Well, it appears that on my machine one needs administrator permission to change the Program Files directory. I'm not sure why it became necessary, but the fix is simple: Run Eclipse as an administrator. To do that, just navigate to the directory, right click on the file, and click "Run as Administrator." You can also set it to run that way permanently by right-clicking on the file, choosing "Properties", then the "Compatibility" tab, and checking "Run this program as an administrator".

Bleargh!

Usually, I know, I'd lay down 750 words on it. No one ever accused me of brevity. But this is actually pretty simple. I'll encapsulate Carr's argument in a few sentences, then present my own.

Carr: People who complain about privacy on the web should shut up. They are deluded about what today's social systems are really like. They shouldn't put anything about themselves on the internet that might be a problem, and they should control all others who might do the same. "Blaming Facebook’s flaky approach to privacy for the ills of the exhibitionist generation is just yelling at the stable door, long after the horse has bolted."

Me: Carr sounds like an ignorant elitist jackass calling all the rest of us "whiny, entitled dipshits" just because we don't want to live by the lowest common denominator of privacy, whatever Facebook decides is best for its bottom line. It's ridiculous for a geeky, tech-savvy internet journalist who spends all his waking hours trying to understand online social systems to crap on people who do other things with their time by calling them whiny and entitled. Get a clue, buddy. People like you might code the web, but it's people like us who make it work. Learn to live by our rules, not the other way around. Expecting people to learn how to 100% control all the content they share online, and then do the same for everyone else around them is pure fantasy. If the horse has bolted, then lock the fucking stable door and we'll just hang with the chickens and the pigs.

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," Zuckerberg said at a technology awards show in January. "That social norm is just something that has evolved." (via The LA Times)

FALSE. Objectively. Some people are comfortable, but many / most are not. The question is, can Facebook dictate that norm to the web by making business-first decisions now, worrying about the consequences after? Increasingly I believe the answer is yes.

I hear many people say that Facebook is destined to go the way of MySpace, and be superseded by the next big thing in social networking. But I don't believe that anymore. There was Lycos and Altavista and the crew, and then Google came along and people thought the next thing would be along soon. Even in the last few years, there were the people who predicted that Bing or Cuil, or Powerset, or Wolfram or whatever would be the next big thing. But no one's stealing Google's market share on search (although Bing is doing ok…). Google has become a standard, and it will be very hard to shake.

Well, I think Facebook is moving towards that same position. Facebook's idea this past week has been to explode its walls. Facebook wants to be the social graph that powers the web. There will still be new, cool sites for users to get involved in, but why re-invent the wheel? Facebook will allow these sites to slice off a part of the Facebook graph for their users and populate it with their own content. All the while, of course, Facebook is keeping track, expanding its own graph, making a mint. Facebook knows things are going this way, and so this week they slapped down their trump card and said "just you try and stop us!"

We've seen a pretty big backlash in internet terms, but nothing strong enough to lead to anything but minor concessions on Facebook's part. The only things that will stop them at this point might be action from Congress or the courts. At least a few folks in Washington seem to be paying attention.

In the meantime, I think the kind of protest, resistance we're seeing is useful and necessary. I'll be interested to see if Facebook really takes notice. I'm guessing no. So for most of us, our real decision is whether to accept a public life with Facebook, or log off for good. As for me, I'm not thinking of logging off yet, but only because I always assume information about me is public and widely shared without my knowledge. I decided long ago not to put anything on Facebook (or elsewhere) that I wouldn't want to share with the world. But that's me. Facebook allows me to manage my privacy the way I'd like by default. But it should do the same for others too, rather than forcing them into potentially dangerous and uncomfortable choices.

Fire! Brimstone! Hyperbole! An unpopular opinion! Apple is not really doomed. But they're in trouble. Yes, the iPad just came out, and the internet had a giant geistgasm. There's no denying, it's a sexy device.

Here's the problem – who wants it? Right now, Mac fanboys (and girls). Soon, a few others who will convert once it's on to v2 with some of the kinks ironed out, next OS version (multi-tasking!!), and the inevitable camera. Kids will love it. Ok, so that's kind of a crowd. Remember, people, this post is about hyperbole! God! You're all so dense!

So, Apple may expand its market a bit, and bring in a few converts who have a need that the iPad matches. But here's the problem. There are two reasons why Apple's introduction of the iPad is a big step backwards for the company:

1. Apple has always been good at opening genres. They pick a niche – mobile music, smart phones, slates, and they knock v1.0 out of the park. That's what the Cupertino brand of perfectionism and attention to detail in user experience and hardware will get you. In the case of the iPad, they didn't just crack the door on a new genre, they kicked it wide open. And many, many, many others will come pouring through. Soon there will be lots of cheaper, faster, more feature-rich competitors that will run a wider variety of software. So some people will buy an iPad, but others will wait for the HP Slate, or whatever comes next. This was true for the iPhone too, but it took a *really* long time for anyone to rival the iPhone experience. But now we have Android, and soon we will have Windows 7 Phone. Whatever you think of those two OSs, take away the app. store (which is Apple's ace-in-the-hole), make this about devices and OS, and iPhone is not so clearly better. It won't take nearly as long for all the slates to make their way to market. Just a few months from now we'll see them hitting stores, and in a year we'll see what Apple has really gained.
2. But here's the bigger issue. The ideological issue. Just like Kim Jong Il, Apple has a viciously tight ecosystem, built on secrecy, that has draconian and seemingly arbitrary policies that they enforce through code. Also like Kim Jong Il, they'll tell you it's all for your benefit, comrade user. It makes for a better experience, it allows Apple to make the perfect society… err, phone and keep it that way, free of the imperialist influences of free markets and free culture. That's all good and well, except… well, except that the biggest opportunity for the iPad to open a new market for Apple is in the education space, but those are the very people who will hate the North Korean strategy. Apple is locking out competitors and enforcing arbitrary limitations on free speech, and this is probably just the beginning. It's the Apple way, or the highway. Well, educators, educational activists, parents won't stand for that. Why would they? Oh, they could just join the enterprise developer program or what have you and circumvent Apple's process. But that will limit educational innovations to private, circumscribed groups. And why get involved with a company that might endanger your ability to teach what you want when you can get a cheaper, faster device that has none of those restrictions? Apple shot itself in the foot. It had a chance to release a groundbreaking device and capture a new market. But that chance is slipping away, further and further each time they do some crazy shit. Apple, you make me so crazy. If you'd only open your fist I would take your hand!!

Update: Wow! This post has generated some angry response (see below). A few responses:

1. Get Latex2RTF, which is an open source converter for both Windows and Linux. Install it.
2. The GUI front-end that came with the software didn't work, so I skipped directly to the command line. I navigated to the proper directory – for me that's C:\Program Files\latex2rtf. The basic command worked great for me: "latex2rt {path to table}\table1.tex" Remember that on Windows, if you have spaces in your directory names you may need to put the whole path to the file in quotes. It'll do this for you automatically if you use the tab autocomplete when typing the path.
3. Latex2RTF seems pretty complete, but there are still one or two latex commands that it just won't handle. For example, I had to remove the @{} format from my table declaration, which was no big deal. Finding the commands that bonk is easy, just use the debugging option at level 4, like "latex2rt -d4 {path to table}\table1.tex"
4. I got an almost perfect RTF out of this process, but make sure to check the table carefully. I found, for example, that it didn't convert my text daggers, so I had to add them back. After a minimum of fiddling with font sizes, row spacing, etc., save as .doc, CELEBRATE!

(Click for a larger image.)

1. Google rushed the product to launch, bypassing their normal testing process.
2. They tested Buzz internally with their 20,000 employees, but no one sounded the privacy alarm, or perhaps no one sounded it loudly enough.

It's point #2 that's fascinating to me. When it came out, Buzz was so obviously broken to so many people, not just researchers and geeks, but many in the general public. How did 20,000 Google employees miss that? And what does that say about Google's internal culture?

I began to think about this more when I noticed a news story about how Google and other top Silicon Valley firms are claiming that the demographics of their workforces are trade secrets, refusing to release them. Really? Seems like kind of an obvious cover-up there. Google is an engineering culture, and engineers tend to be overwhelmingly white and male. And what does a white, male engineering culture get you? Buzz, apparently, and a ridiculous inattention to common sense privacy concerns.

I don't mean to bash on Google – they're far from the only company that's predominately white, male, and engineering dominated. But until now I think Google and others have played that card as an asset. They're proud of the fact that they don't have any social scientists around. They think they don't need them. There are lots of computer scientists and engineers who are now creeping into social spaces, claiming they can use massive data and computing to solve the hard problems that social scientists haven't been able to solve. Well, I call BS (a thousand times BS!), and I use Buzz as Exhibit A. I'm no longer shocked that some computer scientists can be that naive and narrow minded. But I still don't understand what's so hard about saying that we need each other. Smart at one thing != smart at everything.

So, do I think Google's internal culture will change? Not in the short term, and maybe not at all. Not unless they suddenly hire a slew of social scientists and put them in positions with real power over engineers, product direction. But I hope this Buzz experience could be the start of a slow realization that algorithms have no answers, they have no whys. They have stunningly small amounts of nuance and subtlety, which is where I'd argue real wisdom lies. And apparently they don't have much common sense either.

I'll let other more knowledgeable folks take a swing at the nature of the privacy debate. I think this whole debacle reveals a more fundamental flaw in the way web companies handle online privacy today: they treat it as a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Google sat down to make decisions about how to share information for Buzz users. Undoubtedly they started with a list of outcomes that would be good for Google. Then they probably started to imagine the user, and they wanted to make it easy to manage the service. They saw themselves as simplifying what some think is a tedious process of finding friends, managing connections, sharing content. They thought their innovation would be to make all that happen auto-magically. And once they came up with a solution they liked, they shoved it down our collective throat. We revolted (vomited) at their presumption. So they made a few changes. But it's still pretty much like the Gap selling all its clothes in XXL.

I think the diversity of responses to Buzz and its privacy implications should encourage us to stop thinking of privacy as a unitary concept. Attitudes about privacy are personal and contextual. Some people will decide that Buzz is so brilliant, it shouldn't matter that there are some privacy hiccups. Some people are so used to transparently sharing their online lives that revealing all their contacts wouldn't make a difference to them. Others, of course, will have the opposite reaction and feel completely and utterly violated. I myself fall squarely in the middle. I won't be using Buzz, at least in the short term. And my primary reaction is to be angry at Google for having the gall to do this. They knew exactly what they were doing – this was not a privacy "accident" – but they decided it didn't matter. They decided to try and dictate the next privacy norm to us via their awesome power.

The single worst thing about the web right now is that it tries to squeeze all us irregular geometric shapes into the same round hole. There has been almost no effort to assess privacy attitudes and adapt to them. And I'm not talking about opt-in and opt-out, or the types of (seemingly but not really) fine-grained privacy and sharing choices that Facebook recently implemented. I think Google's impulse was probably right: it's a lot to ask of many users to manage all that themselves, especially as systems are so complex and the tendrils and traces of our content and behavior spread out across the web through APIs. But it wasn't right for everyone. In fact, it wasn't right for most people. The $10 billion question is: how can we tell the difference between users, and adapt the experience to what they want? The pace of innovation over the last 10 years has been accompanied by social norms that move so fast they can be easily pushed around by the behemoths of the web. I suspect that era is coming to a close, and companies like Google and Facebook will have to start responding to our attitudes about things like privacy, trust, and motivation rather than trying to dictate them to us.