The study itself doesn't upset me one bit. Random unsupported conclusions injected into the science, ostensibly by the journalists (but I haven't checked), should upset anyone who is concerned about the direction the country has been headed in post-Trump and post-BLM.
'In other news', my smugly psychoanalytical AC stalker is still at it. Why don't you show yourself? What is your game here? Did you follow me here from another forum, perchance?
I do this to sharpen the mind and also sometimes to prototype stuff. Slashdot keeps comments forever and has no censorship to speak of, and I've already made use of my prior lengthy comments as quick cliff notes in discussions I've had elsewhere. Some of these posts will eventually turn into Youtube videos, so if you *really* want to stalking me, be sure to have a box of kleenex at the ready. I've had numerous delays but I think it's going to happen soonish. Just know that you're going to have to do a lot better than a Youtube comment if you expect me to take the time to destroy you in A/V format.
By the way, this was apparently a quote from the USA Today, not some random blogger. I'm talking specifically about the mainstream media doing its best to confirm the accusations being leveled against it.
I'm far, far from being a kneejerk anti-SJW ranter, but I've been noticing this sort of thing a *lot* more over the past six months:
Whites still earn dramatically more than Blacks and Latinos, reflecting the legacy of discrimination for jobs, education and housing.
Random reminders of racism, often of dubious intellectual merit, randomly injected into articles not about racism. I don't think it's an evil tinfoil hat conspiracy so much as lefties overcompensating in their horror of the Trump phenomenon and thinking that the proper solution is to start subtly injecting their opinions everywhere, but it's starting to rub me the wrong way. And I'm afraid it'll backfire again, and once again wind up operating in exactly the opposite direction as intended (making racism more acceptable.) So, let's not let this shit slide any more:
1. The discrimination against Blacks did obviously have and still has a profound effect on their socioeconomic status, although it is ostrichlike head in the sand behavior to casually imply that other factors do not exist. In particular, I suspect that many black subcultures, which were indeed originally formed as a direct result of racism, nonetheless will not be found to promote such as academic achievement to the same extent as their white counterparts. This should not be any more controversial to suggest than it is to suggest that Han Chinese, Japanese, and Ashkenazi Jewish subcultures probably tend to promote academic achievement to a greater extent than most white subcultures. This has nothing to do with genetics.
2. The casual accusation that discrimination against Latinos is entirely or primarily responsible for their lower average socioeconomic status is far more contentious. First off, all of the objections from #1 apply here. Additionally, unlike black people, tens of millions of them have only been here for a generation or two, and those ancestors did not arrive on slave ships. Their socioeconomic status is thus quite heavily influenced by how poor they were when they (or their parents, or grandparents) arrived from Latin America, and it is additionally negatively affected by the fact that 11 million of them arrived here illegally, meaning that they face significant employment barriers that are not the result of discrimination, but rather are a result of their conscious decision to break the law[1]. The number of people who do not yet speak English fluently (a minority, to be fair) is also very relevant to the average socioeconomic outcome and the deleterious effects this has on job-hunting is not primarily a result of racism.
There are, of course, some far-left people who will deny both of these latter points and insist any limits or barriers to immigration is inherently racist and so is any insistence on a shared common language as a prerequisite for citizenship (without which the melting pot cannot function and over time the society and nation will inevitably fracture along ethnic lines, as history has repeatedly showed.) If you want to have that debate, sure, let's have that discussion some time. I'm actually for increased legal immigration overall, with a few caveats about things that need to be fixed first.
But cut it out with the snarky attempts at cultural mind control with these one-line assertions. You're not helping. You're simply feeding the right and alt-right narratives of the biased and lying mainstream media and mainstream academia. It's really, really hard to continue pushing back against the alt-right when you keep ensuring that ~30% of what they say is more or less correct.
1. I don't say they're evil people for doing so, just that it's not some kind of big secret that it's going to be harder getting a job if you're not here legally, and the primary responsibility for that outcome must therefore fall on their shoulders.
Why can't you admit you were wrong? Do you have some kind of complex with being wrong??
It's a very human thing to be wrong... Come down to our level and let's talk.
This is white noise. Come at me with a real argument. I'm a +5. I say this not to brag, but to point out it is largely agreed that I was not, in fact, proven wrong about anything. The onus is on you to say something intelligent instead of these puerile games.
It was irrelevant for those users but it is still an Apple-created problem, not a problem with CR's methodology. And given MBP's market penetration, at least some users would have been affected by the bug.
People who are testing laptop performance should be able to use any and all existing functionality of the product without random stuff breaking. I gave a car analogy in my other reply.
Methodologies should assume that features do what they say they do and nothing more. If I press the hazard lights on my car and (somehow) the muffler falls off and I report that the muffler fell off while I was driving (not realizing that pressing the hazard lights was what triggered it), my methodology isn't flawed. Clearly, the car company is at fault for creating a flawed product. "But most people never even use the hazard lights! You should have tested it without touching the hazard light button!" is not a reasonable response. This entire tone and focus is steeped in the rankest of apologia via bass-ackwards thinking.
On another note: And it's entirely conceivable and reasonable that they would be using debug mode to either examine more closely how it's performing or to configure it to more closely match their other tested notebooks (perhaps they disable caching in all browsers, for instance.)
It was a metaphor/comparison. You were talking about "in the way a regular user would experience" and insisting that CR tested it incorrectly. The parallels are clear, and I didn't put that bit in quote tags for a reason. That phrase is a meme now, in case you aren't aware. I was mocking you.
For the 3rd time the bug in the developer tools is the cause of Consumer Reports problems up but has no bearing on Apples battery estimates which are based on a system with "all settings left at default
A complete irrelevancy. I never said anything about Apple's estimates. The issue was about the cause of CR's findings. CR does not claim to test the computer in exactly the same way Apple does, nor should they.
? It has unequivocally nothing to with the variability in the CR tests
I never said it did. It was entirely pertinent to the real-world practical drawbacks of having a battery life that low.
Were Apples battery life estimates wrong? No.
Which I never referred to.
Was Consumer Reports correct with their estimates? No.
Entirely correct for pro users, nor did they have any reason to suspect that turning that on would have such an effect. Because the effect was driven by a bug. That Apple created. And has now fixed, now that CR has drawn it to their attention.
How people like you can spin all of that as "CR uses flawed methodologies and gives unfair rating to Apple!" is utterly beyond me. (Cliff notes: No, that usage of quotes isn't meant to be something that you have literally typed.)
Methodologies should assume that features do what they say they do and nothing more. If I press the hazard lights on my car and (somehow) the muffler falls off and I report that the muffler fell off while I was driving (not realizing that pressing the hazard lights was what triggered it), my methodology isn't flawed. Clearly, the car company is at fault for creating a flawed product. "But most people never even use the hazard lights! You should have tested it without touching the hazard light button!" is not a reasonable response. Your entire tone and focus is steeped in the rankest of apologia via bass-ackwards thinking.
It has nothing to do with what we were discussing (how wrong you were to blame apple for the inconsistent battery life) and it doesn't take a debate genius to see this.
That's some industrial-grade solipsism you've got going on over there. I wasn't talking to you in that first post, nor was I confined to a single super-narrow topic. I was referring to the potential practical effects of an unresolved bug (the proposed *hypothetical* one, which was quite different from the real one).
I can do that. There are no rules here. I could even start lecturing you about sixteenth century Dutch art and that wouldn't mean I've committed a fallacy, just that I'm being insane or a douche. The practical synergistic effects of having a non-removable battery AND a shortened battery life seemed, in comparison, a rather tame and obvious and short tangent to traverse.
added a whole lot more logical fallacies
Please, give me the list. I'm quite curious given your highly mysterious interpretation of strawman.
And just to quickly get this out there, in the name of everything that's holy of course I'm not saying that all Apple users everywhere do this, or that they're in any way bad or stupid for using Apple products. If anything they make suits your requirements perfectly in features and performance and price, great. If you want to mention their advantages in a public forum, great. (I reserve the right to mention their disadvantages.)
And if you want to gently mention how this was an obscure bug that wasn't likely to affect average users, a bug that has now been fixed, that's great too. I agree. This bug obviously wasn't a huge deal.
It's just that this frothing at the mouth, "how dare you blaspheme against the mighty Apple by claiming they're responsible for their own bugs?!" segment of the Apple userbase... is getting really, really tiresome.
Your quote "That's all well and good, but either way it's still Apple's fault. Not that their fans will care." is factually incorrect. The issue in question was whether Apples estimates on battery life were wrong.
This statement was and is entirely correct. It would have been correct even if it turned out that the Consumer Reports' result was the result of the tester smoking meth and deciding to type random stuff on his report. For the third (fourth?) time, I was responding to a hypothetical given by someone else. What the hell, I'm feeling charitable, let me try to give you some pointers on the bits I think you may be misunderstanding:
A. The "either" refers to the battery life being off (hardware issue of some sort), or there being a bug in Safari.
B. The hypothetical bug was not and is not the same as the actual bug.
They weren't, consumer reports enabled hidden developer features so were not testing the battery in the way Apple does or in the way a regular user would experience.
[Reminder: this issue/argument is COMPLETELY SEPARATE from the above. I'd still be right on that first point even if I were wrong on this second point, which I'm not]
Holy hell, where to even begin...
1. "You're holding it wrong." This gives you away immediately. No sane person who hasn't chugged a gallon of Jobs' kool-aid says stuff like this.
2. I love how we're basically openly admitting now that the Macbook "Pro" is not intended for developers or power users. Your arguments make no sense whatsoever as soon as you admit that there are advanced users who very well might tinker with browser internals, and who might wish to buy a MBP.
3. At any point did I say or imply that the latest MBP is a horrible piece of crap that no one should buy specifically because of the bad battery life? No. I simply said that the responsibility for the bad test result, in case of a bug in Safari, lies on Apple and not Consumer Reports. This closely ties into #1. Read it repeatedly. Try to apply your argument to a product not made by Apple and see if it's reasonable. Let me get you started:
"Well I'm so sorry the robot attacked your technician! But you see, he was wearing a metallic green shirt, and regular users don't wear metallic green shirts, so really it's your fault. Yes, your test of our robot was definitely set up incorrectly because he wore a metallic green shirt and thus it was really unfair of you guys to initially give our robot an unfavorable review."
4. The setting was activated presumably for a good reason as part of CR's methodology, perhaps to make the browser settings as close as possible to the other notebooks they were comparing it with. I might be wrong on this point and it was just a dumb mistake of theirs, but even if I'm wrong on this point my other 3 points will stand.
"how the hell is that a "flaw in the testing methodology" you ask frothily? That seems obvious now.
Indeed. The guy who was decapitated by the berserk robot was clearly using flawed methodology because he wore a metallic green shirt, which is unusual.
Yes their was apparently a bug in the developer tools that disable caching of websites but you including that in your conclusion was a strawman
The "informal logical fallacies of debate" were abused almost immediately after they were popularized, but it's been getting really bad lately. This one is particularly sad, though.
A conclusion isn't a strawman. Premises are (or can be) strawmen. A strawman involves misunderstanding/misrepresenting someone's argument. Try Googling words you aren't sure the meaning of before using them. (Bonus points if, at this stage, you decide to erroneously accuse me of ad hominems.)
The other strawmen you built regarding removable batteries
I'm a very rare slashdot commenter. This comment was horrible so I just had to get in here and let you know:) Just admit you were wrong guy. And the rest of your righteous spiel comes off equally as bad.
This is such an asinine statement I hardly know where to begin. Even if there were no Safari bug and it were 100% Consumer Reports' fault, my initial statement would still be entirely correct because it was explicitly couched in an "if" and was responding to a hypothetical that someone else gave.
This is first and foremost a factual issue. I provided you with the link. My reasoning a couple weeks ago was clear and I have spelled it all out for you again in exacting detail. If you do truly believe that I have been proven wrong, I advise you to enroll in an adult literacy course as soon as possible, to be supplemented with an introductory informal logic or debate course if that isn't sufficient.
Perhaps, then, you will obtain the confidence to post more frequently.
lol are you new here? Anti-apple posts always get modded up, defending Apple will usually get you modded down. It's slashdot: home to cranky old people who hate technology, any big tech companies, the government, and kids on their lawns.
No, we hate bad technology and overpriced technology. Every single tech company that makes bad decisions around here gets criticized; every single one. Show of hands: who here likes Google's anti-microSD card policies? Who is willing to write a lengthy screed defending it and pretending that anyone who likes microSD card slots must be "an old person who hates technology" ?
This shit ONLY happens with Apple because only Apple has this contingent of fanboys who treat every conversation about flaws in its products as if it were a conversation about how ugly their mothers are.
And the fact that this utter rubbish (from an AC, no less) has been modded up to +5 really gives the lie to your thesis here. As I explained elsewhere, the crux of the matter is the AC here is/was attempting to claim that Consumer Reports is responsible for bugs in Safari.
Apple is responsible for Safari bugs. That was my assertion then, and it's my assertion now.
How was that Slashdot comment, which turned out to be right, modded? -1.
Wow. So you're complaining that an Anonymous Coward (you?) speculating baselessly (yes baselessly, because no preliminary observations or experiments were mentioned) about the possible cause of the poor test result and then implying that Apple should be let off the hook if it's a Safari bug received a single -1 downmod instead of being modded up to +5, Nostradamus?
No one is going to have their mod privileges revoked. Instead, try re-working your tone to sound less like a perpetually whining fanboy.
I mean, for many years I liked Google (still do, in some ways) but I don't flip the fuck out when people criticize, for example, their decision to drop microSD card slots from their devices. That was a horrible anti-consumer decision and I made sure to mention it any time I talked to someone who was thinking about buying a Nexus device. There's a reason why Apple fanboys have the reputation that they do. No other tech company on Earth inspires this kind of rabid and unthinking loyalty.
Incidentally, if you register for an account people are around here will be less likely to assume you're a blithering fool or astroturfer.
The real moderation tragedy is that your comment here is currently modded up to +4. "Admins, go back and fix the moderation and mod everyone else down! My speculative Apple apologia turned out to be correct in fact [just not in conclusion]!", Jesus fucking Christ...
the patent lasts like 5 or 10 or 20 years (I don't know)
Uh, it's 20 years, sometimes including an additional exclusivity period of up to 5 years (or apparently up to 10 years for certain antibiotics) offered by the FDA in some situations such that competitors' products will not be approved during that time. The exclusivity period isn't guaranteed to run consecutive to the patent period, although the drug companies obviously attempt to engineer it that way if possible.
I just thought that was worth clarifying. Like, "I'm don't recall if Joe was two or four or eight feet tall [and it turns out he might've been as much as twelve feet tall]"... that's not something you should hand-wave away. Yes, it's a complicated situation, but the government-created barriers to entry here (of which drug patents are just a tiny piece) are significant. We do need some barriers, obviously, along with some method of incentivization, but given the high or wildly fluctuating prices of some generics when there doesn't appear to be much of a marginal cost involved (I'm not necessarily saying that's the case with the epi-pens), the system as a whole does not appear to be functioning terribly well.
Some of us just expect them to follow the same laws that cabbies are required to. You know like the same insurance that's required for a commercial operator. Vehicle inspections, CPR training and so on. You know, exactly the same things that were put into law because cabbies had such a terrible track record that it was killing people.
Yes, how dare people demand they actually follow the law.
I don't particularly like Uber as a company and I'm not at all happy with the current contractor vs. employee status quo in general, but if there was ever an argument for a libertarian-ish view of things, it would have to be here. You're describing things that aren't necessary or indeed pertinent to driving someone safely from point A to point B with the possible exception of vehicle inspections[1]. Simple performance tracking should suffice here.
Piling on the red tape to give it a veneer of professionalism might make life a little easier for the tiny fraction of a percent of people who get in a car accident, but they don't reduce accident fatalities and its most immediate effect is to create barriers to entry that dramatically affect both the consumers and the drivers. Those are mostly bullshit laws that make life more difficult, particularly for the working poor. I don't just mean the Uber drivers looking to make a few bucks on the side; I'm referring to people like my former coworker who don't have a car and are constantly having to deal with the hassle and expense of buses and cabs.
If you want people to be upset about apparent violations of the law, go reform the law in an intelligent fashion instead of implying that paying 2x+ more for cabs is definitely worth any arbitrary amount of red tape, regardless of its actual impact on transportation safety.
1. But how many fatal car accidents are caused by hardware failure? Surely it's a tiny percentage? Regardless, I don't see any reason to single out cabs for hardware inspections. Either everyone should be forced to get them or no one should.
Spectacularly wrong. Carbon fiber is about as brittle as china. It has very little toughness.
It's a bit depressing to see this volley continue back and forth with no one mentioning the fact that the "carbon fiber" you're referring to is... plastic. Plastic with carbon fibers added to strengthen it, just like fiberglass refers to plastic with glass fibers added to strengthen it.
From this, there are two key points to make in this debate that so far haven't been made:
1. The properties of carbon fiber depend largely on the properties of the material its being added to. There are a wide variety of polymers out there and, in principle, you could probably put it in concrete, or maybe even a cold-forged metal.
2. The parallels between carbon fiber and whatever this new material is are inconsequential if the new material is something that can be used directly and not as an additive.
The article is shockingly unhelpful in clarifying this second point, and it even cryptically adds that the geometrical techniques here could be used directly with non-carbon materials, which doesn't make a lot of sense given the unique molecular geometric properties of graphene (clearly show in illustrations in the article) are dependent on the chemical properties of carbon.
You can instead have this in a right-click menu, or simply have the content available if the user presses a down-arrow in the relevant field.
A lot of people are suggesting solutions in this vein, which is changing the nature of autofill by making it more cumbersome to use. I don't use it myself and don't plan to, but I suspect that one of the reasons why some people do like it is the ease of use. The popup, problematic as it is, is the one way to do this with a minimum of extra fuss. If you want to argue people are going to just click though it, well, there's no saving those people anyway.
I assure you the original was two-space indented. Slashdot doesn't seem to accept the leading spaces, even within the code or quote tags, while in HTML mode.
I'm just waiting for someone to mention that my solution would be totally unnecessary if only phishing sites would properly support the standards outlined in RFC 3514.
That sounds tricky as hell... how many different ways of hiding the fields are there? They could be tiny, they could be behind another element, they could be unlabeled with white text on a white background, they could be at the bottom of the page past the point where most people will bother scrolling, etc.
If autofill absolutely must be used, the correct way to do this would be to warn the user with a popup that the website is requesting information XYZ, not unlike how they currently have a popup saying that a website is requesting your detailed location information.
Also, I'm astonished this attack hasn't popped up before now.
Slashdot Mirror
Your bar for "screed" is set curiously low.
The study itself doesn't upset me one bit. Random unsupported conclusions injected into the science, ostensibly by the journalists (but I haven't checked), should upset anyone who is concerned about the direction the country has been headed in post-Trump and post-BLM.
'In other news', my smugly psychoanalytical AC stalker is still at it. Why don't you show yourself? What is your game here? Did you follow me here from another forum, perchance?
I do this to sharpen the mind and also sometimes to prototype stuff. Slashdot keeps comments forever and has no censorship to speak of, and I've already made use of my prior lengthy comments as quick cliff notes in discussions I've had elsewhere. Some of these posts will eventually turn into Youtube videos, so if you *really* want to stalking me, be sure to have a box of kleenex at the ready. I've had numerous delays but I think it's going to happen soonish. Just know that you're going to have to do a lot better than a Youtube comment if you expect me to take the time to destroy you in A/V format.
By the way, this was apparently a quote from the USA Today, not some random blogger. I'm talking specifically about the mainstream media doing its best to confirm the accusations being leveled against it.
Whites still earn dramatically more than Blacks and Latinos, reflecting the legacy of discrimination for jobs, education and housing.
Random reminders of racism, often of dubious intellectual merit, randomly injected into articles not about racism. I don't think it's an evil tinfoil hat conspiracy so much as lefties overcompensating in their horror of the Trump phenomenon and thinking that the proper solution is to start subtly injecting their opinions everywhere, but it's starting to rub me the wrong way. And I'm afraid it'll backfire again, and once again wind up operating in exactly the opposite direction as intended (making racism more acceptable.) So, let's not let this shit slide any more:
1. The discrimination against Blacks did obviously have and still has a profound effect on their socioeconomic status, although it is ostrichlike head in the sand behavior to casually imply that other factors do not exist. In particular, I suspect that many black subcultures, which were indeed originally formed as a direct result of racism, nonetheless will not be found to promote such as academic achievement to the same extent as their white counterparts. This should not be any more controversial to suggest than it is to suggest that Han Chinese, Japanese, and Ashkenazi Jewish subcultures probably tend to promote academic achievement to a greater extent than most white subcultures. This has nothing to do with genetics.
2. The casual accusation that discrimination against Latinos is entirely or primarily responsible for their lower average socioeconomic status is far more contentious. First off, all of the objections from #1 apply here. Additionally, unlike black people, tens of millions of them have only been here for a generation or two, and those ancestors did not arrive on slave ships. Their socioeconomic status is thus quite heavily influenced by how poor they were when they (or their parents, or grandparents) arrived from Latin America, and it is additionally negatively affected by the fact that 11 million of them arrived here illegally, meaning that they face significant employment barriers that are not the result of discrimination, but rather are a result of their conscious decision to break the law[1]. The number of people who do not yet speak English fluently (a minority, to be fair) is also very relevant to the average socioeconomic outcome and the deleterious effects this has on job-hunting is not primarily a result of racism.
There are, of course, some far-left people who will deny both of these latter points and insist any limits or barriers to immigration is inherently racist and so is any insistence on a shared common language as a prerequisite for citizenship (without which the melting pot cannot function and over time the society and nation will inevitably fracture along ethnic lines, as history has repeatedly showed.) If you want to have that debate, sure, let's have that discussion some time. I'm actually for increased legal immigration overall, with a few caveats about things that need to be fixed first.
But cut it out with the snarky attempts at cultural mind control with these one-line assertions. You're not helping. You're simply feeding the right and alt-right narratives of the biased and lying mainstream media and mainstream academia. It's really, really hard to continue pushing back against the alt-right when you keep ensuring that ~30% of what they say is more or less correct.
1. I don't say they're evil people for doing so, just that it's not some kind of big secret that it's going to be harder getting a job if you're not here legally, and the primary responsibility for that outcome must therefore fall on their shoulders.
Why can't you admit you were wrong? Do you have some kind of complex with being wrong??
It's a very human thing to be wrong... Come down to our level and let's talk.
This is white noise. Come at me with a real argument. I'm a +5. I say this not to brag, but to point out it is largely agreed that I was not, in fact, proven wrong about anything. The onus is on you to say something intelligent instead of these puerile games.
Shane_Optima is quickly turning into a troll.
ACs often don't understand what common words mean. Film at 11.
It was irrelevant for those users but it is still an Apple-created problem, not a problem with CR's methodology. And given MBP's market penetration, at least some users would have been affected by the bug.
People who are testing laptop performance should be able to use any and all existing functionality of the product without random stuff breaking. I gave a car analogy in my other reply.
I'm just going to C&P this on over:
Methodologies should assume that features do what they say they do and nothing more. If I press the hazard lights on my car and (somehow) the muffler falls off and I report that the muffler fell off while I was driving (not realizing that pressing the hazard lights was what triggered it), my methodology isn't flawed. Clearly, the car company is at fault for creating a flawed product. "But most people never even use the hazard lights! You should have tested it without touching the hazard light button!" is not a reasonable response. This entire tone and focus is steeped in the rankest of apologia via bass-ackwards thinking.
On another note: And it's entirely conceivable and reasonable that they would be using debug mode to either examine more closely how it's performing or to configure it to more closely match their other tested notebooks (perhaps they disable caching in all browsers, for instance.)
I didn't mention "you're holding wrong"
It was a metaphor/comparison. You were talking about "in the way a regular user would experience" and insisting that CR tested it incorrectly. The parallels are clear, and I didn't put that bit in quote tags for a reason. That phrase is a meme now, in case you aren't aware. I was mocking you.
For the 3rd time the bug in the developer tools is the cause of Consumer Reports problems up but has no bearing on Apples battery estimates which are based on a system with "all settings left at default
A complete irrelevancy. I never said anything about Apple's estimates. The issue was about the cause of CR's findings. CR does not claim to test the computer in exactly the same way Apple does, nor should they.
? It has unequivocally nothing to with the variability in the CR tests
I never said it did. It was entirely pertinent to the real-world practical drawbacks of having a battery life that low.
Were Apples battery life estimates wrong? No.
Which I never referred to.
Was Consumer Reports correct with their estimates? No.
Entirely correct for pro users, nor did they have any reason to suspect that turning that on would have such an effect. Because the effect was driven by a bug. That Apple created. And has now fixed, now that CR has drawn it to their attention.
How people like you can spin all of that as "CR uses flawed methodologies and gives unfair rating to Apple!" is utterly beyond me. (Cliff notes: No, that usage of quotes isn't meant to be something that you have literally typed.)
Methodologies should assume that features do what they say they do and nothing more. If I press the hazard lights on my car and (somehow) the muffler falls off and I report that the muffler fell off while I was driving (not realizing that pressing the hazard lights was what triggered it), my methodology isn't flawed. Clearly, the car company is at fault for creating a flawed product. "But most people never even use the hazard lights! You should have tested it without touching the hazard light button!" is not a reasonable response. Your entire tone and focus is steeped in the rankest of apologia via bass-ackwards thinking.
It has nothing to do with what we were discussing (how wrong you were to blame apple for the inconsistent battery life) and it doesn't take a debate genius to see this.
That's some industrial-grade solipsism you've got going on over there. I wasn't talking to you in that first post, nor was I confined to a single super-narrow topic. I was referring to the potential practical effects of an unresolved bug (the proposed *hypothetical* one, which was quite different from the real one).
I can do that. There are no rules here. I could even start lecturing you about sixteenth century Dutch art and that wouldn't mean I've committed a fallacy, just that I'm being insane or a douche. The practical synergistic effects of having a non-removable battery AND a shortened battery life seemed, in comparison, a rather tame and obvious and short tangent to traverse.
added a whole lot more logical fallacies
Please, give me the list. I'm quite curious given your highly mysterious interpretation of strawman.
And just to quickly get this out there, in the name of everything that's holy of course I'm not saying that all Apple users everywhere do this, or that they're in any way bad or stupid for using Apple products. If anything they make suits your requirements perfectly in features and performance and price, great. If you want to mention their advantages in a public forum, great. (I reserve the right to mention their disadvantages.)
And if you want to gently mention how this was an obscure bug that wasn't likely to affect average users, a bug that has now been fixed, that's great too. I agree. This bug obviously wasn't a huge deal.
It's just that this frothing at the mouth, "how dare you blaspheme against the mighty Apple by claiming they're responsible for their own bugs?!" segment of the Apple userbase... is getting really, really tiresome.
Your quote "That's all well and good, but either way it's still Apple's fault. Not that their fans will care." is factually incorrect. The issue in question was whether Apples estimates on battery life were wrong.
This statement was and is entirely correct. It would have been correct even if it turned out that the Consumer Reports' result was the result of the tester smoking meth and deciding to type random stuff on his report. For the third (fourth?) time, I was responding to a hypothetical given by someone else. What the hell, I'm feeling charitable, let me try to give you some pointers on the bits I think you may be misunderstanding:
A. The "either" refers to the battery life being off (hardware issue of some sort), or there being a bug in Safari.
B. The hypothetical bug was not and is not the same as the actual bug.
They weren't, consumer reports enabled hidden developer features so were not testing the battery in the way Apple does or in the way a regular user would experience.
[Reminder: this issue/argument is COMPLETELY SEPARATE from the above. I'd still be right on that first point even if I were wrong on this second point, which I'm not]
Holy hell, where to even begin...
1. "You're holding it wrong." This gives you away immediately. No sane person who hasn't chugged a gallon of Jobs' kool-aid says stuff like this.
2. I love how we're basically openly admitting now that the Macbook "Pro" is not intended for developers or power users. Your arguments make no sense whatsoever as soon as you admit that there are advanced users who very well might tinker with browser internals, and who might wish to buy a MBP.
3. At any point did I say or imply that the latest MBP is a horrible piece of crap that no one should buy specifically because of the bad battery life? No. I simply said that the responsibility for the bad test result, in case of a bug in Safari, lies on Apple and not Consumer Reports. This closely ties into #1. Read it repeatedly. Try to apply your argument to a product not made by Apple and see if it's reasonable. Let me get you started:
"Well I'm so sorry the robot attacked your technician! But you see, he was wearing a metallic green shirt, and regular users don't wear metallic green shirts, so really it's your fault. Yes, your test of our robot was definitely set up incorrectly because he wore a metallic green shirt and thus it was really unfair of you guys to initially give our robot an unfavorable review."
4. The setting was activated presumably for a good reason as part of CR's methodology, perhaps to make the browser settings as close as possible to the other notebooks they were comparing it with. I might be wrong on this point and it was just a dumb mistake of theirs, but even if I'm wrong on this point my other 3 points will stand.
"how the hell is that a "flaw in the testing methodology" you ask frothily? That seems obvious now.
Indeed. The guy who was decapitated by the berserk robot was clearly using flawed methodology because he wore a metallic green shirt, which is unusual.
Yes their was apparently a bug in the developer tools that disable caching of websites but you including that in your conclusion was a strawman
The "informal logical fallacies of debate" were abused almost immediately after they were popularized, but it's been getting really bad lately. This one is particularly sad, though.
A conclusion isn't a strawman. Premises are (or can be) strawmen. A strawman involves misunderstanding/misrepresenting someone's argument. Try Googling words you aren't sure the meaning of before using them. (Bonus points if, at this stage, you decide to erroneously accuse me of ad hominems.)
The other strawmen you built regarding removable batteries
That's not a strawman either, not
I'm a very rare slashdot commenter. This comment was horrible so I just had to get in here and let you know :) Just admit you were wrong guy. And the rest of your righteous spiel comes off equally as bad.
This is such an asinine statement I hardly know where to begin. Even if there were no Safari bug and it were 100% Consumer Reports' fault, my initial statement would still be entirely correct because it was explicitly couched in an "if" and was responding to a hypothetical that someone else gave.
This is first and foremost a factual issue. I provided you with the link. My reasoning a couple weeks ago was clear and I have spelled it all out for you again in exacting detail. If you do truly believe that I have been proven wrong, I advise you to enroll in an adult literacy course as soon as possible, to be supplemented with an introductory informal logic or debate course if that isn't sufficient.
Perhaps, then, you will obtain the confidence to post more frequently.
lol are you new here? Anti-apple posts always get modded up, defending Apple will usually get you modded down. It's slashdot: home to cranky old people who hate technology, any big tech companies, the government, and kids on their lawns.
No, we hate bad technology and overpriced technology. Every single tech company that makes bad decisions around here gets criticized; every single one. Show of hands: who here likes Google's anti-microSD card policies? Who is willing to write a lengthy screed defending it and pretending that anyone who likes microSD card slots must be "an old person who hates technology" ?
This shit ONLY happens with Apple because only Apple has this contingent of fanboys who treat every conversation about flaws in its products as if it were a conversation about how ugly their mothers are.
And the fact that this utter rubbish (from an AC, no less) has been modded up to +5 really gives the lie to your thesis here. As I explained elsewhere, the crux of the matter is the AC here is/was attempting to claim that Consumer Reports is responsible for bugs in Safari.
Shane_Optima was wrong.
I most certainly was not wrong. I said that if it was a software bug in Safari (as alleged) that it was obviously still Apple's fault. I didn't address the possibility of CR screwing up one way or another. And guess what? According to TFS, Apple *did* screw up.
Apple is responsible for Safari bugs. That was my assertion then, and it's my assertion now.
How was that Slashdot comment, which turned out to be right, modded? -1.
Wow. So you're complaining that an Anonymous Coward (you?) speculating baselessly (yes baselessly, because no preliminary observations or experiments were mentioned) about the possible cause of the poor test result and then implying that Apple should be let off the hook if it's a Safari bug received a single -1 downmod instead of being modded up to +5, Nostradamus?
No one is going to have their mod privileges revoked. Instead, try re-working your tone to sound less like a perpetually whining fanboy.
I mean, for many years I liked Google (still do, in some ways) but I don't flip the fuck out when people criticize, for example, their decision to drop microSD card slots from their devices. That was a horrible anti-consumer decision and I made sure to mention it any time I talked to someone who was thinking about buying a Nexus device. There's a reason why Apple fanboys have the reputation that they do. No other tech company on Earth inspires this kind of rabid and unthinking loyalty.
Incidentally, if you register for an account people are around here will be less likely to assume you're a blithering fool or astroturfer.
The real moderation tragedy is that your comment here is currently modded up to +4. "Admins, go back and fix the moderation and mod everyone else down! My speculative Apple apologia turned out to be correct in fact [just not in conclusion]!", Jesus fucking Christ...
the patent lasts like 5 or 10 or 20 years (I don't know)
Uh, it's 20 years, sometimes including an additional exclusivity period of up to 5 years (or apparently up to 10 years for certain antibiotics) offered by the FDA in some situations such that competitors' products will not be approved during that time. The exclusivity period isn't guaranteed to run consecutive to the patent period, although the drug companies obviously attempt to engineer it that way if possible.
I just thought that was worth clarifying. Like, "I'm don't recall if Joe was two or four or eight feet tall [and it turns out he might've been as much as twelve feet tall]"... that's not something you should hand-wave away. Yes, it's a complicated situation, but the government-created barriers to entry here (of which drug patents are just a tiny piece) are significant. We do need some barriers, obviously, along with some method of incentivization, but given the high or wildly fluctuating prices of some generics when there doesn't appear to be much of a marginal cost involved (I'm not necessarily saying that's the case with the epi-pens), the system as a whole does not appear to be functioning terribly well.
Some of us just expect them to follow the same laws that cabbies are required to. You know like the same insurance that's required for a commercial operator. Vehicle inspections, CPR training and so on. You know, exactly the same things that were put into law because cabbies had such a terrible track record that it was killing people.
Yes, how dare people demand they actually follow the law.
I don't particularly like Uber as a company and I'm not at all happy with the current contractor vs. employee status quo in general, but if there was ever an argument for a libertarian-ish view of things, it would have to be here. You're describing things that aren't necessary or indeed pertinent to driving someone safely from point A to point B with the possible exception of vehicle inspections[1]. Simple performance tracking should suffice here.
Piling on the red tape to give it a veneer of professionalism might make life a little easier for the tiny fraction of a percent of people who get in a car accident, but they don't reduce accident fatalities and its most immediate effect is to create barriers to entry that dramatically affect both the consumers and the drivers. Those are mostly bullshit laws that make life more difficult, particularly for the working poor. I don't just mean the Uber drivers looking to make a few bucks on the side; I'm referring to people like my former coworker who don't have a car and are constantly having to deal with the hassle and expense of buses and cabs.
If you want people to be upset about apparent violations of the law, go reform the law in an intelligent fashion instead of implying that paying 2x+ more for cabs is definitely worth any arbitrary amount of red tape, regardless of its actual impact on transportation safety.
1. But how many fatal car accidents are caused by hardware failure? Surely it's a tiny percentage? Regardless, I don't see any reason to single out cabs for hardware inspections. Either everyone should be forced to get them or no one should.
Spectacularly wrong. Carbon fiber is about as brittle as china. It has very little toughness.
It's a bit depressing to see this volley continue back and forth with no one mentioning the fact that the "carbon fiber" you're referring to is... plastic. Plastic with carbon fibers added to strengthen it, just like fiberglass refers to plastic with glass fibers added to strengthen it.
From this, there are two key points to make in this debate that so far haven't been made:
1. The properties of carbon fiber depend largely on the properties of the material its being added to. There are a wide variety of polymers out there and, in principle, you could probably put it in concrete, or maybe even a cold-forged metal.
2. The parallels between carbon fiber and whatever this new material is are inconsequential if the new material is something that can be used directly and not as an additive.
The article is shockingly unhelpful in clarifying this second point, and it even cryptically adds that the geometrical techniques here could be used directly with non-carbon materials, which doesn't make a lot of sense given the unique molecular geometric properties of graphene (clearly show in illustrations in the article) are dependent on the chemical properties of carbon.
There's already been a Gategate, although as the redirect shows I think it was more commonly known as "Plebgate".
It may be etymologically dumb, but it's a handy bit of syntax. Sort of like "-aholic" for being addicted to something other than alcohol.
"The researchers conducted nearly 1,000 computer simulations and estimate about 20 impacts could do the job."
this is what modern science is reduced to, old theories joined to faddish techs that can be easily trailered to fit the theory.
Yeah, when is this Monte Carlo fad going to die anyway??? It's worse than bell bottoms.
You can instead have this in a right-click menu, or simply have the content available if the user presses a down-arrow in the relevant field.
A lot of people are suggesting solutions in this vein, which is changing the nature of autofill by making it more cumbersome to use. I don't use it myself and don't plan to, but I suspect that one of the reasons why some people do like it is the ease of use. The popup, problematic as it is, is the one way to do this with a minimum of extra fuss. If you want to argue people are going to just click though it, well, there's no saving those people anyway.
I assure you the original was two-space indented. Slashdot doesn't seem to accept the leading spaces, even within the code or quote tags, while in HTML mode.
Woosh.
I'm just waiting for someone to mention that my solution would be totally unnecessary if only phishing sites would properly support the standards outlined in RFC 3514.
"don't autofill hidden form fields". Kudos to the researcher, but hardly a topic worthy of lengthy discussion?
Hmm.
Wow, you're right! That was easy!
Surely just only auto-fill visible fields?
That sounds tricky as hell... how many different ways of hiding the fields are there? They could be tiny, they could be behind another element, they could be unlabeled with white text on a white background, they could be at the bottom of the page past the point where most people will bother scrolling, etc.
If autofill absolutely must be used, the correct way to do this would be to warn the user with a popup that the website is requesting information XYZ, not unlike how they currently have a popup saying that a website is requesting your detailed location information.
Also, I'm astonished this attack hasn't popped up before now.