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I always wondered why the Phone app didn't have location services on and a big button that when the user presses it would grab the GPS coordinates and reverse g

I always wondered why the Phone app didn't have location services on and a big button that when the user presses it would grab the GPS coordinates and reverse geocoded address then have Siri read those over the phone line. That way no 911 center needs to upgrade and no telcos need to change infrastructure. A simple button right there on the phone that sends the following sound (in best Siri Voice imitation): "This phone is likely located near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue North West, Washington DC, Latitude North 38° 53.8258', Longitude West 77° 2.1927' admire.admit.hulk" (last words intentional: http://what3words.com/ http://what3words.com/)

joering2 9y ago
Here is your answer: > That way no 911 center needs to upgrade and no telcos need to change infrastructure. If you ever touched upon how government bureaucracy works you will immediately realize the more taxpayers money spent the "better". Of course Im not for it, I'm just playing devil's advocate.
passivepinetree 9y ago
I had never heard of what3words before. It's a super cool and potentially incredibly useful idea. I wonder how they manage altitude (would a cave underground have the same 3 words as the patch of surface above it?). I also wonder how this is a monetizable product that warrants a company behind it. It seems like it'd be a perfect fit for open source work. Thanks for letting me know!
- Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
  Indeed, it's entirely proprietary. Being able to get deliveries to your house shouldn't be dependent on someone paying a royalty to a startup.
- stevefeinstein 9y ago
  > potentially incredibly useful idea Do you really want to depend on a startup's ability to keep their service running and well funded to the location needs of emergency services? Unless they donate the grid and word associations to the public domain, it's a bad idea to use proprietary data sources for emergency services especially since there's nothing wrong with longitude and latitude, and humans really don't need to be able to read it, computers do just fine with it.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  Also patented WO2014170646 A1, as such is unusable by everyone except dominoes. Hooray. They also actively takedown similar projects.
- pwinnski 9y ago
  Aside from the fact, already highlighted by other commenters, that this is a proprietary system operated by a company that actively protects their IP, I think it's also a terrible idea. As you noticed, it does not differentiate based on height, so the ballyhooed deliveries would require two addresses to find an appropriate suite number in an office building, but more importantly, their app is required in real-time to find anything. Given an address like 123 Main St, I know that I can find Main Street, and then head in one direction or the other to find 123. Given an address that is three arbitrary words tells me absolutely nothing about where that is in relation to me. Zip, zero, zilch. Only an app, or a clumsy proprietary printed map, can help me. Even then, anything other than following arrows on screen is a genuinely ugly experience. A public, open address of the traditional variety lets one get close, then closer, and zoom in based on the address alone. In the US, for example, you can first read the country, then the state, then the city, then the street, and finally the street number. It's all stored pretty efficiently in a standardized address. This dumb system loses all of that, but they claim it's better for places that lack standardized addresses. Of course, we already have a system for that: latitude and longitude. The advantage of the public, open lat+long system is that, again, you can generalize and approximate at first, and then add more decimal points when it matters. There is no way to do this with this dumb system. It's an idea that seems great when you first encounter it, but it's proprietary in a way that hampers its utility, and is also impractical in actual operation.
jstarfish 9y ago
Smartphones are nightmarish enough in an actual emergency-- try unlocking your phone and calling 911 when you've got blood all over your hands, or you're actively sinking in a submerged vehicle in a dark and frozen lake. Or if fluids get into the TFT, good luck getting the screen to stay on long enough for you to press anything at all. There are better ways. Government has the money to arm police with grenade launchers and MRAPs. The telcos have no end of cash from mobile data exploitation. Nobody is suffering except the people. Spend the money. Fix the goddamn infrastructure.
- Washuu 9y ago
  I have found that touch screens work pretty well when covered in blood. Using my phone is the last thing I would be doing in a sinking vehicle and preferably outside of the vehicle.
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    > I have found that touch screens work pretty well when covered in blood. I haven't. The screen registered keypresses all over the place. It doesn't work reliably with wet hands either, or even in a steamy bathroom. > Using my phone is the last thing I would be doing in a sinking vehicle and preferably outside of the vehicle. Every situation is different. Revisit your strategy once the car has already slipped under the ice and started to drift. The cabin is filling with freezing water but you still have some oxygen left. You won't be able to make any calls once you break the window and go underwater, so you better hope you can find/reach the spot where you broke through the ice...in the dark. I personally knew someone who drowned under these circumstances. (And the saddest part is, even though she accurately reported her location, responders showed up instead where E911 said she was...an entire county away.) At the very least, you should be able to just call 911 and engage no further. It should be broadcasting your exact GPS coordinates. To the dispatcher, the pinpoint on the map in the middle of a body of water should speak for itself.
- azinman2 9y ago
  You don’t need to unlock to call 911. But clearly if the phone isn’t working or you can’t press buttons then it’s a problem.
52-6F-62 9y ago
A bit off topic, but thanks for the link to what3words It's a great idea. Commenting from near concerts.also.could
- hrrsn 9y ago
  It's an interesting concept! Hello from term.dame.hurt (Auckland).
- tgsovlerkhgsel 9y ago
  Great idea but it's easy to mistake stutters.screening.somehow for stutter.screening.somehow, and it gets worse when you consider words that are pronounced similarly but spelled very differently. If the similar words are indeed spread far apart, and not random, that might work OK, but adding a checkword, or more words with fewer different variants, could help here. It's also a commercial, closed standard (https://what3words.com/pricing/ https://what3words.com/pricing/) which is as good as a death sentence for adoption.
api_or_ipa 9y ago
Seems like a great hackathon idea. You could even build it as a webapp and target all your major platforms at once. I'm going to give this a crack while I'm sitting at the hospital.
Simulacra 9y ago
That's a very fascinating idea. Also might that same button turn on all tracking and signal pinging. I wonder if it's been considered but has not been implemented due to mistaken buttons pressed
api_or_ipa 9y ago
Whipped this up in a few hours. While I was writing it I realized it's pretty non-trivial to figure out a nearby address using google maps. Maybe there really is a good use case for this. https://myaddr.io/ https://myaddr.io/

joering2 9y ago

Here is your answer: > That way no 911 center needs to upgrade and no telcos need to change infrastructure. If you ever touched upon how government bureaucracy works you will immediately realize the more taxpayers money spent the "better". Of course Im not for it, I'm just playing devil's advocate.

passivepinetree 9y ago

I had never heard of what3words before. It's a super cool and potentially incredibly useful idea. I wonder how they manage altitude (would a cave underground have the same 3 words as the patch of surface above it?). I also wonder how this is a monetizable product that warrants a company behind it. It seems like it'd be a perfect fit for open source work. Thanks for letting me know!

Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
Indeed, it's entirely proprietary. Being able to get deliveries to your house shouldn't be dependent on someone paying a royalty to a startup.
stevefeinstein 9y ago
> potentially incredibly useful idea Do you really want to depend on a startup's ability to keep their service running and well funded to the location needs of emergency services? Unless they donate the grid and word associations to the public domain, it's a bad idea to use proprietary data sources for emergency services especially since there's nothing wrong with longitude and latitude, and humans really don't need to be able to read it, computers do just fine with it.
ReverseCold 9y ago
Also patented WO2014170646 A1, as such is unusable by everyone except dominoes. Hooray. They also actively takedown similar projects.
pwinnski 9y ago
Aside from the fact, already highlighted by other commenters, that this is a proprietary system operated by a company that actively protects their IP, I think it's also a terrible idea. As you noticed, it does not differentiate based on height, so the ballyhooed deliveries would require two addresses to find an appropriate suite number in an office building, but more importantly, their app is required in real-time to find anything. Given an address like 123 Main St, I know that I can find Main Street, and then head in one direction or the other to find 123. Given an address that is three arbitrary words tells me absolutely nothing about where that is in relation to me. Zip, zero, zilch. Only an app, or a clumsy proprietary printed map, can help me. Even then, anything other than following arrows on screen is a genuinely ugly experience. A public, open address of the traditional variety lets one get close, then closer, and zoom in based on the address alone. In the US, for example, you can first read the country, then the state, then the city, then the street, and finally the street number. It's all stored pretty efficiently in a standardized address. This dumb system loses all of that, but they claim it's better for places that lack standardized addresses. Of course, we already have a system for that: latitude and longitude. The advantage of the public, open lat+long system is that, again, you can generalize and approximate at first, and then add more decimal points when it matters. There is no way to do this with this dumb system. It's an idea that seems great when you first encounter it, but it's proprietary in a way that hampers its utility, and is also impractical in actual operation.

jstarfish 9y ago

Smartphones are nightmarish enough in an actual emergency-- try unlocking your phone and calling 911 when you've got blood all over your hands, or you're actively sinking in a submerged vehicle in a dark and frozen lake. Or if fluids get into the TFT, good luck getting the screen to stay on long enough for you to press anything at all. There are better ways. Government has the money to arm police with grenade launchers and MRAPs. The telcos have no end of cash from mobile data exploitation. Nobody is suffering except the people. Spend the money. Fix the goddamn infrastructure.

Washuu 9y ago
I have found that touch screens work pretty well when covered in blood. Using my phone is the last thing I would be doing in a sinking vehicle and preferably outside of the vehicle.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  > I have found that touch screens work pretty well when covered in blood. I haven't. The screen registered keypresses all over the place. It doesn't work reliably with wet hands either, or even in a steamy bathroom. > Using my phone is the last thing I would be doing in a sinking vehicle and preferably outside of the vehicle. Every situation is different. Revisit your strategy once the car has already slipped under the ice and started to drift. The cabin is filling with freezing water but you still have some oxygen left. You won't be able to make any calls once you break the window and go underwater, so you better hope you can find/reach the spot where you broke through the ice...in the dark. I personally knew someone who drowned under these circumstances. (And the saddest part is, even though she accurately reported her location, responders showed up instead where E911 said she was...an entire county away.) At the very least, you should be able to just call 911 and engage no further. It should be broadcasting your exact GPS coordinates. To the dispatcher, the pinpoint on the map in the middle of a body of water should speak for itself.
azinman2 9y ago
You don’t need to unlock to call 911. But clearly if the phone isn’t working or you can’t press buttons then it’s a problem.

52-6F-62 9y ago

A bit off topic, but thanks for the link to what3words It's a great idea. Commenting from near concerts.also.could

hrrsn 9y ago
It's an interesting concept! Hello from term.dame.hurt (Auckland).
tgsovlerkhgsel 9y ago
Great idea but it's easy to mistake stutters.screening.somehow for stutter.screening.somehow, and it gets worse when you consider words that are pronounced similarly but spelled very differently. If the similar words are indeed spread far apart, and not random, that might work OK, but adding a checkword, or more words with fewer different variants, could help here. It's also a commercial, closed standard (https://what3words.com/pricing/ https://what3words.com/pricing/) which is as good as a death sentence for adoption.

api_or_ipa 9y ago

Seems like a great hackathon idea. You could even build it as a webapp and target all your major platforms at once. I'm going to give this a crack while I'm sitting at the hospital.

Simulacra 9y ago

That's a very fascinating idea. Also might that same button turn on all tracking and signal pinging. I wonder if it's been considered but has not been implemented due to mistaken buttons pressed

api_or_ipa 9y ago

Whipped this up in a few hours. While I was writing it I realized it's pretty non-trivial to figure out a nearby address using google maps. Maybe there really is a good use case for this. https://myaddr.io/ https://myaddr.io/