If you read the PhysicsWorld article, you'll see it actually says:
But he believed that it would be impossible in practice to track this motion, given the incredibly short timescales over which the Brownian fluctuations take place
Ahhh... still don't have the original source quotation from Einstein here, but it sounds like Einstein believed it was "impossible in practice" - in other words, that the technology didn't exist at that time to measure rapid fluctuations over microsecond or even nanosecond time scales, and maybe he couldn't even imagine such technology existing.
So he never actually said he thought it was beyond the physical limits of the universe. There was no proof or physical law involved.
Now call me up when somebody figures out how to move matter or information faster than the speed of light (i.e. group velocity greater than c). Einstein really did believe that was *impossible*.
Just to give you a word of support - ignore the people saying it's your fault for who you accepted as a friend. The problem is that it's easy to say "yes, this person is my friend", even if they are somebody marginal who you never particularly cared for (it's easy to click "Ignore" for evil ex-girlfriends and the real assholes from high school). But it's very hard to rethink that and unfriend them in such a public forum later on, and have to deal with awkward questions about why you unfriended so-and-so. However, that is what Facebook made the "hide this person's updates" feature for - when somebody isn't egregiously awful enough to unfriend, but you just don't want to see their bullshit updates anymore.
In any case, I didn't actually delete my Facebook account, but I have cleared out any information but the absolute basics. And I began an experiment by avoiding logging into Facebook for a week. I found that I rapidly reverted to visiting other websites and finding other things online to fill my down time at work.
I believe the reason Facebook is so addictive is the feed mechanism. It fills our psychological need for gossip and trivial sorts of information about friends. However, like many addictive things, I think too much of a "good" thing (and by good thing, I mean it's fun, enjoyable, makes us feel connected) is no longer a good thing. While I want to know when old friends go back to grad school, get engaged, married, or have their first kids, I don't really want to hear somebody's snarky comments about their workplace, read about their lost cell phone, hear about how they just bought an iPad and it's changed their lives, or read about their drunken escapades.
So the point - I agree with you, and I think we are both going to be happier, with cleaner, fresher, less cluttered minds for turning our backs on this inane distracting chatter. Saying "I'm Facebook friends with them" has become synonymous with "they are somebody I know but don't really give enough of a shit about to keep up with in real life".
This guy is a bit of an idiot. There's a ridiculously simple Python wrapper right here, based on the Boto S3 library, that Google has already built/customized for him if he doesn't feel like writing his own REST wrapper in the language of his choice.
They provide examples there in a few lines of code each for uploading, copying files, reading metadata, deleting files, etc.
That's about as easy as a web-based file system is going to get. Duh.
If he wants to talk directly to the REST API from the language of his choice, that's fine, but it's really no worse than any other web service API out there in terms of complexity. Or just take somebody else's S3 wrapper library and adapt it like Google did - this probably wouldn't be more than a few hours work (or a few minutes - I haven't looked at how similar the APIs are).
Sure, they are, right here in the US. They have announced that they plan to phase out direct distribution in favor of retail distribution through carriers. Unfortunately, they communicated this so fucking poorly that half the people who read articles based on the press release thought the Nexus One was discontinued and that it was some sort of failure, or even that Google was getting out of the phone business entirely, just when Android is really starting to take off.
In fact, Nexus One is the best GSM smartphone on the market in the US right now. All the iPhone owners who see mine (my wife included) are jealous of how much it can do, and how easily it can do it. Google is obviously bad at PR - or else they would have simply said "We are responding to customer demand to see the phone first and are going to be distributing it through retail stores and carriers in the US".
There was really no need to phase out the online store at all - just accept it as a minor channel that is not going to change the game that the carriers play. Only the ubergeeks are going to shell out the big bucks for unlocked, unsubsidized phones.
There are other options. You can run Android just fine without any of the Google-branded proprietary apps (Google Maps, Google Earth, Gmail, etc.). They are kind of cool, whiz-bang things but you don't need em.
Their mail client is Open Source, and there's a fantastic fork called K9mail that is the most used app on my iPhone. The browser is based on Webkit and there's nothing that forces you to download/use/enable the Flash plugin. You can even download Mozilla Fennec (the alpha build at this point, but hey) if you prefer. There are customized versions of the Contacts and Phone apps out there.
As a matter of fact, there are community-built ROMs out there that don't have the Google stuff built in. Or you can easily enough remove them from your phone if they bother you.
If you want complete freedom and choice, buy the Nexus One, there are ton of custom ROMs for it. Don't buy the carrier-subsidized locked-down phones. Despite the fact that Google is shifting to a retail distribution model, the Google branded phones aren't going away. The Nexus One is currently the best GSM smartphone on the market in the US (Desire isn't available here, EVO 4G isn't GSM). Get it now, build your own ROMs or use other people's ROMs, hack-away, be happy.
Right, I don't have a problem with OpenID. But I see tons of sites pimping the idea that I should log in with my Facebook credentials and relatively few saying "Log in here with OpenID!". A standard that very few people use yet isn't relevant.
Well there's this little problem, see. I am all for the concept of a cross-site single sign on solution that works everywhere. The problem is I'm not okay with "Facebook Connect", which is run by an abusive privacy intruding company with no respect for its users.
Until you find another alternative, we're stuck with the current system.
I am not a securities lawyer, but the SEC 1934 Act allows private civil suits regarding securities fraud. This act has been amended and reformed and affected by case law, but you can get the basic gist of modern requirements for civil securities fraud lawsuites here.
The securities don't have to be publicly traded. You don't have to sit around and wait for the SEC to investigate. If somebody made material misrepresentations in connection with the sale of securities, that's enough to meet the basic threshold of being subject to this law and open to civil suits. Then there are just a series of bars to get over regarding showing that the person knowingly caused you to lose money and had the intention of screwing you.
These things are expensive to litigate, so the stakes have to be high. Your average $250k angel investment gone wrong isn't going to be something you bring to court. A class action representing thousands of shareholders who each lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a publicly traded company, however, has enough money at stake to see this sort of lawsuit fairly frequently.
This case is only unusual in that most parties to large private investments on this scale (tens of millions of dollars) are private equity firms or venture capital funds and they generally can do their own due diligence on transactions in the tens of millions of dollars and can afford to write off the expected percentage of complete losses and partial losses. In this case, the suing party took securities that may have been misrepresented as settlement for a lawsuit, and presumably didn't have the resources on hand to conduct their own due diligence.
So I can't say for certain whether a judge will allow this case - are securities offered as part of a settlement being "offered for purchase or sale"? You'd have to ask a lawyer to tell you whether that is technically the case, but if they accepted the securities in lieu of cash, there might be a case for that.
But just because you don't hear about this kind of case terribly frequently doesn't mean it's total bullshit or that the author is flaming or an idiot.
The funny thing is that actually *all* the good modern web browsers do those things very well. Opera, Firefox and Chrome are all great at rendering stuff pretty fast.
In fact, I'd say at this point that Firefox often is better at rendering/scrolling/browsing around complex pages than Chrome on Windows. At least on my desktop computer it feels perceptually faster (a Core 2 Duo running Windows 7).
Everybody insists Chrome is blazingly faster than anything else out there because it has the fastest Javascript engine right now by a significant margin (how significant depends on whose benchmark - some would say 20-30%, some seem to say 100%+).
But when doing something like scrolling around on Slashdot or other big, content-filled pages, the actual browsing is faster on Firefox. I have compared on several computers. The re-rendering of scrolled pages and elements, screen tearing, weird things when you move the page around that make the browser feel sluggish - all worse with Chrome than Firefox.
I don't know why everybody seems to think that the fastest benchmarked Javascript engine == the fastest web browser. It clearly doesn't - that's only a fraction of the web browsing experience.
Here is a very helpful post from a few weeks back. Easy enough to set up Adblock to block all that stuff out.
Alternatively, if you log out of Facebook after use, most of this stuff doesn't show up. However, that doesn't block all the Facebook content on third party websites according to some.
The Adblock solution seems to be 100% effective for me.
The sad part is that because they are called the Pirate Party, we grown up adults can't really tell friends and family about them without sounding ridiculous. Maybe "Pirate Party" doesn't sound so ridiculous in Swedish or other languages, but in Standard American English it conjures up all the wrong images, especially given the recent rash of high profile high-seas-piracy incidents.
"Creative Commons" - now that's a name that has positive associations. "Open Source" - positive associations. "Electronic Frontier Foundation" - check. These are things I can tell people about in a business or personal context without sounding like a fricking loon.
Yeah, those are mostly so that people don't die in building collapses on your property. I don't hear a lot of people arguing that those are bad ideas. That's a fairly minor sort of freedom to give up (the freedom to build a flimsy death trap) in exchange for knowing that you will most likely not die in a random building collapse.
An article in the Washington Post today still says the estimate is around 5000 barrels a day. The highest estimate they cite from a semi-legitimate source is in the 20,000 barrels a day range.
I haven't seen a single legitimate source for any of these other numbers.
The 200,000 figure is gallons per day, not barrels. 1,000,000 barrels a day is a factor of 200 higher than the government's estimate, so either there's a huge cover-up going or, or that dude is full of shit.
The Constitution features two Amendments within the Bill of Rights, known as Amendment 1 and Amendment 6, which respectively prohibit any laws respecting the establishment of religion or laws restricting the free exercise of religion, and prohibit tests of religion as qualification for public offices or roles.
Since an agreement to form the Bill of Rights was necessary and essential to gain ratification of the Constitution, and the Bill is generally included within the meaning of the Constitution, I'd say it's safe to say that there is a Constitutional separation of church and state.
I'm not sure what you think that phrase means, but it seems pretty clear that the Constitution doesn't want the government messing with religion, nor religion messing with the government.
If you want the phases from the Constitution expounded upon further, there are lots of other writings by the guys who wrote them that clarify their views.
But don't pretend that this is all some mythical liberal conspiracy by talking about people pushing an "agenda".
Sorry, that's not the point. I am well aware of the large size of FB's userbase - and I'm guessing you may work for FB. The size of a network is only part of the equation - the bigger part is the switching costs.
For example, nearly everybody uses Google right now - the userbase is huge, but the network effects keeping people stuck there are relatively minimal. They use Google because it's been the best for some time now and they are used to using it. But it wouldn't take much to get some people to overcome that inertia and start switching. That's why Google has rushed around spending money on other projects, invested in building a mobile platform, and so on. They know that search, in and of itself, doesn't guarantee users will stick with Google and protect their advertising profit margins. But Gmail and Android and Google Calendar and Chrome and Firefox search placement so on - these other services that Google has been in a frenzied panic to roll out over the last few years are the ways they plan to hold on to userbase in the face of competitive threats to the core search business, and to make it harder to totally switch away from Google.
I'll give you an example of a more indirect, but much stronger network effect - the near-monopoly Microsoft has enjoyed due to the installed base of Windows leading to a huge Windows legacy application base and the installed base of Office leading to a huge number of Office documents in every company and on nearly every computer out there. The duration of this effect has been rather staggering - Windows has basically owned the PC market for years now, and has basically owned the office software market. Switching costs are huge if you can't read your existing Word docs or run your legacy apps.
When Facebook is still the dominant social networking platform and is a 100 billion dollar company 20 years from now, I will concede that the network effects were strong indeed and admit that I was wrong on this.
Interesting - OneSocialWeb looks like it has some promise to me. StatusNet seems like it's aimed at a somewhat different role, though it clearly exists already, and I see that there's overlap.
OneSocialWeb needs to make sampling easy - open source is great, but just proclaiming the potential benefits and sticking up source code on a website isn't going to draw people, even geeky people like me, in. This is all still too early or too feature-incomplete to say "here it is, don't bother Diaspora guys, it's already been done".
I realize OneSocialWeb is alpha at this point, but installing your own XMPP server etc. is a relatively high hurdle for setting up an online community.
It has to be easy to try out joining a community AND easy to set up your own community that links into the overall social network if you want to attract even the early adopter types who will then contribute back code and features to the community. The first "open social web" project to hit that critical mass point will probably get some real traction.
People said the same thing about Friendster, for certain values of "everyone" at the time that Facebook started up. They said that MySpace was toast and that Friendster was taking off. Then Friendster just let the whole thing rot and people moved en masse to Facebook. It turned out it wasn't really that hard to pick up and move your social networking to another site - because really, most of the historical content was either not that relevant or not that hard to move.
Now, Facebook has tried hard to make that less true with features with tagging of images that build up their own database of historical information that is a bit harder to move over to another site.
But the reality is that like a club or social venue, the crowds can pick up and move to a new place when the last place becomes passe. And when your grandmother and your parents are all on Facebook, it's safe to say it's less cool than it used to be. More people, but because that network is now *so* broad, from people you went to school with, people you work with, your family, your parents, your kids, etc. it's hard to share anything but the lowest common denominator of information on there, especially with their continual stream of privacy gaffes. Which makes it distinctly less useful to many of us - more like a public website, less like a way to share information with friends.
People can pick up and move to other social networking venues. They aren't realistically going to abandon Facebook of course, but they can add a new social networking venue and just not update their Facebook profiles as much. That's what I did with Friendster. Then after a while, when you notice that nobody else is updating their Friendster profiles either, it stops being interesting going there. As a result, I haven't logged in for probably two years now, but it was a slow withdrawal process.
Don't overestimate the strength of Facebook's network effect. It's there, but it's not all-powerful. Shit on your customers for a while and alternatives will pop up, it's inevitable. I have no idea who will "win" in the long run and I don't think Facebook is going away anytime soon, but there is certainly still room for new entrants.
I think the key is that "openness" in and of itself isn't a feature. There needs to be more of a killer feature to get people to try something new. An open social networking framework is geek-cool, but if there are one or two things you can functionally accomplish there that Facebook can't or doesn't offer, that will get people to sample the new product and consider adopting it.
Most definitely not. Allow me to explain: If a product in inventory is stolen, you, i.e. the company that owned the goods, can write off the cost of goods associated with that product as a loss from theft.
Similarly, if a person owns a car and it's stolen (and not replaced by insurance), they can write off the depreciated value of the car at the time of its theft.
But you can't write off losses associated with products you didn't actually make because somebody illegally copied your software.
Just like you can't get a tax deduction for "donating" unpaid services (because you'd have to record pay for them, i.e. income, then take a deduction for a donation - net tax impact is zero). However, you can potentially write off other expenses actually incurred as part of a charitable endeavor.
So if you had a bunch of software, in boxes, ready to ship to stores, stolen from your warehouse, you can deduct the cost of replicating the CDs, printing the boxes and so on. But you can't deduct the retail or even wholesale price of the software units stolen.
Since there were no direct costs associated with producing the copied items in this case, you can't deduct them.
Otherwise, everybody would "lose" stuff to theft all the time for the tax benefits. And Uncle Sam isn't *that* stupid. There are certainly tax loopholes out there, but they require a bit more cautious execution to benefit from, or they tend to get legislated away eventually.
Yeah, except this isn't a comparison by language. It's a comparison by platform technology. For example, JSP shows as one of the highest vulnerability ratios, whereas Struts (Apache's Java MVC framework) has just about the lowest vulnerability ratio (on par with ASPX).
Clearly they are measuring *something* but it seems to have relatively little to do with languages themselves.
If anything, it seems like web apps written in frameworks that don't actively discourage mixing code and presentation are more likely to have vulnerabilities, whereas frameworks that encourage separation more actively (and perhaps are newer frameworks) are less likely to have vulnerabilities. The worst two measured, Perl and JSP, are older technologies that date from the era before frameworks that enforced more MVC separation were common and before web app best practices really existed.
That does sound awesome - sit around all day, surf the web, read email, and watch video. If you can figure out how I can support my lifestyle on that, I am totally down to replace my Macbook with an iPad too.
Does it still require switching to a "developer channel", a procedure that was fundamentally broken when I tried it the last time? It simply never worked - I repeatedly ran the "channel switcher" app, and nonetheless my browser never switched into the developer channel, and thus no extensions would work.
Does your browser still download ads, slowing page loads down, and just hide them? Or is actual blocking of ad loads now possible?
I know these things exist, but there is still a lot of work to be done on them.
I know fast Javascript is awesome, but it's not the entirety of a web browser. But at least this puts some competitive pressure on Firefox to optimize their Javascript engine further.
My understanding is that Google realized this (albeit a bit late in the game) and has addressed this with the Froyo (Android 2.2) release, by making more pieces of the OS itself into the Market auto-updating framework, and apparently reducing their release frequency to once a year or so after Froyo.
Well, you can obviously see from the response you got that basically nobody agrees with you. Why? Because we've all been barraged with shit ads ever since the internet became a mass-market ad-fest. The ads are excessive, the ads are abusive, the ads are intrusive, and frankly, ad-supported media sucks.
I love HBO. I love Showtime. I own a Roku box and pay for my Netflix subscription. I pay for my New York Times subscription, and read the online content. I've even paid for Slashdot a few times as a subscriber, though most of the value here is created by the commenters, not the stories the "editors" post. In other words, I do pay for the content I use most.
I am *happy* to pay for quality web content that is ad-free. You can have a reasonably amount of my money if you offer me good value for my dime.
I've been begging and begging for years for proper business models for online content. Like content consortiums, micropayment systems, etc.
You morons in the web content industry have failed utterly to provide this. And then you have the nerve to whine and bitch at me? Go fuck yourself. I hope you go out of business and fail if blinking banners and Flash ads are the best ways you can figure out to make money.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the PhysicsWorld article, you'll see it actually says:
But he believed that it would be impossible in practice to track this motion, given the incredibly short timescales over which the Brownian fluctuations take place
Ahhh... still don't have the original source quotation from Einstein here, but it sounds like Einstein believed it was "impossible in practice" - in other words, that the technology didn't exist at that time to measure rapid fluctuations over microsecond or even nanosecond time scales, and maybe he couldn't even imagine such technology existing.
So he never actually said he thought it was beyond the physical limits of the universe. There was no proof or physical law involved.
Now call me up when somebody figures out how to move matter or information faster than the speed of light (i.e. group velocity greater than c). Einstein really did believe that was *impossible*.
Just to give you a word of support - ignore the people saying it's your fault for who you accepted as a friend. The problem is that it's easy to say "yes, this person is my friend", even if they are somebody marginal who you never particularly cared for (it's easy to click "Ignore" for evil ex-girlfriends and the real assholes from high school). But it's very hard to rethink that and unfriend them in such a public forum later on, and have to deal with awkward questions about why you unfriended so-and-so. However, that is what Facebook made the "hide this person's updates" feature for - when somebody isn't egregiously awful enough to unfriend, but you just don't want to see their bullshit updates anymore.
In any case, I didn't actually delete my Facebook account, but I have cleared out any information but the absolute basics. And I began an experiment by avoiding logging into Facebook for a week. I found that I rapidly reverted to visiting other websites and finding other things online to fill my down time at work.
I believe the reason Facebook is so addictive is the feed mechanism. It fills our psychological need for gossip and trivial sorts of information about friends. However, like many addictive things, I think too much of a "good" thing (and by good thing, I mean it's fun, enjoyable, makes us feel connected) is no longer a good thing. While I want to know when old friends go back to grad school, get engaged, married, or have their first kids, I don't really want to hear somebody's snarky comments about their workplace, read about their lost cell phone, hear about how they just bought an iPad and it's changed their lives, or read about their drunken escapades.
So the point - I agree with you, and I think we are both going to be happier, with cleaner, fresher, less cluttered minds for turning our backs on this inane distracting chatter. Saying "I'm Facebook friends with them" has become synonymous with "they are somebody I know but don't really give enough of a shit about to keep up with in real life".
This guy is a bit of an idiot. There's a ridiculously simple Python wrapper right here, based on the Boto S3 library, that Google has already built/customized for him if he doesn't feel like writing his own REST wrapper in the language of his choice.
They provide examples there in a few lines of code each for uploading, copying files, reading metadata, deleting files, etc.
That's about as easy as a web-based file system is going to get. Duh.
If he wants to talk directly to the REST API from the language of his choice, that's fine, but it's really no worse than any other web service API out there in terms of complexity. Or just take somebody else's S3 wrapper library and adapt it like Google did - this probably wouldn't be more than a few hours work (or a few minutes - I haven't looked at how similar the APIs are).
Sure, they are, right here in the US. They have announced that they plan to phase out direct distribution in favor of retail distribution through carriers. Unfortunately, they communicated this so fucking poorly that half the people who read articles based on the press release thought the Nexus One was discontinued and that it was some sort of failure, or even that Google was getting out of the phone business entirely, just when Android is really starting to take off.
In fact, Nexus One is the best GSM smartphone on the market in the US right now. All the iPhone owners who see mine (my wife included) are jealous of how much it can do, and how easily it can do it. Google is obviously bad at PR - or else they would have simply said "We are responding to customer demand to see the phone first and are going to be distributing it through retail stores and carriers in the US".
There was really no need to phase out the online store at all - just accept it as a minor channel that is not going to change the game that the carriers play. Only the ubergeeks are going to shell out the big bucks for unlocked, unsubsidized phones.
Epic PR fail for Google.
There are other options. You can run Android just fine without any of the Google-branded proprietary apps (Google Maps, Google Earth, Gmail, etc.). They are kind of cool, whiz-bang things but you don't need em.
Their mail client is Open Source, and there's a fantastic fork called K9mail that is the most used app on my iPhone. The browser is based on Webkit and there's nothing that forces you to download/use/enable the Flash plugin. You can even download Mozilla Fennec (the alpha build at this point, but hey) if you prefer. There are customized versions of the Contacts and Phone apps out there.
As a matter of fact, there are community-built ROMs out there that don't have the Google stuff built in. Or you can easily enough remove them from your phone if they bother you.
If you want complete freedom and choice, buy the Nexus One, there are ton of custom ROMs for it. Don't buy the carrier-subsidized locked-down phones. Despite the fact that Google is shifting to a retail distribution model, the Google branded phones aren't going away. The Nexus One is currently the best GSM smartphone on the market in the US (Desire isn't available here, EVO 4G isn't GSM). Get it now, build your own ROMs or use other people's ROMs, hack-away, be happy.
Right, I don't have a problem with OpenID. But I see tons of sites pimping the idea that I should log in with my Facebook credentials and relatively few saying "Log in here with OpenID!". A standard that very few people use yet isn't relevant.
Well there's this little problem, see. I am all for the concept of a cross-site single sign on solution that works everywhere. The problem is I'm not okay with "Facebook Connect", which is run by an abusive privacy intruding company with no respect for its users.
Until you find another alternative, we're stuck with the current system.
I am not a securities lawyer, but the SEC 1934 Act allows private civil suits regarding securities fraud. This act has been amended and reformed and affected by case law, but you can get the basic gist of modern requirements for civil securities fraud lawsuites here.
The securities don't have to be publicly traded. You don't have to sit around and wait for the SEC to investigate. If somebody made material misrepresentations in connection with the sale of securities, that's enough to meet the basic threshold of being subject to this law and open to civil suits. Then there are just a series of bars to get over regarding showing that the person knowingly caused you to lose money and had the intention of screwing you.
These things are expensive to litigate, so the stakes have to be high. Your average $250k angel investment gone wrong isn't going to be something you bring to court. A class action representing thousands of shareholders who each lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a publicly traded company, however, has enough money at stake to see this sort of lawsuit fairly frequently.
This case is only unusual in that most parties to large private investments on this scale (tens of millions of dollars) are private equity firms or venture capital funds and they generally can do their own due diligence on transactions in the tens of millions of dollars and can afford to write off the expected percentage of complete losses and partial losses. In this case, the suing party took securities that may have been misrepresented as settlement for a lawsuit, and presumably didn't have the resources on hand to conduct their own due diligence.
So I can't say for certain whether a judge will allow this case - are securities offered as part of a settlement being "offered for purchase or sale"? You'd have to ask a lawyer to tell you whether that is technically the case, but if they accepted the securities in lieu of cash, there might be a case for that.
But just because you don't hear about this kind of case terribly frequently doesn't mean it's total bullshit or that the author is flaming or an idiot.
If FarmVille is the most compelling thing you can find online, then I don't think I want to be your friend. Facebook or real-life friend.
The funny thing is that actually *all* the good modern web browsers do those things very well. Opera, Firefox and Chrome are all great at rendering stuff pretty fast.
In fact, I'd say at this point that Firefox often is better at rendering/scrolling/browsing around complex pages than Chrome on Windows. At least on my desktop computer it feels perceptually faster (a Core 2 Duo running Windows 7).
Everybody insists Chrome is blazingly faster than anything else out there because it has the fastest Javascript engine right now by a significant margin (how significant depends on whose benchmark - some would say 20-30%, some seem to say 100%+).
But when doing something like scrolling around on Slashdot or other big, content-filled pages, the actual browsing is faster on Firefox. I have compared on several computers. The re-rendering of scrolled pages and elements, screen tearing, weird things when you move the page around that make the browser feel sluggish - all worse with Chrome than Firefox.
I don't know why everybody seems to think that the fastest benchmarked Javascript engine == the fastest web browser. It clearly doesn't - that's only a fraction of the web browsing experience.
Here is a very helpful post from a few weeks back. Easy enough to set up Adblock to block all that stuff out.
Alternatively, if you log out of Facebook after use, most of this stuff doesn't show up. However, that doesn't block all the Facebook content on third party websites according to some.
The Adblock solution seems to be 100% effective for me.
The sad part is that because they are called the Pirate Party, we grown up adults can't really tell friends and family about them without sounding ridiculous. Maybe "Pirate Party" doesn't sound so ridiculous in Swedish or other languages, but in Standard American English it conjures up all the wrong images, especially given the recent rash of high profile high-seas-piracy incidents.
"Creative Commons" - now that's a name that has positive associations. "Open Source" - positive associations. "Electronic Frontier Foundation" - check. These are things I can tell people about in a business or personal context without sounding like a fricking loon.
Yeah, those are mostly so that people don't die in building collapses on your property. I don't hear a lot of people arguing that those are bad ideas. That's a fairly minor sort of freedom to give up (the freedom to build a flimsy death trap) in exchange for knowing that you will most likely not die in a random building collapse.
An article in the Washington Post today still says the estimate is around 5000 barrels a day. The highest estimate they cite from a semi-legitimate source is in the 20,000 barrels a day range.
I haven't seen a single legitimate source for any of these other numbers.
The 200,000 figure is gallons per day, not barrels. 1,000,000 barrels a day is a factor of 200 higher than the government's estimate, so either there's a huge cover-up going or, or that dude is full of shit.
The Constitution features two Amendments within the Bill of Rights, known as Amendment 1 and Amendment 6, which respectively prohibit any laws respecting the establishment of religion or laws restricting the free exercise of religion, and prohibit tests of religion as qualification for public offices or roles.
Since an agreement to form the Bill of Rights was necessary and essential to gain ratification of the Constitution, and the Bill is generally included within the meaning of the Constitution, I'd say it's safe to say that there is a Constitutional separation of church and state.
I'm not sure what you think that phrase means, but it seems pretty clear that the Constitution doesn't want the government messing with religion, nor religion messing with the government.
If you want the phases from the Constitution expounded upon further, there are lots of other writings by the guys who wrote them that clarify their views.
But don't pretend that this is all some mythical liberal conspiracy by talking about people pushing an "agenda".
Sorry, that's not the point. I am well aware of the large size of FB's userbase - and I'm guessing you may work for FB. The size of a network is only part of the equation - the bigger part is the switching costs.
For example, nearly everybody uses Google right now - the userbase is huge, but the network effects keeping people stuck there are relatively minimal. They use Google because it's been the best for some time now and they are used to using it. But it wouldn't take much to get some people to overcome that inertia and start switching. That's why Google has rushed around spending money on other projects, invested in building a mobile platform, and so on. They know that search, in and of itself, doesn't guarantee users will stick with Google and protect their advertising profit margins. But Gmail and Android and Google Calendar and Chrome and Firefox search placement so on - these other services that Google has been in a frenzied panic to roll out over the last few years are the ways they plan to hold on to userbase in the face of competitive threats to the core search business, and to make it harder to totally switch away from Google.
I'll give you an example of a more indirect, but much stronger network effect - the near-monopoly Microsoft has enjoyed due to the installed base of Windows leading to a huge Windows legacy application base and the installed base of Office leading to a huge number of Office documents in every company and on nearly every computer out there. The duration of this effect has been rather staggering - Windows has basically owned the PC market for years now, and has basically owned the office software market. Switching costs are huge if you can't read your existing Word docs or run your legacy apps.
When Facebook is still the dominant social networking platform and is a 100 billion dollar company 20 years from now, I will concede that the network effects were strong indeed and admit that I was wrong on this.
Interesting - OneSocialWeb looks like it has some promise to me. StatusNet seems like it's aimed at a somewhat different role, though it clearly exists already, and I see that there's overlap.
OneSocialWeb needs to make sampling easy - open source is great, but just proclaiming the potential benefits and sticking up source code on a website isn't going to draw people, even geeky people like me, in. This is all still too early or too feature-incomplete to say "here it is, don't bother Diaspora guys, it's already been done".
I realize OneSocialWeb is alpha at this point, but installing your own XMPP server etc. is a relatively high hurdle for setting up an online community.
It has to be easy to try out joining a community AND easy to set up your own community that links into the overall social network if you want to attract even the early adopter types who will then contribute back code and features to the community. The first "open social web" project to hit that critical mass point will probably get some real traction.
People said the same thing about Friendster, for certain values of "everyone" at the time that Facebook started up. They said that MySpace was toast and that Friendster was taking off. Then Friendster just let the whole thing rot and people moved en masse to Facebook. It turned out it wasn't really that hard to pick up and move your social networking to another site - because really, most of the historical content was either not that relevant or not that hard to move.
Now, Facebook has tried hard to make that less true with features with tagging of images that build up their own database of historical information that is a bit harder to move over to another site.
But the reality is that like a club or social venue, the crowds can pick up and move to a new place when the last place becomes passe. And when your grandmother and your parents are all on Facebook, it's safe to say it's less cool than it used to be. More people, but because that network is now *so* broad, from people you went to school with, people you work with, your family, your parents, your kids, etc. it's hard to share anything but the lowest common denominator of information on there, especially with their continual stream of privacy gaffes. Which makes it distinctly less useful to many of us - more like a public website, less like a way to share information with friends.
People can pick up and move to other social networking venues. They aren't realistically going to abandon Facebook of course, but they can add a new social networking venue and just not update their Facebook profiles as much. That's what I did with Friendster. Then after a while, when you notice that nobody else is updating their Friendster profiles either, it stops being interesting going there. As a result, I haven't logged in for probably two years now, but it was a slow withdrawal process.
Don't overestimate the strength of Facebook's network effect. It's there, but it's not all-powerful. Shit on your customers for a while and alternatives will pop up, it's inevitable. I have no idea who will "win" in the long run and I don't think Facebook is going away anytime soon, but there is certainly still room for new entrants.
I think the key is that "openness" in and of itself isn't a feature. There needs to be more of a killer feature to get people to try something new. An open social networking framework is geek-cool, but if there are one or two things you can functionally accomplish there that Facebook can't or doesn't offer, that will get people to sample the new product and consider adopting it.
Most definitely not. Allow me to explain: If a product in inventory is stolen, you, i.e. the company that owned the goods, can write off the cost of goods associated with that product as a loss from theft.
Similarly, if a person owns a car and it's stolen (and not replaced by insurance), they can write off the depreciated value of the car at the time of its theft.
But you can't write off losses associated with products you didn't actually make because somebody illegally copied your software.
Just like you can't get a tax deduction for "donating" unpaid services (because you'd have to record pay for them, i.e. income, then take a deduction for a donation - net tax impact is zero). However, you can potentially write off other expenses actually incurred as part of a charitable endeavor.
So if you had a bunch of software, in boxes, ready to ship to stores, stolen from your warehouse, you can deduct the cost of replicating the CDs, printing the boxes and so on. But you can't deduct the retail or even wholesale price of the software units stolen.
Since there were no direct costs associated with producing the copied items in this case, you can't deduct them.
Otherwise, everybody would "lose" stuff to theft all the time for the tax benefits. And Uncle Sam isn't *that* stupid. There are certainly tax loopholes out there, but they require a bit more cautious execution to benefit from, or they tend to get legislated away eventually.
Yeah, except this isn't a comparison by language. It's a comparison by platform technology. For example, JSP shows as one of the highest vulnerability ratios, whereas Struts (Apache's Java MVC framework) has just about the lowest vulnerability ratio (on par with ASPX).
Clearly they are measuring *something* but it seems to have relatively little to do with languages themselves.
If anything, it seems like web apps written in frameworks that don't actively discourage mixing code and presentation are more likely to have vulnerabilities, whereas frameworks that encourage separation more actively (and perhaps are newer frameworks) are less likely to have vulnerabilities. The worst two measured, Perl and JSP, are older technologies that date from the era before frameworks that enforced more MVC separation were common and before web app best practices really existed.
That does sound awesome - sit around all day, surf the web, read email, and watch video. If you can figure out how I can support my lifestyle on that, I am totally down to replace my Macbook with an iPad too.
Does it still require switching to a "developer channel", a procedure that was fundamentally broken when I tried it the last time? It simply never worked - I repeatedly ran the "channel switcher" app, and nonetheless my browser never switched into the developer channel, and thus no extensions would work.
Does your browser still download ads, slowing page loads down, and just hide them? Or is actual blocking of ad loads now possible?
I know these things exist, but there is still a lot of work to be done on them.
I know fast Javascript is awesome, but it's not the entirety of a web browser. But at least this puts some competitive pressure on Firefox to optimize their Javascript engine further.
My understanding is that Google realized this (albeit a bit late in the game) and has addressed this with the Froyo (Android 2.2) release, by making more pieces of the OS itself into the Market auto-updating framework, and apparently reducing their release frequency to once a year or so after Froyo.
Whether it all works out that way, we'll see.
Dude, absolutely EPIC karma burn. Keep it rolling.
Well, you can obviously see from the response you got that basically nobody agrees with you. Why? Because we've all been barraged with shit ads ever since the internet became a mass-market ad-fest. The ads are excessive, the ads are abusive, the ads are intrusive, and frankly, ad-supported media sucks.
I love HBO. I love Showtime. I own a Roku box and pay for my Netflix subscription. I pay for my New York Times subscription, and read the online content. I've even paid for Slashdot a few times as a subscriber, though most of the value here is created by the commenters, not the stories the "editors" post. In other words, I do pay for the content I use most.
I am *happy* to pay for quality web content that is ad-free. You can have a reasonably amount of my money if you offer me good value for my dime.
I've been begging and begging for years for proper business models for online content. Like content consortiums, micropayment systems, etc.
You morons in the web content industry have failed utterly to provide this. And then you have the nerve to whine and bitch at me? Go fuck yourself. I hope you go out of business and fail if blinking banners and Flash ads are the best ways you can figure out to make money.