So if you get divorced because she left you and cheated on you, thats a public record, and you obviously would not mind one bit if on the day of the filing that was on the front page of the NY Times?
You need to update your browser. It's not catching the sarcasm tags.
The only point I was making is that going out to news.google.com and searching for the latest news on topic X is not the same as setting up an automatic filter or feed to send the articles to you. Similarly, checking out the latest article from blog Y is not the same thing as subscribing to the RSS feed from blog Y.
Some people may prefer one to the other, but they are not the same thing The information you get, however, is. So this proves my point: that there's more to this question than just what information is available.
This is so manifestly obvious that it's frustrating to believe there are people too stupid to realize this, and thick enough to actually argue that it's not the case.
If only we could make stupidity more painful... [thanks to whomever I ripped the sig from]
This is a damn social networking site we are talking about, not a copyrighted work.
You mean my analogy wasn't the same scenario as what we were talking about? Are you serious? Crap! Oh wait, it's an analogy.
The principle of spreading information still applies in both cases. That's like me making an analogy about how different OSs are like different car brands, and then you complaining that cars have wheels and OSs don't. The response would be... so? Unless my analogy relied on some intrinsic quality or characteristic of wheels or the lack thereof, then you're just not saying anything intelligent.
People make changes to their profiles with the clear intention of making the new information available to friends. So to complain that that information is made available more easily is absolutely ludicrous.
As opposed to authors, who desperately hope and pray no one will ever read their books.
Authors don't just want people to read their books. They'd also like to get credit for writing them. And they'd also like to get paid. Clearly they want people to read what they write, but there are other considerations.
The same goes for Facebook users. First of all, they don't want everyone to know what's on the profile. If they did, they'd be MySpace users. Second of all, they don't necessarily want all of their friends to know everything that they do on Facebook. A Facebook friend might not be a friend in real life, it might be a passing acquaintance or even an old high school buddy you haven't seen in 10 years or more. I have a couple of Facebook friends whom I don't even recognize (just one or two, not sure when I friended them), a couple of strangers who just wanted to make friends when they moved into my geographical area, and also my wife and my closest friends. Are you seriously saying I want them all to have equal access to what I write?
Now it would be really complicated for me to have to set up unique privileges for all of them. Or to set up nested hierarchies of user groups. Not to mention that I might be giving away information I don't really want to give away (e.g. someone may consider me a closer friend than I consider them, and neither of use would know this until I had access to their entire profile and they had access to practically none of mine). So the Facebook method is simple: if someone wants to find out all about you and track down every comment you've made on every album and wall and discussion board all across your network: they have to do the work. This is a type of marginal privacy in the same sense that locking your front door is marginal privacy. Someone that really wants to break in will be able to. But it would take them time and effort. And most people don't want to do that (plus the threat of jail time - it's not a perfect analogy) but the principle is simple and elegant.
That's what Facebook's new system endangered. Although now of course you can get it back by opting out of the Feed.
No, you're totally wrong. If information is publicly available than it is just public. Period. End of story. If you make information available then obviously you want it immediately delivered to everyone you know.
That's why no one bothers to use RSS feeds and they are such a big flop. Because there's no difference between going and finding info that's available on line and having it delivered to you automatically. None whatsoever.
Instead, they waited three days to plug this massive breach of privacy.
OK, I get really annoyed at the stupid people who can't tell the difference between making information available and delivering it to you all collated and sorted. Clearly how you present the information matters. But to call the Feeds a "massive breach of privacy" is really silly. Every single thing the Feeds announced was information already available to everyone that got the Feed. How is this a "massive" breach?
Massive breaches are when companies lose millions of social security numbers or credit card numbers. You seriously are crazy if you think just broadcasting to a group of friends whom you have already selected to see the information is really that horrible of a deal.
So for 3 days people had an easier time tracking your wall posts. Was it really so traumatic for you?
Why is this insightful? It's not. Do we really have to go around this circle again? How information is accessible is sometimes just important as what information is accessible.
No one previously thought that information they posted on Facebook anywhere was private (at least, from their friends). But now it is being aggregated and broadcast to every friend. If you think this is the same thing, then I suppose you also think that Google making the full-text of every book available on line is the same thing, whether they do it (as they are doing it) by allowing you to see only a snippet at time or whether they allow you to download the whole thing as a text file. The information available in either scenario is exactly the same, but based purely on how easy it is to get at that publicly available info one is fair use and the other is not.
It's just a simple fact, even IF information is public accessible, it still matters how accessible. Stop acting as though privacy is a binary proposition: either top-secret or totally-public with no differences in between. Facebook users are not posting info on the Net and getting annoyed that people aggregate it (which would be annoying but fair) they have joined a private networking group and then the rule's of that networking group got changed and it made a lot of them mad. Nothing private was revealed, but information that would have taken hours to aggregate every single day was suddenly available with 0 effort. That is a change, and not everyone has to be happy about it.
I say "them" because I didn't mind the changes. Now that the new privacy features have been changed, there's pretty much nothing left to talk about. The only complaint Facebook users have left is that the Feed disrupts the layout and (apparently) there's no way to turn it off by default so that you never even see it.
But considering how incredibly fast Mark and Facebook were to implement the needed privacy controls, I'm sure that this too will be available soon in the future. If only every company was as agile and quick to respond to its customers demands...
If the show starts floundering on it's own, then you're right. But that wasn't the case with S:AAB. It started out strong, but from the very beginning Chris Carter had it in for the show because two of his best writers created it. He wanted them back for the X-Files. Remember, this was at the heigh of X-Files mania and Carter was basically god at Fox.
Since S:AAB was actually getting god ratings he couldn't just have the show yanked, however, so he started having it preempted on an almost random basis. It was practically impossible for me to know if S:AAB was going to be on when it was scheduled to.
He also applied all the pressure he could to get his writers back. I think it was that presure, and possible the early loss of the original writers, that led to the decline in quality of S:AAB. I believe if Carter hadn't messed with it, the episodes wouldn't have started. In the end, we'll never know, but if S:AAB had started to suck without outside intervention, I wouldn't have blamed Fox for cancelling it at all.
If you're too stupid to realize that this isn't the same as someone following you,
No, it's not the same. It's an analogy.
These people are CHOOSING to post every detail on a public website, and then complain when people actually see it.
Your inane ad-hominem references to "every detail" and later to drunken pictures are getting annoying. The nature oh the information is utterly irrelevant, and it is also abundantly clear that you do not use Facebook and therefore do not understand what you are talking about. Facebook is NOT just a homepage and a few albums. There's a lot of stuff there.
The fact that there's a lot of stuff is relevant because that's how we find anonymity in a crowd. Haven't you heard the expression "lonely in a crowd"? That's what it's referncing. If your comments are A - spread across literally a hundred+ profiles and B - changed without notfication then you have a degree of privacy.
Now the info is public (as far as your friends are concerned) so you can't get upset that people actually read it, but what Facebook is doing is different. How you present the info matters.
Consider the information that is the full text of Tom Clancy's novel. Google has every right in the world to make the info publicly available, or it doesn't. All depending on HOW they make the info available. If the text is searchable, but only a snippet at a time, then it's legal. If it's full text with butons for "next page", "previous page", etc., then it is illegal
You keep acting as though the only thing that matters is what information is public. This is patently false. More than just the information itself, organization and access also make a difference. They just do. I've given you one clear example - there are many more. Advertisemens do not make information public. You could release your ad on YouTube. But in order to be sure more people see it (who could easily find it on YouTube if they wanted to) millions of dollars are spent to broadcast that info. So again - access matters. Get over that.
No I didn't; something is not more embarresing because mroe people see it. Doing a lot of stupid things isn't new information, since anyone that came to your profile enough could figure that out without the news feeds.
Are you pulling my leg? Can you be this stupid. You wrote that a person who came to your profil could figure that out. What this means, as I said, is that the datum "three stupid events took place" is more than the isolated data that "event 1 happened", "event 2 happened", and "event 3 happened". The fact that there's a pattern is the new infomation. That was my point.
But, to take it further, yes, anyone could find this pattern by going to the site: but they'd have to go to the site. How stupid are you, really? Why do you think that graduate students get paid to do just that? Because there's value in actualy aggregating the information that is already out there. You keep acting as though there's no difference between having 1,000 facts spread out across a couple thousand web pages on the one hand, or having all of those 1,000 facts sorted and presented for you on one page. THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. That's why Google makes money, genius. Because access to information has value independent of the information itself. Do you really need more examples?
"I posted all my pictures of me being drunk and now everyone can see them!! That's not right!!!" Shut up retard.
I have no problem with the new Facebook rules. I joined the group "I for one welcome our new feeds overlords". Clearly that's not an issue to me. I also don't drink, while we're on that topic, and I have nothing on my Facebook profile that I don't want available to every one of my friends.
My whole point has been to reply to people like you who are so stupid you can't tell that there's a difference between information being searchable and information being broadcast.
Look, if you're obsessive, then you're not going to be using Facebook. Most people that are friends are in the same network. That means in the same college. Why would you camp as meager a source of information as Facebook when you could just actually stalk someone?
I'm not trying to make a straw man out of anybody. I don't even dislike the new Facebook Feed. All I'm saying is that there's a difference between posting information that a circle of "friends" (many of whom are not actually close friends) can go out and find of their own initiative, and having every move you make on Facebook broadcast (and yes, broadcast is the right word) to all of those people. It's not the same thing. That's all I'm saying.
Actually, I'm not saying that, other people are saying that.
Look, if you define Facebook as private, then it's private posting versus private broadcast. If you define Facebook as public where "public" means "every one of your friends" then it's public posting versus public broadcast. In either case, the difference is between information that is accessible, and information that is broadcast.
You are right to point out that Facebook isn't just broadcasting to the general public, however.
I agree 100% that the later episodes were moronic. It was really sad watching the show go from "Who Watches the Birds?" to episodes like the ones you are talking about. The continuity of the universe started to fall apart, the characters started to get silly, and the plots got downright stupid.
When I'm talking about S:AAB, I'm referring to the great episodes before the show went into it's death-throes. I assume most other people are too (just as saying "I'm a fan of old-school Star Wars" shouldn't ever be interpreted a "I love the Star Wars Christmas Special").
There is a difference between someone else digging around to get your information, and posting that information yourself on the goddamn internet.
And there's also a difference between Facebook and the "internet". Facebook is not searchable from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. Profiles aren't even completely searchable within Facebook. Quit acting like posting to Facebook is the equivalent to posting to some public messageboard (like Slashdot). It's not.
And as for aggregation - I agree. But nobody aggregates their own Facebook data. The information that can be tracked includes: - all posts to all walls - leaving/joining every group - all posts to all discussion boards - all changes to relationship status - all comments to all photos on all albums - etc.
This information was NOT aggregated previous. That's the whole point. To track it all you'd have to log on to your own account, view your friend's account, and then from there visit every one of their accounts, and within each account you'd have to check out every album. Not to mention checking out every single group, and then all the discussion threads in those groups. There's a TON of aggregation that Facebook users never did, that now is being done. I'm glad you can see that there's a difference.
Do you spray-paint comments about abortion on your friend's house, with the expectation that only he'll read them?
This analogy fails for the simple reason that houses are in public view, profiles are not. If you spray paint on your friend's house, his neighbors are guaranteed to see it - whether they are in the "circle" or not. If I leave a comment on your Slashdot profile (say a comment to your journal, if that can be done) then the analogy fits. But leaving a comment on a friends wall or on a single photo in a single album is akin to an off-hand comment. It's not identical because there's a recording being made, but you can have several albums with dozens of photos - no one's going to continuously cycle through all of those to track down every word you say.
In any case, my wife informed me last night that if you delete something from your mini-feed it is deleted from all feeds. This means that you can easily censor information about yourself that you don't want getting out - assuming that you can delete from the mini-feed before someone else sees it. I think this is a pretty good compromise.
It's clear to me why Facebook did this. They are trying to take their site from being a kind of static reference site to a dynamic social site (aka MySpace). If there's no Feed, it's hard to find out what's going on. With the Feed, it's easy to keep conversations going, react to more posts, group joining/leavings, etc. I kind of like the Feed, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to say it's a bad thing - just that it is a definite change from the previous policy that actually matters to the people who use Facebook.
No, you're not wrong at all. If Facebook was a public web site, you would be, but guess what? It's not.
It's a closed system that requires registration, some measure of authentication, and then even after that it STILL limits you to only seeing people in your network (e.g. college) by default.
When you break up you will tell your best friends, your good friends, and eventually the people that you hang out with (probably). You won't tell them all at the same time. Facebook (as it was) mimicked this. You change your status, only people that change your profile notice soon (if at all). So the information spreads out in the similar fashion to how it will among your "real world" social circle. It IS private, because it's restricted to people you've formally entered into "friend" relationship with.
Now, instead of a natural dispersion, the info will be broadcast the moment you change your relationship status. This is akin to calling a conference call with everyone you know to tell them all the fantastic news "I just got dumped."
First of all, I never said I had a problem with Facebooks new system. I was startled by it, but I don't really care. So I don't have a dog in this fight, from that perspective. I'm not worried about what people say.
What I take issue with is the idea that there's no difference between making information available and broadcasting it. This idea is fundamentally absurd. It's not a very difficult question. If there was a video tape of you doing something really embarrassing, and you were given the option of locating it in hard copy (on a DVD, say) in some random library or having it posted on YouTube with an accompanying targeted marketing blitz to everyone you know, can you honestly tell me you would say "doesn't matter to me - the two are the same"? In either case the information is publicly accessible, but in one case someone would have to go find it, and the other case, it would be gift-wrapped and distributed for you.
Obviously the two are not the same, or we wouldn't need PR and marketing firms. Want to get the word out on Coke? Just make it publicly available. No need to buy time and broadcast it. Just stick it where people will find it 'cause it's the same thing. THAT is what I have an issue with. Not because it threatens me, but because it's so manifestly stupid.
The same applies to the Facebook debate. I'm not saying that it's a good or a bad thing to have the new feed function. What I'm saying is it's not the same thing. Saying "if you want to find out everything I'm doing, you have to constantly monitor my profile, my albums, my wall, my friends walls, my groups, my group albums, my group walls, my group discussion boards, etc" is NOT the same thing as saying "from now on, every move I make anywhere on Facebook will be posted to your profile to read". In scenario 1 anyone that wants to keep tabs on my will have to invest large amounts of effort (or know how to script really well, if that's possible). This means that I can relax knowing that there's a degree of effort required in learning about me.
This acts as a natural filter. The ones who know the most about you will be the ones that spend the most time looking at your profile. Just like in the real world, where generally the ones that know you the best are the ones that are around you the most. I'm not worried about people not learning things about me, but I'd like their degree of knowledge about what I'm doing correspond to their interest in me. Contrast this with the new system, where quite frankly I know more than I'd ever want to know about a lot of my friends. There are people whose profiles I haven't read in MONTHS (if ever) and now I know whenever they join or leave a group? It's creepy.
It's not a question of taking information that otherwise would have been private and making it public. It's a question of taking publicly available information that would have required effort and handing it out. Again - there ARE publicly available records that (given your name and college as a starting point) could be used to assemble quite the dossier on you. Do you REALLY mean to tell me you'd be happy to have someone go through and collect the info and hand it out at your school or work place? Even if there was nothing embarrassing or incriminating in it, aren't you just opposed to a loss of privacy through the revelation of already publicly available information?
That's what happened to Facebook. They signed up to make information SEARCH-ABLE to a select group of friends, not to have it distributed automatically. As (yet another) example of how distributing the information can be just as important as the information itself consider the Google books project. There's nothing wrong with them amassing all the information from published books and making it publicly available. The ENTIRE TEXT of, say, Michael Crichton's latest book, will be publicly available. This is fair use not based on WHAT is known, but HOW Google makes it known. If you can only search the book o
1. If you are honestly saying you would have no qualms about someone follow you around for weeks, note everything you did in public, and broadcast to everyone you know you're either a sociopath or lying. I'm not talking major stuff. I'm just saying, you'd have to watch what you said and you might not want to do that. Even just a montage of every time you try to say a sentence and get tongue-tied would be annoying.
2. But I don't expect you to know that. Not reading a contract you agree to does not mean you cannot be held to said contract. Ask any lawyer. Never said that.
3. No, its not. Its the same three pieces of information. Its more embarresing because you appear to do a lot of stupid things.
You just contradicted yourself. It's "more embarrassing" because now it's not just three embarrassing incidents it's that "you appear to do a lot of stupid things". That's a new piece of information. Exactly as I said. Look, this isn't really a debatable point - it's just basic information science. As you sample more often, you're not just getting disparate data points, you're also increasing certainty about population mean, etc.
If you can't see this basic fact, I can't help you, and it's no wonder you're so confused about whether what Facebook has done has changed anything or not.
Are you going to honestly tell me you've never done anything in public that you'd really prefer not to be emailed to everyone you have contact with. Seriously?
Yup. I don't act like an ass in public.
I'm not bothering to read the rest of your post. Clearly as flawless and perfect an individual as yourself who maintains a public persona that has never been mistaken, never said a wrong word, and has essentially never faced a moment of genuine embarrassment in its entire life is well beyond my meager mortal abilities to comprehend or criticize.
I will now let you return to idyllic status as demi-god among mortals.
The service is. Your profile isn't. Maybe you should have some idea how it works before you start arguing about it. Profiles are broken down into networks (e.g. colleges). You can (by default) see the profiles of people in networks that you share - but most people turn that off and you can only see profiles of people who are your friends. The idea that you can register with an.edu address and see everyone's profile is just totally wrong. It's IMPOSSIBLE to open your account that much.
but your privacy was compromised before, you just weren't aware of it.
Wrong. Privacy is not on/off. You don't prevent security violations. You discourage them. This is how all security works. The essence of keeping people from robbing your house is NOT making your house impossible to rob. It's just about making it not worth their time. So requiring people who wanted to know everything about you to actually continuously loop through your profile, your albums, your friends walls, etc. was a good deterrent. That could take hours to go through just one iteration. No one has the time to do that. Now you don't have to. That's an actual decrease in privacy - just as going from a deadbolt to no deadbolt is a decrease. The deadbolt was never going to keep someone from smashing a 2nd story window and climbing a ladder if they really wanted to get in, but that doesn't mean taking out the deadbolt doesn't make your house less secure.
1. You have information publicly available that you don't want broadcast. Period. I never said "on Slashdot". I never even said "on the web". I guarantee that someone could follow you around for a week or so and have stuff like you picking your nose that you wouldn't want seen on the internet. I'm not saying it would ruin your life, I'm just saying you'd rather it not be there.
2. Come on, are you seriously going to fall back on a EULA? You've got to be kidding me. Everyone knows that no one reads them and that they are routinely unenforceable anyway.
3. Information about information is information. If you do 3 embarrassing things, then each one of those is an embarrassing piece of information. The collection of all 3 is greater than the sum of the parts, however, it is NEW information. This applies to Facebook. When I post on someone's wall, that's one datum. I don't care if someone goes and reads that post. Obviously, or I wouldn't have posted it where people can see it. But when Facebook aggregates all the posts that I've made and presents them to every person I have a connection to - THAT'S NEW INFORMATION. It's new data. Furthermore, it's information that I didn't provide. I provided the individual posts, but I didn't aggregate them in one place and hand the list to Facebook.
In conclusion: Facebook is not the equivalent of a public forum. It's not a public place. Credentials are required to enter. It's a private space. It's as though you rent a few hotel rooms for a circle of friends. They're not your rooms, but you have an expectation of privacy. Any conversation you have in your suite could be overhead by another guest. But that doesn't mean the hotel has a right to bug the room, record every word everyone says, and then give the tapes out at the end of your stay, and I'm pretty sure you'd be pissed if a hotel every tried that on you.
You could even say that instead of conversations, you leave sticky-notes in the various rooms for your friends. Of course if someone else finds it, your fault for leaving it out. But again, should the hotel collect all the stickes and publish them? Is that the same thing? If you leave a sticky note for a friend on their bedside table, is that THE SAME THING as the hotel finding all the sticky notes you leave and giving copies to everybody?
Would you be mad if someone took your picture and wrote a story about what you were doing in public? You wouldn't have any recourse (assuming its all true).
Your problem is you can't tell the difference between those two statements. Yes, if someone published a picture of me picking my nose or something on my college paper I'd be pretty pissed. It's not really a decent thing to do. But I wouldn't have recourse either. But we're talking about Facebook. Why should I sign up to have someone follow everything I do and broadcast it to everyone I talk to?
Are you going to honestly tell me you've never done anything in public that you'd really prefer not to be emailed to everyone you have contact with. Seriously?
You obviously don't care if they see it OR YOU WOULD NOT HAVE POSTED THE INFORMATION THERE. You post it and then expect that others WON'T look at it? What kind of stupidity is that?
You clearly don't understand how Facebook works. I may very well post something on someone else's wall that I'd rather not have everyone I know look at. For example, if I'm talking about how much I hate the War in Iraq and make a joke at stupid conservatives with my liberal buddy on his/her wall, I may not want my other friend to get it as a memo. Sure, I know they might stumble across it, but that's a different risk to run than having it posted to their front page.
Anything I put out on the web myself I cannot expect to keep private.
Who said anything about the web? The internet, in general, is anonymous. Facebook is an onymous site. This means the same rules that apply to the internet in general apply to this location in specific. If you're on Facebook, I can do a ton of research on you because I know your name and the college you go to. Does this mean it's ethical to gather all the info and post it? How would this be different from a kid in your calc class doing the same to you? You may be anonymous on the web, but don't act like you've somehow covered your ass and aren't vulnerable to this. Society is onymous. The argument still applies.
I don't believe you'd find the first thing about me, being able to hire a PI or not.
See above. Facebook is an onymous site, so is real life. If you were on Facebook - I could find the info. If I was in your calc class - I could find the info. In both cases it's legal, but in neither case would you appreciate it.
If you're telling 100 people private details,
Who said anything about private details? It's just about regular friendly relationships. You may not discuss abortion with all your friends at the same time. This doesn't mean you would actively hide your opinions from your friends, but you probably don't want them broadcast either. I'm not worried about people stealing credit card info or finding out that you're cheating on your wife, it's just not the way social relationships work.
No one has 50 to 100 friends. They are aquentices, nothing more. You simpily cannot have that close of a relationship with 50 to 100 people at one time. Choosing to give out that much personal info to 50 to 100 aquentices and then complaining that they actually looked at the info is stupid.
"Friends" are what they're called in Facebook. That's the sense I was using it in. You're just another person who doesn't even use the site complaining about how other people should use it. Why?
And furthermore the WHOLE POINT is that I would not complain if people went to the trouble of looking at my profile. Nothing there is secret. But you have this stupid idea that people only have two ways to think about information: secret or free for everyone. I'm not troubled by someone perusing my profile. That's exactly the type of person I want to see my profile. Someone who cares enough to look. I am annoyed by my profile (or rather, changes thereto) being sent to people who would never bother to look at it on their own. The brill
I said anyone who wanted to know about you could have before.
1. First of all, not "anyone". Facebook is NOT public. Get that in your head. It's friends only. So you shouldn't treat information posted on Facebook the same way you treat information posted on MySpace. I'm not saying it's 100% secure, but that doesn't mean there's no expectation of privacy. A lot of people can pick the lock on your house, but that doesn't mean that if someone does and steals your Magic: The Gathering collection that it's your fault.
2. Secondly, people had to do work to learn about you. That is the very essence of security. No practical security is really 100% effective - from the locks on your door to the encryption on your files. The point of most security is NOT to prevent people from doing something, it's to make it cost enough that most people won't bother. So if you have 100 friends or so, most of them would not pay close enough attention to your profile to know when things change. So if you updated your profile guess what - only people that checked your profile on a regular basis would notice. This would statistically be either a> someone who's stalking you (and they're going to know if it's broadcast or not) or b> close friends.
In this way, the non-broadcast method created natural privacy similar to what we expect in public places. You don't really watch what you say every time you're outside 'cause you just assume no one is taking the trouble to trail you and bug you. I bet it'd be a lot different if you knew every action you made was being broadcast to everyone you considered a friend. There's a very real form of privacy that has been stripped away. Now, instead of just relying on the system to know that in general just your (real) friends would be up-to-the-minute on your status, now everybody is up-to-date on your status. This includes people you want as your (Facebook) friend so that you can keep track of them from year to year, but that you also don't really consider your (real) friends.
The original point was this: Also the Spacecowboy thing didn't appeal anyone outside the US.
If you're just saying it might have been too much of a Western thing, I suppose that's different. I don't really know enough about Firefly's reception outside the US to comment. I just wanted to point out that Westerns may have originated as the prototypical American genre, but that doesn't mean other people don't appreciate the genre.
I find people to be a lot more forgiving of "anime" in general
Understatement of the year! I've never been a fan of anime, but my friend has been getting me to watch a bunch during lunch at work. I'd seen a few in the past (e.g. Akira) and thought they were OK. I realy liked "Nausicaa", but that didn't seem to be "anime" by most people's standards.
So we started with Cowboy Bepop and I like it a lot. Then we watched Trigun and I nearly strangled him. The first episode has to be the most painful 25 minutes of TV I've ever sat through. The rest of the series was very uneven, with some good parts but also incredibly poor animation, worse dialogue (we're talking subtitles, not dubbed) and even more pathetic attempts to use Christian symbolism the writers clearly didn't really get. The sad part is that my friend, who'd seen it through anime-tinted glasses originally, can't seem to like it as much as he used to having seen it through my eyes.
We're onto Macross Plus now, and it seems OK, but I think that - like with a lot of sci fi - the nerds just completely lose their sense of critical appreciation when you throw eye-candy their way (defining eye-candy as either nubile young anime girls or even just spaceships and kung-fu). Same thing for intellectual fodder - the candy seems to be enough for most people. Kind of depressing, really.
charmingly quirky sounds intriguing. I will make another attempt and stick with it into the second season. Thanks for the encouragement (assuming that I actually start to like it by then!)
Slashdot Mirror
So if you get divorced because she left you and cheated on you, thats a public record, and you obviously would not mind one bit if on the day of the filing that was on the front page of the NY Times?
You need to update your browser. It's not catching the sarcasm tags.
-stormin
The only point I was making is that going out to news.google.com and searching for the latest news on topic X is not the same as setting up an automatic filter or feed to send the articles to you. Similarly, checking out the latest article from blog Y is not the same thing as subscribing to the RSS feed from blog Y.
Some people may prefer one to the other, but they are not the same thing The information you get, however, is. So this proves my point: that there's more to this question than just what information is available.
This is so manifestly obvious that it's frustrating to believe there are people too stupid to realize this, and thick enough to actually argue that it's not the case.
If only we could make stupidity more painful...
[thanks to whomever I ripped the sig from]
-stormin
This is a damn social networking site we are talking about, not a copyrighted work.
You mean my analogy wasn't the same scenario as what we were talking about? Are you serious? Crap! Oh wait, it's an analogy.
The principle of spreading information still applies in both cases. That's like me making an analogy about how different OSs are like different car brands, and then you complaining that cars have wheels and OSs don't. The response would be... so? Unless my analogy relied on some intrinsic quality or characteristic of wheels or the lack thereof, then you're just not saying anything intelligent.
People make changes to their profiles with the clear intention of making the new information available to friends. So to complain that that information is made available more easily is absolutely ludicrous.
As opposed to authors, who desperately hope and pray no one will ever read their books.
Authors don't just want people to read their books. They'd also like to get credit for writing them. And they'd also like to get paid. Clearly they want people to read what they write, but there are other considerations.
The same goes for Facebook users. First of all, they don't want everyone to know what's on the profile. If they did, they'd be MySpace users. Second of all, they don't necessarily want all of their friends to know everything that they do on Facebook. A Facebook friend might not be a friend in real life, it might be a passing acquaintance or even an old high school buddy you haven't seen in 10 years or more. I have a couple of Facebook friends whom I don't even recognize (just one or two, not sure when I friended them), a couple of strangers who just wanted to make friends when they moved into my geographical area, and also my wife and my closest friends. Are you seriously saying I want them all to have equal access to what I write?
Now it would be really complicated for me to have to set up unique privileges for all of them. Or to set up nested hierarchies of user groups. Not to mention that I might be giving away information I don't really want to give away (e.g. someone may consider me a closer friend than I consider them, and neither of use would know this until I had access to their entire profile and they had access to practically none of mine). So the Facebook method is simple: if someone wants to find out all about you and track down every comment you've made on every album and wall and discussion board all across your network: they have to do the work. This is a type of marginal privacy in the same sense that locking your front door is marginal privacy. Someone that really wants to break in will be able to. But it would take them time and effort. And most people don't want to do that (plus the threat of jail time - it's not a perfect analogy) but the principle is simple and elegant.
That's what Facebook's new system endangered. Although now of course you can get it back by opting out of the Feed.
-stormin
No, you're totally wrong. If information is publicly available than it is just public. Period. End of story. If you make information available then obviously you want it immediately delivered to everyone you know.
That's why no one bothers to use RSS feeds and they are such a big flop. Because there's no difference between going and finding info that's available on line and having it delivered to you automatically. None whatsoever.
-stormin
Instead, they waited three days to plug this massive breach of privacy.
OK, I get really annoyed at the stupid people who can't tell the difference between making information available and delivering it to you all collated and sorted. Clearly how you present the information matters. But to call the Feeds a "massive breach of privacy" is really silly. Every single thing the Feeds announced was information already available to everyone that got the Feed. How is this a "massive" breach?
Massive breaches are when companies lose millions of social security numbers or credit card numbers. You seriously are crazy if you think just broadcasting to a group of friends whom you have already selected to see the information is really that horrible of a deal.
So for 3 days people had an easier time tracking your wall posts. Was it really so traumatic for you?
-stormin
What do you expect from college kids?
Imagine if they viewed MS the way they view Facebook... I'd hate to be in Redmond in the days after Vista rolled out.
"WHAT!? YOU'RE MISSING A DRIVER!?? PROTEST TIME!!! "
-stormin
Why is this insightful? It's not. Do we really have to go around this circle again? How information is accessible is sometimes just important as what information is accessible.
No one previously thought that information they posted on Facebook anywhere was private (at least, from their friends). But now it is being aggregated and broadcast to every friend. If you think this is the same thing, then I suppose you also think that Google making the full-text of every book available on line is the same thing, whether they do it (as they are doing it) by allowing you to see only a snippet at time or whether they allow you to download the whole thing as a text file. The information available in either scenario is exactly the same, but based purely on how easy it is to get at that publicly available info one is fair use and the other is not.
It's just a simple fact, even IF information is public accessible, it still matters how accessible. Stop acting as though privacy is a binary proposition: either top-secret or totally-public with no differences in between. Facebook users are not posting info on the Net and getting annoyed that people aggregate it (which would be annoying but fair) they have joined a private networking group and then the rule's of that networking group got changed and it made a lot of them mad. Nothing private was revealed, but information that would have taken hours to aggregate every single day was suddenly available with 0 effort. That is a change, and not everyone has to be happy about it.
I say "them" because I didn't mind the changes. Now that the new privacy features have been changed, there's pretty much nothing left to talk about. The only complaint Facebook users have left is that the Feed disrupts the layout and (apparently) there's no way to turn it off by default so that you never even see it.
But considering how incredibly fast Mark and Facebook were to implement the needed privacy controls, I'm sure that this too will be available soon in the future. If only every company was as agile and quick to respond to its customers demands...
-stormin
If the show starts floundering on it's own, then you're right. But that wasn't the case with S:AAB. It started out strong, but from the very beginning Chris Carter had it in for the show because two of his best writers created it. He wanted them back for the X-Files. Remember, this was at the heigh of X-Files mania and Carter was basically god at Fox.
Since S:AAB was actually getting god ratings he couldn't just have the show yanked, however, so he started having it preempted on an almost random basis. It was practically impossible for me to know if S:AAB was going to be on when it was scheduled to.
He also applied all the pressure he could to get his writers back. I think it was that presure, and possible the early loss of the original writers, that led to the decline in quality of S:AAB. I believe if Carter hadn't messed with it, the episodes wouldn't have started. In the end, we'll never know, but if S:AAB had started to suck without outside intervention, I wouldn't have blamed Fox for cancelling it at all.
-stormin
If you're too stupid to realize that this isn't the same as someone following you,
No, it's not the same. It's an analogy.
These people are CHOOSING to post every detail on a public website, and then complain when people actually see it.
Your inane ad-hominem references to "every detail" and later to drunken pictures are getting annoying. The nature oh the information is utterly irrelevant, and it is also abundantly clear that you do not use Facebook and therefore do not understand what you are talking about. Facebook is NOT just a homepage and a few albums. There's a lot of stuff there.
The fact that there's a lot of stuff is relevant because that's how we find anonymity in a crowd. Haven't you heard the expression "lonely in a crowd"? That's what it's referncing. If your comments are A - spread across literally a hundred+ profiles and B - changed without notfication then you have a degree of privacy.
Now the info is public (as far as your friends are concerned) so you can't get upset that people actually read it, but what Facebook is doing is different. How you present the info matters.
Consider the information that is the full text of Tom Clancy's novel. Google has every right in the world to make the info publicly available, or it doesn't. All depending on HOW they make the info available. If the text is searchable, but only a snippet at a time, then it's legal. If it's full text with butons for "next page", "previous page", etc., then it is illegal
You keep acting as though the only thing that matters is what information is public. This is patently false. More than just the information itself, organization and access also make a difference. They just do. I've given you one clear example - there are many more. Advertisemens do not make information public. You could release your ad on YouTube. But in order to be sure more people see it (who could easily find it on YouTube if they wanted to) millions of dollars are spent to broadcast that info. So again - access matters. Get over that.
No I didn't; something is not more embarresing because mroe people see it. Doing a lot of stupid things isn't new information, since anyone that came to your profile enough could figure that out without the news feeds.
Are you pulling my leg? Can you be this stupid. You wrote that a person who came to your profil could figure that out. What this means, as I said, is that the datum "three stupid events took place" is more than the isolated data that "event 1 happened", "event 2 happened", and "event 3 happened". The fact that there's a pattern is the new infomation. That was my point.
But, to take it further, yes, anyone could find this pattern by going to the site: but they'd have to go to the site. How stupid are you, really? Why do you think that graduate students get paid to do just that? Because there's value in actualy aggregating the information that is already out there. You keep acting as though there's no difference between having 1,000 facts spread out across a couple thousand web pages on the one hand, or having all of those 1,000 facts sorted and presented for you on one page. THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. That's why Google makes money, genius. Because access to information has value independent of the information itself. Do you really need more examples?
"I posted all my pictures of me being drunk and now everyone can see them!! That's not right!!!" Shut up retard.
I have no problem with the new Facebook rules. I joined the group "I for one welcome our new feeds overlords". Clearly that's not an issue to me. I also don't drink, while we're on that topic, and I have nothing on my Facebook profile that I don't want available to every one of my friends.
My whole point has been to reply to people like you who are so stupid you can't tell that there's a difference between information being searchable and information being broadcast.
-stormin
Well said.
Go fuck yourself.
Touché.
Look, if you're obsessive, then you're not going to be using Facebook. Most people that are friends are in the same network. That means in the same college. Why would you camp as meager a source of information as Facebook when you could just actually stalk someone?
I'm not trying to make a straw man out of anybody. I don't even dislike the new Facebook Feed. All I'm saying is that there's a difference between posting information that a circle of "friends" (many of whom are not actually close friends) can go out and find of their own initiative, and having every move you make on Facebook broadcast (and yes, broadcast is the right word) to all of those people. It's not the same thing. That's all I'm saying.
-stormin
Actually, I'm not saying that, other people are saying that.
Look, if you define Facebook as private, then it's private posting versus private broadcast. If you define Facebook as public where "public" means "every one of your friends" then it's public posting versus public broadcast. In either case, the difference is between information that is accessible, and information that is broadcast.
You are right to point out that Facebook isn't just broadcasting to the general public, however.
-stormin
I agree 100% that the later episodes were moronic. It was really sad watching the show go from "Who Watches the Birds?" to episodes like the ones you are talking about. The continuity of the universe started to fall apart, the characters started to get silly, and the plots got downright stupid.
When I'm talking about S:AAB, I'm referring to the great episodes before the show went into it's death-throes. I assume most other people are too (just as saying "I'm a fan of old-school Star Wars" shouldn't ever be interpreted a "I love the Star Wars Christmas Special").
-stormin
There is a difference between someone else digging around to get your information, and posting that information yourself on the goddamn internet.
And there's also a difference between Facebook and the "internet". Facebook is not searchable from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. Profiles aren't even completely searchable within Facebook. Quit acting like posting to Facebook is the equivalent to posting to some public messageboard (like Slashdot). It's not.
And as for aggregation - I agree. But nobody aggregates their own Facebook data. The information that can be tracked includes:
- all posts to all walls
- leaving/joining every group
- all posts to all discussion boards
- all changes to relationship status
- all comments to all photos on all albums
- etc.
This information was NOT aggregated previous. That's the whole point. To track it all you'd have to log on to your own account, view your friend's account, and then from there visit every one of their accounts, and within each account you'd have to check out every album. Not to mention checking out every single group, and then all the discussion threads in those groups. There's a TON of aggregation that Facebook users never did, that now is being done. I'm glad you can see that there's a difference.
Do you spray-paint comments about abortion on your friend's house, with the expectation that only he'll read them?
This analogy fails for the simple reason that houses are in public view, profiles are not. If you spray paint on your friend's house, his neighbors are guaranteed to see it - whether they are in the "circle" or not. If I leave a comment on your Slashdot profile (say a comment to your journal, if that can be done) then the analogy fits. But leaving a comment on a friends wall or on a single photo in a single album is akin to an off-hand comment. It's not identical because there's a recording being made, but you can have several albums with dozens of photos - no one's going to continuously cycle through all of those to track down every word you say.
In any case, my wife informed me last night that if you delete something from your mini-feed it is deleted from all feeds. This means that you can easily censor information about yourself that you don't want getting out - assuming that you can delete from the mini-feed before someone else sees it. I think this is a pretty good compromise.
It's clear to me why Facebook did this. They are trying to take their site from being a kind of static reference site to a dynamic social site (aka MySpace). If there's no Feed, it's hard to find out what's going on. With the Feed, it's easy to keep conversations going, react to more posts, group joining/leavings, etc. I kind of like the Feed, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to say it's a bad thing - just that it is a definite change from the previous policy that actually matters to the people who use Facebook.
-stormin
No, you're not wrong at all. If Facebook was a public web site, you would be, but guess what? It's not.
It's a closed system that requires registration, some measure of authentication, and then even after that it STILL limits you to only seeing people in your network (e.g. college) by default.
When you break up you will tell your best friends, your good friends, and eventually the people that you hang out with (probably). You won't tell them all at the same time. Facebook (as it was) mimicked this. You change your status, only people that change your profile notice soon (if at all). So the information spreads out in the similar fashion to how it will among your "real world" social circle. It IS private, because it's restricted to people you've formally entered into "friend" relationship with.
Now, instead of a natural dispersion, the info will be broadcast the moment you change your relationship status. This is akin to calling a conference call with everyone you know to tell them all the fantastic news "I just got dumped."
-stormin
First of all, I never said I had a problem with Facebooks new system. I was startled by it, but I don't really care. So I don't have a dog in this fight, from that perspective. I'm not worried about what people say.
What I take issue with is the idea that there's no difference between making information available and broadcasting it. This idea is fundamentally absurd. It's not a very difficult question. If there was a video tape of you doing something really embarrassing, and you were given the option of locating it in hard copy (on a DVD, say) in some random library or having it posted on YouTube with an accompanying targeted marketing blitz to everyone you know, can you honestly tell me you would say "doesn't matter to me - the two are the same"? In either case the information is publicly accessible, but in one case someone would have to go find it, and the other case, it would be gift-wrapped and distributed for you.
Obviously the two are not the same, or we wouldn't need PR and marketing firms. Want to get the word out on Coke? Just make it publicly available. No need to buy time and broadcast it. Just stick it where people will find it 'cause it's the same thing. THAT is what I have an issue with. Not because it threatens me, but because it's so manifestly stupid.
The same applies to the Facebook debate. I'm not saying that it's a good or a bad thing to have the new feed function. What I'm saying is it's not the same thing. Saying "if you want to find out everything I'm doing, you have to constantly monitor my profile, my albums, my wall, my friends walls, my groups, my group albums, my group walls, my group discussion boards, etc" is NOT the same thing as saying "from now on, every move I make anywhere on Facebook will be posted to your profile to read". In scenario 1 anyone that wants to keep tabs on my will have to invest large amounts of effort (or know how to script really well, if that's possible). This means that I can relax knowing that there's a degree of effort required in learning about me.
This acts as a natural filter. The ones who know the most about you will be the ones that spend the most time looking at your profile. Just like in the real world, where generally the ones that know you the best are the ones that are around you the most. I'm not worried about people not learning things about me, but I'd like their degree of knowledge about what I'm doing correspond to their interest in me. Contrast this with the new system, where quite frankly I know more than I'd ever want to know about a lot of my friends. There are people whose profiles I haven't read in MONTHS (if ever) and now I know whenever they join or leave a group? It's creepy.
It's not a question of taking information that otherwise would have been private and making it public. It's a question of taking publicly available information that would have required effort and handing it out. Again - there ARE publicly available records that (given your name and college as a starting point) could be used to assemble quite the dossier on you. Do you REALLY mean to tell me you'd be happy to have someone go through and collect the info and hand it out at your school or work place? Even if there was nothing embarrassing or incriminating in it, aren't you just opposed to a loss of privacy through the revelation of already publicly available information?
That's what happened to Facebook. They signed up to make information SEARCH-ABLE to a select group of friends, not to have it distributed automatically. As (yet another) example of how distributing the information can be just as important as the information itself consider the Google books project. There's nothing wrong with them amassing all the information from published books and making it publicly available. The ENTIRE TEXT of, say, Michael Crichton's latest book, will be publicly available. This is fair use not based on WHAT is known, but HOW Google makes it known. If you can only search the book o
Right, 'cause that's what you're average Facebook user wants to do. Write a script to cycle through their friends and monitor every single event.
You're on crack.
-stormin
1. If you are honestly saying you would have no qualms about someone follow you around for weeks, note everything you did in public, and broadcast to everyone you know you're either a sociopath or lying. I'm not talking major stuff. I'm just saying, you'd have to watch what you said and you might not want to do that. Even just a montage of every time you try to say a sentence and get tongue-tied would be annoying.
2. But I don't expect you to know that. Not reading a contract you agree to does not mean you cannot be held to said contract. Ask any lawyer. Never said that.
3. No, its not. Its the same three pieces of information. Its more embarresing because you appear to do a lot of stupid things.
You just contradicted yourself. It's "more embarrassing" because now it's not just three embarrassing incidents it's that "you appear to do a lot of stupid things". That's a new piece of information. Exactly as I said. Look, this isn't really a debatable point - it's just basic information science. As you sample more often, you're not just getting disparate data points, you're also increasing certainty about population mean, etc.
If you can't see this basic fact, I can't help you, and it's no wonder you're so confused about whether what Facebook has done has changed anything or not.
-stormin
Are you going to honestly tell me you've never done anything in public that you'd really prefer not to be emailed to everyone you have contact with. Seriously?
Yup. I don't act like an ass in public.
I'm not bothering to read the rest of your post. Clearly as flawless and perfect an individual as yourself who maintains a public persona that has never been mistaken, never said a wrong word, and has essentially never faced a moment of genuine embarrassment in its entire life is well beyond my meager mortal abilities to comprehend or criticize.
I will now let you return to idyllic status as demi-god among mortals.
Asshat.
-stormin
It's open to anyone with an edu email, isn't it?
.edu address and see everyone's profile is just totally wrong. It's IMPOSSIBLE to open your account that much.
The service is. Your profile isn't. Maybe you should have some idea how it works before you start arguing about it. Profiles are broken down into networks (e.g. colleges). You can (by default) see the profiles of people in networks that you share - but most people turn that off and you can only see profiles of people who are your friends. The idea that you can register with an
but your privacy was compromised before, you just weren't aware of it.
Wrong. Privacy is not on/off. You don't prevent security violations. You discourage them. This is how all security works. The essence of keeping people from robbing your house is NOT making your house impossible to rob. It's just about making it not worth their time. So requiring people who wanted to know everything about you to actually continuously loop through your profile, your albums, your friends walls, etc. was a good deterrent. That could take hours to go through just one iteration. No one has the time to do that. Now you don't have to. That's an actual decrease in privacy - just as going from a deadbolt to no deadbolt is a decrease. The deadbolt was never going to keep someone from smashing a 2nd story window and climbing a ladder if they really wanted to get in, but that doesn't mean taking out the deadbolt doesn't make your house less secure.
-stormin
1. You have information publicly available that you don't want broadcast. Period. I never said "on Slashdot". I never even said "on the web". I guarantee that someone could follow you around for a week or so and have stuff like you picking your nose that you wouldn't want seen on the internet. I'm not saying it would ruin your life, I'm just saying you'd rather it not be there.
2. Come on, are you seriously going to fall back on a EULA? You've got to be kidding me. Everyone knows that no one reads them and that they are routinely unenforceable anyway.
3. Information about information is information. If you do 3 embarrassing things, then each one of those is an embarrassing piece of information. The collection of all 3 is greater than the sum of the parts, however, it is NEW information. This applies to Facebook. When I post on someone's wall, that's one datum. I don't care if someone goes and reads that post. Obviously, or I wouldn't have posted it where people can see it. But when Facebook aggregates all the posts that I've made and presents them to every person I have a connection to - THAT'S NEW INFORMATION. It's new data. Furthermore, it's information that I didn't provide. I provided the individual posts, but I didn't aggregate them in one place and hand the list to Facebook.
In conclusion: Facebook is not the equivalent of a public forum. It's not a public place. Credentials are required to enter. It's a private space. It's as though you rent a few hotel rooms for a circle of friends. They're not your rooms, but you have an expectation of privacy. Any conversation you have in your suite could be overhead by another guest. But that doesn't mean the hotel has a right to bug the room, record every word everyone says, and then give the tapes out at the end of your stay, and I'm pretty sure you'd be pissed if a hotel every tried that on you.
You could even say that instead of conversations, you leave sticky-notes in the various rooms for your friends. Of course if someone else finds it, your fault for leaving it out. But again, should the hotel collect all the stickes and publish them? Is that the same thing? If you leave a sticky note for a friend on their bedside table, is that THE SAME THING as the hotel finding all the sticky notes you leave and giving copies to everybody?
-stormin
Would you be mad if someone took your picture and wrote a story about what you were doing in public? You wouldn't have any recourse (assuming its all true).
Your problem is you can't tell the difference between those two statements. Yes, if someone published a picture of me picking my nose or something on my college paper I'd be pretty pissed. It's not really a decent thing to do. But I wouldn't have recourse either. But we're talking about Facebook. Why should I sign up to have someone follow everything I do and broadcast it to everyone I talk to?
Are you going to honestly tell me you've never done anything in public that you'd really prefer not to be emailed to everyone you have contact with. Seriously?
You obviously don't care if they see it OR YOU WOULD NOT HAVE POSTED THE INFORMATION THERE. You post it and then expect that others WON'T look at it? What kind of stupidity is that?
You clearly don't understand how Facebook works. I may very well post something on someone else's wall that I'd rather not have everyone I know look at. For example, if I'm talking about how much I hate the War in Iraq and make a joke at stupid conservatives with my liberal buddy on his/her wall, I may not want my other friend to get it as a memo. Sure, I know they might stumble across it, but that's a different risk to run than having it posted to their front page.
Anything I put out on the web myself I cannot expect to keep private.
Who said anything about the web? The internet, in general, is anonymous. Facebook is an onymous site. This means the same rules that apply to the internet in general apply to this location in specific. If you're on Facebook, I can do a ton of research on you because I know your name and the college you go to. Does this mean it's ethical to gather all the info and post it? How would this be different from a kid in your calc class doing the same to you? You may be anonymous on the web, but don't act like you've somehow covered your ass and aren't vulnerable to this. Society is onymous. The argument still applies.
I don't believe you'd find the first thing about me, being able to hire a PI or not.
See above. Facebook is an onymous site, so is real life. If you were on Facebook - I could find the info. If I was in your calc class - I could find the info. In both cases it's legal, but in neither case would you appreciate it.
If you're telling 100 people private details,
Who said anything about private details? It's just about regular friendly relationships. You may not discuss abortion with all your friends at the same time. This doesn't mean you would actively hide your opinions from your friends, but you probably don't want them broadcast either. I'm not worried about people stealing credit card info or finding out that you're cheating on your wife, it's just not the way social relationships work.
No one has 50 to 100 friends. They are aquentices, nothing more. You simpily cannot have that close of a relationship with 50 to 100 people at one time. Choosing to give out that much personal info to 50 to 100 aquentices and then complaining that they actually looked at the info is stupid.
"Friends" are what they're called in Facebook. That's the sense I was using it in. You're just another person who doesn't even use the site complaining about how other people should use it. Why?
And furthermore the WHOLE POINT is that I would not complain if people went to the trouble of looking at my profile. Nothing there is secret. But you have this stupid idea that people only have two ways to think about information: secret or free for everyone. I'm not troubled by someone perusing my profile. That's exactly the type of person I want to see my profile. Someone who cares enough to look. I am annoyed by my profile (or rather, changes thereto) being sent to people who would never bother to look at it on their own. The brill
What are you talking about?
I said anyone who wanted to know about you could have before.
1. First of all, not "anyone". Facebook is NOT public. Get that in your head. It's friends only. So you shouldn't treat information posted on Facebook the same way you treat information posted on MySpace. I'm not saying it's 100% secure, but that doesn't mean there's no expectation of privacy. A lot of people can pick the lock on your house, but that doesn't mean that if someone does and steals your Magic: The Gathering collection that it's your fault.
2. Secondly, people had to do work to learn about you. That is the very essence of security. No practical security is really 100% effective - from the locks on your door to the encryption on your files. The point of most security is NOT to prevent people from doing something, it's to make it cost enough that most people won't bother. So if you have 100 friends or so, most of them would not pay close enough attention to your profile to know when things change. So if you updated your profile guess what - only people that checked your profile on a regular basis would notice. This would statistically be either a> someone who's stalking you (and they're going to know if it's broadcast or not) or b> close friends.
In this way, the non-broadcast method created natural privacy similar to what we expect in public places. You don't really watch what you say every time you're outside 'cause you just assume no one is taking the trouble to trail you and bug you. I bet it'd be a lot different if you knew every action you made was being broadcast to everyone you considered a friend. There's a very real form of privacy that has been stripped away. Now, instead of just relying on the system to know that in general just your (real) friends would be up-to-the-minute on your status, now everybody is up-to-date on your status. This includes people you want as your (Facebook) friend so that you can keep track of them from year to year, but that you also don't really consider your (real) friends.
-stormin
The original point was this: Also the Spacecowboy thing didn't appeal anyone outside the US.
If you're just saying it might have been too much of a Western thing, I suppose that's different. I don't really know enough about Firefly's reception outside the US to comment. I just wanted to point out that Westerns may have originated as the prototypical American genre, but that doesn't mean other people don't appreciate the genre.
I find people to be a lot more forgiving of "anime" in general
Understatement of the year! I've never been a fan of anime, but my friend has been getting me to watch a bunch during lunch at work. I'd seen a few in the past (e.g. Akira) and thought they were OK. I realy liked "Nausicaa", but that didn't seem to be "anime" by most people's standards.
So we started with Cowboy Bepop and I like it a lot. Then we watched Trigun and I nearly strangled him. The first episode has to be the most painful 25 minutes of TV I've ever sat through. The rest of the series was very uneven, with some good parts but also incredibly poor animation, worse dialogue (we're talking subtitles, not dubbed) and even more pathetic attempts to use Christian symbolism the writers clearly didn't really get. The sad part is that my friend, who'd seen it through anime-tinted glasses originally, can't seem to like it as much as he used to having seen it through my eyes.
We're onto Macross Plus now, and it seems OK, but I think that - like with a lot of sci fi - the nerds just completely lose their sense of critical appreciation when you throw eye-candy their way (defining eye-candy as either nubile young anime girls or even just spaceships and kung-fu). Same thing for intellectual fodder - the candy seems to be enough for most people. Kind of depressing, really.
-stormin
charmingly quirky sounds intriguing. I will make another attempt and stick with it into the second season. Thanks for the encouragement (assuming that I actually start to like it by then!)
-stormin