To imply small government is the opposite of good governance is absurd.
That's not what he implied. He was saying that small government is not a *substitute* for good governance. In its simplest form, you won't necessarily fix your government just by making it smaller. But what he was actually saying there was more insightful than its simplest form. He was implying both that there may be some size of government necessary for good governance, and that whether the governance provided was at least somewhat independent of the size of the government.
No. I also don't want Microsoft to have a hard-wired camera in my living room.
Also, I don't think it makes sense for Google to buy the XBox from Google.
Unless I'm missing something, the hardware seems relatively unremarkable. The Kinect seems cool, but it seems like something Google could build on their own, assuming they didn't run into patent trouble, and it's not clear Microsoft would look to sell those patents. The software is based on Windows, which I doubt Google would want to use.
Plus, I'm predicting the whole console market is going to be in trouble once the Steam consoles really hit. If it's not Steam, it'll be something else. Nintendo might survive, but only because of their relatively cheap prices, simple designs, and exclusivity on their own games.
If I were running Microsoft, I'd probably ditch XBox somehow. I'd re-engineer the XBox interface to be an optional install for Windows, and allow Windows to run 3 different (but relatively consistent) interfaces: Desktop, Tablet, and TV. Maybe you can combine "tablet" and "TV", since there are similar needs, but Windows should provide a UI that can be driven by a remote or game controller for anyone who wants to hook their computer up to the TV. Tell XBox game developers to just develop for Windows instead. Produce the hardware if it still makes sense, but have it run a stock version of Windows and allow it to serve as a desktop machine.
That's my view. I'm sure some Microsoft nutcases are going to explain why it's so much better that you can't run desktop apps on an XBox, even though they're the same people who would complain that you can't run desktop apps on an iPad.
So they get rid of their most successful consumer product....
"Successful" in that it sold a lot of units. Maybe not so successful in terms of profits. I don't know what the current state of the balance sheet is, but as of a couple of years ago, the entire XBox line was still in the red. To begin with, they sell the hardware as a loss-leader. Plus they spent a bunch of extra money on the first generation to break into the market, so they were expecting the XBox360 to be successful enough to pay for those losses. Then the XBox360 was riddled with hardware failures, so Microsoft lost a ton of money on replacements. At one point, I remember it was estimated that almost 50% of all XBox360 units had manufacturing defects requiring the units be replaced.
I don't remember exactly. Everything I've written above is pulled out of my fuzzy memory. The point is, the XBox was hardly the enormous success you might be imagining.
How is it not the same number of clicks? In the best case, in both systems, it's two clicks. You click once on the start button, and then once again on the item you'd like to launch. In either case, that's assuming that you want to launch something that's going to come up right away, and you aren't going to go hunting through other items.
Of course, in both systems you could cut out clicks entirely by pressing the Windows key on the keyboard and typing what you want.
It seems to me that the big difference is that Microsoft hid the button, meaning you had to hover in the correct place before you could click. Then the menu that came up brought up, by default, showed a bunch of tablet apps, and not the desktop apps that you probably want, in a way that completely broke the context you were working in. Every time you wanted to launch something, you were thrown into a different little virtual world with no common spacial orientation, and where all the buttons behaved differently.
It may not seem strange to you once you've gotten used to it, but the normal and appropriate reaction when a person first encounters this sort of thing is to feel unpleasantly disoriented. A good UI designer would know that it was bad, and that users would be unhappy with the change. A good UI designer would also know that hidden hover buttons and hover menus are not generally desirable.
No offense, but that's not a very sensible response. Your job may require off-hours work, but that depends largely on the needs of the company your supporting, and what you negotiate your job to be. Regardless, there's no reason why you shouldn't try to diminish the amount of off-hours work, and make it as painless as possible.
For example, let's say I have to do server updates similar to what this guy is describing, and my maintenance window is 5am-9am. The updates consist of running a few commands to kick the updates off, waiting for everything to download and install, rebooting, then checking to make sure everything was successful. Because the updates are large and the internet is slow, it sometimes takes 3 hours to perform the updates, but only 10 minutes to roll things back.
It's an exaggerated scenario, but given that basic outline, why wouldn't I just script the update process, and roll in at 8:30 with plenty of time to confirm success and roll things back if needed? What, I should still come in at 5am just because an Anonymous Coward on the Internet decided it was "part of the job"?
but rather a bunch of fire and brimstone nonsense about the signal-stealing piratepocalypse.
And I think you're implying this, but all of the pirateocalypse nonsense, whether it's regarding Aereo or Bittorrent-- all of it really comes down to "we want to maintain our current extremely profitable business model in the face of changing technology which renders it obsolete." Like record labels and news organizations and all the other forms of media and information-related industries, they will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age.
I think more to the point, at least as far as I understood it, the Turing test was not meant to be a real test for whether an AI was actually intelligent.
The point of the test was essentially this: If a machine becomes able to imitate intelligence well enough that we can't tell the difference, then we may as well treat it as actual intelligence. As much anything, Turing was making a philosophical point from a pragmatic point of view. It doesn't make sense to ask whether a machine is "actually intelligent", but only whether it's capable of behaving as though it has intelligence.
So it's not really about fooling a certain specific percentage of people, or having the test go on for a specific point of time. Those are just issues of how you might hypothetically conduct an actual test, but what you're testing for is whether the effects of the machine "intelligence" have reached a level of being indistinguishable from human intelligence.
So really, the point was to have something like a "blind taste test". You say you can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, but if I pour Coke and Pepsi into identically glasses, can you tell the difference? If not, then maybe you shouldn't express a preference. Similarly, if I can put a series of questions to a person and a computer, and no matter what questions I ask, I can't tell the human's responses from the computer's responses, then maybe we shouldn't think that the computer is less intelligent than the human.
Yeah, I'm a bit confused because I thought this had become common practice. For a few years now, I've seen a bunch of games where you get some special content (a different outfit, or starting the game with some bonus or special gear) when you pre-order from a specific store. Since it's different "special content" for different stores, you'd have to buy multiple copies of the game to get all of the content. Then, after some period of time, the game releases all of the special gear as "DLC", and then it's also is included in the GoTY edition (or whatever they feel like calling the edition that includes all the updates and DLC).
Is there a difference between that and what we're talking about? I'm not sure I really see the problem. These bit of "special content" are usually kind of stupid, like maybe you start with a extra bit of body armor and some shotgun shells or something.
Plus, honestly, I usually wait until the "extra special edition" is on sale on Steam before I buy games these days. Not that I would expect everyone to wait, but it's kind of great. I avoid the hype machine and get to see what people think after the hype has died down, you get all the DLC, additional content, and bug fixes all at once, and you get it for 40% off or something.
I think that the examples you cite are bad decisions on Microsoft's part, not because of what they did, but because they simply did it too soon.
I'm not saying that you can't drop backwards compatibility. It just seems like Microsoft sometimes screws up compatibility with older versions of their software to force you onto the upgrade treadmill, which is what was originally being discussed.
BTW, when has MS ever created incompatibilities with old versions for no reason? I assume you're talking old versions of software?
I don't remember what I had in mind when writing that, but the first thing that comes to mind is Microsoft Office formats. There were a few years where they would release a new version of Office with incompatible versions of their Office file formats, which meant that if one person in the company upgraded, every file they touched suddenly became unreadable in older versions. That was a few years ago, but they've gotten so much flack for it that they've stabilized the formats after Office 2007.
IIRC they did similar shenanigans at some point with WMA/WMV files, where they released a new version of Windows Media Player that automatically used the new version of their codec, which was unsupported on older versions of Windows Media Player. That would be fine, since Windows Media Player was free, except that they didn't allow you to install the new version of Windows Media Player on older versions of Windows. They've done similar things with DirectX and IE.
It doesn't happen very often anymore, but for many years I kept hearing people say things like, "The story of Bill Gates shows what's so great about our country. The guy started out poor, he had absolutely nothing, but he was pretty much the best programmer in the world. Using nothing but his programming skills, he managed to become the richest guy in the world. It's a great success story."
Yeah, Bill Gates got rich by being a brilliant programmer, and Steve Jobs got rich by being a really nice guy. Meanwhile, Ballmer just skated by on his good looks, social graces, and beautiful head of hair.
Even if they used it now, I'm not sure they'd sue. It would make them look pretty crappy. As it is, they got a request to use their logo on a statue of a murdered child, and they were like, "Eh... we'd rather not." It's really not that hard to understand why DC wouldn't want to be strongly linked to child abuse and murder in such a potentially long-lasting medium, given the choice. How much trouble they'd go through to stop it, though, is another issue.
Part of the question, I'd imagine, is whether they're denying the use of the logo via copyright protection or trademark protection. I'm not sure it makes sense for them to claim trademark protection here, but if so, there are some legal requirements for them to protect their trademark, so they might need to at least send a cease and desist letter. I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding.
Whenever you set off to do something like "setting up an internal corporate Intranet site", you should always be very clear about your answer to this question: "Why are we doing this?" As in, what problem are we solving? How do we actually imagine this being used?
Lots of people will start something like this and think, "This application looks cool. It's like Facebook, but private and we can control it." And yeah, it may be fun to set up, but why are you doing it? What problem does it solve? Does it serve a purpose in disseminating information in a way that a normal website or email mailing list would be less effective? Does it aid in collaboration somehow? Once you have a clear answer, then you have to have a plan on how to get buy-in from employees. How are you going to get them to think it's a good way of accomplishing whatever it is that you hope it'll accomplish? Why should they bother with it at all? You need to convince them and then remind them to follow through.
But none of that works if there's no purpose in the first place. Is the intention just to socialize? First, they can do that in Facebook. If they want a more professional setting, that's what LinkedIn is for. Beyond that, lots of those people are sitting in the same office building anyway, so they can meet face to face. Throw them a little cupcake party on the first Friday of every month. It'll be cheaper, and people will like it more.
Sure it can't be all human experimentation, or else ad agencies couldn't attempt to measure the effectiveness of their ads. Parents couldn't raise their children (e.g. "Let's try withholding cookies and see if that works!").
There must be specific parameters under which human experimentation is illegal.
I feel like I'm being a little paranoid, but I had the same thought. And after all the NSA revelations and whatnot, I feel like paranoia is justified.
It's an industry that has always tacked on weird semi-fraudulent charges to your bill. The industry has always tried to hide what you're actually being charged for, advertised different prices than what you're actually charged, charged you for add-on services without consent, and charged for unexpected overages without warning. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has been shaking up the industry with simpler billing, making their charges more clear, and doing away with overages. Why would the FTC be going after them specifically?
Being unhappy tends to lead to increased awareness of details and a more cautious/pessimistic approach to problems. While that can be a handicap in many situations, it can be helpful when the shit hits the fan. "Stress" is itself a biological state that is priming us for bad situations. Stress can be helpful in dangerous situations. The problem is, in our relatively safe modern society, we have a tendency to enter a state of stress, and then never leave.
It's not just about putting in more effort to stay with the company, or putting in more effort out of loyalty. Both of those can play a role in increase efficiency, but it's also the fact that your brain's ability to function is impacted by mood. You will think differently when you're under stress, panicked, depressed, worried, happy, horny, angry, or hungry. Being in a "happy" state is often good for solving the kinds of problems that present themselves at work.
Some people make the mistake of saying something like, "You make better decisions when you're happy." That's not altogether true. Being in a different state of mind will alter your thinking in ways that may be useful for certain situations. Being angry might make you more ready for a physical fight. Being hungry might distract you from other concerns in favor of finding food, which can be useful in keeping you from starving. These are useful things until you're in the wrong state of mind for the things you want to get done.
Is economics considered a science now? I thought it was one of those "soft sciences" or like sociology, psychology, or medicine where it's not practiced with any rigor, and nobody trusts it anyway.
Still, it's not just a case of the "Upgrade Treadmill". Windows 8 was not the typical Microsoft move of "rearrange all the buttons, slap on a new theme, create incompatibility with old versions for no reason, and drop support on the old software to force people to upgrade." They actually made improvements for once.
Well honestly, if you ignore the whole Metro UI fiasco, Windows 8 is a nice update to Windows 7. There a lots of little improvements. It may sound silly, but I think the dialog boxes for copying/moving files alone would be worth a $20 upgrade for my own use.
My two main qualms with Windows at this point are (a) forcing users to use a touchscreen UI on the desktop; and (b) the requirement of stupid/annoying copyright protection schemes. I don't pirate and I don't have any problem paying for software, but product activation needs to go.
It really makes me wonder if Ballmer was somehow the source of the problem. I feel like Microsoft has been a little less evil since the new guy took over.
Yes they did. There is more to communication than the specific words used. Tone, timing, delivery, emphasis, etc all are part of the message. If Facebook altered any of these to be different from the expectations of the user without informing them beforehand then they changed what people said. There is MUCH more to human communication than the syntax used.
I'm not sure how you think they changed the tone, timing, delivery, or emphasis of the messages. Apparently they used real posts and posted the entire content of each post without alteration. From what I understand, though I'm interpreting from a few different stories that I read, all they did was to alter the algorithm that Facebook already uses to choose which posts to show in your feed. They didn't insert or remove words from the posts. They didn't do anything to really re-contextualize them.
Whether people realize it or not, Facebook already filters and resorts your feed to emphasize posts that they think you're interested in. If you pay attention, you'll notice that when you have a friend that you "Like" a lot of their posts, then more of their posts will show up in your feed, and they'll appear higher up. I suspect that they also do things like prioritize posts with links from friends who you follow their links. I think they probably even do things like, if you've looked at a persons' profile a lot, or perhaps even if they look at yours a lot, the posts will be more likely to show up. I doubt that Facebook has made this algorithm clear, but it's clear that they're doing things like this.
So it seems that all they did was to add into the algorithm for some users to favor posts with happy words, and for other users posts with unhappy words. I don't think they're altering anything about the tone or emphasis of any individual message. I don't say this to really defend them.
Slashdot Mirror
To imply small government is the opposite of good governance is absurd.
That's not what he implied. He was saying that small government is not a *substitute* for good governance. In its simplest form, you won't necessarily fix your government just by making it smaller. But what he was actually saying there was more insightful than its simplest form. He was implying both that there may be some size of government necessary for good governance, and that whether the governance provided was at least somewhat independent of the size of the government.
No. I also don't want Microsoft to have a hard-wired camera in my living room.
Also, I don't think it makes sense for Google to buy the XBox from Google.
Unless I'm missing something, the hardware seems relatively unremarkable. The Kinect seems cool, but it seems like something Google could build on their own, assuming they didn't run into patent trouble, and it's not clear Microsoft would look to sell those patents. The software is based on Windows, which I doubt Google would want to use.
Plus, I'm predicting the whole console market is going to be in trouble once the Steam consoles really hit. If it's not Steam, it'll be something else. Nintendo might survive, but only because of their relatively cheap prices, simple designs, and exclusivity on their own games.
If I were running Microsoft, I'd probably ditch XBox somehow. I'd re-engineer the XBox interface to be an optional install for Windows, and allow Windows to run 3 different (but relatively consistent) interfaces: Desktop, Tablet, and TV. Maybe you can combine "tablet" and "TV", since there are similar needs, but Windows should provide a UI that can be driven by a remote or game controller for anyone who wants to hook their computer up to the TV. Tell XBox game developers to just develop for Windows instead. Produce the hardware if it still makes sense, but have it run a stock version of Windows and allow it to serve as a desktop machine.
That's my view. I'm sure some Microsoft nutcases are going to explain why it's so much better that you can't run desktop apps on an XBox, even though they're the same people who would complain that you can't run desktop apps on an iPad.
So they get rid of their most successful consumer product....
"Successful" in that it sold a lot of units. Maybe not so successful in terms of profits. I don't know what the current state of the balance sheet is, but as of a couple of years ago, the entire XBox line was still in the red. To begin with, they sell the hardware as a loss-leader. Plus they spent a bunch of extra money on the first generation to break into the market, so they were expecting the XBox360 to be successful enough to pay for those losses. Then the XBox360 was riddled with hardware failures, so Microsoft lost a ton of money on replacements. At one point, I remember it was estimated that almost 50% of all XBox360 units had manufacturing defects requiring the units be replaced.
I don't remember exactly. Everything I've written above is pulled out of my fuzzy memory. The point is, the XBox was hardly the enormous success you might be imagining.
How is it not the same number of clicks? In the best case, in both systems, it's two clicks. You click once on the start button, and then once again on the item you'd like to launch. In either case, that's assuming that you want to launch something that's going to come up right away, and you aren't going to go hunting through other items.
Of course, in both systems you could cut out clicks entirely by pressing the Windows key on the keyboard and typing what you want.
It seems to me that the big difference is that Microsoft hid the button, meaning you had to hover in the correct place before you could click. Then the menu that came up brought up, by default, showed a bunch of tablet apps, and not the desktop apps that you probably want, in a way that completely broke the context you were working in. Every time you wanted to launch something, you were thrown into a different little virtual world with no common spacial orientation, and where all the buttons behaved differently.
It may not seem strange to you once you've gotten used to it, but the normal and appropriate reaction when a person first encounters this sort of thing is to feel unpleasantly disoriented. A good UI designer would know that it was bad, and that users would be unhappy with the change. A good UI designer would also know that hidden hover buttons and hover menus are not generally desirable.
Or were you just trolling?
No offense, but that's not a very sensible response. Your job may require off-hours work, but that depends largely on the needs of the company your supporting, and what you negotiate your job to be. Regardless, there's no reason why you shouldn't try to diminish the amount of off-hours work, and make it as painless as possible.
For example, let's say I have to do server updates similar to what this guy is describing, and my maintenance window is 5am-9am. The updates consist of running a few commands to kick the updates off, waiting for everything to download and install, rebooting, then checking to make sure everything was successful. Because the updates are large and the internet is slow, it sometimes takes 3 hours to perform the updates, but only 10 minutes to roll things back.
It's an exaggerated scenario, but given that basic outline, why wouldn't I just script the update process, and roll in at 8:30 with plenty of time to confirm success and roll things back if needed? What, I should still come in at 5am just because an Anonymous Coward on the Internet decided it was "part of the job"?
but rather a bunch of fire and brimstone nonsense about the signal-stealing piratepocalypse.
And I think you're implying this, but all of the pirateocalypse nonsense, whether it's regarding Aereo or Bittorrent-- all of it really comes down to "we want to maintain our current extremely profitable business model in the face of changing technology which renders it obsolete." Like record labels and news organizations and all the other forms of media and information-related industries, they will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age.
Well also the networks want people to subscribe to cable specifically because the owners of the networks also own other cable channels.
I think more to the point, at least as far as I understood it, the Turing test was not meant to be a real test for whether an AI was actually intelligent.
The point of the test was essentially this: If a machine becomes able to imitate intelligence well enough that we can't tell the difference, then we may as well treat it as actual intelligence. As much anything, Turing was making a philosophical point from a pragmatic point of view. It doesn't make sense to ask whether a machine is "actually intelligent", but only whether it's capable of behaving as though it has intelligence.
So it's not really about fooling a certain specific percentage of people, or having the test go on for a specific point of time. Those are just issues of how you might hypothetically conduct an actual test, but what you're testing for is whether the effects of the machine "intelligence" have reached a level of being indistinguishable from human intelligence.
So really, the point was to have something like a "blind taste test". You say you can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, but if I pour Coke and Pepsi into identically glasses, can you tell the difference? If not, then maybe you shouldn't express a preference. Similarly, if I can put a series of questions to a person and a computer, and no matter what questions I ask, I can't tell the human's responses from the computer's responses, then maybe we shouldn't think that the computer is less intelligent than the human.
Yeah, I'm a bit confused because I thought this had become common practice. For a few years now, I've seen a bunch of games where you get some special content (a different outfit, or starting the game with some bonus or special gear) when you pre-order from a specific store. Since it's different "special content" for different stores, you'd have to buy multiple copies of the game to get all of the content. Then, after some period of time, the game releases all of the special gear as "DLC", and then it's also is included in the GoTY edition (or whatever they feel like calling the edition that includes all the updates and DLC).
Is there a difference between that and what we're talking about? I'm not sure I really see the problem. These bit of "special content" are usually kind of stupid, like maybe you start with a extra bit of body armor and some shotgun shells or something.
Plus, honestly, I usually wait until the "extra special edition" is on sale on Steam before I buy games these days. Not that I would expect everyone to wait, but it's kind of great. I avoid the hype machine and get to see what people think after the hype has died down, you get all the DLC, additional content, and bug fixes all at once, and you get it for 40% off or something.
I think that the examples you cite are bad decisions on Microsoft's part, not because of what they did, but because they simply did it too soon.
I'm not saying that you can't drop backwards compatibility. It just seems like Microsoft sometimes screws up compatibility with older versions of their software to force you onto the upgrade treadmill, which is what was originally being discussed.
BTW, when has MS ever created incompatibilities with old versions for no reason? I assume you're talking old versions of software?
I don't remember what I had in mind when writing that, but the first thing that comes to mind is Microsoft Office formats. There were a few years where they would release a new version of Office with incompatible versions of their Office file formats, which meant that if one person in the company upgraded, every file they touched suddenly became unreadable in older versions. That was a few years ago, but they've gotten so much flack for it that they've stabilized the formats after Office 2007.
IIRC they did similar shenanigans at some point with WMA/WMV files, where they released a new version of Windows Media Player that automatically used the new version of their codec, which was unsupported on older versions of Windows Media Player. That would be fine, since Windows Media Player was free, except that they didn't allow you to install the new version of Windows Media Player on older versions of Windows. They've done similar things with DirectX and IE.
It doesn't happen very often anymore, but for many years I kept hearing people say things like, "The story of Bill Gates shows what's so great about our country. The guy started out poor, he had absolutely nothing, but he was pretty much the best programmer in the world. Using nothing but his programming skills, he managed to become the richest guy in the world. It's a great success story."
Yeah, Bill Gates got rich by being a brilliant programmer, and Steve Jobs got rich by being a really nice guy. Meanwhile, Ballmer just skated by on his good looks, social graces, and beautiful head of hair.
Even if they used it now, I'm not sure they'd sue. It would make them look pretty crappy. As it is, they got a request to use their logo on a statue of a murdered child, and they were like, "Eh... we'd rather not." It's really not that hard to understand why DC wouldn't want to be strongly linked to child abuse and murder in such a potentially long-lasting medium, given the choice. How much trouble they'd go through to stop it, though, is another issue.
Part of the question, I'd imagine, is whether they're denying the use of the logo via copyright protection or trademark protection. I'm not sure it makes sense for them to claim trademark protection here, but if so, there are some legal requirements for them to protect their trademark, so they might need to at least send a cease and desist letter. I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding.
Isn't part of the problem caused by checked baggage? They don't like when you check baggage and then decide not to get on the plane.
Whenever you set off to do something like "setting up an internal corporate Intranet site", you should always be very clear about your answer to this question: "Why are we doing this?" As in, what problem are we solving? How do we actually imagine this being used?
Lots of people will start something like this and think, "This application looks cool. It's like Facebook, but private and we can control it." And yeah, it may be fun to set up, but why are you doing it? What problem does it solve? Does it serve a purpose in disseminating information in a way that a normal website or email mailing list would be less effective? Does it aid in collaboration somehow? Once you have a clear answer, then you have to have a plan on how to get buy-in from employees. How are you going to get them to think it's a good way of accomplishing whatever it is that you hope it'll accomplish? Why should they bother with it at all? You need to convince them and then remind them to follow through.
But none of that works if there's no purpose in the first place. Is the intention just to socialize? First, they can do that in Facebook. If they want a more professional setting, that's what LinkedIn is for. Beyond that, lots of those people are sitting in the same office building anyway, so they can meet face to face. Throw them a little cupcake party on the first Friday of every month. It'll be cheaper, and people will like it more.
Sure it can't be all human experimentation, or else ad agencies couldn't attempt to measure the effectiveness of their ads. Parents couldn't raise their children (e.g. "Let's try withholding cookies and see if that works!").
There must be specific parameters under which human experimentation is illegal.
I feel like I'm being a little paranoid, but I had the same thought. And after all the NSA revelations and whatnot, I feel like paranoia is justified.
It's an industry that has always tacked on weird semi-fraudulent charges to your bill. The industry has always tried to hide what you're actually being charged for, advertised different prices than what you're actually charged, charged you for add-on services without consent, and charged for unexpected overages without warning. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has been shaking up the industry with simpler billing, making their charges more clear, and doing away with overages. Why would the FTC be going after them specifically?
Being unhappy tends to lead to increased awareness of details and a more cautious/pessimistic approach to problems. While that can be a handicap in many situations, it can be helpful when the shit hits the fan. "Stress" is itself a biological state that is priming us for bad situations. Stress can be helpful in dangerous situations. The problem is, in our relatively safe modern society, we have a tendency to enter a state of stress, and then never leave.
I agree, up to a point. We worship happiness a little too much and fail to see the value of other emotions.
It's not just about putting in more effort to stay with the company, or putting in more effort out of loyalty. Both of those can play a role in increase efficiency, but it's also the fact that your brain's ability to function is impacted by mood. You will think differently when you're under stress, panicked, depressed, worried, happy, horny, angry, or hungry. Being in a "happy" state is often good for solving the kinds of problems that present themselves at work.
Some people make the mistake of saying something like, "You make better decisions when you're happy." That's not altogether true. Being in a different state of mind will alter your thinking in ways that may be useful for certain situations. Being angry might make you more ready for a physical fight. Being hungry might distract you from other concerns in favor of finding food, which can be useful in keeping you from starving. These are useful things until you're in the wrong state of mind for the things you want to get done.
Is economics considered a science now? I thought it was one of those "soft sciences" or like sociology, psychology, or medicine where it's not practiced with any rigor, and nobody trusts it anyway.
Still, it's not just a case of the "Upgrade Treadmill". Windows 8 was not the typical Microsoft move of "rearrange all the buttons, slap on a new theme, create incompatibility with old versions for no reason, and drop support on the old software to force people to upgrade." They actually made improvements for once.
Well honestly, if you ignore the whole Metro UI fiasco, Windows 8 is a nice update to Windows 7. There a lots of little improvements. It may sound silly, but I think the dialog boxes for copying/moving files alone would be worth a $20 upgrade for my own use.
My two main qualms with Windows at this point are (a) forcing users to use a touchscreen UI on the desktop; and (b) the requirement of stupid/annoying copyright protection schemes. I don't pirate and I don't have any problem paying for software, but product activation needs to go.
It really makes me wonder if Ballmer was somehow the source of the problem. I feel like Microsoft has been a little less evil since the new guy took over.
Yes they did. There is more to communication than the specific words used. Tone, timing, delivery, emphasis, etc all are part of the message. If Facebook altered any of these to be different from the expectations of the user without informing them beforehand then they changed what people said. There is MUCH more to human communication than the syntax used.
I'm not sure how you think they changed the tone, timing, delivery, or emphasis of the messages. Apparently they used real posts and posted the entire content of each post without alteration. From what I understand, though I'm interpreting from a few different stories that I read, all they did was to alter the algorithm that Facebook already uses to choose which posts to show in your feed. They didn't insert or remove words from the posts. They didn't do anything to really re-contextualize them.
Whether people realize it or not, Facebook already filters and resorts your feed to emphasize posts that they think you're interested in. If you pay attention, you'll notice that when you have a friend that you "Like" a lot of their posts, then more of their posts will show up in your feed, and they'll appear higher up. I suspect that they also do things like prioritize posts with links from friends who you follow their links. I think they probably even do things like, if you've looked at a persons' profile a lot, or perhaps even if they look at yours a lot, the posts will be more likely to show up. I doubt that Facebook has made this algorithm clear, but it's clear that they're doing things like this.
So it seems that all they did was to add into the algorithm for some users to favor posts with happy words, and for other users posts with unhappy words. I don't think they're altering anything about the tone or emphasis of any individual message. I don't say this to really defend them.