On the contrary, texting while driving would be so outrageously dangerous that even the morons who will talk while driving would probably balk at attempting to type.
Talking while driving has shown to be as dangerous as drunk driving, or thereabouts. It should be banned, and any who causes an accident while yapping should be sued into oblivion.
In many situations, it is both superior to and FAR more polite than yapping. I had my first cell phone when I lived in Japan, and I sent and received about twenty messages a day. Talking on cell phones was banned in many locations including public transportation, and severly frowned upon in most other public locations. It was like heaven.
Then I returned to the US: People yap while driving. Yap on the bus. Yap while in line. Yap yap yap, oblivious to the people around them or how annoying (and dangerous) they are being.
I blame this largely on the cell phone providers. It is obvious that a text message is far cheaper for them than a phone call, as the amount of information to be sent is tiny. Yet here in the states, text is expensive, typically the price of a minute of talk or so. In Japan, a text was 2-3 cents, while a minute of talk nearly ten times that. Text was automatically part of any plan that I saw. Such pricing is sensible, given the large amount of data that needs to be transferred for live calls, and the fact that it has to be immediate.
American wireless companies should drop the price of text down to a fair price (pennies) in order to encourage its use. Not only is this the fair market price, but it would help the adoption of a great complementary technology to direct voice communication.
people assume corporations always have evil motives. I work for a major chemical company. We do "unscheduled maintenance" all the time. Things break. New problems are discovered. New corporate initiatives are passed.
Personally, I completely disrespect those with the "corporations are evil" attitude. Not only are they wrong, but they are practicing a form of bigotry. The vast majority of people working in major corporations, from top to bottom, are just like people anywhere else - predominantly good, but with a few rotten eggs. If anything, you will find fewer rotten eggs in a major company than you would find in the general population.
I lived in Japan for a while. Lots of people cycle to work there, but it depends. If the weather is bad, the numbers drop tremendously. I barely cycled at all during July and August, because it was 85 degrees by 8 am and terribly humid. I didn't cycle most of the time in the middle of winter for the opposite reason. Rain cancelled quite a few days as well, either directly, or because I had chosen to use the buses the night before due to rain and left my bike at work. In the end, I rode my bike about 60% of the time. Note that having a good public transportation system is almost a necessity for using a bike on a commute. Without public transportation, how do you get home if you cycle to work but the weather turns sour in the late afternoon? Bum a ride? That may be OK on occasion, but not once every week or two as would actually happen.
Europe has a much more moderate climate than most of the United States. In general, the winters are not as cold and the summers not as hot, though it obviously depends on location.
I agree, however, that we need public transporation. Lots of it. Unfortunately, it is a chicken-and-egg problem. Our sprawl-inducing love affair with cars and highways has lowered the population density to the point where public transporation is not viable. However, if you have good public transporation, the system itself creates the density to sustain it. However, I don't think our current system is the result of "poor planning". Rather, it is the spontaneous result of our large open areas, low population density and young cities that were largely built after the advent of the automobile. Canada and Australia face the same issues.
Let's see...I can spend either forty minutes riding my bike through freezing cold or sweltering heat, head to the far side of my company's complex to use the shower in the gym, then spend 10 minutes getting over to my office...or I can just take the 9 minute drive and two minute walk inside. I am sorry, but spending an extra two hours a day on my commute is not an option.
And yes, I HAVE used bicycles and public transport for my regular commutes, when I lived in places where it was practical. In 95% of America, it is not.
You could live in Michigan, where the weather is not suitable for bike riding about 250 days per year. Then what do you do? It's either raining or at least seriously threatening rain or storms, or were buried in snow, or it's 85+ degrees / 80% humidity for the summer. Getting to work all hot and sweaty or drenched is not an option.
California has one of the most benign and hospitable climates on Earth, and can't be used as an example.
I love public transporation and am all for it, but it sickens me that California, with its perfect weather and holier-than-thou attitude, still has almost none. The entire LA freeway system should be ripped up immediately.
A bicycle can work well for commuting, but not even the best of circumstances can it be used every day, unless you are willing to ride to work in 100 degree heat, snowstorms, or pouring rain. Also, if there is no public transportation to back up your riding, what happens when you ride to work some fair morning and leave work only to find a lightning storm?
That being said, bicycle commuting can work for large numbers of people, but not in America. We have set up our cities entirely the wrong way. In Japan, for example, bicycle commutes are common. The cities are dense. Bicyclists move fluidly between the roads (on which bikes move as fast as traffic, or faster) and the sidewalks, which are wide enough. When the weather is bad, the public transport is top notch. It is a great system and it works, but it would radically require ripping up our idiotic sprawl and replacing it entirely. And unfortunately that just isn't going to happen.
Bicycling will always be a bit player here unless we have a complete re-design of our urban and suburban layouts.
"Projects like this one will create jobs, which is a net increase for the Province when it comes to overall tax collections."
First, every time I heard someone spout this old canard, I like to ask them to demonstrate that their pet project will create MORE jobs than the alternatives. I have no idea whether the solar plant or a coal mine or a nuclear plant will create more jobs, and neither do you.
Even more importantly, creating jobs is not a good thing. Our labor is not an end itself, it is the fruits of that labor that should be our goal. Imagine I want to build a bridge. Doing it one way requires ten people. Doing it a different way requires twenty people. Would any rational person say that we should use the 20-person route, just to "create jobs"? Of course not. We should be trying to create as possible in all our endeavors, leaving people free to do other things.
Your quest to avoid Chinese-made goods is pointless, unless you plan on going off-grid and not buying any manufactured goods at all. Even if you try to buy stuff "Made in the USA" or anywhere else, it is likely to contain some material made in China. When it comes to electronics, your quest is completely quixodic - there are probably hundreds of parts and materials contained in your device that were made in China.
you have no idea what you are currently eating. So why the double standard?
GMO foods, irradiated foods, cloned foods...there is no significant reason to believe any of them are unsafe. These issues are like global warming with the political parties reversed, with the left now being the ones who just can't stand the fact that the science keeps coming up against their pre-conceived wishes.
Is there something wrong with giving the first one free? Actually, its often more than one. It's pretty much up to the doctor's descretion who they give them to. My grandmother has received quite a few of these free drugs from her doctor over the years. When the free ones ran out, sometimes the doctor had more, sometimes he had something equivalent, and sometimes she decided to buy whatever was the best deal. Should we condemn the pharmas for this?
Doctors regularly give free "sample" drugs to the poor and elderly. Some of these people find that the drugs work, and will find ways to stick with them when the samples run out. If they had been asked to pay up front for a drug they don't know works, most would have passed and never found out in the first place.
It costs the pharmas almost nothing (the number they record in their marketing budget is the sales cost, not their production cost), buys them some goodwill, and generates customers.
Having worked for major corporations, I can assure you that they are composed of human beings (surprise!) who by-and-large care about what they do and are proud of the value you they bring to their customers.
Second, virtually all companies are only chartible when it suits their own purposes. Indeed, it would be a violation of their charters for it to be any other way. On the other hand, most individuals are little different, and donate or volunteer because of various "returns" they get on their investment.
consists of free drugs they give to doctors to distribute to the poor and eldery. Somehow, you failed to mention that. Either you didn't know this fact, in which case you have no idea what you are talking about, or you DID know this fact, and are being dishonest. Which do you plead guilty to?
Only about 10% of pharma advertising is direct to consumer. A little more than half is the aforementioned drug donations, and the rest is pharma-to-doctor. The latter may not be perfectly excuted but is obviously necessary in some form, and it will never be cheap.
2: Women are more likely to attend college than men. Virtually all college students are required to use the internet while they are there, and at least some will keep up the habit later.
3: Women are more likely to have desk jobs or other indoor jobs, which again often exposes them to the internet.
That being said, I think time spent on the internet is a much greater measure. I bet men spend far more time on the internet than women, despite the apparent data that says women dabble with it more often.
MSNBC, CBS, and any companies which pubically backed out of advertising on his show before it was cancelled are now on my personal list of companies with whom I will not associate with. And yes, I have written them letters and hope they get the message that giving into PC whiners will cost them business as well.
Barring something really important, I will not watch MSNBC or CBS for six months. Lesser punishments have been dealt to P&G, Sprint, GM, and Staples. I am sure there were more but those are the ones I saw somewhere.
Sure, Imus is a loud-mouth idiot who says all sorts of ridiculous things. He offends just about everybody at some point. I am so sick of certain communities screaming bloody murder when THEY are offended that I now WANT them to be offended as often and thoroughly as possible. They need to learn to get over it.
What really matters is retail availability. I've been reading about advances in solar panel technology for years, and it's dripping into the consumer market like molasses. Why? Well, for one thing, oil companies are snapping up solar intellectual property and companies like crazy...
And I call bullwhoey on you. First, this is simply not true. There are all sorts of solar manufacturers at all levels of the production chain, all growing rapidly and cranking out as many panels as they can. The biggest bottleneck right now is the availibity of high-grade silicon. All of the major manufacturers of silicon metal (and a few new ones) are expanding as fast as they can.
Second, you are basing this on an economic myth that should have been refuted in your Econ 101 textbook (You DID take, and pass, Econ 101, did you not)? Your textbook should have clearly debunked the myth of a company buying a technology to "hide" it. This simply does not happen. Why? Because if the technology is valuable in the market, THEY CAN SELL IT FOR MORE. Assuming the corporation is greedy (fair enough), they would ditch their old product and start selling the newer, better one at higher profit.
If you think companies would break the law and risk heavy fines in order to lose money, well, I need some of what you are smoking.
Health insurance, disability insurance, $100 bucks a month in my healh savings account, six months or more of income in readily accessable accounts, a job that I could do even with fairly severe handicaps, a good education (paid for by me, not mommy and daddy) that allows me to do a number of jobs, some virtually certain to be avaiable regardless of circumstance, little or no credit card debt, and a circle of family and friends that would help me out if all else fails.
Get a clue and get a life. And for the love of God, stay off the dole. I absolutely do not want one red cent of my tax dollars going to the likes of you, when there are billions of people around the world who deserve it far, far, far more than you ever will.
And don't give me excuses. You screwed up. It's your own darned fault.
I am a professional who flies often enough because of work. There is virtually no scenario where talking on a phone is necessary and the issue cannot be resolved by text/email that I can even concieve of.
Ban the former, allow the latter. Having lived in Japan, where such a policy is the norm on all public transportation, I find it heavenly.
Listening to one side of a phone conversation is far harder to ignore than simply ignoring a conversation. It must be psychological, and may not affect all people, which is why some people don't seem to understand what the bother is. Combine that annoyance with the fact that people yell at their phones, and I swear I will gouge anyone who dares yap on a cell phone on a flight (emergencies excepted).
The solution is simple. Ban yap, let people text. Works great in public transportation all around the world.
on public transportation. Everyone texts. It works perfectly.
The sound of someone talking on a phone is incredibly annoying to many people, including me. At least on a train or bus, I can move further away and know that the ride is short. I will literally rip the eyes out of someone who dares yap next to me in a plane and not shut up after the first time I ask them. I consider it that inconsiderate.
Barring some apocalyptic emergency, talking on a phone while on a plane is a luxury at the expense of everyone around you, and is completely over the line of civil behavior.
Ban yapping, allow people to text whatever they wish. It is easy and is the general rule in many transit systems around the world. If you REALLY need to communicate with someone on the ground during flight, text is sufficient.
I WILL gouge the eyes out of the first person I ever hear yapping on their phone on the plane.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, texting while driving would be so outrageously dangerous that even the morons who will talk while driving would probably balk at attempting to type.
Talking while driving has shown to be as dangerous as drunk driving, or thereabouts. It should be banned, and any who causes an accident while yapping should be sued into oblivion.
In many situations, it is both superior to and FAR more polite than yapping. I had my first cell phone when I lived in Japan, and I sent and received about twenty messages a day. Talking on cell phones was banned in many locations including public transportation, and severly frowned upon in most other public locations. It was like heaven.
Then I returned to the US: People yap while driving. Yap on the bus. Yap while in line. Yap yap yap, oblivious to the people around them or how annoying (and dangerous) they are being.
I blame this largely on the cell phone providers. It is obvious that a text message is far cheaper for them than a phone call, as the amount of information to be sent is tiny. Yet here in the states, text is expensive, typically the price of a minute of talk or so. In Japan, a text was 2-3 cents, while a minute of talk nearly ten times that. Text was automatically part of any plan that I saw. Such pricing is sensible, given the large amount of data that needs to be transferred for live calls, and the fact that it has to be immediate.
American wireless companies should drop the price of text down to a fair price (pennies) in order to encourage its use. Not only is this the fair market price, but it would help the adoption of a great complementary technology to direct voice communication.
people assume corporations always have evil motives. I work for a major chemical company. We do "unscheduled maintenance" all the time. Things break. New problems are discovered. New corporate initiatives are passed.
Personally, I completely disrespect those with the "corporations are evil" attitude. Not only are they wrong, but they are practicing a form of bigotry. The vast majority of people working in major corporations, from top to bottom, are just like people anywhere else - predominantly good, but with a few rotten eggs. If anything, you will find fewer rotten eggs in a major company than you would find in the general population.
I lived in Japan for a while. Lots of people cycle to work there, but it depends. If the weather is bad, the numbers drop tremendously. I barely cycled at all during July and August, because it was 85 degrees by 8 am and terribly humid. I didn't cycle most of the time in the middle of winter for the opposite reason. Rain cancelled quite a few days as well, either directly, or because I had chosen to use the buses the night before due to rain and left my bike at work. In the end, I rode my bike about 60% of the time. Note that having a good public transportation system is almost a necessity for using a bike on a commute. Without public transportation, how do you get home if you cycle to work but the weather turns sour in the late afternoon? Bum a ride? That may be OK on occasion, but not once every week or two as would actually happen.
Europe has a much more moderate climate than most of the United States. In general, the winters are not as cold and the summers not as hot, though it obviously depends on location.
I agree, however, that we need public transporation. Lots of it. Unfortunately, it is a chicken-and-egg problem. Our sprawl-inducing love affair with cars and highways has lowered the population density to the point where public transporation is not viable. However, if you have good public transporation, the system itself creates the density to sustain it. However, I don't think our current system is the result of "poor planning". Rather, it is the spontaneous result of our large open areas, low population density and young cities that were largely built after the advent of the automobile. Canada and Australia face the same issues.
Let's see...I can spend either forty minutes riding my bike through freezing cold or sweltering heat, head to the far side of my company's complex to use the shower in the gym, then spend 10 minutes getting over to my office...or I can just take the 9 minute drive and two minute walk inside. I am sorry, but spending an extra two hours a day on my commute is not an option.
And yes, I HAVE used bicycles and public transport for my regular commutes, when I lived in places where it was practical. In 95% of America, it is not.
You could live in Michigan, where the weather is not suitable for bike riding about 250 days per year. Then what do you do? It's either raining or at least seriously threatening rain or storms, or were buried in snow, or it's 85+ degrees / 80% humidity for the summer. Getting to work all hot and sweaty or drenched is not an option.
California has one of the most benign and hospitable climates on Earth, and can't be used as an example.
I love public transporation and am all for it, but it sickens me that California, with its perfect weather and holier-than-thou attitude, still has almost none. The entire LA freeway system should be ripped up immediately.
A bicycle can work well for commuting, but not even the best of circumstances can it be used every day, unless you are willing to ride to work in 100 degree heat, snowstorms, or pouring rain. Also, if there is no public transportation to back up your riding, what happens when you ride to work some fair morning and leave work only to find a lightning storm?
That being said, bicycle commuting can work for large numbers of people, but not in America. We have set up our cities entirely the wrong way. In Japan, for example, bicycle commutes are common. The cities are dense. Bicyclists move fluidly between the roads (on which bikes move as fast as traffic, or faster) and the sidewalks, which are wide enough. When the weather is bad, the public transport is top notch. It is a great system and it works, but it would radically require ripping up our idiotic sprawl and replacing it entirely. And unfortunately that just isn't going to happen.
Bicycling will always be a bit player here unless we have a complete re-design of our urban and suburban layouts.
"Projects like this one will create jobs, which is a net increase for the Province when it comes to overall tax collections."
First, every time I heard someone spout this old canard, I like to ask them to demonstrate that their pet project will create MORE jobs than the alternatives. I have no idea whether the solar plant or a coal mine or a nuclear plant will create more jobs, and neither do you.
Even more importantly, creating jobs is not a good thing. Our labor is not an end itself, it is the fruits of that labor that should be our goal. Imagine I want to build a bridge. Doing it one way requires ten people. Doing it a different way requires twenty people. Would any rational person say that we should use the 20-person route, just to "create jobs"? Of course not. We should be trying to create as possible in all our endeavors, leaving people free to do other things.
Your quest to avoid Chinese-made goods is pointless, unless you plan on going off-grid and not buying any manufactured goods at all. Even if you try to buy stuff "Made in the USA" or anywhere else, it is likely to contain some material made in China. When it comes to electronics, your quest is completely quixodic - there are probably hundreds of parts and materials contained in your device that were made in China.
you have no idea what you are currently eating. So why the double standard?
GMO foods, irradiated foods, cloned foods...there is no significant reason to believe any of them are unsafe. These issues are like global warming with the political parties reversed, with the left now being the ones who just can't stand the fact that the science keeps coming up against their pre-conceived wishes.
Clearly, the one(s) you have suck.
I notice you didn't mention price. If your stuff was truly better AND cheaper, then I am sure you will have no problem selling your product.
Is there something wrong with giving the first one free? Actually, its often more than one. It's pretty much up to the doctor's descretion who they give them to. My grandmother has received quite a few of these free drugs from her doctor over the years. When the free ones ran out, sometimes the doctor had more, sometimes he had something equivalent, and sometimes she decided to buy whatever was the best deal. Should we condemn the pharmas for this?
Doctors regularly give free "sample" drugs to the poor and elderly. Some of these people find that the drugs work, and will find ways to stick with them when the samples run out. If they had been asked to pay up front for a drug they don't know works, most would have passed and never found out in the first place.
It costs the pharmas almost nothing (the number they record in their marketing budget is the sales cost, not their production cost), buys them some goodwill, and generates customers.
Companies don't "care". People do.
Having worked for major corporations, I can assure you that they are composed of human beings (surprise!) who by-and-large care about what they do and are proud of the value you they bring to their customers.
Second, virtually all companies are only chartible when it suits their own purposes. Indeed, it would be a violation of their charters for it to be any other way. On the other hand, most individuals are little different, and donate or volunteer because of various "returns" they get on their investment.
consists of free drugs they give to doctors to distribute to the poor and eldery. Somehow, you failed to mention that. Either you didn't know this fact, in which case you have no idea what you are talking about, or you DID know this fact, and are being dishonest. Which do you plead guilty to?
Only about 10% of pharma advertising is direct to consumer. A little more than half is the aforementioned drug donations, and the rest is pharma-to-doctor. The latter may not be perfectly excuted but is obviously necessary in some form, and it will never be cheap.
1: There are more females than males
2: Women are more likely to attend college than men. Virtually all college students are required to use the internet while they are there, and at least some will keep up the habit later.
3: Women are more likely to have desk jobs or other indoor jobs, which again often exposes them to the internet.
That being said, I think time spent on the internet is a much greater measure. I bet men spend far more time on the internet than women, despite the apparent data that says women dabble with it more often.
MSNBC, CBS, and any companies which pubically backed out of advertising on his show before it was cancelled are now on my personal list of companies with whom I will not associate with. And yes, I have written them letters and hope they get the message that giving into PC whiners will cost them business as well.
Barring something really important, I will not watch MSNBC or CBS for six months. Lesser punishments have been dealt to P&G, Sprint, GM, and Staples. I am sure there were more but those are the ones I saw somewhere.
Sure, Imus is a loud-mouth idiot who says all sorts of ridiculous things. He offends just about everybody at some point. I am so sick of certain communities screaming bloody murder when THEY are offended that I now WANT them to be offended as often and thoroughly as possible. They need to learn to get over it.
What really matters is retail availability. I've been reading about advances in solar panel technology for years, and it's dripping into the consumer market like molasses. Why? Well, for one thing, oil companies are snapping up solar intellectual property and companies like crazy...
And I call bullwhoey on you. First, this is simply not true. There are all sorts of solar manufacturers at all levels of the production chain, all growing rapidly and cranking out as many panels as they can. The biggest bottleneck right now is the availibity of high-grade silicon. All of the major manufacturers of silicon metal (and a few new ones) are expanding as fast as they can.
Second, you are basing this on an economic myth that should have been refuted in your Econ 101 textbook (You DID take, and pass, Econ 101, did you not)? Your textbook should have clearly debunked the myth of a company buying a technology to "hide" it. This simply does not happen. Why? Because if the technology is valuable in the market, THEY CAN SELL IT FOR MORE. Assuming the corporation is greedy (fair enough), they would ditch their old product and start selling the newer, better one at higher profit.
If you think companies would break the law and risk heavy fines in order to lose money, well, I need some of what you are smoking.
Health insurance, disability insurance, $100 bucks a month in my healh savings account, six months or more of income in readily accessable accounts, a job that I could do even with fairly severe handicaps, a good education (paid for by me, not mommy and daddy) that allows me to do a number of jobs, some virtually certain to be avaiable regardless of circumstance, little or no credit card debt, and a circle of family and friends that would help me out if all else fails.
It's called responsibility. Look into it.
and you blame Bush.
Get a clue and get a life. And for the love of God, stay off the dole. I absolutely do not want one red cent of my tax dollars going to the likes of you, when there are billions of people around the world who deserve it far, far, far more than you ever will.
And don't give me excuses. You screwed up. It's your own darned fault.
I am a professional who flies often enough because of work. There is virtually no scenario where talking on a phone is necessary and the issue cannot be resolved by text/email that I can even concieve of.
Ban the former, allow the latter. Having lived in Japan, where such a policy is the norm on all public transportation, I find it heavenly.
Listening to one side of a phone conversation is far harder to ignore than simply ignoring a conversation. It must be psychological, and may not affect all people, which is why some people don't seem to understand what the bother is. Combine that annoyance with the fact that people yell at their phones, and I swear I will gouge anyone who dares yap on a cell phone on a flight (emergencies excepted).
The solution is simple. Ban yap, let people text. Works great in public transportation all around the world.
on public transportation. Everyone texts. It works perfectly.
The sound of someone talking on a phone is incredibly annoying to many people, including me. At least on a train or bus, I can move further away and know that the ride is short. I will literally rip the eyes out of someone who dares yap next to me in a plane and not shut up after the first time I ask them. I consider it that inconsiderate.
Barring some apocalyptic emergency, talking on a phone while on a plane is a luxury at the expense of everyone around you, and is completely over the line of civil behavior.
Learn2text
Ban yapping, allow people to text whatever they wish. It is easy and is the general rule in many transit systems around the world. If you REALLY need to communicate with someone on the ground during flight, text is sufficient.
I WILL gouge the eyes out of the first person I ever hear yapping on their phone on the plane.