Something interesting is happening in the US telecom industry. As the NYTimes reports, phone companies are moving to flat-rate plans. Geography and distance are truly becoming irrelevant in the voice business, as much of is now carried over data networks.

These unlimited-use plans offer callers the advantage of predictability and less time spent checking monthly bills. They commonly cost $50 to $60 a month with services like voice mail and caller ID bundled in, making the price only slightly higher than the $48 that American households typically spend on local and long-distance calling, according to the FCC.

Positive responses from customers are good news for an industry that faces a number of incipient threats, including the loss of market share to calls made over the Internet, cellphone-addicted young customers who spurn land lines, and families who swap their second telephone lines for high-speed Internet connections.

Most calls now travel most of their journey over fiber optic lines that connect the whole country. A company's expense in routing a call depends very little on the distance the call travels, but largely on whether a call needs to travel across lines owned by other phone companies and the access fees charged for that use. In most cases, calling a friend across the country now costs your phone company about as much as calling your next-door neighbor.

The Orphans of Invention is the title of a piece by Ellen Ullman in the New York Times, remembering a talk gien by Doug Engelbart five years ago:

Back then, Silicon Valley companies were hiring people in great numbers, and a tide of youthful energy entered the field. And for the few years of the boom, the industry was large enough to employ several generations of programmers, from 22-year-old Web-page coders to 50-year-old experts in C++. There was, in that moment, a passing on of generational memory. The audience became aware that computers, though innovative, were not exactly new.

With the bust came the scattering of those generations. The 25-year-olds were fired first, then came the ones in their 30's; soon came the layoffs of even more senior people. No one was immune. In 2001 and 2002, America lost 560,000 technology jobs. In Silicon Valley alone, 27,000 software positions disappeared between the spring of 2001 and the spring of 2002.

But more than jobs have been lost. To listen to Mr. Engelbart that day almost five years ago was to realize that the computer industry, when it started, was not simply about becoming a chief executive or retiring on stock options at 35. It was to remember that real innovation — the stuff that made computers so much more than "crummy factors of production" — comes from mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers, and to remember all the skepticism they had to endure.