And somehow teenagers across the world search out pictures of all the things you listed just to see what they're all about. Hell, there were a few kids in my old hometown who got arrested for possession of child pornography after they had a sort of "competition" to see which of them could find the most disgusting thing online, luckily for them it was obvious that this wasn't a gang of "teenage child rapists" or anything of the sort but rather just a few kids who were trying to gross each other out and ended up overstepping that invisible line in the sand (Murder videos? Ok. Videos of sex with animals? Perfectly legal. Various people hurting themselves in horrible ways? Sure, why not. Naked children? CUFF 'EM BOYS!)
I've seen this kind of thing before. In the Scandinavian countries there was (and probably is) a service that went by the initials BBB. This was apparently 10mbits DSL and this was back in like 2001, when such a thing was pretty rare. However I found that any transfer to them was dog slow. Basically, they only got those rates internally. Because of this they noted their connection as being BBB and tended to share files among themselves largely.
Actually, back then the main attraction of BBB (Bredbandsbolaget, "The broadband company") was that they would install 10/10 Mbps ethernet connections directly into apartment buildings in exchange for being the exclusive provider and back in those days most people would use Direct Connect and connect to hubs that were on the same network as they were regardless of their ISP so it made sense to a lot of their customers to use BBB over an ADSL ISP with better peering arrangements since the upload was better than it was for a g.dmt DSL connection (8/0.8 vs. 10/10).
That said, these days BBB isn't nearly as dominant in the "real broadband" market as they were, in fact these days I'd describe them as a tiny minority player compared to the open city nets where you find ISPs like TeliaSonera, Bahnhof and many others with a much better reputation than BBB (There will always be complaints about TeliaSonera since they have their old state-owned Televerket legacy reputation but when it comes to connection quality and peering they're top notch compared to many others).
A big part of why BBB used to be so big was that a lot of the other ISPs were busy trying to squeeze more and more speed out of their DSL networks but for the last 4-5 years it seems "everyone" has begun to realize that those who were investing in FTTH were right, there are limits to what the PSTN wiring is capable of.
The EU is not a nation, most ISPs do not freely operate across the borders of different European countries (although some do operate in neighboring countries, like Telenor in Sweden and Norway and TeliaSonera in Finland and Sweden).
Also, by lumping all of Europe together you're basically trying to lower the higher speeds of some countries by throwing them in with low performers like Greece, Spain and Italy (I don't think most europeans needed netindex.com to know that these guys have fairly crappy internet infrastructure, anyone who's ever been there on vacation could tell you that, to paraphrase a description of Italy from a swede who went there a few years ago "Italy is like being in the dark ages with mopeds and indoor plumbing that occasionally works, I will never understand how these people made it into the G8").
Ok, so how come us Swedes mostly started to go online in the mid-90s (using regular old dialup), then everyone but the college students who were on 10 Mbps SUNET connections switched to ADSL (at that time mostly g.dmt) or DOCSIS connections, then "everyone" switched to ADSL2+ and the DOCSIS networks began to disappear (except ComHem who kept upping the speed of their network to stay competitive) and the whole time fiber connections have become more and more common (ten years ago 10/10 Mbps was the "standard" for what you could get with a fiber connection, today it's 100/100 Mbps with some people having access to 1000/1000 Mbps)?
By your reasoning we should all still be stuck on dialup or first-gen (g.dmt) ADSL. Especially when you consider our low population density...
What if I took a picture of you in the bar and uploaded it to the internet without your knowledge, your boss saw it and fired you?
What if your boss walked by the bar and peeked in through a window and saw you?
What if you did absolutely nothing illegal and you also did this perfectly legal thing in your own time? Why should your boss have any right to fire you over what you do in your own time?
Probably not since that person is clearly either seriously ill or on some serious stimulants since he/she is able to forgo sleep in favor of deliberately trying to make his/her employer look bad. OTOH, it's McDonald's and considering their record as an employer it's probably expected of at least a few of their employees to publicly rant about their horrible employer (those of my friends in high school who worked at McDonald's restaurants always had lots of good reason to avoid eating at or working for McDonald's).
Yes, private in the same sense as if you were to decide to go to a bar and have a few drinks with your friends while not working it would still be a "private" event in the sense that her employer would have little grounds for firing you even using the "but anyone could see him/her in the bar and we don't condone binge drinking here! We have to protect our corporate image!" argument. Once you're off the clock it is your private time to do with as you please (unless you're getting paid to be on call).
So I assume she was getting paid for those 16 hours of every weekday (and 48 hours of weekends every week) where she was required to abide by some company "behaviour code"?
I was sooo glad when I moved into an area where I could get service from Internode -- "If it speaks TCP/IP and it works for you, it works for us, too." Heaven.
The downside to policies like that is of course obvious if you've ever worked tech support for an ISP, you get some pretty scary setups that people are trying to bring online. I really didn't mind the truly insane stuff like the guys with 15 year old Amiga towers running some binary hacked version of AmigaOS and various hacked together pieces of hardware, at least those guys knew what they were doing (even if their hardware and software did strange things), it was the guy running Mac OS 9 with IE5 or Win95 OSR2 with Netscape 4.x that hurt, because while the former guys were well aware of just how crazy they were the latter group tended to fly into rants about how their 30 year old car still ran like a charm so why wouldn't a ten year old computer work as well as a new one (to those about to tell me that getting OS 9 or Win95 online really isn't that hard, well no, it isn't, not if you're at the machine, it's got all the necessary drivers and a somewhat fresh operating system install, if you're trying to guide someone who hates computers with a vengeance over the phone and he's using a computer that's been mismanaged since the first day he owned it, yeah, good luck with that).
An all-wireless internet is not "the future" no matter how many times the "omg it has noe wiers!!!1" crowd say it is.
Show me a stable 10 Gbps transatlantic connection using satellites that requires little to no maintenance and which doesn't risk randomly interfering with other links (or being interfered with by other links) and I'll believe it's getting close. Until then fiber is still king no matter how much some people scream about "wireless!!1" like it's the second coming of christ.
I didn't blame the tools and since asking you to re-read my post will probably do nothing I'll try to explain it.
Certain tools are more dangerous than others. Few people can cause large-scale damage with a screwdriver but most people can do serious damage with a few sticks of dynamite even though both can be equally useful for different purposes. A bit extreme perhaps but the point is that VBScript is not a very good language for apps that you wish to keep maintaining and adding features to, add into this the fact that it is often mandated from above ("You will use this dynamite when erecting the wall, I don't care if you think a hammer is a better tool, I'm the CxO DAMNIT!"). These business applications also tend to be built according to specifications which are missing crucial features and when upper management realize that features are missing they feel that "it's just a few lines of code" so they allocate one or two programmers to add the feature with a three day deadline even though properly implementing the feature would require more programmers several weeks in order to properly restructure the code, instead you end up with ugly hacks. After a few years this codebase begins to look like a building held together by twine, duct tape and the occasional 2-by-4 hammered in place just to keep a wall from falling down. Now when you're working with a codebase like this it tends to get to the point where you end up accepting that things will break when you fix other things because all the different parts seem to be connected in the strangest way ("Why does the foo module crash when we fix the divide by zero bug in the bar module?" "Oh yeah, I think a couple of years ago someone decided to use part of the bar module for some of the foo processing to check if the input data was erronous").
Basically, the tool may not be useless but when coupled with an environment in which the tool is only being used "because I say so" and there is never enough time to do stuff properly certain tools can definitely be more dangerous than others (IMO one of the advantages of object oriented languages and designs is that with a proper base design it is a lot easier to keep parts of an application separate from each other which makes rewriting only part of the app easier).
An example of a typical "VBScript horror" is the "include-o-mania" I mentioned, this was also common with a lot of non-OO PHP code. Basically you'd have programmers put dozens of include statements in their code in the fashion I detailed above which made the code close to unreadable. While the language may not have outright encouraged this it sure made it tempting.
You're assuming that the original design isn't an organically grown mess of code that's grown and mutated over the last 10+ years (this is pretty common on the business world), preferably written in some proprietary and deprecated language (ASP + VBScript is a current classic, most likely pushed to the company as a good "business language" by some MS sales drone). After ten years of "organic" growth of such apps cleaning them up generally takes longer than just rebuilding from scratch in a sane language with proper separation of presentation, business logic and data storage, exporting the database to the new database and calling it a day. Really, I've done this more than once and sometimes these code bases end up so rotten that it's painful to fix minor bugs, stuff that should take thirty minutes ends up taking the better part of a day because the entire codebase is a total mess with include-o-mania run wild (anyone remember that from the PHP3 days as well? lots of if(condition) { include("filename.php"); } crap that almost impossible to follow).
Actually, from what I got from the article it seems they also felt that the basic design of the original version of application just wasn't good enough, that it was in fact seriously lacking and that a gradual rewrite would take longer and not accomplish what they wanted (to clean up and future-proof their application).
First mover advantage (especially in information technology) is never as powerful as one thinks it is. I mean, look at IBM. Sure, they invented the x86 personal computer, but they quickly lost the market to companies like Compaq and Dell, who looked and saw the mistakes that IBM made. Given that, the way Facebook has managed to stay in the lead against all its competition (e.g. MySpace, Friendster, and even newer competitors, like Google Buzz) is truly impressive.
Of course, Facebook wasn't first. There were community websites with all the features Facebook had when it "took off" years before Facebook existed. Facebook didn't really create anything new, they just happened to manage to snag a large part of the market. As an example of one of the multitude of reasons why lots of people joined FB, here in Sweden most people seem to already be members of at least a couple of other community websites but in order to communicate with their foreign friends they sign up for FB since it's "not myspace" (around here the only opinion I've heard about myspace (except from musicians) is that it's for 13 year-olds, people looking for 13 year-olds to sleep with and garage bands) and their foreign friends have Facebook accounts. However, most people I know don't consider Facebook their "primary" community website, just the one where everyone is, it's the lowest common denominator.
The idea is to limit the number of purchases that a single customer can make. It's sort of hard to sell a hundred iPads on eBay or to people in other countries when you're only able to buy two of them yourself (yes, obviously it's probably possible to use several credit cards or have your friends buy iPads but I think this should be seen as more of a way to eliminate the low hanging fruit to discourage the casual opportunists).
I think what macinnisrr meant were all those "artists" who showed up with some generic dance/love song that just followed the formula for what was popular at that particular point in time. If you look at the singles charts those are the songs that tend to be the majority at any given time. A lot of times these people would get one or two albums out the door, with maybe three or four songs worth listening to.
Not to mention the electronic music craze of the 90's. I'm kind of sad that this went away, while a lot of the mainstream stuff was crap it at least had the advantage of the non-mainstream artists sounding as good as or better than the mainstream ones. Something which just isn't true when it comes to most "regular" music, a lot of times what makes one musician stand out as "better" is simply more time and money spent on the studio recording.
Did you notice the word "hits"? A lot of the hits of the 90s can easily be emulated on any home computer these days, there's even software specifically tailored for non-musicians that easily creates generic-sounding popular music. Just add some random vocals about love, hate or some other common pop music theme, run the vocals through autotune and you're about done.
But how much fun have you had? And I don't mean "watch the game while drinking an ice cold beer straight out of the fridge", I mean "hitchhike to a festival 300 miles away with nothing but the clothes on your body and a couple of bottles of homemade wine...<Insert six days of madness>".
Well, to be honest Facebook really wasn't the first "community" website, or the first site to have the features that it has, it just happened to manage to become the biggest.
Personally I don't mind congratulating and rewarding whoever first came up with an idea (although almost everything "new" is built on what came before it in one way or another, I doubt there was some caveman who woke up one morning, had some leftovers from yesterday's hunt and then figured out the theory of relativity) but why should we all smile and pretend we admire Zuckerberg just because his site happened to become the biggest? By the same logic no one should be criticizing Microsoft because they, after all, managed to become the biggest. Or IBM for that matter, or any other industrial, political or military giants. Hell, we should all have been congratulating the soviets on a job well done when their nuclear arsenal surpassed the US one (and if some brownnosing people had their way we'd also be rewriting the history books to ignore any US achievements in building nuclear weapons that came prior to the soviet equivalents).
A lot of what is considered "business savvy" these days is really just a matter of some decent knowledge of a subject (but not "OMG NEW EINSTEIN!!1" knowledge, just solid knowledge) combined with luck and timing (and you can get lucky when it comes to the timing, your idea might have been tried by some other guy a year ago when the market wasn't ready for it but now the market is ready for it and since you were unaware of the other guy's failure you take another stab at it, or maybe you simply took longer to complete your product/service and the other guy was actually better than you but ignored by customers/users because the market wasn't ready yet, just because you're "first to market" isn't a guaranteed path to profit).
So compile on another machine. Not good enough? Write your toolchain (assembler in machine code, compiler in assembler and finally another competent compiler that uses your original compiler).
Also, one way or another you can produce a "clean" system that you can use for going through the system you suspect has something evil hidden in it, it's just not practical due to the enormous amount of software a modern operating system contains...
Anyway, I still feel that OS X is better than Windows in that sense since it does give you access to the source (so as long as you have a clean system with a clean compiler capable of cross-compiling you could go through the source instead of being forced to use a disassembler or debugger).
Well, at least large chunks of OS X are open source (and I don't mean "Pay us lots of money and promise to never even think of what you saw and we'll let you have the source", I mean GPL, LGPL, BSD and a few other real open source licenses. Here you go).
The issue here is apparently that there is a lower limit for severity of a crime before the extradition treaty "kicks in" and there are a lot of people who are arguing that the claimed damage i vastly exaggerated (that pretty much any cost related to the systems in question in any way since he first connected to them is being thrown into the alleged damage he made).
To try to come up with a serious answer to your post...
I've found that the amount of swearing and choice of curse words is strongly linked to socioeconomic background. I know plenty of people from typical working class backgrounds who despite having college educations, high IQs, large vocabularies and all the necessary tools for swear-free communication will still curse a lot more than other friends who come from the middle or upper classes of society, they also tend to use simpler swear words with more direct "force" behind them.
Someone from the upper class is more likely to avoid swearing in general and will most likely often try to vary him-/herself when swearing while someone with a working class background is more likely to just blurt out "fuck", "fuck you", "fuck it", "ah fuck", "fuck this shit" and so on.
Also, since language in general is very context-dependent it is likely that using "fuck", "shit", "cunt" or another swear word in a sentence will not distort the message enough for it to be unintelligible.
Of course, this whole fucking post is based on a big pile of anecdotal shit.
Slashdot Mirror
And somehow teenagers across the world search out pictures of all the things you listed just to see what they're all about. Hell, there were a few kids in my old hometown who got arrested for possession of child pornography after they had a sort of "competition" to see which of them could find the most disgusting thing online, luckily for them it was obvious that this wasn't a gang of "teenage child rapists" or anything of the sort but rather just a few kids who were trying to gross each other out and ended up overstepping that invisible line in the sand (Murder videos? Ok. Videos of sex with animals? Perfectly legal. Various people hurting themselves in horrible ways? Sure, why not. Naked children? CUFF 'EM BOYS!)
What country would this be Mr. Troll? Because my income tax is a lot less than 80%, I'm actually pretty certain that it's somewhere around 35%.
I've seen this kind of thing before. In the Scandinavian countries there was (and probably is) a service that went by the initials BBB. This was apparently 10mbits DSL and this was back in like 2001, when such a thing was pretty rare. However I found that any transfer to them was dog slow. Basically, they only got those rates internally. Because of this they noted their connection as being BBB and tended to share files among themselves largely.
Actually, back then the main attraction of BBB (Bredbandsbolaget, "The broadband company") was that they would install 10/10 Mbps ethernet connections directly into apartment buildings in exchange for being the exclusive provider and back in those days most people would use Direct Connect and connect to hubs that were on the same network as they were regardless of their ISP so it made sense to a lot of their customers to use BBB over an ADSL ISP with better peering arrangements since the upload was better than it was for a g.dmt DSL connection (8/0.8 vs. 10/10).
That said, these days BBB isn't nearly as dominant in the "real broadband" market as they were, in fact these days I'd describe them as a tiny minority player compared to the open city nets where you find ISPs like TeliaSonera, Bahnhof and many others with a much better reputation than BBB (There will always be complaints about TeliaSonera since they have their old state-owned Televerket legacy reputation but when it comes to connection quality and peering they're top notch compared to many others).
A big part of why BBB used to be so big was that a lot of the other ISPs were busy trying to squeeze more and more speed out of their DSL networks but for the last 4-5 years it seems "everyone" has begun to realize that those who were investing in FTTH were right, there are limits to what the PSTN wiring is capable of.
The EU is not a nation, most ISPs do not freely operate across the borders of different European countries (although some do operate in neighboring countries, like Telenor in Sweden and Norway and TeliaSonera in Finland and Sweden).
Also, by lumping all of Europe together you're basically trying to lower the higher speeds of some countries by throwing them in with low performers like Greece, Spain and Italy (I don't think most europeans needed netindex.com to know that these guys have fairly crappy internet infrastructure, anyone who's ever been there on vacation could tell you that, to paraphrase a description of Italy from a swede who went there a few years ago "Italy is like being in the dark ages with mopeds and indoor plumbing that occasionally works, I will never understand how these people made it into the G8").
Ok, so how come us Swedes mostly started to go online in the mid-90s (using regular old dialup), then everyone but the college students who were on 10 Mbps SUNET connections switched to ADSL (at that time mostly g.dmt) or DOCSIS connections, then "everyone" switched to ADSL2+ and the DOCSIS networks began to disappear (except ComHem who kept upping the speed of their network to stay competitive) and the whole time fiber connections have become more and more common (ten years ago 10/10 Mbps was the "standard" for what you could get with a fiber connection, today it's 100/100 Mbps with some people having access to 1000/1000 Mbps)?
By your reasoning we should all still be stuck on dialup or first-gen (g.dmt) ADSL. Especially when you consider our low population density...
What if I took a picture of you in the bar and uploaded it to the internet without your knowledge, your boss saw it and fired you?
What if your boss walked by the bar and peeked in through a window and saw you?
What if you did absolutely nothing illegal and you also did this perfectly legal thing in your own time? Why should your boss have any right to fire you over what you do in your own time?
Probably not since that person is clearly either seriously ill or on some serious stimulants since he/she is able to forgo sleep in favor of deliberately trying to make his/her employer look bad. OTOH, it's McDonald's and considering their record as an employer it's probably expected of at least a few of their employees to publicly rant about their horrible employer (those of my friends in high school who worked at McDonald's restaurants always had lots of good reason to avoid eating at or working for McDonald's).
Yes, private in the same sense as if you were to decide to go to a bar and have a few drinks with your friends while not working it would still be a "private" event in the sense that her employer would have little grounds for firing you even using the "but anyone could see him/her in the bar and we don't condone binge drinking here! We have to protect our corporate image!" argument. Once you're off the clock it is your private time to do with as you please (unless you're getting paid to be on call).
So I assume she was getting paid for those 16 hours of every weekday (and 48 hours of weekends every week) where she was required to abide by some company "behaviour code"?
I was sooo glad when I moved into an area where I could get service from Internode -- "If it speaks TCP/IP and it works for you, it works for us, too." Heaven.
The downside to policies like that is of course obvious if you've ever worked tech support for an ISP, you get some pretty scary setups that people are trying to bring online. I really didn't mind the truly insane stuff like the guys with 15 year old Amiga towers running some binary hacked version of AmigaOS and various hacked together pieces of hardware, at least those guys knew what they were doing (even if their hardware and software did strange things), it was the guy running Mac OS 9 with IE5 or Win95 OSR2 with Netscape 4.x that hurt, because while the former guys were well aware of just how crazy they were the latter group tended to fly into rants about how their 30 year old car still ran like a charm so why wouldn't a ten year old computer work as well as a new one (to those about to tell me that getting OS 9 or Win95 online really isn't that hard, well no, it isn't, not if you're at the machine, it's got all the necessary drivers and a somewhat fresh operating system install, if you're trying to guide someone who hates computers with a vengeance over the phone and he's using a computer that's been mismanaged since the first day he owned it, yeah, good luck with that).
An all-wireless internet is not "the future" no matter how many times the "omg it has noe wiers!!!1" crowd say it is.
Show me a stable 10 Gbps transatlantic connection using satellites that requires little to no maintenance and which doesn't risk randomly interfering with other links (or being interfered with by other links) and I'll believe it's getting close. Until then fiber is still king no matter how much some people scream about "wireless!!1" like it's the second coming of christ.
I didn't blame the tools and since asking you to re-read my post will probably do nothing I'll try to explain it.
Certain tools are more dangerous than others. Few people can cause large-scale damage with a screwdriver but most people can do serious damage with a few sticks of dynamite even though both can be equally useful for different purposes. A bit extreme perhaps but the point is that VBScript is not a very good language for apps that you wish to keep maintaining and adding features to, add into this the fact that it is often mandated from above ("You will use this dynamite when erecting the wall, I don't care if you think a hammer is a better tool, I'm the CxO DAMNIT!"). These business applications also tend to be built according to specifications which are missing crucial features and when upper management realize that features are missing they feel that "it's just a few lines of code" so they allocate one or two programmers to add the feature with a three day deadline even though properly implementing the feature would require more programmers several weeks in order to properly restructure the code, instead you end up with ugly hacks. After a few years this codebase begins to look like a building held together by twine, duct tape and the occasional 2-by-4 hammered in place just to keep a wall from falling down. Now when you're working with a codebase like this it tends to get to the point where you end up accepting that things will break when you fix other things because all the different parts seem to be connected in the strangest way ("Why does the foo module crash when we fix the divide by zero bug in the bar module?" "Oh yeah, I think a couple of years ago someone decided to use part of the bar module for some of the foo processing to check if the input data was erronous").
Basically, the tool may not be useless but when coupled with an environment in which the tool is only being used "because I say so" and there is never enough time to do stuff properly certain tools can definitely be more dangerous than others (IMO one of the advantages of object oriented languages and designs is that with a proper base design it is a lot easier to keep parts of an application separate from each other which makes rewriting only part of the app easier).
An example of a typical "VBScript horror" is the "include-o-mania" I mentioned, this was also common with a lot of non-OO PHP code. Basically you'd have programmers put dozens of include statements in their code in the fashion I detailed above which made the code close to unreadable. While the language may not have outright encouraged this it sure made it tempting.
You're assuming that the original design isn't an organically grown mess of code that's grown and mutated over the last 10+ years (this is pretty common on the business world), preferably written in some proprietary and deprecated language (ASP + VBScript is a current classic, most likely pushed to the company as a good "business language" by some MS sales drone). After ten years of "organic" growth of such apps cleaning them up generally takes longer than just rebuilding from scratch in a sane language with proper separation of presentation, business logic and data storage, exporting the database to the new database and calling it a day. Really, I've done this more than once and sometimes these code bases end up so rotten that it's painful to fix minor bugs, stuff that should take thirty minutes ends up taking the better part of a day because the entire codebase is a total mess with include-o-mania run wild (anyone remember that from the PHP3 days as well? lots of if(condition) { include("filename.php"); } crap that almost impossible to follow).
Actually, from what I got from the article it seems they also felt that the basic design of the original version of application just wasn't good enough, that it was in fact seriously lacking and that a gradual rewrite would take longer and not accomplish what they wanted (to clean up and future-proof their application).
They can't do that, that would be illegal (since the pirate party is a political party).
First mover advantage (especially in information technology) is never as powerful as one thinks it is. I mean, look at IBM. Sure, they invented the x86 personal computer, but they quickly lost the market to companies like Compaq and Dell, who looked and saw the mistakes that IBM made. Given that, the way Facebook has managed to stay in the lead against all its competition (e.g. MySpace, Friendster, and even newer competitors, like Google Buzz) is truly impressive.
Of course, Facebook wasn't first. There were community websites with all the features Facebook had when it "took off" years before Facebook existed. Facebook didn't really create anything new, they just happened to manage to snag a large part of the market. As an example of one of the multitude of reasons why lots of people joined FB, here in Sweden most people seem to already be members of at least a couple of other community websites but in order to communicate with their foreign friends they sign up for FB since it's "not myspace" (around here the only opinion I've heard about myspace (except from musicians) is that it's for 13 year-olds, people looking for 13 year-olds to sleep with and garage bands) and their foreign friends have Facebook accounts. However, most people I know don't consider Facebook their "primary" community website, just the one where everyone is, it's the lowest common denominator.
The idea is to limit the number of purchases that a single customer can make. It's sort of hard to sell a hundred iPads on eBay or to people in other countries when you're only able to buy two of them yourself (yes, obviously it's probably possible to use several credit cards or have your friends buy iPads but I think this should be seen as more of a way to eliminate the low hanging fruit to discourage the casual opportunists).
I think what macinnisrr meant were all those "artists" who showed up with some generic dance/love song that just followed the formula for what was popular at that particular point in time. If you look at the singles charts those are the songs that tend to be the majority at any given time. A lot of times these people would get one or two albums out the door, with maybe three or four songs worth listening to.
Not to mention the electronic music craze of the 90's. I'm kind of sad that this went away, while a lot of the mainstream stuff was crap it at least had the advantage of the non-mainstream artists sounding as good as or better than the mainstream ones. Something which just isn't true when it comes to most "regular" music, a lot of times what makes one musician stand out as "better" is simply more time and money spent on the studio recording.
Did you notice the word "hits"? A lot of the hits of the 90s can easily be emulated on any home computer these days, there's even software specifically tailored for non-musicians that easily creates generic-sounding popular music. Just add some random vocals about love, hate or some other common pop music theme, run the vocals through autotune and you're about done.
But how much fun have you had? And I don't mean "watch the game while drinking an ice cold beer straight out of the fridge", I mean "hitchhike to a festival 300 miles away with nothing but the clothes on your body and a couple of bottles of homemade wine...<Insert six days of madness>".
Well, to be honest Facebook really wasn't the first "community" website, or the first site to have the features that it has, it just happened to manage to become the biggest.
Personally I don't mind congratulating and rewarding whoever first came up with an idea (although almost everything "new" is built on what came before it in one way or another, I doubt there was some caveman who woke up one morning, had some leftovers from yesterday's hunt and then figured out the theory of relativity) but why should we all smile and pretend we admire Zuckerberg just because his site happened to become the biggest? By the same logic no one should be criticizing Microsoft because they, after all, managed to become the biggest. Or IBM for that matter, or any other industrial, political or military giants. Hell, we should all have been congratulating the soviets on a job well done when their nuclear arsenal surpassed the US one (and if some brownnosing people had their way we'd also be rewriting the history books to ignore any US achievements in building nuclear weapons that came prior to the soviet equivalents).
A lot of what is considered "business savvy" these days is really just a matter of some decent knowledge of a subject (but not "OMG NEW EINSTEIN!!1" knowledge, just solid knowledge) combined with luck and timing (and you can get lucky when it comes to the timing, your idea might have been tried by some other guy a year ago when the market wasn't ready for it but now the market is ready for it and since you were unaware of the other guy's failure you take another stab at it, or maybe you simply took longer to complete your product/service and the other guy was actually better than you but ignored by customers/users because the market wasn't ready yet, just because you're "first to market" isn't a guaranteed path to profit).
So compile on another machine. Not good enough? Write your toolchain (assembler in machine code, compiler in assembler and finally another competent compiler that uses your original compiler).
Also, one way or another you can produce a "clean" system that you can use for going through the system you suspect has something evil hidden in it, it's just not practical due to the enormous amount of software a modern operating system contains...
Anyway, I still feel that OS X is better than Windows in that sense since it does give you access to the source (so as long as you have a clean system with a clean compiler capable of cross-compiling you could go through the source instead of being forced to use a disassembler or debugger).
Is Mac OS any better? (falls over laughing)
Well, at least large chunks of OS X are open source (and I don't mean "Pay us lots of money and promise to never even think of what you saw and we'll let you have the source", I mean GPL, LGPL, BSD and a few other real open source licenses. Here you go).
The issue here is apparently that there is a lower limit for severity of a crime before the extradition treaty "kicks in" and there are a lot of people who are arguing that the claimed damage i vastly exaggerated (that pretty much any cost related to the systems in question in any way since he first connected to them is being thrown into the alleged damage he made).
To try to come up with a serious answer to your post...
I've found that the amount of swearing and choice of curse words is strongly linked to socioeconomic background. I know plenty of people from typical working class backgrounds who despite having college educations, high IQs, large vocabularies and all the necessary tools for swear-free communication will still curse a lot more than other friends who come from the middle or upper classes of society, they also tend to use simpler swear words with more direct "force" behind them.
Someone from the upper class is more likely to avoid swearing in general and will most likely often try to vary him-/herself when swearing while someone with a working class background is more likely to just blurt out "fuck", "fuck you", "fuck it", "ah fuck", "fuck this shit" and so on.
Also, since language in general is very context-dependent it is likely that using "fuck", "shit", "cunt" or another swear word in a sentence will not distort the message enough for it to be unintelligible.
Of course, this whole fucking post is based on a big pile of anecdotal shit.