@Cerberus Yes, I enjoy the fact that I was able to use the Nexus toolkit to just factory-reset it to the latest android instead of having to download OTA after OTA
@terdon As opposed to almost every other product in Canada. Consider, for example, the landline phone industry. Imagine the chaos, where you can just buy any phone from any manufacturer in any store! Or the TV industry, where you can buy any TV in any store! And in neither case do you need to provide ID or demonstrate that you subscribe to a particular phone plan or cable TV service.
Somehow, former beloved Dutch Eurocommissioner Kroes managed to come up with a really good proposal: I don't know how she withstood the lobbyists that Brussels is teeming with. Then the Commission was forced to support it. The Europarliament also supported it, because they usually vote for the good things in the end. Guess what happened?
The Council of Ministers, who can veto such things, came up with a new proposal.
Instead of a true common market with no more roaming at all, beginning in 2016, they proposed: 5MB free roaming a day within the EU, beginning in 2018.
They did the same thing to the net-neutrality clauses from the same proposal.
It rather seems like they read the carriers' teleprompts word by word at the press conference.
But it's interesting how the EP is still relatively good, while our national governments are easier to corrupt.
That is, you need to corrupt the majority of 28 ministers on telco stuff for this. The relevant ministers form the Council of Ministers, depending on the issue.
It just seems strange. Every time those fuckers come out with a new article on Greece, it makes frontpage news here. I can understand it when it's a more serious publication but a rag of this sort?
@Cerberus Well, not in any kind of organized way. I just always go to beaches were nudity is not a problem. Those are very common in Greece. I don't go to those silly organized resorts where clothes are forbidden. Just places that aren't jam-packed with people and nobody gives a damn.
@Cerberus Yeah, nudism is very accepted in Greece (which is odd given the prudish nature of Greeks). Basically any beach that's not jammed will have nude people in one corner or another. There are some that are designated nudist beaches but, again, with certain exceptions, that's just because the nudists go there, not because it's organized in any way.
Hell, I did a naked bike protest twice in Barcelona.
@terdon But it's not just that they're an oligopoly on mobile service. They're also an oligopoly on phones, which has gone way past the point when that sort of thing made sense or was tolerable.
Amazon.ca has a fraction of the products .com has, and the prices are uniformly worse. Also, .com ships some things to Canada, but doesn't ship other things.
@Cerberus I bet it will show that there is absolutely no collusion among the 'amazons' com vs co.uk vs de vs etc, and that not only does one hand not concern itself with the other, they are totally unconscious that the prices might be different on their different web sites.
So why were there no virtual providers here that offer you, say, basic service but without a bundle for €3 (that should pay for maintenance of the network), and €0,50 extra for each GB?
Luckily, we don't have that N-A culture here where people's plans are linked to other plans.
@Cerberus Yes you tried explaining this to me before and it was confusing.
There is one company here, Wind Mobile, that has great plans and will sell you phones even if you're not a customer. But they're a recent startup and they've had difficulty building out their network, so I had to quit them because even though I supposedly had 5GB HSDPA data it behaved like I had 0GB 2G data.
oh, and here's something annoying. Let's say you have a phone and a 4G tablet. You probably don't need separate data plans for each, right? So you can get a shared plan (which is fine). But for the privilege of doing that, you pay $10/month JUST for the sim card for the tablet.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 On reflection I think that kind of chaotic pricing schedule means that they are confused. They are just reacting to local information.
@Mitch No, there is no confusion on their part. There are three companies that control 99% of the market. They each have two faces: the expensive face and the cheap face. They all change their prices in lock-step
You should have seen them panic when there was a rumour that Verizon might open up shop up here
The three of them teamed up to make ads to for TV and Radio talking about how great they were and how awful Verizon was and how un-Canadian it'd be for the government to let Verizon in.
Or maybe it's quite the otherway around, it's like airlines who are all running some big dynamic linear inequality solver in the sky, and at this very moment when you inquire, the optimum price for that exact phone choice you made, is price X, and then 10 minutes later with a zillion route changes and other buying decisions made, the price is Y. So to the computer it is totally rational, but the individual it looks insane.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That sounds like a cartel
if not by conscious direct communication, by unconscious fashionable copying.
I tried to buck the system and buy the phone I wanted from the vendor with the best price. I wasted hours and hours and ended up buying from the very company that keeps me captive.