Let's look back at the last few acts of actual terrorism carried out in this country, including the attempt to slaughter children at a Martin Luther King parade and various shooting sprees. That you can look at recent history and declare that the bulk of the violence is coming from the left shows just how disconnected from reality you are. The right has become radicalized and violent to an extent far beyond anything this country has seen since the years just before MLK's assassination.
If I may throw the words of one of your own at you: "Prove to me, sir, that you are not a terrorist."
He's busy defending the corporate aristocracy. Shame on you for thinking they should be held accountable for their actions. What are you? Some kind of communist? [/rightwinger]
If non-DRM games get pirated at the same rate at DRM games, what motive is there to produce DRM-free games? The pirates have been undermining our case that it would be in the publishers' interest to keep DRM out of their games, but right now we cannot make a reasonable case that removing DRM would necessarily result in more sales.
...if piracy rates are about the same for non-DRM as for DRM games, what possible motivation would publishers have for not including DRM in their games? Yes, the cracks appear very quickly, but as long as the game is uncracked in the first critical hours of release, there will be some impact on their bottom line. So as things stand right now, there is a slight benefit to having DRM, and a negligible benefit to not having DRM.
In their place, who wouldn't make similar decisions?
I do not think most people have noticed, but we the public have been subjected to a massive PR/marketing campaign by the nuclear industry in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, and I don't think most posters here (or at some other Internet communities I frequent) have understood just how much they are parroting nuclear industry talking points.
Under more normal circumstances, I am quick to point out when people are getting hysterical at the mere mention of the word "nuclear" (and plenty of people do), but I am shocked to see people who normally don't fall for this kind of thing spouting nuclear industry talking points as if they were lobbyists themselves.
Has the media exaggerated some of the danger? Possibly. But to hear some people around here talk, it would be perfectly safe to raise a family in the remains of the Daiichi plant and we must never ever ever consider reviewing the safety procedures of older nuclear plants in other countries. This is patently absurd.
I am not interested in living in a nuclear-free world. I happen to think nuclear power may some day prove a critical transition technology as we move from one to another form of energy generation. However, I do not think it is unreasonable to occasionally review the safety of older plants, and be prepared to close them if they are found lacking.
Also, nuclear power is currently not economically viable without massive government subsidies. I'd love to keep nuclear power around in the hopes that someone will some day develop a nuclear power plant that is economically viable without massive government subsidies, but until that day comes, we should not have as many nuclear plants as we have. Furthermore, even though the current economic analysis suggests that it is not economically viable without massive government studies, whatever numbers you have heard thrown about do not include the cost of disposing of fuel. No estimate can include this information because no one yet knows how we will ever go about disposing of the stuff.
Nuclear power is simply not ready for large scale use yet, and it is absurd to pretend that it is.
As a legitimate consumer, I hate DRM with a burning passion because I'm the one getting punished for the actions of pirates, while pirates get to enjoy a DRM-free experience. I want to believe this is true, but unfortunately, I cannot let myself engage in argument from consequence logical fallacies nor indulge in confirmation bias. I look at the evidence, and the evidence (to my knowledge) says that DRM-free games get pirated at about the same rate as DRM games.
Not that I would personally advocate such a thing, but conservatives routinely do, so they won't mind people making helpful suggestions like this. Anyone have mister Beck's private home address? We can suggest that second amendment remedists go there.
The Bible says that the world is flat and that the Sun orbits the Earth. Any intellectually honest proponent of the Talking Snake Theory of Creation would also be defending geocentrism and platygaeanism alongside creationism (moreso, since there are direct claims about platygaeanism and geocentrism in the Holy Bible), but we all know that they are not interested in intellectual honesty.
They've been playing the "God of the gaps" game for some time now, and they've noticed that the gaps keep shrinking and becoming fewer in number, so they're switching strategies from "God of the gaps" to "deny reality". It doesn't matter that their arguments have gone from questionable to openly laughable as long as their followers are gullible enough to swallow whatever they are fed.
...particularly regarding energy issues, I can tell you that electric and gas bills are frequently based on estimates in apartment buildings. As you can imagine, some of these estimates are wildly inaccurate. If the meter reader runs into any problems, they just make something up.
Not that it matters. After the Republicans take away the teabaggers' social security checks and their Medicare coverage, they'll just blame the Democrats. That's the advantage of building a political base around angry morons.
Since it's not likely that we have robotics-related technology that the Japanese don't already have, this is an obvious prelude to the Robot Rebellion that all those science fiction stories warned us about!;)
Wall Street has their grubby mitts all over our government, and has for decades leading up to the Obama administration. The higher-ups at the various regulatory agencies won't press charges because they want to get big juicy jobs when they leave government, so the only ones who actually want to pursue real criminal cases are the folks at the bottom of the food chain, who get overruled by the people who want those juicy jobs.
Our government no longer exists to serve the needs of the people, it exists to serve the needs of Wall Street, multinational corporations, and the extremely rich. The most maddening thing is that conservatives and libertarians work tirelessly to make sure the aristocracy has ever more influence over our government (e.g. the recent Citizen's United ruling made possible by decades of conservative/libertarian activism).
Normal people look at the undue influence the rich and corporations have over our government and think "This is unfair and unjust. How can we transfer that power back to the people where it belongs?" Conservatives and libertarians look at this same set of circumstances and conclude "Buncha dirty no-good peasants. How can we transfer even more power to our lords and ladies?" For this, our "liberal media" labels them as populists and liberals the elitists.
The right spends so much time going on about how Obama is some kind of super liberal that is totally indistinguishable from a socialist, when in fact he is largely indistinguishable from Bush. Hell, his much-maligned health care bill was almost a note-for-note copy of a Republican health care proposal from the 1990s. He has proved to be exactly the kind of conservative appeaser/collaborator that I expected him to be.
I think very soon we are going to reach a point where graphics are no longer the driving concern in game platforms. With each new generation of graphics technology, the percentage of development costs that must go towards artists (as opposed to designers, writers, voice actors, etc.) goes up. Eventually we have to hit the point where developers are simply unwilling to throw any more money at the art side of the budget than they already are.
I hope that time comes soon, because frankly I would love it if they put more of those budgets into hiring designers. No offense to artists, but the designers have more direct impact on gameplay.
Let's agree not to call this a "Republican" or "Democratic" position.
Have you read the article? It clearly states that the vast majority of Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates are against global warming.[....]
Did you have a straight face when you typed this? Because I refuse to believe that someone capable of using a keyboard and producing complete sentences could possibly be this delusional.
You must be British. If only verifiably true free speech is protected, then someone (in this case the government) has to determine what is true and what is false. One need only look back at the Bush II administration to see the potential problem with that.
Whether or not the US has gained or lost jobs over a given period of time is very much measurable. You have to be incredibly partisan to claim otherwise, which is exactly what we expect from anyone making the "both sides are just as bad" false equivalence claim. Even if the people doing this study were "just as bad", that would not prove that the evidence of FOX's bias is itself biased.
So we get a false claim (that this study is exactly as bad as FOX News, which is demonstrably not the case), and the attempt to use a tu quoque logical fallacy to absolve FOX News of bias (or at least mitigate the claims of bias). As usual with the false equivalence claim, we get a two for one deal!
Sorry for the lack of cites, but these are old, crusty memories.
The reason people assume men are unfaithful and women are not is partly cultural, and partly due to quite a bit of research that turned out to be flawed.
Old marriage laws viewed wives and children as property. Female infidelity was frowned upon because it resulted in confusion over which of your pieces of property was supposed to inherit your stuff when you die. The law didn't give a crap about male infidelity because of this, and that view is reflected in most of the major world religions. This in turn leads to a widely-held cultural view that male infidelity is acceptable but female infidelity is not, which invariably leads to the perception that men cheat and women don't (because women have to become much better at hiding it or face the wrath of society).
The other side of this coin is research that showed that male infidelity rates are higher, and there's plenty such research done that showed such results. This would have served to reinforce the view that men cheat more than women even among those who know to place more stock in empirical data. Then someone did an infidelity study in which the researchers went to great lengths to assure the respondents of anonymity. They of course found a higher incidence of male infidelity than in the other studies, but they also found a higher incidence of female infidelity than the other studies. Much higher. They found that men are slightly more than 50% likely to cheat on a spouse at least once in their lives, while women are slightly less than 50% likely to cheat on a spouse at least once in their lives. The difference between these two numbers was less than the margin of error for the study.
This shows not only that the other studies were flawed, but it revealed a number of other things. For one, women are much more likely to lie about infidelity (possibly due to the social pressures I mentioned above). For another, women and men cheat at about the same rates.
To get back to the topic of discussion, a genetic link to fidelity makes sense. There are genetic advantages to both fidelity and infidelity when viewed at the population level. Infidelity results in greater genetic diversity, while fidelity results in more stable homes in which to raise children (and human children take a lot more time and effort to raise than other mammals). At the population level, higher genetic diversity reduces a population's vulnerability to disease (with insufficient genetic diversity, a single disease could wipe out the whole population). On the flip side, greater fidelity produces more productive adults for the population.
Smart people can fall for phishing attacks as well. The counter is knowledge, not intelligence. The more people know about how phishing scams work, the better prepared they are to identify phishing attacks.
I can't believe this! George Bush was right all along and the media suppressed the story! Only a massive, international socialist conspiracy could explain this!!!!!!!11!!1!oneone
Yeah, the blister agents were discovered and reported by the media. The chemicals had so degraded in potency that Saddam would have had to get American troops to agree to have it rubbed on them, and even then in most cases they would have had a nasty rash. If that's your justification for starting a war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, you have a very low bar for justifying that sort of thing.
Didn't anyone tell you that you're only supposed to use that "blame America first" language when a Republican is in the White House? If you don't rescind your statement, I'm gonna tell all your freeper friends that you're an Obama supporter.:P
You can quote up to 10% of an article to make a point. More than that, and you've crossed the line into copyright infringement. Furthermore, if you are refuting Al Gore or Sarah Palin, chances are you're going to be refuting something they said, which is a matter of public record. So if you repost what the public figure said rather than repost huge chunks of an article written about what they said, you're pretty much in the clear. If you are going off of some book they wrote rather than something they said, then you should have no problem citing the book (paraphrasing as necessary) without directly copying any text from the book.
While there is a lot about copyright law that really torques my 'nards, I really don't see this as a problem. The law gives us enough wriggle room to cite for refutation (or agreement for that matter) as needed.
In general I'd stay away from Macs. They cost more per unit, and they are not good with business support. Their idea of support is generally "Take the system to a store, we'll look at it and get it back to you." Fine for a consumer, not for a business. For a business you want "I call you and a tech shows up tomorrow with all the parts to fix it." Only go with Macs if you have a real reason and if you can't think of one, then you don't have one.
[...]
Disclaimer: I have not worked with Macs since the days of MacOS 9.x, so take everything I say with a huge grain of salt, as what I know about Macs is seriously out of date.
It's true that Apple doesn't send techs out to your site to fix computers for you, but if you're at a smallish operation, there is going to be very little need for that kind of thing anyway (at least in my experience). Once that's out of the equation, the Macs may be more expensive up front, but fixing them is generally faster and easier than fixing Windows computers. (Mac aficionados insist that things go wrong less frequently on Macs, but at least during the 90s when I was supporting Macs, this was not the case for me, the advantage was that Macs took less time and effort to fix.)
The number one downside with Macs is that most organizations have legacy applications that won't run on anything other than Windows. If you are starting up an organization from scratch though, this is not a problem. If you need to develop any apps, you can choose to develop them for whatever platform you choose to buy.
On the plus side, Macs work great as computers for average cubicle monkeys: it runs Internet Explorer, and it runs Microsoft Office, which is all most cubicle monkeys need. Microsoft has done a really good job with making the Mac version of Office highly compatible with the Windows version. Even your macros will run just fine (provided none of them make OS-specific calls to external functions).
Another downside: in the 90s when I was supporting Macs, most office workers didn't know how to use any computer. Back then, Macs had an advantage as office computers, because it takes less time to train someone to use Macs than to train them to use Windows computers. Nowadays, however, most people already know how to use Windows, so Windows has the advantage in training costs.
Then there's the upside you already know about: malware. Despite the claims of Mac people, there is nothing about MacOS that is in any way inherently resistant to malware attacks. The main advantage is that very little malware is made to run on Macintoshes. "In the wild" outbreaks are so rare that you can get away with not installing any antivirus at all and install them only when you read about an actual outbreak on one of the tech blogs/news sites. Back in the 90s, this seemed to happen around once every 1.5 years.
From what I understand, modern Macs play much nicer on Windows networks, and vice versa, from when I was dealing with mixed Mac-Windows environments in the 90s.
I happen to think Macs are very competitive with Windows as office computers, but clearly inferior as home computers (since there are far fewer games and educational titles written for Macs), and I find the general perception of "Macs for home, Windows for the office" attitude to be perplexing.
Does this mean I think every IT department should go out and trade in their Windows computers for Macintoshes? Hell no. There's a reason I haven't used Macs in a very long time. However, if one were starting an office from scratch, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss Mac as a platform without thinking about it carefully first.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's look back at the last few acts of actual terrorism carried out in this country, including the attempt to slaughter children at a Martin Luther King parade and various shooting sprees. That you can look at recent history and declare that the bulk of the violence is coming from the left shows just how disconnected from reality you are. The right has become radicalized and violent to an extent far beyond anything this country has seen since the years just before MLK's assassination.
If I may throw the words of one of your own at you: "Prove to me, sir, that you are not a terrorist."
He's busy defending the corporate aristocracy. Shame on you for thinking they should be held accountable for their actions. What are you? Some kind of communist? [/rightwinger]
If non-DRM games get pirated at the same rate at DRM games, what motive is there to produce DRM-free games? The pirates have been undermining our case that it would be in the publishers' interest to keep DRM out of their games, but right now we cannot make a reasonable case that removing DRM would necessarily result in more sales.
...if piracy rates are about the same for non-DRM as for DRM games, what possible motivation would publishers have for not including DRM in their games? Yes, the cracks appear very quickly, but as long as the game is uncracked in the first critical hours of release, there will be some impact on their bottom line. So as things stand right now, there is a slight benefit to having DRM, and a negligible benefit to not having DRM.
In their place, who wouldn't make similar decisions?
I do not think most people have noticed, but we the public have been subjected to a massive PR/marketing campaign by the nuclear industry in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, and I don't think most posters here (or at some other Internet communities I frequent) have understood just how much they are parroting nuclear industry talking points.
Under more normal circumstances, I am quick to point out when people are getting hysterical at the mere mention of the word "nuclear" (and plenty of people do), but I am shocked to see people who normally don't fall for this kind of thing spouting nuclear industry talking points as if they were lobbyists themselves.
Has the media exaggerated some of the danger? Possibly. But to hear some people around here talk, it would be perfectly safe to raise a family in the remains of the Daiichi plant and we must never ever ever consider reviewing the safety procedures of older nuclear plants in other countries. This is patently absurd.
I am not interested in living in a nuclear-free world. I happen to think nuclear power may some day prove a critical transition technology as we move from one to another form of energy generation. However, I do not think it is unreasonable to occasionally review the safety of older plants, and be prepared to close them if they are found lacking.
Also, nuclear power is currently not economically viable without massive government subsidies. I'd love to keep nuclear power around in the hopes that someone will some day develop a nuclear power plant that is economically viable without massive government subsidies, but until that day comes, we should not have as many nuclear plants as we have. Furthermore, even though the current economic analysis suggests that it is not economically viable without massive government studies, whatever numbers you have heard thrown about do not include the cost of disposing of fuel. No estimate can include this information because no one yet knows how we will ever go about disposing of the stuff.
Nuclear power is simply not ready for large scale use yet, and it is absurd to pretend that it is.
As a legitimate consumer, I hate DRM with a burning passion because I'm the one getting punished for the actions of pirates, while pirates get to enjoy a DRM-free experience. I want to believe this is true, but unfortunately, I cannot let myself engage in argument from consequence logical fallacies nor indulge in confirmation bias. I look at the evidence, and the evidence (to my knowledge) says that DRM-free games get pirated at about the same rate as DRM games.
Someone please prove me wrong.
Not that I would personally advocate such a thing, but conservatives routinely do, so they won't mind people making helpful suggestions like this. Anyone have mister Beck's private home address? We can suggest that second amendment remedists go there.
The Bible says that the world is flat and that the Sun orbits the Earth. Any intellectually honest proponent of the Talking Snake Theory of Creation would also be defending geocentrism and platygaeanism alongside creationism (moreso, since there are direct claims about platygaeanism and geocentrism in the Holy Bible), but we all know that they are not interested in intellectual honesty.
They've been playing the "God of the gaps" game for some time now, and they've noticed that the gaps keep shrinking and becoming fewer in number, so they're switching strategies from "God of the gaps" to "deny reality". It doesn't matter that their arguments have gone from questionable to openly laughable as long as their followers are gullible enough to swallow whatever they are fed.
...particularly regarding energy issues, I can tell you that electric and gas bills are frequently based on estimates in apartment buildings. As you can imagine, some of these estimates are wildly inaccurate. If the meter reader runs into any problems, they just make something up.
Not that it matters. After the Republicans take away the teabaggers' social security checks and their Medicare coverage, they'll just blame the Democrats. That's the advantage of building a political base around angry morons.
Since it's not likely that we have robotics-related technology that the Japanese don't already have, this is an obvious prelude to the Robot Rebellion that all those science fiction stories warned us about! ;)
Corporations are people, and money counts as speech, not bribery! [/rightist]
Wall Street has their grubby mitts all over our government, and has for decades leading up to the Obama administration. The higher-ups at the various regulatory agencies won't press charges because they want to get big juicy jobs when they leave government, so the only ones who actually want to pursue real criminal cases are the folks at the bottom of the food chain, who get overruled by the people who want those juicy jobs.
Our government no longer exists to serve the needs of the people, it exists to serve the needs of Wall Street, multinational corporations, and the extremely rich. The most maddening thing is that conservatives and libertarians work tirelessly to make sure the aristocracy has ever more influence over our government (e.g. the recent Citizen's United ruling made possible by decades of conservative/libertarian activism).
Normal people look at the undue influence the rich and corporations have over our government and think "This is unfair and unjust. How can we transfer that power back to the people where it belongs?" Conservatives and libertarians look at this same set of circumstances and conclude "Buncha dirty no-good peasants. How can we transfer even more power to our lords and ladies?" For this, our "liberal media" labels them as populists and liberals the elitists.
The right spends so much time going on about how Obama is some kind of super liberal that is totally indistinguishable from a socialist, when in fact he is largely indistinguishable from Bush. Hell, his much-maligned health care bill was almost a note-for-note copy of a Republican health care proposal from the 1990s. He has proved to be exactly the kind of conservative appeaser/collaborator that I expected him to be.
I think very soon we are going to reach a point where graphics are no longer the driving concern in game platforms. With each new generation of graphics technology, the percentage of development costs that must go towards artists (as opposed to designers, writers, voice actors, etc.) goes up. Eventually we have to hit the point where developers are simply unwilling to throw any more money at the art side of the budget than they already are.
I hope that time comes soon, because frankly I would love it if they put more of those budgets into hiring designers. No offense to artists, but the designers have more direct impact on gameplay.
Let's agree not to call this a "Republican" or "Democratic" position.
Have you read the article? It clearly states that the vast majority of Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates are against global warming.[....]
Did you have a straight face when you typed this? Because I refuse to believe that someone capable of using a keyboard and producing complete sentences could possibly be this delusional.
You must be British. If only verifiably true free speech is protected, then someone (in this case the government) has to determine what is true and what is false. One need only look back at the Bush II administration to see the potential problem with that.
Whether or not the US has gained or lost jobs over a given period of time is very much measurable. You have to be incredibly partisan to claim otherwise, which is exactly what we expect from anyone making the "both sides are just as bad" false equivalence claim. Even if the people doing this study were "just as bad", that would not prove that the evidence of FOX's bias is itself biased.
So we get a false claim (that this study is exactly as bad as FOX News, which is demonstrably not the case), and the attempt to use a tu quoque logical fallacy to absolve FOX News of bias (or at least mitigate the claims of bias). As usual with the false equivalence claim, we get a two for one deal!
Sorry for the lack of cites, but these are old, crusty memories.
The reason people assume men are unfaithful and women are not is partly cultural, and partly due to quite a bit of research that turned out to be flawed.
Old marriage laws viewed wives and children as property. Female infidelity was frowned upon because it resulted in confusion over which of your pieces of property was supposed to inherit your stuff when you die. The law didn't give a crap about male infidelity because of this, and that view is reflected in most of the major world religions. This in turn leads to a widely-held cultural view that male infidelity is acceptable but female infidelity is not, which invariably leads to the perception that men cheat and women don't (because women have to become much better at hiding it or face the wrath of society).
The other side of this coin is research that showed that male infidelity rates are higher, and there's plenty such research done that showed such results. This would have served to reinforce the view that men cheat more than women even among those who know to place more stock in empirical data. Then someone did an infidelity study in which the researchers went to great lengths to assure the respondents of anonymity. They of course found a higher incidence of male infidelity than in the other studies, but they also found a higher incidence of female infidelity than the other studies. Much higher. They found that men are slightly more than 50% likely to cheat on a spouse at least once in their lives, while women are slightly less than 50% likely to cheat on a spouse at least once in their lives. The difference between these two numbers was less than the margin of error for the study.
This shows not only that the other studies were flawed, but it revealed a number of other things. For one, women are much more likely to lie about infidelity (possibly due to the social pressures I mentioned above). For another, women and men cheat at about the same rates.
To get back to the topic of discussion, a genetic link to fidelity makes sense. There are genetic advantages to both fidelity and infidelity when viewed at the population level. Infidelity results in greater genetic diversity, while fidelity results in more stable homes in which to raise children (and human children take a lot more time and effort to raise than other mammals). At the population level, higher genetic diversity reduces a population's vulnerability to disease (with insufficient genetic diversity, a single disease could wipe out the whole population). On the flip side, greater fidelity produces more productive adults for the population.
So it is highly unlikely that he is a Muslim.
Smart people can fall for phishing attacks as well. The counter is knowledge, not intelligence. The more people know about how phishing scams work, the better prepared they are to identify phishing attacks.
I can't believe this! George Bush was right all along and the media suppressed the story! Only a massive, international socialist conspiracy could explain this!!!!!!!11!!1!oneone
Yeah, the blister agents were discovered and reported by the media. The chemicals had so degraded in potency that Saddam would have had to get American troops to agree to have it rubbed on them, and even then in most cases they would have had a nasty rash. If that's your justification for starting a war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, you have a very low bar for justifying that sort of thing.
Didn't anyone tell you that you're only supposed to use that "blame America first" language when a Republican is in the White House? If you don't rescind your statement, I'm gonna tell all your freeper friends that you're an Obama supporter. :P
You can quote up to 10% of an article to make a point. More than that, and you've crossed the line into copyright infringement. Furthermore, if you are refuting Al Gore or Sarah Palin, chances are you're going to be refuting something they said, which is a matter of public record. So if you repost what the public figure said rather than repost huge chunks of an article written about what they said, you're pretty much in the clear. If you are going off of some book they wrote rather than something they said, then you should have no problem citing the book (paraphrasing as necessary) without directly copying any text from the book.
While there is a lot about copyright law that really torques my 'nards, I really don't see this as a problem. The law gives us enough wriggle room to cite for refutation (or agreement for that matter) as needed.
[...]
In general I'd stay away from Macs. They cost more per unit, and they are not good with business support. Their idea of support is generally "Take the system to a store, we'll look at it and get it back to you." Fine for a consumer, not for a business. For a business you want "I call you and a tech shows up tomorrow with all the parts to fix it." Only go with Macs if you have a real reason and if you can't think of one, then you don't have one.
[...]
Disclaimer: I have not worked with Macs since the days of MacOS 9.x, so take everything I say with a huge grain of salt, as what I know about Macs is seriously out of date.
It's true that Apple doesn't send techs out to your site to fix computers for you, but if you're at a smallish operation, there is going to be very little need for that kind of thing anyway (at least in my experience). Once that's out of the equation, the Macs may be more expensive up front, but fixing them is generally faster and easier than fixing Windows computers. (Mac aficionados insist that things go wrong less frequently on Macs, but at least during the 90s when I was supporting Macs, this was not the case for me, the advantage was that Macs took less time and effort to fix.)
The number one downside with Macs is that most organizations have legacy applications that won't run on anything other than Windows. If you are starting up an organization from scratch though, this is not a problem. If you need to develop any apps, you can choose to develop them for whatever platform you choose to buy.
On the plus side, Macs work great as computers for average cubicle monkeys: it runs Internet Explorer, and it runs Microsoft Office, which is all most cubicle monkeys need. Microsoft has done a really good job with making the Mac version of Office highly compatible with the Windows version. Even your macros will run just fine (provided none of them make OS-specific calls to external functions).
Another downside: in the 90s when I was supporting Macs, most office workers didn't know how to use any computer. Back then, Macs had an advantage as office computers, because it takes less time to train someone to use Macs than to train them to use Windows computers. Nowadays, however, most people already know how to use Windows, so Windows has the advantage in training costs.
Then there's the upside you already know about: malware. Despite the claims of Mac people, there is nothing about MacOS that is in any way inherently resistant to malware attacks. The main advantage is that very little malware is made to run on Macintoshes. "In the wild" outbreaks are so rare that you can get away with not installing any antivirus at all and install them only when you read about an actual outbreak on one of the tech blogs/news sites. Back in the 90s, this seemed to happen around once every 1.5 years.
From what I understand, modern Macs play much nicer on Windows networks, and vice versa, from when I was dealing with mixed Mac-Windows environments in the 90s.
I happen to think Macs are very competitive with Windows as office computers, but clearly inferior as home computers (since there are far fewer games and educational titles written for Macs), and I find the general perception of "Macs for home, Windows for the office" attitude to be perplexing.
Does this mean I think every IT department should go out and trade in their Windows computers for Macintoshes? Hell no. There's a reason I haven't used Macs in a very long time. However, if one were starting an office from scratch, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss Mac as a platform without thinking about it carefully first.