if you see an #ipad2 running away from a thief, it's mine! Please contact his beloved father...
Whether it is just a political move or not, it's nice to see a politician in the arab world that actually uses his Facebook page to generate ideas: http://on.fb.me/ggHfQl Dr. Fayyad dismissed his old cabinet on February 14, in the wake of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. He is obliged to appoint a new cabinet in less than six weeks, so he's reached out to the young people to ask them to be a part of the process. |
 Fayyad's goal seems to be to bring the Gaza Strip, under Hamas, and the West Bank, under Fatah, back together as a single polity. One way he hopes to do that is get the youth of Palestine on his side using social media.
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Using Smart Playlist to keep the size of my audiobooks under a manageable size on my iPhone. Use a playlist to limit audiobooks to a specific size |
Here’s how it works. First, create a new Smart Playlist named “Audiobooks (xx gigs)” where xx is the amount of your device’s capacity you want to dedicate to audiobooks. I dedicate about 4 gigabytes, roughly half of my iPhone’s capacity. The playlist definition should find only tracks with a genre that starts with “Audiobook”, that are checked, and limit the list to e.g. 4 gigabytes, ordered by name. This is what my Smart Playlist definition looks like: |
This will create a playlist that always contains 4 gigabytes of audiobooks that have not yet been listened to: |
As soon as I listen to an audiobook, I uncheck its track(s) in iTunes, and it instantly disappears from this playlist (that’s the “smart” part of Smart Playlists), replaced with other tracks that are still checked, and therefor not yet listened to. The next time I sync, I’ll lose the tracks I’ve heard, and get new tracks to replace them. Just by unchecking the box when I’ve finished a track. |
The “Listen Now” playlist |
| So what do you do when you want to listen to a book with a title that’s further down in the alphabet |
| Create a second playlist, this one a standard (manually managed) playlist, named “Listen Now”, and add a couple of the books that don’t appear in the Audiobooks smart playlist |
| There are a number of articles about creating smart playlists of music (here’s a good one), that keep things interesting and in rotation, rather than a static list. |
Keep your podcasts under control |
Is this problem of "instant gratification" and "painless solutions" only an issue for the USA or is it a reality of most "developed nations" from Greece to Canada? I do think that to reverse that, we need some real politicians who can take the courage to tell the truth and some real citizens who can have the courage to hear it and VOTE for it!!!
But to reach this, I do believe that we need a new way of doing politics: with limited fixed budgets for all the parties, zero advertising, controlled airtime for each party, and 100% local and national debates. | Why, he asked, have we spent so much money on school reform in America and have so little to show for it in terms of scalable solutions that produce better student test scores? Maybe, he answered, it is not just because of bad teachers, weak principals or selfish unions. |
| “The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” |
| The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” |
| “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ” |
| We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism |
| Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot-com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs. |
Ask yourself: What made our Greatest Generation great? First, the problems they faced were huge, merciless and inescapable: the Depression, Nazism and Soviet Communism. Second, the Greatest Generation’s leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice. Third, that generation was ready to sacrifice, and pull together, for the good of the country. And fourth, because they were ready to do hard things, they earned global leadership the only way you can, by saying: “Follow me.” |
| Contrast that with the Baby Boomer Generation. Our big problems are unfolding incrementally — the decline in U.S. education, competitiveness and infrastructure, as well as oil addiction and climate change. Our generation’s leaders never dare utter the word “sacrifice.” |
| All solutions must be painless. Which drug would you like? A stimulus from Democrats or a tax cut from Republicans? |
| For a decade we sent our best minds not to make computer chips in Silicon Valley but to make poker chips on Wall Street, |
| while telling ourselves we could have the American dream — a home — without saving and investing, for nothing down and nothing to pay for two years. |
| debate between the two parties, notes David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment visiting scholar, “is about assigning blame rather than assuming responsibility. |
| It’s a contest to see who can give away more at precisely the time they should be asking more of the American people.” |
| we would get excited about U.S. politics when our national debate is between Democrats and Republicans who start by acknowledging that we can’t cut deficits without both tax increases and spending cuts — and then debate which ones and when |
| China and India have been catching up to America not only via cheap labor and currencies. They are catching us because they now have free markets like we do, education like we do, access to capital and technology like we do, but, most importantly, values like our Greatest Generation had |
| That is, a willingness to postpone gratification, invest for the future, work harder than the next guy and hold their kids to the highest expectations. |
| In a flat world where everyone has access to everything, values matter more than ever |
I guess this is a big test for America's values (especially regarding religious twisting for political aim) and not even talking about the 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...". It is also another test for the muslim community regarding transparency and empathy.
Unfortunately it seems that as usually it is used for political strategies (political harm), and the real and important questions (like the source of the funds) will be taken to the shadow of the stupid ones (like: is Obama muslim, is he allowed to lie because of his fate, blablabla...)
But at the end of the day, people should stop thinking about a "winning/losing" scenario: if American let this Muslim group build their community center it would be a victory for Muslims over America and vice versa! I do think that american should show tolerance and let this Muslim group build the community center, AND I do think that Abdel Rauf should deal something with NYC in order to get a nice spot outside of Ground-Zero area to build a Muslim community center, just like the Christians or the Jews did build in New York (and by the way, it does not mean that it's an exclusive center for their congregation, the JCC and the YMCA are not!!!). It would be a nice gesture from both sides and a real step toward more tolerance AND both sides would "win"!
For a glimpse of how venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become, consider a blog post in The New Republic this month. Written by Martin Peretz, the magazine’s editor in chief, it asserted: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.”
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This is one of those times that test our values, a bit like the shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. |
It would have been natural for this test to have come right after 9/11, but it was forestalled because President George W. Bush pushed back at his conservative ranks and repeatedly warned Americans not to confuse Al Qaeda with Islam. |
Or there’s the e-mail I received the other day from a relative, declaring: “President Obama has directed the United States Postal Service to remember and honor the Eid Muslim holiday season with a new commemorative 44 cent first class holiday postage stamp.” In fact, it was President Bush’s administration that first issued the Eid stamp in 2001 and that issued new versions after that. |
That kind of extremism undermines our democracy, risks violence and empowers jihadis. |
Newsweek quoted a Taliban operative, Zabihullah, about opposition to the mosque near ground zero: “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor. It’s providing us with more recruits, donations and popular support.” Mr. Zabihullah added, “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get.” |
One American university professor wrote to me that “every Muslim in the world” believes that the proposed Manhattan Islamic center would symbolize triumph over America. That reminded me of Pakistanis who used to tell me that “every Jew” knew of 9/11 in advance, so that none died in the World Trade Center. |
If this is a testing time, then some have passed with flying colors. Hats off to a rabbinical student in Massachusetts, Rachel Barenblat, who raised money to replace prayer rugs that a drunken intruder had urinated on at a mosque. She told me that she quickly raised more than $1,100 from Jews and Christians alike. |
Above all, bravo to those Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders who jointly denounced what they called “the anti-Muslim frenzy.” |
“We know what it is like when people have attacked us physically, have attacked us verbally, and others have remained silent,” said Rabbi David Saperstein. “It cannot happen here in America in 2010.” |
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick put it this way: “This is not America. America was not built on hate.” |
“Shame on you,” the Rev. Richard Cizik, a leading evangelical Christian, said to those castigating Islam. “You bring dishonor to the name of Jesus Christ. You directly disobey his commandment to love your neighbor.” Read more at www.nytimes.com |
I'm wondering if as I read in this comment on a RWW's post there is a legal breach of contract, and if then what should happen?
1. I mean users could just leave if they are not happy.
2. It's legally abiding not to change the contract and thus FB has a legal responsibility to keep the same contract for the users who signed in on the former terms of service.
I don't know how it works, but I do know that cell phone companies do change some terms in their agreement (higher prices usually), but not others (lowering your minutes for ex).
I don't know the law actually. So any hint?
thanks! The real question that is being ignored in relation to FB's changes is the blatant breach of contract involved in soliciting personal information about people's lives (which is what makes FB work) under one privacy guarantee, and then simply "deciding" that it is acceptable to breach that guarantee and make information more available unless the user takes positive action.
A contract, such as is formed by signing up under one privacy guarantee, and disclosing information based on that guarantee, represents a meeting of the minds of BOTH parties, not just one of them.
FB, or any other company, is free to solicit the disclosure of personal information from NEW customers under any policy that it believes that customers will now accept. If Zuckerburg wants to do that, it is just fine.
But to obtain the information under one guarantee, and then change the privacy policy and apply it to information gathered under a different guarantee is no less FRAUD than if it gathered information under one pretext, and then just released it. The difference is only in amount, not in kind.
This is especially true when anything that FB makes publicly available (unless a customer relying on the old privacy policy takes a timely positive action) may be indexed by search engines and permanently cached outside the control of FB and the customer. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com |
Wondering what is the "in" company to work for today, if you had the same great job offer from Google, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft, which one would you chose?
There are more than 20 distributed open social networks in work-in-progress (http://www.reddit.com/tb/c3ynt), will such a large amount of project succeed in overcoming our Social Inertia as defined below? | Social inertia consists of people who have given in to social inertia.
When you surrender to social inertia, you become part of the pressure
it exerts on others; when you resist it, you reduce it. We conquer
social inertia by identifying it, and resolving not to be part of
it.Read more at www.gnu.org |
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