Of course not -- but would you honestly advise a government agency trusted with secure data to perform their work that requires that data while connected to a public wifi hotspot, regardless of the encryption used?

Paying for itself means that it will generate revenue proportional to the cost of implementing and maintaining it. For any government program to do this is unusual (and this is not always a criticism -- the government is in the business of governing, and it's unreasonable to assume that every or even many sectors of governing will generate revenue).

But "helping us do our jobs" by having WiFi available everywhere is completely orthagonal to this. Will they be replacing government office networks with free, public Wifi? Of course not. Do you want YOUR SSN and government records floating around the local DMV on a public wireless network?

It's been said that big telcos and other ISPs oppose these kinds of things and that's the chief obstacle. Of course they oppose it: the government offering for free what was previously the province of the marketplace to offer is going to drive out private business, since hardly anyone can afford to compete with the government. "But no private company is offering city-wide Wifi!" you say? Could it be that hardly anyone is willing to pay for these services? Business travelers will have subscriptions to Wifi hotspots using a service like Boingo, but not enough people are going to pay to use Wifi in the park. Some will, sure. Not anywhere near enough to make it worthwhile -- and that's why ISPs don't offer it.

It's conceivable that the small city or town exists where it's cheap enough to roll out something like this and worth it to the locals to fund it such that you could have a successful municipal Wifi service. That would be the exception to the rule. You'd think a bigger city would more easily be able to do it, but bigger cities also have more free wifi spots already available, and regular broadband is generally cheaper and better in an urban area anyway.

An interesting point, but is that bad?

I prefer GSM to CDMA precisely because the rest of the world uses it. I'm not sure how that could be a factor in an anti-trust case though (not saying it couldn't, I'm just not sure how it could be).

That's nothing but speculation by the author to the effect of 'AT&T doesn't need the spectrum it says it needs!' It's also quite biased, blaming AT&T because 'overall network investment' would go down (meaning AT&T alone would invest less than AT&T and T-mobile separately) -- well, duh, that's the point of economics of scale.

He also appears to be bashing AT&T because AT&T is only speculating that it can reach 80% of the US population by the end of 2012, rather than a higher number. Wow. Only 4 out of 5 people in the entire continental US? This is supposed to be bad? So let's see if T-Mobile significantly expands its reach in the same time frame. I'll bet you five bucks that it won't, because Deutsche Telecom already indicated that it doesn't want to invest more in the US market. It's possible that they'll change their mind since they have $4 bil more with which to do it, but $4 billion isn't a huge amount when you're talking about nationwide wireless broadband coverage.

This is not some predatory takeover. AT&T isn't going to drop nearly 40 billion dollars to buy T-Mobile unless T-Mobile has something it wants. A customer base alone isn't worth that when the customer loyalty factor is so close to zero.

Maybe AT&T will fail to compete well even if it got additional spectrum. They're a big business and big businesses screw up all the time. If they do, I'll go to their competitors, just like everybody else would. But I fail to see the bugaboo that our government is protecting us from in this case. If Verizon and Sprint didn't exist, then I would.

There is an awful lot of 'thank god AT&T was denied by the FCC' and 'this is just AT&T trying to be a monopoly again' as if AT&T's purchase of T-Mobile would somehow result in a monopoly of the sort that AT&T used to have on land lines. Some then go on to say that AT&T is nothing but 'business class wankers with a huge sense of entitlement,' which sounds to me more like the wireless market than the wireless providers.

At the risk of stating the tremendously obvious, a monopoly is when one company controls the whole market. This is very obviously not the case for wireless phones. 'Well,' you might say, 'a handful of corporate juggernauts are no different than a monopoly!' Actually, they're entirely different, because you have several large corporations all competing with each other. Let's look at why we ended up in this situation:

Wireless customers:

• want to take their phones anywhere in their home country and not pay extra. Remember roaming charges? Now you worry about those internationally, but being able to take your phone anywhere in the US and pay the same rate is a huge improvement over where we were ten years ago.
• want to pay the same whether they use 1 gigabyte a month of data or a 100, even though there is only a fixed amount of spectrum available
• have little to no loyalty to their provider: they will switch over to another if they think they can get a better deal, which is not possible in a monopoly

The old Ma Bell of POTS has got nearly nothing to do with AT&T today for the very simple reason that you don't have the same issue where everybody has got to share one set of copper. This issue hasn't gone away entirely, but it's more relevant to the ISP side of AT&T, and that hasn't got anything to do with the T-mobile deal.

AT&T is having a hard time competing because they need more spectrum. T-Mobile is having such a hard time competing that they decided they'd rather just get out of the market than make the necessary investment to compete with Verizon and AT&T. Deutsche Telecom, who owns T-Mobile, decided that an outright sale to their competitor was in their best interests, so they agreed to the sale.

These posts are full of circular reasoning like 'AT&T's service is so shitty, they would just screw up T-Mobile' when the biggest impediment to AT&T improving the quality of its service is more spectrum. Or maybe, like most people, you preferred the 'smaller company' feel of T-mobile; this is natural, but the things wireless customers want (to use huge gobs of data cheaply) are not conducive to smaller companies. If there's been consolidation, it's because we've demanded it, because we feel entitled to the unlimited usage that these companies were foolish enough to offer. Maybe you think that foolishness means your entitlement is justified, but it doesn't change the reality that more usage needs more bandwidth and more bandwidth means more spectrum.

I am an AT&T customer and I fit my own description here. I have no particular loyalty to them. If I got a better deal from Verizon or Sprint I'd probably change. But I'm annoyed that they're losing billions of dollars because the FTC decided that they'd be a monopoly in a market with at least three major competitors and several other minor ones. Instead of paying to get new spectrum and increase their capacity, they're paying through the nose to get nothing. The winners: politicians (who always win in anti-trust matters because of how easy it is to hearken back to the real monopolies of 100 years ago even when the analogies are paper-thin), lawyers, and probably Deutsche Telecom for having the win-win of getting a bucket of money no matter what happened.

And to those who say AT&T was going to raise prices anyway: so what? They can't raise them on you in the middle of your contract and if your contract is up, you (like me) can walk. As a small business owner I don't care a lot for big businesses in general, but I'm sure glad I"m not in the wireless telecom business. As Louis CK says, we're the whiniest, most entitled, most self-important customers on the planet. We bitch when we get a dropped call but we certainly don't feel any gratitude when we're in a pickle and our smartphones find us a cab, a restaurant, or a map. We take it for granted. I would've preferred that my wireless provider gain access to additional spectrum. So long as I have two or three other choices, they most they can ever screw me for is one billing cycle, and they haven't done that yet -- unlike Worldcom, which did all the time back when I first got cell service.

This is nothing but FUD. Yucca Mountain has got next to nothing to do with nuclear weapons and you aren't going to get on a 'watch list' by asking about it. It's been studied and discussed and studied all over again dating back to 1978. The proposed storage facility is for spent fuel from nuclear reactors. You can't use this stuff to make nuclear weapons. That doesn't mean you want to hand it out at parties, but it's a basic radioactive storage problem first, and a security problem no more so than storing any other hazmat.

Yucca Mountain has been declared safe and a great site for exactly what the US wanted to do with it numerous times, but it suffers from a huge case of NIMBY. Nobody, state or Federal, wins votes by announcing that they've found a great spot to put all their spent nuclear reactor fuel. It doesn't matter if all the spent nuclear fuel in the country could fit in a football field and it doesn't matter if it's the best place in the entire country for it. The only thing that matters, like all political boondoggles, is whether anybody with clout is going to suspend cover-your-ass mode and actually try to solve the problem -- and Obama's answer, like most politicians, has been a resounding 'no.' This is usually followed up by some squirming and an admission to the effect of 'actually, all this stuff is fine where it is! We are so much smarter than we were in 1978. Those crazy kids back then thought we should bury this stuff in a mountain! Naaaaah.'

As someone who actually deals with this stuff every day, no, most merchants will try to avoid raising their prices if they can help it, because this isn't an across-the-board raise. What you had for a while was a completely variable transaction fee depending on the type of card used -- a regular, no-frills credit card might be 1% while a rewards card might be 3%. While there is a point at which a merchant will pass a fee increase on to a customer, it's naive to think that it's a simple cause-and-effect. Price increases are very difficult in some industries, particularly if the competition is larger (and can therefore negotiate lower rates).

As a general rule, businesses will of course try to pass increased cost of operation on to their customers, but to assume this happens in every industry or that it happens automatically would be 'retarded.' But then I work with merchants who are regular people and not evil millionaires as you (and others) seem to feel that somebody who busts their ass far beyond a 40 hour work week and doesn't have any unemployment protection -- most every small business owner -- are somehow evil vultures trying to rob you.

If credit cards were 'useless crap' then it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry.

This is simply not the case (or if it is, ditch your annual fee card). The merchant pays the transaction fees on rewards cards, not the cardholder. Some banks do issue annual fee cards withe ven higher rewards, and there you have to do the math to make sure you're coming out ahead.

Many banks are now charging for bill pay as they had other revenue streams closed down by Congress.

Though in my experience it's a flat monthly charge and not a per-transaction fee. Given that they have to pay postage, it's not really surprising.

They will probably either call it something else (a 'convenience fee' for online payment) or else just exempt NYS. Or it's possible that they're not subject to it if they aren't an NY corporation, though I think they have offices in NY and so most likely wouldn't be exempt.

This is about credit card interchange and transaction fees, which have recently gone up as a result of congressional price controls on debit card (but not credit card) fees and other regulations that closed a few avenues banks used to have for making money. Another cause is the rise of 'rewards' cards over the last decade -- if you get 1-2% back on your transactions, whether via 'points' or cash back, almost all of that is coming from the merchants who pay these fees and not your credit card bank. Predictably, they raised rates on other things to try and make up the difference. Transaction fees on credit cards have skyrocketed over the last 5-6 years, especially for Internet 'card not present' transactions. I handle ecommerce for a non-profit that does about 1.5 mil a year through us, and only after a lot of haggling were we able to get something like 2.29% + 21 cents per charge, which on your average Verizon wireless bill is right around or even over $2. Some places will hit you for closer to 3%, though a company as big as Verizon undoubtedly has a lower rate.

These fees don't apply to ACH/bank transfers, so Verizon wants you to use those. If my business accepted credit cards for payment, we'd probably want to do the same thing, but Verizon is a big bad phone company and so it's easy to pile on them. I'm glad I'm an AT&T customer in this case (since they don't have anything like this ... yet).

The story is being spun a bit as 'Verizon wants you to mail in a check and why are they charging me to do their work for them.' Verizon doesn't want you to mail in a check. Verizon wants you to pay from your bank account, as tons of people do in Europe. It's a perk for me to be able to pay most of my bills - business and personal - via credit card (which I pay off every month) because I get 1-2% back and because the credit card companies will go to bat for me if there is a problem with a charge, whereas once an ACH is complete there is not an easy mechanism to reverse it. Right now, AT&T is paying about $4/month (of my $150 bill) for me to have those perks. Since AT&T is a huge company and most of its customers are 'the little guy,' you could argue that we're entitled to those perks and AT&T should pay for it - to which my response (were I AT&T) would be that we have no problem paying something for it, but rates are now high enough that it's worth considering the big PR hit of adding a fee like this.

Most of us wouldn't switch carriers over a $2/mo fee. Most of us would set up the automatic bank transfer and grumble about it, and Verizon knows that.

I get the author's objection. It's a fair criticism. The melodrama is a but much. 'Offensive'? You may be a little thin-skinned if the bookshelf UI offends you.

I'm not interested in mandating the draft at all. I'm interested in you having to do your part to retain the status of United States Citizen that every other United States Citizen is required to do. You know, one of those '99%/1%' things.

You think that, because you also hold UK citizenship, that somehow this makes it impossible for you to comply with US law. It doesn't. Maybe there are cases where it would, bu this isn't one of them. You fill out a selective service card when you're 18, mail it in, and forget about it. You didn't do this and now you're blaming 'the system' for being unfair. You think you're a special case. You aren't.

In fact, you have extra rights and privileges as a dual citizen. You can work in the Euro zone very easily. I can't. You can work in the US (even if only the private sector) far more easily than a UK citizen. I don't see you rejecting any of the perks of your situation, and yet you have the audacity to reject the grave responsibility of mailing in an index card?

You are a self-important twit with a tremendous sense of entitlement and no corresponding sense of justice or the law.

You seem to be under the impression that Selective Service is optional. It isn't. You were required by law to register for it within 30 days of turning 18. Being abroad doesn't exempt you from this requirement.

Your attitude of blowing off selective service has probably got to do with the fact that nobody has been drafted in decades, but if they instituted a draft tomorrow, they can't just start collecting the information they need then - they have to maintain a database of eligible conscriptees. It sucks but that's the way of the world. If the worst that happened to you is that you can't get a federal loan or a government job, I'd say you got off pretty easy compared to, I don't know, going to Vietnam.

That you so lightly prefer 'gulags' to the 'bigotry' you have received tells me that you have never seen a real gulag, and also that you've probably never experienced real bigotry. May you be reincarnated as a Tsarist after the Bolshevik revolution or a Japanese American during the internment camps. You'll probably bitch less about gulags and bigotry in 2011.

As the guy who hires people like you for his small business, this is the biggest thing I care about. Show me what you've done. A college degree is nice but these days everybody has one and so it's difficult to assign a lot of meaning to the degree itself rather than the stuff that was accomplished while pursuing one.

Other big things (for me, anyway, YMMV): Show me you can write well, communicate with normal (non-technical) humans politely and professionally (references would be great), and that you have an active interest in improving yourself and your skillset. I hardly ever hire anybody because they know the language or languages I need right then. I try to hire smart people who have proven that they can learn on the job.

(Shameless plug: Go to recruiterbox and search for 'inLeague' if this is you!)