Related: New year's resolutions: quitting your job, cooking from scratch and shopping sustainably Disconnecting It's incredibly tough for a journalist to disconnect from technology.
From the outside, improvements look cosmetic a friendlier tone in bills, for example, and a much-publicised customer hotline, which in a recent test played soothing music for a few minutes before disconnecting abruptly.Besides charm, the company has two further tactics.
His text-message graffiti system gives people a way to stay engaged, he believes, "instead of just plugging into games or music on the phone, and disconnecting from society".Digital graffiti can have commercial as well as political uses.
The pipes are vulnerable: in 2008 Egypt temporarily lost more than two-thirds of its bandwidth when two submarine cables in the Mediterranean were severed, possibly by ships' anchors.But crudely disconnecting cables risks outrage elsewhere: much of the internet traffic between Europe and Asia passes through the cables which also serve Egypt, for instance.
By contrast, rationing data, which disconnecting a bandwidth-hogging user amounts to, is an inefficient way to manage a scarce resource.AT&T's latest ploy is more elaborate.
Such a pool of cash would launder a transaction, disconnecting the serial number on the note you pinned from the one you claimed.Money laundering attempts to disguise the origin of funds so that ill-gotten gains are recycled into seemingly legitimate purchases; or, for those opposed to government oversight, to prevent snooping on private interactions.
Previously, egged on by local governments, they had charged industrial users very high prices for electricity in order to charge householders very low ones.The old policy was tolerable since local governments could also usually dissuade power companies from disconnecting factories that could not pay their bills.
Something happened (still under investigation) to cause the substation to shut down, disconnecting a 500kV transmission line connected to it and disrupting the electricity supply to Yuma's 90,000 residents.
Customers grumble that its slogan should be "Disconnecting Ethiopia from the future".The country is one of the world's last big untouched telecoms markets.
Now, that's something new.In an earlier piece we described the benefits of disconnecting.
Re-connecting with one group can all too easily mean disconnecting with another.
