Re: Buyouts of AT&T, MCI Sign of Long Distance's Demise

This has also happened in the computer world. Once programmers had to
> carefully track every character to avoid wasting scarce computer > memory, but today memory is so cheap those tracking skills (and > products) aren't as important anymore either.

I don't think the parallels are very close. The impact of telco changes are almost purely economic, the cost of carrying a call keeps going down, but the impact of cheap computer memory has been sloppy programming. Yes, it gets done more quickly, but it often doesn't work quite right and no one knows it well enough to fix it.

Of course, "long distance" may be dead, but we still have those, some of them on this list, who continue to insist on toll-alerting. Any possible value of that system gets less every day. I say to the advocates: isn't it about time to admit toll-alerting is a dead-end?

Dave Close, Compata, Costa Mesa CA "Politics is the business of getting snipped-for-privacy@compata.com, +1 714 434 7359 power and privilege without snipped-for-privacy@alumni.caltech.edu possessing merit." - P. J. O'Rourke