I suppose there is software out there that can decode or rather , if you will, transcribe the conversation into text for storage....text compresses nicely...

Yes, there exists software for transcribing sound into text. I have not used any. I understand it has improved, but is still not all that great.

And since Skype traffic move accross multiple domains, ie; Your ISP, then their uplink, then to the party that you are speaking to..they also have an ISP...so, there are probably alot of opportunities for this along the pathway.

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I suppose there is software out there that can decode or rather , if you will, transcribe the conversation into text for storage....text compresses nicely...

Yes, there exists software for transcribing sound into text. I have not used any. I understand it has improved, but is still not all that great.

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Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

f (all) yi . . . thErE arE NO rECordings - rEgarding SKYPE - that arE bEing MONITORED (EtC) by any GovErnmEnt - lEgally - in thE USA or abroad - 'accEss is NOT allowEd' - and thErE supposEdly isn't any rEason for doin' so - according to CErtain Rulings as well as sourCEs . . . sooooooooooo - in short - until *soMEbody* gEts thEir way - in rEspECt to thE nEEd for monitoring ALL that Exists - SKYPE is still safE / sECurE . . . just thought i'd drop this 'commEnt' in again . . . and i kEEp rEpEatin' this faCtor . . . f(all) yi ;)

. . . note: thE *commission* doEsn't likE thosE 'tErms' (don't ask!)

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

I'm still wondering what skype has to do with the notion that all cell phone calls in the USA are recorded and stored?

As I said, I do not buy the other guys' claims, just like you do not.
I made no comparison between Skype and cell phones.
My point simply was, both e-mail and Skype are using the "interweb."
So, if some/all e-mail is stored, maybe Skype calls could be as well ... but again that ignores the storage space needed when comparing listenable audio versus text.

I suppose there is software out there that can decode or rather , if you will, transcribe the conversation into text for storage....text compresses nicely...

And I guess the same could be said about Skype...such as if a key word is spoken a transcription of the rest of the conversation begins...dunno...

Furthermore, I should propose that this same software could then transcribe all cell phones calls the same way, only in textual format...but that could prove difficult to use against someone because sometimes the voice inflection would change the meaning of a word or word(s).

Your thoughts sir?


Edit: fixed some typos.

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I'm still wondering what skype has to do with the notion that all cell phone calls in the USA are recorded and stored?

As I said, I do not buy the other guys' claims, just like you do not.
I made no comparison between Skype and cell phones.
My point simply was, both e-mail and Skype are using the "interweb."
So, if some/all e-mail is stored, maybe Skype calls could be as well ... but again that ignores the storage space needed when comparing listenable audio versus text.

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Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

Do you realize how much storage space that would require?

Where exactly are you going to store it?

The same place google stores all our emails? Even the deleted ones... ;)

An email verses recorded phone conversations. Two completely different monsters.

Ya'll need to think about that....

Michael, I think if we compare our responses, I think you'll find us largely in agreement.
However ... I do not have long distance service at home, since I rarely make or receive long distance calls. That is, until the last few months, going to conferences and on interviews means I am in contact w/ new ppl and need to be more accessible.
So ... I use Skype. I've paid for both SkypeIn and SkypeOut. (So much cheaper!)
Thus, though text is different from audio, and I have mentioned above the problems with storing so much audio data (as have you, from a different direction), still by using Skype, it is info traveling the net just like e-mail.

I'm still wondering what skype has to do with the notion that all cell phone calls in the USA are recorded and stored?

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Do you realize how much storage space that would require?

Where exactly are you going to store it?

The same place google stores all our emails? Even the deleted ones... ;)

An email verses recorded phone conversations. Two completely different monsters.

Ya'll need to think about that....

Michael, I think if we compare our responses, I think you'll find us largely in agreement.
However ... I do not have long distance service at home, since I rarely make or receive long distance calls. That is, until the last few months, going to conferences and on interviews means I am in contact w/ new ppl and need to be more accessible.
So ... I use Skype. I've paid for both SkypeIn and SkypeOut. (So much cheaper!)
Thus, though text is different from audio, and I have mentioned above the problems with storing so much audio data (as have you, from a different direction), still by using Skype, it is info traveling the net just like e-mail.

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Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

Article from Steven Qualyes website on Global Agenda

Jan. 10th 2003
From The Economist Global Agenda

After losing one-tenth of its value during 2002, the American dollar has fallen to its lowest point against the euro since 1999. Will it continue its retreat?


IS THE party finally over? For years, currency experts have been confidently—and largely mistakenly—forecasting the decline of the dollar. They were able to marshal an impressive array of evidence in support of their arguments. It was, they said, overvalued on any historical measure. America could not continue to absorb the large capital inflows which had propped up the greenback for so long. The euro, after its creation in January 1999, would soon challenge the dollar’s reserve-currency status. More recently, America’s burgeoning current-account deficit alarmed economists, who saw no alternative to a precipitous collapse of the dollar.

Yet the dollar—or, more accurately, the people who buy and sell currencies—remained impervious to economic forecasts. The world’s most important currency continued to be its most sought-after. The euro endured what to many Europeans was a humiliating decline in its international value almost from its inception. Neither the American recession in 2001 nor the huge and growing current-account deficit (about 5% of GDP) seemed to discourage people from holding dollars. And then, in the closing months of last year, the dollar finally started to weaken. By the end of the year, the dollar had lost 10% of its value as measured against a trade-weighted basket of currencies. The first few days of 2003 have seen it slip further against the euro and the yen.

About Global Agenda

Will the slide continue—and if it does, what will it mean for the global economy? Only a brave forecaster would try to predict with any confidence where the dollar will be in six months’ time. Of course, currency economists make such forecasts all the time—but that's their job and they are frequently mistaken. The factors which affect the value of one currency in relation to another are numerous and complex, and often confusingly contradictory. It is not simply a question of working out what foreign-exchange speculators think. Most currency trading is not speculative: it is the consequence of economic decisions taken by largely rational actors. Any shift in a currency’s value is driven by the cumulative impact of those millions of rational decisions.

The source of the great dollar surge in the late 1990s was easy to spot. The booming American economy offered enormously attractive rates of return on investment: as a consequence, large amounts of investment capital flooded into the country. Even when boom turned to bust, America still looked to be a better home for capital than many other, even more lacklustre economies. In 2001 and 2002, for instance, Europe’s economic performance was disappointingly sluggish, and the prospects for 2003 look little better. Emerging-market economies have lost their allure for most investors, especially after the collapse of the Argentine economy.

As the most important reserve currency, the dollar is also seen as a haven in times of global political uncertainty. Even after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington—putting America, for the first time, at the heart of the security threat—it was to the dollar that nervous investors first fled. More recently, gold has recovered some of its attractiveness as a haven, reaching its highest level in six years this month. But the yellow metal is still worth only a fraction of its long-term historical value.

The prospect of war with Iraq, and the continuing threat from international terrorism, have made investors more nervous about the future. Yet the tide now seems to be turning against the dollar. This suggests that, for the time being at least, factors other than risk-aversion are more powerful in determining currency flows. One of the most important is the recognition that American investment returns are likely to be significantly worse than in the recent past for at least the next year or two. It doesn’t need investors to start shifting capital out of America to weaken the dollar—lower inflows would be enough.

Some of the dollar’s weakness is also likely to be self-fulfilling. As investors become convinced that the American currency will depreciate, they will seek an alternative home for their funds. That will, in turn, put further downward pressure on the dollar.

But is the decline such a bad thing, for the American economy or the rest of the world? Few American exporters will weep as the greenback sinks: the strong dollar has made it difficult for them to compete in world markets in recent years. Nor will tears be shed among manufacturers who have been desperately trying to fight off competition from cheap imports. Those countries whose currencies are linked, loosely or tightly, to the dollar will breathe a sigh of relief as well—Hong Kong and Brazil are among those economies that have suffered as the dollar has soared. Argentina’s currency peg was stretched to breaking point—and beyond—partly because of the American currency’s strength.

Those countries that compete for business in America, or with American exporters, though, will not relish the impact of the dollar’s decline. The rise in the value of the euro might boost morale at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, but it will not bring much comfort to Germany’s export-driven corporate sector. East Asian economies such as Singapore, still reeling from the collapse of the high-tech boom, have no reason to welcome a devalued dollar.

Paul O’Neill, the treasury secretary fired by President George Bush at the beginning of December, was known for his belief in the benefits of a strong dollar. Such conviction is the refuge of old-fashioned politicians who associate national pride with a strong currency. Mr O’Neill was accused of trying to talk up the dollar, and consequently blamed for its persistent strength. His successor, John Snow, is, as yet, innocent of such uncomplicated views. In reality, of course, politicians have almost no power to influence currency movements except in the very short term. They are reduced to watching when currencies overshoot—as they almost always do—on the way up, and on the way down.

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1533317

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

Here is an brief article from the Coast to Coast website on the Global Agenda

author David Icke shared his view that a hidden global elite is seeking to control humanity, and plans a centralization of power and an eventual one world government. This group manipulates the population through various means, he contended. These methods include the bombardment of electromagnetic frequencies (from cell phones, cell towers, HAARP) and substances such as aspartame and fluoride, which act as "excitotoxins," lowering brain cell functioning and vitality.

To reach their goal of creating a centralized state with a microchipped population connected to a computer, super powers such as the US have to be destroyed, and Icke believes that is now systematically under way. They want to create the conditions for World War III, said Icke-- afterwards they can step in and say that in order to stop this from ever happening again, we need a world government to take over.

He foresees a "massive fork in the road," for humanity's future. Within a few short years we could be living in a global fascist state-- "a centralized Orwellian nightmare," or if we start to address this now and not cooperate, we can transform the outcome into something very different.


author Steve Quayle presented similar concerns about the agenda of globalists. He argued that the bird flu is a cover for a more deadly "transgenic" epidemic, which the elite intend to use to massively reduce the earth's population. Quayle also shared his belief that there are a number of signs we are currently living in the prophesized Biblical "end times," such as the new National ID law.

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

Do you realize how much storage space that would require?

Where exactly are you going to store it?

The same place google stores all our emails? Even the deleted ones... ;)

An email verses recorded phone conversations. Two completely different monsters.

Ya'll need to think about that....

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Europe’s Plan to Track Phone and Net Use

PARIS, Feb. 19 — European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.

In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.

A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.

Even now, Internet service providers in Europe divulge customer information — which they normally keep on hand for about three months, for billing purposes — to police officials with legally valid orders on a routine basis, said Peter Fleischer, the Paris-based European privacy counsel for Google. The data concerns how the communication was sent and by whom but not its content.

But law enforcement officials argued after the terrorist bombings in Spain and Britain that they needed better and longer data storage from companies handling Europe’s communications networks.

European Union countries have until 2009 to put the Data Retention Directive into law, so the proposals seen now are early interpretations. But some people involved in the issue are concerned about a shift in policy in Europe, which has long been a defender of individuals’ privacy rights.

Under the proposals in Germany, consumers theoretically could not create fictitious e-mail accounts, to disguise themselves in online auctions, for example. Nor could they use a made-up account to use for receiving commercial junk mail. While e-mail aliases would not be banned, they would have to be traceable to the actual account holder.

“This is an incredibly bad thing in terms of privacy, since people have grown up with the idea that you ought to be able to have an anonymous e-mail account,” Mr. Fleischer said. “Moreover, it’s totally unenforceable and would never work.”

Mr. Fleischer said the law would have to require some kind of identity verification, “like you may have to register for an e-mail address with your national ID card.”

Jörg Hladjk, a privacy lawyer at Hunton & Williams, a Brussels law firm, said that might also mean that it could become illegal to pay cash for prepaid cellphone accounts. The billing information for regular cellphone subscriptions is already verified.

Mr. Fleischer said: “It’s ironic, because Germany is one of the countries in Europe where people talk the most about privacy. In terms of consciousness of privacy in general, I would put Germany at the extreme end.”

He said it was not clear that any European law would apply to e-mail providers based in the United States, like Google, so anyone who needed an unverified e-mail address — for political, commercial or philosophical reasons — could still use Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail addresses.

Mr. Hladjk said, “It’s going to be difficult to know which law applies.” Google requires only two pieces of information to open a Gmail account — a name and a password — and the company does not try to determine whether the name is authentic.

In the Netherlands, the proposed extension of the law on phone company records to all mobile location data “implies surveillance of the movement of large amounts of innocent citizens,” the Dutch Data Protection Agency has said. The agency concluded in January that the draft disregarded privacy protections in the European Convention on Human Rights. Similarly, the German technology trade association Bitkom said the draft there violated the German Constitution.

Internet and telecommunications industry associations raised objections when the directive was being debated, but at that time their concerns were for the length of time the data would have to be stored and how the companies would be compensated for the cost of gathering and keeping the information. The directive ended up leaving both decisions in the hands of national governments, setting a range of six months to two years. The German draft settled on six months, while in Spain the proposal is for a year, and in the Netherlands it is 18 months.

“There are not a lot of people in Germany who support this draft entirely,” said Christian Spahr, a spokesman for Bitkom. “But there are others who are more critical of it than we are.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/business/worldbusiness/20privacy.html?ex=1329627600&en=7c38ad310b81c458&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

Do you realize how much storage space that would require?

Where exactly are you going to store it?

The same place google stores all our emails? Even the deleted ones... ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

On the other hand, Chicago and Sprint are planning a city-wide wireless network using WiMax (as opposed to WiFi). A spokesman (forget where from) was quoted in The Chicago Tribune regarding some proposed uses ... such as when someone is in an area and they have their laptop on ... assuming they're connected via WiMax, altering ads on billboards nearby to appeal to that persons within that user's age range and of the same gender. Hmmm. What's THAT sound like. Can we say the mediocre to bad movie "Minority Report." What the heck do they need to do that for, when ppl just want to be able to roam further and remain in touch?

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Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

I know in the U.S.A every cell phone call is recorded by each cell phone company.

hehe, no way. Do you realize how much storage space that would require?

not that much. when you imagine: with mp3 I can get ten albums of stereo music on one CD. Makes about 6 hours. telephoning is mono, and less sound quality, means less data per second. So you can save 9 or 10 hours of talk on one CD, filed as mp3. If you choose Ogg Vorbis, you could get even more. I suppose 12 to 15 hours of mono sound files, due to the sound quality and compression rate. On only one single CD. 700MB. Guess what you get on a DVD...

But ... one, consider the INCREDIBLE amount of meaningless chatter going on in cell-phones. When I walk around campus during times just before and after classes begin or end, the amount of people talking on cells is INSANE.

Two, no matter how little bandwidth is needed, storing at lower and lower bitrates (compression rates?) eventually will make it so tinny and "thin" as to make it difficult to listen to and understand. Moreover, if you have not saved another copy at a "normal" compression rate (e.g., for music, say about 196-320 kbps in mpa or mp3 format or lower 1000s for wav format) ... you cannot convert it to a higher bitrate and have it restore quality when doing so.

Three, the sound quality of cell phones is bad enough even before compression.

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Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

I know in the U.S.A every cell phone call is recorded by each cell phone company.

hehe, no way. Do you realize how much storage space that would require?

not that much. when you imagine: with mp3 I can get ten albums of stereo music on one CD. Makes about 6 hours. telephoning is mono, and less sound quality, means less data per second. So you can save 9 or 10 hours of talk on one CD, filed as mp3. If you choose Ogg Vorbis, you could get even more. I suppose 12 to 15 hours of mono sound files, due to the sound quality and compression rate. On only one single CD. 700MB. Guess what you get on a DVD...

Now multiply that by the thousands of combined "talk time" hours nationwide that is done DAILY. Where exactly are you going to store it? How long is it kept on record? 30 days? forever?

NO WAY.

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I know in the U.S.A every cell phone call is recorded by each cell phone company.

hehe, no way. Do you realize how much storage space that would require?

not that much. when you imagine: with mp3 I can get ten albums of stereo music on one CD. Makes about 6 hours. telephoning is mono, and less sound quality, means less data per second. So you can save 9 or 10 hours of talk on one CD, filed as mp3. If you choose Ogg Vorbis, you could get even more. I suppose 12 to 15 hours of mono sound files, due to the sound quality and compression rate. On only one single CD. 700MB. Guess what you get on a DVD...

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Account frozen...

Yeffrey! Jou yust checked the countrj box!

Oh darn... Now they know where to find me... ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

I know in the U.S.A every cell phone call is recorded by each cell phone company.

hehe, no way. Do you realize how much storage space that would require?

coughin' loudly . . . makE a bEt? btw - iT's NOT thE cEll phonE company doin' iT . . . though iT is bEin' donE . . . and thaT rEfErs to EvEry call plaCEd on this planEt . . . (and now, DON'T ask . . .)

I know in the U.S.A every cell phone call is recorded by each cell phone company.

hehe, no way. Do you realize how much storage space that would require?

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I know in the U.S.A every cell phone call is recorded by each cell phone company.

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010