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"Facebook may be sleazy and selling more of your information than you like to advertisers, but the idea it wants to steal your IP and do something with it seems vanishingly unlikely. I suspect the change in TOS has something to do with protecting their asses against overzealous privacy claims or their right to hang on to data under some jurisdiction's stringent laws instead. If I really wanted to know, I'd ask Facebook, which nobody, including the authors of the article above, seems to have bothered doing.
"Treat Facebook with some caution, people. But you should be treating every web site, particularly free/ad-supported sites, that has your personal with that kind of caution. if the advantages of using the site outweigh the privacy risks, enjoy Facebook or Livejournal or whatever. If not, don't set up an account. It's that simple."
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"MARIO LIVIO IS an astrophysicist, a man whose work and worldview are inextricably intertwined with mathematics. Like most scientists, he depends on math and an underlying faith in its incredible power to explain the universe. But over the years, he has been nagged by a bewildering thought. Scientific progress, in everything from economics to neurobiology to physics, depends on math's ability. But what is math? Why should its abstract concepts be so uncannily good at explaining reality?"
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"It's hard to know what that means, exactly, to "believe in" or "not believe in" evolution. It's like not believing in Missouri, or not believing in thermal conduction. Those two examples are a bit different from one another, but they both get at aspects of what this odd sort of disbelief entails."
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"That the âbusiness modelâ works for business if of course an arguable proposition. One might well ask âWhich business model are we talking about?â Is it the Enron model? Adelphia? Lehman Brothers? You get the idea. As academics we owe it to ourselves to be more precise about the terms we use.
"We should stop our unexamined admiration for something we do not understand and concentrate on the âeducation model.â The âbusiness modelâ is the wrong model for education. We need to reaffirm what it is, beyond âtechnicalâ knowledge of a subject, that we wish our students to learn."
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"It struck me though, that asking questions of total strangers is both a distinctively journalistic activity and one that implies and requires a special kind of professional license. In fact, âJournalists do interviewsâ comes much closer to a definition of what is distinctive about journalism than formulations like âjournalists report news, bloggers do opinionâ."
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You're not really saving money if the cheaper flight includes a layover at O'Hare.
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"One quick clue that the criminal justice system is probably not the best venue for addressing the sexting crisis? A survey of the charges brought in the cases reflects thatâdepending on the jurisdictionâprosecutors have charged the senders of smutty photos, the recipients of smutty photos, those who save the smutty photos, and the hapless forwarders of smutty photos with the same crime: child pornography. Who is the victim here and who is the perpetrator? Everybody and nobody."
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George W. Bush: the seventh worst President.
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File that airline ticket price study under "well, duh". I sometimes use Orbitz to price out airfares for budget purposes, but wading through the site's results is often a chore--often I have to skip through several itineraries that make me spend the night at LAX in order to get a cheaper fare, and there are many instances where various outbound options are attached to one of the LAX overnight return itineraries.
So why do I bother with Orbitz? Because once in a while I find myself looking at some bizarre city pair where Orbitz is the only web site to offer any solution. And sometimes the travel agents' systems fail, too. There just aren't that many flights to Fairbanks at this time of year, especially with the constraint of connecting to the East Coast.
I have to agree with Eric about the airline study's press release. Of course you should look at more than price, and obviously people do this. I've rejected cheap flights do to long layovers or inconvenient times, and the travel websites provide some tools for doing this. The press release is rather silly, saying that the study found you should look at more than price to get the best value and then saying that they assumed that "quality of flight" had value to perform their calculations. Circular logic.
Based on the paper's abstract, the actual study seems to have been more about developing a calculation for the "right price" - that being the one that would deliver the airline maximum profits.
*due* to long layovers....
Damn the permanency of the internets.
I generally like Ginger Stampley, but the basic message of the passage you quote from her seems to be "Neener neener, Facebook and sites like it are more powerful than puny you, and if you think they ought to be clearer and less opaque about their intentions, you're a pathetic sap. Wise up, pathetic sap."
Was there some smarter and more insightful message there which I missed? I mean, I'm all for "hey, learn how to protect yourself." But when people start insisting that "it's that simple" while hectoring me to "get over it," I find myself growing distinctly soggy and hard to light.
I generally like Ginger Stampley, but the basic message of the passage you quote from her seems to be "Neener neener, Facebook and sites like it are more powerful than puny you, and if you think they ought to be clearer and less opaque about their intentions, you're a pathetic sap. Wise up, pathetic sap."
I think I flagged it for two reasons: 1) the point that nobody had asked Facebook what motivated the change in the first place, and 2) I thought it was fairly similar to something I wrote a week or so ago, triggered by a completely different online angst event, but I think it basically applies.
I say "I think," because I tag these things mostly on impulse, and that one would've been generated Sunday night, immediately after getting home from Boskone, when I was not at my sharpest. I'm attempting to reconstruct my thought processes when I tagged it, and that's the best I can come up with.