While I agree that tablets are currently consumption devices, the Pages (MS Word Equivalent) and Keynote (PPT Editor) are actually quite mature and tailored for the tablet. Add GoodReader to that (PDF editor/annotator) and you can do a LOT of day to day viewing and minor editing.
That being said, I'm typing this on my Windows laptop:)
Mod this up. The "it's just like the naturally produced thing" argument is complete BS -- there are quite a few "naturally produced" plants which are poisonous. You also have absolutely no way to know which mods were made to the organisms.
In either case, if it's such a great thing, just label it and I might still buy the GMO product -- but leave me the choice.
I've lived/worked in a LOT of cities in the USA (as well as another country). If you're an IT researcher, USA is probably the place to be for the greatest earning potential/mobility -- this is where the brainpower of the world aggregates. It will continue to be this way for a while despite reports to the contrary.
Food, gas, and electronics are cheap and plentiful. People (depending on where you are) have a high tolerance for eccentricity, 'different-ness', and new ideas. The Internet (for the time being) remains uncensored.
Seattle is EXCELLENT for jobs (even if you don't want to work for Microsoft), and has both a hacker and a foreigner friendly culture. This is the only place I've ever been where I can put a resume online and get around 8 phone calls the same day (YMMV). Besides Microsoft, it has Amazon, Boeing, and a couple of other places you've heard of nearby. That being said, it can be very isolating, and very cold and dark if you're from Southern Europe. The cost of living is high, but not insanely high. The city is beautiful and eclectic (live in the city -- do not move to Redmond -- neither beautiful nor eclectic!). It's the perfect place to be in the summer, and wonderful in the winter if you like having ski resorts within 30 minutes of driving distance. Avoid anyplace in this latitude if you have a problem with 4:30 pm sunsets during the winter.
Silicon Valley is another place where you will probably find a good critical mass of companies who need your skills.
Los Angeles is a place that I'd personally like to move to, and I imagine would have critical mass. The weather and beaches are beautiful.
The Washington, DC area (East Coast in the USA) including Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland is also a good area for IT, but has a lot of defense contracting work (which means that you will be at a disadvantage as an immigrant).
Florida also has some decent opportunities, and the wonderful bonus of being able to drive to the beach whenever you want (you will miss this pretty much anywhere else in the USA, even if it looks close to the water on the map).
Texas is also rich and foreigner-friendly in a way that you would not expect -- but it's not Silicon Valley!
I would stay away from the Midwest (as wonderful as it is) and any metropolitan area whose name you've never heard of, even if the particular opportunity is good. You will want the ability to change companies without necessarily moving.
Another piece of advice: If you care at all about your home country, do three things: 1) try to find a position that will let you go to there for the summers -- e.g., an appointment at an institution for only 9 months, etc. This is very difficult to come by, but otherwise you may be slowly driven insane with homesickness and the one to three (if you're super-lucky) weeks of vacation that a typical US company will give you. 2) Get plugged into your local expat community. Make sure it exists where you're going. 3) Pick a place with the most direct airline routes back to your home city -- otherwise you'll waste 2-3 days traveling each way (I'm not kidding!).
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley followed by a short story I read which I can't locate right now.
I believe it was called 2439 -- the premise being that in the year 2439 (I might be wrong about the year), the Earth is covered in its entirety with a 700 story building in order to provide for the almost 1 trillion humans that live in it (with only algae left to supply them). The story was about the last man to actually have animals, and the authorities plight to convince him to euthanize them in order to make room for the trillionth human, so that 'perfection' can be achieved. The claim of the authorities was that there was enough color microfiche of all the animals that ever lived so that the actual ones need no longer be around to consume resources.
My paraphrase may seem very silly, but the actual story had enough of an impact on me when I was 15 to change my outlook on our relationship with the environment for good. It'd be great if anyone could point me to the actual story/author.
I've tried many things, and I've found that a blank hard-bound sketch pad (Canson makes a great one -- you can get it at a B&N store in the USA), a pen, and a laptop are the best tools for me.
The sketch pad is for the notes and the diagrams. The laptop is for Googling anything I don't understand during the lecture so that I can add more notes to my sketch pad. I also maintain a Chrome bookmark folder with the name of the class, as I run into some fascinating stuff while trying to understand the lecture. I keep two other tabs open to WolframAlpha and Wikipedia.
I write down only things that I did not understand before the lecture, or things that I think will be on the exam.
Sometimes I go to class with a 3 ring binder containing printed out lecture notes, and annotate important things. This is a good complement to the notebook and is very useful for review.
I've also tried to use just the laptop, as I type way faster than I can write. I find that I end up with wonderful Word documents (with pasted diagrams, wikipedia excerpts, etc) and remember nothing when I do this. I think there's something to the tactile reinforcement of a pen and the mental exercise of distilling stuff down to the main points on the spot.
The toll mathematics takes begins early. To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school.
Why is finishing high school a goal in and of itself? I thought the fact that you finished was supposed to mean something -- if not, let's relax the requirements of History, English, Science, etc. and graduate students solely based on attendance! Of course, if we did that, such enlightened minds might start asking why we are wasting billions of dollars on an education which teaches nothing.
I believe an advanced society _should_ have the goal of educating every citizen to his/her full capacity. If this is not possible, however, it may be better to divert some students to trade schools where they only learn what they need. Even if this were the case, however, not giving future voters a basic grounding in Science, History, and Math virtually guarantees that they will eventually elect morons who revel in their ignorance.
I second this. Some pictures I had bound together with rubber bands were damaged when the rubber turned into some glue-like substance...I think it only took about a decade for this to happen.
Stone tablets, on the other hand, have a proven shelf life. Try engraving them with a laser -- it may be nostalgic to see something produced by 2012 'high tech' 25 years from now...
In true Slashdot fashion, might I humbly suggest the following:
If you don't want a 3DTV, please do not purchase one!
If you don't want to see a 3D movie, see the 2D version -- or get creative, obtain two 3D cinema glasses and fashion some "2D" ones for yourself that only show the left (or right) eye image to both eyes.
Why is there this collective attitude of "OMG I HATE THIS TECHNOLOGY IT MUST DIE NOW"? Some of us have been waiting patiently for some of this tech to reach mass market maturity so that we can do cool stuff with it (3D gaming, head tracking, affordable multiple screen virtual reality, etc.).
3D is not really the whole issue -- I fear that we now have a generation techies who completely lack imagination about anything beyond higher frame rates, the latest handheld gizmo, and the right to download music for free. (You also see this type of hate spewed on advances in space exploration by so-called 'nerds' ).
I've worked in a lot of different environments, in some as lead, and in some as the coder. I've seen some things which work, and a LOT of "fail."
This is what boils down to: The mission must be more important than anything extraneous to it, and the people must be more important than the mission. NOTHING beats motivation to succeed (not even money).
The "show must go on" attitude (as long as it does not trample on people's lives) really helps to cull the nonsense. Have fast release cycles, and make sure customer feedback is immediate and visible to the team. Do not isolate the team from the end-user. It really helps to have everyone have a sense of ownership in the project -- developers get turned off and start reading Slashdot if they do not see the impact of what they produce.
Encourage new ideas, and listen to people when they speak in areas of their own expertise. Make sure there are several larger steps to be taken after the immediate project, and a grander vision for what the team is trying to accomplish. Development methodology, etc. is team specific -- find what works for your specific team.
Get rid of the jerks, cynics, and fanatics as soon as possible. Make sure you yourself are not in these categories!!!
Foster a sense of teamwork. Keep the team socially engaged with each other. Take them out to lunches, dinners, drinking, etc. Send them to conferences to demonstrate the product, if this is applicable. If they can't stop talking shop during these events, you're doing it right:)
Unless we (as a society) take some very concrete legal steps to make it illegal for our governments to use the results of certain types of surveillance, our children will read 1984 and ask "so, what's the big deal?"
This is not some paranoid worry. If the marginal cost of recording everything you say (online or offline) is near zero (and technology is driving it there), why shouldn't they keep it on file, just in case? (Think of how easy it would be to prosecute certain crimes if you could go back and re-play every conversation the criminal had).
Of course, before that happens "they" will probably buy the publishing rights to the novel, and use forever-copyright and DMCA to make sure nobody ever reads it:)
UC Berkeley Webcasts (I learned quite a bit from these -- try different courses by semester. Listen to the 1st and 2nd lecture to see if it's high value. Some are better than others. I got an excellent MEMS lecture from here once, and a really good one on Byzantine history. Some (like history) are good as audio in your car. Others get better with charts.
Kaplan http://www.kaptest.com/ (Take something like the MCAT review if you can afford it for science/physics. They do a really good job of distilling the basics of science/biology/etc. without any nonsense. Disclaimer: I've also taught for Kaplan)
Also, don't discount old fashioned books:
The "Head First" series of books (Try the "Dummies" books also if you're not insulted by the title)
Home Schooling Curricula Whatever you may feel about the social implications of home schooling, there are some excellent science resources which will catch you up. I will shy away from recommending specific ones for fear of inciting a flame war. I hope someone better versed in these curricula can enlighten us with recommendations.
Textbooks! Try to get some used textbooks from a used book store, if all you want is the 101 level stuff:
(Warning: do not try these at home until you know what you're doing)
You may also wish to check out your local Makerspace/Hackerspace. You will probably find very educated geeks who'd be more than willing to teach you stuff...
I really hope they are not using this newfangled "Internet" thing to coordinate their attacks. Unless they are using devices with vacuum tubes only, the computers and cell phones they use are definitely products of nanotechnology -- the popular sense of 'nanotech' simply involves the application of the same Integrated Circuit fabrication technologies to MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical) devices.
The idea that these devices will start self-reproducing has the same amount of credibility that computers will gain consciousness by themselves all of a sudden...
(Neither is necessarily impossible, but highly unlikely)
I don't know if this specific backdoor is real, but would you be horribly surprised if you found out that your router, etc. had chips in it that could be remotely disabled with the right information fed to the device (e.g., repeated processing of a certain string of bytes in an incoming packet)?
Of course, this stunt could only be pulled off once, and may not work in every device. But it's not inconceivable for a military-industrial power to figure out how certain common chips are used in certain devices, figure out what the chips "see" during regular operation with certain inputs given to the device, and design an "enhancement" for this common chip that will cause it to behave differently when a certain type of signal is received.
Since they have control over their supply chain, it's not inconceivable that they might build this functionality into the chips and flood the market with them. They would have to keep doing this for years. We will be none the wiser until they invoke the capability during a true emergency scenario, when we find that a good percentage of our devices stop functioning for no apparent reason.
I don't know if certain people are really thinking this far ahead, but if they are there is little we can do about it -- except maybe to build custom hardware and hope for the best. Even if hardware were "open source" it's not trivial to open up chips and see what's really inside.
I'm sure the people building the truly mission critical stuff have thought about this and are fabricating their own ICs...
I was actually looking for information on this for a blind friend. Is there Linux distro anyone knows of with these features already installed and turned on?
It's very trendy to hate Facebook, and be proud of not having a profile. But for some of us (especially those of us who have non-techie friends spread across the world), it provides real value.
It lets you:
1) Find people (and be found by people) that you want to get back in contact with
2) Hold asynchronous, casual conversations with friends, and friends of friends. I don't know an existing solution which allows the same thing as smoothly.
I am disturbed it has replaced texting and e-mail for most people, and I have friends for whom it is the most reliable contact info (i.e., they don't necessarily pay attention to their e-mail). I would love there to be a real open-source solution which allowed different clients, like e-mail and Usenet News used to be. I don't think this will happen anytime soon...
I seriously pay to have true privacy controls, where I could opt out of having my data / posts sold to whomever paid for it, or let me see who's been bidding (and let me choose who gets it).
I'd also pay to get access to all the data they have on me (what I have deleted, who's viewed my page, etc). This, of course, would not be good for their business model.
But they would probably take my money and sell my data anyway:)
"The Content Advisory committee felt that students would know what flowers were and would view this statement as subjective."
It doesn't get better, actually. Even in higher education you might be punished for knowing too much, or not having the same mindset that a bunch of people sitting around a conference table had at a given moment.
This is why I'm a fan of tests like the MCAT and the GRE, which test application of scientific concepts, with questions statistically validated and reviewed by a lot of people. You won't find as much of the the type of nonsense mentioned in the article on national tests seen by a lot of people.
I don't think they intend for anyone to use this. It seems to be there to legally counter the argument that "there is no legal way to format shift our content" that proponents of DMCA and copyright exemptions might make.
Slashdot Mirror
These guys have been around for quite a while:
http://www.telemed.lt/main_en.htm
While I agree that tablets are currently consumption devices, the Pages (MS Word Equivalent) and Keynote (PPT Editor) are actually quite mature and tailored for the tablet. Add GoodReader to that (PDF editor/annotator) and you can do a LOT of day to day viewing and minor editing.
That being said, I'm typing this on my Windows laptop :)
Mod this up. The "it's just like the naturally produced thing" argument is complete BS -- there are quite a few "naturally produced" plants which are poisonous. You also have absolutely no way to know which mods were made to the organisms.
In either case, if it's such a great thing, just label it and I might still buy the GMO product -- but leave me the choice.
I've lived/worked in a LOT of cities in the USA (as well as another country). If you're an IT researcher, USA is probably the place to be for the greatest earning potential/mobility -- this is where the brainpower of the world aggregates. It will continue to be this way for a while despite reports to the contrary.
Food, gas, and electronics are cheap and plentiful. People (depending on where you are) have a high tolerance for eccentricity, 'different-ness', and new ideas. The Internet (for the time being) remains uncensored.
Seattle is EXCELLENT for jobs (even if you don't want to work for Microsoft), and has both a hacker and a foreigner friendly culture. This is the only place I've ever been where I can put a resume online and get around 8 phone calls the same day (YMMV). Besides Microsoft, it has Amazon, Boeing, and a couple of other places you've heard of nearby. That being said, it can be very isolating, and very cold and dark if you're from Southern Europe. The cost of living is high, but not insanely high. The city is beautiful and eclectic (live in the city -- do not move to Redmond -- neither beautiful nor eclectic!). It's the perfect place to be in the summer, and wonderful in the winter if you like having ski resorts within 30 minutes of driving distance. Avoid anyplace in this latitude if you have a problem with 4:30 pm sunsets during the winter.
Silicon Valley is another place where you will probably find a good critical mass of companies who need your skills.
Los Angeles is a place that I'd personally like to move to, and I imagine would have critical mass. The weather and beaches are beautiful.
The Washington, DC area (East Coast in the USA) including Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland is also a good area for IT, but has a lot of defense contracting work (which means that you will be at a disadvantage as an immigrant).
Florida also has some decent opportunities, and the wonderful bonus of being able to drive to the beach whenever you want (you will miss this pretty much anywhere else in the USA, even if it looks close to the water on the map).
Texas is also rich and foreigner-friendly in a way that you would not expect -- but it's not Silicon Valley!
I would stay away from the Midwest (as wonderful as it is) and any metropolitan area whose name you've never heard of, even if the particular opportunity is good. You will want the ability to change companies without necessarily moving.
Another piece of advice: If you care at all about your home country, do three things: 1) try to find a position that will let you go to there for the summers -- e.g., an appointment at an institution for only 9 months, etc. This is very difficult to come by, but otherwise you may be slowly driven insane with homesickness and the one to three (if you're super-lucky) weeks of vacation that a typical US company will give you. 2) Get plugged into your local expat community. Make sure it exists where you're going. 3) Pick a place with the most direct airline routes back to your home city -- otherwise you'll waste 2-3 days traveling each way (I'm not kidding!).
Yes, thank you! 2430 A.D. by Isaac Asimov.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2430_A.D.
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley followed by a short story I read which I can't locate right now.
I believe it was called 2439 -- the premise being that in the year 2439 (I might be wrong about the year), the Earth is covered in its entirety with a 700 story building in order to provide for the almost 1 trillion humans that live in it (with only algae left to supply them). The story was about the last man to actually have animals, and the authorities plight to convince him to euthanize them in order to make room for the trillionth human, so that 'perfection' can be achieved. The claim of the authorities was that there was enough color microfiche of all the animals that ever lived so that the actual ones need no longer be around to consume resources.
My paraphrase may seem very silly, but the actual story had enough of an impact on me when I was 15 to change my outlook on our relationship with the environment for good. It'd be great if anyone could point me to the actual story/author.
I've tried many things, and I've found that a blank hard-bound sketch pad (Canson makes a great one -- you can get it at a B&N store in the USA), a pen, and a laptop are the best tools for me.
The sketch pad is for the notes and the diagrams. The laptop is for Googling anything I don't understand during the lecture so that I can add more notes to my sketch pad. I also maintain a Chrome bookmark folder with the name of the class, as I run into some fascinating stuff while trying to understand the lecture. I keep two other tabs open to WolframAlpha and Wikipedia.
I write down only things that I did not understand before the lecture, or things that I think will be on the exam.
Sometimes I go to class with a 3 ring binder containing printed out lecture notes, and annotate important things. This is a good complement to the notebook and is very useful for review.
I've also tried to use just the laptop, as I type way faster than I can write. I find that I end up with wonderful Word documents (with pasted diagrams, wikipedia excerpts, etc) and remember nothing when I do this. I think there's something to the tactile reinforcement of a pen and the mental exercise of distilling stuff down to the main points on the spot.
Why is finishing high school a goal in and of itself? I thought the fact that you finished was supposed to mean something -- if not, let's relax the requirements of History, English, Science, etc. and graduate students solely based on attendance! Of course, if we did that, such enlightened minds might start asking why we are wasting billions of dollars on an education which teaches nothing.
I believe an advanced society _should_ have the goal of educating every citizen to his/her full capacity. If this is not possible, however, it may be better to divert some students to trade schools where they only learn what they need. Even if this were the case, however, not giving future voters a basic grounding in Science, History, and Math virtually guarantees that they will eventually elect morons who revel in their ignorance.
I second this. Some pictures I had bound together with rubber bands were damaged when the rubber turned into some glue-like substance...I think it only took about a decade for this to happen.
Stone tablets, on the other hand, have a proven shelf life. Try engraving them with a laser -- it may be nostalgic to see something produced by 2012 'high tech' 25 years from now...
Mod parent up! My first reaction was "F@#*( -- Charles Stross was right!" For the uninitiated, here's a summary and here's the full text of the mind bending novel Accelerando.
In true Slashdot fashion, might I humbly suggest the following:
If you don't want a 3DTV, please do not purchase one!
If you don't want to see a 3D movie, see the 2D version -- or get creative, obtain two 3D cinema glasses and fashion some "2D" ones for yourself that only show the left (or right) eye image to both eyes.
Why is there this collective attitude of "OMG I HATE THIS TECHNOLOGY IT MUST DIE NOW"? Some of us have been waiting patiently for some of this tech to reach mass market maturity so that we can do cool stuff with it (3D gaming, head tracking, affordable multiple screen virtual reality, etc.).
3D is not really the whole issue -- I fear that we now have a generation techies who completely lack imagination about anything beyond higher frame rates, the latest handheld gizmo, and the right to download music for free. (You also see this type of hate spewed on advances in space exploration by so-called 'nerds' ).
Read Scroogled by Cory Doctorow for a treatment of how this might go...
I've worked in a lot of different environments, in some as lead, and in some as the coder. I've seen some things which work, and a LOT of "fail."
This is what boils down to: The mission must be more important than anything extraneous to it, and the people must be more important than the mission. NOTHING beats motivation to succeed (not even money).
The "show must go on" attitude (as long as it does not trample on people's lives) really helps to cull the nonsense. Have fast release cycles, and make sure customer feedback is immediate and visible to the team. Do not isolate the team from the end-user. It really helps to have everyone have a sense of ownership in the project -- developers get turned off and start reading Slashdot if they do not see the impact of what they produce.
Encourage new ideas, and listen to people when they speak in areas of their own expertise. Make sure there are several larger steps to be taken after the immediate project, and a grander vision for what the team is trying to accomplish. Development methodology, etc. is team specific -- find what works for your specific team.
Get rid of the jerks, cynics, and fanatics as soon as possible. Make sure you yourself are not in these categories!!!
Foster a sense of teamwork. Keep the team socially engaged with each other. Take them out to lunches, dinners, drinking, etc. Send them to conferences to demonstrate the product, if this is applicable. If they can't stop talking shop during these events, you're doing it right :)
Unless we (as a society) take some very concrete legal steps to make it illegal for our governments to use the results of certain types of surveillance, our children will read 1984 and ask "so, what's the big deal?"
This is not some paranoid worry. If the marginal cost of recording everything you say (online or offline) is near zero (and technology is driving it there), why shouldn't they keep it on file, just in case? (Think of how easy it would be to prosecute certain crimes if you could go back and re-play every conversation the criminal had).
Of course, before that happens "they" will probably buy the publishing rights to the novel, and use forever-copyright and DMCA to make sure nobody ever reads it :)
It's because of this book that I remember pretty much everything I learned in high school chemistry:
http://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Demonstrations-Handbook-Teachers-Chemistry/dp/0299088901
Start with the "Oxidation of Luminol" -- how to make your own glow-in-the-dark chemiluminescent solution.
(All 3 volumes are good -- some of the experiments are dangerous -- use due caution)
(Seeing Prof. Shakhashiri in action is also pretty cool: http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/
Check out his Experiments You can Do at Home"
)
FREE STUFF
UC Berkeley Webcasts (I learned quite a bit from these -- try different courses by semester. Listen to the 1st and 2nd lecture to see if it's high value. Some are better than others. I got an excellent MEMS lecture from here once, and a really good one on Byzantine history. Some (like history) are good as audio in your car. Others get better with charts.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
MIT OpenCourseWare (haven't tried, but hear good things)
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
Khan academy (of course)
http://www.khanacademy.org/
PAID RESOURCES
Kaplan http://www.kaptest.com/
(Take something like the MCAT review if you can afford it for science/physics. They do a really good job of distilling the basics of science/biology/etc. without any nonsense. Disclaimer: I've also taught for Kaplan)
Also, don't discount old fashioned books:
The "Head First" series of books
(Try the "Dummies" books also if you're not insulted by the title)
Head First Physics
Home Schooling Curricula
Whatever you may feel about the social implications of home schooling, there are some excellent science resources which will catch you up. I will shy away from recommending specific ones for fear of inciting a flame war. I hope someone better versed in these curricula can enlighten us with recommendations.
Textbooks!
Try to get some used textbooks from a used book store, if all you want is the 101 level stuff:
Chemistry (Oxtoby-Nachtrieb) http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Modern-Chemistry-Fifth-Edition/dp/B001F39B2Y
(There are many nicely written Biology books -- see what you like)
And if you really want to enjoy chemistry:
Chemical Demonstrations, Shakhashiri
(Warning: do not try these at home until you know what you're doing)
You may also wish to check out your local Makerspace/Hackerspace. You will probably find very educated geeks who'd be more than willing to teach you stuff...
I really hope they are not using this newfangled "Internet" thing to coordinate their attacks. Unless they are using devices with vacuum tubes only, the computers and cell phones they use are definitely products of nanotechnology -- the popular sense of 'nanotech' simply involves the application of the same Integrated Circuit fabrication technologies to MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical) devices.
The idea that these devices will start self-reproducing has the same amount of credibility that computers will gain consciousness by themselves all of a sudden...
(Neither is necessarily impossible, but highly unlikely)
I don't know if this specific backdoor is real, but would you be horribly surprised if you found out that your router, etc. had chips in it that could be remotely disabled with the right information fed to the device (e.g., repeated processing of a certain string of bytes in an incoming packet)?
Of course, this stunt could only be pulled off once, and may not work in every device. But it's not inconceivable for a military-industrial power to figure out how certain common chips are used in certain devices, figure out what the chips "see" during regular operation with certain inputs given to the device, and design an "enhancement" for this common chip that will cause it to behave differently when a certain type of signal is received.
Since they have control over their supply chain, it's not inconceivable that they might build this functionality into the chips and flood the market with them. They would have to keep doing this for years. We will be none the wiser until they invoke the capability during a true emergency scenario, when we find that a good percentage of our devices stop functioning for no apparent reason.
I don't know if certain people are really thinking this far ahead, but if they are there is little we can do about it -- except maybe to build custom hardware and hope for the best. Even if hardware were "open source" it's not trivial to open up chips and see what's really inside.
I'm sure the people building the truly mission critical stuff have thought about this and are fabricating their own ICs...
I was actually looking for information on this for a blind friend. Is there Linux distro anyone knows of with these features already installed and turned on?
It's very trendy to hate Facebook, and be proud of not having a profile. But for some of us (especially those of us who have non-techie friends spread across the world), it provides real value.
It lets you:
1) Find people (and be found by people) that you want to get back in contact with
2) Hold asynchronous, casual conversations with friends, and friends of friends. I don't know an existing solution which allows the same thing as smoothly.
I am disturbed it has replaced texting and e-mail for most people, and I have friends for whom it is the most reliable contact info (i.e., they don't necessarily pay attention to their e-mail). I would love there to be a real open-source solution which allowed different clients, like e-mail and Usenet News used to be. I don't think this will happen anytime soon...
I seriously pay to have true privacy controls, where I could opt out of having my data / posts sold to whomever paid for it, or let me see who's been bidding (and let me choose who gets it).
I'd also pay to get access to all the data they have on me (what I have deleted, who's viewed my page, etc). This, of course, would not be good for their business model.
But they would probably take my money and sell my data anyway :)
Mod parent up -- I could not have said it better.
And, while you're at it -- get off our collective lawn!
It doesn't get better, actually. Even in higher education you might be punished for knowing too much, or not having the same mindset that a bunch of people sitting around a conference table had at a given moment.
This is why I'm a fan of tests like the MCAT and the GRE, which test application of scientific concepts, with questions statistically validated and reviewed by a lot of people. You won't find as much of the the type of nonsense mentioned in the article on national tests seen by a lot of people.
Mod parent up -- as the first one to actually answer the question!
(As opposed to berating the OP for asking the question, as is traditional)
I don't think they intend for anyone to use this. It seems to be there to legally counter the argument that "there is no legal way to format shift our content" that proponents of DMCA and copyright exemptions might make.