Big Wheel

A flash mob in Copenhagen wishes their bus driver a happy birthday:

An unfortunate situation, but almost certainly an oversight rather than a deliberate exclusion of "Palestine" as a location. (As weird as Mark Zuckerberg is, are we really so paranoid as to think the guy wants to insert himself into the Middle East conflict too?) I suspect one of the following happened: 1) A Facebook engineer built a new database of locations himself or herself and forgot to include several locations in there, or they neglected to vet their country data thoroughly with a product manager who might have caught the error. 2) Facebook imported a location database from a third party, and didn't realize that it had inconsistencies with what they'd used before. This wiped out some options that were previously selectable. Sloppy? Yes. Deliberately excluding the OT? No. These kinds of stupid little data bugs happen constantly on the internets. The question is: whose assumption may have a basis in fact? You really think it's likelier that Silicon Valley nerds care about imposing a militant Zionist agenda on their users rather than that they are just sometimes careless with data? I will happily bet all the money in my bank account that nobody at Facebook gave a second thought to the political ramifications of whatever country database they used. Anyone care to make it interesting?

An unfortunate situation, but almost certainly an oversight rather than a deliberate exclusion of "Palestine" as a location. (As weird as Mark Zuckerberg is, are we really so paranoid as to think the guy wants to insert himself into the Middle East conflict too?) I suspect one of the following happened: 1) A Facebook engineer built a new database of locations himself or herself and forgot to include several locations in there, or they neglected to vet their country data thoroughly with a product manager who might have caught the error. 2) Facebook imported a location database from a third party, and didn't realize that it had inconsistencies with what they'd used before. This wiped out some options that were previously selectable. Sloppy? Yes. Deliberately excluding the OT? No. These kinds of stupid little data bugs happen constantly on the internets.

My take on a lot of these issues, I think, is that we're criticizing Facebook because they do unusual things with our data - but it's data that we gave them. Is Facebook invading your privacy by telling you that it knows that you probably know someone, because you showed up in their email contacts? Well, the person told Facebook that they knew you, and Facebook now has that data whether they display that fact to you or not. So if there's any creepiness here, it's more in the retention of that person's data than that the fact that they tell you that they have it. Likewise, when I started checking out the photos of the attractive woman I met the other day, all her posts immediately shot up to the top of my "Top News" feed. Is that creepy? (Of Facebook, not me, I mean. I think my own creepiness is a given.) By the number of pageviews I've already told Facebook I'm interested in information about this person. So while obviously it would be awful if Facebook sent her a message saying "wow, this guy sure has looked at a lot of your photos lately", it doesn't strike me as so irresponsible to tailor my own news feed to posts that I'm probably going to be interested in.

Did you ever allow facebook access to your email to search for people you already know on facebook? If not, what you're saying is possible - they could be noticing that your email address turns up in a bunch of other people's contact lists. Or it's possible that their algorithm is just noticing that you share lots of friends (or friends of friends). That's the connection I have with most of the friend suggestions - they worked at the same company as me and we usually share a number of acquaintances. Funnily enough, I know a few Facebook engineers and this subject came up in conversation with one of them tonight. Your last guess was correct - for some (not all AFAIK) of the friend suggestions, they actually harvest the email addresses from other people's uploaded contact lists and match it (if possible) with the email address associated with your Facebook account. Slightly creepy, but there you have it.

Do Swedes get a discount on them? If so, do I have a deal for you... Stupid question: why do synth makers tout how much memory their synths have and then put a trivial amount of memory in them? The SV-1 has 512 MB of ROM to hold all the sounds, and that's twice as much as the Nord Stage EX 88. You can get a full GB of RAM for a whopping $43 at Newegg. Is there something special about this memory that makes it much more expensive than computer memory? Or is the amount of memory actually not very important in enhancing the synth's capabilities?

Did you ever allow facebook access to your email to search for people you already know on facebook? If not, what you're saying is possible - they could be noticing that your email address turns up in a bunch of other people's contact lists. Or it's possible that their algorithm is just noticing that you share lots of friends (or friends of friends). That's the connection I have with most of the friend suggestions - they worked at the same company as me and we usually share a number of acquaintances.

How do these stack up against the Nord 88? That thing costs a fortune, but I remember being impressed with it when I was messing around in Guitar Center several months ago.

By "direct contact" you mean the ability to easily contact their support team? They have 400 million active users. Imagine if, when you worked at WBAI, that every inhabitant of North America listened to you every day. Now imagine that, say, 0.1% of those listeners had some beef that they needed to work out - they wanted to make a request or had trouble with their signal or whatever. That still comes out to 400,000 requests every day. That's the kind of scale we're talking about here - even if they hired 1000 people to field such requests they'd still have to tackle them at a rate of almost one every minute just to answer them all. You make a good point, BW. That said, other hugely popular sites somehow manage to respond to e-mail, Amazon, for example. And if the sheer number of subscribers makes direct contact prohibitive, they should give one less reason to attempt such contact—for example, a simple way out. Amazon a) is taking your money, and thus has an enormous business incentive to be reachable; b) likely has fewer users than Facebook by at least a factor of two; c) has had a head start of a decade to learn how to do this. That said, even Amazon's support is mostly crap - while I've found it responsive, all email support is handled by India and the quality of answer to non-routine questions is bad.

By "direct contact" you mean the ability to easily contact their support team? They have 400 million active users. Imagine if, when you worked at WBAI, that every inhabitant of North America listened to you every day. Now imagine that, say, 0.1% of those listeners had some beef that they needed to work out - they wanted to make a request or had trouble with their signal or whatever. That still comes out to 400,000 requests every day. That's the kind of scale we're talking about here - even if they hired 1000 people to field such requests they'd still have to tackle them at a rate of almost one every minute just to answer them all.

Possible, but in this case VBII is getting requests from people he's never even heard of, so it's not clear why they are sending him messages. This suggests that either: -VBII is very forgetful/alcoholic and doesn't remember that he has drunken encounters with random strangers all the time; -These people don't know VBII, but have harvested his email address and are trying to get him to sign up for Facebook simply to spam him further. Or they are trying to use him to evade Facebook's algorithms designed to catch people who do this sort of thing - the more legitimate friends you have, the less you look like a spammer. -These people aren't actually going through Facebook at all but are faking emails that look like they are from Facebook so they can grab your passwords or do other nefarious things with your personal info.

Not a "forgery" in the sense of a Photoshop job. This was a boot that was actually issued: http://krisiesmopes.blogspot.com/2010/02/led-zeppelin-1973-seattle-bootleg.html

1. Are you sure these are legitimate emails sent through Facebook and not attempts to phish your personal info? 2. Can't you just filter these emails or report them as spam so they go into your spam folder in the future? Repeated, unwanted, unsolicited email is practically the definition of spam.

You can also just filter the notifications or (like I do) shunt them off to a never-used inbox...

Yeah, that is a little odd considering the new price for big boxes is $17 per disc. I wonder if they are experimenting a little bit to see what happens when giving customers a break around the shipping threshold of $150. Total cost with shipping is $159, whereas if it were priced normally at $153 it would be $165.

A meme is a more general concept than a catchphrase and not necessarily transient, like a fad is. "Not so much" is a meme that also is a catchphrase, but bacon (or really, the wacky fixation some people seem to have recently acquired with bacon) obviously isn't a catchphrase. And I think it's at least arguable that that fixation isn't really a fad. From wikipedia:

http://www.azcentral.com/ent/pop/articles/1031catchphrases1031.html

I haven't noticed anything particularly in the last few months, but it does seem like it's become more popular in the last few years. My completely uninformed guess is that Jon Stewart is actually responsible for the phrase becoming popular again. The ironic "not so much" when you really mean "the diametric opposite" strikes me as an old Yiddishism, though I have no evidence to prove it.

That was her sister, you assclown.

A suggestion: when locking threads, I think it would be useful if the moderator who closed the thread posted a brief (1 sentence) explanation of why they locked it. Two reasons for this: 1) It gives the moderators a bit of a human face and at least counteracts the perception that any thread of yours can be "bombed from 30000 feet", so to speak, without you having any idea who did it or why; 2) It gives people an idea of how the moderators tend to interpret the rules. If I have no idea what caused a thread to get locked, I'm not going to do anything different in the future. Whereas if I know that the moderators generally lock threads for doing X, I'm probably going to be more cautious when I think about posting something with X in it. I realize that this kind of non-anonymous moderation means that a mod will probably get more PMs from people contesting the decision to lock. NOT saying that a mod needs to respond to these and engage people in long discussions over this or that point - but as we can see in this thread, the current system of moderating isn't exactly preventing those kinds of annoying discussions, either. It just tends to make them more public because lots of others get confused as to what the hell happened.

I don't remember but it's usually unreasonable for larger CD orders. I think they do something like $1 per CD no matter how many you order, so until this $2.95 deal was posted they wanted to charge me something like $15 for a 15-CD order.

Via Dave Liebman's newsletter, some gospel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXDlAZJm19Y&feature=player_embedded

It might, but if they continue to charge your credit card at the time of order placement, rather than at time of shipment, I'm out. It doesn't look like it...I just put an item in my cart and clicked "checkout". Was routed directly to Amazon. Not sure of the specific way they've integrated with Amazon, but if I had to guess, it's Amazon that's charging your card and doing things the way Amazon always does it.

FWIW, Tower.com has a new CEO and he posted a letter on their site saying he knows a lot of customers are unhappy and he's trying to turn things around. I dunno if that's real, honest contrition or just a slick attempt at PR, but there you go. Tower is also moving to migrating all their order fulfillment and customer service to Amazon, so maybe that will improve things?

Interesting! If everything went up in smoke, at least I have a list of all my CDs (about half of yours), which would help prove their former existence. Fortunately, I've no experience of loss or claims of this sort. As for burglary, who'd want the stuff? Have to be a pretty cool burglar! I once left a bag of about a dozen jazz LPs (Blue Note, Riverside, etc) on a train which traveled a hundred miles to its terminus, where someone handed it in intact. As they say, you couldn't give it away! Don't be too surprised. Years ago when I was gradually moving in with my girlfriend (now wife), our apartment was burglarized. The only things stolen were my NAD integrated amplifier, a CD player and about 100 of my CDs (somehow the two TVs and other electronics and all of my wife's jewelry were untouched). Luckily, I had not yet formally moved in and the vast majority of my collection was still at my former apartment. I doubt the person (I had my suspicions regarding a possible cuplrit) had even the slightest interest in the music and instead was just looking for something to grab quick and possibly sell some place else. I have also had the misfortune of having a significant number of CD booklets and LP covers damaged in a flood that occurred shortly after we moved in to our current home. Now that hurts to this day every time I look at all the CDs and LPs on spindles and in sleeves that I had to toss the covers for because of water damage. The flood was nearly five years ago and I still have not had the strength to go into one or two boxes of CDs that were also damaged - booklets still stuck to discs. Give it a shot if you can. I bought a copy of Miles in Berlin from J&R 5 years ago and got caught in a downpour that soaked it and did the same thing. Tons of wet paper stuck to the disc. Last year I looked forlornly at it sitting there on the shelf, and said "what the hell, it barely cost anything and it probably won't screw up my computer, let's give it a shot." It ripped flawlessly to my hard drive.