I wrote to Sainsburys (large UK grocery store chain) in 1993, suggesting an idea for a "self checkout", where you would scan items yourself as you put them into your shipping cart. My anti-theft solution was that they'd weigh your cart as you left, to make sure you'd scanned everything!
I never expected a reply, but was so stoked when I received a letter with a similar generic-but-enthusiastic reply, along the lines of "Thanks for such a creative idea!"
Do kids still get the opportunity to experience things like this? I can't imagine that sending an email to a company's generic contact@ address is ever going to get the save kind of response - and certainly not something that they can proudly pin on their wall for motivation.
The problem with that is the benefit of inspiring children does little to nothing for the business, while the risk of frivolous but expensive legal actions because you decide you should get millions for inventing the self service checkout is not insignificant.
I'd suspect many places would still respond positively though, especially in the more creative worlds. Almost every creative was that kid once.
You'd have better luck mailing a letter, but to be honest the kind of "sending a letter and getting a reply from the CEO or some sort of higher up" is long gone unfortunately. There is a few exceptions, but all of them are for very old private companies. You will never get a reply from Pepsi as a kid with a new flavour idea. Or Disney about a new ride for that matter.
Ask a kid (preferably one of your own or a niece or nephew, etc.) to write to your local football team and see what happens. Some are good about it, some aren't. It helps if you send a letter to the correct department instead of sending an email to a generic contact address.
It wouldn't solve every issue. Nothing will. But hopefully cameras could prevent the situations that I've heard about directly from people, where drivers wouldn't let them out the car and we asking for their number, or were asking for dates/propositioning them, etc.
And who knows, if the situations you quoted there began with a driver forcing them into his place, or following the rider into her house, then a camera could also have prevented them - or have been clear evidence.
Well, we looked at those gigantic pyramids, translated the hieroglyphs in some places to mean that a dangerous curse would afflict anyone who entered, and then went in to explore / loot the places.
So... yeah. That's the level of being willing to ignore warnings that we have to prepare for.
Right, but at the cost of throwing waste on the ground. I’m not arguing that it is harmful (i’d imagine it biodegrades pretty easily) but it seems flippant to me to assume zero impact.
This would come off as meaningful if you didn’t dismiss the environmental impact without even acknowledging its existence. I am not against celebrations like these so long as you can acknowledge their impact.... sanitation workers are not responsible for our actions, regardless of how content they are to clean the visible impacts from the streets.
Except the Touch didn't have a data connection. 'Voice calls' isn't the killer feature of a contemporary smart phone, an always-on internet connection is.
Indeed. If iPod touches had cellular radios in them, I wouldn't need an iPhone — but then they'd probably also cost the same, so I'd just get an iPhone anyway.
The iPod touches also have lower-quality displays, lower-capacity batteries, base units have less storage capacity, usually have older or slightly underpowered A chips, and lower-quality materials leading to a slightly inferior build quality compared to iPhone.
(Also, iPod touch hasn't been updated for three years)
I never expected a reply, but was so stoked when I received a letter with a similar generic-but-enthusiastic reply, along the lines of "Thanks for such a creative idea!"
Do kids still get the opportunity to experience things like this? I can't imagine that sending an email to a company's generic contact@ address is ever going to get the save kind of response - and certainly not something that they can proudly pin on their wall for motivation.