

Business Travelers Want to Be Left to Their Own Devices - romefort
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/business/business-travelers-want-to-be-left-to-their-own-devices.html

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MichaelCrawford
"But technology in the future will allow them to see travelers’ positions —
through the GPS device on their phones — to track their movements. If a
passenger is late for a flight, for instance, an airline might decide to
rebook the passenger on the next flight automatically. The car rental service
or taxi service would know of the delay, and the hotel might be notified of a
late arrival — all seamlessly."

That's Just Creepy.

This just clinched my decision to leave my iPhone powered off unless I am
specifically expecting an _important_ call, or I intend to make a call myself.

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mediascreen
I would love this!

But since airlines currently have trouble with basic things like crediting my
miles correctly, sending me texts about delayed flights and letting me book
flights without repeatedly logging me out; I'm not holding my breath.

These kinds of services are only useful of they work perfectly every time. A
glitchy service would be worse than not having it at all.

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MichaelCrawford
A good start would be to send an electronic ticket that Mom's iMac can
successfully download over her Earthlink dialup.

What she gets is a few megabytes of mind-boggling HTML, CSS and Javascript,
all so she can print a hardcopy with an eight-character booking number.

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w1ntermute
Isn't this solved by mobile devices and LTE? You can just show them a QR code
that's emailed to your phone, both at the TSA checkpoint and at the terminal.
I never print my ticket out anymore (and don't have a printer to do so).

~~~
MichaelCrawford
My mother is quite happy with her $35.00 Walmart pay-as-you go phone.

For quite a long time I struggled to convince her to learn how to use its
contacts list, but always she refused.

For years, she had the idea that leaving her phone powered off would save her
money. She finally relented when I pointed out to her that I might need to
reach her in an emergency.

My aunt - her identical twin sister - absolutely adores me, just loves to see
me in person, but cannot bear to speak to me on the phone for longer than just
one or two minutes. This because she has the idea that long distance service
is exhorbitantly expensive.

I can still remember when we lived in Italy, and Mom needed to call her
sister, who was coming to visit. We all got up real early in the morning. Mom
requested a call to the US from the International Operator, then Mom, my own
sister and I took turns waiting by the phone, so we could pick it up right
away when the International Operator called us back with an available line.

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domas
I had similar issue where my grandmother would not talk more than one minute
when I'm calling from abroad. Trick that worked on her was telling her that I
have "free minutes" so she does not need to worry about the cost.

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MichaelCrawford
My mother knows what VoIP is; I expect that's because she is quite thrifty.
Yet I cannot convince her to actually avail herself of it.

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pavel_lishin
I'd be happy enough if my company didn't hire a travel agency to book our
flights. A $60 surcharge so they can ignore my directions and call instead of
email me, to offer me a flight that goes against everything I wrote down on
their form, so I can look up a better and cheaper flight on Hipmunk for them.

At least they seem to have gotten me the right hotel this time, unlike a few
of my coworkers.

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JshWright
I just send ours the technical summary that the ITA Matrix spits outs.

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mattmanser
Obvious puff piece for certify.com with no basis in reality is obvious puff
piece.

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w1ntermute
Not sure it's for Certify, but my first thought when I saw the title was:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

