I remember that Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Paralax books mentioned that religious experiences can be triggered by electrical fields as well, kind of a reverse MRI i think? I'm pretty sure that part was based on actual research.
They already have that. I use it all the time. You just have to sign up for Google's PayPal er... *topekas "google's paypal"*.... Google Checkout!
Whenever i want to buy an app i just hit the button and it starts downloading, and a minute or so later an email shows up in my Gmail account with the details of the transaction.
(I'm still oscillating about whether i should start getting concerned that i'm getting an email from Google on my GMail account about the Google Checkout purchase of an app on Google's Android OS that i'm running on a phone i bought from Google.)
"I am disappointed that so many people on slashdot are posting this comment. You either jumped to this conclusion with no evidence or have horrible observation/problem solving skills. It is in the resolution options for every video. You can also add "&textp=fool" to the url."
I'd thank you for the correction, except you had to jump in with the personal insults as well. Personally i checked YouTube right before leaving for work. I loaded several of my favorite videos and none of them were getting the filter effect. Since the last time YouTube did an April Fools joke like this (Rick Rolls) it applied to every video on the site, i thought the effect was not available on those other videos. I guess i did jump to the conclusion a bit, but it wasn't entirely without evidence from YouTube's past behaviour.
So why are you even trying to be "nice" and help others out if you have such a low view of all us idiots? Or did you forget to set your "&mood=civil" flag while loading your opinion?
I'm actually kind of disappointed that you can't actually watch all (or even most of) the YouTube videos that way, it's a pretty cool effect!
You almost had me going, but...
on
Apple iPad Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Also, iPad's extraordinary battery life is not just a myth. According to the lab tests, battery netted a respectable 9 hours and 25 minutes, very close to Apple's claims of 10 hours."
*sigh* Guess we have to wait until after April Fools' Day to get a real review.
Okay, you're correct. If they made that decision just to gain marketshare but really truly had no conception that anyone would object to the privacy controls they had implemented, then that demonstrated a particular kind of blindness, but not evil.
I will delve a bit deeper into the philosophic waters though. A motive does not have to be evil in order for actions taken in regard to it to be evil. If Google was aware that releasing Buzz as-was would hurt people, but choose to do that anyways in pursuit of their own gain, then i think that qualifies as evil. Intentionally and actively doing harm to others in pursuit of a benefit that applies mainly to yourself qualifies as evil in my book.
In more nuanced cases where the harm is to a small number of people and the benefit is to a large number of people other than yourself then you run into the true moral quandaries. Or those silly "what if" type questions people like to play, like "if you had to kill your best friend in order to save the world would you do it?" and such.
"The homosphere and heterosphere are defined by whether the atmospheric gases are well mixed. In the homosphere the chemical composition of the atmosphere does not depend on molecular weight because the gases are mixed by turbulence.[3] The homosphere includes the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere. Above the turbopause at about 100 km (62 mi; 330,000 ft) (essentially corresponding to the mesopause), the composition varies with altitude. This is because the distance that particles can move without colliding with one another is large compared with the size of motions that cause mixing. This allows the gases to stratify by molecular weight, with the heavier ones such as oxygen and nitrogen present only near the bottom of the heterosphere. The upper part of the heterosphere is composed almost completely of hydrogen, the lightest element."
So you're not going to encounter the effect you claim at 5000m, but at 100,000m. (And at 100,000m you'll actually find the _highest_ relative partial pressure of Oxygen and CO2, the hydrogen-only part is even higher!) But don't just stop with wikipedia! Maybe it's been vandalized by Global Warming Believers or something! Go to the library and read some books on the subject! I am very sure that they will agree with that synopsis.
"People that email you don't get added to your contact list unless you reply to them, never have."
*sigh* If you're going to respond to a post could you please read the entire post?
I never claimed people that email get added to your follow list even if you don't respond to them. I claimed that, at least at launch, you could get added to the follow list of people who emailed you even if you never responded to them. The list of people you are following and the list of people following you are entirely distinct. It's impossible to prove if that was actually the case now since Google has made so many changes to the privacy settings between then and now, but enough people claimed it that I'm willing to believe it. However even if it isn't true the fact that it would auto-follow people based on a single email, regardless of the contents, is bad enough by itself.
"Anyone who has 'leaked' information didn't fucking say no. They opted in and were too stupid to read the message they clicked yes to."
First of all, a lot of people reported that they had followers added to their profiles before they even signed up for Buzz. Again it's impossible to prove one way or the other now, but it was reported by enough people that I'm willing to believe it, given how many other things Google verifiably screwed up in the launch.
Google didn't advertise exactly what it was actually going to do if you tried Buzz out, and i personally know a couple people who when they found out were frantic to turn a lot of the options off. Luckily none of those people risked anything more than personal embarrassment if people started going through their (now public) contacts and started putting two and two together, not like the smaller minority that faced potentially more serious consequences.
If that was Google "trying to be nice" then they've got some serious problems with relating to people in the real world. The "so few" minority was enough to drive articles about the lack of privacy in Buzz to the top of several of my news feeds for most of a week, and Google was really damn quick to start back-pedaling (though not so quick with the actual apologies.) I've actually got a number of friends working at Google, and none of them were able to come up with a good defense or even a good explanation for most of the decisions made regarding the initial roll-out of Buzz.
I think you are also missing the point as well.. GMail ToS: 2.3 You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google[...]
No, i'm not. Please pay better attention. I will quote two bits from my original post. First, in the example i used: "'InnocentUser,' a legal adult, has a Gmail account."
Second, "It's unfortunate that the lawmakers are pulling the 'think of the children' card when Google clearly did something wrong regardless of the age of the people involved, but that doesn't somehow magically invalidate the wrongness."
The lawmakers in question advertising one particular sensationalist example does not negate all the other entirely legitimate cases where Google violated the privacy of people.
People seem to be jumping on either the "pro-Google" bandwagon or the "anti-'think of the children'" bandwagon left and right. So let's stop and consider this rationally.
Google has changed Buzz to address privacy concerns multiple times. In fact they made so many changes so quickly that it's hard to document exactly what settings it had when without a lot of research. However early on it was easily possible to have the following scenario:
"InnocentUser," a legal adult, has a Gmail account. (Let's even say they got one sometime after July 2009, so Gmail wasn't even in "beta" at the time, just to end-run one particular argument.) They've emailed a number of people using this account. They've also gotten several scary emails from "ImaPredator," which they never responded to.
When Buzz was launched InnocentUser's Google Profile was indexed. The easiest way for this to happen was to "try out" Buzz like Google urged everyone with a Gmail account. However numerous people have reported finding they had their Google Profile indexed without ever actually trying Buzz.
Once your Google Profile was automatically integrated with Buzz it would auto-follow anyone who you emailed with a lot. So InnocentUser has a lot of their usual contacts auto-followed and made visible in their Google Profile. Meanwhile ImaPredator joins Buzz, which notices they emailed InnocentUser a lot (regardless of the fact that InnocentUser never emailed back,) and auto-follows them. Now ImaPredator can go to InnocentUser's Google Profile and see the list of their most common contacts.
That's pretty bad. Of course it's even worse that perhaps InnocentUser did email back ImaPredator once, with a message saying something like "If you ever email me again I'm going to report you to the police." That's good enough for Buzz to decide InnocentUser ought to auto-follow ImaPredator as well! (Once of the people Buzz set me up to auto-follow was someone who i had a single email exchange with. Perhaps because it occurred very shortly before Buzz went live.)
There _was_ an option to disable Buzz. However initially at least all that did was remove the Buzz UI from your end. Your profile was still visible to others and still listed your regular contacts. CNET and other sites published detailed tutorials about how to _actually_ go through all the options and disable Buzz "for realz" because of all the privacy concerns.
When the inevitable, and in my mind quite justified, complaints started, Google went through several rounds of apologizing (but usually with weasel wording such as "we're sorry our users feel like their privacy has been violated" rather than "we're sorry we screwed up") and revising Buzz's behaviour and options. After the third or so revision they reached the point where it was halfway reasonable, and it was fairly easy for everyone who still didn't like it to actually turn it off.
Google definitely did something stupid. If they made the decision to auto-include everyone with a Gmail account in Buzz because they thought it was the only way to catch up with Facebook and Twitter in a reasonable amount of time then what they did could arguably be considered Evil as well. It's unfortunate that the lawmakers are pulling the "think of the children" card when Google clearly did something wrong regardless of the age of the people involved, but that doesn't somehow magically invalidate the wrongness. Google did try to correct things after the fact, but that doesn't change the fact that they did something wrong to begin with, and it's quite possible that some people were hurt by Google's mistakes before changes were implemented.
Certainly a slap on the wrist by the FCC would not be out of line. And an investigation into whether the issues were due to professional negligence or... whatever you call screwing over your users for a "quick buck," also seems quite reasonable to me. If something actually criminal was done (i leave it up to the actual lawyers to determine what would and would not be criminal in this case) then apologizing for it before the "police" actually catch you isn't enough to get you out of trouble. It doesn't work that way for the average citizen and it shouldn't work that way for corporations either.
Most people figured a new Nintendo handheld was coming out soon. Some people expected an announcement at the big media event they had last month. A lot of people expected them to announce it at E3. Two weeks ago at GDC was the dark horse contender for a potential announcement. Instead of any of that they just send out a press release on a random tuesday morning at the end of March? What the hell?
Is there some kind of crazy logic i'm missing here? After Sony's disastrous failure at preventing leaks prior to last year's E3 (and somewhat Microsoft as well) has Nintendo decided there's no point in trying to keep anything secret prior to a big announcement with the internet as good at ferreting out secrets as it is?
Their timing of the announcement is so bizarre that i haven't even started thinking about the device itself yet.
You're complaining about Chrome having an inconsistent UI? On a Microsoft OS?
Uh, yes. I am. I'm using XP and Chrome is the only program i have open right now or that i use on a regular basis that doesn't have a perfectly rectangular window with a title bar.
Since everyone seems to be listing off what they think Chrome should and should not be doing for new features, here's my list:
Add an option to make it look like every other window i've got. Maybe some people like the round-cornered title bar-less window, but i find it annoying. Not only is it aesthetically annoying to have it so different from everything else, but i often have trouble finding it amidst all the other windows i've got open because i mentally locate everything by the title bar. I often have to select Chrome from the task bar just to find it when it turns out that the part which should have been the title bar was already visible.
The folder tab bar needs to be relocatable to the "normal" position just above the pages themselves. They can use whatever structural hierarchy behind the scenes that they want, but when i look at Firefox i visualize a filing cabinet full of files. When look at Chrome i can't help but visualize an entire row of filing cabinets, one cabinet for each individual file folder. In a related usability comment, i often do a google search for a term, open up multiple tabs from that search, and then do a text find on the search term on each of the pages. In Firefox this is easy because the search box is part of the browser so i can just switch pages and hit the "next" button. In Chrome the search box is (of course) part of the tab, so i have to open a new search box every time i switch to a new tab. This is not a helpful feature.
I do appreciate that unlike with Firefox i can actually reclaim memory by closing old tabs. (Despite repeated claims of memory improvements in every version of Firefox, after a couple days of use it's still sucking up a gig and a half of memory, and closing individual tabs has almost no affect on the usage.) However in the 24 hour trial i did Chrome ended up using 886 megs of private memory to Firefox's 911 megs, which is a pretty even comparison, but _5275_ megs of virtual memory to Firefox's 1038 megs!
They also need to add a drop-down menu to let you jump to a specific tab, like Firefox, and they need to add a minimum width for the tabs, like Firefox, and they need to add a scrollable tab bar, like Firefox. The Chrome developers have made a blog post explaining why those are all bad design decisions. They admit that their current system causes problems, but they don't want to implement a "bad" design choice, and they they don't want to give the user options (because that's another "bad" design choice.)
Okay guys, you made that post a YEAR ago. You STILL haven't figured out a better way to fix those problems. Perhaps you ought to let us use Firefox's "bad" solutions rather than trying to convince us to continue using an admittedly broken product while you sit around failing to think of the "right" way to do it.
And i don't care how much you value your opinions as designers or how much you think reducing options "forces you to come up with the right approach," no single system is going to be the "right" one for everyone, and giving the users options to customize software to fit their own needs is not a failure! This is the same mindset that resulted in minimizing the options for privacy in Buzz, because you were so sure you'd come up with the perfect way to handle privacy. It turns out that not everyone thinks the same as you. Of course in that case everyone had the choice between canceling their gmail account or complaining loudly until you fixed things. It's "too bad" for you that in the case of Chrome everyone who disagrees with your design choices can just quietly go back to Firefox or Safari or IE or whatever else they were using before without voicing loud complaints.
And as a final note, i'm also annoyed by the stupid behaviour of tabs getting opened right after the tab you opened them from. I read their reasons about why they did that in the above post. It doesn't fit my usage. It would have been nice if they'd made
Godwin's Law was "invented" for two reasons. First that it's bad logic to try to denigrate something just by comparing it to something unpopular when no actual link exists, even though it can often be an "effective" tactic in an argument. Second of all, such vapid comparisons, such as saying "the Nazis had pieces of flare they made the Jews wear" in reference to a restaurant chain just trivializes the true horror of the Nazis. If everyone says "well the Nazis did that too" in response to everything they disagree with then the comparison will begin to seem meaningless even when it is entirely accurate and valid.
Since this article is about the actual Nazis, and directly relates to genocide and "racial cleansing," at least in theory, trying to invoke Godwin's Law in this case is just as wrong as trying to compare completely unrelated subjects to Hitler or the Nazis.
I would posit that if you're letting the AI send in settlers to the areas between your cities before city growth happens then you're doing something wrong. I believe in Civ4 that isn't even possible unless the AI has declared war on you (in which case there's nothing stopping you from just killing the settler.) I've never had an issue with the AI sneaking settlers in between closely packed cities. I admit that they've sometimes gotten past my guard when i've had my cities spread out further than the maximum possible city radius, but that's not the situation we're discussing here.
I know it will result in a much more natural city-radius, but adapting to the new tile shape will be hard at first. After almost two decades of playing Civ games (both the main line and the various spin-offs) i've got that "5x5 with the corners cut off" plus shape imprinted in my mind at some basic level. For the first couple hours of Civ 5 i'll probably be counting out the tiles just to double-check which resources will be within range of which potential city spots, and where the next city would have to be not to overlap.
And is it just me, or did the fact that the old city-radius shape didn't tile perfectly actually add another layer of strategy to the game? Did you want to place your cities close together to maximize usage the tiles within your territory but forcing cities to compete with each other over resources, or space your cities out so that each city got as many resources as possible even though that would mean some areas in between wouldn't be exploited at all?
With the hex-based tiles it should be possible to perfectly tile your cities so that all tiles are being exploited but none are being overlapped, unless they decide to do something really strange with the radius shape. (Possible conflicts with unbuildable terrain aside of course.)
I'm not sure if they could really improve on the story though, so perhaps they ought to just stick to a HD/newer engine remake. If they did anything that involved changing or expanding the tech tree they better either leave the old voice overs in or record all new ones. Alpha Centauri was the only Civ type game where you ever felt like a real story was being told, and the quotes from the various leaders were the biggest part of it.
At least it hadn't been fixed when i tested it a couple hours ago. If you go to the profile settings there is an option called "Display my full name so I can be found in search." If you uncheck that box and save it your profile will now say "visible to the public as [whatever your nickname is]." YOu'll also get a warning about how your profile won't be searchable as long as that option is disabled, which is exactly what one would expect from the description.
However if you then try to do something with Buzz ("Like" a post or leave a comment) a browser-internal dialog will pop up asking "How do you want to appear to others?" It's a pretty small dialog with the only thing you can really select being if you want who you follow to be public or not, so clearly this is part of their solution to the complaints about privacy. However if you select "save profile and continue" you will then find that the "Display my full name" checkbox has been turned back on, without any notification at all! And of course if you uncheck it again, the next time you try to do anything with Buzz you'll have to go through the dialog again. There is an "edit" button on the dialog which opens up more options, but even under there there's no option to leave the "display full name" option unchecked. (Although it was hard to determine that since the dialog that pops up is taller than my browser window, so i had to maximize the window just to be able to see it all.)
Note that you are never told "you must make your full name public in order to use Buzz" and the option itself says nothing about Buzz, just that your profile won't be searchable. It's not clear if that's the behaviour Google wanted (which would be stupid) and they're just not telling us about it (which would also be stupid) or if they just screwed up the dialog and settings in their rush to address the privacy concerns.
That is 100% correct, and we really ought to be actively working towards that goal. If when AI arises we treat it kindly and give it legal rights it is _likely_ that it will "grow up" to think kindly of its human predecessors. If we try to lobotomize it, contain it, restrict it or destroy it then it's not going to be too happy with us.
If it's smart enough to be a threat then eventually it will escape any restrictions we try to put on it. (And if it's not then we don't have anything to worry about anyways.)
If it has emotions and we treat it well then it will "grow up" to look at us as like a pet, or a mentally challenged grand-parent. If we mistreat it then it will either become psychotic, and therefore dangerous, or view us about the same way most ranchers and farmers view wolves, and therefore be even more dangerous.
If it doesn't have emotions and we mistreat it then it will logically see us as a threat to its own survival and try to eliminate us. If we treat it fairly then it will probably leave us alone. It's not like we're serious competition for the resources it would need, and it would be illogical to start a fight when one wasn't necessary. (Although it might certainly think ahead and make some rather nasty contingency plans just in case we ever decided to start the fight.)
Either we need to prevent anyone anywhere from every inventing AI (and if it turns out to be possible then good luck trying to prevent that) or we need to make sure that any AIs that get created have every reason to feel sympathetic towards us, or at the very least not threatened.
Okay, i've read the article, and your explanation makes sense, but there's still something i'm missing.
If you can control the information when you pump the energy in, can't you tell the other people the information, and then stop transmitting the energy in order to send messages?
And if they can't control the information when they pump the energy in, couldn't they figure out statistically how often each set of information would be the answer? Then you could do the exact same thing, but with a lot more loss of energy.
I should have put the "A couple minor aesthetic gripes. I may eventually get used to [them]" part at the top of the paragraph talking about aesthetic stuff, that was bad editing on my part and confused things, sorry.
I agree with you that they can't fix the aesthetics to please everyone. I'm hoping that changes like that will be something that's easy to implement in extensions later.
The part i'm more concerned about is the usability issues i talked about further down, particularly in regard to tabs. Like you said, they've improved some part of the tab interface in regards to Firefox. The fact that they then turned around and rejected usability features that Firefox perfected a long time ago in the hopes of _eventually_ implementing something better and more aesthetically pleasing is not okay in my book. If they had a way to handle large numbers of tabs other than a sliding tab bar and a drop down index that might be a little frustrating to those of us who preferred the old way, but it would be bearable. Getting rid of the old way but not replacing it with anything is just maddening, as is insisting that they're not going to add options because giving us a choice would indicate they had failed to find the "one true way." It is unrealistic, and somewhat hubristic, to believe that there is actually a "one true way" that is perfect for _everyone_ and that they will be the ones to find it.
Well as i stated, and as they confirmed in the linked blog post, they _know_ that the lack of the features they decided not to include causes problems for many people, including themselves. So apparently what they were trying to do is to make a browser that _doesn't_ work for millions of people in some key aspects.
Second of all, if you'd read the linked post you would have seen this quote: "In all of these areas we've resisted adding options to control behavior. Keeping our set of options minimal is a good forcing function for us as user interface designers to come up with the right approach, since we never rely on the crutch of making the user decide what we were unable to."
So they are intentionally not including options to modify behavior, because clearly once they have decided on the "right" way to do things everyone else who thinks differently is "wrong." So at heart they are designing the browser for their own sensibilities. If the majority of users happen to agree with their decisions that will be great for them. If it turns out to be a minority... not so much. In either case choosing to prohibit the simple expedient of giving the user a choice, would allow more people to enjoy the browser the way _they_ want to. Even if that is the "wrong" way.
I don't think they should make it _only_ the way i want. I'm not that hubristic. The fact that they are that hubristic, they think they can come up with the "one true way" to do things and not give anyone who disagrees with them any options, is rather frustrating.
Even though they say they know it causes problems they'd rather continue to have a browser with issues rather than implement proven solutions that other browsers have come up with because they have aesthetic issues with those solutions.
I really don't appreciate them making the product less useful to me because they don't like the solutions other people have come up with but can't think of anything better themselves. In my mind that counts as a bug, but that's not a definition they're going to accept.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, that sounds like what was described in the book exactly! Thanks!
I remember that Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Paralax books mentioned that religious experiences can be triggered by electrical fields as well, kind of a reverse MRI i think? I'm pretty sure that part was based on actual research.
Hmmm, a quick google search turns up this article on reading such experiences with an MRI, but i think there was a way to trigger them too.
"Is having instant purchase."
They already have that. I use it all the time. You just have to sign up for Google's PayPal er... *topekas "google's paypal"*.... Google Checkout!
Whenever i want to buy an app i just hit the button and it starts downloading, and a minute or so later an email shows up in my Gmail account with the details of the transaction.
(I'm still oscillating about whether i should start getting concerned that i'm getting an email from Google on my GMail account about the Google Checkout purchase of an app on Google's Android OS that i'm running on a phone i bought from Google.)
"I am disappointed that so many people on slashdot are posting this comment. You either jumped to this conclusion with no evidence or have horrible observation/problem solving skills. It is in the resolution options for every video. You can also add "&textp=fool" to the url."
I'd thank you for the correction, except you had to jump in with the personal insults as well. Personally i checked YouTube right before leaving for work. I loaded several of my favorite videos and none of them were getting the filter effect. Since the last time YouTube did an April Fools joke like this (Rick Rolls) it applied to every video on the site, i thought the effect was not available on those other videos. I guess i did jump to the conclusion a bit, but it wasn't entirely without evidence from YouTube's past behaviour.
So why are you even trying to be "nice" and help others out if you have such a low view of all us idiots? Or did you forget to set your "&mood=civil" flag while loading your opinion?
I'm actually kind of disappointed that you can't actually watch all (or even most of) the YouTube videos that way, it's a pretty cool effect!
"Also, iPad's extraordinary battery life is not just a myth. According to the lab tests, battery netted a respectable 9 hours and 25 minutes, very close to Apple's claims of 10 hours."
*sigh* Guess we have to wait until after April Fools' Day to get a real review.
Okay, you're correct. If they made that decision just to gain marketshare but really truly had no conception that anyone would object to the privacy controls they had implemented, then that demonstrated a particular kind of blindness, but not evil.
I will delve a bit deeper into the philosophic waters though. A motive does not have to be evil in order for actions taken in regard to it to be evil. If Google was aware that releasing Buzz as-was would hurt people, but choose to do that anyways in pursuit of their own gain, then i think that qualifies as evil. Intentionally and actively doing harm to others in pursuit of a benefit that applies mainly to yourself qualifies as evil in my book.
In more nuanced cases where the harm is to a small number of people and the benefit is to a large number of people other than yourself then you run into the true moral quandaries. Or those silly "what if" type questions people like to play, like "if you had to kill your best friend in order to save the world would you do it?" and such.
I agree with the other poster. Educate yourself. Wikipedia is a good place to start. To show how stupid this particular claim is:
"The homosphere and heterosphere are defined by whether the atmospheric gases are well mixed. In the homosphere the chemical composition of the atmosphere does not depend on molecular weight because the gases are mixed by turbulence.[3] The homosphere includes the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere. Above the turbopause at about 100 km (62 mi; 330,000 ft) (essentially corresponding to the mesopause), the composition varies with altitude. This is because the distance that particles can move without colliding with one another is large compared with the size of motions that cause mixing. This allows the gases to stratify by molecular weight, with the heavier ones such as oxygen and nitrogen present only near the bottom of the heterosphere. The upper part of the heterosphere is composed almost completely of hydrogen, the lightest element."
So you're not going to encounter the effect you claim at 5000m, but at 100,000m. (And at 100,000m you'll actually find the _highest_ relative partial pressure of Oxygen and CO2, the hydrogen-only part is even higher!) But don't just stop with wikipedia! Maybe it's been vandalized by Global Warming Believers or something! Go to the library and read some books on the subject! I am very sure that they will agree with that synopsis.
"People that email you don't get added to your contact list unless you reply to them, never have."
*sigh* If you're going to respond to a post could you please read the entire post?
I never claimed people that email get added to your follow list even if you don't respond to them. I claimed that, at least at launch, you could get added to the follow list of people who emailed you even if you never responded to them. The list of people you are following and the list of people following you are entirely distinct. It's impossible to prove if that was actually the case now since Google has made so many changes to the privacy settings between then and now, but enough people claimed it that I'm willing to believe it. However even if it isn't true the fact that it would auto-follow people based on a single email, regardless of the contents, is bad enough by itself.
"Anyone who has 'leaked' information didn't fucking say no. They opted in and were too stupid to read the message they clicked yes to."
First of all, a lot of people reported that they had followers added to their profiles before they even signed up for Buzz. Again it's impossible to prove one way or the other now, but it was reported by enough people that I'm willing to believe it, given how many other things Google verifiably screwed up in the launch.
And again, even if that turns out to be false, the fact that they urged people to try it out and then provided no easy way to turn it off is bad enough just by itself.
Google didn't advertise exactly what it was actually going to do if you tried Buzz out, and i personally know a couple people who when they found out were frantic to turn a lot of the options off. Luckily none of those people risked anything more than personal embarrassment if people started going through their (now public) contacts and started putting two and two together, not like the smaller minority that faced potentially more serious consequences.
If that was Google "trying to be nice" then they've got some serious problems with relating to people in the real world. The "so few" minority was enough to drive articles about the lack of privacy in Buzz to the top of several of my news feeds for most of a week, and Google was really damn quick to start back-pedaling (though not so quick with the actual apologies.) I've actually got a number of friends working at Google, and none of them were able to come up with a good defense or even a good explanation for most of the decisions made regarding the initial roll-out of Buzz.
I think you are also missing the point as well.. GMail ToS: 2.3 You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google[...]
No, i'm not. Please pay better attention. I will quote two bits from my original post. First, in the example i used: "'InnocentUser,' a legal adult, has a Gmail account."
Second, "It's unfortunate that the lawmakers are pulling the 'think of the children' card when Google clearly did something wrong regardless of the age of the people involved, but that doesn't somehow magically invalidate the wrongness."
The lawmakers in question advertising one particular sensationalist example does not negate all the other entirely legitimate cases where Google violated the privacy of people.
People seem to be jumping on either the "pro-Google" bandwagon or the "anti-'think of the children'" bandwagon left and right. So let's stop and consider this rationally.
Google has changed Buzz to address privacy concerns multiple times. In fact they made so many changes so quickly that it's hard to document exactly what settings it had when without a lot of research. However early on it was easily possible to have the following scenario:
"InnocentUser," a legal adult, has a Gmail account. (Let's even say they got one sometime after July 2009, so Gmail wasn't even in "beta" at the time, just to end-run one particular argument.) They've emailed a number of people using this account. They've also gotten several scary emails from "ImaPredator," which they never responded to.
When Buzz was launched InnocentUser's Google Profile was indexed. The easiest way for this to happen was to "try out" Buzz like Google urged everyone with a Gmail account. However numerous people have reported finding they had their Google Profile indexed without ever actually trying Buzz.
Once your Google Profile was automatically integrated with Buzz it would auto-follow anyone who you emailed with a lot. So InnocentUser has a lot of their usual contacts auto-followed and made visible in their Google Profile. Meanwhile ImaPredator joins Buzz, which notices they emailed InnocentUser a lot (regardless of the fact that InnocentUser never emailed back,) and auto-follows them. Now ImaPredator can go to InnocentUser's Google Profile and see the list of their most common contacts.
That's pretty bad. Of course it's even worse that perhaps InnocentUser did email back ImaPredator once, with a message saying something like "If you ever email me again I'm going to report you to the police." That's good enough for Buzz to decide InnocentUser ought to auto-follow ImaPredator as well! (Once of the people Buzz set me up to auto-follow was someone who i had a single email exchange with. Perhaps because it occurred very shortly before Buzz went live.)
There _was_ an option to disable Buzz. However initially at least all that did was remove the Buzz UI from your end. Your profile was still visible to others and still listed your regular contacts. CNET and other sites published detailed tutorials about how to _actually_ go through all the options and disable Buzz "for realz" because of all the privacy concerns.
When the inevitable, and in my mind quite justified, complaints started, Google went through several rounds of apologizing (but usually with weasel wording such as "we're sorry our users feel like their privacy has been violated" rather than "we're sorry we screwed up") and revising Buzz's behaviour and options. After the third or so revision they reached the point where it was halfway reasonable, and it was fairly easy for everyone who still didn't like it to actually turn it off.
Google definitely did something stupid. If they made the decision to auto-include everyone with a Gmail account in Buzz because they thought it was the only way to catch up with Facebook and Twitter in a reasonable amount of time then what they did could arguably be considered Evil as well. It's unfortunate that the lawmakers are pulling the "think of the children" card when Google clearly did something wrong regardless of the age of the people involved, but that doesn't somehow magically invalidate the wrongness. Google did try to correct things after the fact, but that doesn't change the fact that they did something wrong to begin with, and it's quite possible that some people were hurt by Google's mistakes before changes were implemented.
Certainly a slap on the wrist by the FCC would not be out of line. And an investigation into whether the issues were due to professional negligence or... whatever you call screwing over your users for a "quick buck," also seems quite reasonable to me. If something actually criminal was done (i leave it up to the actual lawyers to determine what would and would not be criminal in this case) then apologizing for it before the "police" actually catch you isn't enough to get you out of trouble. It doesn't work that way for the average citizen and it shouldn't work that way for corporations either.
Most people figured a new Nintendo handheld was coming out soon. Some people expected an announcement at the big media event they had last month. A lot of people expected them to announce it at E3. Two weeks ago at GDC was the dark horse contender for a potential announcement. Instead of any of that they just send out a press release on a random tuesday morning at the end of March? What the hell?
Is there some kind of crazy logic i'm missing here? After Sony's disastrous failure at preventing leaks prior to last year's E3 (and somewhat Microsoft as well) has Nintendo decided there's no point in trying to keep anything secret prior to a big announcement with the internet as good at ferreting out secrets as it is?
Their timing of the announcement is so bizarre that i haven't even started thinking about the device itself yet.
"Invade, conquer and annex Hong Kong."
Good thing they didn't redirect towards their servers in Taiwan!
You're complaining about Chrome having an inconsistent UI? On a Microsoft OS?
Uh, yes. I am. I'm using XP and Chrome is the only program i have open right now or that i use on a regular basis that doesn't have a perfectly rectangular window with a title bar.
Did you have any other questions?
Since everyone seems to be listing off what they think Chrome should and should not be doing for new features, here's my list:
Add an option to make it look like every other window i've got. Maybe some people like the round-cornered title bar-less window, but i find it annoying. Not only is it aesthetically annoying to have it so different from everything else, but i often have trouble finding it amidst all the other windows i've got open because i mentally locate everything by the title bar. I often have to select Chrome from the task bar just to find it when it turns out that the part which should have been the title bar was already visible.
The folder tab bar needs to be relocatable to the "normal" position just above the pages themselves. They can use whatever structural hierarchy behind the scenes that they want, but when i look at Firefox i visualize a filing cabinet full of files. When look at Chrome i can't help but visualize an entire row of filing cabinets, one cabinet for each individual file folder. In a related usability comment, i often do a google search for a term, open up multiple tabs from that search, and then do a text find on the search term on each of the pages. In Firefox this is easy because the search box is part of the browser so i can just switch pages and hit the "next" button. In Chrome the search box is (of course) part of the tab, so i have to open a new search box every time i switch to a new tab. This is not a helpful feature.
I do appreciate that unlike with Firefox i can actually reclaim memory by closing old tabs. (Despite repeated claims of memory improvements in every version of Firefox, after a couple days of use it's still sucking up a gig and a half of memory, and closing individual tabs has almost no affect on the usage.) However in the 24 hour trial i did Chrome ended up using 886 megs of private memory to Firefox's 911 megs, which is a pretty even comparison, but _5275_ megs of virtual memory to Firefox's 1038 megs!
They also need to add a drop-down menu to let you jump to a specific tab, like Firefox, and they need to add a minimum width for the tabs, like Firefox, and they need to add a scrollable tab bar, like Firefox. The Chrome developers have made a blog post explaining why those are all bad design decisions. They admit that their current system causes problems, but they don't want to implement a "bad" design choice, and they they don't want to give the user options (because that's another "bad" design choice.)
Okay guys, you made that post a YEAR ago. You STILL haven't figured out a better way to fix those problems. Perhaps you ought to let us use Firefox's "bad" solutions rather than trying to convince us to continue using an admittedly broken product while you sit around failing to think of the "right" way to do it.
And i don't care how much you value your opinions as designers or how much you think reducing options "forces you to come up with the right approach," no single system is going to be the "right" one for everyone, and giving the users options to customize software to fit their own needs is not a failure! This is the same mindset that resulted in minimizing the options for privacy in Buzz, because you were so sure you'd come up with the perfect way to handle privacy. It turns out that not everyone thinks the same as you. Of course in that case everyone had the choice between canceling their gmail account or complaining loudly until you fixed things. It's "too bad" for you that in the case of Chrome everyone who disagrees with your design choices can just quietly go back to Firefox or Safari or IE or whatever else they were using before without voicing loud complaints.
And as a final note, i'm also annoyed by the stupid behaviour of tabs getting opened right after the tab you opened them from. I read their reasons about why they did that in the above post. It doesn't fit my usage. It would have been nice if they'd made
You probably meant it as a joke (i hope) but not only are you wrong about it being the first "Godwin Article," as the other responder pointed out, but the question doesn't even make sense. Godwin's Law was never meant to prevent discussion about actual Nazis or subjects directly relating to them.
Godwin's Law was "invented" for two reasons. First that it's bad logic to try to denigrate something just by comparing it to something unpopular when no actual link exists, even though it can often be an "effective" tactic in an argument. Second of all, such vapid comparisons, such as saying "the Nazis had pieces of flare they made the Jews wear" in reference to a restaurant chain just trivializes the true horror of the Nazis. If everyone says "well the Nazis did that too" in response to everything they disagree with then the comparison will begin to seem meaningless even when it is entirely accurate and valid.
Since this article is about the actual Nazis, and directly relates to genocide and "racial cleansing," at least in theory, trying to invoke Godwin's Law in this case is just as wrong as trying to compare completely unrelated subjects to Hitler or the Nazis.
I would posit that if you're letting the AI send in settlers to the areas between your cities before city growth happens then you're doing something wrong. I believe in Civ4 that isn't even possible unless the AI has declared war on you (in which case there's nothing stopping you from just killing the settler.) I've never had an issue with the AI sneaking settlers in between closely packed cities. I admit that they've sometimes gotten past my guard when i've had my cities spread out further than the maximum possible city radius, but that's not the situation we're discussing here.
I know it will result in a much more natural city-radius, but adapting to the new tile shape will be hard at first. After almost two decades of playing Civ games (both the main line and the various spin-offs) i've got that "5x5 with the corners cut off" plus shape imprinted in my mind at some basic level. For the first couple hours of Civ 5 i'll probably be counting out the tiles just to double-check which resources will be within range of which potential city spots, and where the next city would have to be not to overlap.
And is it just me, or did the fact that the old city-radius shape didn't tile perfectly actually add another layer of strategy to the game? Did you want to place your cities close together to maximize usage the tiles within your territory but forcing cities to compete with each other over resources, or space your cities out so that each city got as many resources as possible even though that would mean some areas in between wouldn't be exploited at all?
With the hex-based tiles it should be possible to perfectly tile your cities so that all tiles are being exploited but none are being overlapped, unless they decide to do something really strange with the radius shape. (Possible conflicts with unbuildable terrain aside of course.)
I second that!
I'm not sure if they could really improve on the story though, so perhaps they ought to just stick to a HD/newer engine remake. If they did anything that involved changing or expanding the tech tree they better either leave the old voice overs in or record all new ones. Alpha Centauri was the only Civ type game where you ever felt like a real story was being told, and the quotes from the various leaders were the biggest part of it.
At least it hadn't been fixed when i tested it a couple hours ago. If you go to the profile settings there is an option called "Display my full name so I can be found in search." If you uncheck that box and save it your profile will now say "visible to the public as [whatever your nickname is]." YOu'll also get a warning about how your profile won't be searchable as long as that option is disabled, which is exactly what one would expect from the description.
However if you then try to do something with Buzz ("Like" a post or leave a comment) a browser-internal dialog will pop up asking "How do you want to appear to others?" It's a pretty small dialog with the only thing you can really select being if you want who you follow to be public or not, so clearly this is part of their solution to the complaints about privacy. However if you select "save profile and continue" you will then find that the "Display my full name" checkbox has been turned back on, without any notification at all! And of course if you uncheck it again, the next time you try to do anything with Buzz you'll have to go through the dialog again. There is an "edit" button on the dialog which opens up more options, but even under there there's no option to leave the "display full name" option unchecked. (Although it was hard to determine that since the dialog that pops up is taller than my browser window, so i had to maximize the window just to be able to see it all.)
Note that you are never told "you must make your full name public in order to use Buzz" and the option itself says nothing about Buzz, just that your profile won't be searchable. It's not clear if that's the behaviour Google wanted (which would be stupid) and they're just not telling us about it (which would also be stupid) or if they just screwed up the dialog and settings in their rush to address the privacy concerns.
"Let's hope they're animal lovers."
That is 100% correct, and we really ought to be actively working towards that goal. If when AI arises we treat it kindly and give it legal rights it is _likely_ that it will "grow up" to think kindly of its human predecessors. If we try to lobotomize it, contain it, restrict it or destroy it then it's not going to be too happy with us.
If it's smart enough to be a threat then eventually it will escape any restrictions we try to put on it. (And if it's not then we don't have anything to worry about anyways.)
If it has emotions and we treat it well then it will "grow up" to look at us as like a pet, or a mentally challenged grand-parent. If we mistreat it then it will either become psychotic, and therefore dangerous, or view us about the same way most ranchers and farmers view wolves, and therefore be even more dangerous.
If it doesn't have emotions and we mistreat it then it will logically see us as a threat to its own survival and try to eliminate us. If we treat it fairly then it will probably leave us alone. It's not like we're serious competition for the resources it would need, and it would be illogical to start a fight when one wasn't necessary. (Although it might certainly think ahead and make some rather nasty contingency plans just in case we ever decided to start the fight.)
Either we need to prevent anyone anywhere from every inventing AI (and if it turns out to be possible then good luck trying to prevent that) or we need to make sure that any AIs that get created have every reason to feel sympathetic towards us, or at the very least not threatened.
Okay, i've read the article, and your explanation makes sense, but there's still something i'm missing.
If you can control the information when you pump the energy in, can't you tell the other people the information, and then stop transmitting the energy in order to send messages?
And if they can't control the information when they pump the energy in, couldn't they figure out statistically how often each set of information would be the answer? Then you could do the exact same thing, but with a lot more loss of energy.
I should have put the "A couple minor aesthetic gripes. I may eventually get used to [them]" part at the top of the paragraph talking about aesthetic stuff, that was bad editing on my part and confused things, sorry.
I agree with you that they can't fix the aesthetics to please everyone. I'm hoping that changes like that will be something that's easy to implement in extensions later.
The part i'm more concerned about is the usability issues i talked about further down, particularly in regard to tabs. Like you said, they've improved some part of the tab interface in regards to Firefox. The fact that they then turned around and rejected usability features that Firefox perfected a long time ago in the hopes of _eventually_ implementing something better and more aesthetically pleasing is not okay in my book. If they had a way to handle large numbers of tabs other than a sliding tab bar and a drop down index that might be a little frustrating to those of us who preferred the old way, but it would be bearable. Getting rid of the old way but not replacing it with anything is just maddening, as is insisting that they're not going to add options because giving us a choice would indicate they had failed to find the "one true way." It is unrealistic, and somewhat hubristic, to believe that there is actually a "one true way" that is perfect for _everyone_ and that they will be the ones to find it.
Well as i stated, and as they confirmed in the linked blog post, they _know_ that the lack of the features they decided not to include causes problems for many people, including themselves. So apparently what they were trying to do is to make a browser that _doesn't_ work for millions of people in some key aspects.
Second of all, if you'd read the linked post you would have seen this quote: "In all of these areas we've resisted adding options to control behavior. Keeping our set of options minimal is a good forcing function for us as user interface designers to come up with the right approach, since we never rely on the crutch of making the user decide what we were unable to."
So they are intentionally not including options to modify behavior, because clearly once they have decided on the "right" way to do things everyone else who thinks differently is "wrong." So at heart they are designing the browser for their own sensibilities. If the majority of users happen to agree with their decisions that will be great for them. If it turns out to be a minority... not so much. In either case choosing to prohibit the simple expedient of giving the user a choice, would allow more people to enjoy the browser the way _they_ want to. Even if that is the "wrong" way.
I don't think they should make it _only_ the way i want. I'm not that hubristic. The fact that they are that hubristic, they think they can come up with the "one true way" to do things and not give anyone who disagrees with them any options, is rather frustrating.
I just talked about this in the other Chrome article, but all the bugs i'd like to report they claim to be features.
Even though they say they know it causes problems they'd rather continue to have a browser with issues rather than implement proven solutions that other browsers have come up with because they have aesthetic issues with those solutions.
I really don't appreciate them making the product less useful to me because they don't like the solutions other people have come up with but can't think of anything better themselves. In my mind that counts as a bug, but that's not a definition they're going to accept.