Facebook has every right to promote paid posts, and Google has every right to promote paid links despite not exercising it. And we as users have every right to decide whether we find the Facebook feed and Google search results relevant and useful based on that. When Facebook's policy starts effecting the quality of their services for users and companies, people will stop using it, just as if Google's search results lowered in quality people would switch to something else.
You're definition of socialism is a little funny. There's a big difference between socialized medicine as a single-payer system where the government has an incentive to keep costs low and a somewhat-centralized and somewhat-regulated system "socialized" system where the government has no such incentive.
Seriously! Lack of customer support is one of the worst things about Google. I don't know how many times I've had a question about a Google product and their forums either don't have an answer, have contradictory answers or someone's uninformed guess about what the answer could be.
Yeah with my apps I haven't noticed many iCloud related problems. I generally however just store simple keys in iCloud then pull the real data from my server based on those. It's not as robust as I'd like it but works.
This is a fluff piece. Weren't all of those products in production or development when Jobs passed away? And hasn't Page continued to cut and EOL products since then too?
By that logic knowing Spanish, Portuguese and Italian wouldn't make you trilingual since they're all related with different "key words, library function names", etc. I mean vocabularies and small grammar rules.
How much of that innovation and world-class industry is created from immigrants? The business-friendly policies of the United States can be thanked too, but those business run on the labor of immigrants.
While I agree with the premise of academia not really being a meritocracy, this article limited scope focusing solely on academia just comes across as thinly veiled anti-intellectualism that conservatives have been preaching forever. Why didn't the author take any time to focus on the lack of meritocracy in corporate culture or even political culture? They hate science, they hate facts, and they want to "defund the left" but destroying our institutions of higher learning and research.
I agree with a lot of this analysis, but one things stuck out: "Marketing will become better – and harder to resist." While I don't doubt that marketing will become better, I do think we'll develop ways of filtering it out just as we have with "banner blindness", SPAM filtering and DVR-skipping commercials. Maybe the people who continually bug their friends about some cause, campaign or product will tend to lose those friends too. It wasn't uncommon to hear people say they're unfriending people on Facebook during the last election for political posts. I know I personally tried hard to resist posting political comments on social networks to maintain peace and tranquility from amateur campaigners.
I did this too, but I was 27 at the time and it was only about $5000 I had in there. It paid off as my company has allowed me to save more now. It is a very risky thing to do. But if you are young and it's a good source of capital. I also like the idea of investing in myself, not some faceless institution.
My guess is that this has something to do with the horrendous updates to and broken pieces of the App Store. The iOS version got quicker but it's still like searching half-blind. There still lots of little broken services in the Mac OS X version. Try going to company's profile and try to sort their apps by popularity. As excited as I am about iTunes 11, I'll be happy about the delay if that can make things better.
Daniel Dennett has a nice critique of the Libet experiment where he argues that there's a temporal mismatch between making the decision and recording that the decision was made. Basically that experiment can't actually measure the decision moving from unconsciousness to consciousness, only the shifting to making that decision to consciousness being aware that you made the decision and now need to focus on shifting attention. It's important to note too that people who have more attention report faster response times.
A option they seemed to have left out is raising the "inheritance tax". If these baby boomers got Reagan tax breaks in their prime earning years, we should compensate by increasing the "death tax".
Metro is interesting for its originality and almost complete lack of skeuomorphic flourishes. The problem with it though is that everything looks alike and nothing analogous. They've even eliminated drop shadows and depth-implying gradients from the interface. While those may be skeuomorphic in the broadest sense, because our vision expects depth, they provide the user by functional signifiers. Metro, in its deviant haste, went too far to the other aesthetic extreme.
I have a very intelligent friend who try as he might cannot learn programming. He has interests all over the academic board and teaches two unrelated courses. I think I understand now why he cannot. He's an eternal optimist. I tell him he's selectively ADD about programming, but maybe he's just allergic to the negativity of it all.
Washington cannot be trusted to be free of influence from AT&T and Verizon.
Duh, in the Capitalist country the government is influenced by the businesses and in the Communist country the businesses are influenced by the government.
Why does everyone think this is about Apple? It's possible the comic is referring to Google's monopoly of web searches.
My guess would be he's criticizing "monopoly as dangerous" accusations in general as silly since Microsoft has fallen so far. But that's kind of a poor argument since Microsoft was punished for monopolistic practices, both de jure and de facto.
This really isn't XKCD's best comic and it's not even funny.
Yes, the whole App Store seems laggy now. When you're on the 25th card, it takes a while for card #26 to show its edge, leading the user to think there aren't more apps and if there are no one wants to download them anyways.
This is a great insight into how people actually search and use apps. It makes the case for free-to-download with in-app purchases. People won't think twice about downloading a free app to try it out, and if they like it, they'll spend the extra couple bucks or so to unlock its full feature set. My guess is that this is more profitable to everyone than Android's "erase in whatever time" to get a refund scheme.
Before iOS 5 - the first to overdo skuemorphism - the last major design hoopla was when Apple couldn't decide on a single on windowing theme. It was brush-metal, then just white, then just gray, then all of them at the same time in different windows, sometimes with candy buttons, sometimes now. It was probably due more to Jobs' indecisiveness.