The real business driver for shutting down older generation networks isn't the profitability or lack thereof of the phones and their subscribers, but instead the profitable use of that spectrum. If you have a band that is allocated to 2G and it has only a few subscribers on it, that spectrum license would be much more profitably (and efficiently) used on a newer technology with more users on it. The carrier also gains a benefit of sunsetting older networks by being able to remove gear from the tower and being able to repurpose that "real estate" for additional radios/equipment supporting high-demand newer technologies.

Uh-oh. You may want to check on the nationality of Motorola's ownership. Hint: not in Schaumburg, Illinois anymore.

It's really not that simple or that nefarious. Your data does not go to "everyone who is interested." At least in the US, it goes to potentially five groups of people depending on circumstances:

• Your cellphone carrier: Otherwise your phone would not work. The cell network can locate you based on which tower(s) you can "see" and which sectors, within a resolution of several hundred meters. Additionally, Android (but not iOS) will let your carrier ask the phone for its GPS location. This was originally done per government mandate in order to know where to route your 9-1-1 calls, but can also be repurposed by your cell carrier for big data/ad purposes. But honestly that isn't where the cell carriers make their money so keeping tabs on your exact location isn't a high priority to them.
• Your mobile OS vendor: *If* and *only if* you opt in to using their "free" services (in which you of course are the product; that's the trade-off). If you use Google Maps or Apple Maps or their ilk, Apple and/or Google are "fingerprinting" your location every few seconds via a combination of your GPS, altimeter, cell signal strength, nearby WiFi hotspots and nearby Bluetooth sources to know exactly where you are and remember it over time. *Selling this information (along with what you searched for and what somebody Gmailed your about, etc.) to advertisers indirectly via targeting is Google's core business model.* For Apple, they do sell that data but that is a sideline - they mainly just want to make your location services really good so you buy another iPhone instead of a Galaxy.
• Your device OEM: Actually not so much in the US, unless you have an iPhone or Google Pixel (see above). Most name-brand device OEMs sold through carriers in the US don't have the size and sophistication to try to monetize location data and wouldn't know what to profitably use it for if they did. Buy a cheap shady phone at a flea market in Shenzhen? Absolutely.
• Mobile app developers: Did you get an awesome app for free? Your "free" app means you are the product. Any "free" mobile app service you are using is almost certainly using the sale of advertising based on your location as its business model. But you signed up for that when you clicked the "sure, whatever" button on the EULA. Not to sound callous, but that's the price of "free."
• The US government: The US government *does not know where you are via your cellphone* except in the following cases: 1.) you have dialed 9-1-1 in which case your call needs to be routed to the closest Public Safety Answering Point; 2.) a warrant has been issued by a court (open or secret/FISA) for your wireless carrier to record your conversations and location for the government; or 3.) with or without a warrant a government agency has gotten access to your phone/vehicle/whatever. People generally don't understand both how poor government IT is and how worthless the data of 99.97% of 300 million people's cellular location data is, even if they got it. "They" almost certainly aren't following you. Really.

Yes, sort of kinda. See above - your carrier knows where you are at all times within a broad range to provide service, and in a small range when you call 9-1-1. Otherwise, not really. What the government does to your phone with or without a warrant if they have accessed it, I can't say.

Not so much. If you can turn your phone genuinely "off" - not "sleep" mode - you are fine.

TL/DR: The Gubmint isn't following you all the time because they lack the competency. Google and/or Apple are if you use their "free" services, as is Facebook or Tindr or Grindr or Humpr or whatever other apps you are using. Your cell carrier mostly doesn't care.

The era of smartphone growth when you could build a new significant player in the smartphone business are over - no matter how good or different you think your device is. There are only a few places left to make profit selling phones:

• High end features/price tag backed by global brand awareness marketing (Apple, Samsung)
• Um... wait, there's only one.

Of course there are other phone makers. A few will make high margins on specialty devices aimed at niche markets (security, ultra rugged). A few will do very good volumes, especially those backed by the Chinese government and/or serving the ultra low cost Indian market. But nobody but Apple or Samsung will do both, and the remainder are basically making manufacturer margins (5% or less profit) rather than technology company margins (20-40% profit). Everyone else, please don't bother.

There was an attempted coup by militants in the Japanese Army after the bombs were dropped, but it was against the Emperor specifically because he had accepted surrender. Why on earth would we want to provoke a similar coup by militarist elements against a ruler who was showing signs of acceding to our wishes?

Personally, I think this was all for show on both sides, attempting to look like they were open to de-escalation while having no intention of ever following through on any terms that the other side would consider accepting. But I can't imagine that there was any serious consideration that the negotiations themselves would precipitate regime change or that we would want that if it did.

That's the thing. If this device is being considered for retirement, it's precisely because not enough people want it.

If what the Slashdot crowd wanted represented actual consumer tastes in any volume, then every PC would be running Linux - WITH OH GOD NO SYSTEMD - and be 100% upgradeable/replaceable. It's not, and it doesn't. Most other people don't want what a theoretical Slashdot "you" wants, and that's how the market works.

I work for a giant large evil US cellular carrier, and I can tell you it's the same for smartphones. The smartphone business is about three things: 1.) volume; 2.) volume; 3.) volume. That's why Apple and Samsung have some crazy percentage of the total profits in the market. Do you want something different? For example, a MILSPEC rugged phone? You want an intrinsically safe smartphone? You want a smartphone that supports HAM radio?

You can get it, just be prepared to pay for it. You can get almost anything you want in a smart phone, but you have to vote with your wallet, not just on Interwebs comment boards. Because you are going to pay out the wazoo for what you want because it isn't the same as what tens of millions of other users want.

Slashdot-y people said they wanted a phone that could dock and be an Android device. Motorola built one, and nobody bought it. Slashdot-y people said they wanted a super duper secure phone and nobody is buying it. I worked years ago on the "Obama Blackberry" that numerous US government agencies insisted that they needed and... wait for it... not even they bought it when they figured out how much it cost ($3500 vs. a not as secure but more functional $200 BlackBerry).

There are lots and lots of smartphones out there that meet different needs. Unless your needs happen to match with that of tens of millions of other users, please be prepared that your wallet will take a hit when you vote for it. Otherwise... if you want a smartphone from a big carrier store that you can get for next to nothing upfront, be prepared to get the exact same kind of phone that meets the needs of tens of millions of users who don't include you.

The "digital" question is very important. Are you getting into this to be a comic book collector, or just to read comics? If it's the latter, I highly recommend Comixology. It offers purchase of individual comic issues, graphic novels and trade paperbacks/collections, but also a monthly subscription service where you can read zillions of (mostly indie, natch, but some Marvel/DC) titles and see what appeals to you.

I still have several long boxes full of comics from my teenage collector years (need to check if the Silver Age stuff is worth something, I know nothing contemporary in the 80s/90s is). But I haven't bought a physical comic in five years because nowadays I'm in it to read, not to collect.

I'd suggest reading TFA, which is actually both less sensational and more damning than the cheap clickbait Slashdot version.

The short version is that they arrested the CEO of a company which proactively markets its services to criminal organizations. The company performs perfectly legal activities: they mod phones to remove camera, GPS, web browsing, etc.; add secure messaging software; and then operate a remote Enterprise Mobility Management server that the phones are connected to so they can manage remote wipe/lock/whatever. That second half is the problem: it's not a "fire and forget" operation of just selling a modded phone. It's doing the EMM bit of acting as the IT department of criminal organizations ("call us to wipe your phone if your dude gets arrested") knowingly and willingly, to the extent of the CEO saying "we made this for drug traffickers."

Long story short: you're right, selling legal stuff to criminals that they use for illegal activity: not a crime. But marketing your services specifically to be used in illegal activities: yes, a crime.

I love Slashdot. I've been here since it was my favorite place to read rumors about The Phantom Menace (AICN's design made my eyes bleed). But that being said, it has never been a "valuable property."

Taco and Hemos couldn't find a way to make it pay for its own bandwidth and infrastructure, which was why they sold it in the first place. VA Linux bought it as a loss leader for "nerd cred." ThinkGeek couldn't figure out a way to get nerds to buy enough hoodies and Tux plushies to make it worthwhile. Apparently no one else has figured it out either since it keeps getting flipped like a McMansion in Florida in 2006. What do you expect from an advertising-driven site whose users vocally defend their right to AdBlock in a way that makes the NRA's defense of the 2nd amendment look half-hearted?

My point is that yes, Slashdot was once geekier and less reliant on click bait articles. But it has always been terribly edited, it has always had its share of gimmicks to attract ad clicks, and it has never, ever been a viable commercial web property. We really should thank all the owners over the years for keeping it around as a labor of love (or greed) when it so clearly isn't much of a money maker for any of the many who have tried.

This is the misunderstanding. Apple does have one fundamental difference from its competitors. (BTW, the examples of corporate bad behavior you cited are correct and are pretty common.) Apple has a core belief that "making the whole widget" is an inherently superior idea because it allows you to provide an end-to-end QA and user experience. Steve Jobs said it himself, multiple times; it's also why practically his first act after coming back to the company was to kill the Mac clone market. If you complain about Apple's walled garden, you fundamentally misunderstand their strategy because they don't see it as a limitation but as their core differentiator.

If you don't like walled gardens, don't buy Apple products. But don't pretend like it is a tactical error on their part. It's their entire strategy. And you can make the argument either way about whether making the hardware + the OS + the store + the services is better or not, but it's the one thing that defines Apple. We have even seen their competitors adopt the same idea in some cases - see the Surface or the Pixel phone - so there must be at least something to it. But it's what Apple is 100% committed to.

Most companies can become very successful if they ever pull a single "rabbit out of the hat" - a category-defining product (even if it isn't first to market). And that's all most companies ever get, even if they're lucky. Apple under Steve Jobs pulled three rabbits out of the hat:

• iPod + iTunes (for its time, the easiest to use MP3 player plus a way to buy legal content for it)
• iPhone + app store (for its time, the easiest to use smartphone plus a way to extend 3rd party functionality)
• iPad (for its time, the easiest to use tablet with a different UI experience from a phone sized device)

Three rabbits makes you the biggest company in the world by market valuation. Apple has been coasting off the backs of those products ever since. But still nothing has changed their "build the whole widget" approach and most likely nothing ever will.

This is part of "the cost of being poor." I'm not making a cruel joke, this is an established economic effect. And I'm saying this as someone who spent my first year post-college (1995-1996) as a VISTA Volunteer getting a $15K annual stipend. So I understand and have been there. BUT:

1.) Lots of people do in fact spend $500 or even $1000 on a smartphone. If you can do this and pay it off within your first credit card cycle, you are in the long run saving $200-$400 over the next two years.

2.) If you were like me as a college graduate with a reasonable expectation of more remunerative future employment, saving money in the short term was not great economically but somewhat reasonable in shifting short term expenses into the long term when you could pay them off more easily. But if you don't have better long term income expectations, it's a terrible deal. The "cost of being poor" is the excess that you pay (in making small instead of volume purchases or paying with interest-bearing debt) versus taking the upfront hit - as long as it is below the pace of inflation - and saving money in the long term. If you are renting furniture, buying consumer goods on long-term credit, paying month-to-month rents, cashing payday loans or IRS checks, etc. you are costing yourself money you can't afford. If your income will eventually rise, that may be okay, but otherwise you are hurting yourself terribly and extending a cycle of credit dependency and bankruptcy risk.

3.) I am not defending Apple or anyone else's decision to do away with the headphone jack. But to be frank the choice is really not between a proprietary jack and Bluetooth; just buy a $20-$30 adapter and keep using your existing headphones.

4.) There is a genuine argument to be made that if you can't buy a $500 phone upfront, then you shouldn't be buying a $500 phone. (I am guilty - when I was 22 and living off Ramen noodles, I still paid $12.99/month for my CompuServe account and bought plenty of CDs that I didn't need either.) But I'm just saying - without any moral judgment - that if your problem is you can't buy a $500 phone then the cost of accessories should probably be a far downstream concern.

You have this already, no government required. Anybody can call up one of the four major US carriers (if they have the money) and become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) that buys wholesale airtime and resells it. You have dozens of those out there - Cricket, Tracfone, Straight Talk, MetroPCS, Project Fi, Ting, Virgin Mobile, etc. Maybe you don't like the existing options, but there's no reason that having the government in that business would necessarily increase the number of MVNOs out there.

The fact of the matter is that building a nationwide wireless network is about a $60 billion proposition. You already have four companies out there that have spent this money and will resell it to anyone who asks. Why would you want to spend another $60 billion on a solved problem when those tax dollars could go to almost anything else?

You are 100% right. Specifically, it is a lot harder to make money providing wireline broadband in a geographically diverse country like the US (where 70% of the populace live in 3% of the landmass but 97% of the populace live in 70% of the landmass live).

More specifically, it if was easy to put money into last mile wireline ISP infrastructure, then there would be more competition. But there's not - yes, there is some municipal or state interference in the way - but overall, it takes a f**k-ton of money, capital and patience to make money off it. That's what all the companies we hate (*disclaimer: I work for one of them) discovered.

Do you think that Verizon stopped building out FiOS in NYC because they could have made money but were just a**holes? (Yes, they are but...) No, it's because they did the business case and figured out that people would not vote with their wallets for a different high speed Internet choice. Do you think that there would be dozens of ISPs thriving everywhere that there were competitive markets in municipal fiber markets? No, because owning "the pipe" is valuable in a way that just charging for "unlimited" bits while people download 50 GB of Netflix a month is not. Or do you think that Google Fiber stopped because they got bored? (Well, that would sound like Google.) No, it was because they realized that software is easy but telecom investment and operations are hard.

The good news (sort of) is 5G. 5G cellular uses spectrum that is so high that it is more or less useless in penetrating buildings in dense urban areas. But it is very good at providing broadband wireless services in suburban or rural areas where there are fewer big buildings to block the line-of-sight service (sorry if you're rural and behind a mountain). Within three years, you should have not just whatever your Cableco and Telco franchise offering 50 Mbps+ service but also the four national wireless carriers (one or more of which may also be your Telco, sorry).

The moral of the story being that there was little or no demonstrable value to laying new fiber to your area. But 5G wireless may make it an open competition again, at least for a while...

Remember that this, like almost everything else in life, is a case of trade-offs and "some win, some lose." You may be on one side or the other but some use cases/users will benefit and others won't. It's almost never purely black and white - if you think about both sides of the story.

Short version: more than half a century ago, interested organizations - ranging from the military to railroad networks to local police/fire to nascent TV/radio broadcasters - were all given broad swathes of spectrum. This was is low frequency bands because that has a great signal propagation over long distances or through buildings, and because it was all (except for TV) narrowband - there wasn't much more to send than voice.

Everything was of course analog rather than digital, which means that a weaker signal just gets fuzzier and fuzzier until it goes out. It worked well for everybody - the people in areas far from a broadcasting tower just got fuzzier radio or needed to get a roof antenna for their TV.

Flash forward to thirty years ago, though, and digital shows up. Digital makes vasty more efficient use of spectrum than traditional analog signals. You could, for example, take one patch of VHF (in US terms) signal channels and instead of lots of people watching one TV channel over analog TV, thousands of people in one LTE cell site area watching a thousand different shows over Netflix. And a thousand different people watching a different thousand shows in the next cell tower over.

But a digital signal is on/off, so those with a receiver outside a certain area are out of luck. So we have winners and losers. Those getting signals from cellular/TV/radio towers inside a certain area get more service. Those further away get less.

If you assume that there are more people getting more/better service from more digital towers, then this is a win. If you look at the edge cases, it's a loss. It's purely a situation of "where you sit is where you stand."