So dragging your finger from left to right in a drawing program is supposed to do the same things as dragging your finger from left to right in a contact list? Which should do the same exact thing when you drag your finger from left to right in iBooks or the Kindle app?
Sorry, but context and mode mean that the "same" gestures do different things. Discoverability is often an issue, true, and consistency can always be improved, but the fact that the same gesture doesn't trigger the same kind of action isn't any more confusing on a touch screen than the fact that a click and drag does one thing in the Finder and another in Photoshop.
"... because there have been decades of research conducted already into how people interact with machines and devices..."
I''m sure that there have been *decades* of user-interaction research into portable, hand-held, touch-operated devices like the iPhone and iPad.
Despite the fact that the iPhone wasn't even publicly available four years ago. And no, pen-based tablets and PDAs are NOT the same thing.
I mean, it's not like Apple hasn't had any experience creating and publishing and standardizing user-interface guidelines. Or of doing extensive usability testing. And, by and large, most apps seem to adhere to the guidelines and apps and examples Apple created. Fail to do so, and your app stands a good chance of being rejected by the marketplace.
I respect Jakob, but it's still early days yet, and so some people are still experimenting with new approaches, like the Twitter-style sliding panels. The "touch" vocabulary is still in flux, and still expanding.
"If stroke-right deletes in one case, it should be the gesture for delete in all cases."
Wrong, because you're not considering mode and context. Dragging your finger to the right is a drawing program is different that dragging your finger to the right in a list, which is different from dragging your finger to the right in a multi-view app like Weather.
It's like saying that clicking and dragging a mouse cursor to the right should always do the same thing, regardless of the type of program, mode, and what you clicked on.
Pretty much everything you said is either a rationalization or justification as to why you believe you have no choice but to root the phone, and violate your EULA and carrier agreement in the process. As such, my original point still stands: If you believe that X set of circumstances is unfair, or that you're entitled to "cheat" under Y set of circumstances, then I, as Google, have no reason to believe that you won't rationalize your way into cheating under other circumstances as well.
Though as others have mentioned, this is probably a restriction insisted upon by the studios. From their perspective, who knows what sort of capture software might exist on an unsafe device.
"...by making it so that your most savvy users have no choice..."
Most savvy... and demonstrably the most untrustworthy. I mean, you've already shown you could care less about violating your carrier contract, and your device EULA, and probably Google's Android agreement to boot.
And you *had* a choice, rationalizations aside. You had a choice as to which phone to buy. You had a choice of carriers. But every sentence you wrote demonstrates that you believe you're entitled to whatever it is you want, however you want it, and no matter what it takes to get it. Face it. If it wasn't this, it would have been the rental price. Or the selection. Or the quality. Or the rental period. Or whatever.
Well, you have to admit that the whole thing is a little fishy. I mean, Amazon loves to make statements like ebooks outselling pbooks, but then they turn around and refuse to give actual numbers.
Same for the Kindle. Amazon loves to state that it's a "bestselling" product... but does anyone know how many of the darn things have actually been sold? And are still in the marketplace? (I only add the last because I bought two Kindles, and returned both.)
On the flip side, there are 200 million iPhones, iPods, and iPads that can run the Kindle app. Probably close to the same number of Android phones. Who knows how many Blackberries. Then -- not insignificantly -- there's Kindle for the Mac and for Windows.
That's a *lot* of hardware that can run Kindle applications. So is Amazon actually selling a ton of Kindles... or are all of those ebook sales coming from the Kindle platform?
"... then they wouldn't bother, at least in the US. There wouldn't have been the amazing economic growth of the Cold War period."
Right. Of course, this ignores that fact that they DID bother, and we DID have have been the "amazing economic growth of the Cold War period."
I'm not suggesting that we return the rates to 91%. I am, however, suggesting that we do not need further cuts for the for the top 1% of the individuals in this country who own or control nearly half its wealth.
You did note that 19% of the income comes from corporate income tax, excise taxes, fees, and the like, correct? Which means that 42% of the money that "funds" the government does not come from income tax. Hence, your original statement that , "The federal budget is funded by federal income taxes" is in fact disingenuous and mendacious.
BTW, the 47% number is misleading as well. Check out the NYT....
Okay, the suicide rate in the US is 11.3 individuals for every 100,000. That would be 45.2 suicides for 400,000 people (city the size of Shenzhen), giving us a difference of almost 3-to-1.
Or are you going to question our average education and and prospects now? (And I don't believe the Foxconn PhD's were the ones committing suicide...)
"If that's not happening, you can hardly blame amazon that a whole bunch of whiners who are demanding government services aren't paying they legally required taxes that fund those services."
Please. Texas recently said that the government "lost" $600 million dollars in sales tax revenue. Put another way, however, we can say that the citizens of Texas SAVED $600 million dollars. Now for the money question: What happened, do you think, to that $600 million dollars?
Did it just vanish? Or, perhaps, did many of the the citizens of Texas buy cars, buy gas to put into those cars, go shopping, and then go out to dinner and to a movie? Money that was spent locally, taxed locally, and as such, used to provide the services in question.
Given a $600 million "stimulus" package of that nature, I think Texas benefits just as much, if not more, from the current arrangement.
In 1961, the Federal Income Tax rate was 91% of all income over $400,000. That's right, 91% of ALL income over $400,000 went to the government.
Now, did we have rich people in 1961? Yes. Did we have jobs in 1961? Again, yes.
Currently the rate is 35%, but effectively it's about 12% with all of the credits, cuts, and so on.
12%... vs. 91%. So don't tell me that eliminating a few tax cuts for the richest 2% of the individuals in our country is going to have dire repercussions or a major impact on businesses and corporations providing jobs.
You need to stop and smell what you're shoveling...
"A wealthy person who buys a multi-million dollar yacht will spend much more on tax on that single purchase than most families will make in a year."
Perhaps. Then again, he may just setup a foreign shell corporation to buy it and then provide it to him as an executive service for being on it's board. Or offset a stock loss such that his tax situation is zero. Or... any of a thousand such games.
They can afford to spend $20K in legal fees in order to skip paying $200K or so in sales and excise taxes. You and I can not.
"The federal budget is funded by federal income taxes."
"Individual income taxes (45%) and payroll taxes (36%) now account for four out of every five federal revenue dollars. Corporate income taxes contribute another 12 percent. Excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, and miscellaneous receipts (earnings of the Federal Reserve System and various fees and charges) make up the balance."
YES!!!!! The oil companies posted $10 billion in profits over the last quarter. At that rate, they should clear $40 billion for the year.
Now, it may just be me, but does it seem stupid to give those self-same oil companies $2 billion a year in tax breaks and subsidies? I mean, if you're clearing $40 billion a year, THEN YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE SUBSIDIZED BY THE US GOVERNMENT!!!
Sigh. Medicare is a self-funded program. You can't cut it and magically have more money, because that program collects taxes to fund itself. Cut the program, the taxes are cut. Medicare is insurance... people pay into it, independent of income tax, and then they get money out. People are hardly going to keep buying Medicare is if it doesn't provide benefits.
It has nothing to do with the debt, and nothing to do with the deficit. Eliminate Medicare expenses, and you eliminate Medicare insurance income, and you still have the existing debt, and you still have the existing deficit spending. Yes, you've cut government "spending", but you've also cut government "income" by pretty much the same amount.
The debt and deficit are problems, true. But in terms of Medicare they're just a smokescreen. The Republicans simply want to chop social spending. Period.
Oddly enough, even the insurance companies are against the idea. Medicare and Medicaid got the older, sicker segment of the population off their books. Now the Republicans are talking about putting them back on via "vouchers" that won't begin to cover private insurance costs, and which will also probably drive up rates for everyone else to boot.
You want to tackle the "only" discretionary spending program big enough to matter? Try Defense.
"According to figures Wheeler compiled for The Pentagon Labyrinth, the military’s base budget of $549 billion in 2011 is just the starting point for calculating military dollars. Adding in war spending ($159 billion), homeland defense ($44 billion), Veterans Affairs ($122 billion), interest on defense-related debt ($48 billion) and other items pushes the total to more than $1 trillion a year."
One trillion dollars, 2/3's of the entire deficit in one great big pile. That's more than the 2010 numbers for Medicare AND Medicade combined. That's more than Social Security AND the interest on the federal budget.
Add it all up, and the US -- ALONE -- spends about as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.
"Finally, a big portion of the US economy and tax revenue already comes either directly from the rich or from the people they employ."
Keep repeating the Repubican party line. Companies, businesses, and corporations employee people. Rich *individuals* should be subject to taxation just like everyone else.
In 1961, the Federal Income Tax rate was 91% of all income over $400,000. That's right, 91% of ALL income over $400,000 went to the government.
But by 1971, the top rate had declined to 77% of all income over $200,000. It dropped to 70% in 1971 (Nixon), dropped again to 50% in '85 (Reagan), and dropped yet again to 31% in 1991 under George H. W. Bush. The tax bill for our wealthiest Americans plummeted from 70%, down to 31%, all in a mere 20 years.
It increased to 39.6% in 1993 under Clinton, but then fell again when George W. Bush, Jr., enacted the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 after the market collapse in 2001. That "temporary" act also chopped the capital gains tax from rates of 8%, 10%, and 20% to 5% and 15%.
Currently, under the "Bush Era Tax Cuts", the Federal Income Tax rate is capped at 35% of all income over... $373,650.
That's 91% to 77% to 70% to 50% to 39% to 35%. You might find the numbers to be depressing, but It's never been a better time to be rich and pay taxes.
Assuming, of course, that with your estate planning, IRA swaps, tax-deferred loans, and so forth, the rich pay any taxes at all.
"The ability to watch server logs while doing things in a web browser."
I do this quite a bit... but use an iPad running WinAdmin. It's also handy for keeping project specifications and PDFs open, project to-do lists, Instapaper articles and notes. Watching training videos and podcasts while I follow along on the computer. The occasional Mail window, and more. In fact, it's so handy I'm considering getting another one.
Then there's Citrix, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Dropbox, and, of course, Air Display so I can actually use it as a second monitor from time to time.
Software patents and, worse, business process patents should be abolished. A few dozen lines of text about how someone, sometime, could possibly want to purchase an upgrade to some software by talking to a server?
And that idea warrants a percentage every time someone wants to do so? I think not.
Heck, I'm not so sure that ALL patents shouldn't be abolished. Billions (literally) of dollars are spent (wasted) each and every year litigating patents.
"All files stored on Dropbox are encrypted (AES-256)."
Well, the op states, "...but in fact, as the encryption keys are in their possession...". As such, the statement can easily be true. The files *are* stored in an encrypted format.
In fact, if you think about the "shared" features of their service, folders and files, they would HAVE to be able to access them and decrypt them, otherwise they could not be shared.
Slashdot Mirror
What's next on your list? Adding RIM to your portfolio?
So dragging your finger from left to right in a drawing program is supposed to do the same things as dragging your finger from left to right in a contact list? Which should do the same exact thing when you drag your finger from left to right in iBooks or the Kindle app?
Sorry, but context and mode mean that the "same" gestures do different things. Discoverability is often an issue, true, and consistency can always be improved, but the fact that the same gesture doesn't trigger the same kind of action isn't any more confusing on a touch screen than the fact that a click and drag does one thing in the Finder and another in Photoshop.
"... because there have been decades of research conducted already into how people interact with machines and devices..."
I''m sure that there have been *decades* of user-interaction research into portable, hand-held, touch-operated devices like the iPhone and iPad.
Despite the fact that the iPhone wasn't even publicly available four years ago. And no, pen-based tablets and PDAs are NOT the same thing.
I mean, it's not like Apple hasn't had any experience creating and publishing and standardizing user-interface guidelines. Or of doing extensive usability testing. And, by and large, most apps seem to adhere to the guidelines and apps and examples Apple created. Fail to do so, and your app stands a good chance of being rejected by the marketplace.
I respect Jakob, but it's still early days yet, and so some people are still experimenting with new approaches, like the Twitter-style sliding panels. The "touch" vocabulary is still in flux, and still expanding.
And that, IMHO, is a good thing.
"If stroke-right deletes in one case, it should be the gesture for delete in all cases."
Wrong, because you're not considering mode and context. Dragging your finger to the right is a drawing program is different that dragging your finger to the right in a list, which is different from dragging your finger to the right in a multi-view app like Weather.
It's like saying that clicking and dragging a mouse cursor to the right should always do the same thing, regardless of the type of program, mode, and what you clicked on.
"This claim seems very unlikely to ever come true."
Despite Apple's patent to the contrary? We'll see....
Pretty much everything you said is either a rationalization or justification as to why you believe you have no choice but to root the phone, and violate your EULA and carrier agreement in the process. As such, my original point still stands: If you believe that X set of circumstances is unfair, or that you're entitled to "cheat" under Y set of circumstances, then I, as Google, have no reason to believe that you won't rationalize your way into cheating under other circumstances as well.
Though as others have mentioned, this is probably a restriction insisted upon by the studios. From their perspective, who knows what sort of capture software might exist on an unsafe device.
"...by making it so that your most savvy users have no choice ..."
Most savvy... and demonstrably the most untrustworthy. I mean, you've already shown you could care less about violating your carrier contract, and your device EULA, and probably Google's Android agreement to boot.
And you *had* a choice, rationalizations aside. You had a choice as to which phone to buy. You had a choice of carriers. But every sentence you wrote demonstrates that you believe you're entitled to whatever it is you want, however you want it, and no matter what it takes to get it. Face it. If it wasn't this, it would have been the rental price. Or the selection. Or the quality. Or the rental period. Or whatever.
You'd have have *no* choice....
You mean no improvement other than basically making the PCI Express bus available to any device that wants to use it?
No improvement other than running TWO bi-directional 10 Gbps channels through a single connector? (4x USB 3.0)
No improvement other than allowing manufacturers to build Firewire, eSATA, USB, and even USB 3.0 adaptors and docks connecting to a single port?
No improvement other than (in the future) allowing you to snap in a MagSafe power cord and get power AND Thunderbolt connectivity?
No improvement other than letting you run multiple monitors simultaneously? (new iMac)
Those "no improvements"?
Well, you have to admit that the whole thing is a little fishy. I mean, Amazon loves to make statements like ebooks outselling pbooks, but then they turn around and refuse to give actual numbers.
Same for the Kindle. Amazon loves to state that it's a "bestselling" product... but does anyone know how many of the darn things have actually been sold? And are still in the marketplace? (I only add the last because I bought two Kindles, and returned both.)
On the flip side, there are 200 million iPhones, iPods, and iPads that can run the Kindle app. Probably close to the same number of Android phones. Who knows how many Blackberries. Then -- not insignificantly -- there's Kindle for the Mac and for Windows.
That's a *lot* of hardware that can run Kindle applications. So is Amazon actually selling a ton of Kindles... or are all of those ebook sales coming from the Kindle platform?
It does if they only support DRM-free epubs...
"... then they wouldn't bother, at least in the US. There wouldn't have been the amazing economic growth of the Cold War period."
Right. Of course, this ignores that fact that they DID bother, and we DID have have been the "amazing economic growth of the Cold War period."
I'm not suggesting that we return the rates to 91%. I am, however, suggesting that we do not need further cuts for the for the top 1% of the individuals in this country who own or control nearly half its wealth.
You did note that 19% of the income comes from corporate income tax, excise taxes, fees, and the like, correct? Which means that 42% of the money that "funds" the government does not come from income tax. Hence, your original statement that , "The federal budget is funded by federal income taxes" is in fact disingenuous and mendacious.
BTW, the 47% number is misleading as well. Check out the NYT....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/business/economy/14leonhardt.html
Okay, the suicide rate in the US is 11.3 individuals for every 100,000. That would be 45.2 suicides for 400,000 people (city the size of Shenzhen), giving us a difference of almost 3-to-1.
Or are you going to question our average education and and prospects now? (And I don't believe the Foxconn PhD's were the ones committing suicide...)
"If that's not happening, you can hardly blame amazon that a whole bunch of whiners who are demanding government services aren't paying they legally required taxes that fund those services."
Please. Texas recently said that the government "lost" $600 million dollars in sales tax revenue. Put another way, however, we can say that the citizens of Texas SAVED $600 million dollars. Now for the money question: What happened, do you think, to that $600 million dollars?
Did it just vanish? Or, perhaps, did many of the the citizens of Texas buy cars, buy gas to put into those cars, go shopping, and then go out to dinner and to a movie? Money that was spent locally, taxed locally, and as such, used to provide the services in question.
Given a $600 million "stimulus" package of that nature, I think Texas benefits just as much, if not more, from the current arrangement.
In 1961, the Federal Income Tax rate was 91% of all income over $400,000. That's right, 91% of ALL income over $400,000 went to the government.
Now, did we have rich people in 1961? Yes. Did we have jobs in 1961? Again, yes.
Currently the rate is 35%, but effectively it's about 12% with all of the credits, cuts, and so on.
12%... vs. 91%. So don't tell me that eliminating a few tax cuts for the richest 2% of the individuals in our country is going to have dire repercussions or a major impact on businesses and corporations providing jobs.
You need to stop and smell what you're shoveling...
"A wealthy person who buys a multi-million dollar yacht will spend much more on tax on that single purchase than most families will make in a year."
Perhaps. Then again, he may just setup a foreign shell corporation to buy it and then provide it to him as an executive service for being on it's board. Or offset a stock loss such that his tax situation is zero. Or... any of a thousand such games.
They can afford to spend $20K in legal fees in order to skip paying $200K or so in sales and excise taxes. You and I can not.
"The federal budget is funded by federal income taxes."
"Individual income taxes (45%) and payroll taxes (36%) now account for four out of every five federal revenue dollars. Corporate income taxes contribute another 12 percent. Excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, and miscellaneous receipts (earnings of the Federal Reserve System and various fees and charges) make up the balance."
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/revenue.cfm
Try again.
"...ending oil, gas and coal subsidies..."
YES!!!!! The oil companies posted $10 billion in profits over the last quarter. At that rate, they should clear $40 billion for the year.
Now, it may just be me, but does it seem stupid to give those self-same oil companies $2 billion a year in tax breaks and subsidies? I mean, if you're clearing $40 billion a year, THEN YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE SUBSIDIZED BY THE US GOVERNMENT!!!
"Its got to be Medicare bunky."
Sigh. Medicare is a self-funded program. You can't cut it and magically have more money, because that program collects taxes to fund itself. Cut the program, the taxes are cut. Medicare is insurance... people pay into it, independent of income tax, and then they get money out. People are hardly going to keep buying Medicare is if it doesn't provide benefits.
It has nothing to do with the debt, and nothing to do with the deficit. Eliminate Medicare expenses, and you eliminate Medicare insurance income, and you still have the existing debt, and you still have the existing deficit spending. Yes, you've cut government "spending", but you've also cut government "income" by pretty much the same amount.
The debt and deficit are problems, true. But in terms of Medicare they're just a smokescreen. The Republicans simply want to chop social spending. Period.
Oddly enough, even the insurance companies are against the idea. Medicare and Medicaid got the older, sicker segment of the population off their books. Now the Republicans are talking about putting them back on via "vouchers" that won't begin to cover private insurance costs, and which will also probably drive up rates for everyone else to boot.
You want to tackle the "only" discretionary spending program big enough to matter? Try Defense.
"According to figures Wheeler compiled for The Pentagon Labyrinth, the military’s base budget of $549 billion in 2011 is just the starting point for calculating military dollars. Adding in war spending ($159 billion), homeland defense ($44 billion), Veterans Affairs ($122 billion), interest on defense-related debt ($48 billion) and other items pushes the total to more than $1 trillion a year."
One trillion dollars, 2/3's of the entire deficit in one great big pile. That's more than the 2010 numbers for Medicare AND Medicade combined. That's more than Social Security AND the interest on the federal budget.
Add it all up, and the US -- ALONE -- spends about as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.
"Finally, a big portion of the US economy and tax revenue already comes either directly from the rich or from the people they employ."
Keep repeating the Repubican party line. Companies, businesses, and corporations employee people. Rich *individuals* should be subject to taxation just like everyone else.
In 1961, the Federal Income Tax rate was 91% of all income over $400,000. That's right, 91% of ALL income over $400,000 went to the government.
But by 1971, the top rate had declined to 77% of all income over $200,000. It dropped to 70% in 1971 (Nixon), dropped again to 50% in '85 (Reagan), and dropped yet again to 31% in 1991 under George H. W. Bush. The tax bill for our wealthiest Americans plummeted from 70%, down to 31%, all in a mere 20 years.
It increased to 39.6% in 1993 under Clinton, but then fell again when George W. Bush, Jr., enacted the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 after the market collapse in 2001. That "temporary" act also chopped the capital gains tax from rates of 8%, 10%, and 20% to 5% and 15%.
Currently, under the "Bush Era Tax Cuts", the Federal Income Tax rate is capped at 35% of all income over... $373,650.
That's 91% to 77% to 70% to 50% to 39% to 35%. You might find the numbers to be depressing, but It's never been a better time to be rich and pay taxes.
Assuming, of course, that with your estate planning, IRA swaps, tax-deferred loans, and so forth, the rich pay any taxes at all.
"The ability to watch server logs while doing things in a web browser."
I do this quite a bit... but use an iPad running WinAdmin. It's also handy for keeping project specifications and PDFs open, project to-do lists, Instapaper articles and notes. Watching training videos and podcasts while I follow along on the computer. The occasional Mail window, and more. In fact, it's so handy I'm considering getting another one.
Then there's Citrix, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Dropbox, and, of course, Air Display so I can actually use it as a second monitor from time to time.
And it's useful when I'm not at the computer...
Software patents and, worse, business process patents should be abolished. A few dozen lines of text about how someone, sometime, could possibly want to purchase an upgrade to some software by talking to a server?
And that idea warrants a percentage every time someone wants to do so? I think not.
Heck, I'm not so sure that ALL patents shouldn't be abolished. Billions (literally) of dollars are spent (wasted) each and every year litigating patents.
"All files stored on Dropbox are encrypted (AES-256)."
Well, the op states, "...but in fact, as the encryption keys are in their possession...". As such, the statement can easily be true. The files *are* stored in an encrypted format.
In fact, if you think about the "shared" features of their service, folders and files, they would HAVE to be able to access them and decrypt them, otherwise they could not be shared.
"I think it is a minor miracle that Google got them to go the open source route at all even though it is in the current limited fashion. "
Hardly. Google offered them a free OS back when the iPhone was starting to eat everyone's breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
In effect, they said: "With this, you can either compete... or not. Your choice."
Or to paraphrase another line, "A choice that is no choice, is not a choice."
They own the code. They chose the license. They can release it, or not. Correct?
I really don't care. Except when every third phrase coming out of Google's PR machine is "open source"...
Which apparently means one thing when Mozilla, Apache, and Linus uses it, and something else when Google uses it.