Лёвик в Нью Йорке и других местах

From "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar...", which I bought for reading on the plane:

Two cows are standing in the pasture. One turns to the other and says,
"Although pi is usually abbreviated to five numbers, it actually goes on to infinity."
The second cow turns to the first and says, "Moo".

... is SMS. Think about it. Text messages are limited to 160 characters in length. That means it would take 6,250 SMSes to transmit one measely Megabyte of data. Most carriers will charge between 10 and 25 cents per message, which translates into a rate of $625 to $1,562 per MB. Some carriers offer SMS packages: I pay Verizon $8 for 500 SMSes per month - this still makes the rate $100 per MB. These figures are a bit exaggerated because there is some overhead involved in sending each SMS, but even if the effective transmission size is doubled the rates are still pretty outrageous.

Compare this to the data plans available from most of the same companies: $20 - $35 per month buys you all the data you can reasonably download. Even the connected iPhone makes you pay extra for SMSes - on top of the unlimited data plan.