Maybe, just maybe, subjects like math will not be overly politicized.
Obviously you haven't heard of things like the New Math, where math curricula were suddenly changed to emphasize abstract math concepts at an earlier age, supposedly in order to prepare more students to go to college in science and math. Why? Because of the Space Race and the Soviet threat.
So, unfortunately, math curricula are not immune either.
You might think that such moves are less distressing, since students are still getting good information in math classes, just a different emphasis. The problem is that in most states the math curriculum never recovered. Students today tend to learn very little practical math that might actually be useful in their lives (which was something distinctly emphasized earlier in the 20th century). I say this as someone who taught high school math and science for a few years. There were "application" courses for math that were supposed to teach practical skills, but they were thought of as the "dumb classes" and usually were taught by the worst teachers.
Meanwhile, some of my algebra II students could barely do basic arithmetic. (By basic, I mean things like 5 + 7.) Out of 140 or so students I taught my first year, only 2 of them knew what compound interest even was. Certainly none of them understood how it actually worked, or how it affected savings plans, loans and mortgages, etc. Many of these students were seniors in high school. Unfortunately, because of the state curriculum, I was forced to teach them a bunch of useless higher math skills (like putting the equation of a hyperbola in standard form) -- six weeks on abstract manipulation of conic section equations, but nothing in the curriculum that stated that exponential equations should cover practical issues like loans, interest, etc.
Most of this is the way it is because of the "new math" reforms... all because of politics. And how many people aren't able to manage their finances today because they are innumerate as a result of emphasizing abstract math over practical application?
$100 is obscene for a kitchen knife. A good kitchen knife is much cheaper than a pocket knife that is built well enough to be worth using. Your analogy fails.
You obviously know nothing about knives. Can you get a "decent" kitchen knife for a few bucks? Sure, but you're limiting yourself to a pretty small range of acceptable knives, and most of them aren't designed for heavy-duty use. I've tried a lot of knives, and I know of only one company that manufactures decent kitchen knives cheaply (and they're not for everyone, because they're very light and feel "cheap" even though the blades are high quality). Good quality chef's knives generally start around $50 and go up from there.
If you cook a lot, you want a better tool -- particularly a chef's knife, which can be used for about 85% of kitchen tasks. Better quality knives can be less fatiguing to use, stay sharper longer, can sometimes stand up to greater stress for use in more tasks (this is particularly true of chef's knives, which are multipurpose), and are generally more durable.
Of course, you have to know how to use a knife and know how to pick one appropriate for yourself and your needs in order to reap these benefits.
$100 for a chef's knife is about mid-range for a professional, about what your standard professional-grade knives cost from the major European and Japanese manufacturers. Some people prefer fancy handmade Japanese knives (which tend to be manufactured to be super hard and thus can hold a thin, razor-sharp edge, but are more brittle), and those can run hundreds of dollars. Personally, I don't think these are worth it, but I don't judge those who buy them, because I know they have certain features that some people may want.
You may not need these features, but that doesn't mean that some professionals who use that tool for 8 hours/day don't... or even some skilled home users who appreciate them.
True, but professional chefs will tell you that the $80 set is subpar, even if it came from the same factory. They will argue some stuff about design, ergonomics, balance, control and maneuverability. Stuff that I don't really understand: for me $80 set is just fine and I don't see any advantage.
This is a bit misleading.
I'm not a professional chef, but I do a lot of cooking. I spent a lot of time doing research, corresponding and talking to knife retailers, and even chatting with a few friends who are trained chefs before I bought my current knives.
Anyhow, the point is, I did spend a lot more than $80 on my knives. But I could also point to a collection of knives available for about $80 that even my professional chef friends say are fantastic for home use.
People are picky about various things. Balance used to be highly prized for example, and classic European knives still are, but various Japanese knives that are now the rage in professional circles aren't generally "balanced" in the normal sense. (Many "balanced" knives are full-tang and have full bolsters; full-tang isn't really necessary to create a sturdy knife, and full bolsters get in the way of efficient sharpening.) Ergonomics? Classic knife designs for high-end knives weren't particularly ergonomic; chefs often resort to filing down the spine of their knives (for example) to make them more comfortable. Control and maneuverability? You have a point there, but these two goals are generally antithetical -- heftier knives are generally easier to control, while very light blades are quick for maneuvering. For most knives, it's a trade-off.
All of that said, professionals all want various things and are willing to pay a premium for them. If all you want is a sharp, resilient blade manufactured to reasonably consistent quality standards, you can get them for $5-20 depending on the type of knife (about $80 per set).
But they do notice the difference. And they know what they are talking about: after all they use the tool all day long.
Ah... and there we see the difference. People who use tools "all day long" often care about particular features that are completely unnecessary (and perhaps worthless or even a negative) to those who use those tools occasionally and/or are less experienced.
welcome to the world - where marketeering, self-proclaimed experts and buzzwords matter more than content and reality.
There, fixed that for ya. There's nothing special about the "world of today."
Content and reality never really mattered to most people. Whether it was some random religious guy or a snake oil salesman, people have always believed just about anything if it was said with authority and/or marketed well.
Finale and sibelius are the best, but not even they are used to produce the music sold by most publishers. The result simply isn't good enough.
Yes, of course you're right. I brought them up because they're the most common apps familiar to home users. Many professional publishers use true layout apps, sort of like doing Lilypond free-form "without a net." Like most word processors, Finale and Sibelius have the problem that they are trying to do too many things -- composition, music editing, playback, sound synthesis/sampling and even editing in output, etc. as well as music typesetting. It's pretty hard to duplicate the output of a skilled engraver who knows how to tweak a score for best readability.
Wikipedia has made me hate those two words. Not because citing sources is bad, but Wikipedia has turned it into a parody. If you look at a real encyclopedia, it will contain a rather original text written in encyclopedic style. If you took such an article and pasted into Wikipedia you'd get dozens of [citation needed] because not every other sentence has one. Meanwhile you can pretty much load it with all the bias you want just by using biased sources despite the NPOV policy.
I absolutely agree with this. The current policy makes it really hard to fight internet memes dealing with obscure topics, for example. There are some things that get discussed a lot on the internet, but mainstream scholarly views aren't as easy to find online, either because no real scholar much cares about the topic or because the standard interpretation is taken to be so self-evident that no scholar ever questions it. On Wikipedia, though, online sources tend to be the most common citations. If you're lucky, you might be able to find some readily available print resource with the right information, if you're unlucky, you might not even be able to find that... particularly if it's an assumption that scholars simply take for granted.
I've seen completely wacky ideas remain part of Wikipedia articles for many years, and when someone would come along and try to question them, they'd be shouted down by a bunch of editors who believed it because the article had always been that way. Outside of mainstream science and math, most obscure disciplines have lacked a lot of expert editors until the past 2-3 years, so there's still a lot of this crap in articles on history, the arts, etc.
First-hand experience is not appropriate for Wikipedia at all, regardless of how good it is. That's because there's no way for anyone later to verify your friend's level of experience. All information on Wikipedia is supposed to be cited (or common knowledge). Do you really think it would be a good idea to just trust all contributors who claim to have knowledge of some subject?
I noted your disclaimer at the end of your post, but your response makes certain assumptions that are often part of the problem in Wikipedia editor discussions. The GP didn't really say his friend was contributing "original research" (according to the Wikipedia definition), only that perhaps his friend who was actually from a country might be able to contribute something useful to an article on that country compared to some random guy from some random place who isn't an expert on the country. While it's inappropriate to cite first-hand experience in Wikipedia, it's also important to know a lot about a topic in order to sort through the best secondary and tertiary sources.
Again, like you, I don't know the specifics. But while I have seen plenty of fights happen on Wikipedia due to people asserting stuff that would fall under "original research," my sense is that those problems are less common now than they were when Wikipedia was new and "[citation needed]" tags weren't everywhere on most articles.
For the past couple years, the larger problem (in my experience) is little fiefdoms that some Wikipedia editors have created for themselves, where they view themselves as curators over a particular article or even a whole subdiscipline. The problem with many of these people is that they just happened to get on Wikipedia in the early days and happened to have a little more knowledge in a particular area than most. Then, in the past 2-3 years when Wikipedia has gone more mainstream, and more actual experts are trying to contribute, conflicts emerge between people who actually know about something and people who just have been around for a while.
This isn't something you see on the most popular articles, but in specialized areas, there's a real tension between these two groups. I don't know for sure about the GP's situation, but it sounds more like one where two editors are just fighting over content without proper references or whatever, and the GP was asserting that one person actually had more experience with the topic. For all we know, the random guy could have been the one doing "original research" in this situation, and the Georgian friend could have been correcting misinformation.
I find your assumptions about this situation to be interesting, though.
While I certainly applaud the effort to create a music-editing program in an HTML5 app, this is far from "beautifully rendered music notation."
Basically, from the "demo," we can see that he's managed to map music glyphs onto staves. That's barely "music notation," and it certainly isn't "beautiful" yet. As others have pointed out, there doesn't seem to be a lot of attention paid to spacing, sizing, general layout, etc.
I'm not saying it isn't promising, but if music notation were easy to do well, a few applications like Finale and Sibelius wouldn't have a complete lock on the professional market. Lilypond is the only good open-source alternative I know of, but it isn't WYSIWYG, and I don't know of a free WYSIWYG music notation program with high quality output, i.e., the kind that a professional musician would like to use.
Calling this "beautifully rendered music notation" and saying this guy has a "music notation engraver" is sort of like saying that somebody who built a basic text editor that outputs plain text without formatting has created a "publishing application" that "renders beautiful typeset prose."
- What proportion of users really care about the finesse of the layout? Most people are happy with MS Word's typesetting, and don't really notice the improvement in a TeX typeset document, for example.
I'll admit that it does take a trained eye to actually spot the differences in a TeX output versus something crappy from Word. But much of the improvement with TeX, though subtle, can actually facilitate reading. I don't know if those effects are really large enough to measure well, though. I notice them because I know they are there.
Music notation is a different animal. You can usually read text at your leisure, and if you misread something the first time, you can go back and read it again. With music notation, you should be able to read it accurately in real time, and that means any little thing that you stumble over can be an annoyance to a performer. Suddenly, you feel the need to mark up the score to point out that sharp you missed, the extra beat that was obscured by poor spacing, etc.
Obviously, standard notation applications have been producing crap layout for decades, so I suppose people have gotten used to it. But I have done a lot of work with Finale and Sibelius (for example), and I've used music typesetters that are better at spacing (e.g., Lilypond). The Lilypond output actually is easier for me to play from, even in pieces I've written or know really well. Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, but I have a lot of friends who are professional musicians that have agreed (even if they use Finale or Sibelius themselves because they are easily available and WYSIWYG). Finale and Sibelius have gotten a lot better over the past decade, but a lot of that improvement has to do with better automatic spacing algorithms.
Likewise, both the Twitter-derived sentiments and the traditional polls reflected declining approval of President Obama's job performance during 2009, with a 72 percent correlation between them.
Okay... not a great correlation, but let's continue....
But the researchers found that their sentiment analysis did not correlate as well with election polling during 2008. For instance, increased mentions of "Obama" tended to correlate with rises in Barack Obama's polling numbers, but increased mentions of "McCain" also correlated with rises in Obama's popularity.
WTF? Is all of this built on how many times "Obama" or "McCain" is uttered on Twitter? And, given the obvious skewed demographics on Twitter (i.e., younger people, which tended to poll way toward Obama), increased conversations about McCain probably were bad in general.
Well, how do they explain this? Ah, the next sentence....
Improved computational methods for understanding natural language, particularly the unusual lexicon of microblogs, will be necessary before Twitter feeds can be reliably mined to predict elections, the researchers concluded.
Ah yes, the "unusual lexicon of microblogs," which probably consisted of sentiments like "I luv Obama!" and "McCain too old - WTF?"
Perhaps if they bothered to measure more than "mentions" of a candidates name, the data might have some (albeit still vague) meaning...
If this is the best stuff from the study which they actually mention in a press release, how much crap results are they not reporting?
It would be nice if they could make the effort to implement a touch based layout without biasing against lefties. This is a significant annoyance especially with traditional mouse oriented controls like scroll bars. To do this right requires a design that minimizes the occurrence of the hand covering the screen while performing touch operations.
I'm having trouble thinking of what features you could be talking about other than the common right scrollbar. (Scroll bars themselves aren't biased; bottom scroll bars are equalled "biased" toward lefties and righties.)
No other feature is "biased" in touchscreen operation against lefties. If you want to hit a start button in Windows, access most menus in the generic form of Gnome or KDE, access most menus in most applications on any platform, hit the navigation buttons in a browser windows, etc., etc., you'd have to hit the left side of the screen, which requires a "reachover" for righties.
In fact, as I look at my current screen and think of most of the screen layouts in most OSes and applications I've used, if anything, almost everything is on the LEFT side of the screen.
That said, I agree that the vertical scrollbar is one of the most common things you'd want to use while you're actually reading content, so I can see why moving that to the left side of the screen might be an advantage for some.
On the other hand, most of these interfaces really aren't that hard to do with both hands. I'm primarily right-handed, but switched to left mouse over a decade ago (for various reasons). It wasn't hard; it took maybe a week or two before I was perfectly comfortable. Try using the scroll-bar with your right hand... it really isn't that difficult.
This is pretty much what happened when Nader "spoiled" the vote for Gore in Florida back in 2000. Even if you discount the whole recount issue, if Nader hadn't been running most of his votes would have likely gone to Gore (both being liberals), and Gore would have easily won the state and the election.
Wow. Still this crap 10 years out. I'm no Nader fan, but the logic of this argument is (and has always been) preposterous. Nader didn't "spoil" anything. Gore did. To wit:
Gore needed 0.5% of Nader's votes to win. But Gore needed only 0.01% of Bush's votes. Which would be easier? Getting 1 out of 200 people dedicated enough to a third-party candidate to buck the mainstream, or 1 out of 10,000 random sheep who chose one of the two main candidates by default?
Also, 12% of registered Florida Democrats voted for Bush (roughly 200,000 voters). If Gore had succeeded in getting even 1 out of 1000 of these Democratic defectors from his own party to vote for him, he could have won Florida. Many more Democrats voted for Bush than all of Nader's votes combined (including Democrats, Republicans, and independents who voted for Nader).
The simple fact is that Nader's group of voters was tiny compared to the amount of Democratic defectors to Bush.
You don't get it. The fact is that elections are also lost by candidates who lose votes, including those from their own party. That was a hell of a lot more significant in Florida than Nader's "spoiling" effect. And given how many defectors were already present in Gore's own party (which dwarfed the Nader vote), how can you be so certain that if the entire election were run without Nader, a majority of the Nader voters would have gone to Gore?
The myth of the Nader "spoil effect" is just another way the Democrats have tried to blame their losses on someone else -- "It wasn't our candidate's fault -- it was... uh... Nader! Er... uh... the Supreme Court!" Sure, we might have created a different outcome by disenfranchising millions of voters nationwide who wanted an alternative to the two majority parties... or Democrats could have just had a candidate that would have caused about 0.1% fewer people to defect to Bush from his own party.
Plain ASCII txt comes to mind. Works on anything as far as I know.
Yeah, if you only need 128 characters, about a quarter of which are mostly obsolete control characters.
If you need to write in a language other than English (or even use foreign terms in an English text, with accents and such), you'll need something a little better, like unicode-based plain text.
But I take your point -- plain text using an international standard works pretty well for the vast majority of documents, though making it look pretty can take a tiny bit of work if you actually want to read long sections of it.
It's only recently that we have opposing views in media that expose the bias.
Really? Most major cities in the U.S. (and elsewhere) have had competing newspapers for centuries, some of which tend to be associated with liberal biases, some with conservative, some with other views. About a century ago, huge syndicates started growing that created a system where many papers nationwide were owned by the same person or corporation. It's not surprising that such mass media markets all got similar news when they were owned by the same company. Smaller independent papers couldn't compete, so we lost the diversity of news sources somewhat in the early 1900s.
Nevertheless, most major cities maintained at least two newspapers that had contrasting political viewpoints.
Since we now have differing views on different channels, we can compare them and the bias becomes obvious.
I think what you're referring to is the Fairness Doctrine, large sections of which were repealed in the 1980s. This only applied to broadcast media, and it actually required opposing viewpoints to be considered on the same channel. Of course, one of the major impacts of this rule was that extremist views tended to be avoided in broadcast media, since it was too hard to be "fair" to all extremist positions. Repeal of some provisions of this resulted in a more fragmented broadcast media with more extreme positions.
Nevertheless, the point is that this only ever applied to broadcast media. You could always have alternative newspapers with different perspectives, for example, and these have always existed.
When all the media is saying the same thing, bias is harder to spot. It gets accepted as truth by default. [...] Getting the same story from different views is a good thing.
While I agree with the basic principle here (since I too like reading the same story from different views), the majority of people seem to gravitate toward news sources that agree with their own personal biases. So, rather than educating the public in terms of a reasoned debate (which is what the "Fairness Doctrine" was supposed to do), we have a system that allows people to get their news from sources that already agree with them. People end up reinforcing their own biases, and those biases can grow stronger and more extreme.
I'm not saying we should go back to the older system, but the current system doesn't completely solve the problem you bring up -- and arguably, it tends to make the news media more fragmented and more extremist, which obviously trickles down to listeners/viewers.
While technically the law does prohibit it, racial profiling is what is actually happening
And how is this different from the situation before the law was passed? If you've been following the exploits of Sheriff Joe Arpaio for the past few years, you know that some jurisdictions in Arizona have been doing this for years.
The only thing the law did was take a practice that was already happening and put a little more legal force behind it. (Previously, many people suspected of being illegal immigrants were arrested for being "co-conspirators" with those who smuggled them across the border, and smuggling people into the U.S. was already a crime under Arizona law, as it is under federal law.)
Jurisdictions that were already doing this will keep doing it; those that weren't, probably won't start in earnest just because of this law.
So, if anything, the main impact of this law is to make the issue into a national one, which is bringing attention to a practice that was already happening and which some people condemn as discriminatory. If you're against the principle behind the law, isn't it better to call attention to the practice rather than to let it happen quietly under legal technicalities?
Not, let me grab some popcorn before the shrieking begins from both sides. What a perfect compromise candidate - everyone will hate her.
There are more than two "sides."
For example, the Sartorial Extremists already hate her for refusing to wear morning dress when she was arguing before the Supreme Court -- thus denying them the satisfaction of being able to point to the Solicitor General as the last outpost in American public life for the morning coat and striped trousers.
She's already killed formal daytime attire. Heavens! Who knows what will happen when she becomes a justice... you think Rehnquist's gold stripes were crazy? Look out....
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Almost five years ago I bought an ultraportable convertible notebook. I still use it sometimes. It weighs about 2 lbs., it has a touchscreen, it can switch back and forth between "laptop" mode (with the keyboard available and screen in landscape) and "tablet" mode (defaulting to touchscreen, screen in portrait, etc.).
I can't do econometric analysis or write software on my ipad, but I don't intend to. I sure as hell can surf the web, watch movies, answer emails, etc.
I could do all of that 5 years ago. In tablet mode, I could surf the web navigating by touchscreen, take notes with a stylus, read eBooks and PDFs (and take notes on top of the latter), etc. AND I had a built-in keyboard in case I actually wanted to do some serious typing. If I wanted, I could have just bought a tablet PC at that time which would have been able to do all the things you mention. It just missed a few aspects of the iPad's slick interface, but it did what you say... FIVE YEARS AGO.
Of course, that computer was about triple the price of the iPad, though tablet PCs at that time were cheaper. New computers are cheaper and faster (my new netbook also weighs about 2 lbs. and is more powerful than my 5-year-old ultraportable, but it only cost $250), but the idea that something like the iPad was "inconceivable 3 years ago"?!? It not only was conceivable -- it was widely available, just at a slightly more premium price and without the Apple coolness factor.
But political persecution of scientists is bad... like 15th century Vatican bad.
Umm... can you name the scientists who were persecuted by the Vatican in the 1400s? Throughout most of the middle ages and early Renaissance, the Catholic Church was a primary sponsor of scientific and technological research.
Perhaps you're thinking of a few incidents in the 17th century (Galileo, Bruno, etc.)? Two hundred years give-or-take... who cares....
I can only speak for myself, but if you want to read a text, you read it? Any child should intuitively turn the illustrations off, or simply ignore them if they are distracting.
While I'd like to agree with you (because personally I do "turn the illustrations off" for myself as well), it doesn't work that way for a lot of (most?) adults, let alone distractable children.
To take an even more subtle example, I have a lot of academic friends who hate footnotes, particularly those that provide more than a reference. Why? Because they are -- supposedly -- distracting. I would think by the time that a person had achieved a doctorate in the humanities (for example), they'd have enough self-discipline that they could just read the text without getting distracted by little superscript numbers. But apparently, according to many of my friends, they just can't ignore them... and a number of them actually are on a mission to eradicate footnotes for this reason.
While there are various arguments for and against the use of footnotes, I find this one to be the one most of friends complain about the most. If they can't ignore little superscript numbers and other text at the bottom of the page, what hope do these people have for avoiding illustrations, must less entertaining interactive ones??
Facebook is successful because they have sold young people the illusion that they are engaging in a fundamentally new form of socialization. They are not. They are hanging out with their friends just as people have done for 200,000 years or more, its just that the generational window dressing has changed.
While you started out okay, this is just nonsense. I'm no fan of Facebook or any other new "social media" devices (I'm the kind of guy who only takes his cell phone with him when there's an actual important reason to have it), but if you want to claim that there's nothing different about new social media, you're also living with your own illusions.
Those who claim that the means of communication (voice v. sms v. email v. blog v. etc. etc.) makes the difference are deluding themselves.
While to some extent, I understand where you're coming from here, this is simply wrong. Cheap nationwide telephone plans in your example didn't give people the ability to broadcast their ideas -- whether short (Twitter, etc.) or long (blog) to potentially millions of people. Studies have been posted here about how teenagers send each other thousands of texts each month on average -- many send at least 100 per day, and some of them send as many as 500 per day. Thousands of such interactions does not actually do the same thing as a couple intimate conversations from a social standpoint. And some interact on Facebook that much as well.
I very, very rarely post anything on Facebook, but when I do, I usually have a few out of my hundreds of "friends" say something in response. This includes a lot of people I haven't seen in years, people I'd never pick up the phone to call... in essence, people I sort of know, but people I wouldn't really call my "friends" in the real world. Yet they will respond to something I say, and if I were to post updates about my life, they might read them, etc. Keeping up hundreds of "friendships" in the real world is next to impossible, but now you can keep hundreds of connections active -- or at least broadcast your thoughts to hundreds of them. Generally, someone's out there listening.
And I'm someone who's notorious as never being on Facebook. For my close friends who are, these sorts of interactions are happening all the time.
If you don't see the difference between hanging out with maybe a dozen close friends in long personal conversations versus having 140-character or so interactions with hundreds or even thousands of people who tune in and out as they wish, well, I don't know what to say.
It's sort of like comparing a search engine to traditional reference materials. In Google, I can search thousands or millions of resources instantly. Or I could look up things in the dozen or so books on my shelf. If I have thousands of resources instantly at my fingertips, the way I use it will be different (I'll look for smaller, more specific bits of things) than if I only have a few books (I'd be likely to read longer passages to get greater context, be dependent on a few limited authorities on a topic, etc.). Social interaction on Facebook does a similar thing -- and it is different from "hanging out with your friends."
I am NOT registered on any of those site ! so how do they keep track of me ? it's not cookies and it's not IP...
Assuming they are actually tracking you, are you sure it isn't cookies of some sort? Unless you're doing something like running Firefox with NoScript (to stop random scripts running and doing random things), RequestPolicy (to control the requests sent between websites and the interactions between them), some cookie manager that goes beyond basic browser settings to really limit cookie use (like CookieSafe), BetterPrivacy (to disable Flash cookies), etc., etc., etc. you kind of have to assume you're being tracked by something.
Or you can have a virtual machine with only an OS and a browser installed, which you boot up only to browse the web. Each time you browse, you start the machine from the same original state and never save it... that way, you can be relatively sure random data isn't being stored on your machine to track you in any way. Of course, this also depends on disguising your IP as well.
It's not related to the World Wide Web, but you can use something called "e-mail" to send a private message to a specific recipient, and they can even reply back to you!
Yes -- and this is something I really don't get about Facebook. Once in a while, I have received messages through Facebook from people I don't know very well and who may not know my e-mail address directly in their address book.
But the majority of the "private messages" I get through Facebook are from people I know very well and have exchanged many e-mails with -- often people I've corresponded with by e-mail within the past few months, if not the past few days. Generally, I just respond by e-mail. Why give Facebook access to private correspondence?
I of course realize e-mail isn't private and shouldn't be treated that way, but I have greater confidence that my normal e-mail provider won't deliberately publish the content of my private messages to the entire internet without cause (like a legal investigation)... unlike all the information on Facebook, whose privacy policy seems to get weaker on an almost weekly basis.
I guess I can understand how some people see Facebook as a general replacement for a lot of interaction over the internet, but the friends who do this aren't the type who spend hours every day on Facebook.
Why would you send a private message through a third-party service like this if there's a reasonable standard alternative?
The problem is that here in the U.S. we have to be oh so politically correct at all times. We have to treat 74 year old white-haired grandmothers *exactly* the same way as we treat 20-something guys with a bread and a strong middle-eastern accent when everyone knows that the odds of someone from either of these two groups doing something harmful on a flight are massively skewed towards the latter group.
Except... it has little to do with being politically correct. It's actually the only way courts have allowed these searches to go around the Constitutional provisions against unreasonable searches. You just have to search everyone or at least make the searches random. If you start profiling people, then you're singling out people for searches without probable cause, and that's a legal no-no. You'd at least have to have a tip that someone matching that description were going to carry a weapon, or you'd have to notice something specific about the person that was suspicious.
Personally, I think the argument that searches are legal just because they are done to everyone is nonsense from a rights perspective. But if they started singling people out without any specific evidence for searching them, they'd definitely be ruled illegal... politically correct or not.
You're wrong, actually. There are special exemptions for border guards/customs to sieze and/or search everything on or including your person.
TSA != border guards/customs
If they were border guards, they might have a legitimate interest in preventing something from coming into a country -- whether it's tainted meat, produce, biological/chemical weapon, whatever.
TSA searches domestic as well as international flights, and asking a citizen to submit to a random search within the U.S. requires a (slightly) higher standard.
Except this lack of 'nit-picking' has real-world consequences. At the weekend I was reading a story in a newspaper where some real-world forensics investigators were complaining that shows like CSI have given the public the impression that they are magicians to the extent that juries are acquitting people because the police don't have a CSI-style case... after all, since they know from CSI that DNA sequencing only takes a few seconds, why don't the police have DNA evidence to prove that this guy is guilty? And why can't they get perfect fingerprints from objects where fingerprints can't possibly exist? CSI can get fingerprints from anything.
Agree completely with this -- a trend that has been noted by law enforcement for quite a few years now.
This post seems to have generated the typical Slashdot wisdom in replies about how all cops are corrupt, anything that makes it harder to convict is a good thing, better to let 100 guilty men free... etc.
At the risk of going against the mainstream here, I think the larger issue here is anything that tends to distort people's perception of the efficacy of various forensic or investigative procedures -- in EITHER direction.
For example, CSI may make it seem like DNA analysis is fast and easy, fingerprints are readily available, etc. But they also make hair and fiber analysis seem more convincing than it should be. The show doesn't consider the statistics or procedures involved in making any sort of match (DNA, fingerprint, fiber, bullet, etc.) with any degree of detail -- instead, the computer always just displays a magical number: "98% match" flashing or whatever. What does such a match mean? If you're talking about a city of a million people, and there's a 2% chance that this thing could match someone else, does that mean that there are 20,000 other suspects we should be looking at? Such questions are rarely addressed on CSI.
Basically, juries tend to overestimate the efficacy of many procedures, particularly traditional investigative "techniques" like eye-witness identification, handwriting analysis, etc. Most people think they understand how to recognize someone's face or writing or whatever, so they have an instinct about whether they should believe such evidence. (Even though their instincts are usually wrong.)
On the other hand, we don't have an intuition about how hard or easy it should be to match fingerprints or DNA or fibers or whatever, because most people don't have personal experience doing those things. When we have a popular TV show watched by a lot of potential jurors that pretends to show them a quasi-realistic portrayal of how such things are done, and yet represents them in a very misleading way, this is a real problem... whether it results in more or less convictions because of those distortions.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, just maybe, subjects like math will not be overly politicized.
Obviously you haven't heard of things like the New Math, where math curricula were suddenly changed to emphasize abstract math concepts at an earlier age, supposedly in order to prepare more students to go to college in science and math. Why? Because of the Space Race and the Soviet threat.
So, unfortunately, math curricula are not immune either.
You might think that such moves are less distressing, since students are still getting good information in math classes, just a different emphasis. The problem is that in most states the math curriculum never recovered. Students today tend to learn very little practical math that might actually be useful in their lives (which was something distinctly emphasized earlier in the 20th century). I say this as someone who taught high school math and science for a few years. There were "application" courses for math that were supposed to teach practical skills, but they were thought of as the "dumb classes" and usually were taught by the worst teachers.
Meanwhile, some of my algebra II students could barely do basic arithmetic. (By basic, I mean things like 5 + 7.) Out of 140 or so students I taught my first year, only 2 of them knew what compound interest even was. Certainly none of them understood how it actually worked, or how it affected savings plans, loans and mortgages, etc. Many of these students were seniors in high school. Unfortunately, because of the state curriculum, I was forced to teach them a bunch of useless higher math skills (like putting the equation of a hyperbola in standard form) -- six weeks on abstract manipulation of conic section equations, but nothing in the curriculum that stated that exponential equations should cover practical issues like loans, interest, etc.
Most of this is the way it is because of the "new math" reforms... all because of politics. And how many people aren't able to manage their finances today because they are innumerate as a result of emphasizing abstract math over practical application?
$100 is obscene for a kitchen knife. A good kitchen knife is much cheaper than a pocket knife that is built well enough to be worth using. Your analogy fails.
You obviously know nothing about knives. Can you get a "decent" kitchen knife for a few bucks? Sure, but you're limiting yourself to a pretty small range of acceptable knives, and most of them aren't designed for heavy-duty use. I've tried a lot of knives, and I know of only one company that manufactures decent kitchen knives cheaply (and they're not for everyone, because they're very light and feel "cheap" even though the blades are high quality). Good quality chef's knives generally start around $50 and go up from there.
If you cook a lot, you want a better tool -- particularly a chef's knife, which can be used for about 85% of kitchen tasks. Better quality knives can be less fatiguing to use, stay sharper longer, can sometimes stand up to greater stress for use in more tasks (this is particularly true of chef's knives, which are multipurpose), and are generally more durable.
Of course, you have to know how to use a knife and know how to pick one appropriate for yourself and your needs in order to reap these benefits.
$100 for a chef's knife is about mid-range for a professional, about what your standard professional-grade knives cost from the major European and Japanese manufacturers. Some people prefer fancy handmade Japanese knives (which tend to be manufactured to be super hard and thus can hold a thin, razor-sharp edge, but are more brittle), and those can run hundreds of dollars. Personally, I don't think these are worth it, but I don't judge those who buy them, because I know they have certain features that some people may want.
You may not need these features, but that doesn't mean that some professionals who use that tool for 8 hours/day don't... or even some skilled home users who appreciate them.
True, but professional chefs will tell you that the $80 set is subpar, even if it came from the same factory. They will argue some stuff about design, ergonomics, balance, control and maneuverability. Stuff that I don't really understand: for me $80 set is just fine and I don't see any advantage.
This is a bit misleading.
I'm not a professional chef, but I do a lot of cooking. I spent a lot of time doing research, corresponding and talking to knife retailers, and even chatting with a few friends who are trained chefs before I bought my current knives.
Anyhow, the point is, I did spend a lot more than $80 on my knives. But I could also point to a collection of knives available for about $80 that even my professional chef friends say are fantastic for home use.
People are picky about various things. Balance used to be highly prized for example, and classic European knives still are, but various Japanese knives that are now the rage in professional circles aren't generally "balanced" in the normal sense. (Many "balanced" knives are full-tang and have full bolsters; full-tang isn't really necessary to create a sturdy knife, and full bolsters get in the way of efficient sharpening.) Ergonomics? Classic knife designs for high-end knives weren't particularly ergonomic; chefs often resort to filing down the spine of their knives (for example) to make them more comfortable. Control and maneuverability? You have a point there, but these two goals are generally antithetical -- heftier knives are generally easier to control, while very light blades are quick for maneuvering. For most knives, it's a trade-off.
All of that said, professionals all want various things and are willing to pay a premium for them. If all you want is a sharp, resilient blade manufactured to reasonably consistent quality standards, you can get them for $5-20 depending on the type of knife (about $80 per set).
But they do notice the difference. And they know what they are talking about: after all they use the tool all day long .
Ah... and there we see the difference. People who use tools "all day long" often care about particular features that are completely unnecessary (and perhaps worthless or even a negative) to those who use those tools occasionally and/or are less experienced.
welcome to the world - where marketeering, self-proclaimed experts and buzzwords matter more than content and reality.
There, fixed that for ya. There's nothing special about the "world of today."
Content and reality never really mattered to most people. Whether it was some random religious guy or a snake oil salesman, people have always believed just about anything if it was said with authority and/or marketed well.
Finale and sibelius are the best, but not even they are used to produce the music sold by most publishers. The result simply isn't good enough.
Yes, of course you're right. I brought them up because they're the most common apps familiar to home users. Many professional publishers use true layout apps, sort of like doing Lilypond free-form "without a net." Like most word processors, Finale and Sibelius have the problem that they are trying to do too many things -- composition, music editing, playback, sound synthesis/sampling and even editing in output, etc. as well as music typesetting. It's pretty hard to duplicate the output of a skilled engraver who knows how to tweak a score for best readability.
Wikipedia has made me hate those two words. Not because citing sources is bad, but Wikipedia has turned it into a parody. If you look at a real encyclopedia, it will contain a rather original text written in encyclopedic style. If you took such an article and pasted into Wikipedia you'd get dozens of [citation needed] because not every other sentence has one. Meanwhile you can pretty much load it with all the bias you want just by using biased sources despite the NPOV policy.
I absolutely agree with this. The current policy makes it really hard to fight internet memes dealing with obscure topics, for example. There are some things that get discussed a lot on the internet, but mainstream scholarly views aren't as easy to find online, either because no real scholar much cares about the topic or because the standard interpretation is taken to be so self-evident that no scholar ever questions it. On Wikipedia, though, online sources tend to be the most common citations. If you're lucky, you might be able to find some readily available print resource with the right information, if you're unlucky, you might not even be able to find that... particularly if it's an assumption that scholars simply take for granted.
I've seen completely wacky ideas remain part of Wikipedia articles for many years, and when someone would come along and try to question them, they'd be shouted down by a bunch of editors who believed it because the article had always been that way. Outside of mainstream science and math, most obscure disciplines have lacked a lot of expert editors until the past 2-3 years, so there's still a lot of this crap in articles on history, the arts, etc.
First-hand experience is not appropriate for Wikipedia at all, regardless of how good it is. That's because there's no way for anyone later to verify your friend's level of experience. All information on Wikipedia is supposed to be cited (or common knowledge). Do you really think it would be a good idea to just trust all contributors who claim to have knowledge of some subject?
I noted your disclaimer at the end of your post, but your response makes certain assumptions that are often part of the problem in Wikipedia editor discussions. The GP didn't really say his friend was contributing "original research" (according to the Wikipedia definition), only that perhaps his friend who was actually from a country might be able to contribute something useful to an article on that country compared to some random guy from some random place who isn't an expert on the country. While it's inappropriate to cite first-hand experience in Wikipedia, it's also important to know a lot about a topic in order to sort through the best secondary and tertiary sources.
Again, like you, I don't know the specifics. But while I have seen plenty of fights happen on Wikipedia due to people asserting stuff that would fall under "original research," my sense is that those problems are less common now than they were when Wikipedia was new and "[citation needed]" tags weren't everywhere on most articles.
For the past couple years, the larger problem (in my experience) is little fiefdoms that some Wikipedia editors have created for themselves, where they view themselves as curators over a particular article or even a whole subdiscipline. The problem with many of these people is that they just happened to get on Wikipedia in the early days and happened to have a little more knowledge in a particular area than most. Then, in the past 2-3 years when Wikipedia has gone more mainstream, and more actual experts are trying to contribute, conflicts emerge between people who actually know about something and people who just have been around for a while.
This isn't something you see on the most popular articles, but in specialized areas, there's a real tension between these two groups. I don't know for sure about the GP's situation, but it sounds more like one where two editors are just fighting over content without proper references or whatever, and the GP was asserting that one person actually had more experience with the topic. For all we know, the random guy could have been the one doing "original research" in this situation, and the Georgian friend could have been correcting misinformation.
I find your assumptions about this situation to be interesting, though.
While I certainly applaud the effort to create a music-editing program in an HTML5 app, this is far from "beautifully rendered music notation."
Basically, from the "demo," we can see that he's managed to map music glyphs onto staves. That's barely "music notation," and it certainly isn't "beautiful" yet. As others have pointed out, there doesn't seem to be a lot of attention paid to spacing, sizing, general layout, etc.
I'm not saying it isn't promising, but if music notation were easy to do well, a few applications like Finale and Sibelius wouldn't have a complete lock on the professional market. Lilypond is the only good open-source alternative I know of, but it isn't WYSIWYG, and I don't know of a free WYSIWYG music notation program with high quality output, i.e., the kind that a professional musician would like to use.
Calling this "beautifully rendered music notation" and saying this guy has a "music notation engraver" is sort of like saying that somebody who built a basic text editor that outputs plain text without formatting has created a "publishing application" that "renders beautiful typeset prose."
- What proportion of users really care about the finesse of the layout? Most people are happy with MS Word's typesetting, and don't really notice the improvement in a TeX typeset document, for example.
I'll admit that it does take a trained eye to actually spot the differences in a TeX output versus something crappy from Word. But much of the improvement with TeX, though subtle, can actually facilitate reading. I don't know if those effects are really large enough to measure well, though. I notice them because I know they are there.
Music notation is a different animal. You can usually read text at your leisure, and if you misread something the first time, you can go back and read it again. With music notation, you should be able to read it accurately in real time, and that means any little thing that you stumble over can be an annoyance to a performer. Suddenly, you feel the need to mark up the score to point out that sharp you missed, the extra beat that was obscured by poor spacing, etc.
Obviously, standard notation applications have been producing crap layout for decades, so I suppose people have gotten used to it. But I have done a lot of work with Finale and Sibelius (for example), and I've used music typesetters that are better at spacing (e.g., Lilypond). The Lilypond output actually is easier for me to play from, even in pieces I've written or know really well. Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, but I have a lot of friends who are professional musicians that have agreed (even if they use Finale or Sibelius themselves because they are easily available and WYSIWYG). Finale and Sibelius have gotten a lot better over the past decade, but a lot of that improvement has to do with better automatic spacing algorithms.
Umm... from TFA:
Likewise, both the Twitter-derived sentiments and the traditional polls reflected declining approval of President Obama's job performance during 2009, with a 72 percent correlation between them.
Okay... not a great correlation, but let's continue....
But the researchers found that their sentiment analysis did not correlate as well with election polling during 2008. For instance, increased mentions of "Obama" tended to correlate with rises in Barack Obama's polling numbers, but increased mentions of "McCain" also correlated with rises in Obama's popularity.
WTF? Is all of this built on how many times "Obama" or "McCain" is uttered on Twitter? And, given the obvious skewed demographics on Twitter (i.e., younger people, which tended to poll way toward Obama), increased conversations about McCain probably were bad in general.
Well, how do they explain this? Ah, the next sentence....
Improved computational methods for understanding natural language, particularly the unusual lexicon of microblogs, will be necessary before Twitter feeds can be reliably mined to predict elections, the researchers concluded.
Ah yes, the "unusual lexicon of microblogs," which probably consisted of sentiments like "I luv Obama!" and "McCain too old - WTF?"
Perhaps if they bothered to measure more than "mentions" of a candidates name, the data might have some (albeit still vague) meaning...
If this is the best stuff from the study which they actually mention in a press release, how much crap results are they not reporting?
It would be nice if they could make the effort to implement a touch based layout without biasing against lefties. This is a significant annoyance especially with traditional mouse oriented controls like scroll bars. To do this right requires a design that minimizes the occurrence of the hand covering the screen while performing touch operations.
I'm having trouble thinking of what features you could be talking about other than the common right scrollbar. (Scroll bars themselves aren't biased; bottom scroll bars are equalled "biased" toward lefties and righties.)
No other feature is "biased" in touchscreen operation against lefties. If you want to hit a start button in Windows, access most menus in the generic form of Gnome or KDE, access most menus in most applications on any platform, hit the navigation buttons in a browser windows, etc., etc., you'd have to hit the left side of the screen, which requires a "reachover" for righties.
In fact, as I look at my current screen and think of most of the screen layouts in most OSes and applications I've used, if anything, almost everything is on the LEFT side of the screen.
That said, I agree that the vertical scrollbar is one of the most common things you'd want to use while you're actually reading content, so I can see why moving that to the left side of the screen might be an advantage for some.
On the other hand, most of these interfaces really aren't that hard to do with both hands. I'm primarily right-handed, but switched to left mouse over a decade ago (for various reasons). It wasn't hard; it took maybe a week or two before I was perfectly comfortable. Try using the scroll-bar with your right hand... it really isn't that difficult.
This is pretty much what happened when Nader "spoiled" the vote for Gore in Florida back in 2000. Even if you discount the whole recount issue, if Nader hadn't been running most of his votes would have likely gone to Gore (both being liberals), and Gore would have easily won the state and the election.
Wow. Still this crap 10 years out. I'm no Nader fan, but the logic of this argument is (and has always been) preposterous. Nader didn't "spoil" anything. Gore did. To wit:
Gore needed 0.5% of Nader's votes to win. But Gore needed only 0.01% of Bush's votes. Which would be easier? Getting 1 out of 200 people dedicated enough to a third-party candidate to buck the mainstream, or 1 out of 10,000 random sheep who chose one of the two main candidates by default?
Also, 12% of registered Florida Democrats voted for Bush (roughly 200,000 voters). If Gore had succeeded in getting even 1 out of 1000 of these Democratic defectors from his own party to vote for him, he could have won Florida. Many more Democrats voted for Bush than all of Nader's votes combined (including Democrats, Republicans, and independents who voted for Nader).
The simple fact is that Nader's group of voters was tiny compared to the amount of Democratic defectors to Bush.
You don't get it. The fact is that elections are also lost by candidates who lose votes, including those from their own party. That was a hell of a lot more significant in Florida than Nader's "spoiling" effect. And given how many defectors were already present in Gore's own party (which dwarfed the Nader vote), how can you be so certain that if the entire election were run without Nader, a majority of the Nader voters would have gone to Gore?
The myth of the Nader "spoil effect" is just another way the Democrats have tried to blame their losses on someone else -- "It wasn't our candidate's fault -- it was... uh... Nader! Er... uh... the Supreme Court!" Sure, we might have created a different outcome by disenfranchising millions of voters nationwide who wanted an alternative to the two majority parties... or Democrats could have just had a candidate that would have caused about 0.1% fewer people to defect to Bush from his own party.
Plain ASCII txt comes to mind. Works on anything as far as I know.
Yeah, if you only need 128 characters, about a quarter of which are mostly obsolete control characters.
If you need to write in a language other than English (or even use foreign terms in an English text, with accents and such), you'll need something a little better, like unicode-based plain text.
But I take your point -- plain text using an international standard works pretty well for the vast majority of documents, though making it look pretty can take a tiny bit of work if you actually want to read long sections of it.
It's only recently that we have opposing views in media that expose the bias.
Really? Most major cities in the U.S. (and elsewhere) have had competing newspapers for centuries, some of which tend to be associated with liberal biases, some with conservative, some with other views. About a century ago, huge syndicates started growing that created a system where many papers nationwide were owned by the same person or corporation. It's not surprising that such mass media markets all got similar news when they were owned by the same company. Smaller independent papers couldn't compete, so we lost the diversity of news sources somewhat in the early 1900s.
Nevertheless, most major cities maintained at least two newspapers that had contrasting political viewpoints.
Since we now have differing views on different channels, we can compare them and the bias becomes obvious.
I think what you're referring to is the Fairness Doctrine, large sections of which were repealed in the 1980s. This only applied to broadcast media, and it actually required opposing viewpoints to be considered on the same channel. Of course, one of the major impacts of this rule was that extremist views tended to be avoided in broadcast media, since it was too hard to be "fair" to all extremist positions. Repeal of some provisions of this resulted in a more fragmented broadcast media with more extreme positions.
Nevertheless, the point is that this only ever applied to broadcast media. You could always have alternative newspapers with different perspectives, for example, and these have always existed.
When all the media is saying the same thing, bias is harder to spot. It gets accepted as truth by default. [...] Getting the same story from different views is a good thing.
While I agree with the basic principle here (since I too like reading the same story from different views), the majority of people seem to gravitate toward news sources that agree with their own personal biases. So, rather than educating the public in terms of a reasoned debate (which is what the "Fairness Doctrine" was supposed to do), we have a system that allows people to get their news from sources that already agree with them. People end up reinforcing their own biases, and those biases can grow stronger and more extreme.
I'm not saying we should go back to the older system, but the current system doesn't completely solve the problem you bring up -- and arguably, it tends to make the news media more fragmented and more extremist, which obviously trickles down to listeners/viewers.
While technically the law does prohibit it, racial profiling is what is actually happening
And how is this different from the situation before the law was passed? If you've been following the exploits of Sheriff Joe Arpaio for the past few years, you know that some jurisdictions in Arizona have been doing this for years.
The only thing the law did was take a practice that was already happening and put a little more legal force behind it. (Previously, many people suspected of being illegal immigrants were arrested for being "co-conspirators" with those who smuggled them across the border, and smuggling people into the U.S. was already a crime under Arizona law, as it is under federal law.)
Jurisdictions that were already doing this will keep doing it; those that weren't, probably won't start in earnest just because of this law.
So, if anything, the main impact of this law is to make the issue into a national one, which is bringing attention to a practice that was already happening and which some people condemn as discriminatory. If you're against the principle behind the law, isn't it better to call attention to the practice rather than to let it happen quietly under legal technicalities?
Not, let me grab some popcorn before the shrieking begins from both sides. What a perfect compromise candidate - everyone will hate her.
There are more than two "sides."
For example, the Sartorial Extremists already hate her for refusing to wear morning dress when she was arguing before the Supreme Court -- thus denying them the satisfaction of being able to point to the Solicitor General as the last outpost in American public life for the morning coat and striped trousers.
She's already killed formal daytime attire. Heavens! Who knows what will happen when she becomes a justice... you think Rehnquist's gold stripes were crazy? Look out....
The ipad wasn't even conceivable 3 years ago.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Almost five years ago I bought an ultraportable convertible notebook. I still use it sometimes. It weighs about 2 lbs., it has a touchscreen, it can switch back and forth between "laptop" mode (with the keyboard available and screen in landscape) and "tablet" mode (defaulting to touchscreen, screen in portrait, etc.).
I can't do econometric analysis or write software on my ipad, but I don't intend to. I sure as hell can surf the web, watch movies, answer emails, etc.
I could do all of that 5 years ago. In tablet mode, I could surf the web navigating by touchscreen, take notes with a stylus, read eBooks and PDFs (and take notes on top of the latter), etc. AND I had a built-in keyboard in case I actually wanted to do some serious typing. If I wanted, I could have just bought a tablet PC at that time which would have been able to do all the things you mention. It just missed a few aspects of the iPad's slick interface, but it did what you say... FIVE YEARS AGO.
Of course, that computer was about triple the price of the iPad, though tablet PCs at that time were cheaper. New computers are cheaper and faster (my new netbook also weighs about 2 lbs. and is more powerful than my 5-year-old ultraportable, but it only cost $250), but the idea that something like the iPad was "inconceivable 3 years ago"?!? It not only was conceivable -- it was widely available, just at a slightly more premium price and without the Apple coolness factor.
But political persecution of scientists is bad... like 15th century Vatican bad.
Umm... can you name the scientists who were persecuted by the Vatican in the 1400s? Throughout most of the middle ages and early Renaissance, the Catholic Church was a primary sponsor of scientific and technological research.
Perhaps you're thinking of a few incidents in the 17th century (Galileo, Bruno, etc.)? Two hundred years give-or-take... who cares....
I can only speak for myself, but if you want to read a text, you read it? Any child should intuitively turn the illustrations off, or simply ignore them if they are distracting.
While I'd like to agree with you (because personally I do "turn the illustrations off" for myself as well), it doesn't work that way for a lot of (most?) adults, let alone distractable children.
To take an even more subtle example, I have a lot of academic friends who hate footnotes, particularly those that provide more than a reference. Why? Because they are -- supposedly -- distracting. I would think by the time that a person had achieved a doctorate in the humanities (for example), they'd have enough self-discipline that they could just read the text without getting distracted by little superscript numbers. But apparently, according to many of my friends, they just can't ignore them... and a number of them actually are on a mission to eradicate footnotes for this reason.
While there are various arguments for and against the use of footnotes, I find this one to be the one most of friends complain about the most. If they can't ignore little superscript numbers and other text at the bottom of the page, what hope do these people have for avoiding illustrations, must less entertaining interactive ones??
Facebook is successful because they have sold young people the illusion that they are engaging in a fundamentally new form of socialization. They are not. They are hanging out with their friends just as people have done for 200,000 years or more, its just that the generational window dressing has changed.
While you started out okay, this is just nonsense. I'm no fan of Facebook or any other new "social media" devices (I'm the kind of guy who only takes his cell phone with him when there's an actual important reason to have it), but if you want to claim that there's nothing different about new social media, you're also living with your own illusions.
Those who claim that the means of communication (voice v. sms v. email v. blog v. etc. etc.) makes the difference are deluding themselves.
While to some extent, I understand where you're coming from here, this is simply wrong. Cheap nationwide telephone plans in your example didn't give people the ability to broadcast their ideas -- whether short (Twitter, etc.) or long (blog) to potentially millions of people. Studies have been posted here about how teenagers send each other thousands of texts each month on average -- many send at least 100 per day, and some of them send as many as 500 per day. Thousands of such interactions does not actually do the same thing as a couple intimate conversations from a social standpoint. And some interact on Facebook that much as well.
I very, very rarely post anything on Facebook, but when I do, I usually have a few out of my hundreds of "friends" say something in response. This includes a lot of people I haven't seen in years, people I'd never pick up the phone to call... in essence, people I sort of know, but people I wouldn't really call my "friends" in the real world. Yet they will respond to something I say, and if I were to post updates about my life, they might read them, etc. Keeping up hundreds of "friendships" in the real world is next to impossible, but now you can keep hundreds of connections active -- or at least broadcast your thoughts to hundreds of them. Generally, someone's out there listening.
And I'm someone who's notorious as never being on Facebook. For my close friends who are, these sorts of interactions are happening all the time.
If you don't see the difference between hanging out with maybe a dozen close friends in long personal conversations versus having 140-character or so interactions with hundreds or even thousands of people who tune in and out as they wish, well, I don't know what to say.
It's sort of like comparing a search engine to traditional reference materials. In Google, I can search thousands or millions of resources instantly. Or I could look up things in the dozen or so books on my shelf. If I have thousands of resources instantly at my fingertips, the way I use it will be different (I'll look for smaller, more specific bits of things) than if I only have a few books (I'd be likely to read longer passages to get greater context, be dependent on a few limited authorities on a topic, etc.). Social interaction on Facebook does a similar thing -- and it is different from "hanging out with your friends."
I am NOT registered on any of those site ! so how do they keep track of me ? it's not cookies and it's not IP...
Assuming they are actually tracking you, are you sure it isn't cookies of some sort? Unless you're doing something like running Firefox with NoScript (to stop random scripts running and doing random things), RequestPolicy (to control the requests sent between websites and the interactions between them), some cookie manager that goes beyond basic browser settings to really limit cookie use (like CookieSafe), BetterPrivacy (to disable Flash cookies), etc., etc., etc. you kind of have to assume you're being tracked by something.
Or you can have a virtual machine with only an OS and a browser installed, which you boot up only to browse the web. Each time you browse, you start the machine from the same original state and never save it... that way, you can be relatively sure random data isn't being stored on your machine to track you in any way. Of course, this also depends on disguising your IP as well.
It's not related to the World Wide Web, but you can use something called "e-mail" to send a private message to a specific recipient, and they can even reply back to you!
Yes -- and this is something I really don't get about Facebook. Once in a while, I have received messages through Facebook from people I don't know very well and who may not know my e-mail address directly in their address book.
But the majority of the "private messages" I get through Facebook are from people I know very well and have exchanged many e-mails with -- often people I've corresponded with by e-mail within the past few months, if not the past few days. Generally, I just respond by e-mail. Why give Facebook access to private correspondence?
I of course realize e-mail isn't private and shouldn't be treated that way, but I have greater confidence that my normal e-mail provider won't deliberately publish the content of my private messages to the entire internet without cause (like a legal investigation)... unlike all the information on Facebook, whose privacy policy seems to get weaker on an almost weekly basis.
I guess I can understand how some people see Facebook as a general replacement for a lot of interaction over the internet, but the friends who do this aren't the type who spend hours every day on Facebook.
Why would you send a private message through a third-party service like this if there's a reasonable standard alternative?
The problem is that here in the U.S. we have to be oh so politically correct at all times. We have to treat 74 year old white-haired grandmothers *exactly* the same way as we treat 20-something guys with a bread and a strong middle-eastern accent when everyone knows that the odds of someone from either of these two groups doing something harmful on a flight are massively skewed towards the latter group.
Except... it has little to do with being politically correct. It's actually the only way courts have allowed these searches to go around the Constitutional provisions against unreasonable searches. You just have to search everyone or at least make the searches random. If you start profiling people, then you're singling out people for searches without probable cause, and that's a legal no-no. You'd at least have to have a tip that someone matching that description were going to carry a weapon, or you'd have to notice something specific about the person that was suspicious.
Personally, I think the argument that searches are legal just because they are done to everyone is nonsense from a rights perspective. But if they started singling people out without any specific evidence for searching them, they'd definitely be ruled illegal... politically correct or not.
You're wrong, actually. There are special exemptions for border guards/customs to sieze and/or search everything on or including your person.
TSA != border guards/customs
If they were border guards, they might have a legitimate interest in preventing something from coming into a country -- whether it's tainted meat, produce, biological/chemical weapon, whatever.
TSA searches domestic as well as international flights, and asking a citizen to submit to a random search within the U.S. requires a (slightly) higher standard.
Except this lack of 'nit-picking' has real-world consequences. At the weekend I was reading a story in a newspaper where some real-world forensics investigators were complaining that shows like CSI have given the public the impression that they are magicians to the extent that juries are acquitting people because the police don't have a CSI-style case... after all, since they know from CSI that DNA sequencing only takes a few seconds, why don't the police have DNA evidence to prove that this guy is guilty? And why can't they get perfect fingerprints from objects where fingerprints can't possibly exist? CSI can get fingerprints from anything.
Agree completely with this -- a trend that has been noted by law enforcement for quite a few years now.
This post seems to have generated the typical Slashdot wisdom in replies about how all cops are corrupt, anything that makes it harder to convict is a good thing, better to let 100 guilty men free... etc.
At the risk of going against the mainstream here, I think the larger issue here is anything that tends to distort people's perception of the efficacy of various forensic or investigative procedures -- in EITHER direction.
For example, CSI may make it seem like DNA analysis is fast and easy, fingerprints are readily available, etc. But they also make hair and fiber analysis seem more convincing than it should be. The show doesn't consider the statistics or procedures involved in making any sort of match (DNA, fingerprint, fiber, bullet, etc.) with any degree of detail -- instead, the computer always just displays a magical number: "98% match" flashing or whatever. What does such a match mean? If you're talking about a city of a million people, and there's a 2% chance that this thing could match someone else, does that mean that there are 20,000 other suspects we should be looking at? Such questions are rarely addressed on CSI.
Basically, juries tend to overestimate the efficacy of many procedures, particularly traditional investigative "techniques" like eye-witness identification, handwriting analysis, etc. Most people think they understand how to recognize someone's face or writing or whatever, so they have an instinct about whether they should believe such evidence. (Even though their instincts are usually wrong.)
On the other hand, we don't have an intuition about how hard or easy it should be to match fingerprints or DNA or fibers or whatever, because most people don't have personal experience doing those things. When we have a popular TV show watched by a lot of potential jurors that pretends to show them a quasi-realistic portrayal of how such things are done, and yet represents them in a very misleading way, this is a real problem... whether it results in more or less convictions because of those distortions.