Well said. Let's not live in our cubicles any longer than we have to.
I love the fact that this guy feels there is a huge gaping hole out there, and that he intensely wants to do something about it. For me, that counts for more than fitting in as a company man.
Well exactly. Even if the code sucks, someone who spends 6 months of his own time implementing something he thinks will be good, and then just giving it away, deserves respect.
But man, what really gets my goat is people looking past the effort, looking past the code and the project, and just zeroing in on some absolute red herring like "cursing" or what not. Christ, it's his project, he can say whatever he wants. If it's good, use it, if not, don't, it's not rocket science. "Cursing" is about the most irrelevant thing you can possibly judge a project on. Geeze.
"But what does it mean, really, to be happier? For 30 years, Denmark has topped international happiness surveys. But Danes are hardly a sanguine bunch. Ask an American how it’s going, and you will usually hear 'Really good.' Ask a Dane, and you will hear 'Det kunne være værre (It could be worse).'
"'Danes have consistently low (and indubitably realistic) expectations for the year to come,' a team of Danish scholars concluded. 'Year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.'"
"Of course, happiness scientists have come up with all kinds of straightforward, and actionable, findings: that money does little to make us happier once our basic needs are met; that marriage and faith lead to happiness (or it could be that happy people are more likely to be married and spiritual); that temperamental “set points” for happiness—a predisposition to stay at a certain level of happiness—account for a large, but not overwhelming, percentage of our well-being. (Fifty percent, says Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness. Circumstances account for 10 percent, and the other 40 percent is within our control.) But why do countries with the highest self-reports of subjective well-being also yield the most suicides? How is it that children are often found to be a source of “negative affect” (sadness, anger)—yet people identify children as their greatest source of pleasure?"
I'm a little skeptical of this type of happiness in Denmark. It seems to come with a feeling of giving up. Yes, things could be worse, but if they were, would you really care or try to make it better? Are you giving up on life?
I'm a former Republican, and I used to say two things:
(1) it's none of our business whether a private citizen is earning $10 or $10,000,000;
(2) supply and demand produces, over the long run, an optimal distribution of resources, because a society's needs (i.e. for goods and services) and abilities (i.e. the ability to provide those goods and services) need to be matched in a way that reflects the actual priorities of that society.
It's hard -- probably impossible -- to justify Wall Street compensation packages on supply-and-demand grounds. In the 70s, CEOs earned about 30 times the earnings of their workers. By 2007, they earned 344 times the average pay of their workers.
CEOs do not provide 10 times the value they produced in the 70s. They are not 10 times more scarce. Corporations are not 10 times more profitable. They are not 10 times more prosperous by any measure -- if they were, they would offer 10 times more compensation, on average, to everyone at their company.
So if I were still a Republican, I'd probably say something like this: banks like Bear Stearns were irrational, and they should pay the consequences. The fewer bad banks we have, the better it is for all of us in the long run.
I don't know how many Republicans would agree with that last bit. Truth be told, most of them aren't even pro-free-trade. They're just anti-socialist. Anything that sounds like socialism sends them running for the hills. "Supply and demand" are useful to them only as a cudgel with which to attack the socialist view.
And this sort of justification is trumpeted only by the educated, Wall-Street-Journal-reading elite of the Republican party. Their popular support base in rural areas couldn't care less about economic issues.
When I see articles that attribute far-reaching health consequences to specific chemicals like anti-oxidants -- which are rarely tested in isolation from other compounds -- I'm reminded of a quote from Gary Taubes:
"If public health research functioned like some of the harder sciences -- high energy physics being the one I know best -- then researchers would be ridiculed and perhaps even run out of the field for over-interpreting their evidence or publicly presenting the results of sloppy experiments or basing claims on premature evidence and none of this would have happened."
Unfortunately, human research isn't as simple - you actually have to worry about the health consequences as well as the benefits. But correlations can be very meaningful. For instance, cross-cultural studies w/r to diets can be illuminating even as there are no experiments being run. Still, I'd place my bets, and my life, on fresh foods - high in anti-oxidants - over processed ones. The beauty is it ain't rocket science. And better, good diets can control and even inhibit pathologies (diabetes, heart disease, etc.).
I don't think the problem is one of complexity as such but more of being more complex than people imagine. Very few people have any knowledge of high energy physics, so only those who actually know what they're talking about offer an opinion, but everyone knows about food and diets, so everyone has an opinion.
I took a nutrition class through an accredited correspondence school for a science credit. If you look around you should be able to find a school near you teaching the classes. Most of them suggest or require high school biology and chemistry and give you a nice background without marketing bs tossed in.
Valid advice if you've got serious persistent problems with food, like overeating, junk food addictions, etc. But, if you already have a good diet and have no food-related health issues, then a nutritionist will likely be of limited utility--certainly less than a few hours of research on the Internet (careful research...citations needed).
Certainly there are some nutritionists who are on the cutting edge of the field and follow the latest research (and parse it with knowledge that most popular science coverage of food is bullshit), but I've come upon a few who mingled current trends with "ancient wisdom" a little too much and end up being purveyors of "alternative medicine". A friend of mine went on a huge soy kick for a year or two, because her nutritionist had bought into the "soy is a magical cancer preventative" hype. We now know with confidence that soy in many forms is actually kinda hard on the body (hormone producing chemicals in food are something that should be treated with caution, and not consumed in large quantities without careful study), and the research that indicated cancer prevention was probably overblown and certainly not specific enough.
So, see a nutritionist if you want, but take all advice with a grain of salt. Nobody knows everything, and moderation is probably the best choice when in doubt. (Though anyone who tells that you should eat more fruits and vegetables is almost certainly right. Moderation is probably not a concern with broccoli and carrots and blueberries.)
Quite honestly I've had my eyes opened. Good nutritionists aren't that hard to find and their expertise involves not just "persistent problems with food", but can also help you to avoid diets that cause health problems in the long-term. Even more amazing to me is that those health problems can be controlled through foods. The nutritionist can go through your family history and help you to understand your relationship with food and how it affects you - now and into the future.
"Though anyone who tells that you should eat more fruits and vegetables is almost certainly right."
That I can agree with. I should have also mentioned Michael Pollan's books. His most recent is an analysis of what to eat - and the subtitle says it all: Eat food^. Not too much. Mostly plants.
"Although the United Arab Emirates is becoming less dependent on natural resources as a source of revenue, petroleum and natural gas exports still play an important role in the economy, especially in Abu Dhabi. A massive construction boom, an expanding manufacturing base, and a thriving services sector are helping the UAE diversify its economy. Nationwide, there is currently $350 billion worth of active construction projects."
Google allows you to retain copyright over your content. That's great. So if you send a copy of your manuscript to your publisher using Chrome, you technically will always be "the owner." You can still earn royalties from your content, and enter into contracts with publishers or other parties that want to license your content.
But Google will still have a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through" the browser.
Usually, when we own rights to something, it gives us the power to do all those things without being bothered by someone else.
So in layman's terms, this essentially makes them "co-owner" of your content. They can license it to others, collect revenues (albeit not technically "royalties") from its sale, copy it at will, alter it at will. They don't have to have your permission to do any of this.
And that's just the intellectual property side. Forget about privacy with regard to your personal life or with regard to trade secrets.
They actually don't have the rights to license it to others. They're not co-owners, nor do they pretend to be, hence "You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."
But their license justly protects them from being sued because you uploaded a video to YouTube that became a hit, and then you decide you want to sue them because they're hosting a video you submitted but now want to charge people for.
Check out the "Google Chrome Terms of Service": anything you post or transmit with Chrome can be used by Google in any way it wants, for all time. They can display your writings in public, modify it, or both.
This applies to everything you transmit using Chrome, no matter how private it may seem, no matter if it's encrypted, no matter if you're sending it to friends, family, lovers, business partners, employers, financial services planners...
What was that slogan? "Don't be evil"?
"11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
"11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services."
It is strange that up to now there have been virtually no comments about privacy issues in this thread. It is clear to me that for a company in the advertising business the prime reason to release a browser is to improve data mining.
If, say, an association of insurers generously releases a "free" browser, would people install it?
Greg Linden used to work at Amazon. From an older blog post of his:
"In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue."
I find it immaterial considering the easier thing to speed up is the number of HTTP requests on the site, and that has clearly gotten worse over the years, not better. I pushed heavily to get HTML cleaned up and valid (showing an easy 10-20% reduction with HTML alone), reduce the amount of javascript, etc. It simply wasn't a priority. To be fair, at the time I was there the priority was to grow as fast as possible and deal with profits later.
The power point linked to in the article implies that its from Amazon's own internal data, but unfortunately there's very little substance presented. However, I don't find it surprising that amazon found a high correlation between responsive and overall sales.
I love the fact that this guy feels there is a huge gaping hole out there, and that he intensely wants to do something about it. For me, that counts for more than fitting in as a company man.