And why isn't this a problem in Europe? E.g. Germany? I'm not getting any unsolicited phone calls anymore - robot or not (this used to be a problem 15 years ago, but not isn't anymore).
There are national do-not-call registries. Companies are required to check those before calling. If they don't then they get fined, which usually starts at around 25,000 euro.
This is for The Netherlands, but I believe it's similar throughout Europe.
The U.S. also has a do-not-call registry that you get fined for violating (donotcall.gov). The problem is that they don't know who to fine, because it's really easy to spoof caller ID and the businesses aren't dumb enough to identify themselves.
How can those businesses try to sell you something without identifying themselves?
Also, there must be some weird political or legal reason why they can't (or won't) get the identity from the phone companies. It can't be a technical reason, because they're already capable of tapping everything, and the phone companies are already in full cooperation with that, even developing and providing specific technical interfaces for law enforcement.
And, maybe someone can tell me if this is actually possible (as opposed to a "CSI" type exaggeration): In many police series you see them requesting full cell-phone logs of all incoming and outgoing calls to a certain phone in the past few weeks or so.
In case that's realistic, I certainly hope that it can't be foiled by something as simple as spoofing the caller ID? Because, you know, that'd make it really easy to frame someone.
I haven't seen or heard one of these calls actually play out, but they might not even be trying to sell something - they could just be scammers out to steal credit card information. (I get one all the time that's a prerecorded message from "Rachel from Cardholder Services")
I'm sure telephone companies could technically stop them if they really wanted to, but telephone companies make a profit from these people. What incentive do they have to stop them? Same with text message spam. If they tracked it (which they surely collect enough money per message to do), they could easily notice one number sending a hundred spam texts and stop it before it sends tens of thousands of them. They don't, though, because each of these messages means anywhere from another 5 to 25 cents in their pocket. Most people don't even contest getting charged for receiving spam texts, because who's going to argue over a quarter?
The biggest issue seems to be that all of this data is ephemeral - even if they had a "more powerful" caller ID (which I believe 911 dispatchers do), you would have to catch them in the act and personally have access to check where the other end of the call is terminating, and you'd have to do it before they hung up. For IP calls, I think it's unlikely they would even be able to fully trace it.
This law was passed (in NL) only some 5-7 years ago, IIRC? Because I also don't recall any "robocalls" to landlines before that time. There were the unsolicited phonecalls, but they were human, you could always request to be taken off their list and taking some basic privacy precautions I only got them very very rarely.
But I don't remember getting mass-phonecalls with pre-recorded messages, nor heard about people that did. I could be wrong, of course.
> ... my own interface builder ...
Nice, but you have a "Try it now" button on the first page, that suggests (at least to me) that I can try it right away. When click-ing however, on get's a "Login with..." page.
Would be much better if users could try it without login, and only if they really like it and want to save their work than would be a login required, or when they start to use it professionally.
I think for demo/show purposes, lowering the "entry" is always better, as it will get more people to really try it.
Yes, exactly this. I clicked the try now and immediately left the page. I still don't know what the site does, there wasn't any *features page or anything to make me curious enough to try this out.
It doesn't seem to contain recent information: I checked the ISBNs from the latest books of a few publishing houses and none of them seems to be recognized :(.
It is cool, but it's pretty useless as it's missing important features to subtract, add, intersect, etc. shapes, and other very important functionality required to do something useful beyond the typical "finger painting" :).
Absolutely! The beta is currently restricted to the mobile device in order to test our MVP, however Presence will soon be offered to traditional web based clients as well (see the screenshot in the features section).
Would be nice if there were something like this (like Heroku) for Java. I know that there are several "cloud" solutions for Java, but I haven't found something as simple to manage/extend/deploy like Heroku so far :(.
I used Stax during beta, and it's nice, but it's no near the Heroku ease of use (puls it's little helper Nezumi http://nezumiapp.com/ when on the way). With very small restrictions, one can install anything on Stax, so it's very flexible, but just not that easy to use as Heroku'.
