I like the fact that you both made a thoughtful comment about accent and finished with a Mark Twain comment. His preamble to Huck Finn on accents seems very relevant! ("In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.")
I love the irony of a racist complaint about put-upon white guys having to put up with poor English being written by some arse who doesn't realise that English does not capitalise random words like "White" or "Ilegal Aliens" just because they're important in what passes for his mind. AC, try again, but in German. Then you can live out your sub-Aryan fantasy in full.
But surely you made a trade-off? Ie you weighed up the difficulty of understanding the accent vs the brilliance of what was being said? I mean, accent is important but it's hardly the be-all and end-all, is it?
Erm. RP is just as much of an accent as any other form of spoken English. There is no such thing as accent-free English or indeed accent-free spoken language! And RP has certainly not killed off southern English accents. Media and mobility have had an impact, but RP was only ever spoken by a small fraction of the population. And significant regional differences continue to exist: a West Country accent is still pretty easily distinguishable from a Londoner's accent. It's even possible to quite clearly distinguish between a NW London teenage girl's accent depending on ethnicity: Asian, Jewish or WASP. And none sounds exactly like their parents...
I agree with everything you say, with a single exception: buying index ETFs is *not* buying the index. It's buying a sophisticated financial instrument that sorta mimics the index. There are very significant risks for holding ETFs, especially synthetic ETFs. Tread carefully....
TThe problem is that if they maintain their margins (as can be expected) in the face of competition which is of sufficiently high quality and sufficiently lower price, their volume will be reduced.
There's been no sign *at all* of a slowing of volume growth for iPhone. Because, the alternative to either accepting shrinking margins or shrinking volumes in the face of competition is, of course, to bring new products to market that consumers desire. Like, I dunno, the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2...and of course the iPhone 5 and the iPad 3.
No, the GP specifically excluded older cities, which grew organically and had more old-world influence.
As for San Diego...you'll lose your wager. Go to Google Maps and open a page looking at San Diego and another looking at London at a scale showing 2mi. You will see that 1) there is far more green on the London map 2) it is much more interdigitated -- you are always very close to green in London, which is decidedly *not* the case if you're in San Diego. The green spaces in San Diego are bigger, but there are far fewer of them. 3) London is much more compact -- at 2m scale, you can comfortably see the whole of London from Barnet in the north to Croydon in the south, from Hounslow in the west to Bexley in the east. Wiki says it has a density of nearly 13,000 inhabitants per square mile, cf San Diego at 3,500 per square mile, and the San Diego metropolitan area at 712 per square mile. Houston is even more sprawling than San Diego and has even less green space, of course. (And a significant part of the green space is not accessible to the public, being private golf courses and country clubs).
This is why the GP said what he said. I really think you should give up now!
You've argued about what is meaningful to you, but you fail to recognise that you are not representative of most people. For example: the App Store is not compelling to you, but it is very compelling to iPad users -- the integration is part of it, the wide range of apps is another part of it, and the trust is a third part of it ("Apple aren't going to let me download something that could break my iPad"). Android doesn't offer the same integration, doesn't offer the same range of apps (e.g., I don't think Epicurious offers an enhanced version of its app for Android tabs yet -- this is the kind of app that millions of consumers use day-to-day), and doesn't offer the same level of trust (with the App Store, I trust Apple; with Android, I have to trust Epicurious).
Re your last point on marketing and brand loyalty: any marketing 101 course begins by saying "brands need to be authentic to have lasting value". In other words, brands are built on something meaningful. In Apple's case, the brand's values are about "Apple 'gets' you as a consumer" "Apple products delight you" "Apple products don't break easily or often and are nicely built" "Apple products feel slick, look good, work well" "Apple products allow you to easily do things that are difficult with competitor products" etc. These are real values based on the real experiences of many tens of millions of people. They seep into the public consciousness by osmosis, as well as by marketing campaigns.
What the hell, let's do a line-by-line on just the first sentence for fun: "They're using their flimsy patents" - Flimsy isn't in the eye of the beholder, it's in the eyes of the courts. If their IP protection is flimsy, they'll lose. - It's not just patents. It's also trade dress.
"to prevent anyone with a product that could damage their market penetration." - The poor syntax and grammar makes this sentence ambiguous. Not clear if you mean "prevent anyone *from making* a product that could damage their market penetration" or "prevent anyone who has a product that could damage their market penetration from selling it". If the former, that's demonstrably not true: there are other tablets on the market. If the latter, you're simply defining "a product that could damage Apple's market penetration" using circular logic, ie as any product where Apple is involved in an IP stunt.
I could carry on but honestly, what would be the point? You've told yourself the story and got the righteous lather going, so go ahead and enjoy the bathing in your indignation.
Erm. The GP specifically excluded older cities like NYC from his general case. Compare Houston or San diego to London... And London has the royal parks, the Heath, clapham common, etc. It's got tons of green space considering 11m people live there. And the tube or a bike is far quicker for most journeys than a car.
You *really* think that the only "meaningful relationships with people outside of the family are market relationships"?
I know that lots of Slashdotters make jokes about being geeks with no friends, but this is a whole new level. I think you may be projecting onto the rest of the world....
It's a shame there's not a "Not half as bright as he thinks he is" moderation, because that's the one I'd choose for you, not troll.
Are you seriously claiming that Norway's rate of personal taxation is a significant cause of developing world starvation? And you were calling him a fool?
The chain of causation you describe is...erm...tenuous at best. Norway is not part of the EU. The propensity of 5m Norwegians to pay relatively high taxes has no significant impact at all on the price of crops in Nigeria. Things that do affect the price of crops in Nigeria include: - price speculation by lightly regulated financial institutions - political unrest and corruption in Cairo (yay! score one for the Arab spring) - relatively scarce supply due to poor harvests and in direct distinction to the point you make: - growing demand -- not only are there lots of hungry mouths in Nigeria, but local farmers quite often sell food to agents for the developing world in preference to selling to local residents, in the hope of making more money that way (it doesn't work out well for them very often). A bit less overseas competition for scarce supplies of crops, land, energy and water would tend to be of net benefit, given the paltry foreign exchange receipts the trade earns (especially given how much middle-men take and how agricultural equipment and resources eg fertilisers cause net outflows of money from the developing world)
But people soured on Microsoft because they produced crappy products that folks had to use because of their effective monopoly position. Apple will need to produce devices that most consumers feel are crap *and* that most consumers feel they have to use due to no alternatives before they get a crappy reputation. That's conceivable, but a stretch...
Worth figuring in to your decision that an iPad has essentially no moving parts to break and is made of a hefty chunk of metal+glass. It's perfectly possible to break it, of course, but it's a damned sight more robust than that POS laptop you described. Incidentally, a MacBook Pro is also much better engineered than your cheap laptop, as you'd expect from a much more expensive product.
That is absolutely spot on. And I'm glad your grandfather enjoyed the photos! (It works at the other end of the spectrum, too: my daughter has been able to use the iPad from the day she first saw it -- she's two)
Wow, the stuff about handling different size screens *really* misses the point about tablets. Why waste all that screen real-estate by not providing additional functionality in your tablet app cf your phone app. That's why the photo, mail, epicurious and a gazillion and one other iPad apps are quite different (and better) than their iPhone counterparts. By providing smooth scaling, Android removes a significant pressure for developers to rework phone apps to take advantage of the tablet screen size.
How about following a recipe from something that's at eyeline height, being able to click videos to see how a particular step is done? Possible with an iPad, not so much with a phone or laptop. That's only one use-case, of course, there will be tons more.
1. Murder is indeed only one form of violence. Feel free to quote others that disprove what I was saying. Otherwise you can take your assertion that homicide statistics are "not an accurate measure of violence" and non-violently insert them where the sun don't shine. I mean, wtf?! Murder rates are not indicative of levels of violence in a country??
2. That's because the definition of Europe used included Eastern Europe and the OP talked about "any other western country".
3. I'd say a five-fold difference between the US and individual EU5 countries was substantial.
4. Unless you want to stretch language all out of shape, Mexico and Brazil would not be included as a "western country" for this definition. The OP was clearly, if sloppily, talking about developed nations aka the First World. Countries like Finland, Sweden, the EU5, Luxembourg, Australia, Canada, etc. Not ex-Soviet bloc nations, not the BRIC countries, not the Asian tigers.
I picked up but chose not to comment on the pretty tasteless "joke" comparison of Ashkenazi Jews with Nazis. Instead, I was commenting on "they dare to talk about "terrorist" in front of them..." which is an excitingly, erm, different form of English. I have no problems with people not writing perfectly, not by a long shot. But it does need to be sufficiently clear to be comprehensible.
It's ironic that you (implicitly) chastise me for picking up on his English and then go on to describe how word choice matters when describing the change in use of the term "anti-semitism". By the way, my view on moans about the use of "anti-semitism" differing now from its original meaning reminds me of a chemistry prof at university who railed in a lecture about "organic food" being a misnomer. As though chemists had ownership of the word and could keep it immutable. Same with thin-lipped blue-rinsed ladies who read the Mail and mutter darkly about "gay" being a "perfectly decent" word until "they stole it from us". I think you were being descriptive rather than normative, though.
Worth noting, however, that these moans also happen to be wrong. Antisemitism as a term was first used only in the late C19 in Germany, and from the outset was used mainly to describe anti-Jewish sentiment more frequently than it was used to describe prejudice against all Semites (and in fact, a German journalist founded a "League of Anti-semites" that was targeted at Jews, not Semites more widely, in 1880. Wikipedia has an article about it that's quite good. Frankly, I've seen quite a few complaints about this supposed semantic shift that imply that it's yet another thing "the Jews" have stolen from Arabs, which always makes me think of Robert Heinlein's remark that "man is a rationalising animal, not a rational animal".
You might think that from the summary. *I* read the summary as a perfectly accurate reflection of the thrust of the article -- that a lot of tickets were being written, and that lots of them were for behaviour that doesn't seem to warrant school discipline, never mind police intervention. I assume your SWAT reference was not in relation to the OP's comment about "Alamo Heights Special Airborne Brigade and SEAL TEAM CROCKETT". You'd have to be unbelievably dim not to spot that this was a humorous reductio ad absurdum. But having said that, it makes me wonder what specifically in the summary you thought misrepresented the article. The fact that lots of people are concerned about this, doesn't mean that it isn't as bad as the summary suggests: the fact remains that lots of kids are being ticketed, some of them are extremely young, and some of the behaviours clearly do not warrant the punishments being meted out.
Erm. The OP didn't claim that other countries had no violence, he claimed that the USA has a "culture that's so much more violent than any other western country I know". Riots in England, France and Greece do not disprove that.
The spirit is willing but by God the English was weak. Try again but use simpler words. It looks like English isn't your first language, so keep your sentences short and simple and we might be able to understand you properly.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the fact that you both made a thoughtful comment about accent and finished with a Mark Twain comment. His preamble to Huck Finn on accents seems very relevant! ("In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.")
I love the irony of a racist complaint about put-upon white guys having to put up with poor English being written by some arse who doesn't realise that English does not capitalise random words like "White" or "Ilegal Aliens" just because they're important in what passes for his mind. AC, try again, but in German. Then you can live out your sub-Aryan fantasy in full.
But surely you made a trade-off? Ie you weighed up the difficulty of understanding the accent vs the brilliance of what was being said? I mean, accent is important but it's hardly the be-all and end-all, is it?
RP is certainly not "the Queen's English". The Queen speaks with a distinct upper class accent, as satirised endlessly by Steve Bell et al.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cartoon/2010/nov/23/queen-prince-philip?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
Erm. RP is just as much of an accent as any other form of spoken English. There is no such thing as accent-free English or indeed accent-free spoken language! And RP has certainly not killed off southern English accents. Media and mobility have had an impact, but RP was only ever spoken by a small fraction of the population. And significant regional differences continue to exist: a West Country accent is still pretty easily distinguishable from a Londoner's accent. It's even possible to quite clearly distinguish between a NW London teenage girl's accent depending on ethnicity: Asian, Jewish or WASP. And none sounds exactly like their parents...
I agree with everything you say, with a single exception: buying index ETFs is *not* buying the index. It's buying a sophisticated financial instrument that sorta mimics the index. There are very significant risks for holding ETFs, especially synthetic ETFs. Tread carefully....
Here's a pdf of a BBC programme on the topic:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/fileon4_05_07_11_usual.pdf
TThe problem is that if they maintain their margins (as can be expected) in the face of competition which is of sufficiently high quality and sufficiently lower price, their volume will be reduced.
There's been no sign *at all* of a slowing of volume growth for iPhone. Because, the alternative to either accepting shrinking margins or shrinking volumes in the face of competition is, of course, to bring new products to market that consumers desire. Like, I dunno, the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2...and of course the iPhone 5 and the iPad 3.
No, the GP specifically excluded older cities, which grew organically and had more old-world influence.
As for San Diego...you'll lose your wager. Go to Google Maps and open a page looking at San Diego and another looking at London at a scale showing 2mi. You will see that
1) there is far more green on the London map
2) it is much more interdigitated -- you are always very close to green in London, which is decidedly *not* the case if you're in San Diego. The green spaces in San Diego are bigger, but there are far fewer of them.
3) London is much more compact -- at 2m scale, you can comfortably see the whole of London from Barnet in the north to Croydon in the south, from Hounslow in the west to Bexley in the east. Wiki says it has a density of nearly 13,000 inhabitants per square mile, cf San Diego at 3,500 per square mile, and the San Diego metropolitan area at 712 per square mile. Houston is even more sprawling than San Diego and has even less green space, of course. (And a significant part of the green space is not accessible to the public, being private golf courses and country clubs).
This is why the GP said what he said. I really think you should give up now!
You've argued about what is meaningful to you, but you fail to recognise that you are not representative of most people. For example: the App Store is not compelling to you, but it is very compelling to iPad users -- the integration is part of it, the wide range of apps is another part of it, and the trust is a third part of it ("Apple aren't going to let me download something that could break my iPad"). Android doesn't offer the same integration, doesn't offer the same range of apps (e.g., I don't think Epicurious offers an enhanced version of its app for Android tabs yet -- this is the kind of app that millions of consumers use day-to-day), and doesn't offer the same level of trust (with the App Store, I trust Apple; with Android, I have to trust Epicurious).
Re your last point on marketing and brand loyalty: any marketing 101 course begins by saying "brands need to be authentic to have lasting value". In other words, brands are built on something meaningful. In Apple's case, the brand's values are about "Apple 'gets' you as a consumer" "Apple products delight you" "Apple products don't break easily or often and are nicely built" "Apple products feel slick, look good, work well" "Apple products allow you to easily do things that are difficult with competitor products" etc. These are real values based on the real experiences of many tens of millions of people. They seep into the public consciousness by osmosis, as well as by marketing campaigns.
What the hell, let's do a line-by-line on just the first sentence for fun:
"They're using their flimsy patents"
- Flimsy isn't in the eye of the beholder, it's in the eyes of the courts. If their IP protection is flimsy, they'll lose.
- It's not just patents. It's also trade dress.
"to prevent anyone with a product that could damage their market penetration."
- The poor syntax and grammar makes this sentence ambiguous. Not clear if you mean "prevent anyone *from making* a product that could damage their market penetration" or "prevent anyone who has a product that could damage their market penetration from selling it". If the former, that's demonstrably not true: there are other tablets on the market. If the latter, you're simply defining "a product that could damage Apple's market penetration" using circular logic, ie as any product where Apple is involved in an IP stunt.
I could carry on but honestly, what would be the point? You've told yourself the story and got the righteous lather going, so go ahead and enjoy the bathing in your indignation.
Erm. The GP specifically excluded older cities like NYC from his general case. Compare Houston or San diego to London... And London has the royal parks, the Heath, clapham common, etc. It's got tons of green space considering 11m people live there. And the tube or a bike is far quicker for most journeys than a car.
You *really* think that the only "meaningful relationships with people outside of the family are market relationships"?
I know that lots of Slashdotters make jokes about being geeks with no friends, but this is a whole new level. I think you may be projecting onto the rest of the world....
It's a shame there's not a "Not half as bright as he thinks he is" moderation, because that's the one I'd choose for you, not troll.
Are you seriously claiming that Norway's rate of personal taxation is a significant cause of developing world starvation? And you were calling him a fool?
The chain of causation you describe is...erm...tenuous at best. Norway is not part of the EU. The propensity of 5m Norwegians to pay relatively high taxes has no significant impact at all on the price of crops in Nigeria. Things that do affect the price of crops in Nigeria include:
- price speculation by lightly regulated financial institutions
- political unrest and corruption in Cairo (yay! score one for the Arab spring)
- relatively scarce supply due to poor harvests
and in direct distinction to the point you make:
- growing demand -- not only are there lots of hungry mouths in Nigeria, but local farmers quite often sell food to agents for the developing world in preference to selling to local residents, in the hope of making more money that way (it doesn't work out well for them very often). A bit less overseas competition for scarce supplies of crops, land, energy and water would tend to be of net benefit, given the paltry foreign exchange receipts the trade earns (especially given how much middle-men take and how agricultural equipment and resources eg fertilisers cause net outflows of money from the developing world)
But people soured on Microsoft because they produced crappy products that folks had to use because of their effective monopoly position. Apple will need to produce devices that most consumers feel are crap *and* that most consumers feel they have to use due to no alternatives before they get a crappy reputation. That's conceivable, but a stretch...
Worth figuring in to your decision that an iPad has essentially no moving parts to break and is made of a hefty chunk of metal+glass. It's perfectly possible to break it, of course, but it's a damned sight more robust than that POS laptop you described. Incidentally, a MacBook Pro is also much better engineered than your cheap laptop, as you'd expect from a much more expensive product.
That is absolutely spot on. And I'm glad your grandfather enjoyed the photos! (It works at the other end of the spectrum, too: my daughter has been able to use the iPad from the day she first saw it -- she's two)
Wow, the stuff about handling different size screens *really* misses the point about tablets. Why waste all that screen real-estate by not providing additional functionality in your tablet app cf your phone app. That's why the photo, mail, epicurious and a gazillion and one other iPad apps are quite different (and better) than their iPhone counterparts. By providing smooth scaling, Android removes a significant pressure for developers to rework phone apps to take advantage of the tablet screen size.
How about following a recipe from something that's at eyeline height, being able to click videos to see how a particular step is done? Possible with an iPad, not so much with a phone or laptop. That's only one use-case, of course, there will be tons more.
Hum.
1. Murder is indeed only one form of violence. Feel free to quote others that disprove what I was saying. Otherwise you can take your assertion that homicide statistics are "not an accurate measure of violence" and non-violently insert them where the sun don't shine. I mean, wtf?! Murder rates are not indicative of levels of violence in a country??
2. That's because the definition of Europe used included Eastern Europe and the OP talked about "any other western country".
3. I'd say a five-fold difference between the US and individual EU5 countries was substantial.
4. Unless you want to stretch language all out of shape, Mexico and Brazil would not be included as a "western country" for this definition. The OP was clearly, if sloppily, talking about developed nations aka the First World. Countries like Finland, Sweden, the EU5, Luxembourg, Australia, Canada, etc. Not ex-Soviet bloc nations, not the BRIC countries, not the Asian tigers.
This Jew certainly does!
Tanakh on Slashdot! Who'd've thunk it?
I think this is spot on, and every one but the black hats would agree with you.
Oh, where to start.
I picked up but chose not to comment on the pretty tasteless "joke" comparison of Ashkenazi Jews with Nazis. Instead, I was commenting on "they dare to talk about "terrorist" in front of them..." which is an excitingly, erm, different form of English. I have no problems with people not writing perfectly, not by a long shot. But it does need to be sufficiently clear to be comprehensible.
It's ironic that you (implicitly) chastise me for picking up on his English and then go on to describe how word choice matters when describing the change in use of the term "anti-semitism". By the way, my view on moans about the use of "anti-semitism" differing now from its original meaning reminds me of a chemistry prof at university who railed in a lecture about "organic food" being a misnomer. As though chemists had ownership of the word and could keep it immutable. Same with thin-lipped blue-rinsed ladies who read the Mail and mutter darkly about "gay" being a "perfectly decent" word until "they stole it from us". I think you were being descriptive rather than normative, though.
Worth noting, however, that these moans also happen to be wrong. Antisemitism as a term was first used only in the late C19 in Germany, and from the outset was used mainly to describe anti-Jewish sentiment more frequently than it was used to describe prejudice against all Semites (and in fact, a German journalist founded a "League of Anti-semites" that was targeted at Jews, not Semites more widely, in 1880. Wikipedia has an article about it that's quite good. Frankly, I've seen quite a few complaints about this supposed semantic shift that imply that it's yet another thing "the Jews" have stolen from Arabs, which always makes me think of Robert Heinlein's remark that "man is a rationalising animal, not a rational animal".
You might think that from the summary. *I* read the summary as a perfectly accurate reflection of the thrust of the article -- that a lot of tickets were being written, and that lots of them were for behaviour that doesn't seem to warrant school discipline, never mind police intervention. I assume your SWAT reference was not in relation to the OP's comment about "Alamo Heights Special Airborne Brigade and SEAL TEAM CROCKETT". You'd have to be unbelievably dim not to spot that this was a humorous reductio ad absurdum. But having said that, it makes me wonder what specifically in the summary you thought misrepresented the article. The fact that lots of people are concerned about this, doesn't mean that it isn't as bad as the summary suggests: the fact remains that lots of kids are being ticketed, some of them are extremely young, and some of the behaviours clearly do not warrant the punishments being meted out.
Erm. The OP didn't claim that other countries had no violence, he claimed that the USA has a "culture that's so much more violent than any other western country I know". Riots in England, France and Greece do not disprove that.
Here is an example of what he was talking about: look at the 2000s table for murder rates by country and you will see the US rate being substantially higher than the rates for any of the EU big 5.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
The spirit is willing but by God the English was weak. Try again but use simpler words. It looks like English isn't your first language, so keep your sentences short and simple and we might be able to understand you properly.