Exactly, instead it will go back to the newspapers/TV news as being the main avenue for releasing leaked information. Once they get their hands on it there's no knowing what they'll do to it in the process of editorialising it and publishing their POV on the incident.

With wikileaks you are able to see the original documents, so even though there may be bias added to some of their reporting (many complained about the shortened & commentated video of the helicopter attack), the original source is also available.

I don't know where you're getting the idea it's cheaper to shoot on film than digital, but in the vast majority of cases it's much, *much*, cheaper to shoot digitally than on film.

Film is costly for several reasons, including having a finite supply of it (when shooting a film you tend to shoot between 3-4x more footage than you end up using. On digital it's much closer to 15-20x more footage), having to scan it to work on it digitally in post production (optical effects and tints being very rare today), and increasingly in today's world, a lack of people trained to handle it.

Not to mention the fact that stock itself is very expensive, and for digital you're either shooting on magnetic media or SSD.

Finally, your assertion that "depth is a known problem with filming" is nonsense. You may be used to seeing films with a shallow field, but it's entirely possible to shoot films without any depth of field at all. There was a movment in the 1930s to this effect - some really classic films such as 'The Rules of the Game' are shot almost entirely in 'deep focus', where there effectively is no depth of field, and everything is in sharp clarity.

"C) With no restrictions on app development, the person who makes a $.99 fart application loses business to the teenager with an hour of free time and an SDK who makes his own one and releases it for free for his own amusement. With the iPhone that app might cost $50 or more to develop"

Ah, but that's not strictly true, is it? Because to get onto the Android Market you need to pay a $25 registration fee. Now, I'll admit the App Store requires a $99 fee, but I think it's worth noting both platforms require some form of payment to actually get onto the main storefront.

I think the other important difference was that during WWI and WWII we were in "total war" with quite literally all resources being devoted to winning the war (or at least Europe was). In times like that, with daily bombardments by the enemy, censorship and the associated positive propaganda is quite important.

However this "War on Terror" hardly affects anyone back home, it's not a vital war by any definition for those that are fighting it now and we should be questioning whether it's valid to be there. In which case, censorship really isn't a good place to be.

Which would be a good point, except it's not just about the screens. Have you read the Android documentation? *Technically*, you're not even guaranteed the device you're writing for will have a touchscreen.

I was trying to make that point, maybe it wasn't clear as some people don't want it to breed compromise.

Breeding compromise is good!

I voted for them but see the evisceration coming the other way (or probably both ways). The country's in quite a bit of shit with its debt and we need to make some nasty cuts.

If they side with Labour they won't have an outright majority and need a coalition of a load of smaller parties. You can't include the nationalist parties because they will "fight for Wales and Scotland", or summing up the SNP's party political, tell Westminister to fuck off if they suggest any cuts in Scotland. The only thing this loose coalition will be able to do is wangle through a vote on PR before collapsing in a massive heap in a very early election.

In the meantime, the markets will decide this barmy coalition of parties won't be able to control the deficit at all, certainly not in the long term. They'll destroy our credit-worthiness and increase the cost of borrowing / require us to print money to keep going in the way this coalition will want. In doing so they'll destroy the country and no-one will vote for the Lib Dems for being so stupid to put their "selfish" demands for PR above anything else.

Now this would be very different if Labour and Lib Dems had enough seats between them for the outright majority. They could actually form a stable coalition, have a fair amount of confidence and get PR through all at the same time. The problem is, the numbers don't add up.

Except multi-party politics breeds compromise. If another party comes along promising most of what you do but without the crazy you'll start to lose votes to them. The Lib Dems are left-of-centre, but are still in the middle, whereas Labour are on the left.

The 65% bitching about the 35% being in power are probably less disgruntled than the 48% bitching about the 52% in the US, because each side over there is so polar.

I agree, although i do need to read into all the systems properly.

The Lib Dems want something more proportional and call for PR, but I do fear the removal of the constituency link. The fact that a person represents ~70k people in a local area is a good thing and provides for accountability. If we remove this you could end up with some very unpopular people put at the top of each party's list resulting in them never being removed from power.

With the constituency link they would need to be able to find anywhere that would actually take them!

I think will is a bit of a strong word, however in the current example the Conservative party represent the one with the most stringent cuts proposed and the others may disagree enough to vote against it.

However the Conservative party is only 20 seats short, so they just need 20 people out of the other 344 to agree with them. It's called running a minority government, and depending on how much of a minority you are it may simply fall apart.

I don't get this argument. As soon as it becomes actively required, I don't see what would ever stop the US from using their nuclear weapons. You've spent hundreds of Billions on your nuclear arsenal and aren't going to be limited by a fancy piece of paper with a presidential stamp on it.

When was the US likely to use their nukes on any country that attacked them via conventional means anyway? As most people have pointed out, this is a nice PR stunt, but you've reiterated the sort-of known stance of the US since the end of the cold war, we've got nukes but we don't really want to use them.

It's sort of ironic that Facebook is trying to stop someone crawling public profiles on their site, because that's exactly what Mark Zuckerberg did while he was at Harvard (I was a grad student in the CS department at the time).

Pre-Facebook, Zuckerberg created a site that let Harvard students compare each other, a bit like Hot or Not. Obviously nobody was going to go to a site that wasn't populated with their classmates, so he basically crawled the websites of the various residential houses that put their students info online (but behind passwords and auth) and copied it into his own site.

He actually got into a fair bit of trouble for this, and ended up being sent to Harvard's ad-board for discipline (I think he got put on probation, but I'm not entirely sure).

The key difference here is that this guy actually did everything by the book and followed robots.txt, whereas Mark Zuckerberg didn't.

Not only that, we knew that those were going to become obseleted as soon as the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats come into power. It was only the Labour party that wanted ID cards and it's (one of many) reasons i don't want them to win the next election.

Exactly. People who are stupid enough to fall for it deserve what they get.

This isn't the government going behind your back, putting you under covert surveillance. It's completely in the open. A friend of mine used to work for the MA state police, in the computer forensics unit. He was amazed at the number of gang members who would just openly accept his friend request on Facebook, which would lead to him quietly beavering away to figure out the social network of the gang, where they met, what they got up to. Sneaky? Perhaps, but not illegal.

Really, people are just plain stupid.

So that seems any better when your lawyer is there? Are you meant to make up some form of alibi? Are you supposed to try and make up a place where you weren't?

It might be an unfortunate fact that where you were was somewhere, alone that's quite unverifiable. However this is reasonably common, what are you supposed to do?

I don't buy that example one bit.