Bell’s Blues

August 23, 2010 by Dick.

Google denied selling out network neutrality with Verizon earlier this month but the ballistic blogosphere bucked that.

You may recall that Google and Verizon unveiled a plan on August 9 that would prohibit wireline operators from discriminating on the open Internet but proposed a second, closed (mobile) Internet where they could do just that.

Turns out that BP’s Tony Hayward has assumed the helm of the joint GOOG-VZ P.R. department.

[Important Note: The following column appeared under this same title in the Burlington Free Press in March of 1997.]

“Hang on. I dropped the phone.”

Like the toilet, the telephone is the household appliance that must perform faithfully every time you need to make a call.

Once upon a time the telephone came one style (Durable Dial), one color (Bell Black). One monopoly served everyone. Local calls were unlimited, operators assisted, phone bills were reasonable, and the phones stood up to the occasional gambol on the kitchen floor.

Then, with a swipe of the judicial pen, “Ma Bell” split into AT&T and all the regional Baby Bells like New England Bell. Phone bills soared. We all had to buy cheap phones that bounce poorly. Trust in the phone company went down the toilet.

Heard at a Vermont IGA, “Their minutes last 53 seconds.”

[Historical Note: New England Bell spawned NYNEX which in turn merged with Bell Atlantic and spawned Verizon which sold out to Fairpoint which went bankrupt. See how that works?]

Thanks to the Vermont Telecommunications Agreement, NYNEX gave us measured service. In phone company parlance, measured service counts each instant of local phone use. Then they bill us. NYNEX sold measured service to Vermonters by saying it controls our local telephone costs.

Sure. The old way, we paid $19.63 every month.

Measured service means we can’t “pay any more that $26.67.” If you manage not to use their minimum daily allowance, you’ll pay only $19.52.

Here’s the scoop. NYNEX “gives” us a $6.95 worth of message units each month. Every message unit amounts to one minute on the phone. More or less. When you use more message units, NYNEX bills you. NYNEX charges you for each whole minute’s worth if you use even a single second. Even if you get a wrong number. If I use less than my allotment, does NYNEX give me a discount? No. They just make more profit.

Who counts those minutes? The electric company puts their meters where we can see them. When I pump gasoline into my car, the readout tells me how much in thousandths of gallons. I’ve always wondered why I need that kind of precision.

I installed a phone timer to record every outgoing call; the log shows whether the call is peak or off-peak. The local usage charge on my bill has never come within 10% of the total shown in the log. Since NYNEX apparently cannot count, I guess I do need the gas pump kind of precision in my phone bill. Wasn’t NYNEX forced to return a $15 million excess profit?

Maybe that’s why they needed an 8.2% rate increase [then].

Measured service is such a delicious oxymoron. It positions its purveyors perfectly in a world where decamping lovers practice “cruel kindness,” a computer crash can cause a “partial shutdown” in your life, and “call answering” leads to a heartfelt conversation with a computer voice.

Almost everyone has a phone story. Your state Public Service Board wants to hear yours. Speak up at public hearings; write to them in your state capitol. If one or two of us sing loud and long, it might sound like a song from Woodstock. If a hundred of us serenade them, they’ll think it’s a movement. And if they get letters by the mailbag, who knows, NYNEX might get some competition. With more than one dial tone provider looking for your business, Vermonters might get nicer phone bills.

There is another way. A NYNEX representative told me she has had measured service for a few years, and it doesn’t cost her any extra.

“How so?” I asked.

“I don’t make any calls.”

Back to Verizon and Google. The Internet will be open but not the mobile Internet.

The big players say it is to protect bandwidth.

Some of the talking heads agree and note it is to protect (phone company) revenue.

The Media and Democracy Coalition, for example, noted that this have-have not system “could further widen the digital divide, particularly for those that rely primarily or exclusively on wireless Internet access, as do many individuals in rural areas, and many low-income consumers. It may also create a barrier to entry by independent creators, entrepreneurs and startups.”

That’s true but there is a bigger issue.

Remember the NYNEX message units? Verizon does. You pay them every time you dial your cellular phone.

Bank of America will test a system that bills consumers for purchases they make with their mobile phones. The initial mobile payments test, beginning in New York City next month, includes BP gas stations, New York City taxis, Burger King and McDonald’s restaurants, Home Depot, and the Walgreen’s and CVS drug store chains.

Mobile payments. Phone company collectors with baseball bats.

Mobile payments are especially popular in Asia and Europe where consumer use smartphones to pay for goods and services. The billing uses SMS-based transactions, “direct mobile billing,” mobile web payments (WAP), or the fastest-growing contactless NFC (Near Field Communication). Most purchases are for digital goods (music and videos, ebooks, online games, and the like), bus fares or parking meters, and burgers.

Experts say the market for mobile payments will exceed $600 billion globally in less than three years. That’s almost as much as the AIG bailout.

And you think Google and Verizon aren’t slobbering to skim that?

Remember the former Soviet republic of Moldova? About the same time in 1997 that I reported the NYNEX fleecing of Vermonters, that tiny country gave us the Moldovan horse, a Trojan horse that hijacked customers’ modems and dialed up Eastern Europe, at tens or hundreds or even a thousand dollars per minute. Victims ended up with phone bills that cost more than their cars.

AT&T’s Fraud Control Group got involved. The FTC investigated intensively. And while that was going on the phone company mafia kept collecting on those thousand-dollar phone bills.

Are these the peeps you want in charge of your Visa bill?

Google says their mobile Internet plan is “compromising not selling out.”

Uh huh. And NYNEX said the check was in the mail and they won’t … well, you know the rest.

Posted in History, Business, Tech Toys, Politics & News, Random Access | 1 Comment »

Independence or Bust

July 5, 2010 by Dick.

I feel independent today.

Yesterday the 30th rendition of our local annual summer festival, Bay Day, fell on Independence Day. It was a day with far more than fireworks in St. Albans Town Bay Park in northwestern Vermont; it was a family day with a triathalon, lakefront games, sports, fair food, fireworks, and continuous live music. I book the music.

The Summer Sounds concert series starts on Bay Day each year and our kickoff yesterday was inspired. Carol Ann Jones and The Superchargers performed an Independence Day tribute.

Ms. Jones sang an Irving Berlin song at the end of her third set. God Bless America is the unofficial national anthem of the United States. Andre Maquera closed the show as the fireworks flew with a guitar solo of the Star Spangled Banner. In front of the stage, on his knees in the single spotlight, he shot down enemy rockets with his guitar and we heard the guns firing.

Inspiring.

Independence doesn’t come cheaply. Specialist Ryan Grady, 25, of West Burke was killed by an IED near Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan last week. “He made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of a nation that he both loved and served” as a member of the Vermont Army National Guard, Maj. Gen. Michael Dubie said. He is the first Vermonter to be killed since the National Guard deployed.

We dedicated the concert to the Vermont Guard and we remembered Ryan Grady when the fireworks lit the darkened sky.

I feel particularly independent today of the bozos who want my town to take down its Christmas tree but won’t dare to offend anyone who would have an ayatollah take over City Hall. According to the Huff Post, President Obama “rebuked the old chestnut that the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation” during a press conference he held in Turkey last year.

That old chestnut ?

I’m not very religious in an organized way but I went to Sunday School and drilled the catechism. I can recite the Apostle’s Creed and I know the Lord’s Prayer with and without the doxology, with debtors or with trespassers. That said, the evangelicals worry me. Pretty much anyone who trespasses against me does. If you, dear reader, didn’t understand this paragraph, we have little to talk about.

See, I also know that the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence knew somebody’s God was lurking in our founding and I know that the 1892 Supreme Court decision that “this is a Christian nation” affirmed it.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator…

On the one hand, I’m very glad the Ayatollah Obama is not the head of the state church. On the other hand, it worries me that the ayatollahs of godlessness would assure that our kids grow up without the cultural teachings that make us the Good Guys. America is changing from a strong, independent leader to a nation of appeasers.

“Dear Mr./Ms. Bozo:
I don’t mind offending you. Nope, I don’t mind that at all.
Sincerely,
Me.”

Ryan Grady didn’t die because of oil no matter what some evangelical trespassers might think. Ryan Grady died so those bozos could say out loud that this nation never heard of God.

Posted in History, Society, Politics & News, Random Access | 4 Comments »

Let Them Eat Dirt

May 24, 2010 by Dick.

Want to know everything that is wrong with schools today?

Kids aren’t allowed to eat dirt.

About a century ago in news biz terms, on the Fifth of May of this year, Miguel Rodriguez, an assistant school principal at Live Oak High School in Santa Clara, CA, punished five sophomores for wearing the American flag on their t-shirts. He deemed their shirts conspicuously “incendiary” mostly because other students were wearing the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag that day.

Incendiary?

A lot longer ago than the Santa Clara wardrobe malfunction, the assistant principal of our local high school did the same thing to our daughter. We had taken our kids on their first trip to Key West shortly after we bought this house in South Puffin. The Half Shell Raw Bar is one of the favorite tourist stops there. It inhabits a building that was once a Key West shrimp packing building in the historic seaport.

The Half Shell sells t-shirts.

You know the story. “Our ‘rents went on vacation and all I got was this stupid shirt.”

Number One daughter really liked her shirt with its nubile, bikini-clad waitress, platter of oysters, and slogan. Particularly the slogan.

Naturally, her Assistant Principal went after that shirt with tar and bonfire. Number One daughter wasn’t even allowed to turn it inside out. That insidious, salacious message was still there, still capable of corrupting those innocent 1980s high schoolers. She had to call home, get a ride home, and change clothes. The school banned her from classes until she did.

Banned.

The holiday of Cinco de Mayo, the 5th of May, is not, as Assistant Principal Rodriguez and many other people apparently think, Mexico’s Independence Day. South of the Border, Independence Day is September 16. Here’s the history: Mexico was a debtor nation when, in 1861, then-Mexican President Benito Juarez stopped paying the interest on the loans. France held a lot of the notes, so they sent in their debt collectors in the form of the French army to force payment of this debt. The regional holiday of Puebla commemorates the victory of the Mexican militia over the French army at The Battle of Puebla in 1862.

So Live Oak High School wanted to punish five kids for not celebrating a battle over a loan default.

Never occurred to Assistant Principal Rodriguez (a professional educator) that the right principle would have been to let the kids duke it out, send them to separate corners, and use the whole experience as a teaching moment, eh?

Back to kids eating dirt.

The United States maintains a fiction that we want well educated kids. We bandy about buzz words like “experiential learning,” “critical thinking,” and “expanding horizons” while we isolate the kids from the ebb and flow of playground confrontation, intelligent decision making, or anything that might impact their self esteem. And gawd help us if we expose them to germs.

Ofttimes kids learn better when we let them be kids. That includes having the odd playground discussion over political values and eating a bit of dirt in the playground along the way.

Posted in Teaching, History, Politics & News, PC, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 7 Comments »

Hat Shopping

May 10, 2010 by Dick.

There has been some Internet blather about the U.S. “carpet bombing” Afghanistan.

Heh. In addition to fuel-air explosives, smart bombs, and about 8,800 M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, the United States currently maintains 5,113 nuclear warheads. The United States was the first to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare–the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War II to a close.

If the U.S. carpet bombed Afghanistan, there would be darned few men, women, children, poppies, or blades of grass left standing.

Let us switch hats for a moment. Regular readers know I usually wear the comfortable straw hat favored by Librarians at the beach. Today, let us pretend we are wearing the bicycle helmet of the Liberal Left so we can play “Let’s Pretend” with no worrisome consequences of political incorrectness.

Today we shall imagine that history has swapped our homelands.

Sunni is the largest branch of Islam but since the 16th century the Twelver Shi’i have become the dominant Shi’a sect and one that rules in several countries. The Shi’a led a precarious until the 16th century when the Safavid dynasty established Shi’a as the state religion of Persia. That gave the Twelver Shi’a support, protection, and state money. They built major theological centers in Esfahan, Meshed, Najaf, and Qom and looked to other worlds for expansion.

The iman Hassan as-Salat made the perilous journey to the New World in the mid-1700s and settled with his brethern and his 24 wives in the fertile lands of Virginia. Hassan as-Salat and his followers largely drove the Christian settlers into seclusion and, in 1776, declared America a Muslim state and cut its ties to King George.

At about the same time, George Washington gathered a group of rebels together and sailed the other direction. They settled in the Persian lands known today as the states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, the Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Yemen, where they fought an arduous guerilla war and formed the United States of Southwest Asia, at that time the only democracy in the world.

American Muslim voters elected Mahmoud Imadinnerjacket President of the Islamic Republic of America in 1995. He reports to the Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hoseyni Khamenei. Voters in the United States of Southwest Asia elected General Colin Patton as President of the U.S.S.A. in 2008. General Patton had planned an executed a stunning attack on American infrastructure in 2001 when he burned the World Mosque Center to the ground.

The seven building World Mosque Center complex was located in the heart of New York City’s downtown financial district. Its 13.4 million square feet included over two million set aside for worship and religious studies. Although not Mecca, it was the second most popular pilgrimage destination in the Islamic world. Mecca itself, located in the state of Saudi Arabia’s Makkah township in the United States of Southwest Asia remains the most popular Islamic pilgrimage. The U.S.S.A. granted unfettered passage and automatic visas to all Muslims to cross to Mecca at any time.

President Imadinnerjacket has the entire American arsenal at his fingertips with which to retaliate.

Will he send in the tanks to root out General Patton and to burn Patton’s statue in a public square? Or will he send the B52s to melt all of the United States of Southwest Asia into a puddle of glowing glass?

I’m pretty sure we know the answer to that.

Me? I’m off to buy a new hat before they all get incinerated.

Posted in History, Politics & News, Random Access | 4 Comments »

Uphill. Both Ways.

April 12, 2010 by Dick.

Do you remember where you were 40 years ago today? Jim Lovell and Fred Haise certainly do.

You kids today, you just don’t know how easy you’ve got it!

40 years ago, Mr. Lovell and Mr. Haise would have given their eye teeth for an iPad. They had two computers but they had to write down data on a scrap of paper from one computer then retype it into the other. Mr. Lovell even had to do arithmetic on paper to make sure he converted the data so it would work in the second computer. There wasn’t even any email! They had to write letters. With pens. There was no Sony Playstation with high-res 3-D graphics. There was not even an Atari 2600 with Space Invaders or Asteroids. Those games got faster and faster until you died.

As an aside, the iPad, the Playstation, the Atari, the computer that runs your Toyota, and your microwave oven all came out of space program engineering.

Apollo 13 launched on April 11, 1970, 40 years ago yesterday, at 13:13 hours CST. That third Apollo mission was expected to land on the Moon, but an unplanned event forced an ABEND to the mission. And gave us a new phrase that bridged the generations.

“Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Jack Swigert, the man who announced the problem to the world, died of bone cancer in 1982, one of only 24 people ever to have flown to the Moon. Ever. Mr. Lovell and Mr. Haise are two of the 24.

There have been 131 manned U.S. missions into space including Shuttle Discovery, in space now to deliver a logistics module to the International Space Station as well as three spacewalks.

President Obama has killed the shuttle program. STS-131 is the fourth from the last shuttle mission. Ever.

President Obama has killed Project Constellation. That $108 billion program to develop the next generation of rockets and space vehicles is dead.

President Obama has no plan to build any new rocket capable of carrying men into space. Manned space travel will be outsourced just as tech support and kids’ toys and the shirt on your back has been. “We’ll just let the Russians or Chinese do that for us.” NASA will no longer be able to dream about flying astronauts beyond Earth orbit. NASA will no longer be able to dream.

Since those heady days 40 years ago, no man has had to walk twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill, barefoot. Both ways. And according to this president’s plan no American man ever will again.

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Great Britain, a country entirely surrounded by water, stopped being a seafaring nation when George V stopped sending brave men in ships to the sea.

America stopped being a great spacefaring nation when Barack Obama stopped sending brave men in ships into space.

We didn’t, either country, go down in a great battle. We whimpered out of the room without a fight.

Posted in History, Society, Politics & News, Random Access | 2 Comments »