Submission Summary: 0 pending, 43 declined, 13 accepted (56 total, 23.21% accepted)
Facebook is a company of technologists, not marketers. If you wanted to bet on someone succeeding in the marketing business, you'd bet on technologists only if they could invent some new way to sell; you wouldn't bet on them to sell the way marketers have always sold.
As Facebook gluts an already glutted market, the fallacy of the Web as a profitable ad medium can no longer be overlooked. The crash will come. And Facebook—that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site—will fall with everybody else.
Friedman, who carries a radio-frequency analyzer that emits frightening crackles around cell phones and Wi-Fi routers, says smart meters are a dangerous idea. They are an invasion of privacy and might even cause illness, he has alleged in a legal complaint set to be heard by the Maine Supreme Court next month.
As a promotional tool to impress potential clients, Mykonos engineers have built versions of the company's software that taunt attackers. One directs a hacker to a Google Maps search for nearby criminal attorneys. Another parodies Microsoft's now-defunct anthropomorphic paper clip, Clippy, with the message: "It looks like you're an unsophisticated script kiddie. Do you need help writing code?"
Their tactics include placing supercookies on suspected attackers computers.
There are few things hackers hate more than being taunted. So is this a valid strategy? Or is it waiving a red cloak at a bull?
As of Friday, the viruses were still active. The Chronicle says that CCSF administrators are telling students and employees to "change computer passwords, avoid using school computers for banking or purchases, and to check home computers for viruses" since the viruses have, the college's Chief Technology Officer warned, infected servers and desktops "across administrative, instructional and wireless networks."
Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalise it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.
When the original Xbox video-game console went on sale in 2001, it wasn't clear why Microsoft, known for staid workplace software, was branching out into fast-paced action games. But Microsoft decided that capitalizing on the popularity of gaming could help the company position itself for the coming wave of home digital entertainment.
Panos Iperitos set out to study the dollar value of online reputation, and along the way he discovered the counter-intuitive ways that reviews inform it
Not surprisingly, people are willing to pay a premium (up to 5%) to buy a product for a seller with a good reputation, but interestingly, negative product reviews can lead to higher sales:
One reason is that buyers gain confidence that "if this is the worst this product will throw at me, it must be pretty good." "Negative reviews that are specific actually tend to serve as risk mitigators," says Ipeirotis On the other hand, the phrase "good packaging" makes it sound like there was nothing else in the transaction worth complimenting.
Spelling and grammar in reviews also have an impact. So much so that unconfirmed rumors have suggested that shoe seller Zappos has spent $0.10 per review to have Amazon's Mechanical Turk correct spelling and grammar in Zappos reviews.
Though people with autism face many challenges because of their condition, they may have been capable hunter-gatherers in prehistoric times, according to a paper published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology in May.
The "autism advantage," a relatively new perspective, contends that sometimes autism has compensating benefits, including increased abilities for spatial intelligence, concentration and memory. Although individuals with autism have trouble with social cognition, their other cognitive abilities are sometimes largely intact.
So is autism a "disorder" or a normal part of human evolutionary history?
“The human race has a susceptibility to harm, but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed ‘Friday Night,’ that is, ‘Everybody needs to get laid,’ and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality. And he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free Web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time.’ ”
These are the provocative words of Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen and begins IEEE Spectrum's interview with the Software Freedom Law Center's James Vasile, one of the minds (along with Moglen) behind the idea of the Freedom Box.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce