... is that, this scrape has raised the profile and visibility of the importance of document formats and vendor lock. Many people in power are now more aware of these issues.
How much can MSFT charge for MS-Office? It can price it just a shade under what it would cost you to switch to an alternative. Your switching cost determines the money you need to pay to MSFT. If a company wants to lower the money it pays, it has to lower the switching costs. Slowly ODF will gain acceptance.
Also the ODF proponents should realize that the total money collected by MSFT is just 40 billion dollars. I say just because, for the amount of money corporate America is spending, it is not much. For most companies their core operation is transportation or retail or selling insurance or whatever. Compared to the health insurance, labour costs, office building maintenance and rent, advertising expenses, the amount they spend on Office software is a pittance. As long as MSFT keeps prices that low, it is difficult for ODF to gain traction.
The switch will be very very gradual initially. First companies for whom office software costs is a significant portion of their operating expenses. Then slowly it will spread to other companies. We should not expect any quick victories. Then once the alternative formats have gained enough critical mass, and the backward compatibility issues have become less of an issue, there would be quick upsurge for ODF. But still MSFT will have a significant market share in office software for a long time to come.
Do you have any proof the Designer was the one mentioned in your Bible?
It could very well be Maha Vishnu. Prove it was not Vishnu and it was indeed Jesus who is the real God. You have much less evidence to support your "Jesus is the real God, not Vishnu" than there is evidence supporting the Theory of Evolution.
By the way, I did not choose Vishu on a whim. The 10 recorded "avatars" of Vishnu were, in that order, Fish, Turtle, Boar, Half-Lion-Half-Man, The Dwarf Man, The Angry Man, The Perfect Man Raman, Over the hill, less than perfect men Krishnan & BalaRaman and Kalki. In an allegory the Hindu scriptures have recorded roughly the sequence of evolution. Note how well the sequence matches the ascent of man predicted by the Theory of Evolution.
You know, it's all fun and games to joke about Intelligent Design, but when you think about it, evolution is also pretty much just a theory at this point, too.
You talk as though being a Theory is an insult. In science, for something to be called a Theory, it is quite a honor. Just look at other theories: Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, The Heliocentric Theory...
Lower than theory is hypothesis. Even lower than hypothesis would be a conjecture. I don't think ID would even qualify as a conjecture. Let ID answer some questions before it starts asking questions to The Theory of Evolution.
How can you call the Designer, Intelligent? Why it could not be a Theory of Idiotic Design? There is as much evidence to infer truly spectacular idiocy and lunacy in the part of the Designer, as there is for His Intelligence. Why do we have diseases? Why do we grow old and die? Why do whales have totally useless leg bones buried deep inside their bodies?
Why do human embryos develop a coat of fur, just like the Chimpanzees, during the seventh month of gestation? When you are done answering them I got a couple of million more.
The key issue is not whether it is coming from MSFT or if it gives MSFT any leg up. They key issue, can anyone implement the standard directly without payments, without agreements without any restrictions? MSFT can very well say, there is no payment but all implementors should sign some agreement with us. Then there could be a clause that could revoke the agreement. Thus if any competitor gets too big MSFT can pull the rug from under them.
If the specification is as free as ASCII, to use one example, then there is nothing wrong in adopting that as a standard.
Apart from the tenuous connection that he spammed and ran a website to sell his drugs, this guy seems to be a regular run of the mill criminal. Let some one be sent to jail for 30 years, nay, 30 days, solely for spamming, then it deserves to be of interest to technozanti.
Dont get disheartened pfhorrest. You are debt free, have a college degree and you are better off than your parents were when they were 25. You seem to have a clear head on your shoulder and people like you would form the backbone of any community. If Santa Barbara prices itself out of reach for you, the loser is Santa Barbara, not you. You go where you can be productive and live a happy life. Home prices in Santa Barbara will either come down or stay stagnant and allow the local income to catch up. Typically a community's mean home price should be around 3 times its median income. At the peak CA home prices were 6 or 7 times the median income. It will balance eventually.
I have moved half way across the world, and I was dirt poor in grad school too with negative net worth. Yes, that is euphemism for being in debt.
If you can strate that the loan was issued without your knowledge or consent they should update their records accordingly, not because it's legally required but because it's in their own self-interest.
That is probably the current law. But still I believe the burden of proof should not be on me. The companies can extend credit with lax authentication if they want to, it is after all, their money. But they should prove that they actually lent the money to the correct person before reporting it to the agencies or putting it on permanent record. And if my salary works out to some 35$ an hour and it takes me 10 hours to clear the records, they own should owe me 350$. Put in rules like that, and the identity theft would go down drastically.
What are you talkin' about? None of my friends are in serious credit card debt. In my extended circle of friends nobody owns a car more than five years old. None of them rent. No body has serious debt credit card or HELOC.
In America there is no reason to drown in debt except for the extremely poor people. There is no public transportation infrastructure here. So the poorest of the poor are just one fender bender, one alternator failure, one radiator failure or one medical emergency from bankruptcy. Their car breaks down, they cant get to work, they get into very high interest rate credit and get into an never ending circle of debt. But for this section, everyone else is drowning in debt because of their own poor financial skills.
People drowning in debt still have digital cable and cell phones, they eat out in restaurants, live in huge homes they cant afford... I dont have much sympathy for folks who borrow without knowing their limits.
The root cause of identity theft is that the credit industry wants to lend without too much of checking and authentication. If someone has an impulse to borrow, they want to lend it immediately before the moment passes. If they issue a few bad loans they consider it cost of doing business. If criminals take advantage of it and borrow both the identity and the money, the credit industry does not care because there is no serious liability to the lender who lent the money. A few thousand dollars, big deal, cost of doing business for them. It is the victims of id-theft who raise a hue and cry.
ID theft is not limited to the internet. The waiter who takes away your credit card, or people who steal from your mailbox, or people who file a change of address form to intercept your mail, or employees who have access to the credit card numbers in the sales/accounting dept, employees in doctor's offices or hospital billing dept, can steal identities.
It is stupid to assume id theft is an internet problem or to find technical solution for it when there is no incentive for the credit industry to cut down on it. If a lender damages my credit rating by lax lending, the lender is liable for a sum like 10% of my annual income. Then they will clean up their act in a hurry.
It would be a good PR for Google to bid 4.6B for it, knowing fully well it will be out bidded by AT&T and Verizon.
They said the same thing b4 FireFox came along.
on
Does ODF Have a Future?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Websites hardwired to support just IE, hacks and stuff that does not even consider that other browsers can exist. That was how the web was some three years ago. Even now FF does not have a majority marketshare. Even in techie websites it garners nearly half the market share, depending on how you measure it. In non techie websites, it scores below 20%. Still it made a big impact on the way the sites are created and maintained.
The MS-Office monopoly has so far been nearly impossible to beat. But things can change quite rapidly. Terms like vendor-lock and interoperability will eventually penetrate the skulls of the thickest CIOs and CTOs.
It would help if the supporters of Free Software and Open Software would stop fighting the internecine battles and start uniformly supporting Open Standards. Even before you mention the word Open Standards, immediately others pushing Free Software agenda and Open Source agenda push their pet projects, creating an impression it is all one and the same and one can not have Open Standards without also Open Source and Free Software. They are different.
You might not agree that replacing MSFT monopoly with some kind of duopoly (like it is with Intuit-Quicken and MS-Money). But it is definitely better than the monopoly. Once the customers are educated about the vendor lock and compatibility the duopoly will naturally break down. Eventually there will be enough space for Free Software, Open Software, and Close source software to coexist.
Looks like RIAA is to goblins, what muggles are to wizards. Their (RIAA's and goblin's) idea of property, ownership etc are remarkably similar.
In The Deathly Hallows by JKR there is this conversation: (nah, it is not a spoiler. Don't worry.)
"You don't understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with the goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is its maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs."
"But if it was bought ---"
"---then they would consider it rented by one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. [snip] I believe he thinks, as do the fiercest of his kind, that it ought to have been returned to the goblins once the original purchaser died. They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft."
The ruling affects only the contracts posted on line. The right of credit card companies, banks, brokerages, phone, electric and water utilities etc to include a piece of paper printed in unreadable font using ununderstandable language with their monthly bills and claim that their customers have been notified about the change in contracts will continue without any change.
The online companies just have to include "Contract terms have changed Click here to read, click here to ignore it and go to the site" flash screen to comply with the new ruling.
So it is all fine and wonderful and dandy in the corporate world, and peace and serenity will continue to reign in
Ye Olde Country Club.
Switching to grid electricity is good for national security. We need to distinguish between the energy requirements of the transportation sector from all other sectors. USA and Europe are self sufficient in non-transportation energy sector. There is enough coal, natural gas, tar sands, nuclear and renewables to keep the grid juiced up. But transportation...
Gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks, furnace oil for ships and kerosene for the jets all come mainly from imported crude oil. The shortfall between domestic crude production and the demand has widened very rapidly in the last decade. To keep sending more and more money to the Middle East to import oil is madness. Sooner we kick the imported oil addiction better it is for the West. Plug in hybrids would reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
8 miles? under ideal conditions, flat road, no a/c... very disappointing. Toyota's engineering is very good. If this is all such great engineers can manage, it shows that batteries have a long way to go.
There are dozens of vendors like belkin selling simple chargers for iPods without using the USB ports. So they all wont be able to charge iPods? Apple can at best thwart iTunes/iPod link on devices reported to be stolen. But preventing charging? Nah.
When you sign software as a service model, you will be renting the software too. And *IAA claims you dont own the cd or DVD you are only renting it.
It is the Goblin logic. George Weasley clearly tells Harry, "The Goblins dont believe they sell anything to the wizards. They believe it belongs to the maker and you are only renting it. Once you die, the object should be returned to the Goblin manufacturer. They dont like the idea of the Wizards passing goblin made objects from person to person without them getting paid." Was JKR talking about *IAA there?
I am not sure DELL will lose the massive discount. If it does, then it will start pre-loading FireFox and OpenOffice in the Windows machines.
No vendor likes to compete on price alone. Every vendor would like to have some kind of product differentiation in the market place to set himself apart. One of the most important product differentiation a PC maker could have would be to tout "my PCs use the safer browser FireFox!" in the ads. The claim may or may not be true. The claim could be contested by other vendors. But it is a differentiation and it will work in an ad campaign. Why no major PC vendor is doing this, then? They lose massive MSFT subsidy to preload only MSFT and its vassals like Intuit.
So in effect MSFT is not so free to withdraw the subsidy or even to punish DELL for selling Ubuntu. DELL does have some bargaining power in its ability to provide a marketshare for non MSFT products in the Windows universe.
All OpenOffice needs is a small but significant marketshare, like 5% or 10%. Once FireFox reached 5 to 10% marketshare, the websites had to retool and make sure they are compatible with it, and started taking out the IE only hacks, and the attitude changed from, "We dont support anything other than IE" to "we must support Firefox or we lose 10% of the visitors". Similar changes would take place in the Office arena. The moment people start demanding true inter operability between MS Office and Open Office, the game becomes wide open. Since DELL is in a position to boost the marketshare of OpenOffice by 5% quite easily it can play hardball and get the MSFT wholesale price and sell Ubuntu. HP/Compaq knows this too. The question is, will HP also decide to sell Ubuntu or negotiate secret extra discounts (compared to DELL) for not doing ubuntu.
download folder could be a sub folder of the cache folder. Without any execute privilege. If you download an executable that you really want to run, you should move it using file manager to another location with execute privilege and then run it. Painful? may be. Inconvenient? Definitely. But safe. Convenience should never trump safety.
If you leave your door open, the cable guy can come in anytime and fix your cable box. You dont have to house sit over that stupid four hour window. Would you do that? Then why people put up such great resistance to the idea that you must take action, not doable by the browser alone, to download and execute a file from the internet?
Then who is calling them? Are they all answering technical support calls from the USA?
Mostly people like rickshaw (a weird three wheeled scooter like thingie) drivers, taxi drivers, vegetable vendors, free lance plumbers, electricians and such tradesmen, students, school children, elderly parents, delivery boys, errand boys... really there are millions of people who will only accept incoming calls. They never make out going calls unless it is a very real emergency. Further the outgoing calls too are metered only after being picked up. Many of them have an "call me back" understanding with others. For example the child might call from school, but the mom will note the caller-id and decline the call. And she would immediately call the child from a land line or a phone with larger call allowance. Despite all these cost minimization ideas by consumers, Indian telcos run a huge profit. Infact I submitted a story to Slashdot about Indian Telcos refusing tax subsidy from the govt. It did not make it.
The entire USA is not covered by Cell phone towers. Infact the coverage is very very spotty in rural areas. There is very heavy urban concentration in the USA. 66% of the people live within 100miles of the coasts. The coverage map of USA is simply patches of urban areas. The higher cost is not due to covering larger area or supporting larger call volumes, or ensuring higher quality of voice or ensuring higher availability.
The real reason is that people here are used to higher prices. They were raised for generations to pay large sums of money to AT&T first and then to the baby bells. People are willing to pay and the Telcos happily oblige. India is very poor country. You need to fight tooth and nail to pry pennies from the people's fists. The Indian Telcos do.
My brother-in-law in India bought two shares of some TATA company for 750Rs per share. Imagine! buying 2 shares! The trade commission was 15 Rs or 33 cents USA. It was high as a percentage 1% of the value of the trade. I would not trade at 1% cost per trade, no sensible person would. So I am sure Indian don't trade as much as the Americans. But how can a company execute a trade and make a profit at 33 cents a trade? It is insane. In India, incoming cell phone calls are free. I think SMS is free. I got 180 minutes of talk time for some 7.5$, no contracts, no other fees. Millions of Indians use their phones only to receive calls, and so dont pay a dime as fees. Why is it so damned expensive in USA. Definitely because of lack of competition. There is no other explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
How much can MSFT charge for MS-Office? It can price it just a shade under what it would cost you to switch to an alternative. Your switching cost determines the money you need to pay to MSFT. If a company wants to lower the money it pays, it has to lower the switching costs. Slowly ODF will gain acceptance.
Also the ODF proponents should realize that the total money collected by MSFT is just 40 billion dollars. I say just because, for the amount of money corporate America is spending, it is not much. For most companies their core operation is transportation or retail or selling insurance or whatever. Compared to the health insurance, labour costs, office building maintenance and rent, advertising expenses, the amount they spend on Office software is a pittance. As long as MSFT keeps prices that low, it is difficult for ODF to gain traction.
The switch will be very very gradual initially. First companies for whom office software costs is a significant portion of their operating expenses. Then slowly it will spread to other companies. We should not expect any quick victories. Then once the alternative formats have gained enough critical mass, and the backward compatibility issues have become less of an issue, there would be quick upsurge for ODF. But still MSFT will have a significant market share in office software for a long time to come.
By the way, I did not choose Vishu on a whim. The 10 recorded "avatars" of Vishnu were, in that order, Fish, Turtle, Boar, Half-Lion-Half-Man, The Dwarf Man, The Angry Man, The Perfect Man Raman, Over the hill, less than perfect men Krishnan & BalaRaman and Kalki. In an allegory the Hindu scriptures have recorded roughly the sequence of evolution. Note how well the sequence matches the ascent of man predicted by the Theory of Evolution.
You talk as though being a Theory is an insult. In science, for something to be called a Theory, it is quite a honor. Just look at other theories: Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, The Heliocentric Theory ...
Lower than theory is hypothesis. Even lower than hypothesis would be a conjecture. I don't think ID would even qualify as a conjecture. Let ID answer some questions before it starts asking questions to The Theory of Evolution.
How can you call the Designer, Intelligent? Why it could not be a Theory of Idiotic Design? There is as much evidence to infer truly spectacular idiocy and lunacy in the part of the Designer, as there is for His Intelligence. Why do we have diseases? Why do we grow old and die? Why do whales have totally useless leg bones buried deep inside their bodies? Why do human embryos develop a coat of fur, just like the Chimpanzees, during the seventh month of gestation? When you are done answering them I got a couple of million more.
Everyone knows the extinctions were perfectly explained using the Theory of Intelligent Smiting.
If the specification is as free as ASCII, to use one example, then there is nothing wrong in adopting that as a standard.
Has any one actually shelled out money to buy works? It is installed as crapware by the vendors. How out of touch with reality is MSFT really?
Apart from the tenuous connection that he spammed and ran a website to sell his drugs, this guy seems to be a regular run of the mill criminal. Let some one be sent to jail for 30 years, nay, 30 days, solely for spamming, then it deserves to be of interest to technozanti.
I have moved half way across the world, and I was dirt poor in grad school too with negative net worth. Yes, that is euphemism for being in debt.
That is probably the current law. But still I believe the burden of proof should not be on me. The companies can extend credit with lax authentication if they want to, it is after all, their money. But they should prove that they actually lent the money to the correct person before reporting it to the agencies or putting it on permanent record. And if my salary works out to some 35$ an hour and it takes me 10 hours to clear the records, they own should owe me 350$. Put in rules like that, and the identity theft would go down drastically.
In America there is no reason to drown in debt except for the extremely poor people. There is no public transportation infrastructure here. So the poorest of the poor are just one fender bender, one alternator failure, one radiator failure or one medical emergency from bankruptcy. Their car breaks down, they cant get to work, they get into very high interest rate credit and get into an never ending circle of debt. But for this section, everyone else is drowning in debt because of their own poor financial skills.
People drowning in debt still have digital cable and cell phones, they eat out in restaurants, live in huge homes they cant afford ... I dont have much sympathy for folks who borrow without knowing their limits.
ID theft is not limited to the internet. The waiter who takes away your credit card, or people who steal from your mailbox, or people who file a change of address form to intercept your mail, or employees who have access to the credit card numbers in the sales/accounting dept, employees in doctor's offices or hospital billing dept, can steal identities.
It is stupid to assume id theft is an internet problem or to find technical solution for it when there is no incentive for the credit industry to cut down on it. If a lender damages my credit rating by lax lending, the lender is liable for a sum like 10% of my annual income. Then they will clean up their act in a hurry.
Since slashdotters have typically IQ in the range of 160 to 220, the will remain virgins till age 72 or so by my extrapolation.
It would be a good PR for Google to bid 4.6B for it, knowing fully well it will be out bidded by AT&T and Verizon.
The MS-Office monopoly has so far been nearly impossible to beat. But things can change quite rapidly. Terms like vendor-lock and interoperability will eventually penetrate the skulls of the thickest CIOs and CTOs.
It would help if the supporters of Free Software and Open Software would stop fighting the internecine battles and start uniformly supporting Open Standards. Even before you mention the word Open Standards, immediately others pushing Free Software agenda and Open Source agenda push their pet projects, creating an impression it is all one and the same and one can not have Open Standards without also Open Source and Free Software. They are different.
You might not agree that replacing MSFT monopoly with some kind of duopoly (like it is with Intuit-Quicken and MS-Money). But it is definitely better than the monopoly. Once the customers are educated about the vendor lock and compatibility the duopoly will naturally break down. Eventually there will be enough space for Free Software, Open Software, and Close source software to coexist.
In The Deathly Hallows by JKR there is this conversation: (nah, it is not a spoiler. Don't worry.)
"You don't understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with the goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is its maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs."
"But if it was bought ---"
"---then they would consider it rented by one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. [snip] I believe he thinks, as do the fiercest of his kind, that it ought to have been returned to the goblins once the original purchaser died. They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft."
The online companies just have to include "Contract terms have changed Click here to read, click here to ignore it and go to the site" flash screen to comply with the new ruling.
So it is all fine and wonderful and dandy in the corporate world, and peace and serenity will continue to reign in Ye Olde Country Club.
Gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks, furnace oil for ships and kerosene for the jets all come mainly from imported crude oil. The shortfall between domestic crude production and the demand has widened very rapidly in the last decade. To keep sending more and more money to the Middle East to import oil is madness. Sooner we kick the imported oil addiction better it is for the West. Plug in hybrids would reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
8 miles? under ideal conditions, flat road, no a/c ... very disappointing. Toyota's engineering is very good. If this is all such great engineers can manage, it shows that batteries have a long way to go.
There are dozens of vendors like belkin selling simple chargers for iPods without using the USB ports. So they all wont be able to charge iPods? Apple can at best thwart iTunes/iPod link on devices reported to be stolen. But preventing charging? Nah.
It is the Goblin logic. George Weasley clearly tells Harry, "The Goblins dont believe they sell anything to the wizards. They believe it belongs to the maker and you are only renting it. Once you die, the object should be returned to the Goblin manufacturer. They dont like the idea of the Wizards passing goblin made objects from person to person without them getting paid." Was JKR talking about *IAA there?
No vendor likes to compete on price alone. Every vendor would like to have some kind of product differentiation in the market place to set himself apart. One of the most important product differentiation a PC maker could have would be to tout "my PCs use the safer browser FireFox!" in the ads. The claim may or may not be true. The claim could be contested by other vendors. But it is a differentiation and it will work in an ad campaign. Why no major PC vendor is doing this, then? They lose massive MSFT subsidy to preload only MSFT and its vassals like Intuit.
So in effect MSFT is not so free to withdraw the subsidy or even to punish DELL for selling Ubuntu. DELL does have some bargaining power in its ability to provide a marketshare for non MSFT products in the Windows universe.
All OpenOffice needs is a small but significant marketshare, like 5% or 10%. Once FireFox reached 5 to 10% marketshare, the websites had to retool and make sure they are compatible with it, and started taking out the IE only hacks, and the attitude changed from, "We dont support anything other than IE" to "we must support Firefox or we lose 10% of the visitors". Similar changes would take place in the Office arena. The moment people start demanding true inter operability between MS Office and Open Office, the game becomes wide open. Since DELL is in a position to boost the marketshare of OpenOffice by 5% quite easily it can play hardball and get the MSFT wholesale price and sell Ubuntu. HP/Compaq knows this too. The question is, will HP also decide to sell Ubuntu or negotiate secret extra discounts (compared to DELL) for not doing ubuntu.
If you leave your door open, the cable guy can come in anytime and fix your cable box. You dont have to house sit over that stupid four hour window. Would you do that? Then why people put up such great resistance to the idea that you must take action, not doable by the browser alone, to download and execute a file from the internet?
Why should the browser be able to run privileged commands on the OS? Why should it have access to anything other than the cache directory?
Mostly people like rickshaw (a weird three wheeled scooter like thingie) drivers, taxi drivers, vegetable vendors, free lance plumbers, electricians and such tradesmen, students, school children, elderly parents, delivery boys, errand boys ... really there are millions of people who will only accept incoming calls. They never make out going calls unless it is a very real emergency. Further the outgoing calls too are metered only after being picked up. Many of them have an "call me back" understanding with others. For example the child might call from school, but the mom will note the caller-id and decline the call. And she would immediately call the child from a land line or a phone with larger call allowance. Despite all these cost minimization ideas by consumers, Indian telcos run a huge profit. Infact I submitted a story to Slashdot about Indian Telcos refusing tax subsidy from the govt. It did not make it.
The entire USA is not covered by Cell phone towers. Infact the coverage is very very spotty in rural areas. There is very heavy urban concentration in the USA. 66% of the people live within 100miles of the coasts. The coverage map of USA is simply patches of urban areas. The higher cost is not due to covering larger area or supporting larger call volumes, or ensuring higher quality of voice or ensuring higher availability.
The real reason is that people here are used to higher prices. They were raised for generations to pay large sums of money to AT&T first and then to the baby bells. People are willing to pay and the Telcos happily oblige. India is very poor country. You need to fight tooth and nail to pry pennies from the people's fists. The Indian Telcos do.
My brother-in-law in India bought two shares of some TATA company for 750Rs per share. Imagine! buying 2 shares! The trade commission was 15 Rs or 33 cents USA. It was high as a percentage 1% of the value of the trade. I would not trade at 1% cost per trade, no sensible person would. So I am sure Indian don't trade as much as the Americans. But how can a company execute a trade and make a profit at 33 cents a trade? It is insane. In India, incoming cell phone calls are free. I think SMS is free. I got 180 minutes of talk time for some 7.5$, no contracts, no other fees. Millions of Indians use their phones only to receive calls, and so dont pay a dime as fees. Why is it so damned expensive in USA. Definitely because of lack of competition. There is no other explanation.