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Shenk you far callink Eenterprice Grummar Solootions. Moy nam is "Jason". How cane I be helpink you today?
I see you are havink a service agreement with us. Zees ees very good. I will be transferrink you now to "second-tier support". Thank you for callink us today. Goodbye.
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Entaprise Gramma Solutions. This is Bob. What can I do for ya?
All-righty. Ye've got yerself a nice little post there. Now, that there semicolon in your third paragraph should be a comma. That's it. Now, according to this here agreement, you'll be billed $99.95 for this call. Thanks for callin'.
they were used for hundreds of years without contamination
[citation needed]
How are you sure they weren't contaminated before? There's no measurement. Oh, yes, people drank from the wells for hundreds of years with no ill effects... just as they can do now! There's no clear link between methane in water and health problems, so before the current paranoia over fracking, would anybody have bothered to check for (or care about) methane?
OR, you can rightly conclude the operations caused the contamination.
or, I can conclude that there isn't enough evidence to blame anybody just yet, and instead just push for regulation to stop things that are blatantly bad, like dumping wastewater into nearby streams. An attack on fracking in general simply isn't supported by the studies performed to date. The study inspiring this story concludes by recommending more long-term monitoring, and finds only a correlation between well sites and contaminated water.
fascist, corporatist tool... of the sociopaths
That's quite an opinion after only a few paragraphs of discussion. I bet it'd shock you to know that I've actually helped organize protests against corporations, and voted repeatedly to raise corporate taxes in my area. That's okay. You go on and jump to your conclusions, and I'll just be content watching facts as they are discovered through proper science.
... unmarred by coercion and the threat of force
...and the scientific method, and concept of innocence, apparently.
The schism comes from democracy's fetish for cooperative efforts, and the public's inability to see similarities. The laws the police enforce are (ideally) proposed by the people, voted on by the people, and enforced by elected representatives of the people. Corporate regulations are seen as being chosen arbitrarily by a small committee.
Now, that committee is a group of (ideally) experts, who regulate things that are legitimate problems, but that thought doesn't always occur to John Q. Public. Similarly, the corporation is nothing more than a collaborative effort among many people, but there's enough layers of abstraction to make corporations appear different from individuals. In my opinion, that's where the divide starts, and that's why discussions of corporations are always such a hot topic.
How about the theory where the water goes to the well hole, where it (and the gas it contains) is pumped up to the surface, separated, and pushed back down again?
Likewise, for any such story, there will be a certain cast of recurring characters who will jump to attack. You can almost hear their thoughts, "How dare these groups place the needs of many before the needs of a few individuals?" It is a knee-jerk attack on cooperation.
So tell me, did you miss the part of science where you need a control group with the exact same circumstances, or at least control measurements from before the experiment takes place? Science has not been satisfied. But science doesn't matter to you, does it? The only thing that matters is that the "individuals" are fighting against the evil collaborations, in the grand tradition of "one man vs. the world".
Would there have been a reason to test the water BEFORE you could light it on fire?
How do you know when you could light the water on fire, if you didn't test it by lighting the water on fire? Now that fracking's well-known, everybody near a fracking site goes and tries to light their tap water on fire, just to see if it works. If it works, the response is "It's the fracking's fault!" If the water stays as boring as ever, the response is "Well, I guess I'm not contaminated enough." There is no easy test that shows that it's not the fracking's fault, unless every well owner checks their water daily.
That's not to say that there aren't bad companies out there. There are, and there's a lot of them. As fracking became known as a cheap and easy way to get into the energy business, lots of small companies sprung up to capitalize on the potential. They did bad things, and a lot of them are getting in deep trouble for what they did. In TFA, I'm not seeing any indication as to which injection chemicals were used near contaminated sites, what practices were followed on the surface, or even the environmental record of the companies involved. The business landscape changes rapidly, and I doubt that past mistakes really point toward future ones. Like every other industry, the small companies will die off under the pressure of regulation and efficiency, and the big companies will adapt to the recommendations of the time.
I have connections to the professional photography industry, in the form of a now-closed family business.
A comparable print package from a professional lab costs a few dollars. The blogger's estimates are on the high side in that regard alone. The basic airbrushing and editing is a somewhat common freebie from a lab, partly as a way of hiding processing defects (painting over dust spots on the paper). It gets even more disgustingly inaccurate when you factor in the cost of a minilab print. If the photographer owns their own minilab, they can do all their own prints for far less than the blogger's estimating. I'd be surprised if the photographer were actually losing money on this. Maybe not making very much, but certainly not losing.
Then there's the business side. The photo industry is based entirely around the photographer's skill, rather than the actual product. It's the little things that make the difference between a picture that says "Wow, that's a nice portrait!" and "Gee, that guy looks creepy". Things like shadows around the eyes, light balance, a lit background, and even the position of the subject's feet all affect a simple head shot. Full-body photos are more complicated. With today's supply of decent digital cameras and Wal-Mart printers, convincing people to actually pay a professional is constantly getting harder. A ridiculously-cheap deal like this means there's 301 more customers on the area who know of the photographer's service and quality. If even a handful of those come back for a second round, it's a net profit.
Of course, but sticking 50 cans of fuel on a plane is cheaper and easier than 50 of these things. On a cloudy day, I can't assume these are reliable, either.
If only it were that simple. Hypothetically, let's assume all such remarks went unseen and unheard. Then, in the public eye, our energy problems are "solved" because fusion works, pollution problems are "solved" because of solar cells, world hunger is "solved" because of GM food crops, and world peace should be "solved" really soon now that Bin Laden is dead. Given that all those problems are solved, the only reason we don't have such miracles is must be... a global conspiracy, perhaps? I jest, of course, but those flying cars and jetpacks are just so awesome that something must be holding them back.
I don't intend to disparage the progress made by this team, or the benefit this invention could bring to the world. I do feel it is important to note that reaching a milestone does not "solve" a problem. I'd have no problem if the summary said the students had "made progress toward eliminating a huge health concern" or "helped the fight against a huge health concern", but I would like to reserve the term "solved" for when the problem is completely solved, including those pesky business concerns.
But this is solar! It uses the sun, which is a renewable resource! Surely doctors care more about a pollution-free environment than about their scarce money and office space, right?
They're minor details that kill off a staggering number of projects. I'm also not convinced the OLPC is a success yet, and it's been almost four years. Only 2 million laptops have been distributed, at double the intended price point, to only a few countries. OLPC is certainly ferther along the path to success, but I don't think they're there just yet.
No, they haven't. They have made some nice progress, and apparently have small-scale usage in Haiti, but I certainly wouldn't classify the problem as "solved". They still need to get the devices to where they're needed, which means shipping, mass manufacturing, establishing supply lines, and convincing somebody (corporation, government, investor, or otherwise) that this is a worthwhile idea.
One year to take an invention to market? I take it you've never actually invented anything. For physical products where you need to set up a supply chain, five or ten years is to be expected. For a software product, estimates get more complicated, because though you can get faster production and distribution, you have to account for hardware availability and feature roadmaps. Maybe a better limit is something like 20 years. That should be enough for ahead-of-their-time inventions to be brought to market.
A bit of both. Its intent was as a caricature. Fortunately, I wrote a Slashdot comment, not a formal mathematical proof, so I'm not particularly worried about set theory's incompatibility with exaggeration.
There are certainly a lot of Slashdot users who are generally sane and reasonable folks. However, there are enough people with biases to form a critical mass of bad mods and metamods. One post with careless wording offends someone, and gets marked as a troll. There's enough others who see it as a troll that that knee-jerking mod can get good metamod results, and can go on to jump to conclusions about other posts. Other users see the troll label, assume the post is trolling, and then read with biased eyes. As a result of Slashdot's entirely-crowdsourced modding system, biases never really go away.
I chose one particular bias to pick on for my caricature. There's lots of others. If you'll allow me to pick on another, I'll take a look at your signature. I personally have nothing to hide, and will gladly give up my privacy for fairly small (even some ideological) reasons. Try to force other people to give up their privacy without a damned good reason, and I'll fight it to the bitter end. Now, if I were to post the first half of my opinion in a discussion without the second half, you'd apparently think I'm a "goddamned idiot". Would you mod under the assumption that I'm either stupid or trolling?
Similarly, I get annoyed by heavily-slanted posts about how governments and corporations are evil. Post something saying that you understand a company's position, make a few decent points I hadn't thought of, and I'm likely to give an "insightful" mod. That's a bias, too. I intentionally never excluded myself from the community I talked about.
Effectively everyone in the community is biased in some way. That's okay. The original post in this thread was modded "troll" apparently because of these biases. The modding system certainly can't be perfect, but with so many different opinions, the system as a whole ends up in a pretty reasonable center. Slashdot's moderation system is the worst, except for all the others.
You got modded troll because you equated one kind of illegal activity with another, ignoring the arbitrary distinction that the Slashdot community holds between "good crimes" and "bad crimes". There is no "Illustrates hypocrisy" mod, so you got "Troll" instead.
Slashdotters in general have a particularly flexible idea of good and bad. Basically, if a single person does something, it's good. If a group of people work together to do something, it's great. If a group of people work together as a company to do something, it's bad. If a group of people elect some people to make decisions for them, those decisions are always terrible.
To Slashdotters, copyright infringement is a noble cause that should be promoted whenever possible. Child porn is funny, and great for trolling. The thought that some kid is being abused or some writer is begging on a street corner doesn't occur to them, and they don't like being reminded that it really happens.
In a typical Slashdotter's perfect world, the courts would look at all the parties involved (without seeing any of an individual person's information they might consider private), and decide that playing Robin Hood is perfectly fine, while following a strict code of rules covering every possible scenario and written in a 200-page book at a 6th-grade reading level. In the real world, justice is blind, and judges try to apply laws equally, accounting for complexities as best they can. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. This annoys the community here greatly.
Let's see... come into town right at the elementary school, get out of the school zone for a little while, then go by the high school, then head into a less-dense area of town, then leave it. Sounds like a lot of small towns, including my hometown. Write the city council and complain about the inconsistent limits. Ask for that middle 35 section to be lowered to 25 to benefit drivers.
Speeds are set by politicians reacting to (and anticipating) the needs and complaints of the public. Sure, people will complain about that one stretch of 25 MPH road that used to be 45 MPH, but they'll also complain about the student getting hit walking home from the new school there. To avoid looking like an ignorant jackass, a savvy politician will try to make the road safe before the school opens. He'll listen to the opinions of traffic engineers, who will adapt existing traffic patterns to accommodate the new school. A few warning signs later, the school opens, kids are safe(r), and traffic is minimally disrupted. Everyone wins, except that driver who still insists on going 60 MPH.
The reason none of your roads go over 65MPH (though note that several US states are higher, up to 75MPH in Montana) is because the demand for speed doesn't outweigh the demand for safety. Write your representatives, and tell them that you want your collisions to have more energy!
Suppose some legal person gets a hard on for the legal pursuit of you. I decide you are a child predator because that helps me get reelected. I take your phone log, makes excerpts of it, and "notice" in front of the Grand Jury and the actual Jury that you spend an awful lot of time near a preschool. Now _you_ never noticed that your coffee stand of choice is right next to some kinder-care place in the same strip mall, or if you did, you didn't care at all. But _there_ _you_ _are_ spending every morning watching the kiddies come and go "according to your phone" and the way someone has chosen to take data and "reimagine" your intent.
Well, gee... it sure is convenient that we live in a world where circumstantial evidence is all that's needed before calling up a jury, right? And it sure is convenient that after I show up every morning to the same coffee stand, and spend a significant amount of time there, nobody recognizes me as "that guy who stares at the cute girl behind the counter" or "that guy who does the daily crossword puzzle." Attempting such a weak case would be political suicide.
Less Obviously: If I took the iPhone you have in your hot little hands, and computed all the time-distance values "near" roads, how often would you "be speeding"... lets just use that to set your car and health insurance rates shall we? Do you have an app from your insurance company on your phone right now? Will you never have such an app? Are you _sure_?
In order: Rarely, yes please, no, I sure hope I do someday, and yes. I'm sorry, was there a point you were trying to make?
I have absolutely no problem with people or companies knowing my actions. I follow applicable laws, and I know how to sue those that don't. If the insurance company promises me (in a legally-binding way) that recording me driving safely will lower my premiums, I'd be happy to bring a salesman to work with me daily. If they just want to put a radio beacon in my car, that's fine. An app would work too, I suppose. If, after presenting a record that appears to be safe, they don't lower my premiums or explain what I did that was unsafe, I do have a few lawyers I visit regularly.
As you can probably tell from my sig, I have little respect for the folks who think they have some absolute right to behave however they want, to the detriment of society at large. If an app from an insurance company can shift insurance premiums more heavily towards those who increase costs, I'm happy with it.
I don't currently have a smartphone (though I guess my cheap old Nokia might qualify, if I ever used it for more than phone calls), mostly because I don't think they're worth the ridiculously high cost.
Yes, I do want omniscience. I want my maybe-someday-smart phone to, while I'm driving, recognize the route and timing, and tell me Miami's weather before I leave my first night's hotel room.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for calling Enterprise Grammar Solutions. Your business is important to us. We understand that you have a choice of grammar Nazis, and we thank you for choosing to read our post. All of our operators are busy at the moment, so please remain on the line until a qualified operator is available to assist you.
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Thank you for calling Enterprise Grammar Solutions. Your business is important to us. We understand that you have a choice of grammar Nazis, and we thank you for choosing to read our post. All of our operators are busy at the moment, so please remain on the line until a qualified operator is available to assist you.
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Shenk you far callink Eenterprice Grummar Solootions. Moy nam is "Jason". How cane I be helpink you today?
I see you are havink a service agreement with us. Zees ees very good. I will be transferrink you now to "second-tier support". Thank you for callink us today. Goodbye.
...
Thank you for calling Enterprise Grammar Solutions. Your business is important to us. We understand that you have a choice of grammar Nazis, and we thank you for choosing to read our post. All of our operators are busy at the moment, so please remain on the line until a qualified operator is available to assist you.
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Entaprise Gramma Solutions. This is Bob. What can I do for ya?
All-righty. Ye've got yerself a nice little post there. Now, that there semicolon in your third paragraph should be a comma. That's it. Now, according to this here agreement, you'll be billed $99.95 for this call. Thanks for callin'.
Because the discussion was about the HTML5 audio/video tags, toward the goal of specifically eliminating Flash.
Not at all biased, are you?
they were used for hundreds of years without contamination
[citation needed]
How are you sure they weren't contaminated before? There's no measurement. Oh, yes, people drank from the wells for hundreds of years with no ill effects... just as they can do now! There's no clear link between methane in water and health problems, so before the current paranoia over fracking, would anybody have bothered to check for (or care about) methane?
OR, you can rightly conclude the operations caused the contamination.
or, I can conclude that there isn't enough evidence to blame anybody just yet, and instead just push for regulation to stop things that are blatantly bad, like dumping wastewater into nearby streams. An attack on fracking in general simply isn't supported by the studies performed to date. The study inspiring this story concludes by recommending more long-term monitoring, and finds only a correlation between well sites and contaminated water.
fascist, corporatist tool... of the sociopaths
That's quite an opinion after only a few paragraphs of discussion. I bet it'd shock you to know that I've actually helped organize protests against corporations, and voted repeatedly to raise corporate taxes in my area. That's okay. You go on and jump to your conclusions, and I'll just be content watching facts as they are discovered through proper science.
... unmarred by coercion and the threat of force
...and the scientific method, and concept of innocence, apparently.
Yes.
The schism comes from democracy's fetish for cooperative efforts, and the public's inability to see similarities. The laws the police enforce are (ideally) proposed by the people, voted on by the people, and enforced by elected representatives of the people. Corporate regulations are seen as being chosen arbitrarily by a small committee.
Now, that committee is a group of (ideally) experts, who regulate things that are legitimate problems, but that thought doesn't always occur to John Q. Public. Similarly, the corporation is nothing more than a collaborative effort among many people, but there's enough layers of abstraction to make corporations appear different from individuals. In my opinion, that's where the divide starts, and that's why discussions of corporations are always such a hot topic.
How about the theory where the water goes to the well hole, where it (and the gas it contains) is pumped up to the surface, separated, and pushed back down again?
Likewise, for any such story, there will be a certain cast of recurring characters who will jump to attack. You can almost hear their thoughts, "How dare these groups place the needs of many before the needs of a few individuals?" It is a knee-jerk attack on cooperation.
So tell me, did you miss the part of science where you need a control group with the exact same circumstances, or at least control measurements from before the experiment takes place? Science has not been satisfied. But science doesn't matter to you, does it? The only thing that matters is that the "individuals" are fighting against the evil collaborations, in the grand tradition of "one man vs. the world".
Would there have been a reason to test the water BEFORE you could light it on fire?
How do you know when you could light the water on fire, if you didn't test it by lighting the water on fire? Now that fracking's well-known, everybody near a fracking site goes and tries to light their tap water on fire, just to see if it works. If it works, the response is "It's the fracking's fault!" If the water stays as boring as ever, the response is "Well, I guess I'm not contaminated enough." There is no easy test that shows that it's not the fracking's fault, unless every well owner checks their water daily.
That's not to say that there aren't bad companies out there. There are, and there's a lot of them. As fracking became known as a cheap and easy way to get into the energy business, lots of small companies sprung up to capitalize on the potential. They did bad things, and a lot of them are getting in deep trouble for what they did. In TFA, I'm not seeing any indication as to which injection chemicals were used near contaminated sites, what practices were followed on the surface, or even the environmental record of the companies involved. The business landscape changes rapidly, and I doubt that past mistakes really point toward future ones. Like every other industry, the small companies will die off under the pressure of regulation and efficiency, and the big companies will adapt to the recommendations of the time.
+1, Insightful
I have no mod points, so I'm hoping this comment will make the parent be read more. See his first point about ACs.
Just like every other population, under favorable circumstances.
I have connections to the professional photography industry, in the form of a now-closed family business.
A comparable print package from a professional lab costs a few dollars. The blogger's estimates are on the high side in that regard alone. The basic airbrushing and editing is a somewhat common freebie from a lab, partly as a way of hiding processing defects (painting over dust spots on the paper). It gets even more disgustingly inaccurate when you factor in the cost of a minilab print. If the photographer owns their own minilab, they can do all their own prints for far less than the blogger's estimating. I'd be surprised if the photographer were actually losing money on this. Maybe not making very much, but certainly not losing.
Then there's the business side. The photo industry is based entirely around the photographer's skill, rather than the actual product. It's the little things that make the difference between a picture that says "Wow, that's a nice portrait!" and "Gee, that guy looks creepy". Things like shadows around the eyes, light balance, a lit background, and even the position of the subject's feet all affect a simple head shot. Full-body photos are more complicated. With today's supply of decent digital cameras and Wal-Mart printers, convincing people to actually pay a professional is constantly getting harder. A ridiculously-cheap deal like this means there's 301 more customers on the area who know of the photographer's service and quality. If even a handful of those come back for a second round, it's a net profit.
Of course, but sticking 50 cans of fuel on a plane is cheaper and easier than 50 of these things. On a cloudy day, I can't assume these are reliable, either.
If only it were that simple. Hypothetically, let's assume all such remarks went unseen and unheard. Then, in the public eye, our energy problems are "solved" because fusion works, pollution problems are "solved" because of solar cells, world hunger is "solved" because of GM food crops, and world peace should be "solved" really soon now that Bin Laden is dead. Given that all those problems are solved, the only reason we don't have such miracles is must be... a global conspiracy, perhaps? I jest, of course, but those flying cars and jetpacks are just so awesome that something must be holding them back.
I don't intend to disparage the progress made by this team, or the benefit this invention could bring to the world. I do feel it is important to note that reaching a milestone does not "solve" a problem. I'd have no problem if the summary said the students had "made progress toward eliminating a huge health concern" or "helped the fight against a huge health concern", but I would like to reserve the term "solved" for when the problem is completely solved, including those pesky business concerns.
But this is solar! It uses the sun, which is a renewable resource! Surely doctors care more about a pollution-free environment than about their scarce money and office space, right?
They're minor details that kill off a staggering number of projects. I'm also not convinced the OLPC is a success yet, and it's been almost four years. Only 2 million laptops have been distributed, at double the intended price point, to only a few countries. OLPC is certainly ferther along the path to success, but I don't think they're there just yet.
students... have solved...
No, they haven't. They have made some nice progress, and apparently have small-scale usage in Haiti, but I certainly wouldn't classify the problem as "solved". They still need to get the devices to where they're needed, which means shipping, mass manufacturing, establishing supply lines, and convincing somebody (corporation, government, investor, or otherwise) that this is a worthwhile idea.
tl;dr
One year to take an invention to market? I take it you've never actually invented anything. For physical products where you need to set up a supply chain, five or ten years is to be expected. For a software product, estimates get more complicated, because though you can get faster production and distribution, you have to account for hardware availability and feature roadmaps. Maybe a better limit is something like 20 years. That should be enough for ahead-of-their-time inventions to be brought to market.
Like I Polish.
A bit of both. Its intent was as a caricature. Fortunately, I wrote a Slashdot comment, not a formal mathematical proof, so I'm not particularly worried about set theory's incompatibility with exaggeration.
There are certainly a lot of Slashdot users who are generally sane and reasonable folks. However, there are enough people with biases to form a critical mass of bad mods and metamods. One post with careless wording offends someone, and gets marked as a troll. There's enough others who see it as a troll that that knee-jerking mod can get good metamod results, and can go on to jump to conclusions about other posts. Other users see the troll label, assume the post is trolling, and then read with biased eyes. As a result of Slashdot's entirely-crowdsourced modding system, biases never really go away.
I chose one particular bias to pick on for my caricature. There's lots of others. If you'll allow me to pick on another, I'll take a look at your signature. I personally have nothing to hide, and will gladly give up my privacy for fairly small (even some ideological) reasons. Try to force other people to give up their privacy without a damned good reason, and I'll fight it to the bitter end. Now, if I were to post the first half of my opinion in a discussion without the second half, you'd apparently think I'm a "goddamned idiot". Would you mod under the assumption that I'm either stupid or trolling?
Similarly, I get annoyed by heavily-slanted posts about how governments and corporations are evil. Post something saying that you understand a company's position, make a few decent points I hadn't thought of, and I'm likely to give an "insightful" mod. That's a bias, too. I intentionally never excluded myself from the community I talked about.
Effectively everyone in the community is biased in some way. That's okay. The original post in this thread was modded "troll" apparently because of these biases. The modding system certainly can't be perfect, but with so many different opinions, the system as a whole ends up in a pretty reasonable center. Slashdot's moderation system is the worst, except for all the others.
You got modded troll because you equated one kind of illegal activity with another, ignoring the arbitrary distinction that the Slashdot community holds between "good crimes" and "bad crimes". There is no "Illustrates hypocrisy" mod, so you got "Troll" instead.
Slashdotters in general have a particularly flexible idea of good and bad. Basically, if a single person does something, it's good. If a group of people work together to do something, it's great. If a group of people work together as a company to do something, it's bad. If a group of people elect some people to make decisions for them, those decisions are always terrible.
To Slashdotters, copyright infringement is a noble cause that should be promoted whenever possible. Child porn is funny, and great for trolling. The thought that some kid is being abused or some writer is begging on a street corner doesn't occur to them, and they don't like being reminded that it really happens.
In a typical Slashdotter's perfect world, the courts would look at all the parties involved (without seeing any of an individual person's information they might consider private), and decide that playing Robin Hood is perfectly fine, while following a strict code of rules covering every possible scenario and written in a 200-page book at a 6th-grade reading level. In the real world, justice is blind, and judges try to apply laws equally, accounting for complexities as best they can. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. This annoys the community here greatly.
Let's see... come into town right at the elementary school, get out of the school zone for a little while, then go by the high school, then head into a less-dense area of town, then leave it. Sounds like a lot of small towns, including my hometown. Write the city council and complain about the inconsistent limits. Ask for that middle 35 section to be lowered to 25 to benefit drivers.
Speeds are set by politicians reacting to (and anticipating) the needs and complaints of the public. Sure, people will complain about that one stretch of 25 MPH road that used to be 45 MPH, but they'll also complain about the student getting hit walking home from the new school there. To avoid looking like an ignorant jackass, a savvy politician will try to make the road safe before the school opens. He'll listen to the opinions of traffic engineers, who will adapt existing traffic patterns to accommodate the new school. A few warning signs later, the school opens, kids are safe(r), and traffic is minimally disrupted. Everyone wins, except that driver who still insists on going 60 MPH.
The reason none of your roads go over 65MPH (though note that several US states are higher, up to 75MPH in Montana) is because the demand for speed doesn't outweigh the demand for safety. Write your representatives, and tell them that you want your collisions to have more energy!
Suppose some legal person gets a hard on for the legal pursuit of you. I decide you are a child predator because that helps me get reelected. I take your phone log, makes excerpts of it, and "notice" in front of the Grand Jury and the actual Jury that you spend an awful lot of time near a preschool. Now _you_ never noticed that your coffee stand of choice is right next to some kinder-care place in the same strip mall, or if you did, you didn't care at all. But _there_ _you_ _are_ spending every morning watching the kiddies come and go "according to your phone" and the way someone has chosen to take data and "reimagine" your intent.
Well, gee... it sure is convenient that we live in a world where circumstantial evidence is all that's needed before calling up a jury, right? And it sure is convenient that after I show up every morning to the same coffee stand, and spend a significant amount of time there, nobody recognizes me as "that guy who stares at the cute girl behind the counter" or "that guy who does the daily crossword puzzle." Attempting such a weak case would be political suicide.
Less Obviously: If I took the iPhone you have in your hot little hands, and computed all the time-distance values "near" roads, how often would you "be speeding"... lets just use that to set your car and health insurance rates shall we? Do you have an app from your insurance company on your phone right now? Will you never have such an app? Are you _sure_?
In order: Rarely, yes please, no, I sure hope I do someday, and yes. I'm sorry, was there a point you were trying to make?
I have absolutely no problem with people or companies knowing my actions. I follow applicable laws, and I know how to sue those that don't. If the insurance company promises me (in a legally-binding way) that recording me driving safely will lower my premiums, I'd be happy to bring a salesman to work with me daily. If they just want to put a radio beacon in my car, that's fine. An app would work too, I suppose. If, after presenting a record that appears to be safe, they don't lower my premiums or explain what I did that was unsafe, I do have a few lawyers I visit regularly.
As you can probably tell from my sig, I have little respect for the folks who think they have some absolute right to behave however they want, to the detriment of society at large. If an app from an insurance company can shift insurance premiums more heavily towards those who increase costs, I'm happy with it.
I don't currently have a smartphone (though I guess my cheap old Nokia might qualify, if I ever used it for more than phone calls), mostly because I don't think they're worth the ridiculously high cost.
Yes, I do want omniscience. I want my maybe-someday-smart phone to, while I'm driving, recognize the route and timing, and tell me Miami's weather before I leave my first night's hotel room.