Nokia was also killed from below, from the cheap dumb phones. That was the bread and butter when most of the world did not want feature phones or smart phones. But cheap low quality phones was hurting the Nokia line a lot, probably more than the smart phones killing feature phones. The market stopped wanting high quality phones. The smart phone users didn't even care about the voice quality on the smart phones, they were mostly texting and using apps, and I think this caught quality phone makers by surprise.

The iphone is basically a phone+pda, plus a little ipod on the side. And it was a collaboration with AT&T as well. Apple basically succeeded because they had an army of followers.

So the whole point is to avoid walking to the client's desk? I remember when that used to be the majority of my social life...

But the instructor at the certificate course assured me that it was safe!

I have my desktop, monitor, speakers, etc, all plugged into a power control thingy, and I always turn that off. So the desktop can not power itself on without a finger pushing a button. Ya, I'm a bit paranoid, or maybe it's OCD, but I like to power things off for real rather than allow standby/vampire power which can amount to a lot of juice if you add up all the devices doing this.

Presumably "off" does not mean "powered down with no obvious source of energy"? A laptop has a battery but a desktop does not.
What if a laptop disables wifi (I always do this), will the bios power it up against my will?

Maybe that's the difference between US and Europe. Government spends money in the US and nothing ever comes back from it. Government spends money in Europe and the people actually get something in return. Ie, the US invests in junk bonds it seems.

They spent a lot of that money buying legislators, a far better investment than street grade whores.

Do you really think that the reason we have poor service in the US is a direct result of not providing a trivially bypassable internet nanny? Forget the UK, what about the Scandinavian countries with better internet service but with all the freedom of the US internet? There is no tradeoff there, no advantage to the US in any way. And that applies to the majority of European countries. Even Estonia, a former Soviet nation, has vastly better internet than the US without restrictions.

Pointing to the UK because of it's nanny rules is ridiculous because it is not at all representative of first world countries.

So why can't we pick an area the size of Sweden within the US and get equivalent service? We certainly have many states smaller than Sweden, in size and population. It'd be amazing if we even had one single city with internet as good as Sweden.

The total size is utterly irrelevant unless you have to pick only one single internet provider for all of it, which is certainly not the case in the US. If the US internet providers give the excuse that the country is too big then the solution is straight forward: split up those monopolies and make sure no one provider ever has the burden of providing service to an area or population larger than Sweden.

Square miles is not that useful a statistic, the cost per person for the same speed is still less in Sweden. No one is asking any one internet provider to give access to the entirety of the US in one go, and yet we can't even get decent internet service in major cities without going through a cable company (using infrastructure rolled out decades ago and controlled by abusive monopolies). Sweden has better internet because they realized that as a matter of public policy that a good internet infrastructure was good for the country. The US has crappy internet because the public policy was to deregulate and look the other way while hoping that the market sorts itself out.

The telephone and cable companies already have decent profits in their core businesses without investing in infrastructure. The internet side of their business is seen as a money pit. They like the internet only so far as they can piggy back cheaply on top of their existing infrastructure, but to actually invest and improve the internet is not in their interests.

Much of EU was also years ahead of the US in terms of mobile phone availability and service. Much of this I think comes from the difference in attitudes towards government funding of public infrastructures. In the US was have 1950's era infrastructure and this put us well ahead of Europe which was still recovering from the war. But we have not kept up on the infrastructure and have set back and relaxed, like the hare racing the tortoise. Today there is much opposition towards government spending on this sort of stuff, with many people pushing for a pure private enterprise solution, which leads to really awful service from companies who want to spend the minimum amount possible on infrastructure (plus internet being a side business to their other enterprises such as mobile phone or television service). Whereas in EU they still understand that public infrastructure is good for both the public and business and thus is worth the expense to improve it.

The irony is that much of the earlier pushes for infrastructure, including universal telephone service, was promoted by the same pro-business political party that today is opposed to such things. Perhaps back then the great fear was of the Soviet Union and there was a big national feeling that we must stay ahead of the technologically; we poured lots of government money into many things out of this fear while simultaneously having a growing economy. At the time everyone hated the phone company and it was lampooned often and yet they still gave us (as required by law) universal service, high availability, quality voice transmission, Bell Labs was the envy of R&D, and so forth. Competition is a good thing. Today the big fear is about terrorists, so no worries about falling behind in technology or education...

IPv6 solves a lot of these problems as it is. Maybe one benefit here is that the IoT pushes the IPv6 standard more strongly. A lot of devices have been using IPv6 for quite some time and it's in wide use in the industry, even though the devices are not directly connected to the internet.

Problem is, just like the cloud, there is some real stuff there only it gets hidden behind all the marketing and hype. Ie, the smart grid is basically an internet of things and it started rolling out long before anyone said Internet of Things. People stored data on servers before anyone called it the Cloud.

Once we've got some things networked that needed to be networked then we start seeing more things that logically should be networked. Then someone in marketing starts seeing things that could be networked but should not be networked and the hype begins to build.

Then there's the confusion between "internet" and being networked, or using IPv6 versus being on the internet. Most of this stuff won't really be on the internet but be part of a private network. Some people are even calling control of bluetooth devices from a smartphone to be Internet of Things, which is clearly is not.