Several loads of crap in this.

1. BREW has had an app store since the early 2000s, which many carriers around the world have used and continue to use, especially in developing countries/on cheaper phones. The iPhone wouldn't have happened without BREW being a strategic and commercial proof of concept that a curated…

The Turk was never considered a racially charged name for that 18th century automaton, so I don't understand the equivalence to cotton picker that you're trying to portray.

Hate to be Debbie Downer here, but it will never happen. It goes against the fundamental nature of life itself, which is based on conflict (over food or other resources). We just happen to complicate it even further than the animal kingdom, by introducing reasons to kill each other like religion or politics.

Yeah, I'm sure there would be. But it's not called that. So what's your point?

The history of the human race is almost constant war punctuated with occasional gaps of local or regional peace, but rarely is there any period of longer than a year or two free of military conflict across the entire globe (if even that; it's entirely possible that there's never been a period of any length where…

Having lived in Apple Valley, I feel its pain.

"basic tenant of human hygiene"

Denver, Salt Lake, and Phoenix are all metropolises with practically nothing around them. I wouldn't expect you to get a signal while you're at altitude over the Wasatch or Rocky mountains with no freeways below you.

Jimmy Fallon is a psychopathic neuroscientist?

If you think that socialized medicine will provide a higher level of care in a shorter time frame and for less money, you're in for a rude awakening.

You do realize that your phone is checking signal strength several hundred times a second and will ramp up power usage as high as necessary to talk to the towers on the ground (in the absence of a picocell on the aircraft). Your battery will just drain rapidly when the radios are turned all the way up.

Sure, they'll do a picocell on the plane to avoid the handoff issues, but my point was, even if they didn't, you'd still get a signal anytime you're over a freeway or relatively populated areas (but, yes, your battery will drain fast). I've accidentally left my phone on during a couple of flights and still showed…

The cell reception is going to be awesome. There is nothing but air between you and the towers.

Besides which, since everything is digital now, it either works or it doesn't. Ambient noise from the plane's engines is going to be the bigger issue.

There is a huge difference between your neighbors in a small town "knowing what everybody's doing" for the purposes of gossip over the back yard fence vs. *the government* and *corporations* knowing what everybody is doing for potentially far more nefarious purposes.

If you were my employee, you'd be so fired for writing this.

Reminds me of the trip up to the Valle Nevado ski resort in the Andes above Santiago, Chile. The bus ride up was a little bit like this, but perhaps a few notches less insane.

And that's why Sully is such a badass. That flight had the unbelievably good fortune to be piloted by somebody who spent most of his off time manually flying gliders. Probably a different outcome if somebody else had been at the controls.

Mike Hankey?

There's still no point of comparison. Sweden could have 10,000 prisons capable of holding a million prisoners and be under capacity, while the US could have 10 prisons capable of holding 50 prisoners and be 40% over capacity. The comparison as written doesn't tell you anything.