The whole thing is, as always, the end result of a myriad of factors that lead to societal rot and allow sociopathic world-views to become acceptable.

It is natural in all societies that the sociopathic and psychopathic individuals always gravitate to the top, but in healthy societies they must at all times maintain some kind of pretense of wishing all the members of the society well. Thus they are barred from certain blatantly, obviously selfish actions. As a society rots, these obstacles are removed and the sociopaths can obtain wide-spread support or at least tacit approval for downright evil activity, such as persecution of minorities, mass scale theft of public resources, totalitarian powers etc.

But such rot has its own terrible long-term price: disintegration of the society's ideological backbone, with a possible violently malignant stage, such as the one Germany underwent in the 1930s.

For some of these assholes on the top it is also more a case of "riding the tiger" at this point. The less psychotic of these idiots who got the ball rolling down the Fascist Hill for personal profit have been caught by surprise by the effects of their own bullshit and now can't stop anymore. The monster they hatched turned out to be far more powerful than they anticipated and has a mind of its own...

Suddenly unmarked cars are pulling people over, seems you can't drive more than 2 miles without seeing someone pulled over anymore. I am pretty sure the war on car drivers as a way to justify jobs has begun in full earnest.

The thing is that this is still part of the "war on Terra" or the "war on drugs" schemes, not some new "war on car accidents" or an actual attempt to improve driving safety without all the idiocy of trying to make it into some kind of a "war".

So I expect you will see a continuous increase in the presence of all sorts of "security agencies" on the roads, all with absolute and unchallengeable authority over the citizen sheep - naturally, until eventually actual, genuine, "your papers please" checkpoints are established, first on the major roads, then on all the exits of cities and in the long run pretty much on every second street corner, Iraq-style. All in the name of "security" and "winning the war on [insert the boogeyman here]".

Genuine artist? Real artists ship & posting a couple of chapters is not finishing a book.

No, real artists are the ones who produce art, even if it is never completed.

And I already explained the difference between art and commercial crapola kitsch: its the motivation for creating it.

just to point out many ways in which your statements are factually and objectively wrong, rather than leave them unchallenged and potentially misguiding passers by ...

None of which you achieved, not to mention that by opening your post with such a whooper, your task became nigh impossible with whatever tiny amount of credibility was left to you after that...

I do love your fox news esque spin, ridiculing what I said without any argument or supporting evidence at all.

Actually, you did your own ridicule all by yourself, I merely operated the spot-light and the rim-shot machine. And if some "passer by" truly believes that a 2-line LCD screen is functionally equivalent to, say, a 24" 1920x1200 one, you might have him or her as your ally - by all means. I would not want to get between the two of you for anything! Why, I can already see you congratulating each other on your convergence of ideas ... using gloriously billowing clouds of "no loss of anything" smoke signals.

But hey, a lot people have genuine and interesting philosophical beliefs against paying for services rather than physical objects ("it's just bits, man! You can't own bits...!").

I am one of those people and such a belief is based on an in-depth analysis of what is "private property" and what are its characteristics and how they are utterly incompatible with the characteristics of information. Note that the objection is not to "services" - which are indeed quite subject to commercial exchange and are in fact one of the pillars of economy - but to the idea of "ownership" of particular patterns of information.

But that does not mean that I am against artists making a living, and I have to say that you appear to be a genuine artist, unlike a lot of the "properties" (their term) of the RIAA behemoths who purport to be "artists".

Our objection is to the corrupt, and inadequate for the modern age, method of being paid, i.e. a pig-headed, arrogant attempt to go against the very laws of physics in order to pretend that information can be someone's private property, an attempt that is extremely dangerous to our future because it ultimately requires a draconian police-state regime to sustain - it has, after all, laws of physics to deny - and as if that was not enough, it can (and will) be used as means of creating a neo-feudal "landed gentry" system in the area of human knowledge akin to the one that once governed real lands before the age of enlightenment and rural reforms.

Fortunately, many other ways exist. One of them being direct audience patronage, which is what you yourself are doing, and at which I wish you great luck and much income.

As to the rest of your post, it has always been my belief that ultimately the point of art is for the artist to share his ideas and thoughts with the audience and that financial aspects of art were always, to true artists, far secondary. That is what makes them distinct from kitsch peddlers whose whole idea is to "get rich quick and be famous", irrespective of what they supposedly "create" as a tool to achieve that goal. And it is my belief that those who are dedicated to their art sooner or later find financial success without having to resort to outright legal thuggery, which is again quite different from the depths of filthy lies backed by brutal force to which kitsch peddlers must descend to make their wares "financially viable".

The web is HTML, which is a mark-up language, which can be displayed any way you like. I can squeeze it onto a 2-line LCD watch and not lose anything.

I pretty much have to ignore the rest of your post from this point on as a discussion of usability with someone who thinks that he "did not lose anything" by taking, say, a National Geographic Magazine or even the Amazon.com web site and putting it on a 2-line 0.1" monochrome LCD screen of a watch is rather pointless. Unless of course you've been frequenting only the Fox News site or something. In which case I must point out that you would "not lose anything" by sending the whole thing to /dev/null either...

Subsequently, I am sure there more fruitful things for you to do than to try to sway me to your view of the world, like watching your neighbour's TV via the "no loss of anything" telescope made out of beer bottle bottoms ... or something involving a pair of cans and a string.

If you had merely stated that it was a "compromise", you would of course be correct, as we already agreed. However, describing it as a "kludge compromise" carries a negative implication, which is not merely an "objective truth" nor representative of a general consensus- it's your opinion.

No, it is merely an emphasis. A matter of degree. I could have said a very, very, very poor compromise to the same effect and just used more words to do it.

The glass-front phones are not just a compromise, they are a very, very, very poor compromise (i.e "kludge") for a long list of reasons, including diametrically opposed requirements of a touch screen interface and a device that can be held to one's face and talked into, thus putting that very touch interface in one's face, literally.

Again, its objective truth. It's physics. No glass-front brick format touch phone manufacturer can somehow magically escape this obvious reality, all they can do is come up with various unreliable methods of trying to disable the interface whenever they detect (or so they hope) the phone being used as a phone and not a smudgy underpowered computer with an imprecise interface that features 70% error rate for anyone with fingers thicker than a toothpick who is trying to type on its "virtual keyboard".

Kludge. Objective truth.

No, I didn't. The way that you said it I interpreted as either (a) you implying that many people held similar opinions ...

They do. I personally know many who are tired of the lack of choice in this matter.

or (b) that many people's usage patterns backed up your assertion, even if they didn't realise it.

Again true, a lot of people (if not a majority) are trend followers and are easily swayed by marketing and in fact never actually needed "smart phones" to begin with...

If you do not believe me, take some time to look at how average people around you use their iPhones and what not. Their typical usage pattern involves loading a lot of free apps and some commercial trendy apps, all within a month of purchase after which time none of these apps are ever opened again and the phone is used again only as a phone or a texting device. Many don't even have email set up on their "smart phones".

So clearly marketing and telco's need for extra income from "smart phone plans" is a major driving force here and the usage patterns would be quite different without the multi-billion dollar sales push by gizmo peddlers.

This is somewhat disingenuous. You claim that you are posting your personal opinion, but you phrase such things as if they are representative of generally-accepted consensus and/or trend, or "objective" truth (see above).

No, it is you who are getting all mixed up. I simply stated the truth, which has many aspects. There is the objective truth, as in the compromise aspects of the touch screen phones. There is the subjective truth as to my personal preferences. And then there is the high probability of the truth in the optimal patterns of usage for many phone users, many of whom do not even realize it, but the exact numerical breakdown of which is unknown.

It is the fact that I did all three in one post is what seems to bother you so greatly.

This is because with the advent of tablets the concept of a "smart phone" has become quite exposed for a kludge-compromise that it is.

as intended to be representative of a consensus rather than personal opinion because of the way it was phrased.

It was phrased that way because it is the objective truth. But that does not negate the fact that for many people (in fact probably most) the kludgy compromise is still the most convenient.

You interpreted my pointing out the obvious technical problems with glass-front "smart phones" as a condemnation of all the users of the phones. The fact that something is a kuldgy compromise does not mean that people will shy away from it. To the contrary, the reason such compromises are made because the public clamours for them.

I pointed out that from my perspective, based on my usage patterns the compromise is no longer acceptable and an increase in performance of the phone part as a communication device and the increase of performance of the data part in form of a tablet are in order.

Many will find that instead of usability gains they prefer for the thing to fit in their back jeans pocket. So I stated: "to each their own". Repeatedly.

The rest of your post is based on this misconception.

They are insignificant in historical perspective. If every country's populace was as spoiled, narcissistic and cowardly as that of the modern US, "global wars" with "anything goes" rules would be erupting for every few citizens that get killed by some wacko cult or a fringe political nut, pretty much every other week.

Far more people (per capita) got killed in terrorist attacks in countries all over the globe conducted by far-out-leftists, lunatic "separatist" movements, religious cults and what not.

In real wars the death toll was in hundreds of millions not in numbers measured in fractions of a percentile.

20 times more people get killed in car accidents in US every year but fighting "war on cars" does not offer the same kinds of opportunities for dictatorial power, national supremacism and profit as a bullshit "global war on terror" does.

9/11 was actually very educational for the world because the US was exposed, for all to see - on live TV - as a bunch of cowardly, whiny, self-absorbed, supremacist hypocrites whose whole pretense of "democracy and rule of law" fell apart like a cheap paper screen the very moment they took just one, tiny by historical standards, hit on the chin from a wacko religious cult and which resulted in a bout of mindless, screaming, incoherent, violent, murderous national hysteria that is getting ever worse as time goes on.

The one bright ray of hope is that the US will ruin itself financially in this insanity as its instigators gorge themselves on "war" profits and power while the populace slides ever closer to mindless police-state dystopia where summary executions of "enemies of the state" are quite acceptable, which also can't be too good for economy.

It does only one thing but it does it great. It makes calls.

Well, I wish for a modern clam-shell to expand that definition to "it transmits/receives voice and data" so that it can become the go-between for any data device I fancy, be it my tablet or a laptop.

Other than that, you are right indeed, clam-shell phones come with what is in effect a self-contained protective hard-case. Another reason why I think an updated, data-capable model would sell well.

You seem (here and elsewhere) to use "flip phone" as synonymous with "solid, traditional, non-smart mobile phone". Which obviously misses out the "bar" format of phones like the once ubiquitous Nokia 3310.

No, I specifically mean the mechanical format of a flip phone combined with good voice/data communication capabilities, yet with no emphasis on the "smart phone" functionality. Of course it is possible to produce a bar-format phone with these same capabilities but it was not what I meant.

It is also possible to construct a flip-phone format "smart phone" but such a device would also be undesirable by me because it would, by necessity, entail unneeded by me compromises and cost.

The flip-phone, clam-shell design offers to me most useful mechanical properties for a phone from all the form-factors I tried over the years.

Virtually all the non-smart phones seem to have gone back to the "bar" form factor, or perhaps it's that the people who once bought clamshells are now buying smartphones, and the people who just wanted simple functionality always preferred the "bar" phones.

Actually this is more likely a sign of cost cutting and shuffling of limited resources into the "high end- high margin" i.e. "smart phone" products.

The bar format is simply far cheaper to manufacture and the unholy marriage of telcos and phone manufacturers is simply unwilling to offer their audience much in a way of choice in most countries. So where the clam-shells were once the "high end" phones (I remember a super-thin Motorola clam-shell once sold at US$2.5k here) that niche was taken over by the glass-front "smart phones" (which incidentally are also mechanically much simpler to manufacture than the clam-shells and their costs lies mostly in price of components).

Your argument is apparently(?) that now tablets are here smartphones are no longer needed as we can use a non-smart phone for the "phone" bit and a tablet for the "smart" bit. Missing the point that this isn't much good if you want the "smart" bit on the go and don't have iPad-sized pockets(!) (Or were you saying something else?)

No, what I am saying that for many people, myself included, the usage patterns of the phone/tablet are such that we no longer need the functionality of the "smart phone" because that part has been transferred to the tablet and what remains is the functionality of a wireless voice/data communication device.

Obviously this usage pattern is not universal and for some the compromise of a "smart phone" is the only useful option.

So in my case, I always carry a light backpack (before I used to carry briefcases and what not) that provides for a permanent place for a tablet. Some people insist on carrying only the phone in their pant pocket. Obviously to each their own.

But for people like me who decided on separation of functions along the line of phone/tablet, a different arrangement is optimal then for those who need "all in one" small factor device and who therefore must put up with all the short-comings of such a device.

I am simply no longer willing to pay for and accept all of the desperate compromises that such an all-in-one device entails and wish to return to a good quality, convenient communication-only device supplemented by a separate, specialized data processing device.

You prefer a solid traditional phone? That's fine, I can understand that. But others might not, and a tablet certainly isn't a replacement for a smartphone. Personally, I have a smartphone, but little interest in tablets as they currently are- I'd rather just use my computer if I didn't want to use something that fitted in my pocket!

As I said, to each their own. I, apparently unlike some "smart phone" fanatics out here, do not propsose that all phones become flip phones or that the marketplace abandons "smart phones". I merely point out that there is a (possibly sizeable) audience out there who have different priorities and require a different device and that the seeming progression of all phones to an iPhone "me-too" format that utterly disregards this audience is not dictated by reason or market demand but by something akin to mass hysteria.

Flip is a must for me. I had literally upward of 40 phones over the years, starting with a lead-acid battery analog cell phone in the "purse" format, and I find the flip phone format far superior for normal phone use, hands down.

When I look at how I use the phone, 90% of the time I will be talking after answering an incoming call on it and for that a flip phone is, to me, the most convenient because I can operate it one handed without looking at it and hold it up by tilting my head when I need two hands without compromising communication quality. No modern brick phone can do that well, especially the glass-front, all-touch phones that go positively nuts due to the pathetic "face proximity sensor" compromises that had to be made to make the device fullfil mutually-contradictory requirements.

As to the E72, I had a chance to try the E61 which was the older generation equivalent and even though I found its build quality very good, the form factor was actually quite cumbersome in my daily use.

This format would be however a good fit for someone used to keyboard-primary rather then voice-primary communication, i.e. someone looking for a Blackberry replacement.

Have fun pushing those virtual buttons on that touch screen with your face when the "face proximity" sensor steams up.

Not all "new" tech is superior to the "old" tech just because its shiny or because some fashionistas think it ups their snob factor a few times. Everything has its place and its worth is measured by many different factors, some of them purely subjective from the user's perspective. This is why there is no "one-size-fits-all", "my-way-or-everyone-else-is-an-idiot" approach, although it appears to be the very delusion under which you seem to labour.

Tactile feedback for example is something brick-format, all-touchscreen "smart phones" can only dream of, despite all sorts of desperate kludges like wobbly, rickety slide-out keyboards.

Their screen size is too small for many people for comfortable web browsing and increasing it renders the whole phone an unwieldy, inconvenient gimmick, still too small to be useful as a web platform and too big to be a phone.

Compromising one outstanding feature so that many mediocre features can be included is also why many people used to "obsolete" RIM products refuse to "upgrade" to the new no-keyboard "cool" format. They simply do not care for "apps", they instead care for an ability to communicate via text efficiently.

This is also why many prefer the flip-phone format, despite the fashionistas trying to ram the glass-front brick down everyone's throats.

There will still be a market for "feature phones".

In fact I would have given up any of my "smart phones" that I had over the years for a flip-phone that supported all the 3g bands globally, had bluetooth and wi-fi hotspot capability and tethering that is not controlled by a telco, a magnetic charger cradle, good case with belt attachment, etc, all the basic standbys of a good phone.

This is because with the advent of tablets the concept of a "smart phone" has become quite exposed for a kludge-compromise that it is. A tablet is very good at web browsing, email, apps etc but a phone is a communication device and mostly sucks at those things due to its restrictive form factor. Worse, "smart phones" also suck at being phones, again due to the kludge-compromises required. Wireless tethering of a good phone and a lightweight tablet is an optimal approach in my opinion.

And if you added some limited "bonus" functions to the phone such as simple web access and email functionality, camera and a basic music player to act as a backup should you leave the tablet at home, many would choose such a phone over an overpriced everything-and-a-kitchen-sink-3hrs-battery-life "smart phone".

And nothing beats being able to answer a call by simply flipping a flip-phone open with one hand, not to mention that its microphone is naturally placed in front of your mouth. Close it and the call ends, protecting its screen and keyboard from mishaps.

Sooner or later someone is bound to realize this. And if Nokia puts out a flip phone like this, I won't care if the thing runs some Hell-spawned Windows Nightmare because the OS will be quite irrelevant to me as long as it does not compromise the phone's communication performance or its general usability. Unfortunately for Nokia, with Windows these very things naturally become somewhat of a challenge.