Thank you for providing a perfect example of the kind of extremism that I'm criticizing. You see the people place too much effort on survival (quantity of life) and not enough on quality of life and your reaction is to exclude quantity from consideration. This is exactly the myopic extremism that makes all of life's answers seem so simple, but in fact is just as bad as the extremism you're opposing.
The truth of the matter is that we should be concerned about both quality AND quantity. The false dichotomy you espouse is just that: false.
So again, thanks for popping up as a textbook radical. You've got the rock: over-emphasis on quantity, and the hard-place: over-emphasis on quality, and extremists can't seem to keep their eye on both at the same time.
I dont have the exact statistics at hand but the chances of you or anyone else suffering from the actions of 'terrorists' are vanishingly small. You know this and I know this, ie more chance of dying driving to work in the morning,etc.
This is a strange measure of danger. In 1938 what was the chance of being killed by a Nazi? Or a Japanese soldier? For that matter, what was the chance of being killed by either in 1942 - assuming you stayed in America? Practically 0. So what exactly are you trying to prove with this? That because the terrorists aren't here yet, there's no danger? And you know what - they never have to get here. Thanks to American policies (see "hard place") we have a genuine vulnerability to economic forces. If a successful Islamic revolution took hold in the Middle East - one willing to cut off their own oil revenue to spite us - then we lose 20% of our oil. What effect will that have on our day-to-day life? Plus that's leaving aside the fact that, within a few decades, India and China will likely be able to take up the slack if OPEC nations decided to cut off the tap to the US. And I haven't even bothered to get started on weapons of mass destruction.
You have to be incredibly naive and short-sighted to say that because, so far the number of attacks has directly influenced only a handful of Americans (proportionally), therefore in the future the risk will be the same as it has been so far. That's just not how statistics work.
Al qaeda is nothing in the scheme of real threats that you face in your day to day life. People only believe that there is a threat becos there has been systemic mass media fear-mongering.
Again, I disagree. In 1938, you could use the same logic and you would have been wrong. In the Cold War, you could have used the same logic and (apparently) you'd have been right. Clearly your analytic methodology is sporadic at best.
So in conclusion: your dichotomy is false and the problem really does lie with Bush/Cheney et al and the corporate media.
No, I'm not wrong. I have my eyes open. There's a reason people snicker about conspiracy theorists. Because you choose to focus somuch on the one danger (US corruption) that you can't hear the rhetoric and growing threat of the other danter. Anyone who thinks radical Islam is not a rising global threat clearly has at least one eye closed.
I believe the point he was making is that unless you are on the top then you are usually under someone's heel.
I guess my point would be: is he assuming that such a state of affairs is evitable? Would it have been realistically possible for the US to not have expanded territorially beyond its 1776 boundaries? George Washington explicitly sought to restrain territorial growth b banning pan-Appalachian settlement. So it seems ridiculous, at the outset, to portray US oppression of the Native Americans as being 100% a result of elite white leaders. The President was opposed (clearly matters had changed by the time Andrew Jackson was around).
So we have to ask the question: was there a way for this conflict to have been avoided? Is it possible for two nations to exist in overlapping or adjoining territories where one has an overwhelming military/social/economic advantage over the other, but refuses to expand?
To lay the blame for that expansion at the feet of individual US leaders seems to miss the point. To lay the blame for specific actions (e.g. the Trail of Tears, US-Mexican War, etc.) makes sense, but to act as though it was somebody's fault that the US expanded at all, I'm not sure if we can do that. If there's no possibility of something not happening, does it make sense to blame people when it does? I'm not sure.
In order for history to be enlightening, you have to do more than just merely catalog the conflicts, or lay blame for individual conflicts. I want to see an approach to history that is at least cognizant of the fundamental question: why conflict? Can it ever be avoided? Is it a result of environmental factors? Human nature? Should we bring in game theory? What about sociological factors, or cultural factors? When, how and why - if ever - do stronger nations exhibit altruistic restraint? (By the way, this is just one of the annoying failures of Jared Diamonds "Guns, Germs, and Steel" in my opinion.)
Short of awareness of these complexities, rants like the one I responded to are worthless, vacuous polemics of no intellectual merit whatsoever.
This is only informative as an example of the extent to which science has been subverted by culture. Saying something is racist is NOT a rational basis for saying it is wrong. Issues of morality don't dictate laws of the universe. You have to separate questions of what is true/false from questions of what is right/wrong. You can't say that a scientific theory is wrong because it is evil: period. That's like saying 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong because it's red. You might be right (2+2=5 is, indeed, wrong) but your reasoning is utterly flawed.
So first of all, Social Darwinism is a direct application of Darwin's theories to society. The fact that it's an incorrect application has to do with the fact that there's no factual evidence to support racism and nothing to do with the fact that racism is evil.
I agree that social darwinism is science twisted for evil, but so - according to some - was atomic energy in at least some cases. That doesn't explain why atomic bombs work and social darwinism doesn't seem to.
That's kind of silly. Happiness is a good general criteria (if somewhat difficult to quantify) but it leaves out a lot of important evaluation. For example, if you live in a country that is newly freed from some external oppression, has no infrastructure, disease is rampant, etc. and you compare with a fully industrialized nation that hasn't been in war or natural disaster for a few decades, then do you think "happiness" will really reflect anything about the governments of those two countries?
I doubt it. Not that this is a case for the US being great or anything - I'm just pointing out that not all countries start out equally, so judging based on the results (e.g. happiness of the populace) may be reflecting the starting positions of the countries, and NOT anything inherent to the nations themselves.
"Saying that the main objective of this fight is to not get scared is like saying that if you have to fight a grizzly bear, the only thing to worry about is not getting scare. Not panicking is a great idea, but you might want to also figure out how to avoid getting eaten. In fact, the point of not panicking is to achieve the greater goal of not being eaten."
I'm glad you got a +5 Insightful. We'd hate for people to have to actually read an article before responding to it. Most Slashdot posters operate by a pretty simple switch statement;
if (gotfirstpost == true)
makestupidfristpostjoke() else
Case (topic = terrorism)
Bush is evil! America is evil! Terrorism is just an excuse to take our rights!
Case (topic = MS)
Down with the evil empire! M$ is the great, white Satan!
Case (topic = linux)... end else
Having actually read the article, I thought I'd talk about that. And I find that the contention that terrorist attacks are simply a means to an end, and that the end is terrorism, is outright stupid. You'd think someone concentrating on separating means from ends would be smart enough to follow the chain all the way. Terrorism itself is a means to an end. Let's keep this discussion in perspective. The ultimate goal is not to make airline passengers wet themselves, it's to bring down the American/Western Empire and instate a medieval religious empire founded on some perverse version of Islam.
If you focus on the corruption of US politics to the exclusion of that real threat, you're ignoring the rock. If you focus on so-called "islamo-fascism" and ignore the very real blights in US/Western politics and culture, you're ignoring the hard place. You have to keep your eye on both (a skill radicals from either side are notoriously deficient with.)
In addition, if you treat "terror" as the ultimate measure of the success of terrorism, then why not simply instate severe censorship? If the ultimate goal is to prevent terror - then just ban any reporting about terrorism. That's pretty simple isn't? Saying that the main objective of this fight is to not get scared is like saying that if you have to fight a grizzly bear, the only thing to worry about is not getting eaten. Not panicking is a great idea, but you might want to also figure out how to avoid getting eaten.
Obviously terror isn't the ultimate measure of this conflict. I don't want to be a US citizen living in safety without any fear if that means I've lost the liberties that made America America. And that's exactly what this article - implicitly - advocates.
The reason radicals like to fixate on one end of the spectrum or the other is simple: it makes the problem easy. Trying to figure out how to balance safety concerns and civil liberties, idealism and realism, is difficult. It doesn't lend itself to grand rhetoric, dramatic action, and so on. It's easy to die for a cause if you really believe in that cause, it's harder to actually find a cause that you can rationally support and continue to muddle through your life supporting that cause without the convenience of a world view that bestows black-and-white contours to your environment.
If you ask me, the real danger isn't terror. It's not civil liberties either. It's becoming what we face. And I don't mean we're all in danger of becoming radical Islamic fundamentalists. I mean there is a very real danger that the stressfulness and ambiguity of the present conflict will lead increasingly large numbers of Americans to radicilize. To seek emotional and mental respite from complexity by turning a blind eye to either the rock, or to the hard place.
That is the danger that we face. Because in reality we are between a rock and a hard place, and the only way to see this true is to keep one eye on both.
The important thing to remember is that things aren't the way there are simply because humanity willed it so. Our true blue, slave owning, whore fucking founding fathers didn't just get to draw up a consitution and the country birthed out of that and everybody went around respecting everyone. They ordered thousands and thousands of common people to march face first into the outstretched bayonets of our enemies. When all the boides were finally piled up and counted, more of their guys were killed than our guys, so we could call this place our own and go back to being eaten alive by bears and half starving to death until we recuperated enough strength to go on a murderous genocidal rampage against the people who were here when we arrived.
I'm glad to see that the kind of US history taught in middle school is adequate to get some people through their entire lives.
Did you pause to consider that the citizens of the US at the time had a higher standard of living than anyone else in the world (source: The Victory of Reason, by Rodney Stark)? Oh no, of course they didn't. They were "being eaten alive by bears and half starving to death".
It's comforting to live in a world where you have all the answers, but you can also probably rest assured that if you live in a world where you have all the answers, you're not living in the real world.
Don't publish data you don't want in a feed, because bam, someone will make it a feed.
If that's all your saying, then I don't really disagree with you. It seemed like you were also saying the Facebook Feed was nothing new, or nothing different. That's not the same, however.
Your point is: the average facebook user isn't getting live feeds unless facebook provides them. This is true.
No. My point is that there is a cost associated with creating that live feed, and that for the average facebook user this cost is high relative to how they normally use facebook.
My point is: live feeds can be had from facebook without facebook providing them. You call this irrelevant. I call it reality. Information you publish about yourself can and will be used in ways you don't expect.
I'm not calling this irrelevant. I'm calling your example of the coder who can do this at essentially zero cost irrelevant. The vast majority of facebook users are not Python coders, and thus it really is irrelevant if.1% of the population (or less) can do this with essentially zero effort. The cost for the rest is still high.
Now you're bringing into the equation new informatino that I didn't know. You say that spiders are available - thus making the cost of implementing feed-like features practically zero for everyone. You should have done more research before you made this case.
First of all there's the obvious point that you still need relatively specialized information to know what to look for. Poll Facebook users, how many do you think would know what a web spider is? 1%? So even if it's free to download, you're talking about something no one knows exists. If there's a store that gives away free iPods and no one knows it exists, how useful is that?
Secondly, look at the actual features of the facebook spiders available (yes, I went ahead and googled to see what you'd found). As far as I can tell, there are only two that are commonly available from a simple Google search.
Michael Kelly wrote a Perl script that only collects information about user's friends. (http://stephen.evilcoder.com/archives/2006/01/26/ facebook-spider) That's not even remotely close to the functionality of Feeds. I'd say less than 10% offhand, but that's being generous.
The more advanced spider located at that same URL may at first seem to be an improvement. It collects captures all the information available in a user's profile (except for the 'About Me' field). So you're getting most of the information, right? Not so fast.
Where does the data go? That's right - it gets dumped into an SQL database (SQLite3 by default). So if you actually want any information you have to write your own database queries.
So this is your idea of "zero effort"? Search for a term most people don't know exists, download and figure out how to run Perl/Python scripts, get a copy of SQLite, and then write unique queries for everything you want to search?
Did you actually read through what would be required to get one of these off the ground?
I've gone around and around this issue with so many Slashdotters, I'm getting really tired of it. This is what it comes down to:
Facebook is not a public network, it is a private network where people post information they want to be searchable to their friends. They realize full well that anyone they've friended (either real friends, or just acquaintances) can see any and all information they post. They are not afraid that people will find out information they wanted secret. However, they do expect that if someone wants to find information about them real-time, considerable effort will be required. Like bicycle locks this is an easily-circumvented security measure designed only to thwart causal interest.
So while you may be right to say "look, the info was there, anyone determined enough (or who's already a coder) could put together the tool to get at it as a real-time feed" the analogy is this: just because anyone who's determined enough (or who cracks locks for a hobby) can get at your bike should you have no right to complain if someone takes away your bike lock?
Here's another news flash for captain clever, sometimes an argument can be implicit in the premise.
The argument I'm making is simply that the News Feeds drastically reduced the amount of work necessary to collate the information, and therefore the News Feeds constitute a significant change. Stating that "well you could code in Python pretty quick" is either:
a. utterly irrelevant b. assuming (implicitly) that the average Facebook user can could Python.
Take your pick. I went for foolish relevance over insane irrelevance. Should I have picked otherwise? In either case, the arguments on life-support.
And as with most people committed to argument-by-fallacy, you can't recognize logic when it slaps you in the face.
I used "M$" instead of "MS" in that post because I was (*gasp*) annoyed at Microsoft. Go look through my history if you like, and try to see if I've referred to them as M$ before. I don't think that I have.
The bottom line is that you don't like Microsoft and you have what you consider a perfect excuse to take shots at them.
Oh shut the hell up. If there's one thing worse than linux leet fanboi hackzorz bashing microsoft, it's these annoying people who run around thinking that any criticism of MS is based on some kind of pre-existing bias. Get over yourself. You think you've got me pinned as someone that hates MS, and you don't know jack.
MS does a lot of good on several fronts. Do I have to provide a list of all the good things that I appreciate from MS to pass muster and prove that I'm worthy to criticize them?
Sheesh. If MS grabbed a C&C game and made, say, an RPG out of it and I knew they weren't hurting Westwood Studios then I'd be fine with it. The entire reason MS's actions piss me off is that an indie developing a fan game is no more threatening to a book than a couple of fans making a fan-version of Harry Potter (book, movie, I don't care). As far as I know, the Halogen guys weren't trying to profit. If MS wants to grab someone else's storyline and make a game out of it with no motive for profit and no threat to the company, then I say have at it. I'd be thrilled if, for example, they picked up Duke Nukem Forever and actually released it!
Go find someone else to burn as a witch in your inquisition.
Yes, that's exactly what copyright laws are designed to make possible.
No, it's not. Please turn your brain back on. Copyright laws give you SOME rights, they do NOT give you the same rights as possession of physical goods for the very simple reason that ideas are NOT physical goods. This isn't rocket science. If you go by a car, I can't do anything with that car without your permission. But if you go write a story about Harry Potter, I can write one too. I can write ten if I like. Now I can't distribute them, true, but that's not the point I was making. The point I was making is that the rights associated with intellectual property are NOT identical to those associated with physical property, and therefore simply making an analogy to physical property is insufficient to win an argument.
You clearly aren't thinking this through, as this statement demonstrates: "Stephen King can't write his own Harry Potter book (without permission from the various copyright and trademark holders) - whether they decide to do it for profit or not."
Stephen King can write any damn book he wants. He can write a book about how Captain Kirk meets the Master Chief on the Planet of the Apes, and then they go visit Jack Bauer to help him fight terrorist evil. I can write such a book, you can write such a book, ANYONE can write such a book. This is precisely why your attempts to view intellectual property as physical property fail so completely. They're not the same. And you know what? Microsoft can make their own Starcaft if they want. Who's going to stop them? Under what basis?
And if Stephen writes his book and gives it to his kids to read - do you honestly believe copyright law would allow someone to sue him? Now, if he tried to publish it, we may run into issues. But where do you draw the line between publishing and distributing to friends? Where do you draw the line between Stephen King working on his own to write a book for fun about Master Chief, and someone trying to steal someone else's ideas?
And you haven't even mentioned the fact that parody comes under fair use.
My point is simple: your arguments fail completely and utterly because you have never stopped to realize that physical property and intellectual property are not the same things. Figure that out. Then we'll talk.
And what if the game sucked beyond belief and turned people off to the idea of a Halo RTS, reducing the sales of Microsoft's hypothetical product?
That's retarded. One of the things I said was as long as no one confuses their product with an official product. So how could you possibly see a FAN-made RTS and then get "turned off" to the idea of a genuine RTS? That's absurd. No matter how badly a fan-RTS turned out as long as everyone knows it's not an official RTS there will be no brand-dilution. That's like saying someone would read some really awful fun-fiction and then decide not to read the 7th Harry Potter book. Not. Going. To. Happen.
Whatever one might think of copyright laws... Blah, blah blah. Look, when I start saying "all copywright laws should be abolished", then the rest of our paragraph will at least be relevant. So then we can decide if it's right or not. But since I haven't said that, it's not even relevant. So let's not waste time arguing about it.
My point is simple: Microsoft is not a villain in this situation. They simply decided that they don't want someone else using their properties (copyrighted, trademarked, etc.) to create a videogame. That isn't an unreasonable position to take. There are lots of reasons to despise Microsoft, but this isn't one of them.
People don't own ideas. Period. Get that through your head. Not even copyright laws say that. "Intellectual property laws confer a bundle of exclusive rights in relation to the particular form or manner in which ideas or information are expressed or manifested, and not in relation to the ideas or concepts themselves. It is therefore important to note that the term "intellectual property" denotes the specific legal rights which authors, inventors and other IP holders may hold and exercise, and not the intellectual work itself." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_propert y)
People own specific rights to use the ideas (putting it loosely). Anyone else can use those ideas, as long as they are not infringing on those rights. In simple terms: no harm, no foul. Until I see how the fan-RTS was actually going to negatively impact MS I'm just not buying your silly property analogy - as though a fictional character can belong to someone the way a pencil can. Please.
Let's short circuit this and just point out the obvious: there's a difference between what is right and what is legal. I'm not contesting Microsoft's legal right to control their own IP. I'm just questioning the intelligence and ethics of doing so in this specific case.
Now I don't know all there is to know in this case. Maybe they're about to announce a Halo-themed RTS, or have some other reason to need to crack down. But I doubt it. And since I doubt that, this seems like just another knee-jerk reaction to step on fans.
People who love Harry Potter write fan-fiction, people who love Halo make fan-games. Let the fans have their fun. That's all I'm saying.
Calling people "dumb" before making your point is not generally an effective approach to influencing people
1. Debate is a spectator sport.
You almost never run into someone who's admitting to be honest and admit they were wrong, and it's a waste of time (all things considered) to go looking for such a person behind posts that lack any evidence of self-revision. In short: the people I'm trying to influence are generally not the ones I call dumb.
2. It's nothing personal
When I come across people whom I perceive to actually be trying to think, I do my utmost to treat them with respect and dignity. But when someone makes assumptions like "the average Facebook user can write Python scripts" I take it for granted that I'm dealing with someone who hasn't bothered to consider what they are saying before posting it.
If that hurts your feelings, I'm sorry. Honestly. That's not just something I say, I do regret it when I hurt people's feelings. My objective is not to be a pain in the ass, but even a cursory glance at Slashdot can show you how much time I'd be wasting if every time some schmuck pounded his infantile rantings I took the time to do a velvet-glove response. If you made an honest mistake, then sorry for biting your head off, but that's the name of the game. I mean this in the nicest way possible: Be more careful next time.
I guess to really understand my posting style you'd have to have been there years ago when I got into my first internet debates. I'd be trying to write some benign post about some hobby of mine and next thing I know 3 or 4 trolls are spreading rather nasty half-truths and lies about my religion. You try being nice to people like that. There's no mercy. (For several years after that I shortened my nick to just "stormin" to try to avoid the confrontation. It worked, but it didn't feel right.) I guess I may not have learned all the right lessons from those experiences, and I'll try to tone it down in future when it's pretty clear nothing major is at stake.
That's totally different. That's IP going from "open" to "closed". If, on the other hand, MS came in and grabbed some GPL stuff, improved it, and kept it under the GPL then I'd have no problem with it. Would you?
If they were trying to sell the game, I would understand. If they were trying to pass the game off as official, I would understand.
But if they are giving the game away for free without any deception, than really there's only 2 alternatives: 1. The game is typical "fan" quality, and thus offers no competition for any potential official releases. 2. The game is so good, that MS buys it and (for much less than it would have cost to develop in-house) releases the game officially.
In either case - I don't see why making an RTS version of an FPS is anything other than making fan-fiction based on Harry Potter. Do you see Scholastic or Rowling coming down on all the fan-fiction out there? Of course not.
I think I know why MS Games canned us, just need to wait a couple of weeks to make sure, so I'm not really comfortable writing about it yet. But I'm 95% sure it had nothing to do with "spontaneous noticement", and very little to do with "MS are teh jerks and will do anything to stop their IP from being Xploited!!"
Perhaps there is some reasonable explanation for M$s behavior, I don't know. He seems willing to patiently wait to find out. That's a lot more patience than I have. Just when i was starting to feel like MS wasn't entirely a blight on the face of the planet (free version of XNA, realizing how much of a pain in the ass linux can be to actually use, grudging respect for aspects of the.NET frramework, etc.) they come out with this nonsense.
It's funny to me that M$ had that ad campaign about the dinosaurs. They ARE the dinosaurs. Just like the RIAA, the MPAA, and everyone that's suing Google's project to make books search-able online, I feel like the last remnants of business feudalism are still waving rusty swords and shouting obscenities while those of us not stuck in the 14th century get on with the business of making life better without trying to own, control, and manipulate everything along the way.
Seriously, you're just being dumb. How many Facebook users code AT ALL. That looks simple enough that I might be able to pick it up in a few minutes, but I already code in C#, Java, C++, VBA, etc. (Not for a living, mind you, and I'm not very good at it, but I can code.)
But the vast majority of Facebook users don't code at all, and so they don't even know what it would take to begin to learn what it would take to code this. Seriously. Spend some time in the real world and you'll realize that a lot of tech stuff you take for granted may as well be voodoo to these people. These are the same people that manage to post pictures on Facebook, but still can't tell a monitor from a tower when it comes to computer parts, and have no idea what code looks like, how it works, or what it can do.
I guarantee that if writing this kind of code was commonplace among Facebook users, the new Feeds wouldn't have created a stir. Who knows - maybe that's why Mark misjudged the reaction. He too just couldn't fathom that to most people even as simple a bit of code like that is essentially magic.
But proving that, to your own limited and small population group (coders) X is not a big deal doesn't mean that to a very different (and much larger) population group X isn't a huge deal. If you and your buddies are all telepaths, then adding a News Feed is ridiculously trivial. You hear people's thoughts anyway. But to those who don't have that ability, it's a big deal. Same thing here. You can write the PHP code in 5 minutes. Do you want a pat on the back? 99.9% of Facebook users can't. Not a single person in my circle of friends knows how to do that. A few could no doubt learn if they wanted to, but no one knows how to.
Option 1 - Facebook the old fashioned way. If you want to get info, you have to manually go get it yourself. Option 2 - Facebook with a Feed. Now the information can come to you automatically.
Clearly there's a difference between 1 and 2, and it's essentially the amount of effort you save. That's one way to look at it: in terms of cost.
All you're doing is replacing Option 1 with this:
Option 1b - Facebook the old fashioned way. If you want to get info, you can write your own script to get it yourself. Option 2 - Facebook with a Feed. Now the information comes to you automatically.
So now the difference in effort between 1b and 2 is less (a lot less). Is it the same? No. It took me ZERO effort to get Facebook Feeds. I just logged on one day and there it was. Would it take you ZERO effort to write the script? No. So there's a difference.
Furthermore, how much effort did it take for you to learn Python scripting? You could arguable include some portion of that in the "cost" since scripting in python is not a skill you can assume everyone has (like, say, breathing, walking upright, or even typing if you like).
I'm not saying you can get rich scripting, but it is a valuable skill in the sense that you can make some money doing it. You have a specialized skill that means for you pesronally the benefit of the feeds is dramatically less than for most people. But in general, most people can't script Python (or any language) and so, in general the difference in cost between the options is that reflected in 1 vs. 2 (and not 1b vs. 2).
Apparently that's where you belong. I say "there's more to this question than just what information is available" and then you respond by saying "the only informational difference..." That's like me saying "even though these boxes are both red, there's more to the question than color. This one is wood, and this one is plastic." and you responding with "yes, but if we restrict ourselves to just color..."
I'm not making the point that the information is different, I'm making the point that even though it is the same information there is a difference between having the information delivered and having to find it yourself. The difference is the amount of work it takes to gather that information for delivery (assuming cost of delivery itself is zero). From the perspective of a research would you rather make 1,000 phone calls to call people or sit in your office and have 1,000 people spontaneously show up and add their opinion to a carefully maintained database?
I don't really think you're stupid, I think the difference is just so mind-bogglingly obvious that you are assuming no one can be so stupid they don't see it, and are therefore looking for some other possible difference in information science and not finding it there. The trouble is that some people really just are that stupid.
It matters not what Facebook does or does not have for functionality. They are not the only gatherer and publisher of information on their site.
This is just manifestly false. It this were true there would be no RSS feeds. There's a difference between having to go out and find articles on X, and having articles on X delivered automatically. There's a difference between checking blog Y manually for updates, and having updates from blog Y sent to you. It's really basic. Call it "publish" vs. "broadcast", call it "push" vs. "pull" but to act as though there's no difference is mind-bogglingly stupid. There is a difference - that's why people make money offering these services you twat.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for providing a perfect example of the kind of extremism that I'm criticizing. You see the people place too much effort on survival (quantity of life) and not enough on quality of life and your reaction is to exclude quantity from consideration. This is exactly the myopic extremism that makes all of life's answers seem so simple, but in fact is just as bad as the extremism you're opposing.
The truth of the matter is that we should be concerned about both quality AND quantity. The false dichotomy you espouse is just that: false.
So again, thanks for popping up as a textbook radical. You've got the rock: over-emphasis on quantity, and the hard-place: over-emphasis on quality, and extremists can't seem to keep their eye on both at the same time.
-stormin
I dont have the exact statistics at hand but the chances of you or anyone else suffering from the actions of 'terrorists' are vanishingly small. You know this and I know this, ie more chance of dying driving to work in the morning,etc.
This is a strange measure of danger. In 1938 what was the chance of being killed by a Nazi? Or a Japanese soldier? For that matter, what was the chance of being killed by either in 1942 - assuming you stayed in America? Practically 0. So what exactly are you trying to prove with this? That because the terrorists aren't here yet, there's no danger? And you know what - they never have to get here. Thanks to American policies (see "hard place") we have a genuine vulnerability to economic forces. If a successful Islamic revolution took hold in the Middle East - one willing to cut off their own oil revenue to spite us - then we lose 20% of our oil. What effect will that have on our day-to-day life? Plus that's leaving aside the fact that, within a few decades, India and China will likely be able to take up the slack if OPEC nations decided to cut off the tap to the US. And I haven't even bothered to get started on weapons of mass destruction.
You have to be incredibly naive and short-sighted to say that because, so far the number of attacks has directly influenced only a handful of Americans (proportionally), therefore in the future the risk will be the same as it has been so far. That's just not how statistics work.
Al qaeda is nothing in the scheme of real threats that you face in your day to day life. People only believe that there is a threat becos there has been systemic mass media fear-mongering.
Again, I disagree. In 1938, you could use the same logic and you would have been wrong. In the Cold War, you could have used the same logic and (apparently) you'd have been right. Clearly your analytic methodology is sporadic at best.
So in conclusion: your dichotomy is false and the problem really does lie with Bush/Cheney et al and the corporate media.
No, I'm not wrong. I have my eyes open. There's a reason people snicker about conspiracy theorists. Because you choose to focus somuch on the one danger (US corruption) that you can't hear the rhetoric and growing threat of the other danter. Anyone who thinks radical Islam is not a rising global threat clearly has at least one eye closed.
-stormin
I believe the point he was making is that unless you are on the top then you are usually under someone's heel.
I guess my point would be: is he assuming that such a state of affairs is evitable? Would it have been realistically possible for the US to not have expanded territorially beyond its 1776 boundaries? George Washington explicitly sought to restrain territorial growth b banning pan-Appalachian settlement. So it seems ridiculous, at the outset, to portray US oppression of the Native Americans as being 100% a result of elite white leaders. The President was opposed (clearly matters had changed by the time Andrew Jackson was around).
So we have to ask the question: was there a way for this conflict to have been avoided? Is it possible for two nations to exist in overlapping or adjoining territories where one has an overwhelming military/social/economic advantage over the other, but refuses to expand?
To lay the blame for that expansion at the feet of individual US leaders seems to miss the point. To lay the blame for specific actions (e.g. the Trail of Tears, US-Mexican War, etc.) makes sense, but to act as though it was somebody's fault that the US expanded at all, I'm not sure if we can do that. If there's no possibility of something not happening, does it make sense to blame people when it does? I'm not sure.
In order for history to be enlightening, you have to do more than just merely catalog the conflicts, or lay blame for individual conflicts. I want to see an approach to history that is at least cognizant of the fundamental question: why conflict? Can it ever be avoided? Is it a result of environmental factors? Human nature? Should we bring in game theory? What about sociological factors, or cultural factors? When, how and why - if ever - do stronger nations exhibit altruistic restraint? (By the way, this is just one of the annoying failures of Jared Diamonds "Guns, Germs, and Steel" in my opinion.)
Short of awareness of these complexities, rants like the one I responded to are worthless, vacuous polemics of no intellectual merit whatsoever.
-stormin
This is only informative as an example of the extent to which science has been subverted by culture. Saying something is racist is NOT a rational basis for saying it is wrong. Issues of morality don't dictate laws of the universe. You have to separate questions of what is true/false from questions of what is right/wrong. You can't say that a scientific theory is wrong because it is evil: period. That's like saying 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong because it's red. You might be right (2+2=5 is, indeed, wrong) but your reasoning is utterly flawed.
So first of all, Social Darwinism is a direct application of Darwin's theories to society. The fact that it's an incorrect application has to do with the fact that there's no factual evidence to support racism and nothing to do with the fact that racism is evil.
I agree that social darwinism is science twisted for evil, but so - according to some - was atomic energy in at least some cases. That doesn't explain why atomic bombs work and social darwinism doesn't seem to.
-stormin
That's kind of silly. Happiness is a good general criteria (if somewhat difficult to quantify) but it leaves out a lot of important evaluation. For example, if you live in a country that is newly freed from some external oppression, has no infrastructure, disease is rampant, etc. and you compare with a fully industrialized nation that hasn't been in war or natural disaster for a few decades, then do you think "happiness" will really reflect anything about the governments of those two countries?
I doubt it. Not that this is a case for the US being great or anything - I'm just pointing out that not all countries start out equally, so judging based on the results (e.g. happiness of the populace) may be reflecting the starting positions of the countries, and NOT anything inherent to the nations themselves.
-stormin
Replace my grizzly-bear fight analogy with this:
"Saying that the main objective of this fight is to not get scared is like saying that if you have to fight a grizzly bear, the only thing to worry about is not getting scare. Not panicking is a great idea, but you might want to also figure out how to avoid getting eaten. In fact, the point of not panicking is to achieve the greater goal of not being eaten."
I'm glad you got a +5 Insightful. We'd hate for people to have to actually read an article before responding to it. Most Slashdot posters operate by a pretty simple switch statement;
...
if (gotfirstpost == true)
makestupidfristpostjoke()
else
Case (topic = terrorism)
Bush is evil! America is evil! Terrorism is just an excuse to take our rights!
Case (topic = MS)
Down with the evil empire! M$ is the great, white Satan!
Case (topic = linux)
end else
Having actually read the article, I thought I'd talk about that. And I find that the contention that terrorist attacks are simply a means to an end, and that the end is terrorism, is outright stupid. You'd think someone concentrating on separating means from ends would be smart enough to follow the chain all the way. Terrorism itself is a means to an end. Let's keep this discussion in perspective. The ultimate goal is not to make airline passengers wet themselves, it's to bring down the American/Western Empire and instate a medieval religious empire founded on some perverse version of Islam.
If you focus on the corruption of US politics to the exclusion of that real threat, you're ignoring the rock. If you focus on so-called "islamo-fascism" and ignore the very real blights in US/Western politics and culture, you're ignoring the hard place. You have to keep your eye on both (a skill radicals from either side are notoriously deficient with.)
In addition, if you treat "terror" as the ultimate measure of the success of terrorism, then why not simply instate severe censorship? If the ultimate goal is to prevent terror - then just ban any reporting about terrorism. That's pretty simple isn't? Saying that the main objective of this fight is to not get scared is like saying that if you have to fight a grizzly bear, the only thing to worry about is not getting eaten. Not panicking is a great idea, but you might want to also figure out how to avoid getting eaten.
Obviously terror isn't the ultimate measure of this conflict. I don't want to be a US citizen living in safety without any fear if that means I've lost the liberties that made America America. And that's exactly what this article - implicitly - advocates.
The reason radicals like to fixate on one end of the spectrum or the other is simple: it makes the problem easy. Trying to figure out how to balance safety concerns and civil liberties, idealism and realism, is difficult. It doesn't lend itself to grand rhetoric, dramatic action, and so on. It's easy to die for a cause if you really believe in that cause, it's harder to actually find a cause that you can rationally support and continue to muddle through your life supporting that cause without the convenience of a world view that bestows black-and-white contours to your environment.
If you ask me, the real danger isn't terror. It's not civil liberties either. It's becoming what we face. And I don't mean we're all in danger of becoming radical Islamic fundamentalists. I mean there is a very real danger that the stressfulness and ambiguity of the present conflict will lead increasingly large numbers of Americans to radicilize. To seek emotional and mental respite from complexity by turning a blind eye to either the rock, or to the hard place.
That is the danger that we face. Because in reality we are between a rock and a hard place, and the only way to see this true is to keep one eye on both.
-stormin
The important thing to remember is that things aren't the way there are simply because humanity willed it so. Our true blue, slave owning, whore fucking founding fathers didn't just get to draw up a consitution and the country birthed out of that and everybody went around respecting everyone. They ordered thousands and thousands of common people to march face first into the outstretched bayonets of our enemies. When all the boides were finally piled up and counted, more of their guys were killed than our guys, so we could call this place our own and go back to being eaten alive by bears and half starving to death until we recuperated enough strength to go on a murderous genocidal rampage against the people who were here when we arrived.
I'm glad to see that the kind of US history taught in middle school is adequate to get some people through their entire lives.
Did you pause to consider that the citizens of the US at the time had a higher standard of living than anyone else in the world (source: The Victory of Reason, by Rodney Stark)? Oh no, of course they didn't. They were "being eaten alive by bears and half starving to death".
It's comforting to live in a world where you have all the answers, but you can also probably rest assured that if you live in a world where you have all the answers, you're not living in the real world.
-stormin
Don't publish data you don't want in a feed, because bam, someone will make it a feed.
If that's all your saying, then I don't really disagree with you. It seemed like you were also saying the Facebook Feed was nothing new, or nothing different. That's not the same, however.
-stormin
Your point is: the average facebook user isn't getting live feeds unless facebook provides them. This is true.
.1% of the population (or less) can do this with essentially zero effort. The cost for the rest is still high.
No. My point is that there is a cost associated with creating that live feed, and that for the average facebook user this cost is high relative to how they normally use facebook.
My point is: live feeds can be had from facebook without facebook providing them. You call this irrelevant. I call it reality. Information you publish about yourself can and will be used in ways you don't expect.
I'm not calling this irrelevant. I'm calling your example of the coder who can do this at essentially zero cost irrelevant. The vast majority of facebook users are not Python coders, and thus it really is irrelevant if
Now you're bringing into the equation new informatino that I didn't know. You say that spiders are available - thus making the cost of implementing feed-like features practically zero for everyone. You should have done more research before you made this case.
First of all there's the obvious point that you still need relatively specialized information to know what to look for. Poll Facebook users, how many do you think would know what a web spider is? 1%? So even if it's free to download, you're talking about something no one knows exists. If there's a store that gives away free iPods and no one knows it exists, how useful is that?
Secondly, look at the actual features of the facebook spiders available (yes, I went ahead and googled to see what you'd found). As far as I can tell, there are only two that are commonly available from a simple Google search.
Michael Kelly wrote a Perl script that only collects information about user's friends. (http://stephen.evilcoder.com/archives/2006/01/26/ facebook-spider) That's not even remotely close to the functionality of Feeds. I'd say less than 10% offhand, but that's being generous.
The more advanced spider located at that same URL may at first seem to be an improvement. It collects captures all the information available in a user's profile (except for the 'About Me' field). So you're getting most of the information, right? Not so fast.
Where does the data go? That's right - it gets dumped into an SQL database (SQLite3 by default). So if you actually want any information you have to write your own database queries.
So this is your idea of "zero effort"? Search for a term most people don't know exists, download and figure out how to run Perl/Python scripts, get a copy of SQLite, and then write unique queries for everything you want to search?
Did you actually read through what would be required to get one of these off the ground?
I've gone around and around this issue with so many Slashdotters, I'm getting really tired of it. This is what it comes down to:
Facebook is not a public network, it is a private network where people post information they want to be searchable to their friends. They realize full well that anyone they've friended (either real friends, or just acquaintances) can see any and all information they post. They are not afraid that people will find out information they wanted secret. However, they do expect that if someone wants to find information about them real-time, considerable effort will be required. Like bicycle locks this is an easily-circumvented security measure designed only to thwart causal interest.
So while you may be right to say "look, the info was there, anyone determined enough (or who's already a coder) could put together the tool to get at it as a real-time feed" the analogy is this: just because anyone who's determined enough (or who cracks locks for a hobby) can get at your bike should you have no right to complain if someone takes away your bike lock?
There is a difference between information
*could = code
Here's another news flash for captain clever, sometimes an argument can be implicit in the premise.
The argument I'm making is simply that the News Feeds drastically reduced the amount of work necessary to collate the information, and therefore the News Feeds constitute a significant change. Stating that "well you could code in Python pretty quick" is either:
a. utterly irrelevant
b. assuming (implicitly) that the average Facebook user can could Python.
Take your pick. I went for foolish relevance over insane irrelevance. Should I have picked otherwise? In either case, the arguments on life-support.
-stormin
I used "M$" instead of "MS" in that post because I was (*gasp*) annoyed at Microsoft. Go look through my history if you like, and try to see if I've referred to them as M$ before. I don't think that I have.
Anyway, some light reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
Funny how your "argument" fits right in.
-stormin
The bottom line is that you don't like Microsoft and you have what you consider a perfect excuse to take shots at them.
Oh shut the hell up. If there's one thing worse than linux leet fanboi hackzorz bashing microsoft, it's these annoying people who run around thinking that any criticism of MS is based on some kind of pre-existing bias. Get over yourself. You think you've got me pinned as someone that hates MS, and you don't know jack.
MS does a lot of good on several fronts. Do I have to provide a list of all the good things that I appreciate from MS to pass muster and prove that I'm worthy to criticize them?
Sheesh. If MS grabbed a C&C game and made, say, an RPG out of it and I knew they weren't hurting Westwood Studios then I'd be fine with it. The entire reason MS's actions piss me off is that an indie developing a fan game is no more threatening to a book than a couple of fans making a fan-version of Harry Potter (book, movie, I don't care). As far as I know, the Halogen guys weren't trying to profit. If MS wants to grab someone else's storyline and make a game out of it with no motive for profit and no threat to the company, then I say have at it. I'd be thrilled if, for example, they picked up Duke Nukem Forever and actually released it!
Go find someone else to burn as a witch in your inquisition.
-stormin
Yes, that's exactly what copyright laws are designed to make possible.
No, it's not. Please turn your brain back on. Copyright laws give you SOME rights, they do NOT give you the same rights as possession of physical goods for the very simple reason that ideas are NOT physical goods. This isn't rocket science. If you go by a car, I can't do anything with that car without your permission. But if you go write a story about Harry Potter, I can write one too. I can write ten if I like. Now I can't distribute them, true, but that's not the point I was making. The point I was making is that the rights associated with intellectual property are NOT identical to those associated with physical property, and therefore simply making an analogy to physical property is insufficient to win an argument.
You clearly aren't thinking this through, as this statement demonstrates: "Stephen King can't write his own Harry Potter book (without permission from the various copyright and trademark holders) - whether they decide to do it for profit or not."
Stephen King can write any damn book he wants. He can write a book about how Captain Kirk meets the Master Chief on the Planet of the Apes, and then they go visit Jack Bauer to help him fight terrorist evil. I can write such a book, you can write such a book, ANYONE can write such a book. This is precisely why your attempts to view intellectual property as physical property fail so completely. They're not the same. And you know what? Microsoft can make their own Starcaft if they want. Who's going to stop them? Under what basis?
And if Stephen writes his book and gives it to his kids to read - do you honestly believe copyright law would allow someone to sue him? Now, if he tried to publish it, we may run into issues. But where do you draw the line between publishing and distributing to friends? Where do you draw the line between Stephen King working on his own to write a book for fun about Master Chief, and someone trying to steal someone else's ideas?
And you haven't even mentioned the fact that parody comes under fair use.
My point is simple: your arguments fail completely and utterly because you have never stopped to realize that physical property and intellectual property are not the same things. Figure that out. Then we'll talk.
-stormin
And what if the game sucked beyond belief and turned people off to the idea of a Halo RTS, reducing the sales of Microsoft's hypothetical product?
t y)
That's retarded. One of the things I said was as long as no one confuses their product with an official product. So how could you possibly see a FAN-made RTS and then get "turned off" to the idea of a genuine RTS? That's absurd. No matter how badly a fan-RTS turned out as long as everyone knows it's not an official RTS there will be no brand-dilution. That's like saying someone would read some really awful fun-fiction and then decide not to read the 7th Harry Potter book. Not. Going. To. Happen.
Whatever one might think of copyright laws... Blah, blah blah. Look, when I start saying "all copywright laws should be abolished", then the rest of our paragraph will at least be relevant. So then we can decide if it's right or not. But since I haven't said that, it's not even relevant. So let's not waste time arguing about it.
My point is simple: Microsoft is not a villain in this situation. They simply decided that they don't want someone else using their properties (copyrighted, trademarked, etc.) to create a videogame. That isn't an unreasonable position to take. There are lots of reasons to despise Microsoft, but this isn't one of them.
People don't own ideas. Period. Get that through your head. Not even copyright laws say that. "Intellectual property laws confer a bundle of exclusive rights in relation to the particular form or manner in which ideas or information are expressed or manifested, and not in relation to the ideas or concepts themselves. It is therefore important to note that the term "intellectual property" denotes the specific legal rights which authors, inventors and other IP holders may hold and exercise, and not the intellectual work itself." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_proper
People own specific rights to use the ideas (putting it loosely). Anyone else can use those ideas, as long as they are not infringing on those rights. In simple terms: no harm, no foul. Until I see how the fan-RTS was actually going to negatively impact MS I'm just not buying your silly property analogy - as though a fictional character can belong to someone the way a pencil can. Please.
-stormin
Let's short circuit this and just point out the obvious: there's a difference between what is right and what is legal. I'm not contesting Microsoft's legal right to control their own IP. I'm just questioning the intelligence and ethics of doing so in this specific case.
Now I don't know all there is to know in this case. Maybe they're about to announce a Halo-themed RTS, or have some other reason to need to crack down. But I doubt it. And since I doubt that, this seems like just another knee-jerk reaction to step on fans.
People who love Harry Potter write fan-fiction, people who love Halo make fan-games. Let the fans have their fun. That's all I'm saying.
-stormin
Calling people "dumb" before making your point is not generally an effective approach to influencing people
1. Debate is a spectator sport.
You almost never run into someone who's admitting to be honest and admit they were wrong, and it's a waste of time (all things considered) to go looking for such a person behind posts that lack any evidence of self-revision. In short: the people I'm trying to influence are generally not the ones I call dumb.
2. It's nothing personal
When I come across people whom I perceive to actually be trying to think, I do my utmost to treat them with respect and dignity. But when someone makes assumptions like "the average Facebook user can write Python scripts" I take it for granted that I'm dealing with someone who hasn't bothered to consider what they are saying before posting it.
If that hurts your feelings, I'm sorry. Honestly. That's not just something I say, I do regret it when I hurt people's feelings. My objective is not to be a pain in the ass, but even a cursory glance at Slashdot can show you how much time I'd be wasting if every time some schmuck pounded his infantile rantings I took the time to do a velvet-glove response. If you made an honest mistake, then sorry for biting your head off, but that's the name of the game. I mean this in the nicest way possible: Be more careful next time.
I guess to really understand my posting style you'd have to have been there years ago when I got into my first internet debates. I'd be trying to write some benign post about some hobby of mine and next thing I know 3 or 4 trolls are spreading rather nasty half-truths and lies about my religion. You try being nice to people like that. There's no mercy. (For several years after that I shortened my nick to just "stormin" to try to avoid the confrontation. It worked, but it didn't feel right.) I guess I may not have learned all the right lessons from those experiences, and I'll try to tone it down in future when it's pretty clear nothing major is at stake.
-stormin
That's totally different. That's IP going from "open" to "closed". If, on the other hand, MS came in and grabbed some GPL stuff, improved it, and kept it under the GPL then I'd have no problem with it. Would you?
-stormin
If they were trying to sell the game, I would understand.
If they were trying to pass the game off as official, I would understand.
But if they are giving the game away for free without any deception, than really there's only 2 alternatives:
1. The game is typical "fan" quality, and thus offers no competition for any potential official releases.
2. The game is so good, that MS buys it and (for much less than it would have cost to develop in-house) releases the game officially.
In either case - I don't see why making an RTS version of an FPS is anything other than making fan-fiction based on Harry Potter. Do you see Scholastic or Rowling coming down on all the fan-fiction out there? Of course not.
Why should this be any different?
-stormin
I think I know why MS Games canned us, just need to wait a couple of weeks to make sure, so I'm not really comfortable writing about it yet. But I'm 95% sure it had nothing to do with "spontaneous noticement", and very little to do with "MS are teh jerks and will do anything to stop their IP from being Xploited!!"
.NET frramework, etc.) they come out with this nonsense.
Perhaps there is some reasonable explanation for M$s behavior, I don't know. He seems willing to patiently wait to find out. That's a lot more patience than I have. Just when i was starting to feel like MS wasn't entirely a blight on the face of the planet (free version of XNA, realizing how much of a pain in the ass linux can be to actually use, grudging respect for aspects of the
It's funny to me that M$ had that ad campaign about the dinosaurs. They ARE the dinosaurs. Just like the RIAA, the MPAA, and everyone that's suing Google's project to make books search-able online, I feel like the last remnants of business feudalism are still waving rusty swords and shouting obscenities while those of us not stuck in the 14th century get on with the business of making life better without trying to own, control, and manipulate everything along the way.
-stormin
Seriously, you're just being dumb. How many Facebook users code AT ALL. That looks simple enough that I might be able to pick it up in a few minutes, but I already code in C#, Java, C++, VBA, etc. (Not for a living, mind you, and I'm not very good at it, but I can code.)
But the vast majority of Facebook users don't code at all, and so they don't even know what it would take to begin to learn what it would take to code this. Seriously. Spend some time in the real world and you'll realize that a lot of tech stuff you take for granted may as well be voodoo to these people. These are the same people that manage to post pictures on Facebook, but still can't tell a monitor from a tower when it comes to computer parts, and have no idea what code looks like, how it works, or what it can do.
I guarantee that if writing this kind of code was commonplace among Facebook users, the new Feeds wouldn't have created a stir. Who knows - maybe that's why Mark misjudged the reaction. He too just couldn't fathom that to most people even as simple a bit of code like that is essentially magic.
But proving that, to your own limited and small population group (coders) X is not a big deal doesn't mean that to a very different (and much larger) population group X isn't a huge deal. If you and your buddies are all telepaths, then adding a News Feed is ridiculously trivial. You hear people's thoughts anyway. But to those who don't have that ability, it's a big deal. Same thing here. You can write the PHP code in 5 minutes. Do you want a pat on the back? 99.9% of Facebook users can't. Not a single person in my circle of friends knows how to do that. A few could no doubt learn if they wanted to, but no one knows how to.
-stormin
I'm getting so tired of this.
Option 1 - Facebook the old fashioned way. If you want to get info, you have to manually go get it yourself.
Option 2 - Facebook with a Feed. Now the information can come to you automatically.
Clearly there's a difference between 1 and 2, and it's essentially the amount of effort you save. That's one way to look at it: in terms of cost.
All you're doing is replacing Option 1 with this:
Option 1b - Facebook the old fashioned way. If you want to get info, you can write your own script to get it yourself.
Option 2 - Facebook with a Feed. Now the information comes to you automatically.
So now the difference in effort between 1b and 2 is less (a lot less). Is it the same? No. It took me ZERO effort to get Facebook Feeds. I just logged on one day and there it was. Would it take you ZERO effort to write the script? No. So there's a difference.
Furthermore, how much effort did it take for you to learn Python scripting? You could arguable include some portion of that in the "cost" since scripting in python is not a skill you can assume everyone has (like, say, breathing, walking upright, or even typing if you like).
I'm not saying you can get rich scripting, but it is a valuable skill in the sense that you can make some money doing it. You have a specialized skill that means for you pesronally the benefit of the feeds is dramatically less than for most people. But in general, most people can't script Python (or any language) and so, in general the difference in cost between the options is that reflected in 1 vs. 2 (and not 1b vs. 2).
-stormin
Put me in the stupid column then
Apparently that's where you belong. I say "there's more to this question than just what information is available" and then you respond by saying "the only informational difference..." That's like me saying "even though these boxes are both red, there's more to the question than color. This one is wood, and this one is plastic." and you responding with "yes, but if we restrict ourselves to just color..."
I'm not making the point that the information is different, I'm making the point that even though it is the same information there is a difference between having the information delivered and having to find it yourself. The difference is the amount of work it takes to gather that information for delivery (assuming cost of delivery itself is zero). From the perspective of a research would you rather make 1,000 phone calls to call people or sit in your office and have 1,000 people spontaneously show up and add their opinion to a carefully maintained database?
I don't really think you're stupid, I think the difference is just so mind-bogglingly obvious that you are assuming no one can be so stupid they don't see it, and are therefore looking for some other possible difference in information science and not finding it there. The trouble is that some people really just are that stupid.
-stormin
It matters not what Facebook does or does not have for functionality. They are not the only gatherer and publisher of information on their site.
This is just manifestly false. It this were true there would be no RSS feeds. There's a difference between having to go out and find articles on X, and having articles on X delivered automatically. There's a difference between checking blog Y manually for updates, and having updates from blog Y sent to you. It's really basic. Call it "publish" vs. "broadcast", call it "push" vs. "pull" but to act as though there's no difference is mind-bogglingly stupid. There is a difference - that's why people make money offering these services you twat.
-stormin