At some level what Apple is doing does make a lot of sense. Does it really make sense to have two different APIs, one for mobile devices and one for traditional computers? At least for the general consumer apps, it probably doesn't make much sense in maintaining two separate Mail apps, Photo apps, etc. For the average non-technical user, having a consistent UI is probably a good thing. I haven't seen any indication that Apple is going to discontinue Mac OS, or lock it down to prevent users from installing their own software. A lot of the article is pure speculation and fear mongering.
The reason MS has been lagging on innovation is that they are still the dominant player in office apps and in consumer operating systems. MS executives and engineers are used to sleeping soundly at night. Google has innovated because they were a new company and need to come up with something fast. Apple innovated because if they kept on selling OS 9 on Motorola they would have gone out of business five years ago. IBM got out of the retail space and focused on being a computer science company.
There is not a lot of room for growth or innovation at the top. Look at GM, AT&T, Disney, Boeing, PanAm and other former industry leaders. They get too comfortable to innovate. Suddenly new players are entering their markets and they are late to see that the competition is better. As for the hedge fund managers comments. I would take them with a grain of salt. He obviously has put a fair amount of his clients money in MS. Is he really long on MS, or just trying to stir up enough controversy that he can dislodge SB and make a few million on the bump?
A lot of comments here that NASA shouldn't settle for a redesigned Apollo capsule. NASA has been developing space planes since before Project Mercury. The X-15, the Blended-Wing lifting bodies are examples. Most recently, NASA cancelled the X-33 in 2001 because the X-33 was too heavy to ever make it into space. All space planes have one thing in common: None of them can carry enough fuel to reach orbit. The only space planes to ever fly into orbit were carried aloft by conventional rockets, such as the Space Shuttle.
Maybe some day these problems will be solved by more efficient propulsion and lighter structures. In the mean time, NASA is right for sticking with proven technology. NASA needs something that can work within the foreseeable future. Spaceplanes, as space elevators, warp drives, etc. are still a long ways off.
I would have thought that military unit designations are basically government property and can be used by anyone under the first amendment. For example, anyone can make reproductions of the Statue of Liberty, the American Flag, etc. If Disney can trademark a unit designation, then why don't they just trademark the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force. It would piss a lot of unit coffee mess officers off when they have to buy their fund raising t-shirts from the Disney Corporation though. Maybe Disney should also trademark all of the national landmarks, national parks, the Liberty Bell, etc.
I disagree with the posters comment that a ground-effect vehicle is inherently more difficult to control than a MagLev train. A MagLev train utilizes magnetic bearings to compensate its weight. There are two separate MagLev concepts. The Siemens MagLev utilizes attractive magnets in order to compensate the weight of the train and maintain frictionless motion along the track. Magnet force is nonlinearly inversely proportional to the gap between the anchor and the stator. That means by a disturbance in position, the forces will increase in the opposite direction of that disturbance. A magnetic bearing has inverse stiffness and requires an active control system in order to maintain a constant operating point. The alternative concept for a MagLev was developed in Japan utilizes attractive magnets, but requires wheels at low speed to operate. It also requires an active control system in order to maintain its desired operating point. It is actually mathematically impossible to design a magnetic bearing system that is stable in all six degrees of freedom. An active control system is always required.
A ground effect vehicle on the other hand can be designed to be aerodynamically stable because as the air gap decreases, the air pressure within that gap increases. It would work along some of the same principles of operation of an air bearing.
The design of an actively-controled magnetic bearing system is non-trivial. Designing an effective control system which can maintain a desired operating point with measurement noise, external disturbances, etc. is also non-trivial. I think developing a MagLev train is inherently a much more difficult engineering problem to solve than designing a ground effect vehicle.
When you get down to it, files are based on documents, books, scrolls, etc. So by implication, the first known clay tablets being written in Sumeria, one could say our model of information storage and retrieval dates to about that time. I don't know how one could do it differently or better. Is he advocating having computers display spinning colorful text and mathematical gibberish like in the movies?
Maybe China is concerned about filmmakers using time travel to sneak non-state-approved ideas about China's history past the censors. It has nothing to do with cultural 'insults.' It has to do with China wanting to control their peoples' perception of their own history. I watched an East German Propaganda movie once about a condemned village in Bavaria being saved by the workers and farmers standing up to the evil gangster Yankees and the puppet-West German government and Catholic Church. The Americans wanted to bulldoze the village to build a nuclear bomber base. But when one thinks about the film at a deeper level, it could be a critique of the East German Government and their relations with the Soviet Union. The film maker knew he couldn't openly criticize his own government, so he set his movie in the west. I wonder how many East Germans saw the movie and thought that exactly the same thing is happening here, but in the West, the people had the freedom to protest and be heard.
His balloon was not a hot air balloon. It was filled with a lifting gas, either helium or hydrogen. Operating a hot air balloon at that altitude would require bringing along oxygen for the burner, which would increase overall weight and decrease altitude. Also, Gagarin orbited the planet in space. Kitinger explored the upper atmosphere in a high-altitude balloon. Both achievements were equally dangerous and impressive, but they are not the same.
If the FSB / KGB, NSA, etc. come down too hard on Gmail, etc. then people who need or desire security will probably start using Open PGP or some other, stronger form of encryption. The smart spook should work on cracking the lowest-common form of encryption and try to get people to use it and think it's secure.
There's a lot of this going on in Europe and to a lesser extent, N. America. Make a commitment, but put it so far off into the future that you can take credit for being "green" or visionary without having to actually do anything or make any hard choices. If the technology works out, you get to take credit for it. If the technology fails, then it's some other person who gets to repeal the law, but you'll be long gone by then.
Good stewardship of our natural resources is a good thing, but the problem with environmentalism is it has become a movement which can do no wrong and knows no self-criticism. Any inconvenience or failure is either a misunderstanding (stupid people), or poor implementation (the people are too stupid to to it right, so we have to make it simpler). So the EU will go on mandating Ethanol-based fuel additives which deplete the rain forests, energy-saving lightbulbs, which contain mercury and need to be properly disposed of, etc.
Once upon a time, CS was a field within applied mathematics. In my opinion, CS still is. The problem is most people who major in CS, especially at the Bachelor level, will likely end up become programmers once they graduate and won't be actual "computer scientists" per se. In most other engineering fields, there is a differentiation between mechanics, machinists, technicians, engineers etc. Most people wouldn't hire a mechanical engineer to do machine and tool making, or a civil engineer to dig holes, unless he was also so qualified. One alternative is for universities to have separate tracts for applied programmers and students who are more interested in the theoretical end of CS. I don't think you need to be a mathematician to implement most programming ideas, but you do need to be very well versed in mathematics to know how to find optimal solutions or design software to solve unique problems for which there is no simple recipe.
Disclaimer, I am not a CS major. It is only my opinion from the outside.
I read this article and I have to wonder...the CIA and Air Force believed at some point that his software could detect a black blob as a terrorist from a black blob who's not a terrorist, off of a UAV video feed. So did they incorporate this into their Rules of Engagement (ROE) at some point and actually declare anyone hostile based on feedback from his software? Because if this is the case, then this guy is probably guilty of more than just ripping the government off. If the government admits to wrongfully killing someone based on bogus software, then who is liable and at what level?
On another note, he claimed he could decipher hidden messages in Al Jazeera broadcasts. For this to be correct, Al Jazeera would have to be providing some form of communication services for Al Queda. Did anyone believe there was a link? And if this were the case, why would Al Queda telegraph their plans on an open channel given the more secure alternatives. It pretty much fails the common sense test. Oh well... More government buffoonery for our general entertainment.
It has military value if it causes a nation to divert resources from other, more pressing security and social issues in order to militarize the moon. But its military value is probably negative as previously stated by the other posts, but value none the less.
Certainly FB isn't perfect....But it does have 500 million users and so many people really are connected to all their friends and family this way (and no other way really).
- That is precisely the problem with FB. They are trying to replace email and other open standards of online communication. It is already becoming virtually impossible to communicate with a lot of people online without joining FB.
The US is the only country in the world where you can patent software or business methods. In the rest of the world, only original inventions solving a technical problem are patentable, software, mathematical algorithms, numbers, letters, etc. are not patentable. It would be possible for a foreign company to ignore US software patents if they didn't do any business in the US. I personally think the US patent system is all about protectionism, not about protecting intellectual property. Having software patents may prevent foreign companies from introducing products to the US market, eventually leading to the US being a second-tier country.
If you really want to read some stupid patents, look at some of the business methods. I read one about a method for using pictures to instruct non-english speaking workers how to do cleaning. It's number is US Patent: 5,851,117 dated Dec. 22, 1998, "Building Block Training Systems and Training Methods"
Most people don't realize that backscatter is an imaging tool and not a bomb detector. It requires a human operator to interpret the image. If the bomb is well blended into body contours, there is a high probability that the operator would miss it. If you look at the backscatter sales literature (it's on their web sites) it shows images of people with concealed knives or guns. Stuff that would also set off a metal detector.
In my opinion, it is a little disingenuous that the TSA is using the bomb threat as the justification to switch from metal detectors to backscatter. One of the reasons that the shoe and underwear bombers failed is they weren't able to conceal a proper detonator (which contains metal), and resorted to trying jerry rig a lighted fuze detonator. So in that sense, the metal detectors did do their job. But if concealed explosives were the primary threat, then x-ray in tandem with bomb sniffing dogs or some type of actual bomb detector would be more effective. The other downside to imaging is the human operator spends hours looking at thousands of passengers. There is a good chance that the operator won't be alert enough to spot a bomb or weapon, even when it is not perfectly concealed.
All this Chrome OS cloud stuff reminds me of the mid to late '90s. I remember when IBM, Oracle, SUN and a few others pushing stripped-down, inexpensive appliance-like computers as the next big thing. I think at the time it was called a "network computer" for handling E-mail, word processing, "surfing" the internet, database accessing, etc. Then storage and memory prices fell so quickly, there was never really a market for an internet appliance. Also most people at the time were on dial up. Internet connections may be faster now, but why would anyone want to buy a "network computer", given that HD storage and RAM don't really impact the end price as much as they used to? Is Google looking at a "free PC" subscription-based business model like most mobile phones?
My opinion at the time was the "network computer" makers missed the boat in the platform wars, so were trying to redefine the game in some way that didn't involve Microsoft. Why is it any different this time around? This is not a troll, I am just curious about the business case for Chrome OS, especially considering the success of its stable mate Android.
I think Wikileaks has been discussed ad nauseam here on/. I am a former insider, but a civilian now. My position is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum on this debate. The U.S. needs to realize that even if they successfully drive Wikileaks from the internet, it is an idea whose time has come and there will be other whistle blower web sites from here on out. I am concerned that if the US makes it a crime to publish classified information obtained from sources, it will basically end investigative journalism and take the US one step closer to being like Russia or China. So instead of focusing on destroying Wikileaks, the US should focus on preventing leaks from occurring. Pvt Manning needs to be punished. His commanding officer, executive officer and security officer all need to be fired and sent into early retirement. Mr. Assange wouldn't have much of a web site if Pvt. Manning hadn't sent him those CDs.
I can already see Sarah Palin dressed in a hunting outfit with a bolt-action rifle going after Mr. Assange just like a Moose in Alsaka. Maybe she will have him stuffed and mounted in her den next to the singing trout.
I wrote some of the classified documents on Wikilieaks during my time with the military. I am a civilian now. Much of what I have written is already available to researchers and journalists from the Marine Corps Historical archive in Quantico, Virginia. The Iraq dump contained many significant events from my battalion, but lacked the commanders' comments or the command chronology narrative to tie the events together and put them into perspective. This information is actually available through official sources. What is on Wikileaks has is actually quite limited.
I have two concerns about the fallout to the leak. The first concern is the U.S. may retroactively classify documents currently available to the public, or be less likely to release documents in the future. This will result in a net loss of access to information to the general public. My second concern is the military may become more compartmentalized and soldiers at the small-unit level may no longer have access to the same amount of intelligence information as they previously had. This would be unfortunate because a lot of the young Marines or Soldiers bring a fresh perspective to looking at the raw information and can often connect the dots and find things missed by back-office analysts.
The public has a right to know what the government is doing as long as it doesn't compromise operational security. Within the government there are people pushing to declassify information and make it available. There are others who would like to make everything a secret until the end of time. This latest leak will push the pendulum towards the secret squirrels. I doubt too many service members will want to follow in Pvt. Manning's footsteps, so Mr. Assange probably won't be getting too much new information. Without people sending him leaks, Mr. Assange wouldn't have much of a web site. If the U.S. were smart, they would put up an alternate web site to Wikileaks which would provide declassified versions of government documents and explain why it is important to balance the public's right to know with the need for operational security.
Apple is run by people who put product design first and understand that profits follow having good products, not the other way around. Most US companies are run by investment bankers, not by designers. Bankers usually just focus only on the score and forget all about the game being played.
I agree with everything you are saying with some caveats. Apple's P/E has historically been higher than it is now. This could mean that Apple has a lot of potential upside, and a lot of investors are betting on this. But betting on Apple at $300 + is really betting on the broader market. The market will need to also hit an inflection point in order to sustain a larger Apple. I believe Apple has already hit an inflection point at $190 last year. Betting on another inflection is risky.
I am not a smart investor, so my opinions are by no means correct; investing is a judgement call. That being said, I plan on keeping Apple in my portfolio, but I plan on reducing my exposure to it. I hope Apple continues to make successful products and provide outsize returns. But I know that no company, not even Apple can go to infinity. At some point I need to get off the ride and let others take a spin.
Slashdot Mirror
If this guy does find a body at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, maybe he can find Jimmy Hoffa's remains too.
At some level what Apple is doing does make a lot of sense. Does it really make sense to have two different APIs, one for mobile devices and one for traditional computers? At least for the general consumer apps, it probably doesn't make much sense in maintaining two separate Mail apps, Photo apps, etc. For the average non-technical user, having a consistent UI is probably a good thing. I haven't seen any indication that Apple is going to discontinue Mac OS, or lock it down to prevent users from installing their own software. A lot of the article is pure speculation and fear mongering.
The reason MS has been lagging on innovation is that they are still the dominant player in office apps and in consumer operating systems. MS executives and engineers are used to sleeping soundly at night. Google has innovated because they were a new company and need to come up with something fast. Apple innovated because if they kept on selling OS 9 on Motorola they would have gone out of business five years ago. IBM got out of the retail space and focused on being a computer science company.
There is not a lot of room for growth or innovation at the top. Look at GM, AT&T, Disney, Boeing, PanAm and other former industry leaders. They get too comfortable to innovate. Suddenly new players are entering their markets and they are late to see that the competition is better. As for the hedge fund managers comments. I would take them with a grain of salt. He obviously has put a fair amount of his clients money in MS. Is he really long on MS, or just trying to stir up enough controversy that he can dislodge SB and make a few million on the bump?
A lot of comments here that NASA shouldn't settle for a redesigned Apollo capsule. NASA has been developing space planes since before Project Mercury. The X-15, the Blended-Wing lifting bodies are examples. Most recently, NASA cancelled the X-33 in 2001 because the X-33 was too heavy to ever make it into space. All space planes have one thing in common: None of them can carry enough fuel to reach orbit. The only space planes to ever fly into orbit were carried aloft by conventional rockets, such as the Space Shuttle.
Maybe some day these problems will be solved by more efficient propulsion and lighter structures. In the mean time, NASA is right for sticking with proven technology. NASA needs something that can work within the foreseeable future. Spaceplanes, as space elevators, warp drives, etc. are still a long ways off.
I would have thought that military unit designations are basically government property and can be used by anyone under the first amendment. For example, anyone can make reproductions of the Statue of Liberty, the American Flag, etc. If Disney can trademark a unit designation, then why don't they just trademark the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force. It would piss a lot of unit coffee mess officers off when they have to buy their fund raising t-shirts from the Disney Corporation though. Maybe Disney should also trademark all of the national landmarks, national parks, the Liberty Bell, etc.
I disagree with the posters comment that a ground-effect vehicle is inherently more difficult to control than a MagLev train. A MagLev train utilizes magnetic bearings to compensate its weight. There are two separate MagLev concepts. The Siemens MagLev utilizes attractive magnets in order to compensate the weight of the train and maintain frictionless motion along the track. Magnet force is nonlinearly inversely proportional to the gap between the anchor and the stator. That means by a disturbance in position, the forces will increase in the opposite direction of that disturbance. A magnetic bearing has inverse stiffness and requires an active control system in order to maintain a constant operating point. The alternative concept for a MagLev was developed in Japan utilizes attractive magnets, but requires wheels at low speed to operate. It also requires an active control system in order to maintain its desired operating point. It is actually mathematically impossible to design a magnetic bearing system that is stable in all six degrees of freedom. An active control system is always required.
A ground effect vehicle on the other hand can be designed to be aerodynamically stable because as the air gap decreases, the air pressure within that gap increases. It would work along some of the same principles of operation of an air bearing.
The design of an actively-controled magnetic bearing system is non-trivial. Designing an effective control system which can maintain a desired operating point with measurement noise, external disturbances, etc. is also non-trivial. I think developing a MagLev train is inherently a much more difficult engineering problem to solve than designing a ground effect vehicle.
When you get down to it, files are based on documents, books, scrolls, etc. So by implication, the first known clay tablets being written in Sumeria, one could say our model of information storage and retrieval dates to about that time. I don't know how one could do it differently or better. Is he advocating having computers display spinning colorful text and mathematical gibberish like in the movies?
Maybe China is concerned about filmmakers using time travel to sneak non-state-approved ideas about China's history past the censors. It has nothing to do with cultural 'insults.' It has to do with China wanting to control their peoples' perception of their own history. I watched an East German Propaganda movie once about a condemned village in Bavaria being saved by the workers and farmers standing up to the evil gangster Yankees and the puppet-West German government and Catholic Church. The Americans wanted to bulldoze the village to build a nuclear bomber base. But when one thinks about the film at a deeper level, it could be a critique of the East German Government and their relations with the Soviet Union. The film maker knew he couldn't openly criticize his own government, so he set his movie in the west. I wonder how many East Germans saw the movie and thought that exactly the same thing is happening here, but in the West, the people had the freedom to protest and be heard.
His balloon was not a hot air balloon. It was filled with a lifting gas, either helium or hydrogen. Operating a hot air balloon at that altitude would require bringing along oxygen for the burner, which would increase overall weight and decrease altitude. Also, Gagarin orbited the planet in space. Kitinger explored the upper atmosphere in a high-altitude balloon. Both achievements were equally dangerous and impressive, but they are not the same.
If the FSB / KGB, NSA, etc. come down too hard on Gmail, etc. then people who need or desire security will probably start using Open PGP or some other, stronger form of encryption. The smart spook should work on cracking the lowest-common form of encryption and try to get people to use it and think it's secure.
There's a lot of this going on in Europe and to a lesser extent, N. America. Make a commitment, but put it so far off into the future that you can take credit for being "green" or visionary without having to actually do anything or make any hard choices. If the technology works out, you get to take credit for it. If the technology fails, then it's some other person who gets to repeal the law, but you'll be long gone by then.
Good stewardship of our natural resources is a good thing, but the problem with environmentalism is it has become a movement which can do no wrong and knows no self-criticism. Any inconvenience or failure is either a misunderstanding (stupid people), or poor implementation (the people are too stupid to to it right, so we have to make it simpler). So the EU will go on mandating Ethanol-based fuel additives which deplete the rain forests, energy-saving lightbulbs, which contain mercury and need to be properly disposed of, etc.
"Pepe, It's not nuclear, it's nucular." - Homer Simpson
Once upon a time, CS was a field within applied mathematics. In my opinion, CS still is. The problem is most people who major in CS, especially at the Bachelor level, will likely end up become programmers once they graduate and won't be actual "computer scientists" per se. In most other engineering fields, there is a differentiation between mechanics, machinists, technicians, engineers etc. Most people wouldn't hire a mechanical engineer to do machine and tool making, or a civil engineer to dig holes, unless he was also so qualified. One alternative is for universities to have separate tracts for applied programmers and students who are more interested in the theoretical end of CS. I don't think you need to be a mathematician to implement most programming ideas, but you do need to be very well versed in mathematics to know how to find optimal solutions or design software to solve unique problems for which there is no simple recipe. Disclaimer, I am not a CS major. It is only my opinion from the outside.
I read this article and I have to wonder...the CIA and Air Force believed at some point that his software could detect a black blob as a terrorist from a black blob who's not a terrorist, off of a UAV video feed. So did they incorporate this into their Rules of Engagement (ROE) at some point and actually declare anyone hostile based on feedback from his software? Because if this is the case, then this guy is probably guilty of more than just ripping the government off. If the government admits to wrongfully killing someone based on bogus software, then who is liable and at what level? On another note, he claimed he could decipher hidden messages in Al Jazeera broadcasts. For this to be correct, Al Jazeera would have to be providing some form of communication services for Al Queda. Did anyone believe there was a link? And if this were the case, why would Al Queda telegraph their plans on an open channel given the more secure alternatives. It pretty much fails the common sense test. Oh well... More government buffoonery for our general entertainment.
It has military value if it causes a nation to divert resources from other, more pressing security and social issues in order to militarize the moon. But its military value is probably negative as previously stated by the other posts, but value none the less.
Certainly FB isn't perfect ....But it does have 500 million users and so many people really are connected to all their friends and family this way (and no other way really).
- That is precisely the problem with FB. They are trying to replace email and other open standards of online communication. It is already becoming virtually impossible to communicate with a lot of people online without joining FB.
The US is the only country in the world where you can patent software or business methods. In the rest of the world, only original inventions solving a technical problem are patentable, software, mathematical algorithms, numbers, letters, etc. are not patentable. It would be possible for a foreign company to ignore US software patents if they didn't do any business in the US. I personally think the US patent system is all about protectionism, not about protecting intellectual property. Having software patents may prevent foreign companies from introducing products to the US market, eventually leading to the US being a second-tier country.
If you really want to read some stupid patents, look at some of the business methods. I read one about a method for using pictures to instruct non-english speaking workers how to do cleaning. It's number is US Patent: 5,851,117 dated Dec. 22, 1998, "Building Block Training Systems and Training Methods"
Most people don't realize that backscatter is an imaging tool and not a bomb detector. It requires a human operator to interpret the image. If the bomb is well blended into body contours, there is a high probability that the operator would miss it. If you look at the backscatter sales literature (it's on their web sites) it shows images of people with concealed knives or guns. Stuff that would also set off a metal detector.
In my opinion, it is a little disingenuous that the TSA is using the bomb threat as the justification to switch from metal detectors to backscatter. One of the reasons that the shoe and underwear bombers failed is they weren't able to conceal a proper detonator (which contains metal), and resorted to trying jerry rig a lighted fuze detonator. So in that sense, the metal detectors did do their job. But if concealed explosives were the primary threat, then x-ray in tandem with bomb sniffing dogs or some type of actual bomb detector would be more effective. The other downside to imaging is the human operator spends hours looking at thousands of passengers. There is a good chance that the operator won't be alert enough to spot a bomb or weapon, even when it is not perfectly concealed.
All this Chrome OS cloud stuff reminds me of the mid to late '90s. I remember when IBM, Oracle, SUN and a few others pushing stripped-down, inexpensive appliance-like computers as the next big thing. I think at the time it was called a "network computer" for handling E-mail, word processing, "surfing" the internet, database accessing, etc. Then storage and memory prices fell so quickly, there was never really a market for an internet appliance. Also most people at the time were on dial up. Internet connections may be faster now, but why would anyone want to buy a "network computer", given that HD storage and RAM don't really impact the end price as much as they used to? Is Google looking at a "free PC" subscription-based business model like most mobile phones?
My opinion at the time was the "network computer" makers missed the boat in the platform wars, so were trying to redefine the game in some way that didn't involve Microsoft. Why is it any different this time around? This is not a troll, I am just curious about the business case for Chrome OS, especially considering the success of its stable mate Android.
I think Wikileaks has been discussed ad nauseam here on /. I am a former insider, but a civilian now. My position is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum on this debate. The U.S. needs to realize that even if they successfully drive Wikileaks from the internet, it is an idea whose time has come and there will be other whistle blower web sites from here on out. I am concerned that if the US makes it a crime to publish classified information obtained from sources, it will basically end investigative journalism and take the US one step closer to being like Russia or China. So instead of focusing on destroying Wikileaks, the US should focus on preventing leaks from occurring. Pvt Manning needs to be punished. His commanding officer, executive officer and security officer all need to be fired and sent into early retirement. Mr. Assange wouldn't have much of a web site if Pvt. Manning hadn't sent him those CDs.
I can already see Sarah Palin dressed in a hunting outfit with a bolt-action rifle going after Mr. Assange just like a Moose in Alsaka. Maybe she will have him stuffed and mounted in her den next to the singing trout.
That is exactly right. Without people feeding him documents such as Pvt. Manning, Mr. Assange wouldn't have much of a web site.
I wrote some of the classified documents on Wikilieaks during my time with the military. I am a civilian now. Much of what I have written is already available to researchers and journalists from the Marine Corps Historical archive in Quantico, Virginia. The Iraq dump contained many significant events from my battalion, but lacked the commanders' comments or the command chronology narrative to tie the events together and put them into perspective. This information is actually available through official sources. What is on Wikileaks has is actually quite limited.
I have two concerns about the fallout to the leak. The first concern is the U.S. may retroactively classify documents currently available to the public, or be less likely to release documents in the future. This will result in a net loss of access to information to the general public. My second concern is the military may become more compartmentalized and soldiers at the small-unit level may no longer have access to the same amount of intelligence information as they previously had. This would be unfortunate because a lot of the young Marines or Soldiers bring a fresh perspective to looking at the raw information and can often connect the dots and find things missed by back-office analysts.
The public has a right to know what the government is doing as long as it doesn't compromise operational security. Within the government there are people pushing to declassify information and make it available. There are others who would like to make everything a secret until the end of time. This latest leak will push the pendulum towards the secret squirrels. I doubt too many service members will want to follow in Pvt. Manning's footsteps, so Mr. Assange probably won't be getting too much new information. Without people sending him leaks, Mr. Assange wouldn't have much of a web site. If the U.S. were smart, they would put up an alternate web site to Wikileaks which would provide declassified versions of government documents and explain why it is important to balance the public's right to know with the need for operational security.
Apple is run by people who put product design first and understand that profits follow having good products, not the other way around. Most US companies are run by investment bankers, not by designers. Bankers usually just focus only on the score and forget all about the game being played.
I agree with everything you are saying with some caveats. Apple's P/E has historically been higher than it is now. This could mean that Apple has a lot of potential upside, and a lot of investors are betting on this. But betting on Apple at $300 + is really betting on the broader market. The market will need to also hit an inflection point in order to sustain a larger Apple. I believe Apple has already hit an inflection point at $190 last year. Betting on another inflection is risky.
I am not a smart investor, so my opinions are by no means correct; investing is a judgement call. That being said, I plan on keeping Apple in my portfolio, but I plan on reducing my exposure to it. I hope Apple continues to make successful products and provide outsize returns. But I know that no company, not even Apple can go to infinity. At some point I need to get off the ride and let others take a spin.