As a photography enthusiast (or whatever), I absolutely hate facebook's current photo sharing system. They force really bad lossy-compression on all images resulting in large blocky artifacts all over your images. It lacks the option to fix a problem with a picture without deleting the photo and reuploading (thus removing all of the comments). And those are just the worst problems.

I've been wanting to switch to Flickr, but it would be too difficult to explain to certain family members and friends. (and it would eliminate the ability to tag friends)
I suspect that I'm not alone in this position (especially among photographers) and if facebook can fix it by purchasing a company, then it might actually be worth a billion or two USD.

(replying to myself because I thought of something else)

My guess is that by allowing everyone to switch over whenever they want and then randomly forcing certain people to switch over, they're trying to use "peer pressure" to make the transition easier. (e.g. "everyone else is switching to timeline so I should too"... it's better for facebook if people think they're doing it voluntarily)

They're pushing it out randomly to people, giving them about a week's notice before they automatically switch you over. I got a notice about a month ago that said they were going to switch me over in a week and that I should prepare by choosing a cover photo, etc. And now I have timeline. (whether I like it or not)

Well then enlighten us. What do you want CS students and CS departments to do in order to attract more female students? What exactly is being done to shut them out?

I tend to agree with you, as your reason is more aligned with Google's interests. However, Google+ doesn't have ads (right now, at least). It seems to me as though all of Google's products start out ad-free while Google throws all of its resources at them to make them successful. Finally, when their place in the market is secure, they start plastering ads all over them. The Google+ search results are probably part of the strategy to help Google+ gain some ground against Facebook. I don't know how they're going to overtake Facebook, but I don't think it wouldn't surprise me.

If you think about back when Google search overtook its competitors, the product wasn't really that much better than any of the other search engines... and yet somehow "google" turned into a verb for "web search." Same thing with Gmail. Gmail wasn't really any better than any of the other email providers. Sure, it had significantly more storage, but I don't think that was really an issue for most people. Could all of this really have been a result of the Google brand name? I have a hard time coming up with any other reason for all of this success. Really good marketing and PR combined with engineering talent (which they got by providing the best perks).

Patents are a time-limited right to exclude in exchange for publishing your process/invention. Patent applications are public and can be "invented around" even during the term of the patent. (because the patent holders are forced to publish, and as a result that information is in the public domain). These inventions create jobs and introduce new technology into society. And after the life of the patent, it's free for anyone to make, use, sell, offer to sell, or import. The application is required by law to be "enabling" such that the invention can be reproduced from the patent description "without undue experimentation." The public absolutely benefits from that. That new information in the public domain leads to new inventions. Without patents, companies would have absolutely no reason to publish their trade secrets and innovation would only happen in huge corporations. Patents give the proverbial "little guy" the opportunity to compete, and we all know the benefits of additional competition.

(sorry, ignore that comma splice in the first sentence)

That's what I was thinking, as well. Some teachers will post notes after class, though, and that's where his advice would be relevant. In those classes, focus on the material and how you're going to remember it. Then try and reproduce it all after class, on paper. Then compare it against the actual notes that were posted online and pay extra time learning the stuff that you forgot.

I'm curious how you know that those specific accounts are from Waggener Edstrom. That link you referenced only says that they monitor social media as a means for gauging public opinion. (and so that if a PR "crisis," as they put it, is about to happen, they can know quicker so that they can spin it in their favor via traditional media outlets) This sort of thing is not new (or even wrong), they're just adding "social media" to the list of sources they monitor.

I suppose it's possible that someone at Slashdot with access to logs matched their IP addresses to Waggener Edstrom, but my guess is that these "sockpuppets" are actually just regular people with an unhealthy obsession with Microsoft.

Another possible source of skew could be that the subset of programmers who create these materials happen to prefer language X over language Y. The entire set of all programmers (which is much larger than the aforementioned "writers" subset) might all be learning language Y, but since the "writers" prefer writing about X, it's possible that X would be at a higher position on the TIOBE index than the actual fastest growing language Y.

The GP brought up a perfectly rational argument. If you find it flawed, then, in a constructive way, tell us how it's flawed. Don't complain about a lack of citation. This is not Wikipedia.

The problem with this is that you're not considering the total number of questions per tag. The tags you said "none" for at the bottom are (1) not actually "none", and (2) not very popular tags.

Here is a full table with percentages, where you can see that there isn't much of a difference between languages with respect to the percentage of unanswered questions: (in order of ascending percentage)

Objective-C

Unanswered: 11,735 / 68,034 = 17.25%

Javascript

Unanswered: 26,932 / 165,543 = 16.27%

BASIC

Unanswered: 10 / 67 = 14.93%

PHP

Unanswered: 26,697 / 181,413 = 14.72%

Java

Unanswered: 28,050 / 195,957 = 14.31%

Ruby

Unanswered: 5,074 / 37,266 = 13.62%

C#

Unanswered: 31,934 / 255,266 = 12.51%

Python

Unanswered: 9,065 / 88,496 = 10.24%

C++

Unanswered: 8,012 / 104,647 = 7.66%

C

Unanswered: 3,006 / 48,720 = 6.17%

Perl

Unanswered: 879 / 15,600 = 5.63%

Lisp

Unanswered: 28 / 1,629 = 1.72%

Also, who's to say that Objective-C questions are the same level of difficulty as all of the others. Also not considered is the type of programmer who answers questions on Stack Overflow. Perhaps it's mostly professional C++ and C# developers (which would explain why there are lots of C# and C++ questions with a small percentage of unanswered questions) that mostly answer languages they know but occasionally answer some of the other languages that they may not know as well.

My bad. You switched units midsentence and I didn't notice... Yes, that does make more sense.

I'm a Computer Science major. Uppercase means byte and lowercase means bit, as always.

Oh, well I guess that's the difference. I pay about as much as you do for an advertised speed of 10 Mbps, and I usually get around 3 Mbps. So I guess in that regard my provider is "more honest". We're supposed to be getting Verizon FiOs (fiber) pretty soon, so maybe that will change things.