107 karma · joined March 26, 2007
Also I believe Facebook does not show these ads for minors, so most likely she lied about her age... but I remember just vaguely reading about this at some point in the past.
Let's think critically for a moment: Is it more likely that a 14 year old girl liked the AT&T page in all her days of using Facebook and forgot or that this is normal for Facebook ads that would potentially open them up for a huge lawsuit, after all this is basically libel.
Also check out this author's about section. He's a Google+ fanboy (Google+ is pretty nice, nothing wrong with liking it) and hardly a biased source.
Articles like this and its spread of misinformation highlight the inherent dangers of how easy the Internet has made it for random, misinformed people to get massive reach and it seems that even our "enlightened" community has fallen for it.
I am so disappointed.
Disclaimer: My parents are non-native English speakers and I can't understand a thing they say over the phone, but in person I have no trouble.
"According to South Korean experts, Pyongyang’s electronic warfare capabilities are second only to Russia and the United States."
Not sure how accurate THAT statement is, but North Korea has waged electronic warfare multiple times in the past including jamming SK's GPS systems at one point. They probably have a fully capable electronics warfare unit.
Its also quite possible that China supplies the technology/know how to conduct such attacks and uses NK as a proxy to test systems as SK military procedures are somewhat related to the United States.
Also, South Korea has REALLY bad security. For example, if you want to use some form of online banking you must use an ActiveX control with IE.
1) The idea of "blood" diamonds as well as the fat that the industry marks up diamonds to a ridiculous notion without translating any of those benefits to the societies it exploits. 2) There is no tangible benefit to a diamond ring that CZ or similar gem would not provide.
That being said, my fiancee very strongly wanted a genuine diamond ring. When I explained my viewpoints and she understood and said that she did not want to force me to purchase a ring that I felt very conflicted about. At no point was our relationship in jeopardy over the issue. Even so, I knew that she really wanted a rock and it took me a while to figure out what to do.
In the end I decide to get her a ring because it was what she really wanted, even though she was wiling to suppress her desires to respect mine. I wanted to respect her wishes as well. If she had threatened or had gotten upset over the matter, I might have not reached this conclusion. Maybe she's just a super shrewd negotiator.
For me, the biggest blocking point is the human hardship that goes behind the diamond industry, and I was able to somewhat subdue this by seeking out a conflict free diamond provider. There are a couple around and if this is your biggest blocking point as well you should look into it. Artificial diamonds were not an option for me, because at the moment they are not able to provide colorless diamonds afaik.
We should also keep in mind that this community has always been aligned more with the engineering side of entrepreneurship and less on the all the other equally important functions, which tends to make the community somewhat insular and under-represented.
A friend of mine worked as a curator for its stop in Korea and it was pretty cool. You can tell how much the original iPod and iMac were inspired by his work.
Even though large technology companies are opening offices, like you mentioned, the difference are that these are satellite offices. Your career potential will be limited, its just an unavoidable fact of the current corporate world. Its a very different scenario to move from the center of the solar system to Pluto.
A self feeding startup culture is not a healthy startup culture, at least imo.
Contrast this to how Google handles compensation and employee retention. Granted, Google is a much smaller organization and can afford to be more nimble, but part of it has to do with with the fact that being in the valley means that its incredibly easy for talented, motivated engineers to move to the next hot startup once they're dissatisfied with their current job.
In Redmond, however, these options don't really exist and creates a culture of stagnation. People goto their jobs because they have and leave as soon as it is culturally acceptable.
I fear a lot of Microsoft's future as I just don't believe that they are able to recruit top young talent anymore. Not only is Microsoft not a "hip" place to work anymore, but their compensation is generally below market. Its pretty standard for funded startups to give more BASE salary than Microsoft. Google's base is roughly 50% more than what Microsoft pays. New hires at Google make more money than level 64 Microsoft engineers (5 levels from starting).
Microsoft will continue to execute and create good products, but until their internal culture drastically changes they will slowly slide into irrelevance.
Your master's degree does not have much of an impact, but I know personally of strong performers at Google with 3-4 years of experience who are receiving 135k-150k in base salary + other goodies such as their obscene bonus scheme and stock grants.
http://my.cmu.edu/portal/site/admission/adm_statistics/
You can see that compared to the other departments that the College of Fine Arts lags "significantly" behind the other "academically rigorous" departments. Yet even that being the case, we have one of the strongest fine arts programs in the country with many of the programs being considered top 10.
My reason for bringing this up is that college admissions are (and should be) based on something more meaningful than paper qualifications. The point of a well rounded University is to foster a place of learning across a varied set of fields. Who is to say that athletics is any more or less worthwhile than Fine Arts, Drama, or Computer Science? Athletics contribute a lot to a school's experience. Who cares if their grades are slightly lower and didn't get perfect SAT scores. They are recruited because they have astounding talent in their respective fields just like a geek might have a talent for numbers or a music major has talent for playing the piano.
(I am not and never was an athlete)
One of my biggest regrets of my collegiate education was not making a conscious effort to expand my curriculum by taking courses in the humanities department.
The largest issue with this is you can lose out on really good engineers who view technology as their work, but not their hobby. There is a great number of awesome engineers who only do work within their employment, and therefore won't have a good repository of code to show potential employers.
A good alternative to this is to simply present a coding challenge to solve during an alloted time period (day/week).
There are of course issues with managing such a large population, but the chance of any sort of collapse is the figment, and hope, of our pride and does not reflect the realities of the situation.
* - Income of middle class in the US is higher, but cost of living is also substantially less in China.
edit On innovators: I agree in the current climate the environment in the US is more conducive to raising people with the entrepeneural spirit, however China is rapidly changing. This is the time when the first batch of college grads have parents who had white collar jobs. They aspire to be more than their parents, and this desire/greed/ambition will inspire a new generation of business men and engineers. Their children will be even more so.
Ultimately though, this doesn't matter. As the world becomes more globalized it will matter less and less where companies physically exist. Global companies will still hire the best minds from wherever in the world they graduate from, and global companies/investment firms will still invest in the best of ideas.
Plato. Strangely enough, Plato is probably one of the best introductions to philosophy, not only because he was one of the first whose writings survive to modern time, but also because its relatively simple to read and understand. Some of my personal favorite are 'The Apology', 'The Symposium', and 'The Phaedrus', and of course 'The Republic'. The weird thing with Plato is you'll never know how much of his writings are his thinking as opposed to Socrates teaching. I still reread Plato because the stories (most of his writing is in narrative form) are so damn entertaining.
Aristotle. This is a natural progression from reading Plato. The 'Nichomachean Ethics' is a cornerstone of ancient philosophy and is a relative simple read.
John Locke/Gottfried Leibniz. I'll admit, I struggled through 'An Essay of Human Understanding' but this title and Leibniz's rebuttal 'New Essays on Human Understanding' illustrate a historically important philosophical debate between empiricists and rationalists. Since you're reading 'Common Sense' you might also want to give Locke's 'Second Treatise on Civil Government' a gander.
Immaneul Kant. Since you're reading Schopenhauer you should read Kant as he was heavily influenced by him. You'll hear him referenced a lot if you continue to read philosophy so you should familiarize yourself with his thinking, especially on his thoughts in epistemology.
Bertrand Russell. People have already recommended him and he's one of the most popular philosopher's of modern times, mostly because he's so easy to read and was somewhat of a cultural icon during his time. I have a particular fondness for his work because when I had doubts about my faith, "Why I Am not A Christian" helped me find words to communicate my break with Catholocism. His "History of Western Philosophy" is considered a cornerstone history of philosophy book (although it is somewhat dated now). His writings are usually rather short and concise.
Jacques Derrida/Gilles Deleuze. Now we're getting into some wacky shit. To be fair, I shouldn't even be commenting on it because I have no idea what these guys are talking about half the time. These are the philosophers that people read and pretend to understand because they want to sound smart. You know the stereotypical "philosophy" students that you see in movies. Maybe you'll find something of substance in their work although many philsopher's believe these guys are/were hacks and purposefully obfuscate their writing to hide the fact that there's no substance in it.
One of the best ways to read philosophy is to start with a philosopher who truly changed the game with their work (such as Kant) and work your way out reading the work of his supporters as well as the work of those that disagree with him. This way you'll get a worldy view on 'important' philosophical issues while starting to formulate your own opinions on th ematter.
So I say, "who cares," as long as product placement is not impacting me from being entertained and/or compromising the artistic merit of the show.