The Kno has all the problems listed in the comment i was responding to, which are part of the basic design of the Kno and not something that can be fixed without entirely redesigning the product. The Edge on the other hand has the right idea, they just didn't do so well on the implementation.
I already steer clear of the "1 click" option on Amazon. Not only is it something that never should have been patentable, but it's not even a "service" i want to use. If i don't want something enough to go through the usual purchasing process it's really not worth it. I don't need Amazon encouraging me to spend on a whim.
"1-nod" is an even worse idea. People might end up buying something just because of a "smile or even a raise of the eyebrow"? If Amazon actually managed to convince a lot of people to sign up for that service than purchases of items like this would skyrocket.
I agree completely. I'm much more interested in the Entourage Edge, or at least the general idea of something like that. One regular LCD screen and one e-ink screen.
Of course i'll be waiting to see if there's a second generation version that fixes all the problems present in the first model. In particular, it needs to have Android 2.2, complete with access to the regular app store. Both screens need to have multitouch. You need to be able to put it in laptop configuration and use the bottom screen as a virtual keyboard. And it would be nice if when you have it folded all the way backwards you could use the screen on the back to control a pointer on the front screen. (I think the Motorola Backflip does something like that?) Oh yeah, and it needs expandable memory. Now if they could get all that together in one package for a reasonable price i'd be seriously interested.
Yeah, i'm not sure what's up with the wifi coverage. The router is only two rooms away, about 20-30 feet. Perhaps the line of "sight" goes right through the refrigerator? Or perhaps the kitchen walls are lined with lead? I dunno.
"You say, "How about the other 5%?" Maybe the top 5% should be paying more for data!"
I think that qualifies pretty much exactly as "(YMMV on exactly how much of a right that is [to complain] to begin with of course.)" I'm just saying slashdotters probably contain a higher than usual percentage of people who might be adversely affected by data limits. It's more likely to be bad news for them, regardless of whether you consider the changes "fair" or not, and they're more likely to complain or change carriers because it directly affects them.
If that top 5% is really such a burden then eventually all the carriers will implement similar measures. On the other hand, if one or more carriers keep "premium" unlimited data plans and eventually all the heavy data users more to those carriers, would AT&T then lower the data limits even more in order to cap the new top 5% of heavy users?
Wrong. I am a very heavy data user and I have yet to crest 1GB/month, ever.
Well i consider myself a pretty light data user. I'm currently 1/3rd of the way through my billing period and according to T-Mobile website i've used 480 megs so far this cycle. So at this rate i'll be at about 1.5 gigs by the end of the month long period. And i suspect it's only that light because half the time i can pickup wifi from the bedroom so playing Pandora in the evening isn't always counting against my mobile total. And given that i only use Pandora a couple times a week, then someone who listens to Pandora frequently outside of wifi radius could easily go through four times as much data as me without even trying.
So i'm already getting very near the cap. If i listened to Pandora a little more, or was getting poor reception in the bedroom more often than usual during a given a month, i could easily go over a 2GB cap, and that's without doing any tethering at all. That makes the cost per MB after exceeding the cap not at all irrelevant for me. (Well, not if i was using or considering switching to AT&T anyways.) Maybe that makes me a super-heavy data user, but i don't think most people would consider checking news and listening to music to be "heavy data use."
So... only on slashdot would you find someone who actually is aware of their own data usage and knows for a fact that they would be at risk of going over a 2GB limit? I can't say which of us is the more typical slashdot user, but i'm certainly willing to take others at their word when they claim that a 2GB limit is a legitimate concern for them.
"It's yet another "No wireless. Less space than a nomad moment" except that instead of involving the most basic of deductive reasoning to see why a product might be popular and avoid embarrassingly bad prognostication, here as you say a product is suddenly cheaper for 95% of tens of millions of iPhone users, and on top of that you FINALLY have the ability to tether which people have been (rightfully) bitching about for ages. And instead of saying "finally AT&T lowers prices a bit" you get a flood of whining because you cannot have enough bandwidth to stream a full 1080p HD rip of a movie per day on your PHONE!"
You and the GP are hilariously off base in two key aspects. First of all, yes this new plan system _may_ be cheaper for 95% of the people out there. However the 5% who it won't be cheaper for are disproportionately concentrated on geeky sites like slashdot. So whether or not it's good for AT&T or good for the average AT&T user, most slashdot users are just as entitled to complain about this as any other decision by a company that adversely affects them. (YMMV on exactly how much of a right that is to begin with of course.)
Second, you and the GP are pretty much saying, it's not that bad, and besides now we can do tethering!... so you're excited that the average cost per MB has gone up, but at least now you're able to consume more MB? I'd want to take a long hard look at what my average data usage is on various devices before i'd consider tethering using these data plans. And who's talking about streaming 1080 HD movies every day? I'm pretty sure that just listening to Pandora for an average of an hour a day would burn through a significant percentage of that 2GB limit.
"Part of maturity is accepting that shit happens, but you have to soldier on anyhow."
Wouldn't that apply just as much to those who keep on going despite being bullied but without fighting back? In fact trying to confront the bullies seems more indicative of an attitude that shit _doesn't_ have to happen, or at least that you don't have to be the one that it happens to. In fact...
"Immature adults, ie spineless dweebs, are always searching for someone else to accept the pain on their behalf."
So are the immature adults the ones who accept the pain of getting beat up, or the ones that search for someone else (ie the bullies) to inflict pain on, thus making them accept the pain on their behalf rather than get beat up themselves?
I think i know what you're trying to say in general, but specifically you seem to be arguing for a policy of simultaneous proactiveness and stoicism, which doesn't seem to be blending well together.
On the one hand, outside the kind of geeky population represented by slashdot, I really doubt a lot of people know about the 11 year cycle. On the other hand, I've seen othee articles about the recent abnormally low period, and the subect also seems to come up frequently on the recurring global warming debate that seems to crop up in every third article.
(Which isn't to say that more information about the subject isn't wanted of course.)
I can't access the video at the moment, but if the broken "pixels" go away again when the screen is unbent they've still got something great. How many people desperately want animated pencils? The useful bit is that the screen doesn't break when you wrap it up like that. They can attach such screens to spring loaded rollers, like old style movie screens. You unroll it when you want to watch something, and roll it back up for easy storage when you're done.
I'm not sure where you came up with that angle. It's not spin, it's just differentiating between where BP (or the rig owners, or Haliburton, or whoever) screwed up and where they didn't. I don't know the details about what safeguards they were supposed to have in place beforehand and what safeguards they actually had in place beforehand, but that's clearly the part that they @#$%ed up. Yell at, sue, or imprison everyone involved for that as you wish.
To the best of my (admittedly imperfect) knowledge however, now that the spill has already happened there is no "magic bullet" method that has been tested and proven to work before for spills of this magnitude at this depth. If that is indeed true then complaining that they're trying untested solutions when there are no tested solutions is just stupid. They can either take a gamble with new solutions (or solutions that haven't been used under these conditions before) or they can sit there with their thumb up their ass. As much as i want the people responsible for the spill to be held accountable i _also_ want them to stop the spill as quickly as possible, and unless i can suggest something better griping about the "untested" methods they're trying is pointless.
I'm not going to claim that BP (and the other oil companies) haven't done anything wrong in this situation, but how exactly do you propose that they have tested any solutions prior to this? Their failure is that the safeguards they had in place weren't sufficient to stop the problem from happening in the first place, not that they didn't intentionally cause such a disaster earlier so they could do testing to determine the best way of stopping it after the fact.
I listened to the Google I/O keynote this morning, and i didn't really hear about any compelling features that couldn't be reproduced by a good A/V switch and a line in from my PC to the TV. They did make some crack about how previous attempts at internet TV failed as soon as they required the user to switch inputs since most of them didn't know how to get back to regular TV (certainly a rather cynical view) but i'm not sure how it will benefit anyone who's technically proficient enough to handle normal input switching.
Actually, if you check the website (and click the "show more" link,) the N1 requires a "special" plan if you're getting the subscription model:
"500 talk minutes. Unlimited nights and weekends. Unlimited T-Mobile to T-Mobile minutes. Unlimited domestic messaging including SMS, MMS, IM. Android Unlimited Web. $79.99 per month."
So i'm actually saving $20 a month using the Even More Plus plan than i would be with the subscription model for the N1.
Actually i pay $30 less a month compared to the identical plan on AT&T. (Although at the time i'm pretty sure AT&T's prices were a little higher, so if i wanted to be a stickler for accuracy i should figure out how many months it was before AT&T dropped their prices in response to the cheaper plans other companies was offering and calculate accordingly.) Verizon's prices seem to be about the same as AT&Ts. Sprint _does_ have a $70 plan that seems to include 500 minutes and unlimited texting and messaging, but their plan selection pages is a bit more confusing than the others.
The other variable is do i want to consider the upfront price for the phone on the subscription plan to be a sunk cost? ie do i consider myself to be ahead of the game when i've amortized the difference between what i paid and what i would have paid for the subscription version? Or when i've amortized the complete cost of the phone?
So depending on which carrier i'm comparing it to, and whether or not i track differences in the price plans over time, and whether i want to meet or beat the value of getting the subscription version, the time until i've "paid off" the phone varies by quite a lot.
"no, AT&T iphone plan is $70 / month. on t-mo, you save $10 a month with the no-contract plan. if you do the math, the nexus one in and out of contract options works out almost exactly the same over 2 years."
Okay, [citation needed].
I went and checked the the AT&T website after the last guy claimed something about a $70 a month plan. I don't know if the link will work properly, but when i checked this page for the iPhone plan options it says 450 minutes a month is $40, unlimited texting is $20, and the data plan is $30. That totals out to $90 a month. There are other plan combinations you could get which would cost more, and other plan combinations you could get which would cost less, but if you want to compare apples to apples it's $60 for t-mobile's 500 minutes/unlimited/unlimited to at&t's $90 for 450 minutes/unlimited/unlimited.
As other people have pointed out, i am not you. In fact, _most_ people are not you. I don't have access to some special $70 a month plan from AT&T. If i wanted an iPhone the comparable plan would cost me $90 a month. So _i_ am saving $30 a month over the subsidized alternative, and that math is the same for most other people looking into getting a new smartphone.
I have some relatives who work at Google, so i got to play with their Nexus Ones while i was home for the holidays (obviously a marketing angle that didn't impact most people.) I was impressed with the phone, and equally impressed with the ability to buy the hardware upfront and get a cheaper no contract plan from T-Mobile. I ordered one from the website the first day they were available and i've been quite happy with it. (Okay, aside from the stupid "soft" home row keys. Going with those instead of real pressable buttons was a horrible idea, and i find it strange that manufacturers seem to be continuing to make the same stupid decision with newer models.)
I'm a little worried about this development though, even though i've already got mine. After the closure of the Google store how easy will it be to get unlocked phones in the future? The savings from the no contract data plan will have completely paid the difference for my phone somewhere between 4 and 18 months from now (depending on how i want to count it) so what happens when i decide i want to upgrade to whatever the latest and greatest is? I don't want to get locked into that whole subscriber model again.
Don't subsidized smart phone plans generally cost $90 or more? I bought the unlocked Nexus One for $530, and got an unlimited data/unlimited texting/500 minutes with unlimited nights and weekends plan with T-Mobile for $60 a month. At a savings of $30 a month i'll have covered the difference between the full cost and the subsidized cost in a year.
"Year over year" means comparing the sales for the current month with the sales from the same month last year. The reason for doing this is that the industry generally follows cycles. Comparing sales in January to sales in December would be uninformative because of the huge boost to sales during the holiday season.
What the article says is that the difference, or rather the loss, between April 2009 sales and April 2010 sales was larger than any other since July 2009. July 2010 doesn't factor into the equation at all.
How much time does it take to port an iPhone app to Android as compared to writing an entirely new iPhone app? (I have no idea myself, having developed for neither platform.) The number of Android users is growing rapidly, and all the articles i've found so far saying that the difference is multiple orders of magnitude are from over six months ago. Being able to port a project several times faster, even an order of magnitude faster, than writing a new one from scratch isn't entirely unreasonable.
Also the original poster seemed to be implying that individual Android owners buy less apps, which may have been just due to a poor choice of metaphors. Irrespective of the total size of the two markets, i'm not convinced that the average iPhone owner is either richer or more free with their money than the average Android owner, not based on the evidence of the respective app stores at any rate.
Ah yes, refusal to discuss serious issues in a calm and rational manner with the people who disagree with you. Truly the hallmark of intelligent and open minded non-zealots everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
The Kno has all the problems listed in the comment i was responding to, which are part of the basic design of the Kno and not something that can be fixed without entirely redesigning the product. The Edge on the other hand has the right idea, they just didn't do so well on the implementation.
I already steer clear of the "1 click" option on Amazon. Not only is it something that never should have been patentable, but it's not even a "service" i want to use. If i don't want something enough to go through the usual purchasing process it's really not worth it. I don't need Amazon encouraging me to spend on a whim.
"1-nod" is an even worse idea. People might end up buying something just because of a "smile or even a raise of the eyebrow"? If Amazon actually managed to convince a lot of people to sign up for that service than purchases of items like this would skyrocket.
I agree completely. I'm much more interested in the Entourage Edge, or at least the general idea of something like that. One regular LCD screen and one e-ink screen.
Of course i'll be waiting to see if there's a second generation version that fixes all the problems present in the first model. In particular, it needs to have Android 2.2, complete with access to the regular app store. Both screens need to have multitouch. You need to be able to put it in laptop configuration and use the bottom screen as a virtual keyboard. And it would be nice if when you have it folded all the way backwards you could use the screen on the back to control a pointer on the front screen. (I think the Motorola Backflip does something like that?) Oh yeah, and it needs expandable memory. Now if they could get all that together in one package for a reasonable price i'd be seriously interested.
Yeah, i'm not sure what's up with the wifi coverage. The router is only two rooms away, about 20-30 feet. Perhaps the line of "sight" goes right through the refrigerator? Or perhaps the kitchen walls are lined with lead? I dunno.
"You say, "How about the other 5%?" Maybe the top 5% should be paying more for data!"
I think that qualifies pretty much exactly as "(YMMV on exactly how much of a right that is [to complain] to begin with of course.)" I'm just saying slashdotters probably contain a higher than usual percentage of people who might be adversely affected by data limits. It's more likely to be bad news for them, regardless of whether you consider the changes "fair" or not, and they're more likely to complain or change carriers because it directly affects them.
If that top 5% is really such a burden then eventually all the carriers will implement similar measures. On the other hand, if one or more carriers keep "premium" unlimited data plans and eventually all the heavy data users more to those carriers, would AT&T then lower the data limits even more in order to cap the new top 5% of heavy users?
Wrong. I am a very heavy data user and I have yet to crest 1GB/month, ever.
Well i consider myself a pretty light data user. I'm currently 1/3rd of the way through my billing period and according to T-Mobile website i've used 480 megs so far this cycle. So at this rate i'll be at about 1.5 gigs by the end of the month long period. And i suspect it's only that light because half the time i can pickup wifi from the bedroom so playing Pandora in the evening isn't always counting against my mobile total. And given that i only use Pandora a couple times a week, then someone who listens to Pandora frequently outside of wifi radius could easily go through four times as much data as me without even trying.
So i'm already getting very near the cap. If i listened to Pandora a little more, or was getting poor reception in the bedroom more often than usual during a given a month, i could easily go over a 2GB cap, and that's without doing any tethering at all. That makes the cost per MB after exceeding the cap not at all irrelevant for me. (Well, not if i was using or considering switching to AT&T anyways.) Maybe that makes me a super-heavy data user, but i don't think most people would consider checking news and listening to music to be "heavy data use."
So... only on slashdot would you find someone who actually is aware of their own data usage and knows for a fact that they would be at risk of going over a 2GB limit? I can't say which of us is the more typical slashdot user, but i'm certainly willing to take others at their word when they claim that a 2GB limit is a legitimate concern for them.
"It's yet another "No wireless. Less space than a nomad moment" except that instead of involving the most basic of deductive reasoning to see why a product might be popular and avoid embarrassingly bad prognostication, here as you say a product is suddenly cheaper for 95% of tens of millions of iPhone users, and on top of that you FINALLY have the ability to tether which people have been (rightfully) bitching about for ages. And instead of saying "finally AT&T lowers prices a bit" you get a flood of whining because you cannot have enough bandwidth to stream a full 1080p HD rip of a movie per day on your PHONE!"
... so you're excited that the average cost per MB has gone up, but at least now you're able to consume more MB? I'd want to take a long hard look at what my average data usage is on various devices before i'd consider tethering using these data plans. And who's talking about streaming 1080 HD movies every day? I'm pretty sure that just listening to Pandora for an average of an hour a day would burn through a significant percentage of that 2GB limit.
You and the GP are hilariously off base in two key aspects. First of all, yes this new plan system _may_ be cheaper for 95% of the people out there. However the 5% who it won't be cheaper for are disproportionately concentrated on geeky sites like slashdot. So whether or not it's good for AT&T or good for the average AT&T user, most slashdot users are just as entitled to complain about this as any other decision by a company that adversely affects them. (YMMV on exactly how much of a right that is to begin with of course.)
Second, you and the GP are pretty much saying, it's not that bad, and besides now we can do tethering!
"Part of maturity is accepting that shit happens, but you have to soldier on anyhow."
Wouldn't that apply just as much to those who keep on going despite being bullied but without fighting back? In fact trying to confront the bullies seems more indicative of an attitude that shit _doesn't_ have to happen, or at least that you don't have to be the one that it happens to. In fact...
"Immature adults, ie spineless dweebs, are always searching for someone else to accept the pain on their behalf."
So are the immature adults the ones who accept the pain of getting beat up, or the ones that search for someone else (ie the bullies) to inflict pain on, thus making them accept the pain on their behalf rather than get beat up themselves?
I think i know what you're trying to say in general, but specifically you seem to be arguing for a policy of simultaneous proactiveness and stoicism, which doesn't seem to be blending well together.
On the one hand, outside the kind of geeky population represented by slashdot, I really doubt a lot of people know about the 11 year cycle. On the other hand, I've seen othee articles about the recent abnormally low period, and the subect also seems to come up frequently on the recurring global warming debate that seems to crop up in every third article. (Which isn't to say that more information about the subject isn't wanted of course.)
I can't access the video at the moment, but if the broken "pixels" go away again when the screen is unbent they've still got something great. How many people desperately want animated pencils? The useful bit is that the screen doesn't break when you wrap it up like that. They can attach such screens to spring loaded rollers, like old style movie screens. You unroll it when you want to watch something, and roll it back up for easy storage when you're done.
I'm not sure where you came up with that angle. It's not spin, it's just differentiating between where BP (or the rig owners, or Haliburton, or whoever) screwed up and where they didn't. I don't know the details about what safeguards they were supposed to have in place beforehand and what safeguards they actually had in place beforehand, but that's clearly the part that they @#$%ed up. Yell at, sue, or imprison everyone involved for that as you wish.
To the best of my (admittedly imperfect) knowledge however, now that the spill has already happened there is no "magic bullet" method that has been tested and proven to work before for spills of this magnitude at this depth. If that is indeed true then complaining that they're trying untested solutions when there are no tested solutions is just stupid. They can either take a gamble with new solutions (or solutions that haven't been used under these conditions before) or they can sit there with their thumb up their ass. As much as i want the people responsible for the spill to be held accountable i _also_ want them to stop the spill as quickly as possible, and unless i can suggest something better griping about the "untested" methods they're trying is pointless.
Sucking up $120 million of employee time is _totally_ not doing evil! (Well i don't think so as an employee anyways, the employers may disagree.)
I know it's not the same lander, but i still think this xkcd is somewhat appropriate.
I'm not going to claim that BP (and the other oil companies) haven't done anything wrong in this situation, but how exactly do you propose that they have tested any solutions prior to this? Their failure is that the safeguards they had in place weren't sufficient to stop the problem from happening in the first place, not that they didn't intentionally cause such a disaster earlier so they could do testing to determine the best way of stopping it after the fact.
From the sounds of it, this method is _also_ wholly unproven, with the added bonus that there's a chance it could actually make things worse.
I listened to the Google I/O keynote this morning, and i didn't really hear about any compelling features that couldn't be reproduced by a good A/V switch and a line in from my PC to the TV. They did make some crack about how previous attempts at internet TV failed as soon as they required the user to switch inputs since most of them didn't know how to get back to regular TV (certainly a rather cynical view) but i'm not sure how it will benefit anyone who's technically proficient enough to handle normal input switching.
Actually, if you check the website (and click the "show more" link,) the N1 requires a "special" plan if you're getting the subscription model:
"500 talk minutes. Unlimited nights and weekends. Unlimited T-Mobile to T-Mobile minutes. Unlimited domestic messaging including SMS, MMS, IM. Android Unlimited Web. $79.99 per month."
So i'm actually saving $20 a month using the Even More Plus plan than i would be with the subscription model for the N1.
Actually i pay $30 less a month compared to the identical plan on AT&T. (Although at the time i'm pretty sure AT&T's prices were a little higher, so if i wanted to be a stickler for accuracy i should figure out how many months it was before AT&T dropped their prices in response to the cheaper plans other companies was offering and calculate accordingly.) Verizon's prices seem to be about the same as AT&Ts. Sprint _does_ have a $70 plan that seems to include 500 minutes and unlimited texting and messaging, but their plan selection pages is a bit more confusing than the others.
The other variable is do i want to consider the upfront price for the phone on the subscription plan to be a sunk cost? ie do i consider myself to be ahead of the game when i've amortized the difference between what i paid and what i would have paid for the subscription version? Or when i've amortized the complete cost of the phone?
So depending on which carrier i'm comparing it to, and whether or not i track differences in the price plans over time, and whether i want to meet or beat the value of getting the subscription version, the time until i've "paid off" the phone varies by quite a lot.
"no, AT&T iphone plan is $70 / month. on t-mo, you save $10 a month with the no-contract plan. if you do the math, the nexus one in and out of contract options works out almost exactly the same over 2 years."
Okay, [citation needed].
I went and checked the the AT&T website after the last guy claimed something about a $70 a month plan. I don't know if the link will work properly, but when i checked this page for the iPhone plan options it says 450 minutes a month is $40, unlimited texting is $20, and the data plan is $30. That totals out to $90 a month. There are other plan combinations you could get which would cost more, and other plan combinations you could get which would cost less, but if you want to compare apples to apples it's $60 for t-mobile's 500 minutes/unlimited/unlimited to at&t's $90 for 450 minutes/unlimited/unlimited.
As other people have pointed out, i am not you. In fact, _most_ people are not you. I don't have access to some special $70 a month plan from AT&T. If i wanted an iPhone the comparable plan would cost me $90 a month. So _i_ am saving $30 a month over the subsidized alternative, and that math is the same for most other people looking into getting a new smartphone.
I have some relatives who work at Google, so i got to play with their Nexus Ones while i was home for the holidays (obviously a marketing angle that didn't impact most people.) I was impressed with the phone, and equally impressed with the ability to buy the hardware upfront and get a cheaper no contract plan from T-Mobile. I ordered one from the website the first day they were available and i've been quite happy with it. (Okay, aside from the stupid "soft" home row keys. Going with those instead of real pressable buttons was a horrible idea, and i find it strange that manufacturers seem to be continuing to make the same stupid decision with newer models.)
I'm a little worried about this development though, even though i've already got mine. After the closure of the Google store how easy will it be to get unlocked phones in the future? The savings from the no contract data plan will have completely paid the difference for my phone somewhere between 4 and 18 months from now (depending on how i want to count it) so what happens when i decide i want to upgrade to whatever the latest and greatest is? I don't want to get locked into that whole subscriber model again.
Don't subsidized smart phone plans generally cost $90 or more? I bought the unlocked Nexus One for $530, and got an unlimited data/unlimited texting /500 minutes with unlimited nights and weekends plan with T-Mobile for $60 a month. At a savings of $30 a month i'll have covered the difference between the full cost and the subsidized cost in a year.
"Year over year" means comparing the sales for the current month with the sales from the same month last year. The reason for doing this is that the industry generally follows cycles. Comparing sales in January to sales in December would be uninformative because of the huge boost to sales during the holiday season.
What the article says is that the difference, or rather the loss, between April 2009 sales and April 2010 sales was larger than any other since July 2009. July 2010 doesn't factor into the equation at all.
How much time does it take to port an iPhone app to Android as compared to writing an entirely new iPhone app? (I have no idea myself, having developed for neither platform.) The number of Android users is growing rapidly, and all the articles i've found so far saying that the difference is multiple orders of magnitude are from over six months ago. Being able to port a project several times faster, even an order of magnitude faster, than writing a new one from scratch isn't entirely unreasonable.
Also the original poster seemed to be implying that individual Android owners buy less apps, which may have been just due to a poor choice of metaphors. Irrespective of the total size of the two markets, i'm not convinced that the average iPhone owner is either richer or more free with their money than the average Android owner, not based on the evidence of the respective app stores at any rate.
Ah yes, refusal to discuss serious issues in a calm and rational manner with the people who disagree with you. Truly the hallmark of intelligent and open minded non-zealots everywhere.