This is VERY true, especially for Nintendo games. As a point of reference, Viewtiful Joe for Gamecube was on store shelves selling for 6800 yen (~$60) when I was in Tokyo last week, compared to the $40 pre-order price here in the U.S.
Good letter. If I had mod points I'd mod you up myself.
you're not really thinking about the big picture
on
Microsoft's Patent Problem
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If someone wants to profit from their own work, they can simply manufacture and sell it.
Ok. Let's say you come up with a great idea for a new chip fabrication process that could potentially increase transistor density by 1000 times. You start up a small business venture and get a loan from the bank and a small group of investors to fund this idea. However, it's very expensive to fully develop this technique. You spend several years and millions of dollars perfecting it (trying different frequencies of lasers, different combinations of semiconductor materials, etc.) but finally get it right.
You start making your chips using this new process, but don't patent the process because patents are bad, mmmkay? Since your chips are so much better than the competition they sell pretty well. In fact, your small business is overwhelmed by orders and you run out of your reserve supply trying to meet the initial demand. However in order to break even on all the money your poured into initial R&D you need to sell tens of millions of units, and it will take at least a year or two just to manufacture that many.
Then, 3 months later, your competitor, which is an entrenched behemoth semiconductor manufacturer, reverse-engineers your process and starts making a duplicate product at much, much lower prices than you charge. Since they don't have to pay back the R&D expense, and their larger facilities mean lower fixed manufacturing costs per-chip, their margins are better even though their price is less than half or yours.
Well, thanks to this new competition you now have to lower your prices to match just to get any sales, meaning your margins are extremely tight and it will now take decades to pay off all those research costs. Plus, your sales are down significantly since the market is now diluted with copycats, and the competition has better brand recognition. You can't sustain enough profits to pay back your debts in a timely fashion (you had to borrow money to conduct research and build your facilities, after all) and are forced into bankruptcy. Thanks to the fact that you didn't have a patent for your invention, you just gave your best idea to the competition for free, and got yourself into bankruptcy to boot.
Yes, God forbid anyone should actually be able to recover the costs associated with researching and developing new technology, let alone be able to profit from it. Patents are not inherently evil. They provide inventors an incentive to spend their time and money developing inventions. If patents didn't exist, inventors would be screwed if they spent their whole lives and fortunes inventing a new widget only to have it copied by a million competitors as soon as it hit the market.
There is a balance, however, between giving the inventor the ability to benefit from their invention, and giving that benefit to society, which is why patents expire. I think if you want to complain about patents, you should complain that they don't expire quickly enough for your tastes. Although, I think patent expirations are a godsend compared to the current expirations on copyrights.
It's easy. Let's say you want to read this article (which is the top story ATM):
"Iraqi Council to Seek U.N. Seat; One G.I. Killed in Baghdad" The URL is:
http://www.nytimes.com/login.asp?URL=http://www. ny times.com/2003/07/14/international/worldspecial/14 CND-IRAQ.html (or something like that)
Well, instead just substitue archive.nytimes.com: http://archive.nytimes.com/l ogin.asp?http://www.ny times.com/2003/07/14/international/worldspecial/14 CND-IRAQ.html
You will get a message that says something like "authorization error" and the browser then takes you back to the front page. However, when you click on the same story, you will get taken to the content rather than a login page.
The *real* karma whores link to http://archive.nytimes.com anyway.
NYTimes have futzed around with it a bit, but if you play with it, it still gives you registration-free access to their content, it just takes a couple of clicks nowadays.
First of all, where in my post did I even suggest that the original poster did not read the article?
Second of all, apparently you aren't very skilled at reading patents, because otherwise you'd be able to differentiate background material (such as an example implementation of the system, which is what you quoted) from the claims, which are the only "true" important part of a patent. I'll quote the claims so you can peruse them:
1. A means for enabling a computer to decode and simulate the use of affective language within an ongoing verbal interaction comprising the steps of:
(a) determining the precise motivational parameters of an ongoing verbal interaction through a matching procedure with a multi-part schematic complement of power pyramid definitions, and
(b) utilizing said determination for employing a further sequence of linguistic transformations predicted from said schematic complement of power pyramid definitions,
whereby enabling a computer to predict a next most probable response within an ongoing verbal interaction, or alternately, offering said next most probable response as originating directly from said computer, simulating artificial intelligence in an ethical mode.
2. A device for decoding and simulating the use of affective language in an ongoing verbal interaction, comprising:
(a) a matching procedure expert system matching said ongoing verbal interaction against a multi-part complement of power pyramid definitions, and
(b) a master control unit expert system determining a next most probable response for said ongoing interaction, in either a passive monitoring mode, or through use of a sentence generator, offering said next most probable response as originating from said computer,
whereby stimulating artificial intelligence in an ethical mode.
Now, please read those claims carefully and explain to me where the author is forcing his own ethics down your throat.
There is nothing in the patent that says he's deciding ethics and morality.
He has simply developed a system which makes it possible to codify a systme of ethics, then make decisions based upon that structure. The ethics in question are not predetermined by the patent or the author, they are part of the system you build in order to create an ethical AI.
I also do not buy "(small) companies can't be bothered to grow that kind of capability..."
What capabilities are necessary to grow? Purchaser still pays shipping, and you create seperate national and international warranty/exchange programs. The national program is the standard warranty, international terms can be whatever you deem, eg:
"Warranty only good in the US."
"International purchasers are liable to shipping costs for returned/exchanged items..."
et cetera. It doesn't seem like much capability growth to me. Perhaps I'm missing something.
Speaking as the manager of an international sales channel, I can hopefully fill you in on the big picture.
Here's a few items off the top of my head:
Infrastructure. There's a lot of little things that you have to do to enable international sales. You need targeted sales and marketing materials. You have to know how much it costs to ship stuff to that country. You need access to people who speak the native language that can help you out with all the business and legal issues that crop up, etc.
Payment. Suppose you ship off an order of widgets to another country, and the credit card turns out to be stolen, or the Purchase Order is reneged, or a myriad of other things that could go wrong with payment happens. You've basically just lost that money, with very little way to recover it. Thanks to the fact that it is an international payment, it might very well cost you much more to attempt to recover the money than the value of the sale. Of course there are steps you can take to mitigate this problem. I had an associate tell me that if I ever sell something to country XYZ, be sure that I have all the money in my bank and accounted for before I even ship anything. This works, but it's a bad solution for other reasons. As the RIAA has shown, there's nothing like treating your customers like criminals to win their loyalty.
Warranties are not necessarily whatever you put on the box. There are laws that state minimum warranties for products, and those laws vary country-to-country and sometimes state-to-state.
Like warranty claims, liability can be a big issue. If the product breaks and causes financial or other damages, the laws of that country take over and determine the liability of the seller. It is very difficult and expensive to sort out these legal issues and establish policies for every country in the world. If you think lawyers are already expensive, you should try hiring a specialist like those that handle international contract law. It is a major bank-buster just to do the proper groundwork and establish a beachhead in a new country.
Customer support is a big issue. It is expensive and difficult to provide adequate customer support to the international community, especially when there are language issues involved. In this particular case the guy happens to be a native English speaker, but I can certainly see why a company would establish a general policy of not selling to some countries. Generally speaking, it's a major pain in the ass. I dunno about Dell, IBM, etc. but I want my company to provide the best customer support possible, and just the language barrier by itself is a detriment to providing a level of support I am comfortable with. Add to that issues with time zones covering reasonable business hours in the country you're selling to, shipping expenses for returns, etc. and customer support can quickly get out of control.
It doesn't matter who owns the copyrights. The statutory license says that if you broadcast *any* performance you must pay royalties, which are then distributed appropriately for you.
That is, unless you negotiate a license directly with the copyright holder (which supercedes the statutory license). See my earlier post for references to the appropriate text of the law in question.
Can you substantiate this claim? It seems that it would be patently illegal to ask for payment to play music that the RIAA members dont have copyright on.
I agree, but that's basically what statutory licensing is all about.
Anyway, here is the proof you asked for. It's in section 114(b)(2) of the Copyright Code.
(2) Statutory licensing of certain transmissions. --
The performance of a sound recording publicly by means of a subscription digital audio transmission not exempt under paragraph (1), an eligible nonsubscription transmission, or a transmission not exempt under paragraph (1) that is made by a preexisting satellite digital audio radio service shall be subject to statutory licensing...
However, as far as I can tell, if the webcaster takes the time to negotiate licenses with individual copyright holders they can avoid these statutory royalties under Section 112(e)(5):
(5) License agreements voluntarily negotiated at any time between 1 or more copyright owners of sound recordings and 1 or more transmitting organizations entitled to obtain a statutory license under this subsection shall be given effect in lieu of any determination by a copyright arbitration royalty panel or decision by the Librarian of Congress.
I'm more interested in seeing actual ideas explored rather than some scantily-clad blonde who looks like every other billboard-queen out there.
Why can't we have both? I mean, I would pay good money to see supermodels intelligently discussing the existentialism of a post-nuclear wasteland dominated by machines.
Re:JR Rowling and initials and fashion...
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 1
Her initials are J.K., but other than that it's true.
You have to wonder about the publishers given the success of other women fantasy authors such as Ursula K. LeGuin.
Maybe they're hoping to sell products designed to stop spam, and are afraid that anti-spam laws might be enough of a preventative measure to impact their potential business. Sorta like how sales of car theft deterrent systems are lower in areas where there are fewer car thefts.
A lot of the problem was that back then people would run their hypersonic CFD analysis, and some other group of people would run their hypersonic propulsion analysis, and another group would run their hypersonic structural analysis, and the dynamic interactions between these disciplines went uncaptured. These interactions between the disciplines are extremely important once you reach hypersonic speeds. A little bit of vibration in the wing can dramatically change the airflow over it, causing a cascade effect that is often unpredictable. Running the analyses separately means you often don't even realize such an interaction is present until you're very far along into the design process.
This effect is mitigated nowadays by tightly coupling the disciplines together into what is called multi-physics analysis. Since the finite element meshes used to model structures looks very different from the structures used to model airflow, for example, there is a lot of calculation behind the scenes that must correlate structural, thermal, and aerodynamic properties into a cohesive model.
Furthermore, the level of detail (number of nodes & elements in the mesh) required for proper hypersonics analysis is much higher than that of "normal" aircraft design. And, the inherently chaotic nature of hypersonics means that it is very difficult to show meaningful results without good probabilistics. Running probabilistic analysis on something so complex, however, requires serious computing resources. Computing resources even a few years later are many times faster now than they were back then, and many improvements have been made to the structure and methods used in parallelizing this kind of interdisciplinary calculation, such as the development of the SIERRA framework developed at Sandia National Labs.
A month of refactoring/cleanup can often pay for itself in increased productivity within a few months. There's nothing like spending a couple weeks to find and fix an old bug, then spending another week to find the same bug again because someone cut-and-pasted code all over the place.
In that case spending a month refactoring won't help much if the offender still uses the same programming methods on new code. But, yeah I do assume that someone competent is making those decisions.
It's not the programmers that pay for large-scale code cleanup, it's the company. A good commercial software manager realizes it's a large investment in time and money to completely refactor code, so if the planned functionality doesn't require a rewrite of that magnitude, they won't do it.
Open-source applications aren't limited by hard deadlines, demanding customers that want the feature yesterday, and budgets that limit the man-hours that can be devoted to a project. An open-source project manager can take all the time in the world to completely redesign a project from scratch and slowly build up the infrastructure necessary to make it happen. As soon as there are thousands of paying customers calling up with feature requests, bug reports, etc. then it's the company's job to fulfill those requests in as timely a fashion as possible, lest they lose their customers. That often means fixing the bug, but leaving an underlying problem in the infrastructure that could be rewritten, but doesn't adversely affect developing or releasing the next version of the software.
RTFA. He liked MacOS (back in the day), but switched because he got a job at a PC mag, and also tried OS/2 but ended up going back to Windows. Let's also try to remember that he works at a PC mag, so more than likely everyone he works with uses Windows for their day-to-day activites, all the documents he works with are MS Office documents, etc. Why would you deliberately alienate yourself from everyone else, especially if you needed to be able to swap documents with everyone for work-related purposes? He doesn't follow Linux news, so he'd have no idea that stuff like OpenOffice even exist unless some kindly folks took the time to dispel his false assumptions.
True, he hasn't actually caused all this damage yet, but the article says that he already had 5000 orders for these decryption devices and he was trying to crack the latest DTV cards.
Ok, so we have 5000 people who might have paid for DirecTV that would instead use this device he sold. Let's imagine that each of these 5000 lost customers would have bought the most expensive package DirecTV offers, which weighs in at around $86/month. In order to break $180 million in damages, each of those 5000 lost customers would have to receive unlimited DirecTV service for approximately 420 years continuously. Where I come from, damages awarded in court are supposed to reflect actual losses, not magic fairy numbers an accountant pulls out of his ass. The damages this guy has to pay are easily 1000 times any reasonable amount of actual losses.
This is not a guy who was just doing this casually. He was trying to make money and already had a warning. Maybe $180 million is too much, but it's not like they expect him to pay it.
WTF are you talking about? If they hand down a judgement for that amount that guy is in debt for the rest of his life until he either dies (I don't believe he can get out of the judgement by filing bankruptcy, but I could be wrong), or pays it off. If he happens to win $180 million playing the lottery next week, he has to hand it over to pay this judgement. He is only paying $500/month because he can't possibly afford to pay more without cutting into expenses so much that he can't afford to live.
It's only a DMCA violation if it is circumventing the protection in order to violate a copyright.
Clearly, they are trying to boot linux on the machine (that's what they're asking for from MS) a.k.a. reverse-engineering to develop compatible system, which is explicitly allowed by the DMCA even if they are circumventing copy protection.
I'd provide a link to the relevant section of the law which states this, but I'm pretty lazy and someone else can use the karma.
If they change ads to make me want to watch them, that's fine by me.
What would be cool is to develop ads that convey a concise "summary" message if they are viewed with fast-forward on, and a more detailed message if viewed in realtime.
they just need the software, did an evaluation, and concluded that to switch over to OSS at this juncture would cost them way more than $471 million thanks to all of the training necessary combined with the very high cost of trying to migrate hundreds of thousands of existing systems and data to a completely different standard.
The DoD and other government entities learned many years ago that they were paying top dollar for hammers and IT work like suckers, and they instituted a lot of very stringent policies that directly address that problem. When they do any kind of major purchase like this you can be sure they have studied it extensively, and sent out RFPs (Request For Proposals) to several competing bidders, fairly evaluated all of the proposals, and selected the winner. $471 million contracts do not get handed out on a handshake anymore because too many people got their ass handed to them in the 80s, and the government took steps to rectify the situation.
Nowadays when bidding on government proposals, you typically have to bid at much lower service rates than you would to a private company, because the proposals are very competitive, and the goverment doesn't want to look like suckers.
If you have an expensive phone, more than likely it is a tri-mode phone meaning it is already compatible with pretty much every network in the US, and many overseas networks as well. By law your provider has to tell you how to unlock your phone to use it with another provider. Although they deliberately make it a bit difficult, it's not too hard to get the appropriate information using google.
Slashdot Mirror
This is VERY true, especially for Nintendo games. As a point of reference, Viewtiful Joe for Gamecube was on store shelves selling for 6800 yen (~$60) when I was in Tokyo last week, compared to the $40 pre-order price here in the U.S.
Good letter. If I had mod points I'd mod you up myself.
Ok. Let's say you come up with a great idea for a new chip fabrication process that could potentially increase transistor density by 1000 times. You start up a small business venture and get a loan from the bank and a small group of investors to fund this idea. However, it's very expensive to fully develop this technique. You spend several years and millions of dollars perfecting it (trying different frequencies of lasers, different combinations of semiconductor materials, etc.) but finally get it right.
You start making your chips using this new process, but don't patent the process because patents are bad, mmmkay? Since your chips are so much better than the competition they sell pretty well. In fact, your small business is overwhelmed by orders and you run out of your reserve supply trying to meet the initial demand. However in order to break even on all the money your poured into initial R&D you need to sell tens of millions of units, and it will take at least a year or two just to manufacture that many.
Then, 3 months later, your competitor, which is an entrenched behemoth semiconductor manufacturer, reverse-engineers your process and starts making a duplicate product at much, much lower prices than you charge. Since they don't have to pay back the R&D expense, and their larger facilities mean lower fixed manufacturing costs per-chip, their margins are better even though their price is less than half or yours.
Well, thanks to this new competition you now have to lower your prices to match just to get any sales, meaning your margins are extremely tight and it will now take decades to pay off all those research costs. Plus, your sales are down significantly since the market is now diluted with copycats, and the competition has better brand recognition. You can't sustain enough profits to pay back your debts in a timely fashion (you had to borrow money to conduct research and build your facilities, after all) and are forced into bankruptcy. Thanks to the fact that you didn't have a patent for your invention, you just gave your best idea to the competition for free, and got yourself into bankruptcy to boot.
Yes, God forbid anyone should actually be able to recover the costs associated with researching and developing new technology, let alone be able to profit from it. Patents are not inherently evil. They provide inventors an incentive to spend their time and money developing inventions. If patents didn't exist, inventors would be screwed if they spent their whole lives and fortunes inventing a new widget only to have it copied by a million competitors as soon as it hit the market.
There is a balance, however, between giving the inventor the ability to benefit from their invention, and giving that benefit to society, which is why patents expire. I think if you want to complain about patents, you should complain that they don't expire quickly enough for your tastes. Although, I think patent expirations are a godsend compared to the current expirations on copyrights.
It's easy. Let's say you want to read this article (which is the top story ATM):
. ny times.com/2003/07/14/international/worldspecial/14 CND-IRAQ.html
l ogin.asp?http://www.ny times.com/2003/07/14/international/worldspecial/14 CND-IRAQ.html
"Iraqi Council to Seek U.N. Seat; One G.I. Killed in Baghdad"
The URL is:
http://www.nytimes.com/login.asp?URL=http://www
(or something like that)
Well, instead just substitue archive.nytimes.com:
http://archive.nytimes.com/
You will get a message that says something like "authorization error" and the browser then takes you back to the front page. However, when you click on the same story, you will get taken to the content rather than a login page.
The *real* karma whores link to http://archive.nytimes.com anyway.
NYTimes have futzed around with it a bit, but if you play with it, it still gives you registration-free access to their content, it just takes a couple of clicks nowadays.
Second of all, apparently you aren't very skilled at reading patents, because otherwise you'd be able to differentiate background material (such as an example implementation of the system, which is what you quoted) from the claims, which are the only "true" important part of a patent. I'll quote the claims so you can peruse them:
Now, please read those claims carefully and explain to me where the author is forcing his own ethics down your throat.
There is nothing in the patent that says he's deciding ethics and morality.
He has simply developed a system which makes it possible to codify a systme of ethics, then make decisions based upon that structure. The ethics in question are not predetermined by the patent or the author, they are part of the system you build in order to create an ethical AI.
Speaking as the manager of an international sales channel, I can hopefully fill you in on the big picture.
It doesn't matter who owns the copyrights. The statutory license says that if you broadcast *any* performance you must pay royalties, which are then distributed appropriately for you.
That is, unless you negotiate a license directly with the copyright holder (which supercedes the statutory license). See my earlier post for references to the appropriate text of the law in question.
I agree, but that's basically what statutory licensing is all about.
Anyway, here is the proof you asked for. It's in section 114(b)(2) of the Copyright Code.
Link
However, as far as I can tell, if the webcaster takes the time to negotiate licenses with individual copyright holders they can avoid these statutory royalties under Section 112(e)(5):
Link
Why can't we have both? I mean, I would pay good money to see supermodels intelligently discussing the existentialism of a post-nuclear wasteland dominated by machines.
Her initials are J.K., but other than that it's true.
You have to wonder about the publishers given the success of other women fantasy authors such as Ursula K. LeGuin.
You slashdotted PA. I'll bet this is one time they wished they had a micropayment system.
Maybe they're hoping to sell products designed to stop spam, and are afraid that anti-spam laws might be enough of a preventative measure to impact their potential business. Sorta like how sales of car theft deterrent systems are lower in areas where there are fewer car thefts.
A lot of the problem was that back then people would run their hypersonic CFD analysis, and some other group of people would run their hypersonic propulsion analysis, and another group would run their hypersonic structural analysis, and the dynamic interactions between these disciplines went uncaptured. These interactions between the disciplines are extremely important once you reach hypersonic speeds. A little bit of vibration in the wing can dramatically change the airflow over it, causing a cascade effect that is often unpredictable. Running the analyses separately means you often don't even realize such an interaction is present until you're very far along into the design process.
This effect is mitigated nowadays by tightly coupling the disciplines together into what is called multi-physics analysis. Since the finite element meshes used to model structures looks very different from the structures used to model airflow, for example, there is a lot of calculation behind the scenes that must correlate structural, thermal, and aerodynamic properties into a cohesive model.
Furthermore, the level of detail (number of nodes & elements in the mesh) required for proper hypersonics analysis is much higher than that of "normal" aircraft design. And, the inherently chaotic nature of hypersonics means that it is very difficult to show meaningful results without good probabilistics. Running probabilistic analysis on something so complex, however, requires serious computing resources. Computing resources even a few years later are many times faster now than they were back then, and many improvements have been made to the structure and methods used in parallelizing this kind of interdisciplinary calculation, such as the development of the SIERRA framework developed at Sandia National Labs.
In that case spending a month refactoring won't help much if the offender still uses the same programming methods on new code. But, yeah I do assume that someone competent is making those decisions.
It's not the programmers that pay for large-scale code cleanup, it's the company. A good commercial software manager realizes it's a large investment in time and money to completely refactor code, so if the planned functionality doesn't require a rewrite of that magnitude, they won't do it.
Open-source applications aren't limited by hard deadlines, demanding customers that want the feature yesterday, and budgets that limit the man-hours that can be devoted to a project. An open-source project manager can take all the time in the world to completely redesign a project from scratch and slowly build up the infrastructure necessary to make it happen. As soon as there are thousands of paying customers calling up with feature requests, bug reports, etc. then it's the company's job to fulfill those requests in as timely a fashion as possible, lest they lose their customers. That often means fixing the bug, but leaving an underlying problem in the infrastructure that could be rewritten, but doesn't adversely affect developing or releasing the next version of the software.
Well, if he's selling cars for less than he pays for them, he can certainly get out of paying income taxes, since he won't have any.
RTFA. He liked MacOS (back in the day), but switched because he got a job at a PC mag, and also tried OS/2 but ended up going back to Windows. Let's also try to remember that he works at a PC mag, so more than likely everyone he works with uses Windows for their day-to-day activites, all the documents he works with are MS Office documents, etc. Why would you deliberately alienate yourself from everyone else, especially if you needed to be able to swap documents with everyone for work-related purposes? He doesn't follow Linux news, so he'd have no idea that stuff like OpenOffice even exist unless some kindly folks took the time to dispel his false assumptions.
Ok, so we have 5000 people who might have paid for DirecTV that would instead use this device he sold. Let's imagine that each of these 5000 lost customers would have bought the most expensive package DirecTV offers, which weighs in at around $86/month. In order to break $180 million in damages, each of those 5000 lost customers would have to receive unlimited DirecTV service for approximately 420 years continuously. Where I come from, damages awarded in court are supposed to reflect actual losses, not magic fairy numbers an accountant pulls out of his ass. The damages this guy has to pay are easily 1000 times any reasonable amount of actual losses.
WTF are you talking about? If they hand down a judgement for that amount that guy is in debt for the rest of his life until he either dies (I don't believe he can get out of the judgement by filing bankruptcy, but I could be wrong), or pays it off. If he happens to win $180 million playing the lottery next week, he has to hand it over to pay this judgement. He is only paying $500/month because he can't possibly afford to pay more without cutting into expenses so much that he can't afford to live.It's only a DMCA violation if it is circumventing the protection in order to violate a copyright.
Clearly, they are trying to boot linux on the machine (that's what they're asking for from MS) a.k.a. reverse-engineering to develop compatible system, which is explicitly allowed by the DMCA even if they are circumventing copy protection.
I'd provide a link to the relevant section of the law which states this, but I'm pretty lazy and someone else can use the karma.
If they change ads to make me want to watch them, that's fine by me.
What would be cool is to develop ads that convey a concise "summary" message if they are viewed with fast-forward on, and a more detailed message if viewed in realtime.
they just need the software, did an evaluation, and concluded that to switch over to OSS at this juncture would cost them way more than $471 million thanks to all of the training necessary combined with the very high cost of trying to migrate hundreds of thousands of existing systems and data to a completely different standard.
The DoD and other government entities learned many years ago that they were paying top dollar for hammers and IT work like suckers, and they instituted a lot of very stringent policies that directly address that problem. When they do any kind of major purchase like this you can be sure they have studied it extensively, and sent out RFPs (Request For Proposals) to several competing bidders, fairly evaluated all of the proposals, and selected the winner. $471 million contracts do not get handed out on a handshake anymore because too many people got their ass handed to them in the 80s, and the government took steps to rectify the situation.
Nowadays when bidding on government proposals, you typically have to bid at much lower service rates than you would to a private company, because the proposals are very competitive, and the goverment doesn't want to look like suckers.
If you have an expensive phone, more than likely it is a tri-mode phone meaning it is already compatible with pretty much every network in the US, and many overseas networks as well. By law your provider has to tell you how to unlock your phone to use it with another provider. Although they deliberately make it a bit difficult, it's not too hard to get the appropriate information using google.