I wouldn't count on it working in IE6.

Awesome. They have an Atom feed. That way I can stay up to date.

Two words: Tacit Collusion

And to all those libertarians here, no just market forces wont fix it, as in this case they are clearly broken. As long as the carriers have a lock on the data on your phone, and what applications you use on your phone.

This is a classic examples where some gov. regulation is required, by: 1. Forcing prices down. 2. Or forcing carriers to allow users to use their prefered SMS provider

EU has been using option 1., where it recently forced carriers to put caps on insanely "roaming data" pricing. (or better rip-off).

The internet equivalent of this would be that your ISP forces you to use only one kind of push email that they provide. Kinda outrageous, no?

What a classic linkbait submission title.

The economist doing error correction codes?? Are you guys sure the LHC didn't do anything to the universe?

That's trivializing a not so simple problem. In a pure market, with no regulation whatsover, anybody could just stick an high power antena on it's roof, and bam, they have their own network.

But, also spectrum is finite, especially on what we can use with the current technologies. If everybody puts it's own high powered antenas, it would just make everbody's service unsuable. And taking out your competitor, ment to just place a bigger antena.

Also, high costs and barriers of entry don't just come b/c regulation. There is huge capital costs to build a infrastructure (towers, technology, etc.) Look at Wimax, (which has less regulations than cellular telephone) where two companies had to merge in order to make it feasable.

What I would like, is option 2. The goverment makes sure there is fair competition for services, and where a carrier shouldn't lock your devices, and not allow you have your own apps and services in your phone.

If you look a classical use of goverment regulation: Road traffic, traffic lights, rules etc. In the early days of the car, none existed, and it used to be every man for each own. Result was lots of accidents, traffic jams (deadlocks everywhere), making cities almost too chaotic. People driving without knowing how to really drive (accident rates where very high). Regulation brought some control to the chaos, where it made roads usable, traffic flowing, and make sure only people that know how to drive, drove.

But, regulation can also go too far, but making things expensive, excessive tickets that serve only to make revenue to cities and states. etc.

And yes, I have real life experience with this. I come from an ex-communist country, where twice in my life time goverment basically ceased to exist (once in 90-92, and once in 97). It was everybody on it's own, and it wasn't pretty.

I remember my favorite TV channel went off air, b/c one their competitors decided to erect a bigger antena, and use the same band.

Overegulation is bad, but under regulation is surely aweful. And I lived through it. Most of you probably just dream about it, and think it is cool, but it is not.

Apparently, when energy becomes matter, it creates some sort of cloud of javascript context in which the variable worldHasEnded is defined.

I don't think that was covered in my college physics textbook.

Three words: High entry cost.

As a libertarian, I blame regulation for that.

From the page source: "if the lhc actually destroys the earth & this page isn't yet updated please email mike@frantic.org to receive a full refund"

The world isn't black and white. It's perfectly logical not to like something, but to use it anyway.

No, it won't. OO has ruled the roost in the so-called Enterprise space for nigh-on 20 years now. Java hasn't (yet?) fully displaced C++ in 10 years despite, for this specific class of application, have several clear advantages. This is as much cultural as technological. Large corporations have a morbid (and self-fulfilling) paranoia about staff turnover and have adopted technologies such as OO because it is far easier to manage a hundred average coders each of whom has a clear boundary (the object) than it is to manage 10 rocket scientists. The power of the functional paradigm comes with a steep learning curve, there's no way around that.

So... they haven't crossed the beams yet?

This sets the bar for an elite programmer fairly low IMHO.