This is my position exactly. And skeumorphism wasn't even in my vocabulary (until now, thanks!). The example I tend to compare email to is the general design of early electric lights: so many of them simply looked like gas lamps into which an electric bulb had been jammed. Like these: http://goo.gl/808F6 Sure they're pretty, but over time, we've designed much better electric lights by moving away from the restrictions imposed by an open flame. Email, on the other hand, hasn't evolved much at all since its birth in 1982 (!), and better filters simply don't impress me anymore.
And the cost in bandwidth and wasted time email and its spam problem impose on us cannot be understated. We really do need something new.
A recent problem I ran into was sending Xmas cards to friends and family. We had over a hundred addresses to send to and I didn't want to send them all by hand. So, I wrote a script. Of course, most of the emails went straight into the spam folders because, I guess, doing this just made them look like spam to most filters.
Granted, the emails were all sent from a shared hosting account, the mail server of which I had no control over as far as certificates and reputation were concerned. But my feeling is that anything I could have done to improve my Xmas greetings' success rate would have been exactly what spammers also try to do.
Aggressive filters assume everyone is a bad actor until proven otherwise, and I think that's a problem. Our quality of life is degraded whenever we make this calculation.
My script wrote an individual email to every recipient in my list; so none of them knew about the others anyway. I speculate that the email servers that received them, particularly the larger service providers, might have seen multiple copies going to different addresses, noticed that the emails were identical, and assumed they were spam. Usually, a pretty good rule for a filter. But in my case, not so much.
Nothing ambitious was mentioned in that article. And if you want a to-do list you should check out something like trello.com Otherwise, a spiral notebook and a pen is a great deal better than your inbox as a to-do list.
--Please feel free to ignore the following email rant.--
Email is a pretty impressive digital translation of the written letter. And for cases where a letter written by hand on paper would work well, email works even better. As long as by better you mean faster and without paper or stamps or penmanship. The SMTP protocol is over 30 years old and still going strong; that's pretty amazing. But email kind of sucks, too.
Frankly, most people aren't good at writing letters. Simply creating a meaningful subject line is difficult. And keeping a conversation germane to the stated subject is also difficult; folks often talk about multiple topics in a typical conversation. To review long conversations, one must read awkwardly from bottom to top, opposite normal English reading direction. Adding someone to a conversation in progress is also awkward. Sending another message (a correction or addition to your last message) before the person (or people) you're talking with replies creates confusion as a reply can only be made to one or the other message, dropping parts of the conversation. Attachments can be problematic. Clearly, spam the likes of which we see today was never anticipated by SMTP's authors, and neither has anyone come up with an especially successful solution to it. We've all just come to accept spam as part of the background noise, filtering the polluted stream, rather than removing the decomposing carcasses from the upstream source.
Creating an alternative that addresses its shortcomings would be ambitious. And I think many people were frightened by Wave, which addressed many of email's shortcomings but was disruptive in the way so many people like to claim they admire but will almost always shun in practice (kind of like how folks always claim to love to root for the underdog, unless it's Haiti). I'm not saying Wave was perfect, but it had great potential. And as far as genuinely ambitious attempts at improving email (or the kind of conversing we typically do with email), I can't think of another example.
What did Wave do that addressed email's shortcomings? Any examples? I remember when Wave came out, I couldn't figure out what it actually was or what problem it was trying to solve... it was as vexing to this email user as Haskell's zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms to a Java programmer.
Most of the problems I mentioned: conversations of any length could be read in the normal English left-to-right and top-to-bottom direction, adding someone to a conversation already in progress was easy (as was removing someone), I don't think spam could ever have been as big a problem on Wave as it is in email, changing one's mind and the ability to edit what has been said was trivial in Wave, and it created a single, canonical conversation as opposed to the fusillade of conversation chunks firing back and forth (and multiplying times the number of participants) that we've become so familiar with in email.
My suspicion is that the rat-thing was inserted after-the-fact to facilitate the book's ending. It's been a while since I read it, and I remember enjoying it, but the rat-thing always seemed like a cheat to me.
I'm not sure the book ever mentioned LCDs specifically? It was written in 1992 before LCDs became prevalent; perhaps he imagined some other (analog) technology being used instead.
It was very sad when I realized Gibson's great line "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." had been completely lost on me because I assumed he meant bright blue instead of gray.
That's my point. The title dates the story. It's supposed to take place in the near future, but for the title to make sense it will have to take place in the recent past.
It really is an amazing testament to human ingenuity that something as mind-bogglingly complicated as the modern automobile could have ever become a consumer item. But their cost is profound (DanI-S sums it up here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872338). Surely, concern for people who "can't afford" expensive things would lead to adopting more public transportation, don't you think?
Also, let's add wi-fi hot-spots to all of them so that they'll create a giant mesh-network, providing cheap internet access for everyone. And ponies! Everyone gets ponies!
Must be perspective. I, for instance, think we should all be terrified to share the road with scores, hundreds, or even thousands of multi-ton mechanical devices traveling anywhere from 25 to 70 mph which are operated by people, easily-distracted, endlessly fallible, and often foolishly reckless people. Computer-controlled sounds better/safer to me.
You have many of the same observations as me, but form a different conclusion. Although, one thing: you say, "My goal is to safely get from Point A to Point B..." Cars are a great way to kill 30 or 40 thousand people a year. Not very safe. And the quality of service (and riders) will surely improve on public transportation as more people use it, don't you think? Japan seems to prove that.
The quality of service will never reach the level of Japan. Transit operators have it easy there because people don't vandalize and they don't litter. This means that your maintenance costs are very low and it's more economical to buy high quality, comfortable seating.
As well, transit is only good for getting you around in the cities. Once you get out to "inaka", a car is all but a requirement, much like in North America.
This "world without cars" is a nice pipe dream, but the reality is that no matter how good your transit system, it's still a huge time sink to use it. The only time it becomes faster than a car is if you live in a dense city with poor traffic flow, and that accounts for a tiny percentage of the world population. That's also why it's only the pampered urbanites who dream of a carless world.
> if you live in a dense city with poor traffic flow, and that accounts for a tiny percentage of the world population
That's false. Most of the world's population now lives in cities. Deciding what percentage of those fall below the threshold of "poor" traffic-flow wise is difficult, but it's not "tiny". (http://www.gizmag.com/go/7613/)
Cars beget cars. The reason people need cars in a lot of the US is because they moved somewhere that they need a car to get to. People talk about the amount of time that things take without a car forgetting that said problem was created by cars in the first place. In places where most folks don't have cars you have a small grocery store every few blocks rather than a large one every few miles. The demographics of public transit differ from society at large because the well-off drive cars.
I grew up in American suburbia and have lived in Europe for the last decade. The amount of time required to say, go shopping, or commute to work has remained broadly similar in the half-dozen areas I've lived in, though the distances have not.
Progressively moving away from cars is largely a cultural rather than technological problem. Some well-done urban planning (including structuring energy prices to favor more efficient means) and a few decades to execute it could drastically shift the balance to where we have far fewer cars.
The generic "city" is not a very useful term here. How many people are there? There's a big difference between New York and Maza. What is the topography like? Is it sprawling like Phoenix? Or dense like Tokyo? How much density, population, and infrastructure is required to make a convenient and economical transit system? I'd wager far too much to displace cars in any meaningful way except in the largest cities.
Cars are used because they are versatile. Every other form of transport has far more narrow use cases.
That's not a huge difference - I actually wonder if the more direct routing and door-to-door service allowed by cars could make up that difference entirely.
> commuter rail kills .09 people per 10 million passenger miles.
The non-suicide number is quite a bit lower, though, by (probably) an order of magnitude. Pedestrians on the tracks in an area they aren't supposed to be, who are struck and killed by trains, are classified in the bucket category of "trespasser" fatalities. Unless they left a note or something it's usually impossible to conclusively say that they were suicides, but the assumption is that the vast majority of trespasser fatalities are suicides, because the number of people struck while trying to steal things or take illegal shortcuts is relatively small. And, trespasser fatalities account for 88% of total commuter-rail fatalities (p. 13 in that report). All other commuter-rail fatalities (passengers, collisions with automobiles, etc.) add up to 0.011 people per 10 million passenger miles.
The way I'm reading table 18, of the 526 commuter-rail fatalities, at most 285 of them are suicide-by-train. As you point out, trespassing is a wide category - it includes things like highway-rail collisions. That 285 number might be high, as it also includes things like a child straying onto the tracks that was hit by a train.
I'm not sure it matters. The automobile statistics seem to include various methods of suicide involving cars. If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.
> The automobile statistics seem to include various methods of suicide involving cars.
I'm not sure they include them equally, though. The most obvious way of killing yourself on train tracks is standing in front of a train, but the most obvious way of killing yourself on a road usually does not involve a car, but involves jumping from a bridge (which doesn't get counted as an automobile fatality).
> If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.
I'm not too sure about that one. If there are a significant number of people who, absent trains, wouldn't kill themselves, that would be significant. But I would guess a larger proportion are just choosing a suicide modality, and if it weren't trains, it'd be jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, taking pills, etc. It's hard to come up with any real data for that counterfactual, though. I suppose a blunt correlational approach would be to see if there's any correlation between availability of commuter rail and suicide rates, after controlling for other confounding variables. I would guess that there isn't one, but could be wrong.
is a Federal Railroad Administration report that breaks down the cause of trespasser fatalities. This isn't 100% comparable to the previous report, but it does claim that 23% of trespasser fatalities are suicides.
Appendix H breaks down the reported fatalities - it looks like walking and sleeping (drunk?) on tracks each claim more lives than suicide.
One really interesting story is the massive increase in car safety. Deaths per 100M vehicle miles have dropped from 1.73 in 1994 to about 1.09 in 2010.
Fundamentally, I'm not sure any of this matters. We're talking a very small difference in safety - to the point where convenience is probably more important to most people.
