Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Why won’t these things go away:

• Paper mail, consisting primarily of junk and things that could be e-mailed or web-advertised instead. If e-mail is not secure enough for credit card codes and what-not, just make it secure. The technology for that has existed for 20 years.
• Air travel, that is a major polluter and time waster.
• Cars, that are also major polluters, and in bigger cities major time-wasters too.
• Unsolicited e-mail, when chat has so clearly solved it, by requiring invitation/confirmation, stopping any kind of unsolicited messages. Well, almost completely at least.
• Big and power-consuming PCs, when in an office you really only need a laptop or a small desktop PC (e.g. Mac Mini or Dell Optiplex).
• Fixed line phones, when you really only need a mobile phone, that is yours rather than shared among family members or colleagues at the office. Switchboards can easily be emulated in the network, also for family use.

Just thinking…

Ironically, most of the country representatives at the environment meeting in Denmark recently travelled by their own limousine to the meeting on a daily basis. Leading by example, not.

I intentionally didn’t mention mobile phones too much, as the environmental impact is still not fully comprehended and accepted. As people switch phones so often the environmental impact should be quite big. Even more so now when this behavior occurs across the world.

China’s decision to require USB charging in phones, so that chargers can be re-used between phones was clever indeed. Actually too clever for the Western world, that should have come to that conclusion long ago, and did just recently. More thinking like that and I might feel more calm about the mobile future.

Posted by Anders Borg 12:57 | Permalink