All of these subsidies may cost the carriers some money, but they are costing you money as well. The carriers pay for smart phone subsidies with the price of their plans. Rather than laugh at the carriers' misfortune, you should consider this article to be an insight into why your bill is so high. People love Apple for the iPhone and hate the carriers for their ridiculous fees which is exactly how Apple planned it when they required the carriers to subsidize $450 of the iPhone 4S in order to sell it.

You may have been using a 4G phone in an area without 4G coverage. I have a 4G phone in an area with 4G coverage. The difference is huge. In case anyone wants numbers, I'll run a speed test:

Speakeasy.net going from Indianapolis to the Chicago test location. Using a Droid Bionic phone through Verizon.
4G: 35Mbps down, 12Mbps up
3G: 0.48Mbps down, 0.47Mbps up

Without going into long lists of examples, I'll just say that I can envision some situations where this would be useful and others where it would be detrimental. I think that a "smart search" ... one that uses data from browsing history, Google+, and maybe other places... would be a good optional filter. It should be something that's easily accessible from the main page, sort of like filtering by date. It should not be default though, and it really needs to be able to be toggled on/off easily.

I think that the problem is with WHEN people decide to use their phones while driving. It's not dangerous at all to glance at your phone at a stoplight, and I think that it's minimally dangerous to use your phone on a familiar road while driving straight in light traffic. The problem is with people who are talking on their phones while trying to aggressively change lanes in rush hour or with people who are looking at their phone to text or dial in stop-and-go traffic. I think that if you are reasonable about when you choose to use your phone, it negates most of the danger. The problem with the studies is that subjects are tested in situations where they shouldn't be using their phones anyway under normal circumstances. You don't have to worry about missing an exit or crashing into a car in front of you when you know the area and you aren't following closely to begin with... ie: situations where it's safe to use your phone.

It sounds like he's trying to market to hipsters.

So what if Siri is just now starting to collect speech recognition data for Apple? Google has been doing it for years with Google Voice. All of the calls that it handles and voicemails it transcribes give Google a huge amount of voice data. When you include that along with voice/context data that it may get from Google Voice Search and context data it gets from regular Google searches, I don't know that Apple really has a "two year" advantage.

You don't need to own what produces it, but there are risks. There are many situations that could cause France to ration or cut off your electricity supply leaving you SOL.

Write down everything you want to share on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. Store the envelope with other important documents. Tell your spouse and maybe another family member or close friend of its existence. Every time you update your passwords or other information, shred the old one and make a new one. Envelopes and paper are cheap. If you're extra paranoid, use some method to mark the envelope so you can tell if it has been tampered with, and don't tell anyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudspeaker

Who knew?

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that I think there should be an extra sales tax added or a new sales tax for states that don't currently have one. I am saying that I think it's reasonable for states that already have a sales tax to have some kind of simple method (for both the state and the citizen) to collect that sales tax on internet purchases.