The issue with facebook is really rather simple.

Facebook's value for its investors is that it's a gigantic comprehensive advertising database where the marks *cough* I mean customers input all the data on their own. People put information into Facebook that they'd never tell someone taking a survey and you don't even have to pay someone to ask them the questions. Achieving this goal is basically top on Facebook's list of long term priorities, just as it will be on any other free social networking site which doesn't want to operate at a massive loss.

The conflict is that the users of facebook didn't sign up for that. They want and quite rightfully expect a certain level of privacy for the content they post on the site. You might argue that telling everyone about your personal life is the antithesis of privacy, but privacy is about your ability to determine your own level of disclosure, not having some specific level of disclosure which the older generations find appropriate.

Essentially the end result of all of this is that every 6 months or so, facebook tries to turn all the information it has into cold hard cash and shortly thereafter their userbase throws a wobbly and they have to back out.

And, well, that may be the case. However, if you look, there's been an ebb and flow to the quality of CompSci around the US over the last several years. I still do what I can to keep quality up. However, we do have folks who're more interested in making sure the kids are Microsoft compliant than in determining if they understand the Science part of Computer Science.

And, as a result, Farmville/Mafiawars updates on Facebook temporarily stop.
Nothing of value was lost.

We use Salesforce.com (since rebranded as Common Ground), and I can answer most of these queries -- on tech backbone, it's the best you're going to get. It's all done in the cloud, and it's fairly robust commercial grade stuff. Exporting 50,000 records is just a question of downloading the CSV. If it's a really big job, they schedule it and ship it in an hour or so. Given that most NPOs can't or don't want to invest in their own hardware, putting it in the cloud is a really good idea. Likewise with data security concerns -- Salesforce.com is much better than leaving it to the typical NPO tech guy.

J

Of the versions you showed, the US version is for Vista, and the EU version is for Mac. Of course the Mac version is more expensive. It's for Mac (which means people will pay a much higher price for the exact same product even if it doesn't work as well as on competitors hardware; also development costs are spread across a smaller marketbase thus raising price), and its in the EU (which means it has VAT). Meanwhile, the same product comparatively, when both version are for vista, shows http://www.amazon.de/Adobe-Creative-Master-Collection-deutsch/dp/B003FSSL5K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1273780415&sr=1-1

The Vista EU version is 1784 Euro, which is 2230 USD. Its cheaper in Europe for the same product.

This, by the way, is a fairly niche product that hasn't been released yet, and due to its price, will only be purchased by those who have a very real need for it. No one is buying this unless they already have a way to profit from it or they are super rich and spend their money on software instead of cars and vacation houses.

If you don't like European software laws, set up your company in the US (business registrations are along the lines of $250 a year, and if you can't afford that but for some reason need $2500 software packages, you might try another line of business, for example not having one) and set up a European subsidiary that has to follow the software of the parent company in order to gain work. File everything under US GAAP and make sure you have a residence. A US citizen in name owning the company probably wouldn't hurt (keeping you as either an employee or a [non-general] partner. At any rate, keep the liability in the US, and you can use US software no problem. On the other hand, unless you are a fairly large (publicly traded or on the cusp of doing so) company, hiring expats for the sake of saving money on software doesn't really make any sense. While you *can* do this, it definitely won't be worth the time or effort.

And flash is not a standard. It is a moving target completely controlled by one company that makes changes to the "standard" whenever it wants to sell more tools...

Seumas you have no idea how much I agree with you on this one.

Last time a similar story was posted (couldn't find the link), somebody brought up that autism/aspergers as being the new "chic" diagnosis....it has everything a parents wants, an excuse to justify their child's behavioral issues as a manifestation of a disability which allows them to absolve themselves of any parenting failures with a label that's associated with high intelligence.

To the GP, as the parent of a severely autistic child this isn't at all reprehensible, providing autistic individuals with any kind of vocational/technical training is doing them, and their family/caregiver, a huge service. We just hope that Rachel will have an opportunity like this some day.

I took the extra large web image and decided to draw some lines to connect large (12 pixel or more), bright (50% luminous) objects together. The point was to try to find large regions of relatively dark sky in the image. Why? The original deep field images were taken upon "black" sky to see what really long exposures could find. Now with the ultra deep field images, it's plenty clear that most "black" sky has lots of galaxies visible. So, in the future, it'd probably be a good idea to take an ultra deep field image of a "black" part of the ultra deep field image just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Besides, the images are pretty.

Hubble UDF Infrared with lines connecting large, bright objects

The same as above, but with the large, bright objects colored to better differentiate what counts as "large, bright objects"

PS - I used two slightly different, slowish python scripts to do the actual drawing. I'll post them as well, if anyone is interested.

How about those iPhone worms?

sudo is a command. Not an account. Besides, if the user account has a poor password, then chances are that one of these is true:
a) The user and root accounts have the same password.
b) The root account has a different but similarly insecure password.
c) The user made a file with the root password:
    i) The file has mode 660, so all you need is the user's password
    ii) The file has mode 666, so all you need is nobody access.
d) The user somehow managed to get /bin/bash (or something similar) setuid (mode 4755).

They used state of the art simulation software, of course.