an after-the-fact civil/criminal proceeding against the police. As for (2), the police themselves largely keep your efforts at bay.
As for the oddness of the argument, my post was simply pointing out that the judiciary is an "after the arrest" check on the police. Our posts are not in opposition.
No you don't. Police can arrest anyone at any time.
As as mattter of law, this is simply not true...
"PROBABLE CAUSE - A reasonable belief that a person has committed a crime. The test the court (emphasis added) employs...
Please note that the court gets involved sometime after the arrest, so as a matter of law your comment is simply not true.
You can be arrested but released w/o a charge without the court getting involved. Perhaps you're trying to point out that the court gets involved once (at the point?) you are actually charged with a crime (at the arraignment?), at which juncture the court applies your "probable cause" test. Perhaps you're also trying to suggest that if a police department made a habit of arresting people without reasonable "probable cause" they'd eventually run into a judge that slapped them down in some fashion.
Of course, if you are not charged within a reasonable timeframe (72 hours in the US?), you can (in all cases, at least pre-Bush) instigate the court's involvement by requesting "a writ of habeas corpus -- a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody."
I think the argument is that softswitches and the related IP infrastructure is cheaper than the TDM counterparts (in particular the cost of Class-5 switches). Also, once things are IP-based a lot of possibilities present themselves as far as cute (and useless?) features go, which supposedly helps with customer retention.
Things may have changed since I was working for a cable provider...
Yes, things have changed -- all recent deployments are IP-based, and even the older TDM-based ones (like the one you were exposed to, apparently) are switching to IP.
though I'm assuming you're going for a "funny" moderation, I'll bite...
What we all REALLY want to know is how well does it handle our Dial-Up connections?
Apparently well enough. We monitor a few PacketCable deployments and see quite a bit of dial-up to RoadRunner and the like -- you gotta love the digital-to-analog-to-digital-to-analog-to-digital approach to Intenet connectivity.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, I work for a telephony provider and we see approximately 1 call per day to emergency services per 1k lines.
Weather it works or not, that's not their concern.
But they probably do bring an umbrella if they're really worried about the whether.
FWIW, "rickrolling" made today's New York Times crossword puzzle. Clue was "Widespread Internet prank involving a bait-and-switch link to a music video":
http://www.crosswordmanblog.com/2009/04/nyt-monday-41309-rick-trick.html
Things are rarely ever so clear-cut as to guarantee a particular result.
For example, say the employee has a 5-year old signed/notarized/whatever document that says "You now have 10% of the shares of the company". What if the board (most likely the owner/founder in a small co.) in the interim issued 10 times more shares and diluted her stake of the outstanding shares to 1%? Or issued 100 times more and diluted her stake to .1%?
isn't $823/ct more like it?
Maybe the situation here is more dire in the UK, but I don't think your claim holds true for the US (and, absent statistics, it makes me doubt that it holds true for the UK):
...Being your own boss isn't sleeping in till noon and taking days off when you want...
From my experience it's even worse than that.
When I was contracting I didn't take *any* vacation days. I found it hard to let billable hours slip through my fingers, mostly because I was never quite sure how long the current situation would last, when the next contract contracting opportunity would arise, etc.
If only that were true...
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/border-agents-c.html
Speaking of Windows NT beta versions, best I saw was a Q/A lab with over 100 Windows boxes. All the boxes were mistakenly installed/configured over the course of a few days with a beta (or trial) version of Windows 4.0 which timed-out after 180 days (I think) with a "blue screen of death" (no licensing issue, the tech just grabbed the wrong CD and kept using it) . All was fine for quite some time until boxes stared BSOD-ing one-by-one -- once we realized what happened it was kind of humorous to watch them fail one after the other.
Aren't your numbers quite a bit off, i.e. isn't 99.9% uptime equal to 1 part in 1,000 downtime?
What you got right:
hours/yr=8766, 99.9% uptime=8.76 hours/yr of downtime
What you got wrong:
min/day=1440, 99.9% uptime=1.44 min/day of downtime
min/hr=60, 99.9% uptime=.06 min/hr of downtime
sec/min=60, 99.9% uptime=.06 sec/min of downtime
AFAIK, the gist of the process is that LECs request blocks of TNs from a regulatory body (NANPA or the FCC?) along with justification of why they need the TNs. Further, on a quarterly basis the LECs have to justify their retention of previously-allocated blocks by reporting on TN usage (e.g. those in service, aging, etc.). Also, as service areas grow TNs are added (through allocation of unused blocks, creation/splitting of area codes, etc.) so there really isn't a fixed supply of numbers to be fought over (or bid up in price).
As for LNP, I understand it as a "pull" process initiated by the subscriber, e.g. if you're currently a Verizon subscriber and want to port to Sprint, you'd contact Sprint and authorize them to port your number from Verizon and they'd take it from there (here's a so-so Wikipedia article on the topic). I'm not clear on the financial aspects of this, though -- my weak guess is that in that case Sprint would pay a one-time fee to Verizon for the port, along with a nominal monthly recurring cost (MRC) for continued use of the ported number (not sure if this is capped by regulation, how much MRC Verizon pays to the regulatory body for continued use of TN, etc.).
Judging from this and your previous posts, it looks like you have a lot of reading to do if you really want to understand the POTS infrastructure.
ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2004- 107.pdf
Where in the article does it break down the 439k by type of requests?
Do you concede the possibility that the numbers were quoted just that way to downplay them, i.e. the number might actually reflect 439k tap requests and zero requests of the other types?
FWIW, I ran into a similar situation while flying back to the US from Germany on Lufthansa a few years back. The guy across the aisle from me leafed through some very graphic porno mags at different times during the flight. I found it odd, but wrote it off to different societal norms (I assume from his speech and the context of the flight that he was German). I didn't notice anyone else reacting to it, either.
As for the oddness of the argument, my post was simply pointing out that the judiciary is an "after the arrest" check on the police. Our posts are not in opposition.
You can be arrested but released w/o a charge without the court getting involved. Perhaps you're trying to point out that the court gets involved once (at the point?) you are actually charged with a crime (at the arraignment?), at which juncture the court applies your "probable cause" test. Perhaps you're also trying to suggest that if a police department made a habit of arresting people without reasonable "probable cause" they'd eventually run into a judge that slapped them down in some fashion.
Of course, if you are not charged within a reasonable timeframe (72 hours in the US?), you can (in all cases, at least pre-Bush) instigate the court's involvement by requesting "a writ of habeas corpus -- a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody."
I think the argument is that softswitches and the related IP infrastructure is cheaper than the TDM counterparts (in particular the cost of Class-5 switches). Also, once things are IP-based a lot of possibilities present themselves as far as cute (and useless?) features go, which supposedly helps with customer retention.