Amen to that. (Sorry, couldn't resist carrying on the biblical theme.) Opera is perhaps the single most innovative piece of software that I've used in the last ten years.
I don't know why it is, but Opera does almost everything right. And it's doesn't have one or two innovations, it has dozens of them - even after having used the browser for months I'm still barely scratching the surface of its power and flexibility.
I won't bore you with a feature list, I'll just give you one piece of very good advice: try it for a week and decide for yourself. It makes MSIE, Netscape and Mozilla all look very stupid. This is one product that is worth its weight in gold. (And, for those of you with very tight budgets or who like to try before you buy, there is a free version as well.)
The last product that I encountered that impressed me even a tenth as much as Opera was Lotus Improv and it's not like I've been in software stasis since then.
If Netscape had been half as innovative as Opera then perhaps it wouldn't have lost the browser war to Microsoft. At the very least we would have had a better MSIE as Microsoft played catch-up.
You're the CEO of a dotcom. You're VC cash is rapidly running out. You're close to being profitable but not quite there yet. The end of the tunnel is siz, maybe twelve months ahead, after which even the conservative forecasts have you in the clear. But, to make sure you're still around in six months, you need to generate some cash now. You and your board have explored all other avenues and have come to the conclusion that your customer database - a prized but untapped asset - is the only way that you're going to generate some cash.
Do you:
A) Sell/loan all customer information (even down to their mothers' maiden names)? B) Sell/load some customer information (but nothing that's personal such as a name or address)? or C) Sell no customer information, go into liquidation, wave goodbye to your job, salary, stock options, pension plan, future employment opportunities, those of your co-workers and your entire company?
If you answered C, bzzzt thanks for playing. This is a real world. Any CEO who answered C would be out on their ass and the next guy in his/her seat would be the one picking A or B. Sorry, but we don't live in an ideal world and that's the plain truth.
In business, when you're balls are on the line you don't get any prizes for being a nice guy. Deciding in favour of yourself, your employees and your customers at the expense of some of your customers (remember, not every customer will care about the privacy issues, or even be fully aware of them) is a no-brainer.
If you answered A then you got it right. After all, you know some of your customers personally, or you're probably one yourself, so you don't want to give out all that information. It'll be pretty hard to look your friends, family and neighbours in the face if the junk mail, etc that they've been getting is because of a bad business decision that you made.
If you answered B then you've saved your company but sold your soul. You might not give the decision a second thought but some of your customers will. It only takes one or two to kick up a real fuss and your ass will be on the line again. The last thing you need is a mass customer exodus or, worse, death threats from less well-adjusted ex-customers arriving to your home address.
I'm not suggesting that selling customer info is right. I'm not condoning that. Not for even a second. All I'm saying here is that CEOs sometimes have to make tough decisions. And those decisions often have to do with chosing the lesser of two (many) evils.
Q: What do you call a company that doesn't make a profit?
A: Fucked.
The main reason that most companies exist is to profit from their customers. Without making money from their customers, companies cannot pay their staff, their suppliers, their rent or their other bills and soon fold.
No matter how well-intentioned or altruistic the principles of the company may be, any company that fails to generate revenue is doomed to failure - that's a fact that's pretty obvious to most of us but one that seems to have only just become clear to the management teams of a lot of dotcoms.
Besides selling me something (or, better still, getting me to sell it for them on their behalf), there's only one way that a company can profit from me and that's by selling what it knows about me, my lifestyle and my shopping habits.
I'm sure a lot of people would rather the online bookstore that they use went bust rather than even sharing one tiny shred of personal data but that's just not going to happen. After all, when it talk to its advertisers, a company will always give a generic breakdown of its customers, their typical spends and their buying patterns, and that's just as true of etailers as it is of retailers.
Clearly, a company that will sell every last personal detail is not the kind of company that you want to deal with. But one that just describes you as customer a, living in country b, buying c items a month and spending an average of d on them isn't doing your privacy too much harm when it aggregates that data with that of 100,000 others before passing it on to a third party.
That being said, I'll say what I've said countless times before: companies will always put profit before people.
I've not seen it in action, but Expose strikes me as being the kind of feature that we want to see in our operating systems and applications - like most real software innovations, it's quick, simple and does something useful.
Features like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, show desktop, context-sensitive help, tooltips, etc don't add to what you can acheive with your software but they do add to the richness of your user-experience by making software more flexible and user-friendly.
Very few computing tasks are truly intuitive - if you want proof of this, try putting a novice in front of a PC and watch them struggle with even the most basic concepts - but adding nice touches like this really do help users feel more at ease with their computers and more productive in the long run.
It's not earth-shattering stuff but it's stuff like this that's made today's software so much more accessible to the masses than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.
Is it me or do the three guys pictured in the article look like they're identical? I mean, even their baseball caps, t-shirts and footwear are the same and their only distinguishing features are their trousers - presumably so that they can tell each other apart.
Hmmm, clones with rockets. Where have I heard that before?
No, the real irony is that, on a site that claims to deliver "news for nerds", a significant proportion of the stories are either old, factually incorrect and/or dupes.
Re:South Park episode display classic irony
on
Isn't It Ironic?
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· Score: 1
See, Nodatadj tried to correct spun's definition of ironic but missed the target and needed your help with the correct definition of the word - now that's ironic.
Re:South Park episode display classic irony
on
Isn't It Ironic?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Let's not forget that giving diseased blankets to Native Americans who had no resistance to European infections (because they had never been previously exposed to them) was a favourite trick in the days of the open frontiers.
When times were bad for the pilgrims, the Native Americans shared what they had with them, hence Thanksgiving. When times were good, the European settlers fucked over the Native Americans every chance they got (and they still do), hence the virtually non-existant Native American population in the US today.
It's nice that, in the nation's capital, a city named after the first European settler to preside over the US, the nation's pride in its indigenous peoples is proudly displayed in the name of that city's NFL franchise, the Washington Redskins, and on the side of it's helmets. Perhaps, in centuries to come, people of Latin American and African descent will be equally honoured by NFL teams called the LA Niggers or the Miami Dagos.
Your Rights Online: EMI and Sony Lose Lawsuit Over Crippled Music Disks
Music Disks?
Ahem. Compact Discs, Hard Disk Drives. It's not that hard to get right.
I'm sure someone will mod this down as flamebait but, seriously, would it kill the editors to do their jobs and actually edit the articles that get posted?
1. As someone has said elsewhere already in another post, terrorist is what the big army calls the small army. For example:
i) The French Resistance during World War Two (WWII) were regarded by the Nazis as terrorists. ii) Irish republican terrorists regard themselves as freedom fighters.
Clearly, resistance/freedom fighters and terrorists are interchangeable, depending on your political worldview. One man's terrorist truly is another man's freedom fighter.
2. Saddam Hussein wasn't an international terrorist.
He may have started the Iran-Iraq War (with US backing, I might just add), invaded Kuwait (which, as he claimed, was historically part of Iraq before the region was divided up after WWII by the British), and launched Scud missiles at Israel (during the Gulf War) but all of those acts were carried out by one nation upon another in open war.
As despicable as you might have found them, these were all acts of war, and acts of war aren't terrorism.
By your definition, the US is guilty of many acts of terrorism, the latest invasion of Iraq being the latest in a long line of unwanted incursions into other sovereign states.
3. The people of Iraq aren't free.
US forces committing house-to-house searches, stripping people of personal firearms (in Iraq, virtually every household has at least two rifles), restricting travel and firing upon civilian vehicles that fail to observe strict checkpoint procedures, former Ba'ath party members being banned from any official posts (including judges and doctors, who by law had to be members of that party to have served previously), etc is what you call free?
So, the people in Iraq live in conditions that no American would ever have to (there are at least three violations of the US constitution in the last paragraph), yet to you they are free?
Well, it's nice to know that double standards aren't dead.
4. When did the US ever "liberate" Cuba, as you suggest?
I remember the US backing the Bay of Pigs fiasco, supporting Fidel Castro's political enemies in their attempt to overthrow him, but when did the US ever "free" Cuba?
Unilateral US intervention in other countries, especially in Latin America, has been a disaster in almost every case. Want some examples? Here are three:
1953: US overthrows Prime Minister Mossadeq of Iran and installs the Shah as a dictator. Widescale human rights abuses take become commonplace.
1954: US overthrows democratically-elected President Arbenz of Guatemala and installs Castillo Armas in power as a dictator. Between 1954 and 1990, the US-backed military regimes murdered almost 200,000 civilians and widescale human rights abuses take become commonplace.
1973: US stages coup in Chile. Democratically-elected President Salvador Allende assassinated after US President Richard Nixon orders CIA not to let Allende take office. US-backed dictator General Augusto Pinochet installed in power as a dictator. Thousands of Allende supporters killed and widescale human rights abuses take become commonplace.
And, while we're at it, how was the US intervention in the Philippines beneficial to its people? What was so good about the US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos? The mass infringement of civil liberties? The corruption? The widescale human rights abuses? The open assassinations of political opponents?
And I haven't even mentioned the 4 million South East Asians that were killed by US forces during the Vietnam War.
I'm sorry, buy you have a seriously fucked-up view of how much "good" the US has done around the world and how "beneficial" its been to the countries and the people concerned. Consider yourself fortunate that nobody's been that "good" to you and do yourself a favour by reading a book or doing some online research before you start spouting rubbish about "definition changing".
There really was no such thing as a Japanes civilian. If we hadn't done that, they most likely would have fought till every last man (or woman or child).
1. You seem to be under the mistaken belief that children, even infants, are capable of presenting a threat to soldiers.
Do you know how silly that sounds? A new-born baby isn't a civilian but a combatant? Are you completely stupid?
2. The Geneva Convention defines who is a combatant and who isn't.
Non-combatant men, women and children aren't legitimate targets. Treating them as such isn't very civilised, no matter what you might say.
3. If nukes had to be dropped, they didn't have to be dropped on civilian populations.
The US deliberately targetted two cities with its nuclear strikes against Japan. Clearly, they could have just as easily hit military targets or areas that weren't as heavily populated. Either of these two options would have had just the same effect - showing the Japanese government that they could be totally destroyed if necessary, and that immediate surrender was the sane only option.
It must be nice to be able to not only ignore the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated needlessly but also believe that the massacre of hundreds of thousands was a good thing. Ironically, 1984 gave us a word that describes twisting of facts in ones head like this perfectly: doublethink.
My personal philosophy...
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Minor point, which may only be of interest to the pedants out there but the plural of Secretary General isn't Secretary Generals, it's Secretaries General.
Why so? Because they are secretaries, not generals.
Thanks for the link. Normally, for a file of this size I would look for a BitTorrent link but I think Microsoft can afford the bandwidth hit of us all downloading it individually.
And, for what it's worth, I agree with your sentiments about Windows 2000. Without a doubt, it's the best OS that Microsoft have ever released.
I don't see what this has to do with SCO. I read scodot.org for all the SCO news, not for some unrelated tosh about a piece of kit which is guaranteed to have the MPAA kicking your door down!
Tivo runs on Linux (get your Tivo code here), so this is a SCO story after all.
Some people thought you were kidding but you know and I know that you were being deadly serious, right buddy?
Side note: How can a patent with over 20 references be considered new and innovative? Seriously, that's not genius or inspiration, it's adding 1+1. Looking through the software patents, it's a joke that most of them got granted - the Cheif Patent Officer must be Obvious Guy.
Sorry, but your post is in clear violation of my adding two numbers together patent.
You're so right. I wish I had such a commanding control of sarcasm. Maybe if I wasn't such a disemboweled chickenshit eunuch I could get a brain, grow up and create a Slashdot login so I could post stuff that makes me sound clever (by repeating disingenuous lies) instead of meaning what I say, anonymously.
3. See the comment I made in point 4 of my original post. People can tell it's your mobile they're calling you on because of its area code.
That's not necessarily true, cell #'s can have the same area code as any other landline number in an area. However they do have seperate exchange number - as they need to have that. - but really, why is that such a problem?
Thanks for pointing that out. Perhaps you missed the fact that my original post was pointing out the differences between the US system and those in use elsewhere! D'oh!
2. It's a problem if you can't wake up one morning and say "screw x, I'm gonna switch to y" without having to go out and spend a pile of cash buying a brand new handset and thus get screwed yourself.
4. One provider? That's not exactly a lot of choice is it? What happens if it's that one provider that you don't want to do business with? Or when they hike their prices on you? The words "shit", "creek" and "paddle" spring to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
...because the number of software patents alone in the 1990s would have given him a heart attack.
Amen to that. (Sorry, couldn't resist carrying on the biblical theme.) Opera is perhaps the single most innovative piece of software that I've used in the last ten years.
I don't know why it is, but Opera does almost everything right. And it's doesn't have one or two innovations, it has dozens of them - even after having used the browser for months I'm still barely scratching the surface of its power and flexibility.
I won't bore you with a feature list, I'll just give you one piece of very good advice: try it for a week and decide for yourself. It makes MSIE, Netscape and Mozilla all look very stupid. This is one product that is worth its weight in gold. (And, for those of you with very tight budgets or who like to try before you buy, there is a free version as well.)
The last product that I encountered that impressed me even a tenth as much as Opera was Lotus Improv and it's not like I've been in software stasis since then.
If Netscape had been half as innovative as Opera then perhaps it wouldn't have lost the browser war to Microsoft. At the very least we would have had a better MSIE as Microsoft played catch-up.
You're the CEO of a dotcom. You're VC cash is rapidly running out. You're close to being profitable but not quite there yet. The end of the tunnel is siz, maybe twelve months ahead, after which even the conservative forecasts have you in the clear. But, to make sure you're still around in six months, you need to generate some cash now. You and your board have explored all other avenues and have come to the conclusion that your customer database - a prized but untapped asset - is the only way that you're going to generate some cash.
Do you:
A) Sell/loan all customer information (even down to their mothers' maiden names)?
B) Sell/load some customer information (but nothing that's personal such as a name or address)? or
C) Sell no customer information, go into liquidation, wave goodbye to your job, salary, stock options, pension plan, future employment opportunities, those of your co-workers and your entire company?
If you answered C, bzzzt thanks for playing. This is a real world. Any CEO who answered C would be out on their ass and the next guy in his/her seat would be the one picking A or B. Sorry, but we don't live in an ideal world and that's the plain truth.
In business, when you're balls are on the line you don't get any prizes for being a nice guy. Deciding in favour of yourself, your employees and your customers at the expense of some of your customers (remember, not every customer will care about the privacy issues, or even be fully aware of them) is a no-brainer.
If you answered A then you got it right. After all, you know some of your customers personally, or you're probably one yourself, so you don't want to give out all that information. It'll be pretty hard to look your friends, family and neighbours in the face if the junk mail, etc that they've been getting is because of a bad business decision that you made.
If you answered B then you've saved your company but sold your soul. You might not give the decision a second thought but some of your customers will. It only takes one or two to kick up a real fuss and your ass will be on the line again. The last thing you need is a mass customer exodus or, worse, death threats from less well-adjusted ex-customers arriving to your home address.
I'm not suggesting that selling customer info is right. I'm not condoning that. Not for even a second. All I'm saying here is that CEOs sometimes have to make tough decisions. And those decisions often have to do with chosing the lesser of two (many) evils.
If you're the CEO, which are you going to pick?
Q: What do you call a company that doesn't make a profit?
A: Fucked.
The main reason that most companies exist is to profit from their customers. Without making money from their customers, companies cannot pay their staff, their suppliers, their rent or their other bills and soon fold.
No matter how well-intentioned or altruistic the principles of the company may be, any company that fails to generate revenue is doomed to failure - that's a fact that's pretty obvious to most of us but one that seems to have only just become clear to the management teams of a lot of dotcoms.
Besides selling me something (or, better still, getting me to sell it for them on their behalf), there's only one way that a company can profit from me and that's by selling what it knows about me, my lifestyle and my shopping habits.
I'm sure a lot of people would rather the online bookstore that they use went bust rather than even sharing one tiny shred of personal data but that's just not going to happen. After all, when it talk to its advertisers, a company will always give a generic breakdown of its customers, their typical spends and their buying patterns, and that's just as true of etailers as it is of retailers.
Clearly, a company that will sell every last personal detail is not the kind of company that you want to deal with. But one that just describes you as customer a, living in country b, buying c items a month and spending an average of d on them isn't doing your privacy too much harm when it aggregates that data with that of 100,000 others before passing it on to a third party.
That being said, I'll say what I've said countless times before: companies will always put profit before people.
I've not seen it in action, but Expose strikes me as being the kind of feature that we want to see in our operating systems and applications - like most real software innovations, it's quick, simple and does something useful.
Features like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, show desktop, context-sensitive help, tooltips, etc don't add to what you can acheive with your software but they do add to the richness of your user-experience by making software more flexible and user-friendly.
Very few computing tasks are truly intuitive - if you want proof of this, try putting a novice in front of a PC and watch them struggle with even the most basic concepts - but adding nice touches like this really do help users feel more at ease with their computers and more productive in the long run.
It's not earth-shattering stuff but it's stuff like this that's made today's software so much more accessible to the masses than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.
Is it me or do the three guys pictured in the article look like they're identical? I mean, even their baseball caps, t-shirts and footwear are the same and their only distinguishing features are their trousers - presumably so that they can tell each other apart.
Hmmm, clones with rockets. Where have I heard that before?
What's the attraction?
Chicks dig things that big, that aerodynamic and with that much thrust.
No, the real irony is that, on a site that claims to deliver "news for nerds", a significant proportion of the stories are either old, factually incorrect and/or dupes.
See, Nodatadj tried to correct spun's definition of ironic but missed the target and needed your help with the correct definition of the word - now that's ironic.
Let's not forget that giving diseased blankets to Native Americans who had no resistance to European infections (because they had never been previously exposed to them) was a favourite trick in the days of the open frontiers.
When times were bad for the pilgrims, the Native Americans shared what they had with them, hence Thanksgiving. When times were good, the European settlers fucked over the Native Americans every chance they got (and they still do), hence the virtually non-existant Native American population in the US today.
It's nice that, in the nation's capital, a city named after the first European settler to preside over the US, the nation's pride in its indigenous peoples is proudly displayed in the name of that city's NFL franchise, the Washington Redskins, and on the side of it's helmets. Perhaps, in centuries to come, people of Latin American and African descent will be equally honoured by NFL teams called the LA Niggers or the Miami Dagos.
Your Rights Online: EMI and Sony Lose Lawsuit Over Crippled Music Disks
Music Disks?
Ahem. Compact Discs, Hard Disk Drives. It's not that hard to get right.
I'm sure someone will mod this down as flamebait but, seriously, would it kill the editors to do their jobs and actually edit the articles that get posted?
1. As someone has said elsewhere already in another post, terrorist is what the big army calls the small army. For example:
i) The French Resistance during World War Two (WWII) were regarded by the Nazis as terrorists.
ii) Irish republican terrorists regard themselves as freedom fighters.
Clearly, resistance/freedom fighters and terrorists are interchangeable, depending on your political worldview. One man's terrorist truly is another man's freedom fighter.
2. Saddam Hussein wasn't an international terrorist.
He may have started the Iran-Iraq War (with US backing, I might just add), invaded Kuwait (which, as he claimed, was historically part of Iraq before the region was divided up after WWII by the British), and launched Scud missiles at Israel (during the Gulf War) but all of those acts were carried out by one nation upon another in open war.
As despicable as you might have found them, these were all acts of war, and acts of war aren't terrorism.
By your definition, the US is guilty of many acts of terrorism, the latest invasion of Iraq being the latest in a long line of unwanted incursions into other sovereign states.
3. The people of Iraq aren't free.
US forces committing house-to-house searches, stripping people of personal firearms (in Iraq, virtually every household has at least two rifles), restricting travel and firing upon civilian vehicles that fail to observe strict checkpoint procedures, former Ba'ath party members being banned from any official posts (including judges and doctors, who by law had to be members of that party to have served previously), etc is what you call free?
So, the people in Iraq live in conditions that no American would ever have to (there are at least three violations of the US constitution in the last paragraph), yet to you they are free?
Well, it's nice to know that double standards aren't dead.
4. When did the US ever "liberate" Cuba, as you suggest?
I remember the US backing the Bay of Pigs fiasco, supporting Fidel Castro's political enemies in their attempt to overthrow him, but when did the US ever "free" Cuba?
Unilateral US intervention in other countries, especially in Latin America, has been a disaster in almost every case. Want some examples? Here are three:
1953: US overthrows Prime Minister Mossadeq of Iran and installs the Shah as a dictator. Widescale human rights abuses take become commonplace.
1954: US overthrows democratically-elected President Arbenz of Guatemala and installs Castillo Armas in power as a dictator. Between 1954 and 1990, the US-backed military regimes murdered almost 200,000 civilians and widescale human rights abuses take become commonplace.
1973: US stages coup in Chile. Democratically-elected President Salvador Allende assassinated after US President Richard Nixon orders CIA not to let Allende take office. US-backed dictator General Augusto Pinochet installed in power as a dictator. Thousands of Allende supporters killed and widescale human rights abuses take become commonplace.
And, while we're at it, how was the US intervention in the Philippines beneficial to its people? What was so good about the US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos? The mass infringement of civil liberties? The corruption? The widescale human rights abuses? The open assassinations of political opponents?
And I haven't even mentioned the 4 million South East Asians that were killed by US forces during the Vietnam War.
I'm sorry, buy you have a seriously fucked-up view of how much "good" the US has done around the world and how "beneficial" its been to the countries and the people concerned. Consider yourself fortunate that nobody's been that "good" to you and do yourself a favour by reading a book or doing some online research before you start spouting rubbish about "definition changing".
There really was no such thing as a Japanes civilian. If we hadn't done that, they most likely would have fought till every last man (or woman or child).
1. You seem to be under the mistaken belief that children, even infants, are capable of presenting a threat to soldiers.
Do you know how silly that sounds? A new-born baby isn't a civilian but a combatant? Are you completely stupid?
2. The Geneva Convention defines who is a combatant and who isn't.
Non-combatant men, women and children aren't legitimate targets. Treating them as such isn't very civilised, no matter what you might say.
3. If nukes had to be dropped, they didn't have to be dropped on civilian populations.
The US deliberately targetted two cities with its nuclear strikes against Japan. Clearly, they could have just as easily hit military targets or areas that weren't as heavily populated. Either of these two options would have had just the same effect - showing the Japanese government that they could be totally destroyed if necessary, and that immediate surrender was the sane only option.
It must be nice to be able to not only ignore the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated needlessly but also believe that the massacre of hundreds of thousands was a good thing. Ironically, 1984 gave us a word that describes twisting of facts in ones head like this perfectly: doublethink.
Work to live, don't live to work.
Anything else is just crazy.
Gates are all well and good but what if your developers have left you with secret backdoors?
Minor point, which may only be of interest to the pedants out there but the plural of Secretary General isn't Secretary Generals, it's Secretaries General.
Why so? Because they are secretaries, not generals.
Thanks for the link. Normally, for a file of this size I would look for a BitTorrent link but I think Microsoft can afford the bandwidth hit of us all downloading it individually.
And, for what it's worth, I agree with your sentiments about Windows 2000. Without a doubt, it's the best OS that Microsoft have ever released.
The US pattent office is well on it's way to push every profitable tech offshore... hey, maybe I should pattent that !
Whilst you're at it, why don't you patent adding extra apostrophes to words for no reason and extra spacing in front of exclamation marks too!
I don't see what this has to do with SCO. I read scodot.org for all the SCO news, not for some unrelated tosh about a piece of kit which is guaranteed to have the MPAA kicking your door down!
Tivo runs on Linux (get your Tivo code here), so this is a SCO story after all.
Some people thought you were kidding but you know and I know that you were being deadly serious, right buddy?
Or are we going to have to wait until someone releases a distro that does all this on PC hardware?
Yes.
not-inexpensive = not-in-unaffordable, and for now not-unimpractical to even consider using just to record TV shows.
:)
"not-in-unaffordable"? " not-unimpractical"?
Wow, I bet your English teacher loved you.
Side note: How can a patent with over 20 references be considered new and innovative? Seriously, that's not genius or inspiration, it's adding 1+1. Looking through the software patents, it's a joke that most of them got granted - the Cheif Patent Officer must be Obvious Guy.
Sorry, but your post is in clear violation of my adding two numbers together patent.
You're so right. I wish I had such a commanding control of sarcasm. Maybe if I wasn't such a disemboweled chickenshit eunuch I could get a brain, grow up and create a Slashdot login so I could post stuff that makes me sound clever (by repeating disingenuous lies) instead of meaning what I say, anonymously.
-Aaron Evans, ahde@kfalls.net
And which "disingenuous lies" would that be?
2. It's a problem if you can't wake up one morning and say "screw x, I'm gonna switch to y" without having to go out and spend a pile of cash buying a brand new handset and thus get screwed yourself.
4. One provider? That's not exactly a lot of choice is it? What happens if it's that one provider that you don't want to do business with? Or when they hike their prices on you? The words "shit", "creek" and "paddle" spring to mind.