Apparently freeconference.com is now sending notes to its customers (one of whom forwarded an example to me) because Sprint, Cingular, Qwest and some others finally got around to blocking calls to their numbers. They pitch it as the big companies trying to block their free service so the giants can sell expensive services, and are trying to whip up support by suggesting this is akin to a network neutrality violation.

In fact, it's an example of the big guys actually doing something right, and fixing a loophole caused by bizarre legacy telco regulation. The number you called for freeconference, and many other services, were served by telcos in rural areas such as Iowa. The phone regulations are set up so that when you make a long distance call on the PSTN, the long distance company pays the remote local phone company to complete the call. Usually that fee is about half a cent per minute in cities, and even free for cell phones. (Frankly, it should always be zero, and this should be paid for as part of my local phone fee, but that's another story.) In Iowa, however, in order to, in theory, help pay the costs of being a phone company that has to send the call out to a lonely Iowa farmhouse, the rural telcos get to charge as much as 6 cents or more per minute to complete the call.

When I watch the boundless energy of young children, and their parents' frustration over it, I wonder how high-tech will alter how children are raised in the next few decades. Of course already TV, and now computers play a large role, and it seems very few toys don't talk or move on their own.

But I've also realized that children, both from a sense of play and due to youthful simplicity, will tolerate some technologies far before adults will. For example, making an AI to pass the Turing Test for children may be much, much simpler than making one that can fool an adult. As such, we may start to see simple AIs meant for interacting with, occupying the minds of and educating children long before we find them usable as adults.

Another technology that young children might well tolerate sooner is virtual reality. We might hate the cartoonish graphics and un-natural interfaces of today's VRs but children don't know the interfaces aren't natural -- they will learn any interface -- and they love cartoon worlds.

Lots of people love model airplanes, and I bet they would love to simulate dogfights. They can't fire actual projectiles, as that would be dangerous, expensive, unworkable due to the weight and actually damage planes.

I have written several times before about Peerflix -- Now that I've started applying some tags as well as categories to my items you can now see all the Peerflix stories using that link -- and the issues behind doing a P2P media trading/loaning system. Unlike my own ideas in this area, Peerflix took a selling approach. You sold and bought DVDs, initially for their own internal currency. It was 3 "Peerbux" for new releases, 2 for older ones, and 1 for bargain bin disks.

That system, however, was failing. You would often be stuck for months or more with an unpopular disk. Getting box sets was difficult. So in December they moved to pricing videos in real dollars. I found that interesting because it makes them, in a way, much closer to a specialty eBay. There are still a lot of differences from eBay -- only unboxed disks are traded, they provide insurance for broken disks and most importantly, they set the price on disks.

One can trade DVDs on eBay fairy efficiently but it requires a lot of brain effort because you must put time into figuring good bid and ask prices for items of inconsequential price. Peerflix agreed that this is probably a poor idea, so they decided to set the prices. I don't know how they set their initial prices, but it may have been by looking at eBay data or similar information.