Okay, that's a point well made. Simply saying "slippery slope" alone doesn't illustrate anything. One must also illustrate that there is a slope. E.g. in your examples, you don't support that Y lies in the same direction as X - i.e. 'allowing gays to marry means we'll be allowing people to marry dead cats.' Is it reasonable to propose that common factors prevent both? No, it isn't. There might be a few factors in common (i.e. a prohibition against anyone marrying other than an adult of the opposite sex and same species affects both gay marriage and dead cats), but they're dwarfed by the far larger factors preventing dead cat marrying so the example becomes hyperbole. However, in cases where the factors are comparable, e.g. prohibitions against a little bit of hacking, are largely the same as prohibitions against large scale hacking, then the slippery slope is a valid criticism. The removal of factors preventing X does also reduce the factors preventing Y where the factors of the two overlap.
Which is what I said. In most of your examples, we can't identify much in the way similar factors, hence your examples are hyperbole. That doesn't mean that in cases where people are talking about slippery slopes it isn't because they have identified common factors. Again, History stands testament to that.
You can kind of see this by watching movies and TV shows from "then" and now. Violence in older media tends to be short, mean and clumsy. Not to mention unpredictable! That's because people used to be more commonly familiar with violence and would see the prolonged, choreographed and get-hit-on-the-jaw-fifteen-times-and-still-get-up-again violence in todays actioners as, entertaining perhaps, but far more likely to break their suspension of disbelief.
That's why it is a fallacy. It assumes a relation between X and Y which does not necessarily exist.
It isn't a fallacy. If circumstance X and circumstance Y are both prevented by some common factors, and we see that X occurs, it highlights that Y has become more likely.
Saying that "slippery slopes" are a fallacy, shows a distinct lack of awareness of History.
The headline doesn't say 2/3rds of people. It says 2/3rds of "consumers" whatever the fuck they are. it could say "people", it could say "citizens". It could even, at a push, say "the public". But no - it's "consumers". So I don't think they're people, whatever they are. Maybe some sort of cow?
I just couldn't go to see it after the spoof trailer that I linked to above. I saw the serious trailer afterwards in the cinema and it was just taking itself so seriously I could barely stop myself from laughing.
How can anyone think that is a documentary? I don't know. Scary thing is, I'm not surprised by that. : (
If everybody who agreed with only 1 in 3 things another person said, could actually confine their disagreements to the two things they didn't and not let it impact the 1 they could work together on, we'd have colonised Mars by now.;)
I'll look forward to intelligent disagreements in the future then. Who knows. maybe you'll convince me that we should all be invading Iraq armed with iPads, yet.;)
Thank you. It certainly wasn't intended as a troll or an insult - just a genuine observation of something that is quite striking to outsiders.
It's always possible this is thread-leak from other stories I've posted in. I've recently been annoying (not deliberately) people in Apple and Iraq subject threads. Sometimes people note a poster that has said things they disagree with and mod them down when they see them elsewhere. It's a destructive practice but it does happen. Maybe it will get caught in meta-moderation.
Appreciate the post though - might help people browsing above 0 to notice it.
Bullshit plain and simple.
And the announcement about the Bush administration pulling troops out of Iraq was because the conditions set forth for the withdraw had been met (mostly due to the surge and the confidence the people of Iraq gained) and Iraq was considered a sovereign country in it's own right. Because of that, we had to enter a Status of Foreign Soldiers Agreement with Iraq which is the same agreement Obama is working from except the remaining troops will be called something different. John Stewart did a sketch on obama's withdrawal plans for Iraq and made fun of the fact that the only difference was the name of the support troops left behind.
I'm sorry the facts get in the way of your ideology, but if you were to pay more attention to them, maybe your ideology would change.
You don't know anything about my ideology and nothing that I have said has relied on some political view to be supported. I said that the current administration's foreign policy is in all significant ways identical to what the previous administrations plans were. You respond by telling me there's no difference between the current withdrawal plans and those of the Bush administration. What you're saying doesn't contradict my point at all. You also say that the conditions for withdrawal had been met. Are you now trying to imply that they have been 'unmet'?
Given that your position on the same action changes depending on whether its carried out by the Republicans or the Democrats, you should probably be slower to throw out accusations of bias.
Well changing a word that isn't actually something to be ashamed of because other parties start using it as a term of abuse is certainly an American tradition. Witness negro, black, coloured, african-american. They keep changing when the actual meaning is nothing offensive at all. But the map is more important than the territory.
And it's not unique to America. When I was a kid "spastic" was a medical term. Then it became a term of abuse and children became "retarded". Now you'll get your head bitten off in the medical industry if you use that last word. And before "spastic" you had "cretin" and other terms.
If something is socialist, call it socialist. To do otherwise is to accept other parties opinion that there is something wrong with it. Allow them to start defining what words you use, and you you cede a lot of power to them. And they'll still call you "socialist" anyway.
And oh, I nearly forgot. The point was whether the Democrats had done anything differently to how the Republicans would have in regard to their foreign policy. The Bush administration would be pulling troops out in just the same way as Obama. They had already announced before the election that they were going to withdraw troops. That is simply the military, political and economic reality of the situation.
How about telling our enemies when we are going to be leaving Afghanistan by setting a time table instead of a set of conditions that need to be met. As soon as the majority of our troops are out of Afghanistan, they will attack and overwhelm us.
First off, he has announced a withdrawal date for Iraq, not Afghanistan. So your entire point is off. Secondly, announcing a withdrawal date for Afghanistan is the only way it can be done. Unless you're advocating a permanent occupation, then a withdrawal must happen. When a withdrawal is going to happen, the "enemy" will certainly know a month in advance whether you announce it or not. You don't suddenly pull out an occupying army without making arrangements with the local security forces (amongst a lot of other giveaways) so that means people will know. All you'd accomplish by trying to withdraw suddenly and secretly is either looking stupid or, if by some miracle yo managed it, creating a power vacuum that no-one had been prepared for resulting in destructive chaos. Finally, the US forces aren't going to be overwhelmed if they're not carrying out "Combat Operations". They'll be nicely protected in their bases and suffer occasional erratic rocket attacks at worst. It's when the US forces go out and try to do things that they really suffer casualties.
You don't tell the enemy to essentially take it easy until after a certain date when we will be gone. What do you think the people of Afghanistan think about that? Are they going to side with the US and their new government or with the fucking Taliban? If you need a hint, the Taliban won't just give up and leave, the US will, they will have to deal with the Taliban long after we have tucked out tails and ran.
I'm going to cut through all the media spin and tell this to you straight: The US is losing in Afghanistan. They've been unable to bring down the Taliban. They control a tiny handful of the total number of strategic areas they would need to in order to actually say they controlled Afghanistan. The government there is a brutal regime in waiting. What exactly are you advocating? Permament occupation?
The British system is not being "decentralized" because of nit-wit politicians, it's being decentralized because the politicians are realizing the fact that greymarket doctors were a booming market and that better healthcare could be had for less government money by opening the market.
My credentials: Three years of management in the NHS. I can promise you that the New Labour government did everything it could behind the scenes to privatise health care in the UK without actually having to publically admit it and they did this because they are corrupt as fuck. The US health care giants view the UK as a big pot of gold going to waste. Thanks to New Labour, they're getting their snouts in the trough and we are not going to get cheaper or better health care in return.
The really scary thing to Europeans, is that people of the US have been conditioned to think socialism is a synonym for bad, to the extent that some institute trying to prove (falsely) that the current administration's health care plans are socialist is a viable tactic. In the rest of the world, saying the health plan was socialist would just get a shrug (and some corrections from those that understood what Socialism actually means). In the US, supporters of the plan have to scurry to prove that it isn't socialist.
It's a shame the plan isn't socialist, btw. The US pays far more than most of the world per capita for its health care than most Western European countries which have socialised care.
Obama flies around the world apologizing to everyone for our existence to match the image of the enlightened intellectual, yet people in the rest of the world continue to hate us and are openly making nukes.
He's been making various diplomatic noises for the proles, but in terms of policy and international agreements, he's been no more conciliatory or giving that Bush was. Less, even.
I'm open to debate if you know of any significant examples where the current administration's foreign policy is less dominating than the previous one, but as far as I can tell, its just rolling on with the same courses of action the Bush administration would have.
Oh fuck me, that annoys the shit out of me. And IE annoys me because its cookie management is a pain. And Opera annoys me because sometimes I click a mouse button and it tries to search the web for whatever I happen to have on my clipboard (one day, that will be a problem).
If I could get the bits I want from all the different browsers and mash them together into a new one, I'd be happy.
I don't care if you think it's a strange comment. Tablets are an appliance device, streamlined for simple computing.
Tablets can be whatever there is a market for and there's a market for ones not like the iPad.
If you're a business user, you may be interested to know that 50% of Fortune 100 companies are already using the iPad. So really, nobody knows what it is you're complaining about except that you want a stylus, which is an obsolete input device that nobody wants.
I like styluses. They're good for hand-writing recognition, making notes on PDFs and sketching quick diagrams. As to those 250 companies using the iPad, it really rather depends on how many and what for. Reporting that a company as huge as Wells Fargo has bought 15 iPads is hardly conclusive. Right now the iPad is the only modern tablet on the market. We'll see how things go when there are others.
Yes, you think Steve Jobs can hear you. Apple-haters like you obsessively reference him by name as if it strengthens your point.
You've brought him up more times than I have. I was just parodying the style of the OP who wrote a personal rant about Ballmer. Your repeated accusation of "Apple-hater" is meaningless. It has no objective value. Why do you keep repeating it?
His post was a joke. The monarchies he listed were ceremonial ones only. The monarchs in these countries have no direct involvement in government (though the UK lot are part of a rich establishment, so there are ties). The monarchy in Saudi Arabia is old style monarchy. They actually have a family there that is actually in charge of the country and shoots those that try to change things (or gets the US navy to do it if there are too many of them).
Amazing how an entire society seemingly hangs by the flimsy thread of a rogue blackberry user...
Ban these dangerous devices like nuclear and biological weapons, for they will be the fall of society!
Weapons are a threat to people. Information is a threat to governments.
Heh. I like that the House of Saud are such pieces of shit that even pro- and anti- Israel types can agree on their utter contempt for the corrupt oppressive bastards.:)
It's amazing that the people of the US allow their government to keep propping it up. Without the US support, they'd have been overthrown by their people long ago. It's a fucking monarchy in the 21st Century. We should be ashamed as a species.
Everything in UAE is either to do with censorship, or to do with money. Or both. I submitted this story myself earlier. Note that there's also coverage on this from the BBC here. Note that the TRA (the UAE's telecom regulatory agency) last year sent messages to Blackberry owners in the country instructing them to install an update which would improve performance. Not only did it not improve performance (actually caused crashes and shortened battery life for a reason you'll see in a second), but it actually forwarded received messages onto the goverment. Slashdot covered it last year here.
They're a scummy government. Blackberries are fairly popular in UAE (the lack of snooping is actually a plus, btw) and by threatening to make them illegal the government there is trying to force RIM who make them to hand over encryption keys or open up access to its customers in some other manner. If RIM have any sense, and I'm sure they have, they'll call TRA's bluff.
UAE's government ain't that nice and the country is riddled with corruption and duplicity. Hell, this is the country where all the shops sell MP5 players. Why? Because they're newer than MP3 players. I try to find that funny but after a ten minute argument with someone from there who kept insisting his device was superior because "yeah, but mine's an MP5 player", I just lost the humour along the way, somewhere. UAE also does its best to fuck up Skype and any other VoIP services. (They don't do a very effective job, btw.)
By repeatedly trying to demonstrate how every need can be met by the iPad, yes, you are effectively trying to argue that the iPad suits all needs. By arguing that no-one other technical experts would ever want an open tablet, you're entirely detached from reality as well as ignoring that jailbreaking the device voids vendor support warranties - a big no no for both individual and business users. Having a device that, for example, you need to manage by syncing it to iTunes in a business setting would be absurd. You skip over several arguments, not least the very large fact that there is a wealth of Windows based software out there that we would like to run on a tablet. You invoke the holy name of Physics, saying that its very laws dictate that a Windows-based platform must always lag behind a Mac OS X derived platform when this is not "the laws of Physics" but merely an article of faith. Two systems, both derived from desktop OS's. The laws of Physics have nothing to say about which must run best. Your argument that a Windows-based one must lag, is also not an argument that makes sense in context. What we want is a tablet that does more than the iPad. So long as performance is adequate for our needs, then our goal is to get the required features. I can say that my phone runs more quickly than my laptop, but that's meaningless if I want to do something that only a laptop can accomplish. You're arguing that a more limited device running faster, is inherently better than a more capable device running fast enough. Plainly wrong.
Sorry to laugh outright at your earlier assertion; I did not believe you were actually serious.
I am serious. The logical reasoning and reference to facts is the giveaway.:)
But he is not condemning people who want something other than an iPad. He is condemning people who want to make the iPad something other than what it is
No, I posted a comment about how I was looking forward to a tablet from someone other than Apple, and he responded with a non-sensical screed about how I should enjoy my cut-rate crapola I buy at Wallmart amongst other things. Stop defending the cretin just because he's slavishly pro-Apple. You keep arguing against people who want to turn the iPad into something its not. Well go out and find some such people because no-one here is trying to change or take your iPad away from you - we're all saying we want more choice, not less. And yet you keep acting as if saying we find the iPad unduly limited for our needs is us trying to take it away from others. Did you even read the first post I was replying to? It was a really stupid analogy that implied Microsoft releasing a tablet was equivalent to them taking people's iPads away. Did IQ's suddently drop, while I was away? Please stop mischaracterising what I'm saying. It doesn't do you any favours with me and I doubt anyone still bothering to read this thread can't see that what you're saying only applies to fictional posters that aren't us.
And this is key. Because it does mean something like an Android or Palm tablet has a chance, and means that a Windows 7 tablet will always come off poor in comparison - because in running side by side it will always seem slower, or the hardware will be much larger.
This seems to be an article of faith for you. Microsoft will have access to the exact same technology as Apple. There's nothing to stop them making something just as light, same size, same (or better) spec. If it has a cut-down Windows 7 derivative on it, then I'll likely be able to do all the things with it that Apple prevented me doing with the iPad. Bang - instant market!
Please stop arguing that people who want more choice are in some way trying to take people's iPads away from them. Please stop trying to rationalise the ramblings of the cretin who ranted about Pringles. Please stop repeating as an article of faith that anything MS produces must be shit. I have a Windows 7 laptop. It's more powerful than Macs that cost more and the UI is just as nice (nicer to my preferences). I don't therefore see why a similar situation cannot exist on the tablet form factor.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, that's a point well made. Simply saying "slippery slope" alone doesn't illustrate anything. One must also illustrate that there is a slope. E.g. in your examples, you don't support that Y lies in the same direction as X - i.e. 'allowing gays to marry means we'll be allowing people to marry dead cats.' Is it reasonable to propose that common factors prevent both? No, it isn't. There might be a few factors in common (i.e. a prohibition against anyone marrying other than an adult of the opposite sex and same species affects both gay marriage and dead cats), but they're dwarfed by the far larger factors preventing dead cat marrying so the example becomes hyperbole. However, in cases where the factors are comparable, e.g. prohibitions against a little bit of hacking, are largely the same as prohibitions against large scale hacking, then the slippery slope is a valid criticism. The removal of factors preventing X does also reduce the factors preventing Y where the factors of the two overlap.
Which is what I said. In most of your examples, we can't identify much in the way similar factors, hence your examples are hyperbole. That doesn't mean that in cases where people are talking about slippery slopes it isn't because they have identified common factors. Again, History stands testament to that.
You can kind of see this by watching movies and TV shows from "then" and now. Violence in older media tends to be short, mean and clumsy. Not to mention unpredictable! That's because people used to be more commonly familiar with violence and would see the prolonged, choreographed and get-hit-on-the-jaw-fifteen-times-and-still-get-up-again violence in todays actioners as, entertaining perhaps, but far more likely to break their suspension of disbelief.
It isn't a fallacy. If circumstance X and circumstance Y are both prevented by some common factors, and we see that X occurs, it highlights that Y has become more likely.
Saying that "slippery slopes" are a fallacy, shows a distinct lack of awareness of History.
The headline doesn't say 2/3rds of people. It says 2/3rds of "consumers" whatever the fuck they are. it could say "people", it could say "citizens". It could even, at a push, say "the public". But no - it's "consumers". So I don't think they're people, whatever they are. Maybe some sort of cow?
I just couldn't go to see it after the spoof trailer that I linked to above. I saw the serious trailer afterwards in the cinema and it was just taking itself so seriously I could barely stop myself from laughing.
How can anyone think that is a documentary? I don't know. Scary thing is, I'm not surprised by that. : (
I don't think anybody watched 2012!
(Bit I did enjoy the trailer).
If everybody who agreed with only 1 in 3 things another person said, could actually confine their disagreements to the two things they didn't and not let it impact the 1 they could work together on, we'd have colonised Mars by now. ;)
;)
I'll look forward to intelligent disagreements in the future then. Who knows. maybe you'll convince me that we should all be invading Iraq armed with iPads, yet.
Thank you. It certainly wasn't intended as a troll or an insult - just a genuine observation of something that is quite striking to outsiders.
It's always possible this is thread-leak from other stories I've posted in. I've recently been annoying (not deliberately) people in Apple and Iraq subject threads. Sometimes people note a poster that has said things they disagree with and mod them down when they see them elsewhere. It's a destructive practice but it does happen. Maybe it will get caught in meta-moderation.
Appreciate the post though - might help people browsing above 0 to notice it.
You don't know anything about my ideology and nothing that I have said has relied on some political view to be supported. I said that the current administration's foreign policy is in all significant ways identical to what the previous administrations plans were. You respond by telling me there's no difference between the current withdrawal plans and those of the Bush administration. What you're saying doesn't contradict my point at all. You also say that the conditions for withdrawal had been met. Are you now trying to imply that they have been 'unmet'?
Given that your position on the same action changes depending on whether its carried out by the Republicans or the Democrats, you should probably be slower to throw out accusations of bias.
Well changing a word that isn't actually something to be ashamed of because other parties start using it as a term of abuse is certainly an American tradition. Witness negro, black, coloured, african-american. They keep changing when the actual meaning is nothing offensive at all. But the map is more important than the territory.
And it's not unique to America. When I was a kid "spastic" was a medical term. Then it became a term of abuse and children became "retarded". Now you'll get your head bitten off in the medical industry if you use that last word. And before "spastic" you had "cretin" and other terms.
If something is socialist, call it socialist. To do otherwise is to accept other parties opinion that there is something wrong with it. Allow them to start defining what words you use, and you you cede a lot of power to them. And they'll still call you "socialist" anyway.
And oh, I nearly forgot. The point was whether the Democrats had done anything differently to how the Republicans would have in regard to their foreign policy. The Bush administration would be pulling troops out in just the same way as Obama. They had already announced before the election that they were going to withdraw troops. That is simply the military, political and economic reality of the situation.
First off, he has announced a withdrawal date for Iraq, not Afghanistan. So your entire point is off. Secondly, announcing a withdrawal date for Afghanistan is the only way it can be done. Unless you're advocating a permanent occupation, then a withdrawal must happen. When a withdrawal is going to happen, the "enemy" will certainly know a month in advance whether you announce it or not. You don't suddenly pull out an occupying army without making arrangements with the local security forces (amongst a lot of other giveaways) so that means people will know. All you'd accomplish by trying to withdraw suddenly and secretly is either looking stupid or, if by some miracle yo managed it, creating a power vacuum that no-one had been prepared for resulting in destructive chaos. Finally, the US forces aren't going to be overwhelmed if they're not carrying out "Combat Operations". They'll be nicely protected in their bases and suffer occasional erratic rocket attacks at worst. It's when the US forces go out and try to do things that they really suffer casualties.
I'm going to cut through all the media spin and tell this to you straight: The US is losing in Afghanistan. They've been unable to bring down the Taliban. They control a tiny handful of the total number of strategic areas they would need to in order to actually say they controlled Afghanistan. The government there is a brutal regime in waiting. What exactly are you advocating? Permament occupation?
My credentials: Three years of management in the NHS. I can promise you that the New Labour government did everything it could behind the scenes to privatise health care in the UK without actually having to publically admit it and they did this because they are corrupt as fuck. The US health care giants view the UK as a big pot of gold going to waste. Thanks to New Labour, they're getting their snouts in the trough and we are not going to get cheaper or better health care in return.
The really scary thing to Europeans, is that people of the US have been conditioned to think socialism is a synonym for bad, to the extent that some institute trying to prove (falsely) that the current administration's health care plans are socialist is a viable tactic. In the rest of the world, saying the health plan was socialist would just get a shrug (and some corrections from those that understood what Socialism actually means). In the US, supporters of the plan have to scurry to prove that it isn't socialist.
It's a shame the plan isn't socialist, btw. The US pays far more than most of the world per capita for its health care than most Western European countries which have socialised care.
He's been making various diplomatic noises for the proles, but in terms of policy and international agreements, he's been no more conciliatory or giving that Bush was. Less, even.
I'm open to debate if you know of any significant examples where the current administration's foreign policy is less dominating than the previous one, but as far as I can tell, its just rolling on with the same courses of action the Bush administration would have.
So far it's just a big bit of paper with wget written in one corner and a note reading "Start Here".
Oh fuck me, that annoys the shit out of me. And IE annoys me because its cookie management is a pain. And Opera annoys me because sometimes I click a mouse button and it tries to search the web for whatever I happen to have on my clipboard (one day, that will be a problem).
If I could get the bits I want from all the different browsers and mash them together into a new one, I'd be happy.
Tablets can be whatever there is a market for and there's a market for ones not like the iPad.
I like styluses. They're good for hand-writing recognition, making notes on PDFs and sketching quick diagrams. As to those 250 companies using the iPad, it really rather depends on how many and what for. Reporting that a company as huge as Wells Fargo has bought 15 iPads is hardly conclusive. Right now the iPad is the only modern tablet on the market. We'll see how things go when there are others.
You've brought him up more times than I have. I was just parodying the style of the OP who wrote a personal rant about Ballmer. Your repeated accusation of "Apple-hater" is meaningless. It has no objective value. Why do you keep repeating it?
His post was a joke. The monarchies he listed were ceremonial ones only. The monarchs in these countries have no direct involvement in government (though the UK lot are part of a rich establishment, so there are ties). The monarchy in Saudi Arabia is old style monarchy. They actually have a family there that is actually in charge of the country and shoots those that try to change things (or gets the US navy to do it if there are too many of them).
LOL! I wish that I had thought of it. Would have made the point more effectively than my trying to explain file formats to them.
Weapons are a threat to people. Information is a threat to governments.
Heh. I like that the House of Saud are such pieces of shit that even pro- and anti- Israel types can agree on their utter contempt for the corrupt oppressive bastards. :)
It's amazing that the people of the US allow their government to keep propping it up. Without the US support, they'd have been overthrown by their people long ago. It's a fucking monarchy in the 21st Century. We should be ashamed as a species.
Everything in UAE is either to do with censorship, or to do with money. Or both. I submitted this story myself earlier. Note that there's also coverage on this from the BBC here. Note that the TRA (the UAE's telecom regulatory agency) last year sent messages to Blackberry owners in the country instructing them to install an update which would improve performance. Not only did it not improve performance (actually caused crashes and shortened battery life for a reason you'll see in a second), but it actually forwarded received messages onto the goverment. Slashdot covered it last year here.
They're a scummy government. Blackberries are fairly popular in UAE (the lack of snooping is actually a plus, btw) and by threatening to make them illegal the government there is trying to force RIM who make them to hand over encryption keys or open up access to its customers in some other manner. If RIM have any sense, and I'm sure they have, they'll call TRA's bluff.
UAE's government ain't that nice and the country is riddled with corruption and duplicity. Hell, this is the country where all the shops sell MP5 players. Why? Because they're newer than MP3 players. I try to find that funny but after a ten minute argument with someone from there who kept insisting his device was superior because "yeah, but mine's an MP5 player", I just lost the humour along the way, somewhere. UAE also does its best to fuck up Skype and any other VoIP services. (They don't do a very effective job, btw.)
By repeatedly trying to demonstrate how every need can be met by the iPad, yes, you are effectively trying to argue that the iPad suits all needs. By arguing that no-one other technical experts would ever want an open tablet, you're entirely detached from reality as well as ignoring that jailbreaking the device voids vendor support warranties - a big no no for both individual and business users. Having a device that, for example, you need to manage by syncing it to iTunes in a business setting would be absurd. You skip over several arguments, not least the very large fact that there is a wealth of Windows based software out there that we would like to run on a tablet. You invoke the holy name of Physics, saying that its very laws dictate that a Windows-based platform must always lag behind a Mac OS X derived platform when this is not "the laws of Physics" but merely an article of faith. Two systems, both derived from desktop OS's. The laws of Physics have nothing to say about which must run best. Your argument that a Windows-based one must lag, is also not an argument that makes sense in context. What we want is a tablet that does more than the iPad. So long as performance is adequate for our needs, then our goal is to get the required features. I can say that my phone runs more quickly than my laptop, but that's meaningless if I want to do something that only a laptop can accomplish. You're arguing that a more limited device running faster, is inherently better than a more capable device running fast enough. Plainly wrong.
I am serious. The logical reasoning and reference to facts is the giveaway. :)
No, I posted a comment about how I was looking forward to a tablet from someone other than Apple, and he responded with a non-sensical screed about how I should enjoy my cut-rate crapola I buy at Wallmart amongst other things. Stop defending the cretin just because he's slavishly pro-Apple. You keep arguing against people who want to turn the iPad into something its not. Well go out and find some such people because no-one here is trying to change or take your iPad away from you - we're all saying we want more choice, not less. And yet you keep acting as if saying we find the iPad unduly limited for our needs is us trying to take it away from others. Did you even read the first post I was replying to? It was a really stupid analogy that implied Microsoft releasing a tablet was equivalent to them taking people's iPads away. Did IQ's suddently drop, while I was away? Please stop mischaracterising what I'm saying. It doesn't do you any favours with me and I doubt anyone still bothering to read this thread can't see that what you're saying only applies to fictional posters that aren't us.
This seems to be an article of faith for you. Microsoft will have access to the exact same technology as Apple. There's nothing to stop them making something just as light, same size, same (or better) spec. If it has a cut-down Windows 7 derivative on it, then I'll likely be able to do all the things with it that Apple prevented me doing with the iPad. Bang - instant market!
Please stop arguing that people who want more choice are in some way trying to take people's iPads away from them. Please stop trying to rationalise the ramblings of the cretin who ranted about Pringles. Please stop repeating as an article of faith that anything MS produces must be shit. I have a Windows 7 laptop. It's more powerful than Macs that cost more and the UI is just as nice (nicer to my preferences). I don't therefore see why a similar situation cannot exist on the tablet form factor.