Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Economics, Technology and Society

Some Thoughts On Trust

4 Comments

This piece kind of jumped out at me, because of this post the other day:

…my Comcast cable service crashed yesterday afternoon at 4 p.m. That not only means my Internet access is down on all five of our family computers, but my cable television is down as well. In fact, the only service still working in our house in the landline phone – and that’s only because, when Comcast offered that service as well, my wife replied, “I don’t trust you people not to screw that up as well. I need something in this house I can depend on to work right.”

And, in fact, she used that phone to call Comcast to report the outage. And I took off for Peet’s to file this column.

As someone noted in comments at the landline post, during Florida hurricanes, he lost everything, and his POTS phone line fell down on to the ground, but it never quit working. My experience during Frances and Jeanne five years ago was the same — no power, no cell, but I never lost phone, including DSL. I was blogging right after the storm, using a laptop and modem plugged into a power inverter running off the car battery.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Facebook Etiquette Question

30 Comments

OK, I’m an antique. I’ve got a Facebook account, but I still haven’t figured out why, other than as another phone book for contacts with people that I want to contact. I was told by Burton Lee that I had to have an account to be in the 21st century but (again) he never quite explained why.

I can understand that it’s sort of a way to blog and have your own on-line community if you don’t have a real…you know…blog. And because I do have a real blog, and one fairly highly rated on Technorati, among other places, I don’t have time to build Facebook pages.

Anyway. What is the protocol for having Facebook Friends? What is a Facebook “Friend”? Because I get a lot of requests from people I haven’t met, and have never heard of, and don’t even have friends in common with, to become their Facebook Friends. I have several pending “friends” both with and without mutual Facebook Friends, and I just don’t know what to do with them.

I may be old fashioned, but in my day, the word “friend” meant something. Has it lost that meaning?

[Update a few minutes later]

You know, if someone of whom I had no previous knowledge requested to be my Facebook “Friend” with an explanation of who they were, and why, I’d be more inclined to at least consider it, but when it’s just a response from a click on a button that says, “Become a friend,” I’m not very inclined to say, “Great!” “More Facebook Friends.”

Is collecting FFs some kind of weird status symbol?

Business, Economics, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Landline Problem

19 Comments

I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.

I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.

General, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Every Man

5 Comments

“…would give up his brain for a decent size.”

That was the subject of one of the myriad spam emails I get encouraging me to enhance…something or other. I have to believe that women get them, too.

Anyone who responds to such idiocy had no brain to give up in the first place. It’s as stupid as the ones that tell me that no one can resist buying a new watch. Watch me.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Asteroid Impact Craters

5 Comments

Some great pictures from space, which is the best place from which to see them.

But we still don’t seem to be taking the problem seriously:

NASA is charged with seeking out nearly all the asteroids that threaten Earth but doesn’t have the money to do the job, a federal report says.

That’s because even though Congress assigned the space agency this mission four years ago, it never gave NASA money to build the necessary telescopes, the new National Academy of Sciences report says.

Because space isn’t important. Even when it is.