Without even looking at the invasion of privacy for Indian citizens if all of that data is recorded, what makes them think they would be able to do anything with the data anyway? They can't even get a handle on the illegal scam call centers running in their country. Those are operating very much in the open, and people, not even in law enforcement, have little trouble tracking them down to the room number of the building they are in from the opposite side of the world, yet they continue to thrive. The Indian government has bigger fish to fry than the few people that are using a VPN to maintain privacy. I know for a fact that legitimate Indian businesses are suffering due to the negative reputation the scammers are giving the country. They need to look at the obvious before they start looking at the fringes.

WhatsApp won't need to implement less secure encryption, they'd just need to publish an API/spec for 3rd party clients and/or networks to use. If Signal wanted to allow its users to communicate directly with WhatsApp's userbase, it would be up to Signal to do the work to make it happen. They would have to develop against the spec, including the encryption algorithms, to be compatible.

Interoperability is good. Years ago we were headed down that path, Google chat/hangouts was using XMPP (Jabber) protocol, and the specs for other networks were open enough for 3rd party clients. Remember Trillian, Pidgin, or Bitlbee? It was a beautiful time, one client to communicate with all your friends. There are still some efforts being made, but they're based right now on reverse-engineering the protocols. I would love to be able to add a user "whatsapp:username" to my contact list in Telegram and be able to talk to the two-three people that I know on that app. Or "messenger:friendname" to chat with Facebook Messenger friends. Instead, I have to have individual apps installed for each one. That is wasteful and annoying to try to keep track of who is using which service, and switching back and forth between apps all the time.

I know Google cited limitations of the XMPP protocol when it was abandoned in favor of their now-proprietary protocol. The thing is, if a standard was agreed upon for the core functionality, all of them could use basic chat functionality with each other, and the individual companies can extend the protocol if they need to.

It's a multi-faceted problem.

First, the theater experience isn't nearly as good as it used to be. Sure there have been upgrades in sound systems, and stadium seating, and things like that. Those pale to the disrespect audience members have for their fellow movie viewers. Between cell phones, constant talking, and rustling of loud food wrappers, it just isn't as compelling of a reason to go. Which is too bad, part of the larger experience has always been the laughter of people around you during a comedy, the simultaneous jumping of everyone when the monster jumps out.

Second, it used to be months from the time a movie was in the first-run theaters before they'd filter down through the dollar theaters, to rentals, then finally the movie channels/streaming. Now with that lag being only a couple of weeks, if not immediate with some of the simultaneous releases they do now, you aren't forced to go to the theater to be able to discuss the latest movies with your friends, or miss out on all the online news and social media while trying to avoid spoilers.

Third, the prices. Many blame Moviepass for devaluing the movie experience. I counter that by saying they were just being honest with what the movies were really worth. I'm sorry, but upwards of $15/ticket for a movie is out of line when you can go to Walmart and buy the BluRay for $20 and watch it as many times as you want. I've gone to the theater a couple of times in the last couple of months, and it had been 3-4 years prior to that. Why? Because I got tickets from T-Mobile for $2 each. It was worth every penny seeing the movies on the big screen at that price.

And finally, the biggest reason in my opinion is the lack of good movies coming out. It used to be that during the summer months there'd be a dozen or more movies that looked awesome, and I'd be picking and choosing as to which ones I really wanted to see in the theater vs. which ones I'd wait to show up in Redbox. Now I look through the theater showings are most of the time don't see anything compelling at all. Every now and then a gem comes out, but overall it's been very lackluster. Lots of "reboots" and tugs at the nostalgia strings for people in their late 30s and early 40s, but those are never as good as they're hyped up to be. What happened to big movies, with unique story lines, with great actors?

As far as the media reboots go, those are all a matter of personal preference. For me, I grew up on TNG, and I love the continuations in the Trek universe. Discovery keeps getting better and better, and I'm looking forward to the new season of Piccard. I also enjoy the movies, and I think it was very smart of them to introduce a parallel timeline so that they weren't limited by cannon to have the artistic freedom they needed. I've also thoroughly enjoyed all of the new Doctor Who episodes, with the exception of the last couple of seasons where I feel they've changed the feel of the show, but I digress. I never watched the classic episodes, so that isn't even a play on nostalgia to me. On the other hand, a lot of reboots, especially in the movie realm, are horrible. Matrix Resurrection for example was very blatantly a pull on nostalgia, to the point of breaking the 4th wall, and it wasn't great. And how many reboots of Spiderman do we need? Do we really need to keep making more movies in the Fast and the Furious franchise?

As for products, some of them make sense. Flip phones, for example, are making a comeback. We only went away from flip phones because the form factor wasn't conducive to smartphone technology. Now that we have foldable displays, I feel it is a great way to shrink phones back down in size so they fit better in pockets and are more convenient to carry without sacrificing the large touch-screen display that is needed for today's media-centric mobile use. They're still new to the market so it may be a little bit before the technology improves and becomes mainstream, but it is likely the direction most "phablets" will go.

I don't really know what you mean by tower PCs. Full-size towers never went away for gamers and people that need the highest-performance machines. If anything they've grown as people have added larger graphics cards, more hard drives, water cooling systems, etc. On the other hand, I wouldn't say they're making a comeback anywhere else. Most consumer PCs these days are using mini or micro ATX boards, so even if they are a "tower" shape, they're half the size or less than the standard from 15-20 years ago. I haven't purchased a full size tower for my company in probably 10+ years at this point, we've gone almost exclusively to laptops, all-in-one workstations, and single-board PCs that are small enough to attach to the back of a monitor on the VESA mounts. A lot of the enterprise push is going back to thin clients with the PC hardware itself virtualized in the cloud.

While I can agree with you that there is a lot of push for nostalgia in advertising and in many products right now, I just don't feel your examples were very fitting.

How many of those would you have paid full price to see? At say $10 a piece (for easy math) would you have paid to see more than 9 of those? If not, that is money that went to the movie industry anyway. Granted I don't know what portion of those fees went to the theaters or studios, but the math is still there. You spent $94 to watch movies that you likely wouldn't have otherwise. That's 181 opportunities your local theater had to sell you concessions that they wouldn't have had. I know the couple of months I was actually able to use Moviepass I saw more movies than I would have in a year's time, and I often went ahead and bought a popcorn and drink. I wouldn't have bought the snack if I had already just paid $20 for my wife and I to walk in the door. I saw more movies, and my local theaters made more money from me as a result.

Movie Pass wasn't perfect, but they were onto something. I think they were forced to give up before the got the formula balanced right to make everyone happy.

Your drug costs $600/mo retail price. Normally your insurance pays $400 of that (or some negotiated price, but we'll keep this for simplicity,) leaving you with $200 to pay the pharmacy. The drug company knows that if you are struggling to pay your $200 share every month, you are likely to drop it altogether and/or try to find another medication that works for you that you can afford. So they give you a $190 discount coupon to use. You pay $10 to the pharmacy, they still receive their cut of the $400 from the insurance company. $400 out of the original $600 is better than nothing, and when the drug costs them $5 to make (plus the research overhead they're recovering) it's still greatly profitable for them. On top of that, the $190 they give you reduces their taxable income, and lets them market the fact that they "Gave $XYZ Million to underprivileged people to help them afford their medication." It's a huge racket designed to maximize their profits (and the insurance companies' profits) while making them seem like they're going above and beyond to help you.

I've never looked to see how it shows on your deductible, but my guess is it probably shows the $10. I think a lot of contracts (if not laws) would be broken if the pharmacies reported the cash you paid plus any discounts to the insurance companies as out-of-pocket fees paid. While not every system is perfect, I think this is a good example of an improvement single-payer healthcare would provide. So much accounting nonsense takes place designed to extract the maximum amount of money from the people that need it the most.

> > If they are receiving interference from those signals that can cause a safety hazard, then there is insufficient shielding around the components and wiring

> That's literally not at all how spectrum licensing works.

How is that not the case? As a licensee, both commercial and amateur, I am authorized to transmit on the frequencies that have been assigned/allocated to me. It is my responsibility to ensure my equipment is operating properly and not interfering with other users by transmitting outside of my expected frequency and bandwidth. If I am operating in spec, and my signals are interfering with something else, it is their responsibility to fix it. If I am out of spec, it is my responsibility. Conversely, if someone else's transmitter is interfering with the signals I wish to receive, it goes one of two ways. 1. If the offending signal is within spec and is transmitting only within its designated frequencies, then it is on me to filter that offending signal on my receiving equipment. 2. If the transmitter is out of spec, and spurious signals are causing the interference, then it's on the owner of the transmitter to fix their gear and filter out any signals that are putting it out of spec.

If the cellular companies have been allocated these frequencies and the airlines have not, then it is 100% the responsibility of the airlines to coordinate with the equipment manufacturers to repair the equipment so that it rejects the harmful, but in-spec, signals. From my understanding the airlines have had more than a year of advanced warning that this is coming, and they should have mitigation techniques in place by now. If the FCC granted authorizations to AT&T/Verizon that are in conflict with existing licensed uses, then that is something specific to this case, but otherwise the receiver is responsible to filter unwanted signals from properly operating and licensed transmitters as the previous poster stated.

At least when I got laid off years ago it was my manager that let the handful of us in our department know. We'd all heard rumors so we had a pretty good idea when we got called to his office what it was going to be out. After we all got settled, he started with "I know you've all heard the rumors. Unfortunately if you're here in the room, you're in the affected group. Myself included."

In today's news, the sky is blue!

Did people actually believe Amazon is going to just eat the cost of prime? My company dipped our toes into the water of selling some items about 10 years ago (time sure flies.) By the time we factored in all the hidden fees that Amazon tacks on, what we thought was a decent profit on the items ended up being a loss unless we bumped the price up to well above the MSRP. I've been wondering for years how anyone is able to actually make money selling through Amazon unless they're only dealing in high-margin products to begin with.

T-Mobile bought a hot mess to begin with. I've been through all the carriers basically over the years with the exception of T-Mobile. At one point I was on Nextel, and I loved their service. Great, reliable signal almost everywhere I went. They had crummy data speeds and they didn't jump on the smartphone bandwagon fast enough, so I ended up switching back to AT&T/Cingular for a while. Eventually that got too expensive so I switched over to Sprint and got a great plan and Android phones. They were decent, but they also picked WiMax for their upgrade pathway and that didn't go well. I still stuck with them because their incumbent network was "fast enough" at the time and it would have cost double my monthly rate to switch to AT&T or Verizon. Then they bought Nextel and shut down the iDEN network. Sprint's service plummeted as they couldn't carry the load on the CDMA network of all of the new devices. Calls cutting in and out, dropped calls, incredibly slow data, you name it. They went from great to trash practically overnight. I had no choice but to switch as a phone was critical to my job. I ended up on Verizon and have been there since.

T-Mobile (formerly Voicestream) has never been known in my area for great coverage. Cheap service if you happen to live within a short distance of the interstate that passes through, but if you travel outside that at all, you have no signal. So now T-Mobile bought Sprint, both of them being sub-par carriers, and everyone wonders why they have issues? Attach two leaky hoses together you're going to have a longer distance you can reach, but your total losses are the sum of the losses of both hoses. It's not some complimentary combination where they each fill in each other's blanks to make one better system. I do wish they'd get their act together though, it would be nice to give the top tier carriers some real competition so that there's incentive to innovate and/or reduce prices. Right now the two big boys just laugh whenever anyone refers to T-Mobile as "competition." They truly aren't in the same league.

This is such an underrated concept! Overselling is absolutely OK, and necessary, for an ISP to manage their resources and expenses. Everybody doesn't use all their bandwidth at once, so it is not cost effective to size the system as if they were. Sometimes there are short spikes that would go over, and that is to be expected on an occasional basis. The problem is when they underestimate the expected bandwidth use, or if something changes (like a new bandwidth-intensive technology such as streaming, or a change in peoples' habits, such as work- and school-at-home) and the congestion becomes constant. They don't like to spend the money to compensate. Why improve their service when they can just charge more then add restrictions to the "highest consumers" of the service. One method makes them more money with less work, the other is more work and doesn't increase their profits (in the near term anyway.) Some people like to say overselling is the problem, but that isn't it. The problem is how they react when they have oversold and begin to frequently underperform as a result.

> sold me a 100Mbps bandwidth for one month with an unlimited number of terabytes

Even that is usually not the case. Most "unlimited" lines have asterisks next to the word unlimited, and even if they don't, there is likely language in the Terms of Service and/or Acceptable Use Policy that limits you. Ask me how I know that "unlimited" is actually 8TB in ISP-speak...

To be fair it's never been tried, so we don't know that it "doesn't work." When has pay-per-email ever been implemented on anything other than as proof of concept installations? There have been lots of systems proposed over the years to directly combat spam, but none of them ever really got off the ground. Instead we've ended up with a lot of workarounds that happen on the server side, and those aren't 100% effective. I still believe a true system where every email arrives with a nickel attached to it, giving me the option to return it, return and whitelist the sender (so they don't have to pay anymore) or keep it would work wonders.

I could actually make the case that it has been tried on the phone level. How many spam calls used to come through when cell providers offered "calling party pays" plans? Even after those plans went away, cell phones used to be excluded by default from a lot of spam and even collections calls because of rules barring a company from causing the customer to incur costs to answer their calls. That all went away when cell phones became nearly 100% "unlimited minutes" plans.

It isn't that simple though. There are laws in place that state that phone carriers must accept calls from other carriers. It's in order to prevent Verizon from saying "Only other Verizon customers can call you unless they pay a fee." Or any other carrier for that matter. That law has prevented carriers from implementing filters to stop the calls that originate off of their own network, even if they're certain they are spam/scam calls. The FCC is finally putting steps in place to allow carriers to block calls or even entire carriers if they refuse to address the scam calls. Until that happens, there are plenty of carriers that are willing to look the other way as long as the scammers pay their phone bills every month. When it starts to negatively affect their legitimate customers, their tune will change very quickly I believe.

Caller ID is so easy to fake it isn't even funny. There are legitimate reasons to do so (forwarded calls, making PBX calls look like they're coming from your cell phone, etc.) but unfortunately it has been abused so badly that it will probably take breaking the legitimate uses in order to fix the problem.

No, they most definitely don't have lists to avoid. I get several calls per day most days between my direct DID, the department phone number, and my cell phone. If I'm not busy (or can multitask with whatever I'm working on) I mess with them, feeding them fake info, and waste as much of their time as possible. My goal is to see how long I can string them along and keep them on the phone. I've had them over 2 hours on multiple occasions. The number of calls hasn't decreased one bit. In fact I now get calls from the same outfits, asking for the fake names I've given them, and asking me about the fake credit card (reading back all of the info I gave them last time) trying to get me to confirm the data and complete their scam. If they had any kind of blacklist, I would most certainly be on it with several exclamation points after my phone number. Yet the calls don't even slow down, let alone stop.

To be fair, I suppose a few of them could have blacklists, but it has to be exceedingly rare based on my own experiences.