Please quit with the misinformation - blogs are not reliable sources (except in special cases where it is from a notable "expert", or site considered reliable in itself).
Primary sources are recognised, it's just that Wikipedia itself can't be used as the original publication. There are all sorts of good reasons for this - such as telling experts from random people. Why not publish elsewhere?
I fail to see the problem here. Researchers and experts can carry on publishing as they did before in peer reviewed journals. Why do they think they need to edit their research onto Wikipedia as the primary and initial means of publication?
They don't get to write Britannica articles either, I don't see them whining about that.
Experts in a field we are quite busy publishing their findings, which for whatever reason is not a valid citation on wikipedia.
False. If you publish your finding, it is acceptable as a reference (subject to issues of reliability - that in practice means a peer-reviewed journal, or being published by someone notable enough to be an authority). The only rule is against people who try to publish it on Wikipedia (No Original Research).
I am not paid to fight with some unemployed self appointed editor of "knowledge" who's only qualification seems to be the ability to over pedantically interpret arbitrary rules.
And here you demonstrate your ignorance - of course you are not expected to argue with editors (many of who are employed, so you can take your libel elsewhere), just as you are not expected to argue with Britannica editors. That's a straw man argument. Your job, if you really are a scientist, is to publish your findings in peer reviewed journals. Encyclopedias will then reference that information. If you really think that the world of science works not by peer reviewed journals, but by trying to persuade encyclopedia editors to publish your information, then I'm worried what kind of scientist you are.
And yes, interpretting rules is what editors are supposed to do. The way it should work is accepting information following the three fundamental policies of verifiability, no original research and neutral point of view ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability ). As opposed to being a free-for-all where anything that's put in gets to stay in.
Policies are good you know, just like the idea that science in peer reviewed journals is more trustworthy than something that a so-called scientist claims is true on his blog or whatever.
(And I love the irony that an ill-informed rant by an anonymous person gets believed as fact...)
The wiki might be good for party facts, but not if really need to know something.
How many better sources are there? There are some of course, such as Britannica, but "not quite as good as Britannica" doesn't mean it's poor. And how many better sources are there for free (especially as in speech)?
To be honest we have better things to do with our time.
Evidently you still have time to post here to grind an axe against Wikipedia. I apologise in advance for taking up your time. I look forward to reading the great scientific advancements you make on Wikipedia.
Citation needed - link to the article and edits, please?
And what do you propose? That edits should be allowed no matter what they claim, because you were right, honest? This is exactly the sort of thing that other people criticise Wikipedia - that it contains unsourced claims! So which is it?
I've seen claims in the media that I know to be false many times. There I don't even have any option to challenge it whatsoever. But if I did, I would expect to have to prove my case with evidence and published sources, rather than suggesting a newspaper that keeps all contributions from anyone is better.
Facts be damned, we don't need those in an encyclopedia.
You mean: Facts be damned, we don't need those in the media.
It was the media who kept this statement rather than taking this down. It was the media who took their facts from somewhere that didn't cite a source. It is the media who never cite their own sources - whether they have them or not.
But hey, let's all blame Wikipedia.
With Wikipedia, sources are either cited - or if not, you should know to take it with a pinch of salt. Even if the cited source is wrong (as might happen in the scenario you describe), the point is that that it's attributed to another source. (E.g., if Wikipedia says "X is true [ref]", you read that as shorthand for "ref claims that X is true", and then if you don't trust the ref, that's up to you.)
We ought to be doing that with every other place that presents something without a source (including the media), but for some reason we live in a world where claims from the media, not to mention blog posts and random anonymous comments on Slashdot, are accepted as fact, but when it comes to Wikipedia? Well heaven forbid you trust that - the existence of a single false claim out of millions of articles, for a period of 24 hours, means you can't trust it at all!
(Are people not aware of how many falsehoods are published by the media, and later corrected? Countless times I've seen an obvious blooper on a website, even on places like the BBC. It's later corrected, often after a few hours. Because there's no edit history, all trace of it is lost, but continued editing of articles on media websites is commonplace. Then there's the newspapers where a major story contains an error, which is later apologised for in small column of a later edition...)
If you want to measure the accuracy of Wikipedia, then let's have evidence based on a survey of pages, comparing that to other sources (whether it's the media, or other encyclopedias). Previous such surveys, IIRC, have shown Wikipedia to be almost on par with Britannica (so yeah, not as good, but you get what you pay for, and that hardly makes it unreliable). I fail to see how tabloid-style outrage over single instances trumps that.
I'm talking about phones, not music players. The number of people who care about the Zune as a music player is about the same number that care about the Iphone as a phone.
Which is a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of millions sold by the other companies, as I said in my other post.
Not to mention that the other phones are generally compatible with each other across different make/models - whilst Apple think their 37 million is an "enormous platform", the Java platform runs on 2.1 billion phones.
My Motorola V980 functions as a music player, phone, Internet device, gaming platform, camera and video recorder. (I did consider getting an Iphone, but I'd have to carry around a separate device for video.)
It's amazing the way that music fades out automatically when someone rings me - uncanny isn't it, it's almost as if they realised that playing the music and the person speaking to you through the loudspeaker at the same time might just be a bad idea.
However, I still prefer a separate mp3 player when I'm travelling, so I don't find my battery's drained because I've been listening to music for ages, or I've used the flash a few too many times on the camera.
Since most phones come with games installed for free, that's true of most phones. Whilst I'm sure that Nintendo do have some concern about increasing competition from mobile phones, the idea that the Iphone presents more competition than major players like Nokia is just pro-Apple FUD again, I'm afraid.
But you have your logic backwards. The concern for Nintendo is not "people who buy a phone and then have a game on it", it's "out of people who decide they want a handheld gaming device, how many of them buy a phone?" You have offered no evidence to suggest that any significant number of phone sales were from people looking for a gaming device.
I don't see how Apple can't surpass the DS easily.
If you mean surpass in sales, then plenty of companies have "easily" done that - and left both Nintendo, and Apple, long behind.
And Hewlett-Packard sold 13.3 million a quarter - your point? You're comparing different markets.
The mobile phone market is vastly bigger than handheld consoles. If they were going to be worried about someone, they should be worried about Nokia (who shipped 117.8 million phones a quarterduring last year). They might, after that, be worried about Samsung (51.8 million a quarter), Motorola (25.4 million a quarter) and LG (23 million a quarter) ( http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/10/30/motorola.q3.2008.results/ ). And the vast majority of these phones can play games (using an industry standard method that's been around over a decade allowing different models of phones to run the same software, though the Iphone has yet to catch up to this ability). (If you're going to quibble about sales of an individual model, then that unfairly penalises other companies for offering more choice to consumers, and anyway there have been different models of the Iphone; but even for single models, the Motorola RAZR alone sold 110 million.)
Sorry guys, but despite all the stories that Slashdot posts about it ("You can read this website on an Iphone! Isn't that amazing!"), at 4 million sales they're a niche player in the mobile phone market.
More specifically, that it contains no hardware that can't be emulated in software. That's really not that big an assumption, because the alternative is literally magic.
We already know there are some things in nature that would take sufficiently long to simulate on conventional computer to be impractical (though a quantum computer may help).
But even if we could simulate it - whilst that would be an immensely useful thing, this doesn't necessarily help you if your desire is to "download" yourself onto the computer. The question still remains as to whether a simulation is equivalent to the real thing (i.e., a simulation on a computer can itself be conscious).
Last year, they decided to start charging me an extra £10 a month for no reason. I phoned them up, got someone who seemed incapable of understanding what I was saying, and insisted the amount was right, despite them offering no explanation for the rise, and it not matching up with what they advertised on their own website. Finally she apparently realised the problem and said it would be fixed - but it wasn't, there was no refund, and the extra charges continued. Thankfully I then managed to get through to someone with a brain, who finally fixed the problem. Even then though, he didn't refund my money, instead he said they'd put it on my account so I'd be charged less accordingly the next month.
Consider the flip side, what happens if we're accidently late paying our bills. Do we say "Oh nevermind, I'll pay the extra next month"? Do we get to ignore them altogether? No, it's an automatic £10 late payment. To be honest I should have sent them a £10 fee, as well as demanded they refund my money immediately, but it was so much work just to fix the problem, I gave up after that.
(It's a similar issue with calling them out. If you're not in when they come, they charge you money. But if you stay in and they don't turn up, tough luck.)
Don't worry - I'm on Virgin Media, but my "10Mbps" service is still running at the old speed of 4Mbps. And as others have pointed out, anyone actually using this service to its full potential will quickly be throttled for "using too much".
As a general rule, if it turns out that existing law can't be applied to a particular case, legislators should first ask themselves why that is, and whether the thing should be a matter for criminal law in the first place - perhaps there was a good reason for there not being a law against it.
Unfortunately all too often, the Government thinks that any case where a person can't be criminalised someone is a "loophole" in the law that needs closing (I'm in the UK, but I see it here too). And in some cases, even if someone can be criminalised, they still use such cases as an argument for new laws (e.g., here in the UK a murderer had previously looked at naughty pictures, so even though he was convicted under the perfectly good laws we have for murder, the mother of the victim went on a rabid emotional crusade against naughty pictures, so now it's illegal to look at or possess naughty pictures).
Also note that even libel where you make untrue statements is, AIUI, a civil matter, but this law would make even true statements a criminal offence.
The fact that some knowledge was attained without rigorous and formal application of the scientific method is neither here nor there - the problem here is actively teaching children things that are disproven by overwhelming amounts of evidence.
Yes, perhaps we'll end up in a world where people can still tie their shoelaces, but the OP never claimed otherwise - so that is another straw man. A world where people believe we lived with dinosaurs, and we're supposed to not care just so long as people can still tie shoelaces?
The OP may have been an exaggeration, in that teaching ID in some schools may not lead to such effects worldwide. But I don't see how it's a straw man.
The point is that on other phones, you are free to download apps from wherever you want, without hacking the phone.
So even if the official app-place has rules about content, that's not a problem as you can go elsewhere. Just as with the recent store about Microsoft and disallowing VoIP apps - it's simply not comparable to Apple where you aren't free to download elsewhere.
I see your straw men got you modded insightful. I'm afraid mine will just get me set on fire.
You're claiming that the attempts to teach Creationism or "Intelligent Design" in schools is a myth? I'm not sure in what sense you think it was a straw man?
Indeed - note that (AIUI) it's done under a local anesthetic, so you're awake and aware during the procedure.
I know that there's no rational reason to be worried, but as someone who's never had any kind of surgery under only a local, I would be squicked at the idea at starting off with this:)
(Although thinking about it, I'm still more squicked at the idea of eye surgery to correct short sightedness...)
OTOH, I prefer injections to pills, which probably makes me different here to most people.
I agree, I hated the "old" Macs. I find it amusing that after years of arguing with Mac users about it, Apple themselves ditched the OS.
The irritating thing is that the greater success of OS X is sometimes used to allude that Macs were great all along (such as the people in this thread telling us how long they've been using their "Macs"). They've now changed the OS, the hardware, everything about it - claiming it's the same platform is just like Trigger's broom... If there's a "cult", it's more over the trademark name, than anything tangible. I might as well put a sticky label on my dual core multitasking PC and call it an Amiga.
I like my modern computers, and I run Windows on them, so I guess you could say I like Windows. Plenty of people do - just because we don't get fanatically about it doesn't mean we don't like it.
For a while, I viewed Windows as very much a "least worst", but that just means the other offerings are even worse. But since 2000, I have to say it's a decent OS (based on the robust NT line, but capable of running consumer applications). Computing in the late 90s was terrible, as all the choices were dire, but I have to say that now, computing is fun again. There are still a few things that annoy me about Windows, and it's a shame that there isn't a mainstream descendant of a decent platform like AmigaOS, but the other mainstream alternatives annoy me far more than Windows.
So yes, I'll say it, I like Windows. And I've tried plenty of operating systems in my time. I used to hate it, but ironically the poor offerings from the alternatives that survived, and the vast improvement over the NT line of DOS/9x, mean that things are different now.
Ever heard that phrase "lies, damned lies and statistics"? Your are basing your argument on one poll, and worse than that a poll in a newspaper.
Right, a linked to poll is unreliable, but:
On the Andrew Marr show in the BBC yesterday, in a poll of polls Labour were still ahead and an election would likely either keep them in or create a hung parliament.
"Some guy on the telly last night said" isn't?
You can find a poll to say whatever you like.
Therefore, "Most likely an election tomorrow would keep Labour in with a slim majority or create a hung parliament." is just speculation.
They'd have to scrap the TV licence. Doesn't sound too bad, but if you try to explain the concept to a BBC employee they look at you as though you've suggested they shag a chicken.
If people are still paying the licence fee, it's not a problem if a few extra people also get hold of it through Iplayer for free. But yes, if they decide to switch to a subscription model, that would be their choice, and of course they should scrap the licence fee. If the BBC employee thinks that strange, they can stick with the licence method.
Well, that settles it then. Politicians and government officials never lie, do they?
The whole source in the first place for this plan comes from the Government, so if they're untrustworthy, we don't have a source for the claim in the first place.
Not to say that they won't do it, but I'd be curious to see another source first.
Why aren't they a good source? They're the second best selling mainstream newspaper in Britain.
Are you serious - lots of readers mean it must be reliable?
Generally any tabloid should be taken with a pinch of salt - the strange thing is though that whilst Slashdot would never cite any other UK tabloid (imagine stories from The Sun listed here?), for some reason people treat the Daily Mail as a serious newspaper and a reliable source.
You don't like their editorial stance?
You appear to not understand the difference between how good a source is, and what point of view it takes. There are sources that I may often disagree with, but still respect that they argue their point well, and do not scaremonger or spread misinformation. Then you have the tabloids that - even though sometimes I might agree with their point of view, I do not enjoy the way it is reported, nor am I sure at all if I can trust it.
Slashdot Mirror
Please quit with the misinformation - blogs are not reliable sources (except in special cases where it is from a notable "expert", or site considered reliable in itself).
Primary sources are recognised, it's just that Wikipedia itself can't be used as the original publication. There are all sorts of good reasons for this - such as telling experts from random people. Why not publish elsewhere?
I fail to see the problem here. Researchers and experts can carry on publishing as they did before in peer reviewed journals. Why do they think they need to edit their research onto Wikipedia as the primary and initial means of publication?
They don't get to write Britannica articles either, I don't see them whining about that.
Experts in a field we are quite busy publishing their findings, which for whatever reason is not a valid citation on wikipedia.
False. If you publish your finding, it is acceptable as a reference (subject to issues of reliability - that in practice means a peer-reviewed journal, or being published by someone notable enough to be an authority). The only rule is against people who try to publish it on Wikipedia (No Original Research).
I am not paid to fight with some unemployed self appointed editor of "knowledge" who's only qualification seems to be the ability to over pedantically interpret arbitrary rules.
And here you demonstrate your ignorance - of course you are not expected to argue with editors (many of who are employed, so you can take your libel elsewhere), just as you are not expected to argue with Britannica editors. That's a straw man argument. Your job, if you really are a scientist, is to publish your findings in peer reviewed journals. Encyclopedias will then reference that information. If you really think that the world of science works not by peer reviewed journals, but by trying to persuade encyclopedia editors to publish your information, then I'm worried what kind of scientist you are.
And yes, interpretting rules is what editors are supposed to do. The way it should work is accepting information following the three fundamental policies of verifiability, no original research and neutral point of view ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability ). As opposed to being a free-for-all where anything that's put in gets to stay in.
Policies are good you know, just like the idea that science in peer reviewed journals is more trustworthy than something that a so-called scientist claims is true on his blog or whatever.
(And I love the irony that an ill-informed rant by an anonymous person gets believed as fact...)
The wiki might be good for party facts, but not if really need to know something.
How many better sources are there? There are some of course, such as Britannica, but "not quite as good as Britannica" doesn't mean it's poor. And how many better sources are there for free (especially as in speech)?
To be honest we have better things to do with our time.
Evidently you still have time to post here to grind an axe against Wikipedia. I apologise in advance for taking up your time. I look forward to reading the great scientific advancements you make on Wikipedia.
Citation needed - link to the article and edits, please?
And what do you propose? That edits should be allowed no matter what they claim, because you were right, honest? This is exactly the sort of thing that other people criticise Wikipedia - that it contains unsourced claims! So which is it?
I've seen claims in the media that I know to be false many times. There I don't even have any option to challenge it whatsoever. But if I did, I would expect to have to prove my case with evidence and published sources, rather than suggesting a newspaper that keeps all contributions from anyone is better.
Facts be damned, we don't need those in an encyclopedia.
You mean: Facts be damned, we don't need those in the media.
It was the media who kept this statement rather than taking this down. It was the media who took their facts from somewhere that didn't cite a source. It is the media who never cite their own sources - whether they have them or not.
But hey, let's all blame Wikipedia.
With Wikipedia, sources are either cited - or if not, you should know to take it with a pinch of salt. Even if the cited source is wrong (as might happen in the scenario you describe), the point is that that it's attributed to another source. (E.g., if Wikipedia says "X is true [ref]", you read that as shorthand for "ref claims that X is true", and then if you don't trust the ref, that's up to you.)
We ought to be doing that with every other place that presents something without a source (including the media), but for some reason we live in a world where claims from the media, not to mention blog posts and random anonymous comments on Slashdot, are accepted as fact, but when it comes to Wikipedia? Well heaven forbid you trust that - the existence of a single false claim out of millions of articles, for a period of 24 hours, means you can't trust it at all!
(Are people not aware of how many falsehoods are published by the media, and later corrected? Countless times I've seen an obvious blooper on a website, even on places like the BBC. It's later corrected, often after a few hours. Because there's no edit history, all trace of it is lost, but continued editing of articles on media websites is commonplace. Then there's the newspapers where a major story contains an error, which is later apologised for in small column of a later edition...)
If you want to measure the accuracy of Wikipedia, then let's have evidence based on a survey of pages, comparing that to other sources (whether it's the media, or other encyclopedias). Previous such surveys, IIRC, have shown Wikipedia to be almost on par with Britannica (so yeah, not as good, but you get what you pay for, and that hardly makes it unreliable). I fail to see how tabloid-style outrage over single instances trumps that.
I'm talking about phones, not music players. The number of people who care about the Zune as a music player is about the same number that care about the Iphone as a phone.
No, the total sales is 37 million: http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/index.cfm?newsid=25810 .
Which is a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of millions sold by the other companies, as I said in my other post.
Not to mention that the other phones are generally compatible with each other across different make/models - whilst Apple think their 37 million is an "enormous platform", the Java platform runs on 2.1 billion phones.
My Motorola V980 functions as a music player, phone, Internet device, gaming platform, camera and video recorder. (I did consider getting an Iphone, but I'd have to carry around a separate device for video.)
It's amazing the way that music fades out automatically when someone rings me - uncanny isn't it, it's almost as if they realised that playing the music and the person speaking to you through the loudspeaker at the same time might just be a bad idea.
However, I still prefer a separate mp3 player when I'm travelling, so I don't find my battery's drained because I've been listening to music for ages, or I've used the flash a few too many times on the camera.
Since most phones come with games installed for free, that's true of most phones. Whilst I'm sure that Nintendo do have some concern about increasing competition from mobile phones, the idea that the Iphone presents more competition than major players like Nokia is just pro-Apple FUD again, I'm afraid.
But you have your logic backwards. The concern for Nintendo is not "people who buy a phone and then have a game on it", it's "out of people who decide they want a handheld gaming device, how many of them buy a phone?" You have offered no evidence to suggest that any significant number of phone sales were from people looking for a gaming device.
I don't see how Apple can't surpass the DS easily.
If you mean surpass in sales, then plenty of companies have "easily" done that - and left both Nintendo, and Apple, long behind.
And Hewlett-Packard sold 13.3 million a quarter - your point? You're comparing different markets.
The mobile phone market is vastly bigger than handheld consoles. If they were going to be worried about someone, they should be worried about Nokia (who shipped 117.8 million phones a quarter during last year). They might, after that, be worried about Samsung (51.8 million a quarter), Motorola (25.4 million a quarter) and LG (23 million a quarter) ( http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/10/30/motorola.q3.2008.results/ ). And the vast majority of these phones can play games (using an industry standard method that's been around over a decade allowing different models of phones to run the same software, though the Iphone has yet to catch up to this ability). (If you're going to quibble about sales of an individual model, then that unfairly penalises other companies for offering more choice to consumers, and anyway there have been different models of the Iphone; but even for single models, the Motorola RAZR alone sold 110 million.)
Sorry guys, but despite all the stories that Slashdot posts about it ("You can read this website on an Iphone! Isn't that amazing!"), at 4 million sales they're a niche player in the mobile phone market.
Are you aware of what the primary purpose of a phone is?
Hint: It's not to buy whatever apps are being sold on their app-store.
More specifically, that it contains no hardware that can't be emulated in software. That's really not that big an assumption, because the alternative is literally magic.
We already know there are some things in nature that would take sufficiently long to simulate on conventional computer to be impractical (though a quantum computer may help).
But even if we could simulate it - whilst that would be an immensely useful thing, this doesn't necessarily help you if your desire is to "download" yourself onto the computer. The question still remains as to whether a simulation is equivalent to the real thing (i.e., a simulation on a computer can itself be conscious).
who calls technical support anyway?
When you do need them, it can be bad.
Last year, they decided to start charging me an extra £10 a month for no reason. I phoned them up, got someone who seemed incapable of understanding what I was saying, and insisted the amount was right, despite them offering no explanation for the rise, and it not matching up with what they advertised on their own website. Finally she apparently realised the problem and said it would be fixed - but it wasn't, there was no refund, and the extra charges continued. Thankfully I then managed to get through to someone with a brain, who finally fixed the problem. Even then though, he didn't refund my money, instead he said they'd put it on my account so I'd be charged less accordingly the next month.
Consider the flip side, what happens if we're accidently late paying our bills. Do we say "Oh nevermind, I'll pay the extra next month"? Do we get to ignore them altogether? No, it's an automatic £10 late payment. To be honest I should have sent them a £10 fee, as well as demanded they refund my money immediately, but it was so much work just to fix the problem, I gave up after that.
(It's a similar issue with calling them out. If you're not in when they come, they charge you money. But if you stay in and they don't turn up, tough luck.)
Don't worry - I'm on Virgin Media, but my "10Mbps" service is still running at the old speed of 4Mbps. And as others have pointed out, anyone actually using this service to its full potential will quickly be throttled for "using too much".
As a general rule, if it turns out that existing law can't be applied to a particular case, legislators should first ask themselves why that is, and whether the thing should be a matter for criminal law in the first place - perhaps there was a good reason for there not being a law against it.
Unfortunately all too often, the Government thinks that any case where a person can't be criminalised someone is a "loophole" in the law that needs closing (I'm in the UK, but I see it here too). And in some cases, even if someone can be criminalised, they still use such cases as an argument for new laws (e.g., here in the UK a murderer had previously looked at naughty pictures, so even though he was convicted under the perfectly good laws we have for murder, the mother of the victim went on a rabid emotional crusade against naughty pictures, so now it's illegal to look at or possess naughty pictures).
Also note that even libel where you make untrue statements is, AIUI, a civil matter, but this law would make even true statements a criminal offence.
The fact that some knowledge was attained without rigorous and formal application of the scientific method is neither here nor there - the problem here is actively teaching children things that are disproven by overwhelming amounts of evidence.
Yes, perhaps we'll end up in a world where people can still tie their shoelaces, but the OP never claimed otherwise - so that is another straw man. A world where people believe we lived with dinosaurs, and we're supposed to not care just so long as people can still tie shoelaces?
The OP may have been an exaggeration, in that teaching ID in some schools may not lead to such effects worldwide. But I don't see how it's a straw man.
The point is that on other phones, you are free to download apps from wherever you want, without hacking the phone.
So even if the official app-place has rules about content, that's not a problem as you can go elsewhere. Just as with the recent store about Microsoft and disallowing VoIP apps - it's simply not comparable to Apple where you aren't free to download elsewhere.
I see your straw men got you modded insightful. I'm afraid mine will just get me set on fire.
You're claiming that the attempts to teach Creationism or "Intelligent Design" in schools is a myth? I'm not sure in what sense you think it was a straw man?
Who's to say the next IPhone won't stab users in the face with a fork?
And when it does, you can bet that it will be touted as an advantage :)
"It doesn't matter that other phones stabbed users in the face with a fork, Apple were the first ones to integrate the fork properly with your face".
And when the next version after that removes the fork-stabbing, there'll be media hype and praise about that too.
Indeed - note that (AIUI) it's done under a local anesthetic, so you're awake and aware during the procedure.
I know that there's no rational reason to be worried, but as someone who's never had any kind of surgery under only a local, I would be squicked at the idea at starting off with this :)
(Although thinking about it, I'm still more squicked at the idea of eye surgery to correct short sightedness...)
OTOH, I prefer injections to pills, which probably makes me different here to most people.
I agree, I hated the "old" Macs. I find it amusing that after years of arguing with Mac users about it, Apple themselves ditched the OS.
The irritating thing is that the greater success of OS X is sometimes used to allude that Macs were great all along (such as the people in this thread telling us how long they've been using their "Macs"). They've now changed the OS, the hardware, everything about it - claiming it's the same platform is just like Trigger's broom... If there's a "cult", it's more over the trademark name, than anything tangible. I might as well put a sticky label on my dual core multitasking PC and call it an Amiga.
I like my modern computers, and I run Windows on them, so I guess you could say I like Windows. Plenty of people do - just because we don't get fanatically about it doesn't mean we don't like it.
For a while, I viewed Windows as very much a "least worst", but that just means the other offerings are even worse. But since 2000, I have to say it's a decent OS (based on the robust NT line, but capable of running consumer applications). Computing in the late 90s was terrible, as all the choices were dire, but I have to say that now, computing is fun again. There are still a few things that annoy me about Windows, and it's a shame that there isn't a mainstream descendant of a decent platform like AmigaOS, but the other mainstream alternatives annoy me far more than Windows.
So yes, I'll say it, I like Windows. And I've tried plenty of operating systems in my time. I used to hate it, but ironically the poor offerings from the alternatives that survived, and the vast improvement over the NT line of DOS/9x, mean that things are different now.
Ever heard that phrase "lies, damned lies and statistics"? Your are basing your argument on one poll, and worse than that a poll in a newspaper.
Right, a linked to poll is unreliable, but:
On the Andrew Marr show in the BBC yesterday, in a poll of polls Labour were still ahead and an election would likely either keep them in or create a hung parliament.
"Some guy on the telly last night said" isn't?
You can find a poll to say whatever you like.
Therefore, "Most likely an election tomorrow would keep Labour in with a slim majority or create a hung parliament." is just speculation.
They'd have to scrap the TV licence. Doesn't sound too bad, but if you try to explain the concept to a BBC employee they look at you as though you've suggested they shag a chicken.
If people are still paying the licence fee, it's not a problem if a few extra people also get hold of it through Iplayer for free. But yes, if they decide to switch to a subscription model, that would be their choice, and of course they should scrap the licence fee. If the BBC employee thinks that strange, they can stick with the licence method.
And just to add:
Well, that settles it then. Politicians and government officials never lie, do they?
The whole source in the first place for this plan comes from the Government, so if they're untrustworthy, we don't have a source for the claim in the first place.
Not to say that they won't do it, but I'd be curious to see another source first.
Why aren't they a good source? They're the second best selling mainstream newspaper in Britain.
Are you serious - lots of readers mean it must be reliable?
Generally any tabloid should be taken with a pinch of salt - the strange thing is though that whilst Slashdot would never cite any other UK tabloid (imagine stories from The Sun listed here?), for some reason people treat the Daily Mail as a serious newspaper and a reliable source.
You don't like their editorial stance?
You appear to not understand the difference between how good a source is, and what point of view it takes. There are sources that I may often disagree with, but still respect that they argue their point well, and do not scaremonger or spread misinformation. Then you have the tabloids that - even though sometimes I might agree with their point of view, I do not enjoy the way it is reported, nor am I sure at all if I can trust it.