8 hour old coffee is insufficiently aged; it has yet to achieve peak bitterness.

Most areas of most cities have fairly intuitive street layouts, if you learn them.

... in the US.

In Europe, they're intuitive only if you were born there or know a lot of history. (Of course South Parade is further north than North Parade!)

If you don't frequently experience navigational problems, clearly a compass is not a sensible investment.

I have to say, I've made questionable suggestions on LW in the past, but the tone of the responses to this one has been baffling.

I ADBOC with the last of them (except the “everyone knows” part -- my mother didn't know what the significance of St. Paddy's was until I told her a few years ago).

"Gay people shouldn't marry because it will undermine the very fabric of civilization" "Women shouldn't vote, because they don't understand male concepts like War and Empire" "Everyone knows Irish people get drunk on St. Patrick's day!"

Is your claim that these statements are obviously false or that they're so offensive that they shouldn't be stated even if they're true?

...cold and unpleasant? You mean perfect?

Yes, I like my coffee cold. I like my soda and beer warm, too. I'm just that kind of guy.

I guess it would be helpful to have a "normal" range of time in which it's reasonable to feel sad or weird after a death, break-up, etc. Sometimes, it feels like they all pile up.

I'd hesitate to pin it down to any particular feature set, but the following two features have been very useful to me:

Date-based alarm scheduling - I don't want a feature-heavy calendar application running on my phone, so this has been useful.

Custom text for alarms - Useful for gym reminders; I can plan exercises for each day in advance, rather than deciding what to do in advance. (Again, I stay away from feature-heavy applications. I like lightweight.)

Day-based alarms, and multiple alarms, while trivial features on most smartphone alarm apps, are in fact quite useful, and weren't present in my pre-smartphone phones. I have two alarms set for waking up, for example; the first tells me to down an energy drink (Xenadrine drink mix, supposedly for dieting but my favorite energy drink, or Redline energy drinks, are both awesome for this) or extra-large cup of coffee. Thirty minutes later, when the second alarm wakes me up, I wake up easily and without grogginess. (Alternatively, you can use an alarm application that wakes you up in the ideal part of your sleep cycle. That's a bit... feature-rich for me, however.)

My main objection to smartphone use is that by putting anything you want to pay attention to at your fingertips, it can introduce a certain distance from what is actually going on. I would not advocate, say, spending your 4 hours at the DMV observing your surroundings (that would be a waste of time). But I am concerned that time spent with portable Internet corresponds to ever thicker-walled and less-apparent echo chambers. Is this an issue you have thoughts on?

By way of example, I'm trying to think about the difference between reading a novel on the subway and reading the internets on the subway; the main distinction is that when I'm reading the novel, I'm aware that I'm not actually paying attention to my surroundings.

This is an unfair comparison, especially in light of the explanation given in the edit.

OP's point was that GPS can frequently be unreliable. In terms of navigating without it, basic orientation is typically enough to get you started, and "smart" substitutes for a compass are strictly inferior to an actual compass.