I'm not an American, but I have seen similar cases from my own country. The reactions varies a lot. Some people are well connected or are lucky enough to get media coverage, that forces the government to act.
Example:
1. A "stoner" didn't have enough money to pay a bribe in India after a "random" drug search (small amount of cannabis) and spent several years in prison and was sick most of the time due to the conditions. Almost no reaction from the government... in the end someone in the Indian government pardoned him for humanitarian reasons because he had suffered enough.
2. Two upper-class young girls smuggled several kg of heroin and was caught. The government moved heaven and earth to get them to serve prison time in their home country.
> whose support for APIs was all over the map, which meant producing a shitload of JARs depending of what you needed
I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually one of the reasons why Sun fought MS and Google when they tried to make their own "Java" versions (embrace+extend). They didn't want a repeat of the J2ME situation.
I think Opera Mini did much more than compression.
I seem to remember them actually rewriting (rendering?) the web page server side, and then sending an optimized mobile friendly version to make it more readable for pages that were originally designed for desktop.
It worked great on my phone and I even used it when the phones were more cabable, because web pages looked better and it saved a lot of bandwidth.