Over here, the doctors already use an electronic prescription system most of the time. A doctor will ask you which pharmacy you go to, enter the details in his computer, and by the time you get to the pharmacy, the prescription will be ready and waiting for you. Having a robot doing the actual filling would eliminate another source of human error.
For what it's worth they reckon that the robot is more accurate than a human. It might well be true: people preparing medicine doses in hospitals or drug stores aren't 100% accurate anyway, and mistakes do happen. Sometimes with deadly consequences.
"Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html?"
The Internet of those days to me is more or less the same as today's Internet: a means of data transport. For what it's worth, that transport now reaches much more people than it did way back when, and at greater speeds also. Don't fall into that delusion that many ISP's suffer from: that they somehow have to offer content as well as transport.
"Bring back the meritocracy of the internet - you remember? The place where you were entitled to an opinion if you were intelligent enough to actually learn and connect."
The great achievement of the Internet is that it has given a voice (or medium or whatever) to whomever needs one. Sure, that includes the crackpots, spammers, lousy web designers, Flash users, and so on and so forth. Internet is no longer the plaything of the elite at universities and defense organisations, as it was 10 years ago. As a result, there is more worthwhile stuff on the Internet than ever there was in the past, but there is a corresponding increase in crap, which one has to sort through to get to the meat. But the crap goes hand in hand with the good stuff... culling the crap would probably mean curtailing essential freedoms that leads to the good stuff.
Interesting to see the post I am replying to modded as troll and the grandparent modded as "insightful". Both have exactly the same content: an opinion about the two shows, and both have exactly the same intent: to evoke a reaction of either dissent or assent from the readers, nothing more. The only difference is the wording.
Whether your tools are books or computers, the subject matter itself must still be drilled. Some schools see computers as a replacement for the tedious drilling ("play with the subject material"), others see them as a replacement for teachers (teaching programs), and others still see them as a glorified library or calculator. I would expect the latter category, the schools that use the computers most conservatively, to see the least of a decline in the students' performance. Those that try and use computers for new ways of learning fumble for it mostly, using inadequate software and poorly trained teachers. The very worst performers are those schools that see computers as the long-awaited tool that allows then to let the students "play with the subject material". Let the students play endlessly with (for instance) simulations of an economy, instead of drilling and teaching the fundamentals of economics, and you end up with students who are excellent problem-solvers and socializers, and even have a little grasp of the cause and effect of certain economic measures, but they'll have nu understanding of why measure a causes effect x.
I can't see computer software replacing drilling of the subject material, except perhaps aiding it. It's very cute to be able to plot a graph at the press of a button so the students can visualise it (and what an awful buzzword in education that word has become...), rather than do the tedious analysis of the function and draw it youself, but only by doing it the hard way will you come to a good understanding of functions. Software can help build understanding, but I foresee a very limited effect.
Software can be a replacement for a teacher to some extend. I can imagine a piece of software that does what the teacher will do when he or she sets the students to work a set of problems: look at how the student attacks the problem, and suggest different approaches or give little hints when the student gets stuck. This is like having a private tutor, available 24/7, for each of the students. Unfortunately there isn't software that is very good at this except for the simplest of problems.
If you are unemployed but you can still pay your bills, this beats sitting at home in front of the telly.
5 Years ago I helped start a small IT consultancy company. I learned tons of stuff, not just IT skills, but things about how companies work, what is actually involved in setting one up, legal issues, finance matters, marketing, etc. etc. Looking back, I would say that experience has been invaluable to me, so much that I'd say it may be worth quitting a paying job for, in some cases.
Then again, do take a good hard look at those stock options and make sure you'll hit big if the company does take off. You are working for free to build a company, with part of the risk of things not working out falling on your shoulders. But... if it does work out, you should then reap part of the (substantial) rewards as well.
"it's a bit stupid that nations spend so much money on weapons/military"
Hey, at least if you spend it on weapons, you have something, namely nice weapons to defend yourself with.
Holland is building one useless freight railroad from nowhere to nowhere, and another high-speed train line that will cut the Amsterdam-Paris journey by an impressive 15 minutes. Total cost for these two projects? 15 billion Euro's. 15 frikkin' billion Euro's for two useless projects. A 1000 Euro's from every Dutch citizen. Just think what we could have done with this money in the area of science, education, medicine... or these Space missions.
I do applaud this initiative, and I hope that European states will contribute liberally, though... I see that chances for that are very slim: this project affords no prestige to individual ministers and is thus doomed, as far as allocating funds is concerned.
Technology for cellphones/wireless comes from the USA? Nah...
Anyways, I'd say the USA and (to a lesser degree) Europe are lagging behind Japan, not so much with the technology itself but the things we do with it. I spent most of last year in Japan, and I see much of the cool stuff they had over there, emerge in Europe only now, a year later. Things like ubiquitous and cheap wireless Internet access, MIDI ringtones, MMS, cellphones with camera's in them...
A performance of the Nutcracker Suite, and art in general, has a very important practical use: it affords enjoyment to the spectators. Of course this does not necessarily have to be the goal of the artist, nor is it what defines good art. In this case I doubt anyone would derive any enjoyment from this (it would be a bit impractical as well).
The (IMHO) more bollocksy modern art does not afford enjoyment in itself, it is more the idea behind the work of art that interests people and offers them enjoyment. Somewhat like that artist that sold cans of his own faeces. Interesting idea, sure, and it makes for a great news item on TV, but I wouldn't care much to own one of those cans myself. Oh well, for some people this is good enough to be called art and who am I to gainsay them? As long as they don't get a g..damn state subsidy for it...
Come on... is there any point to this? Yes, I know it is hard to have a discussion on the merit or quality of works of art, but I will say this: (modern) art is not just about having a neat idea.
For those who are wondering about the title of my post, this is from the movie Nothing lasts forever by Tom Schiller. Life Walk 5000 was an installation of an artist walking on a threadmill and counting to a million (obviously mocking modern art)
Actually, the ad opened a new browser window to the destination; it didn't hijack an existing window.
Not much of a bother... I am already used to closing pop-unders by right-clicking on their task bar icon, and picking Close from the menu.
Bloody annoying... as any pop under ad
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
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· Score: 3, Informative
Go to espn to see this thing in action. I don't think this form of advertising is much worse than regular pop-ups, just slightly more annoying. I do wonder how advertising agencies will distinguish between eyeballs and click-throughs... since many people will click-through accidently on these things.
A favorite quote from the article: "There's an enormous segment of the population that are appreciating these ads". Eh, name one!
Re:Listen up, this is the last time I'll say this
on
Decentralization
·
· Score: 1
"If someone tells a racist joke, are they not a racist regardless of if they were "just joking"?".
I'm going offtopic here (and modding myself down as well...), but I do feel I have to reply to this. My answer to this (rethorical) question is No. It is possible to not be a racist, believe in equality of all men, and yet laugh at racist jokes precisely because the reinforced stereotypes are so damn funny I remember some racist jokes being swapped at my previous workplace, with everyone laughing along heartily, including the boss... who is from Suriname and as black as they come. Come to think of it, he told most of them.
It used to be so that telling racist or antisemitic jokes was regarded the same as joking about blondes or men/women. Sad thing is, these days, at least here in the Netherlands, you can actually be hauled in front of court for telling a racist joke. Welcome to 1984.
Imagine... building such a machine from scratch, with hardly any prior experience to build upon. According to the article he had to figure out and build everything himself up to the engine and the prop. Then... climbing into that thing and actually flying it. Remember, this guy didn't attend flight school first.
Now that the IT market is in the crapper, our company probably feels obliged to the stockholders to cut expenses a bit. Unfortunately bonuses were done away with years ago (when the market was great, go figure), so they cannot cut those. So... we don't get any raises, for the second year in a row. That kinda hurts; the inflation over last two years was 4,5% anually. Oh yes, we should be happy to have a job, right? Well, soon a number of us won't have one; there's another round of layoffs coming on top of the last one.
Funnily enough, in this terrible market our company is still making a profit in IT! We're outperforming most or all of our competitors, and the thank-you we got from the company was just that: a letter from the CEO thanking us.
My real worry is how long our profitability will last though. This may piss of everyone to the point that they'll start leaving. While management may think that they'll get rid of some headcount for free, it'll be the good people leaving, the ones that are 1) competent, and 2) chargable, ie. they bring in more than they cost. The good ones go first because they'll have little trouble finding jobs in other companies.
The point to my little rant? Nothing... except keeping your employees happy is important and has an associated cost, same as renting the building, greasing palms of the clients, and what have you. To all you people who say "be glad you have a job, whiner", I say this: pissing the employees off hurts the company as well. If you hope for a big effort from them to turn things around when times are bad, you would do well to motivate them rather than fob them off.
Not that elegant.... He lists the pros and cons, mostly just glosses over the reasons people want more than one character, and misses an obvious (and tried-and-true) solution to the problem of having characters in multiple factions: allow multiple characters on a server, but in one faction only. Dark Age of Camelot does this.
Another concern would be how viable it actually is to play on different servers. With most MMORPGs, your connection to the server plays a large role in how well you'll fight, especially in PvP. For that reason people choose a server that is closest to them physically, so they can enjoy a good connection. You'll probably find one or two SWG servers with a good connection, but on the further servers you'll always be playing second fiddle to the locals.
In the end I agree with the poster who said "You can have my 10 characters on 10 servers, if you give me just 2 characters on a single server". Raph Koster goes on about experimenting (dabbling as he calls it), muling and twinking, and he does not miss the fact that these are in fact very popular playstyles. That leads me to believe that this is primarily a business decision: these playstyles are in fact so popular that people will happily fork over money for an additional account once they are hooked. I'm not sure that Raph is the one that made this decision, it might have been some drongo from Lucasart marketing. But it's a smart move... look at Ultima Online, where one gets to play 5 characters per server on all the servers. Even so, some players have as many as 5 accounts. Personally I think that anyone playing SWG and liking it, will very soon feel the need for an additional account.
Re:steel mouse pad looks nice
on
Hardware Bits
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Oh yes, those.... they are actually very very bad for you. I used the Sun metal mousepad for quite a while.
When you use a mouse, your wrist will actually rest on the mousepad quite often. A metal one will drain the warmth from your wrist nicely, which does nothing to help prevent Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. After a few months of using this thing my wrist started to hurt, and my physician recommended "keeping my hands warm", even wearing gloves, since cold hands and wrists are more susceptible to CTS than warm ones. I switched to a regular mouse and my problems went away.
No bloody way I am ever using a metal mosuepad again. I'm using an optical mouse now that requires no mousepad at all.
I can well imagine the MPAA telling Norway that Jon was up to something fishy. However the rest of your account is rather improbable. I suppose the normal legal process ran its course. The Norwegian prosecutors' office examined the MPAA claim against Norwegian law, and found that they might have a case. On the strength of that they decided to prosecute. Many other countries would (rightly) have done the same, except perhaps the US (not trying to be a USA basher here, but the US is notoriously lax in bringing suit against their own citizens or companies when asked to by foreign countries, even when those citizens or companies turn out to be in violation of US law).
Jon is being tried for breaking Norwegian law, not US ones. It'll be a shame if he is convicted, but it isn't a shame because he is just a kid, and it will not be the fault of the DMCA, or other silly US laws, or the MPAA, or whatever. It will be Norwegian law at fault here.
Of course it is popular... per-byte cost doesn't figure into this; no consumer will give a crap about an outrageous per-byte cost. What the consumer buys with his money is convenience.
Think of it: SMS offers a few key advantages:
- Send and receive anywhere: What other form of simple technology allows messaging from almost anywhere? (And in this case: simple means just that, my great-grandmother should be able to use it. She can use SMS and cellphones, she cannot use a laptop and 802.11 and read war chalk or whatever)
- A low to zero initial cost to use this service. Most people already have cell phones, SMS comes as an extra service that you can use straight away without any extra charges (besides the cost of the messages themselves)
- Can be used unobtrusively: Very few other forms of messaging can be used without disturbing others, including voice calls on cell phones or usig a laptop with wireless data. Think about it: what other form of communication would you use comfortably in a theatre or classroom?
- Low cost. Oh yes, the cost of an SMS is often less than a phone call, especially fwhen you want to convey simple message's like "Honey I'll be home by 6"
When you think of it, the popularity of SMS messages despite the crappy interface, isn't all that surprising.
Incausal relation! I pointed this out elsewhere but I'll just repeat myself.
Look at Holland... very strict gun control, with only the criminals carrying guns. By your logic violent crime should be on the increase here as well. Yet, crime rates are similar to the US in every category (excepting bike theft) Here are the numbers (Click on "Volledige tekst in pdf" for the full report in English).
Slashdot Mirror
Over here, the doctors already use an electronic prescription system most of the time. A doctor will ask you which pharmacy you go to, enter the details in his computer, and by the time you get to the pharmacy, the prescription will be ready and waiting for you. Having a robot doing the actual filling would eliminate another source of human error.
"it can tell the difference between a skittle and and M&M"
Thank god for that!
Well, the lawyers get richer, of course!
For what it's worth they reckon that the robot is more accurate than a human. It might well be true: people preparing medicine doses in hospitals or drug stores aren't 100% accurate anyway, and mistakes do happen. Sometimes with deadly consequences.
"Anyone else harking for the days of gopher and html?"
The Internet of those days to me is more or less the same as today's Internet: a means of data transport. For what it's worth, that transport now reaches much more people than it did way back when, and at greater speeds also. Don't fall into that delusion that many ISP's suffer from: that they somehow have to offer content as well as transport.
"Bring back the meritocracy of the internet - you remember? The place where you were entitled to an opinion if you were intelligent enough to actually learn and connect."
The great achievement of the Internet is that it has given a voice (or medium or whatever) to whomever needs one. Sure, that includes the crackpots, spammers, lousy web designers, Flash users, and so on and so forth. Internet is no longer the plaything of the elite at universities and defense organisations, as it was 10 years ago. As a result, there is more worthwhile stuff on the Internet than ever there was in the past, but there is a corresponding increase in crap, which one has to sort through to get to the meat. But the crap goes hand in hand with the good stuff... culling the crap would probably mean curtailing essential freedoms that leads to the good stuff.
Interesting to see the post I am replying to modded as troll and the grandparent modded as "insightful". Both have exactly the same content: an opinion about the two shows, and both have exactly the same intent: to evoke a reaction of either dissent or assent from the readers, nothing more. The only difference is the wording.
In short, metamoderators do your worst!
Whether your tools are books or computers, the subject matter itself must still be drilled. Some schools see computers as a replacement for the tedious drilling ("play with the subject material"), others see them as a replacement for teachers (teaching programs), and others still see them as a glorified library or calculator. I would expect the latter category, the schools that use the computers most conservatively, to see the least of a decline in the students' performance. Those that try and use computers for new ways of learning fumble for it mostly, using inadequate software and poorly trained teachers. The very worst performers are those schools that see computers as the long-awaited tool that allows then to let the students "play with the subject material". Let the students play endlessly with (for instance) simulations of an economy, instead of drilling and teaching the fundamentals of economics, and you end up with students who are excellent problem-solvers and socializers, and even have a little grasp of the cause and effect of certain economic measures, but they'll have nu understanding of why measure a causes effect x.
I can't see computer software replacing drilling of the subject material, except perhaps aiding it. It's very cute to be able to plot a graph at the press of a button so the students can visualise it (and what an awful buzzword in education that word has become...), rather than do the tedious analysis of the function and draw it youself, but only by doing it the hard way will you come to a good understanding of functions. Software can help build understanding, but I foresee a very limited effect.
Software can be a replacement for a teacher to some extend. I can imagine a piece of software that does what the teacher will do when he or she sets the students to work a set of problems: look at how the student attacks the problem, and suggest different approaches or give little hints when the student gets stuck. This is like having a private tutor, available 24/7, for each of the students. Unfortunately there isn't software that is very good at this except for the simplest of problems.
If you are unemployed but you can still pay your bills, this beats sitting at home in front of the telly.
5 Years ago I helped start a small IT consultancy company. I learned tons of stuff, not just IT skills, but things about how companies work, what is actually involved in setting one up, legal issues, finance matters, marketing, etc. etc. Looking back, I would say that experience has been invaluable to me, so much that I'd say it may be worth quitting a paying job for, in some cases.
Then again, do take a good hard look at those stock options and make sure you'll hit big if the company does take off. You are working for free to build a company, with part of the risk of things not working out falling on your shoulders. But... if it does work out, you should then reap part of the (substantial) rewards as well.
"it's a bit stupid that nations spend so much money on weapons/military"
Hey, at least if you spend it on weapons, you have something, namely nice weapons to defend yourself with.
Holland is building one useless freight railroad from nowhere to nowhere, and another high-speed train line that will cut the Amsterdam-Paris journey by an impressive 15 minutes. Total cost for these two projects? 15 billion Euro's. 15 frikkin' billion Euro's for two useless projects. A 1000 Euro's from every Dutch citizen. Just think what we could have done with this money in the area of science, education, medicine... or these Space missions.
I do applaud this initiative, and I hope that European states will contribute liberally, though... I see that chances for that are very slim: this project affords no prestige to individual ministers and is thus doomed, as far as allocating funds is concerned.
The Soviet Union predicts YOU!
Erm, okay I'll go away now...
Technology for cellphones/wireless comes from the USA? Nah...
Anyways, I'd say the USA and (to a lesser degree) Europe are lagging behind Japan, not so much with the technology itself but the things we do with it. I spent most of last year in Japan, and I see much of the cool stuff they had over there, emerge in Europe only now, a year later. Things like ubiquitous and cheap wireless Internet access, MIDI ringtones, MMS, cellphones with camera's in them...
Ehhhh??? So something only becomes "free speech" when it is spoken out loud at least once? Utter bollocks.
"DirectX doesn't support cars, cards support DirectX (hereafter, "DX")."
That sounds like one of those "In Soviet Russia..." jokes.
A performance of the Nutcracker Suite, and art in general, has a very important practical use: it affords enjoyment to the spectators. Of course this does not necessarily have to be the goal of the artist, nor is it what defines good art. In this case I doubt anyone would derive any enjoyment from this (it would be a bit impractical as well).
The (IMHO) more bollocksy modern art does not afford enjoyment in itself, it is more the idea behind the work of art that interests people and offers them enjoyment. Somewhat like that artist that sold cans of his own faeces. Interesting idea, sure, and it makes for a great news item on TV, but I wouldn't care much to own one of those cans myself. Oh well, for some people this is good enough to be called art and who am I to gainsay them? As long as they don't get a g..damn state subsidy for it...
Come on... is there any point to this? Yes, I know it is hard to have a discussion on the merit or quality of works of art, but I will say this: (modern) art is not just about having a neat idea.
For those who are wondering about the title of my post, this is from the movie Nothing lasts forever by Tom Schiller. Life Walk 5000 was an installation of an artist walking on a threadmill and counting to a million (obviously mocking modern art)
Actually, the ad opened a new browser window to the destination; it didn't hijack an existing window.
Not much of a bother... I am already used to closing pop-unders by right-clicking on their task bar icon, and picking Close from the menu.
Go to espn to see this thing in action. I don't think this form of advertising is much worse than regular pop-ups, just slightly more annoying. I do wonder how advertising agencies will distinguish between eyeballs and click-throughs... since many people will click-through accidently on these things.
A favorite quote from the article: "There's an enormous segment of the population that are appreciating these ads". Eh, name one!
"If someone tells a racist joke, are they not a racist regardless of if they were "just joking"?".
I'm going offtopic here (and modding myself down as well...), but I do feel I have to reply to this. My answer to this (rethorical) question is No. It is possible to not be a racist, believe in equality of all men, and yet laugh at racist jokes precisely because the reinforced stereotypes are so damn funny I remember some racist jokes being swapped at my previous workplace, with everyone laughing along heartily, including the boss... who is from Suriname and as black as they come. Come to think of it, he told most of them.
It used to be so that telling racist or antisemitic jokes was regarded the same as joking about blondes or men/women. Sad thing is, these days, at least here in the Netherlands, you can actually be hauled in front of court for telling a racist joke. Welcome to 1984.
Imagine... building such a machine from scratch, with hardly any prior experience to build upon. According to the article he had to figure out and build everything himself up to the engine and the prop. Then... climbing into that thing and actually flying it. Remember, this guy didn't attend flight school first.
Anyway, here's a picture of the replica and a lot more info.
Wish I'd have gotten one.
Now that the IT market is in the crapper, our company probably feels obliged to the stockholders to cut expenses a bit. Unfortunately bonuses were done away with years ago (when the market was great, go figure), so they cannot cut those. So... we don't get any raises, for the second year in a row. That kinda hurts; the inflation over last two years was 4,5% anually. Oh yes, we should be happy to have a job, right? Well, soon a number of us won't have one; there's another round of layoffs coming on top of the last one.
Funnily enough, in this terrible market our company is still making a profit in IT! We're outperforming most or all of our competitors, and the thank-you we got from the company was just that: a letter from the CEO thanking us.
My real worry is how long our profitability will last though. This may piss of everyone to the point that they'll start leaving. While management may think that they'll get rid of some headcount for free, it'll be the good people leaving, the ones that are 1) competent, and 2) chargable, ie. they bring in more than they cost. The good ones go first because they'll have little trouble finding jobs in other companies.
The point to my little rant? Nothing... except keeping your employees happy is important and has an associated cost, same as renting the building, greasing palms of the clients, and what have you. To all you people who say "be glad you have a job, whiner", I say this: pissing the employees off hurts the company as well. If you hope for a big effort from them to turn things around when times are bad, you would do well to motivate them rather than fob them off.
Not that elegant.... He lists the pros and cons, mostly just glosses over the reasons people want more than one character, and misses an obvious (and tried-and-true) solution to the problem of having characters in multiple factions: allow multiple characters on a server, but in one faction only. Dark Age of Camelot does this.
Another concern would be how viable it actually is to play on different servers. With most MMORPGs, your connection to the server plays a large role in how well you'll fight, especially in PvP. For that reason people choose a server that is closest to them physically, so they can enjoy a good connection. You'll probably find one or two SWG servers with a good connection, but on the further servers you'll always be playing second fiddle to the locals.
In the end I agree with the poster who said "You can have my 10 characters on 10 servers, if you give me just 2 characters on a single server". Raph Koster goes on about experimenting (dabbling as he calls it), muling and twinking, and he does not miss the fact that these are in fact very popular playstyles. That leads me to believe that this is primarily a business decision: these playstyles are in fact so popular that people will happily fork over money for an additional account once they are hooked. I'm not sure that Raph is the one that made this decision, it might have been some drongo from Lucasart marketing. But it's a smart move... look at Ultima Online, where one gets to play 5 characters per server on all the servers. Even so, some players have as many as 5 accounts. Personally I think that anyone playing SWG and liking it, will very soon feel the need for an additional account.
Oh yes, those.... they are actually very very bad for you. I used the Sun metal mousepad for quite a while.
When you use a mouse, your wrist will actually rest on the mousepad quite often. A metal one will drain the warmth from your wrist nicely, which does nothing to help prevent Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. After a few months of using this thing my wrist started to hurt, and my physician recommended "keeping my hands warm", even wearing gloves, since cold hands and wrists are more susceptible to CTS than warm ones. I switched to a regular mouse and my problems went away.
No bloody way I am ever using a metal mosuepad again. I'm using an optical mouse now that requires no mousepad at all.
I can well imagine the MPAA telling Norway that Jon was up to something fishy. However the rest of your account is rather improbable. I suppose the normal legal process ran its course. The Norwegian prosecutors' office examined the MPAA claim against Norwegian law, and found that they might have a case. On the strength of that they decided to prosecute. Many other countries would (rightly) have done the same, except perhaps the US (not trying to be a USA basher here, but the US is notoriously lax in bringing suit against their own citizens or companies when asked to by foreign countries, even when those citizens or companies turn out to be in violation of US law).
Jon is being tried for breaking Norwegian law, not US ones. It'll be a shame if he is convicted, but it isn't a shame because he is just a kid, and it will not be the fault of the DMCA, or other silly US laws, or the MPAA, or whatever. It will be Norwegian law at fault here.
Of course it is popular... per-byte cost doesn't figure into this; no consumer will give a crap about an outrageous per-byte cost. What the consumer buys with his money is convenience.
Think of it: SMS offers a few key advantages:
- Send and receive anywhere: What other form of simple technology allows messaging from almost anywhere? (And in this case: simple means just that, my great-grandmother should be able to use it. She can use SMS and cellphones, she cannot use a laptop and 802.11 and read war chalk or whatever)
- A low to zero initial cost to use this service. Most people already have cell phones, SMS comes as an extra service that you can use straight away without any extra charges (besides the cost of the messages themselves)
- Can be used unobtrusively: Very few other forms of messaging can be used without disturbing others, including voice calls on cell phones or usig a laptop with wireless data. Think about it: what other form of communication would you use comfortably in a theatre or classroom?
- Low cost. Oh yes, the cost of an SMS is often less than a phone call, especially fwhen you want to convey simple message's like "Honey I'll be home by 6"
When you think of it, the popularity of SMS messages despite the crappy interface, isn't all that surprising.
Incausal relation! I pointed this out elsewhere but I'll just repeat myself.
Look at Holland... very strict gun control, with only the criminals carrying guns. By your logic violent crime should be on the increase here as well. Yet, crime rates are similar to the US in every category (excepting bike theft) Here are the numbers (Click on "Volledige tekst in pdf" for the full report in English).
Imagine one of these contraptions lumbering towards you when you're getting a tan on the beach! Even better, imagine a cluster of... nah.