Let's put it this way. Let's say some old man is about to go on a family vacation. Let's say he's really afraid of airplanes, and insists on trading his plane ticket for a train ticket.

If agrees to go on the airplane and everyone dies because of it, that's coincidence. If he gets on the train and his family dies, but he arrives safely, that's coincidence. If he gets on the train and dies while his family lands safely, that's irony.

What happened here was that Gawker's advertising team put up a Sprint ad, and Gizmodo's editors wrote an article that's more or less critical of Sprint. There were no expectations on anyone's part, no collaboration, and no obvious pattern broken, hence it's coincidence.

Of course, that's situational irony, and doesn't apply to Socratic, verbal, or dramatic irony.

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I've never thought the two to be mutually exclusive. That is to say, why can't you have an ironic coincidence? While you do need expectations of the contrary to have true irony, saying that a coincidence can't be ironic implies that irony can only be intentional.

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people are already paying at least 70.00/month for plans to use these phones (which includes data). There is no real need to pay more for the "option" to do this, just let us tether the damn thing.

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I think charging $70 like AT&T seems to be planning will be exorbitant, but they probably don't want everyone jumping on the tether bandwagon at the same time, and they need the money to build up their infrastructure so that in a couple years, they could handle everyone doing this.

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