Really, think this one through. What're you paying the carrier for? Dialtone. Which means that you're paying them to reliably (for values of reliability that vary with carrier, but here in NZ they're all pretty damn good) deliver your call data to the recipient. Take away that service, and how do you ensure that, when you need it, you'll have the ability to make a call, or send a text message? What if you need to make an emergency call and there're no other phones around to hop your signal into range of a network interconnection point? Or if the only phones that are nearby are in transit, and thus you lose your signal mid-call because your multi-hop path back into the POTS network has irretrievably lost a link?

You might wonder what you're paying your provider for, but I guarantee that if they dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, to be replaced by this conceptual system, you wouldn't last a month before you were begging for their return. And if you regularly make trips that take you to less-populated areas, I'd give you a week. This might work in the middle of New York City or some similarly heavily populated area, maybe, but even there you still need some way of interconnecting with both other mobile networks and with POTS. Those interconnects are what you pay your carrier for.

My 1996 Nissan Primera, which has four-wheel-drive just to increase its consumption, can get around 440km of urban driving off a single tank. On a long trip (such as Auckland to Wellington) I regularly achieve in excess of 600km from a tank. That's nearer 400 miles than 300. In an older car, with the extra drive-train losses from powering all four wheels. I'm not a particularly conservative driver, either, in terms of my acceleration habits - I don't exceed the posted limits, but I like to get there as quickly as possible.

Yeah. "Old tyre or leather thongs". That's called "Stopping my feet getting all cut to shit as I run across the rocky ground" not "I've got crap technique and use these shoes to try and compensate". Not even vaguely comparable. One has a function related in no way to the running, but in every way to the protection of the feet from the ground. The other is all about the running, and not just protecting the feet from the ground but also about protecting the joints from the impact of the feet impacting the ground. Do you actually not see the total lack of correlation?

Can't speak for Europe, but it's definitely the same in the UK (and countries that derive from its legal traditions, such as New Zealand). Can't recall the name of the case, but it was affirmed by a rock artist's manager who outed the artist's public sanctimony on drugs, sex, etc, as totally hypocritical given their narcotics-fuelled benders and various "immoral" carryings-on. Funnily enough the artist sued, and the manager was vindicated by proving that it was all true.