No it's not. Terrorism is activity meant to terrorize an entire population and/or influence the public policy of a Government. Falsely reporting an incident does not rise to the level of terrorism and when people keep using the 'T' word to cover all manner of crimes that aren't terrorism they undermine the meaning and impact of the word.

If you can develop a working fusion engine you'll have so much fucking money that it won't matter. Seriously, you'll be able to swim in your money like Scrooge McDuck. I highly doubt that Boeing's patent is a deal-breaker for the person that's smart enough to solve this engineering challenge. "Aww, shucks, I was going to change the course of human civilization but now I've got lawyers and paperwork to deal with. Screw it, I'm gonna go watch American Idol."

Felony endangerment doesn't garner a 10 year sentence in any American State that I'm familiar with, much less in Canada. That's the whole point of this subthread, I was questioning the person that said "at least 10 years" for this offense. Adults wouldn't get ten years for doing it; a juvenile certainly won't.

If data gets too slow it becomes useless. In general I like your idea (use QoS to prioritize low usage customers ahead of high usage ones) and have advocated for it before, but I'm not at all certain you'd be able to price data at $30/mo in such a scenario. The exact economics of the wireless industry are not known to any of us outside of upper level management at the carriers, but what we do know is that data is the GROWTH market. Voice isn't dying, but it's less and less important to young people, and there's a limit to how much money you could raise by tariffing it at higher rates. The carriers are looking at tens of billions of dollars of CapEx to keep pace with the growing demand for data; they're not going to find that money by inflating voice rates.

That has happened here too (Columbine being the most infamous example) but as "active shooters" have become a bigger perceived threat the training of North American law enforcement has shifted towards a more aggressive response. That's probably for the best, dead is forever, ruptured eardrums and broken doors can be repaired.

Homicide in common law jurisdictions (which includes Canada) requires the presence of mens rea, better known as intent. Can you get inside this kid's head and say that he wanted someone to die? Because that's the burden you'd need to meet to convict him of attempted homicide.

It should be a serious crime. I haven't maintained otherwise. I just questioned that it should be a ten year prison sentence level of serious. That's over the top even by American standards of jurisprudence. In New York State, assuming no prior convictions, you need a class C felony to reach that kind of sentence. For perspective, class C felonies include robbery, burglary, criminal possession of a weapon, soliciting or supporting an act of terrorism, assault on a judge or first responder, or an attempt to commit a class B felony. There's some non-violent crimes in there too, primarily fraud that reaches a certain dollar amount.

IANAL but the closest charge we would have here to fit swatting would probably be falsely reporting an incident in the third degree, which is a misdemeanor. A reading of the law would seem to support bumping it up to first degree if someone is killed as a result of the false report, which makes it a class D felony.

He's talking about domestic roaming, i.e., he's somewhere where T-Mobile doesn't have a network and is using another cellular network, most likely AT&T's. T-Mobile pays whomever he's connected to for every byte of data used and every minute of airtime. Back in the day the carriers would pass this cost along to their customers and didn't care about how much you roamed. That went out of vogue in the early 2000s, with the advent of so-called "nationwide" plans, and they started eating the cost in favor of providing a simpler experience for their customers.

Most every American cell company limits the amount you can roam, either with an explicit policy like T-Mobile (you only get 100MB and then we shut you off) or a "soft cap" in the Terms of Service. The ones that limit via TOS typically have language saying something like, "If more than 50% of your usage for three consecutive billing cycles is on partner networks we reserve the right to terminate your service." The exception to this rule is Verizon; they've never cared about how much of your usage is domestic roaming. They make far more money from all those regional carriers whose customers roam on the Verizon network than they pay them for the handful of Verizon customers that venture into their service areas.

There's a limit to how far "What might have been" goes in the criminal justice system. If you text while driving you might kill someone. That doesn't argue in favor of giving every distracted driver a sentence equivalent to what you'd get for manslaughter.

I don't know the particulars of this case but as a general rule of thumb I would not be willing to throw in the towel on a 17 year old. The ostensible point of the criminal justice system is rehabilitation. That's the case even in the United States, which is probably the harshest Western country when it comes to criminal justice.

I don't think that's really at play here. Let's play devil's advocate and pretend the SWAT team had never been developed; now call the police and tell them that someone is in the process of murdering your neighbor. What do you suppose happens? They come to your neighbor's house with firearms drawn and immediately force entry into his home. They won't have all of the expensive tactical gear but do you think that's really going to alter the "experience" for your neighbor by any appreciable degree? Do you think there's much difference between looking at the business end of a .38 Special vs. an AR-15?

The militarization of the police is a worrisome trend that I've discussed before but I don't think it has anything to do with swatting. If the police think that someone is in the process of being murdered they're going to respond quickly and aggressively. There's really no good solution here; I don't think you want the police to discount such reports.

You've mellowed but you think someone should forfeit 10 years of their life for essentially being an immature teenaged brat? That's roughly the amount of time you can expect to spend in prison for murder in Finland. I guess that's the difference between viewing imprisonment as a correction vs. a punishment. I wouldn't think the little turd should get a slap on the wrist but ten years seems a bit harsh unless there's some extenuating circumstance (someone died or was permanently disfigured) I don't know about. Isn't the objective to make the offender a productive member of society rather than a professional criminal?

Your carrier's billing system will never agree with what's collected on your phone. They'll typically see more sent on the downstream (tower -> phone) than your device because of retransmissions of packets your phone never received. Likewise, they'll see less on the upstream (phone -> tower) for the same reason. They can't bill you for a failed packet on the upstream but your phone will still count it.

In the real world the difference isn't statistically significant; Verizon usually agrees with my phone to within 1%. It's just something to be mindful of when you're getting close to your cap or if you're roaming and paying those rates.

FB Messenger is not a particularly offensive app with regards to data consumption. I used 56MB with it during my last billing cycle and the total was only that "high" because of photo sharing. If you just use it for text messaging the data usage is insignificant.

Their actual app is another matter, as you point out, and I would highly recommend ditching it in favor of using m.facebook.com through your mobile browser of choice. It's also better from a privacy standpoint because you can control whether or not you share your location with them via the web browser and they don't get access to the file structure, camera, dialer, or anything else for that matter. That site will work as a messenger replacement too, with the caveat that you won't get push notifications. I would be happy to ditch FB Messenger altogether but I've got a lot of friends aboard that use it exclusively; they live in countries where SMS is billed per message and there's no unlimited option as there is here in the States.

Pandora mobile is only 64kbit/s with the default setting or about 80kbit/s with "high quality." That's ~30MB per hour. Your high usage numbers are entirely driven by video. :)

It costs tens of billions of dollars to bid on licensed spectrum and billions more to actually deploy a modern cellular network. That's not to say that the wireless industry isn't profitable (it certainly is) but you can't equate their cost structure with wireline networks.

Gouging? How old are you? I remember paying $20/mo for dial up internet just 15 years ago. $40/mo if you count the second POTS line. Now I've got the rough equivalent of a T3 in my pocket, for $30/mo, that I can use almost anywhere in the continental United States.

Your information is out of date, T-Mo does not throttle on their unlimited plan. What they do is use QoS to prioritize customers in the bottom 97% percentile over customers in the top 3% during times of congestion. If you're connected to a non-congested tower you can suck data 24/7/365. Verizon does something similar with their 3G network. It's a whole lot of bellyaching about nothing in my experience; there are congested cell sites here and there but they're the exception rather than the rule.

Apart from that, the two key differences between T-Mobile and Verizon are:

1. T-Mo's unlimited plan doesn't include tethering. Verizon's does, free of charge with a rooted device or $30/mo without one. And no, it's not "stealing" to get it for free with root; the Band 13 rules specifically say you can use any application you want and Verizon has never hassled those that tether without paying for the hotspot feature. They even hassled people doing it on the 3G network even though it's a technical violation of the customer agreement and they'd be within their rights to prohibit it.

2. T-Mo's unlimited plan won't follow you when you're roaming domestically. Verizon doesn't care how much of your data or minute usage occurs on partner networks.