LOL; yeah, I noticed that my markup had been filtered after I posted it.

You're being disingenuous, or intentionally obtuse. You putting up your own web page so people can see your rants is a far cry from some putative distributed Facebook competitor that exists only to get out from under the "heel" of what the OP dislikes as properties of Facebook he wants to make as architecturally difficult as possible to implement.

No, that's a feature of snapchat in particular which is considered by most people to be a means of evading law enforcement, at worst, and the same thing as having an expiration date where the service effectively has a sliding "we're going out of business, sorry" at best. Think MySpace.

Ephemeral is a feature to only a very few.

That more of a consequence of the inability of the journalists to classify it, and so they pick a lexicographically "a cherry is like a tomato, because both are red and fruit" close thing, and call it that. IT also sells itself as that, because if you can sell yourself as that, you can pretty much get VC funding.

I think I pretty much want to out Bob as a Nazi everywhere. I want to punish him for being a Nazi by ensuring he is socially ostracized to the point that he gives up being a Nazi because he's decided that his perceived costs outweigh his perceived benefit. It'd also be nice if he can't pass on his heinous meme to another unsuspecting person by being sly about slowly indoctrinating them, and it'd be nice if any woman who might get into a relationship with him and have his kids would be able to make that decision on the basis of complete information. People frequently make an emotional or financial investment in a bad venture, and then rather than cut their losses, they "throw good money after bad".

This is how gambling addiction works. It why people stay in abusive relationships.

You are either an old anarchist, or you are otherwise not very knowledgable about how younger people view "friends" on Facebook. Calling them "friends" is a terminology Facebook uses; these are not "friends" in terms of "web of trust". This is not like a PGP key-signing party.

Younger users accept *all* friend requests. If it turns out they don't like what the person is saying or doing, they "unfriend" them later. But the default is to accept *all* requests. This is not how older people do it, and it's not how you would expect them to treat an online relationship, but it's how it works.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...

I think you haven't been following the whole GamerGate sock puppet situation very closely. Yes, it's the equivalent of real-world stalking, and there's no mechanism to deal with trolls now. In a distributed social network, you could be scrupulously upstanding with your immediate peer nodes, and be a total asshole otherwise. Once you are inside the web of trust, you're inside, and even if someone wants to not hear from you, as a peer node, your node doesn't have to run unadulterated software; it can imply graph relationships that don't exist outside their rogue node.

This is, in fact, precisely how the TOR network had been infiltrated by various third parties: peer-of-peer implied trust relationships.

I don't think this is a workable concept, unless you can figure out a way to (1) Stop the whole GamerGate thing in its traces, without hugely invasive surveillance to root out bad actors at their houses, and figure a way to cut out the cancers permanently and/or take criminal and/or civil action to force them to not be bad actors ("Bob is a Nazi; let's put social pressure on him to change that"/"Bob is a criminal; lets put social pressure on him to not act that way by locking him in a cell"), and (2) Figure out a way to do source verification so that if ted trusts Bob, and Alice trusts Ted, that Alice can legitimately not trust Bob without having to throw away the trust relationship with Ted.

I expect all of the number crunching is being done by an on-board AI trying to figure out how the heck to get away from the high pressure water jet...

They are.

In order to apply critical thinking skills, however, you have to establish a corpus of information (knowledge) from which to operate as a base when testing new information for validity.

In other words, you can't start from a phenomenological basis from the start, you have to assume language in order to be able to communicate about concepts, and then adequately judge their validity or invalidity.

What this means is that you have to shovel their heads full of as much rote knowledge as you can possibly shovel in, prior to their critical thinking filter slamming into place and interfering with the process o communicating things like "rules of grammar", "mathematical concepts", "tigonometric identities", and so on. Because once those filters slam into place, they are going to be thinking for themselves, and so busy questioning the validity of what an authority is saying, and their motives for saying it, that it's going to be difficult to jam anything in.

As to the validity of the rote knowledge you've already jammed into their heads prior to that event - effectively, where they stop being sponges, and wake up into themselves as human beings - well, hopefully the event that throws up the gates occurs after you have taught them Aristotelian logic, and Platonic/Homeric introspective self examination ("The unexamined life is not worth living"), so that they can selectively filter for any "bullshit" that was inserted, along with their times tables or the idea that sin(x) + cos(x) = 1.

So while their motivations may be impure, I have to agree with them that, at least through High School, you want to just shovel as fast as you possibly can, and then when they get to their Sophomore year in college, you send them to the philosophy department to teach them symbolic logic, and you send them to the physics department to teach them how to think rationally about problem solving (something physics is good at, because it's as unforgiving about facts as gravity in a "Road Runner" cartoon isn't).

And if they never make it to their Sophomore year in college, because they stop after the mandatory public schooling, and don't pursue further education... well, they will likely be happier as people not having had their delusions challenged, particularly since those delusions were probably shoveled into their heads at a young age - say 5 or so - and all you are going to do by having taught them critical thinking skills early is to make them miserable as adults.

She can't. This was a test of the stem cell transplant, and didn't hook the new cells up to anything that would provide vision.

There's a gene therapy technique which would have worked, but she didn't get that:

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu...

Actually, the Linux patch is to put things back, and to recognize an illegal PID (per the USB spec.) anyway.

FTDI doesn't own the PID, they own the VID; they weren't changing the VID (it would have been OK if they had changed the VID to 6666, which is the recognized experimental device VID, rather than effectively bricking the device until there's semi-substantial driver changes to allow an otherwise illegal PID to be used).

It was an intentional bricking that requires bit-bang mode to correct the EEPROM contents, which they overwrote with the invalid PID, before it can be used again.

Actually, this isn't how McDonalds corporate works.

The way McDonalds works is it picks your location for you, buys it, builds a McDonalds there, and guarantees you your franchise buy-in back in one year. The franchise buy-in is $1M, which you get back in one year, and then you make that each year thereafter.

They *do* sell you trade dress items - fry boxes with the 'M' on them, and they sell you food supplies - but their primary profit actually comes from their real estate holdings, the fact that they are your landlord, and franchise fees.

Once they do sell you a franchise, they dictate your trade dress, which means corporate pays for remodeling the individual franchise stores (after all, McDonalds themselves owns the property), and when they tell you remodel, expect the crews to show up and just do it, you are at best granted minor choices on things like arrangement of the bathrooms, and the manager's office, and so on. Otherwise, they dictate. This is a typically good thing, since they know how many people will go through in a given amount of time, max, because they have a PhD in mathematics who understands queuing theory work it out.

In addition, you can't buy a franchise unless you have been a store manager, and you can't be a store manager unless you've been an assistant manager, and you can't be an assistant manager unless you've been a shift lead, and you can't be a shift lead unless you've been an ordinary employee. In other words, every step in responsibility requires that you be able to do all the jobs at the previous step in responsibility. This is why when they have walkouts, they typically don't close down over them.

So it's not like this will change the need for employees, from the line on up, or they'll have no new franchise owners, unless they totally rework their entire model. Which they won't do, since their primary profit comes from real estate, them being your landlord, and franchise fees.

This really has nothing to do with the Minimum Wage issue; that's just because the author of the opinion section piece that the OP referenced, since they could care less.

They did however throw $200M in venture funding behind the company providing the automation software and equipment a few years back. Time to recoup their investment there.

Not everyone is educable. Not everyone has value to society that's sufficient for them to support themselves.

If you are attacked by said unemployed maximized minimum wage person, perhaps you should just beat them with your buggy whip until they back off.

The qualification that in order to get an L1-B, they had to have worked for EFI for 18 months, were presumably already bound by an NDA, wanted to keep their jobs when they got back, and were already familiar with "You will do it this way because this way is the way EFI does things". How long, exactly, do you think it takes for a new employee to get up to speed on company specific policies and procedures for wiring closets and server rooms, particularly for a company that, among other things, sells outsourced compute infrastructure?

Nope. I don't. Not without a buttload of hassle, if the intent was a work visa. I think they could send you there, though, and you would be able to do the work anyway because of reciprocity agreements between the U.S. and India. IBM frequently does that sort of thing because technically, you're being paid in the U.S., so it doesn't matter that you're working remotely at an IBM facility somewhere else.

Surely, instead of spending money on smart tanks, they should have all those former Nokia employees laid off by Microsoft build them feature tanks instead?

PS: I'm still wondering why they need soldiers *inside* then, rather than having them be drive-by-wire, just like airborne drones?

You're acting like a social network is a web site. It's not, it's a fabric. If you want to be able to do this type of editing, fine, put up a web page, but don't try to pretend that you posting something that makes you look like an asshole, and then me commenting on it, calling you out for being an asshole, and then you changing the original posting so that it looks like I'm the asshole for engaging in an ad hominim attack, is somehow OK.

What the OP has suggested is more or less the old Usenet, but with a single point of failure for me being able to access the shared history of the gestalt of people who were engaged in the conversation or conversations that resulted in that gestalt in the first place. If I'm connected to you and Bob and Tom and etc., we're not just connected through our freedom of association choices, we're also connected by our shared context and history.

See above; I can't just erase our shared context from my memory, if I decide Bob is a Nazi after the fact. One of the problems with Facebook is one of things which make it useful: the extended shared social network, where I not only see what you write in a conversation, but because Bob knows you, and you know me, I get to see Bob being an ass because of his association with you. Am I just supposed to "de-friend" everyone? How do I know that I'm seeing Bob because of you, and not Tom? Maybe I'm seeing him because of both you *and* Tom?

Twitter's links are "strong" because if you "follow" them, you see every little thing they post. Facebook's links are "weak", because if you "follow" someone, you don't necessarily see every little thing they post.

The reason that offline social networks work is because you have transient freedom of association. You have less of that with Facebook, and drastically less of that with Twitter. That's why Twitter is basically a troll-sewer, and Facebook is less of one.

Another reason for the "troll-sewer" effect is that there is no longer term consequence, if you can delete your posts after the fact. By allowing the rewrite of history (discussed earlier), you remove the need for the social lubricants of politeness, civility, and (possibly pretend) rationality, which are required in real-world interactions. Because of that you end up with large amounts of vitriol over things which would have blown over, or which people would have just avoided commenting on in the first place, in order to try to keep the peace with someone they disagreed with over some issue they brought up.

If anything eventually dooms social networking, it's going to be the "Twitter effect", where people's mood swings are driven harmonic oscillators; at least Facebook is a damped, driven harmonic oscillator, and as a worst case scenario, by reducing what you see of your friends posts, or of reactive posts that tend to blow up into large threads, they have the ability to damp it further by pushing in the control rods.

A social network of the type that the OP suggested combines the worst effects of Twitter, with the worst effects of removing accountability. IT would be a highly chaotic and unstable system. This is perhaps what the OP wanted in the first place, but it's not a place most of us would choose to participate in, or participate in creating so that he could feel good about having one.

It mutates as it reproduces. It's like the rolling codes on your car alarm or garage door opener: vaccination against the previous code won't prevent you getting infected with the new one. This same effect is why you can have the cold or flu more than once in your life.

Actually, it's not.

Glaxo Smith Klein has said that even if they relax the bio safety level 2 requirements for filling the vaccine vials, after a certain (short) point, they will be converting their production of other vaccines from such diseases as rotavirus, measles, mumps, and rubella.

At that point, we are talking about trading American lives to benefit Liberian lives.

Note that the NewLink vaccine donated by Canada has demonstrated Ebola-like symptoms in many of the people who've been inoculated in Phase I trials, so it's entirely possible Canada Health has been giving those people either the virus or a weakened strain of the virus, and is actually infecting people. Apart from that, they also have the fill rate problem that GSK was complaining about, which would short-sheet supplies of other vaccines.

How exactly is coming in through the airports with ebola, where you have a nice vector to spread the virus both nationally and internationally, superior to people sneaking into the country with ebola?