If you've got some hot information that you know governments will try to suppress, why the heck would you give them a few weeks to do so?
Well, a few reasons come to mind:
The information may be dangerously time-sensitive to those who provided it. For example, if it is an image of a building, that means that troops may be in the area. If you give it a few weeks, the troops will be gone and it may be safe to show the footage.
While I love my blogs and such, the Mainstream Media is really the way to get information out. But they need some time to get everything together. Giving them some notice means a better chance that reporters will be allocated.
Something like this will generate a lot of publicity for WikiLeaks which survives on donations. Assuming it's true, it's worthwhile to organize how you're going to present the information to generate the most publicity possible for your organization.
You bought the phone, so you do own it. You can smash it against a wall, use it's shiny face as a mirror, take it apart, use it as a coaster, or put it in a blender.
You don't own the software the causes the iPhone to be such a wonderful device. Apple owns that. They just let you use it.
If I may draw a non-car related analogy, suppose you bought a Nintendo Wii. Nintendo restricts what games are available for the Wii. As does Sony on their PS3 and Microsoft on their Xbox 360. While all three are being a bit looser in certain areas, you can't just write a program for the Wii and ship it without Nintendo's approval. Same with the PS3 and Xbox 360.
I did mean mouse pointer, actually. And you're right that the assumption that the mouse pointer is on the right hand part of the screen may or may not be accurate (which is why I started by saying, "assuming the mouse is on the right hand side...")
That said, it's a fair cop. Why would the mouse tend to be towards the right-hand side of the screen? Is it because a control that gets used alot--like, say, a scrollbar--is over there? If all the controls for a window were on the left hand side, would the mouse tend to live over there?
This means moving the mouse minimally, which means moving the mouse pointer minimally, irrespective of the absolute position of your hand relative to the screen. In fact, since most active UI elements in a window (menu items, tool bar icons) are on the left side, it sounds to me that Fitt's Law is an argument for having the scroll bars and window controls on the left.
Not necessarily.
Remember that close things are easier to hit than far away things and bigger things are easier to hit than small things. Scroll bars down the side of the window are pretty big things. The scrollbar on this window that I'm typing into is probably about 1400 pixels high.
There's also a question of the algorithm used to control the mouse. Most systems do not use a 1:1 ratio (ie, move the mouse 1 inch to move the pointer 1 inch). It usually depends on the acceleration of the mouse. So a small but quick movement may move the mouse from the middle of the screen to the top of the screen. But the accuracy usually suffers when you do this.
Well, they usually give feedback on the relatively position and length of a document. That said...
Consider the iPhone. While you have no scrollbars, when you scroll around in a document, you will see markers showing you about where you are. But they disappear once you stop scrolling.
One nice thing about doing something like that is the markers can be smaller because they don't have to act as controls.
While I agree that "Because the Mac does it that way" is not a good reason, Apple spent about $50 million in research (according to Bruce Tognazzini) to study some of these sorts of things. So one can probably assume that Apple actually might have a good reason.
Why do you assume mouse side on the right determines that putting scroll bars on the right is the most effecient thing to do?
There's a little thing called Fitts' Law which has two elements:
Things that are closer to the mouse are quicker to access than things far away from the mouse
Bigger things are quicker to access than smaller things
From this, assuming that the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen, accessing a same-sized scrollbar would be quicker if it is on the right than if it were on the left. A scrollbar could be placed on the left, but it would have to be larger in order to be as efficient as one on the right which would mean less space for data.
It is also good for scrollbars to be in a consistent place (either left or right) for motor-memory and that fact that if you have multiple scrollbars, it will be confusing as to which controls what.
That said, since most mice sold nowadays have a scroll-wheel, perhaps it's time to rethink the need for scrollbars in the first place.
Actually, I looked over the various articles and it doesn't mention anything about using Biotechnological approaches. What seems to be new and exciting, according to the articles, is that they're feeding the males something which is supposed to be make them more enticing to the females so that the females will be more interested in the sterile males than the non-sterile males.
I remember hearing about the sterile insect technique back in high-school in the 70s. Even the articles in question say that the concept isn't new--the only new part seems to be using attractive males.
While I agree that it is a treadmill and it is something that they're going to have to stay alert with, I'm not convinced that marketing their tradition and atmosphere will work very well.
Who goes to see the most movies? Teenagers. Teenagers, frankly, don't give a rat's patootie about seeing movies the way Mom & Dad saw them--if anything, that's a turn-off. And some of the more profitable theaters are creating an "atmosphere" similar to what you might have at home (eg, big comfy chairs) as well as having servers bring you food and drinks. So the old theater atmosphere of crowded rooms full of uncomfortable chairs is going away.
Nope. It's a technology race. The theaters have an advantage, though. They have more money to spend on equipment than I do.
You could set up your own mobile phone company in your basement and Nokia would be obliged to licence the patents to you too - at the same rate that everyone pays to use them.
I tried that, but Mom still wants me to get a "real job."
But I think the US Government is right to cut the apron strings between manned lunar exploration and public funding.
One of the biggest issues for lunar activities is going to be infrastructure. That means getting electricity, oxygen, water, food, etc. There are lots of really great theories as to how to do this. What we need is to do is actually start trying these out.
There's uranium on the moon. How do we get to it? How do we use it in a nuclear reactor on the moon? Are we better off with solar? What do we do when we're rotated away from the sun? If we build lots of solar power stations, how do we get the power from there to a moon base?
There's water-ice on the moon, in theory. How do we get to it? How do we use it to create oxygen and water? Do we build our moon bases right next to it? What's that going to do to our ability to get in and out (this water-ice is usually located in dark cold craters which are not necessarily the best landing spots for ships). How do you build a water pipeline on the moon? We can supposedly get oxygen by heating moon rocks. Is that more or less efficient?
How about food? Growing vegetables is nice, sure, and animals are inefficient but tasty. But do you want to stick with a vegetarian diet in order to live on the moon?
Developing the technologies for that is going to cost big money--and that's just so people can live on the moon. Then we have to talk about making money from the moon.
Part of the issue with mining the moon is that there really isn't anything up there that we can't get down here on Earth. About the only thing I've heard of is Helium-3 which may be useful in Nuclear Fusion. But getting the Helium-3 from the Moon to the Earth is going to be pricey. Some ideas, such as fusion plants in orbit may make that cost go down, but you still have to get the electricity to the grid on Earth and if you come up with an efficient way to do it, why not use solar instead of fusion?
So you don't want to mine stuff on the Moon and send the ore back to Earth because it will always be more expensive than just mining it on the Earth. What you really want to do is mine it, refine it, make products out of it, and use those products on the Moon. Here's where private industry comes in. Yeah, they'll do that stuff if they have a market. But for there to be a market, there needs to be entities there to create the demand. Those entities aren't going to be there unless there's some kind of infrastructure in place for them to survive.
For example, I've commented previously that I think the Moon is a great place to build space ships. You have gravity on the Moon, unlike in Earth orbit, so you don't need any fancy system to transport, say, molten iron from point A to point B--let it flow downhill like we do on Earth. A dropped screw isn't going to go whizzing around the planet for the next 100 years, it will fall to the ground where it can be picked up. But the gravity on the Moon is 1/6th that of the Earth. So you can use 1/6th the fuel to lift an object into lunar orbit than you would into Earth orbit--or you can lift something six times heavier. And going outside the Earth/Moon environment will need less fuel if you leave from the moon than if you leave from Earth.
But, again, you need that infrastructure before you can start doing such things. Private industry is not going to pay for the R&D of that infrastructure. They might be willing to pay for the R&D of how to mine and build stuff on the Moon if a customer will come along who will pay them for the finished products (whose prices will contain the R&D). That someone is going to be a Government entity (US or otherwise).
There are now threads of private funding for human activities in low earth orbit. These threads should be encouraged to grow.
FTFY.
By the way, most of that isn't entirely "private" funding. One of their biggest customers will still be the good ol' US
Of course, they use a different-sized SIM card than the iPhone (smaller) so you can't just pop the SIM card out of your phone and use it with your iPad.
You would think so, wouldn't you? But, nope, Apple won't allow you to do this. That is, unless Apple also gets to distribute it through their store (and take the 30% off the top of the sale).
If you use the Kindle App for the iPhone, for example, you can't buy a book via the Kindle App. You have to use Safari and buy the book. Then you can go to your Kindle App and download it.
What I'm curious about is what is Apple going to do with all those "book apps" in the "Books" section of the App Store? Apple is currently getting rid of "cookie-cutter" Apps (ie, the same App with different content) which describes book apps perfectly. So when the iBookstore comes out, will we see a bunch of Apps go bye-bye because (a) they're cookie-cutter Apps and (b) they compete with Apple's offerings?
Good point. You can use it with a keyboard and enter text. Of course, if you want to include, say, the pictures off of your iPhone, you'll have to e-mail them to yourself.
[...] each year the structure sunk deeper into the ice it was built on.
Everyone said I was daft to build a dome on an ice sheet, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the ice. So I dismantled that one and built another. That sank into the ice. So I dismantled that one and built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the ice. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest dome in all of Antarctica!
I was actually thinking about this, today, in regards to HTC.
One problem Apple has with Android is a similar problem that Microsoft had with Linux--there's no one to sue. Android "belongs" to no one--it's an open source project.
So, for example, let's say Apple manages to get an injunction against HTC and they can't import their phones. So HTC stops installing Android on the phone and sends a phone without an operating system on it. When the customer buys the phone from T-mobile, say, T-mobile takes it in the back room and installs the latest greatest version of Android for that phone and brings it out to the customer.
Now Apple would obviously try to go after T-mobile. I wonder how effective that would be...
The fact that a vehicle with a certain license number is at a certain location is public information and there is no reasonable assumption of privacy. Anyone walking down the street can gather this information.
Agreed. However, the fact that the certain license number is linked to an actual human being is where the privacy part comes in. You can certainly walk down the street and collect license plate numbers all day long if your little heart so desires.
Seven stories!? I used to dream of dropping my phone seven stories!
I dropped my Motorola StarTAC off the Tower 1 of the World Trade Center! Someone on the ground picked it up, put it in a cannon, and shot it back up to Tower 2! Then someone on Tower 2 threw it back to me, but I missed it and it fell to the ground again! The guy on the ground put it back in his cannon and shot it back up to me on Tower 1!
And it still worked!
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe you.
The reason--as was stated above--is that the contracting company is protected because they are a company. You're right in that a company contracting with an individual and doing 1099 can very well be hit with the "If it walks like an employee"-type of situations.
However, if you are a one man company and your company contracts with other companies, there is no issue about employees. My roomate worked for a staffing company which shoved her into a company. She was an employee of the staffing company, the staffing company got paid $X/hour for her work and she got paid % of $X/hour for her work. There is no problem here because the staffing company generated a W2 for her because she was an employee of the staffing company (even though she did all her work for someone else).
So they contract with GooberToo, LLC. They pay GooberToo, LLC, with checks payable to GooberToo, LLC. GooberToo, LLC, determines an hourly rate for their employee, Goober, and pays him that much. GooberToo, LLC, also pays the taxes for their employee, Goober.
So you're right in that nobody wants to hire a contract employee for just the reasons you describe. The solution is to stop being a contract employee and become a full-time employee of your own company.
A few years ago, my friend wiped out on her bicycle. She ended up with a collapsed lung and a couple of cracked ribs. Ended up spending 3 days in the hospital.
She had no health insurance.
She had two choices: Pay $20,000 over 10 years or pay $5,000 up front, right now. She payed the $5,000.
I asked about the reason for the disparity and was told that lots of people sign up for $20,000 and then skip out. After all, what's the hospital going to do? They can't repo. If they try to sue, the media will run a sob-story about this poor injured person. About all they can do is hurt their credit rating.
I was amused because a bill showed up a week or two later for an extra $1500. "Ah ha!" I thought, "now we'll see the, 'Oh! That didn't include...' even though we asked, repeatedly, whether this includes everything." She went in with the bill and the hospital said, "Oops! Our mistake! Never mind." and tossed the bill.
So never underestimate what cash on the barrelhead can accomplish.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've got some hot information that you know governments will try to suppress, why the heck would you give them a few weeks to do so?
Well, a few reasons come to mind:
Well, you should also use "alleged."
You bought the phone, so you do own it. You can smash it against a wall, use it's shiny face as a mirror, take it apart, use it as a coaster, or put it in a blender.
You don't own the software the causes the iPhone to be such a wonderful device. Apple owns that. They just let you use it.
If I may draw a non-car related analogy, suppose you bought a Nintendo Wii. Nintendo restricts what games are available for the Wii. As does Sony on their PS3 and Microsoft on their Xbox 360. While all three are being a bit looser in certain areas, you can't just write a program for the Wii and ship it without Nintendo's approval. Same with the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Does this mean you don't own your game console?
True. If they launch in 2011, you could say that it took private industry 50 years to recreate what NASA did.
I did mean mouse pointer, actually. And you're right that the assumption that the mouse pointer is on the right hand part of the screen may or may not be accurate (which is why I started by saying, "assuming the mouse is on the right hand side...")
That said, it's a fair cop. Why would the mouse tend to be towards the right-hand side of the screen? Is it because a control that gets used alot--like, say, a scrollbar--is over there? If all the controls for a window were on the left hand side, would the mouse tend to live over there?
This means moving the mouse minimally, which means moving the mouse pointer minimally, irrespective of the absolute position of your hand relative to the screen. In fact, since most active UI elements in a window (menu items, tool bar icons) are on the left side, it sounds to me that Fitt's Law is an argument for having the scroll bars and window controls on the left.
Not necessarily.
Remember that close things are easier to hit than far away things and bigger things are easier to hit than small things. Scroll bars down the side of the window are pretty big things. The scrollbar on this window that I'm typing into is probably about 1400 pixels high.
There's also a question of the algorithm used to control the mouse. Most systems do not use a 1:1 ratio (ie, move the mouse 1 inch to move the pointer 1 inch). It usually depends on the acceleration of the mouse. So a small but quick movement may move the mouse from the middle of the screen to the top of the screen. But the accuracy usually suffers when you do this.
Well, they usually give feedback on the relatively position and length of a document. That said...
Consider the iPhone. While you have no scrollbars, when you scroll around in a document, you will see markers showing you about where you are. But they disappear once you stop scrolling.
One nice thing about doing something like that is the markers can be smaller because they don't have to act as controls.
Well, yeah, but what happens when some open source project comes along that's organized along the lines of ninjas?
While I agree that "Because the Mac does it that way" is not a good reason, Apple spent about $50 million in research (according to Bruce Tognazzini) to study some of these sorts of things. So one can probably assume that Apple actually might have a good reason.
Why do you assume mouse side on the right determines that putting scroll bars on the right is the most effecient thing to do?
There's a little thing called Fitts' Law which has two elements:
From this, assuming that the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen, accessing a same-sized scrollbar would be quicker if it is on the right than if it were on the left. A scrollbar could be placed on the left, but it would have to be larger in order to be as efficient as one on the right which would mean less space for data.
It is also good for scrollbars to be in a consistent place (either left or right) for motor-memory and that fact that if you have multiple scrollbars, it will be confusing as to which controls what.
That said, since most mice sold nowadays have a scroll-wheel, perhaps it's time to rethink the need for scrollbars in the first place.
Just make sure you patent it so you can make money in 50 years...
Actually, I looked over the various articles and it doesn't mention anything about using Biotechnological approaches. What seems to be new and exciting, according to the articles, is that they're feeding the males something which is supposed to be make them more enticing to the females so that the females will be more interested in the sterile males than the non-sterile males.
I remember hearing about the sterile insect technique back in high-school in the 70s. Even the articles in question say that the concept isn't new--the only new part seems to be using attractive males.
While I agree that it is a treadmill and it is something that they're going to have to stay alert with, I'm not convinced that marketing their tradition and atmosphere will work very well.
Who goes to see the most movies? Teenagers. Teenagers, frankly, don't give a rat's patootie about seeing movies the way Mom & Dad saw them--if anything, that's a turn-off. And some of the more profitable theaters are creating an "atmosphere" similar to what you might have at home (eg, big comfy chairs) as well as having servers bring you food and drinks. So the old theater atmosphere of crowded rooms full of uncomfortable chairs is going away.
Nope. It's a technology race. The theaters have an advantage, though. They have more money to spend on equipment than I do.
You could set up your own mobile phone company in your basement and Nokia would be obliged to licence the patents to you too - at the same rate that everyone pays to use them.
I tried that, but Mom still wants me to get a "real job."
Bummer.
Yes, but Apple has iPhone-using snipers.
How about an Abyss tag?
But I think the US Government is right to cut the apron strings between manned lunar exploration and public funding.
One of the biggest issues for lunar activities is going to be infrastructure. That means getting electricity, oxygen, water, food, etc. There are lots of really great theories as to how to do this. What we need is to do is actually start trying these out.
There's uranium on the moon. How do we get to it? How do we use it in a nuclear reactor on the moon? Are we better off with solar? What do we do when we're rotated away from the sun? If we build lots of solar power stations, how do we get the power from there to a moon base?
There's water-ice on the moon, in theory. How do we get to it? How do we use it to create oxygen and water? Do we build our moon bases right next to it? What's that going to do to our ability to get in and out (this water-ice is usually located in dark cold craters which are not necessarily the best landing spots for ships). How do you build a water pipeline on the moon? We can supposedly get oxygen by heating moon rocks. Is that more or less efficient?
How about food? Growing vegetables is nice, sure, and animals are inefficient but tasty. But do you want to stick with a vegetarian diet in order to live on the moon?
Developing the technologies for that is going to cost big money--and that's just so people can live on the moon. Then we have to talk about making money from the moon.
Part of the issue with mining the moon is that there really isn't anything up there that we can't get down here on Earth. About the only thing I've heard of is Helium-3 which may be useful in Nuclear Fusion. But getting the Helium-3 from the Moon to the Earth is going to be pricey. Some ideas, such as fusion plants in orbit may make that cost go down, but you still have to get the electricity to the grid on Earth and if you come up with an efficient way to do it, why not use solar instead of fusion?
So you don't want to mine stuff on the Moon and send the ore back to Earth because it will always be more expensive than just mining it on the Earth. What you really want to do is mine it, refine it, make products out of it, and use those products on the Moon. Here's where private industry comes in. Yeah, they'll do that stuff if they have a market. But for there to be a market, there needs to be entities there to create the demand. Those entities aren't going to be there unless there's some kind of infrastructure in place for them to survive.
For example, I've commented previously that I think the Moon is a great place to build space ships. You have gravity on the Moon, unlike in Earth orbit, so you don't need any fancy system to transport, say, molten iron from point A to point B--let it flow downhill like we do on Earth. A dropped screw isn't going to go whizzing around the planet for the next 100 years, it will fall to the ground where it can be picked up. But the gravity on the Moon is 1/6th that of the Earth. So you can use 1/6th the fuel to lift an object into lunar orbit than you would into Earth orbit--or you can lift something six times heavier. And going outside the Earth/Moon environment will need less fuel if you leave from the moon than if you leave from Earth.
But, again, you need that infrastructure before you can start doing such things. Private industry is not going to pay for the R&D of that infrastructure. They might be willing to pay for the R&D of how to mine and build stuff on the Moon if a customer will come along who will pay them for the finished products (whose prices will contain the R&D). That someone is going to be a Government entity (US or otherwise).
There are now threads of private funding for human activities in low earth orbit. These threads should be encouraged to grow.
FTFY.
By the way, most of that isn't entirely "private" funding. One of their biggest customers will still be the good ol' US
Of course, they use a different-sized SIM card than the iPhone (smaller) so you can't just pop the SIM card out of your phone and use it with your iPad.
Clever rascals...
You would think so, wouldn't you? But, nope, Apple won't allow you to do this. That is, unless Apple also gets to distribute it through their store (and take the 30% off the top of the sale).
If you use the Kindle App for the iPhone, for example, you can't buy a book via the Kindle App. You have to use Safari and buy the book. Then you can go to your Kindle App and download it.
What I'm curious about is what is Apple going to do with all those "book apps" in the "Books" section of the App Store? Apple is currently getting rid of "cookie-cutter" Apps (ie, the same App with different content) which describes book apps perfectly. So when the iBookstore comes out, will we see a bunch of Apps go bye-bye because (a) they're cookie-cutter Apps and (b) they compete with Apple's offerings?
Good point. You can use it with a keyboard and enter text. Of course, if you want to include, say, the pictures off of your iPhone, you'll have to e-mail them to yourself.
[...] each year the structure sunk deeper into the ice it was built on.
Everyone said I was daft to build a dome on an ice sheet, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the ice. So I dismantled that one and built another. That sank into the ice. So I dismantled that one and built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the ice. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest dome in all of Antarctica!
(Sorry. It just came to me...)
That does it. I need to find a cockroach costume for the Apple Developer Conference this year.
Until apple sues android out of existence.
I was actually thinking about this, today, in regards to HTC.
One problem Apple has with Android is a similar problem that Microsoft had with Linux--there's no one to sue. Android "belongs" to no one--it's an open source project.
So, for example, let's say Apple manages to get an injunction against HTC and they can't import their phones. So HTC stops installing Android on the phone and sends a phone without an operating system on it. When the customer buys the phone from T-mobile, say, T-mobile takes it in the back room and installs the latest greatest version of Android for that phone and brings it out to the customer.
Now Apple would obviously try to go after T-mobile. I wonder how effective that would be...
The fact that a vehicle with a certain license number is at a certain location is public information and there is no reasonable assumption of privacy. Anyone walking down the street can gather this information.
Agreed. However, the fact that the certain license number is linked to an actual human being is where the privacy part comes in. You can certainly walk down the street and collect license plate numbers all day long if your little heart so desires.
Seven stories!? I used to dream of dropping my phone seven stories!
I dropped my Motorola StarTAC off the Tower 1 of the World Trade Center! Someone on the ground picked it up, put it in a cannon, and shot it back up to Tower 2! Then someone on Tower 2 threw it back to me, but I missed it and it fell to the ground again! The guy on the ground put it back in his cannon and shot it back up to me on Tower 1!
And it still worked!
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe you.
Well, yes and no.
The reason--as was stated above--is that the contracting company is protected because they are a company. You're right in that a company contracting with an individual and doing 1099 can very well be hit with the "If it walks like an employee"-type of situations.
However, if you are a one man company and your company contracts with other companies, there is no issue about employees. My roomate worked for a staffing company which shoved her into a company. She was an employee of the staffing company, the staffing company got paid $X/hour for her work and she got paid % of $X/hour for her work. There is no problem here because the staffing company generated a W2 for her because she was an employee of the staffing company (even though she did all her work for someone else).
So they contract with GooberToo, LLC. They pay GooberToo, LLC, with checks payable to GooberToo, LLC. GooberToo, LLC, determines an hourly rate for their employee, Goober, and pays him that much. GooberToo, LLC, also pays the taxes for their employee, Goober.
So you're right in that nobody wants to hire a contract employee for just the reasons you describe. The solution is to stop being a contract employee and become a full-time employee of your own company.
A few years ago, my friend wiped out on her bicycle. She ended up with a collapsed lung and a couple of cracked ribs. Ended up spending 3 days in the hospital.
She had no health insurance.
She had two choices: Pay $20,000 over 10 years or pay $5,000 up front, right now. She payed the $5,000.
I asked about the reason for the disparity and was told that lots of people sign up for $20,000 and then skip out. After all, what's the hospital going to do? They can't repo. If they try to sue, the media will run a sob-story about this poor injured person. About all they can do is hurt their credit rating.
I was amused because a bill showed up a week or two later for an extra $1500. "Ah ha!" I thought, "now we'll see the, 'Oh! That didn't include...' even though we asked, repeatedly, whether this includes everything." She went in with the bill and the hospital said, "Oops! Our mistake! Never mind." and tossed the bill.
So never underestimate what cash on the barrelhead can accomplish.