I really can't take this seriously. It seems like someone who works for Facebook wrote this.
Millions of people have perfectly normal social lives without facebook or with really minimal facebook use. I know a lot of people who log-in once a week. I know a lot of people who go long periods of time without ever using facebook.
I think the fact that the author thinks its almost impossible to live a normal life without it says more about him/her than it does about facebook.
This is just Twitter covering their ass by providing a way for a user to furnish a "report" to the police that isn't some shitty picture they took on their phone.
But what can police do? Say you live in Bumfuck Nowhere, USA and you bring this report to your local Sheriff saying InternetUser1234 in SomewhereFarAway, USA is accosting me online. Then what? They get out the bloodhounds to "trace the IP"?
Most PDs don't have units or personnel equipped or trained to utilize these reports.
Why doesn't twitter just provide a button that a user can push when they feel relentlessly accosted by internet trolls. It would delete the user's account.
I feel that most technically literate people at least knew that this kind of "spying" was technically trivial and obviously monetizable. Any device with some kind of a network connection and a microphone / camera can easily record everything you do and say and send it anywhere it wants. This little company called Google figured out that by collecting more and more information about you they can make huge sums of money by mining and selling that data and now everyone wants in on that game.
I feel like most comments here will be along the lines of "yeah duh what did you think they were doing with that data", however on less tech focused sites the comments will have the tone of "OMG evil corporations spying on us how is this even legal, hold on let me ask Siri!"
But that is the problem. The general population has no idea how every time they use a thing like Siri or Kinect, or OnStar they are allowing the respective companies that created those services nearly unlimited access to their microphone or camera. Just like people really don't understand how Facebook monetizes their profile and activities.
I think until there is general knowledge of the fact that we have entered the era of generating revenue from users through mining and analyzing their activities, preferences, and other data, we can't even have a productive discussion about the limits of these new ways to collect information. Right now it is just fear mongering and attention grabbing headlines.
Lets get to the point where we can have a rational discourse about the benefits and potential risks of ever present microphones and cameras and develop both moral and legal guidelines to govern their use.
The "average" person is not going to setup their own Diaspora server. If Diaspora came pre-installed and setup on a Roku like device that a user simply plugged in and connected to their home network then I think it would be more viable. It has to be really really easy to setup so that Grandma can use it.
Beyond that I would like to see someone develop an ad network that allowed individual users of Diaspora to monetize their own information. Say I really don't mind being part of an anonymized data-set. Then I should be able to opt-in to an advertising network and get a chunk of that ad revenue.It would be great if the user could even decide what companies advertise to them. 35 year old man? Home Depot is ok, but maybe you don't want to see advertisements for the newest Hunger Games movie.
I think that we need to fundamentally change the web so that Google and Facebook share their profits with us. They are after all making profits by selling your data. Now obviously they do lots of complicated analysis which is where a lot of the value added is but the raw resource is your data. You should be compensated for it.
It is obviously a help for start-ups until the consumer gives a shit about what a company does ethically.
The question should be is a moral compass a help to society. Then the follow up is: What should we do given that we know a moral compass is a benefit to society but almost 0% of companies have one.
While theory does have its place, the situation raises the question of whether colleges are teaching the right skills people need to join the workforce, and what its place is amid the rise of open source learning.
This part:
raises the question of whether colleges are teaching the right skills people need to join the workforce
begs the question of whether or not a university exists to train people to enter the workforce.
I do not believe this to be the case. I think that if you are resourceful, think critically, and learn quickly you are employable in many fields. You are ready to join the workforce. If you are all of those things we can basically train you on the job. Then why get an education at all? To build knowledge.
University educations exist to expose you to knowledge so that you can use that knowledge and your critical thinking ability to synthesize solutions.
Example: Understanding algorithms and data structures + critical thinking = knowing when to use a linked list vs an array.
You can tell a programmer: "use an array for faster random element access and use a list for faster element inserts at arbitrary locations". Great, he/she might remember, probably doesn't understand why thats the case but whatever. Now in some new standard library there is a Map. The guy who actually understands data structures is now gone and the programmer doesn't know what the fuck a map is nor how to use it. Thats not a good situation.
Now if that programmer had gotten a CS/CompE education he would have the tools to synthesize a solution based on the knowledge he as about data structures and his critical analysis of what is important in the problem's context.
The programmer could receive data structure / algorithm knowledge on the job but thats not what is going to make his company money. If he comes into that job with that knowledge then he can learn the domain specific knowledge of whatever his company is and then start solving problems.
I think it is really sad that people expect to be trained in a university. It is short sighted because that training will one day be obsolete and then your fucked, and it also allows the student to shift the blame when they can't find a job. The student can rationalize it as "my university didn't train me, now I cant find a job" instead of " I don't have the skills to be employable (resourcefulness, critical thinking ability, good learner), so despite the fact that I got a 4.0 and can regurgitate shit from a book I don't have the ability to synthesize solutions so I'm useless.
/rant, I'm just really sick of people bemoaning the university system when it is very clear that they just expected to be handed a great job despite lacking any kind of critical thinking or problem solving skills. In university you (largely) get rewarded for recitation, in a job you get rewarded for synthesis. If you cant turn your knowledge into solutions to problems you are just a walking book.
I liked a lot of the C++11 features. Lambdas, move semantics, std::mutex, and consistent initializers are all cool things.
Looking at C++14 I see a lot of expansion of the support of the auto type. I have not found a scenario where I perer auto, so I'm curious about such a large focus on it.
Everybody with an IQ above that of a jellybean knows the main job of the congresscritters is to bring back the pork. The blue guys do it and the red guys do it.
The reason they can keep doing it and no one really gives a shit is because once you explain to Joe Schmoe that cutting program X or agency Y's budget means he or his cousin or his drinking buddy could lose their job, well Joe can rationalize keeping that program.
Americans all want pork cut everywhere except their home district. We are short sighted, have short memories, and aren't willing to endure short term discomfort in the pursuit of long term prosperity.
Anyone candidate that would be for cutting this kind of corporate welfare isn't viable on a national ticket. Eisenhower was right about this all by the way.
He is speaking pretty specifically about web/app programmers and how there are a glut of convoluted and overlapping frameworks that seem to pop into existence overnight can discourage and confuse the average rube.
Just because thats where all the cool start up money is right now (see facebook, whatsApp, etc...) doesn't mean thats the only kind of programming. What about the people building this "internet of things", what about the people actually evolving the internet architecture, what about the people building the appliances to make sense of "big data"? None of those people should be "average". Joe Schmoe doesn't want to work on those things in his spare time.
Car analogy: out of all the makes and models of cars, this guy is talking about wanting Joe Schmoe to be able to build a backyard go kart. Fine, great, whatever. I suppose it would be cool if he could do that without goofy tools and processes.
There is nothing wrong with the "elites" building the BMWs though.
With enough data these companies can compile a "Safety Score", kind of like how a few companies know everything about your financial life and give you a credit score.
Why wouldn't an apartment or condo community want to check your safety score? A lot of them do background checks and credit checks now, I can definitely imagine people wanting to live in communities where everyone has a safety score above some number. And I can imagine communities for the rejects. The more data companies compile on you the more they can begin to stratify their goods and services. If they do it right and it benefits more people than it hurts then it will work.
I'm an embedded developer and also have a hobby garden. So when things got cheap enough I got really excited about building a contraption to monitor moisture, ph, amount of sun and to adjust fertilizer and water levels accordingly. Then I realized that for hobby gardeners this really defeats the purpose. We garden for fun, and at least for me, I don't like bringing technology to things that don't need it.
On the other hand, those guys out in colorado growing pot will love this kind of thing.
I use to have a retirement account with a certain financial services company. They stored my password in plain text. To recover your password they would physically mail it to you. This kind of stupidity should be illegal. It should be criminal and the company should have to pay fines for being asshats.
Companies don't fix underlying problems because management doesn't see any value in doing so. They also see no risk in having insecure products. Until there are real financial penalties for blatant incompetence regarding security nothing will improve.
Smart devices are cool, the data they collect going to advertising companies and the NSA isn't.
It is obvious the paradigm should be changed. People love facebook, so why can't we make a distributed facebook where each member has a little roku type device sitting in their home on their network that stores all of their data? Each person that member connects with gets a key that is associated with contact so that you can form secure networks of friends and share data. Then as the owner of your data you can opt into sharing a limited set of that data with advertisers but only if they pay you to mine your data. That would be a positive paradigm shift.
I wouldn't mind having smart devices in my home, I just don't want them communicating to the public internet. They can communicate with a server in my home and I can control what the software on this server does. Smart devices don't have to all connect to the public internet, and we don't have to allow every smart device manufacturer to mine our data. Eventually there will be open source automation software for servers and open source software for the smart devices so we can control what they do (like tomato or ddwrt for home wifi routers).
Everybody is commenting "Why aren't we using Nitrogen, Why don't we just use chemical X, why is it so hard to kill someone?"
Comments like those miss the point. It isn't hard to kill someone. It is hard to find trained medical professionals that are willing to be part of an execution. Not everybody agrees with capital punishment, and there is a strong correlation with being highly educated (like doctors are) and being liberal (who are typically against capital punishment). I'm sure there are enough doctors who support capital punishment, but they still have to maintain professional affiliations and relationships with organizations who may be more liberal and may not support capital punishment. It just isn't worth it.
I think one reason people report poor conditions on Yelp a lot more than NYC's 311 number is because people get a sense of satisfaction reviewing things on yelp. You get little internet points the more reviews you make and you get to tell your friends (and annoy wait staff) by saying "I'm a big foodie, I have 173 Yelp reviews". This gives people an incentive to use Yelp that they don't have with calling 311.
Everybody wins here, a bunch of people get to say they did something in the fight against the NSA. The Executive branch and those in the house who support invasive domestic spying get to keep the majority of their surveillance programs, and most importantly there isn't much more meaningful oversight so who actually knows if the NSA is following the rules. The Executive still gets to hide themselves behind national security letters, "state secrets", and special secret courts.
However I do not feel like this caused any meaningful change. Hopefully the nation remains outraged at the NSA and this is just the first step in fixing our domestic spying programs, but I feel like we get a few meaningless bills passed and then this issue goes away until the next Snowden.
I really think consumers should own their own behavioral data / preferences. I'll agree to put smart devices in my house if I control the data, I control who I give that data to, and I would only give that data out if it benefited me.
Think about it. Maybe a national grocery store chain or two and GE want to get together and offer a subsidised smart fridge. I agree to let them monetize my spending habits and food preferences in exchange for the fridge being subsidised somewhat and targeted discounts for what I like to buy.
This is obviously because when the company gets sued and the lawyers go through discovery they will look for anything that helps them show that GM knew of a problem. This doesn't mean that the engineers can't bring up problems, it means that they have to do it verbally or write it on a paper airplane and fly it across the room.
This is obviously unethical. However this is the state of the industry. I have worked at a company where we were told specifically not to write any invention related things down or anything that our competitors could use against us. We (company I worked for and competitor) would trade stupid lawsuits and each companies lawyers would get to read the other companies emails and although it is against law ethics to share proprietary information discovered in a lawsuit it happens every day anyways.
Haha I don't own a single apple device. I'm just saying this isn't the end of the world. It is a fuck up, sure, but it isn't anywhere as bad as antennagate.
Seriously how do you people deal with getting a new phone number? Do you think the phone manufactures should automatically have all your friends update their contact books with your new number? The iMessage app should fail over to SMS if it thinks the other endpoint is no longer on iMessage, but there is a very obvious work around until they release the patch.
Send MMS,Add all contacts
Dear iPhone owning friend:
I no longer am one of you. I have forsaken my iPhone, my Siri, my coolness if you will. I now have a [insert phone manufacturer]. You can no longer contact me via iMessage. Please delete my contact and re add it or otherwise inform your iPhone that I cannot be contacted via iMessage. Your phone is currently too stupid to figure it out for itself.
I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience,
Former iUser
so you think this is a reasonable user experience? first off knowing which of your contacts use imessage, and then contacting all them and tell them to screw with their phone settings?
No, I explicitly said its a user experience fuck up, in the part of the post that you decided not to quote.
What I said is this isn't a bug nor a "a much larger problem" because there is a straightforward workaround.
Have you ever changed phone numbers? Mass text to your friends "hey this is my new phone number". Why can't this person mass text their contact list (or send an email) and say "I don't have iMessage, if you use an iPhone change your settings for me".
Slashdot Mirror
I expect every engineer to assume human error is guaranteed to happen.
The engineers probably did one but obviously it wasn't good enough. Software fails, but you can design it to fail in safe ways.
I really can't take this seriously. It seems like someone who works for Facebook wrote this.
Millions of people have perfectly normal social lives without facebook or with really minimal facebook use. I know a lot of people who log-in once a week. I know a lot of people who go long periods of time without ever using facebook.
I think the fact that the author thinks its almost impossible to live a normal life without it says more about him/her than it does about facebook.
This is just Twitter covering their ass by providing a way for a user to furnish a "report" to the police that isn't some shitty picture they took on their phone.
But what can police do? Say you live in Bumfuck Nowhere, USA and you bring this report to your local Sheriff saying InternetUser1234 in SomewhereFarAway, USA is accosting me online. Then what? They get out the bloodhounds to "trace the IP"?
Most PDs don't have units or personnel equipped or trained to utilize these reports.
Why doesn't twitter just provide a button that a user can push when they feel relentlessly accosted by internet trolls. It would delete the user's account.
The artwork matched the title perfectly.
The artwork for Now That I'm a Ghost I'm Gay matched as well.
I feel that most technically literate people at least knew that this kind of "spying" was technically trivial and obviously monetizable. Any device with some kind of a network connection and a microphone / camera can easily record everything you do and say and send it anywhere it wants. This little company called Google figured out that by collecting more and more information about you they can make huge sums of money by mining and selling that data and now everyone wants in on that game.
I feel like most comments here will be along the lines of "yeah duh what did you think they were doing with that data", however on less tech focused sites the comments will have the tone of "OMG evil corporations spying on us how is this even legal, hold on let me ask Siri!"
But that is the problem. The general population has no idea how every time they use a thing like Siri or Kinect, or OnStar they are allowing the respective companies that created those services nearly unlimited access to their microphone or camera. Just like people really don't understand how Facebook monetizes their profile and activities.
I think until there is general knowledge of the fact that we have entered the era of generating revenue from users through mining and analyzing their activities, preferences, and other data, we can't even have a productive discussion about the limits of these new ways to collect information. Right now it is just fear mongering and attention grabbing headlines.
Lets get to the point where we can have a rational discourse about the benefits and potential risks of ever present microphones and cameras and develop both moral and legal guidelines to govern their use.
Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.
I would like to see a few things happen:
The "average" person is not going to setup their own Diaspora server. If Diaspora came pre-installed and setup on a Roku like device that a user simply plugged in and connected to their home network then I think it would be more viable. It has to be really really easy to setup so that Grandma can use it.
Beyond that I would like to see someone develop an ad network that allowed individual users of Diaspora to monetize their own information. Say I really don't mind being part of an anonymized data-set. Then I should be able to opt-in to an advertising network and get a chunk of that ad revenue.It would be great if the user could even decide what companies advertise to them. 35 year old man? Home Depot is ok, but maybe you don't want to see advertisements for the newest Hunger Games movie.
I think that we need to fundamentally change the web so that Google and Facebook share their profits with us. They are after all making profits by selling your data. Now obviously they do lots of complicated analysis which is where a lot of the value added is but the raw resource is your data. You should be compensated for it.
It is obviously a help for start-ups until the consumer gives a shit about what a company does ethically.
The question should be is a moral compass a help to society. Then the follow up is: What should we do given that we know a moral compass is a benefit to society but almost 0% of companies have one.
While theory does have its place, the situation raises the question of whether colleges are teaching the right skills people need to join the workforce, and what its place is amid the rise of open source learning.
This part:
raises the question of whether colleges are teaching the right skills people need to join the workforce
begs the question of whether or not a university exists to train people to enter the workforce.
/rant, I'm just really sick of people bemoaning the university system when it is very clear that they just expected to be handed a great job despite lacking any kind of critical thinking or problem solving skills. In university you (largely) get rewarded for recitation, in a job you get rewarded for synthesis. If you cant turn your knowledge into solutions to problems you are just a walking book.
I do not believe this to be the case. I think that if you are resourceful, think critically, and learn quickly you are employable in many fields. You are ready to join the workforce. If you are all of those things we can basically train you on the job. Then why get an education at all? To build knowledge.
University educations exist to expose you to knowledge so that you can use that knowledge and your critical thinking ability to synthesize solutions.
Example: Understanding algorithms and data structures + critical thinking = knowing when to use a linked list vs an array.
You can tell a programmer: "use an array for faster random element access and use a list for faster element inserts at arbitrary locations". Great, he/she might remember, probably doesn't understand why thats the case but whatever. Now in some new standard library there is a Map. The guy who actually understands data structures is now gone and the programmer doesn't know what the fuck a map is nor how to use it. Thats not a good situation.
Now if that programmer had gotten a CS/CompE education he would have the tools to synthesize a solution based on the knowledge he as about data structures and his critical analysis of what is important in the problem's context.
The programmer could receive data structure / algorithm knowledge on the job but thats not what is going to make his company money. If he comes into that job with that knowledge then he can learn the domain specific knowledge of whatever his company is and then start solving problems.
I think it is really sad that people expect to be trained in a university. It is short sighted because that training will one day be obsolete and then your fucked, and it also allows the student to shift the blame when they can't find a job. The student can rationalize it as "my university didn't train me, now I cant find a job" instead of " I don't have the skills to be employable (resourcefulness, critical thinking ability, good learner), so despite the fact that I got a 4.0 and can regurgitate shit from a book I don't have the ability to synthesize solutions so I'm useless.
I liked a lot of the C++11 features. Lambdas, move semantics, std::mutex, and consistent initializers are all cool things.
Looking at C++14 I see a lot of expansion of the support of the auto type. I have not found a scenario where I perer auto, so I'm curious about such a large focus on it.
Everybody with an IQ above that of a jellybean knows the main job of the congresscritters is to bring back the pork. The blue guys do it and the red guys do it.
The reason they can keep doing it and no one really gives a shit is because once you explain to Joe Schmoe that cutting program X or agency Y's budget means he or his cousin or his drinking buddy could lose their job, well Joe can rationalize keeping that program.
Americans all want pork cut everywhere except their home district. We are short sighted, have short memories, and aren't willing to endure short term discomfort in the pursuit of long term prosperity.
Anyone candidate that would be for cutting this kind of corporate welfare isn't viable on a national ticket. Eisenhower was right about this all by the way.
He is speaking pretty specifically about web/app programmers and how there are a glut of convoluted and overlapping frameworks that seem to pop into existence overnight can discourage and confuse the average rube.
Just because thats where all the cool start up money is right now (see facebook, whatsApp, etc...) doesn't mean thats the only kind of programming. What about the people building this "internet of things", what about the people actually evolving the internet architecture, what about the people building the appliances to make sense of "big data"? None of those people should be "average". Joe Schmoe doesn't want to work on those things in his spare time.
Car analogy: out of all the makes and models of cars, this guy is talking about wanting Joe Schmoe to be able to build a backyard go kart. Fine, great, whatever. I suppose it would be cool if he could do that without goofy tools and processes.
There is nothing wrong with the "elites" building the BMWs though.
With enough data these companies can compile a "Safety Score", kind of like how a few companies know everything about your financial life and give you a credit score.
Why wouldn't an apartment or condo community want to check your safety score? A lot of them do background checks and credit checks now, I can definitely imagine people wanting to live in communities where everyone has a safety score above some number. And I can imagine communities for the rejects. The more data companies compile on you the more they can begin to stratify their goods and services. If they do it right and it benefits more people than it hurts then it will work.
I'm an embedded developer and also have a hobby garden. So when things got cheap enough I got really excited about building a contraption to monitor moisture, ph, amount of sun and to adjust fertilizer and water levels accordingly. Then I realized that for hobby gardeners this really defeats the purpose. We garden for fun, and at least for me, I don't like bringing technology to things that don't need it.
On the other hand, those guys out in colorado growing pot will love this kind of thing.
I use to have a retirement account with a certain financial services company. They stored my password in plain text. To recover your password they would physically mail it to you. This kind of stupidity should be illegal. It should be criminal and the company should have to pay fines for being asshats.
Companies don't fix underlying problems because management doesn't see any value in doing so. They also see no risk in having insecure products. Until there are real financial penalties for blatant incompetence regarding security nothing will improve.
Smart devices are cool, the data they collect going to advertising companies and the NSA isn't.
It is obvious the paradigm should be changed. People love facebook, so why can't we make a distributed facebook where each member has a little roku type device sitting in their home on their network that stores all of their data? Each person that member connects with gets a key that is associated with contact so that you can form secure networks of friends and share data. Then as the owner of your data you can opt into sharing a limited set of that data with advertisers but only if they pay you to mine your data. That would be a positive paradigm shift.
I wouldn't mind having smart devices in my home, I just don't want them communicating to the public internet. They can communicate with a server in my home and I can control what the software on this server does. Smart devices don't have to all connect to the public internet, and we don't have to allow every smart device manufacturer to mine our data. Eventually there will be open source automation software for servers and open source software for the smart devices so we can control what they do (like tomato or ddwrt for home wifi routers).
This is one pocket scope for less than $100
This is another.
Everybody is commenting "Why aren't we using Nitrogen, Why don't we just use chemical X, why is it so hard to kill someone?"
Comments like those miss the point. It isn't hard to kill someone. It is hard to find trained medical professionals that are willing to be part of an execution. Not everybody agrees with capital punishment, and there is a strong correlation with being highly educated (like doctors are) and being liberal (who are typically against capital punishment). I'm sure there are enough doctors who support capital punishment, but they still have to maintain professional affiliations and relationships with organizations who may be more liberal and may not support capital punishment. It just isn't worth it.
I think one reason people report poor conditions on Yelp a lot more than NYC's 311 number is because people get a sense of satisfaction reviewing things on yelp. You get little internet points the more reviews you make and you get to tell your friends (and annoy wait staff) by saying "I'm a big foodie, I have 173 Yelp reviews". This gives people an incentive to use Yelp that they don't have with calling 311.
Everybody wins here, a bunch of people get to say they did something in the fight against the NSA. The Executive branch and those in the house who support invasive domestic spying get to keep the majority of their surveillance programs, and most importantly there isn't much more meaningful oversight so who actually knows if the NSA is following the rules. The Executive still gets to hide themselves behind national security letters, "state secrets", and special secret courts.
However I do not feel like this caused any meaningful change. Hopefully the nation remains outraged at the NSA and this is just the first step in fixing our domestic spying programs, but I feel like we get a few meaningless bills passed and then this issue goes away until the next Snowden.
I really think consumers should own their own behavioral data / preferences. I'll agree to put smart devices in my house if I control the data, I control who I give that data to, and I would only give that data out if it benefited me.
Think about it. Maybe a national grocery store chain or two and GE want to get together and offer a subsidised smart fridge. I agree to let them monetize my spending habits and food preferences in exchange for the fridge being subsidised somewhat and targeted discounts for what I like to buy.
This is obviously because when the company gets sued and the lawyers go through discovery they will look for anything that helps them show that GM knew of a problem. This doesn't mean that the engineers can't bring up problems, it means that they have to do it verbally or write it on a paper airplane and fly it across the room.
This is obviously unethical. However this is the state of the industry. I have worked at a company where we were told specifically not to write any invention related things down or anything that our competitors could use against us. We (company I worked for and competitor) would trade stupid lawsuits and each companies lawyers would get to read the other companies emails and although it is against law ethics to share proprietary information discovered in a lawsuit it happens every day anyways.
Haha I don't own a single apple device. I'm just saying this isn't the end of the world. It is a fuck up, sure, but it isn't anywhere as bad as antennagate.
,Add all contacts
Seriously how do you people deal with getting a new phone number? Do you think the phone manufactures should automatically have all your friends update their contact books with your new number? The iMessage app should fail over to SMS if it thinks the other endpoint is no longer on iMessage, but there is a very obvious work around until they release the patch.
Send MMS
Dear iPhone owning friend:
I no longer am one of you. I have forsaken my iPhone, my Siri, my coolness if you will. I now have a [insert phone manufacturer]. You can no longer contact me via iMessage. Please delete my contact and re add it or otherwise inform your iPhone that I cannot be contacted via iMessage. Your phone is currently too stupid to figure it out for itself.
I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience,
Former iUser
so you think this is a reasonable user experience? first off knowing which of your contacts use imessage, and then contacting all them and tell them to screw with their phone settings?
No, I explicitly said its a user experience fuck up, in the part of the post that you decided not to quote.
What I said is this isn't a bug nor a "a much larger problem" because there is a straightforward workaround.
Have you ever changed phone numbers? Mass text to your friends "hey this is my new phone number". Why can't this person mass text their contact list (or send an email) and say "I don't have iMessage, if you use an iPhone change your settings for me".
sheesh.