If he succeeds in selling the idea that there is a new Cold War which oh so happens to be fought with the product his company sells then he is in line to get a hefty ton of money from people spending money on their quackery. There is a reason why all of a sudden McAfee started complaining about losing the war on computer security and companies such IBM started warning that there is a supercomputer arms race between China and the US and the US was about to lose. It's all about generating demand where there is none and creating a market for something which isn't needed.
OpenGL and OpenCL are not programming languages. They are APIs, which happen to be available on multiple languages. Trying to bundle APIs such as Open{GL,CL} with programming languages such as C, C++ and even Assembly is a public demonstration of your ignorance.
To be fair, whatwg's "HTML is a living standard" bullshit was the first successful attempt at breaking HTML, and is in essence the exact same thing that these companies are proposing. So, it appears that everyone is trying to break up HTML to their own benefit.
It goes a bit beyond that. The changes to Paul Revere's article are based on direct quotes from Sarah Palin and the editions to Paul Revere's article are being discussed in Sarah Palin's talk page. Among the people committing the changes we find this guy, who on his user page includes the following quote:
Getting those quotes right
I quote reliable sources such as the LA Times, CNN, when they tell me that Sarah Palin said that Paul Revere used bells to warn colonists during his midnight ride. An enquiring mind such as mine wants to find out exactly how this was accomplished.
So, it's pretty obvious that there is more at play than mere correlation.
Yet, this is just an idiot wasting his time posting stuff he came up with on a wikipedia article. There are literally hundreds of this sort of edits being committed every single day on wikipedia, adding crap that is later removed. Why is this particular idiot being singled out for shovelling crap onto that site?
I believe the proper terms have already been invented. Twitter is a blog which only accepts a terribly limited amount of text. Therefore, if "blogging" is seen as a verb then it also covers message posted to twitter. If that fails then there is also micro-blogging. Even if some people don't believe that that is good enough then I don't see how it is impossible to say "he/she stated that..." or even "he/she stated in a website that..." instead of "he/she tweeted...".
Regarding facebook, it is nothing but a glorified personal site which happens to have a set of features which enable users to communicate between accounts. Therefore, it's pretty clear that instead of saying something similar to "he/she posted on his facebook that..." it is very reasonable to say "he/she posted on his personal website that...". In fact, the latter is clearer and sounds a lot more natural.
Well, the thing is that all he has to complain about is their decision to ship a underperforming system. They built their phones, they tested their phones with the OS and applications, they knew that their performance sucks. Complaining that apps force their phones to lag away is exactly like complaining that your computer lags away if you happen to run anything other than a clean desktop environment. The thing is, if you ship a computer which is incapable of handling mundane apps which other phones handle quite well then you cannot blame the apps. The problem is that Motorola's products are crap, not whatever app a user may use.
I don't believe you understand OpenCL's application domain, as you insinuate that it only applies to specialized use case scenarios. Even if you choose to ignore how widespread OpenCL is in domains such as games, you always have multimedia and graphics processing. Adding to this, there are countless people all around the world who desperately seek a "supercomputer in a box" such as what you can get if you are suddenly able to use graphics cards for this. I happen to be one of these people who desperately want to get OpenCL off the ground and into our daily life, mainly because I develop FEM software and all the extra processing power is desperately needed for every application, particularly nonlinear analysis. If OpenCL doesn't fly then people like me are forced to deal with costly, specialized solutions, which means that only people who can afford a supercomputer can have that. If it flies then we can have supercomputers as easy as buying a new graphics card. And that's trully excellent.
Although I agree to most of your points, I have a hard time believing that you don't understand people's references to "editors" as meaning those which are part of the "inner circle" with special powers to do things like locking articles or banning people.
Those aren't editors, but administrators. In my experience, administrators are only involved when there are a whole lot of personal problems between editors (i.e., regular users who edit articles) thrown into the mix.
And I'm sure you can do some research and find cases where some such power-editors had strange reasons to veto some articles/changes/people.
If that is true then you must ask yourself why those who criticize wikipedia and make wild claims regarding prepotent administrators never manage to point out a single case where that took place. I mean, wikipedia provides public logs regarding every single edit that has been made, including who made it and when. Even communication between editors is made through publicly available sites, which is also logged. So, if there is such a extensive set of records encompassing every edit that was ever made then why do they have such a hard time providing a single example to back their claims?
That said, I find it hard to believe that I'm the only person who trusts Wikipedia for one of my first sources of general knowledge. Or the only person who finds its drawbacks not worse than those of any encyclopedia but its advantages a lot, lot greater.
I'm sorry for those who tried to contribute and had problems. Nothing is perfect, not even any of the already chosen World Wonders.
I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the greatest assets that humanity got today and its usefulness is infinitely bigger than all World Wonders combined.
I also agree that it's become an extremely useful asset to humanity. Yet, it is just now becoming useful, and it is still a massive rough edge which needs a whole lot of work.
You fail at reading comprehension. First of all, let's take a look at Wikipedia:Truth. It says:
Truth is not the criterion for inclusion of any idea or statement in a Wikipedia article, even if it is on a scientific topic (see Wikipedia:Science). The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true.
So, as it is obvious and contrary to what you've claimed, wikipedia isn't designed to foster articles with "stupid or untrue" content. What wikipedia's policy states is that you can't simply put up something on wikipedia and expect it to be preserved just because you or anyone else claims its true. Your word is worth nothing if you can't back it up with proof. Therefore, if you wish to contribute something then you can't simply base your contribution on your own personal authority, and gut feeling of how true it may be. To put it differently, there is no place in wikipedia for truthiness.
Knowing this, your comment is even more amusing, as your defence of this truthiness thing, which basically means that you expect that you could post everything that in your gut you believe is true without presenting any evidence or basis, is in fact a gateway for content which is stupid and untrue. This means that the target of your criticism is exactly what keeps stupidity out of wikipedia, and therefore does exactly the opposite of what you claim to happen.
A benchmark is a fancy word to describe a process where a set of items are evaluated objectively based on pre-defined parameters and following a standardized set of procedures. To put it shortly, benchmarking is a process to determine the best option.
Knowing this, why is it so odd that someone found a way to test paper and determine what's best for a given application? Does timothy actually believe that only computer parts can be evaluated by potential buyers?
Judging by your quote, he's saying that Wikipedia is nerdy and therefore not cool.
Yes, that actually sounds just about right. It appears that watching people talk about things that go way over his head makes him feel threatened, and therefore feels the need to try to downplay what they know and do in order for him to feel better about his underachievement.
Uhh, most scientists use the scientific method, which doesn't involve any sort of debate since controlled repeatable experiments are hard to argue with.
Care to know how I know you don't have the faintest clue on what you are talking about?
I think the problem that many people have with Wikipedia is that the pedantic discussions on scientific information are undertaken by people who have zero qualifications or training in the subjects.
Do you actually have any basis to make that claim? More to the point, a contribution is either valid or invalid, and from my experience that doesn't have a strong relation with someone's aura of authority. If someone adds something which is true, valid and correct then you don't need to demand to see their resume to decide if you accept or object their contributions. You simply turn on your brain, think and evaluate the merit of their contribution.
Another problem is that expert opinions are disregarded in favor of the leading editors and/or the rigid and sometimes arcane rules.
Again, do you have any basis for that claim? I'm a structural engineer and I've created a hefty set of articles on my topic of expertise and contributed to countless more. During this time I've experienced zero cases similar to the one you've described. I've stumbled on stubs which shouldn't be stubs, I've stumbled on articles which were poorly edited and I've even stumbled on a hand full of blatant errors. Yet, I've never had anyone revert my contributions due to petty behaviour you've described.
Yet, what you are trying to attribute to a conspiracy by "leading editors" may as well be the result of you being a dick, and trying to strong-arm objectionable edits based on arrogant premises such as an attitude of "you have zero qualifications or training in the subject when compared to me". In that case, don't try to attribute to a conspiracy the problems that you bring onto yourself due to your lack of basic social skills.
Basically, many people see a dichotomy in how the editors act: they profess to be seeking truth or facts, but their actions often conflict with these stated aims.
You are bitching about "editors" as if they were some sort of external group, dividing them into a "them" group while you are kept in the "us" group. Yet, if you actually had any experience whatsoever contributing to wikipedia you would know by now that you are an editor, just as I am and countless others. There is no "us Vs them". Anyone can edit, anyone can create articles, anyone can contribute to articles, anyone can change articles. So, please don't try to come up with conspiracies and "us Vs them" excuses to try to justify your lame, baseless point of view.
I see what you mean and I have to say you have a point. Yet, as I see it, although lists of pokemon stuff are largely irrelevant, hosting them isn't necessarily a problem. The real problem is keeping out information which can be seen as relevant. This, obviously, is a very grey area, and terribly subjective. Therefore, it is only natural that some level of noise is generated over these issues, mainly because the decisions to include/exclude information is not cut and dry and instead is based on subjective aspects. As a consequence, this is why everyone remotely interested in wikipeia's health must participate, in order for those decisions to be done as a community.
The counterclaim is a bit more idiotic than that. From the article:
But Wikipedia resembles less the masterpiece of a genius than the fixation of an idiot savant. You know: grinding out articles through endless pedantic debate. Wikipedia’s strength lies in thousands volunteers who care desperately about things most people have never even heard of.
This description, which was given as criticism directed towards wikipedia and intentionally done so with the intent of making it look bad, has the strange problem of also describing how the scientific process unrolls in the scientific community. Well, with the single difference of the majority of scientists not being volunteers, at least in the sense of wikipedia.
But even when ignoring this blatant mishap, I don't see how pedantic discussions on factual and scientific information can be seen as bad, particularly when the point of those pedantic discussions is to meticulously log information, free of bias and independent of any point of view. That is, it seems that those who make this sort of criticism simply don't know what they are talking about.
But hey, you have to avenge that time someone deleted your pet article on some irrelevant subject.
If you pay attention to the scale in those geiger counters you will notice that although it makes a lot of noise it measures radiation in micro sieverts. The geiger counter made the most noise at 15 micro Sieverts. In comparison, an airplane flight from LA to NY earns you 40 micro Sieverts.
If we rig a thermometer with a siren when temperature hits 30C then it will also sound dangerous. That doesn't make it a danger to your health.
Seriously.. I can't imagine what happens to bandwith when multiple people at the same ISP or office all stream the same live video at the same time.. (I think IPV6 multicast could be one of the truly bright stars pushing IPv6 adoption..)
Seriously? You can't imagine people using webcams on chat networks or even teleconferencing, using programs such as skype?
The "social" value of this is that the service provider (in this case Google) is able to implement a way for their users to declare their preferences in multiple subjects, which is a form of declared-strategy surveying. By this, the service provider is able to harvest more personal information from their users and therefore draw their profile more accurately than before, which in turn lets them better target ads and, as a consequence, earn more money.
The sad part is that quite possibly the only reason the book was given a 9/10 is because it is Knuth's book. Otherwise, as any other book on combinatorial algorithms, the book would never be reviewed, as the author doesn't have the faintest grasp on the subject, and this book review would be again dedicated to vacuous "learn X in n hours" books.
The success of what it's now called a netbook is that while in the early 90s a laptop with a small form factor would go for around 2500 dollars and far more expensive than computers with a regular form factor,nowadays it goes for 250 dollars and cheaper than computers with a regular form factor. Otherwise, once we ignore the pretty marketing gimmick of calling it a "netbook" instead of a laptop, it boils down to nothing more than price.
So no, it's not a issue with the form factor. It's an issue with the price. Once we lower it, the demand increases and more units are sold. It's basic economics 101, not brilliant marketing strategies.
You're completely missing the point. High cost of living, crime, traffic, etc are a natural consequence of having lots of people living together *and* not knowing anything about their neighbors..
Well, except they aren't. Read below.
Removing the privacy makes those things go away on their own. He's saying that not only do people not place a high value on privacy, but that they view the problems it causes or is linked to as outweighing the benefits it provides.
Well, except that removing privacy doesn't make any of those problems go away. Let me explain.
The cost of living, in a free market, only depends on how much any given person is willing to spend on stuff such as housing, food, transportation, utilities an other goods/services. If you take privacy away and let everyone, including corporations, know what everyone, including you, is willing to spend on someone then their prices will be set according to how much the retailers are able to get from you. This price discrimination problem is nothing new, with countless articles already being written on the subject.
Traffic is pretty much immune to privacy. For starts, no matter how many morning radio and even TV shows cover which roads are jammed they will always and repeatedly stay jammed day after day, until new transportation routes are created. This is due to the simple fact that everyone evaluates their options and chooses the one which they believe are best for them. That evaluation is performed considering multiple variables, such as time spent, cost, and even comfort. Gaining information on a given issue, such as traffic, may lead some people to choose other options but the vast majority won't change their ways, simply because the added information doesn't change anything in their evaluation, and therefore they keep choosing a path, which keeps getting jammed. And no matter how much information you throw to the problem, including losing all privacy, will not change that.
Regarding crime, it can only be eliminated if we are talking about a total loss of privacy by the entire population and all organizations. This is impossible and absurd. Even then, crimes still happen although people know they were committed and they know who committed them. In fact, England's experience with CCTV shows that the crime rate hasn't receded.
From crime we go to housing costs. It's absurd to claim that housing costs go down if crime goes down. In fact, it's quite clear that crime represents a market pressure on housing costs, which means that if a once crime-ridden area is suddenly crime-free then it's quite obvious that housing costs in that part of town will rise.
Therefore, as I've stated before, It's absurd to think that losing all privacy brings anything good to anyone. It doesn't.
The case that Scot Adams poses is that there would be people who would accept a bad consequence (loss of privacy) in exchange of avoiding a set of bad consequences (high cost of living, high crime).
He could also state that plenty of people would accept losing their privacy if it meant they didn't had their knee caps smashed their legs broken. Yet, in both cases that doesn't mean that losing our privacy is desirable or that people look forward to it. The only thing that it means is that considering a set of consequences, "plenty of volunteers would come forward" to choose a bad consequence if it meant they avoided other bad consequences. No shit, sherlock. I guess that would explain why bank robbers succeed in convincing bank tellers to give away the bank's cash without asking anything in return.
So, to sum things up, this comment is absurd and lacks any merit. It's yet another apology for the attack on privacy that is ongoing.
If you don't want others to use your code, why is it released under an open source license?
If someone releases a piece of software under some license then everyone who wishes to use that software must respect the copyright author's wishes and comply with the conditions specified in the license. That applies to any software distributed under a license, including proprietary licenses.
If someone distributes their code under a license that grants the user the right to access the code provided that they follow a set of conditions specified in the license then everyone who wishes to use that code is forced to respect the author's wishes and comply with the license. That applies to any code distributed under a license, including proprietary licenses, even those that basically state "you can look but you can't touch".
If a user has access to the source code of a particular software package then that user is forced to follow the conditions set forth by the authors, which are encoded in the license. That user has absolutely no rights to hijack other people's code just because he has access to it. If it's a proprietary license that states "you can look but you can't touch" then that user cannot hijack that code, include it in his projects and license it off as their own, completely ignoring the author's wishes. If it's a FLOSS license that states "you can look, you can touch and you can distribute, provided that you also let others access the code in the very same terms you benefited" then, just like in the proprietary license scenario, that user cannot hijack that code, include it in his projects and license it off as their own, completely ignoring the author's wishes.
That means, in short, that just because some work is distributed under a FLOSS license it doesn't grant anyone the right to rip off the software's authors and simply hijack their code. If a user wants to access any given work of art and try to use it commercially then he is forced to respect the author's conditions. This holds invariably to any license, whether it's a proprietary license or a FLOSS license. You can't just rip off other people and hijack their code to suit your fancy. It's not your code and it never was. Therefore you either follow the author's wishes or you go off writing your own code. Is it so hard to understand?
Slashdot Mirror
If he succeeds in selling the idea that there is a new Cold War which oh so happens to be fought with the product his company sells then he is in line to get a hefty ton of money from people spending money on their quackery. There is a reason why all of a sudden McAfee started complaining about losing the war on computer security and companies such IBM started warning that there is a supercomputer arms race between China and the US and the US was about to lose. It's all about generating demand where there is none and creating a market for something which isn't needed.
OpenGL and OpenCL are not programming languages. They are APIs, which happen to be available on multiple languages. Trying to bundle APIs such as Open{GL,CL} with programming languages such as C, C++ and even Assembly is a public demonstration of your ignorance.
To be fair, whatwg's "HTML is a living standard" bullshit was the first successful attempt at breaking HTML, and is in essence the exact same thing that these companies are proposing. So, it appears that everyone is trying to break up HTML to their own benefit.
It goes a bit beyond that. The changes to Paul Revere's article are based on direct quotes from Sarah Palin and the editions to Paul Revere's article are being discussed in Sarah Palin's talk page. Among the people committing the changes we find this guy, who on his user page includes the following quote:
So, it's pretty obvious that there is more at play than mere correlation.
Well, why not look at the article's list of changes? If you do that you will stumble on User:Tomwsulcer, , a user who authored a set of editions which includes adding the aforementioned changes to Paul Revere's article, where he explicitly quotes Sarah Palin as the source. He also posted comments on Sarah Palin's talk page expressing his intention and motivation.
Yet, this is just an idiot wasting his time posting stuff he came up with on a wikipedia article. There are literally hundreds of this sort of edits being committed every single day on wikipedia, adding crap that is later removed. Why is this particular idiot being singled out for shovelling crap onto that site?
I believe the proper terms have already been invented. Twitter is a blog which only accepts a terribly limited amount of text. Therefore, if "blogging" is seen as a verb then it also covers message posted to twitter. If that fails then there is also micro-blogging. Even if some people don't believe that that is good enough then I don't see how it is impossible to say "he/she stated that..." or even "he/she stated in a website that..." instead of "he/she tweeted...".
Regarding facebook, it is nothing but a glorified personal site which happens to have a set of features which enable users to communicate between accounts. Therefore, it's pretty clear that instead of saying something similar to "he/she posted on his facebook that..." it is very reasonable to say "he/she posted on his personal website that...". In fact, the latter is clearer and sounds a lot more natural.
Well, the thing is that all he has to complain about is their decision to ship a underperforming system. They built their phones, they tested their phones with the OS and applications, they knew that their performance sucks. Complaining that apps force their phones to lag away is exactly like complaining that your computer lags away if you happen to run anything other than a clean desktop environment. The thing is, if you ship a computer which is incapable of handling mundane apps which other phones handle quite well then you cannot blame the apps. The problem is that Motorola's products are crap, not whatever app a user may use.
I don't believe you understand OpenCL's application domain, as you insinuate that it only applies to specialized use case scenarios. Even if you choose to ignore how widespread OpenCL is in domains such as games, you always have multimedia and graphics processing. Adding to this, there are countless people all around the world who desperately seek a "supercomputer in a box" such as what you can get if you are suddenly able to use graphics cards for this. I happen to be one of these people who desperately want to get OpenCL off the ground and into our daily life, mainly because I develop FEM software and all the extra processing power is desperately needed for every application, particularly nonlinear analysis. If OpenCL doesn't fly then people like me are forced to deal with costly, specialized solutions, which means that only people who can afford a supercomputer can have that. If it flies then we can have supercomputers as easy as buying a new graphics card. And that's trully excellent.
Those aren't editors, but administrators. In my experience, administrators are only involved when there are a whole lot of personal problems between editors (i.e., regular users who edit articles) thrown into the mix.
If that is true then you must ask yourself why those who criticize wikipedia and make wild claims regarding prepotent administrators never manage to point out a single case where that took place. I mean, wikipedia provides public logs regarding every single edit that has been made, including who made it and when. Even communication between editors is made through publicly available sites, which is also logged. So, if there is such a extensive set of records encompassing every edit that was ever made then why do they have such a hard time providing a single example to back their claims?
I also agree that it's become an extremely useful asset to humanity. Yet, it is just now becoming useful, and it is still a massive rough edge which needs a whole lot of work.
You fail at reading comprehension. First of all, let's take a look at Wikipedia:Truth. It says:
So, as it is obvious and contrary to what you've claimed, wikipedia isn't designed to foster articles with "stupid or untrue" content. What wikipedia's policy states is that you can't simply put up something on wikipedia and expect it to be preserved just because you or anyone else claims its true. Your word is worth nothing if you can't back it up with proof. Therefore, if you wish to contribute something then you can't simply base your contribution on your own personal authority, and gut feeling of how true it may be. To put it differently, there is no place in wikipedia for truthiness.
Knowing this, your comment is even more amusing, as your defence of this truthiness thing, which basically means that you expect that you could post everything that in your gut you believe is true without presenting any evidence or basis, is in fact a gateway for content which is stupid and untrue. This means that the target of your criticism is exactly what keeps stupidity out of wikipedia, and therefore does exactly the opposite of what you claim to happen.
A benchmark is a fancy word to describe a process where a set of items are evaluated objectively based on pre-defined parameters and following a standardized set of procedures. To put it shortly, benchmarking is a process to determine the best option.
Knowing this, why is it so odd that someone found a way to test paper and determine what's best for a given application? Does timothy actually believe that only computer parts can be evaluated by potential buyers?
Judging by your quote, he's saying that Wikipedia is nerdy and therefore not cool.
Yes, that actually sounds just about right. It appears that watching people talk about things that go way over his head makes him feel threatened, and therefore feels the need to try to downplay what they know and do in order for him to feel better about his underachievement.
Care to know how I know you don't have the faintest clue on what you are talking about?
Do you actually have any basis to make that claim? More to the point, a contribution is either valid or invalid, and from my experience that doesn't have a strong relation with someone's aura of authority. If someone adds something which is true, valid and correct then you don't need to demand to see their resume to decide if you accept or object their contributions. You simply turn on your brain, think and evaluate the merit of their contribution.
Again, do you have any basis for that claim? I'm a structural engineer and I've created a hefty set of articles on my topic of expertise and contributed to countless more. During this time I've experienced zero cases similar to the one you've described. I've stumbled on stubs which shouldn't be stubs, I've stumbled on articles which were poorly edited and I've even stumbled on a hand full of blatant errors. Yet, I've never had anyone revert my contributions due to petty behaviour you've described.
Yet, what you are trying to attribute to a conspiracy by "leading editors" may as well be the result of you being a dick, and trying to strong-arm objectionable edits based on arrogant premises such as an attitude of "you have zero qualifications or training in the subject when compared to me". In that case, don't try to attribute to a conspiracy the problems that you bring onto yourself due to your lack of basic social skills.
You are bitching about "editors" as if they were some sort of external group, dividing them into a "them" group while you are kept in the "us" group. Yet, if you actually had any experience whatsoever contributing to wikipedia you would know by now that you are an editor, just as I am and countless others. There is no "us Vs them". Anyone can edit, anyone can create articles, anyone can contribute to articles, anyone can change articles. So, please don't try to come up with conspiracies and "us Vs them" excuses to try to justify your lame, baseless point of view.
I see what you mean and I have to say you have a point. Yet, as I see it, although lists of pokemon stuff are largely irrelevant, hosting them isn't necessarily a problem. The real problem is keeping out information which can be seen as relevant. This, obviously, is a very grey area, and terribly subjective. Therefore, it is only natural that some level of noise is generated over these issues, mainly because the decisions to include/exclude information is not cut and dry and instead is based on subjective aspects. As a consequence, this is why everyone remotely interested in wikipeia's health must participate, in order for those decisions to be done as a community.
The counterclaim is a bit more idiotic than that. From the article:
This description, which was given as criticism directed towards wikipedia and intentionally done so with the intent of making it look bad, has the strange problem of also describing how the scientific process unrolls in the scientific community. Well, with the single difference of the majority of scientists not being volunteers, at least in the sense of wikipedia.
But even when ignoring this blatant mishap, I don't see how pedantic discussions on factual and scientific information can be seen as bad, particularly when the point of those pedantic discussions is to meticulously log information, free of bias and independent of any point of view. That is, it seems that those who make this sort of criticism simply don't know what they are talking about.
But hey, you have to avenge that time someone deleted your pet article on some irrelevant subject.
You know fracking is bad when you can put a lighter up to a running facet in your kitchen and a fireball erupts.
Obligatory youtube clip: inflamable tap water
If you pay attention to the scale in those geiger counters you will notice that although it makes a lot of noise it measures radiation in micro sieverts. The geiger counter made the most noise at 15 micro Sieverts. In comparison, an airplane flight from LA to NY earns you 40 micro Sieverts.
If we rig a thermometer with a siren when temperature hits 30C then it will also sound dangerous. That doesn't make it a danger to your health.
Seriously.. I can't imagine what happens to bandwith when multiple people at the same ISP or office all stream the same live video at the same time.. (I think IPV6 multicast could be one of the truly bright stars pushing IPv6 adoption..)
Seriously? You can't imagine people using webcams on chat networks or even teleconferencing, using programs such as skype?
The "social" value of this is that the service provider (in this case Google) is able to implement a way for their users to declare their preferences in multiple subjects, which is a form of declared-strategy surveying. By this, the service provider is able to harvest more personal information from their users and therefore draw their profile more accurately than before, which in turn lets them better target ads and, as a consequence, earn more money.
The sad part is that quite possibly the only reason the book was given a 9/10 is because it is Knuth's book. Otherwise, as any other book on combinatorial algorithms, the book would never be reviewed, as the author doesn't have the faintest grasp on the subject, and this book review would be again dedicated to vacuous "learn X in n hours" books.
The success of what it's now called a netbook is that while in the early 90s a laptop with a small form factor would go for around 2500 dollars and far more expensive than computers with a regular form factor,nowadays it goes for 250 dollars and cheaper than computers with a regular form factor. Otherwise, once we ignore the pretty marketing gimmick of calling it a "netbook" instead of a laptop, it boils down to nothing more than price.
So no, it's not a issue with the form factor. It's an issue with the price. Once we lower it, the demand increases and more units are sold. It's basic economics 101, not brilliant marketing strategies.
Well, except they aren't. Read below.
Well, except that removing privacy doesn't make any of those problems go away. Let me explain.
The cost of living, in a free market, only depends on how much any given person is willing to spend on stuff such as housing, food, transportation, utilities an other goods/services. If you take privacy away and let everyone, including corporations, know what everyone, including you, is willing to spend on someone then their prices will be set according to how much the retailers are able to get from you. This price discrimination problem is nothing new, with countless articles already being written on the subject.
Traffic is pretty much immune to privacy. For starts, no matter how many morning radio and even TV shows cover which roads are jammed they will always and repeatedly stay jammed day after day, until new transportation routes are created. This is due to the simple fact that everyone evaluates their options and chooses the one which they believe are best for them. That evaluation is performed considering multiple variables, such as time spent, cost, and even comfort. Gaining information on a given issue, such as traffic, may lead some people to choose other options but the vast majority won't change their ways, simply because the added information doesn't change anything in their evaluation, and therefore they keep choosing a path, which keeps getting jammed. And no matter how much information you throw to the problem, including losing all privacy, will not change that.
Regarding crime, it can only be eliminated if we are talking about a total loss of privacy by the entire population and all organizations. This is impossible and absurd. Even then, crimes still happen although people know they were committed and they know who committed them. In fact, England's experience with CCTV shows that the crime rate hasn't receded.
From crime we go to housing costs. It's absurd to claim that housing costs go down if crime goes down. In fact, it's quite clear that crime represents a market pressure on housing costs, which means that if a once crime-ridden area is suddenly crime-free then it's quite obvious that housing costs in that part of town will rise.
Therefore, as I've stated before, It's absurd to think that losing all privacy brings anything good to anyone. It doesn't.
The case that Scot Adams poses is that there would be people who would accept a bad consequence (loss of privacy) in exchange of avoiding a set of bad consequences (high cost of living, high crime).
He could also state that plenty of people would accept losing their privacy if it meant they didn't had their knee caps smashed their legs broken. Yet, in both cases that doesn't mean that losing our privacy is desirable or that people look forward to it. The only thing that it means is that considering a set of consequences, "plenty of volunteers would come forward" to choose a bad consequence if it meant they avoided other bad consequences. No shit, sherlock. I guess that would explain why bank robbers succeed in convincing bank tellers to give away the bank's cash without asking anything in return.
So, to sum things up, this comment is absurd and lacks any merit. It's yet another apology for the attack on privacy that is ongoing.
If someone releases a piece of software under some license then everyone who wishes to use that software must respect the copyright author's wishes and comply with the conditions specified in the license. That applies to any software distributed under a license, including proprietary licenses.
If someone distributes their code under a license that grants the user the right to access the code provided that they follow a set of conditions specified in the license then everyone who wishes to use that code is forced to respect the author's wishes and comply with the license. That applies to any code distributed under a license, including proprietary licenses, even those that basically state "you can look but you can't touch".
If a user has access to the source code of a particular software package then that user is forced to follow the conditions set forth by the authors, which are encoded in the license. That user has absolutely no rights to hijack other people's code just because he has access to it. If it's a proprietary license that states "you can look but you can't touch" then that user cannot hijack that code, include it in his projects and license it off as their own, completely ignoring the author's wishes. If it's a FLOSS license that states "you can look, you can touch and you can distribute, provided that you also let others access the code in the very same terms you benefited" then, just like in the proprietary license scenario, that user cannot hijack that code, include it in his projects and license it off as their own, completely ignoring the author's wishes.
That means, in short, that just because some work is distributed under a FLOSS license it doesn't grant anyone the right to rip off the software's authors and simply hijack their code. If a user wants to access any given work of art and try to use it commercially then he is forced to respect the author's conditions. This holds invariably to any license, whether it's a proprietary license or a FLOSS license. You can't just rip off other people and hijack their code to suit your fancy. It's not your code and it never was. Therefore you either follow the author's wishes or you go off writing your own code. Is it so hard to understand?