Probably because in Europe the carriers have been regulated. For example, a carrier is *required* to unlock a customer's phone if that customer asks them to do so, so long as the customer isn't still tied into the contract. This means that other carriers can take advantage of this by offering cheap SIM-only deals and advertise them as "bring your existing phone to our network and save money" - that's something that fundamentally could never happen if it wasn't easy for someone to unlock their phone. SIM-only deals from a few carriers means competition for all carriers, so everyone starts offering SIM-only deals and the focus is taken off subsidised phones a bit because it is now pretty obvious to the public that tied contracts aren't the only way to do things.

So basically, you're saying that you don't have any financial management abilities and you would therefore prefer to pay something like $1400 spread over 2 years for a $700 phone, rather than waiting a year before you upgrade, saving up $700 and buying upfront.

This seems to be pretty accurate - tied plans are basically a scam to ensure people don't realise how much they are spending, because then sales would slow down as people realise that holding onto their perfectly good old phone for an extra year or two is a pretty good way of saving money.

Umm, yes... yes it does - my phone service costs me under £3 a month on a PAYG contract. The phone itself was about £200 up-front. Over 2 years that works out at somewhere around £11/month - on a subsidised tariff I would expect to be paying £25/month or more over 2 years. And of course, I will keep using the phone until I actually have a need to replace it, so the actual cost is far lower. Also, I got the phone I wanted rather than having to choose from the limited selection the MNO offered.

The roaming fees are pretty low, and later this year are being abolished entirely across the EU.

Of course, the carriers still charge insane fees for roaming outside the EU (I was in Canada earlier in the year and it would have been £6/MB for data, compared to the £0.01/MB I pay domestically), and as such you'd be insane to pay them (roaming data was turned off on my phone the whole time I was there - far better to just use free public wifi).

Untrue.

In 2004 I bought my last subsidised phone - a Sony Ericsson P900. And the only reason I did this was because there was a loophole in the Orange contracts that meant I could get it dirt cheap by getting it on an expensive tariff and then change to a cheap tariff after the first month (they closed this loophole shortly after). My next phone was an HTC Dream in 2009, bought used off eBay. On Three's PAYG tariff that worked out pretty cheap. When the HTC Dream died in 2012, I imported a Samsung Captivate Glide and just swapped my Three SIM into it.

So the option to buy a handset and put it on a tariff of your choice has been there for years, if you actually look. But almost no one *advertises* off-contract handsets, so a lot of people don't even realise that you can do this, so they get a standard subsidised handset on, what they seem to think, is a good deal because they pay a low low upfront price and then a fixed monthly fee which gives them way more inclusive minutes/texts/data than they are ever going to use. If they had actually investigated their options, a lot of people would've realised that it was cheaper for them to buy a handset and put a PAYG SIM in it, because they're never *really* going to use those 10,000 minutes per month that they would've got with the subsidised phone.

Then, after 1-2 years, the MNO writes to their customer to say they can get a "free" (or low price) upgrade if they renew their contract, and you'd be stupid to turn down "free", right? Again, people don't investigate their options - if they did they would often realise it would be better to stick with their existing phone and move it onto a cheaper tariff.

And of course, no one in the industry wants to change this - the MNOs are making lots of money through these overpriced contracts, the phone vendors love the fact that everyone chucks away their perfectly good phone every 2 years and gets a replacement, and the customers usually don't know any better.

I guess add to that that for some crazy reason, phones are seen as a status symbol and therefore everyone's always got to have a brand new phone. TBH, from my perspective, the more recent phones don't seem anywhere near as good as the older ones, so I am loath to "upgrade" my phone. The HTC Dream may have been slow, but the form factor was fantastic; the Samsung Captivate Glide that I replaced it with is verging on the "slightly too big" side and the keyboard isn't anywhere near as nice to use; If I had to upgrade now, I'd be hard pressed to find anything to replace it with - none of the current phones have hard keyboards at all and screen sizes seem to have become stupid - everyone seems to be competing to be the first to make a phone that's even less likely to fit in your pocket/hand than their competetor's. Yes, the internals of phones are getting way better, but the form factors are far worse.

Most falling objects tend to get to about 0 velocity at 0m :)

Anyway, I can't help but think that it would've been smart to eject a floating lump of flash memory before the rocket sank rather than relying on a live radio link.

English... learn it some time.

English... learn it some time.

I wonder if there is any kind of liability resulting from the gross incompetence of installing old, known to be insecure, software on customers' machines instead of the latest release with the latest security fixes...

(Also, doesn't Windows auto-update to IE 11 anyway? Or are you turning of auto-updates too?!)

There is already an international treaty - the Ottawa treaty bans the use, stockpiling and production of mines. The US refused to sign it.

But some of the people participating in this discussion may have voted for the government who decided to lay the mines, or the government who decided that manufacturing and exporting mines was ok...

Ah, ok. The original article I saw it in didn't make it clear that it included all consumables - it kind of sounded like your normal annual servicing charge (which would usually cover oil, except there's no oil, spark plugs, except there's no spark plugs... :)

Can't find the original article I saw, but this explains it:
http://www.greencarreports.com...

Includes stuff like tyres, but still seems slightly on the high side to me.

Since we only have one data point, all of this is basically a guess though. Maybe it doesn't take a billion years to produce eukaryotic life - maybe it's really quite fast, but the conditions just weren't right for a long time and that held it back. Get another planet with more suitable conditions and you might be talking millions instead of billions of years. My point is that we just don't know because we don't have enough data to tell the difference between low probability and high probability events.

Well, I'm not so sure about that - the Tesla S apparently has a $600/year service schedule... which largely seems to be an inspection - sounds expensive for an inspection to me...