Re:Environmental impact of travel
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
You haven't finished the maths, though. There are more cars than planes, but planes travel much further than cars. And you have to look at CO2 equivalent emissions -- planes emit a whole bunch of things at an altitude that considerably increases their impact. Cars are more of a problem, but (1) they're not overwhelmingly more of a problem, (2) they're inherently more amenable to decarbonisation
It's progress for the people who travel, for a time. It's not progress for other people, by and large -- it's a net negative as it results in a global externality that we haven't the willpower to fix. And of course, that negative externality may come back to haunt all of us travellers too.
Well, the person who said "We stand by our decision" is linnea.walsh@state.ma.us
I think it would be helpful for people to drop her a line asking how she lives with herself, and whether she can look her children in the eye now that she's helped ruined a man's reputation.
Of course you can upset people, but that's not what slander and libel are about. They are about stopping malicious devastation that has no basis in fact. If a noted paediatrician was falsely accused of raping little kids, and there was no legal recourse, and all the doctor could do was issue stout denials, there would be a grave risk that they may never be able to work again, that they may be assaulted, that they may be shunned by friends family and neighbours etc.
It's a bit more complicated than that for most jurisdictions.
Typically, I can have any opinion I like, and tell others about it ("that restaurant was rubbish"). What I can't do is publicly make a *false statement* which injures someone's business or personal reputation ("that restaurant had cockroaches crawling all over the tables" when I did not see that happen).
However, opinions that imply knowledge of underlying facts, then that can *potentially* be libellous ("he is a fraud"). But I'd think you'd have a hard job showing that "shady and morally bankrupt" implies knowledge of a set of underlying facts that are clearly misleading. All it implies is that the author didn't like the behaviour of the person he was writing about, ie opinion.
1. Copy and paste is missing, you're right. It's a lack. 2. MMS is crap, expensive and unreliable. I've tried it multiple times on my blackberry and it doesn't work 80% of the time -- the intended recipient never gets the picture (although I still get charged). It's not enough to have theoretical functionality, it needs to be real functionality. That's borne out in the traffic figures, which show that in 07, there were roughly 27bn MMS messages sent globally, compared with 42bn SMS messages passing through Verisign alone in just Q1 08. I'm sure that the relative unpopularity of MMS means that Apple was confident in focusing on email instead. 3. Video is a lack, but not a huge lack. It's also not a routinely-available feature on smartphones (unlike cut and paste & MMS), eg it's not on my pearl.
Now, compare your list to mine: On the one hand, conference calling and visual voicemail -- these seem like pretty fundamental benefits for a phone. On the other, copy and paste, sending a picture via MMS and video -- these seem like "somewhat nice to have". I realise YMMV, but the question is, whose mileage is more typical of what people in general want from a smartphone?
I have my blackberry pearl sitting here in front of me. I have *no* idea about how to do conference calling on it. It may or may not exist, but it's certainly not easy to use. I'm sure there may be one or two phones where this feature approaches usability, but there's none where it's as easy as the iPhone, IMO -- have you evidence to the contrary?
Voicemail is something else that isn't remotely as well implemented on any other phone.
Ease of use may be subjective, but it's also very very real.
There are dozens of features that work this well on an iPhone and far less well on other phones.
Jeez, it's just a bit of not-particularly-elitist jargon that's commonly understood to mean "not merely the device, ie iPhone, but the peripherals, software and other content whose sales are only possible because of the device's existence". I once had a chemistry professor who got cross that people used the word "organic" in the context of food, instead of carbon chemistry. For the life of me, I can't understand why people apparently view it as immoral for a word to have two distinct but related meanings, with one an analogy derived from the other; nor why they don't see that this is a routine feature of English (I love apple pie and I love you; the animal had horny projections and was feeling horny; etc etc).
Don't be so fuckin' dumb. Apple makes devices that suit the needs of consumers, not techies. The rules reflect this, ie they make it easy for consumers to choose software they know won't break their phone, at a (fairly nominal) cost to the developer. If you don't like the rules, don't buy the device.
I realise that YMMV, but I find it staggering that you can honestly think that the most commonly eaten apples are so much more worth eating. The flavour of a Braeburn is incomparably inferior to an Egremont Russett, which I doubt it commonly sold in most supermarkets, but is a reasonably large commercial brand all the same. And there are much finer and rarer apple varieties available, such as Ashmead's Kernel. http://www.orchard-group.uklinux.net/glos/apples/Ashmead's+Kernel.html
Yeah, well if people had any sense of historical fucking perspective, they'd have heard of the term Potemkin village and wouldn't assume that an impoverished dictatorship hemmed in for a decade by several powerful armed forces really would have WMD
It's a sorry reflection on corporate culture today that the idea that "I'm on holiday and therefore uncontactable" seems to be so foreign to many people. Y'know, in the days before cellphones, the vast vast majority of people were able to go on holiday without having to stay in contact with their boss all the time, and the world did not fall apart.
a) So what? Mean old Tussauds. b) It's actually called Merlin Entertainments, not Tussauds c) There are in fact a few other theme parks (eg Drayton) d) This is the UK, there's lots of other fun stuff to do with kids besides go to theme parks
Where I'm from, George Bush is notorious for his Manichean view of, say, the Iranians, but it's a real pleasure to see the same nimble thinking applied to Dads Who Use Smartphones Too Much who apparently can now be cast as Forever Vile To Their Children and Beyond All Hope of Redemption.
Christ, wouldja take a minute to think even briefly before typing. What are you on about, saying, "it's not like it spoils anyone else's fun if you want to spoil your trip by playing Solitaire on your smartphone the whole time"? This policy is not aimed at 19-year-old geeks who've turned up by themselves, it's aimed at parents. And yes it really will spoil your 10-year-old's day if you're playing Solitaire instead of joining them on the rides.
It's not forced fun. That would be if they forced people to actively do something. This is forcing people not to do something that's detrimental to fun. They're not idiots. They do realise that some parents are miserable twats and will continue to be miserable twats even if they aren't spending all their time blackberrying about Terribly Important Meetings instead of watching little Fenella run around, but they also suspect that some parents will be more likely to play with their kids if the park insists that PDAs aren't used. And frankly, I think that's a pretty reasonable hypothesis.
Oh well if it says it on boingboing, it must be true. Just take a minute to engage your brain and think to yourself whether it's even remotely likely that an amusement park is actually going to set up a policy to steal people's PDAs. Aside from being illegal, it's hardly going to pull in the punters, is it? Obviously, the policy will be to ask adults with PDAs to take them to the drop-off zones. Strikes me as a fairly innocuous policy, and if people don't like it, it'll be reflected in the attendance figures no doubt, and then they'll drop the policy or risk losing out to rivals.
1) I don't know about the US, but here in the UK, intercity train routes typically include a mix of express trains that don't stop at more than one or two places between originating city and destination city, and trains that stop more frequently. New trains are capable of such rapid acceleration and deceleration that it adds very little time to a journey per stop, in any event -- when the new Pendolinos were brought in between London and Manchester, they cut journey times down from 2h40m to about 2h through just this improvement.
2) People in the UK will typically arrive 10 to 20mins ahead of a train's scheduled departure, cf 40mins to 2hrs for a plane. And you can be out of a train station with your luggage in about 5 to 10mins, cf 30 to 90mins for a domestic airport. Finally, train stations are typically in city centres, so your journey time door-to-door is much shorter.
3) You may not take much in the way of luggage, but plenty of others do (and do so out of necessity, not stupidity).
Quadruple piles of arse in this particular thread. The UK government wrote the European Convention of Human Rights in the late 1940s and all Council of Europe states (*not* EU states) adopted it. It has bound British law ever since, but prior to the Human Rights Act in 1998, UK citizens had to go to Strasbourg to fight a case. That's no longer true.
And guess what clause 2 of article 6 says? "Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law."
Jesus, what is it with you people? Of course there are horrible incidents like this from time to time, but that doesn't mean that the *typical* home intruder is there to commit violence. Most break ins are about stealing property, no more and no less.
Don't be a norbert. You don't need everything to go wrong to have an unintended injury with a gun, you just need one thing to go wrong. And the facts are that it is more likely that one thing will go wrong and there will be an unintended injury than that there will be an intended injury.
It strikes me that it's less about his being paralysed with fear than your being so hopped up on testosterone that you're not willing to look at the cold hard facts, which is that guns have a net negative impact on the safety of US households... ie on average, a household is more likely to suffer an injury if it has a gun than if it doesn't.
There's plenty of stuff that's a pain in the arse to do on most phones but easy on an iPhone. To take just a single and simple example: ask a BlackBerry user how they do conference calling and then demerge one of the parties -- it might be possible, but I've no idea how, and I'm reasonably techy.
By chopping up my remarks for your reply, you've missed answering the main points I was making: a) the more info you want to send, the slower it will be. Retrieval times are non-trivial for wireless gadgets at present, as I know to my cost in using my blackberry, so it's sensible design not to send more information than most users need. b) even if you present data clearly, concisely and efficiently, sometimes more data will obscure rather than clarify because it just gets in the way. When most people ask the question, "What's the weather like today?", they want a simple answer like "sunny" or "cold with showers from time to time". A six-frame animated gif of complex radar images is just extra noise obscuring the signal. I think sparklines are a clever idea and very powerful for analytical work, ie measured reflection on a complex dataset to come to a thoughtful conclusion. But you'll have a hard time convincing me that most users, most of the time, want to do analytical work on their iPhone, as opposed to look at whether the market is up or down or if they need an umbrella this afternoon.
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You haven't finished the maths, though. There are more cars than planes, but planes travel much further than cars. And you have to look at CO2 equivalent emissions -- planes emit a whole bunch of things at an altitude that considerably increases their impact. Cars are more of a problem, but (1) they're not overwhelmingly more of a problem, (2) they're inherently more amenable to decarbonisation
It's progress for the people who travel, for a time. It's not progress for other people, by and large -- it's a net negative as it results in a global externality that we haven't the willpower to fix. And of course, that negative externality may come back to haunt all of us travellers too.
Well, the person who said "We stand by our decision" is linnea.walsh@state.ma.us
I think it would be helpful for people to drop her a line asking how she lives with herself, and whether she can look her children in the eye now that she's helped ruined a man's reputation.
Of course you can upset people, but that's not what slander and libel are about. They are about stopping malicious devastation that has no basis in fact. If a noted paediatrician was falsely accused of raping little kids, and there was no legal recourse, and all the doctor could do was issue stout denials, there would be a grave risk that they may never be able to work again, that they may be assaulted, that they may be shunned by friends family and neighbours etc.
It's a bit more complicated than that for most jurisdictions.
Typically, I can have any opinion I like, and tell others about it ("that restaurant was rubbish"). What I can't do is publicly make a *false statement* which injures someone's business or personal reputation ("that restaurant had cockroaches crawling all over the tables" when I did not see that happen).
However, opinions that imply knowledge of underlying facts, then that can *potentially* be libellous ("he is a fraud"). But I'd think you'd have a hard job showing that "shady and morally bankrupt" implies knowledge of a set of underlying facts that are clearly misleading. All it implies is that the author didn't like the behaviour of the person he was writing about, ie opinion.
1. Copy and paste is missing, you're right. It's a lack.
2. MMS is crap, expensive and unreliable. I've tried it multiple times on my blackberry and it doesn't work 80% of the time -- the intended recipient never gets the picture (although I still get charged). It's not enough to have theoretical functionality, it needs to be real functionality. That's borne out in the traffic figures, which show that in 07, there were roughly 27bn MMS messages sent globally, compared with 42bn SMS messages passing through Verisign alone in just Q1 08. I'm sure that the relative unpopularity of MMS means that Apple was confident in focusing on email instead.
3. Video is a lack, but not a huge lack. It's also not a routinely-available feature on smartphones (unlike cut and paste & MMS), eg it's not on my pearl.
Now, compare your list to mine:
On the one hand, conference calling and visual voicemail -- these seem like pretty fundamental benefits for a phone.
On the other, copy and paste, sending a picture via MMS and video -- these seem like "somewhat nice to have". I realise YMMV, but the question is, whose mileage is more typical of what people in general want from a smartphone?
OK, I'll bite.
I have my blackberry pearl sitting here in front of me. I have *no* idea about how to do conference calling on it. It may or may not exist, but it's certainly not easy to use. I'm sure there may be one or two phones where this feature approaches usability, but there's none where it's as easy as the iPhone, IMO -- have you evidence to the contrary?
Voicemail is something else that isn't remotely as well implemented on any other phone.
Ease of use may be subjective, but it's also very very real.
There are dozens of features that work this well on an iPhone and far less well on other phones.
Re: ecosystem
Jeez, it's just a bit of not-particularly-elitist jargon that's commonly understood to mean "not merely the device, ie iPhone, but the peripherals, software and other content whose sales are only possible because of the device's existence". I once had a chemistry professor who got cross that people used the word "organic" in the context of food, instead of carbon chemistry. For the life of me, I can't understand why people apparently view it as immoral for a word to have two distinct but related meanings, with one an analogy derived from the other; nor why they don't see that this is a routine feature of English (I love apple pie and I love you; the animal had horny projections and was feeling horny; etc etc).
If you satisfy your developers at the expense of your consumers, you're on much more of a hiding to nothing.
Don't be so fuckin' dumb. Apple makes devices that suit the needs of consumers, not techies. The rules reflect this, ie they make it easy for consumers to choose software they know won't break their phone, at a (fairly nominal) cost to the developer. If you don't like the rules, don't buy the device.
I realise that YMMV, but I find it staggering that you can honestly think that the most commonly eaten apples are so much more worth eating. The flavour of a Braeburn is incomparably inferior to an Egremont Russett, which I doubt it commonly sold in most supermarkets, but is a reasonably large commercial brand all the same. And there are much finer and rarer apple varieties available, such as Ashmead's Kernel. http://www.orchard-group.uklinux.net/glos/apples/Ashmead's+Kernel.html
Yeah, well if people had any sense of historical fucking perspective, they'd have heard of the term Potemkin village and wouldn't assume that an impoverished dictatorship hemmed in for a decade by several powerful armed forces really would have WMD
It's a sorry reflection on corporate culture today that the idea that "I'm on holiday and therefore uncontactable" seems to be so foreign to many people. Y'know, in the days before cellphones, the vast vast majority of people were able to go on holiday without having to stay in contact with their boss all the time, and the world did not fall apart.
a) So what? Mean old Tussauds.
b) It's actually called Merlin Entertainments, not Tussauds
c) There are in fact a few other theme parks (eg Drayton)
d) This is the UK, there's lots of other fun stuff to do with kids besides go to theme parks
Where I'm from, George Bush is notorious for his Manichean view of, say, the Iranians, but it's a real pleasure to see the same nimble thinking applied to Dads Who Use Smartphones Too Much who apparently can now be cast as Forever Vile To Their Children and Beyond All Hope of Redemption.
Christ, wouldja take a minute to think even briefly before typing. What are you on about, saying, "it's not like it spoils anyone else's fun if you want to spoil your trip by playing Solitaire on your smartphone the whole time"? This policy is not aimed at 19-year-old geeks who've turned up by themselves, it's aimed at parents. And yes it really will spoil your 10-year-old's day if you're playing Solitaire instead of joining them on the rides.
It's not forced fun. That would be if they forced people to actively do something. This is forcing people not to do something that's detrimental to fun. They're not idiots. They do realise that some parents are miserable twats and will continue to be miserable twats even if they aren't spending all their time blackberrying about Terribly Important Meetings instead of watching little Fenella run around, but they also suspect that some parents will be more likely to play with their kids if the park insists that PDAs aren't used. And frankly, I think that's a pretty reasonable hypothesis.
Oh well if it says it on boingboing, it must be true. Just take a minute to engage your brain and think to yourself whether it's even remotely likely that an amusement park is actually going to set up a policy to steal people's PDAs. Aside from being illegal, it's hardly going to pull in the punters, is it? Obviously, the policy will be to ask adults with PDAs to take them to the drop-off zones. Strikes me as a fairly innocuous policy, and if people don't like it, it'll be reflected in the attendance figures no doubt, and then they'll drop the policy or risk losing out to rivals.
Um, he said "no flashy logos in my face". The glowing piece of fruit is a flashy logo that distracts observers, but *not* the user.
1) I don't know about the US, but here in the UK, intercity train routes typically include a mix of express trains that don't stop at more than one or two places between originating city and destination city, and trains that stop more frequently. New trains are capable of such rapid acceleration and deceleration that it adds very little time to a journey per stop, in any event -- when the new Pendolinos were brought in between London and Manchester, they cut journey times down from 2h40m to about 2h through just this improvement.
2) People in the UK will typically arrive 10 to 20mins ahead of a train's scheduled departure, cf 40mins to 2hrs for a plane. And you can be out of a train station with your luggage in about 5 to 10mins, cf 30 to 90mins for a domestic airport. Finally, train stations are typically in city centres, so your journey time door-to-door is much shorter.
3) You may not take much in the way of luggage, but plenty of others do (and do so out of necessity, not stupidity).
Quadruple piles of arse in this particular thread. The UK government wrote the European Convention of Human Rights in the late 1940s and all Council of Europe states (*not* EU states) adopted it. It has bound British law ever since, but prior to the Human Rights Act in 1998, UK citizens had to go to Strasbourg to fight a case. That's no longer true.
And guess what clause 2 of article 6 says?
"Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law."
Jesus, what is it with you people? Of course there are horrible incidents like this from time to time, but that doesn't mean that the *typical* home intruder is there to commit violence. Most break ins are about stealing property, no more and no less.
Don't be a norbert. You don't need everything to go wrong to have an unintended injury with a gun, you just need one thing to go wrong. And the facts are that it is more likely that one thing will go wrong and there will be an unintended injury than that there will be an intended injury.
... ie on average, a household is more likely to suffer an injury if it has a gun than if it doesn't.
It strikes me that it's less about his being paralysed with fear than your being so hopped up on testosterone that you're not willing to look at the cold hard facts, which is that guns have a net negative impact on the safety of US households
There's plenty of stuff that's a pain in the arse to do on most phones but easy on an iPhone. To take just a single and simple example: ask a BlackBerry user how they do conference calling and then demerge one of the parties -- it might be possible, but I've no idea how, and I'm reasonably techy.
By chopping up my remarks for your reply, you've missed answering the main points I was making:
a) the more info you want to send, the slower it will be. Retrieval times are non-trivial for wireless gadgets at present, as I know to my cost in using my blackberry, so it's sensible design not to send more information than most users need.
b) even if you present data clearly, concisely and efficiently, sometimes more data will obscure rather than clarify because it just gets in the way. When most people ask the question, "What's the weather like today?", they want a simple answer like "sunny" or "cold with showers from time to time". A six-frame animated gif of complex radar images is just extra noise obscuring the signal. I think sparklines are a clever idea and very powerful for analytical work, ie measured reflection on a complex dataset to come to a thoughtful conclusion. But you'll have a hard time convincing me that most users, most of the time, want to do analytical work on their iPhone, as opposed to look at whether the market is up or down or if they need an umbrella this afternoon.