51–60 of 432 posts
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This is the US, where money is speech and one dollar is one vote. Individual consumers don't have enough money to matter compared to BigCorp.
Clinton outspent Trump nearly 2:1 in the last election ($768m, $398m respectively) and still lost. Yes she won the popular vote by about 3m votes but that’s hardly a dollar to vote ratio. People vote their emotions, and emotions are surprisingly difficult to buy.
There needs to be postage imposed on connecting calls between systems, payable to the person called, and potentially refundable upon lack of complaint for being unsolicited. This could work for email spam, as well. Bonus if people get to set their own postage rates.
Sure, because that totally would never be abused to facilitate illegal payments or to launder funds.
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>> Stop allowing spoofed numbers. Period. > As someone with a heavy background, it would break a fair bit of the PSTN As it stands, I think quite a few consumers are ready to just walk away from PSTN unless something pretty drastic is done quite soon.
And go to what exactly? There isn't a real alternative out there.
I'm sure it will live on in many places that aren't concerned with customer satisfaction, though.
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Already three down-votes, but not a single explanation or repudiation as to why this particular problem isn’t solved more easily by markets.
The technological and legislative infrastructure required to turn this into a market far exceeds what would be required for simpler anti-spam measures. It comes across as unhelpful and detached, like suggesting world peace as the solution to gang violence in your neighborhood.
There is nothing simpler, except that some very well-funded special interest groups never want to see this happen.
When I was on a limited plan, the amount of spam messages and calls were virtually zero because the limit would run up and be charged against the caller (internationally).
The month I switched to an unlimited, I started getting spammed.
Now much of the spam is domestic, but I fail to see how this is possibly unfeasible technically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Stop allowing spoofed numbers. Period. > As someone with a heavy background, it would break a fair bit of the PSTN As it stands, I think quite a few consumers are ready to just walk away from PSTN unless something pretty drastic is done quite soon.
And go to what exactly? There isn't a real alternative out there.
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This is a market-based problem rather than a policy problem: The problem is the low cost of making calls. Make calls cost money and the problem will naturally go away.
I think the major fault with this reasoning is that the exact same solution has been proposed many times for e-mail, going back decades, and has never come even close to catching on. I think that applying a cost - whether time or money - to producing phone calls would fail for the same reasons. Namely, the significant difficulty in making significant changes to the telephone system (e.g. changing requirements to make…
Free, unlimited phone calls is a fairly recent thing.
This is not a technical problem at all.
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As someone with a heavy background, it would break a fair bit of the PSTN - while moves are in place to change the technical limitations of the PSTN that prevent this kind of verification, they're not complete yet, and will take several more years to implement fully.
>> Stop allowing spoofed numbers. Period. > As someone with a heavy background, it would break a fair bit of the PSTN As it stands, I think quite a few consumers are ready to just walk away from PSTN unless something pretty drastic is done quite soon.
If they still made an iPod like device that ONLY included data, I'd switch to it today. I can get my calls via any of the various online services.
As it stands, my phone is in do not disturb mode so that only calls in my address book get through.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Stop allowing spoofed numbers. Period. > As someone with a heavy background, it would break a fair bit of the PSTN As it stands, I think quite a few consumers are ready to just walk away from PSTN unless something pretty drastic is done quite soon.
And go to what exactly? There isn't a real alternative out there.
Never knew you could contract it has into it's as well.
I remember asking my high school English teacher if I could use the contraction "shouldn't've" for "should not have." She said no. I still disagree.
My science teacher once insisted rivers couldn't flow north because on a globe, north is up.
So, yeah, education is a bit of a mixed bag.