$30 a month buys 300 minutes, unlimited texting, and unlimited 3g/4g (throttled after 2.5 gigs)
I'm a Virgin Mobile customer, so a few clarifications:
All that said, I switched from AT&T to VM a while back and couldn't be happier. They speeds are slower and data coverage is worse than any of the major 4, but I pay half what I did before for my service, so it is worth it to me.
Also, in general, if you are going to be in a major city and want the best coverage (regardless of cost) go Verizon. If you are in a more remote area, and want the best coverage, go AT&T.
Progressive is already using a feature like this in the U.S. It's just not a smart phone app. It's actually a little box you put in your car. It's called Snapshot. Not my kind of thing. There is just no way for the insurance company to know what is or is not going on around you when you're driving.
I actually use snapshot. I do agree it is frustrating sometime when the system registers a "hard break", which drops my discount when it was that hard break that prevented an accident through no fault of my own. Then again, when you think about it from their prospective, they was me to minimize my risk of an accident in any fashion, regardless of fault (in case of an uninsured motorist). So even if the hard break isn't my fault, if I do most my driving in stop and go traffic on the freeway, I am more likely to get in an accident than on a less congested city road.
I really don't mind the program or tracking. According to them, they only track speed, time of day, and breaking, but honestly even if they tracked more, I wouldn't really mind. The whole reason I signed up for it to begin with was because my wife is a stay at home mom and only drives her car two or three times a week and then not very far.
Those prices seem unusually high, although depending on what "conventional" internet is, a one time fee of $300 for broadband internet access sounds tempting.
Where do you live? My choices where I live are Verizon Fios or local Cable co. I have Verizon's cheapest Internet only plan, it is 15/5 and is $55 a month. Their next plan up is 25/10 and is $75 a month. The local cable co is basically the same pricing, but aren't quite as fast. Gigabit for $70 sounds like a good deal to me. I would even take the 5/1 for free
Ownership is cheaper than renting, over the long term.
Is it? Take the original collection of 11,000 songs. At $1 a song (pretty much the going rate), that is $11,000.
Spotfiy, Slacker radio, Rhapsody, etc. pretty much all cost $10 per month. Each of their goals (although none fully achieve it) is to have a complete catalog of music that can be played as desired. At $10 per month, $11,000 will pay for a subscription for almost 92 years, or your whole life.
Add into this that the streaming services are constantly adding to their collection, so in 2040, you can get the latest songs instead of being stuck with what you have already bought.
Really, with the current models, it is by far cheaper to rent and then just buy the random few songs that don't appear on your streaming service (as long as you can find a streaming service that has a decent collection of what you like, which I would claim most people could).
This has the unfortunate implication that infants who die go to Hell, according to Christianity
The hard thing with Christianity is there are a lot of "flavors" or denominations or distros or whatever you want to call them. "Original Sin" is a core Catholic tenant, but generally isn't a core Protestant one (YMMV). Generally Protestants believe that children are ignorant of good and evil and therefore get an automatic pass if they die. This is why most protestant congregations do not practice infant baptism. In most protestant groups, people aren't baptized generally until around age 7or 8 or sometimes not until puberty or so (when all those sexual sins get so enticing).
For protestants, baptism is generally the outward sign of the acceptance of salvation/grace for the redemption of one's on personal sins (in the past and future), not the grace for one "original sin".
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.