Everyone seems to realize the petition itself isn't worth the imaginary paper it's printed on. Even if you get a response, it could be as simple as, "That's nice. You're wrong. The decision stands."

As TheSpoom stated above, there's no reason you can't have a binding contract to make sure the carrier doesn't lose money subsidizing the phone (in fact, you're probably under one of these contracts now) completely unrelated to a carrier lock on the phone. As long as you're in a legally binding contract to pay them the money, they shouldn't really care if you can use your phone on another network. If you want to keep paying AT&T $80/month for the subsidized phone and also pay T-Mobile another $50/month for service on the same phone, why should AT&T care? They're still getting their money that you agreed to pay.

On the other hand, due to the dismal state of cell phone technology in the US, most people don't really need an unlocked phone. The major carriers are on completely different technologies and bands - a Verizon CDMA phone simply won't work on AT&T's GSM network (and they use different LTE bands too). T-Mobile is also GSM, but they use different bands, so (currently) you won't get 4G and maybe even 3G depending on the phone's hardware. Hooray for buying a brand new $700 iPhone 5 to get 2G data speeds on it. Even if you could make a satisfactory switch from one carrier to another, would you want to keep paying AT&T the $80 monthly fee (or the large ETF) under your contract while also paying T-Mobile $50/month for the actual service? In the not-so-extensive looking I've done, there doesn't really seem to be much discount for having a non-subsidized phone anyway; if you're going to be paying the same $X per month, you might as well have the carrier throw in a subsidized phone. Most people are going to keep the phone and service they have for the full duration of the contract, making unlocking completely irrelevant.

Granted, there are some exceptions (relocating unexpectedly, international travel, etc.). I'm used to the iPhone world (it's supplied by my employer), so maybe Androids are very different. But from what I've seen, it's a non-issue for most people in the US. Verizon will unlock the GSM portion of an iPhone for international use (it didn't work for me on AT&T's domestic network, but I didn't end up using it internationally, so the unlock might not have actually been in effect yet) and AT&T unlocked my old off-contract iPhone by simply filling out a web form. In my experience, the carriers seem fairly willing to allow you to do things if it's actually for a legitimate use, as opposed to you simply wanting your phone completely unlocked for no good reason.

Ideally, I'd like to see service and hardware priced separately, with or without contracts. Plan A is $80/month with your own phone, $75 if you agree to a X-month contract (think of it as a bulk discount since the carrier knows you won't ). If you want a new $600 SuperPhone with your Plan A, it costs you $150 plus an extra $20/month with a 2-year contract. You end up paying a little more for the phone ($630 total), but you don't have to drop $600 right now on something you're used to getting for free. If you want to cancel the contract early, you're responsible for whatever the remainder of the amount owed is. If you have your own phone that you already bought with your own money, you know that you're saving $20/month on it. The carriers don't need locks because you're signing a contract to pay them enough to cover the cost of whatever you're getting, regardless of whether or not you get service through some other carrier. And to make those unlocked phones actually useful, let's see the carriers standardize (along with the rest of the world) on a network, so you can use your (paid-for) phone with the service of your choice.

This could result in some price increases if the carriers know that whatever contract they come up with for subsidizing the phone (monthly cost + ETF) needs to cover their actual cost, since they're not necessarily roping you into two years of overpriced service as well. I've seen a few deals where it's actually cheaper to sign up for a contract and pay the ETF than to just buy the no-contract option, so they'd need to make sure they closed all those loopholes. On the flip side, if they know the hardware contract is guaranteed to cover their costs on the phone, they should be able to lower the service price some since they're not including the hardware-subsidy compensation. It removes some of the black-box mystery from their pricing schemes (it's currently just a monthly phone bill, so most people don't realize the costs associated with each component), so I doubt the carriers would actually go for this.

Except, this is a law passed by Congress (the DMCA).

Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of on-line services for copyright infringement by their users.

Per 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(1), the LoC is in charge of reviewing related items on a regular schedule and deciding if "fair use" exemptions need to be made. One of these exemptions was made in '06 to cover phone unlocking, and was not renewed this time.

This type of unlocking has been illegal since '98, with an exemption being granted from '06 - '12. It's not that it's suddenly illegal, it's now just no longer not-illegal (again).

No, it's illegal to violate the DMCA in "cracking" the protection around the carrier lock in your phone's software. Under the recently-expired exemption, you were allowed to violate the DMCA for the purpose of unlocking your phone (via software hack of the carrier lock). The simple act of unlocking your phone is not illegal, only the act of cracking the software used for the carrier lock; there are other ways to unlock your phone, which are completely unaffected by this DMCA exemption.

Send it through your work mail server. Depending on exactly how it's set up, that could be as simple as changing your mail client's settings from "mail.isp.net" to "mail.work.com". It's possible that it's much more complicated than that, but it could be nearly painless.

Keep in mind that your method of sending "me@work.com" emails from mail.isp.net would also fail the old reverse MX lookup that people used to use to block spam. When receiving an email from me@work.com, it would look up work.com and see that it uses mail.work.com as its MX. It would compare that to the sending mail.isp.net server and decide that it was spoofed mail, and reject it.

SPF is reverse MX lookups, but able to be configured by the mail server admin. Instead of tying only the MX records to the domain name, the admin can put whatever he wants in the SPF record.

DMARC (which I just learned about from another comment) seems to be the answer to this problem. It's another layer to install and configure, but it allows senders and receivers to communicate about mail authentication.

Your argument applies to any spam filter, not just SPF. If you do the rejection during the delivery, the sending mailserver (the spammer) gets it. If you accept the email, then later send the NDR based on the (possibly forged) details in the email, you may be contributing to backscatter. This has nothing to do with SPF, and everything to do with how your mail system accepts and rejects messages.

If the OP is advocating that the user download some other company's cleaner program so that your cleaner program can read its definitions to more effectively clean things up, that seems like a bit of a jerk move, even if it is 100% legal (compare to taking a GPL project and simply rebranding it with your own logos and rereleasing it).

However, Winapp2.ini seems to be completely separate from Piriform and CCleaner, as pointed out. Simply remove all references to Piriform and CCleaner from your site (Are you SEO-mooching off their name?) and point out that BleachBit can use Winapp2.ini, just like the Winapp2.ini site states. As far as I can tell, there's no need to mention the other company or product on your site at all, so just remove them. Piriform will have much less to stand on if both products simply have the ability to read in some third party definition file, and your product has nothing at all to do with CCleaner.

I know that I'm not an early adopter in the truest sense of the word, as they were technically around before I was born. However, I did have one before most average people. My buddy and I worked at Best Buy, so we got good deals on them. I had an Ericsson CH668 (or something close to that) on Omnipoint (before they became Voicestream and T-Mobile) in the late '90s.

I started out with the cheap (I thought it was free, but maybe it was just really cheap) Mt. Dew numeric pager promo. My friends and I all got them, and got used to being able to contact each other all the time. I also had a Motorola Advisor Elite alphanumeric pager, and eventually set up a webform so people could page me from the internet.

I've just happened to work for several places which allowed me to get cheap access to pagers and phones before they were ubiquitous. For the most part, they were simply more geek toys for me to play with, rather than something I had a real need or desire for.

I agree that having some Spanish classes has helped me. As stated, it's the second most common language in the US. Plus, it's similar to other Romance languages, which makes it that much easier to understand those languages at least a little. I remember going to see Brotherhood of the Wolf, and simply knowing Spanish allowed me to get a basic idea of what they were saying in French. I was still glad to have the subtitles, but I didn't have to focus quite so much on reading them.

As a person in the Midwest, I think it would be helpful for you to know Spanish. As a software developer specifically, not so much.

On my own domain, I have SpamAssassin configured well enough that I simply have it delete anything flagged as spam. Either it's in my inbox, or it's gone. I do tend to err on the safe side as far as what it tags though. In all the years I've been doing this, I've had one complaint from a family member about a possible missed confirmation message from an online signup. However, I submitted one myself, and the mail was received right away, so I think it was just a fluke that the email didn't get delivered, as opposed to my filter erroneously eating it. A few times I've actually increased the spam threshold, just to allow more borderline spams through so I could learn/report them.

I have a couple GMail accounts, one of which is based on my name and was created solely for testing external mail flow at work. However, there are no less than 5 other people who seem to think it's their address, and these people seem to be the type to enter their email address anywhere they can. I get tons of spam at this address, despite never actually using it publicly. I mainly got the other one just to reserve the name, rather than for actual usage. I get a few spams to it, but nothing major. GMail's filtering does a pretty good job, with only a few getting missed (and no false positives, since I don't actually use them for real email). I do check the caught spams and report them though, just because I'm an angsty geek.

This is exactly the same as anyone else's arrogance. You're very good at something, so people who aren't as good at that thing seem inferior. But as other commenters have said, I'm sure that as you get older you'll run into more and more people who are much better than you in this field. You'll also run into people who are just as good in some other field as you are in this field, while you completely suck in their field just like they suck in your field. Everyone is a genius in some field(s) and an idiot in other(s).

The key is to remember that both of you have strengths and weaknesses. If you don't want them to be an arrogant prick to you when their field is involved, don't be an arrogant prick to them when your field is involved.

P.S. The Big Bang Theory is pretty good for a major network sitcom. It does a good job of capturing the different mentalities of "geeks" vs. "normal people". Sheldon Cooper is an extreme exaggeration of the geek with a superiority complex. He's always condescending to his friends, even though they have doctorates in astrophysics and similar. He acts especially superior to the one who only has a Master's from MIT. However, even his geeky friends realize that his behavior in normal social situations is severely lacking. Sheldon is also taught the lesson that there's always someone better when Stephen Hawking points out a simple arithmetic error he made early on, completely invalidating all of his conclusions. In one episode, another character has to study up on the game of football, so that he can go to his girlfriend's party and attempt to fit in. He sounded just as moronic to those people as these "inferior" people sound to you when talking about computers. To keep things in perspective, just keep in mind how much Sheldon seems like a jerk with his superiority complex, and realize that's exactly what you're doing on a smaller scale.

I'm sticking with my Firefox (actually Waterfox) because it has my old Qute-style them and looks just like it did years ago. SeaMonkey has the new icon style (combined with a few antique Netscape-style icons), so I'd just have to redo all my customizations again, with the only benefit being a bunch of other apps that I don't need in my browser (bloat).

The only reason to use SeaMonkey over Firefox is if you want the extra apps that it includes, as they're both based on the same core and the interface is completely customizable. Rather than switching away from Firefox because you don't like the interface, why not simply change it to your liking? Works for me anyway...

I'm in mid/west lower Michigan. I'm in a fairly rural area by comparison, but only about 20 miles outside Grand Rapids.

I got a cheap cell phone in the late '90s through my friend who worked at Best Buy. Omnipoint (later VoiceStream, later T-Mobile) was cheap, but the coverage wasn't that great around home (though nobody really was at that time). In '99, I got a job at a company that sold Nextel, so I got one of those cheap. Again, coverage wasn't great (it was often referred to as "Nextime", because it might actually work the next time you tried it). However, Nextel's Direct Connect really took off here (this region used up all its numbers in the first fleet, so they had to add a second fleet and eventually cross-fleeting ability so new users could talk to their friends and family on the old fleet). The more people you knew with Nextels, the more useful it was.

I stuck with Nextel until '05, when the Direct Connect wasn't really useful to me anymore due to changes in who I was talking to and their chosen cell service. I went to Verizon, who have pretty widespread coverage around here. VZW seems to be the default if some random person wants a cell phone. As others have said, they have pretty good coverage for calls and texts. My current employer uses VZW for their cell phones, so I switched from my personal VZW plan to the company VZW plan when I started working here.

When the iPhone 3G came out, the company started getting them for some employees, and obviously those people switched to AT&T. I eventually got a 3G and switched also. When the VZW iPhone 4 came out, we started going back for new users. When the 4S was released, the company made the decision to switch everyone back to VZW.

My early experiences probably don't count for much. There wasn't much coverage here at all, and quite a few things have changed in the past 10+ years. My recent experiences involve only 3G, due to using the iPhone 3G/4/4S. However, there was a noticeable speed drop going from the ATT iPhone 4 to the VZW iPhone 4S. Whereas I'd normally get about 3Mb down with ATT, I'm lucky to break 1Mb with VZW (with full bars on each). With ATT, I had noticeable areas of no coverage. A few coworkers got femtocells because ATT simply lacks coverage in a number of places around here. Since switching to VZW, I don't know if I've ever seen it without at least a little coverage (short of my annual camping trip to Middle-of-Nowhere, Canada). However, I frequently find myself with ~3 bars on VZW, where ATT usually seemed to have 4-5 bars (when I had signal). With the 4S having HSPA+, I really wished I was back on ATT, especially since they seem to have added a tower close to my house out in the sticks - one day I suddenly had 5 bars and great speeds. I'm hoping to upgrade to the iPhone 5, largely for LTE (though VZW's map doesn't show any coverage at home or work, but it'll still be handy when I'm out and about).

I never had any issues with any of the companies regarding my personal accounts, so I can't speak for customer service on any of them (though the lack of problems itself is something to mention). I don't deal with the details of the business account. The only thing I've done is having ATT unlock my old iPhone, which was a bit of work. Their automated system replied that it got my request, but never sent me an update to let me know it was finished. When I called in, Support said it had already been processed, but something wasn't quite right with it, so they did it again. Other than that, I have nothing to report.

Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support is almost a year old now, but it does a great job of illustrating the difference between iPhone versions and common Android devices.

I believe it's gotten a little better since then, but those numbers are horrible. 39% never ran a current version. 67% only ran a current version for a matter of weeks (keep in mind that most of these would be on a 2 year contract). 83% weren't on the version that was released almost a year prior. 72% stopped getting updates while they were still being sold.

Compared to that, the 3+ year old 3GS missing a few newer features doesn't sound so bad. I do wish my old 3G was still supported, but it's honestly so much slower that I don't like using it much anyway.

Actually, his point is probably that GoDaddy's policies, regardless of SOPA/PIPA support, allow them to shut down websites on a whim. They've repeatedly demonstrated this by completely shutting down entire accounts when served a DMCA complaint for one site. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/25/1744246/photographer-threatened-with-legal-action-after-asserting-his-copyright is one example. (Part of the reason she went crazy was that all of her sites, including one regarding special needs children, were suspended after GoDaddy received the DMCA complaint over one photo on one specific site.)

GoDaddy has made it clear that it takes very little to convince them to suspend a customer's entire account. If you choose to use GoDaddy's services, that's a risk you're taking.