I really doubt they could do that even if they wanted to, thankfully. They didn't create TCP/IP and I do not believe there are any patents on the protocol they could buy.
Step 1. Make small change to TCP/IP.
Step 2. Patent that change.
Step 3. As controlling body, mandate that internet traffic implement the change.
So you're saying that in the 80s the USA was a repressive and dysfunctional government, but after AT&T was broken up things magically got better?
No, what a weird conclusion.
If I'd said, "The tap water in country X is dangerous to drink, which today is a symptom of an underdeveloped economy," does that mean I think that Great Britain had an underdeveloped economy in 1910, or that a country could become developed and underdeveloped several times in a single day just by manipulating the quantity of fecal matter in the water supply?
It's called an anachronism.
I'm not trying to defend the ITU, but I refuse to believe that state-owned telecommunications monopolies can possibly be any worse than Qwest.
As someone who's lived with several of them, I can promise you that Qwest is your fairy godmother by comparison. When's the last time Qwest got a law passed to block everyone in the country from using VOIP? When did they last ban all incoming called from the Seattle area (area code 206) because that was the location of a major callback provider?
It shouldn't be. There's a 10-ton clue that this kind of crap was going to be the order of the day: I-T-U.
The ITU as an organization exists to promote the interests of state-owned telecommunications monopolies, which today are the province of repressive and dysfunctional governments. It is directly opposed to democracy, to open standards, and to anything that allows the internet to grow organically or in response to interests and technological developments that come from the ground up.
I know of ordinarily-intelligent people with good net cred who are involved in this expense-account-blather-fest, and their crotches are so extravagantly tumescent at being taken seriously by people wearing expensive suits who ride black limos with diplomatic plates that they've totally lost the plot, signing their souls away to the devil. For Pete's sake, how low have we sunk when ICANN stands on the hilltop as our shining paragon of openness?
The ITU has been trying to take over the internet ever since it hit the bigtime around 1994 (up intil then, they just dissed it). Just wait - once they take over, they'll close the standards process, charge huge licensing fees for anyone who talks TCP/IP, and do whatever they have to in order to ensure that "disruptive" technologies like tunneling no longer work.
And then we'll have to start all over again and build a new internet, leaving them behind again, mark my words. What a huge flerkin waste of time.
(Sorry for the delay; I was out at a movie, and I'm happy to report that no cellphones rang)
You're absolutely wrong. We're talking about private property here, which is what I think you're missing. Legally, you don't have the right to a quiet environment or an undisturbed conversation if the owners of the property don't grant you that right.
It's not someone's home. It's a place made accessible to the public, and as such, the property owner's say is constrained to some degree. See, for instance, Marsh v. Alabama, particularly noting Justice Black's conclusion that "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it."
But anyway, the issue in my example about intentionally interfering with two people having a pre-existing conversation is largely irrelevant to the property owner or his wishes. It's a matter of whether the conversants could reasonably expect freedom from this sort of thing; if so, a police officer could cite the interferer for disorderly conduct.
You're right that there's a difference between the legality of it and whether someone has the right to it. I'm using the legality because talking about what one has the right to do ignoring the law is a completely philosophical question, and we all know how arguments about questions like those go. You're basing your argument that you have the right to jam this person's cell phone on the fact that in your opinion, a theater is a place where it should be completely quiet. How do you expect anyone to argue with this opinion? Someone else might argue that it's completely reasonable to talk on a cell phone if it's not too loud. You'd disagree, but it would be a completely subjective opinion!
That's how all the most interesting arguments work. Arguing over who won the World Series in 1957 is boring; someone looks it up and we're done.
The laws are made based on the outcomes of discussion like these. They did not fall down to earth from heaven. Someone has to sit down and decide which is more important: my right to reasonable quiet or your right to use a phone.
I think the right to quiet trumps, because your single phone disturbs multiple people, and because you're the one who wants to do something creating the need for conflict resolution, so it's more reasonable that you step outside to do it. You may think differently, but if you can't make a convincing case then it doesn't matter much.
Or another approach: At the end of the day, there is some outcome which leaves society the best off in the net. You can assume a logarithmic increase in social cost per person as the outcome diverges farther and farther from their preferred outcome, then sample the population to figure out what they'd prefer and then figure out how your numbers add up. I don't have any scientific data, but I brought this topic up with my friends this evening, and 7 out of 8 (including me) felt that jammers in cinemas would be a great idea.
That kind of reasoning leads to people (presumably less peaceful to you) saying things like "Well if he jams my cellphone, I have a right to take his jammer and beat him with it."
Nobody has a right to physical violence except in self-defense. Anyone who thinks seriously about beating someone either for making noise with a phone, or for jamming one, has some problems to work out, and these problems have nothing to do with the phone/jammer issue.
I'm paying plenty of attention. It so happens that I disagree with your conclusions.
A person has the right to do anything (within the law) that THE OWNERS OF THE PROPERTY DEEM THAT PERSON MAY DO.
Okay, you find me a cinema that has posted a "no cellphone jammers" sign. If you can't, then your argument is no more than a reiteration of the present illegality of cellphone jammers in the US, which everyone already takes as a given, and is therefore entirely uninteresting. You might as well argue that trying to find a cure for AIDS was stupid because it was a fatal disease.
Of course you have the right to reasonable tranquility... when you're on YOUR PROPERTY or on public property. Do you have the right to keep people from screaming on a rollercoaster because it hurts your ears? Do you have the right to tell the people at a concert to STFU so you can be more tranquil? NO.
These examples don't address the point. Rock concerts and roller coasters are not places where it is reasonable to expect quiet.
Their right to yack does not supercede your right to relax. But in attempting to exercise your right to relax, you are ILLEGALLY infringing upon their rights. If you sat next to the yacker and talked loudly to your neighbor, infringing on their right to yack, there would be nothing wrong with that. Because, although you're "infringing on their rights", you would be WITHIN THE RULES OF THE OWNERS OF THE PROPERTY.
Sorry, if I went and sat next to someone and started yelling in their ear - or even trying to disrupt a conversation between two other people by talking loudly through them - I could certainly be cited for it.
Sorry about the caps, but I feel like I'm saying the same thing over and over again without anyone listening.
This is because we are dealing in the grey area of conflicting preferences, and not everyone sees things the same way you do. Saying the same thing over and over again is not a very effective approach to these situations.
One day, when you grow up, you will become sufficiently humble to realize that people can disagree with you without necessarily being retarded or hard of hearing.
That's no fun. It's a lot more entertaining to see if you can get them to end it for you:
You've given me an idea. Next person who lights up a phone in the quiet car on the train, I'm going to sit next to them and say into the phone in my sultriest voice, "Hey lover, come back to bed."
You're making the assumption that businesses out there are obligated to give you a comfortable experience, and if that business doesn't then you're perfectly happy illegally treading on other people's rights.
I don't see that their right to yack supersedes my right to relax. If you can convince me that it does, excellent.
Guess what? People have the right to have annoying ringers and speak annoyingly on their cell phones if the owner of the property they're on at the time doesn't have rules against it or doesn't enforce them.
By that same principle I should have the right to annoy them back by jamming their phone. You haven't made it clear to me why one person's "right" is more important than the other's.
You do not have the right to take away other peoples' rights just because the only train in town doesn't meet your expectations.
You're the one who came in saying that the free market had all the answers, and I should just go use a competing train if I didn't like the way this one worked.
One important key to functioning successfully in a social environment is respecting other people, and you have the right to be annoyed. But another important key is respecting other people's rights, recognizing that your desires are not rights
Oh, I get it. Your desires are rights and mine are silly whims.
In point of fact I do have the right to reasonable tranquility; that's why we have laws about disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct and so on.
Your right to WHAT, exactly? Annoying tho cell phones are, I'm pretty sure there's a right to speech
The Supreme Court has been over this a million times. There is no right to speech in any particular time, place, or manner. You just have the right to say what you want to say. A cop can tell you to go say it somewhere else. You cannot spraypaint it on the walls of the White House. You cannot scream it through a bullhorn in a residential area at 4am. And I think it's perfectly fine if you cannot say it on a cellphone in a public area where people have an expectation of quiet.
Can you really not muster enough concern for your fellow man to cut him a break for something that only happens (for most people) once, or maybe twice in a lifetime?
Sounds like one of two things is happening here:
(A) your argument is a red herring, or
(B) the solution is to issue special devices "once, or maybe twice in a lifetime" to spouses of expectant mothers in the days leading up to childbirth. These devices will operate on a special frequency allocated for this purpose and will notify the father even in the case of a local cellphone jammer. They must then be returned to the hospital in order to take the baby home.
But to say that we all have to put up with loudmouth schmucks and their beeping cell phones all day long everywhere we go, just because "once, or maybe twice in a lifetime" you're going to have a child, is preposterous. This line of reasoning could be used to justify any ridiculous thing.
And what are you going to do for the people who live near movie theaters and schools? Jamming is done by electromagnetic waves that propagate in a sphere, but we humans have a tendency to build structures as rectangular solids. There is a boundary problem here, you can either not jam the whole the whole school, or jam the school and the surrounding houses.
Must be some remarkably tall schools you're dealing with here.
How many schools are set off from adjacent buildings by less than their height? I'd wager that outside of the biggest cities, not many at all.
It is now standard for babysitters to have the mobile number of the parents and to text them if there is any sort of problem. Difficulties will arise if that message is going to be jammed because the guy on the next table has unilaterally decided to ban anyone in the room from using their phones.
These are imagined difficulties. For thousands of years humans got by just fine without babysitters needing to text the parents every time Junior starts whining about wanting to stay up late and watch TV.
If the kid has some serious medical condition, fine, you're a very rare exception and you unfortunately will have to choose a restaurant that does not jam. Or you'll have to delegate an aunt or uncle to take the call.
Otherwise, hire a babysitter who is responsible enough to deal with ordinary emergencies, and let it go. As for the rest, the minor things that come up in life are actually not emergencies. They are trivial. People have no perspective these days.
Another point regarding being annoyed in a restaurant/theater/train is one I made in another post in this thread: if you are in a restaurant/theater/train that doesn't effectively prevent people from using their cell phones inappropriately, that's your fault. It's the businesses choice to allow/disallow such behavior, and it's your choice whether or not to patronize that business.
That's a little glib. Only one company runs a train from New York to DC. They put quiet cars on sometimes, but not always, and only a few conductors are vigilant about shutting down the jerks who sit in the quiet car and then use their phones. I have very little control over Amtrak; I can write letters, but that's about it. I do find myself flying more and more when it's a leisure trip, precisely because of the phone issue, but when I need to get a lot done on the trip there's no substitute for the train.
Likewise there may or may not be another cinema showing the movie I want to see, or another restaurant that serves food as good as what I want to eat.
And while you're blocking that one rude person, you might be simultaneously blocking another person's conversation, who might be using that cell phone responsibly (in the lobby of a theater, say) or even in some kind of emergency. That doesn't sound very responsible to me, and just as selfish as the assholes who don't know how to use their cellphones responsibly.
If it's an emergency they can use a payphone. Payphones are readily available in cinemas, on trains, and in or nearby restaurants.
As for the "responsible" phone user, in the hypothetical situation where I have a jammer, they're an unfortumate victim just like I was before. Buying the jammer would be a way to improve my personal odds of a favorable outcome in a zero-sum game. When the "selfish assholes" go away, so will the jammer. Until then it's just a matter of spreading the misery around. No reason I have to be the victim all the time.
I will use my psychic mind reading powers to say that you must be atleast 35.
How come every generation of old people feels the need to criticize every new technology that comes around by mis-characterizing it?
Sorry, I'm not 35 and I'm another cell phone hater.
Are the devices inherently evil? Of course not. However, in the vast majority of people who have them, they encourage behavior that ranges from irritating to extremely annoying to downright dangerous.
I know any number of otherwise nice people who will answer these things (or at least reflexively check the screen) in the middle of face-to-face conversations, which is the height of rudeness. Some of these people do it enough that I really don't enjoy hanging around them anymore. For one of them it's even caused problems with her marriage - her husband can't stand it either and she doesn't seem to be able to kick the habit.
On trains, the racket of cellphones ringing and getting yacked into has destroyed what was once a restful way to travel. Other public spaces have suffered as well. People who are able to maintain normal volume levels when talking with the person next to them are for some reason unable to resist screaming their stupid inane shit into the little plastic box. In fact, I think one of the upsetting things about cell phones is that by raising the volume level of conversations I'm exposed to, it's correspondingly raised my awareness of what morons most people are. I'd like to think it's just that the same people who choose to have cellphones are also subintelligent twits, but depressingly I've seen no particular basis for that.
And, of course, almost every time I look into the window of a car after it's executed some brain-dead maneuver on the city streets (last-minute unsignalled turns, cutting other drivers off, almost mowing down pedestrians in crosswalks, etc.), the driver has a phone stuck to his/her ear.
If the price came down to about $100 I'd happily buy a jammer and carry it always.
You have got to be kidding me. Join most any company that has a significant consulting services or sales branch, and it is easy to see the world. Within the next six weeks I'll hit cities in four continents.... Surprisingly, the view is about the same as a cube. A card table if the client planned ahead, a hotel every nigh where you spend the rest of the evening making magic, and eating at whatever restaurant is nearby. I know where the plane is on some international flight just by the snack cart shuffling about.
There was a point - travel is easy. If you want to spelunk the world and enjoy it, better to do it as a vacationer than trying to 'see the world' after a shift is done. I saw more of Europe backpacking on the cheap in college than I have 'commuting' back and forth.
Depends on the job, schedule, destinations, and your personality, I guess, but I find that work trips offer opportunities for much deeper exploration of a foreign place than I usually get as a tourist.
Spending time working side-by-side with people, you talk about all sorts of things. Get to know them and you'll have invitations to visit homes, meet families, go on weekend trips, and so on. This means traveling like a local, eating true local delicacies, and visiting places not in any guidebook.
In the age of cell phones, this may not be an issue for some, but if you plan on replacing your land line with voip over your broadband, what happens when you need to call someone during a power outage?
Aside from the strawman-killer cell phone, how about your neighbor's phone?
While I've never had a power outage in 5 years at my address - the good thing about living up the street from the White House in Washington DC I guess - I have never in my entire life felt the need to phone anyone during a power outage. Ack, but what if there's a power outage and suddenly my home is laid siege by looters? People around here sure spend a lot of time worrying about doomsday scenarios.
I travel frequently and use Vondage. With this I am able to use my "land line" in a hotel
For what it's worth, I've brought a Vonage box on trips to Europe and Latin America with pretty good results. On European broadband it was always perfect. In Latin America sometimes the calls would be too choppy to use; other times it worked fine. Usually in the evenings it worked better.
But just being able to make and receive free international calls from a hotel room (or a random spot when using my Linux laptop to route Wifi to it) was quite a treat, despite the occasional hiccups. Sometimes it was hard to get people to believe I was actually out of the country ("Hey, I'm calling you from a cafe in Rio!" "Bullshit, I can see it on my caller ID, you're sitting in your apartment.")
The reason why you see coke being drunk in movies is that coke ponies up. My take is that MS just doesn't come across with the cash! They could be all over the silver screen if they decide it will help them. Seeing that they are already in the Media business big time they don't need it.
Ah, I see. So that explains why Gnome and KDE have appeared in all those films people mentioned (and they definitely appear more than Windows - the most common of all, though, are the hokey fake screens that flash "PASSWORD INVALID" in 96-point flashing red type with a skull and crossbones underneath, just like we all see in our corporate workplaces every day).
Here I spent all this money on my KDE license thinking it was going to go toward re-furnishing the KDE headquarters building or buying their CEO a yacht, and now I find out from you that they've been blowing it on product placement.
Again, so? If their function is vigilance of U.S. Government websites to verify that the Administration isn't modifying their previous statements then by all means they should ignore robots.txt.
This is specious. Their function is to provide a record of what web sites have said at various points in the past, and people therefore rely on it for that purpose. Until an institution comes into existence to specifically monitor the course of changes to the whitehouse.gov web site, that's all we've got. Archive.org has voluntarily agreed to respect robots.txt, and this can be taken advantage of for duplicitous purposes. I'm not saying it has, only that it can. This is a speculative discussion.
Believe me, everything the Administration has said is duly noted by news media around the world. You are all fooling yourself if you think the Administration can rewrite history by updating a webpage.
They don't have to. They just have to make it hard enough for the lazy people to find the truth, and they will have done enough to make it worth their trouble.
It would be just like what Arafat does when he says one thing in Arabic and another contradictory thing in English. Any journalist who cared enough could get a translator or learn Arabic and sort this out. But almost all the time they're too lazy to bother, and each language's press only reports on the message delivered in that language.
If Google spiders WhiteHouse.gov and then--under your theory--they decide to change something, Google will just recrawl the new version thus making the new version part of Google's copy of the page. If they disallow it with robots.txt either Google drops it completely or the old version remains in their database. Either way, disallowing pages that have already been cached is counterproductive.
1. Google doesn't spider every day. There can be a substantial gap between when a site is changed and when Google's cache is updated.
So... the White House publishes a ton of information on Iraq and a dozen other topics on their website. The information is available to anyone that goes to the website. And they think by disallowing it to robots (which may or may not pay attention to the robots.txt file) they're going to hide that which is already public by following a few links?
No, they're going to obscure future changes from all but the most sophisticated (and generally media-inaccessible) users.
Everyone else will just see today's approved version of the message.
It is 100% obvious that someone made an error when building the robots.txt file. Or do you think there is a lot on the topic of Barney for Kids in Iraq? Or an Iraqi don't call list? Or the problem of illegal logging in Iraq? Or the history of African Americans in Iraq? Or how about Easter in Iraq?
Your highlighting of the most absurd-looking decontextualized details overlooks the possibility that the webmonkey was told "Make sure that no search engines archive any page on the site called 'iraq'."
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1. Make small change to TCP/IP.
Step 2. Patent that change.
Step 3. As controlling body, mandate that internet traffic implement the change.
No, what a weird conclusion.
If I'd said, "The tap water in country X is dangerous to drink, which today is a symptom of an underdeveloped economy," does that mean I think that Great Britain had an underdeveloped economy in 1910, or that a country could become developed and underdeveloped several times in a single day just by manipulating the quantity of fecal matter in the water supply?
It's called an anachronism.
As someone who's lived with several of them, I can promise you that Qwest is your fairy godmother by comparison. When's the last time Qwest got a law passed to block everyone in the country from using VOIP? When did they last ban all incoming called from the Seattle area (area code 206) because that was the location of a major callback provider?
Indeed it does. Fast, widely available broadband, cheap service (cheaper than the USA), good performance.
It shouldn't be. There's a 10-ton clue that this kind of crap was going to be the order of the day: I-T-U.
The ITU as an organization exists to promote the interests of state-owned telecommunications monopolies, which today are the province of repressive and dysfunctional governments. It is directly opposed to democracy, to open standards, and to anything that allows the internet to grow organically or in response to interests and technological developments that come from the ground up.
I know of ordinarily-intelligent people with good net cred who are involved in this expense-account-blather-fest, and their crotches are so extravagantly tumescent at being taken seriously by people wearing expensive suits who ride black limos with diplomatic plates that they've totally lost the plot, signing their souls away to the devil. For Pete's sake, how low have we sunk when ICANN stands on the hilltop as our shining paragon of openness?
The ITU has been trying to take over the internet ever since it hit the bigtime around 1994 (up intil then, they just dissed it). Just wait - once they take over, they'll close the standards process, charge huge licensing fees for anyone who talks TCP/IP, and do whatever they have to in order to ensure that "disruptive" technologies like tunneling no longer work.
And then we'll have to start all over again and build a new internet, leaving them behind again, mark my words. What a huge flerkin waste of time.
(Sorry for the delay; I was out at a movie, and I'm happy to report that no cellphones rang)
It's not someone's home. It's a place made accessible to the public, and as such, the property owner's say is constrained to some degree. See, for instance, Marsh v. Alabama, particularly noting Justice Black's conclusion that "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it."
But anyway, the issue in my example about intentionally interfering with two people having a pre-existing conversation is largely irrelevant to the property owner or his wishes. It's a matter of whether the conversants could reasonably expect freedom from this sort of thing; if so, a police officer could cite the interferer for disorderly conduct.
That's how all the most interesting arguments work. Arguing over who won the World Series in 1957 is boring; someone looks it up and we're done.
The laws are made based on the outcomes of discussion like these. They did not fall down to earth from heaven. Someone has to sit down and decide which is more important: my right to reasonable quiet or your right to use a phone.
I think the right to quiet trumps, because your single phone disturbs multiple people, and because you're the one who wants to do something creating the need for conflict resolution, so it's more reasonable that you step outside to do it. You may think differently, but if you can't make a convincing case then it doesn't matter much.
Or another approach: At the end of the day, there is some outcome which leaves society the best off in the net. You can assume a logarithmic increase in social cost per person as the outcome diverges farther and farther from their preferred outcome, then sample the population to figure out what they'd prefer and then figure out how your numbers add up. I don't have any scientific data, but I brought this topic up with my friends this evening, and 7 out of 8 (including me) felt that jammers in cinemas would be a great idea.
Nobody has a right to physical violence except in self-defense. Anyone who thinks seriously about beating someone either for making noise with a phone, or for jamming one, has some problems to work out, and these problems have nothing to do with the phone/jammer issue.
I'm paying plenty of attention. It so happens that I disagree with your conclusions.
Okay, you find me a cinema that has posted a "no cellphone jammers" sign. If you can't, then your argument is no more than a reiteration of the present illegality of cellphone jammers in the US, which everyone already takes as a given, and is therefore entirely uninteresting. You might as well argue that trying to find a cure for AIDS was stupid because it was a fatal disease.
These examples don't address the point. Rock concerts and roller coasters are not places where it is reasonable to expect quiet.
Sorry, if I went and sat next to someone and started yelling in their ear - or even trying to disrupt a conversation between two other people by talking loudly through them - I could certainly be cited for it.
This is because we are dealing in the grey area of conflicting preferences, and not everyone sees things the same way you do. Saying the same thing over and over again is not a very effective approach to these situations.
One day, when you grow up, you will become sufficiently humble to realize that people can disagree with you without necessarily being retarded or hard of hearing.
You've given me an idea. Next person who lights up a phone in the quiet car on the train, I'm going to sit next to them and say into the phone in my sultriest voice, "Hey lover, come back to bed."
I don't see that their right to yack supersedes my right to relax. If you can convince me that it does, excellent.
By that same principle I should have the right to annoy them back by jamming their phone. You haven't made it clear to me why one person's "right" is more important than the other's.
You're the one who came in saying that the free market had all the answers, and I should just go use a competing train if I didn't like the way this one worked.
Oh, I get it. Your desires are rights and mine are silly whims.
In point of fact I do have the right to reasonable tranquility; that's why we have laws about disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct and so on.
The Supreme Court has been over this a million times. There is no right to speech in any particular time, place, or manner. You just have the right to say what you want to say. A cop can tell you to go say it somewhere else. You cannot spraypaint it on the walls of the White House. You cannot scream it through a bullhorn in a residential area at 4am. And I think it's perfectly fine if you cannot say it on a cellphone in a public area where people have an expectation of quiet.
Sounds like one of two things is happening here:
(A) your argument is a red herring, or
(B) the solution is to issue special devices "once, or maybe twice in a lifetime" to spouses of expectant mothers in the days leading up to childbirth. These devices will operate on a special frequency allocated for this purpose and will notify the father even in the case of a local cellphone jammer. They must then be returned to the hospital in order to take the baby home.
But to say that we all have to put up with loudmouth schmucks and their beeping cell phones all day long everywhere we go, just because "once, or maybe twice in a lifetime" you're going to have a child, is preposterous. This line of reasoning could be used to justify any ridiculous thing.
Must be some remarkably tall schools you're dealing with here.
How many schools are set off from adjacent buildings by less than their height? I'd wager that outside of the biggest cities, not many at all.
These are imagined difficulties. For thousands of years humans got by just fine without babysitters needing to text the parents every time Junior starts whining about wanting to stay up late and watch TV.
If the kid has some serious medical condition, fine, you're a very rare exception and you unfortunately will have to choose a restaurant that does not jam. Or you'll have to delegate an aunt or uncle to take the call.
Otherwise, hire a babysitter who is responsible enough to deal with ordinary emergencies, and let it go. As for the rest, the minor things that come up in life are actually not emergencies. They are trivial. People have no perspective these days.
Not in the northeast USA. They all have it (all the takeout places, anyway). I get it at least once a week.
That's a little glib. Only one company runs a train from New York to DC. They put quiet cars on sometimes, but not always, and only a few conductors are vigilant about shutting down the jerks who sit in the quiet car and then use their phones. I have very little control over Amtrak; I can write letters, but that's about it. I do find myself flying more and more when it's a leisure trip, precisely because of the phone issue, but when I need to get a lot done on the trip there's no substitute for the train.
Likewise there may or may not be another cinema showing the movie I want to see, or another restaurant that serves food as good as what I want to eat.
If it's an emergency they can use a payphone. Payphones are readily available in cinemas, on trains, and in or nearby restaurants.
As for the "responsible" phone user, in the hypothetical situation where I have a jammer, they're an unfortumate victim just like I was before. Buying the jammer would be a way to improve my personal odds of a favorable outcome in a zero-sum game. When the "selfish assholes" go away, so will the jammer. Until then it's just a matter of spreading the misery around. No reason I have to be the victim all the time.
Sorry, I'm not 35 and I'm another cell phone hater.
Are the devices inherently evil? Of course not. However, in the vast majority of people who have them, they encourage behavior that ranges from irritating to extremely annoying to downright dangerous.
I know any number of otherwise nice people who will answer these things (or at least reflexively check the screen) in the middle of face-to-face conversations, which is the height of rudeness. Some of these people do it enough that I really don't enjoy hanging around them anymore. For one of them it's even caused problems with her marriage - her husband can't stand it either and she doesn't seem to be able to kick the habit.
On trains, the racket of cellphones ringing and getting yacked into has destroyed what was once a restful way to travel. Other public spaces have suffered as well. People who are able to maintain normal volume levels when talking with the person next to them are for some reason unable to resist screaming their stupid inane shit into the little plastic box. In fact, I think one of the upsetting things about cell phones is that by raising the volume level of conversations I'm exposed to, it's correspondingly raised my awareness of what morons most people are. I'd like to think it's just that the same people who choose to have cellphones are also subintelligent twits, but depressingly I've seen no particular basis for that.
And, of course, almost every time I look into the window of a car after it's executed some brain-dead maneuver on the city streets (last-minute unsignalled turns, cutting other drivers off, almost mowing down pedestrians in crosswalks, etc.), the driver has a phone stuck to his/her ear.
If the price came down to about $100 I'd happily buy a jammer and carry it always.
Depends on the job, schedule, destinations, and your personality, I guess, but I find that work trips offer opportunities for much deeper exploration of a foreign place than I usually get as a tourist.
Spending time working side-by-side with people, you talk about all sorts of things. Get to know them and you'll have invitations to visit homes, meet families, go on weekend trips, and so on. This means traveling like a local, eating true local delicacies, and visiting places not in any guidebook.
Aside from the strawman-killer cell phone, how about your neighbor's phone?
While I've never had a power outage in 5 years at my address - the good thing about living up the street from the White House in Washington DC I guess - I have never in my entire life felt the need to phone anyone during a power outage. Ack, but what if there's a power outage and suddenly my home is laid siege by looters? People around here sure spend a lot of time worrying about doomsday scenarios.
For what it's worth, I've brought a Vonage box on trips to Europe and Latin America with pretty good results. On European broadband it was always perfect. In Latin America sometimes the calls would be too choppy to use; other times it worked fine. Usually in the evenings it worked better.
But just being able to make and receive free international calls from a hotel room (or a random spot when using my Linux laptop to route Wifi to it) was quite a treat, despite the occasional hiccups. Sometimes it was hard to get people to believe I was actually out of the country ("Hey, I'm calling you from a cafe in Rio!" "Bullshit, I can see it on my caller ID, you're sitting in your apartment.")
Doesn't it depend on how much business the company did? I have a friend at a 10-person firm who got a $120,000 bonus last year.
Ah, I see. So that explains why Gnome and KDE have appeared in all those films people mentioned (and they definitely appear more than Windows - the most common of all, though, are the hokey fake screens that flash "PASSWORD INVALID" in 96-point flashing red type with a skull and crossbones underneath, just like we all see in our corporate workplaces every day).
Here I spent all this money on my KDE license thinking it was going to go toward re-furnishing the KDE headquarters building or buying their CEO a yacht, and now I find out from you that they've been blowing it on product placement.
Nope, here in DC I remember very well how the internet was the only useful (and critical) source of information.
CNN and the rest just showed the same 5 minutes of clips over and over and over and over again. Total waste of time.
You want to talk about bandwidth, the bandwidth of mainstream media is incredibly narrow. You only get one viewpoint at a time.
This is specious. Their function is to provide a record of what web sites have said at various points in the past, and people therefore rely on it for that purpose. Until an institution comes into existence to specifically monitor the course of changes to the whitehouse.gov web site, that's all we've got. Archive.org has voluntarily agreed to respect robots.txt, and this can be taken advantage of for duplicitous purposes. I'm not saying it has, only that it can. This is a speculative discussion.
They don't have to. They just have to make it hard enough for the lazy people to find the truth, and they will have done enough to make it worth their trouble.
It would be just like what Arafat does when he says one thing in Arabic and another contradictory thing in English. Any journalist who cared enough could get a translator or learn Arabic and sort this out. But almost all the time they're too lazy to bother, and each language's press only reports on the message delivered in that language.
1. Google doesn't spider every day. There can be a substantial gap between when a site is changed and when Google's cache is updated.
2. www.archive.org, not google.
No, they're going to obscure future changes from all but the most sophisticated (and generally media-inaccessible) users.
Everyone else will just see today's approved version of the message.
Your highlighting of the most absurd-looking decontextualized details overlooks the possibility that the webmonkey was told "Make sure that no search engines archive any page on the site called 'iraq'."