Presence of pain...

On the SIMPLE WG email list I had asked a question about how to block (politely) IM buddies during roaming, in order to avoid undue costs. Quite rightly, a commentator pointed out that perhaps the status should indicate "expensive calls", not "roaming" and might also apply when the bundled minutes run out (I guess in receive-party-pays scenarios).

Then, another commentator posted this:

“Remember Dr. McCoy's sick bay on Star Trek?

When he had somebody on the operating table, he had this nifty little bar graph he could point to and say "But Jim, he's experiencing 437% of the human capacity for pain right now!" That's what we need. I think we can solve a lot of this by having a pain threshold indicator in RPID.

"Don't bother me, kid. I hurt all over, and it might be caused by those damnable roaming charges. Or the bottle of Jose Cuervo I drank last night. Whatever. But I'm at a 50% pain threshold and if you call, it'd better be important".

The next thing to do is build a service that automatically notifies other carriers that you're ripe for poaching when your pain threshold hits 98% . . . and legislation that justifies you killing them in self defense."

Now, I could claim that as one of the 100 Ideas series, but I'll get back to those in due course...

...talking of which, someone posted a comment (and I thought I'd turned those damn things off) that my "cellphone in socks" idea (which I hope he understood was a joke) could be enhanced using trouser stay-ups (which I think we call "braces"), only I couldn't quite see how to fit them to socks, not that such technicalities matter here.

p.s. I'm waiting for feedback from Wiley about the reception for my "Introduction to IMS" paper at a recent "Convergence" conference. Then, after any edits, I can email it out to the list. If, by any chance, you're waiting for it, please be patient. On the other hand, if you don't "believe" in IMS (and I'm positively agnostic, but given the fait accompli of it all I think it might be a moot point), then you can take the delay as a good omen, congruent with the whole IMS rollout (or lack of)...

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