To be fair, there is some promise on the civil liberties front - ID cards are already abolished, along with many other changes planned, and it looks like we will see the Freedom / Repeal bill repealing a whole load of authoritarian laws.
Will this law, that allows the one-sided extradition between the US and UK, be repealed? Part of the problem is though that Labour passed so much of these kinds of laws. There are numerous others that I think should be also repealed, but so far I haven't seen them mentioned. I hope the new coalition keep at it, and don't stop short on only a handful of laws to repeal.
It's not so much a moral issue, but more of an issue of how good the platform is. Just as Apple have the right to do it, we have the right to advertise how awful that is, and suggest other platforms.
And the OP's analogy with MS still works here - even leaving aside the legal issues, there'd still be large numbers of people claiming it as a reason for Windows being poor, and how we should all use something else.
(Remember the proposed 3 application Windows limit for netbook, and how much ridicule that got? But now the Ipad with its 1 application limit, and suddenly not only is that acceptable, but it's actually an advantage?)
Also from TFA:...he says he was told by authorities that it was going to be or was cancelled.
Nice selective quoting. I have no idea if the claim has merit or not, but I imagine that was the key point, not your made up selectively quoted straw man.
It's all part of the Apple advertising though - the trend of using "Iphone" or "Ipad" to refer to any old phone or tablet gives you the bad publicity as well as the good. (Thanks to the Apple-only coverage, some Slashdotters here don't even seem to realise that other feature/smart phones and tablets exist.)
Er Flamebait? Did Larry Sanger get mods points, or is a mod here seriously suggesting that papers and Wikipedia should be constrained by what's illegal in other countries, even if it's legal for them?
The Sun are guilty of much hypocrisy - but sorry, doing something that is legal, and only illegal elsewhere is not one of them. It would be absurd as criticising the Wikipedia (hosted in the US) Virgin Killers article, because it might be illegal in places like the UK.
A better example would be, as you note earlier in your comment, the habit of certain tabloids focusing on celebrities approaching 16 (most notably the Daily Star, who did this on one page, and then on the opposite page they were slagging off the Brass Eye parody).
Wow, if only we had some standard universal serial bus that might allow us to connect a phone to a netbook, without relying on a custom "slot" and buying both products from one company. Maybe we could use some wireless short range networking method too. And then if only there was a way for the netbook to make use of the phone's Internet connection, so you can use the same SIM and data account for both.
The modular approach addresses one of the great problems of mobile devices for both buyers and designers: you cannot, with current technology, have a device that is both large enough for comfortable extended use and small enough to carry around all the time.
The issue is exemplified by Apple's Iphone and the larger Ipad. The only way to have the advantages of both Apple devices is to buy both and synchronise data between them.
But how is this netbook and phone bundle any different to buying a phone and netbook? Is the price much better, for example?
And how does this device solve the synchronisation problem - do I magically have access to the same data on both, without synchronisation?
If no one needs it, why are the ISPs so keen to claim "unlimited"? They should just sell it as limited, and obviously no one would mind (because if they do, they're pirates) according to you.
The sad thing is that Wikipedia gets criticism from both sides.
In the real world, the fact that a joke article like this is found on Wikipedia is a reason to criticise and mock it.
Yet among the geek world, suddenly Wikipedia is also bad if they remove an article on joke topics, just because they're obsessed fanatics of XKCD (I like XKCD too, but let's not take a joke seriously). Ironically, you get people who even try to have it both ways - like the OP, who actually thinks that Wikipedia would be more authoritative by including joke articles on made up terms from XKCD!
The problem is not the cost, the problem is of including unreliable information, and misleadingly presenting made up words as having any notability or relevant to an encyclopedia.
Ironically, the very thing that the OP was also criticising Wikipedia for. He actually thinks that Wikipedia would be more "authoritative" if it included made up words from XKCD!
Wait - you're claiming that deleting an article about a non-existent word makes Wikipedia unreliable?
if you use Wikipedia as any sort of authoritative reference, you're an idiot.
Yeah right, obviously Wikipedia would be much better if they included articles on made up words. Obviously those authoritative references like Britannica and the OED have entries for words that XKCD only just made up.
(Nice to see you prefer ad-hominems to reason, by the way.)
Indeed - and if only that was all they did. But there's usually someone who'll add an XKCD "In Popular Culture" reference to just about every single topic that a strip covers.
The particularly sad thing is I don't think they got the message of XKCD's "In Popular Culture" Wood strip...
Wait - Wikipedia is bad, because the consensus might be to not allow articles on non-existent topics?
I guess you must really hate Britannica. Look at all the stuff they don't let in! Is that "political correctness" too?
It needs to peer-to-peer. It needs to be built upon a trust network. Or it will never surpass what is essentially a dictatorship over mindsets and ideas.
How would this work? Either you have a single version - in which case, you end up with it being like Wikipedia, where there will always be whiners who disagree with the decision made, no matter what decision that is - or we end up with numerous different versions, but for an encyclopedia this doesn't really work. (If you want a Wiki for your non-encyclopedic topic, then go and start one.)
And there'll be equal numbers of people saying that Wikipedia is bad, because it's full of nonsense/trivial articles, citing this "malamanteau" fiasco as a prime example.
(I love XKCD, but personally I find it tiresome that someone has to go adding something to XKCD - nevermind this example, there's someone who will do it for almost every single strip. XKCD has a strip about some topic? Bam, someone will add it to "In Popular Culture" under that article. I'm surprise that these sad obsessives haven't completely missed the irony by adding XKCD to the wood article...)
And I think his guess is going be wrong, and he'll learn a very hard lesson that may cost the LibDems most of their votes for many decades to come.
I suspect the problem is that there is no right guess - there are enough Lib Dem voters who would hate a coalition with either party, for it to be a problem. Which is why I think any coalition should only be done for PR - otherwise, what do Lib Dems gain from it? (I suspect the only promise of implementing Lib Dem policies will be things the other party were wanting to do anyway - and if the Lib Dems remain independent, they can still vote on individual bills, from either party.)
I agree that AV+ seems good too, and has the advantage of seeming closer to what we have now, so may be more likely to pass in a referendum.
Note that AV is not proportional. It's still far better than FPTP, so I'm glad it's being considered as a possibility - though I wonder if it is worth the risk of forming a coalition.
If the Conservatives give a promise of voting reform, then it'd be worth it
The latest news according to the BBC is that Tory offer a referendum on AV, but no to PR. Labour offer AV (without referendum), with a referendum on PR - clearly the better deal, but the risk is that a Lab/Lib coalition is less stable.
I don't see there are any good arguments against AV compared with FPTP, but my fear is that Tory, and all the Tory papers, will campaign against it with scaremongering claims, possibly confusing it with PR, and a referendum ends up failing...
There's also a hybrid system called Alternative Vote Plus that was proposed by a Labour commission. It has the local constituencies (only slightly enlarged, due to having fewer MPs elected this way) - and as an added bonus, these would now be elected using Alternative Vote rather than FPTP.
But then there's an extra top up list of 100-150 MPs that people can vote for, who are elected to make the total number of MPs proportional to the votes cast.
Lib Dems support STV with several regions, so you still get a local link - larger than what we currently have, but with 650 constituencies, the UK is already pretty huge. And you have several MPs in each region. This has a side-benefit that you have more than one MP to go to. The problem at the moment is that if your local MP is a Party puppet (always votes with his party line), directly opposed to the issue you're concerned with, or just plain useless, you have no one to turn to.
A commission set up by Labour proposed a system called Alternative Vote Plus, which maintains local constituences pretty much as we have them now, but makes it proportional using a top up system.
the parties decide who the MPs are
No, this is also false. In both systems under consideration, people vote for candidates. What you claim is only an issue in closed party systems (which I agree are bad).
So please look at what's being proposed, before you dismiss all systems of PR based on some flawed version you heard about.
There's almost no situation where a proportional representation system would beat out a FPTP system
Let's see: * Large problems of tactical voting and "wasted" votes. This would be reduced under STV and AV+. * Problems of vote splitting, again reduced under STV and AV+. * Problems where parties are vastly under-represented, needing many more votes to elect a single MPs (Lib Dems need about 4 times as many votes per MP compared with Labour and Tory). * FPTP doesn't even maintain ordering - even if Lib Dems came second or even first in the popular vote, they'd still be third in terms of number of seats. It's possible for Labour to get the most seats, whilst still coming second or third in the popular vote.
Pretty much anything beats FPTP. Even if you don't want proportional, let's still have something like Alternative Vote, Condorcet. Anything but FPTP please!
what coalitions actually mean is that the lunatic fringe (yes including the one trick pony pirate party who has nothing meaningful to say on things like EU tax rates, monetary policy, Ukraine or georgia membership in NATO/EU, muslim immigration to europe etc) gets a disproportionate share of power in exchange for not toppling the government
By "disproportionate" you mean proportionate to what people voted for? How do they topple the Government?
The minority conservatives essentially govern unopposed on all but the most serious of issues because the liberals are too spineless to risk losing another election. In this case we have a party with ~30% popular support governing like it has a majority.
How is this worse than the UK's FPTP, where we always have the case where a party with ~30% popular support governments with an actual majority?
In the UK case, a party - the lib dems, or (god help them) collection of small fringe parties have been handed the power to let the conservatives or theoretically Labour govern.
False. Tories and Labour have the choice too. They have more power - the Tories can do a deal with either Labour or Lib Dem, or they can go ahead as a minority Government. Labour also have a choice who to do a deal with.
Can you give me an example of a law that everyone agrees should be passed, but wouldn't pass in a coalition? Everytime I ask someone this question, I've yet to get an answer. I mean what, would the opposition parties just veto everything just to be awkward, even if they agreed with it?
On the other hand, there are plenty of draconian and dubious laws which are swept through with a majority Government, with no ability for anyone to stop them.
We've got a hung Parliament now, and the sky hasn't fallen down like the scaremongerers predicted.
Anyhow - proportional or not, I don't care. But there's no excuse for keeping with a broken voting system like FPTP. Give us Alternative Vote, Condorcet or whatever - even for non-PR systems, there are vastly better ways of electing MPs. The side benefit of a ranked voting system would also be that in a hung Parliament, we'd know which party or coalition really had the popular support. Right now, thanks to FPTP, we don't have a clue.
You've got it backwards - under FPTP, parties are better off if they have concentrated support, and the Lib Dems lose out precisely because their support is much more uniform.
Case in point is Oxford: it's arbitrarily divided into two constituencies. Overall for Oxford, Lib Dems had most support. But who did they elect? One Tory MP, and one Labour MP. Why? Because the Lib Dem support is uniform across the city.
As much as it seems silly that the two losing parties still remain in power, it isn't when you think of it. If combined they still represent more votes (and thus a higher percentage of people's views), shouldn't they be the ones in power rather than a party that a majority of people didn't want?
Indeed - and the side-benefit of an improved voting system would be that we could see what people's second choices really where, and know whether Tory were really the most popular choice, or if it was a Lab/Lib coalition.
I find it particularly amusing that the scaremongering against voting reform is coming from people whining about "PR will mean it's always like this" when they're also complaining that the choice of who forms Government now is undemocratic and "in back rooms", "behind closed doors" (they should talk in the street?) - if we have voting reform, we'd know what the popular mandate was.
Nick Clegg is in a dilemma as he has no idea what the 2nd choices of his own voters are (and hence whether they would rather Tory or Labour) - all he can go on is that Tory have most votes, but that could be very misleading if most Lib Dem voters might prefer Labour to Tory.
Does deletionism happen on Wikimedia Commons? I was, after all, asking a question - "I'm not sure they currently have any restrictions as to the kind of image hosted"?
It depends partly on what you think an encyclopedia
Note that this seems to be about Wikimedia Commons, not Wikipedia (the title seems to be wrong on this, too).
Which makes it all the more strange. AIUI, Wikimedia Commons is meant to be a free repository for images. I'm not sure they currently have any restrictions as to the kind of image hosted, as long as it's legal? Sure they have the right to say what they want to host on their servers, but it seems the usefulness of this project is reduced if they start going down the slippery slope of saying some things aren't okay, especially when we start off with ill-defined categories.
Well said. Of course it's not surprising to see this Apple spin here - Slashdot is now primarily an Apple news site (that covers other geek stories too, but the days of being oriented towards Linux or open source are long gone).
If they're comparing the Ipad to netbooks, why not to phones - how do Ipad sales compare to the hundreds of millions that Nokia sell each year?
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, there is some promise on the civil liberties front - ID cards are already abolished, along with many other changes planned, and it looks like we will see the Freedom / Repeal bill repealing a whole load of authoritarian laws.
Will this law, that allows the one-sided extradition between the US and UK, be repealed? Part of the problem is though that Labour passed so much of these kinds of laws. There are numerous others that I think should be also repealed, but so far I haven't seen them mentioned. I hope the new coalition keep at it, and don't stop short on only a handful of laws to repeal.
It's not so much a moral issue, but more of an issue of how good the platform is. Just as Apple have the right to do it, we have the right to advertise how awful that is, and suggest other platforms.
And the OP's analogy with MS still works here - even leaving aside the legal issues, there'd still be large numbers of people claiming it as a reason for Windows being poor, and how we should all use something else.
(Remember the proposed 3 application Windows limit for netbook, and how much ridicule that got? But now the Ipad with its 1 application limit, and suddenly not only is that acceptable, but it's actually an advantage?)
Also from TFA: ...he says he was told by authorities that it was going to be or was cancelled.
Nice selective quoting. I have no idea if the claim has merit or not, but I imagine that was the key point, not your made up selectively quoted straw man.
How does one "streamline" appeals, without increasing the chance of convicting an innocent person?
This is about as insightful as suggesting "let's improve efficiency" without explaining how. A war on unnecessary leaflets?
It's all part of the Apple advertising though - the trend of using "Iphone" or "Ipad" to refer to any old phone or tablet gives you the bad publicity as well as the good. (Thanks to the Apple-only coverage, some Slashdotters here don't even seem to realise that other feature/smart phones and tablets exist.)
Er Flamebait? Did Larry Sanger get mods points, or is a mod here seriously suggesting that papers and Wikipedia should be constrained by what's illegal in other countries, even if it's legal for them?
The Sun are guilty of much hypocrisy - but sorry, doing something that is legal, and only illegal elsewhere is not one of them. It would be absurd as criticising the Wikipedia (hosted in the US) Virgin Killers article, because it might be illegal in places like the UK.
A better example would be, as you note earlier in your comment, the habit of certain tabloids focusing on celebrities approaching 16 (most notably the Daily Star, who did this on one page, and then on the opposite page they were slagging off the Brass Eye parody).
Wow, if only we had some standard universal serial bus that might allow us to connect a phone to a netbook, without relying on a custom "slot" and buying both products from one company. Maybe we could use some wireless short range networking method too. And then if only there was a way for the netbook to make use of the phone's Internet connection, so you can use the same SIM and data account for both.
The modular approach addresses one of the great problems of mobile devices for both buyers and designers: you cannot, with current technology, have a device that is both large enough for comfortable extended use and small enough to carry around all the time.
The issue is exemplified by Apple's Iphone and the larger Ipad. The only way to have the advantages of both Apple devices is to buy both and synchronise data between them.
But how is this netbook and phone bundle any different to buying a phone and netbook? Is the price much better, for example?
And how does this device solve the synchronisation problem - do I magically have access to the same data on both, without synchronisation?
If no one needs it, why are the ISPs so keen to claim "unlimited"? They should just sell it as limited, and obviously no one would mind (because if they do, they're pirates) according to you.
The sad thing is that Wikipedia gets criticism from both sides.
In the real world, the fact that a joke article like this is found on Wikipedia is a reason to criticise and mock it.
Yet among the geek world, suddenly Wikipedia is also bad if they remove an article on joke topics, just because they're obsessed fanatics of XKCD (I like XKCD too, but let's not take a joke seriously). Ironically, you get people who even try to have it both ways - like the OP, who actually thinks that Wikipedia would be more authoritative by including joke articles on made up terms from XKCD!
The problem is not the cost, the problem is of including unreliable information, and misleadingly presenting made up words as having any notability or relevant to an encyclopedia.
Ironically, the very thing that the OP was also criticising Wikipedia for. He actually thinks that Wikipedia would be more "authoritative" if it included made up words from XKCD!
Wait - you're claiming that deleting an article about a non-existent word makes Wikipedia unreliable?
if you use Wikipedia as any sort of authoritative reference, you're an idiot.
Yeah right, obviously Wikipedia would be much better if they included articles on made up words. Obviously those authoritative references like Britannica and the OED have entries for words that XKCD only just made up.
(Nice to see you prefer ad-hominems to reason, by the way.)
Indeed - and if only that was all they did. But there's usually someone who'll add an XKCD "In Popular Culture" reference to just about every single topic that a strip covers.
The particularly sad thing is I don't think they got the message of XKCD's "In Popular Culture" Wood strip...
Wait - Wikipedia is bad, because the consensus might be to not allow articles on non-existent topics?
I guess you must really hate Britannica. Look at all the stuff they don't let in! Is that "political correctness" too?
It needs to peer-to-peer. It needs to be built upon a trust network. Or it will never surpass what is essentially a dictatorship over mindsets and ideas.
How would this work? Either you have a single version - in which case, you end up with it being like Wikipedia, where there will always be whiners who disagree with the decision made, no matter what decision that is - or we end up with numerous different versions, but for an encyclopedia this doesn't really work. (If you want a Wiki for your non-encyclopedic topic, then go and start one.)
And there'll be equal numbers of people saying that Wikipedia is bad, because it's full of nonsense/trivial articles, citing this "malamanteau" fiasco as a prime example.
(I love XKCD, but personally I find it tiresome that someone has to go adding something to XKCD - nevermind this example, there's someone who will do it for almost every single strip. XKCD has a strip about some topic? Bam, someone will add it to "In Popular Culture" under that article. I'm surprise that these sad obsessives haven't completely missed the irony by adding XKCD to the wood article...)
And I think his guess is going be wrong, and he'll learn a very hard lesson that may cost the LibDems most of their votes for many decades to come.
I suspect the problem is that there is no right guess - there are enough Lib Dem voters who would hate a coalition with either party, for it to be a problem. Which is why I think any coalition should only be done for PR - otherwise, what do Lib Dems gain from it? (I suspect the only promise of implementing Lib Dem policies will be things the other party were wanting to do anyway - and if the Lib Dems remain independent, they can still vote on individual bills, from either party.)
I agree that AV+ seems good too, and has the advantage of seeming closer to what we have now, so may be more likely to pass in a referendum.
Note that AV is not proportional. It's still far better than FPTP, so I'm glad it's being considered as a possibility - though I wonder if it is worth the risk of forming a coalition.
If the Conservatives give a promise of voting reform, then it'd be worth it
The latest news according to the BBC is that Tory offer a referendum on AV, but no to PR. Labour offer AV (without referendum), with a referendum on PR - clearly the better deal, but the risk is that a Lab/Lib coalition is less stable.
I don't see there are any good arguments against AV compared with FPTP, but my fear is that Tory, and all the Tory papers, will campaign against it with scaremongering claims, possibly confusing it with PR, and a referendum ends up failing...
There's also a hybrid system called Alternative Vote Plus that was proposed by a Labour commission. It has the local constituencies (only slightly enlarged, due to having fewer MPs elected this way) - and as an added bonus, these would now be elected using Alternative Vote rather than FPTP.
But then there's an extra top up list of 100-150 MPs that people can vote for, who are elected to make the total number of MPs proportional to the votes cast.
Lib Dems support STV with several regions, so you still get a local link - larger than what we currently have, but with 650 constituencies, the UK is already pretty huge. And you have several MPs in each region. This has a side-benefit that you have more than one MP to go to. The problem at the moment is that if your local MP is a Party puppet (always votes with his party line), directly opposed to the issue you're concerned with, or just plain useless, you have no one to turn to.
A commission set up by Labour proposed a system called Alternative Vote Plus, which maintains local constituences pretty much as we have them now, but makes it proportional using a top up system.
the parties decide who the MPs are
No, this is also false. In both systems under consideration, people vote for candidates. What you claim is only an issue in closed party systems (which I agree are bad).
So please look at what's being proposed, before you dismiss all systems of PR based on some flawed version you heard about.
There's almost no situation where a proportional representation system would beat out a FPTP system
Let's see:
* Large problems of tactical voting and "wasted" votes. This would be reduced under STV and AV+.
* Problems of vote splitting, again reduced under STV and AV+.
* Problems where parties are vastly under-represented, needing many more votes to elect a single MPs (Lib Dems need about 4 times as many votes per MP compared with Labour and Tory).
* FPTP doesn't even maintain ordering - even if Lib Dems came second or even first in the popular vote, they'd still be third in terms of number of seats. It's possible for Labour to get the most seats, whilst still coming second or third in the popular vote.
Pretty much anything beats FPTP. Even if you don't want proportional, let's still have something like Alternative Vote, Condorcet. Anything but FPTP please!
what coalitions actually mean is that the lunatic fringe (yes including the one trick pony pirate party who has nothing meaningful to say on things like EU tax rates, monetary policy, Ukraine or georgia membership in NATO/EU, muslim immigration to europe etc) gets a disproportionate share of power in exchange for not toppling the government
By "disproportionate" you mean proportionate to what people voted for? How do they topple the Government?
The minority conservatives essentially govern unopposed on all but the most serious of issues because the liberals are too spineless to risk losing another election. In this case we have a party with ~30% popular support governing like it has a majority.
How is this worse than the UK's FPTP, where we always have the case where a party with ~30% popular support governments with an actual majority?
In the UK case, a party - the lib dems, or (god help them) collection of small fringe parties have been handed the power to let the conservatives or theoretically Labour govern.
False. Tories and Labour have the choice too. They have more power - the Tories can do a deal with either Labour or Lib Dem, or they can go ahead as a minority Government. Labour also have a choice who to do a deal with.
Can you give me an example of a law that everyone agrees should be passed, but wouldn't pass in a coalition? Everytime I ask someone this question, I've yet to get an answer. I mean what, would the opposition parties just veto everything just to be awkward, even if they agreed with it?
On the other hand, there are plenty of draconian and dubious laws which are swept through with a majority Government, with no ability for anyone to stop them.
We've got a hung Parliament now, and the sky hasn't fallen down like the scaremongerers predicted.
Anyhow - proportional or not, I don't care. But there's no excuse for keeping with a broken voting system like FPTP. Give us Alternative Vote, Condorcet or whatever - even for non-PR systems, there are vastly better ways of electing MPs. The side benefit of a ranked voting system would also be that in a hung Parliament, we'd know which party or coalition really had the popular support. Right now, thanks to FPTP, we don't have a clue.
The Lib Dems advocate STV with voting for candidates, not parties ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7121275.ece , http://news.stv.tv/election-2010/analysis/176335-stvs-guide-to-stv/ ).
And the Alternative Vote Plus system (which a commission recommended under Labour) would also have people voting for candidates.
So yes, you can argue with your straw man, but the rest of us are proposing something different.
You've got it backwards - under FPTP, parties are better off if they have concentrated support, and the Lib Dems lose out precisely because their support is much more uniform.
Case in point is Oxford: it's arbitrarily divided into two constituencies. Overall for Oxford, Lib Dems had most support. But who did they elect? One Tory MP, and one Labour MP. Why? Because the Lib Dem support is uniform across the city.
As much as it seems silly that the two losing parties still remain in power, it isn't when you think of it. If combined they still represent more votes (and thus a higher percentage of people's views), shouldn't they be the ones in power rather than a party that a majority of people didn't want?
Indeed - and the side-benefit of an improved voting system would be that we could see what people's second choices really where, and know whether Tory were really the most popular choice, or if it was a Lab/Lib coalition.
I find it particularly amusing that the scaremongering against voting reform is coming from people whining about "PR will mean it's always like this" when they're also complaining that the choice of who forms Government now is undemocratic and "in back rooms", "behind closed doors" (they should talk in the street?) - if we have voting reform, we'd know what the popular mandate was.
Nick Clegg is in a dilemma as he has no idea what the 2nd choices of his own voters are (and hence whether they would rather Tory or Labour) - all he can go on is that Tory have most votes, but that could be very misleading if most Lib Dem voters might prefer Labour to Tory.
Does deletionism happen on Wikimedia Commons? I was, after all, asking a question - "I'm not sure they currently have any restrictions as to the kind of image hosted"?
It depends partly on what you think an encyclopedia
Note that this seems to be about Wikimedia Commons, not Wikipedia (the title seems to be wrong on this, too).
Which makes it all the more strange. AIUI, Wikimedia Commons is meant to be a free repository for images. I'm not sure they currently have any restrictions as to the kind of image hosted, as long as it's legal? Sure they have the right to say what they want to host on their servers, but it seems the usefulness of this project is reduced if they start going down the slippery slope of saying some things aren't okay, especially when we start off with ill-defined categories.
Well said. Of course it's not surprising to see this Apple spin here - Slashdot is now primarily an Apple news site (that covers other geek stories too, but the days of being oriented towards Linux or open source are long gone).
If they're comparing the Ipad to netbooks, why not to phones - how do Ipad sales compare to the hundreds of millions that Nokia sell each year?