I suppose this depends on the field you're talking about. Physics and chemistry are less susceptible to corruption, but then you get fields like human biology, psychology and social 'sciences' whose data can easily be subjected to manipulation or bias. To suggest that all scientists are fully immune from bias when it comes to qualitative results is asinine and dangerous.

If science has taught us anything is that we should question everything. Never trust a source to be 100% correct.

Agreed.

Two supporting points:

1) Facebook didn't even have a positive cash flow until 2009. That's an awfully long time to wait around for your financial model to really kick in if you had lofty financial goals in the beginning. That was back when Facebook had about 300 Million users. Passing the 100 Million user mark (Hell, the 10 million user mark) without implementing a strong financial model makes it pretty clear to me that they were a) playing it by ear and b) weren't that eager about making tons of cash (because they certainly could have at that point).

2) Zuckerman had continually turned down enormous amounts of money for the site while also giving up significant shares in the company to third parties which would be quite contradictory behavior for someone motivated by money.

Computer technology seems to be one of the few industries left that really seems to continually push the limits in innovation. I fear the day when this isn't true.

They need one more option:

Give users a quick link to display a -clean- Facebook page and news feed. A lot of people are getting fed up with seeing non-stop wall posts for farmville and news feed items and application requests. I've known several people to leave the site for this exact reason. Sure, you can block various applications from showing up on your news feed, but as far as I know you can't hide them from other people's pages. Even if you could do this, it would be tedious to constantly filter out every application's posts. Additionally it's also quite possible that people may want to see the items only sometimes.

Forcing people to manually block applications (ie, income generating advertisers) only does 2 things: 1) Piss people off due to the tediousness of it and 2) Permanently eliminates those advertisers ability to make money off you. Wouldn't it just make sense to make people happy and at the same time not cut off advertisers completely?

When I try to discuss this with religious people, they often argue that my 'moral code' is based off of Christian teachings and wouldn't exist otherwise.

What they fail to understand is that their moral codes were created for very sensible reasons that likely predates their religion by millenia. We are social creatures, this is how we evolved. Our ability to function within groups has always been so crucially important to our survival. So within those groups, rules naturally form to make sure that group functions as well as possible to help give it better chances of survival. In small groups "for the good of the community" reasons work fine and dandy, but when groups grow beyond Dunbar's Number then more extreme measures have to be taken (as people will lose connection with the 'community' in larger groups and no longer feel as obligated to contribute to it). And the desire to avoid eternal damnation works well for the most part.

16 Labels on my personal email and about a dozen filters

75+ labels on my work email and about 3 dozen filters

Frankly, I'm going to be pissed if I did all that work for nothing

You're right on that point. However give it enough time after it's achieved generic status and you could start losing that market share and have a very tough time maintaining it or getting it back. But that is mostly just true with physical products. In the land of the Internet websites will be born and die out long before this would ever be an issue.

You can't blame FB execs for wanting/expecting their company/product to last forever though.

In the world of marketing that is one of the worst or best things that can happen to a brand, depending on who you ask. In extreme cases people might not realize a particular name is actually just a brand name (such as escalator or thermos). It then becomes very difficult to market your product properly and next to impossible to fix it after it's already happened. Worse, if you let your brand become that genericized you risk losing the ability to enforce your trademark. In the case of thermos or escalator, the two companies can no longer sue people for using those two terms because of how widespread those names have become.

I was just trying to stick with the shoes mentioned in the original post. Poor example, I agree.

And it really has little to do with protection of the customer and more to do with limiting losses and easier quality control.

This potential privacy issue also lacks an implementation, but still represents more information than anyone specifically needs to have.

If those shoes were found to contain pieces of jagged metal as a result of a manufacturing issue, then a quick RFID scan could give a company the details it needs to issue a recall with as narrow a scope as possible. Perhaps less an issue with shoes, but for things like food, this information would invaluable. If they narrowed down an issue to one particular manufacturing line using RFID they could limit their recall to hundreds of items instead of tens of thousands. As it stands food companies try to cram as much information into some cryptic codes on their packaging, but RFID would allow even more information to be stored on the product in a way that would be much easier to decipher (with the aid of a reader that is).

A friend of mine was having issues in the parking lot of their apartment building. Kids were breaking windows and damaging locks to get inside cars to steal change, sunglasses, cds, etc. After breaking in they would sometimes slash the seats if there wasn't anything of value to steal. It was happening every couple months and was costing my friend a lot of money because each time it wasn't meeting their deductible. When talking to the insurance company about reducing their deductible to be able to cover these costs the agent, off the record, told my friend just to remove anything of value and leave the doors unlocked (and by no means tell the insurance company you are doing this). The kids will just go inside your car, see there is nothing to steal and move on. After issues with the kids slashing the seats it seems like a crazy move, but it works. I guess the theory is that the kids resort to damaging the vehicle after being frustrated that there was nothing to steal after expending the effort and time they used to get into it. That was 2 years ago and they haven't had any damage to their cars since.

It's funny what can be done to protect your property. In certain situations, sometimes the easiest and cheapest things work the best.

I didn't mean to imply that each individual bottle has to hold the thousands of pounds of weight, but the bottle as a part of the whole layer.

In response to Todd: It deforms on purpose. That is how it holds that weight. A bottle that doesn't flex will break under enough pressure. By allowing it to flex in a controlled manner (with the aid of an hourglass shape and ridges placed in certain locations to stop it from buckling) you can minimize the amount of material and maximize the strength by distributing the weight.

So try taking an unopened bottle and do just what you said, try to crush it with one hand on the cap and one hand on the bottom. Try to get it to break. Let me know how that turns out for you.

They use different plastics because they are produced using different methods. The bottle is produced by injection molding the top part with the threading and blow molding the rest. There are many things that have to be taken into account when choosing the right polymer to use (and price is only one of them). The ability to blow mold, the strength of the plastic (ie the ability to stack several cases of water on top of each other, amounting to potentially thousands of pounds), the flexibility (A bottle with little flexibility could puncture easily. The injection molded lid then has to have different characteristics in order to work properly. Trust me, the makers are not stupid. A water bottle is incredibly complex and it takes enormous amounts of knowledge and experience to create. You need understandings of biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and economics to design that little thing that costs pennies to make.

To summarize: Try and design something that has the following characteristics (which is only a fraction of what is required) then come back and tell me that bottle designers are stupid:

1)Has to contain a liquid without leaking
2)Has to be relatively puncture proof
3)Has to be lightweight
4)Has to be cheap
5)Needs to be manufactured quickly and must be able to be produced by machine perfectly every time.
6)Has to be able to support thousands of pounds while filled with liquid without breaking or deforming (this isn't an exaggeration. Cases of water will be stacked 6 or 7 tall on a pallet then two or three more full pallets will be stacked on top of that.)
7)Has to be ergonomic
8)Has to withstand heat and freezing temperatures and the tendency for the liquid inside to expand when frozen
9)Has to have a unique shape for branding purposes and still meet all the above criteria
10)Needs to be designed to maximize the quantity on a pallet and in turn maximize the quantity on a truck. Most bottles have short necks for this reason (then go and try and create a short neck that is capable of withstanding weight)
11) The lid needs to be able to be removed easily, but still is able to withstand the weight, the pressure and the temperature changes without leaking.

You have no idea how potentially evil these signs can be. The thing is, age is very tough to identify with certainty with this sort of software (gender is really easy). If you want to know someone's age you first have to know something else about them....Their race. Now it's possible that they're only designing these things to measure people of Japanese descent, but if they're not, I'm willing to bet you that they also check for race to calculate age. The technology exists. I know, I've seen it in action. It works about 95% of the time for gender and they're getting better (I'm part of the 5% that it thinks is the wrong gender...sigh). There would be obvious issues with checking for race so if it does its most likely only using it for calculating age and not being stored, but the ability is most certainly there.