Ah, I see, you have to use the HTML entity rather than typing the character directly: €

That seems odd for a page that was sent with a UTF-8 character set indication in the headers. If you send the â character in the form it gets mangled, which is something I would have expected to happen on a site last updated in 1998, before anyone thought about encodings.

The incumbent operators will have little or no incetive to build out their network capacity/coverage, since the need to upgrade capacity is mainly driven by tourists.

What are you talking about? There is almost no place on earth where the majority of phone traffic comes from tourists. Maybe airports.

increased usage means more cost for the provider. How does that offset the income loss?

Let's say the carrier currently charges EUR 1/MB for a service that costs them EUR 0.02/MB to provide, and customers use 1 million megabytes. That's EUR 20,000 in costs and EUR 980,000 in profit.

Then they are forced to charge their domestic rate of EUR 0.10/MB for roaming data, and customers stop being stingy and use 20 million megabytes. That's EUR 400,000 in costs and EUR 1,600,000 in profit.

Obviously these numbers are plucked straight from my ass but surely you can see how it's possible. Roaming charges are almost pure profit as it is, and that's only possible because we're a captive market.

P.S. What is up with Slashdot still not being able to display the Euro symbol (â)? This is 2014, isn't it?

In the USA I believe the idea of the FCC forcing AT&T to wholesale its lines to competitors is completely alien?

It actually used to be the law of the land. During that period (around 2000) there was an incredibly vibrant broadband ISP scene. Unfortunately the FCC changed its mind (and no doubt a few briefcases full of cash changed hands) and now the situation has reverted to the anti-consumer oligopoly you see today.

I was talking about a solely 40-bit address space -- something different than IPv6.

Well, stop talking about that, it's a stupid idea. If we're going to upgrade billions of devices around the world, I don't want to have to do it again in 4 years' time when 40 bits prove to be inadequate.

Well... don't write shit programs. FTP "active mode" is an example of said shit.

Active mode FTP predates widespread usage of NAT by about 20 years.

It was a perfectly good solution at the time, and saying that its developers wrote a "shit" program is like saying that the people who built ancient Rome were shit architects because the streets weren't wide enough for semi trucks.

lease times could be really short - maybe a minute or two - even if that were not handled

That would mean more spurious data charges, and lower battery life due to frequent activity that has to trickle up from the radio board to the phone's OS. Also I don't want to lose my IP every time I'm in an elevator.

Yes, we already knew that the periodic table of elements is pretty much the same all across the universe.

That wasn't his point at all, as I hope you know. He was describing how it helped us project the specific mineral makeup of the moon, which, though falling on the same periodic table, does not necessarily have to be the same as that of the earth.

I need to be able to hold my finger on a key for pressing on time. I can't imagine how to do this with a "touch"screen. While I generally use a laptop for this, I occasionally use the N900 as a remote (ssh over wlan).

All of my phones have had very erratic latency, even for wifi over LAN. Have yours been consistent enough for this to provide the split-second timing you need?

My N4 is about 3 unobstructed meters from the wifi access point. With 10 samples of each, a laptop at the same distance gets pings to the router ranging from 0.399ms to 0.418ms. The phone's range from 6.89ms to 91.27ms.

Did you miss eighth grade civics class or something?

My eighth grade civics teacher was pretty specific about how "free speech" is a construct involving the relationship between individuals and the government. Perhaps yours left that part out.

The government is obliged to let you say what you want, without putting you in jail.

I, however, am not obliged to continue to give you money if you are saying things that annoy me. I have the freedom to spend my money elsewhere.

I think they are overly sensitive about it, but I do see where they're coming from. It is in fact possible to see both sides of an issue, if you open your mind a little.

And, importantly, the straw man that you're arguing against (that RMS wants people to call the kernel GNU/Linux) is way out in left field. If you are confused about GNU's position, it's clearly laid out here: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html