email accounts, mail programs, and The Stamp

Hi Adam --

Hope you're well.  I started teaching at TheUni this semester and am forwarding my .edu mail to my .com account.  I'm just wondering if I need to set up my Uni email in my email program.  It does forward, but I don't have a separate icon for TheUni email account.  Part of the problem is I don't know if it's a POP server, etc, and couldn't seem to determine that.  What is the advantage of having the separate icon/account?

Thanks,

Jane

adam@computersWTF
to Jane

Hi Jane-

It's purely a personal preference. Think of the Mac Mail program (aka The Stamp or technical term: mail client) as an old mail room in a big office building- sorting, filing and ultimately providing you with your mail as you like it. If you want to have a separate "box" for each of your accounts, each with it's own inbox, sent folder, and so on, then Mac Mail can do that. If you want to have TheUni forward their mail to another account and come in that way, you can obviously do that too as that is your current setup. Each computer has a different mail client (or more than one, like Thunderbird, Outlook, etc), as do mobile devices and tablets. Conversely, web-based email can be logged into remotely from any device or computer with Internet access. Most email accounts can be accessed either way, although some companies/orgs choose to go with one or the other.

Best,

Adam

...but what happens when your car kills someone?

Tom Vanderbilt's new Wired cover story on robotic cars is a must read:

The last time I was in a self-driving car—Stanford University’s “Junior,” at the 2008 World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems—the VW Passat went 25 miles per hour down two closed-off blocks. Its signal achievement seemed to be stopping for a stop sign at an otherwise unoccupied intersection. Now, just a few years later, we are driving close to 70 mph with no human involvement on a busy public highway—a stunning demonstration of just how quickly, and dramatically, the horizon of possibility is expanding. “This car can do 75 mph,” Urmson says. “It can track pedestrians and cyclists. It understands traffic lights. It can merge at highway speeds.” In short, after almost a hundred years in which driving has remained essentially unchanged, it has been completely transformed in just the past half decade.

As an extremely alert and aware driver this scares me quite a bit, but as a tech-geek I'm completely mesmerized by the idea of being able to read on a drive somewhere while knowing that the computerized-cars are probably (more than) twice as safe as all the bad drivers out there.

I just can't help the nagging thought: what will happen when someone's car freaks out (or worse, is hacked into) and goes on a rampage?

Google's new Terms of Service leaves us shrugging

In the handful of reviews of Google's new TOS we've looked into, it all comes back to one sentiment expressed in just one of the reviews [Bianca Bosker's piece on HuffPo] - what are you gonna do, not use any Google Products or Services? That would be like trying to avoid vegetables at this point- doable but extremely arduous. And really, why? If marketing bothers you that much, train your brain to avoid its influence.