Just an aside--but have you noticed that any suggestion that our elected representatives and their minions in Washington aren't pure and righteous as the driven snow gets consistently modded down by a seeming core of embedded government stooges?
No, mostly I see posts critical of the government get modded up. Which slashdot are you reading?
No one thinks Linux is invulnerable. Linux is just MUCH BETTER than Windows.
That's exactly the kind of information that I don't think matters. What matters to me is that Linux is better today than it was yesterday, and then better tomorrow than it is today. Who cares about Windows?
People having to make a security-based decision on a Windows server vs. a *nix server probably care.
Your points are mostly valid, but saying that relative comparisons between different OS's are useless misses some very important real-world considerations.
Maybe if we somehow figured out wonderful technologies to *stop* spammers instead of blocking them, we'd be getting towards the ultimate goal.
Of course, the problem is that everybody knows that spam can't be solved by technology; legislation is the only hope.
Except that everyone knows that legislation is hopless, and the societal causes have to be fixed if we are ever going to end spam.
But then again, everyone knows that it's impossible to prevent everyone from being taken in by spam, so the only we we'll stop spam is with a technological solution.
--
The issue is that, like you, everyone can say what's wrong with proposed method x, and that some nebulous better method y is the way to go... the problem is that no-one has yet proposed such a y that everyone agrees will actually work.
Until the magical silver bullet is found, let's celebrate promising partial solutions--who knows which of them might evolve to become (part of) the ultimate solution?
Apple could bundle it with their iTunes/QuickTime installer on Win32
Why on earth would you bundle a very large, unrelated piece of software with a relatively small program? It doesn't make any sense at all. Hey, why not also bundle perl, python, ruby, cygwin, and gcc as well, so that even more is covered? Sure I have to download hundreds of megs of stuff I don't want when all I'd like to do is listen to music or watch a movie, but so what?
Besides which, why would Apple even care about Windows Java installations?
Would a company making engines calling itself Jeneral Motors Corporation be infringing on GMC?
Of course they would be. "General motors" in not a common phrase by any means (at least, I've never heard anyone use it, maybe it has a specific industry meaning). Not every car has a "general motor" in it... but every GUI has "windows".
The reason that's not a valid comparison is that it's not the General(R) Motors(R) Corporation(R); they make no claim to the word "motors" specifically, only as part of their title.
Just the fact that "windows" was a computer term before MS Windows does not mean that it now doesn't posess serious marketing power.
On the other hand, just the fact that it posesses marketing power doesn't mean it's a valid, defensible trademark either--otherwise there wouldn't have been a case at all.
That's good advice... assuming the options lead you to a person eventually. However, more and more automated systems don't ever give you the option of speaking to a person. This is insanely annoying when you just want to ask a simple question that isn't one of the 10-20 that you are "allowed" to ask.
Good systems subdivide you, give you a list, then have an option to talk to someone if nothing they list is what you want. But for the other 75% of systems, it's good to know how to avoid the whole mess.
Another winner is to simply sit and wait when presented with options. I've found that works on most systems that give you "invalid selection" responses.
The biggest affect has been that communication within groups of like-minded individuals has been greatly increased. Between sites like meetup.com for live meetings and email discussion lists for ongoing meetings online, if you care about an issue or set of issues, you can coordinate with others who feel the same way.
Of course, while that can be a great thing, it's also one of the biggest drawbacks to the internet. Why debate (politically or otherwise) when it's so easy for people to find a big group of people who all think X and thus feel good about how "everybody" agrees with them.
No, you are "Wrong. Wrong wrong."
on
Superbowling
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It may be censorship in the exact definition of the word, but not in the big brother way you're all thinking of it.
Come again? It's not censorship except in the sense of fulfilling the definition of censorship? What makes you think that no-one but you understands the distinction between censorship and government censorship? Where do you get off saying that the parent poster is "Wrong. Wrong wrong." based solely on the fact that you don't think others are capable of understanding the words they use?
censoring: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable
Thus, this is censorship exactly as the parent said. It seems perfectly reasonable that many people find it distasteful that a large corporation is choosing to censor ads based on their own political views (rather than on the basis of public mores, which is a much more common way ads are censored).
The fact that they have the legal right to do it doesn't mean we can't object, nor does that fact that it is (in your opinion, at least) a good business model. Take a quick slashdot survey of the number of people who like Microsoft's business tactics... yet it's hard to argue that they do not form (in most cases) a good business model for Microsoft.
Well, I think that the parent's point is that people will freak out when accused of having broken any law with large penalties, which I think is a valid statement. I'd bet anyone would be afraid if they got a visit from the police saying, "Hey, you are a suspect in the murder of so-and-so, and would you please answer a few questions." You could know that you hadn't done it, even that you'd never heard of the person, but you can't *know* that it's not a horrible mistake that won't be fixed. Innocent people do end up convicted of crimes sometimes, and we all know it. Who hasn't heard of death row inmates who get off decades later because of DNA evidence, or other such stories?
I would be afraid if the FBI seized my computer under suspicion of being a child pornography dealer, even though I'm not. Why? Because maybe, *just maybe*, my computer was rooted and someone loaded some on just for kicks. I'm security-concious, so I would expect the possibility to be very, very small, but I wouldn't *know*, and so with that much on the line, I would be afraid. I think anyone would be... but I don't think that child pornography laws are bad.
You can create a similar story for anything with scary consequences, which is all the parent was trying to say.
I watched a few episodes of Enterprise. It's not bad, but it's not that great either.
Could you let me know which ones?;)
Seriously, I watched from the start, up through the first few episodes of this season, and I would say that "bad" is a pretty good summary. No tears will be shed here if it's cancelled.
And what if half of that advanced military force defected and joined the rebels?
Then it wouldn't matter how much heavy weaponry the average citizen could buy, which was my intended point. I head pro-gun (I'm talking about the scary, not useful for anything but killing lots of people very quickly kind) activists invoke the second ammendment, clearly under the impression that they *could* be Rambo, which is absurd.
Ahhh, the old "Constitution as a living document" argument. In other words you don't like what it says so it needs to be altered. For that to happen it needs to be thought of as "living". How cute.
Sorry if you don't like the term: how about "Society changes over time, and any static document is bound to become out of date in certain respects unless it is modified to reflect those changes." Call it what you like, but it's true. People can argue all they want about which parts need changing, but to say it never requires modification is pointless, as history has shown repeatedly that it *does*. I could care less about the anthopomorphising, it's just a convient term, which people generally understand.
You may think that the ability to change the government is not a valid reason but a few people I know agree with me.
You misunderstood; that's not at all what I was trying to say. What I'm saying is that the right to bear arms under the assault weapon interpretation does not fulfill that purpose. I'm not disagreeing with any of your quotes (so spare me your oh-so-scathing sarcasm). You have to realize that these quotes were discussing a completely different style of warfare, based on the technology of their time. Consider your Hamilton quote:
Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress?
This was written at a time when people could realistically own the same weaponry as an army. That's clearly no longer the case, and no amount of AK-47s will change the fact that a great deal of modern weaponry is outside the reach of most citizens. Would you really want any citizen to be able to own a missile launcher? Nukes?
My point is simply that if it came down to just you and your neighbors with the weapons in your house versus the US military, the number of bullets you could fire in a minute wouldn't make a lot of difference. See the other poster's comments about the psychology of the army.
Thanks for the insightful response--I agree with just about everything you are saying.
Chances are, the soldiers would refuse to kill their countrymen, and perhaps even employ their powerful weapons on the other side.
This is what makes me feel essentially safe from a military takeover by the government... far more than large numbers of assault weapons ever could.
Most of this is true even if the citizens are unarmed, actually -- makeshift weaponry can still be very effective. However, it's less likely that unarmed people will have the confidence to rebel.
That's an interesting point, which I hadn't really considered. Still, I'm inclined to believe that hunting rifles would probably be enough, since, as you said, its largely a psychological issue.
You're missing the point, which is that these are paid banners, not search results. This has absolutely nothing to do with what results a search engine can provide (like your Scientology example); it has to do with what advertizements they can sell based on certain words.
They aren't just saying, "here's something you might be interested in", but "here's something we've been paid to show you in association with a trademarked keyword".
However, we do need AK-47's to change the Congress if we need to
I'm sorry, but you are kidding, right? The 2nd amendment was written at a time when it was my musket vs. your musket. Now, anyone trying to overthrow the government would be facing a highly advanced military force. What good is an AK-47 when you can be smart-bombed out of existence without even seening your enemy?
The current state of affairs is comparable to the founders having given people the right to carry small pointy sticks.
People need to accept that the Constitution is a living document, and that the 2nd amendment no longer makes sense in the context of modern society. Arguing that we need the right to bear arms so we can overthrow our government is absurd in the current technological state. I can't really think of any good reason for people to be able to own assault weapons... maybe you can, but the one you gave isn't one of them.
How exactly would that help? It means that universities would have to have hundreds of times as many public computers, and hire IT staff to maintain all of them, plus pay to keep them relatively up-to-date.
Besides, I would strongly disagree that they are not a vital tool for universities (by 'vital' I mean extremely useful, not 'can't live without'--if the latter is what you meant, then we should ban pencils, erasers, and bookbags too, among other things). Just because you can't think of any real uses for networked computer in your room doesn't mean the rest of us can't think of hundreds. My education was vastly enriched by having convenient internet access. That's not even getting into the uses that don't exist yet, but will never be developed if people have to go to a computer lab, thus eliminating the on-demand convenience that makes so many things possible and popular on the net.
But of course, you are just trolling, so what do you care about logic?
all of the women in porn are there because they chose to be
For varying definitions of the word "chose". In the same sense that everyone in a gang "chose" to be, everyone addicted to drugs "chose" to be, and everyone who is a prostitute "chose" to be. Let's be realistic: there are many people who have a lot their lives forced upon them for a wide variety of reasons... When a choice is between "be beaten to death and dumped in an alley or porn|prostitution|gangs|whatever", the whole "chose" aspect isn't quite as much a justification.
This is not to say that you don't make a lot of valid points. I would imagine that most mainstream porn is much more like your description than mine, but saying that *everyone* in porn chose to be there is to ignore certain unpleasant realities of the world.
None of the above should be construed as anti-pornography though; there are sweatshops and forced labor facilities in the world, but that doesn't mean I'm against manufacturing or textiles.
Safari is not part of the OS in the "embedded so deeply you can never remove it" sense. It's simply a nice program which happens to be a perk of having the lastest version of OS X... Apparently I should have said "a side-benefit of the OS" so you couldn't willfully misinterpret my statement.
In OS X, changing your default browser is a one step process with no hassles, and throwing away Safari is a two-step process (counting emptying the trash) with no side effects.
In Windows, actually removing IE renders the system inoperable. That's the difference.
There's a difference between keeping it "up-to-date", and paying a $120 fee to Apple every year just to run the latest applications.
Actually, no, there isn't. The upgrading and pricing path for OS X is well known. If you want to keep up-to-date, you buy the upgrade and get the new features and a guarantee of compatibilty with the next wave of software. Or you don't pay the fee, and you don't get every new version of every new piece of software. Or you get a different OS, with a different pricing scheme.
The only difference is a set of expectations based on an "I just want it to be this way" mentality. It's not like Apple is suddenly changing the rules on everyone.
It's not ridiculous, because I know, to take the most interesting example, a CS professor who is still using netscape 4, Acrobat Reader 3, older versions of TeX, MatLab, Ghostview, OpenOffice etc. etc. and gets along just fine. He publishes papers, creates class notes, sends and recieves email, interacts with a (non-homogenous) campus network, and basically gets along just fine without upgrading anything.
Can everyone do this? No. Can many more people than actually do? Yes. The web, email, and word processing have all been around for quite some time. There are programs which do most or all of what most people need that are years old, which work fine for most uses. As often as not, it is simple upgrade fever that drives people to get the new software. Yes there are bug releases... but the vast majority of people might never in their life encounter the bug that some release fixes.
It is possible for most computer users to live life without continuous upgrading. I'm not claiming that everyone can, and I'm not claiming it's 100% easy; there are, as I said, real trade-offs. But you can't tell me it's a ludicrous position, because I know many people who live, quite successfully, with a static-software mindset.
So, no, nobody HAS to upgrade... unless, that is, you want to ever add to or upgrade any of your applications.
That's wildly exaggerated. Many, many programs require only 10.1.
More importantly, you can see how silly your statement is by taking out a few words: "nobody HAS to upgrade...unless they want to upgrade". If you want the last and greatest versions of programs, get the lastest and greatest version of the OS. If you don't like upgrading, don't upgrade anything.
Are you saying that there's no web browser for Mac OS X? In fact, the last versions of both IE and Mozilla run just fine on 10.1. From my experience, which is fairly broad, far more applications run on 10.1 or 10.2 than require 10.2.
It's telling that you mention two programs made by Apple. These are, essentially, new features of the OS. You are actually making the parent's post here, not disproving it: all the old browsers work just as well as they used to. You got along just fine without Safari up to now... if you don't want to upgrade, then keep using whatever you were using (or get the latest Mozilla build). It's not like you are going to run into many Safari-only web pages which will cripple your user experience. As for X11, there are perfectly good X systems for 10.1, they just don't have quite the same tight integration (read: features) as Apple's X11. If you don't want to use them; well, you clearly survived without it.
Name one piece of functionality you've LOST by the release of 10.2, and you'll be addressing the point the parent made.
Slashdot Mirror
Just an aside--but have you noticed that any suggestion that our elected representatives and their minions in Washington aren't pure and righteous as the driven snow gets consistently modded down by a seeming core of embedded government stooges?
No, mostly I see posts critical of the government get modded up. Which slashdot are you reading?
Actually, there essentially is a meta-moderate link tucked down at the bottom of the page:
It's not an automated system, but it does let you report "bad moderation".
Sorry, what were you saying? I was distracted by my enjoyment of this fine carrot.
-The average voter
People having to make a security-based decision on a Windows server vs. a *nix server probably care.
Your points are mostly valid, but saying that relative comparisons between different OS's are useless misses some very important real-world considerations.
Maybe if we somehow figured out wonderful technologies to *stop* spammers instead of blocking them, we'd be getting towards the ultimate goal.
Of course, the problem is that everybody knows that spam can't be solved by technology; legislation is the only hope.
Except that everyone knows that legislation is hopless, and the societal causes have to be fixed if we are ever going to end spam.
But then again, everyone knows that it's impossible to prevent everyone from being taken in by spam, so the only we we'll stop spam is with a technological solution.
--
The issue is that, like you, everyone can say what's wrong with proposed method x, and that some nebulous better method y is the way to go... the problem is that no-one has yet proposed such a y that everyone agrees will actually work.
Until the magical silver bullet is found, let's celebrate promising partial solutions--who knows which of them might evolve to become (part of) the ultimate solution?
Apple could bundle it with their iTunes/QuickTime installer on Win32
Why on earth would you bundle a very large, unrelated piece of software with a relatively small program? It doesn't make any sense at all. Hey, why not also bundle perl, python, ruby, cygwin, and gcc as well, so that even more is covered? Sure I have to download hundreds of megs of stuff I don't want when all I'd like to do is listen to music or watch a movie, but so what?
Besides which, why would Apple even care about Windows Java installations?
Would a company making engines calling itself Jeneral Motors Corporation be infringing on GMC?
Of course they would be. "General motors" in not a common phrase by any means (at least, I've never heard anyone use it, maybe it has a specific industry meaning). Not every car has a "general motor" in it... but every GUI has "windows".
The reason that's not a valid comparison is that it's not the General(R) Motors(R) Corporation(R); they make no claim to the word "motors" specifically, only as part of their title.
Just the fact that "windows" was a computer term before MS Windows does not mean that it now doesn't posess serious marketing power.
On the other hand, just the fact that it posesses marketing power doesn't mean it's a valid, defensible trademark either--otherwise there wouldn't have been a case at all.
That's good advice... assuming the options lead you to a person eventually. However, more and more automated systems don't ever give you the option of speaking to a person. This is insanely annoying when you just want to ask a simple question that isn't one of the 10-20 that you are "allowed" to ask.
Good systems subdivide you, give you a list, then have an option to talk to someone if nothing they list is what you want. But for the other 75% of systems, it's good to know how to avoid the whole mess.
Another winner is to simply sit and wait when presented with options. I've found that works on most systems that give you "invalid selection" responses.
The biggest affect has been that communication within groups of like-minded individuals has been greatly increased. Between sites like meetup.com for live meetings and email discussion lists for ongoing meetings online, if you care about an issue or set of issues, you can coordinate with others who feel the same way.
Of course, while that can be a great thing, it's also one of the biggest drawbacks to the internet. Why debate (politically or otherwise) when it's so easy for people to find a big group of people who all think X and thus feel good about how "everybody" agrees with them.
It may be censorship in the exact definition of the word, but not in the big brother way you're all thinking of it.
Come again? It's not censorship except in the sense of fulfilling the definition of censorship? What makes you think that no-one but you understands the distinction between censorship and government censorship? Where do you get off saying that the parent poster is "Wrong. Wrong wrong." based solely on the fact that you don't think others are capable of understanding the words they use?
Thus, this is censorship exactly as the parent said. It seems perfectly reasonable that many people find it distasteful that a large corporation is choosing to censor ads based on their own political views (rather than on the basis of public mores, which is a much more common way ads are censored).
The fact that they have the legal right to do it doesn't mean we can't object, nor does that fact that it is (in your opinion, at least) a good business model. Take a quick slashdot survey of the number of people who like Microsoft's business tactics... yet it's hard to argue that they do not form (in most cases) a good business model for Microsoft.
Well, I think that the parent's point is that people will freak out when accused of having broken any law with large penalties, which I think is a valid statement. I'd bet anyone would be afraid if they got a visit from the police saying, "Hey, you are a suspect in the murder of so-and-so, and would you please answer a few questions." You could know that you hadn't done it, even that you'd never heard of the person, but you can't *know* that it's not a horrible mistake that won't be fixed. Innocent people do end up convicted of crimes sometimes, and we all know it. Who hasn't heard of death row inmates who get off decades later because of DNA evidence, or other such stories?
I would be afraid if the FBI seized my computer under suspicion of being a child pornography dealer, even though I'm not. Why? Because maybe, *just maybe*, my computer was rooted and someone loaded some on just for kicks. I'm security-concious, so I would expect the possibility to be very, very small, but I wouldn't *know*, and so with that much on the line, I would be afraid. I think anyone would be... but I don't think that child pornography laws are bad.
You can create a similar story for anything with scary consequences, which is all the parent was trying to say.
I watched a few episodes of Enterprise. It's not bad, but it's not that great either.
Could you let me know which ones? ;)
Seriously, I watched from the start, up through the first few episodes of this season, and I would say that "bad" is a pretty good summary. No tears will be shed here if it's cancelled.
And what if half of that advanced military force defected and joined the rebels?
Then it wouldn't matter how much heavy weaponry the average citizen could buy, which was my intended point. I head pro-gun (I'm talking about the scary, not useful for anything but killing lots of people very quickly kind) activists invoke the second ammendment, clearly under the impression that they *could* be Rambo, which is absurd.
Ahhh, the old "Constitution as a living document" argument. In other words you don't like what it says so it needs to be altered. For that to happen it needs to be thought of as "living". How cute.
Sorry if you don't like the term: how about "Society changes over time, and any static document is bound to become out of date in certain respects unless it is modified to reflect those changes." Call it what you like, but it's true. People can argue all they want about which parts need changing, but to say it never requires modification is pointless, as history has shown repeatedly that it *does*. I could care less about the anthopomorphising, it's just a convient term, which people generally understand.
You may think that the ability to change the government is not a valid reason but a few people I know agree with me.
You misunderstood; that's not at all what I was trying to say. What I'm saying is that the right to bear arms under the assault weapon interpretation does not fulfill that purpose. I'm not disagreeing with any of your quotes (so spare me your oh-so-scathing sarcasm). You have to realize that these quotes were discussing a completely different style of warfare, based on the technology of their time. Consider your Hamilton quote:
Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress?
This was written at a time when people could realistically own the same weaponry as an army. That's clearly no longer the case, and no amount of AK-47s will change the fact that a great deal of modern weaponry is outside the reach of most citizens. Would you really want any citizen to be able to own a missile launcher? Nukes?
My point is simply that if it came down to just you and your neighbors with the weapons in your house versus the US military, the number of bullets you could fire in a minute wouldn't make a lot of difference. See the other poster's comments about the psychology of the army.
Thanks for the insightful response--I agree with just about everything you are saying.
Chances are, the soldiers would refuse to kill their countrymen, and perhaps even employ their powerful weapons on the other side.
This is what makes me feel essentially safe from a military takeover by the government... far more than large numbers of assault weapons ever could.
Most of this is true even if the citizens are unarmed, actually -- makeshift weaponry can still be very effective. However, it's less likely that unarmed people will have the confidence to rebel.
That's an interesting point, which I hadn't really considered. Still, I'm inclined to believe that hunting rifles would probably be enough, since, as you said, its largely a psychological issue.
You're missing the point, which is that these are paid banners, not search results. This has absolutely nothing to do with what results a search engine can provide (like your Scientology example); it has to do with what advertizements they can sell based on certain words.
They aren't just saying, "here's something you might be interested in", but "here's something we've been paid to show you in association with a trademarked keyword".
However, we do need AK-47's to change the Congress if we need to
I'm sorry, but you are kidding, right? The 2nd amendment was written at a time when it was my musket vs. your musket. Now, anyone trying to overthrow the government would be facing a highly advanced military force. What good is an AK-47 when you can be smart-bombed out of existence without even seening your enemy?
The current state of affairs is comparable to the founders having given people the right to carry small pointy sticks.
People need to accept that the Constitution is a living document, and that the 2nd amendment no longer makes sense in the context of modern society. Arguing that we need the right to bear arms so we can overthrow our government is absurd in the current technological state. I can't really think of any good reason for people to be able to own assault weapons... maybe you can, but the one you gave isn't one of them.
How exactly would that help? It means that universities would have to have hundreds of times as many public computers, and hire IT staff to maintain all of them, plus pay to keep them relatively up-to-date.
Besides, I would strongly disagree that they are not a vital tool for universities (by 'vital' I mean extremely useful, not 'can't live without'--if the latter is what you meant, then we should ban pencils, erasers, and bookbags too, among other things). Just because you can't think of any real uses for networked computer in your room doesn't mean the rest of us can't think of hundreds. My education was vastly enriched by having convenient internet access. That's not even getting into the uses that don't exist yet, but will never be developed if people have to go to a computer lab, thus eliminating the on-demand convenience that makes so many things possible and popular on the net.
But of course, you are just trolling, so what do you care about logic?
all of the women in porn are there because they chose to be
For varying definitions of the word "chose". In the same sense that everyone in a gang "chose" to be, everyone addicted to drugs "chose" to be, and everyone who is a prostitute "chose" to be. Let's be realistic: there are many people who have a lot their lives forced upon them for a wide variety of reasons... When a choice is between "be beaten to death and dumped in an alley or porn|prostitution|gangs|whatever", the whole "chose" aspect isn't quite as much a justification.
This is not to say that you don't make a lot of valid points. I would imagine that most mainstream porn is much more like your description than mine, but saying that *everyone* in porn chose to be there is to ignore certain unpleasant realities of the world.
None of the above should be construed as anti-pornography though; there are sweatshops and forced labor facilities in the world, but that doesn't mean I'm against manufacturing or textiles.
Safari is not part of the OS in the "embedded so deeply you can never remove it" sense. It's simply a nice program which happens to be a perk of having the lastest version of OS X... Apparently I should have said "a side-benefit of the OS" so you couldn't willfully misinterpret my statement.
In OS X, changing your default browser is a one step process with no hassles, and throwing away Safari is a two-step process (counting emptying the trash) with no side effects.
In Windows, actually removing IE renders the system inoperable. That's the difference.
There's a difference between keeping it "up-to-date", and paying a $120 fee to Apple every year just to run the latest applications.
Actually, no, there isn't. The upgrading and pricing path for OS X is well known. If you want to keep up-to-date, you buy the upgrade and get the new features and a guarantee of compatibilty with the next wave of software. Or you don't pay the fee, and you don't get every new version of every new piece of software. Or you get a different OS, with a different pricing scheme.
The only difference is a set of expectations based on an "I just want it to be this way" mentality. It's not like Apple is suddenly changing the rules on everyone.
It's not ridiculous, because I know, to take the most interesting example, a CS professor who is still using netscape 4, Acrobat Reader 3, older versions of TeX, MatLab, Ghostview, OpenOffice etc. etc. and gets along just fine. He publishes papers, creates class notes, sends and recieves email, interacts with a (non-homogenous) campus network, and basically gets along just fine without upgrading anything.
Can everyone do this? No. Can many more people than actually do? Yes. The web, email, and word processing have all been around for quite some time. There are programs which do most or all of what most people need that are years old, which work fine for most uses. As often as not, it is simple upgrade fever that drives people to get the new software. Yes there are bug releases... but the vast majority of people might never in their life encounter the bug that some release fixes.
It is possible for most computer users to live life without continuous upgrading. I'm not claiming that everyone can, and I'm not claiming it's 100% easy; there are, as I said, real trade-offs. But you can't tell me it's a ludicrous position, because I know many people who live, quite successfully, with a static-software mindset.
So, no, nobody HAS to upgrade... unless, that is, you want to ever add to or upgrade any of your applications.
That's wildly exaggerated. Many, many programs require only 10.1.
More importantly, you can see how silly your statement is by taking out a few words: "nobody HAS to upgrade...unless they want to upgrade". If you want the last and greatest versions of programs, get the lastest and greatest version of the OS. If you don't like upgrading, don't upgrade anything.
Are you saying that there's no web browser for Mac OS X? In fact, the last versions of both IE and Mozilla run just fine on 10.1. From my experience, which is fairly broad, far more applications run on 10.1 or 10.2 than require 10.2.
It's telling that you mention two programs made by Apple. These are, essentially, new features of the OS. You are actually making the parent's post here, not disproving it: all the old browsers work just as well as they used to. You got along just fine without Safari up to now... if you don't want to upgrade, then keep using whatever you were using (or get the latest Mozilla build). It's not like you are going to run into many Safari-only web pages which will cripple your user experience. As for X11, there are perfectly good X systems for 10.1, they just don't have quite the same tight integration (read: features) as Apple's X11. If you don't want to use them; well, you clearly survived without it.
Name one piece of functionality you've LOST by the release of 10.2, and you'll be addressing the point the parent made.