I just bought a $50 dollar peripheral for my computer specifically so that I could have a stylus, write handwritten notes and sketches.
The issue is that if you have to have a stylus, it becomes a pain, because you are sitting there awkwardly hunched trying to scratch out handwriting. (elbows in, hunched over squinting at the screen).
Friending someone gives them permission to pull from your most recent feed.
I suppose that if you really wanted privacy, you could give everyone a public key, and then only syndicate your information encrypted with the keys of people who you have friended.
Then I guess you would use a desktop client or something to read feeds... allowing them to be unencrypted someone else's server would kind of defeat the purpose.
Of course, the real problem with privacy on Facebook is that you can't really have it.
When you have 100+ facebook friends, there is a massive attack surface for your information to be leaked. (In our example, get their key stolen, or simply decrypt and repost to a different server). It is almost a ridiculous request...
Or some sort of distributed system with a number of servers provided by anyone, acting on a specified protocol, allowing you to pull from one network to the other.
Like the http or smtp, except for posting short messages about what you had for lunch and funny pictures of your cat.
Fruits are much different from high fructose corn syrup.
I think that people really over complicate things.
On an abstract 'surface' level, it is a very simple feedback system. If you have an idea as to how it works, you should be able to adjust your response to the system (similar to introspecting your brain to adjust your mood).
I therefore try to use a very simple set of rules:
1.) Be hungry before you eat (actually hungry, not bored and looking for something to do...). (Corollary is 'don't snack'; how would you get hungry if you are eating potato chips all day?). I also try to ask myself 'am i hungry or did i just see a commercial for something and it gave me a craving'.
2.) Don't eat until you are full (that stretched out feeling is bad). Eat until you are not hungry (you have to eat slowly to do this).
3.) Mostly plants, lots of water, protein is good too, processed stuff is bad. Cooking for yourself is generally much healthier (if you have common sense and don't set yourself on fire).
4.) Exercise is good, but don't get any delusions of looking like an underwear model. Underwear models aren't any more natural than fat people.
You went a little bit overboard on the rhetoric. The analogy between Android vs iPhone and McDonald's vs Jean Georges is over the top. It comes off as snobbery.
Yes, I know there are online fax services but they don't really solve the requirement of getting my signature on the document.
I bought a pen tablet. It was about 60 bucks, but the cheap ones are even cheaper. You can sign things with it, and if you aren't afraid of a make file it even works (quite easily) on Linux.
That said, I think not getting a printer at all is a mistake. Sometimes it is really nice to be able to print stuff and take it with you and not rely on something with a battery life.
That doesn't make any sense and its not a good analogy.
A Toyota is a hugely expensive piece of hardware.
IE is a 'free' (as in beer) piece of software. Software is cheaply distributed.
In the Toyota situation, I would have to buy an entire new car (to the tune of 20,000). In the IE situation, I'd have to spend a few minutes downloading Firefox. (Or spend a few minutes with windows update downloading + installing Firefox in the background for me). One of these things I cannot afford, the other I can easily afford.
I do a lot of customer support (and development) for a smallish piece of software. We couldn't afford to do tech support on 4 different versions of it. It also doesn't make sense to support 4 different versions of a piece of software, where each version does pretty much the same thing. (Except the newer versions fix bugs!)
The better analogy would be if I went to the Toyota dealer, and they said 'Hey, this Toyota has a bug, wait 10 minutes and we'll give you a brand new Toyota free of charge, it is like the old Toyota, except it is a lot better.'
That is kind of what I use/need stuff like jquery for.
I don't really need the extra level of abstraction it provides, but the extra level of abstraction allows it to do the browser conditionalization that I am too lazy to do.
When Pell grants were named for the senator in 1980, a typical public four-year university cost $2,551 annually. Pell Grants provided $1,750, almost 70 percent of the total. Even private colleges cost only about $5,600 back then. Low-income students could matriculate with little fear of financial hardship, as Pell intended. Over the next three decades, Congress poured vast sums into the program, increasing annual funding from $2 billion to nearly $20 billion. Yet today, Pell Grants cover only 33 percent of the cost of attending a public university. Why? Because prices have increased nearly 500 percent since 1980. Average private college costs, meanwhile, rose to over $34,000 per year.
These numbers don't seem to be adjusted for inflation. If you adjust them for inflation the price increase for expensive colleges is only about 340%. (178% inflation, 5600 = 10k).
Colleges are also offering a lot of financial aid. If you look at NYU, for example, it offers about 26,000 in financial aid on average (vs a 38,000 tuition). So it would cost about 12,000 on average. Other colleges give much more financial aid (ex. hamilton college costs 41k, but offers something like 38k in financial aid). So from my random sampling, at least, it seems that college prices would be right in line with what they were in 1980.
I am not a statistician/economist, but really, this doesn't seem to be the price of college per person really increasing, it seems more likely that the wealth is being distributed differently. The relatively wealthy are being asked to pay sticker price, while the less wealthy are getting a huge discount or free ride.
This makes sense, because it is people who write columns like this one that would really feel it in their wallets (the middle and upper middle class).
Whether this redistribution is a good thing is another question entirely, also it would be nice to know if our young adults are actually learning. I'm of the opinion that College is a garbage in garbage out sort of situation. There is no way to make sure that students will put in the effort, high achievement has to be a cultural thing.
I do, however, draw pictures and diagrams to help me reason through stuff. It is one of the big advantages to writing code on paper. I find tools like visio tend to get in my way (I spend too much time fussing with getting lines connected and not enough time sketching my idea (it also never quite looks right)).
I actually like it so much I was considering buying a bamboo tablet so I can include diagrams in my documentation (and not kill so many trees!).
Of course, then I'd have to write an emacs plugin to call up inkscape (unless anyone has a better 'sketching' type of program) and insert a hyper-link to the saved file in the docs folder.
Why do people in engineering/scientific fields get a free pass make fun of my philosophy degree?
I'm getting kind of tired of hearing jokes about how I should be working at McDonald's and that because I have a non-science degree I can never contribute anything to society.
That's bullshit.
I'm in a masters program right now for computer science, and that it is a ton easier than the bachelor's in philosophy was.
My first thought is that these people majored in the sciences because they were terrible at abstract thought and could never work beyond memorizing equations. These people are useless as they will never make the breakthroughs that the greatest scientists have made. (Einstein's approach to relativity included plenty of mathematics and science, but it was also based in thought experiments).
Secondarily, people have a tendency to mock and belittle anything that they don't understand. By definition, they do not understand most areas of the liberal arts (too abstract). So you get shit like this thread.
I don't know if I'm the only one, but there are 3 things I do as soon as I install Ubuntu:
1.) Configure the video card
2.) Install cairo-dock
3.) Mess with theme packages and desktop backgrounds
I think that the biggest advantage Linux distros tend to have is customization.
It doesn't really matter too much what the default skins for various GUI components are, as I will be changing them anyway.
I know that this doesn't speak to the casual computer user that much, but really, why should I suffer through OS X, which is about 80% of what I want (and doesn't run on 'regular' hardware without license-breaking), when I can install ubuntu or debian or gentoo, customize it, and get 100% of what I want.
I'm pretty sure they already at least use C and Java and maybe python (this is just based on their jobs listings).
As much as it makes sense that they might think to rewrite the code base in whatever their Google standard languages are, there are certain things that you would have a tough time with.
Example would be if they are doing a 'genetic algorithms and x (insert favorite graph theory technique here)' method for the search algorithm. You can certainly write that in any programming language, but rewriting that from Lisp to C or Java would require a GA library (which is probably going to be slower than compiled lisp), or writing some sort of lisp compiler/interpreter (which is not the point).
Also, if Google is acquiring a whole company of talented lisp programmers, it doesn't really make sense to keep the technology and throw out all of the lisp programmers. My understanding is that Google's policy is there because lisp programmers are hard to find/make, and that they don't want to be dependent on them.
It would be interesting* if they used this as an opportunity to manufacture lisp programmers and use lisp in their operations.
The issue is that if you have to have a stylus, it becomes a pain, because you are sitting there awkwardly hunched trying to scratch out handwriting. (elbows in, hunched over squinting at the screen).