aristoxenus

Man, you need to get rid of that TV! There are plenty of ways to procrastinate in the world, but that one must have the lowest "value added to life"-vs-"time utterly wasted" ratio of them all.

It's really hard to get that kind of straight-talk from instructors or native speakers.

The best rationalization I can think of for someone learning this language, is that if you enjoyed the meditative focus of learning how to write cursive as a child, or you miss the wonder of constantly discovering new words as an adolescent, you can re-live that for the rest of your life with Chinese!

Fortunately for Chinese (Mandarin at least), it is a very beautiful language, and every dose of that beauty seems to make you want more.

Getting further OT: I used to agree wholeheartedly with this, but have you noticed how slow Gmail is getting? I recently switched back to Apple mail, after insisting on Gmail as my frontend for years. Can't beat Google on search speed, but Apple does a fine job of that, and every other function is considerably faster.

"Full disclosure" is a discussion about the ethics of publishing an exploit. Publishing exploits is customarily done in a descriptive manner -- I've never seen it done by publicly sharing the spoils of using that exploit.

Did you try publicizing it without the full identifying data available and measuring the response? Did you consider a strategy of escalating outrageousness, instead of going straight for this course of action?

What about automatically contacting the affected users first, and attempt to rouse them to action?

I'm sorry to be so harsh in a public forum, but when someone takes it upon himself to say that the affected lives are going to suffer for a good cause, then he'd better accompany the resulting campaign with a very thorough -- and thoroughly-vetted -- piece of argument explaining exactly why the ethical balance is in his favor. Two guys deciding they'd get more pageviews by going with plan A, and leaving the moral debate for blog commenters after the fact is not a thorough vetting.

There were already numerous forces at play which could potentially result in FB getting things straight. Your app won't have accomplished anything that wouldn't otherwise have been accomplished, except perhaps to cause a few more people to suffer.

To someone with the proper technical skills, it's trivial as you say. But until you do something like what these guys have done, it's dishonest (or geek-myopic) to say that it was trivially available before. When you package it up like this to inject into a receptive media channel, you make it "available" to an audience that would not have had access to this information before.

The rhetorical impact of choosing "playing hooky" over "weight" is obvious, and not the problem here. The problem is that someone whose main motivation was obviously geek cred and not solving a problem went straight for a collateral-damage campaign instead of one of the many other options available. Fixing the Facebook privacy policy is not worth endangering the livelihood of even one of these people.

Let me put it another way: we all have a problem right now that we're trying to solve, which is that FB is screwing people. Your clever idea is screwing them worse, with no foreseeable gain for ethics either now or long-term that another demonstration couldn't provide.

If you really care about the problem, deactivate your project and come up with something more clever that also takes the moral high ground.

Point taken, but what's with the collateral damage? Search for something that's not going to ruin people's lives. FB has a problem. You outing these people on the web isn't helping anything.

If you wanted to be classy, you'd leave out the names and/or put rectangles over their eyes. As it is now, you're at least as much an asshole as Zuckerberg.

You might be able to scrape color + ratings data from sites that offer downloadable themes / editor color schemes / etc. Or why not, a dataset of fine art paintings.

Unfortunately, that in itself is fairly common (gets past one reviewer but rejected/removed much later by another).

That's cool. Should have said "happy" instead of "impressed" -- knowing nothing about the technical side, I was imagining the impact of letting kids program ipods/iphones. They must have loved that.

I agree that it should cause more concern -- but how about more "reflection and rethinking" than "outrage". The kids with the most to gain from an encouraging tool like Scratch can't afford iPods anyway.

That post really puts the "C/C++/Obj-C" thing into much starker relief than the "wish I could use lisp" discussion. Geeks can get around 3.3.1 if they're clever enough; replacing a democratizing technology like Scratch, on the other hand, may be impossible.

That said, if their app really was an interpreter, I'm surprised it made it into the store in the first place. And if anything, the typical Scratch output of a crayon-drawn animation designed by a 13-year-old only bolsters Jobs' point about cross-compilers bringing down the average app quality. But I'm very impressed that they had Scratch working on the platform and I hope Apple can find a way to incorporate that educational mission into their world-domination strategy...