This is awesome! But in this case, instead of introducing the human element, wouldn't it be (relatively) easy to make the entire apparatus self-driving and programmable? As in, mount this thing on a Roomba-like robot and give it a coarse driving path?
Getting a grip on the surface good enough to give you the control you need in the presence of sawdust is a lot harder than it looks at first glance. You might be able to make it work by putting a big magnet on the underside of the surface to attract the router, though.
I think that the magnet idea could work if you added 3 electro-magnets to the router chassis and made another chassis (to ride around underneath) with 3 corresponding ferro magnetic pads.
This is a very convenient service for the users, but it might raise some issues if any of these terms are ever argued in court. Defending that you read the ToS;DR and not the terms of service might not hold much water.
I think the main value here is not in court, it's giving people a better "bird's eye view" of how a service treats you and your data. From this point, you might decide:
- To cancel the service
- To not join in the first place
- To raise a collective stink about something onerous in the terms
Any of these things, in high numbers, could force a service provider to update their TOS to be more friendly. That's a pretty good outcome even if saying "but the ToS;DR said!!!" would never hold up in court or anywhere else.
I think that the pattern of making software as easy to use as possible refers to the amount of work users need to put in _before_ they actually start doing what the product is intended for (e.g. entering personal information). However, the users should definitely be doing work when it comes to the content of the product, as the article states. I think that, for example, the amount of work people put into uploading and commenting on photos on Facebook was part of the reason the switch to Google+ wasn't as big as anticipated -- users had too much of an investment in FB already.
I don't know, I am a college student and I find myself getting the most event invitations from Facebook (that being said, it might change drastically in a work environment).
Do you view the invites you receive as complete spam? I guess it might depend on the size of your college, and how open the college is to parties, events, etc.
Pretty strange that this needs to have a workaround, though, as this would make hangouts much easier to join and get people into G+ as a whole. And if the workaround is this easy, it can't be that hard for Google to incorporate this as a legitimate feature.
Just bought one. The technology listed makes it totally worth the money alone. Not to mention that if this thing has as many developers making (partially free) games for it as does the Android market now, it seems like this won't be outdated for quite a while.
This seems to be a trend in recent political workings -- lawmaker introduces naive and ignorant piece of legislation to support some part of his/her constituency, faces enormous online backlash, quietly backs off. For some reason these legislators still get reelected, though.
