I've a relative did a lot of analysis for Segway - there are some good reasons they didn't catch on like wildfire.
One market they thought they had was Elders, but they're terrified of both falling & breaking something or getting caught out in inclement weather & coming down with something. Turns out the prefer sitting in a big box with a seat, roof, and trunk.
Another was Letter Carriers. They did a trial with 'em in New Hampshire, who thought Segways were great until winter hit. It wasn't snow & ice that dissuaded 'em, it was standing still in the bitter cold instead of walking and keeping warm.
Local regs also hurt a lot of use - many folks feel that a motorized vehicle is inherently incompatible with pedestrians and passed laws dissuading Segway use on sidewalks. Getting bumped by a distracted walker is usually just awkward, getting run over is significantly more serious.
There's also the issue of how & where to park & secure a several thousand dollar vehicle that can be lifted up & carried away. They're not very bike rack compatible, and there aren't all that many bike racks anyhow. It can't be comfortable leaving one's ride outside the market door knowing as you're picking over the fruit BillieBob is possibly hoisting it into the back of his pickup.
Continuing on the technology-for-technology's sake: $400 up front so I can pay full price for ebooks? Sure it's nice that Amazon will 'replace' my ebooks if I lose my Kindle, but I'm still out $400 for the Kindle. At least with paperbacks when I leave them someplace it's only a few bucks to get a new one.
(It's amazing aircraft can fly with the weight of lost literature on them every year.)
Furthermore the Amazon ebooks are DRM'd up the wazoo.
What happens to 'em if/when the Kindle goes up in smoke? With paper books I own them, I've got them on a shelf, with locked-up ebooks I've got encrypted bits I apparently have no claim to.
I look at the folks who've shelled out hundreds of dollars for DRM'd material, like Major League Baseball downloads, then gotten shafted when the next DRM flavor was rolled out & the key server they depend on was quietly retired.
They value their baseball games, I value my library. $400 buys me a lot of paper, and gives me ownership of the words printed on it.
(What could Amazon do for me? Give me the ability to create an online library of books I already own, so I could trivially search through them for facts & quotes. I don't need access to the full text, just the page in question & a citation.)
There’s also the strategy of directly informing local officials of possible problems.
I recently had to call 911 when my mother collapsed. The officer responding was already somewhat aware of her history from notes in the town’s database. What sorts of medications she’s on, her pharmacist, doctors, prior incidents, who-to-contact & how, all were at hand to the 911 operators.
Now, my parents live in a small extremely wealthy town so this sort of service probably isn’t universal.
Also submitting this sort of information could entail a certain loss of privacy.
However in our case we judged it useful to have it all on record. For others with elderly or high risk folks in their lives this sort of preperatory on-file strategy is worth looking into.
Finally, if you’re going to put together a cache of medical information then do note it in all the places a first responder looking for insight might quickly search. For example a note taped to the back wall of the medicine chest, and a laminated card on the ceiling of the freezer, and a message-in-a-bottle always left on the bedside medicine-tray, etc.
ps In response to why the ‘fridge/freezer? ‘Cause it’s something nearly everyone has, they usually have only one of, it’s trivial to find, it’s not rummaging through anything very private or valuable, and things chucked into the back of it tend to stay there for years anyhow.
Besides, the capers & cocktail onions appreciate the company.
Madeleine Robins @ 6 But pumpkin pie has Vitamin A and is therefore a health food. Right?
Of course – it’s orange(ish)!
The chromodietic principles of pumpkin products, like other orange foods such as Orange Jell-O, Butterfingers, and those scary Halloween Snoballs, are all the same as their ur-food: a carrot.
The logical extreme of this is white, which of course represents snow. All white foods can do is hydrate you.
FWIW I have probably at least a half dozen or more folks in my social circles who get into more complex self-sexual-restraint circumstances on a regular basis. I know my friends may be a little more, er, “adventurous” then the run of the mill (or more willing to acknowledge such) but given the range of human sexuality and the power it has in our lives I find it equally bizarre that some folks can’t imagine such.
I mean, we’re talking the same societies that convince women they need to spend their lives wearing at least a layer of maquillage (if not a full burka) if they’re going to be presentable in public. Compared to that is a wet suit or two in private time really so outré?!
Yeah, church deacon, makes for giggles, but c’mon, HUMAN first & foremost. That some religions may pervert & distort sexuality is deplorable, but that’s no reason to denigrate everyone who gets off on complicated sex.
As to protesting funerals, this is the USA. Firefighters, Police, Armed Services, or Congresscritters: I’m not a second-class citizen to any of ‘em! This nation is universal franchise – current smarmy more-patriotic-then-thou uniform fetishism notwithstanding.
The Phelps folks? Press whores doing whatever despicable acts it takes to get attention. Playing to their odious antics only encourages them and grants some soi-disant degree of legitimacy. As was suggested regarding the copycat noose acts– sometimes it is better NOT to react so strongly it enthuses the unbalanced.
Where do we mail the socks to?
(There’s nothing like receiving packets of socks from around the world to emphasize to an employer what a reputation they’re gaining.)
(Am I the only one constantly misparsing David Gerard as David Gerrold, resulting in petit context mals?)
I recently came across, and now can’t find easily again, an interesting suggestion for Wikipedia–reputability by stability.
The idea was, recalled from my casual look-over, that a web of trust be built using Wikipedia article & edit stability as the criteria. Color-coding material based on this, in a sort of heat-map, would be used to communicate a soi-disant measure of reliability (? reputability?)
It’s an interesting idea, not the least as a tool for discussing what drives Wikipedia Authors, Editors, and the dynamics between them.
Under such a regime I imagine lower visibility, less controversial articles would become ‘more valuable’. As would quality writing & editing. Participation in battles would quickly burn off whuffie. Thus a possibly different breed of Wikipedians would be moderated up into authority.
It would also bring about new ways to game the system, organized credibility assaults resulting in collateral article disreputability, hot-button issues becoming too toxic for cooler heads to participate in, and evolving stories not as actively updated.
What really caught my eye was that this wouldn’t be particularly hard to do even from outside Wikipedia. Indeed I imagine some clever coder could make a Greasemonkey script that would parse an article’s history as it is loaded, reference the editors involved, and quickly come up with some first-order analysis of stability & ‘reputability’ (for lack of a more precise term.)
I’m sure there are other ideas out there for refining, or forking and complementing/competing with Wikipedia. I’m ust hoping they’re being given active attention by the senior folks involved.
Not to be contrarian, but I like/use Wikipedia.
I’ve never bothered with an account, but I’ve added the odd ISBN number where needed, contributed a section on transportation in my town, and casually fixed typos and other such minor errors when I’ve come across ‘em.
I’ve done these as a result of my using Wikipedia. No, I’d not consider it definitive on anything, but it is good for getting a gloss and springboarding on to source materials.
As others have noted it does have strengths and failings. Controversial subjects or ones dealing with abstract or subjective material (eg arts) are typically problematic. But a quick glance at an article’s Talk page usually gives an good idea about it’s potential weaknesses.
Again though, for a a quick primer on ‘nearly anything’ who-is-that/what-is-that it’s often quite good.
That Wikipedia has officious little monsters building even smaller kingdoms of egoboo is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. There does seem to be an increasing need for a “civility administrator” with the ability to swiftly correct innapropriate attitudes.
But they, or the occasional mindlessly misguided application of an inappropriate policy, hardly seems sufficient cause for discounting or disparaging the entire body of work.
It’s more accurate then Paul Harvey, and broader then the dead-tree encyclopedias mouldering on my shelves. That’s enough for me to appreciate it.
Seconding #98StephenGranade’s “This is just my opinion”
Which translates as “Even I deny responsibility for my opinion(s)”
Also the ever-popular “Who are you people to judge me?!!”
Had roast pork last night to celebrate outliving a horrible, indeed loathsome, person and categorical enemy. My only regret is he didn’t go slowly, painfully, alone & universally disgraced.
My hope is his legacy will be his tens of thousands of sheeple followers miserably trying to someday explain to their more enlightened children & grandchildren how they could have followed such an awful person and his creed.
Jerry Falwall was an object lesson in hypocrisy, venality, and demagoguery.
“If I were to do something greedy and sleazy like this, I wouldn’t do it with 13 other authors, I would do it for a book only I wrote.”
Would those 13 other authors be the living ones, or the dead ones?
Coupla points:
No, it is not likely advertising permits will be discovered for these devices. Aside from Boston’s rigorous policies regarding outside advertising these were on infrastructure belonging to various non-city levels of government, and it is certain those agencies would not have permitted materials to be haphazardly attached to their structures.
Again, I’ll observe it is easy to Monday-morning Quarterback how safe these devices were. Standing in the cold, prying hand-wired electronics off of a bridge, over a subway platform, in full knowledge of incidents in Tokyo, London, Madrid, not so easy.
It’s also pathetically easy to say “Oooh! A circuit board, LEDS, some wires and a battery! Scaredy scaredies!”
Really?
There are several dozen labs within sight of just the first location stocked with materials that could have caused a public health crisis in quantities of a few cc. Radioisotopes from MIT, Mass Eye & Ear, or Mass General. Biological agents from MIT, Mass General, Biogen-IDEC, Genzyme, Millennium Pharma, etc. Heck even just nasty lab supplies from any of a hundred labs in the area sprayed onto the public below could have been tragedy. And that’s just stuff pilfered from within 1 mile.
Furthermore in my shaving kit I’ve got a cute little promo battery from Duracell, twist the “Coppertop” and it opens to reveal a deep waterproof pill case suitable for concealing all sorts of stuff (I keep my 1-a-day vitamins in mine.)
No, it was not unreasonable to be concerned about these ‘funny devices’. A 555 timer is tiny, so is a charge sufficient to distribute any of the above materials. Suddenly that second “battery” becomes something much worse, and the strange light-up sign the mark of a group with a letter of demands already in the mail.
That immediately after the first was discovered there were a rash of reports of similar devices, while the bomb squad was still evaluating the initial one, all attached to other bridges, was indeed cause for alarm.
Improbable? In the context of reports coming in of strange devices stuck to bridges across the city? No, thanks, I prefer folks who spend their days practicing Hazmat recovery and triage plans get alarmed when things suddenly get weird across the city. Yes, nearly always it won’t be disaster, it’s that exception when they’re responsible for 600,000 folks trapped in a dense urban area that authorities react upon.
Oh, and the poor schmuck who was just-doing-what-he-was-hired-to-do? Lopping shears to his gonads before he can reproduce. On your own or hired by someone else doesn’t absolve you of having a fucking clue, at some point as you’re surreptitiously, illicitly, mounting these around the city thinking (repeating myself) “Is it possible these could be taken wrongly?”
Did the media overplay it? Maybe. They certainly shoulda stopped milking it after it was determined not to be a crisis. But then we know if-it-bleeds/scares/enrages(justifiably or not)-it-leads.
Finally, why ‘close the river’? Because the fuel oil barges (at least used to) come through the nearby locks in the Charles River Dam (aka Museum of Science) to supply whatever Cambridge Electric is called this year. I spent many a bored hour in the tower of the museum watching tugs breaking through the ice and bringing the barges through 20 some years ago.
Assuming the plant is still active the barges must go through the choke point of the locks, directly under a bridge, in an area where it is very easy to hop off the sidewalk and get below. So if one was causing mischief with bridges along the river, and there was a fuel oil shipment, then delaying it, ‘closing the river’, would have indeed been prudent.
Y’know for all the ‘lighten up–it was a JOKE’ postings I’m still irate about the whole thing, and not against the Boston officials.
First there’s the “guerrilla marketing” aspect: I’m sick to death of every fungible urban surface being abused with advertising.
IBM surreptitiously painting faux “graffiti” on city sidewalks, Sony doing the same on buildings for their PSP, now Turner Networks sticking up LED & battery contraptions over subway platforms & bridges. How the hell are these any different from the “Work From Home”, “We Haul Trash”, “Lose Weight Now” etc. sign posters that staple their trash to my neighborhood trees & telephone poles at night?
They’re not. They’re encroaching on my public space and damn it I want to slap their hands hard for trying to grab it. If they want to run an ad campaign then do it on commercial turf, not blots left to rot on my public infrastructure. And emphatically not haphazardly “magnetically attached” over where the public stands while trains race by.
Their insipidity doesn’t excuse their inappropriateness.
Then there is context.
Sure the blinking animated characters can be laughed off as an over-reaction, once one knows what the hell the signs are, when they’re properly photographed. But to J. Random Transit Employee, trying to figure out what the heck this new thing is, where it shouldn’t be, with wires & batteries, stuck in places they’re told to watch for suspicious items, not so easy to feel superior over.
Yes most of Homeland Defense BS really is nothing more then security theater (of the absurd.) On the other hand Boston is where two of the 9-11 flights took off. Tomorrow I’ve a meeting at a suburban Boston office where 5 of their co-workers died on those planes. Folks still do get nervous when they hear aircraft ‘in the wrong place’.
Attaching random circuit-board-ey crap to subways, bridges, that really is just fantastically asinine. What next–mailing envelopes of white powder mailed with a a catchline printed inside at the bottom? C’mon, where didn’t someone think “Y’know, these could really easily be misread”?
Boston & Cambridge have more then their fair history of pranks. Everyone snickers when a plastic cow goes missing from a steakhouse, something improbable appears on top of a campus building, office tower windows start to play out Space Invaders at night. But along with those has been a tradition of responsability–props strapped & buckled down against high winds, disassembly instructions left attached, lookouts ensuring nothing goes awry.
This had none of those. It was intended to be an untracable, responsibility-free, hit ‘n run action. No safeguards, no contingency-planning, no follow-through. Indeed if it hadn’t been for some online bragging I doubt Turner Networks would have been acknowledging their involvement now.
Then there’s Turner’s automatic cliche disavowal, “We didn’t do it, a marketing company did it”.
No, the marketing company Turner Networks hired to do this did it, on their behalf. Signs don’t get manufactured and put up in multiple cities without it getting discussed with the client in context of the impact on the target demographic based on proximal visible locations yadda yadda yadda.
There was a meeting, and an approval, money paid and contracts signed for this to happen. For Turner Networks to after-the-fact hide behind their consultants and project managers is just craven. Sure the contractor will take the hit, that’s what they’re paid for, but Turner Networks was the one calling the shots and really needs to own up to it.
Yeah, I guess I am pretty upset.
I’m upset at the appropriation of my public spaces by marketing companies happy to risk a negligible fine. I’m upset at the disregard for public safety–anyone want to be there when one of these slipped, bounces off a subway car and scythes into a morning crowd? I’m upset at the smug “everyone can tell it’s a joke” of those comfortably looking at headlines & flickr.com photos. And yeah, I’m upset at a nation that has turned into a place where actual funny zany kewl things are now discouraged out of fear.
OH MY GAWD!
I know Kaley Noonan.
Well, not personally, but visiting kaleynoonan-com was deja vu. A former beau of mine was looking to get some webwork/promo writing done and somehow she was on the list of locals he had. I was asked to take a look at their respective websites to see if the html code was sound on the inside (one of my particular sorts of geekery).
I don’t recall the evaluation, nor am I inspired to do so now, though he did go with someone else.
The fun part is that apparently he & Noonan overlap in some ways, and I’ve now an excuse to call him (and not incoincidentally twit him about forgetting my birthday.)
Wow–small world. Guess I know what’ll be cocktail gossip in it soon enough :)
What I'm waiting for is the response.
Kaley Noonan now does have a reputation, as a shameless charlatan. From here on when anyone looks up her name; an agent, a publishing house, a reviewer, what they'll find is her history of misrepresentation.
That's gotta hurt. That's gonna hurt more.
I wonder if the folks involved in this debacle will somehow try and come clean and redeem what they can of their professional reputations? Or will they lay low hoping it all just goes`away (but Google doesn't forget.)
By the way, in 2002 there was a fascinating study by the Pew Research Center about What the World Thinks oof America. It was turned into a television program by the national new services of several nations cooperating to each bring their unique perspective. It examined how the US views itself, how the US thinks the wrold views it, and region by region how that reflects reality.
It was a sobering, and distressing, production. American jingoism brought up short by honest outside appraisals. The most unfortunate part? This apparently wasn’t shown in in the US. BBC, CBC, their equivalent new services around the globe, but not where the subjects themselves could see themselves reflected.
Anyway, here’s the latest report from last summer:
Pew Global Attitudes Project: Introduction: 16-Nation Pew Global Attitudes Survey: U.S. Image Up Slightly, But Still Negative
From ‘95-‘04 I was a US citizen living in Quebec with work contracts in Massachusetts & many friends in Vermont. My father is US, I am, my mother has been a green-card Canadian living in the US for 45 years. Crossing the border was often a weekly, if not occasionally daily, event.
During that time border crossing went from rote formality to becoming a presumed criminal subject to harassment & intimidation, all by the US side, *my* government.
It’s gotten to the point I can no longer recommend to many friends their visiting my beloved Montreal. Pop up from Boston for the weekend? Only if your papers are in order. Plus all of your records.
I’ve an American buddy who broke a single school window when he was 16 in an act of teenage vandalism. This was “expunged” from his records when he was 18; he was assured it was gone forever. 3 years ago, at age 40-something, he was cross-examined by border agents about his “criminal history” with references to this long ago act like it was the day before! (In truth it possibly predated the birth of his questioner.)
Another time crossing the border back into the US an American friend was asked to produce title & registration of his vehicle. Upon opening his glove box the border agent spotted his unmistakable pill-a-day box, lunged for it, and in grabbing it out of the vehicle pulled it open and spilled several hundred dollars of VA-supplied HIV medications across the roadway. After assuring themselves that all of the completely legitimate medications were properly stamped & prescribed my friend was informed he was then free to get on his hands & knees in the middle of the border crossing to collect his meds from among the grit, grime, and oil on the ground surrounding & under his vehicle.
How considerate of our civil servants.
Once upon a time a driver’s license was sufficient to cross the US/Canada border. Dropping that wasn’t unreasonable, a state-issued driver’s license is just that, it has nothing to do with nationality. Then it became Voter ID/Birth Certificate/Passport, which wasn’t bad. Most folks already possess these or can get one with little effort or cost. Now it’s this miscegenation of not-really-a-passport or the new high-tech RFID-for-the-sake-of-it insecuritron passport.
Welcome to security theater Amerika, where pretending is more importing then doing and puffing up our collective chest and making threatening noises has replaced good will and sensibility.
It used to be we made fun of the Soviet Union for it’s citizen controls, bragged about sharing the largest unguarded border in the world with Canada, felt pity on Europeans and their border control nightmares. Now as they’ve thrown off all of those we’ve adopted the worst of these, at great expense & inconvenience.
Wonder why US conferences no longer draw international crowds? Because other nationalities don’t want to subject themselves to US asshattery. Wonder why tourism is down? Because in a competitive world we’re actively discouraging transnational travel. Every day thousands of small decisions are made around the world, ones in which the US used to be the favored, trusted, respected, choice. We’ve blown that, gone from being the leader in truth & rule of law to not believing in it ourselves.
I’m back in the US for now. But I honestly don’t know for how long. It’s getting uglier by the day, and I fear I may soon not have the stomach for the perversion it is becoming. I’ll salute those who stay to fight the good fight, but suspect I’ll take my talents elsewhere and live the life folks used to come to the USA for.
What really goes on in Cheney’s “undisclosed location”, with those fine Secret Service Agents always in attendance (that ring he is endlessly nattering on about, could it be... a c*ck ring?)
Regarding “forcible separation from fandom”, see also Walter Breen’s Wikipedia entry, including the discussion portion.
(Studiously not noting that episodes of BSG, Dr. Who, & Torchwood appear within a day of their broadcast on usenet in news:alt.binaries.multimedia.svcd & like newsgroups)
The BBC & SciFi has taken to mining their productions with concurrent the-making-of features. What used to be saved for the Premium Ultimate Latinum DVD Collection is now a weekly companion Dr. Who/Torchwood “Confidential” program. SciFi channel has something similar with the Producer of BSG, Ron Wood, recording a series of behind-the-scenes & running commentaries for podcast.
In both cases they give the fan base more material to revel in, as well as supplying much background information. Thus we learn the intricacies of costuming Dr. Who, the fun of playing in a Dalek, and why BSG jumped forward a year. Indeed for those interested in television storytelling the BSG commentaries are remarkably candid.
For the casual viewer they’re non-starters. However for those who can’t get enough they’re wonderful treats.
I confess I’ve not yet sat down & actually watched a BSG episode while playing the podcast (helpfully synchronized with beeps for the commercial breaks) but even the casual semi-listen while commuting has been a treat. The bf tells me that the Dr. Who Confential eps are what really hooked him onto the show and got him interested in the Torchwood series
And yes, after watching the first few eps of Torchwood, I’m liking them but wondering what sort of butchering will be required to show them without offending US sensibilities. Half-nekked, half-costumed, pumped-up, greased-up men groping and flipping each other (something I’m generally a fan of!) in mock combat under the eye of alien costumed “divas” is somehow SciFi Channel appropriate, but omnisexual quips are likely too much.
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