Nah, pedantry is the heart and soul of Slashdot.

Does tethering count? If so, I spend 24 hours a day "on the phone". Otherwise, it's just the once weekly parental call (via Skype w/ video, over said tethering) for about 30 minutes. Everything else is handled via IM and email.

"If you were not a power user, you wanted the system to tailor the news for you." This is why we read Slashdot, no?

I've requested that mine be nuked from orbit, it's the only way to be sure..

But I thought, “Nah, forget it. Yo, holmes to Bel-Air!”

And just how are we going create that if we don't have a standard defining how to define a standard?

I second the Tchibo vote. I moved to Germany on a short term basis recently and signed up with these guys. It's completely prepaid, but you can sign up for a monthly "plan" which automatically deducts money each month in exchange for a data allowance. You can turn plans on/off by either texting a certain number and possibly via web interface too. I signed up for the 5GB plan (shaped to 64kbit after) and it only costs €20 a month, which seems a fair bit better than what most providers offer for heavy data users. The coverage isn't amazing compared to t-mobile but it's not too awful if you're not rural and for standard calls o2 has a roaming agreement with t-mobile as well. I get very good data rates and few dropouts using Tchibo in Augsburg as my sole internet connection aka. fairly heavy usage. For anyone wondering why on Earth anyone would get 5GB of 3G data, the answer is tethering + living somewhere without wired internet.

Does the counter to this threat really need to be high tech and expensive? Clearly the perfect counter to UAVs are UAVs. You could take a few gamers and pay them minumum wage to sit around in a room on call. When a possible threat is detected a UAV is launched and remote control is handed over to an operator and they bring down the threat or surveil and report, then they can go back to their wow raid or play flight sims or whatever it is they want to do to keep busy in the meantime. Step it up a notch by training operators/doing background checks/having distributed locations etc but it's still pretty cheap. You don't need many people in order to have it so that there will always be someone ready to take over at a moments notice.