I can't be sure, but it sounds as if the businesses aren't going to be posting things to your news feed that they weren't posting already; rather they will be paying to highlight stories: move them to the top of the feed or make them bigger or something. From the article:
Featured stories you may see
When a Page you like posts something new
When a friend likes something (such as a Facebook Page or individual Page post)
When a friend checks in somewhere, plays a game or uses an app
Those are things that show up in my news feed *anyway*. So I think this is a smaller change than is being suggested here.
If a professor writes a textbook for a course she's teaching, it would amost be silly not to teach from it (unless it's out-of-date), since it uses her preferred notation and vocabulary, follows the order she likes to teach the class in, etc.
The nice part is when the professor beta-tests her textbook with you; that way you get the book for the price of photocopies.
For a good student, video is a supplement to lecture, not a replacement for it. Instead of spending the entire class trying to write everything down that the professor says, the good student can sit back and think about what is being said, formulate qiestions on the spot, make notes about their reactions, and then go back after the class and fill in the details from the video. Video lectures are a lot like textbooks in this regard.
And if you ask "Why should anyone come to class if they can just watch the video?" Well, it's up to the professor to provide added benefit, by making the class interactive: lots of time for questions, group exercises, etc.
They would get better reception if they raised taxes across the board, and then offered a tax break for families with immunized children. Exactly the same result, but it's phrased as a reward rather than a punishment.
Same scheme would work in other contexts too: If Obama's health care plan gave people a tax break to people with health insurance, instead of fining people without it, then there would be no danger of a constitutional challenge. Airlines are always aiming for the smallest list price, but given how people feel about them they could really take an alternative tack: include everything in the cost, but give discounts to people without checked luggage, people who sit in the cramped seats, people who are willing to board the plane last, etc. All of a sudden, you're the airline that is *giving* money away, instead of nickel-and-diming everybody, so that even if your prices are a little higher you will have built up goodwill.
All file-sharing websites will now create ToS forbidding access by RIAA and MPAA representatives; copyright infringement lawsuits will be used as evidence of their violation.
Does GEMA claim non-German artists on its rolls, or collect on behalf of non-German artists? If so, would composers from around the world be able to help by adding themselves to the non-GEMA list, or by demanding that GEMA not represent them?
This is what the App Store is all about: it's a software store for people who are too intimidated to go out and buy shareware. By design, it's for people who prefer security to freedom, so it's only natural that they'd introduce strict safeguards.
I promise that if they prevent non-App Store applications from running on Macs, I will howl (and not use that OS). For one, that would require locking down the terminal, blocking all programming environments, etca Mac would be useless to someone like me who needs to write their own code.
That's pretty much how I type too. I started learning to type by entering BASIC programs into my Vic-20 when I was 8, and by the time I had a typing class in 9th grade it seemed rather pointless to me. I particularly hated typing with my pinkies, other than on the shift keys or the return key. Just tested my typing and got 101wpm (with one mistake) without looking at the keys, so not too shabby.:)
They should have a "notability filter": instead of deleting so-called "non-notable" articles, they get added to the filter so that deletionists can see the nice, clean, austere Wikipedia they've always dreamed of, while the rest of us get the real thing.
The problem is, what if this is the thin edge of the wedge? If Facebook and G+ can convince the public that requiring real names online is reasonable, than we might see it showing up in more and more places.
The short-term solution, of course, is to not use either service. But the debate has been triggered, and there need to be strong voices out there supporting the right to anonymity and pseudonymity online.
We shouldn't overlook the fact that there are short-term pseudonyms and long-term pseudonyms. Short-term names are used to post to internet forums when "anonymous" isn't an option, or they're chosen to be witty or funny or something like that. The poster has nothing invested in that particular name, and so doesn't care if people associate that name with douchebaggery, or even if that name is banned or blacklisted.
Then there are long-term online pseudonyms, alternate identities which people create over the course of months or years. The owner of such a pseudonym is going to treat it with respect, possibly with more respect than their own identity because that identity's reputation depends solely on how it behaves online. These are the identities which people are fighting to use in Google+ and Facebook and so forth, and there aren't any strong rational reasons to keep them out.
My wife and I officially started going out in an ntalk session, back in 1993. There was something very personal about watching messages appear one character at a time (or disappear with a typo or a poorly chosen word), a feature I kinda missed when we switched over to AIM.
It won't work for the very simple reason that the rich are much more able to optimize their tax paying to take advantage of what is in the tax code.
But a computer algorithm could account for that well: not perfectly, and it can't predict what new investment vehicles/Ponzi schemes the rich might come up with in the future, but a good algorithm would be able to model something basic like moving money between bonds, stocks, etc. (It might be hard, but heck, we're not talking about an easy calculation to begin with.)
If you really want the politicians to go along with it, however, you're going to have to take into account geography as well: specifically, states and congressional districts. If your algorithm results in no net change for any district, as well as no net change for those 100 types of American, and it will be more likely to pass.
I'm a college professor, having worked in half a dozen different physics departments, and by far my favorite department to work in was the one where people ate lunch together. As a college lecturer it's really easy to feel isolated: teaching one's own classes doesn't require a lot of interaction with other faculty, people's schedules are all different, and teaching keeps one pretty busy. Having the chance to talk to other faculty in a relaxed environment, on a regular basis, is a luxury I've really missed. (Not only did they have lunch together, but a group often headed over for coffee around 3 as well.)
But I can't speak for other industries. Certainly a mandatory lunchtime together would be too intrusive, and if you spend the whole day working together then you need some time off. But lunch can be a great opportunity to make casual connections with people you wouldn't otherwise talk to, and it seems to me that a company/department/whatever would be smart to encourage a tradition of shared lunches.
I'm an American physicist, but I don't care if the country ever switches. And to my ears, outsiders who complain about our usage of Imperial units sound a lot like the stereotypical American tourist who asks "Why do all the street signs have to be in French?" Or "Chinese would be so much easier if they got rid of the tones, or wrote everything in Roman script."
Every educated American should be familiar with the metric system, just as every educated human nowadays probably needs some passing familiarity with English. But I'm perfectly happy to be "bilingual".
(And who the heck decided that it was a good idea for the tiny little "gram" to be the basic unit of mass? Or that the connection between length and volume isn't 1 cubic meter = 1 liter, no; it's 1 cubic centimeter = 1 milliliter. Sure, that makes buckets of sense. And no one's rushing out to define a decimal second either. The metric system might be slightly more convenient, but it's hardly the apex of human invention.)
I really doubt that the existence of ghosts would invalidate ALL science. It might invalidate some parts of science. But that's not unusual; there are thousands of people out there, right now, whose job it is to prove parts of science wrong. They're called scientists.
Maybe business cards haven't died, but how we treat them probably has: at least, it's my impression that people used to keep the business cards they received for later reference. Presumably most business cards today only last as long as it takes to enter the data into one's iPhone/computer/whatever.
We're in a transitional period here, where we have all of this information out there but we haven't learned what to do with it. Everyone says stupid things they regret, everyone gets photographed in embarrassing poses, everyone is lied about at one point or another. Eventually, we're going to learn to accept this and not holding it against people, learn to cut people some slack and treat what we read online about someone with skepticism. Otherwise, we'll reach a point where NO ONE will be able to get a job, or run for office, or do anything that "requires" a squeaky-clean individual, because said individual doesn't exist.
It seems like it would almost be easier to ask businesses to adjust the workday, rather than change the clock: have everyone work from 7-4 or 6-3 instead of 8-5.
Tolkien hated allegory because he hated putting such restrictions on his readers. If you want to see elements of Hitler or Stalin in Sauron, you're welcome to do so: Tolkien was not against applicability. Tolkien saw connections between his work and the real world all the time. But when the author beats you over the head with the fact that one particular character is supposed to be Hitler, or Churchill, or Obama, or whatever, then that prevents you from seeing the character as a separate individual, and weakens the story by breaking the suspension of disbelief.
To take the Hitler example, there are people who believe that Hitler was misunderstood and actually was a hero, Holocaust deniers and all that. On the other hand, you might have a fantasy writer construct an alternate history in which Hitler's actions are ultimately good ones (because he's fighting a secret alien invasion or something), but the writer doesn't believe in it herself. Such a story would be dangerous to publish because she would be lumped in with the Holocaust deniers and demonized. Still, if her intentions were clear and understood, then that would be a fair story to write, and could be very interesting to read if done cleverly.
Anyway, things are a little murkier in this case, because it is a reinterpretation of an already published story. When dealing with history one must accept facts as a given; when dealing with a story, however, one must accept the author's stated intentions as given. Clearly Tolkien saw Sauron as evil, and so if someone says "No, Sauron in the stories was really a good guy!" then they are wrong, and anger from the fanbase might be warranted. However, if we look at this story as an "alternate history", basically an entirely different story which riffs on the original, then that's just clever.
I'm not the OP, but I know that a lot of time I don't want my browser to be full-screen, because I'm working on something else at the same time. And the smaller the window, the more likely I'd be to want a little extra room for the webpage.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't be sure, but it sounds as if the businesses aren't going to be posting things to your news feed that they weren't posting already; rather they will be paying to highlight stories: move them to the top of the feed or make them bigger or something. From the article:
Featured stories you may see
When a Page you like posts something new
When a friend likes something (such as a Facebook Page or individual Page post)
When a friend checks in somewhere, plays a game or uses an app
Those are things that show up in my news feed *anyway*. So I think this is a smaller change than is being suggested here.
I suspect the real reason is because Tolkien wrote fantasy, and fantasy wasn't "serious literature".
If a professor writes a textbook for a course she's teaching, it would amost be silly not to teach from it (unless it's out-of-date), since it uses her preferred notation and vocabulary, follows the order she likes to teach the class in, etc.
The nice part is when the professor beta-tests her textbook with you; that way you get the book for the price of photocopies.
For a good student, video is a supplement to lecture, not a replacement for it. Instead of spending the entire class trying to write everything down that the professor says, the good student can sit back and think about what is being said, formulate qiestions on the spot, make notes about their reactions, and then go back after the class and fill in the details from the video. Video lectures are a lot like textbooks in this regard.
And if you ask "Why should anyone come to class if they can just watch the video?" Well, it's up to the professor to provide added benefit, by making the class interactive: lots of time for questions, group exercises, etc.
They would get better reception if they raised taxes across the board, and then offered a tax break for families with immunized children. Exactly the same result, but it's phrased as a reward rather than a punishment.
Same scheme would work in other contexts too:
If Obama's health care plan gave people a tax break to people with health insurance, instead of fining people without it, then there would be no danger of a constitutional challenge.
Airlines are always aiming for the smallest list price, but given how people feel about them they could really take an alternative tack: include everything in the cost, but give discounts to people without checked luggage, people who sit in the cramped seats, people who are willing to board the plane last, etc. All of a sudden, you're the airline that is *giving* money away, instead of nickel-and-diming everybody, so that even if your prices are a little higher you will have built up goodwill.
All file-sharing websites will now create ToS forbidding access by RIAA and MPAA representatives; copyright infringement lawsuits will be used as evidence of their violation.
Does GEMA claim non-German artists on its rolls, or collect on behalf of non-German artists? If so, would composers from around the world be able to help by adding themselves to the non-GEMA list, or by demanding that GEMA not represent them?
This is what the App Store is all about: it's a software store for people who are too intimidated to go out and buy shareware. By design, it's for people who prefer security to freedom, so it's only natural that they'd introduce strict safeguards.
I promise that if they prevent non-App Store applications from running on Macs, I will howl (and not use that OS). For one, that would require locking down the terminal, blocking all programming environments, etca Mac would be useless to someone like me who needs to write their own code.
Did they find a rasterized circle?
That's pretty much how I type too. I started learning to type by entering BASIC programs into my Vic-20 when I was 8, and by the time I had a typing class in 9th grade it seemed rather pointless to me. I particularly hated typing with my pinkies, other than on the shift keys or the return key. :)
Just tested my typing and got 101wpm (with one mistake) without looking at the keys, so not too shabby.
The Girl Genius folks have said that they would withdraw themselves from competition next year, FWIW.
They should have a "notability filter": instead of deleting so-called "non-notable" articles, they get added to the filter so that deletionists can see the nice, clean, austere Wikipedia they've always dreamed of, while the rest of us get the real thing.
The problem is, what if this is the thin edge of the wedge? If Facebook and G+ can convince the public that requiring real names online is reasonable, than we might see it showing up in more and more places. The short-term solution, of course, is to not use either service. But the debate has been triggered, and there need to be strong voices out there supporting the right to anonymity and pseudonymity online.
We shouldn't overlook the fact that there are short-term pseudonyms and long-term pseudonyms. Short-term names are used to post to internet forums when "anonymous" isn't an option, or they're chosen to be witty or funny or something like that. The poster has nothing invested in that particular name, and so doesn't care if people associate that name with douchebaggery, or even if that name is banned or blacklisted. Then there are long-term online pseudonyms, alternate identities which people create over the course of months or years. The owner of such a pseudonym is going to treat it with respect, possibly with more respect than their own identity because that identity's reputation depends solely on how it behaves online. These are the identities which people are fighting to use in Google+ and Facebook and so forth, and there aren't any strong rational reasons to keep them out.
My wife and I officially started going out in an ntalk session, back in 1993. There was something very personal about watching messages appear one character at a time (or disappear with a typo or a poorly chosen word), a feature I kinda missed when we switched over to AIM.
It won't work for the very simple reason that the rich are much more able to optimize their tax paying to take advantage of what is in the tax code.
But a computer algorithm could account for that well: not perfectly, and it can't predict what new investment vehicles/Ponzi schemes the rich might come up with in the future, but a good algorithm would be able to model something basic like moving money between bonds, stocks, etc. (It might be hard, but heck, we're not talking about an easy calculation to begin with.) If you really want the politicians to go along with it, however, you're going to have to take into account geography as well: specifically, states and congressional districts. If your algorithm results in no net change for any district, as well as no net change for those 100 types of American, and it will be more likely to pass.
I'm a college professor, having worked in half a dozen different physics departments, and by far my favorite department to work in was the one where people ate lunch together. As a college lecturer it's really easy to feel isolated: teaching one's own classes doesn't require a lot of interaction with other faculty, people's schedules are all different, and teaching keeps one pretty busy. Having the chance to talk to other faculty in a relaxed environment, on a regular basis, is a luxury I've really missed. (Not only did they have lunch together, but a group often headed over for coffee around 3 as well.)
But I can't speak for other industries. Certainly a mandatory lunchtime together would be too intrusive, and if you spend the whole day working together then you need some time off. But lunch can be a great opportunity to make casual connections with people you wouldn't otherwise talk to, and it seems to me that a company/department/whatever would be smart to encourage a tradition of shared lunches.
I'm an American physicist, but I don't care if the country ever switches. And to my ears, outsiders who complain about our usage of Imperial units sound a lot like the stereotypical American tourist who asks "Why do all the street signs have to be in French?" Or "Chinese would be so much easier if they got rid of the tones, or wrote everything in Roman script."
Every educated American should be familiar with the metric system, just as every educated human nowadays probably needs some passing familiarity with English. But I'm perfectly happy to be "bilingual".
(And who the heck decided that it was a good idea for the tiny little "gram" to be the basic unit of mass? Or that the connection between length and volume isn't 1 cubic meter = 1 liter, no; it's 1 cubic centimeter = 1 milliliter. Sure, that makes buckets of sense. And no one's rushing out to define a decimal second either. The metric system might be slightly more convenient, but it's hardly the apex of human invention.)
I really doubt that the existence of ghosts would invalidate ALL science. It might invalidate some parts of science. But that's not unusual; there are thousands of people out there, right now, whose job it is to prove parts of science wrong. They're called scientists.
Maybe business cards haven't died, but how we treat them probably has: at least, it's my impression that people used to keep the business cards they received for later reference. Presumably most business cards today only last as long as it takes to enter the data into one's iPhone/computer/whatever.
We're in a transitional period here, where we have all of this information out there but we haven't learned what to do with it. Everyone says stupid things they regret, everyone gets photographed in embarrassing poses, everyone is lied about at one point or another. Eventually, we're going to learn to accept this and not holding it against people, learn to cut people some slack and treat what we read online about someone with skepticism. Otherwise, we'll reach a point where NO ONE will be able to get a job, or run for office, or do anything that "requires" a squeaky-clean individual, because said individual doesn't exist.
It seems like it would almost be easier to ask businesses to adjust the workday, rather than change the clock: have everyone work from 7-4 or 6-3 instead of 8-5.
Tolkien hated allegory because he hated putting such restrictions on his readers. If you want to see elements of Hitler or Stalin in Sauron, you're welcome to do so: Tolkien was not against applicability. Tolkien saw connections between his work and the real world all the time. But when the author beats you over the head with the fact that one particular character is supposed to be Hitler, or Churchill, or Obama, or whatever, then that prevents you from seeing the character as a separate individual, and weakens the story by breaking the suspension of disbelief.
To take the Hitler example, there are people who believe that Hitler was misunderstood and actually was a hero, Holocaust deniers and all that. On the other hand, you might have a fantasy writer construct an alternate history in which Hitler's actions are ultimately good ones (because he's fighting a secret alien invasion or something), but the writer doesn't believe in it herself. Such a story would be dangerous to publish because she would be lumped in with the Holocaust deniers and demonized. Still, if her intentions were clear and understood, then that would be a fair story to write, and could be very interesting to read if done cleverly.
Anyway, things are a little murkier in this case, because it is a reinterpretation of an already published story. When dealing with history one must accept facts as a given; when dealing with a story, however, one must accept the author's stated intentions as given. Clearly Tolkien saw Sauron as evil, and so if someone says "No, Sauron in the stories was really a good guy!" then they are wrong, and anger from the fanbase might be warranted. However, if we look at this story as an "alternate history", basically an entirely different story which riffs on the original, then that's just clever.
I'm not the OP, but I know that a lot of time I don't want my browser to be full-screen, because I'm working on something else at the same time. And the smaller the window, the more likely I'd be to want a little extra room for the webpage.