You clearly have no idea how automobile insurance in the United States works. Your claim won't be denied because you were speeding, making a soft right turn, etc. If that was the case, the vast majority of claims would never be paid.
Your insurance company can deny payment if you intentionally cause bodily injury or property damage. It can also deny payment if you cause bodily injury or property damage due to a criminal act or omission. This exclusion, however, does not apply to traffic violations.

Contracts vary, but the above is pretty standard for personal auto coverage in the US. You should read you contract sometime.

LOL - read the comments above. People aren't nearly as concerned about Apple getting the information as they are about the government.

I agree with all of your points. As for blackouts in the US, my experience says they are typically caused by storm damage to lines and, less frequently transformers. Admittedly, there are brown-outs in certain areas due to demand exceeding available supply.

In regard to the former, I'd say these are more frequent in the US than in Belgium primarily because of size. The US covers 9,826,630 square kilometers. Much of that has extremely low population density (but still receives power). As a result, line installations have typically been 'above ground' as those line runs are far cheaper to install. I've also heard power companies say that above ground runs are easier to maintain in certain cases. The example I recall is that, on long, underground runs it's very difficult to find and fix a problem. The same is very easy on above-ground runs. You can fix many above ground issues for the cost of one below ground fix. While this makes sense to me, I can't vouch for the validity. I read it in a local publication after below ground installation was proposed as a solution to long outages in rural areas after large storms.

Belgium, on the other hand, is very small and has the second highest population density in Europe. I'm guessing that, with relatively short runs and a small area to cover, most of your infrastructure is underground. This is most comparable to the major cities in the US. I honestly can't recall the last time the power was out in Downtown Seattle.

In regard to the latter, that's a legal and bureaucratic nightmare that few people besides regulators and ex-Enron employees could hope to truly understand.

What isn't pointed out is that, on some sites, the absense of Flash support means there is NO user experience - just a box indicating a missing plug-in. Some might say that the inability to have the experience at all is worse than the poor experience. I won't argue that Flash is a wonderful platform, but it is a platform through which useful content is delivered. I prefer to have the choice to see that content.

To put it more simply, I had an iphone for 2 years. I frequently wished for Flash support. I know have a phone that supports Flash. I've never once wished it did not.

Ah, good. Now I have some interesting documentation to fend off the hordes of moronic sales people that Clear has stalking around the local mall.

That's inconsistent with my experience. I run flash on my Galaxy S and find it to be just fine for animations and video. There are no problems with the load time. I do notice that activities like scrolling and zooming become 'choppy', but that hasn't killed my experience. I expect my mobile device to be a little less snappy when viewing video. To compensate, I just set Dolphin to display Flash content only when I want to see it. I then have the choice to view the content or not. I appreciate that.

I've not used Flash on Android for navigation, but I would imagine that the experience there is poor.

If google would simply force anyone using Android to open source any drivers and or hardware-specific modifications made to the OS in order to support the hardware. If the Dev community had all of that to work with then it would be comparitvely easy to take each vanilla update from Google and create working version for each handset.

Google provides the vast majority of their services to their audience for no charge. As such, I don't think it's really a fair comparison.

Seems like an amendment could address the 'constitutionality' issues. Of course, those are hard to pass. Then again, there's a reason for that.

And Samsung hasn't been kind enough to post the source for the drivers. That's why you didn't see froyo on any of the Galaxy S phones until the Samsung release candidate was leaked. Driver source would be the key that would allow the independent development community to keep all the Galaxy S phones as close to 'up-to-date' as possible. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.

I'd say the reason for that is "choice of carriers." A lot of people are happy with Verizon, Sprint/Nextel, T-Mobile, etc. The iPhone simply isn't enough to get them to switch carriers - especially to the much-maligned AT&T. For those that might prefer the iPhone, the combination of a nice Android device and their preferred carrier is the superior option.

Granted, price probably comes into play in carrier preference (ie T-Mobile), but quality of service and other factors are often as, if not more, important (ie Verizon).

I think Microsoft is failing to recognize that consumers see their mobile phone as something personal. Much like a watch or handbag, consumers want their phone to reflect who they are or who they want to be. This isn't an expectation consumers have of most of the other MSFT products. Things like Office, Windows, Visual Studio, etc. are just tools used to accomplish an end.

Microsoft needs to provide a story that makes people want to connect with their phone. Their biggest push seems to be X-Box Live. I hate to say it, but the people that are going to connect with their phone because it offers XBox Live are probably in the dorks or kids category. Your average person doesn't have a need to be connected to their gamer account 24/7 nor would they have even the slightest interest in that capability. Hell, I'd even venture on to say that most people would be slightly embarrassed to be connected to a phone that was strongly associated with that capability. Few people really want to carry around the 'gamer' label.

Think of a singles bar. A guy is sitting down looking at his phone when a girl walks up and inquires about it. Guy replies "It's my new Windows Phone 7. It lets me connect to my gamer profile on XBox Live so I can score new acheivements and see my friends' gamer scores 24/7." Girl rolls eyes and walks away. Christ, they might as well have tried to sell the phone by saying it connects seamlessly with your WOW account.

To make matters worse there will be two big sets of early adopters with this phone - MSFT employees (because they get a free one) and the types of people mentioned in the preceeding paragraph. Neither group really represents the core of the "people everyone wants to be like" group. In fact, they're more in the "people looked down upon by my social circle" group. Those are the first folk people will see using the phone.

I'm not trying to trash on gamers or MSFT employees or gamers (I've worked at MSFT and used to spend a fair amount of time on Live), but MSFT should at least realize that they aren't necessarily in the 'cool' crowd and probably aren't going to be persuasive in getting people outside their circle to buy a WP7.

So, in short, people want to their phone to be cool. MSFT isn't really 'cool'. They need to do something to make their phone cool so people want it (because being built on the MSFT platform isn't going to cut it buy itself). They tried to make it cool by adding Xbox Live integration. Apparently MSFT hasn't figured out that being considered a 'gamer' isn't really cool.

Interstate truck? That's far too easy. I'm thinking something like slip it in some meat and feed it to a gator in the Everglades.

amphibious assault Seguay couldn't keep its head above water