Joseph Rooks, Internet Collector

Thiel Foundation To New Crop Of College-Bound Grads: Don't Go

Your parents won’t tell you this, guidance counselors won’t tell you this, and university administrators, test prep companies, politicians, a nearly $1 trillion student loan industry, and other unscrupulous profiteers won’t tell you that you don’t have to go. They want you to believe that college is a guaranteed gateway to a successful career and that they’ll help you get there. But you already have what it takes to achieve great things and the price for what college offers—a wicked cocktail of debt, status, insurance, and consumption—is a scam.

Facebook Timeline Designers on Creating an Interface With Soul

Interesting insights about designing for a lifetime of data, which is a very new problem in consumer technology, in a format that is universally understandable:

Facebook wants any user to be able to drop in to any other user’s Timeline and immediately understand the visual language and know how to navigate the Timeline. The more control over visual elements they gave to users, the greater the chance that conflicting languages would emerge, thereby degrading the usability across all users.

So instead, Flynn says, Facebook decided to tightly control the visual language and instead give users control over what to emphasize within that framework. Users can’t decide what borders to use, but they can decide which photographs to emphasize, for example, by making them bigger or smaller.

The Future Of The Internet's Here. And It's Creepy

For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders—every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.