In the current context, we're talking federal law. Sure, you can draft a proposal for a law - but you cannot "draft a law." Only a member of congress can actually sign a proposal and turn it into a draft law that can be submitted for consideration by the house. There is a difference, and while campaign contributions tend to blur that distinction in too many minds (including politicians), it is still rather important.
It is the job of legislators to both draft and pass laws - facebook can do neither. See the connection?
Facebook can not draft legislation, sign it, get other members of the House to sponsor it, and stick it in the red box so it can go for first reading, nor can they vote on it.
All they can do is the same as everyone else - propose legislation to their representatives, who will then submit a draft of the law. Unless facebook is in the business of forging signatures, any such proposal is not a piece of draft legislation.
"Drafting a law" is a commonly-used shorthand for "drafting a proposal for a bill to be potentially voted on by the House and Senate and signed into law by the President".
That can only be done by a member of Congress. Not you. Not me. As your own words say, we can only give a "proposal for a bill" to a member of Congress, but until they actually put their name to it, it doesn't become a draft bill - it's still just a proposal.
Words do have specific meanings in specific contexts. In this one, Facebook is not able to draft a law - they can only draft a proposal for a law. Same as most people can't perform a marriage, but they can propose one, and propose that the duly authorized person of their choice perform one.
In the current context - laws - only legislators can draft bills. You can draft the proposal, which if it has enough $$$ could probably be submitted with no changes other than the right signature - but without that signature, it is not a draft bill that can ever be voted on, and you can't change that.
Here's a question - since facebooks' user numbers are already grossly inflated (people with 50 accounts so they can "do social media" for their bosses, people with 500 accounts so they can pharm game points, people controlling 10,000 accounts so they can sell facebook likes in bulk), why doesn't everyone just create a second account and fill it with all sorts of brown-nose sweetness and light that corps want to believe anyway? You know - stuff like "I'm going for an interview at company xyz tomorrow - I am *so* excited. They make a great product and I'm sure I'll be able to use the years of experience I gained working for their biggest competitor (which I didn't mention because that might be seen as trying to take an unfair advantage over other candidates) to really help them." Look all starry-eyed and naive, the perfect grist for the corporate soul-crushers.
Get a group together and have everyone do it - all sorts of pictures from a community clean-up event (okay, it was really cleaning up the back yard after a big party but who's to say), preparing meals at the local soup kitchen (actually your own kitchen), big brother big sister book reading program (actually babysitting your nieces and nephews)... stuff like that.
It can't be any harder than 10 people creating fake linkedin profiles and bogus job histories at companies that have since gone bankrupt and giving each other recommendations and references.
(all of which goes to show that you should judge the candidate on the skills they can show you and the fit they are for your team, not who they know or the words of someone you never met and never exchanged so much as a blog post with)
I opened with the question "Did I miss something?" The summary says "draft new laws", but nowhere in the linked-to Facebook announcement do I find any of the words "draft", "new," or "law", and certainly not strung together... so... did I miss something?
The other funny thing is that while anyone can write up a proposal for a law, only congress-critters can actually submit a "draught" or "draft" of a law. The day that Facebook can directly submit a "draft new law", rather than having to find a congress-critter to take their proposal, add his or her John or Jane Hancock to it, and convert it to a "draft of law" for the House's consideration, isn't here yet. I think. Unless, again, I missed something...:-p
But you bring up an interesting point - and I would offer a counter-point. Does Facebook count if we don't believe it does? It's mostly an echo chamber, and the people who use it don't even remember the posts they were reading 5 minutes later.
I challenged the social media director at one place I worked, who spent most of her day managing a bunch of identities to "engage with the facebook community" while "on occasion talking up the company's products." In other words, the occasional blog spam... She went on about how she also used it to keep up with her friends and acquaintences, which she had just done because it was lunch time. "So", I asked, "what was the last message you read from one of them?" Total blank. "Okay, can you remember ANY of them?" Same story.
Social media are useless. Studies show that the more engaged you are in facebook the more narcissistic, insecure, and shallow you are in your relationships with others, using facebook as a way of avoiding real interactions with people. The format just sucks too much. Even slashdot is better - there's both up and down mods, for example. Where's the "hate" button on facebook or the "-1" on google+? And people don't go around "friending" total strangers so they can get more points to play some stupid game.
I did some figuring just for fun, and businesses overall would be better off financially spending their social media budget on beer and returning the empties for a refund. I looked at one study on eadwriteweb that claimed that the more "social engagement" a company did, the better the financials... turns out it was wrong. The companies that were the worst rated (BP, McDonalds) are doing a LOT better than some of those "top performers" (Yahoo).
Of course, when you say "show me the money" they start going on about "branding." Even though people won't remember it 10 seconds after they saw it... if it even registers on the brain. And they get really p***ed off when I point out that the market value of a facebook fan is as low as 1/5 of a penny (that's how little you pay when you buy them in bulk if you look hard enough - search the net for "buy facebook twitter google+ fans").
So really, is facebook even relevant in the big scheme of things, when its users develop ADHD and/or Alzheimers within seconds of logging in?
I know what "draft" means. And like I asked in my post, did I miss something? Because, contrary to the claim in the summary, which claims that Facebook seeks to "draft new laws", the linked-to announcement does not contain any of the words "draft", "new", or "law", never mind all 3 together.
For a law to be considered by the House, it has to be submitted as a draft by a congress-critter. Nobody else can submit a draft law, and as such what Facebook could do would be to draft a proposal for a law for a congress-critter to consider, not draft a law itself. That is a right reserved (at least in theory) for members of the House. There is a difference, the same as you might be commissioned by the government to draw up a new design for a $100 bill, and even print it up during the submission process, but only the government can actually print the real McCoy, even if it unchanged from your submission, even if they look exactly identical, right down to the paper and ink used.
Since the announcement that claims Facebook is seeking to "draft new laws" doesn't contain any of the words "draft", "new",or "law", I think my point stands. Where is Facebook saying that it is trying to "draft new laws?"
I know we've all heard about regulatory capture by corporations and lobbyists, but has it gotten so blatant that businesses don't even try to hide it nowadays?
That's just soooo wrong! The universe would *splode. (maybe that's how they'll end the show - Sheldon and Penny hook up... the universe explodes... and then they do a Dallas where we see an average Joe wake up and go "that was the weirdest, longest dream I ever had! It seemed to go on for years and years...")
Then again, so is this:
But for the numerous adult fans of the show "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic,"
Some may express concern that the Free Universal Construction Kit infringes such corporate prerogatives as copyright, design right, trade dress, trademarks
If someone has really trademarked F.U.C.K, we're f***ed.
Well, well, well - looks like one of my 3 cyber-stalkers is getting lonely and wants me to give them another kick in the head. Sorry, fatso, you'll just have to go back on your meds.
You can install programs in your keyboard that will survive a reboot. An old trick was to stuff the loader in the keyboard, then read out a page of video ram that had the actual code (notice how your video ram survives a warm reboot?). Cold booting is a bit harder, but not impossible.
No - they bought a semantic search company that had already compiled a list of answers to 12 million topics 2 years ago - these are NOT poisoned by SEO. Google has spent the last 2 years expanding on that base - they now have specific answers for 200 million topics. Think "Google Siri".
And no, link counts are dead. Forget about them - they're obsolete. They can not increase a pages' visibility any more - just decrease it if you do stupid things like keyword stuffing and irrelevant links to other sites. Similarly, it makes it a lot harder for someone to ruin a pages' rank by creating hordes of low-quality links to a target page - topic analysis ignores incoming links and focuses on context, content, and questions.
You supply the context, based on your search history. The web pages referenced by the topical indexes supply the content, and this is how the topical index itself supplies the answers.
The "TODO" list will be handled mostly in almost real-time, as there will be much less server load for regular searches. Worst-case scenario, they revert to doing a search the old way for that query. 5 minutes later, a new query with the same context will return a much better result from the updated topical index.
The analysis is relatively easy - how many of the questions "who, what, when, where, why, how" that can be constructed from each page are answered on that page or related pages from the same site? If the page has the words "Abraham Lincoln", does it also have information on where he was born, when he was elected, who shot him, what he accomplished, where he lived, an analysis of why he waffled on the slave trade, etc.
That last one is interesting, because one site might not have anything on that, so the question isn't even asked - another one might go into a lot of detail on that and other questions generated from the content, so it will get better ranking. No human intervention required. In other words, the sites that ask and answer more questions related to a topic are better, same as in human terms.
You don't need to do it for every web page - not even nearly every web page. Do it for a couple hundred million - which google has done, btw, and you can answer almost every query people would want.
After all, nobody goes beyond the first 1,000 results (most people don't even go beyond the first page) - so your initial premise - that they have to apply this to every page in their index - is mistaken.
They've spent two years compiling 200 million topics. If your query cannot be satisfied by those, they'll then put it on the "TODO" list for further data mining. As time goes on, new topics will become fewer and fewer, and the task will then be just to continually make sure that each of the currently listed topics is still giving the best results in terms of actual content.
They will also reap significant energy savings, since they won't have to send the same query to 40 different nodes and then triage the results of those that return answers the quickest.
You missed the point - incoming links will no longer change your search rankings. The original PageRank algorithm is dead (but we already knew it was dying long ago). Google indicated as much, without saying it plainly, when they bought a company specializing in data-mining to answer questions, and expanded their topic database from 20 million to 200 million.
So forget about SEO, and forget about Online Reputation Management (pushing others down in the rankings). Those days are coming to an end.
You don't need strong ai. You don't need a program that can extract meaning. There are plenty of ways to get such apparent emergent behaviour without the code actually understanding anything, same as mechanical translation gives you the words in another language without the computer having a single clue as to what the words and phrases mean in either language, or even a volt-ohm-meter telling you how much current is in a circuit - the meter doesn't "understand" what an ampere is.
Apple isn't just using Google for their Siri stuff. They also pull from Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, etc.
The simple fact is that everyone wants to continue to be the engine behind each search, because that is still sellable data (what's hot, what people are looking for in such-and-such a city, etc). So yes, they'll continue to give it up no charge.
People were going bankrupt, then the next year getting a tax bill for the principle that was discharged in bankruptcy (because they didn't include the tax liability in the actual bankruptcy).
Plenty of people got gob-smacked with $50k - $100k tax bills after discharge, which is why a temporary law was put in place
People who have lost their homes through foreclosure or who have restructured their mortgage loans may qualify for tax relief under a new tax law, the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007. The tax relief was extended to cover the years 2007 through 2012 under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.
Prior to the law being passed, there were people who went bankrupt, had the debt itself discharged, but didn't figure on the tax liability - for example, they did a deed in lieu with the bank the prior year, so they wouldn't list the cancelled debt (since it wasn't a debt any more) when they'd flush their other debts - and if you don't list a debt when you go bankrupt, it isn't discharged. This became a big problem by 2006.
They are heading in that direction. After all, they want to be able to compete with Siri. Who, what, when, where, why, and how. If your page doesn't answer one or more of those, it gets tossed.
Every iPhone4 sold means Google looses $20 to $100 a year - every year - and Apple is selling lots of iPhones - almost neck-and-neck with Android.
Google generates 37 billion a year. for every 10 million iPhones sold, Google loses between 200 million and 1 billion in annual revenue. Given that they're selling between 30 and 40 million units a quarter!, that's going to mean a loss of projected revenue of between 2.4 billion and 12 billion. Say only 6 billion - that's a huge change in projected revenue.
Throw in that Apple no longer uses Google Maps - so there's another "lock-in" that's now unlocked - and that advertisers consider queries from iDevices to be worth paying more for than regular users, and the real fight is between Apple and Google, not Bing and Google.
Throw in the relatively unprofitable developer model for Android (too fractured), the failure of Google+ to generate any sort of "stickiness", and Google really has to pick up its game. And this is a good thing - it's about time they removed all those "doorway pages" and other crap from the search results.
I, and many others, have to use link farm networks to gain proper traction since everyone is doing it--i didn't do it a service did it for me. I'm not a spam site, or an ad park--I offer free software, and getting ranked higher has helped a lot of people out by being able to find my software.
You're part of the problem. Go DIAF - slowly. And shove your hosts file up your rectum.
Slashdot Mirror
In the current context, we're talking federal law. Sure, you can draft a proposal for a law - but you cannot "draft a law." Only a member of congress can actually sign a proposal and turn it into a draft law that can be submitted for consideration by the house. There is a difference, and while campaign contributions tend to blur that distinction in too many minds (including politicians), it is still rather important.
Facebook can not draft legislation, sign it, get other members of the House to sponsor it, and stick it in the red box so it can go for first reading, nor can they vote on it.
All they can do is the same as everyone else - propose legislation to their representatives, who will then submit a draft of the law. Unless facebook is in the business of forging signatures, any such proposal is not a piece of draft legislation.
"Drafting a law" is a commonly-used shorthand for "drafting a proposal for a bill to be potentially voted on by the House and Senate and signed into law by the President".
That can only be done by a member of Congress. Not you. Not me. As your own words say, we can only give a "proposal for a bill" to a member of Congress, but until they actually put their name to it, it doesn't become a draft bill - it's still just a proposal.
Words do have specific meanings in specific contexts. In this one, Facebook is not able to draft a law - they can only draft a proposal for a law. Same as most people can't perform a marriage, but they can propose one, and propose that the duly authorized person of their choice perform one.
In the current context - laws - only legislators can draft bills. You can draft the proposal, which if it has enough $$$ could probably be submitted with no changes other than the right signature - but without that signature, it is not a draft bill that can ever be voted on, and you can't change that.
Here's a question - since facebooks' user numbers are already grossly inflated (people with 50 accounts so they can "do social media" for their bosses, people with 500 accounts so they can pharm game points, people controlling 10,000 accounts so they can sell facebook likes in bulk), why doesn't everyone just create a second account and fill it with all sorts of brown-nose sweetness and light that corps want to believe anyway? You know - stuff like "I'm going for an interview at company xyz tomorrow - I am *so* excited. They make a great product and I'm sure I'll be able to use the years of experience I gained working for their biggest competitor (which I didn't mention because that might be seen as trying to take an unfair advantage over other candidates) to really help them." Look all starry-eyed and naive, the perfect grist for the corporate soul-crushers.
Get a group together and have everyone do it - all sorts of pictures from a community clean-up event (okay, it was really cleaning up the back yard after a big party but who's to say), preparing meals at the local soup kitchen (actually your own kitchen), big brother big sister book reading program (actually babysitting your nieces and nephews) ... stuff like that.
It can't be any harder than 10 people creating fake linkedin profiles and bogus job histories at companies that have since gone bankrupt and giving each other recommendations and references.
(all of which goes to show that you should judge the candidate on the skills they can show you and the fit they are for your team, not who they know or the words of someone you never met and never exchanged so much as a blog post with)
I opened with the question "Did I miss something?" The summary says "draft new laws", but nowhere in the linked-to Facebook announcement do I find any of the words "draft", "new," or "law", and certainly not strung together ... so ... did I miss something?
The other funny thing is that while anyone can write up a proposal for a law, only congress-critters can actually submit a "draught" or "draft" of a law. The day that Facebook can directly submit a "draft new law", rather than having to find a congress-critter to take their proposal, add his or her John or Jane Hancock to it, and convert it to a "draft of law" for the House's consideration, isn't here yet. I think. Unless, again, I missed something ... :-p
But you bring up an interesting point - and I would offer a counter-point. Does Facebook count if we don't believe it does? It's mostly an echo chamber, and the people who use it don't even remember the posts they were reading 5 minutes later.
I challenged the social media director at one place I worked, who spent most of her day managing a bunch of identities to "engage with the facebook community" while "on occasion talking up the company's products." In other words, the occasional blog spam ... She went on about how she also used it to keep up with her friends and acquaintences, which she had just done because it was lunch time. "So", I asked, "what was the last message you read from one of them?" Total blank. "Okay, can you remember ANY of them?" Same story.
Social media are useless. Studies show that the more engaged you are in facebook the more narcissistic, insecure, and shallow you are in your relationships with others, using facebook as a way of avoiding real interactions with people. The format just sucks too much. Even slashdot is better - there's both up and down mods, for example. Where's the "hate" button on facebook or the "-1" on google+? And people don't go around "friending" total strangers so they can get more points to play some stupid game.
I did some figuring just for fun, and businesses overall would be better off financially spending their social media budget on beer and returning the empties for a refund. I looked at one study on eadwriteweb that claimed that the more "social engagement" a company did, the better the financials ... turns out it was wrong. The companies that were the worst rated (BP, McDonalds) are doing a LOT better than some of those "top performers" (Yahoo).
Of course, when you say "show me the money" they start going on about "branding." Even though people won't remember it 10 seconds after they saw it ... if it even registers on the brain. And they get really p***ed off when I point out that the market value of a facebook fan is as low as 1/5 of a penny (that's how little you pay when you buy them in bulk if you look hard enough - search the net for "buy facebook twitter google+ fans").
So really, is facebook even relevant in the big scheme of things, when its users develop ADHD and/or Alzheimers within seconds of logging in?
For a law to be considered by the House, it has to be submitted as a draft by a congress-critter. Nobody else can submit a draft law, and as such what Facebook could do would be to draft a proposal for a law for a congress-critter to consider, not draft a law itself. That is a right reserved (at least in theory) for members of the House. There is a difference, the same as you might be commissioned by the government to draw up a new design for a $100 bill, and even print it up during the submission process, but only the government can actually print the real McCoy, even if it unchanged from your submission, even if they look exactly identical, right down to the paper and ink used.
Since the announcement that claims Facebook is seeking to "draft new laws" doesn't contain any of the words "draft", "new",or "law", I think my point stands. Where is Facebook saying that it is trying to "draft new laws?"
Did I miss something?
I know we've all heard about regulatory capture by corporations and lobbyists, but has it gotten so blatant that businesses don't even try to hide it nowadays?
The system is broken when absolute crap like Babylon 5 runs for years, but Firefly gets the axe after 14 episodes.
Then again, so is this:
BTW, your link to the EA logo is broken - it points back to slashdot :-)
Trivially easy.
replace:
with
Both execute on the condition only once at most.
Alternatively, use the ?: for an if/else.
Do you mean the one they stole from Borland more than 2 decades ago?
If someone has really trademarked F.U.C.K, we're f***ed.
Well, well, well - looks like one of my 3 cyber-stalkers is getting lonely and wants me to give them another kick in the head. Sorry, fatso, you'll just have to go back on your meds.
In Soviet Russia, Java runs YOU!
No - they bought a semantic search company that had already compiled a list of answers to 12 million topics 2 years ago - these are NOT poisoned by SEO. Google has spent the last 2 years expanding on that base - they now have specific answers for 200 million topics. Think "Google Siri".
And no, link counts are dead. Forget about them - they're obsolete. They can not increase a pages' visibility any more - just decrease it if you do stupid things like keyword stuffing and irrelevant links to other sites. Similarly, it makes it a lot harder for someone to ruin a pages' rank by creating hordes of low-quality links to a target page - topic analysis ignores incoming links and focuses on context, content, and questions.
You supply the context, based on your search history. The web pages referenced by the topical indexes supply the content, and this is how the topical index itself supplies the answers.
The "TODO" list will be handled mostly in almost real-time, as there will be much less server load for regular searches. Worst-case scenario, they revert to doing a search the old way for that query. 5 minutes later, a new query with the same context will return a much better result from the updated topical index.
The analysis is relatively easy - how many of the questions "who, what, when, where, why, how" that can be constructed from each page are answered on that page or related pages from the same site? If the page has the words "Abraham Lincoln", does it also have information on where he was born, when he was elected, who shot him, what he accomplished, where he lived, an analysis of why he waffled on the slave trade, etc.
That last one is interesting, because one site might not have anything on that, so the question isn't even asked - another one might go into a lot of detail on that and other questions generated from the content, so it will get better ranking. No human intervention required. In other words, the sites that ask and answer more questions related to a topic are better, same as in human terms.
You don't need to do it for every web page - not even nearly every web page. Do it for a couple hundred million - which google has done, btw, and you can answer almost every query people would want.
After all, nobody goes beyond the first 1,000 results (most people don't even go beyond the first page) - so your initial premise - that they have to apply this to every page in their index - is mistaken.
They've spent two years compiling 200 million topics. If your query cannot be satisfied by those, they'll then put it on the "TODO" list for further data mining. As time goes on, new topics will become fewer and fewer, and the task will then be just to continually make sure that each of the currently listed topics is still giving the best results in terms of actual content.
They will also reap significant energy savings, since they won't have to send the same query to 40 different nodes and then triage the results of those that return answers the quickest.
Their home port is 127.0.0.1:80 - feel free to DDoS them off the net!
So forget about SEO, and forget about Online Reputation Management (pushing others down in the rankings). Those days are coming to an end.
You don't need strong ai. You don't need a program that can extract meaning. There are plenty of ways to get such apparent emergent behaviour without the code actually understanding anything, same as mechanical translation gives you the words in another language without the computer having a single clue as to what the words and phrases mean in either language, or even a volt-ohm-meter telling you how much current is in a circuit - the meter doesn't "understand" what an ampere is.
The simple fact is that everyone wants to continue to be the engine behind each search, because that is still sellable data (what's hot, what people are looking for in such-and-such a city, etc). So yes, they'll continue to give it up no charge.
Plenty of people got gob-smacked with $50k - $100k tax bills after discharge, which is why a temporary law was put in place
Prior to the law being passed, there were people who went bankrupt, had the debt itself discharged, but didn't figure on the tax liability - for example, they did a deed in lieu with the bank the prior year, so they wouldn't list the cancelled debt (since it wasn't a debt any more) when they'd flush their other debts - and if you don't list a debt when you go bankrupt, it isn't discharged. This became a big problem by 2006.
Every iPhone4 sold means Google looses $20 to $100 a year - every year - and Apple is selling lots of iPhones - almost neck-and-neck with Android.
Google generates 37 billion a year. for every 10 million iPhones sold, Google loses between 200 million and 1 billion in annual revenue. Given that they're selling between 30 and 40 million units a quarter!, that's going to mean a loss of projected revenue of between 2.4 billion and 12 billion. Say only 6 billion - that's a huge change in projected revenue.
Throw in that Apple no longer uses Google Maps - so there's another "lock-in" that's now unlocked - and that advertisers consider queries from iDevices to be worth paying more for than regular users, and the real fight is between Apple and Google, not Bing and Google.
Throw in the relatively unprofitable developer model for Android (too fractured), the failure of Google+ to generate any sort of "stickiness", and Google really has to pick up its game. And this is a good thing - it's about time they removed all those "doorway pages" and other crap from the search results.
You're part of the problem. Go DIAF - slowly. And shove your hosts file up your rectum.