---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <8b171c7b-9f7a-4155-8bf8-8ab4ffa94cdc@googlegroups.com> Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:23:45 -0700 (PDT) From: Neal McLain <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com> Subject: Re: Senate bares frustration with customer service of cable industry ... On Saturday, June 25, 2016 at 12:07:10 AM UTC-5, HAncock4 wrote: > The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that U.S. senators blasted > Comcast, AT&T, Charter Communications, and Dish Network over > millions of dollars in pay-TV billing overcharges, promotional > pricing, bill haggling, and other loathed customer-service > practices during a hearing on Thursday that included officials > of those companies. The hearing aired the findings of > the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which > reviewed 93,000 documents and spoke with dozens of company > executives over the last 13 months. Senators said the > companies should simplify bills, be more transparent, > and refund overcharges. > > For full article please see: http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20160626_Senate_bares_frustration_with_customer_service_of_cable_industry__including_Comcast.html +--------------------------------------------------------------+ Perhaps they should "simplify" their bills by listing the wholesale license/retrans fee for every channel carried in the basic tier. Identify each channel by its true owner, and, where applicable, specify that the owner requires carriage of that channel as part of a retrans agreement for permission to carry station XXXX-TV. Then state the section of federal law that allows the broadcast station owners to bundle their channels. List the various acts that have been introduced into Congress (Eshoo, Rockefeller-Thune, etc.) to try to break up this monopoly, and note the committee members that "reviewed" the bill. Then list the email addresses and phone numbers of said committee members. This wouldn't "simplify" the bills but it would certainly make them more "transparent". Neal McLain ------------------------------ Message-ID: <nl3d38$1gro$1@grapevine.csail.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:15:52 +0000 (UTC) From: wollman@bimajority.org (Garrett Wollman) Subject: Re: Are telephone surveys statistically valid? In article <Faudnd7CkfGB1u7KnZ2dnUU7-YfNnZ2d@posted.internetamerica>, Gordon Burditt <gordonb.b8q5b@burditt.org> wrote: >>> [I wrote:] >>> Of course you could argue it another way: they are "statistically >>> valid" by construction, the only question is whether the population >>> being sampled is sufficiently similar to the population of interest to >>> allow for generalization. >[...] I don't think "statistically valid by construction" exists. Certainly it does. If you take a random sample of a population, statistics gives you limits on the error when you generalize from the sample to the population. As I indicated, this does not imply that the population you sampled is representative of any other population, including the population you *intended* to sample. People who do serious survey work put a lot of effort into validating their samples to make sure that they actualy *are* representative of the population. Pew, for example, regularly does studies looking into the effect of different survey modalities on the sorts of questions that they are interested in. >There are way more dimensions to people than age, sex, and race, and >maybe religion, and it's easy to match someone in these but be on >opposite sides of an issue (consider labor union strikes - in any >issue related to a strike, it DOES MATTER whether the person in >question is labor (striking union), labor (another union), >management, disgruntled customer, or uninvolved). In any sufficiently large sample to generalize meaningfully about public opinion, all of these groups have a high probability of being represented in proportion to their overall prevalence in the population. (That's practically the definition of "sufficiently large sample".) The issue of non-response bias is a serious one, and may eventually spell the end of random-digit-dial surveys for opinion research. However, non-response bias is, today, still believed to be something that can be managed with fairly crude demographic reweighting. A great deal of marketing research no longer uses telephone surveys, because the cost is not considered to be worth the marginal improvement in generalizability compared to the ease of running Internet-based pre-screened panels. See Pew's report on this at <http://www.pewresearch.org/2016/05/02/evaluating-online-nonprobability-surveys/> (Pew in general does a fabulous job with explaining and validating their survey methods.) -GAWollman -- Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft wollman@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993 ------------------------------ Message-ID: <6ac03bc2-2198-463e-b98a-285d7c5c99df@googlegroups.com> Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:24:48 -0700 (PDT) From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> Subject: Re: Verizon's Mission of Self-Destruction On Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 2:30:34 PM UTC-4, Bill Horne wrote: > Following are three examples that illustrate how these companies are > causing themselves long-term damage. > The Verizon Strike ... While some of the points of this article were well-taken, they were way off base concerning the strike. They said: "Unfortunately for workers, times change. Just as the horse and buggy industry gave way to the automotive industry, things change. Workers can stress a company so badly that it ends up closing, and everyone loses big time. Just think of the recent Hostess story. Workers demanded more from the company than the company could afford. Bottom line: Hostess went out of business. All the workers became unemployed. That is the bottom line every union worker needs to understand. Companies are not invincible." This statement is inaccurate, and further, does not apply to Verizon. The main point is that Verizon had very healthy profits. Its workers were basically seeking to stay in place, not expensive increases; they were fighting cutbacks. Verizon could've easily met the union's demands. In addition, unionized workers today make up only a small portion of Verizon's workforce. Unlike the distant past, where a strike by telephone workers would disrupt telephone service, today the situation is different. First, the system is so automated that virtually all calls do not require human assistance. Second, as mentioned, much of the workforce wasn't unionized and in those segments service was not affected. (I believe the entire wireless segment, which is a major part of the business, is all non-union and not affected by the strike.) ------------------------------ Message-ID: <fc98b839-2988-43c8-beb0-a7d58d8617e7@googlegroups.com> Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:33:58 -0700 (PDT) From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> Subject: Re: Verizon Strike: Epic Labor Standoff Ends, But What About The Future? On Monday, June 27, 2016 at 12:26:08 AM UTC-4, Bill Horne wrote: > For Verizon workers who waged one of the larger strikes in recent > memory, the message it sent was as important as the concessions it > gained from the company: Some things are worth fighting for, and fair > treatment on the job is one of them. In my humble opinion, the recent Verizon strike will not help the labor movement. Companies continue to take a very hard line against their workers, quietly reducing benefits and making the employees pay still more for their health care and retirement. Other companies rely on contractor labor instead of staff positions; contract laborers are essentially temporary workers with gaps in work time and zero benefits, no sick or vacation time. Traditional union workplaces keep closing up. The business community continues to spew propaganda that unions and properly paid employees are a drain on the rest of the economy. Traditional unions seem to have a bad reputation among young people, who show zero interest in joining one or forming a new one. Nothing has come forward to take their place. Young people seem willing to accept onerous working conditions or limited compensation and no fringe benefits. Lots of young people with families to support must work second jobs to make ends meet; this is seen today as just a matter of course, not a problem. ------------------------------ Message-ID: <700bd97a-83e2-4339-9400-cefff2e1a088@googlegroups.com> Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:14:08 -0700 (PDT) From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> Subject: Re: Verizon upgrades network in South Philly, Old City ahead of DNC On Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 2:30:34 PM UTC-4, Bill Horne wrote: > ***** Moderator's Note ***** > > Maybe those whom were forced to use cellular phones after a hurricane > hit New Jersey could have their own convention. It's a shame that > Verizon only puts money into impressing those whom can hurt their > bottom line. Ironically, as previously reported here, Verizon is busy eliminating classic landlines in other parts of Philadelphia. http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20160410_Verizon_s_quiet_plan_to_change_copper_phone_lines_to_FIOS.html http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20160320_Verizon_quietly_cutting_copper_phone_lines.html Historical Note: To 1976, the political conventions were a busy time for Western Union. It was busy installing numerous telegraph lines and teleprinters to allow attendees to send and receive telegrams, send Telex (and later TWX) messages, and for the press to file stories with their home office. There would be a battery of W.U. operators banging away at terminals sending messages and news stories. Messengers would be busy delivering telegrams. I believe the Bell System was busy too, installing additional Long Lines circuits, banks of pay phones, and special private lines. The public relations office of both carriers would report on efforts to serve the political conventions; it was a point of pride. ------------------------------ Message-ID: <EB40CE39-1889-409C-AB13-1F4F288AF35C@roscom.com> Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 19:30:43 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: The WRT54GL: A 54Mbps router from 2005 still makes millions for Linksys In a time when consumers routinely replace gadgets with new models after just two or three years, some products stand out for being built to last. Witness the Linksys WRT54GL, the famous wireless router that came out in 2005 and is still for sale. At first glance, there seems to be little reason to buy the WRT54GL in the year 2016. It uses the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, which has been surpassed by 802.11n and 802.11ac. It delivers data over the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band and is limited to speeds of 54Mbps. You can buy a new router - for less money - and get the benefit of modern standards, expansion into the 5GHz band, and data rates more than 20 times higher. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/the-wrt54gl-a-54mbps-router-from-2005-still-makes-millions-for-linksys/ ------------------------------ Message-ID: <F939E0BC-4861-4933-A35E-7D2EA89DDCFE@roscom.com> Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2016 19:24:02 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Android's full-disk encryption just got much weaker - here's why Android's full-disk encryption just got much weaker--here's why Privacy advocates take note: Android's full-disk encryption just got dramatically easier to defeat on devices that use chips from semiconductor maker Qualcomm, thanks to new research that reveals several methods to extract crypto keys off of a locked handset. Those methods include publicly available attack code that works against an estimated 37 percent of enterprise users. A blog post published Thursday revealed that in stark contrast to the iPhone's iOS, Qualcomm-powered Android devices store the disk encryption keys in software. That leaves the keys vulnerable to a variety of attacks that can pull a key off a device. From there, the key can be loaded onto a server cluster, field-programmable gate array, or supercomputer that has been optimized for super-fast password cracking. http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/07/androids-full-disk-encryption-just-got-much-weaker-heres-why/ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Sun, 03 Jul 2016