To Have And To Hold, In Sickness and Health.......... by Jongsstraw

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

To Have And To Hold, In Sickness and Health..........

POSTED BY: JONGSSTRAW
UPDATED: Friday, January 14, 2011 20:07
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VIEWED: 620
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Friday, January 14, 2011 3:44 AM

Do you Jong take this AT&T Blackberry to be your lawfully wedded cell phone? No sir, I do not!

I just don't get what I see going on in this country with people and their phones, and I'm becoming increasingly annoyed and disconnected from the rest of society over it. The way I see it ...it's a phone, a f'ing phone! Every single "feature" they constantly hawk on TV ads for phones that do this or do that I just shake my head in disbelief. Who are these people that need any of it? They need a phone to tell them where the closest Pizza Hut is? They need a phone to watch TV or movies on? They neeed a phone to Tweet their life to others? Do those receiving the Tweets really give a flying f'ck? I see these people on the streets, and they all look the same.....got their nose buried in their stupid phones, exisiting in their own little phone world, oblivious to what's going on around them. A thousand "aps" for everything imagineable sounds great....but on your phone? Are you kidding me? I hate phones. I like my privacy and I like quiet. I only have a cell phone because my company says I have to have one and they pay for it. I use it only as a telephone. I find it to be a ball and chain....an un-wanted link for the rest of the world to find me when I don't want to be found.

I guess I'm just an old tired geezer. I like to sit in front of my desktop computer with it's 22" screen for my computer activities. I like to watch TV and movies and sports on large screen tvs. Put me in the Smithsonian with a sign that says human dinosaur.

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Friday, January 14, 2011 3:55 AM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
I use it only as a telephone.

I have a cell so I can make calls in case of emergencies, cause there are no pay phones anymore. It is turned off all the time unless I need to make a call. I don't even know my cell phone number.

I'm middle aged, but not a geezer yet, so it's not cause I'm old.

Can't Take (my gorram) Sky
------
Everything I say is just my opinion, not fact.

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Friday, January 14, 2011 5:44 AM

HARDWARE

I work in IT and I don't believe in being an early adopter. I like to let other people spend their money to be part of the live beta testing that has become the way to do business. I'll wait for a year or so before I try out a new gadget. If it is around, great. If it dies 3 months after release, I've saved a bundle.

But I don't always answer my phone. There's this little feature called voicemail. I'd like people to use it. I also have a policy of not listening to an automated call. If I'm not important enough for you to pick up a phone to speak to, you're not important enough for me to listen to your message.

The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.

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Friday, January 14, 2011 5:45 AM

DREAMTROVE

Sign no contracts, carry no debt.

On contracts,, the contract demand is an absurd one. You are buying a piece of equipment, what you choose to do with it is up to you. You paid for it, now it's yours. Ideally, it should connect to whichever tower is closest, or can be reached, if you want to contact that tower, and you should be charged accordingly, according to the actual cost, plus profit model, by some logical model used by the rest of the corporate world.

Imagine a parallel world designed by these guys:

I buy a phone. I have to use their long distance (this is how it started, the govt handed bell the power, and they don't want to let go.) additionally, they have the right to sell your number, and you will get a certain number of calls a day harassing you for money (parallel:bundled bloatware, privacy "slips" resulting spam, etc.)

A television. I can only use this cable company, and I have to subscribe for two years. I also agree to watch fox Sunday.

A computer. It only works with one ISP, and I must pay for two years service. It will only run selected software that is company approved, and comes with its own spyware,

A car, I can only use one companies gas station. The car will only drive on certain roads, and I will be charged for filling a tank of gas each week, regardless of whether or not I use it all, or if I don't even drive, or if the car is long since wrecked.

The problem is that they're not like other companies, and never were. I just stumbled upon the whole history for a very random reason. My mom wanted to buy my sister a sewing machine, and had gotten a cheap one that broke. So she said "I want to get one like my old GrayBar. I doubt those are made anymore."

I said, no, probably not, but I'll bet you can still find one online. This turned out to be an unexpected rabbit hole.GrayBar turns out to be Western Electric, and old and successful company that developed the telephone. The patent was awarded to Bell for curious reasons. The story we learn in school is timing, but of course, that has no real legal standing. Its not really first come first serve. It seems that the govt. Wanted to work with Bell, and they many times had to manipulate things in Bells favor to get him and his firm back on top in the telephone industry.

See, the problem is that Bell had this idea for a telephone, but he had no idea how to build one, and he tried, but didn't really get it to work. He did, with the help of Gray and Barton, but he was later unable to duplicate it successfully. His design didn't seem to work. He contracted with Western Electric to build it, and then later launched into selling his own, but not successfully, so he came back, and the old AT&T phones were made by Western Electric.

Problem is: a patent is a blueprint for building something that works, defined in terms that anyone else in the industry could understand, and not too close to what has already been dsigned. But the resulting telephone was very close to various projects at western electric, and it ultimately used their innards to work. So why was he holding the patent?

This iPad autocompletes holding to put an e in the middle of it, but it came completing att as AT&T so readily that often it would appear in the place of the word at, which probably is more often what you meant, but the touch screen double registers a lot, particularly as it gets older.

But AT&T didn't make this phone. Oh. Right. They don't make phones. They never made phones. They never made phone lines. They didn't invent either. Doesn't seem anyones holding up a Nokia patent on the idea of a cell phone. What gives?

Well, remember a couple years ago when Bush asked companies to tap phones, record people's Internet browsing histories and block a list of sites considered anti-govt, like commies in china do? Well, AT&T was the first to step up and say yupyupyup!! Them, and Time Warner.

It seems that certain companies play ball more, and the capitalist system was corrupted by govt. A long time ago. Once bell was a bad boy, and so the govt. Attacked. AT&T had gone into alternative energy dev. And come up with solar cells and a number of other things. That brought down the wrath of god.

Now I find that AT&T is just easier to deal with than it's evil twin child verizon, which has better service, but is much more of a stickler. They kept trying to force me to sign a contract, and I said "um, cant do that," so eventually, back to AT&T I went.

So for the useful part of this rant: get a prepaid data plan and use Skype or some such. The real geeks say travel abroad, and get someone elses international service that covers the US. It's much cheaper, no strings, and you'll be using the same damn towers.

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Friday, January 14, 2011 8:31 AM

WULFENSTAR

http://youtu.be/VUnGTXRxGHg

Verizon is trying to be quiet about it, but they are ending their 2 year renewal of cell-phones.

http://www.businessinsider.com/verizon-ending-upgrade-discount-program
-before-iphone-release-2011-1

Thanks apple.

"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies"

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Friday, January 14, 2011 5:22 PM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

Well, I currently carry a phone AND an iPod with me, and I'd love it if I could just get it down to one device. I hate telephones, but I need to have one (no land line, no phone wired into the house), so I'd prefer my phone to have features that I *DO* find useful. I use the iPod for maps, GPS, tracking my training rides and runs, I keep my music on it, I listen to podcasts on it, it's got my night sky celestial maps on it, compass, level, calculator, and more...

What I really *DON'T* do on my iPod is surf the web or post online. It's got facebook connectivity, Safari, and e-mail/g-mail apps, but I find it much easier to use a real computer and real keyboard for such things.

The iPod has replaced my CD collection in the car, it's replaced my satellite radio subscription, it's mostly replaced my radio and my TV news.

I tend to look at such devices not as phones with a bunch of extra crap welded on, but as pocket computers that happen to have some phone capabilities. And to be honest, the phone part of it seems to be the least worthwhile part.

And that suits me just fine. As I said, I tend to hate telephones. No one ever got good news at 2 in the morning, and at a certain age, a two o'clock phone call means you've lost another loved one.

This Space For Rent!

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Friday, January 14, 2011 5:24 PM

KWICKO

Quote:
Originally posted by Wulfenstar:
Verizon is trying to be quiet about it, but they are ending their 2 year renewal of cell-phones.

http://www.businessinsider.com/verizon-ending-upgrade-discount-program
-before-iphone-release-2011-1

Thanks apple.

"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies"

Huh. Verizon's been bugging me to take a free phone since last April. They want me to upgrade for free and renew a contract, since I'm not on one currently. I just checked, and they're still offering that deal.

Now, if they want to offer me some kind of sweetheart deal on the iPhone, they might get my attention!

By the way, why do you blame Apple for Verizon's business practices, Wulfie?

This Space For Rent!

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Friday, January 14, 2011 5:28 PM

BYTEMITE

Cell phones and blackberries are silly and pointless. I also don't need massive amounts of time on a phone... I have my computer for that. ._.

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Friday, January 14, 2011 8:07 PM

DREAMTROVE

America is getting to the point where we are so backward that the territory and population are an easy target for any forward thinking predator nation.

Sure, invading would be difficult, but you can bribe your way in pretty easy, I expect to see foreign competitor networks displace american ones pretty quick.

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