It is said so often it is cliche. On Facebook, you, the people, are the product. Whatever privacy and other protections put into place will be the minimal palatable to keep the product engaged.
Farmers maintain a minimum Quality of Life for animals so that they can be managed. This is generally kept at the commercially minimal level so the animals don't die, and produce the optimal quantity and quality of product.
Facebook is no different.

I actually think it's pretty simple. Consciencesness = software. During the teleportation, the body and mind exist in both places. Ergo, continuity (statefulness) is maintained, and the single consciencesness exists in both places simultaneously. Think VM on a live migration. As long as the two copies are forced into exactly the same state (entangled?) It is really just one linked mind. My opinion is that the thing we call a soul, or self awareness, is something that lives entirely in the software of the mind; it's not a tethered spark of ether in an intangible universe. Understanding that our souls are really just the software of an electrochemical network doesn't deaden the experience of self awareness; accepting an understanding of how the mind works shouldn't make your self awareness any less poignant. I do think, however, that the software is less continuous than we may want to admit. Sleeping may be analagous to a computer low power states, but accepting that the soul is effectively a form of software running on a form of a network also accepts that it is likely there are instances where it can be wiped, altered, rebooted, or replaced. There is a lot of interesting reading that dances around this premise, such as, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat." I think it is likely that if we withstand significant trauma or injury the person that wakes up is potentially an altered iteration. However, studies of injuries and neurological issues suggests that there are many levels of how we are encoded in the brain, some of which persist on a durable, low level. Stretching the computer analogy to it's breaking point, short term memory is kind of "Cache", while mid term memory is "RAM". Long term memory is some kind of storage, while behavior, personality and manner are probably closer to System Code. One wonders if the analogy fits well because we build computers to match the ways we think. If the mind works like this, there is a big upside: it makes the path to uploading of the mind straight forward. All we need is the capability to completely simulate a human brain, and to synchronize the two versions completely. One would experience both sets of inputs simultaneously, and the self would be in both places simultaneously. Gracefully shutdown the meat version (cryopreserve?) and you will have moved the mind/soul. Details of the technical implementation are left as an exercise for the reader.

while I don't fully agree with the implementation of systemd I do think conceptually it is far superior to what it replaces, and though is more complex is not THAT complex, and in return you get more flexibility and can do more (setting up services to start in parallel, easily make services restart or trigger other actions on failure etc)

In my experience managing systemd unit files is GREAT! You can (and should) leave the ones installed by the package/source alone and maintain separate files with your own overrides. It is super easy to manage services when you actually take the time to learn how it works.

Systemd has its problems yes, and it was foisted upon users too quickly, but it is 2017, the gripes are overstated or outdated, and the old init.d stuff truly is an old rotten pile of crap. Jury is out on the other systemd stuff that does logging etc.

Also systemd is NOT really monolithic technically speaking...it is actually quite modular. It is the *project management* that is modular, and the modules are "tightly coupled" vs. old school loosely coupled though pipes etc. like I and many others prefer and/or are used to.

I wish half the effort that went into b!tching and moaning would go into a decent alternative but compatible alternative/fork to systemd (ie. works with same unit files etc). There are real reasons systemd came to be (and no, it isn't just some conspiracy by a certain Linux vendor)...if you do not like it DO something about it.

18 cents sounds high, to me. I bought a decent automatic espresso machine for about $300 5 years ago. I drink, on average, 2 cups of coffee per day from it. I expect it to last another 5 years. That's about 4 cents per cup. I buy organic kona blend beans (not pure kona, but pretty tasty never the less) from Costco, at $14 per 2.5 pounds. At . 3 ounces per cup, that is about 10.7 cents per cup. Add in 1.3 cents for electricity and my RO filtered well water, and you get about 15 cents per cup. It takes about 90 seconds to turn on the machine and generate the first cup. 120 seconds if I have to refill the beans, dump the grounds, and refill the water. Subsequent cups take less time. Id consider my home coffee superior to most everything I might buy out, with the exception of any artisnal coffee place selling a high grade (pure kona or similar) coffee generates by a semi automatic espresso machine, operated by someone who knows how to use it.

...they are just joining the rest of the world's pricing strategy:

* airlines set ticket prices largely based on willingness to pay, which is why a short flight between Calgary and Ft.McMurray in Canada full of oil workers costs more than a flight from Canada to Europe or Asia.

* hotels price their rooms based not only on demand but where their customers are visiting from...Americans often get better Vegas deals than Canadians and Europeans, and room prices go up during conventions so the "special convention rate" looks like a deal even though it is pretty much the same rate as non peak.

* Microsoft and most other closed source software companies charge higher prices in Europe and North America in isolation of actual demand because of their willingness to pay more in licensing.

Uber's pricing model was destined to become more complex and opaque...I'm sure bistro math is incorporated somehow at this point. It's like entropy really.

Except that technology exists today to scan your id...and even use face recognition to compare it to the user to make sure it isn't someone else's ID. It wouldn't be perfect but it would be more reliable than most clerks.

Wow, what a bastard. That sort of thing is exactly the opportunity for the VP to say he was doing intrusion testing and the workforce was well trained. You would think you would have been disciplined or fired for letting him in, not keeping him out!

Given away. It is BS to say the use of personal information as currency is "clearly stated" in the terms of service. The Big Five make ZERO effort to ensure users have read and understand how they are paying for the services they offer for "free". They write long form legalese, and they present a little Web link labelled " as have read the terms of service" next to a checkbox in the sign up and there is no mechanism whatsoever to ensure a person has read it.

It is partly our fault for lying by checking the box without following the link, but companies do the absolute minimum required to inform users. They in fact go out of their way to hide their terms.

It's as if a store leaves their stuff on a shelf, without price tags, but a sign saying "take and enjoy!" with fine print saying "you agree to the terms of the agreement available at the customer service desk" underneath. Then when they get home they discover their bank account cleaned out. They go back to the store and they say sorry you agreed to the terms by taking the stuff. It's not our fault you didn't go to customer service desk to get the 5 page agreement stating we have full access to your bank account and can take whatever you want and that we do not take returns.

The point is they are using their services as bait, and their behaviour wouldn't be tolerated when the currency is cash and the product is tangible. Society does not yet appear to value personal information like cash. People give it freely, corporations leverage it however they please without regard to consequences and governments forcefully take whatever they want to further their agendas. Perhaps one day we will live in a Roddenberry style economy without cash and the new currency will be information and it will be valued and respected accordingly, but we are far from that point right now.

So basically what you are saying is that Obama was a pussy and would have accomplished a lot more by growing a pair and shoving his agenda through without compromise...

In short you want Trump except with Bernie Sanders' agenda. Interesting.

I think it is a bit lost on seasoned, technical computer users that if these modern UIs were actually terrible then they wouldn't persist. GNOME 3 is still around because it is actually pretty decent for normal people. It was released before it was complete but in the years since it has become very good.

Microsoft quickly got rid of Bob, and Aero became a flash in the pan. Apple moved past the sometimes awkward, resource intensive photorealistic apps. Some of the modern look is the trend of the day, but the central concepts seem to me to be evolutionary. Maturity coming into computer user interfaces.

I actually really like most of Material Design. I often have to design HMI displays (user interfaces for industrial automation). There are good reasons for much of the design:

* colours should be limited and subdued for user interface elements so as to focus attention on content. Bright colours and animation are intended to call attention to important information.

* textures, gradients, transparency and drop shadow effects for the sake of visual flare cause visual confusion and eyestrain. Important elements get lost in the clutter otherwise

* ability to customize is often good but there can be too much of a good thing. If there are 100 "themes" or "skins" and all controls can be moved around by the user on a whim it severely detracts from usability. There is no consistency with the system and it makes it very difficult to train a group of operators when they all can mess with the UI. Also all the code that goes into extreme customzing is bloat.

* Skeuomorphic Design has no business in UI Design. If it was ever a good idea then MS Windows would have fully embraced Microsoft Bob to this day. Making controls look like photorealistic pictures of real life objects just causes frustration unless they behave exactly as the real object does, and are usually more cumbersome than what can be done on a computing device. Skeuomorphism is especially bad when it badly emulates something that is bad to begin with. Using a Blaupunkt stereo from the 1990s is a miserable experience in real life. Who was the idiot who thought we should have an audio player skin that imitates that crap?!

Good riddance to Bob, to Fisher Price gummi Windows XP and glassy Vista and 7. If you have to sit in front of that kind of garbage continuously for 12 hours a day as an operator in a power plant or refinery or whatever it is refreshing to see this "modern" trend. There are some teething pains as designers evolve, such as obscuring too many options or the wrong ones, lacking visual cues as to what is a control and font choices that are form over function as examples, but I for one am very glad designers are "growing up" and dropping the useless toys.

I'm curious...please elaborate on how he is crazy and why you think this happened recently?

* he has ascribed to his outlook on life and ideology since before creating Dilbert...when he learned hypnosis techniques in his early 20s.

* though he never endorsed any candidate, he correctly observed Trump knew what he was doing and that he would become president...and it isn't the only correct call he has made

* in all his writings and interviews I've almost never seen a more reasoned, dispassionate insightful commentary.

Scott Adams is not crazy. He appears to be super smart...as in Einstein and Hawking smart. He even acknowledges that he doesn't know everything and can be an idiot at certain times, which is a sign of very high intelligence.

I suppose it is understandable that you think he is crazy then. Quite often people confuse intelligence with insanity. But I'm still curious as to what makes him appear crazy because to me he seems quite rational.

Of course, that might say something about me too...hmm...

Solar most definitely requires batteries. Super capacitor banks cannot store enough energy to meet household demand for most people in North America during the winter for example. The days are too short. Especially where I live where solar panels can only function six to seven hours a day in December and January.

Thanks for providing the reference. By disclosing that you have used a slanted, conspiracy-theory style source with no credibility whatsoever I can completely dismiss your comment with little effort!