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The Facebook model of organizing the world’s information involves a mix of personally sensitive information, impersonal information that is potentially widely useful, and information whose sensitivity and usefulness falls in between. It’s a tangle created by Facebook’s origins as the host of unambiguously nonpublic messaging among college students.

The company’s desire now to help out “the world” — an aim that wasn’t mentioned on its “About” page two years ago — has led it to inflict an unending succession of privacy policy changes on its members.

By being given control of a character in a game, we are by definition a part of the world that's being realized in front of our very eyes. We're a part of the action, and a part of the story as it unfolds.

Even so, this would still appear to somewhat support the theory that games are galleries with action sequences. If it's us walking from A to B in a given area, then how is that any different from the enthusiast strolling thoughtfully through the rooms of an exhibition in the real world?

I think the answer is roleplay.

To my mind, the concepts of a believable world and believable characters are inextricably intertwined. This is why skeptics should be paying attention to whether or not their characters are more than empty shells with strong arms and good aim.

Regardless what type of game you're making -- linear action or open world; action or RPG -- you're trying to build a world that players must believe in. Whether you call it a world, or you call it zones, or you call it levels, this is your goal: because one thing we do well, as a medium, is build worlds. But we must recognize that this not just down to the talent of the art team and the quality of their research and imagination.

The iPad is a device you want, but don't need. It departs radically from what consumers think they want from a PC. One month prior to the iPad's launch, a Forrester survey of more than 4,500 US online consumers revealed the top features consumers said they wanted in their next PC purchase. Two-thirds of US online consumers want a DVD drive, but this feature, along with other most-wanted features like CD burners and webcams, are absent from the iPad. The iPad's features, such as the touchscreen, are lower on consumers' wish list, with only 22 percent desiring a touchscreen for their next PC. This doesn't mean consumers won't buy the iPad, it just means that Apple has a steep education process ahead of it. Apple and its future tablet competitors need to teach consumers that they can live without these standard PC components in their tablet device—and in fact, the experience can be better for it.

This education process should not discourage future tablet success. In fact, it is finally the right time to introduce a fourth form factor (desktops, laptops, and netbooks are the first three) to the consumer PC market, since it's now the norm for households to own multiple PCs.

Through a simple subpoena or unwarranted access, vast amounts of personal information on individuals may be accessible to government authorities, much of which would have been previously inaccessible. Tactics such as these are regularly used to discover the identities of journalists' sources by gaining access to telephone and email logs so surveillance creates a hostile environment for free speech.

Over the years, governments in the US and Europe permitted our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to design vulnerabilities into our systems. Starting with the Clinton administration and later by standards developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, we designed our communications systems to provide wide-scale surveillance capabilities to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

it may be impossible for humans or any other animal to bring a memory to mind without altering it in some way. Nader thinks it’s likely that some types of memory, such as a flashbulb memory, are more susceptible to change than others. Memories surrounding a major event like September 11 might be especially susceptible, he says, because we tend to replay them over and over in our minds and in conversation with others—with each repetition having the potential to alter them.

Many male models drink alcohol — brandy and gin are favourites — to speed dehydration. “I open a bottle of red wine the night before, and on the morning of a photoshoot I have another glass of wine and some wine gums,” Martin says. “The sugar in the sweets and the alcohol draw more water from the skin, leaving you looking as lean as possible.”

Among models and many others in the industry, Martin says, there is an unspoken acknowledgement that the pre-shoot regimen is standard. “There is definitely a sense that magazines expect you to turn up dehydrated and dizzy,” he says. “I’ve been on castings for fitness magazines where there are six or seven models who are so groggy and out of it that they need to grab a chair to sit down and literally can’t speak.”

Bad writing can serve as a lesson of one kind or another, but can it ever be recycled into something approximating art? That appears to be what Vernon Lott tried to do with "Bad Writing," a documentary inspired by the discovery of a cache of his old poems. Like Almond, he soon understood that you don't necessarily need more than one person to have a disagreement about what constitutes bad writing. The novel, poem or essay you write today, in full confidence of its genius, may be regarded by some later version of yourself as soul-witheringly dreadful. But was Lott able to spin the straw of poems like "Sketches of Despair" into the gold of a nifty short film featuring interviews with the likes of George Saunders and Margaret Atwood? Hard to say, as "Bad Writing" has yet to find distribution.

compared with what it could have been saying about its strategy toward news companies, Google has undersold its efforts and rarely talked about them as an overall program with a central guiding idea. Partly this is because of the highly decentralized nature of most innovative effort at Google, which often takes place in “20 percent time”—a workday per week when developers can concentrate on projects they choose themselves. Partly it is because of the “permanent beta” culture at Google, in which projects are viewed as tentative and experimental long after they have reached what others would consider a mature stage. (The company’s wildly popular e-mail system, Gmail, officially graduated from beta-test status only last summer, after five years of operation by tens of millions of users worldwide.) And the news organizations that are trying out experimental approaches at Google’s suggestion and with its support have themselves chosen to be quiet.