Taking a closer look

So this has been making the rounds. It's four AT&T ads from 1993. About THE FUTURE, and how the company that will bring it to you is AT&T.



Let's grade them on it, shall we?

1. Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away?
• Brought to you by Google, which is being sued over it. 
2. Crossed the country without stopping for directions?
• Brought to you by GPS, a technology developed by the U.S. military, then made an open standard by presidents of both parties, leading to open competition on features, usability, and price.
3. Sent someone a fax from the beach?  
• Brought to you by AT&T!  We'll give them the benefit of the doubt on the protocol (lol, "fax") and note that AT&T and Sprint had made the technology, cellular modems, available by 1994.
4. Have you ever paid a toll without slowing down?
• Brought to you by E-ZPass.
• And with a transceiver that fits in your pocket, because the only technology needed here is a reliable radio-based identification check. You get a paper bill in the mail.
• But I think it's fantastic that AT&T thought you'd have a full credit-card point-of-sale system in your dashboard. Maybe you can use it to pay your ticket after you get pulled over for swerving around while digging in your pocket for your wallet.
5. Bought concert tickets from a cash machine?
• No. There are ticket kiosks that kind of look like cash machines. But they're basically glorified credit-card point-of-sale systems. Like the one in your car.
6. Tucked your baby in from a phone booth?
• No. AT&T and other telecoms, this is your most pathetic failure. We should have had videophones twenty freaking years ago.
• Now we have video chat on the Internet, but AT&T's only role in it is to complain that people are clogging up their series of tubes and they should be able to charge more.
• In other words, AT&T not only never brought this to you, they are trying to keep other people from bringing it to you now. 
• Currently. 
• 2009.
7. Opened doors with the sound of your voice?
• No, and no one in the biometrics field thinks this is a good idea.
8. Carried your medical history in your wallet?
• No. And don't be silly -- your medical history is going to be stored on centralized servers that are completely tamper-proof, like voting machines.
9. Attended a meeting in your bare feet?
• Brought to me, no video chat required, by my current employer.
• Major in computer science, kids.
• And again, AT&T, and the other telecoms, don't want you to have video chat. They oppose "network neutrality", the idea that all data on the Internet should be treated the same, which is how it's always been done, which is what has allowed all these clever people to come up with all these clever services.
• AT&T would rather you use their own services, since you're using their physical wires. That would almost make sense except that AT&T Never. Did. Get. This. Working.
10. Watched the movie you wanted to, the minute you wanted to?
• Brought to you by Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner. These three cable companies co-own the company that runs the On Demand service.
• Also, by RealMedia, then a hundred web sites that would never have come into being if the telecoms had been able to charge more for TCP/IP packets that didn't come from a company that had paid them for preferred treatment. By the way, the Internet was created by academics and government researchers before being turned over to the telecoms.
11. Learned special things from faraway places?
• Brought to me by satellite television. In 1992.
• I took Japanese in high school, and it was taught by an instructor at the University of Nebraska. We watched the video over satellite, and we called in to talk to him on regular old phone lines. This worked perfectly and used all commodity technology -- the speakerphone, the satellite dish, and a television twice as large as the one these students appear to be clustered around.
12. Tucked your baby in from a phone booth?
• Is it just me or does Tom Selleck sound a little disheartened the second time this one shows up? 
• Maybe he knew that AT&T would eventually oppose network neutrality. 
• Or maybe he knew that cell phones would kill the "phone booth" dead. 
• Or maybe he was sick of babies after "Three Men and a Baby".

Results
RAW SCORE	1/12	Thanks for the cellular modems!
HYPOCRISY ADJUSTMENT	-100/12
FINAL SCORE	-99/12	AT&T, die in a fire.

I'm sure I'm not the only, or the smartest, person to complain about this on the Internet. Thanks for reading.