They do actually have a Privacy option, opted in by default, entitled "Appearance in Facebook Ads". I could forgive users for believing that this option, if set on, allowed them to, well, appear in Facebook Ads. The explanatory text isn't particularly clear, either:
Facebook occasionally pairs advertisements with relevant social actions from a user's friends to create Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. These respect all privacy rules. You may opt out of appearing in your friends' Facebook Ads below.
It sounds like they're using something from your profile in Facebook ads shown to your friends, and it certainly doesn't explicitly rule out using your photos when they have you "appear[] in your friends' Facebook Ads".
It's not hugely surprising to me that there might be issues with a more complex grid, as with a more complex anything, even short of vulnerability to an EMP attack. If there are automated systems, that's automated systems that could fail, or could operate in unintended ways. There's just more stuff that has to go right; more control systems that must be robust under various conditions; more dynamical-system states that need to be understood and designed for.
What is surprising to me is that I can't actually find a decent, even-handed overview of smart grids. You can have your choice of breathless "smart grid is THE FUTURE" books and articles. One book goes so far as to title itself Perfect Power: How the Microgrid Revolution Will Unleash Cleaner, Greener, More Abundant Energy. Yes, that's right, the new grid will provide perfect power, which will solve all our problems. Does anyone seriously believe there aren't pros and cons that at least deserve some consideration and design?
Of course, there are some academics who've written detailed journal articles, usually on some sub-aspect. But our public discourse seems to, at the moment, consist of a bunch of "the smart grid is the messiah" people on the one hand, and now "omg what about terrorism" on the other hand.
That's not really "a new grid" so much as "more of the old grid". Pickens didn't need some fancy computer-controlled smart grid; what he needed were some very long, old-fashioned distribution lines from middle-of-nowhere west Texas to areas where people actually live.
Cisco/Linksys is my favorite example. They keep those two brand names very separate for a good reason. What IT dept would shop Linksys for their company firewall, and who would imagine they could afford/use a Cisco at home?
It's common in the car market, too: Japanese car firms have done very well with their pairings of Honda/Acura, Toyota/Lexus, Nissan/Infiniti.
Some blathering about security is to be expected, but it's interesting that, unlike when this sort of stuff happens in the US or Europe, they actually came out and said the real reason: "concerns of 'a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators' ". I.e., ban it because it would hurt our profits.
I'm not sure we understand yet what the new music business models are, at least not well enough to start applying them to other fields. We have a few examples of things that seem to work, and some blog-based argumentation about why they work, and how those can be generalized. Is saying "let's do that, but for blogs now" really anything more than a really hand-wavy argument that we do New Economy Stuff? Blogs are already pretty much by definition participating in some variety of new-ish economic model. What specifically are they taking from the music business? Just selling shirts directly to consumers is not it; websites have done that forever.
Presumably it means something like, "from observing this experimental phase in the music industry, we've learned some important general lessons about economic activity in the early 21st century, and useful things to do and avoid". But what are those lessons? And are they anything not super-generic, like "sell shirts and stuff"?
Even if Techdirt hasn't given that explanation, I'm curious if anyone knows of a good one. The only book-length discussion of recent music-industry developments (that isn't already dated) that I know of is Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (came out about 2 months ago), which is a reasonable historical summary of the past 10 years, with a bit of analysis. It's not exactly a distillation of lessons suitable for universal application, though; more of a history just collecting the facts about what's gone on, mixed in with a little bit of breathless tech-hype (as the title suggests; it's got good content beyond that, though, fortunately). Anyone know of any other informative/insightful books (or articles) in this area?
That part in particular seems more like a middleman role, proposing that Techdirt, with its built-in connections to fans, platform for distribution and marketing of its content, and so on, sell that access to people who want their material (like a proposed business plan) distributed through that network. That's analogous to what traditional record labels, book publishers, and movie studios do, more than it resembles Trent Reznor selling his own products directly to fans without a middleman.
That's all, incidentally, the same reason unions exist in the first place: if you don't get the company's commitments down on paper, in a legal contract, negotiated and enforced by someone with the power to do something about breaches, the company will find as many loopholes as possible to cheat you.
(This applies to large companies' interactions with consumers too, which is why there are consumer-advocacy organizations and class-action lawsuits.)
In most fields of salaried employment, you can't do a job on the side that is too closely related to your main area of employment, without the employer owning the resulting IP. For example, if Exxon is paying me as an petroleum engineer, and I developed an improvement to an oil-refining process "on my own time", it would be very difficult for me to avoid them owning the resulting patent. If it's totally unrelated, of course, you're on more solid ground: Exxon would probably have no case if I developed some stamp-organization software in my spare time.
But my impression is that most professors are writing stuff in the area that their salaried employment is hiring them to work in. In most cases, they don't make too much effort to even keep it separate: I've had professors try out early drafts of their book in university courses (which they are of course being paid to teach), use university computers and software to write them, print out drafts on university printers, etc.
Yeah, I do think it would have to be done by the schools at "the top" first, since they have the cachet and money to push something like that through. Professors are not going to stop working at MIT or CMU or Stanford because of a change in rules about textbook publishing, so they could probably pull it off.
We already have the massive subsidies though: most professors who write textbooks are not doing it on their own dime, but as part of their employment with a university. Then they get to pocket the profits. The universities can simply change this arrangement so that professors in their employ who write textbooks related to their field of research, which can pretty reasonably be considered works-for-hire, are required to open-source them.
I live in the SF area, and both myself and nearly everyone I know make significantly under $80k. Amazingly enough, we aren't living in boxes or starving, either. Sure, I live in an apartment rather than a house, but I'd say living in an apartment 2 miles from the Pacific Ocean is a better quality of life than a 3000 sq ft house in the Midwest. I'd say my quality of life is pretty good, and I'd feel positively wealthy if I made $80k.
Only if you measure "standard of living" purely by some fixed basket of possessions. I live in the SF Bay Area for under $50k, and I live a much nicer life than I did in Texas. Lots more entertainment is free, for example: I spent some time today walking along the cliffs by the ocean, which I live 2 miles away from. In my former subdivision in a Houston suburb, that wasn't an option, so I had to spend a lot more money paying for indoor entertainment. The terrible weather also makes a bigger living space a necessity IMO: a studio that I'm perfectly happy with in a nice climate where I'm a 30-minute walk from the ocean would drive me insane if I was cooped up in a studio like that in 95-degrees-and-humid Houston.
It may have been the best decision in this case, but it seems strange to argue that there's no reason to include information about someone's current status in a biography. If someone was fired as a professor, the article is typically updated to say they're no longer a professor; if someone went missing in their private Cessna, the article says so; if they're currently in the hospital for cancer treatment, it'll usually say that too. I agree the importance of keeping an article complete and up-to-date should be balanced against the article itself having side effects, particularly in extreme cases, but that's different from pretending there's no value in accurate, up-to-date biographies in the first place.
I would hardly call "public consensus" an objective measure of anything; that's like calling the results of an election an objective measure of leadership quality. It's probably the best method we have to actually select leaders, but it's still inherently a subjective measure.
Market cap is probably the best subjective indicator we have of what the investing public thinks a company is worth. But it's not an objective measure of company size. Even besides the inherently subjective aspects, market caps aren't even that great descriptive tools in the tech business: Red Hat's market cap has fluctuated by many orders of magnitude even while the company stayed roughly the same size.
Market cap doesn't mention any actual business activity, though; it's closer to what I was excluding ("public fame"), since it's solely a measure of how much value the investing public perceives a business to have, which is often wildly off the mark.
They might still be subject to antitrust issues if they're dominant in a particular market, but the statement that they "aren't that big" does seem objectively true, by most measures other than public fame.
You could a polite email to rcampbell@chusd.k12.ca.us indicating that you've heard things about his conduct as principal of Coalinga High School that you find concerning.
That's something you could do in the pre-internet era, too, though: it's not like we just invented the idea that you can make some sort of video recording of lectures. There's an improvement in accessibility, since it's now easier to widely distribute those videos for free, versus charging even nominal fees to duplicate and mail out VHS tapes. But there's no fundamental change in what kind of communication it is.
There had been a lot of educational buzz in the 80s and 90s about how the communication itself would improve education, as it'd no longer be the "watch a VHS" style of one-way communication. It seems to have turned out to still mostly be that, though: watching a YouTube video is still just one-way, not much different from watching it on VHS or DVD, except that it's free and you can skip around between short videos more easily.
That was the gist of my analogy with these "open e-government" initiatives. There've been wild-eyed promises from proponents that it'll change one-way government, in which presidents give speeches and radio addresses, into participatory government, in which people can communicate back and forth and have discussions with their leaders. In practice, I don't think that will work out.
They're hardly the moderator of such discussions. Dozens of other newspapers, TV channels, and websites are also moderating discussions on the subject.
I disagree with all sorts of things the government does; can I have my money back too? I'm not a big fan of the military; if you want to develop new fighter jets, use someone else's money please. And why is my money being used to operate the patent office? Or the courts that adjudicate patent disputes?
It can have different connotations, more strongly emphasizing the negative possibility. For example, if I say "This book may be what you're looking for" versus "This book may or may not be what you're looking for", the 2nd suggestion is phrased in a way that makes me sound much more ambivalent about whether I actually think the book is what the person I'm addressing is looking for.
Yes, as a technical question it's now easy for everyone to communicate with their public officials! But what exactly are these officials supposed to do with ten thousand poor-quality comments? Institute a Slashdot-style moderate system? A digg-style voting system? (Obama did actually try that last one.) Develop a new version of spam filter that is some sort of "shitty comment with no useful content" filter? It seems what they're trying here is exactly what the submitter criticizes, a "barrier to entry" filter, with the hope that people who bother to make a video about their idea at least have an idea they've thought through for 5 minutes. Looks like that may have failed, too, but I can't blame them for trying.
In a different context, Gerhard Fischer pointed out in 1996 something similar about the internet not being a magical solution for education:
The "Nobel Prize winner" myth: Every school child will have access to a Nobel Prize winner. --- This was one of the selling points for the information superhighway. While this argument is true (or will be true soon) at the level of technical connectivity, it is doubtful that Nobel Prize winners will look forward to getting a few thousand e-mail messages a day.
That's part of the problem, I think. The law and economics movement prefers a sort of central-planning-via-law, in which we decide what kinds of outcomes we want, make some simplifying assumptions about rational actors, and then pass laws that will lead to those outcomes. But this completely ignores whether some of the laws might be right or wrong in themselves. In this case, Posner seems not to give much weight to free speech (and fair use) as inherently valuable protections for people living in a free society. He doesn't even discuss it as something to consider when balancing pros and cons of his proposed legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
They do actually have a Privacy option, opted in by default, entitled "Appearance in Facebook Ads". I could forgive users for believing that this option, if set on, allowed them to, well, appear in Facebook Ads. The explanatory text isn't particularly clear, either:
It sounds like they're using something from your profile in Facebook ads shown to your friends, and it certainly doesn't explicitly rule out using your photos when they have you "appear[] in your friends' Facebook Ads".
It's not hugely surprising to me that there might be issues with a more complex grid, as with a more complex anything, even short of vulnerability to an EMP attack. If there are automated systems, that's automated systems that could fail, or could operate in unintended ways. There's just more stuff that has to go right; more control systems that must be robust under various conditions; more dynamical-system states that need to be understood and designed for.
What is surprising to me is that I can't actually find a decent, even-handed overview of smart grids. You can have your choice of breathless "smart grid is THE FUTURE" books and articles. One book goes so far as to title itself Perfect Power: How the Microgrid Revolution Will Unleash Cleaner, Greener, More Abundant Energy . Yes, that's right, the new grid will provide perfect power, which will solve all our problems. Does anyone seriously believe there aren't pros and cons that at least deserve some consideration and design?
Of course, there are some academics who've written detailed journal articles, usually on some sub-aspect. But our public discourse seems to, at the moment, consist of a bunch of "the smart grid is the messiah" people on the one hand, and now "omg what about terrorism" on the other hand.
That's not really "a new grid" so much as "more of the old grid". Pickens didn't need some fancy computer-controlled smart grid; what he needed were some very long, old-fashioned distribution lines from middle-of-nowhere west Texas to areas where people actually live.
It's common in the car market, too: Japanese car firms have done very well with their pairings of Honda/Acura, Toyota/Lexus, Nissan/Infiniti.
Some blathering about security is to be expected, but it's interesting that, unlike when this sort of stuff happens in the US or Europe, they actually came out and said the real reason: "concerns of 'a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators' ". I.e., ban it because it would hurt our profits.
I'm not sure we understand yet what the new music business models are, at least not well enough to start applying them to other fields. We have a few examples of things that seem to work, and some blog-based argumentation about why they work, and how those can be generalized. Is saying "let's do that, but for blogs now" really anything more than a really hand-wavy argument that we do New Economy Stuff? Blogs are already pretty much by definition participating in some variety of new-ish economic model. What specifically are they taking from the music business? Just selling shirts directly to consumers is not it; websites have done that forever.
Presumably it means something like, "from observing this experimental phase in the music industry, we've learned some important general lessons about economic activity in the early 21st century, and useful things to do and avoid". But what are those lessons? And are they anything not super-generic, like "sell shirts and stuff"?
Even if Techdirt hasn't given that explanation, I'm curious if anyone knows of a good one. The only book-length discussion of recent music-industry developments (that isn't already dated) that I know of is Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (came out about 2 months ago), which is a reasonable historical summary of the past 10 years, with a bit of analysis. It's not exactly a distillation of lessons suitable for universal application, though; more of a history just collecting the facts about what's gone on, mixed in with a little bit of breathless tech-hype (as the title suggests; it's got good content beyond that, though, fortunately). Anyone know of any other informative/insightful books (or articles) in this area?
That part in particular seems more like a middleman role, proposing that Techdirt, with its built-in connections to fans, platform for distribution and marketing of its content, and so on, sell that access to people who want their material (like a proposed business plan) distributed through that network. That's analogous to what traditional record labels, book publishers, and movie studios do, more than it resembles Trent Reznor selling his own products directly to fans without a middleman.
That's all, incidentally, the same reason unions exist in the first place: if you don't get the company's commitments down on paper, in a legal contract, negotiated and enforced by someone with the power to do something about breaches, the company will find as many loopholes as possible to cheat you.
(This applies to large companies' interactions with consumers too, which is why there are consumer-advocacy organizations and class-action lawsuits.)
In most fields of salaried employment, you can't do a job on the side that is too closely related to your main area of employment, without the employer owning the resulting IP. For example, if Exxon is paying me as an petroleum engineer, and I developed an improvement to an oil-refining process "on my own time", it would be very difficult for me to avoid them owning the resulting patent. If it's totally unrelated, of course, you're on more solid ground: Exxon would probably have no case if I developed some stamp-organization software in my spare time.
But my impression is that most professors are writing stuff in the area that their salaried employment is hiring them to work in. In most cases, they don't make too much effort to even keep it separate: I've had professors try out early drafts of their book in university courses (which they are of course being paid to teach), use university computers and software to write them, print out drafts on university printers, etc.
Yeah, I do think it would have to be done by the schools at "the top" first, since they have the cachet and money to push something like that through. Professors are not going to stop working at MIT or CMU or Stanford because of a change in rules about textbook publishing, so they could probably pull it off.
It's not usually that hard for students to get a copy of the next-most-recent edition: they're all over places like Amazon and Half.com.
We already have the massive subsidies though: most professors who write textbooks are not doing it on their own dime, but as part of their employment with a university. Then they get to pocket the profits. The universities can simply change this arrangement so that professors in their employ who write textbooks related to their field of research, which can pretty reasonably be considered works-for-hire, are required to open-source them.
I live in the SF area, and both myself and nearly everyone I know make significantly under $80k. Amazingly enough, we aren't living in boxes or starving, either. Sure, I live in an apartment rather than a house, but I'd say living in an apartment 2 miles from the Pacific Ocean is a better quality of life than a 3000 sq ft house in the Midwest. I'd say my quality of life is pretty good, and I'd feel positively wealthy if I made $80k.
Only if you measure "standard of living" purely by some fixed basket of possessions. I live in the SF Bay Area for under $50k, and I live a much nicer life than I did in Texas. Lots more entertainment is free, for example: I spent some time today walking along the cliffs by the ocean, which I live 2 miles away from. In my former subdivision in a Houston suburb, that wasn't an option, so I had to spend a lot more money paying for indoor entertainment. The terrible weather also makes a bigger living space a necessity IMO: a studio that I'm perfectly happy with in a nice climate where I'm a 30-minute walk from the ocean would drive me insane if I was cooped up in a studio like that in 95-degrees-and-humid Houston.
It may have been the best decision in this case, but it seems strange to argue that there's no reason to include information about someone's current status in a biography. If someone was fired as a professor, the article is typically updated to say they're no longer a professor; if someone went missing in their private Cessna, the article says so; if they're currently in the hospital for cancer treatment, it'll usually say that too. I agree the importance of keeping an article complete and up-to-date should be balanced against the article itself having side effects, particularly in extreme cases, but that's different from pretending there's no value in accurate, up-to-date biographies in the first place.
I would hardly call "public consensus" an objective measure of anything; that's like calling the results of an election an objective measure of leadership quality. It's probably the best method we have to actually select leaders, but it's still inherently a subjective measure.
Market cap is probably the best subjective indicator we have of what the investing public thinks a company is worth. But it's not an objective measure of company size. Even besides the inherently subjective aspects, market caps aren't even that great descriptive tools in the tech business: Red Hat's market cap has fluctuated by many orders of magnitude even while the company stayed roughly the same size.
Market cap doesn't mention any actual business activity, though; it's closer to what I was excluding ("public fame"), since it's solely a measure of how much value the investing public perceives a business to have, which is often wildly off the mark.
They might still be subject to antitrust issues if they're dominant in a particular market, but the statement that they "aren't that big" does seem objectively true, by most measures other than public fame.
Some major tech companies by number of employees:
And by revenue:
And by net income:
You could a polite email to rcampbell@chusd.k12.ca.us indicating that you've heard things about his conduct as principal of Coalinga High School that you find concerning.
That's something you could do in the pre-internet era, too, though: it's not like we just invented the idea that you can make some sort of video recording of lectures. There's an improvement in accessibility, since it's now easier to widely distribute those videos for free, versus charging even nominal fees to duplicate and mail out VHS tapes. But there's no fundamental change in what kind of communication it is.
There had been a lot of educational buzz in the 80s and 90s about how the communication itself would improve education, as it'd no longer be the "watch a VHS" style of one-way communication. It seems to have turned out to still mostly be that, though: watching a YouTube video is still just one-way, not much different from watching it on VHS or DVD, except that it's free and you can skip around between short videos more easily.
That was the gist of my analogy with these "open e-government" initiatives. There've been wild-eyed promises from proponents that it'll change one-way government, in which presidents give speeches and radio addresses, into participatory government, in which people can communicate back and forth and have discussions with their leaders. In practice, I don't think that will work out.
They're hardly the moderator of such discussions. Dozens of other newspapers, TV channels, and websites are also moderating discussions on the subject.
I disagree with all sorts of things the government does; can I have my money back too? I'm not a big fan of the military; if you want to develop new fighter jets, use someone else's money please. And why is my money being used to operate the patent office? Or the courts that adjudicate patent disputes?
It can have different connotations, more strongly emphasizing the negative possibility. For example, if I say "This book may be what you're looking for" versus "This book may or may not be what you're looking for", the 2nd suggestion is phrased in a way that makes me sound much more ambivalent about whether I actually think the book is what the person I'm addressing is looking for.
Yes, as a technical question it's now easy for everyone to communicate with their public officials! But what exactly are these officials supposed to do with ten thousand poor-quality comments? Institute a Slashdot-style moderate system? A digg-style voting system? (Obama did actually try that last one.) Develop a new version of spam filter that is some sort of "shitty comment with no useful content" filter? It seems what they're trying here is exactly what the submitter criticizes, a "barrier to entry" filter, with the hope that people who bother to make a video about their idea at least have an idea they've thought through for 5 minutes. Looks like that may have failed, too, but I can't blame them for trying.
In a different context, Gerhard Fischer pointed out in 1996 something similar about the internet not being a magical solution for education:
That's part of the problem, I think. The law and economics movement prefers a sort of central-planning-via-law, in which we decide what kinds of outcomes we want, make some simplifying assumptions about rational actors, and then pass laws that will lead to those outcomes. But this completely ignores whether some of the laws might be right or wrong in themselves. In this case, Posner seems not to give much weight to free speech (and fair use) as inherently valuable protections for people living in a free society. He doesn't even discuss it as something to consider when balancing pros and cons of his proposed legislation.