(always avoid double negations)

This becomes apparent when you create a truth table for it:

    !meetings != !communication

    meetings | communication | expr
    F        | F             | F
    T        | T             | F
    T        | F             | T
    F        | T             | T

"Meetings != communication" is analogous to saying "At meetings, communication doesn't necessarily occur."

In terms you would personally appreciate: (No Patrick Hernandez != No Dancing) similarly is not equivalent to (Patrick Hernandez != Dancing)

One says without Patrick Hernandez, there may be dancing. The other says with Patrick Hernandez there certainly is not any dancing ;-)

In short, I believe neilk should have used => instead of !=. Or just plain english. ;-)

Jackalope.

If you read the above as anything other than a nuanced and well reasoned response thats your mistake, not mine.

neilk incorrectly used a comparison operator to try and point out the logical fallacy known as affirming the consequent. But thats not what was said.

At least thats what I think is happening here. I can't be sure because instead of using logic symbols they used symbols that are ambiguous at best.

For you that don't know, futurism had its roots in 20th century Italy and was a broad art and cultural movement that ultimately gave rise to fascism. It also inspired both Lenin and Hitler and merged with the ideals of industrialism to create communism (Leninism) and national socialism.

The difference is, back in those days futurism was considered avantgarde. Today it seems to be modus operandi.

And on a side note: Why would any sane person want to live in space? Going there to do some important science for a while, sure. But living in a tin-can in an insanely hostile environment for the rest of my life? Not gonna happen.

I would personally probably miss the smells and the seasons the most.

A relevant example of this is organizations who are CMM Level 5 certified.

However I have to agree that others do it better. Hardees has the best fast-food burger around. Also the best ads :)

And just to make it clear, I am not trying to criticizes capitalism per se. I'm only basically stating the same thing the article is stating; that there is an inherent paradox in capitalism that makes it more complex to deal with than is directly apparent. Everyone that goes into business or deals with business indirectly through policy-making should be as aware as possible of this paradox, simply because it will prevent us from collectively ending up in a world with great processes but awful products or with great products but awful processes. Neither of which are very tempting scenarios.

The article is just saying that running an X business means you spend a lot more of your time on the "running a business" part than the X part, for any value of X. It doesn't mean you can't do a good job at X — just that you get to enjoy X more as a consumer than a producer.

But to be honest I thought I was being very careful in my wording about something that should be self evident, e.g.

"...will most likely not be as inherently good as it could be."

Running a business implies a trade-off. The trade-off is that if you want to be successful (i.e. sustainable) you need to focus on the business and not the product. Which is exactly what the article is stating.

Maybe a better example to support my claim is Apple. They make great products. But the way they do that is by focusing on the process of creating great products. Jonathan Ive specifically talks about this in the Objectified documentary. He says that most of their time is spent on designing the manufacturing process and the tools needed to mass-produce the products, only a very small part of the time is spent on the actual design of the phone or computer and that design is almost always a direct implication of the manufacturing process rather than something they magically dream up in some creative haze.

Although I suppose I'm on the verge of becoming somewhat of a troll right now.

Pointing out that your argument is a straw-man is not a disagreement. It's saying that you are misrepresenting the article's position, and that's an objectively bad post.

Also, I'm not sure if downvoting when disagreeing is discouraged. Spam should be marked by flagging, not downvoting.

The author used a low margin, low sucess business example to make a point about what mindset someone should be in to successfully run a business. You took from that the message that anything enjoyable is not sustainable.

"Focus on creating something inherently good --> it will not be sustainable"

You also less directly imply that focusing on profit will necessitate producing an inferior product, again using a specific example to provide a generality.

Rather, the distinction I was aiming at was between "process" and "product". But I suppose that wasn't very clear. My intention was not to start a flame war on capitalism.

In my opinion a process can be sustainable (and thus very likely profitable), but a product can not. In this case a business model is a process and the thing you put in your mouth (the hamburger) is the product. For the hamburger to be perfect we would need an ever escalating process. Constantly adding more complexity or work to refine the product we can create thus creating an unsustainable process.

If you want to create a hamburger in a sustainable and profitable way. The McDonalds process is most likely one of the best ways to do that. But it will NEVER create a perfect hamburger. The same is of course true with the opposite. A tiny connoisseur coffee shop can conceivably create a perfect cup of coffee and push the boundaries of the state of the art. But it will NEVER be a sustainable process. You need to make compromises in order to achieve that.

You have to employ people to make coffee manually, and quickly. You have to buy a machine to aid them in this, and keep it in good maintenance.

Additionally, you have to supply perishables like milk to go in the coffee.

You have to keep them in your shop buying coffee, or incite them to buy coffee here when they're hungry instead of going to go to dunkin dounuts.

You can do this with nice decor, or by placing yourself in an already attractive location, or taking a margin loss on selling bake goods in order to bring in coffee customers.

In any case, your high margins for coffee product have rapidly vanished.

It's a bit like saying: "Oh, by the way. I might be hanging out down at the bar tonight. Swing by if you feel like it". Without actually having to say it out loud.

edit: The more I think about this, the more angry I get. It feels like the Google+ nerd mafia is slowly destroying Facebook through bad influence. They simply don't understand how and why Facebook works and is popular. The whole privacy and circles stuff for example, which is just stupid. No normal person cares about that. Facebook is a tool for sharing and connecting and to limit that in the name of privacy is insanely counterproductive. It only adds a wet blanket of politics on something that is better understood through social psychology and sociology. Facebook used to understand that, but now it seems they've started to become distracted. Sad really.

You can also now do this from your computer (not just your smartphone), and do it just before you go to, or just after you return from your venue, not just while you're there.

The jury is still out on the new privacy stuff though.

I'm not saying plus will win the social wars because Facebook has a lot of people because it built up a lot of momentum. But if it looses it won't be because people found it too nerdy / geeky or whatever. It just means Facebook had a huge advantage and they didn't let it slip.

Except for the massive issues surrounding name use and the triviality in which it can be used to grief other people and not just on Google+ but their entire google account.

The somewhat technical explanation is that what Google is doing is implementing something very similar to "Social role theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_Theory), which emphasizes social roles as the defining characteristic used to understand social interaction. While Facebook rather is implementing something more akin to "Symbolic interaction theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_interaction).

I think it's pretty obvious that Facebook has been, from the start, something very different. It is so ingrained in every little design decision and how they promote and talk about the service that it is a tool for managing your public persona. Not a simple communication tool, or replacement for email. Though they obviously offer that kind of functionality as well through Messages and Chat.

Facebook wants to enhance or maybe even change the way you interact socially. It's not a political agenda, but it is definitly a very conscious mission to change a large part of western culture.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about this. So let me state it again to make it clear:

FACEBOOK IS A TOOL FOR MANAGING YOUR PUBLIC PERSONA.

You are profoundly fooling yourself if you think that most Facebook users aren't using it as a way to CC a list of people some photos. I don't know anyone outside of the tech/blog scene who uses Facebook to manage a public persona. It's just a different way to communicate with people.

FACEBOOK IS A TOOL TO MAKE YOU (the user, their product) MORE MARKETABLE TO ADVERTISERS (the customers).

By knowing everything about you, they can get better rates from advertisers. Everything else, like photo sharing, and the ability to send messages to other people, or check into place, is designed to get more info about you, and to make sure you don't wander off Facebook to their competitors (if you didn't have picture sharing, you'd be using Picasa or Flicker more -- and that might threaten facebook).

Although I think google+ is a welcome player on the market what really frustrates me is that I am forced to add people to some circle.

Why forced?

The same reason LinkedIn "Completion Bar" is effective.

It taxes on your cognitive energy to see people not applied to a specific circle.

Twitters work much better where people just can follow me.

No tips, no explore, No trending, No badges (worthless, but fun), and less specials than Foursquare.

To be fair, I have many friends who use Foursquare for its most obvious and intended purpose, which is to arrange spontaneous meetups without having to text all their friends where they are or to find out where everybody is going. I do it myself, I just pop open 4sq on the phone and see "oh, everybody is at Foo's Bar" and then go there. Easy. Facebook Places makes that simple action incredibly difficult and slow.

Places essentially fails as well because it broadens the userbase too much. My college friends whom I no longer live near couldn't care less what bar I'm at. My local friends who I'm friends with on 4sq do care. So there's a natural separation. I'm only 4sq friends with people I'm likely to see often. I'm Facebook friends with almost everybody I've ever known.

Location as meta is a good thing for Facebook. Location as check-in doesn't fit with Facebook's friend model.

Are you arguing that social networks don't improve peoples lives?

I can't find much in social networks. I cannot imagine calling a person pouring through the wall of friends feeds' live is much improved.

Distributing books this way will add a lot of complexity and cost to an already expensive workflow. If this format succeeds I imagine it will have more in common with "games" than it has with traditional "books". The model for funding and producing these "books" would therefor probably be more similar to how games are produced.

Hey, I think Facebook just launched a very elegant solution for that. But what would the world come to if we would suddenly start using the same tools as our grandchildren for serious business?

Per RFC 2616, the POST method should be used for any context in which a request is non-idempotent: that is, it causes a change in server state each time it is performed, such as submitting a comment to a blog post or voting in an online poll.

The solution to the security problem is to not pass the authentication data in the query string which is intended for specifying parameters that vary the result of the performed query. Instead the authentication data should be passed as custom HTTP headers. E.g. "X-Fb-Sig-User: 218471".

I am very amazed that this is not common knowledge. This is a 20 years old protocol that might possibly be the most widely used and implemented high level communication protocol in human history. Get your shit together people. Seriously!

edit: I guess I was a bit quick to judge. Didn't realize that the request originates from an iframe in a browser where you can't easily set custom HTTP headers. Maybe it is possible to do with some XMLHttpRequest magic, but I can't think of a solution that would work of the top of my head.

Seems like a POST is a perfectly valid way to handle it.