Sadly, as much as I had hope that Obama's administration would be beginning mark of when the government would at least play by the rules publicly, it looks as if the folk running the show now are just as willing to subvert the letter of the law to whatever means they consider expedient rather than go the more righteous route of doing it the hard way without cheating.
I was looking for a pithy quote I could give you from that classic British sitcom, "Yes, Minister" (and the sequel, "Yes, Prime Minister"), to demonstrate that what the people in charge would like you to believe and what actually winds up happening are two different things. Particularly as even the most senior politicians have at best a tenuous grasp of the machinations of the system they're supposed to be controlling.
About 60% of the show consisted of jokes, comments and otherwise insightful remarks along those lines, it'd take all day to track down the most appropriate. About all I can do is refer you to the box set of DVDs.
Were the people currently in Guantanamo US citizens or in US jurisdiction at the time of their "arrest"? "We don't like him" seems to be exactly the normal reason for being sent there.
Let's face it, when was the last time the USA didn't take an opportunity to look as hypocritical as possible on the world stage?
The US was shipping people to the US for crimes with only a very tenuous link to the US way before Guantanamo became a prison camp. Howard Marks is one example, and if there's one example it strikes me that there are very likely others.
The problem with wireless isn't a lack of regulation but lack of competition that results in governments allowing a few companies to oligopolize a medium that costs nothing.
Yes and no. The cost of running the service itself is peanuts - there is nothing intrinsic to the act of carrying a call - or for that matter data - which costs money over and above that required to run the network idle with nothing at all going over it.
The cost of buying all the equipment, installing power for it (quite often these base stations are in areas where you'll have to pay a fair wedge to the electricity company to lay on power), networking it (it's a wired network once it leaves the base station; you need thousands of base stations and again, not all of them are going to be in areas where it's cheap & easy to get wired networking) is actually pretty expensive.
You'll have to give the usual 30 days notice, but you should be able to use this to get out provided you do so immediately (if you don't, they could argue that you've accepted the change). And no, they shouldn't ask for your phone back.
I did exactly this when O2 changed the terms to take 08xx numbers out of the free minutes (they were one of the last operators to do this). I was a Carphone Warehouse customer - they did try and claim it was perfectly OK but the contract just said any change to your [the customer's] detriment is grounds for cancellation.
Which it probably would be under UK consumer law anyway, but IME most CSRs aren't too hot on UK consumer law so it's much easier to get out using the contract.
You could probably use UK consumer law to a similar effect but you'd have to write to them, when they (inevitably) refuse to cancel the contract you'd very likely have to either take them to court or cancel your direct debit and let them take you to court - either way, you'll be looking at several months of aggro and a good chance of your number being blocked. Much easier to get out on the basis of the contract itself.
Contract schmontract, you have a statutory right to break the agreement if they make a change which is to your detriment. That's true even if the contract explicitly gives them the right to make such a change. Statutory rights trump contracts, warranties, fine print, and everything else.
Be that as it may, I guarantee you the CSRs haven't been told that. In fact, there's a very good chance that everyone up the chain of command (or at least everyone you're likely to be able to get on the phone) doesn't know that.
It's almost certainly going to be easier to get out of using the contract than it is to invoke your statutory rights.
You are not paying for the phone alongside it! Where did you get that idea? Lose it!
While it's technically true, most mobile phone contracts aren't worded like that. I wouldn't be surprised if your contract simply says you are obliged to pay them £N/month for two years and the nice girl in the shop was under strict instructions not to let you walk out with an iPhone until you had signed such a contract.
I've got out of phone contracts myself before - unless the T-Mobile contract is dramatically different to the ones I've seen, this technique works quite well:
There's plenty of competition in the UK. They must think that their competitors are going to pull a similar stunt. I wonder what will happen when people on T-Mobile contracts start complaining to the regulator.
They probably will. While the mobile companies do their damnedest to make it difficult to compare, if you put together a spreadsheet of price plans detailing "Monthly cost", "Maximum value of subsidy offered for that cost", "Number of Free minutes", "Number of Free text messages" and "Amount of data", you'd be surprised how similar they generally come out at.
Ha! I like that. I may have to try it myself - write to my phone provider and tell them I'm introducing such a thing. If they turn around and say "You can't do that" I'll say "I'm doing it for all companies I deal with, you're not being singled out and you have no right to complain".
Read your contract. While they're usually in pretty small print, the important clauses that apply here are probably not all that long or complicated - and there is every chance that there really is no clause in the contract that allows them to do this, particularly if you're signed up through a retailer like Carphone Warehouse.
Once you've done that - and assuming I'm right and they have broken the contract - call cancellations and ask for a PAC code to move your number elsewhere. When they say you're still under contract, point out that T-Mobile have broken the terms of that contract.
They may try a number of tricks to argue that it still applies. I've faced a similar issue with a different provider and I've been told:
"You aren't doing the thing we're charging you more for anyway, so it doesn't affect you and therefore doesn't apply". (Really? Where in the contract does it say they can do that? How do they know that your circumstances aren't about to change such that you will be doing it in the near future? Because you've got it in front of you, you're looking at the cancellation clauses and can't see anything of the sort. Ask these questions politely, calmly and firmly - don't back down until they've finally admitted it says no such thing in the contract.)
"Every other telco has done something similar." (Again, where in the contract does it say that they're allowed to do what they like without notice if everyone else is doing it? Again, don't back down)
"This affects everyone on T-Mobile, not just you." (Where in the contract does it say that it's perfectly OK if they do this to everyone rather than singling out one customer?)
No doubt they'll invent some other argument. Same question applies though: where in the contract does it say that their argument is valid? You just have to remain calm, polite and firm.
I don't know what the OP was talking about but I have never heard of termination fees in the UK.
I have, however, heard of being asked to pay the outstanding line rental for the remainder of the contract term in order to cancel. Obviously if you only entered the contract two months ago, this isn't such a palatable option - but being as T-Mobile are changing the terms, I suspect you could probably get out without having to pay the outstanding line rental.
3. As per UK contract legislation all T-mob customers who are affected now have 30 days to terminate the contract if they do not like it. Very few will do though - most phones on T-mob are subsidised so to terminate the contract one has to pay the balance on it (at the outrageously inflated "not-locked-in price).
I've got out of contracts where my telco has done exactly that on one or two occasions - I've never been asked to repay the subsidy.
Normally, while they're quite open about the fact that the phone is subsidised by signing you up to an 18 or 24 month contract, the contract itself says nothing about it. It just says that if the telco changes what they charge (as they have here), the other has every right to cancel without penalty.
I have been given the argument that changing what's included free doesn't alter what they're charging - the per-minute rate for calls is the same and that's what they mean by if the charges change. Usually, asking where in the contract it says that - repeatedly if necessary - resolves that.
That may be, but TFS specifically says "T-Mobile in the UK".
I don't know how it works in continental Europe, but between UK, Ireland and the USA it's not unusual to find that while they may adopt the same name, logo, strapline and colourscheme in different countries, the actual nuts and bolts of what they offer varies so much they may as well be totally different companies. And you often don't get preferential pricing if your phone roams from SuperMobileNetwork (UK) where you live to SuperMobileNetwork (Ireland) or SuperMobileNetwork (France).
Or you could add the people who need admin rights to the appropriate group, which is a lot more secure because you can then audit what individuals do. A general-use user account with that level of privilege is generally considered a Very Bad Idea unless you really can't avoid it.
Go fight Hitler? Did you miss History, or were you misinformed? The Americans basically sat back saying "meh. Not our business." for two years.
It wasn't until the Japanese attacked the US that the Americans became involved - indeed, were it not for the pact whereby Germany and Italy were obliged to defend to Japan by declaring war on the US immediately after the US attacked Japan, there's a good chance we'd be speaking German in most of Europe today.
Which isn't terribly helpful because if you look at the possible side effects for most medicines, they include a list as long as your arm that would terrify anyone.
It goes back much farther than Wakefield. My own mum refused the MMR for my brother having heard that it might "turn him into a vegetable", and he was born in 1986. IIRC the MMR is generally given to babies or very young children, so a 1998 study would be far to late for her to have got that idea.
"Throw another chip on the motherboard" probably won't work so well when that motherboard is part of an iPad clone. Particularly as the drive to run Windows on ARM isn't coming from the iPad cloners who might be in a position to countenance such a thing, it's coming from Microsoft who - as ever - are late to the party.
True, but you're still going to be relying on the software developer to actually compile and ship an ARM version. Emulation typically slows things down dramatically, it only really works when your emulator is running on hardware MUCH faster than the hardware you're emulating - which isn't the case here.
They DO know what they're doing, they're just lying as usual
AFAICT, this is SOP for most western governments in the world today.
It wouldn't surprise me if it had been SOP for most of the last couple of centuries, only now with things like the Internet it's becoming rather easier to spot.
In Debian Stable - in about 2 years (in the next release).
Doubt it - the next release of Debian Stable can't be that far away, Lenny's starting to look rather long in the tooth and Squeeze was frozen back in August. I'd expect to see Squeeze become stable within the next few months.
Had this been a company run by the typical PHB here in the US (with their usual lack of interest in security), everyone and their brother would know what the iPhone 5 looks like, and perhaps even have the source code for that rendition of iOS.
I wish the US would start borrowing from China in this regard.
Give them a few years, they will. It'll start to happen when the first PHB demands evidence that a chinese factory has had no more than three information leaks in the previous 2 years, and they'll get a very bemused email back asking them what sort of information leaks would they like engineered because that's the only way anything's getting out.
Can the company find 10 smart programmers? Last time I checked, nobody had developed a hiring process that was hugely reliable at finding smart people who work well together. Mediocre, OTOH, is dead easy.
and I see all sorts of people saying "This is a lousy idea! Anyone who uses it is a fool!"
I swear half the time what they mean is "This is a great idea! I just wish I had the knowledge to be able to implement it myself!". That or "I don't like the idea of Apple enjoying success!"
Don't think I've ever seen an electricity meter outside in the UK. Gas, sure. Electricity? Never.
The weather around here would mean that if you needed to work on it, you'd either need to bolt a tent to the front of the house or you'd only be able to work about 120 days of the year.
As long as they haven't made the oh-so-painful mistake of interspersing shots of a cheap, flimsy set which looks like something straight out of the 1960's with modern FX shots - they did that with the Red Dwarf remasters (though that was 1980's set) and my God, it was appalling.
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Sadly, as much as I had hope that Obama's administration would be beginning mark of when the government would at least play by the rules publicly, it looks as if the folk running the show now are just as willing to subvert the letter of the law to whatever means they consider expedient rather than go the more righteous route of doing it the hard way without cheating.
I was looking for a pithy quote I could give you from that classic British sitcom, "Yes, Minister" (and the sequel, "Yes, Prime Minister"), to demonstrate that what the people in charge would like you to believe and what actually winds up happening are two different things. Particularly as even the most senior politicians have at best a tenuous grasp of the machinations of the system they're supposed to be controlling.
About 60% of the show consisted of jokes, comments and otherwise insightful remarks along those lines, it'd take all day to track down the most appropriate. About all I can do is refer you to the box set of DVDs.
Were the people currently in Guantanamo US citizens or in US jurisdiction at the time of their "arrest"? "We don't like him" seems to be exactly the normal reason for being sent there.
Let's face it, when was the last time the USA didn't take an opportunity to look as hypocritical as possible on the world stage?
The US was shipping people to the US for crimes with only a very tenuous link to the US way before Guantanamo became a prison camp. Howard Marks is one example, and if there's one example it strikes me that there are very likely others.
The problem with wireless isn't a lack of regulation but lack of competition that results in governments allowing a few companies to oligopolize a medium that costs nothing.
Yes and no. The cost of running the service itself is peanuts - there is nothing intrinsic to the act of carrying a call - or for that matter data - which costs money over and above that required to run the network idle with nothing at all going over it.
The cost of buying all the equipment, installing power for it (quite often these base stations are in areas where you'll have to pay a fair wedge to the electricity company to lay on power), networking it (it's a wired network once it leaves the base station; you need thousands of base stations and again, not all of them are going to be in areas where it's cheap & easy to get wired networking) is actually pretty expensive.
You'll have to give the usual 30 days notice, but you should be able to use this to get out provided you do so immediately (if you don't, they could argue that you've accepted the change). And no, they shouldn't ask for your phone back.
I did exactly this when O2 changed the terms to take 08xx numbers out of the free minutes (they were one of the last operators to do this). I was a Carphone Warehouse customer - they did try and claim it was perfectly OK but the contract just said any change to your [the customer's] detriment is grounds for cancellation.
Which it probably would be under UK consumer law anyway, but IME most CSRs aren't too hot on UK consumer law so it's much easier to get out using the contract.
You could probably use UK consumer law to a similar effect but you'd have to write to them, when they (inevitably) refuse to cancel the contract you'd very likely have to either take them to court or cancel your direct debit and let them take you to court - either way, you'll be looking at several months of aggro and a good chance of your number being blocked. Much easier to get out on the basis of the contract itself.
Caution: ICBW, IANAL.
Contract schmontract, you have a statutory right to break the agreement if they make a change which is to your detriment. That's true even if the contract explicitly gives them the right to make such a change. Statutory rights trump contracts, warranties, fine print, and everything else.
Be that as it may, I guarantee you the CSRs haven't been told that. In fact, there's a very good chance that everyone up the chain of command (or at least everyone you're likely to be able to get on the phone) doesn't know that.
It's almost certainly going to be easier to get out of using the contract than it is to invoke your statutory rights.
You are not paying for the phone alongside it! Where did you get that idea? Lose it!
While it's technically true, most mobile phone contracts aren't worded like that. I wouldn't be surprised if your contract simply says you are obliged to pay them £N/month for two years and the nice girl in the shop was under strict instructions not to let you walk out with an iPhone until you had signed such a contract.
I've got out of phone contracts myself before - unless the T-Mobile contract is dramatically different to the ones I've seen, this technique works quite well:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1945144&cid=34833832
There's plenty of competition in the UK. They must think that their competitors are going to pull a similar stunt. I wonder what will happen when people on T-Mobile contracts start complaining to the regulator.
They probably will. While the mobile companies do their damnedest to make it difficult to compare, if you put together a spreadsheet of price plans detailing "Monthly cost", "Maximum value of subsidy offered for that cost", "Number of Free minutes", "Number of Free text messages" and "Amount of data", you'd be surprised how similar they generally come out at.
Maybe I should introduce a 'payment cap' ?
Ha! I like that. I may have to try it myself - write to my phone provider and tell them I'm introducing such a thing. If they turn around and say "You can't do that" I'll say "I'm doing it for all companies I deal with, you're not being singled out and you have no right to complain".
Here's what you do.
Read your contract. While they're usually in pretty small print, the important clauses that apply here are probably not all that long or complicated - and there is every chance that there really is no clause in the contract that allows them to do this, particularly if you're signed up through a retailer like Carphone Warehouse.
Once you've done that - and assuming I'm right and they have broken the contract - call cancellations and ask for a PAC code to move your number elsewhere. When they say you're still under contract, point out that T-Mobile have broken the terms of that contract.
They may try a number of tricks to argue that it still applies. I've faced a similar issue with a different provider and I've been told:
No doubt they'll invent some other argument. Same question applies though: where in the contract does it say that their argument is valid? You just have to remain calm, polite and firm.
I don't know what the OP was talking about but I have never heard of termination fees in the UK.
I have, however, heard of being asked to pay the outstanding line rental for the remainder of the contract term in order to cancel. Obviously if you only entered the contract two months ago, this isn't such a palatable option - but being as T-Mobile are changing the terms, I suspect you could probably get out without having to pay the outstanding line rental.
3. As per UK contract legislation all T-mob customers who are affected now have 30 days to terminate the contract if they do not like it. Very few will do though - most phones on T-mob are subsidised so to terminate the contract one has to pay the balance on it (at the outrageously inflated "not-locked-in price).
I've got out of contracts where my telco has done exactly that on one or two occasions - I've never been asked to repay the subsidy.
Normally, while they're quite open about the fact that the phone is subsidised by signing you up to an 18 or 24 month contract, the contract itself says nothing about it. It just says that if the telco changes what they charge (as they have here), the other has every right to cancel without penalty.
I have been given the argument that changing what's included free doesn't alter what they're charging - the per-minute rate for calls is the same and that's what they mean by if the charges change. Usually, asking where in the contract it says that - repeatedly if necessary - resolves that.
That may be, but TFS specifically says "T-Mobile in the UK".
I don't know how it works in continental Europe, but between UK, Ireland and the USA it's not unusual to find that while they may adopt the same name, logo, strapline and colourscheme in different countries, the actual nuts and bolts of what they offer varies so much they may as well be totally different companies. And you often don't get preferential pricing if your phone roams from SuperMobileNetwork (UK) where you live to SuperMobileNetwork (Ireland) or SuperMobileNetwork (France).
Or you could add the people who need admin rights to the appropriate group, which is a lot more secure because you can then audit what individuals do. A general-use user account with that level of privilege is generally considered a Very Bad Idea unless you really can't avoid it.
Go fight Hitler? Did you miss History, or were you misinformed? The Americans basically sat back saying "meh. Not our business." for two years.
It wasn't until the Japanese attacked the US that the Americans became involved - indeed, were it not for the pact whereby Germany and Italy were obliged to defend to Japan by declaring war on the US immediately after the US attacked Japan, there's a good chance we'd be speaking German in most of Europe today.
Which isn't terribly helpful because if you look at the possible side effects for most medicines, they include a list as long as your arm that would terrify anyone.
It goes back much farther than Wakefield. My own mum refused the MMR for my brother having heard that it might "turn him into a vegetable", and he was born in 1986. IIRC the MMR is generally given to babies or very young children, so a 1998 study would be far to late for her to have got that idea.
"Throw another chip on the motherboard" probably won't work so well when that motherboard is part of an iPad clone. Particularly as the drive to run Windows on ARM isn't coming from the iPad cloners who might be in a position to countenance such a thing, it's coming from Microsoft who - as ever - are late to the party.
True, but you're still going to be relying on the software developer to actually compile and ship an ARM version. Emulation typically slows things down dramatically, it only really works when your emulator is running on hardware MUCH faster than the hardware you're emulating - which isn't the case here.
They DO know what they're doing, they're just lying as usual
AFAICT, this is SOP for most western governments in the world today.
It wouldn't surprise me if it had been SOP for most of the last couple of centuries, only now with things like the Internet it's becoming rather easier to spot.
In Debian Stable - in about 2 years (in the next release).
Doubt it - the next release of Debian Stable can't be that far away, Lenny's starting to look rather long in the tooth and Squeeze was frozen back in August. I'd expect to see Squeeze become stable within the next few months.
Had this been a company run by the typical PHB here in the US (with their usual lack of interest in security), everyone and their brother would know what the iPhone 5 looks like, and perhaps even have the source code for that rendition of iOS.
I wish the US would start borrowing from China in this regard.
Give them a few years, they will. It'll start to happen when the first PHB demands evidence that a chinese factory has had no more than three information leaks in the previous 2 years, and they'll get a very bemused email back asking them what sort of information leaks would they like engineered because that's the only way anything's getting out.
Can the company find 10 smart programmers? Last time I checked, nobody had developed a hiring process that was hugely reliable at finding smart people who work well together. Mediocre, OTOH, is dead easy.
and I see all sorts of people saying "This is a lousy idea! Anyone who uses it is a fool!"
I swear half the time what they mean is "This is a great idea! I just wish I had the knowledge to be able to implement it myself!". That or "I don't like the idea of Apple enjoying success!"
Don't think I've ever seen an electricity meter outside in the UK. Gas, sure. Electricity? Never.
The weather around here would mean that if you needed to work on it, you'd either need to bolt a tent to the front of the house or you'd only be able to work about 120 days of the year.
As long as they haven't made the oh-so-painful mistake of interspersing shots of a cheap, flimsy set which looks like something straight out of the 1960's with modern FX shots - they did that with the Red Dwarf remasters (though that was 1980's set) and my God, it was appalling.