I just found out that AT&T (A-fee&fee?) is raising their text message pricing. When I first signed up for AT&T 6 or so years ago it cost 10 cents to send an SMS message, and it was free to receive them.

When AT&T switched to Cingular the price of sending a message dropped to 5 cents, but they started charging for incoming texts - also 5 cents. Assuming you send a message for every message you receive, this works out at about the same price as before.

AT&T came back online and phased out the CIngular brand name, and prices were again changed. This time to 15 cents each way.

More changes have taken place that I can't quite remember. At one point text messages were 10 cents either way, and at another point they even included MMS (multimedia messages) at the same price as SMS.

As of March SMS messages on AT&T will cost 20 cents and MMS will cost 30 cents - both to send a receive.

So let's do some math here, and figure out how much this simple transmission is actually costing us.

A standard SMS message contains up to 140 bytes (1120 bits) of data - this takes care of the 160 characters allowed in your text message. This might not make sense at first, until you realize that SMS uses 7 - not 8 - bit characters - leaving you with 128 possible character values instead of the normal 256. So 1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.

So our total message length is about a tenth of a kilobyte (.13671875 Kbytes). In terms that the iPod generation would understand - if you had an iPod with a tenth of a kilobyte you could fit 1/4000th of a song on it. I assume here and for the rest of this article that 1 song = 4 Megabytes.

If you divide 140 (the total number of bytes available to you) by 20 (the cost per message), you find that you are paying 1 cent for every 7 bytes of data. This leaves you with a cost of $1,497.97 for the 1024Kbytes contained in a single megabyte. iPod users: It would cost you $5,991.88 to transfer - not even to buy - a single song via SMS.

By comparison, I pay $50 a month for a soft bandwidth limit of 500 gigabytes through a local ISP. That comes out to 512,000 megabytes or 10,240 megabytes to the dollar. This allows me to transfer 2,560 songs for the same price as a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger off the value menu at Wendy's: $1. I will use this my standard measurement for the rest of this article.

So far I can make the following statements concerning the costs of bandwidth:

Cost to transfer 2560 songs:

From my ISP: $1
Via SMS messaging: $15,339,212.80

But wait, there's more!

When calculating SMS charges, most people don't take into consideration that the message is really being paid for twice! If I send a message to another AT&T user, I am paying to send it AND they're paying to receive it! This should probably be illegal, but that's for another discussion.

So how much does an SMS message actually cost? Not 20 cents - but 40 cents! This doubles all of my numbers above.

Furthermore, my above figures estimate that people actually use all 160 characters available to them. Say people on average actually only used half of that (which is still being generous) - then their price of data has again doubled from the numbers I gave above!

Making adjustments for both of the above statements, we realize that our above number isn't even close to correct! Corrected, the comparison looks more like this:

COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:

via my ISP: $1
via SMS: $61,356,851.20

Phew! THAT is premium data! It's no wonder that SMS texting alone is a 100 Billion dollar a year industry!

How big is that? Take all of hollywood movie box office revenues worldwide. Add all of the global music industry revenues. And add all of videogaming revenues around the world. Even all those three together, we don't reach 100 billion.

Let's even go more premium - how much would it cost to hand deliver data?

The U.S. Postal service is currently charging 41 cents for this privilege (hmm.. only one cent more that AT&T charges to automatically handle an SMS message). So how much written data could we send in a letter?

Google says 250 is considered the standard words per page measurement, and a sheet of paper weighs about 4.5 grams. The U.S. postal service allows your letters to weigh up to 1 ounce before charging you more, which is just over 28 grams. So you could send 6 sheets of paper, minus 1 for the envelope. If you write on both sides that gives you 2500 words (10 pages x 250 words).

According to this page, the average english word is 5 characters long. Add in a space for every word and you have 6 characters per word or 1500 characters for page for a total of 15,000 characters.

Now we are not limited in any way in the types of characters we can use, but let's assume we are using a 256 character (8 bit) set.

Our letter therefore gives us ~14Kbytes for 41 cents. To transfer an MP3 using this method, we would be looking at about $119.95. To transfer 2,560 MP3s, that comes out to only $307,072. We would also need to take into consideration the bulk rate, but for the sake of argument (and because I don't feel like figuring it out), let's leave it where it's at.

The cost would drop dramatically if we compressed the data onto, say a DVD and our cost would be something more like $1.20.

Updating our chart from above:

COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:

TCP/IP: $1
TCP/SMS: $61,356,851.20
TCP/USPS: $307,072.00 (Bits written out on paper)

So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.

What exactly justifies making SMS messages sixty one million times more expensive than ISP data and 200x more expensive than TCP/USPS? How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.

edit: A few readers pointed out that from the title, this article sounds more like it's about the carrier's internal cost for transmitting SMS messages. For that, we turn to an informed slashdot poster:

I know the true cost of SMS messages!

I made a paper for the univeristy some years ago. The marginal cost of a SMS is 0.

They do have a little cost/opportunity. As a matter of fact SMS messages are sent on the control channel. Initially SMS were implemented in the GSM standard as a control system, just like the ICMP protocol of the IP stack. Then NOKIA though to implement a actual instant message function using SMS. The Contol channel is the channel that your mobile listens to in order to receive calls. So for receiving a SMS a control signal is sent. Since bandwidht is somehow limited on these channels it could happen that in a situation of massive usage of texting the control channel gets saturated and normal voice protocol initiation is disrupted. To prevent this carriers nowadays apply a kind of QoS delaying SMSs until there is no risk of congestion. So we can state that the marginal cost is 0 and the cost/opportunity is also 0

Another story is for the MMSs. Their cost/opportunity is even lower since they run almost enterely on GPRS thus using most bandwidht on normal data channels. Thus a MMS with pictures sounds and maybe video SHOULD cost less than a SMS.

So you wonder, why do I pay so much for a SMS or a MMS or even a Call: after the debts for the initial hardware infrastructure have been paid by the carrier you are still paying because of market segmentation (You won't change the carrier on the fly) and a little monopoly (Almost impossible to start a new carrier from 0).

I hereby declare war on horrible pizza topping choices. Pizza ideology is slowly changing such that people are slapping together anything willy nilly and as long as it is on a round, flatt base they call it "pizza."

Look at Domino's latest entry:

They call it the "Oreo Pizza."

Perhaps it would be helpful to define Pizza before we continue. If you click on that little link there, you'll see definitions from around the web. Most mention a bread crust and tomato sauce type combination.

This Oreo "Pizza" is a downright travesty. First of all, the crust is not made of a bread-like substance - it is made of a cardboard-like substance. I know people say "oh that tastes like cardboard" about a lot of things, but the Oreo "Pizza's" crust literally has the consistency and taste of cardboard. And when I say literally, I am using its classic definition not how some people misuse it nowadays: "That's sooo cool! My eyes are litterally popping out of my head!"

Yes, the crust literally is a close cousin of cardboard.

Just examining the crust gives us cause to throw out any argument that this concoction even remotely resembles pizza - but just for fun let's consider that other things that are involved in Pizza. Tomato Sauce: thing thing has none - not even a sugary-replacement unless you count the frosting. But the frosting is on top of the Oreo's, so if that's true than this "Pizza" is even more messed up. Who puts the sauce on the top of a Pizza?
Hey Dominos, look at this:

That's called a pie. An Oreo Pie. What you're making is exactly the same as this Oreo pie except that it's flat and has worse crust. Why not call it a "flat pie?" Calling it a flat pie is hardly stretching the definition of pie, while calling it a pizza is simply baffling. Who sees that thing you made and says "Hey, pizza!" Nobody. Nobody says that.

Now I know this is going to make some people angry, but another thing you don't see in those many definitions of Pizza is Pineapple.

Pineapple does not belong on a Pizza. Period, end of story.

Pineapple is a fruit. It belongs where fruity things go: in drinks, as a side dish perhaps, pretty much anywhere but on top of a Pizza. Just like you can't have Oreos count as a valid topping, you can't have Pineapple count as a topping.

What's next? Fruit salad pizza with Ranch Dressing (p.s. Ranch isn't a valid dipping sauce for Pizza either, but I'll fight that battle later)? Maybe watermelon peach cobbler pizza?

The flavor of Pineapple doesn't go with any part of a Pizza. Would you eat bread+Pineapple? A Pineapple sandwich? No. Tomato sauce with Pineapple? No. Pineapple with cheese melted onto it? No. Yet for some reason people think it's a good idea when it's all put together. It literally boggles the mind! (Owww! My mind is being boggled!)

Another reason Pineapple makes a bad Pizza topping is because it cannot easily be removed. Oh, don't like olives? Simply pick them off. Same with sausage, green onions, whatever. But Pineapple leaves behind all of its juices so if you want to pick it off you're just left with Pineapple juice pizza, which is pretty much worse than the Pineapple pizza was to start with.

Este Pizza (RIP: 2005 - 2007) in Salt Lake City knows how to make a delicious Pizza. And guess what - they don't put pineapple on it. In fact, if you want pineapple on your pizza it costs $99 plus a $50 corking fee. That's what I'm talking about! Make those pineapple loving hippies pay!

By the way - before you say it - No, Este Pizza didn't go out of business because the refused to serve Pineapple. They had a devastating fire so shut up.

Dear World: Please don't mess with something that is already perfect. You can do your own thing within the constraints of the definition of Pizza (make thick crust, put tons of cheese on it, stuffed crust, etc.), but please don't put taco ingredients on a piece of round bread and call it "Taco Pizza." Don't insult us.

I welcome you, the world, to create new an exciting dishes - even ones based on the idea of pizza. But if they're not pizza, don't call them pizza.

A little while back I decided it was time to get some accounting software to keep track of money coming in and going out for various projects that I am doing. I really only had one requirement: the software needed to figure out my taxes.

I looked at AccountEdge for Mac and QuickBooks.

In the end, I bought QuickBooks. It had the added benefit of allowing me to process credit cards right from the software. I thought this would be a good benefit to have in working with clients.

Since day one, I have regretted that decision. Not only does QuickBooks nickel and dime you for every last feature, but doing even simple tasks is endlessly complicated.

Quickbooks will indeed figure out your taxes, but only if you buy some stupid add-on subscription for "payroll." Then, even when you've purchased that, it won't fill out your tax forms for you unless you also purchase a more advanced package. The basic package only gives you the hard numbers which you then have to work with yourself.

Credit card processing only appears to work through their dumb gateway service, but they wouldn't give me an account. So I am not able to use that feature even though that's the only reason I paid for the "pro" package.

Don't even get me started on how complicated it is. Every single time I try to do something, I end up having to troll the forums on their website for answers. Doing something like "Billing a Client" which seems like it should be pretty straightforward, usually consist of no less than 50 steps and navigation of dark, hidden, dust-covered sub-menus in some obscure corner of the software.

I'm constantly inundated with advertisements and alerts to upgrade or buy this or that to make the software do what it should just do out of the box. It was, after all, a few hundred dollars. What did I get with that amount of money? Nothing but invitations to buy actual functionality after I installed.

I really don't understand how or why people use QuickBooks. I'd think you'd need a 4 year degree in QuickBooks just to operate it.

Note to Intuit (The maker's of QuickBooks): Decide what you want to include in your software and include it. Charge people up front for it. I'd rather pay $400 for software that does what it says than $200 for software that does nothing and keeps asking me to buy crap.

Oh, and fire your interface designer/poorly trained monkey.

Those two O's in "Google" represent two beady little eyes, watching your every move and collecting it into one huge database to create a dossier on you that is so extensive that Google knows more about you than you do.

At least that is the picture drawn by this video on 5min.

Queue the gasp!

Google is out to get you, trust us.

First of all, anyone who has been on the Internet for five minutes knows that any online service is gathering as much data as possible on all of us. It's not news.

What is news, apparently, is that it's all part of some worldwide conspiracy to take over the world.

So let's say Google succeeds in their devious plans to take over. Planet earth becomes Google Earth. What can we expect to see?

• No more DMV. Getting a new license is a one-click process.
• Earth can now mathematically determine your value as a human.
• Low value humans are blacklisted and forced to move to Australia.
• Free EMail.
• No more taxes. Money is given to the world government through billboard advertising.
• A new cottage industry will spring up where people help you improve your "HumanRank"™

I've been to the Google campus. I've seen it with my own eyes. There are free bicycles everywhere, and a great public transportation system. Everyone is happy and having fun. I've been to parties at Google and it was free food, drinks, and entertainment as far as the eye could see.

I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

My mind races a lot at night and sometimes I have profound strokes of wisdom. Usually in the morning, what I thought was so amazing the night before has become "well, duh" or doesn't even make sense.

Tonight I was thinking about work and how it's structured. It's obvious that trading time for money is stupid. Time itself is of no value. When you trade time for money, you think that you've done your job by going and sitting in a desk for 8 hours a day.

The time for money system is perpetuated because misery loves company. Some chump is going to hire you and make you work 9 to 5 because that's what he has to do - and damn all but he's not going to let you have a more relaxed schedule then he has!

You'd think flex scheduling wouldn't work in an environment where you have to deal with customers, but I think it can - it just requires a little more planning. Say you have five sales guys and you need people at work all day. You just figure out what hours are popular and what hours are unpopular. You adjust the pay based on popularity of the shift and compensate. So with a base pay of $10/hr. you might get an extra $2 in the morning, and $2 less in the middle of the day.

But wherever and whenever possible, pay should be based on performance.

Think about it.

Scenario A: Your work schedule is 9 to 5. You show up and know you have to stay until the day is done. You do whatever work you happen to get done and you go home.

Scenario B: Your work schedule is to complete 3 major tasks. You go in when you've woken up and become charged and excited for the day, you complete your tasks and you leave. It may take 6 hours and it may take 10.

I bet if more people did scenario B, not only would more work get done but people would end up working fewer hours. Employers might be skeptical at first - why am I paying for a full day's work when they didn't work a full day? But they shouldn't be - they're just stuck in the stupid 8 hours is the end-all be-all of work. You should pay for value, not to rent a body to fill a chair.

I believe that I will get more done if I just do 3 tasks a day. What's my schedule? 3 tasks. Of course, you could adjust the number of tasks to how many you think you can reasonably get done in a good day's work.

Since I work for myself, I'm going to try it for the next week or two. Instead of setting apart 8 hours of every day to work, I'm just going to plan out what needs to be done and do it. I'll keep a pool of tasks and promote three to my schedule every morning.

I'll report my results.

Dean and I went to a new-ish Indian food restaurant last night to try it out. For anyone in Utah, it's on Freedom Blvd. in Provo next to Honk's. The verdict in a moment, first I want to tell you about stupid provo kid who was there.

Stupid Provo kid was there with nine of his friends. Listening to them for any amount of time would reveal many gems of stupidity, but my favorite came when it was time for them to order.

Stupid Provo kid didn't seem to really know what he wanted, but just asked that the waiter bring enough food to feed them all. He added "and we don't want to pay $50 for it!" Saying it in such a way as to imply that the concept of paying $50 for ten people was completely unrealistic.

He might have been able to stay well under $50 with the Wendy's dollar menu, but a quick glance at the menu (which is a huge sign up on the wall) revealed that the average cost of a meal was $7. I'm not sure what kind of gorilla math this kid was using, but unless many in his party are going to go hungry, his total was obviously going to be well over $50.

At the end of the evening his bill came to $82. He seemed a big flabbergasted and asked that the check be split up, even though they had not split the food in any discernible way. The waiter was obviously annoyed, but obliged.

Dear Stupid Provo Kid: You can't feed 10 people indian food for well under $50. You're stupid.

If you're like me an you use FTP servers a lot, you've probably noticed a lack of decent FTP clients for Mac OS X.

For the longest time I used Cyberduck, probably the most popular FTP client around (and its free, too!) But as I used FTP more and more, Cyberduck's annoyances kept getting in my way. For starters, transferring files is slow as all get out. If you are uploading a large group of files - say a Wordpress or Drupal installation, it would fail several times through. Every time it failed, it had to go back through each file to verify its size before it could continue where it left off.

Things got weirder with Leopard. Cyberduck suddenly did things like tell me every single transfer had failed - whether or not it actually had. It would upload all of a 5 megabyte file, keep uploading (???), then finally fail after it had uploaded 6 megabytes. Checking the file on the server would reveal the transfer was a success.

These annoyances (and a few others), lead me to seek out a new FTP client. I first turned Transmit, an FTP client by Panic. I was familiar with some of their other software and always thought they did a great job. However, Transmit left me disappointed. It was still slow like Cyberduck and beyond fixing the bugginess of Cyberduck, it didn't offer anything new or revolutionary.

I kept search, eventually giving up and resigning to my fate of using Cyberduck - hoping the developers might someday fix it.

Until one day I stumbled upon Yummy FTP.

The name didn't do much for me, but I decided to give it a try anyway. What did I have to lose? What I found was a breath of fresh air. A fast, stable FTP client with auto error-correction, multi-threading, and a simple interface. Everything I need!

I started using Yummy a month or two ago and haven't looked back since.

The first thing I noticed was how fast it was. Cyberduck and Transmit would take forever to upload a Drupal installation to a server, but Yummy did it in record time. I noticed in the transfer window it was actually opening multiple connections to the server.

Awesome!

But how does it do with error handling? One of the best FTP clients for Windows is called "Bullet Proof FTP." It's called that because it is bullet proof - any transfer error that comes up it will ignore. It will just keep trying until the file is transfered. This makes sense - because if you're trying to transfer a file you don't want a bunch of error windows, you just want it to get transfered.

Yummy FTP features similar error recovery. It just works. The prefs window even lets you fine tune the error handling, but the defaults were fine for me.

It'll try enough times to get around common transfer hiccups, but not too much in case there is actually a problem.

Another cool thing is the dock menu, which allows you to quickly connect to any of your bookmarked servers.

Yummy allows you to also create FTP droplets. These are icons that you can drop files onto and all your transfers will take place automatically, without any further intervention.

One thing that annoyed me (the only thing, really) about Yummy was that it automatically opened up to a "new connection" window where you could type in FTP details rather than the bookmarks window, which seems like the logical place you would want to be.

This was easily fixed in the preferences. You can toggle the behavior of both windows upon startup. I simply disabled the new connection window and enabled the bookmarks window.

The wording is a bit strange. They should probably both just say "Show xxx window at launch." I don't know why they worded the new connection one differently. It just made it a bit confusing at first.

Yummy is packed full of a bunch of other features I am discovering all the time. Batch and scheduled transfers, advanced syncing, color labels and organization options, and more. I was even able to hook it up to my favorite text editor Smultron for quick and easy editing of on-server files.

Yummy FTP costs $25, but for me the price is worth what you get. If you have several servers you connect to, run a few websites, or otherwise use FTP a lot then Yummy is a must. I highly recommend it.

If you use FTP servers once every six months, you could probably stand to use Cyberduck.

There is a full-featured 30 day trial available if you'd like to try it out.

I was at Wal*Mart recently with a few friends, and before we left one of my friends wanted to pick up some cigarettes. We went to the one lane where you could make such a purchase and the lady asked to see ALL of our IDs.
Annoying and pointless, sure, but I didn't mind showing her my ID. She claimed she was just following the rules, so it was no big deal.

My friends handed over their drivers licenses, and I hand over my concealed weapons permit. She looked at it for a moment and handed it back saying "I'm sorry this isn't valid ID."

Oh really? So a license to drive is valid, but a license to carry a weapon is not valid? Both are government issued, and neither are required to have by law.

The lady at the checkout said she could not sell my friend cigarettes unless I could produce a "valid ID" according to her definition, which seemed to only include driver's licenses. I told her I don't drive and didn't have a drivers license. This is a lie, of course, but she was being a pain and I wasn't willing to give in.

She then disappeared from the register and went to the customer service counter to "double check."

During the few minutes that we waited, I reflected on the requirements of obtaining either form of ID.

A driver's license requires you to pass a driving test, and produce a birth certificate (which may or may not actually be yours). There is actually very little verification that takes place - they don't compare your fingerprints to your birth certificate - they just trust that if it is in your possession it must be you.

I know this because I had several friends in high school who would obtain real IDs from the DMV using their older siblings' birth certificates. The real IDs, of course, contained fake information - but they were valid government issued IDs.

A concealed weapons permit, on the other hand, requires several classes, proficiency tests, en extensive FBI background check, and numerous forms of ID. While it is still not impossible to obtain one, it is certainly not as easy as a driver's license.

The lady finally returned from customer service. She told us she had given all of our IDs to the police officer on duty and that they were being held in a "private room" while they called the police station to check us out.

We asked if we could just leave and forget about the cigarettes, but she told us we would have to wait. She was not willing to give our IDs back. All this time a massive line was stacking up behind us.

We waited several more minutes before the manager came back with our IDs. He gave them back to us and told the cashier that they "checked out."

I couldn't help but feel that the whole thing felt like an invasion of my privacy. Age verification is one thing, and that is fine, but calling the police station and doing a check on me because MY FRIEND wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes was pretty ridiculous.

I've been hearing a lot about the supposed "media conspiracy" to keep everyone from hearing too much about Ron Paul. I have a hard time believing that anyone in the media would be interested in suppressing a valid presidential candidate, but what do I know?

Then I received an automated polling call. It asked me one multiple choice question: "If the republican primaries were today, who would you vote for?" The choices included Huckabee, McCain, Romney, Guliani, and Thompson.

Is Ron Paul really that far behind? He can't even get a mention on the multiple choice poll? I thought it was odd, but dismissed it.

Then I saw a poll on MSNBC. According to the poll, Ron Paul was winning with a landslide victory - something like 70% of the votes or something. A little later, the "poll" had been "pulled" without explanation.

The plot thickens.

Numerous examples have shown up since then. More online polls that showed Ron Paul as the clear winner on MSNBC were taken down. After finishing second in the South Carolina debate, he was dropped to dead last for candidates likely to win the nomination.

During one debate, Ron Paul was not given the opportunity to speak for over half an hour into the debate. When he finally had his chance, he was only aloud to speak a few times totaling at about 3.5 minutes. Other candidates including Thompson and Huckabee were given much more time - and candidates like Romney were aloud to speak up to 9 separate times.

So is there a media bias against Romney?

Today I saw this:

A Facebook poll has chosen Huckabee! Wow that's amazing. Let's just look at those numbers ... yes at 22% Huckabee has almost half the votes of Ron Paul! I guess he is the clear winner!

Then there was this on CBS:

Huckabee with 31%, Mccain with 12%, Romney with 23%, Thompson with 23%, and blank grey pie piece with unknown per cent. Hmm... ominous blank pie piece is tied with McCain, althought you'd have to do the math yourself. (The actual poll puts Paul at 11%).

I think the fact that Ron Paul has garnered so much support online, that he has nearly set a record for the most funds raised in a single day, and that he simply blasts everyone out of the water on every online poll is newsworthy. Yet he barely ever gets a mention. Meanwhile Huckabee, who came out of nowhere, is winning in the polls (with a hefty 22%)!

I'm really not kidding. Here are NBC's current online poll results:

And the results are similar all the way down the board. The only one Ron Paul isn't winning on is "most rehearsed answer," whatever that means.

But all this, and I talk to people every day who still don't know who Ron Paul is.

One thing I hear a lot is that people wished Ron Paul would win, but they don't think he can do it, so they're going to vote for someone else.

Yes, that's the spirit of democracy! If we vote for whoever the media tells us about the most, then who is really choosing the next president?

That's right little sheep, we've got this election under control. All of our polls show that Huckabee is going to win, so just vote for him. Give up on anyone else and come along with the rest of us. Drink the cool-aid.

Oh, by the way, Ron Paul got more than 3x the votes of Giuliani in the Iowa Caucus. Now watch and see who they still talk about more on the news.