If they're under administration (voluntary or not) then no, all you can do is add your name to the list of creditors. Although, you're free to sue them, but then they only need declare bankruptcy (if they haven't already) and again, you're talking to administrators. Neither will get you anywhere, as even if you succesfully registered as a creditor, your proportion of the liquidation would only be a few cents, if anything. It would like cost more to apply than you'd receive.
I applaud them for actually announcing this ahead of time, knowing they'll cop a few weeks of hatemail and angry phone calls, rather than doing what most companies do - which is pretend everything's fine, and simply put off RMAs, until the day they close up shop. Hell, they're even mailing the cards/PSUs back. While it's nothing more than a gesture (its fairly difficut to manually repair a power supply safely, and virtually impossible to repair a physically defective video card), its a nice gesture which companies who care less about their customers simply wouldn't do.
Independent of the original intention, most "lifetime warranties" are somewhat shortened by the company no longer existing, the receipt no longer existing, or the user (and in most cases, the only person who cared about the warranty) dying.
This is the only correct post so far. The only thing handled by the client is movement, and some mob positioning estimation (ie, if the last thing another player was doing was walking forward, your client continues walking them forward until it receives different information - yay for teleporting). Absolutely everything else is server-side. For so many people discussing this topic, it's amazing how many have no clue what they're talking about at all.
Also, while "monster stats" are not copyrightable on their own, taking a dump of the entire database of "monster stats" and copying them IS a copyright breach. Maintaining a website showing stat information (eg, WoWhead) is fair use. Using that information to duplicate server function is a breach. Folks need to stop interpreting the law as "how I see it.." and start thinking about how courts see it.
Hey troll, why ignore the fact that autostereoscopy doesn't work in a cinema? In fact, it doesn't work past more than a few inches from the screen. Those systems which do work more than a few inches away ustilise eye-tracking to always point the image at the user (which, with less than 15 degrees to work with) then fails with more than 1 person watching) - and even so works only to a few feet away. Even the WOWvx system can only be used up to a few feet away due to needing to be close enough to actually register the independent depthmap colors in order to see the "effect".
Short of holography (or any other projection actually occupying three dimensions in real space), autostereoscopy will never, EVER, work in a cinema. You will always need glasses. You're trolling for the sake of trolling. It's quite unpleasant, and you don't come across as nearly as clever as you think you do. In fact, you prove you actually know less about the topic that those replying.
As cinematic 3D projection will always require viewing glasses, I will never support any movie which forces its viewers to take this route.
No, they don't violate any license terms by disabling a warning in the GSM spec. No, they could not be succesfully sued for it. The GSM spec is not even a license, it's a set of guidelines for what a phone must be capable of to meet GSM standards. To meet this specification, the phone has to be able to detect it's connected to a tower without an encryption channel, and to display a warning to that effect. All that matters is that the phone is physically able to do this. The standards authority doesn't require it to be enabled, just able to perform the function. For law enforcement purposes, both the authority and the manufacturers understand it's better to have the functionality disabled.
Sad that folks are always looking for someone to sue.
How exactly does someone "prove" to you who actually programmed their software? That's a fairly stupid question AC. Code comments doesn't prove anything. Pay slips doesn't prove anything. You'd actually need a high-def camera looking over their shoulder while they developed it, for the entire development time, and expect them to provide you with all that footage.
Angry and irrational. You should be a wiki editor!
Not as far as you think. I live in Sydney, Australia. The sun is always North. It moves from North East in the morning, to North West at sunset. For a couple of hours around midday, the sun is almost directly above, but if you're in a North facing office, the sunlight is still hitting the windows and still creating bright reflections on computer screens if you happen to have your back to the windows, as OP was mentioning.
Being wrong.;) As they discovered more, their estimates went up, and up, and up. The information has always come from them - there were no investigative reporter's in SCUBA gear taking their own flow readings. As the realisation of the issue scope increased, so did the announcements in the volume of the leaks.
Your problem is the media - if initially BP say that they estimate 5,000 barrels are leaking, then that gets played for 24 hours. Then, 2 days later, when BP increase that estimate to 10,000, the media starts replaying the quote about 5,000 and starts complaining about how incompetent "British Petroleum" is. Then, a week later, when they get cameras down there and BP increases their estimate to 30,000 barrels, the original estimate of 5,000 barrels is still being played, and BP now being labelled "liars", who have been "intentionally misleading the public and the government all along".
Whether it's 5,000 barrels or 15,000 barrels, lying about it wouldn't reduce BP's cleanup costs. Being wrong doesn't make someone intentionally malicious. Either way, they still have to stop it and pay for it. All the media is tricking you into doing is demonising an enemy because there always has to be a "bad guy" or else how will those same media corporations ever make a movie about it?;)
For Slashdot, its surprising how many people side with the media on this one, simply because being able to label it with a decades-old British name makes hating it a Patriotic issue..
He simply dislikes Lady Gaga and doesn't actually know anything about her DJing or writing past. She's one of the very few "pop" artists who ISN'T fabricated. A bad example for sure.
It can be difficult to initially associate your credit card with your account if they're in different names (have copped this when I was setting up fake accounts in the past). There are though, other payment options, and if you buy the game in a box instead of online, they'll usually let you pay your subscription fee with whomever's credit card you wish to.
So no, you're not "forced" to give your real name. What about the 11 million players who already have accounts that they can't change the name on? Initially, the accounts were an individual WoW thing. Then, they forced you to tie them to a Battle.net account with your "real name", making you unable to transfer the characters off that Battle.net account. Of course, you could have picked a fake one at that stage, but why would you plan to in advance, not knowing this was coming? And finally, they then make all forum posting use your real name? At this stage, there's no way out.
You can't "unassociate" your WoW account from your Battle.net account, so you can't transfer your characters off your account (as you can't transfer them to an account under another name). So, if you want to keep playing the characters you've had for years (ie, keep all your achievements, your pets, the unique world-event items etc - I played WoW for a while, and I'm a hoarder, so I understand the mentality and not wanting to lose all the work you put in), then you're now in a position of either never being able to post to the forums again, or doing so with your real name.
I like the reasoning behind it. It will shut up a huge number of people. Including myself - I'll never post to their forums again (purely for security reasons, I'm not a troll), although I cancelled my account 6 months ago so wouldn't really have any reason to.:)
I have a unique name.:( Every exact google search returns something about myself, wether it be where I work, old pages from school websites, etc. And it's not even an odd-spelling of a name, just an odd arrangement (I have a surname for a first name.. And a surname for a surname.)
However in most cases, no - Real names are by no means unique identifiers.
I undestand perfectly. If you'd actually read the post instead of going on a superiority crusade, you would have read that I was expressly making the point that a download does not equal a purchase, and that the article authors weren't making that point either. The ORIGINAL ARTICLE, not "Gamasutra's opinion on the original article", is about the retail value of pirated copies. Ie, if you make an illegal copy of a $100 game, if that game was a legal copy, would be worth $100 to the copyright holder. The article doesn't even try to make the claim that downloaders would ever purchase the game, that's purely a spin that the western gaming sites reviewing the article have tried to put on it in order to discredit it. It's using values as a measure of scale of piracy, because telling people "800,000,000 copies" means absolutely nothing. It's about the scale of the piracy, not it's value.
As for 390:1 downloads:purchases, the point isn't that 390 people would have purchased it, at all. Again, reading isn't your forte. The remark was on the scale of piracy. MW2 was the best-sold game in Aus this year. And there were almost 400 copies of it downloaded for every copy sold. SCALE. OF. PIRACY.
Don't worry - you're not alone. Nearly every idiot on this thread has been making arguments against statements that the original article never said. Instead, debating against comments made by commentators who never knew what they were talking about in the first place.
And you folks have adequately proved my point. I say "All the people I know pirate", and even explain the basis of that, and nothing. Servi merely says "Well, the people I know don't", and he's marked +3 insightful. Now, I'm not complaining about the moderation system at all - I've had my share of + and - mods, but you can't deny that there's the general mood of the replies to this article are completely biased.
Nobody's even read the article. They've read a biased summary, taken from another gaming site, borrowed from a third gaming site, which links to the article without translation and says "This is what we think it means". And by the time it hits Slashdotters, you're all foaming at the mouth to disagree with anything anyone suggests that "Hey, you know, you downloaders are actually doing something wrong y'know..".
I don't have to tell you how many times I see folks around here pull out the "It's not physical so it's not stealing" english-semantics argument as if it makes any difference.:p
Addendum: That figure is based on PBay trackers alone. It could be higher with other trackers, but also could be lower considering some ADSL users here don't use static IPs and switch around, but meh. It's just illustrative purposes only and to be taken with a spoonful of salt.
It's actually on the low side. From reading the article, I don't think they're even claiming that if there had been 0 downloads, then they'd have an extra $45 billion. Rather, they're looking at the retail value of those downloads when compared to a sale. And based on their methodology, this figure is about three times lower than it should be, as it's pretty much just looking at torrents. Emule, rapidshare (and other sharing sites), FTPs in eastern countries, bulletin board distribution, and wholesale mass-produced sanctioned piracy in many ex-soviet and asian countries, are all going very strong. In the scope of the study, the figure's low. Winny - the most popular file sharing program in Japan, even more popular than torrents there, is not included. It was actually a study into the value of pirated software. The biased game sites referring the article are the ones who've spun it into "CESA believes downloaders COST game companies this much..". Slashdot doesn't help.
Maybe some people are in denial about how rampant piracy is. Of my 10 or so close geek friends who I've grown up with (I'm now 28), I'm the only one who no longer pirates anything - cashflow helps that. One other pirates games which are "too expensive". The other 8 approx pirate everything. OS, games, apps, everything they run except.. of course, World of Warcraft.:P I think most slashdotters are in complete denial about how massive it is. For every cash register sale EB Games in Australia made of Call of Duty MW2, 390 downloads were picked up reaching Australian IP addresses.
Over the past two decades, on my home PC I've used Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 - and I've never had any malware at all.
Marketshare is all that keeps malware writers targetting Windows, not any perceived difference in the ability to write trojans for either system. It's just as easy to write a trojan in an installer on Mac as on PC, which at that time has system level priveleges. The fact of the matter is - why bother?
You can't make assumptions about iPad based on previous tablets. The reason iPad has already outsold all previous tablets put together is iPad is different from them in every way.
Thats a rather big presumption there, that the only reason we notice functionality missing in an iPad is because previous tablets were also missing that functionality? Wait what?
Quite the opposite in fact. We notice missing functionality because other tablets DO have it, and the iPad doesn't. Now, I realise that as an iPad user, you'll happily ignore any function that the iPad can't perform as "unnecessary", but then that just means unnecessary to you. Perhaps you don't know what to do with a PC, and just play around in Wordpad and Solitaire, but some of us actually use PCs for actual work, and the idea that the iPad is a "self-contaned total PC replacement" (your words) is a complete joke.
Starting at the very top of the list of major show-stopping issues with the iPad: 1. I can't install the software I need to do my job.
And I'll stop there, because that already makes it completely useless to me. Your entire post is trollbait. You simply make up statements as if they're fact, and make up positions as if they apply to everyone.
You add an accessory Bluetooth keyboard and it turns into a PC replacement that easily replaces XP for most users.
How many is most? Is it a percentage over 50? Most home-users play games which won't work on the iPad. Most business users are running applications which don't run on the iPad. There certainly is a percentage, but "most" is a fairly extreme statement not based anywhere within the world of fact.
These users can easily switch from a 10 year old XP that they still haven't mastered to a new iPad they can easily become expert in without training.
Comparing a simple one-click user interface with limited accessibility to an entire operating system is a joke, right? I can write a simple GUI which a 5-year old can use, which lets them move blocks around on screen. Does that mean its a superior system to Microsoft Windows? What exactly are you trying to say here? The person who becomes an "expert" in flipping tabs on their iPad still doesn't have a clue how the OS works. And that's what you're comparing - the entire Windows OS and all aspects, to the UI of an iPad..
For many of them, half their computer use is email and Outlook is a FUCKING JOKE.
Outlook is fine. If you want a joke, try Lotus Notes.
The mobility is also very liberating, because they go to a lot of meetings and they can take iPad and show a presentation to a group very easily, or refer to email while they meet without the barrier of a notebook.
What barrier of a notebook? You can do exactly the same thing with a notebook. Oh, the folding screen is the barrier? You can do exactly the same thing with a tablet PC. What additional mobility do you have?
Even for creative workers, iPad has sketching-level tools where you can start art or music or photography projects that you later take to a Mac.
And a Tablet PC can run the industry standard illustration software... that you later take to a.. PC?
I have to stop.. your post is insanely biased. You simply presume that all options offered by the iPad doesn't exist on tablet PCs, and that all additional functionality offered by tablet PCs simply isn't needed. Enjoy your Applie pie.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're under administration (voluntary or not) then no, all you can do is add your name to the list of creditors. Although, you're free to sue them, but then they only need declare bankruptcy (if they haven't already) and again, you're talking to administrators. Neither will get you anywhere, as even if you succesfully registered as a creditor, your proportion of the liquidation would only be a few cents, if anything. It would like cost more to apply than you'd receive.
I applaud them for actually announcing this ahead of time, knowing they'll cop a few weeks of hatemail and angry phone calls, rather than doing what most companies do - which is pretend everything's fine, and simply put off RMAs, until the day they close up shop. Hell, they're even mailing the cards/PSUs back. While it's nothing more than a gesture (its fairly difficut to manually repair a power supply safely, and virtually impossible to repair a physically defective video card), its a nice gesture which companies who care less about their customers simply wouldn't do.
Independent of the original intention, most "lifetime warranties" are somewhat shortened by the company no longer existing, the receipt no longer existing, or the user (and in most cases, the only person who cared about the warranty) dying.
Sad to see, but it happens. Had the same deal with a motherboard once. Couldn't get upset about it.
This is the only correct post so far. The only thing handled by the client is movement, and some mob positioning estimation (ie, if the last thing another player was doing was walking forward, your client continues walking them forward until it receives different information - yay for teleporting). Absolutely everything else is server-side. For so many people discussing this topic, it's amazing how many have no clue what they're talking about at all.
Also, while "monster stats" are not copyrightable on their own, taking a dump of the entire database of "monster stats" and copying them IS a copyright breach. Maintaining a website showing stat information (eg, WoWhead) is fair use. Using that information to duplicate server function is a breach. Folks need to stop interpreting the law as "how I see it.." and start thinking about how courts see it.
Almost every top level post reply to this topic deserves a "Wooosh". Does nobody get thats obviously what the submitter was getting at? :\
Precisely. Missing people don't pay their bills.
Actually, it appears he doesn't. ;)
Err.. I own the full IP for every piece of software I've ever written. What exactly do you think IP is?
Hey troll, why ignore the fact that autostereoscopy doesn't work in a cinema? In fact, it doesn't work past more than a few inches from the screen. Those systems which do work more than a few inches away ustilise eye-tracking to always point the image at the user (which, with less than 15 degrees to work with) then fails with more than 1 person watching) - and even so works only to a few feet away. Even the WOWvx system can only be used up to a few feet away due to needing to be close enough to actually register the independent depthmap colors in order to see the "effect".
Short of holography (or any other projection actually occupying three dimensions in real space), autostereoscopy will never, EVER, work in a cinema. You will always need glasses. You're trolling for the sake of trolling. It's quite unpleasant, and you don't come across as nearly as clever as you think you do. In fact, you prove you actually know less about the topic that those replying.
As cinematic 3D projection will always require viewing glasses, I will never support any movie which forces its viewers to take this route.
No, they don't violate any license terms by disabling a warning in the GSM spec. No, they could not be succesfully sued for it. The GSM spec is not even a license, it's a set of guidelines for what a phone must be capable of to meet GSM standards. To meet this specification, the phone has to be able to detect it's connected to a tower without an encryption channel, and to display a warning to that effect. All that matters is that the phone is physically able to do this. The standards authority doesn't require it to be enabled, just able to perform the function. For law enforcement purposes, both the authority and the manufacturers understand it's better to have the functionality disabled.
Sad that folks are always looking for someone to sue.
How exactly does someone "prove" to you who actually programmed their software? That's a fairly stupid question AC. Code comments doesn't prove anything. Pay slips doesn't prove anything. You'd actually need a high-def camera looking over their shoulder while they developed it, for the entire development time, and expect them to provide you with all that footage.
Angry and irrational. You should be a wiki editor!
Not as far as you think. I live in Sydney, Australia. The sun is always North. It moves from North East in the morning, to North West at sunset. For a couple of hours around midday, the sun is almost directly above, but if you're in a North facing office, the sunlight is still hitting the windows and still creating bright reflections on computer screens if you happen to have your back to the windows, as OP was mentioning.
Being wrong. ;) As they discovered more, their estimates went up, and up, and up. The information has always come from them - there were no investigative reporter's in SCUBA gear taking their own flow readings. As the realisation of the issue scope increased, so did the announcements in the volume of the leaks.
Your problem is the media - if initially BP say that they estimate 5,000 barrels are leaking, then that gets played for 24 hours. Then, 2 days later, when BP increase that estimate to 10,000, the media starts replaying the quote about 5,000 and starts complaining about how incompetent "British Petroleum" is. Then, a week later, when they get cameras down there and BP increases their estimate to 30,000 barrels, the original estimate of 5,000 barrels is still being played, and BP now being labelled "liars", who have been "intentionally misleading the public and the government all along".
Whether it's 5,000 barrels or 15,000 barrels, lying about it wouldn't reduce BP's cleanup costs. Being wrong doesn't make someone intentionally malicious. Either way, they still have to stop it and pay for it. All the media is tricking you into doing is demonising an enemy because there always has to be a "bad guy" or else how will those same media corporations ever make a movie about it? ;)
For Slashdot, its surprising how many people side with the media on this one, simply because being able to label it with a decades-old British name makes hating it a Patriotic issue..
Dissing a company which doesn't exist? Clever. The majority US-owned company hasn't been "British Petroleum" for several decades now.
You say that with sarcasm, but I don't remember them lying at all.
He simply dislikes Lady Gaga and doesn't actually know anything about her DJing or writing past. She's one of the very few "pop" artists who ISN'T fabricated. A bad example for sure.
Alas, of the 83 games I own on Steam, only 5 run on Mac. I dont' think I'll be switching any time soon.
It can be difficult to initially associate your credit card with your account if they're in different names (have copped this when I was setting up fake accounts in the past). There are though, other payment options, and if you buy the game in a box instead of online, they'll usually let you pay your subscription fee with whomever's credit card you wish to.
So no, you're not "forced" to give your real name. What about the 11 million players who already have accounts that they can't change the name on? Initially, the accounts were an individual WoW thing. Then, they forced you to tie them to a Battle.net account with your "real name", making you unable to transfer the characters off that Battle.net account. Of course, you could have picked a fake one at that stage, but why would you plan to in advance, not knowing this was coming? And finally, they then make all forum posting use your real name? At this stage, there's no way out.
You can't "unassociate" your WoW account from your Battle.net account, so you can't transfer your characters off your account (as you can't transfer them to an account under another name). So, if you want to keep playing the characters you've had for years (ie, keep all your achievements, your pets, the unique world-event items etc - I played WoW for a while, and I'm a hoarder, so I understand the mentality and not wanting to lose all the work you put in), then you're now in a position of either never being able to post to the forums again, or doing so with your real name.
I like the reasoning behind it. It will shut up a huge number of people. Including myself - I'll never post to their forums again (purely for security reasons, I'm not a troll), although I cancelled my account 6 months ago so wouldn't really have any reason to. :)
I have a unique name. :( Every exact google search returns something about myself, wether it be where I work, old pages from school websites, etc. And it's not even an odd-spelling of a name, just an odd arrangement (I have a surname for a first name.. And a surname for a surname.)
However in most cases, no - Real names are by no means unique identifiers.
I undestand perfectly. If you'd actually read the post instead of going on a superiority crusade, you would have read that I was expressly making the point that a download does not equal a purchase, and that the article authors weren't making that point either. The ORIGINAL ARTICLE, not "Gamasutra's opinion on the original article", is about the retail value of pirated copies. Ie, if you make an illegal copy of a $100 game, if that game was a legal copy, would be worth $100 to the copyright holder. The article doesn't even try to make the claim that downloaders would ever purchase the game, that's purely a spin that the western gaming sites reviewing the article have tried to put on it in order to discredit it. It's using values as a measure of scale of piracy, because telling people "800,000,000 copies" means absolutely nothing. It's about the scale of the piracy, not it's value.
As for 390:1 downloads:purchases, the point isn't that 390 people would have purchased it, at all. Again, reading isn't your forte. The remark was on the scale of piracy. MW2 was the best-sold game in Aus this year. And there were almost 400 copies of it downloaded for every copy sold. SCALE. OF. PIRACY.
Don't worry - you're not alone. Nearly every idiot on this thread has been making arguments against statements that the original article never said. Instead, debating against comments made by commentators who never knew what they were talking about in the first place.
And you folks have adequately proved my point. I say "All the people I know pirate", and even explain the basis of that, and nothing. Servi merely says "Well, the people I know don't", and he's marked +3 insightful. Now, I'm not complaining about the moderation system at all - I've had my share of + and - mods, but you can't deny that there's the general mood of the replies to this article are completely biased.
Nobody's even read the article. They've read a biased summary, taken from another gaming site, borrowed from a third gaming site, which links to the article without translation and says "This is what we think it means". And by the time it hits Slashdotters, you're all foaming at the mouth to disagree with anything anyone suggests that "Hey, you know, you downloaders are actually doing something wrong y'know..".
I don't have to tell you how many times I see folks around here pull out the "It's not physical so it's not stealing" english-semantics argument as if it makes any difference. :p
Addendum: That figure is based on PBay trackers alone. It could be higher with other trackers, but also could be lower considering some ADSL users here don't use static IPs and switch around, but meh. It's just illustrative purposes only and to be taken with a spoonful of salt.
It's actually on the low side. From reading the article, I don't think they're even claiming that if there had been 0 downloads, then they'd have an extra $45 billion. Rather, they're looking at the retail value of those downloads when compared to a sale. And based on their methodology, this figure is about three times lower than it should be, as it's pretty much just looking at torrents. Emule, rapidshare (and other sharing sites), FTPs in eastern countries, bulletin board distribution, and wholesale mass-produced sanctioned piracy in many ex-soviet and asian countries, are all going very strong. In the scope of the study, the figure's low. Winny - the most popular file sharing program in Japan, even more popular than torrents there, is not included. It was actually a study into the value of pirated software. The biased game sites referring the article are the ones who've spun it into "CESA believes downloaders COST game companies this much..". Slashdot doesn't help.
Maybe some people are in denial about how rampant piracy is. Of my 10 or so close geek friends who I've grown up with (I'm now 28), I'm the only one who no longer pirates anything - cashflow helps that. One other pirates games which are "too expensive". The other 8 approx pirate everything. OS, games, apps, everything they run except.. of course, World of Warcraft. :P I think most slashdotters are in complete denial about how massive it is. For every cash register sale EB Games in Australia made of Call of Duty MW2, 390 downloads were picked up reaching Australian IP addresses.
Over the past two decades, on my home PC I've used Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 - and I've never had any malware at all.
Marketshare is all that keeps malware writers targetting Windows, not any perceived difference in the ability to write trojans for either system. It's just as easy to write a trojan in an installer on Mac as on PC, which at that time has system level priveleges. The fact of the matter is - why bother?
You can't make assumptions about iPad based on previous tablets. The reason iPad has already outsold all previous tablets put together is iPad is different from them in every way.
Thats a rather big presumption there, that the only reason we notice functionality missing in an iPad is because previous tablets were also missing that functionality? Wait what?
Quite the opposite in fact. We notice missing functionality because other tablets DO have it, and the iPad doesn't. Now, I realise that as an iPad user, you'll happily ignore any function that the iPad can't perform as "unnecessary", but then that just means unnecessary to you. Perhaps you don't know what to do with a PC, and just play around in Wordpad and Solitaire, but some of us actually use PCs for actual work, and the idea that the iPad is a "self-contaned total PC replacement" (your words) is a complete joke.
Starting at the very top of the list of major show-stopping issues with the iPad:
1. I can't install the software I need to do my job.
And I'll stop there, because that already makes it completely useless to me. Your entire post is trollbait. You simply make up statements as if they're fact, and make up positions as if they apply to everyone.
You add an accessory Bluetooth keyboard and it turns into a PC replacement that easily replaces XP for most users.
How many is most? Is it a percentage over 50? Most home-users play games which won't work on the iPad. Most business users are running applications which don't run on the iPad. There certainly is a percentage, but "most" is a fairly extreme statement not based anywhere within the world of fact.
These users can easily switch from a 10 year old XP that they still haven't mastered to a new iPad they can easily become expert in without training.
Comparing a simple one-click user interface with limited accessibility to an entire operating system is a joke, right? I can write a simple GUI which a 5-year old can use, which lets them move blocks around on screen. Does that mean its a superior system to Microsoft Windows? What exactly are you trying to say here? The person who becomes an "expert" in flipping tabs on their iPad still doesn't have a clue how the OS works. And that's what you're comparing - the entire Windows OS and all aspects, to the UI of an iPad..
For many of them, half their computer use is email and Outlook is a FUCKING JOKE.
Outlook is fine. If you want a joke, try Lotus Notes.
The mobility is also very liberating, because they go to a lot of meetings and they can take iPad and show a presentation to a group very easily, or refer to email while they meet without the barrier of a notebook.
What barrier of a notebook? You can do exactly the same thing with a notebook. Oh, the folding screen is the barrier? You can do exactly the same thing with a tablet PC. What additional mobility do you have?
Even for creative workers, iPad has sketching-level tools where you can start art or music or photography projects that you later take to a Mac.
And a Tablet PC can run the industry standard illustration software... that you later take to a .. PC?
I have to stop.. your post is insanely biased. You simply presume that all options offered by the iPad doesn't exist on tablet PCs, and that all additional functionality offered by tablet PCs simply isn't needed. Enjoy your Applie pie.