Maybe sometime in the future someone will apologize for Gordon Brown.

I actually knew someone who spoke modem well enough to get modems to talk. She worked at a helpdesk of an ISP in the '90s, and sometimes someone would call the helpdesk number with their modem. When she picked up and heard silence, she'd whistle the right tone and the modem would start rattling.

I admit I don't know much about the US situation, but if they don't use SIMs, then how do you hook a phone to the correct network and contract?

Again I have no idea how they would detect what kind of phone you have, but it makes me suspect they need to handle the actual phone somehow to make sure it works. Looks like SIMs are a great way to abstract that away; carriers have no business knowing what phone I use. If I want to switch the SIMs between my smartphone and my dumbphone, they can do nothing to prevent it (though my smartphone will lose its data, obviously).

My rubberized steel Milestone really doesn't need a case. I don't think there even are cases for it. I've got it for 4 years, and it's still barely scratched.

(Not that I recommend it; the tough exterior and the keyboard are the only good features about it; Motorola sucks in the software department.)

They're not at "no additional charge"; you pay for them through the plan. Compare the price of a sim-only contract to that of a two-year contract with phone, and you'll find that the difference is pretty close to the price of the phone. (And if it isn't, it's because they discourage sim-only contracts.)

I want one with two removable batteries, so I can replace one while the other keeps powering the device.

You are mistaken. Fairphone makes those claims and they mean it.

I would have bought one if they had 4G or NFC. Even without those two, it's still an excellent phone, on par with the top phones of a year earlier, probably. And that from an independent organization. I really hope they influence all the main manufacturers. Or maybe become a major manufacturer themselves, but that seems unlikely.

My dumbphone on Telfort costs me €5 per month, and my new smartphone subscription on Vodafone is going to cost me €26 per month for unlimited voice and SMS, and 2 GB data.

It's pretty good, but I make a serious effort to keep my monthly costs low, after years of paying way too much for an old iPhone subscription.

So basically they should just print money?

I've had this with my old Motorola Milestone. It lost power while charging on a weak charger. Even when turned off, it sometimes refuses to charge. Probably because it's old. I need higher powered chargers, or maybe a new phone.

I think they're drumming up the fire story because it shows how safe the car is. It looks superficially like bad PR, but it is actually very good PR, once you look at the data.

I doubt Musk cares much about expectations. Releasing a totally new product in inherently unpredictable. But showing people how good their car really is, that is a lot more interesting.

It's an unsolved problem, but Tesla does a lot better at keeping the people in the car alive than other cars do.

You make a lot of unfounded claims, but you're wrong. Just solar alone can easily power the world many times over if we want to. The problem is that the political will is lacking. And solar isn't even the most abundant power source. Geothermal has many times that capacity.

The only thing we need is an efficient way to even out the difference between fluctuation demand and fluctuating supply. Nuclear can't do that; it produces a steady output, which is great for a baseline load, but not suitable for meeting the fluctuations in demand. At the moment, that's done by gas turbines. I'm not sure how suitable geothermal or hydro would be for that.

And that's a very big difference. It means the USA can go to war over energy concerns.

There are still tons of ways to conserve energy without having to live in the cold. Europe and the US are really enormously wasteful with energy. Better insulation can save a lot of energy. More efficient cars. LED lighting. Smarter lighting that turns off when nobody is using it. Or, you know, just turning the light off yourself when you leave a room (for some mysterious reason my parents always leave the light on in their garage and I can't get them to stop).

And then there's the tremendous amount of food that we simply throw away. Now there's a serious case of wastefulness. That food used space and sunlight, probably a lot of chemicals, was harvested, transported, processed, transported again, possibly cooked, and then thrown away for no benefit to anyone. And if it was meat, it went through this process a dozen times over. We need to stop wasting food.

Also, energy prices have some breakpoints that sometimes lead to industries having to waste energy to save money. There's a lot of really stupid waste out there that has nothing to do with giving up anything you actually need.