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Sprint has just introduced – for a limited time – text messaging to landline phones. Yes, that’s right. Sprint is now delivering SMS text messages to landlines, which are traditionally non-SMS capable.

How are they doing this? With the help of a company called Telemessage, which specializes in convergent technologies. It boils down to this: if someone sends a text message and Sprint determines that it’s not being sent to a cell phone, the message gets handed off to Telemessage. They then call the landline phone, wait for someone to answer, and then read the message to the person at the other end (or the answering machine, depending) using text to speech software. The receiving party can then record their own message and have it sent back as a voicemail.

Pretty neat huh? But you see… if the person you’re sending a message to is at a landline phone and are going to receive the text message as sound anyway, why not just, oh, CALL THE PERSON UP AND TELL THEM THE MESSAGE YOURSELF?!

Just a thought…

Here’s an excellent story from the Washington Post detailing the trials and tribulations of Comcast high speed internet customers. Comcast’s response is to blame the issue on the phone company. Way to go.

The experiences echo the ones I’ve been having in my own dealings with Comcast High Speed internet. Now you see why I had to go back to Verizon, despite some of their own horrid screwups as of late. Those screwups just happen to be not as bad as the cable company’s, and thus I’m forced to pick the lesser of two evils.

After a very long, sometimes ugly, very protracted legal, political and PR battle, the town of Lafayette, Louisiana has voted to sell bonds to float their own municipal broadband service. The plan is to roll out fiber optic cable to provide high speed internet service, better, faster and hopefully cheaper than the current limited offerings by the phone and cable companies in the area.

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[photo by neogentronyx]

Carlos Owens of Alaska is giving eBayers with enough cash the opportunity to own their own mech. The opening bid? $40,000. There’s about three days left in the auction as of this writing, but alas, so far no bidders.

Owens claims this is a real life, fully functional Mech in the old school Voltron style, with up to 40 points of possible movement. The auction page lists the unit as weighing 3,000 pounds, Chassis Type: X (Anthromorphic\Humanoid), standing 18 feet tall and powered by an 18hp Briggs and Stratton Engine.

There’s even video footage of the mech in action on Owens web site.

Why is Owens selling? he needs the money to build other Mecha prototypes. He has an interesting vision for his creations; some purposes altruistic, others more true-to-anime:

Future Neo-Mecha created by Neogentronyx will be used for everything from fighting forest fires far too hot and unsafe for a human, riot control, construction, maintenance, handling hazardous waste and navigating hostile environments, modern day warfare, to the entertainment industry where Neo-Mecha will do battle in an arena setting with different types of chassis being pitted against one another in combat sparring.

I definitely wish him luck, though it’s a shame that so far there aren’t any takers yet. I’m not surprised though; I don’t have that kind of storage space myself.

Thanks to pier777 for the heads up on this. 🙂