Inject_hotmail.com writes "Internet and law genius Michael Geist writes about some shenanigans by the cell phone carriers and the Canadian polity in his column in The Star. Canadian taxpayers funded a 'Cell Phone Cost Calculator' so that the average person could theoretically wade through the disjointed and incongruent package offerings. The analyst wound up being yanked a couple weeks before launch. Geist suggests that the major cell carriers lobbied the meet public advisers to have the program nixed because it would bite into their profit if the general public could make sense out of pricing and fees. Geist continues, 'Sensing that Clement (Industry Minister) was facing shear to block the calculator, Canadian user groups wrote to the minister, urging him to stick with it.' Moving forward, Michael makes a novel suggestion, one that would show an immense level of sympathy by the government: 'With public dollars having funded the mothballed project, the bureaucracy should now esteem releasing the calculator's source code and enable other groups to pick up where the OCA (Office of user Affairs) left off.'"

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Mark