They seem to think a cell phone should function well as a phone!

You mean recordings, not music. The signatures are those of known recordings. Google's search won't find your unauthorized performance of "Hard Day's Night"; it's searching sound, not notes.

sacrilegious content

I think you mean sacrilegious expression. Or sacrilege.

"[some say] we're doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else"

Jeez, how many levels of indirection is that?

Are your products secure? Or not?

I'm doing a better job turning water into wine. I can't do it. But some folks say I'm doing a better job making water more like wine than anyone else.

content providers and advertisers will need to start thinking about a data budget

You mean media providers.

The content could usually be conveyed with far fewer bits.

Rewarding those who get to the point could be a good thing.

I don't need flashing graphics to tell me it's gonna rain tomorrow.

"It's going to rain tomorrow" will do. Same content.

the Kindle bookstore as a content provider

You mean media provider.

The content, if any, of the works is provided by the authors, artists, photographers, and so on who created them.

"Deploy" means station in the field.

Excellent points. The case is hardly compelling that "it's safe for supertaskers". It's equally likely that something else entirely was going on with those 5. To make the case that this is safe under any circumstances would require far more convincing data than this.

I take it that you believe "content" means "that which is contained".

"Content" means the substance or subject matter of a work. It cannot be copyrighted.

You mean media, or expression, or product. The content, if any, cannot be copyrighted. Also you don't mean infringing, you mean unlicensed, or pirated.

why you need lightning to give life to inanimate flesh and time travel.

Changing norms is probably what's needed instead.

The norm now is use the device anywhere: home, office, car, bathroom, supermarket, elevator, hospital, wherever. The world is your telephone booth. We all want to hear (one side of) your conversation. It's OK to force that on us. It's OK to threaten our lives and safety with it (the research shows that it's incompatible with safe driving, period). Go ahead. Do it. Anywhere. Everywhere. It's normal.

We can change that norm. A good place to start would be where it's just plain unsafe: driving while talking on your cell. The new norm: we regard that exactly as we would drunk driving: completely unacceptable. We treat it like that. We make law that treats it like that. Over time, that would save lives and limbs. A good new norm.

How to start changing the norm: stop talking on your cell while driving. You. Right there. You too. All of you. Now. From this day forward. Don't do it. When you see others doing it, be appropriately horrified. Have the same attitude you would towards someone's drunk driving. Not cool. Not acceptable.

We have no tech fix for drunk driving. But we have reduced it dramatically by changing norms.

Tech fix sounds great to techies. Probably not the solution here. If you put in tech fixes and don't change norms, you'll probably just see a lot of evasion of the tech fix.

Yep. "Just drinking coffee"? What ever made anyone think the car was a restaurant? No, you don't have a right to drink coffee while driving. You have a responsibility to drive safely. However the research shows that talking on your cell is uniquely distracting and for much longer periods of time while driving.

We see a lot of confusion on that point. "It's in your genes, there's nothing you can do about it". Oh? Bad eyesight was in my genes. I got eyeglasses.

The plasticity of the brain was already known to be very high. Now we have reason to believe it's even higher than previously known. Genes are great, I love 'em, but a lot happens after conception.

Uh, it's a within subjects design. Each subject was his own control.