Do MVNOs automatically get roaming on compatible carriers other than those they get wholesale agreements with? I have no idea how roaming works on the back end, but I would think that it would be something that AT&T could block if it wanted to (at least technically).

Even if it "just worked" from a handset usage perspective, there's still the question of the billing side of a roaming agreement. I think inside the US nobody thinks about roaming anymore because all the carriers have roaming agreements. To be competitive with carriers with a larger footprint, smaller carriers eat the roaming imbalance fees without upcharging their uses for roaming.

But would smaller carriers cover this imbalance for MVNOs or pass them on at cost or with some kind of added surcharge?

I still don't see how the economics of this works for Google or Apple. Both would have to be at least competitive on monthly subscriber rates compared to a direct consumer to carrier agreement, which at best would be break-even or a tiny loss. I can see Google eating a larger loss by monetizing the data analytics.

This was my first thought -- it's a search not for security of the devices, but a search for exploits of these devices and/or some form of industrial espionage.

But I wonder -- can Apple set the terms of the audit? Ie, you get to examine whatever it is you examine in our office using our provided systems which aren't connected to the Internet. You may not bring any electronic devices into the audit facility. You may not reproduce any code you review in our facility by any means, including notes, pseudocode, block diagrams, etc.

I suppose there's still some risk -- ie, deliberate subterfuge involving copying in some way or the use of a memory savant or some error so obvious they know how to attack it without any information exfiltrated.

I don't know, but I also assume that a truly thorough security audit of a large, novel (ie, you didn't write it) code base is hard and may be dependent on 2nd order effects, like the actual generated object code. Which may make it extremely time-consuming -- didn't the funded audit of TrueCrypt take an extremely long time just to do the initial audit?

It means no one had died yet, as far as they know.

But this seems more about a third party just dealing with real estate and physical infrastructure upkeep. I think when talking about cell "towers" most people aren't just talking about a steel skeleton rising from a concrete pad with a blockhouse at the bottom and a fence around it.

They're talking about both the physical structure AND the telecommunications infrastructure, from backhaul to site electronics.

It would be another thing altogether if a third party could build the structure AND provide all the electronics and signalling and all the carrier had to do was drop in fiber to connect to the rest of their network.

For some reason I seem to recall Apple also looking to build some kind of MVNO operation.

Build a phone capable of operating on all major networks and then you just pay Apple for "service" while the phone just seeks out the best signal/connectivity depending on your location.

But it makes me wonder what motivation carriers would have to support this. I guess I see Sprint and T-Mobile going along with this, but AT&T and VZW never participating because it ultimately turns them into low-margin wholesalers.

Even if Google or Apple could strike MVNO deals with all carriers, I would imagine that VZW and ATT would price their wholesale agreements such that the passthrough price to consumers would be more than a direct subscriber agreement. If the MVNO priced connectivity at competitive rates they would lose money or worse, steer connections to weaker networks where their wholesale rate was superior even if the connectivity was much worse than available networks. This would make it much less appealing.

If you think about it, the cellular networks are really pretty inefficient.

Every carrier requires their own towers (to the extent that colocation of antennas on a tower doesn't fit their network footprint), radio frequencies and extensive backhaul networks. Carriers leverage this to create anti-competitive incompatibilities and lock-in that makes switching carriers hard to impossible and raises the costs to handset makers through extensive handset model splits to support their differing frequencies or intentional incompatibilities.

The general amount of duplication is ridiculous and painful on the spectrum side since increasing data consumption requires more spectrum and/or more towers at lower radio power to allow for subdividing cells as density and usage increases. And they're not making more spectrum, especially in the more useful lower frequencies.

The ways I can think of to fix this all involve regulation, but maybe its needed. Signalling seems to be converging on LTE and maybe the FCC could consider a mandate for network interoperability -- ie, a single radio signalling protocol that all carriers had to support combined with a "must carry" rule that required any tower to allow any handset on any carrier to use it with some back-end settlement process so that carriers with less backend would have to pay for carriage they didn't provide back-end for.

Phones would be built to handle all radio frequencies, so depending on signal strength and geography, they would associate with the "best" tower not necessarily a "home" tower, balancing out any existing overlap in coverage to reduce the amount of cell subdivision required in built-up areas and encourage development of poorly served areas.

I kind of wonder if a group of companies could create a kind of private currency that would be represented as a store credit, say Amazon, Google Play and maybe Alibaba (to pick 3).

They could denominate it in dollars and provide incentives to customers and vendors to accept some of their income or refunds at a dollar premium in private currency as well as making it transferrable to other people (using a cryptocurrency model, maybe) as well as being portable to other core vendors. They could even offer to process transactions for other web site that wanted to be able to accept it.

They might even save operating expenses if it became widespread enough that it allowed them to reduce currency exchange issues. A combination of Amazon, Google and whoever would also probably be deep-pocketed enough that there wouldn't be much risk of the credits being defaulted on.

I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Even figuring out how the company "works" and how to work within its systems can be time consuming and lead to a lot of inefficiency for employees. This is obvious in large companies with many systems, departments, people and sometimes even space.

It's less obvious in small companies like the one I work in, but as a small company with only 10 years history we are terrible about processes and our own domain knowledge. New employees are often in the dark about a lot of things and aren't effective until they have figured out a lot of information on their own, the hard way.

It's not a complete solution, but it should be possible to ameliorate this sort of problem by making assimilation a more attractive option for immigrants, or segregation a less attractive option.

The left's embrace of multiculturalism has made such a solution politically impossible.

But we have our own internal issues that make a lot of this difficult. We could be much more strict about enforcing secularism in public education, barring the display of religious symbols and restrictive dress and refuse to allow prayer in our schools. Trouble is, our own religionists in the US are so busy trying to put religion back in school they would never support this.

We also have a fair body of case law that prohibits religious discrimination at workplaces and generally forces employers to allow religious clothing and some types of religious activity at work.

I also think that enforcing an official language would help, too. If you can't take your religion to school or work and the only way you can interact with the government is in English you have a lot of motivation to assimilate. If you don't at that point, I guess you're everything I want in a fellow citizen -- someone who supports themselves, stays out of government and keeps their religion to themselves.

"seem to". Christianity is a whole lot less homogenized than Islam, which itself does have distinctions.

The funny thing with Islam is that it is, AFAIK, less centralized than Christianity, whose primary denominations (at least by membership) tend to belong to larger governing bodies who control doctrine, ordination, such as the Catholic church, the Lutheran synods, the Anglican Communion, and the branches of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Despite it's apparent schismatic nature, Christianity has a lot of central authority even if it is weak authority.

Islam as a religion doesn't have any central structure like this, excepting within Islamic states where it is controlled by the government or organized within a given nation. There's no central authority that ordains Imams or is able to establish an orthodoxy, This has been one of the major problems with Islamic Fundamentalism -- you can't go to the Islamic pope and say tone it down. Anybody can grow a beard, grab a Koran, claim to be an Imam and try to be more conservative than the guy next door who he labels an infidel.

  Most so-called Christians aren't particularly religious,

And this is largely what makes Christianity in many ways more compatible with secular modernism -- the dominant flavors available don't lay outright claim to civil governance. Unlike Islamic upheavals, the 30 Years' War was settled with the Peace of Westphalia which established an idea of non-interference in other states' internal affairs, putting an end to the imposition of pan-state Catholic meddling in national affairs and in effect greatly curtailing theocratric governance in the Christian world.

Christian belief tends to be more personal and its edicts begin -- and end -- with its members, and they don't really have explicit civil authority. The Islamic world still is invested in notions of theocratic governance -- there isn't civil law and religious law, there is only one body of law, Sharia. I think one thing that frustrates Muslims is this lack of enshrinement of their religious beliefs in civil law.

Which is why I said "sense of powerlessness" -- I don't know that anyone is ever totally powerless, outside of maybe some kind of prison inmate in a 24-hour solitary confnement situation.

Obviously a member of a more or less free society can project physical power through some kind of violence (guns, bombs, going batshit nuts with a knife in a crowd, even).

But the belief that one lacks the kind of conceptual power to shape their future or influence their larger environment is what I was getting at. And usually the greater the perceived sense of powerlessness, the more over the top the physical response usually is.

The problem with talking about the actual power of "the Muslims" (a fraught concept in and of itself) is that in most ways of looking at it, relative to the West, the Muslims power seems pretty small, politically, militarily, and perhaps even culturally and ideologically.

It strikes me that most flavors of Islam are ideologically and culturally non-competitive with secularized cultures through their rejection of forms of social organization and interaction that limit their ability to adapt or innovate. As one example, suppressing women seems to cut off half your source of economic power, intellectual innovation and inhibits social values that even traditionally patriarchical cultures like Christianity seem to have embraced.

What if one of the "core issues" is a substantial difference in cultural values?

Immigrants show up with cultural values completely at odds with the dominant culture and move into self-isolated communities. The dominant culture rejects the immigrants' value system, which combined with the isolation of a separate community, seems to contribute to the sense of alienation and powerlessness. Some, rather than choosing assimilation, instead choose a kind of victim mindset, seeing the rejection of their values as a kind of active oppression and become ripe for radicalization.

None of this is to say that the dominant culture may have in fact engaged in some actual good old-fashioned discrimination, but labeling all of the dominant cultures rejection of the immigrant's culture seems wrong when things like separation of religion and state, women's equality or concepts like blasphemy are in play.

I just don't know how you "fix" conflicts like this.

After a lot of widespread adoption, is bitcoin considered more or less perfect, or are there weaknesses or problems that should be changed/rethought? Not just software wise, but maybe in terms of assumptions like the maximum number of coins that can be minted or the nature of the blockchain network, etc.

I always wonder how you "improved" a cryptocurrency once it gained some widespread adoption? It seems like network effects and investment would make it kind of easy for an alternate currency that appears "good enough" for initial investors to get somewhat established would be impossible to fix or migrate off of, short of a panic situation where some serious flaw causes holders to be forced to dump it for something else.

Most new cryptocurrencies seem to be either just clones of bitcoin or pump and dump schemes where it's pre-mined for get-rick-quick promoters (or at least they get labeled as such). But those invested in an established one like bitcoin could also be seen as working their own vested interests, be they financial or otherwise, and either ignoring weaknesses or badmouthing potential competitors because they are invested in it.

I'm sure the former is more true than the latter, which is why I'm curious if bitcoin is as good as it can get or if after a period of adoption if there are things that could/should have been done differently.

It's not just commissions. If you can automate away the process you can eliminate a shit ton of people, too, and that's where the costs are. I'll bet a lot of those commissions are in commercial insurance policies and those kinds of policies will still probably be sold by sales people who earn a commission.

Part of me is like, yay, insurance is expensive and it would be nice to pay less for it, and why shouldn't you in theory be able to just find policies via the web?

But part of me is like, ugh, every time some genius decides an industry is ripe for disruption what they end up meaning is they want to shitcan a bunch of employees and pocket the money that was otherwise filtering through the economy and keeping at least SOME people middle class.

It doesn't seem like anyone actually wants to change the business model of insurance -- ie, I pay money in case something bad were to happen and in theory the policy covers my liabilities. I don't know how you "disrupt" the basic structure of that business.

It's just the race to the bottom all over again.

Organized human civilization has been around, what, 10,000 years? How do you suppose bands of humans dealt with some new group that showed up and wanted their fishing spot or their hunting spot or women? Pretty much everyone had some stake in the outcome and hiring a "conflict resolution facilitator" wasn't really an option.

Even a lot of Roman military activity up to about the Marian era wasn't necessarily expansionist but considered defensive against various Gallic and Germanic tribes who made incursions into Roman areas. The Romans were seriously concerned about the risk to Rome itself from these tribes it was several serious defeats that led to changes in the organization and makeup of the Roman legions known as the Marian Reforms. Prior to those reforms, poor citizens couldn't even join the army.

Plus I'd argue that most of your arguments really boil down to economics or economic pressure on existing civilizations even if some of the rationale seems explainable by religious or ideological motivations. It seems unlikely that pure political ideology was any kind of motivating factor until late in the 19th century.