People would be fighting for unlocking laws like that in the US, if it actually mattered. The only providers that use SIM cards are T-Mobile and AT&T, and they use different 3G frequencies so most phones aren't (fully) compatible between them anyway. Europe has choice, the US doesn't really. You choose a provider, you're stuck with their phone options, for the most part.
This is the missing piece for me. I still want to own the physical book, but I would love the convenience of being able to load a bunch of books on my Kindle and take it on a trip or something.
Plus, think of the lock-in that the stores are missing out on. As a Kindle owner, if Amazon offered me bundles, I would probably never buy another book at Barnes & Noble.
People were invested in Myspace with updates, photos, page customizations, etc. Now they're all on Facebook. There's no reason to believe they won't move again if the right feature set comes along.
I'd actually expect that Facebook's far deeper penetration would mean that there is a far lower percentage that are willing to jump on the "next big thing".
This works great until 10 years down the road you pick up an old Mac at a thrift store and discover that the internet recovery for Lion has been ended and the newer OS's aren't supported by the hardware.
The Shuttle fails in its primary objective, that of being a "reusable" vehicle. I attended a presentation by a NASA employee that explained the Shuttle process from landing to launch, and I was amazed at how much of the craft is replaced. I think we would have been far better off extending the Apollo program to new missions, similar to the Soyuz (which is still flying although much improved from the moon landing era).
The shuttle was the worst of both worlds. They replace enough parts to make each mission absurdly expensive, and keep enough components in place that it's extremely difficult to be sure they won't fail in flight.
