WAIT WAIT WAIT. You're telling me that a company with no oversight in a country known for corruption, with NO motive but profit CAN'T be trusted? WAHT???
I thought we were talking about China here. Let's leave Wall Street out of this, OK?
Thanks for the tip. I was unaware of Straight Talk. Straight Talk is the only one of the lot that is GSM / SIM-based. The others are CDMA and non-SIM based. They all require that you buy one of their phones because CDMA phones are not really network portable. They are also mostly useless for non-US residents or us world travellers.
That said, I am now seriously thinking about ditching my T-Mobile contract for Straight Talk. Worst cast is I go back to T-Mobile monthly.
There is *no* mobile contract in the US priced anything close to that. I know. I just looked. I came back from a couple weeks in the UK. I spent about USD30 on a 3 network SIM + top-up. Had phone and internet service for my stay. A month of unlimited internet on 3 is about USD25. It's even cheaper for reasonably limited data (i.e. more than you get in the US on average).
The closest I could get in the US was on T-Mobile and that was USD65/mo for phone/data.
The US does not do much for keeping our telecom services competitive. Our free markets are not exactly filled with robust competition.
If the city has good bike lanes, then bicycling can be much faster than the automobile traffic without the behaviors you are imputing.
Unless you are in Chicago -- where drivers treat bike lanes as another auto lane as they see fit.
You could just leave the SIM card at home and take the phone with you. The wi-fi capability is all you need to maintain communications with the outside world in most urban environments, and doing encrypted, TORed VOIP over a wifi connection shouldn't identify you like the SIM would.
That works only if you know how to spoof your device's MAC address. Otherwise, you are just as uniquely identified as your SIM.
That money is being spent in the USA, it is going to our own citizens to advance our own science.
With your reasoning, just about EVERY SINGLE project this government has EVER undertaken:
I'm sorry, but this is a very real failure. I'm a total space geek at heart, but the cost overruns completely change the cost/benefit analysis of the project. Sure, if there is no other research or project to spend the money on, your argument might make sense. But there are tons of these project that all compete for funding. The value we, as citizens and taxpayers, receive for that money is incredibly important. There are a ton of other very worthy projects that could have done more with that amount of money.
Hell, for that amount of money, how many New Horizons type missions could we have paid for?
Very funny, but the avionics industry is based on real specs. As in, non-junk specs from people who actually know what they're talking about. In a perfect world, business software would have that too.
Exactly. First, imagine a typical American MBA. Now imagine the requirement specs from that MBA.
If you imagined written specs, you failed.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.
