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being a natural monopoly and a vital service with inelastic demand, communications networks like telecoms/ISPs cannot be boycotted effectively by consumers. so even if you believe in having the invisible hand of the Free Market make everything alright, that will not work in this case. but the social apparatus constituting a democratic government exists precisely for situations like these where it provides the only mechanism for carrying out the will of the people in protecting public interest.

Telecommunications may have been a natural monopoly 100 years ago when Theodore Vale used it to argue that AT&T should be the one American telephone company. It certainly is not one now. Why would a government telco be any better than the heavily regulated monopoly system we tried in the past?

At the last mile level there are many competing technologies (DSL, Cable, EVDO, Fixed-wireless) from completing companies with their own pros and cons. If you are not happy with one provider you are free to switch to another provider.

Indeed, AT&T provides wholesale access to the DSL system through ASI at very reasonable rates. In any area where AT&T DSL is available there are several alternate IP carriers available should you not like AT&T's stance on Network Neutrality, etc.

The real tragedy of access is not that consumer choice is limited, rather its that consumers do not look beyond big Phone and big Cable.

Plus, oo requires me to install something, why do I want to go through all of that headache?

On the other hand, google apps require me to install something that costs money per month, why do I want to go through all of that headache?

Couldn't you just compile it with -fno-exceptions to not have exceptions in C++?

You could, but it wouldn't work. For example, std::string throws an exception when you pass it a null pointer. If you simply set -fno-exceptions, it would happily ignore the throw statement, and try to copy data from the null pointer to its own buffer (Segmentation Fault). If you can't throw exceptions, it affects the software interfaces—you need to error codes or a global error state such as errno.

I also don't really understand why Google wouldn't allow exceptions at all because exceptions are pretty useful

They want their code to be universally applicable. Since some projects can't use exceptions (hard realtime, embedded environments, etc.), that means they simply put a blanket rule disallowing exceptions. If you do any C++ development, I would recommend taking a look at their C++ style guidelines. I don't agree with everything in there, but it's a very good read. Another decent read (much longer and more boring, but still full of insight) is the Joint Strike-Fighter C++ guidelines (PDF).

ComScore found that iPhone purchases grew fastest among people with annual household incomes between $25,000 and $50,000.

What!?! How can this group afford the monthly charges? I just checked the AT&T site http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/specials/iphone-info.jsp and saw that the minimum monthly charge is $70/month, plus the $200 outlay for the phone itself. There is simply no way I could afford this while paying for taxes, mortgage, utilities, food, gas, clothing, college tuitions and home and car maintenance, but then I try to live within my means. Next up, government bailout for iPhone owners ...

Whatever you think of Best Buy, they have a successful internal community in Blueshirtnation.com. A google search turns up quite a lot of industry praise on those guys. It was even written up the Groundswell book by Forrester.

If you want your bosses to buy, make sure you give them plenty of examples of other companies being successful at it.

For me, the biggest business benefit to the call center is knowledge sharing, but you have to be careful because communities need a critical mass in members to be successful (or a highly dedicated internal resource building content and encouraging participation). Only the biggest call centers could make it self-sustaining. However, another idea might be to launch a peer-to-peer support community and invite your customers in. You can have a private area for employees, but have a larger area where customers can ask support questions. And unlike email, once a question is answered, everyone can use it. Dell, Lenovo, Juniper, Linksys, AT&T, Blackberry all have successful support forums.

On IRC, I use it at work but my frustration is that it has no real history - I've seen the same questions come up time and again. On a forum you can search and find past discussions.

Disclosure: I work for Lithium Technologies , an online community provider.

"80% of mobile phones being sold today have cameras on them, yet the number of people who actually know how to use them or get the images off the phones ranges between 10% and 50%, depending on the model"

"80% of mobile phones being sold today have cameras on them, yet the number of people who actually know how to use them or get the images off the phones ranges between 10% and 50%, depending on the CARRIER"

There, fixed that for ya.

Verizon is legendary for crippling phones, forcing you to use their website stuff to work with photo files, and of course denying any way to copy ringtones to the phone - for the obvious and logical reason to increase their profits. I understand, but I've never owned a Verizon phone. Not even when they weren't Verizon.

ATT/Cingular less so, but they do seem to play games with wacko web tools, or require you to buy/download the special software, and sometimes it just doesn't work very well. My last Cingular phone was a T637, and fLOAT's tools were slicker than snot. I would never hesitate to have a Sony Ericsson phone, knowing that there are great tools out there to make these into more useful devices.

I dunno much about Sprint, except that people have told me that their tools vary from inscrutable to unusable. But the people I know think Sprint is pus anyways, so I discount their opinions a little. They're all NASCAR freaks anyways...

TMobile seems as simple as can be, but I have a BlackBerry, so it's not fair. But their web album thing is unnecessarily complicated. And Bluetooth transfers are not so easy with a 7105t.

Don't blame the player, blame the game. Using phones as camers leaves you prey to the carrier's revenue enhancement schemes. And some carriers play hard.

oh, and some phones are impossible to use. Yup.

http://www.wireless.att.com/about/disability-resources/mobile-speak-magnifier.jsp "AT&T now offers the latest in screen reader and screen magnifier software from Code Factory. This software works to enhance the functionality of some of our most popular wireless devices for those who have low vision or are blind. The screen reader and screen magnifier software is available for both Symbian and Windows Mobile Smartphone devices."

Seems you're touchy on this subject Mr. AC Troll. One important facet to note here is that it indicates that using the service even once while outside the country is tantamount to a charge of almost $900. This carries the implication that, "because he was out of the country," his rate was hiked unreasonably and therefore further implies that, were he in the country, we can assume that this wouldn't have been a problem, as people aren't going to pay for a service if they don't like the price. Making this point even more salient is this tidbit taken directly from AT&T's website:"International Data Roaming in over 135 countries, including many 3G networks." I can't seem to find a list on their site that enumerates exactly which >135 of the some 200 sovereign nations of the world are included in this, but I have difficulty imagining that the USA's next-door neighbour isn't part of it. Oh, never mind, look! Prices! From this we can estimate that, even were he sending 100 1MB photos from Canada, one of the "select countries" noted on that page, every time (that would be 2100 photos, total) he should still only be paying about $100 in extra fees for it (assuming the least expensive plan that would involve both an AirCard and international capability)

Now, unless you can offer some compelling reason that the Canadian cellular network is, contrary to what is advertised, unable to handle this sort of transfer for less than a grand, I would suggest taking your sneering attitude back to 4chan and rotting there. :)

AT&T is no longer the old AT&T, because the name was sold to SBC. My understanding is that the SBC trademark was worse than useless because the company is so abusive. So, the managers decided to use another name.

Those interested in how that happened can watch Stephen Colbert explain in a 1 minute 14 second video: The New AT&T.

I did some digging, couldn't find the original contract, but I specifically remember the language "waiving the right to a trial by jury" in it, and it was about 18-20 pages IIRC.

Found a link here And although my phone is not a wireless and I can't count the god damn pages, cause I can't find them I see similar wording in wireless contracts

The contract I got said something like "CONTRACT FOR EXISTING AT&T SERVICES (W/ARBITRATION) INSIDE" And it was a lot of pages, and it said if I do nothing, then that was supposed to be my agreement with it.

It really pisses me off I can't find this now. But I guess the law doesn't give a fuck about being pissed off.

That's Google's strategy.. seems to work pretty good for them ;)

From http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/pdf/ds_gsa_apps_whitepaper_0207.pdf :

"The geographic locations of the datacenters were chosen to give protection against catastrophic events"

Geographically disperse full redundancy is also a major key factor.

None of that, of course, helps protect infrastructure in hurricane prone areas. To do that you need to bury power and data lines deep underground, shield them from vibration and moisture, and protect them from faults from failing hardware above ground. Keeping the mobile phone infrastructure up and running may require severely ruggedizing towers... but even then, antennas on top of buildings, etc, are still vulnerable... If a hurricane rips up the building your cell antennas are on.. there's not much you can do (Other then roll in your disaster recovery unit (Like AT&Ts http://www.corp.att.com/ndr/ )

The Bell telephone monopoly might have done a bunch of good things, but as we can see from the Microsoft PC OS monopoly, there are downsides to keeping a company in a monopoly position for too long.

Sorry to be contrary again, but Microsoft isn't a monopoly in the same way that the Bell System was. Microsoft is a big company that plays fast and loose with its majority position in the market. The Bell System was a legally sanctioned monopoly regulated by a consent decree. The Microsoft of your example has a beast of an OS that they develop with huge armies of coders. It's full of obfuscation and DRM and bloat. Bell Labs had Kernighan and Ritchie (and Thompson and fewer than 10 other main guys) who developed UNIX that ran timesharing on PDP11s with 128k RAM, and by 1985, it had 95% of all the goodness that modern Mac/Win/Lin OSes have. BTL UNIX was the opposite of obfuscated and bloated. Well, that's was true through V6. By the time System V came about, the system started to grow fatter and creepy features started creeping in, but I'm not talking about the same order of magnitude of bloat that MS provides in its products

Round about that time I started marveling at how cool UNIX (and BSD and SunOS) were getting, right around the time they got squashed by the Microsoft marketing machine. Remember, the Bell System wasn't allowed to compete with Microsoft - that was the regulated monopoly consent decree thing.

I'm not even saying that the Bell System was alone in supporting basic research. Other big research players were IBM, Xerox, HP, GE, Kodak, and such companies, but eventually the accountants came with their steely knives and that's life in the fast lane.

Re advocating research in academia, that's nice, but academia can't really afford research unless it's supported by industry. And modern industry can't afford to support basic research at universities any more than it can support its own basic research. The shareholders say, "basic research? how does that help our share value?"

Nothing more, nothing less. C++0x does not change that fact.

Having a memory model is a good thing though :)

As the document shows from page 3 to 7, C++ values efficiency a lot. If that's a requirement C++ is great. Criticism that C++ is not Python/Java totally missed the point!

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/abstraction-and-machine.pdf

This update used to be called "C++9x", but the committee got lost in template la-la land for a decade.

Thread-local storage is a good idea. GCC and Microsoft have had it for a decade. There's still no language guarantee that a pointer to a thread-local variable can't be exported outside the thread. But that was already true of stack variables. (Can't say "auto" any more; that keyword has been "repurposed".)

Threading is basically POSIX threads with new paint, plus some atomic primitives that have been around in incompatible forms since the 1990s. There's no improvement in thread safety.

Unordered maps were supposed to go into the original STL years ago, but somebody didn't get the paperwork in on time. Really.

It's no safer than the previous revision of C++. We're doomed to another decade of crashes and buffer overflows. Amit Yoran pointed this out when he was the director of the National Cyber Security Division at Homeland Security. (He resigned under political pressure for pointing out that Microsoft's poor security was the biggest part of the problem.)

At least they didn't put in "concepts".

"There's been no reports of Blackberries having these issue"

There have been many dropped call issues with Blackberries, especially on certain carriers with particular OS version and model combinations. Google "blackberry drops calls" to find out about some of them.

"nor the Symbian based Nokia e90"

The E90 did however have serious microphone problems and frequent browser crashes that required updates from Nokia to fix.

"nor the Windows Mobile based Samsung Blackjack"

AT&T's support pages don't agree with you:

http://forums.wireless.att.com/cng/board/message?board.id=announcements&message.id=276

Quote: "Customers who purchased the Samsung BlackJack i607 manufactured during the months of November 2006 - February 2007 may find they are experiencing dropped calls or poor signal reception."

"Prohibited and Permissible Uses:
... While most common uses for Intranet browsing, email and intranet access are permitted by your data plan, there are certain uses that cause extreme network capacity issues and interference with the network and are therefore prohibited. Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) server devices or host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing..."

from http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/legal/plan-terms.jsp

Then you'd appear to be running a server since P2P by definition uploads, which is also a breach of contract on your end. "the operation of servers... is prohibited" (Prohibited and Permissible Uses, http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/legal/plan-terms.jsp).

If we terminate your service for nonpayment or other default before the end of the Service Commitment, or if you terminate your service for any reason other than (a) in accordance with the cancellation policy; or (b) pursuant to a change of terms, conditions, or rates as set forth below, you agree to pay us with respect to each Equipment identifier or telephone number assigned to you, in addition to all other amounts owed, an Early Termination Fee of $175.

Quoted from AT&T Wireless's Service Agreement (emphasis mine). So yes, they can in fact charge you the fee if they are the ones canceling the contract.

Hopefully not for long.
Judge Rules Sprint Early Termination Fees Illegal

If we terminate your service for nonpayment or other default before the end of the Service Commitment, or if you terminate your service for any reason other than (a) in accordance with the cancellation policy; or (b) pursuant to a change of terms, conditions, or rates as set forth below, you agree to pay us with respect to each Equipment identifier or telephone number assigned to you, in addition to all other amounts owed, an Early Termination Fee of $175.

Quoted from AT&T Wireless's Service Agreement (emphasis mine). So yes, they can in fact charge you the fee if they are the ones canceling the contract.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that suggest that if they terminate you specifically for nonpayment or default, ie, billing issues, they can hit you with that termination fee? I don't see anything in there about breaking the rules...

If we terminate your service for nonpayment or other default before the end of the Service Commitment, or if you terminate your service for any reason other than (a) in accordance with the cancellation policy; or (b) pursuant to a change of terms, conditions, or rates as set forth below, you agree to pay us with respect to each Equipment identifier or telephone number assigned to you, in addition to all other amounts owed, an Early Termination Fee of $175.

Quoted from AT&T Wireless's Service Agreement (emphasis mine). So yes, they can in fact charge you the fee if they are the ones canceling the contract.

According to http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/specials/iphone-info.jsp#0faqSection0 the cheapest plan you can get with AT&T and the iPhone is a $70 per month with 450 minutes and 5,000 night and weekend minutes. With no texting. Now, you get unlimited data. And the plan becomes an extra $20 with unlimited texting.

Linus Torvald Linux Kernel coding style http://lxr.linux.no/linux/Documentation/CodingStyle

Bjarne Stroustrup C++ Style and Technique FAQ (Trivia and style section) http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html

The most of so called "Hungarian notations"(including the ones previously recommended by Microsoft) is the wrong interpretation of the original ones. No wonder that Torvald , Stroustrup, Sutter and Alexandrescu don't recommend them. However, the original notation are quit reasonable and can be found here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260976(VS.60).aspx

Finally, there is the good book C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices By Herb Sutter, Andrei Alexandrescu

The best advice from this book " Don't sweat the small stuff. (Or: Know what not to standardize.)". For example " Don't specify how much to indent, but do indent to show structure" etc.

From http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/articles-resources/wireless-terms.jsp

"Taxes, fees and discretionary charges will apply to your wireless service and will be reflected on your bill. AT&T Mobility imposes either a Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge of up to $1.25 or a Regulatory Programs Charge of $1.75 to help defray costs incurred to comply with State and Federal telecommunications regulations, such as E911 deployment, State and Federal Universal Service, and other government mandates on AT&T Mobility. These charges are not taxes or government required assessments on end-user customers. AT&T Mobility has chosen to pass through these charges to its customers. Actual tax/fee/surcharge information for a particular locality can be found at wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/additionalcharges/."

I've always found the Joint Strike Fighter's coding standards document an interesting read. It is available from Bjarne Stroustrup's website (pdf)

The problem is that they're essentially telling you to sign a two year contract committing yourself to paying whatever bill they send you, but won't tell you what the bill will be.

It's actually a bit more complicated than that, as I found when I shopped last fall for a major carrier:

• Verizon seemed to have the best agreement; it allowed me to cancel (within 60 days of notice) without early termination fees for any billing change that would cause a material adverse effect on me--including any tax they were not required to pass to the consumer but did anyway. I cancelled mostly due to their locked-down phones, their anti-consumer attitude, and their anti-openness lobbying; but when they chose to pass to me an increased state tax it was a last straw and get-out-of-ETF-free card.
• As I recall, Sprint's agreement was similar to Verizon's, but specifically allowed them to increase text message fees without limit, and you would have no recourse. When I see their material adverse effect clause now, it seems that they've removed that exception to be equivalent to Verizon standards (but you must cancel within 30 days of when higher rates take effect).
• When AT&T raises any fees, you may cancel without ETF (within 30 days of first affected bill), except for a change in how much tax they wish to pass to you (in which case you have no recourse).
• T-Mobile's terms are the worst: they say you can cancel without ETF (within 30 days of notice) only if the advertised monthly charge changes, but they can change any "fees" arbitrarily!

I ended up going with T-Mobile's prepaid FlexPay account, which is the same price as the normal one but without the 2-year unbounded risk and without subsidized phones.

That's why they have a web page that tells you what your charges are for your area:

http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/additionalcharges/

State
        CALIFORNIA
Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge
        0.43
Federal Universal Service Fund
        11.4%
State Universal Service Fund
        $0.00
Other AT&T Surcharges
        0.18%

Believe it or not they actually tell you what the charges are for. This is 150 times better than what we had when I was younger. Training is an issue in any retail store, but before hitting the slashdot front page, maybe a bit of googling is in order.

They do their best to keep google from being able to inform you...

http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/additionalcharges/ I went on the AT&T website and found it in less than three minutes. Certainly not worth a diatribe on the front page of Slashdot.

I just wonder if ol' Staph has ever cybered with someone like himself on that DECtalk equipment... I was just playing with some online voice-synthesizers a week ago. Even downloaded some demos. Over at AT&T, I was having a good ol' time with a few "touch me in my no-no spots" and thare she 'blows. I'm so inclined to make a Stephen "cocci" Hawking rap for my voicemale.

Paying when you receive a message, makes no fucking sense.

It's even worse than that...

The basic account comes with precisely zero text messages included. Every one of them costs you 20c.

You activate your phone, they already start sending you texts. "Hey, here's a notification from us. By the way, we just paid ourselves 20c from your wallet to tell you this. Thanks. We'll be sure to send another in a few minutes."

Having spent quite a bit of time searching on line, as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way to say, "That's cool, your system's a rip off. I don't want it."

They do have a relatively hidden url at mymessages.wireless.att.com but it crashes on your iPhone and, surprise, surprise, sends you a nice 20c text message to allow you to sign up. Even then though, it'll only disable certain types of texting.

At least, if you got charged for incoming calls, you could choose whether to pick up or not. With texts, you automatically receive them and have the 20c deducted whether you want the message or not.

So, you get a system that costs more per byte than it costs NASA to communicate with Mars, that you have to pay to receive as well as send, you can't selectively ignore messages from and not pay, and you can't even disable entirely.

When, like me, you have asshat friends who you've yelled at countless times to stop texting you and yet they can't wrap their idiotic heads around the idea, your only option is to keep changing your number... end, even then, AT&T's own systems will keep texting you and billing you for those texts.

And all this on a device that can handle far better messaging formats with its bundled, unlimited net access anyway? It's sickening.

I'm sure the THEORETICAL numbers are available somewhere. Practically, the statistics are going to vary widely and almost certainly be much worse in every case. Cellular companies underbuild their networks as a matter of course.

Don't be an asshole, junior. I used to work for AT&T Local Services; I know what I'm talking about.

http://developer.att.com/developer/index.jsp?page=toolsTechDetail&id=7600078

600ms on EDGE and an average of 150ms on HSPA? Please. Watch what happens when the network sees ANY kind of serious usage.

https://www.wireless.att.com/business/authenticate/

for me its about 20% off service, but it varies with whatever organization you are assocaited with. If I can get 20% off the iphone service plan that would be a pretty nice deal.

He was refering to the raise in the cost of service for the new phone that will end up costing you $160 above what "phone service" used to cost you.

Ok, 160/24 = $6.67 per month. Or a premium of 12% over your minimum plan with the EDGE iPhone.

Your data rate increases by (absolute worst case) a factor of three, even while moving at highway speeds (3G > EDGE). Standing still it's four to ten times as fast. I fail to see how it's a bad deal.

30-DAY CANCELLATION PERIOD/TERMINATION You may terminate this Agreement within thirty (30) days after activating service without paying an Early Termination Fee. You will pay for service fees and charges incurred through the termination date, but AT&T will refund your activation fee, if any, if you terminate within three (3) days of activating the service. Also, you may have to return any handsets and accessories purchased with this Agreement. If you terminate after the 30th day but before expiration of the Agreement's Service Commitment, you will pay AT&T an Early Termination Fee for each wireless telephone number associated with the service.

Seems clear to me. You go through with the contract or you pay the Early Termination Fee or you "may have to" return the phone - period.

AT&T offers naked DSL from $19.99/mo.

They call it DSL Direct

actually, with the new plan from AT&T with the 3G IPhone, the price for unlimited texting is $20/month. See here.

Who said that the dataplan will be limited to 300megs?

ATT itself has documents out there saying it will be "unlimited".

That's true, but you can only do so much to prevent outages. In the enterprise, if you want to avoid fiber-seeking backhoes, you get a failover location. That's difficult to do in a home network.

I'd say cable+DSL ( or maybe throw in something like the AT&T USB Connect 881.

I'd see if it's possible to get FiOS in your area, too. That would give you the best speed, for sure.

Amazon is coded in C++ per Bjarne Stroustrup linked from recent Slashdot article.

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html

I don't know about the other stuff, but you're dead wrong on Stroustrup's position on arrays. Here's what he has to say on the matter:

What's wrong with arrays?

In terms of time and space, an array is just about the optimal construct for accessing a sequence of objects in memory. It is, however, also a very low level data structure with a vast potential for misuse and errors and in essentially all cases there are better alternatives. By "better" I mean easier to write, easier to read, less error prone, and as fast.

The two fundamental problems with arrays are that

* an array doesn't know its own size
* the name of an array converts to a pointer to its first element at the slightest provocation

Naturally, a programmer usually get the size right, but it's extra work and ever so often someone makes the mistake. I prefer the simpler and cleaner version using the standard library vector.

He goes on to make other arguments against using arrays, you can read them here.

Don't you mean: "do I still have a leg to blow off today? ... Nope :("

why do some of you include the cost of the plan in the TCO for the iphone? the new pricing model is the same for all phones (go to ATT and check - the data plan is for PDA/Smartpone, there isn't a line item for the iphone) - so regardless of the hardware you buy your plan is the SAME (minus PAYG which has been dropped for the iphone) ATT PRESS RELEASE: http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=25791 The new agreement between Apple and AT&T eliminates the revenue-sharing model under which AT&T shared a portion of monthly service revenue with Apple. Under the revised agreement, which is consistent with traditional equipment manufacturer-carrier arrangements, there is no revenue sharing and both iPhone 3G models will be offered at attractive prices to broaden the market potential and accelerate subscriber volumes. The phones will be offered with a two-year contract and attractive data plans that are similar to those offered for other smartphones and PDAs. AT&T anticipates that these offers will drive increased sales volumes and revenues among high-quality, data-centric customers. Currently, less than 20 percent of AT&T's postpaid subscribers have integrated devices capable of voice, Web and data applications. Based on the company's experience, average monthly revenues per iPhone subscriber are nearly double the average of the company's overall subscriber base. With a two-year contract, the price of an 8GB iPhone 3G will be $199; the 16GB model will be priced at $299. Unlimited iPhone 3G data plans for consumers will be available for $30 a month, in addition to voice plans starting at $39.99 a month. Unlimited 3G data plans for business users will be available for $45 a month, in addition to a voice plan.

AT&T's wireless Web site is down for maintenance.

http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/site-map

Interesting!

The online encyclopedia of integer sequences says "I am sorry, but the terms do not match anything in the table."

Ma Bell is back. And this time, she's pissed.

Easier said than done when none of the competitors offer anything w/out a contract.

That is not their MEdiaNet plan, that is their PDA plan.

They charge differently for "Smartphones" (per AT&T definition), PDAs and such. Yes, those plans are more expensive.

The Unlimited MEdiaNet plan (ie. unlimited internet access for "regular" cell phones, including unlocked phones like the Nokia N95) is listed here:
http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/services/serviceDetails.jsp?LOSGId=&skuId=sku1160057&catId=cat1470003

AT&T is indeed sold in GiB/MiB:"1,024 kilobytes (KB) = 1 megabyte (MB)" from http://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/popup/dataconnect-comp-table.jsp#laptopconnect

Sprint: yes, from http://nextelonline.nextel.com/en/legal/legal_terms_privacy_popup.shtml

Verizon: yes, from http://b2b.vzw.com/broadband/bba_terms.html

So, yes, they are all sold in binary units, and the SI prefixes are incorrectly used here.

What happens if your not on this list?
You're boned.

Where do you get that number? Last I checked it was more like $70/month. http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phone-plans/pda-personal-plans.jsp