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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On a related note, gskinner is also responsible for one of the coolest regex tools: http://gskinner.com/RegExr/
It's written in Flex and is also available as an Air app, makes writing regular expressions almost intuitive.
The author really sets his screen to yellow text on a black background? Makes my eyes tired just thinking about it. Anywayz... on a Mac you can flip the colors of your monitor by holding down ctrl-option-command and pressing 8, if you like that sort of thing.