Big Wheel

And I'm sure that's exactly how Sony likes it. I now have the freedom to choose - between shelling out $40 for an import of Flood, or $200+ for the pleasure of buying all Herbie's '80s crapola.

Most of the mp3 albums I've seen on BS/SN are much cheaper than $9.90. My thinking is that the mp3 route is preferable for these titles.

Resurrecting this one because I heard a guy yelling for about 10 minutes on the bus today to a female companion (who also looked like she'd seen better days) and some of it was pure gold. (Why do all my best stories about drunks involve public transit?) Most of the rant was about how he can tell a lot about a person's character from their shoes. So a couple of the choicest quotes were: "Jesus didn't even wear SHOES. He wore sandals. But he was JESUS." "I can tell so much about a person from what kind of shoes they have. For instance, if you wear jogging shoes...that tells me you're a jogger." At one point he also started singing the theme from "Secret Agent Man" at full volume in response to a fellow passenger who he apparently thought looked like a secret agent.

Please. You asked a clearly loaded question and now you're calling me bigoted without the slightest bit of evidence. What - actually knowing what the fuck I'm talking about now counts as bigotry? Why do I suspect that one of the reasons musicians liked working with you was that you knew that it wasn't your place as a writer or producer to attempt to meddle in things you barely understood, like which upper extensions they should be playing on that F7 chord in bar 9? That same attitude would better serve you on threads like this.

Where have I defended them besides the one post in which I speculated that the Palestine thing was probably a coding error? For someone who's 79 years old, sometimes you need to grow the fuck up, man. I worked in customer support at a major tech company (not Facebook) for years. When I was there, I saw how frequently users who had only half-learned how our product worked and were misusing it immediately jumped to thinking it was behaving in all kinds of ways that...it wasn't. Usually ways that involved us being malevolent. Because they knew deep down that they didn't have the foggiest idea of how our product did what it did, that made them feel very insecure, unlikely to trust us, and likely to lash out whenever something happened with it that they didn't expect. Sometimes that was our fault for not doing a better job of explaining it. Sometimes that was their fault for being pains in the ass who had no interest in learning about what they were using. Point being, they needed someone to EXPLAIN IT TO THEM to be able to even make an informed decision about what they were doing. This thread alone has a lot of good information in it, and a lot of people who are still confused about the details of how Facebook's product actually works. I'm posting because I think maybe people would benefit from having some of it explained to them.

Who knows where the bot got your first name? If one of your contacts ever had their email account hacked or turned over their contact list to someone they didn't intend, there you go. Or a spammer could have already had it (or guessed it if your email address already contained "jim" in it). Sounds like the email Facebook is sending out does basically the same thing as the webpage I assumed you might be taken to - Facebook's system takes your email and name from whoever supplied it in their form, says "oh, we have this guy's email already - all these members know him", and personalizes the email you see so it contains a bunch of people Facebook already knows you know. But the bot or malicious person or whoever triggered the email has no knowledge of exactly how Facebook's system is going to make it look when it hits your inbox.

Thanks, BW. This message really didn't seem to originate from an individual, based on the address. Also, another thing I didn't mention is that they addressed me as "Jim" in the body of the message. Not sure I can make sense of that, if they only harvested my e-mail address from other members. If it happens again, I'll be more careful about saving more details. The distinction here is that the email you received is user-triggered. The bot or whoever it was likely put your email address AND name in the form that sends the email, which is why the email was addressed to "Jim". Whereas the landing page that you were brought to with all the people you know is not user-triggered - Facebook is building that page on its own from data that it has about your email address, without any immediate input from a user. It should be easy enough to confirm this with more details next time.

Yes. I would have to see more details of your specific case to hazard a good guess at what happened with the person you didn't know, but it's definitely likely that Facebook is storing non-members' email addresses somewhere, the same way they do with people they identify as Facebook members. If you appear in 8 Facebook members' address books, when clicking a link from your email to a "join Facebook" page, the system is probably going to point out to you that joining will allow you to connect with those 8 people.

One of the commenters on the Youtube clip says this was a regular act Red and Benny used to do. I guess it makes sense that you don't see more mention of this particular "meltdown," then.

It looks like Norvo was pissed that the band came in with backgrounds behind him (or maybe that the backgrounds were too loud and he wanted another chorus?). Though from what I've heard about the Goodman bands there was probably always something simmering under the surface waiting to boil.

Wait, wha?? Are we talking about the Larry Young record or something else?

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...