It's Most Certainly Not The End of the OS

TFA wrote:(3) Giving up freedom for convenience is likely a bad idea. You are handing your freedom over to your cloud solutions provider and your telco. Does anyone even like telcos?

I don't see how this is a deterrent for most users. Most people don't care about freedom, only about convenience. This is especially true in America today. No, no one really likes telcos, but all anyone ever does is complain, and usually that's the more tech-aware people. Everyone else just thinks it's perfectly normal to have a monopoly controlling your access to information, and is happy to pay them whatever they ask.

I've started taking every opportunity to mention that in India, barefoot peasants can afford cell phones, and that in Kenya 60+% of the population not only have cell phones, but use them (via M-Pesa) in lieu of a bank account, chequing-account, credit-card, debit card, etc for handling financial transactions.

Then I wonder out loud why it cell-phone service is so ridiculously expensive here in North America...

Lesse.....only 2 major carriers, 1 of them actually using GSM (ATT), only 1 other (afaik) GSM provider around (T-Mobile). So almost no phone portability, and thus the carriers have near monopolies on phone models and use that to force features to be limited on the ones they sell directly to the customers to prevent "unauthorized use" (read: use features the phones were built with but the carrier wants to charge for access to). Yeah. Almost no competition = near no motivation to improve service + lots of motivation to keep increasing prices and find more things to charge for (that the phones can already do as produced by the manufacturers).

Yup....