You're right, it's not a crime. In fact, it's good that we allow people to say stupid things like that because it helps us detects morons that we should completely ignore. Like the tea-partiers and you.

You're totally right, Facebook was completely wrong for you. A device like this sounds like it would really work for you. It's very focused on preserving privacy and giving lots of control over information, highly technical and sophisticated, allows you to write as much as you want, and is completely new and unknown. Unfortunately if you want to use it to socialize with the unwashed masses all of these reasons will stop them from using it with you. They LIKE all the stuff you hated about Facebook. For them it's benefits are:

Simple
They just type something and click the button and their friends can see stuff. Sometimes they change the UI and everyone spends a day or two talking about how the old way was better until they get used to it but it's still pretty easy. To find your friends you tell it where you grew up, where you worked or what your email is. You pick them by their names or pictures. Simple. The lack of lots of control and options are part of this. As more and more people are starting to notice or hear about how Facebook can expose your data they are having to add more controls but simplicity will always be more appealing to most people.

Popular
Everyone is on Facebook!!! (they love exclamation points too -- I know...). People you haven't seen in years are on there and sometimes someone you knew from a long time ago will find you. Isn't that great! Popularity and trendiness are a great feature of Facebook and other products for a lot of people. They love joining groups and knowing that lots of people love the same things they do. All of these things were popular pre-social networks and Facebook has done an adequate job of bringing them to the masses.

Fun
Pictures and games!!! You get to see pictures of other people doing silly things. You get to see pictures of your sister's kid building a snowman and strange places where old friends go on vacation. And they have games too! Not complicated games or games that take a long time but simple things that you can play with your friends if you have a minute or two. Casual gaming's appeal is that you can learn the rules quickly, play during breaks at work or home, and play with people you know (Farmville and the like).

You have different values and interests than the average person on the street but you probably know this already. I hope this gives you a little insight into some of the reasons why Facebook is appealing to a lot of people out there.

My problem with this product is that I think its audience will naturally be limited and that will decrease its value as a social networking appliance for a lot of people. If it only appeals to a small and technical audience why bother with hardware at all? Just make a software version of it and call it a server. The people who will use it will know that means put it on a machine you leave on and connected and they might already have one around.

Depending on your skill set you might even be able to put something like this together out of existing tools. If you have a couple of friends who share your interests and are into technology a solution like this could work for you. You'd give up randomly bumping into that kid you knew when you were 9 but you may not see this as a valuable feature anyway.

If there was a "Canonical's Ultimate Network Test suite", "Sun Human Interface Toolkit" or "Hulu's Interactive Television & Live Entertainment Room" all of those would be descriptive names. However, naming those products after their acronymns would be just as stupid as calling it GIMP.

I say let people install it on any Intel box they want, and if they run into problems, they're on their own.

Given the amount of bitching when Apple broke Atom support for netbook or when they stopped Palm from syncing with iTunes the idea that Apple could just release an OS for sale and people would accept that if anything doesn't work or stops working they're on their own doesn't seem to hold up.

I wonder if you recognize it but your position here is not that much different from a criminal gang. "Snitches get stiches" and all that.

It's neither cowardly nor immoral to report someone for breaking the law, especially when not doing so could lead them to scapegoat you. Let the BSA deal with them and laugh all the way to the bank. Pirates deserve what's coming to them.

Someone who wasn't too great at making graphs designed some slides talking about the problems with O-rings and temperatures. That means an Engineer felt strongly enough about the problem that they raised it as an issue. Are you telling me that management's failure to grasp the simple point he was making, colder temperatures break O-rings, was his fault? The title on his slides is "History of O-ring Damage in Field Joints", but his poor graphical presentation meant that the misfortune but competent managers couldn't understand his basic point? Then you declare that all that was required was a curve fitted using statistical modelling techniques far outside the scope of most engineering courses. Are you so sure they wouldn't have required some 3D coloured graphs with sound and a soundtrack or an animated Chuck Jones short in order to get the point across to a group of people so unmercifully stupid.

Yes, this is exactly the engineer's fault. They held critical information unknown to management (o-rings will fail below certain temperatures resulting in catastrophic failure) and failed in making that point. They titled their slides "History of O-ring Damage in Field Joints" and made a bunch of bad charts when they should have used a graph and titled it "Below Certain Temperatures, Shuttle go BOOM!". If they felt it was a life-or-death situation it may have called for, dare I say it, clip-art. You expect management to go "Oh wow, one of these genius engineering types showed us these charts and I'm not sure what they meant but we should call off the launch because I think he said it was bad or something". I expect an engineer who believes they are in a situation where loss of life may occur to put at least a bullet point at the end saying "If you don't do this, you could risk the shuttle and its passengers" or "Because of this, launches below X degrees have a XX% increased risk of catastrophic failure".

If they haven't been taught the skills to do that, then this is where MIT focusing on liberal arts and communication skills can come in to teach new engineers how to avoid those mistakes. Think of it as an engineering problem. If you study how bridges fail because of their structure, also study how bridges fail because of communication breakdowns amongst the design and build crews.

So what you are saying is that if you cannot convince someone who 1) doesn't understand, 2) doesn't really care and 3) who actively seeks to implement bad ideas, then your idea's and recommendations aren't worth a danm?

Yes, exactly this. The world is full of geniuses who never accomplished a damn thing because they couldn't convince anyone their ideas were worth a damn. They piss everyone off or talk over their heads and they sit and wonder why they never got anything done. It's precisely because they thought that coming up with the great idea was the finish and not the start. The world will very rarely recognize the genius of your idea and come flocking to your door. You need to be able to explain it to the non-propeller-heads in the world in a way that they can understand because, unless your idea is trivial, you'll need lots of those people to pull it off.

The space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing its crew, not because engineers had failed to communicate the dangers, but in spite of their warnings.

No one was claiming engineers failed to communicate dangers, only that they were in no way effective at communicating them. There's a difference between just communicating something and persuading or influencing someone to change a position. The former is the "I sent an email" model of communication while the later requires communication skills.

NASA management wasn't tied to the idea of killing astronauts so I think the idea that they were completely unconvincable is a silly and defeatist point of view to take. Even Feynman agrees:

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them.

This is a direct call for engineers and scientists to inform management of technological problems, and that role requires the ability to write far more than a 500 word essay.

Modern managers and executive peddle in lies, exaggeration and general bullshit. It is the hallmark of their profession. Engineers and scientists by contrast deal in precisely the opposite commodity; they seek the truth.

And this speaks volumes. Interacting with others under the assumption that "I seek the truth while they peddle in bullshit" is precisely the attitude that will get you sidelined and ignored. Technical ability isn't worth a damn if you can't convince anyone your ideas are worth listening to. If your idea is so important, your insight so invaluable or your invention so world-changing why not spend 25% of the time you spent on the technical side of things figuring out how to convince others of its merit?

OK, after doing all that now convince NASA it's too cold to launch a shuttle today.

http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

Communication matters, even to engineers and failures in communication lead to engineering failures and people getting killed. Edward Tufte makes a convincing argument that if they had been better able to present and communicate their ideas they would have been able to make their engineering point in an understandable way and saved lives.

Taking a gun to a political rally sends the message "agree with me or I shoot you". While you have the right to do it in America, the rest of us have the 1st amendment right to call armed thugs and bullies out when we see them and a person who takes a gun to a political rally is just a thug.

I am a UI designer, and the couple of occasions when I've tried to offer UI design improvements for FOSS projects have been pretty depressing. Both times I tried, it seemed that one of the coders on the project doubled as a UI designer and resented anyone who would challenge their ideas. Their contribution of code to the project meant that others then close ranks around them, so that any real discussion of UI improvements is killed off and anyone not a coder was frozen out. You could see why Alan Cooper wrote The Lunatics.

This is more a problem of volunteer projects than open/closed but due to the volunteer nature of a lot of open source projects its still a big problem for open source projects to deal with. As a non-coding project member UI designers in design focused organizations are given tools like processes and management support so you're free to come up with the best design and know that you won't be blocked by the developer who wants to do it their own way. Organzations like Redhat, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla will have design focused management to make sure it works out. On a small volunteer project you may have one person who started a side project to get away from exactly the management and processes that let designers get stuff done.

There are probably lots of designers like you who would love to get involved with a small project for the experience and exposure but without the ability to code you need to either be obviously right, doing it the way they wanted to anyway or very persuasive to get anything done. Additionally it's not really all that difficult to either find small paying jobs or just design stuff on your own website to get experience and exposure. Until designers learn to code their own stuff or coders demand good design and go looking for it I can't it changing.

First corollary: Every contributor to the project tries to take part in the interface design, regardless of how little they know about the subject. And once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.

This isn't necessarily true. It's true that great design is typically the result of a unified vision but design focused companies solve this problem by having a lead designer establish guidelines and standards that are then used by the team to create all the bits and pieces. You don't need one person, but you need one person in charge. For an Ubuntu, RedHat or OpenOffice where you have a corporate structure behind you, this level of design quality is achievable and I think they have it now. For a project of volunteers or a team that's widely distributed this has to be much more difficult.

Second corollary: Even when dedicated interface designers are present, they are not heeded as much as they would be in professional projects, precisely because they're dedicated designers and don't have patches to implement their suggestions.

Without the ability to write code, designers depend on an organizational structure that recognizes and values good design and will work to make sure that the end result meets the design goals you initially set out. This can fail in a non-OSS project and could succeed in an OSS project but a hobbyist project will probably never have a structure that allows a designer to do great work.

Another issue that I think isn't addressed here is that OSS projects are typically (necessarily?) started by people who can code. Once you have something running it takes a huge amount of effort to redesign away some of those early design decisions. You'll also forever be in a mindset that views design as window-dressing that gets applied to APIs. I'm not familiar enough with the history of OSS projects but are there examples of projects that started with a design process?

I might say "behave ethically" but why would I actually do so, other then possibly fear of some power punishing me for my actions?

Off the top of my head:
1) Reputation: Behaving ethically benefits me societally. People are more likely to treat me well and are more likely to respond when I need something from them if they view me as being a fair ethical in my conduct. If I'm widely viewed as a liar or a thief, I'm going to face challenges in cooperating with others.
2) Self-esteem: I view myself as a "good person" and like to be percieved of as a good person by others.
3) Desire for social order: I think its better for all of us to live in a society where, by and large, we are more trusting and helpful than distrusting and back-stabbing.

For electronic and audio-visual media, unauthorized reproduction and distribution is occasionally referred to as piracy (an early reference was made by Daniel Defoe in 1703 when he said of his novel True-born Englishman : "Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates"[2]). The practice of labeling the act of infringement as "piracy" actually predates copyright itself. Even prior to the 1709 enactment of the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first copyright law, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who violated the charter were labeled pirates as early as 1603.[3]

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement

That picture is really cute but historically wrong. Piracy existed as a way of describing illegal copying well before the concept of copyright. Go ahead and call me a collaborator but you're the one who's redefining terms to fit your political agenda.

Which is why the correct response to this isn't putting them in jail or passing new laws, its bankrupting them in a civil lawsuit.

This is not either/or. The cops did wrong, should be fired and subject to punishment for any laws they may have broken as well as civil lawsuits. The 4chan kiddies (or more likely, their mommies and daddies) should also be subject to civil suits. Just because the internet exists, doesn't give you the right to be a sick fuck. It also doesn't make being a sick fuck consequence free.