The Firefox developers have been claiming memory leak fixes since before it was called Firefox.
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Open a lot of windows and tabs and see for yourself. Maybe you don't normally do that, but people who do research online often see Firefox instability.
Should software updating be a system service? Suppose you like the Firefox version you have? Should updating be a system service, as with Google's Chrome? Most people don't know how to disable system services. Some manufacturers try to stop disabling by giving their services misleading names.
These are the Google system services I see on one Windows 7 computer:
Google Update Service (gupdate)
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Update\GoogleUpdate.exe"/svc
Google Update Service (gupdatem)
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Update\GoogleUpdate.exe"/medsvc
Google Updater Service
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Common\Google Updater\GoogleUpdaterService.exe"
Is Google so all-knowing that it can alone decide what should be on user's computers? Or will Google become more and more adversarial and disfunctional eventually go the way of HP and Tektronix?
I like Firefox. I think Mozilla needs a better top manager.
Many years ago, I spent a lot of time teaching Iranian women English. There was a volunteer English teaching group in my city, and one day I was assigned an Iranian woman to teach. Soon another Iranian woman joined her, so I taught 2 Iranian women, and then met others.
It was an extremely unusual social situation. Normally, Iranian women will not allow a man to be alone with Iranian women unless he is the "head" of the family, and then only in a limited way. But these women had been assigned by their families to marry Iranian men who were U.S. citizens. The Iranian men had gone back to Iran, married, and were allowed to re-enter the U.S. with their wives, as is normal for U.S. citizens.
The wives needed to learn English. That's how they came to the volunteer English teaching group. One of the reasons they allowed me to be alone with them is that I was seen as someone at the bottom of Iranian society, like someone who mows lawns. I was seen as someone of no importance, a servant.
Every Iranian woman I met said Iranian WOMEN control Iranian society, and, after spending two years with Iranian-Americans in my U.S. city who were U.S. citizens, during the time I was teaching, I agree with the women. It's not healthy control, but it is control of men by women.
Basically, I learned this: There are many, many women who live outside the cities, and many inside the cities, who are poorly educated. The poorly educated women have methods of countrol that, effectively, require women to be poorly educated. They don't want change, and they are powerful. With mostly hidden, manipulative ways, they are often able to arrange to get what they want.
(However, I've never been to Iran and don't speak Farsi, the Iranian Arabic language, so what I say is just the opinion of someone with limited experience.)
One of the problems some Iranian women have with education is that, with education, people are expected to have responsibility. Education interferes with the traditional cultural ways. Education interferes with the control over men that most Iranian women want.
Also, Iranian men have various ineffective ways of trying to get control, and, in some ways, have limited control.
If you are in the U.S., there are several problems with trying to get an understanding of Iran:
1) Nuclear power companies in the U.S. want control over nuclear power. They pay to influence the U.S. government against "proliferation" of nuclear power. They pay to control, to some extent, what is written by the media.
2) Those who make easy money from war want war. They pay to influence the U.S. government against methods of peaceful co-existence. Obviously, those who make money from killing other people don't have any moral issues with lying, or any moral issues at all. They want war any way they can get it, as long as they are physically safe, and no one they know is involved with actually fighting a war.
Two examples of those who have investments in war are former U.S. president George W. Bush and his family, and former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney.
Those in the U.S. who profit from killing other people have long interfered with Iranian affairs. From the Wikipedia article about Ms. Shirin Ebadi, the subject of this Slashdot story: She " remembers the CIA's 1953 overthrow of prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq with rage."
3) Educated Iranian women often very much dislike some parts of the common traditional Iranian culture, as you might expect. They either don't understand the currents in their own culture, or know that speaking against the wishes of other Iranian women would n
There is no "we" unless you are a war and weapons investor like the Bush and Cheney families. They would kill you if they decided it would make them more money.
If you buy something with an nVidia product in it, you may get involved with enormous hassles like that. People who weren't following the sneakiness and dishonesty closely didn't get their computers replaced because there was a very limited period in which customers needed to act.
Both AMD and nVidia need better management, in my opinion.
It seems to me that it is not only Saverin who is not mindful of and not caring about the health of the nation and the people around him. Judging from the articles linked below, it seems that the entire of Facebook is not healthy:
Facebook's reputation in the mainstream media is rapidly getting worse. Facebook is getting a bad reputation partly because of articles like these:
Worst company: Facebook was a semi-finalist in the April 2012 competition to be voted the worst company in the United States.
Facebook follows its business rules? Not always. The April 7, 2012 Wall Street Journal story, Selling You on Facebook, says:
"Facebook requires apps [mobile phone software applications] to ask
permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's
friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's
app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook
occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy."
There's more like that in the article.
Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button (using Javascript). For example, if you visit the Oregonian Newspaper web site, Facebook tracks every story you visit, even if you don't click on the "Like" button. There are ways to prevent that (using Firefox with the NoScript add-on), but most people don't know about them.
Companies pay people to click on Facebook "Like" buttons. The number of Facebook "Likes" doesn't give any indication of popularity.
On December 9, 2011 it was necessary to click on a Facebook "Like" button to be allowed to see Fry's Electronics ads.
Do 86,688 people (on April 9, 2012) really like Firestone Complete Auto Care, or did the company offer something to be "liked"?
If another store decides to prevent misleading product descriptions, and Home Depot doesn't, Home Depot will go bankrupt. It's that simple, in my opinion.
"... you are only really worried about a lighting strike on the power grid in close vicinity and on your circuit. "
True. A direct strike would burn everything in its path, including surge protectors.
"So dependent upon your circuit board,..."
Not correct. It is VERY useful to have surge protection that can handle a huge amount of energy, that is, a high number of joules. The protection needs to be on the power line, not inside equipment. If possible, you want the surge protector to burn, not your equipment.
Are you saying that at Home Depot no one in top management has control over dishonest descriptions of products?
That description of the surge protector was, in effect, an advertisement for Lowe's, a competitor. I don't want to waste time with companies I can't trust.
Surge protector Fraud Alert: The maximum allowed energy of the $30 surge protector, 560 joules, is tiny. It seems that the manufacturer is taking advantage of the ignorance of
most people and Home Depot about electricity.
A joule is 2.78 x 10-4 Watt-Hours of energy. Calculating the maximum
energy allowed by the surge protector: 2.78 x 10-4 * 560 = 0.15568
Watt-Hours. That means the surge protector can protect against a 1,000 watt surge for
0.00015568 hours. If I calculated correctly, that is 1,000 watts for
0.560448 seconds. More realistically, a lightning strike would cause at least a 10,000 watt surge. The surge
protector could protect against that for 56 milliseconds, a trivial amount of time. I've seen lightning strikes that lasted more than a hundred milliseconds. The current in a 10,000 watt surge at the rated 175 volts is only about 57 amps. If you want to protect against a more realistic 570 amp surge, the protector will last only 5 milliseconds until it explodes.
The surge protector linked may just have 3 small MOVs.
Some surge protectors give no indication or inadequate indication when they have burnt and stopped protecting. The linked description says, "LED indicates operational status". For you to know if the device is working, you must check to see if the LED is lit. That's not convenient if it is installed in "service-entrance locations".
The Home Depot web page to which you linked says, "36,000 Amp maximum
20,000-volt maximum surge current".
The "maximum surge current" listed is said to be 36,000 amps, but that is for a minuscule amount of time. Volts are not current; saying "20,000-volt maximum surge current" is ignorant.
Translation: The CEO of Home Depot has no technical knowledge and should be replaced immediately. If I were CEO of Home Depot, one of the first things I would do would be to make sure all the descriptions were accurate; I would not allow sneaky, tricky product descriptions.
Facebook's reputation with the mainstream media is rapidly getting worse. Facebook is getting a bad reputation partly because of articles like these:
Worst company: Facebook was a semi-finalist in the April 2012 competition to be voted the worst company in the United States.
Facebook follows its business rules? Not always. The April 7, 2012 Wall Street Journal story, Selling You on Facebook, says:
"Facebook requires apps [mobile phone software applications] to ask
permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's
friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's
app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook
occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy."
There's more like that in the article.
Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button (using Javascript). For example, if you visit the Oregonian Newspaper web site, Facebook tracks every story you visit, even if you don't click on the "Like" button. There are ways to prevent that (using Firefox with the NoScript add-on), but most people don't know about them.
Companies pay people to click on Facebook "Like" buttons. The number of Facebook "Likes" doesn't give any indication of popularity.
On December 9, 2011 it was necessary to click on a Facebook "Like" button to be allowed to see Fry's Electronics ads.
Do 86,688 people (on April 9, 2012) really like Firestone Complete Auto Care, or did the company offer something to be "liked"?
Inflation is around 2% only if the reduction in house prices is considered, I'm guessing. The fact is that prices for everything are being raised rapidly.
U.S. dollar inflation, some examples:
Food, +4.8% -- Food Price Outlook, 2012 Quote: "The food-at-home Consumer Price Index (CPI), in turn, increased more than expected '4.8 percent in 2011' which means that food price inflation was not as strong as in 2008 when it increased 6.4 percent over 2007."
Medical treatment, +8.5% -- Medical cost trends for 2012 "This year's report from PwC's Health Research Institute finds that the medical cost trend is expected to increase from 8% in 2011 to 8.5% in 2012."
University tuition, +8.3% -- College costs climb, yet again. "Tuition at the average public university jumped 8.3% to $8,244."
Food, +4.8% -- Food Price Outlook, 2012 Quote: "The food-at-home Consumer Price Index (CPI), in turn, increased more than expectedâ"4.8 percent in 2011â"which means that food price inflation was not as strong as in 2008 when it increased 6.4 percent over 2007."
Medical treatment, +8.5% -- Medical cost trends for 2012 "This year's report from PwC's Health Research Institute finds that the medical cost trend is expected to increase from 8% in 2011 to 8.5% in 2012."
University tuition, +8.3% -- College costs climb, yet again. "Tuition at the average public university jumped 8.3% to $8,244."
"Derivatives Charlie and I are of one mind in how we feel about derivatives and the trading activities that go with them: We view them as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system."
From page 14:
"I can assure you that the marking errors in the derivatives business have not been symmetrical. Almost invariably, they have favored either the trader who was eyeing a multi-million dollar bonus or the CEO who wanted to report impressive "earnings" (or both). The bonuses were paid, and the CEO profited from his options. Only much later did shareholders learn that the reported earnings were a sham."
On page 15:
"In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal." [my emphasis]
Warren Buffett, the world's most famous investor, published that in 2003. It was widely reported. No one can say the fraud was unknown, or that the present severe economic problems are due to a faulty mathematical formula.
For those who doubt the book F.I.A.S.C.O. is as intense as I said above, here's a quote from page 101:
"As the quick-learning derivatives salesmen began to have more and more violent thoughts, the securities they sold became more violent, as well. In 1986 a typical salesman subscribed to Time or perhaps Playboy, played golf, and sold corporate and government bonds. By 1994 that same salesman read Soldier of Fortune and Guns and Ammo, shot doves, and sold leveraged-indexed-inverse-floating-dual-currency structured notes. This was no coincidence."
FRAUD ALERT: It was not a mathematical model that caused the
problem. It was fraud. Financial organizations convinced investors that they
had a "mathematical model" so that they could steal. The theft was
ENTIRELY deliberate, as is described in detail in the 1997 book F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street, by Frank Partnoy.
Somehow the issues were kept quiet for 11 more years until the theft could be completed
in the 2008 financial crash. Traders called their work "ripping the
client's face off".
Nothing has been done to reform the extremely
corrupt financial system in the United States. No one in the SEC, U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission, the government organization that is
supposed to police financial fraud, was prosecuted, even though the agency
knew of the abuses. See the February 17, 2009 show Frontline: Inside the Meltdown.
Even though the U.S. dollar is experiencing rampant
inflation in 2012, U.S. banks give less than 1% interest on savings. Those who would like to
invest can't because the system is so corrupt it cannot be trusted. Corporations
hold unprecedented amounts of cash. See, for example, the October 7, 2010 Washington
Post article, U.S. companies buy back stock in droves as they hold record levels of cash.
F.I.A.S.C.O. stands for "Fixed Income Annual Sporting Clays
Outing" (See page 100 of the 2009 edition.), held at a shooting range
called "Sandanona, a club in upstate New York" (Page 97 of the 2009
edition). Traders would go there to shoot guns. The idea was to encourage
their taste for violence so that they would be even more financially violent
toward the customer.
Perhaps the April 27, 2012 BBC article, Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash referenced in this Slashdot story was influenced by public relations agencies trying to get people to believe that the crash was caused by errors in mathematical thinking, and not by fraud, so that the financial industry can continue stealing.
It would be helpful if Slashdot editors signed a statement about each story saying that they know of no conflict of interest, and no one was paid to run the story.
Slashdot Mirror
"The tabs don't split into multiple lines of tabs..."
Try the Tab Mix Plus extension. Choose this setting:
Tab Mix Plus > Options > Display > Tab Bar > When tabs don't fit width > Multi-row
The reason Firefox is ultra important to human development at present is that it has so many excellent extensions.
The Firefox developers have been claiming memory leak fixes since before it was called Firefox.
/svc
/medsvc
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Open a lot of windows and tabs and see for yourself. Maybe you don't normally do that, but people who do research online often see Firefox instability.
Should software updating be a system service? Suppose you like the Firefox version you have? Should updating be a system service, as with Google's Chrome? Most people don't know how to disable system services. Some manufacturers try to stop disabling by giving their services misleading names.
These are the Google system services I see on one Windows 7 computer:
Google Update Service (gupdate)
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Update\GoogleUpdate.exe"
Google Update Service (gupdatem)
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Update\GoogleUpdate.exe"
Google Updater Service
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Common\Google Updater\GoogleUpdaterService.exe"
Is Google so all-knowing that it can alone decide what should be on user's computers? Or will Google become more and more adversarial and disfunctional eventually go the way of HP and Tektronix?
I like Firefox. I think Mozilla needs a better top manager.
Many years ago, I spent a lot of time teaching Iranian women English. There was a volunteer English teaching group in my city, and one day I was assigned an Iranian woman to teach. Soon another Iranian woman joined her, so I taught 2 Iranian women, and then met others.
It was an extremely unusual social situation. Normally, Iranian women will not allow a man to be alone with Iranian women unless he is the "head" of the family, and then only in a limited way. But these women had been assigned by their families to marry Iranian men who were U.S. citizens. The Iranian men had gone back to Iran, married, and were allowed to re-enter the U.S. with their wives, as is normal for U.S. citizens.
The wives needed to learn English. That's how they came to the volunteer English teaching group. One of the reasons they allowed me to be alone with them is that I was seen as someone at the bottom of Iranian society, like someone who mows lawns. I was seen as someone of no importance, a servant.
Every Iranian woman I met said Iranian WOMEN control Iranian society, and, after spending two years with Iranian-Americans in my U.S. city who were U.S. citizens, during the time I was teaching, I agree with the women. It's not healthy control, but it is control of men by women.
Iran is a modern country in many ways. See, for example these photos of the biggest city, Tehran:
Tehran from the air
Tehran city highway
Basically, I learned this: There are many, many women who live outside the cities, and many inside the cities, who are poorly educated. The poorly educated women have methods of countrol that, effectively, require women to be poorly educated. They don't want change, and they are powerful. With mostly hidden, manipulative ways, they are often able to arrange to get what they want.
(However, I've never been to Iran and don't speak Farsi, the Iranian Arabic language, so what I say is just the opinion of someone with limited experience.)
One of the problems some Iranian women have with education is that, with education, people are expected to have responsibility. Education interferes with the traditional cultural ways. Education interferes with the control over men that most Iranian women want.
Also, Iranian men have various ineffective ways of trying to get control, and, in some ways, have limited control.
If you are in the U.S., there are several problems with trying to get an understanding of Iran:
1) Nuclear power companies in the U.S. want control over nuclear power. They pay to influence the U.S. government against "proliferation" of nuclear power. They pay to control, to some extent, what is written by the media.
2) Those who make easy money from war want war. They pay to influence the U.S. government against methods of peaceful co-existence. Obviously, those who make money from killing other people don't have any moral issues with lying, or any moral issues at all. They want war any way they can get it, as long as they are physically safe, and no one they know is involved with actually fighting a war.
Two examples of those who have investments in war are former U.S. president George W. Bush and his family, and former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney.
Those in the U.S. who profit from killing other people have long interfered with Iranian affairs. From the Wikipedia article about Ms. Shirin Ebadi, the subject of this Slashdot story: She " remembers the CIA's 1953 overthrow of prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq with rage."
3) Educated Iranian women often very much dislike some parts of the common traditional Iranian culture, as you might expect. They either don't understand the currents in their own culture, or know that speaking against the wishes of other Iranian women would n
There is no "we" unless you are a war and weapons investor like the Bush and Cheney families. They would kill you if they decided it would make them more money.
Completely off topic: What does "kill" mean in the 10 commandments? And, do you happen to have a citation?
"When a raindrop hits a mosquito, it's the equivalent of one of us being slammed into by a bus."
You know that's not true. A bus is solid, a raindrop is liquid.
"The argument between HP and nVidia over defective GPUs is between HP and nVidia, not between me and nVidia."
The way nVidia has acted in the past is an indication of how it may act in the future. See one of the many articles, for example: Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip.
If you buy something with an nVidia product in it, you may get involved with enormous hassles like that. People who weren't following the sneakiness and dishonesty closely didn't get their computers replaced because there was a very limited period in which customers needed to act.
Both AMD and nVidia need better management, in my opinion.
LaptopVideo2Go.com is a very active web site entirely devoted to making nVidia graphics devices work correctly. nVidia tried to avoid doing anything about defective chips in HP laptops.
When you download AMD's ATI drivers, the web site tries to sell violent video games. The new drivers often have serious bugs.
If there is a competition, which CEO will be voted the worst? nVidia does not seem honest, and AMD seems to be trying to drive itself out of business.
Name other CEOs you think aren't doing well.
The Adobe Systems CEO, for example.
We investigated Framemaker for putting together books. Framemaker is so badly documented it is amazing.
We also found many flaws in Adobe InDesign.
Anyone know what is the best software for generating Tables of Contents and Indexes for book formatting?
The Pelican 1514 case shouts, "I've got something expensive!"
When I travel, I try not to attract attention.
It seems to me that it is not only Saverin who is not mindful of and not caring about the health of the nation and the people around him. Judging from the articles linked below, it seems that the entire of Facebook is not healthy:
.
... was charged ... based solely on a Fac
Facebook's reputation in the mainstream media is rapidly getting worse. Facebook is getting a bad reputation partly because of articles like these:
Worst company: Facebook was a semi-finalist in the April 2012 competition to be voted the worst company in the United States
Facebook follows its business rules? Not always. The April 7, 2012 Wall Street Journal story, Selling You on Facebook, says:
"Facebook requires apps [mobile phone software applications] to ask permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy."
There's more like that in the article.
Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button (using Javascript). For example, if you visit the Oregonian Newspaper web site, Facebook tracks every story you visit, even if you don't click on the "Like" button. There are ways to prevent that (using Firefox with the NoScript add-on), but most people don't know about them.
Companies pay people to click on Facebook "Like" buttons. The number of Facebook "Likes" doesn't give any indication of popularity.
On December 9, 2011 it was necessary to click on a Facebook "Like" button to be allowed to see Fry's Electronics ads.
Do 86,688 people (on April 9, 2012) really like Firestone Complete Auto Care, or did the company offer something to be "liked"?
A few problems with Facebook: Richard Stallman wrote a short list of things wrong with Facebook.
How much information does Facebook keep? Read the December 13, 2011 article, Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages.
What do people in other countries think? The May 14, 2010 article, Facebook is not your friend gives one idea.
The June 15, 2011 article, The End of Facebook, and the June 14, 2011 article, Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? give others.
Most people don't understand the problems that may occur. For example, consider the March 28, 2012 article, Teacher's aide says 'no access' to her Facebook; now legal battle with school.
This April 4, 2012 article would be funny if it weren't so sad: Woman arrested for assault based on Facebook photo. Quotes:
"Aston
Thanks, I got confused.
It seems certain he is not "required".
If another store decides to prevent misleading product descriptions, and Home Depot doesn't, Home Depot will go bankrupt. It's that simple, in my opinion.
"... you are only really worried about a lighting strike on the power grid in close vicinity and on your circuit. "
..."
True. A direct strike would burn everything in its path, including surge protectors.
"So dependent upon your circuit board,
Not correct. It is VERY useful to have surge protection that can handle a huge amount of energy, that is, a high number of joules. The protection needs to be on the power line, not inside equipment. If possible, you want the surge protector to burn, not your equipment.
Are you saying that at Home Depot no one in top management has control over dishonest descriptions of products?
That description of the surge protector was, in effect, an advertisement for Lowe's, a competitor. I don't want to waste time with companies I can't trust.
Wrong! If the MOVs burn and become open while the surge continues, both the surge protector and the attached electronics can be destroyed.
Surge protector Fraud Alert: The maximum allowed energy of the $30 surge protector, 560 joules, is tiny. It seems that the manufacturer is taking advantage of the ignorance of most people and Home Depot about electricity.
A joule is 2.78 x 10-4 Watt-Hours of energy. Calculating the maximum energy allowed by the surge protector: 2.78 x 10-4 * 560 = 0.15568 Watt-Hours. That means the surge protector can protect against a 1,000 watt surge for 0.00015568 hours. If I calculated correctly, that is 1,000 watts for 0.560448 seconds. More realistically, a lightning strike would cause at least a 10,000 watt surge. The surge protector could protect against that for 56 milliseconds, a trivial amount of time. I've seen lightning strikes that lasted more than a hundred milliseconds. The current in a 10,000 watt surge at the rated 175 volts is only about 57 amps. If you want to protect against a more realistic 570 amp surge, the protector will last only 5 milliseconds until it explodes.
The surge protector linked may just have 3 small MOVs.
Some surge protectors give no indication or inadequate indication when they have burnt and stopped protecting. The linked description says, "LED indicates operational status". For you to know if the device is working, you must check to see if the LED is lit. That's not convenient if it is installed in "service-entrance locations".
The Home Depot web page to which you linked says,
"36,000 Amp maximum
20,000-volt maximum surge current".
The "maximum surge current" listed is said to be 36,000 amps, but that is for a minuscule amount of time. Volts are not current; saying "20,000-volt maximum surge current" is ignorant.
Translation: The CEO of Home Depot has no technical knowledge and should be replaced immediately. If I were CEO of Home Depot, one of the first things I would do would be to make sure all the descriptions were accurate; I would not allow sneaky, tricky product descriptions.
Facebook's reputation with the mainstream media is rapidly getting worse. Facebook is getting a bad reputation partly because of articles like these:
.
... was charged ... based solely on a Facebook photo and a
generic description offered to police by the victim's boyfriend."
Worst company: Facebook was a semi-finalist in the April 2012 competition to be voted the worst company in the United States
Facebook follows its business rules? Not always. The April 7, 2012 Wall Street Journal story, Selling You on Facebook, says:
"Facebook requires apps [mobile phone software applications] to ask permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy."
There's more like that in the article.
Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button (using Javascript). For example, if you visit the Oregonian Newspaper web site, Facebook tracks every story you visit, even if you don't click on the "Like" button. There are ways to prevent that (using Firefox with the NoScript add-on), but most people don't know about them.
Companies pay people to click on Facebook "Like" buttons. The number of Facebook "Likes" doesn't give any indication of popularity.
On December 9, 2011 it was necessary to click on a Facebook "Like" button to be allowed to see Fry's Electronics ads.
Do 86,688 people (on April 9, 2012) really like Firestone Complete Auto Care, or did the company offer something to be "liked"?
A few problems with Facebook: Richard Stallman wrote a short list of things wrong with Facebook.
How much information does Facebook keep? Read the December 13, 2011 article, Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages.
What do people in other countries think? The May 14, 2010 article, Facebook is not your friend gives one idea.
The June 15, 2011 article, The End of Facebook, and the June 14, 2011 article, Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? give others.
Most people don't understand the problems that may occur. For example, consider the March 28, 2012 article, Teacher's aide says 'no access' to her Facebook; now legal battle with school.
This April 4, 2012 article would be funny if it weren't so sad: Woman arrested for assault based on Facebook photo. Quotes:
"Aston
Defending herself required a "... court appearance and several thousand dollars in legal bills."
Open source will prevail. E
My comment below, Price increases are far more than interest rates, had some errors. I'm posting a corrected version again here. I don't have the time to do more research.
Inflation is around 2% only if the reduction in house prices is considered, I'm guessing. The fact is that prices for everything are being raised rapidly.
U.S. dollar inflation, some examples:
Food, +4.8% -- Food Price Outlook, 2012
Quote: "The food-at-home Consumer Price Index (CPI), in turn, increased more than expected '4.8 percent in 2011' which means that food price inflation was not as strong as in 2008 when it increased 6.4 percent over 2007."
Medical treatment, +8.5% -- Medical cost trends for 2012
"This year's report from PwC's Health Research Institute finds that the medical cost trend is expected to increase from 8% in 2011 to 8.5% in 2012."
University tuition, +8.3% -- College costs climb, yet again.
"Tuition at the average public university jumped 8.3% to $8,244."
Gas, +108% in 8 years -- Historical Price Charts
Thanks, I made a mistake.
U.S. dollar inflation, some examples:
Food, +4.8% -- Food Price Outlook, 2012
Quote: "The food-at-home Consumer Price Index (CPI), in turn, increased more than expectedâ"4.8 percent in 2011â"which means that food price inflation was not as strong as in 2008 when it increased 6.4 percent over 2007."
Medical treatment, +8.5% -- Medical cost trends for 2012
"This year's report from PwC's Health Research Institute finds that the medical cost trend is expected to increase from 8% in 2011 to 8.5% in 2012."
University tuition, +8.3% -- College costs climb, yet again.
"Tuition at the average public university jumped 8.3% to $8,244."
Gas, +208% -- Historical Price Charts
I guess you don't know Slashdot well. Here are comments on other articles that raise suspicion. Judge for yourself from these 3:
Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar
Brains Work Best At Age of 39
The Painkiller That Saves Money But Costs Lives
In the Berkshire Hathaway 2002 Annual Report (PDF file), Warren Buffett said this on page 13:
"Derivatives
Charlie and I are of one mind in how we feel about derivatives and the trading activities that go with them: We view them as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system."
From page 14:
"I can assure you that the marking errors in the derivatives business have not been symmetrical. Almost invariably, they have favored either the trader who was eyeing a multi-million dollar bonus or the CEO who wanted to report impressive "earnings" (or both). The bonuses were paid, and the CEO profited from his options. Only much later did shareholders learn that the reported earnings were a sham."
On page 15:
"In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal." [my emphasis]
Warren Buffett, the world's most famous investor, published that in 2003. It was widely reported. No one can say the fraud was unknown, or that the present severe economic problems are due to a faulty mathematical formula.
For those who doubt the book F.I.A.S.C.O. is as intense as I said above, here's a quote from page 101:
"As the quick-learning derivatives salesmen began to have more and more violent thoughts, the securities they sold became more violent, as well. In 1986 a typical salesman subscribed to Time or perhaps Playboy, played golf, and sold corporate and government bonds. By 1994 that same salesman read Soldier of Fortune and Guns and Ammo, shot doves, and sold leveraged-indexed-inverse-floating-dual-currency structured notes. This was no coincidence."
FRAUD ALERT: It was not a mathematical model that caused the problem. It was fraud. Financial organizations convinced investors that they had a "mathematical model" so that they could steal. The theft was ENTIRELY deliberate, as is described in detail in the 1997 book F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street, by Frank Partnoy. Somehow the issues were kept quiet for 11 more years until the theft could be completed in the 2008 financial crash. Traders called their work "ripping the client's face off" .
There are other editions of the book, such as this one published in 1999, Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader, and a 2009 I-told-you-so edition of the original name.
Nothing has been done to reform the extremely corrupt financial system in the United States. No one in the SEC, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the government organization that is supposed to police financial fraud, was prosecuted, even though the agency knew of the abuses. See the February 17, 2009 show Frontline: Inside the Meltdown.
Even though the U.S. dollar is experiencing rampant inflation in 2012, U.S. banks give less than 1% interest on savings. Those who would like to invest can't because the system is so corrupt it cannot be trusted. Corporations hold unprecedented amounts of cash. See, for example, the October 7, 2010 Washington Post article, U.S. companies buy back stock in droves as they hold record levels of cash.
F.I.A.S.C.O. stands for "Fixed Income Annual Sporting Clays Outing" (See page 100 of the 2009 edition.), held at a shooting range called "Sandanona, a club in upstate New York" (Page 97 of the 2009 edition). Traders would go there to shoot guns. The idea was to encourage their taste for violence so that they would be even more financially violent toward the customer.
Perhaps the April 27, 2012 BBC article, Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash referenced in this Slashdot story was influenced by public relations agencies trying to get people to believe that the crash was caused by errors in mathematical thinking, and not by fraud, so that the financial industry can continue stealing.
It would be helpful if Slashdot editors signed a statement about each story saying that they know of no conflict of interest, and no one was paid to run the story.