His phone is "dumb" but mobile. So, I'm
more old fashioned than he is because
my phone is "dumb" but a wire-line
desk set and not mobile.

Why? Because when I use the phone, I
want the rest of my relevant stuff
handy -- paper and pen for notes,
various papers, and relevant data on
my computer.

But I can't make or receive mobile calls? Right.

To receive a call while I am traveling,
my voice phone provider, also my ISP,
has a message recorder, and then I
can get the message via e-mail
and download it. Really, for most
calls, I would not want to receive a call
while traveling because then
I would not have materials,
desk, etc. to
be able to handle the
call well. E.g., maybe I'm walking
down an isle at a grocery store
looking for a one quart or larger
jar of sweet pickle relish
and get a phone call about something
important where I have no
desk to take notes, note pad,
background info, privacy, etc. No thanks.

For making calls
while traveling, mostly I don't
want to do that either.
My work is to write my software, and
I don't travel much. So, when traveling,
I would only call for car emergencies,
and those are too rare to be worth
having a mobile phone, data plan,
keeping batteries charged, etc.

And now I'm concerned about privacy:
As it is, there is no way the NSA
or FBI can track me via my
smartphone signal because I have
no smartphone! So, the NSA and
FBI can't use a smartphone to
track me to my local convenience
store to buy gas for my car and lawn mower, milk,
French vanilla ice cream, and
wheat bread, to a local pizza
shop for a pickup for dinner, to Sam's Club,
Wal-Mart, and A&P for groceries,
cat food, etc., to a coin laundry
(until I get my Maytag fixed),
to Chinese carry-out, to
a hardware store to get epoxy
resin glue to fix loose joints in
wooden furniture, two cycle oil for
my grass trimmer, wet-dry sand paper
to use for sharpening my French chef's
kitchen knife -- really top
national security stuff like that!

Mostly my information, especially that
relevant to phone calls,
is on my computer
which is in a mid-tower case on a
table at home and usually in front of me and, thus, also
not mobile. E.g., for a phone number,
that's on my computer with other
relevant info and easy to find with
some of my software. And I have a
little very simple software to
dial phone numbers -- just write
some characters to a COM port
starting with AT and have the
phone wires going into and out
of an old FAX modem (also good
for sending letters via FAX
to my reps in Congress).

For a mobile
phone to have my collection of phone numbers, I would
have to copy over the data and, in the
future, sync the two locations of
my data. Also a smart phone, with
maybe something from Microsoft an
exception, won't run my most heavily
used piece of software that, in particular I use for
managing information relevant to
phone calls, my favorite text editor.
If my favorite editor were emacs,
then maybe it would also run on
a Linux based smartphone. But, as it is
a smartphone is a computer
but a pain to use instead of
my main computer and, then, a
sync issue.

If Microsoft wants to do something
to get ahead, then they should
make much more clear how to
do syncs, backups, restores,
including of options on software,
and the boot partition, and how
to use a home computer as a
server for mobile devices,
e.g., give good explanations of
VPNs and other security issues
of opening my main computer to
access from mobile devices.

Finally, if I had a smartphone,
then it might get stolen, and
the data on it might be confidential.

Even worse, if the smartphone had
an easy way to get a VPN connection
back to my main computer as a server,
then maybe all of the data on my
main computer -- e.g., my software
which should be treated as a
trade secret -- could be stolen.

Also, now police seem to like to
take smartphones and look through
all the data, photographs, etc.
there and strain to find excuses
to start big legal cases. Also,
with my smartphone in their hands
and a VPN connection back to my
main computer, they would
also have my trade secret software.

If I
have no smartphone, then police
can't grab it and violate my
Fourth Amendment rights.

If
I had a smartphone and had it
visible and if there were some
police doing something or other,
then the police could go wacko
(they basically don't like
citizens recording or even
watching what they do and know
that in practice they can
get away with a lot of
bullying of citizens they don't like),
accuse me of taking their pictures,
rough me up, arrest me,
search my car, plant drugs in my
car and then charge me with
possession of drugs, take my
smartphone, etc. They could
take my car. In searching
my car, they could find excuses
to trash my car, e.g., cut open
the seats.
If I had a dog,
then they could find an excuse
to shoot my dog. Just having
a smartphone could trigger some
not very nice police to get
me into a lot of legal trouble
for no more reason than my
just having a smartphone.
Indeed, likely police are afraid
of smartphones.

With no
smartphone, police have
fewer excuses to bully me
around, get their sadistic
enjoys, and get me into a
lot of legal trouble for
no reason at all.