So it comes down to inconvenience, and users - not wanting inconvenience - will slowly gravitate together on one site. Thus there can be only one or two giant "Social Networking" sites - and that's the bit that people don't like, it has that faint 1984-esque all-knowing taint to it.
I think the future is probably in a more open protocol facilitating the exchange of this "social networking" information between sites.
In the beginning, email was often limited to one site, or only had very limited gateway facilities to the outside. Even quite late in the game, systems like AOL grew to huge sizes before they really talked with the outside world. Facebook is similar to AOL in its pre-opening-to-the-internet heyday.
One day someone will come along with an easy way for everyone's favourite PHPBB forum to share profiles and likes/dislikes and PMs with every other interested site on the web, and everyone will return to their corners again, while Facebook withers up.
There are just too many interesting things to be done that Facebook isn't doing, and too many people with good ideas who don't want to wait around for Zuckerberg to buy them.
it's worth reminding ourselves that Zuckerberg... is heavily ingratiated with a number of high profile political figures. An example would be... UK Prime Minister David Cameron
Yeah, David Cameron will totally take care of this for his pal The Zucker. It's fun to try to anticipate how, though. What do you envision? Lightning assault by the SAS? Threat of trade sanctions against the USA including withholding of Red Dwarf reruns? Something involving redcoats perchance?
Still wears down both my phone's and my laptop's battery much faster than using the USB cable. It takes me about 5 seconds to find and connect the cable, and if I'm using the laptop, it's not like I'm running around anyway, so it's not particularly an inconvenience. Plus it was a whole lot easier to get Linux to work with the cable (worked immediately) than with Bluetooth (required installing additional packages and other puttery).
Yeah, I do that on my Nokia E61i. It sucks the battery down to nothing in well under an hour. In order to really be useful, I still need a cable - the one going from the phone to the charger plugged into the wall.
Overall, the USB cable approach is a whole lot more flexible - works on buses, in taxis, all those places where I may need to get online for a while but don't have AC power.
Yep, I came here to say this. I think the skew from this factor is probably massive. "A few dozen" may even be conservative. It makes the whole headline meaningless.
I thoroughly fail to see how my calculations assume *anything* about market crashes. No shit there will be crashes, based on recent history a pretty fucking bad one every 15 years, but exactly how do you want me to "incorporate...one serious financial catastrophe on average every 30 years" into my calculations? A crystal ball?
If historically there has been one crash every 15 years that has taken the market down an average of 50%, then I think with a little time you could probably figure out how to work that into your calculations. And yes, if you don't work it in, then you are assuming there will be no crash. That's what "assuming" means.
Or, I can do just enough to get by (because nearly every western government has PROGRESSIVE taxation now) and keep a greater portion of my income.
Sure, you can earn $2 a year and keep it all. The fact remains that the more you work, the more you earn, even in heavily progressive tax regimes. I'd rather have $150,000 than $100,000, even if it means I had to work 20 or 30% harder for that last $50,000.
The curve definining the level of correspondence between the two is complex and in some ways arbitrary, and tax levels are just one component of that.
The idea that $1000 in your pre-tax earnings should equal $1000 in your pocket is a fiction to start with. Pre-tax earnings is a figure that depends on the regulatory environment and the economic conditions that it creates. You need to widen your view if you want to have a rational perspective.
Additionally, the simple addition of a group of people who will band together if any are attacked can thwart this to some degree (assuming everyone is honest and cooperates as planned).
And next thing you know, they'll have formed a government. After all, they can defend more effectively if they have a fighter jet that no single one of them can afford. So they can all kick in to pay for it. And there's upkeep for the jet, so that means annual contributions. And someone has to keep track of all the payments and labor and equipment. So there's your civil servants.
If your work/effort makes you rich, you can pay for everything, and need zero govt help.
There's a high level of retardedness in your post, but this sentence sums it up well.
How rich do you need to be in order to pay for your own national defence? If any other person is richer than you, they can attack you on superior terms.
if the govt takes 59% of my pay, why should I bother to work hard at all
Well, if you earn another $100,000 and pay $59,000 of that in taxes, you still have $41,000 to spend as you please. Spending some of it on basic mathematics classes might be a good idea.
For one thing, until it actually is canceled, it's still good for travel. So he can go somewhere else and work on getting a new passport.
For another, all the article claims is that he was told his passport would be canceled. Every passport will be canceled, including yours and mine. There's nothing special about that in itself. If there wasn't some irregularity about this proposed cancellation then it's a non-issue.
Not everyone speaks follows the same rules as you. That doesn't make them wrong.
True. Being wrong makes them wrong.
The link that you provided supports my assertion that the use of "are" in the case above is incorrect. This is true both in American English, where "are" is always wrong, and in UK English, where it's wrong when describing an action made collectively by an entity rather than by individuals making up that entity.
UK English: Apple are enjoying their holidays this Christmas season. Apple is dominating the market for fruit-themed smartphones.
I don't think that would give great results across the board. Sometimes a video is just a small part of what a Flash app provides. Sometimes it loads multiple videos and the first one is not very important to the user (e.g., an ad). But in those cases the content provider might really want to ensure it displays before another one, so just letting the user select from a list of video files would be unsatisfactory.
Apple aren't anything; it's a grammatically singular entity. Apple's managers are. Apple's employees are. Apple's competitors are. Apple is.
They need a hardware exit strategy - for now they have desirable hardware, but elsewhere prices are decreasing, specs are increasing, and beyond that there's going to come a saturation point for these devices. Apple realise this and they're trying to steal a march on the software side of things because they realise it might one day be their primary business.
I don't buy this for a second. Apple's hardware business is extremely profitable, moreso all the time, and the company has been very successful at differentiating itself from the far-less-profitable commodity x86 hardware market. What you write is unsubstantiated fantasy.
A centralized database with pointers to user profiles (e.g., to the XML files of various users posted at various points on the net.) This really needs to be *one* registry. However, it serves a very specific and narrow purpose: if you want to find the guy named Joe from Ypsilanti who you met at an event last week, it needs to point you to his representation (if it's public.)
I don't think that's necessary. There are ways of storing this information in a distributed fashion. Storing and distributing hashes of slices of the directory data can be a condition of participation in the broader network.
It should be possible to create a truly decentralized social network alternative that will allow people to choose where to locate their profile information - with their ISP, on their own server, with a web provider that offers such a service, what have you - and doesn't depend on any single institution other than the one that defines and publishes the protocols.
Actually, that's not true. I can make lists of friends, and have a list of friends whom I trust not to share my information, make nearly anything - posts, photos, profile information - visible only to people in that list.
I think we all know that. You're missing the point.
1) There has been a steady stream of leakage conduits wherein information escapes those rules that you think you've set. Applications are the worst problem, since your friends' apps can see almost anything they can see, and it's impossible to police what the app developers do with that data. But also there have been straight-up bugs, such as the one a week ago that was revealing all kinds of "private" information even if you thought you'd set your privacy options properly.
2) Facebook keeps changing the rules. Every few months more things go "open" by default, and you have to happen to hear about it, then go in and change your settings again.
How exactly are web boards more centralized and proprietary than IRC? There's plenty of servers and OSS implementations of them, like PHPBB.
Because with IRC and Usenet, it was easy to get at the data with open protocols and do with it what you would. You could use your choice of client software to interact with the service, and there was a great ecosystem of powerful and customizable software tools.
With web boards, you're stuck using the least-common-denominator web interface that the board operator chose.
People who never used Usenet when it was good, have no idea how weak the present web discussion tools are compared to a solid threaded newsreader. I could blow through more discussions in ten minutes with strn on a 28.8kbps dialup link than I can in an hour of point-and-click slogging through PHPBB and IPB fora on a 10mbps DSL line.
As for Youtube/Hulu, try watching streaming video over bittorrent. It's not even the same type of service.
We were wandering around the big computer mall in Kuala Lumpur yesterday and found several shops selling 32GB wifi iPads for MYR2900 (USD950). At that price someone would have to be pretty desperate to show off.
Well, the populations were lower back when they switched. But I've spent a LOT of time in all three countries (and still live in one of them today), and the Arabic script has really all but disappeared. It's only used in religious observations, and in some ceremonial and historical circumstances. A minority of the population can make any sense of it. Nobody except for a few religious weirdos uses it for day-to-day communication. I think there's no question that the switch is permanent.
It helps that the Arabic script was brought to these places by Arabs, so it's not like they were giving up something that was truly their own. Also, of course, the fact that Arabic was largely inaccessible to computers for many years (1970s and onward, slowly fading as a barrier as computers got smarter) was a big blow.
Traditional is a minority usage. Beijing has been encouraging the use of pinyin; it is taught in schools from an early age so most everyone is conversant in it.
the phonetics are different, grammar is different, you may be able to figure out the topic but that's about it really. Making basic sense of it, don't think so.
Neither of those (Swedish nor French) is my native language and I find English quite useful in making sense of them. I can get the point of newspaper articles and find my way around signs and warning labels and the like. Hell, I can halfway understand spoken Swedish on the radio/TV.
Arabic having some losses doesn't mean it's not vibrant (and as far as number of users goes, perhaps even growing long-term?)
Vibrant, sure. But the losses from those three countries alone are about 350 million people; that's over one-third of the total number of people who use the Arabic script (Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Pashto, etc.). It would take quite a while to make up that ground.
It would be strange for (in that case) some Arabic TLD to 1) render correctly in a browser of a non-Arabic speaker, and 2) to have Latin characters in the domain name itself and 3) still manage to look correct in RTL scripts.
I'm using a Mac set up in English, and do a fair amount of Arabic and Farsi development work. Mixed Arabic-Latin URLs have worked fine for me, for as long as I can remember. I didn't do any special setup to enable this; they just worked.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the future is probably in a more open protocol facilitating the exchange of this "social networking" information between sites.
In the beginning, email was often limited to one site, or only had very limited gateway facilities to the outside. Even quite late in the game, systems like AOL grew to huge sizes before they really talked with the outside world. Facebook is similar to AOL in its pre-opening-to-the-internet heyday.
One day someone will come along with an easy way for everyone's favourite PHPBB forum to share profiles and likes/dislikes and PMs with every other interested site on the web, and everyone will return to their corners again, while Facebook withers up.
There are just too many interesting things to be done that Facebook isn't doing, and too many people with good ideas who don't want to wait around for Zuckerberg to buy them.
Yeah, David Cameron will totally take care of this for his pal The Zucker. It's fun to try to anticipate how, though. What do you envision? Lightning assault by the SAS? Threat of trade sanctions against the USA including withholding of Red Dwarf reruns? Something involving redcoats perchance?
Inflation is great!
It encourages you to buy lots of stuff today, because tomorrow you won't be able to afford as much.
Then I, who produced that stuff, take the money you spent and convert it to more inflation-proof forms like property and foreign assets.
I get rich, and you get a plasma TV in every room of your house, until it's foreclosed. We all win.
Still wears down both my phone's and my laptop's battery much faster than using the USB cable. It takes me about 5 seconds to find and connect the cable, and if I'm using the laptop, it's not like I'm running around anyway, so it's not particularly an inconvenience. Plus it was a whole lot easier to get Linux to work with the cable (worked immediately) than with Bluetooth (required installing additional packages and other puttery).
Yeah, I do that on my Nokia E61i. It sucks the battery down to nothing in well under an hour. In order to really be useful, I still need a cable - the one going from the phone to the charger plugged into the wall.
Overall, the USB cable approach is a whole lot more flexible - works on buses, in taxis, all those places where I may need to get online for a while but don't have AC power.
Yep, I came here to say this. I think the skew from this factor is probably massive. "A few dozen" may even be conservative. It makes the whole headline meaningless.
If historically there has been one crash every 15 years that has taken the market down an average of 50%, then I think with a little time you could probably figure out how to work that into your calculations. And yes, if you don't work it in, then you are assuming there will be no crash. That's what "assuming" means.
Every government health care system on earth is considerably cheaper and more efficient than the US's private system.
Sure, you can earn $2 a year and keep it all. The fact remains that the more you work, the more you earn, even in heavily progressive tax regimes. I'd rather have $150,000 than $100,000, even if it means I had to work 20 or 30% harder for that last $50,000.
The curve definining the level of correspondence between the two is complex and in some ways arbitrary, and tax levels are just one component of that.
The idea that $1000 in your pre-tax earnings should equal $1000 in your pocket is a fiction to start with. Pre-tax earnings is a figure that depends on the regulatory environment and the economic conditions that it creates. You need to widen your view if you want to have a rational perspective.
And next thing you know, they'll have formed a government. After all, they can defend more effectively if they have a fighter jet that no single one of them can afford. So they can all kick in to pay for it. And there's upkeep for the jet, so that means annual contributions. And someone has to keep track of all the payments and labor and equipment. So there's your civil servants.
There's a high level of retardedness in your post, but this sentence sums it up well.
How rich do you need to be in order to pay for your own national defence? If any other person is richer than you, they can attack you on superior terms.
Well, if you earn another $100,000 and pay $59,000 of that in taxes, you still have $41,000 to spend as you please. Spending some of it on basic mathematics classes might be a good idea.
For one thing, until it actually is canceled, it's still good for travel. So he can go somewhere else and work on getting a new passport.
For another, all the article claims is that he was told his passport would be canceled. Every passport will be canceled, including yours and mine. There's nothing special about that in itself. If there wasn't some irregularity about this proposed cancellation then it's a non-issue.
No it's not; please see my other post in response to Anonymous Coward.
True. Being wrong makes them wrong.
The link that you provided supports my assertion that the use of "are" in the case above is incorrect. This is true both in American English, where "are" is always wrong, and in UK English, where it's wrong when describing an action made collectively by an entity rather than by individuals making up that entity.
UK English: Apple are enjoying their holidays this Christmas season. Apple is dominating the market for fruit-themed smartphones.
I don't think that would give great results across the board. Sometimes a video is just a small part of what a Flash app provides. Sometimes it loads multiple videos and the first one is not very important to the user (e.g., an ad). But in those cases the content provider might really want to ensure it displays before another one, so just letting the user select from a list of video files would be unsatisfactory.
Apple and its products are what made Adobe popular in graphics/video editing departments.
Apple aren't anything; it's a grammatically singular entity. Apple's managers are. Apple's employees are. Apple's competitors are. Apple is.
I don't buy this for a second. Apple's hardware business is extremely profitable, moreso all the time, and the company has been very successful at differentiating itself from the far-less-profitable commodity x86 hardware market. What you write is unsubstantiated fantasy.
I don't think that's necessary. There are ways of storing this information in a distributed fashion. Storing and distributing hashes of slices of the directory data can be a condition of participation in the broader network.
It should be possible to create a truly decentralized social network alternative that will allow people to choose where to locate their profile information - with their ISP, on their own server, with a web provider that offers such a service, what have you - and doesn't depend on any single institution other than the one that defines and publishes the protocols.
I think we all know that. You're missing the point.
1) There has been a steady stream of leakage conduits wherein information escapes those rules that you think you've set. Applications are the worst problem, since your friends' apps can see almost anything they can see, and it's impossible to police what the app developers do with that data. But also there have been straight-up bugs, such as the one a week ago that was revealing all kinds of "private" information even if you thought you'd set your privacy options properly.
2) Facebook keeps changing the rules. Every few months more things go "open" by default, and you have to happen to hear about it, then go in and change your settings again.
Because with IRC and Usenet, it was easy to get at the data with open protocols and do with it what you would. You could use your choice of client software to interact with the service, and there was a great ecosystem of powerful and customizable software tools.
With web boards, you're stuck using the least-common-denominator web interface that the board operator chose.
People who never used Usenet when it was good, have no idea how weak the present web discussion tools are compared to a solid threaded newsreader. I could blow through more discussions in ten minutes with strn on a 28.8kbps dialup link than I can in an hour of point-and-click slogging through PHPBB and IPB fora on a 10mbps DSL line.
Never tried Vuze?
We were wandering around the big computer mall in Kuala Lumpur yesterday and found several shops selling 32GB wifi iPads for MYR2900 (USD950). At that price someone would have to be pretty desperate to show off.
Well, the populations were lower back when they switched. But I've spent a LOT of time in all three countries (and still live in one of them today), and the Arabic script has really all but disappeared. It's only used in religious observations, and in some ceremonial and historical circumstances. A minority of the population can make any sense of it. Nobody except for a few religious weirdos uses it for day-to-day communication. I think there's no question that the switch is permanent.
It helps that the Arabic script was brought to these places by Arabs, so it's not like they were giving up something that was truly their own. Also, of course, the fact that Arabic was largely inaccessible to computers for many years (1970s and onward, slowly fading as a barrier as computers got smarter) was a big blow.
Traditional is a minority usage. Beijing has been encouraging the use of pinyin; it is taught in schools from an early age so most everyone is conversant in it.
Neither of those (Swedish nor French) is my native language and I find English quite useful in making sense of them. I can get the point of newspaper articles and find my way around signs and warning labels and the like. Hell, I can halfway understand spoken Swedish on the radio/TV.
Vibrant, sure. But the losses from those three countries alone are about 350 million people; that's over one-third of the total number of people who use the Arabic script (Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Pashto, etc.). It would take quite a while to make up that ground.
I'm using a Mac set up in English, and do a fair amount of Arabic and Farsi development work. Mixed Arabic-Latin URLs have worked fine for me, for as long as I can remember. I didn't do any special setup to enable this; they just worked.