I think Cricket does this -- which is a mobile carrier that most normal people all know and realize sucks, moreso than AT&T -- which is hard to do. Primary it caters to (and exploits) people in disadvantaged communities and the working poor. You mainly find Cricket near rent-to-own establishments, et. al. So you may know someone with a Cricket phone yourself because they have no choice - they need a pay as you go phone and have little cash - this is recession after all.

Regardless, everytime I have made a comment online regarding Crickets crap service, and exorbitant text fees on pay as you go service the comment either gets modded down, or a gushing defense of Cricket is posted by what is obviously a paid shill shortly thereafter.

Every. Time. So I am really interested in what they will try and do with this comment. If they were smart it would not be modded down, but ignored. My guess is most likely trolled.

Yeah, and that will never happen. The day that happens all developer tools become illegal, all file sharing becomes illegal, including FTP sites, and putting an app on a SD card becomes illegal. Ain't gonna fucking happen and your full of shit. And what type of app cannot be found on iTunes or the Android market. And barring that can't be installed on Windows, Mac OS X, or linux.

BTW Cory Doctorow needs to STFU as well, he doesn't seem to have problems with making money of the non-free Kindle. He is always on his high-horse about censorship unless its at Boing Boing. And I for one have never heard any righteous condemnation of Federated Media and it's dodgy deals with small bloggers, because oh wait, he is making fuckloads of money from Boing Boing and the Federated Media partnership.

SOPA is about control. The web is the one area that the powers that be do not fully control, this legislation provides the mechanism to accomplish that, in much the same way that the true intention of the PATRIOT act was to strip away other rights in the name of security.

Wake up people.

If this isn't proof enough to everyone that both Democrat and Republican parties are both completely beholden to the corporate master I don't know what is. There is no way in hell a member of the old (real) Democrat party of 60 years ago would have done this. The only remaining step for Democrats like these to become full-fledged corporate-whore Republicans will be to join in on union busting efforts.

Because two North American governments are major share holders of this company, I am sure that tracking operations will immediately cease, because we all know governments hate doing shit like that.

You are talking about corporate, academia I am finding out to my chagrin, is no better and in many cases actually worse. Case in point: I am one of two developers (senior of the two) hired to work on a new web project at a respected university. The junior "developer" from day one argued (and almost convinced) management that we should use the standard install images given to students with all control panel/configuration functionality disabled and locked down.

Failing that, he then thinks because he took a "project management" class from a cert. factory, convinces our management to design applications like one would in Access, because well thats what he did when he designed in-house Access applications, and he is "qualified" so it must be right. Being academics they swallow this shite like a crack-deprived prostitute.

Now management has announced this great work is worthy of a lateral promotion (he hasn't managed to write any code that has worked in 6 months) because they "are trying to find something he is good at".

This is just the small cherry on top of the shit mountain of endless, childish, degrading, touchy-feely debates on a daily basis, because everything has to be vetted and discussed "academic style". In this world politics is king, accomplishments, experience, and "real-world" knowledge mean nothing. All aspects of my programming job are "subjective" and need debate, micro management to the sub-atomic level.

Recently, with mgmt. and my incompetent coworker, I found myself explaining and needless to say, debating the merits of data validation. I discovered everything I know about data validation doesn't apply there, because they know the people that enter the data, and they do a good job and therefore just don't know if data validation is worth the time and extra cost. I argued for data validation as any competent developer would.

I lost this argument. Fuck. Me.

I will take your corporate job, at least you don't have fucking nightmares and get chest pains whilst thinking about the future need to debate object oriented programming or error trapping.

Could they do the world a favour and write scripts to make it self-terminate instead?

On a similar note, I suppose you have never heard of Henrietta Lacks and how pharmaceutical companies patented her cancer cells, the strain which makes them billions of dollars and responsible for causing her untimely demise.

There is no degree more overrated than an MBA. The article is right, these people are disastrous when placed in command of tech companies, and one could make a strong point they screw up every other company they touch.

Every conversation I have heard when a group of these "leading lights" set around a table, is buzz-speak laden drivel, totally hollow & devoid of any rational or critical thinking. Usually along the lines of "I heard company x is doing this" which in MBA speak "means we should too", i.e. I am just a stupid MBA and have no original thoughts.

One of my worst corporate experiences is remembering a dinner "meeting" I had to attend once with HR, marketing, executives, and a small group of IT developers. HR the manipulative & shallow eye-candy gathering intelligence, technophobe market droids droning on about branding, narcissistic executives showing off their newest mobiles and laptops they were too stupid to use, and the small band of young developers with few social skills required for "small talk", but great at in-depth conversation.

The only silver lining is that was a self-cleaning affair, the quantity of vacuums in the room ensured that.

No you are missing the point. This has huge bearing on the actual problem. The real issue is that corporations & their paid puppets can do whatever they want. The rest of us have to pay taxes, follow the rules, and abide by the law - even if we think we have the I's dotted and T's crossed as this guy did, you still end up standing before the man. That, my cowardly friend, is the "actual problem".

I take it the only reason the fucking Secret Service is going after him is because he isn't a corporation or the government.
The groups the Secret Service don't go after:
1) Sony Corporation (rootkits caused actual *harm* to PCs)
2) School systems that install "uncle pervy" software on underage students computers.
3) Facebook installing (implementing) facial recognition capabilities *without* the consent of user.

We know a) He had permission. b) Isn't wealthy. It makes great headlines and he has limited resources to fight back & hasn't paid off a legislator -- that is the difference. Fuck Obama -- I thought we were going to get real change - more of the same old shit.

What this basically means is the same type of executives that outsource operations and employees, needlessly eliminating thousands of positions at high tech companies for "cost cutting" purposes aka bonuses -- these very people are surprised they are being treated the same way by another greedy group of managers and money-men ?!

I consider it odd that carriers can hobble Android at will and pass the Google cert program, but a community of dedicated programmers devoted to restoring functionality to Android users would have problems passing this so-called certification process.

Read between the lines: You must be a mobile carrier with $$$ to pass a certification process -- this permits you to have carte blanche to lock down your phones and remove features as you see fit. A real certification process would ensure the Market app would be able to run on each phone or tablet running Android, prevent the device from being loaded with crapware by the carriers, and allow the user to have "root" privileges.

Until a user can do what he or she wants on their mobile, this certification is a bad joke by Google and mobile carriers at the expense of their users and customer base.

Not Cricket, try using their website to view MMS messages if you don't believe me -- it doesn't work. At least on browsers I want to use (Firefox/Chrome) and NFW am I going to install IE to view a glorified text message.

Speaking of texts, they rape you on charges for those as well. In fact, I decided to go with a two year contract with a major carrier after "running the numbers" on my accumulated charges with Cricket. All of this coming from a person that really despises contracts for cell phone service.