Slashdot Mirror
Cell Phone Is The Most Hated Invention
Romeo Elias Cabrera writes "The most hated invention in America -although also one of the most used- is the cell phone, according a
recent survey. The Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, an annual survey by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that among adults asked what invention they hate most but can't live without, 30 percent said the cell phone."
The survey was asking about inventions that the respondants could not live without. I think that all the things you listed clearly fall into the category of being items everyone can live without.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Those numbers do seem a little skewed.. I work part-time on a project basis with an opinion research firm, and I know that sampling is done very carefully in order to get accurate results. I also know that if the people doing the research are biased, the results can follow.
"where words meet intent, lies rhetoric's lament"
those are as useful to the civilian as sticking your dick into a mousetrap
-1 for massive propagandistic cut and paste. It's nice that he even copied the misspellings!
I love the way that was modded up 'Insightful.'
Actually, I really like Natalie Portman, but when I saw those (real) topless pics of her.. man, she's just normal, nothing going on there.
Check it out.. pictures 1, 3, 4, and the first and second ones on the second row are real. All of rest are fake or clothed.
Anyways, just because your alarm clock sucks doesn't mean every one does :D
it makes sense to me, my alarm clock have a 7 minute snooze
some possible reasons are at
m l
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a991126.ht
Have you thought about a pay-as-you-go system? For someone like me who only uses cell phones for emergencies they work out pretty well.
http://www.aaplblog.com/ - News about Apple Inc.
It's vital that employers pay for our time. Otherwise they just take it for granted and will abuse us; maybe not deliberately, but when you've been called two or three times a night, every night for a month it doesn't really matter. (I was the only UNIX admin at one place just after a complete migration from IBM MVS systems, courtesy of every other bastard leaving for greener pastures.)
I used to hate my 'phone (landline) but the cell-phone - and a proper, paid on-call rota - is wonderful. When I'm on-call, I am no-longer tied to the house. When I'm not on-call I can just turn the thing off. The stress-relief is immense.
Most of our problems with technology aren't in the technology itself, but that society has failed to evolve with it.
I don't have a cell phone, and refuse to get one for several reasons, all related to social norms. First, I enjoy moments of solitude in the day. I don't want to be reachable 24/7. I might consider a cellphone for emergencies but too many people can't seem to understand a reasonable definition of emergency.
I could get one and only turn it on when I have an emergency, but it seems that people actually EXPECT to be able to call you when you're on the can and get angry if you turn the phone off. If I don't have one at all, they think I'm odd, but they don't get angry.
People who call a cellphone forget that you're not sitting in a dark corner just waiting for the phone to ring. It's impossible to talk to someone face to face if their phone is ringing every other word. I make it a practice to avoid talking to people who can't ignore their phone for 5 minutes.
This will remain a problem until society's expectations mature enough to be able to hear 'I don't want to have a phone conversation right now' and not get all hacked off about it (as if they've never claimed 'breaking up' to get out of a cell call themselves).
I might re-consider if there was a phone that would play my voice too chopped up to understand for 10 seconds then hang up on command.
In a similar way, the alarm clock, once a handy way to avoid sleeping the whole day away now acts as a chronic (pun intended) sleep deprivation device. It is mis-used by the sleeper who refuses to realize that they would wake up fine if they went to bed at a decent hour, and by the rest of society which now feels that being tired is no excuse for being 30 minutes late.
I don't hold out too much hope for society catching up with technology. We still haven't caught up with ubiquitous accurate wrist watches.
Consider how much less stressed people were about appointments, meetings, and the start of the workday when nobody could really be called late unless it was by more than 15-30 minutes (based on the town clock chiming). While many people have adjusted, there are far too many anal people who start burning spots in the face of their watch if someone is 5 seconds late.
It doesn't actually save any time, since it just forces people to be 15 minutes early and waste their time waiting rather than risking being a minute or two late.
Of course, that is all reletive, and has been going on over 2000 years:
"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE