I'm not sure that doing a web search is really "snooping" either--after all, what you put on the web is information you put out there.
I don't think that follows. If I camped outside someone's house, took notes of when they arrived and left, perhaps viewed them through the window if they didn't draw the curtains, followed them whereever they went in public, most people would call that snooping, even though I never trespass on private property.
No, a simple websearch isn't snooping, just as me looking at someone in public isn't snooping. But it's possible to "snoop" without breaking into private spaces.
It's also worth noting that "private" depends on context. In the context of work, I'd say that things outside of work is my "private life". That isn't negated because I talk about something in a pub, or a picture ends up on Facebook. Here, "private" means "anything outside of work which doesn't concern or affect the business".
legal terms have legislated meanings, ad you don't get to make them up as you go along.
Words have given meanings, and you don't get to redefine them as you go along. I don't see it being specified that these actions are illegal discrimination. Discrimination is a word in the dictionary, that is not simply a legal term.
You are confusing the fact that laws usually only concern themselves with particular classes of discrimination (e.g., based on race etc), but this has nothing to do with the definition of the word itself.
Is it discrimination? Well, it depends on your point of view. I presume he wasn't referring to simply Googling, but using that information to turn someone down, for a reason that wasn't related to their individual merit for the job. That would be discrimination by the dictionary definition, even though it's legal.
Firstly, even if you disagree, that's not a straw man - it would be that you disagree that it's a fallacy.
And a fallacy is an invalid argument. Doesn't just have to apply to physical things - if I said "Your argument is wrong, because the sun rose today", that would be a fallacy.
The British public support this measure and others like it... People are not oblivious to this. You must understand that most people in the UK want this.
Whilst I share your pessimist view of the British population and its media, this is not so clearly true for ID cards. Opinion polls suggest that people are in favour of an ID card, but only for something that is free, or very cheap. Support drops as soon as the price increases - a MORI in 2004 showed that only 20% were willing to pay more than £25, which is way less than the actual proposed cost of the ID card.
Now yes, I wish that people would oppose them out of principle, or issues such as freedom or privacy, rather than simply "I don't want to pay for it". But nonetheless, polls show that most people would be unwilling to support the ID card at its currently proposed cost.
More general polls also show that support for a card has fallen over time.
Well, basically left and right wing are pretty illdefined terms, that are often used to mean something beyond their strict economic meanings. I suspect that's what the OP meant, though I agree it's better to avoid them.
Note that whilst the UK is left of the US, it is not in any meaningful sense remotely "socialist". Yes, we have a national health service. Big deal, the US has nationalised education and military. In both countries, the vast majority of goods and services are produced by private individuals and corporations.
I don't see how filming someone's private sexual activity, so you can distribute it on your commercial website, and write a sensational article to sell newspapers, is "proper investigative reporting".
If they discover evidence of a crime, they can go to the police like everyone else. If they want to publish the information, then they had damn well take some responsibility for when they get it wrong. And in the NOTW's case, there was no mistake here - anyone could see the harm that would be done by their intentional actions.
The NOTW should think themselves lucky - most people filming a private person's sexual acts, even if not for profit and distribution, would find themselves up on some voyeurism or harrassment charge. Is that harming my freedom of speech? Of course not.
The Daily Mail piss and moan about the "nanny state" enough, granted. But that's because there's a Labour government in power right now. If (when) the Tories were in power, they'd be pulling the same shit and the Mail would be praising them for it.
Indeed. Whilst I'm glad of any opposition to authoritarianism, no matter who it's from or what the motive, I can't help thinking the Daily Mail only opposes because these laws will affect everyone (i.e., including white middle class Christian heterosexual British Daily Mail readers...)
Of course, it isn't as simple as some papers good, some papers bad. Most papers have had a range of views. But I think we'd be better off overall without the Daily Mail and other tabloids.
I know that RTFA is unfashionable here, but in this case it is worth it - nowhere on the Facegroup page does it claim that the group is as part of the protest - that's just poor wording in the Slashdot summary. The actions people are urged to do are clearly explained on the group - most notably, writing to your MP. It ought to be pretty obvious that the group is there as one of several means to spread information.
Do you seriously think that the Government would go "Well, we were going to scrap this ID card scheme - but then we found they'd spread the word on Facebook. Hahaha. Obviously we can't take them seriously now because of that"?
We might as well criticise NO2ID because someone decided to spread the word. "Protesting on Slashdot!? Way to take this seriously and be firmly opposed!"
Evidently people in the UK are way too polite, ideally they should protest at Parliament's doorstep....
Why didn't anyone think of it? All this time, people were thinking that protesting meant starting up a facebook group. If only you'd told us this before, ID cards would have long been defeated!
Oh wait - groups such as NO2ID have been campaigning for years, including directly to politicians, through the media, and yes, nationwide protests.
(Last time I looked, plenty of US and other countries have facebook groups too - does this mean that they are also "way too polite", and never protest, by your logic?)
I'd also like to point out that facebook groups are the new Internet petitions: completely meaningless. Either call or mail your representative, or take it like a good consumer.
So you think that Slashdot stories about the Government doing things are also meaningless?
Don't be silly. No one claims that the Government is taking note of Slashdot(!) or Facebook - the point of these is to spread information. And yes, NO2ID have been telling people to write to their MPs, years before you thought of it.
BRILLIANT, at least it shows a highly evolved sense of ironic humor
No, it shows a straw man.
Please point me to somewhere on Facebook where they:
* Make membership compulsory. * Require £93 for membership. * Require information, including address, and fingerprints. (You do realise that you can, gasp, lie on a website? Or is your name really Tensor? Perhaps you should try claiming your name is "Tensor" and refusing to give your address and fingerprints when you are required to sign up for an ID card, and tell me how that works out?) * Pass new laws making associated criminal offences.
to protest against public misuse of private databases they decide to make a private database of people protesting against public misuse of private databases
No one is protesting "databases". I bet NO2ID themselves have databases. Your straw man is no better than the tired "How can you be a member of a group against ID cards!!!" comments.
Furthermore, how does protesting against public misuse of private databases entail opposition to all databases? No one is claiming that "databases" are evil, the problem is the database planned by the UK Government, which as absolutely nothing to do with Facebook's.
protesting on facebook was childish and stupid
The fact that you say this suggests that you just have an axe to grind against Facebook, and hence resort to missing the point and making up a straw man to argue with. That's childish and stupid.
Yes, what a moron I was. There I was protesting ID cards, when I should have been worried about the £93 I have to pay to Facebook. I didn't want to join Facebook, but they made it compulsory for everyone in the UK.
How hypocritical of me for me to question the Government, when I was quite happy to proceed to my local Facebook office, and hand over my fingerprints and other biometrics, as well as whatever personal details they wanted. Yes indeed, go to my profile, and you'll see my date of birth and address clearly entered. It's a good thing too, because if I forgot to keep it updated, it'd be a criminal offence.
Now, I must remember to make sure I haven't lost my Facebook card, as that's a criminal offence too.
Seriously, please try to think, rather than acting as if anything with the word "database" in it must be equivalent. I see that you have a Slashdot account - is that the same too? Does that mean you're a moron if you ever complain about privacy or use of your data, or any law by the Government that has the word "database" in it?
not to mention that if your level of protest is a few mouse clicks, no one is going to take you seriously.
Where does it say the group is itself a protest? The Internet is useful for spreading information. The action is all the other things that NO2ID are doing, and encouraging people to do: writing to MPs, donating to their defence fund, getting media coverage, encouraging people to refuse to register (or renewing their passport early to avoid the database).
But hey, I'm sure it's much easier to pretend they're all morons, and that a random Slashdot poster who's spent five seconds thinking about it knows more about the issues than they do.
Maybe, but the difference is that I choose to use Facebook, and I choose what data what to give it. And it isn't my money that they're forcibly taking.
I might be able to swallow a mouthful of sea water when I'm at the beach, but that doesn't mean I'll be able to finish the rest of the ocean.
Well, sometimes spotting a pattern from past experience is valid, other times it isn't.
It's a fallacy, pure and simple.
You've presented a single counter-example, and claim that the argument is always invalid? That's a fallacy!
In the context of politics, it is valid. One reason is that your analogy is based on what is physically possible, where as laws that are passed are constrained ultimately only by what politicians want. And in politics, you have the concept of a precedent - common is the argument "Since it was okay to pass this law, this new law is merely closing a loophole".
Drinking a mouthful of water doesn't set a precedent for you being physically capable of drinking the ocean. But politicians can pass whatever laws they like, and the issue is not about what's physically possible. A slipperly slope argument is not a fallacy if you can show evidence that we're on a slippery slope. The problem is that it goes like this:
1. New law X is proposed. Critics say "But won't this lead to Y?" Dismissed as a "slippery slope fallacy". 2. A few years later, law Y is proposed. Supporters say "Since we have law X, it's okay to pass Y, it's no different, or just closing a loophole. What's that, you say that X was bad anyway? Well you should have spoken up back then!"
As a real example, I've seen this where the law on fictional child pr0n was X, and the recent law on fictional "extreme" adult images was Y. In fact, the Coroners and Justice Bill mentioned in this law also criminalises all non-realistic child images too, and people giving evidence in support of the law have argued that this is no different to the laws on realistic images. Yet, if I point out my concerns that this'll lead to a law on "extreme" cartoons, I'll get accused of a slippery slope fallacy!
You can't have it both ways.
Similarly, the law on "extreme" images covers possession - the Government claims it's just closing a loophole, based on existing laws of publication.
Since supporters of new laws are quite willing to use previous laws as precedent, we had better damn well make sure we oppose laws not just on what they restrict, but by what precedents they will set for future laws.
True, but I mean they updated it with patches that were stored on hard disk, rather than releasing a new ROM.
A ROM made more sense when hard disks were expensive and few people had them in lower end machines. Just because we're hypothesising about a modern Amiga doesn't mean that everything had to stay the same - it would be like thinking modern PCs should be running a very fast version of DOS. In fact, I'd suspect that if Commodore had stayed in business, then any modern "Amiga" would share little other than the name - just like as happened with Macs, or Windows. (Indeed, some of Commodore's plans for future Amigas at the time included switching to a new CPU, replacing AmigaOS with NT, and a new graphics chipset that was incompatible with the existing chipset.)
I've always dreamed of what the world would be like if modern computing had gone this route. Imagine your OS as a bank of roms, and your PC as a fully integrated machine rather than a patchwork of PCI cards and third party drivers.
But in many ways, I'd argue that modern computing has gone the Amiga way: consider how most motherboards now have everying on board, and it's only the graphics card that people might optionally have as an extra for performance. (Whilst drivers can be a pain, they have the advantage of allowing standardisation through an API - the Amiga was moving towards a driver model for graphics and so on, and I'd have thought it a great advantage for any modern machine taking advantage of 3D hardware, so chances are that a hypothetical modern Amiga would have drivers too. Chances are they would've dropped the ROMs too - AmigaOS 3.5 onwards came entirely on CD.)
Consider: today I run a multitasking OS, with combined GUI and command line. The machine I use has dedicated graphics and sound chips, and everything's integrated on the motherboard. Finally, I'd argue that today's machines are modern Amigas. Compare that to the DOS based PCs, or single-tasking non-command-line and no-chipsets on the classic Macs. Looking back, it's laughable how people back then tried to justify their expensive primitive purchases (e.g., claiming that it was better not to have a GUI), when we see how computers are designed today. The Amiga was written off as a games machine, but what is it that now drives the 3D graphics industry, and arguably the personal computer industry as a whole? Yes, I like having a fast machine with decent graphics in front of me, rather than a boring command line operated piece of business furniture, or a black and white interface that doesn't let me do things the way I want it. The only thing stopping it being a modern Amiga is the trademark.
Safari is made by Apple, that fact alone is enough for a very sizable portion of the Slashdot readership to ignore any reason to dislike it.
Of course a sizable portion don't like Apple products. Just as a sizeable proportion don't like Microsoft, or Linux, or AmigaOS. Since most people like some products, and not others, it follows that for any given product, there'll be a sizeable portion who don't like it. I don't think there's anything special by that. What's more noticeable is the number of people who can't seem to stand any criticism of Apple products, or think that because they like it, it must be the best thing ever.
Net Applications only gives weekly and daily statistics to paying subscribers.
So if there's a updated version of stats, why didn't they use the latest version for the other web browsers? Check the figures - for all the other browsers, the figures matched with the link exactly. This means they're not comparing like with like. How do you explain the total coming to over 100%?!
It's not a surprise that Safari's average for the last month was lower
Um, you miss the point - the article says that the figure was 9.04% last month. So this is still inflated over the statistic given in the link. Are you suggesting that the data is two months old or more?
And where is a reference for your claim? The website I'm looking at is being dynamically updated - in fact, it's changed since I looked this morning. So I'm getting updated statistics. Why would they update it continually, but have it two or months behind? And even if that was true, IT Pro are still telling fibbs in that the other browser stats they quote are also not up to date.
My God - this statistic has been exposed as a lie, and still people are trying to twist it to be true. Only on an Apple story.
quicktime - the most reprehensible video codec ever - it's almost as bad as malware with all the crap that installs with it - even when you tell it not to.
itunes for pc - egads - how many times do you have to say no - don't install this or that, and watch it try to install anyway. again - malware grade software installer
safari - crashed multiple systems, and couldn't open basic sites - will never install another version - ever - oh - the calling home stuff built into it - on par with the latest botnet.
osx - how many macs have been bricked by faulty updates? more than apple would like you to know...
apple hardware - at a minimum 4 times more expensive than it should be - just for a name or apple logo? hardly worth it...
It's a shame that on Apple stories, the mods abuse negative mods for things they disagree with - it's the only category I have to browse at -1.
I haven't used Safari, but I am in full agreement with the rest, especially Quicktime. Given how people rightly dislike things like Realplayer here on Slashdot, why does Quicktime get accepted, when it's far more annoying, invasive, and you even have to pay for basic functionality such as full screen mode? Oh, because it's Apple, and they're held to a different standard.
This reminds me of when someone was repeating the "Just Works" mantra, and claiming that whenever he uses Windows to do things like watching a video, there's always things about it that distracts him from just trying to get on and do it. I said I'd never experienced this, but funningly enough, I concede that that evening, I did have frustrations when trying to do something as basic as watching a video on Windows.
Seems like pro-Apple mods can't bear to hear that other products work too. Opera's a perfectly fine product, as is Firefox.
Perhaps the mod would like to share with us how to enable full screen mode in Quicktime for Windows, since I am obviously mistaken?
(And unfortunately my experience with Apple Quicktime on Windows is that they don't Just Work - even basic functionality such as full screen mode isn't available. Not to mention the hideous and non-standard UI - something they are supposedly praised for. Maybe you mean it Works Just on Macs, but I'm not enthusiastic about downloading anything else they release for Windows.)
But their stats for the other browsers match exactly. So if they're comparing browser usages from one report, to Safari's share in another, that's hardly fair anyway!
As another poster notes, their set of stats adds up to over 100%!
(And I love how you twist the expense of Macs to be a good thing.)
Same numbers you will get if you click the link in TFA to see that 10.91% market share. Cause you CAN'T SEE THE WEEKLY REPORT UNLESS YOU PAY.
Even the idea that the 10.91% is part of some report we can't see is highly unlikely to be true, as the "latest" numbers given for all the other browsers are the same as in the report that is linked to.
Indeed, well spotted - the answer is to be found by looking at their original source that they link ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 ). Guess what? Whilst all the other browsers are reported correctly, Safari is not 10.91%, but 7.42%. With this figure, the total comes to less than 100% (the remainder presumably taken up by the other browsers). So they've inflated Apple's share by 3.49%, or in terms of proportion, it's almost 1.5 times the true value!
(Are we going to hear an article that this is now part of a pro-Apple agenda? I think blatantly lying about usage statistics is far worse than saying people don't use Iphones in Japan, after all...)
I don't know if it's intentional, or incompetence, but together with the "4 times 0.5 equals 1 percent" blooper, I think we can safely put this article in the trash.
I wrote a long post which appears to have been eaten. In summary:
Even allowing for rounding, the growth per day must be less than 0.26125%. Their other statistics are quoted accurately, indeed, to not just 1, but 2 decimal places. There is no way it is reasonable to represent the growth as "almost 0.5%" per day.
I'm not sure how we can trust an article that doesn't get basic maths right.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that doing a web search is really "snooping" either--after all, what you put on the web is information you put out there.
I don't think that follows. If I camped outside someone's house, took notes of when they arrived and left, perhaps viewed them through the window if they didn't draw the curtains, followed them whereever they went in public, most people would call that snooping, even though I never trespass on private property.
No, a simple websearch isn't snooping, just as me looking at someone in public isn't snooping. But it's possible to "snoop" without breaking into private spaces.
It's also worth noting that "private" depends on context. In the context of work, I'd say that things outside of work is my "private life". That isn't negated because I talk about something in a pub, or a picture ends up on Facebook. Here, "private" means "anything outside of work which doesn't concern or affect the business".
legal terms have legislated meanings, ad you don't get to make them up as you go along.
Words have given meanings, and you don't get to redefine them as you go along. I don't see it being specified that these actions are illegal discrimination. Discrimination is a word in the dictionary, that is not simply a legal term.
You are confusing the fact that laws usually only concern themselves with particular classes of discrimination (e.g., based on race etc), but this has nothing to do with the definition of the word itself.
Is it discrimination? Well, it depends on your point of view. I presume he wasn't referring to simply Googling, but using that information to turn someone down, for a reason that wasn't related to their individual merit for the job. That would be discrimination by the dictionary definition, even though it's legal.
Firstly, even if you disagree, that's not a straw man - it would be that you disagree that it's a fallacy.
And a fallacy is an invalid argument. Doesn't just have to apply to physical things - if I said "Your argument is wrong, because the sun rose today", that would be a fallacy.
The British public support this measure and others like it ... People are not oblivious to this. You must understand that most people in the UK want this.
Whilst I share your pessimist view of the British population and its media, this is not so clearly true for ID cards. Opinion polls suggest that people are in favour of an ID card, but only for something that is free, or very cheap. Support drops as soon as the price increases - a MORI in 2004 showed that only 20% were willing to pay more than £25, which is way less than the actual proposed cost of the ID card.
Now yes, I wish that people would oppose them out of principle, or issues such as freedom or privacy, rather than simply "I don't want to pay for it". But nonetheless, polls show that most people would be unwilling to support the ID card at its currently proposed cost.
More general polls also show that support for a card has fallen over time.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_Polls_on_British_National_Identity_Card for more details.
Well, basically left and right wing are pretty illdefined terms, that are often used to mean something beyond their strict economic meanings. I suspect that's what the OP meant, though I agree it's better to avoid them.
Note that whilst the UK is left of the US, it is not in any meaningful sense remotely "socialist". Yes, we have a national health service. Big deal, the US has nationalised education and military. In both countries, the vast majority of goods and services are produced by private individuals and corporations.
I don't see how filming someone's private sexual activity, so you can distribute it on your commercial website, and write a sensational article to sell newspapers, is "proper investigative reporting".
If they discover evidence of a crime, they can go to the police like everyone else. If they want to publish the information, then they had damn well take some responsibility for when they get it wrong. And in the NOTW's case, there was no mistake here - anyone could see the harm that would be done by their intentional actions.
The NOTW should think themselves lucky - most people filming a private person's sexual acts, even if not for profit and distribution, would find themselves up on some voyeurism or harrassment charge. Is that harming my freedom of speech? Of course not.
The Daily Mail piss and moan about the "nanny state" enough, granted. But that's because there's a Labour government in power right now. If (when) the Tories were in power, they'd be pulling the same shit and the Mail would be praising them for it.
Indeed. Whilst I'm glad of any opposition to authoritarianism, no matter who it's from or what the motive, I can't help thinking the Daily Mail only opposes because these laws will affect everyone (i.e., including white middle class Christian heterosexual British Daily Mail readers...)
Of course, it isn't as simple as some papers good, some papers bad. Most papers have had a range of views. But I think we'd be better off overall without the Daily Mail and other tabloids.
I know that RTFA is unfashionable here, but in this case it is worth it - nowhere on the Facegroup page does it claim that the group is as part of the protest - that's just poor wording in the Slashdot summary. The actions people are urged to do are clearly explained on the group - most notably, writing to your MP. It ought to be pretty obvious that the group is there as one of several means to spread information.
Do you seriously think that the Government would go "Well, we were going to scrap this ID card scheme - but then we found they'd spread the word on Facebook. Hahaha. Obviously we can't take them seriously now because of that"?
We might as well criticise NO2ID because someone decided to spread the word. "Protesting on Slashdot!? Way to take this seriously and be firmly opposed!"
Evidently people in the UK are way too polite, ideally they should protest at Parliament's doorstep....
Why didn't anyone think of it? All this time, people were thinking that protesting meant starting up a facebook group. If only you'd told us this before, ID cards would have long been defeated!
Oh wait - groups such as NO2ID have been campaigning for years, including directly to politicians, through the media, and yes, nationwide protests.
(Last time I looked, plenty of US and other countries have facebook groups too - does this mean that they are also "way too polite", and never protest, by your logic?)
I'd also like to point out that facebook groups are the new Internet petitions: completely meaningless. Either call or mail your representative, or take it like a good consumer.
So you think that Slashdot stories about the Government doing things are also meaningless?
Don't be silly. No one claims that the Government is taking note of Slashdot(!) or Facebook - the point of these is to spread information. And yes, NO2ID have been telling people to write to their MPs, years before you thought of it.
BRILLIANT, at least it shows a highly evolved sense of ironic humor
No, it shows a straw man.
Please point me to somewhere on Facebook where they:
* Make membership compulsory.
* Require £93 for membership.
* Require information, including address, and fingerprints. (You do realise that you can, gasp, lie on a website? Or is your name really Tensor? Perhaps you should try claiming your name is "Tensor" and refusing to give your address and fingerprints when you are required to sign up for an ID card, and tell me how that works out?)
* Pass new laws making associated criminal offences.
to protest against public misuse of private databases they decide to make a private database of people protesting against public misuse of private databases
No one is protesting "databases". I bet NO2ID themselves have databases. Your straw man is no better than the tired "How can you be a member of a group against ID cards!!!" comments.
Furthermore, how does protesting against public misuse of private databases entail opposition to all databases? No one is claiming that "databases" are evil, the problem is the database planned by the UK Government, which as absolutely nothing to do with Facebook's.
protesting on facebook was childish and stupid
The fact that you say this suggests that you just have an axe to grind against Facebook, and hence resort to missing the point and making up a straw man to argue with. That's childish and stupid.
Yes, what a moron I was. There I was protesting ID cards, when I should have been worried about the £93 I have to pay to Facebook. I didn't want to join Facebook, but they made it compulsory for everyone in the UK.
How hypocritical of me for me to question the Government, when I was quite happy to proceed to my local Facebook office, and hand over my fingerprints and other biometrics, as well as whatever personal details they wanted. Yes indeed, go to my profile, and you'll see my date of birth and address clearly entered. It's a good thing too, because if I forgot to keep it updated, it'd be a criminal offence.
Now, I must remember to make sure I haven't lost my Facebook card, as that's a criminal offence too.
Seriously, please try to think, rather than acting as if anything with the word "database" in it must be equivalent. I see that you have a Slashdot account - is that the same too? Does that mean you're a moron if you ever complain about privacy or use of your data, or any law by the Government that has the word "database" in it?
not to mention that if your level of protest is a few mouse clicks, no one is going to take you seriously.
Where does it say the group is itself a protest? The Internet is useful for spreading information. The action is all the other things that NO2ID are doing, and encouraging people to do: writing to MPs, donating to their defence fund, getting media coverage, encouraging people to refuse to register (or renewing their passport early to avoid the database).
But hey, I'm sure it's much easier to pretend they're all morons, and that a random Slashdot poster who's spent five seconds thinking about it knows more about the issues than they do.
There's also the opposite problem of too many endings - presumably because the writers repeatedly think the show will be cancelled (e.g., Stargate).
Maybe, but the difference is that I choose to use Facebook, and I choose what data what to give it. And it isn't my money that they're forcibly taking.
Really this is no different to Blunkett's absurd People choose to have supermarket loyalty cards, so the Government's database is no different claim.
I might be able to swallow a mouthful of sea water when I'm at the beach, but that doesn't mean I'll be able to finish the rest of the ocean.
Well, sometimes spotting a pattern from past experience is valid, other times it isn't.
It's a fallacy, pure and simple.
You've presented a single counter-example, and claim that the argument is always invalid? That's a fallacy!
In the context of politics, it is valid. One reason is that your analogy is based on what is physically possible, where as laws that are passed are constrained ultimately only by what politicians want. And in politics, you have the concept of a precedent - common is the argument "Since it was okay to pass this law, this new law is merely closing a loophole".
Drinking a mouthful of water doesn't set a precedent for you being physically capable of drinking the ocean. But politicians can pass whatever laws they like, and the issue is not about what's physically possible. A slipperly slope argument is not a fallacy if you can show evidence that we're on a slippery slope. The problem is that it goes like this:
1. New law X is proposed. Critics say "But won't this lead to Y?" Dismissed as a "slippery slope fallacy".
2. A few years later, law Y is proposed. Supporters say "Since we have law X, it's okay to pass Y, it's no different, or just closing a loophole. What's that, you say that X was bad anyway? Well you should have spoken up back then!"
As a real example, I've seen this where the law on fictional child pr0n was X, and the recent law on fictional "extreme" adult images was Y. In fact, the Coroners and Justice Bill mentioned in this law also criminalises all non-realistic child images too, and people giving evidence in support of the law have argued that this is no different to the laws on realistic images. Yet, if I point out my concerns that this'll lead to a law on "extreme" cartoons, I'll get accused of a slippery slope fallacy!
You can't have it both ways.
Similarly, the law on "extreme" images covers possession - the Government claims it's just closing a loophole, based on existing laws of publication.
Since supporters of new laws are quite willing to use previous laws as precedent, we had better damn well make sure we oppose laws not just on what they restrict, but by what precedents they will set for future laws.
The same court of human rights which awards terrorists compensation?
Link please? Preferably not from the Daily Mail.
True, but I mean they updated it with patches that were stored on hard disk, rather than releasing a new ROM.
A ROM made more sense when hard disks were expensive and few people had them in lower end machines. Just because we're hypothesising about a modern Amiga doesn't mean that everything had to stay the same - it would be like thinking modern PCs should be running a very fast version of DOS. In fact, I'd suspect that if Commodore had stayed in business, then any modern "Amiga" would share little other than the name - just like as happened with Macs, or Windows. (Indeed, some of Commodore's plans for future Amigas at the time included switching to a new CPU, replacing AmigaOS with NT, and a new graphics chipset that was incompatible with the existing chipset.)
I've always dreamed of what the world would be like if modern computing had gone this route. Imagine your OS as a bank of roms, and your PC as a fully integrated machine rather than a patchwork of PCI cards and third party drivers.
But in many ways, I'd argue that modern computing has gone the Amiga way: consider how most motherboards now have everying on board, and it's only the graphics card that people might optionally have as an extra for performance. (Whilst drivers can be a pain, they have the advantage of allowing standardisation through an API - the Amiga was moving towards a driver model for graphics and so on, and I'd have thought it a great advantage for any modern machine taking advantage of 3D hardware, so chances are that a hypothetical modern Amiga would have drivers too. Chances are they would've dropped the ROMs too - AmigaOS 3.5 onwards came entirely on CD.)
Consider: today I run a multitasking OS, with combined GUI and command line. The machine I use has dedicated graphics and sound chips, and everything's integrated on the motherboard. Finally, I'd argue that today's machines are modern Amigas. Compare that to the DOS based PCs, or single-tasking non-command-line and no-chipsets on the classic Macs. Looking back, it's laughable how people back then tried to justify their expensive primitive purchases (e.g., claiming that it was better not to have a GUI), when we see how computers are designed today. The Amiga was written off as a games machine, but what is it that now drives the 3D graphics industry, and arguably the personal computer industry as a whole? Yes, I like having a fast machine with decent graphics in front of me, rather than a boring command line operated piece of business furniture, or a black and white interface that doesn't let me do things the way I want it. The only thing stopping it being a modern Amiga is the trademark.
Safari is made by Apple, that fact alone is enough for a very sizable portion of the Slashdot readership to ignore any reason to dislike it.
Of course a sizable portion don't like Apple products. Just as a sizeable proportion don't like Microsoft, or Linux, or AmigaOS. Since most people like some products, and not others, it follows that for any given product, there'll be a sizeable portion who don't like it. I don't think there's anything special by that. What's more noticeable is the number of people who can't seem to stand any criticism of Apple products, or think that because they like it, it must be the best thing ever.
Net Applications only gives weekly and daily statistics to paying subscribers.
So if there's a updated version of stats, why didn't they use the latest version for the other web browsers? Check the figures - for all the other browsers, the figures matched with the link exactly. This means they're not comparing like with like. How do you explain the total coming to over 100%?!
It's not a surprise that Safari's average for the last month was lower
Um, you miss the point - the article says that the figure was 9.04% last month. So this is still inflated over the statistic given in the link. Are you suggesting that the data is two months old or more?
And where is a reference for your claim? The website I'm looking at is being dynamically updated - in fact, it's changed since I looked this morning. So I'm getting updated statistics. Why would they update it continually, but have it two or months behind? And even if that was true, IT Pro are still telling fibbs in that the other browser stats they quote are also not up to date.
My God - this statistic has been exposed as a lie, and still people are trying to twist it to be true. Only on an Apple story.
quicktime - the most reprehensible video codec ever - it's almost as bad as malware with all the crap that installs with it - even when you tell it not to.
itunes for pc - egads - how many times do you have to say no - don't install this or that, and watch it try to install anyway. again - malware grade software installer
safari - crashed multiple systems, and couldn't open basic sites - will never install another version - ever - oh - the calling home stuff built into it - on par with the latest botnet.
osx - how many macs have been bricked by faulty updates? more than apple would like you to know...
apple hardware - at a minimum 4 times more expensive than it should be - just for a name or apple logo? hardly worth it...
It's a shame that on Apple stories, the mods abuse negative mods for things they disagree with - it's the only category I have to browse at -1.
I haven't used Safari, but I am in full agreement with the rest, especially Quicktime. Given how people rightly dislike things like Realplayer here on Slashdot, why does Quicktime get accepted, when it's far more annoying, invasive, and you even have to pay for basic functionality such as full screen mode? Oh, because it's Apple, and they're held to a different standard.
This reminds me of when someone was repeating the "Just Works" mantra, and claiming that whenever he uses Windows to do things like watching a video, there's always things about it that distracts him from just trying to get on and do it. I said I'd never experienced this, but funningly enough, I concede that that evening, I did have frustrations when trying to do something as basic as watching a video on Windows.
It was a quicktime video.
Seems like pro-Apple mods can't bear to hear that other products work too. Opera's a perfectly fine product, as is Firefox.
Perhaps the mod would like to share with us how to enable full screen mode in Quicktime for Windows, since I am obviously mistaken?
(And unfortunately my experience with Apple Quicktime on Windows is that they don't Just Work - even basic functionality such as full screen mode isn't available. Not to mention the hideous and non-standard UI - something they are supposedly praised for. Maybe you mean it Works Just on Macs, but I'm not enthusiastic about downloading anything else they release for Windows.)
Here's a ref, btw: http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/qtime.htm - not much has changed with the later versions.
But their stats for the other browsers match exactly. So if they're comparing browser usages from one report, to Safari's share in another, that's hardly fair anyway!
As another poster notes, their set of stats adds up to over 100%!
(And I love how you twist the expense of Macs to be a good thing.)
Indeed.
Same numbers you will get if you click the link in TFA to see that 10.91% market share.
Cause you CAN'T SEE THE WEEKLY REPORT UNLESS YOU PAY.
Even the idea that the 10.91% is part of some report we can't see is highly unlikely to be true, as the "latest" numbers given for all the other browsers are the same as in the report that is linked to.
Indeed, well spotted - the answer is to be found by looking at their original source that they link ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 ). Guess what? Whilst all the other browsers are reported correctly, Safari is not 10.91%, but 7.42%. With this figure, the total comes to less than 100% (the remainder presumably taken up by the other browsers). So they've inflated Apple's share by 3.49%, or in terms of proportion, it's almost 1.5 times the true value!
(Are we going to hear an article that this is now part of a pro-Apple agenda? I think blatantly lying about usage statistics is far worse than saying people don't use Iphones in Japan, after all...)
I don't know if it's intentional, or incompetence, but together with the "4 times 0.5 equals 1 percent" blooper, I think we can safely put this article in the trash.
I wrote a long post which appears to have been eaten. In summary:
Even allowing for rounding, the growth per day must be less than 0.26125%. Their other statistics are quoted accurately, indeed, to not just 1, but 2 decimal places. There is no way it is reasonable to represent the growth as "almost 0.5%" per day.
I'm not sure how we can trust an article that doesn't get basic maths right.
Secondly, their article is a blatant lie - the original source http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 lists Safari as 7.42% (the other browsers are all reported accurately).