firehose

atumblratrandom:

oh fuck yes

Youtube Direktglass

Google Glass ist seit heute in sowas wie einer Beta-Phase, dazu haben sie ein Demo-Video und ‘ne Website ins Netz gestellt, auf der man sich per Twitter-Hashtag-Contest unter #ifihadglass für die ersten Brillen bewerben kann. Das Video ist natürlich voller Funfunfun-Menschen und ziemlich microsoftesque, aber es hilft ja nix: Das sieht großartig aus und die Dinger haben das Potential, mindestens einiges an Sehgewohnheiten im Netz zu verändern. I’m totally sold.

Source unknown.

A Night’s Work (Shadowrun promo, 1990) (by Michael Ostrokol)

This April Brian Wood and Olivier Coipel launch a new X-Men title with a roster of Jubilee, Kitty Pryde, Psylocke, Rachel Grey, Rogue and Storm. That the team is all-female isn't unusual for a book that isn't defined along gender-lines. What makes the roster extraordinary is that it's an all-star line-up. These are first draft X-Men, and the book could easily have added more top picks -- Dazzler, Emma Frost, Jean Grey, Magik, Mystique -- and still been all-female.

It's hard to think of any other superhero team with such a strong bench of women, and it's especially hard to think of another team where so many female characters rose to prominence within the team itself. What these characters have in common is no mystery; they were all written by Chris Claremont, the man whose name is synonymous with "strong female characters."

"Strong female characters" is a phrase with rather a mixed reputation in comics today. Viewed retrospectively through the filter of comics' "bad girl" phase of the 1990s, which introduced a slate of violent characters whose power was only exceeded by their state of undress, it feels too much like a justification for bad behavior. Publishers could be as sleazy and exploitative as they liked so long as the character was "tough," as opposed to submissive. The concept has been ably mocked by cartoonists Carly Monardo, Kate Beaton and Meredith Gran, and reclaimed by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Osterag in the webcomic "Strong Female Protagonist."

Yet when used to describe Claremont's characters the phrase "strong female character" acknowledged a sincere shift in the portrayal of women away from limited, stereotypically feminine roles towards allowing women to fulfill any role in a story, up to and including carrying it.

When Claremont came on as X-Men writer with issue #94 in 1975 he inherited a series with rather old-fashioned roots. Jean Grey may be the X-Men's First Lady, but as originally conceived she was nothing special. She was a mild, vulnerable, lovestruck girl who used telekinesis to move people or objects out of the way rather than to fight her foes. While the boys faced death traps in the Danger Room, Jean's sessions involved moving books with her mind.

Jean gets abducted.

Also known as "Marvel Girl," Jean was a love interest, a conscience, and an occasional damsel-in-distress. She wasn't a leader, a brawler, a joker or a troublemaker, because female characters weren't typically cast in these roles. As a woman on a team, her job was to be the woman on the team. They only needed one.

The X-Men launched during the golden age of the superteam. Between 1958 and 1964, DC Comics and Marvel launched the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Justice League, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the Doom Patrol, the X-Men and the Teen Titans. One thing these teams had in common was that they each debuted with only one woman on the roster. Even that was a step-up from teams like the original Justice Society of America and the Seven Soldiers of Victory, which didn't have any.

Jean grew in confidence and ability over X-Men's original 66-issue run -- in the final issue she held back the Hulk -- and she was even joined by a second woman, Lorna Dane (later dubbed Polaris), shortly before the end. Yet if the series had ended there, there would have been nothing remarkable about the X-Men's contribution to the depiction of women in comics.

The X-Men returned from almost five years in reprints with Giant-Sized X-Men #1 by writer Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum. This one-shot radically reinvented the team with an international cast that included the first major black female superhero.

Storm was designed to stand out from previous super-women, and not only by dint of her race. She also had long white hair and strange oval eyes, and arguably the most formidable power set in the new team. From the start, her weather-control powers allowed her to summon raging winds and lightning strikes. She was a heavyweight who had been worshiped as a goddess, and there was never any question of her using her powers only to defend or evade. She wasn't introduced as a damsel, and she wasn't introduced as a love interest.

Chris Claremont did not create or design Storm, but he put the character at the core of the X-Men throughout his epic 17-year-run, starting with his first issue (and Storm's second appearance), X-Men #94. Indeed, the only other character to have such a consistent presence during his tenure was Wolverine. These two were the only characters that readers would always follow even during their sabbaticals from the team.

Claremont also put Storm in charge of the team. She first claimed the role in 1980, but she memorably won the title from Cyclops in combat in 1986, and without her powers. In what may have been a watershed moment for the maturing genre, the contemporary black woman in the punky mohawk and leathers snatched the crown from the old school '60s boy scout in his stuffy body-sock uniform. Indeed, Storm's iconic '80s punk look was a physical manifestation of the character's complexity.

And while Claremont made Storm the X-Men's leading lady, he did not neglect her predecessor. Jean Grey was also a major project for Claremont. Though Jean initially left the team, by Claremont's eighth issue he had given her a major power boost and laid the groundwork for one of the biggest stories in superhero comics history. In X-Men #101, Marvel Girl became Phoenix. In X-Men #129-138, Phoenix became Dark Phoenix.

"The Dark Phoenix Saga" was an ambitious story about power and sacrifice, and it had a woman -- the X-Men's original vulnerable girl -- at the center of it. Though the story did not end well for Jean, her sacrifice gave the story its substance. Claremont took the archetypal team girl and made her the star of one of the most important works in superhero fiction.

The team introduced in Giant-Sized X-Men #1 was actually less balanced than the original one-in-five team -- just one woman in a team of eight -- and though Claremont tweaked the numbers by writing out Sunfire, Thunderbird, and eventually Banshee, and by giving Jean an on-and-off spot on the team, the death of Jean Grey would have once again given the X-Men one woman on a team of five. Fortunately, Claremont had a plan. In the very first issue of "The Dark Phoenix Saga," Claremont introduced a new character who would serve as Jean's de facto replacement.

Kitty Pryde was the first new hero Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne created for the X-Men. She made her debut in X-Men #129 in January 1980, in the same issue that introduced Emma Frost, just one issue before the debut of Dazzler. Kitty's arrival was radical. Although Kitty could be seen as a throwback to Jean's original role as the teen ingenue with defensive powers, she served a different purpose. She was an observer, a kid in a world of adults, and that made her the audience identification character and the center of the series. Readers were reintroduced to the X-Men through her eyes, and even her romance with Colossus was more about her experience than his.

By making his first new X-Man a girl, Claremont established a team of four men and two women. He also set a precedent that he would follow for much of his run. Kitty was the first of five women Claremont added to the team over the course of seven years. (The only male character added during the same period was Magneto, who served as Xavier's replacement as headmaster.)

Rogue, created by Claremont and Michael Golden in 1981, joined the team in 1983, giving the team four men and three women. Rachel Summers (later Grey), created by Claremont, Byrne and John Romita, Jr. and introduced in "Days of Future Past" in 1981, became the fourth woman on the team when she joined in 1985, albeit for a tenure of barely more than a year.

Psylocke, created by Claremont and Herb Trimpe way back in 1976, joined the team in 1986, effectively replacing the injured Kitty. And Dazzler, originally conceived as a multimedia project in partnership with a record label, joined the X-Men in 1987, bringing the team back up to four women. Longshot joined the team near-simultaneously, creating the gender-balanced roster of four men and four women that endured through most of Claremont's "Australia era."

None of these women were the hero's girlfriends. None of them were the designated damsels. None of them were weak or meek, and none of them were derivative versions of male characters (a trope that the X-Men has mostly avoided with the exceptions of X-23, Lady Mastermind and Polaris). Each woman had a different story to tell, and none of them could have stood in place of any of the others. Rogue was a wayward teen dealing with isolation and anger. Rachel was an abuse victim lashing out at the world. Dazzler was a former star perennially trying to recover her identity out of the spotlight. Psylocke sought to reconcile her inner toughness with her outer frailty.

Psylocke's storyline made some sense of her eventual emergence as a '90s bad girl, though the result was still transparently exploitative. There was often a sexual element to Claremont's portrayal of women, and Psylocke's Jim Lee-designed ninja swimsuit was one manifestation of it. Rachel's studded red leather bodysuit and the Hellfire Club's corsets, crops and thongs were even more obvious evocations of Claremont's thematic interest in sado-masochism and subjugation.

Yet there was complexity to Claremont's approach to sexuality; his women were not all of one sexual type, and they did not represent one experience. Virginity meant something quite different for Kitty and for Rogue. Psylocke was determined to claim ownership of her body. Storm was as liberated as any of the libertine villains that the X-Men went up against. Emma Frost even argued, in a Classic X-Men #128 vignette by Claremont and John Bolton, that her style of dress was a form of personal empowerment.

Claremont's interest in female characters was obviously the work of a man with a sexual interest in women. That doesn't diminish his contributions as a writer of female characters. If his primary interest was prurience he would only need one woman on the page (or maybe two).

Claremont not only substantially swelled the ranks of Marvel's female heroes, he also filled his supporting cast with characters like Moira MacTaggart, Lilandra Neramani, Stevie Hunter, Jessica Drew, Carol Danvers, Callisto and Maddy Pryor, and he continued his commitment to female characters in his other mutant team books. In 1982, Claremont and Bob McLeod established the New Mutants, a new class of teen mutants with an initial cast of two men -- Sunspot and Cannonball -- and three women -- Karma, Wolsfbane and Mirage. He added one boy, Cypher, one ostensibly male alien robot, Warlock, and two more girls, Magik and Magma. Under Claremont, the New Mutants was dominated by its women.

In 1987 Claremont created Excalibur with Alan Davis; another team of two men -- Captain Britain and Nightcrawler -- and three women -- Kitty, Rachel and Meggan. The friendship between Rachel and Kitty was the core of the book.

Claremont left the X-Men books in 1991, but not before adding one more woman to the team. Ten years after Kitty Pryde was his first recruit, another teen girl with a very different attitude became the last of his original run. Jubilation Lee was not a quiet observer with passive powers. As brash and obnoxious as the decade that followed, she hitched her wagon to Wolverine and threw herself into trouble. Claremont wrote Jubilee for less than two-dozen issues, but he made sure readers knew who she was, and she was again very different in character to all the women who came before her.

After Claremont, things changed. New Mutants became the ultra-macho X-Force, and the next four new female characters added to the X-Men were Revanche, Cecilia Reyes, Marrow and Stacy-X. None of them made an indelible mark. Other new members were graduates or transfers from other corners of the X-Men's world, many of them Claremont creations; Moonstar, Sage, Emma Frost, Mystique, Magik, Hepzibah, Karma. Claremont's own return to the X-Men in 2001 introduced new characters like Lifeguard, Lady Mastermind and Omega Sentinel, but the seeds of these characters were planted in less fertile ground.

And yet the X-Men still have a reputation for strong female characters more than two decades after the end of Claremont's initial run, and for a generation of creators brought up loving Claremont's stories the idea of creating a classroom of characters where men outnumber women four-to-one should seem inconceivable. The waves of new students at the Westchester School in the last 13 years have borne that out, and characters like Pixie, Armor, Dust, X-23, Hope, Idie and Warbird have emerged as the potential next generation of X-Men stars.

They have some work to do to become as fundamental to the X-Men as Claremont's "strong female characters." Storm and Kitty Pryde are not the X-Men's equivalent of Scarlet Witch and Wasp. They're the X-Men's equivalent of Captain America and Iron Man. (Cyclops is the X-Men's Wasp, and also the X-Men's WASP.) Claremont's work on these characters, and on Jean Grey and Emma Frost, on Dazzler, Rogue, and Psylocke, on Rachel Summers, Dani Moonstar, Magik and Jubilee, are the very foundation of the modern X-Men. Because Claremont made these characters complex and compelling, and because he did not limit the sort of stories they could be used to tell, the women of the X-Men are the X-Men.

Before Claremont, female superheroes were typified by Jean Grey. After Claremont, female superheroes could be the Phoenix. Female superheroes could be anything.

Given that most attempts to "play Breaking Bad at home" generally turn out like this, Joanne Silverman has performed a genuine community service by turning the AMC drama into a board game—specifically Monopoly, whose aspects of empire-building and resenting your family translate quite naturally to the world of Breaking Bad. Inspired by the similar Lostopoly, Silverman’s Methopoly board (available for free download here) features all your favorite properties and amenities to buy on the way to becoming a ruthless kingpin—Los Pollos Hermanos, bottles of hydrofluoric acid—while replacing the Community Chest and Chance cards with “Heisenberg” and “Bell” (as in Hector Salamanca-ringing) cards featuring in-game events like “Hank Sells His Mineral Collection; You Get $50” and the inevitable “Yo, Collect $100 Bitch.”

You’ll still have to fashion your own player pieces, though Silverman also offers a few recommendations there, such as using a chunk of blue ...

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Texas teen wins right to have baby after suing parents Fox News A pregnant Texas teen has won the right to have her baby after she reached an agreement with her parents, who she had sued claiming they were forcing her to abort the fetus. MyFoxHouston.com reports the teen, who was only identified in court records as ... and more »

Tom Hanks

 

Jeff Victor é ilustrador e vive em Los Angeles. Ele fez uma deliciosa linha do tempo com os personagens interpretados por atores como Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson e Uma Thurman, ao longo das suas carreiras. Uma ótima oportunidade pra galera que adora exibir sua memória cinematográfica.

Além de atores, a série inclui uma linha do tempo das diferentes versões de Batman ao longo dos anos, uma linha com as diferentes faces do vilao  Biff Tannen, em De Volta para o Futuro personagem Biff Tannen. 

Johnny Depp

Bill Murray

Jack Nicholson

Kurt Russel

Natalie Portman

Rick Moranis

Sigourney Weaver

Uma Thurman

Biff Tannen

Batman
.

Tweet Tags: Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Victor, johnny depp, Uma Thurman

rickish:

Lot going on here.

zophop:

Neil Gaiman on Alan Moore’s life.

Drawn by the amazing Mark Buckingham. I think we did this for a celebration of Alan’s 50th Birthday.

it is, of course, all true.

Reader was my favorite social network, hands down. I was incredibly sad to see it go. When I found out theoldreader.com existed, I was giddy all day.

I wrote the team to thank them (hello at theoldreader dot com) and to also trouble shoot a bug. They were incredibly kind and prompt in response. After they fixed the glitch my massive address book was causing, I asked the following:

Next dreams:
What are privacy settings? Can only people I follow see my posts, only the friends of people I post comments to see those comments?
Multi-shares in same social network list people who shared rather than showing the post repeatedly.
But these are again, dreams, not issues.
Are we going to be able to pay the team a nominal amount to keep the project going? I would like to be able to support a group to do continued support rather than having this thing we all love die again.

Their response:

As per our privacy policy, all shared posts are currently public. We do have ‘private accounts’ feature in our roadmap that will allow users to expose their shared items only to a limited number of accounts they choose. However, this has very low priority for us; most users only read public RSS feeds that are available to everyone in the first place, so hiding them makes little sense. We have discussed the mechanics of multi-sharing before and decided to stick to the current implementation to avoid mixing comments to two different shares into a single thread. Sometimes people discuss not the shared article itself, but rather the sharer’s comment to it – so, each shared post becomes unique in a way and deserves a separate comment thread. At the moment The Old Reader is not backed up by any company, and we are still looking for the best way to allow our users to support the project. We will definitely update our blog when we decide on something, so make sure you are subscribed to it

Here is what I have sent them. I hope you’ll join me in politely, lovingly, requesting the same. I would also like you to be willing to throw in to support the team if that is the route they go.

I’d like to lobby that privacy get moved up the list. A few reasons, personal, individual, and communal. First, I work in humanitarian and disaster response, with volunteer technical communities and military alike. I also have an incredibly dark sense of humor. The people I work with tend to check out who I am and what I like – having another public space on which to express myself doesn’t really allow me to express myself. Those same working conditions also make it incredibly important that I be able to have a safe space to talk and connect.
On an individual level, I saw friends discover themselves because Reader was a safe space. Things like gender, sexuality, and approach in life are not things which can be held without care. People with very public lives have been able to go through self-discovery with a small group of trusted friends.
And finally, communal – while with privacy my own shares are only to those who I have approved, my comments on a friend’s share are visible to their friends. *This is essential* – there is at least one pairing from our previous ShareBro network which happened because of this serendipity in safe space. They are now married.

As it is now, it’s more like a Tumblr than it is like Reader. I hope you’ll institute the privacy and sharing layers sooner rather than later. Again, I’m happy to contribute what I can towards this being a sustainable effort.

All my best, and thanks again,

Willow

We were surprised to see all of the Christmas gifts that revolved around Minecraft. Seems like there’s a lot of stuff for sale, but we still like the DIY spirit that comes with making your own. [Thacrudd] recently finished this project. It’s a wall lamp that looks like Minecraft’s diamond ore.

The enclosure is a wood box that used to contain chocolates. After studying the pixel art texture for the game’s diamond ore blocks he marked out the pattern and headed over to the scroll to rough them out before finishing with files and a rasp. Next came paint, which was sourced as a sample from the home store. This left him with one shade of gray, but the variations were easy to add by mixing it with white or black.

A strip of white LEDs gives the lamp its inner glow. The openings have been covered with blue acrylic which keep the dust out while providing the appropriate hue.

[via Reddit]

Filed under: led hacks

ananyo writes "Monsanto and other biotechnology firms could be looking to bring back 'terminator' seed technology. The seeds are genetically engineered so that crops grown from them produce sterile seed. They prompted such an outcry that, as Slashdot noted, Monsanto's chief executive pledged not to commercialize them. But a case in the U.S. Supreme Court could allow farmers to plant the progeny of GM seeds rather than buying new seeds from Monsanto, making the technology attractive to biotech companies again. Some environmentalists also see 'terminator' seeds as a way of avoiding GM crops contaminating organic/non-GM crops." Reader 9gezegen adds that Monsanto is getting support, oddly, from parts of the software industry. From the NY Times: "BSA/The Software Alliance, which represents companies like Apple and Microsoft, said in a brief that a decision against Monsanto might 'facilitate software piracy on a broad scale' because software can be easily replicated. But it also said that a decision that goes too far the other way could make nuisance software patent infringement lawsuits too easy to file." The case was heard today; here is a transcript (PDF), and a clear explanation of what the case is about.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though Bruce Lee has already received the biopic treatment with 1993’s Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, that film suffered from its outmoded, 20th-century insistence on occasionally resembling actual moments from its subject’s life. So the time has come for another Bruce Lee biopic, one that takes the modern tack of using a person’s life as mere “inspiration” for a far more interesting story that inevitably becomes a buddy-cop movie. Nixon and Ali writers Christopher Wilkinson and Stephen Rivele—having presumably seen their other screenplay rejected, in which Nixon forces the draft-dodging boxer to team with him to rescue Vietnam POWs—have instead begun Birth Of The Dragon, which uses the real-life 1965 fight between Lee and Wong Jack Man as “a jumping-off point for a wider-canvas action movie in which Wong and Lee team up to battle a band of Chinatown gangsters.”   

Of course, “historical” accounts will ...

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A few weeks ago, author Neil Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods, Coraline, etc.) took to Twitter to call for story prompts. He asked his followers 12 questions over the course of a day, each tied to a month: “Why is January so dangerous?” “If August could speak, what would it say?” “What would you burn in November, if you could?” and so forth. And then he picked one reader response per month and wrote a short story around it. All 12 stories have now been posted online, and Gaiman fans will find them uncharacteristically short, but stylistically familiar, in the vein of his modern, often melancholy fables in Fragile Things or Smoke And Mirrors.

The stories are part of the commercially sponsored “Keep Moving” initiative, which also has Alicia Keys and filmmaker Robert Rodriguez working on their own interactive projects. Gaiman’s project is called “A Calendar Of Tales,” and the ...

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Apple has released a new version of Java meant to plug a vulnerability that can be exploited to install malware on user's computers. The company made an unprecedented announcement this morning, admitting that hackers had effectively infected a "small number" of its computers after employees visited a website for software developers that contained the malicious code. Apple says it isolated those computers from its network, and promised that it would release a support tool today to patch the vulnerability. The update uninstalls Apple's Java applet plugin from all browsers, as well as the Java Preferences application, which it says is no longer needed to configure the applet's settings.

Users can obtain the Java update through Apple's support website, or by using the Software Update tool for OS X.

• Via AppleInsider
• Source Apple Support
• Related Items apple vulnerability malware

Youtube Direktviewz

J.Viewz spielt Massive Attacks „Teardrops“ per Makey Makey auf frisch gekauftem Gemüse.

(via Daniel Dociu | Zeutch)

When members of the Crown Prosecution Service in West Midlands, England (responsible for prosecuting criminal cases in England and Wales), asked the police department for a statement from a witness named PC Peach, they were told that would be difficult because Peach, while intelligent, was actually PD Peach—and “PD” stands for “police dog.”

But the CPS continued to insist on hearing from “the witness.” So, one of Peach’s handlers wrote a statement in the character of the dog.

The statement reads: “I chase him. I bite him. Bad man. He tasty. Good boy. Good boy Peach.” It was then “signed” with a large black paw print.

astroengine writes "If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension, one theoretical physicist calls boring. 'It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself,' Joseph Lykken, with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said. 'This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An 11-year-old cancer survivor who was hospitalized with a head injury is now recovering from third-degree burns after her shirt mysteriously caught fire in a Portland, Ore., hospital room. The girl, Ireland Lane, had been painting in her room at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, ABC affiliate KATU reported. Moments later, she ran into the hallway screaming, with her T-shirt aflame. “I’ve been in medicine going back 30 years now and never heard anything like this. And hopefully I never will again,” Dr. Stacy Nicholson, physician-in-chief at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, told KATU. “Our safety experts are working closely with the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s office on its investigation,” Nicholson added in a statement to ABCNews.com. “We anxiously await the their findings and will certainly make adjustments if the cause was preventable.” Hospital staff extinguished the flames, but the cause of the fire remains a mystery. Ireland said she used hand sanitizer to clean a table that rolled over her bed, where she had painted a wooden box as a gift for her nurses, the Oregonian reported. Officials are investigating whether the alcohol-based sanitizer and static electricity could have sparked the fire, a spokesman for the Oregon State Fire Marshal told ABCNews.com.

Republicans may not like David Plouffe very much, but he did help get Obama elected, twice. And he certainly gets Hispanic politics better than the GOP brain trust. Here’s an excerpt from a piece in Sunday’s NYT magazine:

But, I asked Plouffe, wasn’t the G.O.P. just one postmodern presidential candidate — say, a Senator Marco Rubio — away from getting back into the game?

Keep reading this post . . .

The Humpy Observer has created a seven-minute supercut that shows really cute animals doing really cute things.

music by Dexter Britain – “The Time To Run Finale”

via Viral Viral Videos

Doppelganger: The Universal Game Piece. by Rodney Benesh — Kickstarter

“We’ve known for a while the level of William Shatner’s influence in fictional outer space, but now the 81-year-old actor is using his star power to influence the real deal. The man who played “Star Trek” captain James T. Kirk is summoning his sway with throngs of Trekkies to help get a Pluto moon named “Vulcan.”
The “dwarf” planet’s fourth and fifth moons are currently nameless — simply going by “P4” and “P5” — and the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has set out to change that. The institute, comprised of scientists, has listed out suggested moon names, but has also encouraged voters to submit write-ins.
Enter “Star Trek” fans a/k/a Trekkies.
Once Shatner proposed “Vulcan” to be a Pluto moon name, fans rallied. As of now, “Vulcan” — a fictional planet in the “Star Trek” universe — is winning by a landslide. “Cerberus” and “Styx” are battling it out for second place.”

- William Shatner sways Pluto moon-naming vote with Trekkie power | Movie Talk - Yahoo! Movies

T-Mobile was rumored to be following in Sprint's footsteps with a nationwide launch of its GoSmart prepaid MNVO, and now it's official; Reuters reports that starting today, GoSmart will be available at over 3,000 reseller stores in the United States. The same plans will carry over from the service's trial period: a $30 plan with unlimited voice and text messaging, a $35 plan that adds web browsing, and a $45 plan that adds up to 5GB of faster 3G data. Customers can bring their own GSM device to the service by purchasing a SIM kit, or choose between an Alcatel feature phone or a low-end ZTE Android device running Gingerbread. GoSmart tells Reuters that it has already signed up "tens of thousands" of customers since early December, beating the company's projections.

• Source GoSmartReuters
• Related Items gosmart prepaid mvno wireless carrier T-Mobile Sprint