BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

So tell me again why the company that has caused what may be the greatest ecological calamity in a generation, and has no idea how to stop it, gets any say in the matter? Big Government? Hello?

In contrast, the iPad becomes the app you’re using. That’s part of the magic. The hardware is so understated – it’s just a screen, really – and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

First: Gag.

Second: if the iPad were able to, say, transform itself into a live ostrich that does your taxes for you, then I’d be prepared to call it magical. But what we’re talking about here is a beautifully-engineered, impeccably-designed tablet computer that only knows how to do one thing at a time. This is decidedly non-magical, and everybody really just needs to calm down.

But the problems keep getting fixed, and there’s very little left to complain about. Even Apple’s app-review process has dramatically improved over the last few months to be much faster and offer more detailed feedback for rejections, which eliminates or trivializes most of the problems with app review.

I don’t doubt that the process is getting better, I just think it’s besides the point. None of Apple’s process improvements change the fact that the contract under which developers operate is ridiculous. The EFF recently managed to dig up the details of that agreement, and it’s eye-opening:

App Store Only: Section 7.2 makes it clear that any applications developed using Apple’s SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store, and that Apple can reject an app for any reason, even if it meets all the formal requirements disclosed by Apple. So if you use the SDK and your app is rejected by Apple, you’re prohibited from distributing it through competing app stores like Cydia or Rock Your Phone. [Emphasis mine]

Kill Your App Any Time: Section 8 makes it clear that Apple can “revoke the digital certificate of any of Your Applications at any time.” Steve Jobs has confirmed that Apple can remotely disable apps, even after they have been installed by users. This contract provision would appear to allow that.

We Never Owe You More than Fifty Bucks: Section 14 states that, no matter what, Apple will never be liable to any developer for more than $50 in damages. That’s pretty remarkable, considering that Apple holds a developer’s reputational and commercial value in its hands—it’s not as though the developer can reach its existing customers anywhere else. So if Apple botches an update, accidentally kills your app, or leaks your entire customer list to a competitor, the Agreement tries to cap you at the cost of a nice dinner for one in Cupertino.

This is what a monopoly looks like: the App Store’s feudal lords get to dictate insane/surreal/draconian/should-be-illegal terms, and — if you want to develop software for what is arguably the most exciting platform out there right now — you just have to deal with it.

It’s impossible to deny that the App Store has led to a fluorescence of innovation, and has on balance been a good thing for developers — today. But it seems to me that focussing on the current state of affairs, and effectively ignoring the havoc that Apple could wreak if they wanted to, is dangerous. Apple gets away with this shit because they can — not because it’s right.

Unfortunately, Pogue devotes half of the column to a rant about the “paranoid” people who are complaining about the app’s privacy issues:

1. It uploads what you’re saying to its own servers, which do the transcription and then send the text back down to your phone (it may also store those transcripts; it’s unclear); and
2. It automatically grabs all the names out of your address book and transmits them to those same servers, to make it easier for the application to recognize names you might often say.

Pogue’s reaction to the controversy is, sadly, a bunch of completely-missing-the-point hokum of the usual variety: who cares if they’re storing your data, it’s on secure servers anyway, there are already many other services that do the same kind of thing, etc, etc. I found this particularly galling:

OK, first of all, this business of your audio being sent to Nuance for transcription rings a very familiar bell. Remember the Gmail brouhaha? When Gmail debuted, it offered a fantastic e-mail account, paid for by small text ads on the side whose subjects are matched to the e-mail contents.

At the time, everyone was hysterical about the supposed privacy violation: Google will be reading my e-mail! Of course, no humans were looking at your e-mail. It was just a bunch of servers analyzing keywords. Today, everybody’s forgotten all about it. But now the issue rises again with Dragon Dictation.

There is so much wrong with these two paragraphs. For one thing, the fact that people have stopped screaming about google’s practice of reading your email to target ads at you does not in any way remove the actual problem. People have other things to worry about, are not generally concerned about their privacy, and are constantly bombarded with “paranoia” propaganda by well-meaning people like Pogue, who should know better.

Second, this line of argument depends on trusting implicitly the claims of the corporations who are harvesting your data. Pogue quotes the makers of Dragon Dictation on this point:

Nuance says nope, it’s just a bunch of computers, maintained in a secure facility,

Oh good! That should be fine, then. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that personal information stored in impregnable data strongholds by organizations that will suffer absolutely no legal consequences for losing that data is completely safe.

Third, it’s just incredibly short-sighted. The fact that we are not at the moment under the thumb of a corporate/government megalopoly tells us nothing about what’s going to happen in the future. Have any of us really thought deeply about what it means to have our lives tracked by entities whose entire purpose is to profit from what used to our private information? Yes, this is already happening. And yes, it can get much much worse. And will, if we already assume that the game is lost.

Ok. Having said all that, I’m very aware of the fact that we are sliding inevitably into a future where a good portion of our lives will be stored in the cloud. The “cloud” is a terrible metaphor, incidentally, if for no other reason than it suggests concealment, of a sort. We can’t afford to assume that anything that leaves the confines our computers is in any way concealed. I’d rather we just cut through the crap and say what we’re really doing here: storing data in the open.

But, again, fine — that ship has sailed, and there are real advantages to decentralized data storage. What bugs me about this is the sneakiness. It’s probably ok that Dragon Dictation uploads what you’re saying into the ether, because most stuff people say is innocuous, and because the coolness that Nuance has achieved on an underpowered computer like the iPhone just wouldn’t be possible otherwise. It’s less ok that they upload your contacts, but, since it’s just the names — they claim — maybe no harm done here either.

But, for the love of god, tell us that’s what you’re doing! And I don’t mean tell us in your EULA, which, like all EULAs, is painstakingly engineered to ensure that absolutely no one reads it.²

When the application starts, the first thing you should see is a question:

In order to improve our voice recognition capabilities, we’d like to upload the names of your address book contacts to our servers. We won’t send anything but the names. Is that ok?

The app should only send your stuff up if you click Yes.³ By the same token, before they do the first transcription, they should pop up a message telling you that everything you say will be transmitted to their servers. Just so you know.

Which gets us back to the terrible, ubiquitous canard that people often fall back on in these situations: “But everyone else already has all our data.” It manifests this way in Pogue’s column:

What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits?

It’s a specious argument. The point isn’t that other services are already listening in. It’s that a layman wouldn’t expect this particular application to be transmitting your words into the open in order to do what it does, and we certainly wouldn’t expect it to be sharing our contacts, unbidden.

This is the real battle: not how to turn back this tide of stored-in-the-Cloud information, but how to enter into the new world with our eyes open, understanding the consequences of everything we do. If we’re going to blast our data out into the great beyond, then we have to know that we’re doing it. Any application that doesn’t go to great lengths to inform us of the consequences of our actions is an application we should avoid.

Jeff Atwood tooted something along these lines yesterday:

He’s talking about Facebook’s byzantine and sometimes deceptive privacy settings, but the principle applies in general.

This line of reasoning used to freak me out, but now I think it’s really the only way to go: assume that everything you do that has an online component will be visible to everyone, and act based on that assumption.

Pogue would call this paranoia, I suspect. I call it prudence.

We can (and should) operate under that assumption now, of course. But there are limits to even this simple recipe. As the lines between our personal computers and the ether blur, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s being made public, and what’s not. Which is why applications like Dragon Dictation have an obligation to tell us.

The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.

How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak

I popped the SIM card out of my iPhone last week and put it in back in its old home, an aging (but loyal) Motorola Pebl. A pointless gesture, yes — Apple doesn’t give a shit if I use their phone, especially since I haven’t shackled myself to their reprehensible partner in crime — but, then again, it’s not really a gesture. Apple’s App Store policies have been making my skin crawl lately, and using their phone has become genuinely unpleasant. It’s no fun any more.

And the bad feelings are leaking over into the rest of the Applescape. I got rid of an AppleTV recently, and for the first time in a long time feel no real desire to own any of their increasingly lovely computers. Evil is a turn-off. Graham again:

But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it’s not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren’t the ones that win. I think the reason Google embraced “Don’t be evil” so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.

It would be one thing if Apple was just screwing over its own ecosystem — but what if this horrible software distribution model leaks out into the wider world, and we have to start buying all our stuff through dictatorial, single-channel gatekeepers? It would stunt the industry, hurt software, throttle innovation.

Anyway. It’s weird rooting for Apple to fail, but I sincerely hope they do, and fail hard. The iPhone’s a more or less perfect device, but perfect is no substitute for good.

How is the user supposed to “know” and remember intuitively that click-through now only works in icon view mode and not in list view mode and column view mode? And how is the user supposed to “know” and remember intuitively that, even though click-through no longer works, “double-click-through” (to coin a phrase) still does?

There’s no question of users knowing any of this, of course, and certainly no question of them storing it in the muscle memory they use to deal with the core UI of their operating system.

I’ve long since given up trying to figure out how the Finder is going to react in any given situation, but this just rankles. In fact, I think it cries out for a new UI Law. Let’s call it Fitts and Startts’ Law:

Any sufficiently inconsistent UI behavior is indistinguishable from randomness.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if double-clicking a file in a background window caused a parade of flatulent spider monkeys to fart their way across my screen. That would be somewhat entertaining, at least, and no less unexpected than what actually happens.

(via Gruber)

1. Amazon reserves the right to track a bunch of stuff about what you’re doing with the Kindle, but they’re super-cagey about what they’re actually spying on. They’re at least watching what you’re reading at any given time, down to the specific page, and — given the Kindle’s persistent network connection — could be watching a lot more.
2. You don’t really own the Kindle books you buy. You license them, and Amazon has the ability to take them away from you at any time, as they did with 1984 and Animal Farm earlier this year.
3. You can’t lend your books to other people. You can’t sell them. You can’t make backups, and there are arbitrary, inconsistent, publisher-dictated limits on when you can download them.
4. You can annotate and highlight your books, but the annotations are stored on Amazon’s servers, and that “service” can be suspended at any time.

The EFF has all the ugly details. It’s a familiar pattern: a beautiful and innovative piece of tech is laden with a crapload of nastiness that we’re all supposed to just accept as the price of owning something awesome.

I agree that awesomeness has a price. In the case of the Kindle, it’s $260, and then $9 per book. That ought to be where it ends.

Update: This looks very promising: the Ibis Reader works across platforms, doesn’t cripple its books with any DRM, and uses the HTML 5 persistence mechanism to live entirely inside your browser, yet still work when you’re offline — thus getting around nasty things like the need for App Store approvals. Here’s hoping.

Things appear to have changed since I was a stripling programmer. The new template, as far as I can tell, lays out the following set of rules:

1. Make your resumé at least seven pages long, preferably more. Anything less and you’re not trying.
2. Use a very tiny, very close-spaced font, arranged in giant, eye-killing, soul-crushing blocks of text. If the interviewer isn’t half blind and weeping by the time he’s gotten to the end, you’ve failed.
3. No white space! White space denotes weakness.
4. List every technology that you’ve worked with, read about, heard about, dreamed about, fantasized about, or imagined. And, just to be safe, make up a couple of new ones, especially if you don’t have enough material to fill up your seven pages.
5. Use acronyms whenever possible. If something isn’t susceptible to acronymization, then tack on a few generic filler words until it is. Some candidates: “methodology”, “process”, “methodological process”, “framework”, “design pattern”.
6. List everything you’ve ever done, up to and including the little house you drew with your Logo turtle in 1983, and that time you installed Windows 95 on your grandmother’s Dell.

I’m generally very hesitant to give people career advice — because what the hell do I know — but I feel like I need to make an exception here. Because this is, of course, madness. The purpose of a resumé isn’t to lay out your career in exhaustive detail. It’s to give whoever you want to work for an idea of who you are, where your skills lie, and what you have to offer them.

I can’t speak for everyone who does interviews, but my first thought when I see these explosions of text posing as resumés is not that the person has a lot to offer — it’s that he’s hiding something.

Obviously, this isn’t coming out of nowhere. The Monsters and Dices out there — along with the general, Google-propelled atmosphere of keyword searches as the sine qua non of knowledge gathering — clearly reward an expansive, kitchen-sink approach. So I can understand the temptation to cater to their very specific, very search-oriented, strengths. Once you’ve moved on to actual humans, though, you really should find a way to indulge the preferences of their squishy, organic CPUs.

Unfortunately, XP owners, the biggest body of Windows users, won’t be able to do that. They’ll have to wipe out their hard disks after backing up their files elsewhere, then install Windows 7, then restore their personal files, then re-install all their programs from the original CDs or downloaded installer files. Then, they have to install all the patches and upgrades to those programs from over the years.

I’m with Kevin Drum here. No matter how good Windows 7 is, I can’t imagine most civilians are going to be willing to go through the pain of wiping their hard drives and then painstakingly restoring everything. Many won’t have the first idea how to do this, for one thing, and for another our hard drives have become as cluttered and irrational as our lives. There are nooks and crannies there, forgotten attics, dark cubbyholes that you’re inevitably going to forget about when it comes time to do the Big Nuke.

I could be wrong, but It feels like Microsoft has essentially jettisoned the lion’s share of their upgrade market.

I’m not going to say that this is a bad movie, but only because that would be redundant. Of course it’s a bad movie. It’s not trying to be a good movie. It’s not trying to be anything but an excuse to put cars going very fast somewhere in the vicinity of women not wearing very much, for about an hour and forty minutes. And, honestly, I don’t begrudge it its unremitting assault on the intellect. There’s clearly an appetite out there for exploding cars interspersed with terrible steely-eyed dialog — it certainly appeals to me — so more power to them.

What bothers me, though, are the rudiments of plot and characterization it insists on shoehorning in between the action. Again, not because these interstitial elements are done badly — of course they are — but because it’s clear they’re not even trying to do them well. The perpetrators of this movie had a bunch of action sequences, loud parties, and brief interludes of untitilating not-quite-sex that they needed to throw up on the screen — but no way to stitch them together. What they could have done — what they would have done if they’d had an ounce of pity for their audience — was simply introduce each set piece with little cardboard placards, like the ones they used to use for silent movies. Just pause before each new scene and put up a sign: Car Chase 1, followed by Explosion 1, followed by Car Chase 2, Extreme Close Up Of Woman Wearing Shorts Three Sizes Too Small For Her 1, Car Chase 3. And so on. That would have been fine with me.

But no. They had to go the exposition route.

Case in point: the movie starts with a chase scene in which Vin Diesel and his cohorts are trying to steal gas tankers off of a moving truck. There are cars going very fast and engines revving quite loudly and acrobatics and gunshots and peril and, ultimately, a big explosion — all of which is quite good. There follows, however, an extended sequence in which Vin Diesel’s plight is elucidated via the time-honored medium of terrible dialog and wooden acting. Vin’s had a good run, but he has to move on, because his past is catching up to him. His love interest must be abandoned — but only for her own good. Sad people must stare moodily into the darkness while swelling music plays. There is angst.

But all of this stuff is just watery glue that consistently fails to holds this matchstick house of a movie together. Eventually, we get to the next action sequence — some car chase, the details escape me — which is kind of cool, and then everything grinds to a halt so that more angst can occur. And then there’s another car chase, some angst, a car chase, anger and betrayal, a party with lesbians making out, absolution, something explodes, love is rediscovered (followed immediately by PG-13 not-quite-sex on a kitchen counter) and then car chase car chase explosion collision dead bad guy the end.

This movie, distilled down to its essence, doesn’t need to last longer than thirty minutes, and that’s only if you take the time to throw the inter-scene placards up between the car chases. It would have sucked away an hour less of my life, and been much more enjoyable to boot. But no. They had to introduce a “plot”, and people it with “characters”.

My advice, for the next installment — don’t worry about it. I know you guys see all this story stuff as an annoyance anyway, so everyone would be much happier if you just chuck it aside and spend your energy making stuff go boom. Seriously. I like it when stuff goes boom. Let’s focus on that.

Thank you.