Re: Can't block caller ID in Massachusetts?

[Moroni <moroni@scranton.com>]

     The reason that caller ID cannot be blocked to 800 and 900 numbers 
is that it is used for billing purposes by the telephone company to the 
person or business who owns that 900 or 800 number. EX:  L.L.Bean ( 
alarge mailorder sporting goods store in Freeport,Maine) gets thousands 
of calls from their clientele around the country.The 800s because they 
are not charged to the person calling the L.L.Bean must be charged to 
someone to pay the expenses of running the telephone equiptment and the 
profits going to the stckholders so who pays ? The businesses pay. A way 
must be found to figure out what they owe and the only way to do that is 
to keep records. They records as they stand now include the phone number 
from which they were dialed and the length of the call. My phone call to 
them from Scranton ,Pa will cost the L.L.Bean less then Tim Mays from 
California because I am closer. That is unless I perhaps have a package 
missing and need to stay on the customer service line for twenty minutes 
or longer when he just placed an order and got off in under five.
     THe phone company looks at the L.L.Bean phone records and send them 
a bill that includes how much it cost me to make that phone call to them 
to find out if the package got lost and Tim's to order that wheelbarrow 
and all the other callers. Each caller will have cost the L.L.Bean a 
different amount of money. The telephone number on the reords. It can be 
used to track down teenage hackers who want to upgrade their disk 
drives(Bean has none) and other stuff too dependent upon the size of the 
company (not Bean)and the integrity of the employees. It could 
conceivably be used by an unscrupulous employee from Sadie's S and M to 
blackmail someone or the whole clientele list. This is unforunate.
      What could concevably be done is that the software could be 
reprogrammed to delete the phone number immediatley after the 
computation. Or to have the computation done immediately and deltion to 
accompany it. third, the phone company could reprogram it so the mileage 
and time is computed somhow without the logging of the caller. All of 
this has to do computer programming and I find none of the aforementioned 
an impossibility to achieve.
                         moroni