I dunno. If someone staged a coup in the US, I'd be 'encouraging people to be violent' against it as well.

"few" people? you think people don't move that often state to state?

Only Section 3 of DOMA has been ruled unconstitutional (the definition of marriage)

Section 2 - where anti-gay-marriage states do not have to recognize gay marriages from other states - is alive and well (and awful).

Again - Ellison can afford to pay the monthly invoice from Blackwater. At which point he has a military. The same military we use for half of our dirtiest jobs.

I think Ellison can afford Blackwater's monthly invoice.

It sounds a whole lot like Ellison is planning to just break-away from the US and declare his island a sovereign state.

And, frankly, he can't do a worse job than most of the other developed nations are doing these days.

I wonder if they'll tweet an "oops,our bad #fail #sosorry" when it comes time for them to lay waste to an American military vessel in international waters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

I'm totally stealing this quote (attributed), and posting it on Facebook.

I don't think it requires new laws or regulations either.

I'm beginning to think we're perilously close to being in violent agreement with each other, just describing different sides of the "current situation" :-)

BTW, what I "want to be done" will happen organically. LTE will (finally) standardize the carriers (give it five to ten years for it or its backwards compatible successors to be ubiquitous nationwide), at which point you won't have the GSM/CDMA divide, and you won't have the "CDMA phone has to be flashed to the carrier" requirement. At THAT point, unlocked unsubsidized phones work exactly as everyone hopes they will (although still a pipe dream if anyone thinks that's going to lower the monthly pricing from any major carrier).

You do the best you can with the hand you're dealt and the needs you've got. For various reasons, an iPhone is the best choice of phone for me, for work purposes. For network reasons, Sprint is the only real player in town.

Short of selling my house and moving to attempt to make some silly point to a wireless provider who won't even notice or care, there's not a whole lot that I can actually do.

This has nothing to do with monthly fees (which - I agree - should be charged based on the costs the actual customers incur to the carrier), and please don't presume to tell me what I expect. I expect solely the things which I myself have said.

I'm saying, again, TODAY, in the current world, where there isn't a single ubiquitous standard for phone interoperability, that if I can only use "this device" on "your network", and I can't take it to your competitor, then you damned well better be subsidizing the cost of that "carrier lock-in", because that phone is decidedly of lower value than an identical phone which could be used on - literally - any carrier.

Period. Full-stop.

(not sure why there's an AC version of this post, but I'll take credit for my own words)

That's easy to say if you live in a metropolitan area with a level of GSM service which gives you, at minimum, two carriers to choose from. Then you CAN in fact, maybe, live off unsubsidized and unlocked GSM devices. WHERE YOU ARE, there may in fact be "lots more choices and flexibility", but that is nowhere near being true for anyone not living in a metro area.

For lots of rural america, the GSM network just sucks fetid dingo's kidneys such that GSM providers are not really "viable options", meaning you can't avoid the subsidized phone game.

Trust me, I've had TMO, which had shite coverage, moved to ATTW (because TMO wasn't negotiating a full roaming agreement with ATTW at the time, so I desperately wanted to believe being an ATTW customer directly would be better), and it was "luke-warm shite" at that point. Finally I switched to CDMA carriers, primarily because of network availability. Verizon's network is just goddamned everywhere. Although when I moved to my latest residence a number of years ago, I switched to Sprint mostly because they were the only carrier who'd had the foresight to buy antenna space inside the church steeple of the historic village I live in so they're essentially the only carrier -- at all -- with signal in town.

And then you held in your hand a Verizon phone that was useless anywhere else but Verizon and said to yourself.... shit. Now what do I do with this paperweight?

Right, that's what I thought.

And if a given phone is going to only be useable on their network, then they fucking well better subsidize the thing.