This sounds like "I'm not worried for myself, but I am concerned of the effect could have on other people". So men would transfer their fears, ignorance and paranoia onto concern for womem
What it sounds more like is that purveyors of goods and services that would be displaced by the new technologies usually eventually realize that "but think of the women and children!" has more impact then "but think about my income stream!" when trying to motivate other people to serve your personal financial interests.
What he's saying is that they cite its so-called prerelease status as justification for the existence of such mistakes.
And what I'm saying is that that is not, in fact, what they have done in the case of this error: they've said it was a mistake, apologized for it, and explained what the problem was that resulted in the undesirable symptoms. They didn't cite its (very real, not "so-called") pre-general-release status as justification for the existence of the mistakes. (In the Google+ thread of comments linked from TFA, there will people who did that, but they weren't the Google VP that made the post explaining and apologizing for the problem, they were Google+ users responding to the Google VP.)
Al Qaeda isn't just a bunch of people, it's an ideology.
True.
As V says, "Ideas are bulletproof".
It's true that you can't shoot an idea in the head to kill it. But ideas come from and are spread by people.
Ideologies usually emerge from social circumstances such that an ideology which has any impact won't usually be eliminated just by fighting the particular people holding it at the moment (and that's particularly true of an ideology which is centered around the existence of a particular conflict if you fight it in a way which validates the ideology with the target population.) On the other hand, if you can drive a real distinction between the people selling the ideology and the audience they are trying to sell it to, and take other steps to mitigate the social circumstances which fuel the ideology, then dealing directly with those trying to keep the ideology alive can hasten its demise. An idea may be bulletproof, but its quite possible to strategically defeat an organization centered around an ideology, and even to eradicate, or at least render so limited in influence as to make no difference, the ideology itself.
Just as anti-corporatists bemoan the immortality and geographical reach of corporations, to add to that it is worth considering limiting the number of owners of a corporation and perhaps also setting a minimum period of ownership.
Hard restrictions are blunt tools; a better means to the same end would be to revise the tax system in such a way to encourage dividends rather than increased share value as the primary mechanism for shareholders to earn returns from a corporation.
Quite a long time, but this isn't a beta like the late, fully-public beta of Google Mail, its like the very early, invite-only, restricted beta of Gmail.
Just sounds like they're using "testing" titles to cover their asses when things inevitably go wrong.
Uh, they aren't using to "cover their asses", they are admitting it was a mistake, apologizing for it, and explaining how it happened.
increase the productive part of the economy by say 2% a year instead of negative percents
Oops, if done, no more worries about the trust fund running out of money anytime soon
Incorrect. The annual increase in the productive part of the economy in the projections (both the high-cost and the intermediate) that show the trust fund in trouble are greater than 2% per year, so acheiving that rather meager growth rate would not, as you claim, suffice to eliminate the problems being addressed.
Talk to the Chinese, today, and among the things they are actively doing there, hey, 20 things to do 2% increases
Ignoring for the moment the question of whether, even if they would produce economic growth rates that would be attractive if you ignored all the other impacts, you'd want to mimic the policies of the People's Republic of China in the United States, the impact of a policy isn't just determined by the policy itself, but by the context in which it is implemented, and the PRC is a very different context, politically and economically, from the US. What works for China doesn't necessarily work for the US, and vice versa.
talk to DC types, the priorities are, well, we already covered that in general and we all kind of know anyway. Do we really need to be specific?
Yes, actually, if you want to make a credible argument on that point you need to be a lot more specific (and provide a lot more support) than you did in this post. Simply claiming that unspecified "congress critters" want to avoid doing anything that supports the general welfare and want to do things that harm the general welfare with no more specifics is inadequate.
I think if you look just at public statements and other easily-locatable facts, you could probably find a reasonable degree of support for the argument that at least some Republican members of Congress want to maximize short-term disruption to the economy in the hopes that (as poor economic outcomes fortunes often are) it will be held against the sitting President and his party, and thus improve Republican electoral fortunes in 2012, and when you get to that level of specificity there is something actually possible to have a meaningful discussion about. But your claim about congressional motivations is far too general to even discuss meaningfully.
Except no article on the subject goes past that point. It's just 70% and the story ends there. The mathematical unsustainability of the system in its current state means that the payments will start at 70% and decline year after year after year....
Except that that's not true. Uh, no, the most recent trustees report shows, under the intermediate assumptions that the trust fund will be exhausted in 2036, allowing only 77% of authorized benefits to be paid at that time. That gradually worsens to 74% by 2085, which is the end of the projection period; the projection has it worsening at the end of that period, but at a slower rate as you get farther down the line.
The system needs reform on the expense side of the equation.
Actually, it needs reform on the revenue side; one of the reasons its out of balance in the long term is that social security taxes were set on wages only with the expectation that wages would, over the long-term, bear a stable relation to total income (or at least total income from labor); that assumption has not worked out, as wages represent a declining share of labor income, with a greater share made through fringe benefits which are not subject to Social Security taxes; simply rearranging Social Security taxes to reduce the rates but include fringe benefits, in a manner that was revenue neutral in the short term, would greatly improve long-term balance.
One problem here that not many people know about is that the "trust fund" isn't an actual account with actual money in it.
It's basically just a stack of IOUs from the Treasury dept stating that they will pay that amount when the SSA requests it
One problem here is that people posting things like the above don't know what an "actual account" is, since that's exactly what an actual account (e.g., at a bank) is.
You seem to have "account" confused with "safety deposit box".
Even corporations should be concerned about the prospect of their work being taken private - the project being removed from Open Source and made commercial-only - shortly after their contribution. After all, corporations have to account to their stockholders, and a contribution that can go private quickly would indicate a lack of due diligence or poor negotiation, that could potentially result in lost money, time, and resources.
Often, for corporations, the reason to contribute to open source is to foster an open source community which provides some extra maintenance and development for the project at no cost to the corporation. If that community exists, it doesn't necessarily hurt the corporation if others use the code in closed projects, as long as the open project continues to thrive.
The only upside of the unmarked cars was that you could collect more ticket revenue easily.
No, wrong.
The upside of unmarked patrol cars is that their existence and the fact that they do write tickets and people know about it means that people cannot be certain that the absence of a marked patrol car means that they are safe from enforcement. This enhances deterrence compared to just having marked patrol cars.
You obviously still want to have marked patrol cars as well. If you don't have any unmarked patrol cars and this becomes known (and its unlikely to remain unknown for long) then would-be lawbreakers can feel much safer about being actual lawbreakers if they don't see obviously marked police vehicles around.
The police seem to have no problem analyzing data to figure out the best places and times for speed traps. It's about time they used the same principles to stop real crimes.
That's actually really easy. There are lots of methods for directly measuring the number of speeders, often using similar technology to that used to enforce speeding laws, without actually putting the manpower in place to write tickets. So, you just measure directly and go there.
But that's actually not really what this is about; that method just relies on the future being just like the (very recent) past in terms of where speeding happens without special enforcement, while what this "predictive policing" is about is using analytical tools to get beyond the tomorrow-will-be-just-like-yesterday assumption (which police already have adequate tools to apply to crime) and predict changes to crime patterns so that enhanced enforcement efforts and visibility can be directed where they will be needed this month when that differs from where they would have been most useful last month.
Are they spending a lot of money for a fancy computer system that will tell them to watch out for crime in the crime ridden part of town?
Actually, no, if you RTFA -- or even RTFS -- you'll see that that's what they are spending money to get away from. The last quote in TFS is particularly key here:
'We know where crime has occurred in the last month, but that doesn't mean it'll be there next month,' Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Sean Malinowski says. 'The only way for us to continue to have crime reduction is to start anticipating where crime is going to occur.'"
Because there are many articles here on/. about how cable and mobile carriers are finding various ways to throttle or discriminate among data and in general act in a non-common-carrier-like fashion, and how they have challenged and opposed attempts at net neutrality rules.
Those actions, for the most part, are the background that motivated the current Report and Order. The rules are adopted but not yet effective because required approval of information collection components associated with the enforcement process has not yet occurred (the public comment period ends August 8, 2011.)
It is true that a previous net neutrality-related order adopted on the basis of different statutory authority was struck down as unauthorized by the authority on which it relied.
Obviously, were this order -- the existence of which is part of the premise of other subsequent FCC broadband actions and proposals, including the one related to PSTN under discussion here -- to be repealed (as some in Congress have already attempted, though they've failed to line up sufficient support) or struck down by the courts (as both Verizon and MetroPCS, and maybe others, have already sought to have done before it went into effect), that would change the landscape with regard to other broadband efforts that build on the framework of broadband access with limits on broadband operators power to constrain legal uses of the network that the Open Internet order sets up.
For example, I wrote a sudoku solver in Excel. You can watch the numbers in the spreadsheet cells change as it converges toward the solution. How could I do that in Javascript? I wouldn't know where to begin.
Very easily (once you have the logic to do what you've already done.) In fact, an HTML+JS solution could be done that looked (the code) very similar to the Excel+VBA solution. Calculations aren't hard in JavaScript, and you use DOM references into HTML in JS much the same way you can use cell references to the Excel sheet in VBA.
Goodbye DSL. It will not exist any longer. And no, the government isn't going to decide to spend billions on putting fiber in to every home. Verizon is already doing it and Qwest is getting started.
And Google.
Unfortunately, they might stop or really slow down if there is no more revenue from landline service.
Wait, so if the government announces a multiyear plan which would remove Verizon's ability to earn revenue through one kind of service, you think they would work less hard at making a new services which could replace that soon-to-be-defunct service? Especially when part of the policy proposed for phasing out the existing service is to provide subsidies for the expansion of exactly the class of service that Verizon was already rolling out?
Its possible, of course, but I don't see the logic in expecting that behavior.
Sorry, but DSL dies the moment the PSTN is no longer maintained. Better call the cable company this week.
Many DSL providers also provide fiber and other broadband access options. If the governnent decides to phase out the PSTN, I am sure that they will be very interested in working to roll those out to existing customers rather than losing those customers.
I will give up my PSTN...when the replacement has the reliability of PSTN.
Okay. You do realize the main reason for this proposal is that (1) trends suggest that the vast majority of Americans aren't like you, and will give up their PSTN by 2018 without the reliability of the PSTN, (2) recognizing that, for effective provision of emergency and other services, there is public value in having the network actually used by people have at least the reliability of the current PSTN, (3) recognizing that that means that action is necessary to assure that VoIP and mobile networks have the reliability that PSTN has now, and (4) proposing a set of policy changes that are directed at acheiving that end.
That's fine, but first the wireless and broadband carriers must be made common carriers like they are over telephone. That is one of the biggest differences between the systems. Telephone companies are not permitted to delay, degrade, alter, or record telephone conversations or modem signals. But no such protections exist over broadband or wireless.
This is not correct. While the exact details of the rules are different from PSTN carriers, similar protections (which differ also between fixed and mobile broadband carriers) exist for broadband data. Not sure about cellular specifically.
You are assuming that 'everyone' wants this, including retirees, people in rural areas, people who just don't need broadband and know it.
No, they are measuring empirical trends including the underlying demographics and projecting them out; they actually noted that part of the decline in landline use is organic (that is, because older people who are more resistant are dying, while younger people are more likely to drop landlines or be born into mobile-only or VoIP+mobile households and never acquire a PSTN connection.)
You assume that the cellular/VoIP offerings will be as robust as the PSTN.
No, in fact, the recommendation is that the FCC should address the problem that, with current trends, virtually all of the country will be using cellular/VoIP offerings that are not now and are not projected to be without some additional effort as reliable or robust as the PSTN.
Do you know who connects those cell towers? Those towers don't talk to each other wirelessly, they use terrestrial copper/fiber. If you sunset the network that keeps the copper/fiber infrastructure in reasonably good shape, the economics of maintaining the cellular network change, driving up costs significantly.
I'm pretty sure the sunset isn't for any backend network, its for the end-user facing use of the PSTN network, redirecting government resources designed to provide universal end-user access to the PSTN to assure universal end-user access to next-generation networks.
And please, don't maintain that there is quality parity between these types of services/networks
I'm pretty sure that the FCC advisory commission that is specifically recommending policy changes for the specific purpose of addressing quality and reliability gaps in the networks that end-users are, despite the quality and reliability gaps, choosing over the PSTN is not basing its recommendation on the premise that those gaps don't exist; the recommendation is based on the fact that the quality/reliability gaps exist.
Also note that while many government agencies have adopted VoIP internally, they recognize that they must have a reliable network to serve the public, especially for emergency services, and thus the vast majority stick with the PSTN for dialtone.
Unfortunately, that strategy fails to provide a reliable network "to serve the public" even now, when a sizable fraction of the public isn't using PSTN (and so, the use of such a network to serve the public requires both the PSTN and the networks actually used by the public served to be working), and this problem will just get worse over time as the public continues to abandon the PSTN.
PSTN is broken as a mechanism for connecting people reliably to emergency services. It is not broken because it is technologically inadequate, it is broken because people are not choosing to retain access to the PSTN network.
The alternative services which people are choosing are also, currently, broken for connecting people reliably to emergency services.
The recommendation is to recognize that the first fact is a trend that is largely desirable except for the second fact, and to address the problem posed by the second fact.
Doing this by 2018 is pretty much impossible. There's still huge chunks of land without BB service or even decent cell phone coverage.
The whole basis of the recommendation is a finding that without any policy change, the current trend would have about 6% of the population still using the PSTN network by 2018. I don't really think its anywhere near impossible to bridge that 6% gap with appropriately targetted incentives for service provision and integration of the types recommended.
Today the government requires VOIP providers to warn people about the unreliability of 911 access by any means other than copper. Now the government wants to take away the copper since it is obsolete.
Not quite.
Now an advisory body on telecom policy wants the goverment to begin to take policy steps -- since, warnings are not, VoIP and mobile services are displacing PSTN -- so that (among other things) 911 access is reliable when accessed via the networks on which people are increasingly relying.
The POTS system has had a hundred years of experience to work out issues like redundant power supplies. Cellular networks haven't. So POTS often works when cell doesn't; the reverse is almost never true.
In another seventy years, this will probably not be the case.
The POTS system will always have more years of experience to work out issues than any newer system. This is always true of older infrastructure.
And, actually, in emergencies there have been many situations where the POTS network didn't work where the cell networks did. (And, in emergencies, because of the nature of POTS vs. cellular connections, its particularly likely that people who need to communicate might not have access to devices attached to the POTS network but would still have access to cellular devices. A functioning network that doesn't actually reach the people who need to communicate has limited utility.)
But, its important to understand that the push for a date-certain end to PSTN isn't because the alternatives are good enough to replace POTS as it is, its because they are -- whether or not they are good enough -- actually replacing the existing network for most users, and that they have advantages that the existing PSTN network doesn't provide, and the date-certain end is seen as a way to get both government and private resources directed at improving the areas where it is not good enough for the perceived public emergency needs, and to assure universal access to it so that the additional benefits over PSTN are more widely realized.
The attitude that the ends justify the means in software engineering is a problem.
No, its not; the only possible justification for the costs incurred by the means used are the benefits provided by the ends acheived.
Software isn't a write once and forget it product nor is usually written by one person.
True (well, often true, but actually there is plenty of software that actually is "write once and forget it"), but the error of evaluating software that isn't write-once-and-be-done as if it was write-once-and-be-done isn't that there is something in general wrong with the view that the means taken are to be justified by the ends acheived, but instead failure to accurately consider the actual value of the ends acheived and costs of the means used. Its the specific evaluation that is wrong, not some general principle of justification.
The more people that need to work on a piece of code the more that code needs to adhere to the groups coding standards.
True, but also note that the more people that need to work on a single code module, excluding the number resulting simply from the length of time the software is in service and turnover in assignments, the more likely that there is a more fundamental problem with the development methodology than people not adhering to coding standards. Having more than one person responsible for the same piece of code is as much of a problem as having more than one piece of code responsible for the same external resource.
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What it sounds more like is that purveyors of goods and services that would be displaced by the new technologies usually eventually realize that "but think of the women and children!" has more impact then "but think about my income stream!" when trying to motivate other people to serve your personal financial interests.
And what I'm saying is that that is not, in fact, what they have done in the case of this error: they've said it was a mistake, apologized for it, and explained what the problem was that resulted in the undesirable symptoms. They didn't cite its (very real, not "so-called") pre-general-release status as justification for the existence of the mistakes. (In the Google+ thread of comments linked from TFA, there will people who did that, but they weren't the Google VP that made the post explaining and apologizing for the problem, they were Google+ users responding to the Google VP.)
Wrong.
True.
It's true that you can't shoot an idea in the head to kill it. But ideas come from and are spread by people.
Ideologies usually emerge from social circumstances such that an ideology which has any impact won't usually be eliminated just by fighting the particular people holding it at the moment (and that's particularly true of an ideology which is centered around the existence of a particular conflict if you fight it in a way which validates the ideology with the target population.) On the other hand, if you can drive a real distinction between the people selling the ideology and the audience they are trying to sell it to, and take other steps to mitigate the social circumstances which fuel the ideology, then dealing directly with those trying to keep the ideology alive can hasten its demise. An idea may be bulletproof, but its quite possible to strategically defeat an organization centered around an ideology, and even to eradicate, or at least render so limited in influence as to make no difference, the ideology itself.
Hard restrictions are blunt tools; a better means to the same end would be to revise the tax system in such a way to encourage dividends rather than increased share value as the primary mechanism for shareholders to earn returns from a corporation.
Quite a long time, but this isn't a beta like the late, fully-public beta of Google Mail, its like the very early, invite-only, restricted beta of Gmail.
Uh, they aren't using to "cover their asses", they are admitting it was a mistake, apologizing for it, and explaining how it happened.
Incorrect. The annual increase in the productive part of the economy in the projections (both the high-cost and the intermediate) that show the trust fund in trouble are greater than 2% per year, so acheiving that rather meager growth rate would not, as you claim, suffice to eliminate the problems being addressed.
Ignoring for the moment the question of whether, even if they would produce economic growth rates that would be attractive if you ignored all the other impacts, you'd want to mimic the policies of the People's Republic of China in the United States, the impact of a policy isn't just determined by the policy itself, but by the context in which it is implemented, and the PRC is a very different context, politically and economically, from the US. What works for China doesn't necessarily work for the US, and vice versa.
Yes, actually, if you want to make a credible argument on that point you need to be a lot more specific (and provide a lot more support) than you did in this post. Simply claiming that unspecified "congress critters" want to avoid doing anything that supports the general welfare and want to do things that harm the general welfare with no more specifics is inadequate.
I think if you look just at public statements and other easily-locatable facts, you could probably find a reasonable degree of support for the argument that at least some Republican members of Congress want to maximize short-term disruption to the economy in the hopes that (as poor economic outcomes fortunes often are) it will be held against the sitting President and his party, and thus improve Republican electoral fortunes in 2012, and when you get to that level of specificity there is something actually possible to have a meaningful discussion about. But your claim about congressional motivations is far too general to even discuss meaningfully.
Except that that's not true. Uh, no, the most recent trustees report shows, under the intermediate assumptions that the trust fund will be exhausted in 2036, allowing only 77% of authorized benefits to be paid at that time. That gradually worsens to 74% by 2085, which is the end of the projection period; the projection has it worsening at the end of that period, but at a slower rate as you get farther down the line.
Actually, it needs reform on the revenue side; one of the reasons its out of balance in the long term is that social security taxes were set on wages only with the expectation that wages would, over the long-term, bear a stable relation to total income (or at least total income from labor); that assumption has not worked out, as wages represent a declining share of labor income, with a greater share made through fringe benefits which are not subject to Social Security taxes; simply rearranging Social Security taxes to reduce the rates but include fringe benefits, in a manner that was revenue neutral in the short term, would greatly improve long-term balance.
One problem here is that people posting things like the above don't know what an "actual account" is, since that's exactly what an actual account (e.g., at a bank) is.
You seem to have "account" confused with "safety deposit box".
Often, for corporations, the reason to contribute to open source is to foster an open source community which provides some extra maintenance and development for the project at no cost to the corporation. If that community exists, it doesn't necessarily hurt the corporation if others use the code in closed projects, as long as the open project continues to thrive.
No, wrong.
The upside of unmarked patrol cars is that their existence and the fact that they do write tickets and people know about it means that people cannot be certain that the absence of a marked patrol car means that they are safe from enforcement. This enhances deterrence compared to just having marked patrol cars.
You obviously still want to have marked patrol cars as well. If you don't have any unmarked patrol cars and this becomes known (and its unlikely to remain unknown for long) then would-be lawbreakers can feel much safer about being actual lawbreakers if they don't see obviously marked police vehicles around.
That's actually really easy. There are lots of methods for directly measuring the number of speeders, often using similar technology to that used to enforce speeding laws, without actually putting the manpower in place to write tickets. So, you just measure directly and go there.
But that's actually not really what this is about; that method just relies on the future being just like the (very recent) past in terms of where speeding happens without special enforcement, while what this "predictive policing" is about is using analytical tools to get beyond the tomorrow-will-be-just-like-yesterday assumption (which police already have adequate tools to apply to crime) and predict changes to crime patterns so that enhanced enforcement efforts and visibility can be directed where they will be needed this month when that differs from where they would have been most useful last month.
Actually, no, if you RTFA -- or even RTFS -- you'll see that that's what they are spending money to get away from. The last quote in TFS is particularly key here:
FCC Report and Order 10-201, Adopted Dec. 21, 2010.
Those actions, for the most part, are the background that motivated the current Report and Order. The rules are adopted but not yet effective because required approval of information collection components associated with the enforcement process has not yet occurred (the public comment period ends August 8, 2011.)
It is true that a previous net neutrality-related order adopted on the basis of different statutory authority was struck down as unauthorized by the authority on which it relied.
Obviously, were this order -- the existence of which is part of the premise of other subsequent FCC broadband actions and proposals, including the one related to PSTN under discussion here -- to be repealed (as some in Congress have already attempted, though they've failed to line up sufficient support) or struck down by the courts (as both Verizon and MetroPCS, and maybe others, have already sought to have done before it went into effect), that would change the landscape with regard to other broadband efforts that build on the framework of broadband access with limits on broadband operators power to constrain legal uses of the network that the Open Internet order sets up.
Placing blame on them, even if it is well-deserved, doesn't do anything to address the issue.
Very easily (once you have the logic to do what you've already done.) In fact, an HTML+JS solution could be done that looked (the code) very similar to the Excel+VBA solution. Calculations aren't hard in JavaScript, and you use DOM references into HTML in JS much the same way you can use cell references to the Excel sheet in VBA.
And Google.
Wait, so if the government announces a multiyear plan which would remove Verizon's ability to earn revenue through one kind of service, you think they would work less hard at making a new services which could replace that soon-to-be-defunct service? Especially when part of the policy proposed for phasing out the existing service is to provide subsidies for the expansion of exactly the class of service that Verizon was already rolling out?
Its possible, of course, but I don't see the logic in expecting that behavior.
Many DSL providers also provide fiber and other broadband access options. If the governnent decides to phase out the PSTN, I am sure that they will be very interested in working to roll those out to existing customers rather than losing those customers.
Okay. You do realize the main reason for this proposal is that (1) trends suggest that the vast majority of Americans aren't like you, and will give up their PSTN by 2018 without the reliability of the PSTN, (2) recognizing that, for effective provision of emergency and other services, there is public value in having the network actually used by people have at least the reliability of the current PSTN, (3) recognizing that that means that action is necessary to assure that VoIP and mobile networks have the reliability that PSTN has now, and (4) proposing a set of policy changes that are directed at acheiving that end.
This is not correct. While the exact details of the rules are different from PSTN carriers, similar protections (which differ also between fixed and mobile broadband carriers) exist for broadband data. Not sure about cellular specifically.
No, they are measuring empirical trends including the underlying demographics and projecting them out; they actually noted that part of the decline in landline use is organic (that is, because older people who are more resistant are dying, while younger people are more likely to drop landlines or be born into mobile-only or VoIP+mobile households and never acquire a PSTN connection.)
No, in fact, the recommendation is that the FCC should address the problem that, with current trends, virtually all of the country will be using cellular/VoIP offerings that are not now and are not projected to be without some additional effort as reliable or robust as the PSTN.
I'm pretty sure the sunset isn't for any backend network, its for the end-user facing use of the PSTN network, redirecting government resources designed to provide universal end-user access to the PSTN to assure universal end-user access to next-generation networks.
I'm pretty sure that the FCC advisory commission that is specifically recommending policy changes for the specific purpose of addressing quality and reliability gaps in the networks that end-users are, despite the quality and reliability gaps, choosing over the PSTN is not basing its recommendation on the premise that those gaps don't exist; the recommendation is based on the fact that the quality/reliability gaps exist.
Unfortunately, that strategy fails to provide a reliable network "to serve the public" even now, when a sizable fraction of the public isn't using PSTN (and so, the use of such a network to serve the public requires both the PSTN and the networks actually used by the public served to be working), and this problem will just get worse over time as the public continues to abandon the PSTN.
PSTN is broken as a mechanism for connecting people reliably to emergency services. It is not broken because it is technologically inadequate, it is broken because people are not choosing to retain access to the PSTN network.
The alternative services which people are choosing are also, currently, broken for connecting people reliably to emergency services.
The recommendation is to recognize that the first fact is a trend that is largely desirable except for the second fact, and to address the problem posed by the second fact.
The whole basis of the recommendation is a finding that without any policy change, the current trend would have about 6% of the population still using the PSTN network by 2018. I don't really think its anywhere near impossible to bridge that 6% gap with appropriately targetted incentives for service provision and integration of the types recommended.
Not quite.
Now an advisory body on telecom policy wants the goverment to begin to take policy steps -- since, warnings are not, VoIP and mobile services are displacing PSTN -- so that (among other things) 911 access is reliable when accessed via the networks on which people are increasingly relying.
The POTS system will always have more years of experience to work out issues than any newer system. This is always true of older infrastructure.
And, actually, in emergencies there have been many situations where the POTS network didn't work where the cell networks did. (And, in emergencies, because of the nature of POTS vs. cellular connections, its particularly likely that people who need to communicate might not have access to devices attached to the POTS network but would still have access to cellular devices. A functioning network that doesn't actually reach the people who need to communicate has limited utility.)
But, its important to understand that the push for a date-certain end to PSTN isn't because the alternatives are good enough to replace POTS as it is, its because they are -- whether or not they are good enough -- actually replacing the existing network for most users, and that they have advantages that the existing PSTN network doesn't provide, and the date-certain end is seen as a way to get both government and private resources directed at improving the areas where it is not good enough for the perceived public emergency needs, and to assure universal access to it so that the additional benefits over PSTN are more widely realized.
No, its not; the only possible justification for the costs incurred by the means used are the benefits provided by the ends acheived.
True (well, often true, but actually there is plenty of software that actually is "write once and forget it"), but the error of evaluating software that isn't write-once-and-be-done as if it was write-once-and-be-done isn't that there is something in general wrong with the view that the means taken are to be justified by the ends acheived, but instead failure to accurately consider the actual value of the ends acheived and costs of the means used. Its the specific evaluation that is wrong, not some general principle of justification.
True, but also note that the more people that need to work on a single code module, excluding the number resulting simply from the length of time the software is in service and turnover in assignments, the more likely that there is a more fundamental problem with the development methodology than people not adhering to coding standards. Having more than one person responsible for the same piece of code is as much of a problem as having more than one piece of code responsible for the same external resource.