Not if you're roaming.. at least for my plan/carrier (Verizon).
What's "roaming?" Is it 1999 in here or is it just you?
WTF do you pay by if you're over your monthly minutes?
It's never happened. One time, during September 2004 when I was basically on the phone constantly for two weeks, I went over. AT&T called me up and offered to bump me to the next rate plan for the month, and I said "Yes please." (AT&T is now Cingular.)
Everywhere in the Rockies I've been, yes. That includes most of Colorado.
The Nevada desert?
Are you kidding? The Nevada desert is so flat and wide that you can see no fewer than three mobile phone towers at all times.
Alaska?
I had the opportunity to go ANWR in the fall of 2003. Perfect mobile phone reception everywhere I went.
I take it you're going to dodge my question on planned economies?
Your question was stupid and indicated to me that you're only interested in picking a fight. Coupled with the fact that (1) you were totally and completely wrong about that "my bill was $250" thing, so wrong that I can only conclude you just made it up, and (2) the fact that you tried to bait me a second time into getting into a fight with you, I can only conclude that you are an unskilled and amateurish troll. Call it dodging your question if you want. I call it not wasting my time.
The other side of things, is how many people *really* look at their usage to see whether they have the best plan for their needs instead of going with the herd.
"With the herd?" Nice. Smug much?
Look, every six months or so I get a call from Cingular, my phone company. The guy on the phone says, "Mr. so-n-so, we've noticed that your calling habits are changing. Are you interested in trying plan such-n-such to see about saving some money or getting better service for the same money or whatever?"
Everybody I know gets calls like that. A couple of years ago, when I established a company phone plan for about a dozen employees, the phone company (AT&T at that time) just moved us around from rate plan to rate plan on their own to keep our monthly bill as low as possible.
Why? Because the phone companies know that if they don't, I'm gonna walk across the street to one of their competitors. They have to do stuff like that to keep their customers.
Wrong. There's no icon on the desktop, there's no transferring by drag-and-drop. You're just talking about a phone with more memory with all the usability problems we now face remaining intact. If anything, that would be worse, because I'd have all this memory on my phone and it would be a huge pain in the ass to use it!
In the UK, my phone bill was around 20 pounds (~$40) per month. Upon moving to the US, my first month's bill was $250.
What other difference did you notice when you moved here in 1991?
My mobile phone bill is $40 a month, only $10 more expensive than a plain telephone line with no additional services would be. I get so many minutes per month of airtime that I never use them all. It's something in excess of 1400 minutes of daytime calls and unlimited nights and weekends. I never pay for long distance, and my phone works anywhere in the United States. (Swapping out the SIM card means it will work anywhere in the world, or at least nearly anywhere. There's always an exception.)
Have you ever actually been to Eurpoe?
I think the more important question here, since you are so massively confused about mobile phone pricing in the US, is whether you've ever been out of Europe.
That's not a truism; it's just true in some cases. For instance, the health-care system in the US is not fragmented into incompatible markets. At any time, you can pick up the phone and sign up for a different insurance carrier or make an appointment with a different doctor.
It's not true of mobile phone technology, either, because market forces lead markets like that to converge, not diverge. Any telephone can call any telephone; most phones are compatible with most system. Witness the Microsoft/Apple thing. Two different companies selling two competing products, but over the years, their products have become more compatible, not less.
someone once told me they hate the term "land-line" but is there a more descriptive term?
Sure, there are any number of words. You can call it a telephone line, for starters. Everybody understands that.
POTS is clear to me but not obvious to others
Avoid acronyms. Always. It's just a good rule of thumb. Once your grandmother knows an acronym, it's okay to use it: DVD, ATM. Until then, use actual words. Don't say "POTS." Say "telephone line."
Scenario: someone calls, you have youre mobile off.
The call rolls over to voice mail. When you turn your phone back on, you get a message that one call was missed, and you get the name and number of the caller. If the caller left a message, you can listen to it. Most people don't.
You have your voice mail off, because you pay every time you call it and because your friend pays talking into it.
Massively stupid. You don't pay every time you call your voicemail. Voicemail is always a free call. And if your friend doesn't want to talk to it, he can hang up. Besides, nobody pays by the minute any more anyway.
Then the system logs the call, sends you an sms with the number that called, thus you being aware the moment you turn your phone on that you have been called.
Yes, except for the SMS part.
Incidentally, the only acceptable times to actually turn your phone off, as opposed to just turning off the ring, are at the movies and during air travel. All other times, the phone must be left on.
Interesting observation. I've seen something slightly different. Because I practically never cal somebody who doesn't have caller ID, my conversations go like this:
Ring
Recipient: Hi, Leo.
Me: (begins conversation)
That goes for social calls, of course. If I'm calling somebody I don't know or whatever, it's different, but I think you were talking about social calls.
The strange thing is that when somebody answers the phone with just "Hello," I launch right into the conversation without identifying myself. I just assume, because they answered the phone, that they know who's calling. This has resulted in two awkward "Who is this?" moments. But the social weirdness was defused by the fact that I could relentlessly mock the recepient of my call about the fact that I wasn't in their phone.
I can't remember the last time I even saw a telephone booth, much less used one. Everybody has a mobile phone.
(The six-out-of-ten figure the article quotes must count grammar-school kids, the elderly, criminals in prison and dead people. Because seriously, everybody between the ages of 13 and 60 has a mobile phone.)
Actually, you hit on the one thing that I would like my phone to be able to do that it doesn't presently do: More easily store data.
I'd like my phone to appear on my desktop the way an external hard drive or other mass-storage device does whenever I get into proximity with my computer. I'd like to be able to drag files to it to copy them to the phone over Bluetooth. I'd like text messages in the phone's memory to show up as notes on the phone's interface so I can more conveniently do things like storing driving directions. It's possible to store memos on the phone now, of course, but it requires a program and it's a pain in the rear.
And I'd like it to have a gigabyte of memory instead of 2 MB or whatever.
I'd happily trade the games, the camera, the little Internet browser thingy and the ass-ugly interface "themes" for features like those.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The European choice resulted in a widespread and unified system and very high customer prices, while the American choice resulted in slower and more organic adoption but highly competitive customer prices.
That's the classic planned-economy/market-economy trade off. We see it everywhere from tractor factories to airlines to health care.
while in the US people effectively get charged both to make and receive on their mobile
Except practically nobody in the US actually pays by the call any more. The cheapest rate plans available from the different mobile-phone companies all include something like 2000 minutes of airtime, which is far more than the average person needs.
Even the most telephone-addicted businessman can get 5,000 minutes or more for less than $100 a month.
Don't be fooled by the vendor Web sites. They say that a 1,000 minute plan costs $100, but that's deceptive. They offer incentives to get you to sign up that include things like an extra thousand or two thousand minutes per month free. When you actually go to sign up, you end up getting three or four times more minutes than the plan normally includes because the companies are competing for your business.
That's not really true. A cell tower is a cell tower is a cell tower. If provider X wants to start offering service type Y instead of service type Z, all he has to do is swap out some gear in the tower's electronics rack. He doesn't have to go out and build a new tower.
That's funny. My dictionary defines "to steal" as "to take the property of another wrongfully." It doesn't say anything about the ifs, ands, buts or other qualifications that you want to attach to the word.
The law, however, defines neither "stealing" nor "theft." Those words have no legal meaning. Rather, the law defines a whole set of crimes that are various specific types of stealing. There's larceny (the theft of personal property), robbery (theft from someone's person), burglary (theft from a dwelling or other building), shoplifting (theft of displayed goods from a store), embezzlement (theft of property, usually money, entrusted to one's care), fraud (theft through intentional trickery or deception), espionage (theft of secrets) and many others. Including, yes, the crime of copyright infringement, which is the theft of a copy of a written work, audio recording or other creation protected by Title 17 of the United States Code.
I'm really, really sorry. I swear I am. But copyright infringement is just one type of theft. You can continue to assert all day and all night that it isn't, but that won't change the facts.
You're being pretty careless in your nomenclature, there. Dolphins and whales are both members of the order Cetacea. The humpback whale, for example, is Megaptera novaeangliae, family Balaenopteridae, while the bottlenose dolphin is Tursiops truncatus, family Delphinidae, both under order Cetacea.
The killer whale, Orcinus orca, is also in the Delphinidae family, making it a closer relative to the bottlenose dolphin than to the humpback whale. You got that part right.
So to say that dolphins are whales is actually false. The correct statement is to say that both dolphins and whales are cetaceans.
Are you fucking kidding me? You want to reach back nearly 30 years? I suspect that you might be a dipshit.
HP iPod?
Good point, but technically that's not an OEM arrangement. Apple sells the iPods to HP at wholesale prices and HP retails them. It's the same arrangement that Apple has with other retailers, like Target and Best Buy.
Slashdot Mirror
DVD and ATM are not acronyms
Least useful nitpick ever.
It is completely acceptable to use an acronym.
It is only acceptable to use acronyms which are in common usage. All others should be avoided.
POTS is far more descriptive than "telephone line"
Typical nerd rationalization. "It doesn't matter if no one understands me. I'm more precise!"
Um. Hello. Nokia is a third party.
Not if you're roaming.. at least for my plan/carrier (Verizon).
What's "roaming?" Is it 1999 in here or is it just you?
WTF do you pay by if you're over your monthly minutes?
It's never happened. One time, during September 2004 when I was basically on the phone constantly for two weeks, I went over. AT&T called me up and offered to bump me to the next rate plan for the month, and I said "Yes please." (AT&T is now Cingular.)
1. It requires shitty third-party software.
2. It doesn't work on a Mac.
Show-stoppers both.
The cheapest plan on my carrier has only 400 minutes.
Mine, too. Call them up and ask for a promotion. They'll give you a thousand or two thousand additional minutes at no cost.
And no, I'm talking about Cingular.
Even in the Rockies?
Everywhere in the Rockies I've been, yes. That includes most of Colorado.
The Nevada desert?
Are you kidding? The Nevada desert is so flat and wide that you can see no fewer than three mobile phone towers at all times.
Alaska?
I had the opportunity to go ANWR in the fall of 2003. Perfect mobile phone reception everywhere I went.
I take it you're going to dodge my question on planned economies?
Your question was stupid and indicated to me that you're only interested in picking a fight. Coupled with the fact that (1) you were totally and completely wrong about that "my bill was $250" thing, so wrong that I can only conclude you just made it up, and (2) the fact that you tried to bait me a second time into getting into a fight with you, I can only conclude that you are an unskilled and amateurish troll. Call it dodging your question if you want. I call it not wasting my time.
The other side of things, is how many people *really* look at their usage to see whether they have the best plan for their needs instead of going with the herd.
"With the herd?" Nice. Smug much?
Look, every six months or so I get a call from Cingular, my phone company. The guy on the phone says, "Mr. so-n-so, we've noticed that your calling habits are changing. Are you interested in trying plan such-n-such to see about saving some money or getting better service for the same money or whatever?"
Everybody I know gets calls like that. A couple of years ago, when I established a company phone plan for about a dozen employees, the phone company (AT&T at that time) just moved us around from rate plan to rate plan on their own to keep our monthly bill as low as possible.
Why? Because the phone companies know that if they don't, I'm gonna walk across the street to one of their competitors. They have to do stuff like that to keep their customers.
Competition is good.
you can do things exactly the way you described
Wrong. There's no icon on the desktop, there's no transferring by drag-and-drop. You're just talking about a phone with more memory with all the usability problems we now face remaining intact. If anything, that would be worse, because I'd have all this memory on my phone and it would be a huge pain in the ass to use it!
In the UK, my phone bill was around 20 pounds (~$40) per month. Upon moving to the US, my first month's bill was $250.
What other difference did you notice when you moved here in 1991?
My mobile phone bill is $40 a month, only $10 more expensive than a plain telephone line with no additional services would be. I get so many minutes per month of airtime that I never use them all. It's something in excess of 1400 minutes of daytime calls and unlimited nights and weekends. I never pay for long distance, and my phone works anywhere in the United States. (Swapping out the SIM card means it will work anywhere in the world, or at least nearly anywhere. There's always an exception.)
Have you ever actually been to Eurpoe?
I think the more important question here, since you are so massively confused about mobile phone pricing in the US, is whether you've ever been out of Europe.
That's not a truism; it's just true in some cases. For instance, the health-care system in the US is not fragmented into incompatible markets. At any time, you can pick up the phone and sign up for a different insurance carrier or make an appointment with a different doctor.
It's not true of mobile phone technology, either, because market forces lead markets like that to converge, not diverge. Any telephone can call any telephone; most phones are compatible with most system. Witness the Microsoft/Apple thing. Two different companies selling two competing products, but over the years, their products have become more compatible, not less.
someone once told me they hate the term "land-line" but is there a more descriptive term?
Sure, there are any number of words. You can call it a telephone line, for starters. Everybody understands that.
POTS is clear to me but not obvious to others
Avoid acronyms. Always. It's just a good rule of thumb. Once your grandmother knows an acronym, it's okay to use it: DVD, ATM. Until then, use actual words. Don't say "POTS." Say "telephone line."
Scenario: someone calls, you have youre mobile off.
The call rolls over to voice mail. When you turn your phone back on, you get a message that one call was missed, and you get the name and number of the caller. If the caller left a message, you can listen to it. Most people don't.
You have your voice mail off, because you pay every time you call it and because your friend pays talking into it.
Massively stupid. You don't pay every time you call your voicemail. Voicemail is always a free call. And if your friend doesn't want to talk to it, he can hang up. Besides, nobody pays by the minute any more anyway.
Then the system logs the call, sends you an sms with the number that called, thus you being aware the moment you turn your phone on that you have been called.
Yes, except for the SMS part.
Incidentally, the only acceptable times to actually turn your phone off, as opposed to just turning off the ring, are at the movies and during air travel. All other times, the phone must be left on.
Interesting observation. I've seen something slightly different. Because I practically never cal somebody who doesn't have caller ID, my conversations go like this:
Ring
Recipient: Hi, Leo.
Me: (begins conversation)
That goes for social calls, of course. If I'm calling somebody I don't know or whatever, it's different, but I think you were talking about social calls.
The strange thing is that when somebody answers the phone with just "Hello," I launch right into the conversation without identifying myself. I just assume, because they answered the phone, that they know who's calling. This has resulted in two awkward "Who is this?" moments. But the social weirdness was defused by the fact that I could relentlessly mock the recepient of my call about the fact that I wasn't in their phone.
I can't remember the last time I even saw a telephone booth, much less used one. Everybody has a mobile phone.
(The six-out-of-ten figure the article quotes must count grammar-school kids, the elderly, criminals in prison and dead people. Because seriously, everybody between the ages of 13 and 60 has a mobile phone.)
Actually, you hit on the one thing that I would like my phone to be able to do that it doesn't presently do: More easily store data.
I'd like my phone to appear on my desktop the way an external hard drive or other mass-storage device does whenever I get into proximity with my computer. I'd like to be able to drag files to it to copy them to the phone over Bluetooth. I'd like text messages in the phone's memory to show up as notes on the phone's interface so I can more conveniently do things like storing driving directions. It's possible to store memos on the phone now, of course, but it requires a program and it's a pain in the rear.
And I'd like it to have a gigabyte of memory instead of 2 MB or whatever.
I'd happily trade the games, the camera, the little Internet browser thingy and the ass-ugly interface "themes" for features like those.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The European choice resulted in a widespread and unified system and very high customer prices, while the American choice resulted in slower and more organic adoption but highly competitive customer prices.
That's the classic planned-economy/market-economy trade off. We see it everywhere from tractor factories to airlines to health care.
while in the US people effectively get charged both to make and receive on their mobile
Except practically nobody in the US actually pays by the call any more. The cheapest rate plans available from the different mobile-phone companies all include something like 2000 minutes of airtime, which is far more than the average person needs.
Even the most telephone-addicted businessman can get 5,000 minutes or more for less than $100 a month.
Don't be fooled by the vendor Web sites. They say that a 1,000 minute plan costs $100, but that's deceptive. They offer incentives to get you to sign up that include things like an extra thousand or two thousand minutes per month free. When you actually go to sign up, you end up getting three or four times more minutes than the plan normally includes because the companies are competing for your business.
That's not really true. A cell tower is a cell tower is a cell tower. If provider X wants to start offering service type Y instead of service type Z, all he has to do is swap out some gear in the tower's electronics rack. He doesn't have to go out and build a new tower.
That's funny. My dictionary defines "to steal" as "to take the property of another wrongfully." It doesn't say anything about the ifs, ands, buts or other qualifications that you want to attach to the word.
The law, however, defines neither "stealing" nor "theft." Those words have no legal meaning. Rather, the law defines a whole set of crimes that are various specific types of stealing. There's larceny (the theft of personal property), robbery (theft from someone's person), burglary (theft from a dwelling or other building), shoplifting (theft of displayed goods from a store), embezzlement (theft of property, usually money, entrusted to one's care), fraud (theft through intentional trickery or deception), espionage (theft of secrets) and many others. Including, yes, the crime of copyright infringement, which is the theft of a copy of a written work, audio recording or other creation protected by Title 17 of the United States Code.
I'm really, really sorry. I swear I am. But copyright infringement is just one type of theft. You can continue to assert all day and all night that it isn't, but that won't change the facts.
The term whales spans a group containing dolphins.
No, the term "whales" spans a group including whales. The term "cetaceans" includes both whales and dolphins.
However, I suppose it is incorrect in the same way that refreing to birds as reptiles would be incorrect.
Um. Yes. In the sense that both are, you know, untrue, both are incorrect. Very good.
You're being pretty careless in your nomenclature, there. Dolphins and whales are both members of the order Cetacea. The humpback whale, for example, is Megaptera novaeangliae, family Balaenopteridae, while the bottlenose dolphin is Tursiops truncatus, family Delphinidae, both under order Cetacea.
The killer whale, Orcinus orca, is also in the Delphinidae family, making it a closer relative to the bottlenose dolphin than to the humpback whale. You got that part right.
So to say that dolphins are whales is actually false. The correct statement is to say that both dolphins and whales are cetaceans.
Theft requires that the victim is loses access to the stolen goods.
It really, really doesn't. I totally understand and respect that you wish it did, but it really, really doesn't.
Is there something evil and rude about OEMing stuff?
There's something evil and rude about being a troll.
Try it yourself, and watch what it actually does.
Um. I have one right here. It does nothing like that. Either you have a problem, or you're just making stuff up.
Bell and Howell "Black Apple II"?
Are you fucking kidding me? You want to reach back nearly 30 years? I suspect that you might be a dipshit.
HP iPod?
Good point, but technically that's not an OEM arrangement. Apple sells the iPods to HP at wholesale prices and HP retails them. It's the same arrangement that Apple has with other retailers, like Target and Best Buy.