It's no secret that Assange and the Wikileaks staff already collaborate with many major respected news outlets to review their materials. They help Wikileaks validate the autenticity of the leaks, evaluate their sensitivity and news relevance, and redact the parts that could be really dangerous for themselves or the people mentioned to make public. Wikileaks don't release themselves all the stuff they possess, and their choice of material is influenced by the assessments of the expert journalists they collaborate with.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i0Vruimmvy8loGklsz34QyGDKMDA

So basically this newly formed whistleblower group would do the exact same job, except taking the step of publishing material under their name.

I guess the reasoning is that they want to provide their service to the public debate without polarizing the attention on themselves rather than on the material they make available, with the many risks involved - from trivializing the issue into a "civil heroes" vs "media terrorist" judgment on them, to being devalued as mere attention seekers, and finally to have their operations compromised and boycotted.

Which is exactly what is happening to Wikileaks these days.

I suppose Assange had a latent desire to be in the spotlight as a paladin, and that's what motivated the founder of Openleaks to split from him, foreseeing the troubles.

Getting back from a wiki-based utopia of free information to a "last century" news-filtered setup may seem disappointing to many slashdotter here*, but you have to consider that the majority of the people out there don't - and never will - take the time to dig and review the cables themselves, and will just keep to get their infos from the estabilished news outlet.

So sacrificing the wiki availability could be a reasonable price to pay in the civil battle for accountability and trasparency of government, if it helps the public opinion focusing on the moon rather than on the finger pointing at it.

(*well maybe not much given the historical rate of TFAs reading...)

APROPOS??
Oh dear, I don't know how you could say that dying while riding a vehicle that he himself was marketing as an easy, safe and smart means of transport should be regarded as a fitting fate.

...oh wait, I see, you were just being ironic.

Bitmap and canvas stuff sucks big time on webkit browsers too, especially Safari.

The implementation is still pretty basic, you can only dream of doing most of the things you can do in Flash, and the performance isn't any better.

It's a good thing to have such capabilities right in the browser in an open standard implementation, but there's still a looong way to go.

Having video playback decoupled from a big and complex plugin and sent straight to decoders optimized for the platform is indeed an instant godsend for any low power device

"The reasons for why this failed" are not so unknown, since it's known that the welhead's blowout preventer had gone under repair and maintenance works that were identified as inadequate, exposing to the risk of BOP's failure, in a note that a BP's contractor sent to BP management.

There were also internal notes about the probable inadequacy of the wellhead cement casing, and various reports about dangerous shortcuts took in the operations of the drill in the days preceding the incident, which were protested by the drill workers.

:/

Uhmmm. I'd say instead that dismissing memorization is a tad moronic. The use value of being good at remembering much practical data is in steady decline since the diffusion of notebooks, agendas, photocopiers, photography and so on, and it's been almost zeroed since the availability of instant digital lookups. Yet, having good mnemonical skills is still *fundamental* for your reasoning ability. If your brain is bad at absorbing, retaining and recalling words, dates, facts, concepts, series and definitions, your cognitive abilities end up being crippled. You can't lookup everything everytime, and also you can lookup only what you already somewhat remember.

To get into the topic, if you have bad memorization skills, you can't be a truly creative thinker. Basically your creative thinking skills would lack the bricks to build with

Then of course, there are many better methods to stimulate mnemonic activity than raw memorization, and yes a school system that declares to entirely devote a full year to memorization is quite suspect.

But I truly think that one of the reason of this supposed decline in creative skills can be this, the degradation of mnemonic skills due to the distractions, lack of focus and absence of incentives to memorization that are typical of the digital age.

Spot on! That's *exactly* the point. In case you never tought about it, the essence of racism is assuming that a very large group of people that happen to share some phenotypic attributes are all equally bad.

yep they just have to sell a pluggable shell with a physical pad and some extra battery juice.

But it'd have to be a first party accessory to gain some traction on the market, and Apple would never make it because of their keep-it-simple mantra.

Maybe if some gaming big boy would put its name on it... say, Sega... build it, then port a lot of Dreamcast titles, and have a late laugh at Nintendo and Sony...

Nobody in their right mind *wants* to kill people, not even people in the military.

Exactly. In fact we're not talking about the mind of the people in the military, we are talking about very young guys' minds which shouldn't get brainwashed by educators nor seducted by rectruiters.

Minimizing a window and THEN hunting for the icon to click possibly takes longer than using the start menu...

well it's winkey+D then muscle memory, it's surely faster than traversing the start menu.

Also for notepad, I've its icon on the taskbar in the visible portion of the quicklaunch, it's at click range everytime.

I keep the handful of utilitarian icons in (browser, notepad, calculator...) in the visible portion of the quicklaunch, and the other apps I use organized by folder in the quicklaunch ">>" menÃ. Also apps that respond to drag-to-icon are aligned on the sides of the desktop. I almost never need to dig the start menu.

Same on OSX, I've the utilitarian things in the dock plus alias grouped in stacks. It's everything there, one or two click far away, all the time.

Anyway, I don't contest the snappiness of the quicksilvers and spotlights. They're indeed blazing fast, and also they don't need to be curated and optimized like the point and click launcher devices of the various OSes.

I'm just saying that if you take the time to set up the GUI to your usage patterns, you rarely get lost in clickitis and menu scannning.

Also, keyboard launching is perfect when you spend most of your computer time hands on the keyboard, like I guess most developers or writers, less so when your work is mouse centric. When I'm typing html or coding php, I tend to use keyboard launcher more, but when I'm photoshopping it's ankward. I can "cmd+space then F" with the keyboard hand, but I need to leave the right hand from the mouse or traverse the keyboard with the left hand to hit enter. I can click the spotlight results with the mouse but it's easier to go for the docked icon target. Also, when I'm reading in the browser or loosely editing graphics, I often stand with the left hand scratching my head or smoking a cigarette or whatever, so no hands ready on the keyboard.

Also, switching from windows to osx often, I tend to mess up with the key combos and shortcuts. The point and click approach is less confusing when using regularly more than one os. My experience is that the GUI context assist me better. I often catch myself trying, say, to cmd-space on windows or to winkey-e in osx, but I've never mistried to go for the osx dock on the left side in windows, or to reach the quicklaunch down left in osx.

There are many UI approaches as there are users, so there's not one single better approach for everyone.

It depends where your hands are when you need to start it.

If you've both hands on the keyboard, yes, if you're using the mouse, maybe not.

Also it depends which app you're starting.
If it's a frequent used app you probably have an alias in your quick launch, dock, desktop, pinned start menu whatever, and your muscle memory is sculpted to reach it fast in a click or two.
If it's something you don't use often it's probably buried in some app folder or all programs submenu, typing would get you to that way faster.

Unless you have to pause your brain to remember part of its name.

Bruce Tognazzini once ran a test with users invoking commands with shortcuts and clicking on them in pull down menus.

Many users reported to feel they were faster invoking shortcuts, while measured response times showed they were actually faster when clicking on menus.

That's because they were able to perceive the time they spent moving the pointer to the menu, while they didn't consciously measure the time that passed while they "paused" their thoughts and workflow to recall the desired shortcut.

This doesn't translate perfectly to the act of typing, and of course heavy power users and touch typist are snappier than most users, but it's interesting to point out that the way your consciousness experience the duration of a task is often not accurate.

it's gonna be when he turns it off

They're seriously copying Apple with that name.

well they're honest about not hiding their sources...

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/05/10/apple_filing_reveals_multi_sided_ipod_with_touch_screen_interface.html

Maybe because keeping and bearing arms was seen more like a stupid idea than a dear time-honored right? Anyway, yes, I also have always considered the british legislative system to be somewhat weird (I'm not british btw).

There's also a 8000-pound donkeykong in the house, and is what the 10-15% of that human overpopulation do with their lives.

I'm in my mother's house right now.
Out of the window there's a parking lot and a small park.
When I was ten (1988, not 1888) every sunday there were around forty kids playing soccer in the park, and a dozen of cars in the parking lot.
Today, just 20 years later, there are around 80 cars in the lot, and no kid playing outside (guess they're all home toying with their consoles, pc and sat tv, even if it's sunny and warm today).

Until we deal with the fact that us 1stworld-ers MUST COLLECTIVELY fking change our ridiculous ultra consumeristic lifestyle, none of the rest is anything but posturing.

(and yes, I know I'm part of the problem, sitting here warm on the couch with my laptop and wi-fi)