This is a problem we (GitHub) are facing in a big way right now. Google Charts doesn't offer https alternatives, so almost all our users get a big "this site is going to steal all your private information" (mixed content warning). We chose to roll out SSL first, then deal with the hard problem of mixed content warnings (building ridiculous image proxies) later.

I think a lot of developers underestimate how big of an impact this warning is on users, especially on browsers like IE that throw up a dialog on every page that has this warning. Developers understand that it's not that big of a deal — but to a user, it looks like the site is full of viruses, malware and is going to steal all your bank account information.

I think the president, the VP, every senator, every representative, every supreme court judge and their wives/husbands should be required to go through this.

And the scanner print outs should be publicly available, as well as videos of the groping...eh "pat downs".

Surely they wouldn't require the cattle to do something that they themselves would object to? Surely.

BTW filling out a complaint form is a complete waste of time...if you want to get attention, actually call your senator/representative.

Why you should never quote prices in hours: because it provides prospects with a frame of reference for price negotiation in which (a) you always sound very expensive, and (b) price movements that seem reasonable to the prospect can end up being very painful for you.

If you're going to end up haggling over your price, far better for you to be doing it over numbers like $15,250 which are tied to the specific project than over numbers like $125/hour which are affixed to you for the rest of your relationship with the client. You should never, ever be budging on your rate anyways. Give an inch on your rate and you will never get it back; companies hire whole departments to ensure that rate concessions, once taken, are never surrendered. Negotiate over project scope, not rate.

The question of whether you should go fixed price or time-and-materials is a reasonable one (and it's a negotiating point), but if you're going to bid time-and-materials, price in billable weeks, and estimate the number of weeks up front. Save the details about billable phone call minutes (and, seriously?) for your S.O.W.

The warning isn't spurious, by the way. A man in the middle could inject evil JS into urchin.js (or whatever the equivalent is now) just as easily as he could inject it into your site's JS; the page is not secure.

The problem is the word 'beat' in the title. Markets aren't zero-sum. Apple has thrived over the past decade by focussing on rich margins and on expanding markets, rather than by competing for a bigger sliced of a fixed-size pie.

There's no reason Apple and Android can't both "win" in the phone market. But we'd need to define "win." For Apple it would mean selling a lot of devices and making a good profit on each device. For Google it would mean, uh, some kind of complicated bank shot where more people click on AdSense ads from their phone. (It's hard to see how they'd even know if they won.)

But note that Google would be fine with a future in which the iPhone is still very popular, as long as it doesn't completely dominate the market. (People do a lot of Google searches from their iPhones.) And Apple would be fine with a future in which Android owns the low end of the phone market, i.e. the low-margin commodity devices that are given away free or very cheap with low-end plans.

But of course, stories like "It's X versus Y in a cage match to the death!" are very appealing, even when they're wrong.