The cheapest AT&T plan for the iPhone is $69.99. It does include unlimited data use, but no, there’s no way to get a non-data plan. If you get the phone, you’re stuck paying $70+taxes for the next 2 years.

The iPhone is both a UMTS/HSDPA and a GSM phone, and is now being sold in over 70 countries, so it should work fine just about anywhere overseas – as long as you’re not in the middle of nowhere. I have no idea what you’d be paying, since you’d be on a completely different network in a different country – you’d probably feel your wallet nailed by both AT&T and the local provider’s network that you’re on.

You should go to Italy. The iPhone will work there.

The answer to this question requires a comparison to early sailors/explorers. Before comprehensive maps were created, explorers had to rely on crude maps and add to them as they went. Continents went unexplored because no one had visited and charted them yet. Things were primitive, but as time went on, the ships went further, the maps grew, and the voyages were potentially much more profitable.

Now, spammers are kind of like early explorers. Except they steal the ships that they use, are shot at wherever they go, and spread disease and pain rather than adding any value to human society. Actually, I guess spammers are more like the rats on the ship, and the spam that they send could be compared to the disease-spreading ticks that rats could carry.

As more of the internet is discovered (it’s not built as is commonly believed, all the content is there – sometimes it’s just hiding) these spammers use the new internet maps to spread their plague-filled spam further and faster.

So, the increasing quality of maps increases the amount of spam that is sent.