Copyright is a completely artificial right to a temporary monopoly for an arbitrarily chosen amount of time. I'm a little less excited about such a right being abridged than if it were something like freedom of speech. Copyright merely protects a particular kind of business model.

You get an inbound number with Google Voice. You can now have that routed to an Asterisk box. From there, you could do any kind of filtering of the call you want. You could have Asterisk check your calendar to see if you are currently in a meeting and handle the call differently from there. You could get a SIP client for your smartphone and register it to your Asterisk box at home and then make make free outbound calls with Google Voice w/o having to have any voice plan. Asterisk makes it possible to do just about anything you want with a call. If you want to set it up so you only receive calls from one group of numbers M-F 8-5, and want only certain contacts to be able to call you after midnight--no problem. If you are a control freak, you should love Asterisk.

You are wrong. Asterisk 1.8 supports SRTP. I know, because I merged it myself. :-p

People need to realize that being in public is not private. There is no way to enforce that anything you do in public *isn't* recorded--regardless of what laws are passed. I think people need to realize this and modify their behavior appropriately. Having a mismatch between expected privacy and actual privacy causes people all kinds of problems. It would be much better to realize that when you are in public, you have no expectation of privacy.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

The computer may not let you do that with the car moving and the engine at high rpm. After all, the engine and/or transmission might be damaged (another design defect).

This is just completely wrong. I drive a 2007 Toyota Prius and I tested it the other day by flooring it and then shifting into neutral. Worked like a champ. The Prius transmission doesn't have discrete gears. Shifting into neutral will not harm the transmission. Also keep in mind that the engine routinely shuts off and on and that cutting electric power to the drive is also quite simple. I did have to hold the shifter in the neutral position for about a second to get it to do the shift--I assume because they want to make sure the joystick-like shifter wasn't accidentally bumped into the wrong position.

It is basically expect script for GUIs.

accuracy != precision :-) If they are wanting to put the item "right over there" and it is "right over there" 100% of the time, they have achieved 100% accuracy. They just might not have very precise goals.

Actually, my department did this. I liked it because I didn't have to pick out what to wear each day. But, then again, I'm lazy about such things. On one hand it is good from a "if someone isn't wearing that shirt and is screwing with your computer, something is definitely wrong" stand point. On the other hand, I suppose it might make people more apt to not question anyone who happened to be wearing the shirt whether or not they were really a member of the department.

Sorry to hear you had trouble. I suppose every project attracts some people who aren't the most patient with newcomers--and that is always a shame. I can certainly understand being irritated by that. I am glad that you found a project that works for you.

Yeah, like I said in another post--there are lots of great people and developers (I *suppose* developers are people too) in both the FS and Asterisk communities (in fact there is a decent amount of overlap). His behavior is in no way typical of the FS people I've dealt with.

No, I was just annoyed at your impolite behavior at the time with all of the spamming. Then I noticed this story and saw that you are still at it. I'm glad you found a solution that works for you. Many people have also found other solutions that work great for them, including Asterisk.

Part of having such a huge user community is that the Asterisk devs have 100s of feature requests or bug reports at any given time. If someone is having a problem that is only having an effect on a very small number of people, sometimes it takes longer to fix than other problems. Everyone has to prioritize.

Also, the quality of the debugging information that is presented is also a major factor in how long it takes to get a problem fixed. This is a good example of 3 or 4 actual Asterisk developers trying work on one of your issues and you being rude to them and not giving them the debug information they requested.

I understand that having an issue that is affecting you take a while to get closed is annoying, but something being open for a week with no real information provided to help track it down is certainly no reason to get react the way you did.

And us Asterisk users aren't pissed about FreeSWITCH existing--that is just silly. The more choices out there, the better! We just don't like people coming over and shouting YOU SUCK and doing the equivalent of spray painting our walls with "FreeSWITCH RULEZ!" like you did with the bug tracker. That is just childish. There are many excellent and polite freeswitch users and developers--I just don't think that you are one of them.

I've used Asterisk in installations with 10s of thousands of users--and this was probably 4 years ago or so. It certainly wasn't initially designed for it--but it will most certainly do the job if you are willing to put in the work. And it is light years ahead of where it was when I was using it for carrier-grade operations.

Don't get me wrong, there are certainly things that need improvement--especially in the area of being able to do live migrations and failover w/o dropping calls, but there are some truly massive Asterisk installations out there.

I remember you...you were that guy that spammed the asterisk bug tracker saying that people should switch to FreeSWITCH on about 10 different bugs. Nice to see that some things never change.