Tue Jul 03, 2007 9:48 am

Must admit I like the tone here-till the iphone be a video phone I say whats the point? I'll be happy to enjoy this baby without activation / 2 year contracts if allowed to play videos , music and wifi internet with my present broadband service.

Still this is a mammoth gadget -simply worth getting for blitzing multitasking device that it is and the websurfing ability should /is able to perform. Hands down this is the gadget of the century and no amount of quibbles or nitpicking will impact this. The genius of Jobs unfolds---guess we will always have the nonsensitised in our midst----for the others the experience is total joy -just holding this baby. ( stiil waiting for that samung-oH well-whatever!)

Tue Jul 03, 2007 2:51 pm

Yes, some good points. I for one really dislike the iChat bubbles in iChat, but for some odd reason love them on the phone--it may be that for the first time I think SMS is worthwhile (threading the messages into conversations was the missing element for me). Like you, I was going to wait for Version 2 (with DTT!). But then I stopped in the store Sunday just to look....

I had a 25 hour wait for activation, but am happy now. There may be lots of things it can't do, but I don't care. What it does do it performs amazingly well. I'd fiddled with it for over 2 hours before I even got to trying the iPod. That kept me busy a little while longer.

Tue Jul 03, 2007 8:30 pm

	Terrin wrote:
	Good luck with that Samsung phone, especially if it's 3G, as it may not be shipping into the Country. As for your iPhone complaints, I agree with all of them. However, I could come up with quite a few more complaints for the other phones I have used. Moreover, your embrace of an untried non shipping phone from another company diminishes your credibility.

Since it's a phone that already sits waiting in my local AT&T store, well-reviewed by many folks who live in the Country, I'm not really worried about it being "untried." I'm just waiting for my contract to be up for renewal so I can get the phone for $150 less than MSRP. But thanks for your concern, if you can call it that.

As for the driving while talking, I'm a happy user of a hands-free (yet still with cord) headset. Blah blah phonecakes. Of course because I'm a woman I'm constantly twirling my hair and doing my make-up while I talk on the headset, so I guess the added safety is moot.

1.1, here I wait!

Tue Jul 03, 2007 10:08 pm

	gslusher wrote:
	PLEASE do not talk on a cell phone while driving. A recent study using driving simulators found that the distraction of talking (much less dialing) on a cell phone was as dangerous as being legally intoxicated. There's no data on real accidents because no one has collected it. A car is a lethal weapon--respect it as you would a gun or a bomb.

Yeah, you wouldn't talk on a cell phone while shooting a gun or detonating a bomb. Oh god, this is literally the dumbest comment I've ever read on TMO or iPO. There's no data on real accidents because no one has collected it. OMFG. With all the money available for safety fascists to study scary thing they can imagine, your explanation is just plain brain dead. Really slush, we already figured out you have absolutely no sense of humor, but now it turns out you're a card carrying member of the no fun crowd. Yuk.

Wed Jul 04, 2007 12:07 am

Bosco wrote:

gslusher wrote: PLEASE do not talk on a cell phone while driving. A recent study using driving simulators found that the distraction of talking (much less dialing) on a cell phone was as dangerous as being legally intoxicated. There's no data on real accidents because no one has collected it. A car is a lethal weapon--respect it as you would a gun or a bomb. Yeah, you wouldn't talk on a cell phone while shooting a gun or detonating a bomb. Oh god, this is literally the dumbest comment I've ever read on TMO or iPO. There's no data on real accidents because no one has collected it. OMFG. With all the money available for safety fascists to study scary thing they can imagine, your explanation is just plain brain dead. Really slush, we already figured out you have absolutely no sense of humor, but now it turns out you're a card carrying member of the no fun crowd. Yuk.

I don't know if you've ever done real research, Bosco. (I had to do some research to get my three degrees from MIT. One of my projects actually involved gathering data on auto accidents--I designed a device to step through a checklist and record the answers electronically--in 1969. The device was built by another graduate student and used for several years before handheld computers became available.) Gathering data on accidents requires that one determine the data to be gathered ahead of time. It's only in recent years that the link of accidents with cell phone use has been clearly recognized. One cannot go easily back and collect data on past accidents. Some states (e.g., Texas) have collected data. (Note that the data can take several years to be reported. There's nowhere near as much money as you seem to imply.)

There have been several experimental studies (vs collecting data after the fact), some watching drivers with cameras, others using simulators. See these articles from CNN, Drive and Stay Alive, and C|Net News.Com.

Here's a link to the PDF of a recent article, A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver in a scholarly journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society that directly compared talking on a cell phone with being legally intoxicated. Here's another by the same authors, Fatal Distraction? A Comparison of the Cell-Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver.

The NPR Show Car Talk has a major section on the problem, Drive Now, Talk Later! I don't think that anyone could accuse Tom & Ray Magliozzi of not having a sense of humor, but they are deadly serious about this.

CrashPrevention.org has more information. For a more personal approach, check Drive Now, Chat Later, which has a lot of links to more information. I guess that you should tell the parents of the teenaged twins who were killed by a driver distracted by his cell phone that they're "card carrying members of the no fun crowd."

Wed Jul 04, 2007 2:09 am

The obvious problem of the first PDF you point to is that it inherently assumes two things: (1) that drunk driving accidents (the control group if you will) are caused by delayed reactions to external anomalies, and (2) that drivers using cell phone don't taylor the level of distraction they introduce into their driving equation to the situation.

(1) Drunks are anecdotally known to crash into emergency vehicles parked at the side of the road as they try to stay in the right lane. That's why cops will pull a driver off the freeway or even into a parking lot especially at night to make a traffic stop. People talking on cell phones don't do that. So if you're to believe that the risks associated with each are the same, then you're gonna have to believe that in the remaining accidents, cell phones are indeed more dangerous, if just marginally.

(2) When you see an upcoming problem, like road maintenance or a traffic accident or a road hazard, and you are drunk, you can't just say, "I'm going to be undrunk to get through this section of driving". If you are talking on the phone, you can politely say "hey, need to pay attention for a moment, hang on" or you can just ignore the phone. By contrast, the study's methodology assumes that drivers can't make informed judgments about when it's more or less safe to be distracted, which makes the study's methodology inconsistent with reality. The study assumes that events which require quick reaction are uniformly distributed over time. Not so in the real world.

And one other problem with the whole methodology for determining the relative danger of talking on the cell phone vs. drunk driving... If you have an estimate of the number of drivers using a cell phone at any one time, which the authors did, you could compare that number in Year A and Year B and normalize against other recognized factors, then compare deaths and accidents. Digging into the mechanism doesn't make a lot of sense if you can't observe a significant increase in accidents and fatalities consistent with adoption of the cell phone. Wide scale usage of cell phones is far more recent than introduction of the air bag and mandatory seat belt laws. We don't see such data because it isn't there. Feel free to provide references to the contrary.

Wed Jul 04, 2007 2:46 am

Bosco wrote:

And one other problem with the whole methodology for determining the relative danger of talking on the cell phone vs. drunk driving... If you have an estimate of the number of drivers using a cell phone at any one time, which the authors did, you could compare that number in Year A and Year B and normalize against other recognized factors, then compare deaths and accidents. Digging into the mechanism doesn't make a lot of sense if you can't observe a significant increase in accidents and fatalities consistent with adoption of the cell phone. Wide scale usage of cell phones is far more recent than introduction of the air bag and mandatory seat belt laws. We don't see such data because it isn't there. Feel free to provide references to the contrary.

Check the Texas link above. They have data on accidents, including fatalities, caused by cell phone use in 2001, which increased 40% or so from the previous year.

Wed Jul 04, 2007 3:26 am

	Bosco wrote:
	The obvious problem of the first PDF you point to is that it inherently assumes two things: (1) that drunk driving accidents (the control group if you will) are caused by delayed reactions to external anomalies, and (2) that drivers using cell phone don't taylor the level of distraction they introduce into their driving equation to the situation.

Excellent comments. Now, wasn't that better than using ad hominems and name-calling? Give me some time to dig more deeply. I may be able to contact the authors with your good questions. It would also be interesting to read any comments in the journals.

	Bosco wrote:
	Ugh. Wrong. Come on, you have one more degree than I do. You should be able to see why that doesn't answer my criticism. Unless that extra degree is an MBA...

Nope. All three are in mechanical engineering.

Bosco wrote:

That 40% figure could just as easily be due to methodology as it could to actual cause. And how do you determine cause? How could you tell if an accident or fatality could not be avoided if a cell phone were not in use, other than by subjective judgment of someone who wasn't there? By that kind of reasoning, you could attribute 99%+ of car accidents to having the engine running. No, if you're going to attribute accidents to cell phone, the only way that makes any accounting sense is to normalize for other known factors and attribute some portion of the difference to cell phones. Try again.

If there were a large database with good data on all factors, that would be a good approach. As it is, we have to rely upon the judgment of accident investigators. As you probably know better than I, attempting to normalize for various factors is very difficult in any social science research, much more so than in my field, though I did have some similar experience in working on failures/anomalies with a small number of tests. (ICBMs) Fortunately, my organization just analyzed the data from the tests and determined the circumstances and likely causes of anomalies and failures. We didn't have to determine probabilities of future failure, though some failures were pretty clear indicators of problems that needed to be corrected. We had enough pressure, as it was.

Wed Jul 04, 2007 6:51 am

Bosco wrote:

gslusher wrote: PLEASE do not talk on a cell phone while driving. A recent study using driving simulators found that the distraction of talking (much less dialing) on a cell phone was as dangerous as being legally intoxicated. There's no data on real accidents because no one has collected it. A car is a lethal weapon--respect it as you would a gun or a bomb. Yeah, you wouldn't talk on a cell phone while shooting a gun or detonating a bomb. Oh god, this is literally the dumbest comment I've ever read on TMO or iPO. There's no data on real accidents because no one has collected it. OMFG. With all the money available for safety fascists to study scary thing they can imagine, your explanation is just plain brain dead. Really slush, we already figured out you have absolutely no sense of humor, but now it turns out you're a card carrying member of the no fun crowd. Yuk.

What is it with you and fascism?

Wed Jul 04, 2007 1:43 pm

	Anonymous wrote:
	i just hate stupid fucks using cell phones while they're driving. I don't need to see them swerving in front of me or holding up traffic because they're driving so slow.

You should be banned for inappropriate language and attitude.