Thanks for the intelligent comment! I had considered BootCamp but my father is partially concerned with the spyware, viruses and other bullshit that he's tired of dealing with on the Windows platform. While he understands that there is some of that available for OS X, the risks are far less.
It isn't that she doesn't like or dislike using a computer... She's quite computer savvy for a 57 year old female with limited training in programs like Lotus123 and WordPerfect from years ago. She just wants to be comfortable with it. Dumping her, pretty much against her will into a completely different experience is difficult for a stubborn individual later in life.
If you have any other suggestions, please do respond, I'd love to hear them.
My father just bought my mother a 17" Macbook because he couldn't find a laptop he wanted to buy for her that didn't require you to buy Vista and then downgrade to XP later.
My mother despises MacOS and can't "figure anything out." Now while I don't care for MacOS myself I tried to explain some things over the phone to her so that she would at least be able to use it for the time being until my well-meaning father can figure out what to do to fix things for her. She pretty much was being unreasonable about the whole thing and said over and over, "I'm 57 years old, I don't want to learn something else."
My question for all of you is how, when I'm there at Christmas, do I make MacOS X more like Windows so that she's more comfortable with using the OS?
Every day it's either some government agency or some giant corp that is tightening the screws on US citizens. When will there be a tipping point where Joe Apathetic says "enough!" and takes to the streets? It's alarming that so many people are so docile.
When the actions of the government affect the TV viewing and high fructose corn syrup eating of the American public. Until then? Everyone will continue to sit on their asses smiling that they did "great work" at their pointless jobs and consider themselves successful.
They're about to become corporate serfs. Give them a four year break from corporate dominance, so they have that much more psychological trauma when they exit school, which will make them the perfect mentally broken spiritual voids who need to buy our products.
While my mind was "corrupt" regarding corporate control, copyrights and IP infringement long before entering college, the vast majority of those in college learn about it as soon as they step foot into their dorm room and their geek roommate/hallmate/etc shows them BitTorrent.
I can see why the MPAA wants to stop it there as college is a breeding ground for thoughts of freedom from copyright and that scares the living fucking shit out of them. Once they leave college, with the knowledge they've learned "on the inside" they are less likely to pay for movies, music and other IP when they leave.
I say end the monopolies, produce shit worth paying for that don't costs millions to produce to cover the lack of good writing and get over yourselves.
They exist for people, like me, that have 100s of GB of freely available live music and enjoy listening to a wide variety of it as well as watching TV shows, movies, and storing other data in one spot so I can carry my collection to and from work, friends, whatever.
And while I have pirated music I really don't see many people doing it these days. Why should they bother? It's just as easy to get it from iTunes, eMusic, or whatever and that's exactly what they do.
You guys are an optometrists wet dream. Reading text for long periods on a 3" screen is dumb. Reading a book is is no way comparable to reading text messages. Just because you can deal with it at short sprints does not mean you'll be able to do it for long periods without serious eye problems.
You know, I've been reading Dune -- a copy printed in 1997 that I picked up at a used book store. It looked brand-new and had no creases in the spine. I would assume it had never been read. I started reading it (I really don't understand why it's such a popular novel but that's for a different post) and found that the text was printed faintly in some areas, had a different font size all together in others and the author likes to use strange contractions all which distracts my reading immensely. I have made it only halfway through the book because it's just such a stress to read it both on my eyes and on my mind and the book is just not worth it IMHO. Obviously books themselves can have eyestrain issues when reading them...
I own a T-mobile Sidekick (and have had various versions of it since 4/2004) and consider it an appendage. I am constantly reading it (sometimes for hours at a time depending on the situation -- airports, shopping with the wife, whatever) and you know what? My eyesight is still 20/20 as it has been since my first check 28 years ago. So while it may be true for some individuals that their eyesight will deteriorate with prolonged exposure to smallish text it doesn't mean that mine will -- enough of the generalizations, mmmkay?
The Kindle has a very small market because it's already been gouged by those that want to use mobile devices (like the iPhone, Sidekick, or not-invented-yet-Foo) to do their reading. The rest of the people that are interested in reading novels, that don't want or already own a mobile device, are going to number very few that would instead purchase the over-priced, out-dated-looking, Kindle and then lug around YAMD (yet another mobile device) to do yet another simple thing.
Either people are going to stick with books as they always have (I will as I like physical books and I especially like wandering in book stores to buy random titles because I like to judge them by their covers) or they will use it on their mobile device that they already own that costs about the same and will undoubtedly go with the device that offers far more bang for the buck.
If you forget the price difference, the monthly fee the iPhone requires, the shorter battery life of the iPhone (how long can it last if the display is lit nonstop?)...
If you also forget that the Kindle will have similar monthly access fees ($1.99/mo for RSS or more for books which would then have no printing fees and almost no distribution fees) and it looks like something from 1989. Not only that but what else does it do? Not much compared to any mobile device out there.
I'll stick with reading Foo on my mobile device and will continue to happily pay for monthly service and free reading of shit on the web.
Jesus. I've never hated politicians more than I do this very second. What a waste of time and money and resources, all the expense of so much other awful things going on in the world...
If this is what it took to bring you over the edge, you're just as bad as the non-voting public out there that loves this sort of nanny state bullshit.
Yes, that's not what mail is for. I personally get ruffled the wrong way when I see people generate insane overhead by latching binaries to mails instead of using sensible ways of transfer (like uploading to some server and sending the FTP link via mail), but that's how mail is being used.
I realize you're probably a nerd due to the fact that you're post on Slashdot but the vast majority of people who use e-mail in the corporate world cannot put anything on a FTP server, webserver, or anywhere else. That type of shit is for the IT department and I hope that they honestly have better things to do than place some lame Excel spreadsheet used like a database up so that three people can access the data contained in it once.
I have access to a webserver, FTP server, whatever and you know what? I still send attachments because it makes more sense for 99% of what I (and everyone else) attaches.
Email has been ruined by spam. Either you don't give out your address, meaning that you cannot make wide use of it, or you get too much spam.
You know, I have an e-mail address (billandkimroehl@gmail.com) listed on my website that gets about 12,000 visits a day and I wouldn't doubt if many of those harvest it for spam. While I get almost 0 spam (with blacklisting and SpamAssassin) on my main address (which I hadn't received a single spam to before a year ago) GMail handles the 19 or so spams I get to my website address w/o an issue. In addition to the website posting I also use that account for all the garbage sign ups on the web and yet I only get 19 a day at most.
Spam hasn't ruined e-mail as you have said, it's just that other technology works a fuckload better for most communication. For most of what I do I expect an immediate response and people treat e-mail like voicemail -- they check it frequently but not frequently enough. More modern technology solves that.
Is there some special reason you continue to use YouTube if the constraints bother you? There are a ton of other sites that have different constraints, and if you're just sending links to friends it shouldn't matter which site you use.
Yeah, because I want people to find my videos and the vast majority of the Internet population uses YouTube.
The big question for me is whether or not they will raise the video length limit for standard uploads. I take plenty of my own video and put it on YouTube but I have to constantly remember the small file size (100MB) and video length (10 minutes) when I'm taping...
I don't care as much what the resolution is, but it would be nice to have those limits raised.
Personally I'd like to know just as much where this 4.6+ billion dollars is going to end up. The FCC while not an official government body is still somewhat kind of part of the government. Will this money go back to the people since after all it's all our frequencies, we just choose to let the FCC govern it for us.
I want to see all this money, plus *all* of the money from the sale of the television spectrum following the HD deadline, to come back to us as a fat check to pay for one day in Iraq.
Or you are visiting a friend and there are 6 wireless networks active in the immediate area. All of these networks happened to be named linksysX and you are told "just use the wireless."
I read somewhere that Microsoft developers write something like 1,000 lines of code a year. Last-year, I contributed around forty times that to our source control at work. When you're paid so much to do so little - that has to destroy morale too. Most developers I know like to work.
Strange, I know most people that are exactly the opposite. They want to do as little as possible and get paid 10x more than they currently are and I watch them sit at their desks spending more time surfing blogs, iTunes and news sites than completing the few projects that they claim keep them so busy throughout their days. The sad thing is that those that want to work, like you who's touting their self-worth, get paid shit wages and recognized very little for the simple fact that you make a much better worker and you're content where you are. Management rarely recognizes work the way it should and that's the sad fact in the real world.
What destroys morale is fruitless labor where you work, work, work and in the end you have nothing to show for it. I suppose like scrapping Vista and rewriting it from a completely different source and then watching the popularity of the OS flounder around like a fish in the bottom of the barrel because that's exactly what the result came to be.
We hide more than that -- I brought up the question of sex (marital) with a friend, and he freaked when I asked him about his sex life. As if sex when you're married is immoral or illegal, but still people hide behind the idea that we need privacy about such matters.
It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the simple fact that fucking my wife should be none of your business. If your friend wants to bring up his sex life w/you, that's one thing but for you to ask him about his, that's something out of line IMHO and it has nothing to do w/morality or otherwise.
As far as bloggers that attempt to hide their identity, that's something I guess I don't truly understand unless we're talking about those with insider information or some other secrecy attempt. For those that aren't using their real names and are writing about their daily lives online, they're just being silly.
As you can see, while I opted for the username of "garcia", I still post my real name with a link to my personal website (where I also list my real name). I want people to find me online and I have nothing to hide there.
And remember that it doesn't mean that anything will get done, especially Justice just for Girls likes to call repeatedly and then when you complain, claim that you put their number there or that someone else did.
My other favorite are the automated carpet cleaning calls that you get, number unavailable, that don't leave their number, name or otherwise and I'm not sure what purpose they serve other than to annoy.
Personally, I wish they would stop wasting time with that horseshit and instead spent time growing balls and forcing those that the Bush administration has claimed are immune to testify.
They have the power, they're just being a bunch of fucking pansies. The American public didn't vote for those douchebags to sit in office and do jack shit. They voted for them to fix the numerous wrongs and restore the balance of power. Unfortunately, all that they've proven is that the Bush Administration can make shit up as they go along and not be held accountable for any of it.
The whole study is a joke because it assumes that body mass index is a valid measure of obesity, and it isn't. The only real way to tell how fat you are is to measure your body fat percentage, usually with calipers although some new scales claim to be able to do it electrically.
Exactly. According to the BMI scales typically used I am obese at 199 pounds and they suggest that I should weigh less than 170. Even in my top physical shape in college (6-pack and all) I weighed in at 183.
I was certainly obese when I tipped the scales at over 260 pounds three months ago and I have done what I can to get my weight back under control but to base everything solely on BMI is just wrong.
DHS is at pains to point out that REAL ID is not a national identity card program but a set of regulations that direct states how to create their drivers' licenses and state ID cards. The program mandates digital photos, bar-coded information, and more stringent document checks, and it directs all states to link their databases with one another.
So with the bar-coded information we can't wipe the readability of the card with a magnet to stop the assholes at bars, liquors stores, etc from scanning us unnecessarily. Digital photos means that everyone's picture will be merged into the database of information shared with everyone else and "more stringent document checks" means that even more information will be in that same database. When all this information is linked how is it not a national ID database again?
I'm proud of the states that didn't crumble under the pressure of the Federal Government. At least someone out there is willing to tell them to fuck off -- regardless if it was over funding and not privacy implications.
Like their cars, they don't notice anything is wrong until it breaks down for them.
Another bad analogy I guess because this really doesn't apply here at all. Facebook is doing something that they should be doing. Monitoring usage of their site. Nothing is broken and there don't need to be any laws governing this.
A website operator and its staff should have the ability to see and do whatever they need to make certain the site continues to operate well as it grows and the userbase evolves. If those working behind the scenes at Facebook were only permitted, by law, to run the site and offer some sort of internal privacy guarantee that no one would look at what content was out there, the site would fall apart to legal pressure from the outside for other violations.
Don't want something known widely? Don't post it on a public web site.
Not only that but I'm not sure why they are surprised that employees can view the surfing habits of individuals users on the site that they host. I guess it goes back to the whole story yesterday about US Consumers being clueless about online tracking. Honestly, I continuously monitor the viewing habits of users on my website (the vast majority are anonymous however) so that I can improve content posted, how content is laid out, etc.
This is such a non-story that it isn't even funny.
and honestly? i side with the average guy on the street with (non)this issue. the average guy on the street looks at the data generated from his random meanderings on the web as useless, unimportant, and not a matter of privacy. and you know what?: he's right. frankly, that some database might know what i visited on eBay, then amazon.com, then netflix is not some horrible raping of my psyche. it really isn't
It isn't when it's some third-party non-important entity looking at your surfing habits. However, it is very much an issue when the government decides that because you are waiving your Constitutional rights they can subpoena that same information to use as part of their illegal nationwide net of information on citizens.
I'm sorry if YOU are lumped in with the general uncaring public about something that shouldn't be the business of any group of Marketers, government agencies, or anyone except/dev/null but you're fucking insane if you don't think it's important to protect your privacy.
Thanks for offering me the chance to bite, I enjoy it sometimes.
I just don't get it. I refuse to go to Blockbuster and I cannot justify Netflix's fees and I really like to watch movies (I consider watching three or four movies a month above average). I go to the local grocery store and up to their DVD kiosk and rent a movie for 24 hours at 1.05 (including tax).
I drive by the store containing the kiosk (which is directly across the street from Blockbuster and Hollywood) at least several times a day. I'd rather put my money there ($5 for a rental at Blockbuster? Please.) and have slim pickings than go to Blockbuster.
Can someone please explain to me why you are willing to pay astronomical monthly fees for Netflix on a recurring basis and you might not even get your #1 choices? I just don't understand how the business model survives.
No, users have moved on because other technologies are better at transferring the files to you faster. Napster had two things going for it:
1. Centralized database
2. First popular sharing site of its kind.
Once the centralized database was gone and other methods popped up, there was no reason to stick with it. Napster is nothing more than a name and a lame character in a movie.
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Thanks for the intelligent comment! I had considered BootCamp but my father is partially concerned with the spyware, viruses and other bullshit that he's tired of dealing with on the Windows platform. While he understands that there is some of that available for OS X, the risks are far less.
It isn't that she doesn't like or dislike using a computer... She's quite computer savvy for a 57 year old female with limited training in programs like Lotus123 and WordPerfect from years ago. She just wants to be comfortable with it. Dumping her, pretty much against her will into a completely different experience is difficult for a stubborn individual later in life.
If you have any other suggestions, please do respond, I'd love to hear them.
My father just bought my mother a 17" Macbook because he couldn't find a laptop he wanted to buy for her that didn't require you to buy Vista and then downgrade to XP later.
My mother despises MacOS and can't "figure anything out." Now while I don't care for MacOS myself I tried to explain some things over the phone to her so that she would at least be able to use it for the time being until my well-meaning father can figure out what to do to fix things for her. She pretty much was being unreasonable about the whole thing and said over and over, "I'm 57 years old, I don't want to learn something else."
My question for all of you is how, when I'm there at Christmas, do I make MacOS X more like Windows so that she's more comfortable with using the OS?
Every day it's either some government agency or some giant corp that is tightening the screws on US citizens. When will there be a tipping point where Joe Apathetic says "enough!" and takes to the streets? It's alarming that so many people are so docile.
When the actions of the government affect the TV viewing and high fructose corn syrup eating of the American public. Until then? Everyone will continue to sit on their asses smiling that they did "great work" at their pointless jobs and consider themselves successful.
They're about to become corporate serfs. Give them a four year break from corporate dominance, so they have that much more psychological trauma when they exit school, which will make them the perfect mentally broken spiritual voids who need to buy our products.
While my mind was "corrupt" regarding corporate control, copyrights and IP infringement long before entering college, the vast majority of those in college learn about it as soon as they step foot into their dorm room and their geek roommate/hallmate/etc shows them BitTorrent.
I can see why the MPAA wants to stop it there as college is a breeding ground for thoughts of freedom from copyright and that scares the living fucking shit out of them. Once they leave college, with the knowledge they've learned "on the inside" they are less likely to pay for movies, music and other IP when they leave.
I say end the monopolies, produce shit worth paying for that don't costs millions to produce to cover the lack of good writing and get over yourselves.
They exist for people, like me, that have 100s of GB of freely available live music and enjoy listening to a wide variety of it as well as watching TV shows, movies, and storing other data in one spot so I can carry my collection to and from work, friends, whatever.
And while I have pirated music I really don't see many people doing it these days. Why should they bother? It's just as easy to get it from iTunes, eMusic, or whatever and that's exactly what they do.
You guys are an optometrists wet dream. Reading text for long periods on a 3" screen is dumb. Reading a book is is no way comparable to reading text messages. Just because you can deal with it at short sprints does not mean you'll be able to do it for long periods without serious eye problems.
You know, I've been reading Dune -- a copy printed in 1997 that I picked up at a used book store. It looked brand-new and had no creases in the spine. I would assume it had never been read. I started reading it (I really don't understand why it's such a popular novel but that's for a different post) and found that the text was printed faintly in some areas, had a different font size all together in others and the author likes to use strange contractions all which distracts my reading immensely. I have made it only halfway through the book because it's just such a stress to read it both on my eyes and on my mind and the book is just not worth it IMHO. Obviously books themselves can have eyestrain issues when reading them...
I own a T-mobile Sidekick (and have had various versions of it since 4/2004) and consider it an appendage. I am constantly reading it (sometimes for hours at a time depending on the situation -- airports, shopping with the wife, whatever) and you know what? My eyesight is still 20/20 as it has been since my first check 28 years ago. So while it may be true for some individuals that their eyesight will deteriorate with prolonged exposure to smallish text it doesn't mean that mine will -- enough of the generalizations, mmmkay?
The Kindle has a very small market because it's already been gouged by those that want to use mobile devices (like the iPhone, Sidekick, or not-invented-yet-Foo) to do their reading. The rest of the people that are interested in reading novels, that don't want or already own a mobile device, are going to number very few that would instead purchase the over-priced, out-dated-looking, Kindle and then lug around YAMD (yet another mobile device) to do yet another simple thing.
Either people are going to stick with books as they always have (I will as I like physical books and I especially like wandering in book stores to buy random titles because I like to judge them by their covers) or they will use it on their mobile device that they already own that costs about the same and will undoubtedly go with the device that offers far more bang for the buck.
If you forget the price difference, the monthly fee the iPhone requires, the shorter battery life of the iPhone (how long can it last if the display is lit nonstop?)...
If you also forget that the Kindle will have similar monthly access fees ($1.99/mo for RSS or more for books which would then have no printing fees and almost no distribution fees) and it looks like something from 1989. Not only that but what else does it do? Not much compared to any mobile device out there.
I'll stick with reading Foo on my mobile device and will continue to happily pay for monthly service and free reading of shit on the web.
Jesus. I've never hated politicians more than I do this very second. What a waste of time and money and resources, all the expense of so much other awful things going on in the world...
If this is what it took to bring you over the edge, you're just as bad as the non-voting public out there that loves this sort of nanny state bullshit.
Yes, that's not what mail is for. I personally get ruffled the wrong way when I see people generate insane overhead by latching binaries to mails instead of using sensible ways of transfer (like uploading to some server and sending the FTP link via mail), but that's how mail is being used.
I realize you're probably a nerd due to the fact that you're post on Slashdot but the vast majority of people who use e-mail in the corporate world cannot put anything on a FTP server, webserver, or anywhere else. That type of shit is for the IT department and I hope that they honestly have better things to do than place some lame Excel spreadsheet used like a database up so that three people can access the data contained in it once.
I have access to a webserver, FTP server, whatever and you know what? I still send attachments because it makes more sense for 99% of what I (and everyone else) attaches.
Email has been ruined by spam. Either you don't give out your address, meaning that you cannot make wide use of it, or you get too much spam.
You know, I have an e-mail address (billandkimroehl@gmail.com) listed on my website that gets about 12,000 visits a day and I wouldn't doubt if many of those harvest it for spam. While I get almost 0 spam (with blacklisting and SpamAssassin) on my main address (which I hadn't received a single spam to before a year ago) GMail handles the 19 or so spams I get to my website address w/o an issue. In addition to the website posting I also use that account for all the garbage sign ups on the web and yet I only get 19 a day at most.
Spam hasn't ruined e-mail as you have said, it's just that other technology works a fuckload better for most communication. For most of what I do I expect an immediate response and people treat e-mail like voicemail -- they check it frequently but not frequently enough. More modern technology solves that.
Is there some special reason you continue to use YouTube if the constraints bother you? There are a ton of other sites that have different constraints, and if you're just sending links to friends it shouldn't matter which site you use.
Yeah, because I want people to find my videos and the vast majority of the Internet population uses YouTube.
The big question for me is whether or not they will raise the video length limit for standard uploads. I take plenty of my own video and put it on YouTube but I have to constantly remember the small file size (100MB) and video length (10 minutes) when I'm taping...
I don't care as much what the resolution is, but it would be nice to have those limits raised.
Personally I'd like to know just as much where this 4.6+ billion dollars is going to end up. The FCC while not an official government body is still somewhat kind of part of the government. Will this money go back to the people since after all it's all our frequencies, we just choose to let the FCC govern it for us.
I want to see all this money, plus *all* of the money from the sale of the television spectrum following the HD deadline, to come back to us as a fat check to pay for one day in Iraq.
Or you are visiting a friend and there are 6 wireless networks active in the immediate area. All of these networks happened to be named linksysX and you are told "just use the wireless."
I read somewhere that Microsoft developers write something like 1,000 lines of code a year. Last-year, I contributed around forty times that to our source control at work. When you're paid so much to do so little - that has to destroy morale too. Most developers I know like to work.
Strange, I know most people that are exactly the opposite. They want to do as little as possible and get paid 10x more than they currently are and I watch them sit at their desks spending more time surfing blogs, iTunes and news sites than completing the few projects that they claim keep them so busy throughout their days. The sad thing is that those that want to work, like you who's touting their self-worth, get paid shit wages and recognized very little for the simple fact that you make a much better worker and you're content where you are. Management rarely recognizes work the way it should and that's the sad fact in the real world.
What destroys morale is fruitless labor where you work, work, work and in the end you have nothing to show for it. I suppose like scrapping Vista and rewriting it from a completely different source and then watching the popularity of the OS flounder around like a fish in the bottom of the barrel because that's exactly what the result came to be.
We hide more than that -- I brought up the question of sex (marital) with a friend, and he freaked when I asked him about his sex life. As if sex when you're married is immoral or illegal, but still people hide behind the idea that we need privacy about such matters.
It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the simple fact that fucking my wife should be none of your business. If your friend wants to bring up his sex life w/you, that's one thing but for you to ask him about his, that's something out of line IMHO and it has nothing to do w/morality or otherwise.
As far as bloggers that attempt to hide their identity, that's something I guess I don't truly understand unless we're talking about those with insider information or some other secrecy attempt. For those that aren't using their real names and are writing about their daily lives online, they're just being silly.
As you can see, while I opted for the username of "garcia", I still post my real name with a link to my personal website (where I also list my real name). I want people to find me online and I have nothing to hide there.
And remember that it doesn't mean that anything will get done, especially Justice just for Girls likes to call repeatedly and then when you complain, claim that you put their number there or that someone else did.
My other favorite are the automated carpet cleaning calls that you get, number unavailable, that don't leave their number, name or otherwise and I'm not sure what purpose they serve other than to annoy.
Personally, I wish they would stop wasting time with that horseshit and instead spent time growing balls and forcing those that the Bush administration has claimed are immune to testify.
They have the power, they're just being a bunch of fucking pansies. The American public didn't vote for those douchebags to sit in office and do jack shit. They voted for them to fix the numerous wrongs and restore the balance of power. Unfortunately, all that they've proven is that the Bush Administration can make shit up as they go along and not be held accountable for any of it.
The whole study is a joke because it assumes that body mass index is a valid measure of obesity, and it isn't. The only real way to tell how fat you are is to measure your body fat percentage, usually with calipers although some new scales claim to be able to do it electrically.
Exactly. According to the BMI scales typically used I am obese at 199 pounds and they suggest that I should weigh less than 170. Even in my top physical shape in college (6-pack and all) I weighed in at 183.
I was certainly obese when I tipped the scales at over 260 pounds three months ago and I have done what I can to get my weight back under control but to base everything solely on BMI is just wrong.
DHS is at pains to point out that REAL ID is not a national identity card program but a set of regulations that direct states how to create their drivers' licenses and state ID cards. The program mandates digital photos, bar-coded information, and more stringent document checks, and it directs all states to link their databases with one another.
So with the bar-coded information we can't wipe the readability of the card with a magnet to stop the assholes at bars, liquors stores, etc from scanning us unnecessarily. Digital photos means that everyone's picture will be merged into the database of information shared with everyone else and "more stringent document checks" means that even more information will be in that same database. When all this information is linked how is it not a national ID database again?
I'm proud of the states that didn't crumble under the pressure of the Federal Government. At least someone out there is willing to tell them to fuck off -- regardless if it was over funding and not privacy implications.
Like their cars, they don't notice anything is wrong until it breaks down for them.
Another bad analogy I guess because this really doesn't apply here at all. Facebook is doing something that they should be doing. Monitoring usage of their site. Nothing is broken and there don't need to be any laws governing this.
A website operator and its staff should have the ability to see and do whatever they need to make certain the site continues to operate well as it grows and the userbase evolves. If those working behind the scenes at Facebook were only permitted, by law, to run the site and offer some sort of internal privacy guarantee that no one would look at what content was out there, the site would fall apart to legal pressure from the outside for other violations.
Don't want something known widely? Don't post it on a public web site.
Not only that but I'm not sure why they are surprised that employees can view the surfing habits of individuals users on the site that they host. I guess it goes back to the whole story yesterday about US Consumers being clueless about online tracking. Honestly, I continuously monitor the viewing habits of users on my website (the vast majority are anonymous however) so that I can improve content posted, how content is laid out, etc.
This is such a non-story that it isn't even funny.
and honestly? i side with the average guy on the street with (non)this issue. the average guy on the street looks at the data generated from his random meanderings on the web as useless, unimportant, and not a matter of privacy. and you know what?: he's right. frankly, that some database might know what i visited on eBay, then amazon.com, then netflix is not some horrible raping of my psyche. it really isn't
/dev/null but you're fucking insane if you don't think it's important to protect your privacy.
It isn't when it's some third-party non-important entity looking at your surfing habits. However, it is very much an issue when the government decides that because you are waiving your Constitutional rights they can subpoena that same information to use as part of their illegal nationwide net of information on citizens.
I'm sorry if YOU are lumped in with the general uncaring public about something that shouldn't be the business of any group of Marketers, government agencies, or anyone except
Thanks for offering me the chance to bite, I enjoy it sometimes.
I just don't get it. I refuse to go to Blockbuster and I cannot justify Netflix's fees and I really like to watch movies (I consider watching three or four movies a month above average). I go to the local grocery store and up to their DVD kiosk and rent a movie for 24 hours at 1.05 (including tax).
I drive by the store containing the kiosk (which is directly across the street from Blockbuster and Hollywood) at least several times a day. I'd rather put my money there ($5 for a rental at Blockbuster? Please.) and have slim pickings than go to Blockbuster.
Can someone please explain to me why you are willing to pay astronomical monthly fees for Netflix on a recurring basis and you might not even get your #1 choices? I just don't understand how the business model survives.
That's why users have moved on.
No, users have moved on because other technologies are better at transferring the files to you faster. Napster had two things going for it:
1. Centralized database
2. First popular sharing site of its kind.
Once the centralized database was gone and other methods popped up, there was no reason to stick with it. Napster is nothing more than a name and a lame character in a movie.