From They said it.... You said it, in the Edinburgh Evening News:

[Joe Chi Minh]

"Gordon Brown is a bit like the new owner of an iPhone: he's waited a long time to get it, but now that it's in his hands, he can't make it do what he wants."

Broadcaster, Sue Lawley on the PM's first year in office.

(She might have added, "and when he can and does, it all goes pear-shaped and he wished he hadn't.)

[dkf]

1. That is funny. Are iphones really that impossible?

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. I don't know what iPhones are, but suspect they're some kind of new-fangled

mobile phone.

Neither my wife nor I can work her mobile phone (she'd wanted one for emergencies), given to her by her son, (or our now years-old video, though I was able to work it for a while).

My stepson thought he was being kinder by buying his mother a more expensive model than the most basic one available, against her better judgement. I'm absolutely against them in principle on a number of counts: substantial use of them fries your brain and the masts needed for transmission seem lethal too; I don't want to feed the corporate beast, and though the calls are probably expensive everywhere, this is "rip-off" Britain; we managed without them very well in the past; peer-pressure makes children want them, and probably better and better models to "keep up", and they are now more vulnerable to bullying - even at home, which should be a sanctuary. PCs fail on that score, of course.

But most of all I'm a very, very, very proud LUDDITE!!!!! I want everything made by OUR people. If the standards are medieval because our schools and universities and students have been underfunded, SO BE IT!

Nothing personal here, dkf. I'm not having a shot at you. Just getting on my soap-box.

[dkf]

3. Hey, you know how to use the internet and how to post on DU.

You are light years ahead of John McCain for one!

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. High praise, indeed..... He probably doesn't know how to operate a

petrol pump, judging from what I've just read about his not having bought it for years!

[Prophet 451]

5. They're smartphones

You know how there's been a tendancy to make cellphones more and more complicated? The last one I had, you had to push about seventeen buttons to make a call, in which time, it's raised Tower Bridge, played "God Save The Queen" and made you a cup of tea. Smartphones are the logical conclusion to that: They combine a cellphone with a small computer which makes them powerful but fairly impossible to use and prone to all the problems of PCs.

Personally, I'd rather have a standard cellphone (my employers force me to have one) and a laptop.

[Joe Chi Minh]

6. Thanks. But is it wise for machines to be smarter that their would-be

operators. Garbage in, garbage out. It smacks of what passes for intelligence among us humanoids (... we might aspire to become human beings, when we can discredit the shallow simulacrum of intelligence possessed by those who run the world in such desperately stupid ways, and have a vested interested in maintaining the myth).

Loved the ".... raised Tower Bridge" and played "God save the Queen" bit! Really impressive functionalities. Is that the right word? maybe "functions".

[Prophet 451]

7. They're not that smart

All computers are actually very, very dumb. It's the great secret of techies (of which, I am one) that all computers are essentially just very complex calculators: All they're doing is moving numbers around. How well they do that and how smart they appear to be depends on how sophisticated the program is. They day a computer is capable of adapting it's own program, we've reached true AI and then, we're all in very, very deep trouble.

Functions/functionalities - The difference only matters to programmers. In very technical terms, a "function" is somethign a program is designed to do while a "functionality" is somethign it can be adapted to do but in common parlance, both are correct.

[Joe Chi Minh]

8. Thanks for that info. I was being ironical, though about them being smart or dumb.

I've never believed that computers could become sentient beings.

I found the technical uses of those terms very interesting.