Perhaps traditionally the "I"s were just absent from programming.
I can't cite anything (other than 30 years of programming) but I believe this to be wrong. My elders in this field were all introverts.
In any case, we're not talking about solid 12 hour hackathons as pairs. We're talking, say, 4 hours out of a day, with breaks. And ideally you'd be rotating pair partners regularly.
I'm an introvert. This isn't a disease, something to be cured, medicated, or dealt with. It's the way I am. Even for "4 hours out of a day, with breaks" this is bad. Rotating partners regularly makes this much, much worse.
For us true introverts 4 hours with another person can be a taxing, grueling experience by itself no matter how pleasant a person he or she is. And you'd like us to think clearly and rationally while making us endure something that we're truly averse to? I wouldn't go as far as to say it creates a hostile work environment, but it's damned close.
Recommended reading for extroverts that just Don't Get It, or introverts that are tired of taking this kind of shit quietly: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain.
1. Find a CD or a DVD with your valuable source code on it. 2. Take the media to your kitchen. Insert media into microwave oven. 3. Turn microwave on exposing media to EM radiation.
Of course, psychohistory doesn't work if you publish the results -- so all of this is bullshit. This implies that the psychohistorical result is actually not violence in 2020, but something else that they're trying to steer us towards. Maybe this is also why we're not supposed to be aware that psychohistory exists.
Almost everything can be accounted for in good table design and is. There does come a point where table design and maintenance simply can't accommodate a particular rule. Sometimes exceptions are thrown, longjmp() invoked, raise() called and god help us a GOTO executed.
Tax law is just another programming meta-language which later has to be compiled to code.
disclaimer: I work in the financial software field in a business very similar to Intuit.
Every time this comes up Slashdot is inundated with lots of comments about how easy this should be. It's not. Get over it.
The problem with financial software is that because of regulatory constraints and tax laws it's nearly impossible to start from scratch. Tax laws are vast. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly vast they are. I mean, you may think it's complicated to write an operating system, but that's just peanuts to tax law.
The secondary problems for payroll compliance and tax law is that they change (with alarming frequency). You probably don't know this because you're a single case, but on the federal and state level hundreds of changes happen each quarter for something like payroll taxes. Almost none of them apply to you. But every one of them applies to someone, and it's something you've got to get right. Oh yes, and let's not forget the thousands of cities, counties, and school districts that all have their own compliance.
In software development, you're left with a few choices in this matter. Pare down the problem, scale up the development, or adopt a progressive model and hope you don't go bankrupt waiting to ship while keeping up with the changes along the way.
If you pare down the problem you've limited your market share. Deciding that you'll only handle, say, Federal filings means that your customers are left on their own for state compliance. It's a niche, sure, but a really small one. That's how every one of the companies you've heard of doing tax filing or payroll software started. And then you work really hard to make your company more and more relevant and scaling up quickly.
For option two, development can't scale this large from scratch. Brooks's Law (in this case) means the entire thing will collapse into a black hole of non-shipping code long before you've made it out of Year 1. And it's got to be nearly perfect -- people will tolerate a certain number of bugs in their games, but getting penalties from the IRS will keep your customers from coming back.
So you want to tackle federal and state taxes (no local) with your launch product? Expect to take at least a couple of years for this, and line up the appropriate capital to keep you in business meanwhile. Plan on using the last 25% of your development and test cycle bringing the code up to compliance with the regulations that have shifted while you were mucking around building the product. (i.e. if you can write and test it in 18 months, expect to ship in 2 years because you'll need the last 6 months just to catch up). That number is from experience, folks. Just try to find a venture capitalist that'll fund this kind of effort into a market that already has a few large players (Microsoft Dynamics, Intuit, Solomon) and dozens of small ones for a product that's just marginally better. Just try.
"I'm a web developer! I deal with shifting standards all the time!" No, not like this. There are thousands of standards and they move as often as quarterly and they're all published separately by different entities that don't interact at all. Screwing up browser standards in a web application usually means something doesn't display right and you find out right away; doing the same in payroll taxes means large penalties vastly disproportionate to the size of your mistake which you don't hear about until the letter arrives months later.
"I'll build clever databases!" "Properly designed rule sets will be my silver bullet!". Nope, think again. You're working against an adversarial opponent: politicians. Politicians need to raise taxes without looking like their raising taxes. Their rule sets can have unlimited complexity in their efforts to tax you while not looking like they're taxing you. They do just make shit up. If Congress wants to have an employer payroll tax for companies over 20 employees that have more than
It's stupid to use valuable (or even things that *look* valuable) as warning markers. Pharaohs were buried with jewels and gold, and look how many of their graves survived intact for just a couple of thousand years. As long as there's even a rumor of a payoff, people *will* dig them up even if the ground is cursed. Or radioactive.
[...] On that note, isn't that the American spirit? That everyone has an equal opportunity to rise to the top, proportional to your efforts, and there is no zero-sum game?
Proportional to your efforts... and your talents. That last bit is oftentimes just as important as your efforts, and brushed aside by those that think that all men/people really are equal in every way. No matter how hard I try, I can never be a top marathon runner -- my physiology just doesn't allow for it.
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: -- "We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: -- "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!" -- Rudyard Kipling, 1911
24 hours == 8 weeks of a 3x per week course. That's a reasonable amount of time to learn something.
I'll blow my moderation on this post to say: I wrote the "Perl in 24 Hours" books and this is exactly how it started out. I'm not sure how the other 24 Hours authors did things, but this is how I did it. I taught perl in night classes in the late 90's as part of a retraining effort for programmers that used COBOL or something else.
Classes were two nights per week with about 3 hours of effective class time, over a span of 3 weeks (18 hours). The book's chapters, exercises, and examples were right out of the instructional material (that I wrote). About 30+ minutes of lecturing, whiteboarding, and walking through the examples; the remainder of the hour was lab time to do the problems given. (I always did "open lab" during the lectures too, but time was set aside for those that needed to pay close attention.)
The remaining time in the class were "applications" of what was learned in the earlier sections -- writing useful programs to perform a task. The tasks changed as time went by based on interests of the class, industry needs, etc.. and how bright the students were in that bunch. Each edition of the book (there are 3) has a different set of 6 chapters at the end following this same trend.
To write the book was relatively easy: just lift the lesson plan right into the book. Hour by hour, chapter by chapter. The pacing was right, the material distribution was right, everything worked out.
It sold a ton of copies and is still paying enough royalties to take my wife out for a nice dinner every month.:)
I would be shocked if any payroll software did anything other than arbitrary date ranges. There is just no way to predict what type of harebrained cockamamie scheme our legislature might devise.
I work in payroll software and it's *far* more insane than this. This is just a timed rate change. When bigger stuff happens -- like the dual employer/employee federal withholding change last year or the COBRA credit the year before -- things get crazy.
When last-minute crap like that happens the *IRS* isn't even sure what to do. If a change gets passed, it will take a few days for the IRS to read the law and draft rules about how it'll work: the law is never specific enough and the IRS still needs to interpret it, develop reporting procedures, eligibility rules, etc.. For that entire time the major payroll vendors have frequent conference calls with the IRS for updates and questions so that they can change software to target what the rules will possibly be.
The programmers at payroll services are busy writing code against a spec that's still being written.
It's that you're expecting the guy who calls 911 to come back and tell the operator, "Well, he's not breathing," rather than to "make sure he's dead" by finishing him off. That incongruity is what makes it funny. That, and the fact that the caller is an obvious idiot.
I think the grandparent poster won't ever see the humor in it being clouded with prejudices as he seems to be. After I laughed, I tried translating the joke to see if it might carry into another culture. *tries his stand-up Philosophy*
Time: Ancient Rome (say, Late Republic). And the audience would be Roman citizens of the time.
A physician is examining a patient in his house, when a slave comes running into the room "Doctor! I think my master's gardener is dead! What should I do?". "I'm busy here! Go make sure he's really dead." The slave runs out, and minutes later runs back in, breathless, his tunic now blood-spattered, carrying a shovel, "Yup! He's dead!"
And yeah, the joke still works. The vague instructions from the learned man, the idiot all-too-literal slave, destruction of property, the graphic twist at the end. It's a good joke. In fact, framed this way, it might even be *funnier* to that audience.
The stereotype this plays on is "hunters are stupid rednecks who shoot first and think later". [...] Hunters would probably find the joke less funny but probably the "researchers" didn't define a category for them, so it didn't how up on their stats...
Those stupid redneck hunters often have an enormous ability to laugh at themselves that shouldn't be discounted. I haven't hunted in a while (but my NRA membership is still current) and I found the joke quite funny.
Agreed, the article blows on tech details. Between the Gates-bashing and the Linux/Win95 wars in this thread, there's been a severe lack of technical discussion. Then again, it's Slashdot.
In a nutshell, it seems that name space extensions (NSE) allowed you to leverage using the Windows File Explorer to represent things that weren't really files and directories at all. Details here. Perhaps Novell was layering a document management system (or networked document management system) on top of NSE's.
If WP was managing the documents for something like a law or medical office where it's fairly easy to drown in folders and files, this would be a great selling feature and yeah, NSE's might be a good shortcut to that representation. But you'd think that when MS withdrew the feature a clever engineer could just emulate the Explorer's representation of objects that they'd worked so hard to build already to feed to Explorer's NSE. It wouldn't be the first time someone's re-invented that wheel, for sure. Hell, if I were that engineer, it might be something I'd already have around for testing. When you play in someone else's sandbox, you'd better be prepared for them to take their best toys and go home; at least there's always sticks and rocks to play with.
Any way you slice it having something like that sink your word processing software is possible, I guess, but only if you're position was already tenuous.
You never take an artistic rendering as a fact in science. See dinosaurs.
I'd take a Audubon rendition of a bird to be a reasonable description of a specimen of a species. Not science, but a reliable factual eyewitness account.
Bob: You wanted to be Krusty's sidekick since you were five! What
about the buffoon lessons, the four years at clown college? Cecil: I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.
I spent a year doing data entry starting off my programming career while still going to school at night. Nothing glamorous and only vaguely related to what I wanted to do which was programming. However, that related-but-not-really experience was invaluable down the road when having to design user interfaces and workflow. A year of keying shipping bills of lading on an IBM 3270 terminal for a really terribly designed database taught me a lot. Sometime later I took a couple of years to be a sysadmin, and later applied that experience to tool building and system design.
Now I'm paid really well, enjoy what I do, and design kick-ass data entry UI's and systems tools. It's a shame when a programmer wastes their time and everyone else's designing an application they wouldn't use themselves.
Experience can't hurt. Well, it can, but you'll learn something in the process.:)
Agreed with your recommendation, but for different reasons. I read Blackout/All Clear back-to-back and didn't like them so much as Doomsday Book. They seemed to drag on and on, and there's a couple of sub-plots that sort of peter out and go nowhere important and simply act as distraction and add to the bulk of the books (the Bletchley Park and Operation Fortitude subplots for examples). This could have been a nicely trimmed single novel.
Contrast this with the Doomsday Book where the Kivrin thread is very intense and personal, focused, and well thought out; the epidemic thread provides a nice parallel with the black plague.
"Every other nation should be shunned until they raise their standards to the level of the civilized nations."
You are an elitist, selfish, and reasonably-argued racist snob. If you didn't also represent the views of others I've met, I'd just consider you a not-clever troll.
Please crawl back under your diamond-covered lily-white rock and don't come out again until Asia, Africa, and most of South America has reached the prosperity levels of Europe, the US and Canada. And without trade with more prosperous nations that could be a very very long time.
When you search for a person's name on Google, you might be looking for information about that person, or you might be doing research on what other people in the world can find about that person (particularly if that person is yourself). If a certain fact about you — for example, the members of your Facebook friends list — is viewable to anyone with a Facebook account as long as they're logged in to Facebook, then anybody in the world can obtain that information about you anyway, by getting their own Facebook account.
Minor nit here. I think the author assumes that anyone that can use Google to obtain information can also legitimately use Facebook to obtain the same information. Except this isn't true. There are people who aren't allowed to use Facebook in any form: those under 13 and those that have had their Facebook accounts disabled for violations of TOS. An argument could be made that Google is making information available to those who are legally not permitted to have it since Google makes no such distinctions.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't cite anything (other than 30 years of programming) but I believe this to be wrong. My elders in this field were all introverts.
I'm an introvert. This isn't a disease, something to be cured, medicated, or dealt with. It's the way I am. Even for "4 hours out of a day, with breaks" this is bad. Rotating partners regularly makes this much, much worse.
For us true introverts 4 hours with another person can be a taxing, grueling experience by itself no matter how pleasant a person he or she is. And you'd like us to think clearly and rationally while making us endure something that we're truly averse to? I wouldn't go as far as to say it creates a hostile work environment, but it's damned close.
Recommended reading for extroverts that just Don't Get It, or introverts that are tired of taking this kind of shit quietly: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain.
How would optical be wiped by e/m radiation?
1. Find a CD or a DVD with your valuable source code on it.
2. Take the media to your kitchen. Insert media into microwave oven.
3. Turn microwave on exposing media to EM radiation.
Of course, psychohistory doesn't work if you publish the results -- so all of this is bullshit. This implies that the psychohistorical result is actually not violence in 2020, but something else that they're trying to steer us towards. Maybe this is also why we're not supposed to be aware that psychohistory exists.
Back to the Prime Radiant, guys.
Almost everything can be accounted for in good table design and is. There does come a point where table design and maintenance simply can't accommodate a particular rule. Sometimes exceptions are thrown, longjmp() invoked, raise() called and god help us a GOTO executed.
Tax law is just another programming meta-language which later has to be compiled to code.
disclaimer: I work in the financial software field in a business very similar to Intuit.
Every time this comes up Slashdot is inundated with lots of comments about how easy this should be. It's not. Get over it.
The problem with financial software is that because of regulatory constraints and tax laws it's nearly impossible to start from scratch. Tax laws are vast. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly vast they are. I mean, you may think it's complicated to write an operating system, but that's just peanuts to tax law.
The secondary problems for payroll compliance and tax law is that they change (with alarming frequency). You probably don't know this because you're a single case, but on the federal and state level hundreds of changes happen each quarter for something like payroll taxes. Almost none of them apply to you. But every one of them applies to someone, and it's something you've got to get right. Oh yes, and let's not forget the thousands of cities, counties, and school districts that all have their own compliance.
In software development, you're left with a few choices in this matter. Pare down the problem, scale up the development, or adopt a progressive model and hope you don't go bankrupt waiting to ship while keeping up with the changes along the way.
If you pare down the problem you've limited your market share. Deciding that you'll only handle, say, Federal filings means that your customers are left on their own for state compliance. It's a niche, sure, but a really small one. That's how every one of the companies you've heard of doing tax filing or payroll software started. And then you work really hard to make your company more and more relevant and scaling up quickly.
For option two, development can't scale this large from scratch. Brooks's Law (in this case) means the entire thing will collapse into a black hole of non-shipping code long before you've made it out of Year 1. And it's got to be nearly perfect -- people will tolerate a certain number of bugs in their games, but getting penalties from the IRS will keep your customers from coming back.
So you want to tackle federal and state taxes (no local) with your launch product? Expect to take at least a couple of years for this, and line up the appropriate capital to keep you in business meanwhile. Plan on using the last 25% of your development and test cycle bringing the code up to compliance with the regulations that have shifted while you were mucking around building the product. (i.e. if you can write and test it in 18 months, expect to ship in 2 years because you'll need the last 6 months just to catch up). That number is from experience, folks. Just try to find a venture capitalist that'll fund this kind of effort into a market that already has a few large players (Microsoft Dynamics, Intuit, Solomon) and dozens of small ones for a product that's just marginally better. Just try.
"I'm a web developer! I deal with shifting standards all the time!" No, not like this. There are thousands of standards and they move as often as quarterly and they're all published separately by different entities that don't interact at all. Screwing up browser standards in a web application usually means something doesn't display right and you find out right away; doing the same in payroll taxes means large penalties vastly disproportionate to the size of your mistake which you don't hear about until the letter arrives months later.
"I'll build clever databases!" "Properly designed rule sets will be my silver bullet!". Nope, think again. You're working against an adversarial opponent: politicians. Politicians need to raise taxes without looking like their raising taxes. Their rule sets can have unlimited complexity in their efforts to tax you while not looking like they're taxing you. They do just make shit up. If Congress wants to have an employer payroll tax for companies over 20 employees that have more than
Sapphire and platinum? Where do I dig?
It's stupid to use valuable (or even things that *look* valuable) as warning markers. Pharaohs were buried with jewels and gold, and look how many of their graves survived intact for just a couple of thousand years. As long as there's even a rumor of a payoff, people *will* dig them up even if the ground is cursed. Or radioactive.
[...] On that note, isn't that the American spirit? That everyone has an equal opportunity to rise to the top, proportional to your efforts, and there is no zero-sum game?
Proportional to your efforts ... and your talents. That last bit is oftentimes just as important as your efforts, and brushed aside by those that think that all men/people really are equal in every way. No matter how hard I try, I can never be a top marathon runner -- my physiology just doesn't allow for it.
Luck doesn't hurt either.
Not Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling:
Yup. Rain doesn't stop the little buggers at all. To add further insult, it washes off the insect repellent too.
she honestly can't remember the password. How the hell are they going to rule on that???
A court of law is no place for honesty.
I'll blow my moderation on this post to say: I wrote the "Perl in 24 Hours" books and this is exactly how it started out. I'm not sure how the other 24 Hours authors did things, but this is how I did it. I taught perl in night classes in the late 90's as part of a retraining effort for programmers that used COBOL or something else.
Classes were two nights per week with about 3 hours of effective class time, over a span of 3 weeks (18 hours). The book's chapters, exercises, and examples were right out of the instructional material (that I wrote). About 30+ minutes of lecturing, whiteboarding, and walking through the examples; the remainder of the hour was lab time to do the problems given. (I always did "open lab" during the lectures too, but time was set aside for those that needed to pay close attention.)
The remaining time in the class were "applications" of what was learned in the earlier sections -- writing useful programs to perform a task. The tasks changed as time went by based on interests of the class, industry needs, etc.. and how bright the students were in that bunch. Each edition of the book (there are 3) has a different set of 6 chapters at the end following this same trend.
To write the book was relatively easy: just lift the lesson plan right into the book. Hour by hour, chapter by chapter. The pacing was right, the material distribution was right, everything worked out.
It sold a ton of copies and is still paying enough royalties to take my wife out for a nice dinner every month. :)
I would be shocked if any payroll software did anything other than arbitrary date ranges. There is just no way to predict what type of harebrained cockamamie scheme our legislature might devise.
I work in payroll software and it's *far* more insane than this. This is just a timed rate change. When bigger stuff happens -- like the dual employer/employee federal withholding change last year or the COBRA credit the year before -- things get crazy.
When last-minute crap like that happens the *IRS* isn't even sure what to do. If a change gets passed, it will take a few days for the IRS to read the law and draft rules about how it'll work: the law is never specific enough and the IRS still needs to interpret it, develop reporting procedures, eligibility rules, etc.. For that entire time the major payroll vendors have frequent conference calls with the IRS for updates and questions so that they can change software to target what the rules will possibly be.
The programmers at payroll services are busy writing code against a spec that's still being written.
It's that you're expecting the guy who calls 911 to come back and tell the operator, "Well, he's not breathing," rather than to "make sure he's dead" by finishing him off. That incongruity is what makes it funny. That, and the fact that the caller is an obvious idiot.
I think the grandparent poster won't ever see the humor in it being clouded with prejudices as he seems to be. After I laughed, I tried translating the joke to see if it might carry into another culture. *tries his stand-up Philosophy*
Time: Ancient Rome (say, Late Republic). And the audience would be Roman citizens of the time.
A physician is examining a patient in his house, when a slave comes running into the room "Doctor! I think my master's gardener is dead! What should I do?". "I'm busy here! Go make sure he's really dead." The slave runs out, and minutes later runs back in, breathless, his tunic now blood-spattered, carrying a shovel, "Yup! He's dead!"
And yeah, the joke still works. The vague instructions from the learned man, the idiot all-too-literal slave, destruction of property, the graphic twist at the end. It's a good joke. In fact, framed this way, it might even be *funnier* to that audience.
If it bends its funny. If it breaks its not funny..
Baloney. The breaking is funny too, if it's broken well.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. -- Mel Brooks
The stereotype this plays on is "hunters are stupid rednecks who shoot first and think later". [...] Hunters would probably find the joke less funny but probably the "researchers" didn't define a category for them, so it didn't how up on their stats...
Those stupid redneck hunters often have an enormous ability to laugh at themselves that shouldn't be discounted. I haven't hunted in a while (but my NRA membership is still current) and I found the joke quite funny.
Agreed, the article blows on tech details. Between the Gates-bashing and the Linux/Win95 wars in this thread, there's been a severe lack of technical discussion. Then again, it's Slashdot.
In a nutshell, it seems that name space extensions (NSE) allowed you to leverage using the Windows File Explorer to represent things that weren't really files and directories at all. Details here. Perhaps Novell was layering a document management system (or networked document management system) on top of NSE's.
If WP was managing the documents for something like a law or medical office where it's fairly easy to drown in folders and files, this would be a great selling feature and yeah, NSE's might be a good shortcut to that representation. But you'd think that when MS withdrew the feature a clever engineer could just emulate the Explorer's representation of objects that they'd worked so hard to build already to feed to Explorer's NSE. It wouldn't be the first time someone's re-invented that wheel, for sure. Hell, if I were that engineer, it might be something I'd already have around for testing. When you play in someone else's sandbox, you'd better be prepared for them to take their best toys and go home; at least there's always sticks and rocks to play with.
Any way you slice it having something like that sink your word processing software is possible, I guess, but only if you're position was already tenuous.
You never take an artistic rendering as a fact in science. See dinosaurs.
I'd take a Audubon rendition of a bird to be a reasonable description of a specimen of a species. Not science, but a reliable factual eyewitness account.
Of course, by oath, a Freemason wouldn't be able to confirm or deny if this document contains a description of a Masonic ritual.
*ahem*
ObClassicSimpsons:
Bob: You wanted to be Krusty's sidekick since you were five! What
about the buffoon lessons, the four years at clown college?
Cecil: I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.
-- "The Brother From Another Series"
>I mean isn't anonymous pretty widely recognized as being associated with the child porn website 4chan?
Yes, in the same way that Princeton University is widely recognized as being associated with The Jersey Shore.
I spent a year doing data entry starting off my programming career while still going to school at night. Nothing glamorous and only vaguely related to what I wanted to do which was programming. However, that related-but-not-really experience was invaluable down the road when having to design user interfaces and workflow. A year of keying shipping bills of lading on an IBM 3270 terminal for a really terribly designed database taught me a lot. Sometime later I took a couple of years to be a sysadmin, and later applied that experience to tool building and system design.
Now I'm paid really well, enjoy what I do, and design kick-ass data entry UI's and systems tools. It's a shame when a programmer wastes their time and everyone else's designing an application they wouldn't use themselves.
Experience can't hurt. Well, it can, but you'll learn something in the process. :)
Let me help lower that average a bit. Who will I vote for in the polls now? /settles in with some hot grits
Agreed with your recommendation, but for different reasons. I read Blackout/All Clear back-to-back and didn't like them so much as Doomsday Book. They seemed to drag on and on, and there's a couple of sub-plots that sort of peter out and go nowhere important and simply act as distraction and add to the bulk of the books (the Bletchley Park and Operation Fortitude subplots for examples). This could have been a nicely trimmed single novel.
Contrast this with the Doomsday Book where the Kivrin thread is very intense and personal, focused, and well thought out; the epidemic thread provides a nice parallel with the black plague.
"Every other nation should be shunned until they raise their standards to the level of the civilized nations."
You are an elitist, selfish, and reasonably-argued racist snob. If you didn't also represent the views of others I've met, I'd just consider you a not-clever troll.
Please crawl back under your diamond-covered lily-white rock and don't come out again until Asia, Africa, and most of South America has reached the prosperity levels of Europe, the US and Canada. And without trade with more prosperous nations that could be a very very long time.
Minor nit here. I think the author assumes that anyone that can use Google to obtain information can also legitimately use Facebook to obtain the same information. Except this isn't true. There are people who aren't allowed to use Facebook in any form: those under 13 and those that have had their Facebook accounts disabled for violations of TOS. An argument could be made that Google is making information available to those who are legally not permitted to have it since Google makes no such distinctions.