61–70 of 80 posts
This type of scam is big business in rural Iowa (and I'm sure other areas). I used to work in rural northwest Iowa. We had a "programmer" (to use it loosely) quit to work for a company who's sole purpose was to abuse this system. They ran a "phone company" in a small town and then connected a big asterisk box at their local exchange to accept free conference calls. They then installed smaller asterisk boxes in other…
Pretty fascinating...the OP describes the regulation as "outdated"...but are there rural companies that depend on it? Or is it truly outdated and due for a change?
Might handle the problem by putting the termination fees on a sliding scale based on call volume. Telco lines are fixed assets, if one line is getting millions of calls then the cost of that line should be amortized faster than assumed in the region-wide termination fee. There will be complaints that revision will kill jobs in rural areas. Thus does the regulatory state accumulate, and willfully retain, misallocation…
If the call is not ultimately terminated at an actual human resident of the area then no termination fee shall be paid.
Related: Cameras May Open Up the Board Room to Hackers — NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/technology/flaws-in-videoc... >
This seems like a good example of SEO-driven linkbait. It's not quite spam -- the story is interesting, if not exactly breaking news -- but I'm pretty sure the main goal is to get inbound links to feefighters.com
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, the cost of the government putting in those lines plus the cost of the inefficiency and corruption attached to government action still need to be paid. Which means the people have less money to buy the cheaper food. Not only is government money not free, it happens to be some of the most expensive and inefficient money available.
Is this a valid rebuttal of your point? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/09/1053022/-Medicare-i...
That explains why I can never connect using Vonage. Thanks. I always wondered about this, but not enough to dig into the details. Interesting.
It bothers me that the VOIP providers don't, say, play a special message explaining the issue. If it's not illegal for them to block these numbers, then why not at least explain themselves? Perhaps they could offer at-cost connections? "Press 1 if you are willing to pay $0.08/minute for this call"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the [current] 4 replies, but why-o-why is eli downvoted for this opinion? It's not spam/troll, it's not badly put, it's not a priori based on a falsehood. Do not downvote for mere disagreement. /grrrr
Eli is not adding anything to the discussion. S/he is not disputing the content of the article; just the motive. Are we going to have an SEO discussion about every article that makes it to the frontpage?
But I think it's worthwhile to note that this post was almost surely written with the primary intent of boosting page rank as a sort of guerilla SEO.
This seems like a good example of SEO-driven linkbait. It's not quite spam -- the story is interesting, if not exactly breaking news -- but I'm pretty sure the main goal is to get inbound links to feefighters.com
Inbound links are the indirect goal of every blogger. I found the article to be very informative about the details of a business segment I wasn't familiar with. What makes this article different than others?
Interesting, I dint know that. I had an interesting experience with ATT. I was into the 6 month of a 2year contract back in 2007. I wasn't using my phone much (non-iphone). But then I went on a road trip to Yellowstone, which included driving through ND, SD, MT and WY. During this 7 day trip, I was using my phone a lot (work + personal). The total amount of minutes I spent in those 7 days were way more than my usual…
This seems like a good example of SEO-driven linkbait. It's not quite spam -- the story is interesting, if not exactly breaking news -- but I'm pretty sure the main goal is to get inbound links to feefighters.com
Inbound links are the indirect goal of every blogger. I found the article to be very informative about the details of a business segment I wasn't familiar with. What makes this article different than others?
Given that so many links on HN follow this pattern, however, I don't think this subthread is very useful.