The straw man is you redefining "corruption" in the context of this discussion and then making an unsupported assertion about it, in an attempt to divert the discussion away from something you don't want to address.
Bullshit. I was just having a friendly discussion of some cultural differences that I think are important. That you think it irrelevant, does not make my argument a straw man.
Incidentally, if you don't think those things happen in Australia, you're pretty naive.
I never said that. It's just nowhere near as endemic.
Actually, I did provide evidence of roads with higher speed limits have no worse (or better) safety statistics.
But you haven't shown a causal link. The differences could be due to many things, for example, Europe being more public transit friendly, so people are less likely to depend on cars when their driving ability or physical condition deteriorates, or have to drive home from a party or something. You also didn't provide any figures. For this to be true, you'd have to show that EVERY country with higher or unrestricted speed limits have substantially lower accident rates, and that would still just be correlation.
Speed limits have not been _raised_ despite dramatic improvements to vehicles and roads applying upward pressure on 85th percentile speeds.
But why should we be using the "85th percentile" it doesn't seem like very good assumptions, and is based on flawed premise and methodology. What reason is there to raise speed limits?
Probably because my primary argument is not that faster is safer, but that faster is not inherently more dangerous.
But it is. Did you fail basic physics or something?
A straw man again - and an ironic one at that. My argument was that a higher speed limit without higher fatality rates demonstrates there is not a causative relationship between speed and safety,
Not a strawman, and no, you haven't demonstrated it. You seem to think that any veering from your talking points is a straw man. Very odd.
Another straw man.
How? it's a perfectly relevant question. I just think you don't want a real discussion, you just want to preach.
But provided no evidence. The speed limit in Australia has been 100-110km/h for many years, well before speed cameras and such. So, where is the evidence that seed limits have been lowered for financial gain?
Considering one of your (not to mention the Government's) key arguments seems to be "faster == more dangerous", why is the level of safety on the roads with the highest vehicle speeds not relevant ?
Because you're not providing any evidence that faster is safer. Just pointing to the autobahns is irrelevant, because drivers there have a different standard of training, different vehicles, etc. Correlation is not causation. Even if their speed limit is higher, and there are fewer accidents, does not mean it's because of the higher speed limit. Do you really believe that if the speed limit was lowered on the autobahns, and it was obeyed, that there would suddenly be more accidents?
Any action against Net Neutrality, for one, will be one step towards establishing a Pirate Party here at home. Any action that tries to legislate morality on the internet will be one step towards a viable Pirate Party third party. The only real chance legislators have in the U.S. of stopping the growth of the Pirate Party here is ironically to embrace the tenets of the Pirate Party and implement the freedom of information it espouses.
So, you're saying that the US should be more draconian about establishing morality laws for the internet?
Do we see people roll in and viciously attack Apple like we all would attack Microsoft if IE8 had Bing's Javascript Attackable Toolbar checked by default on installation? Or Microsoft's indexing service that eats up all your cycles whenever it feels like it? No, no,
Errr, yes, actually. What do you think your post, and dozens of other in this thread are doing?
How much research do you think people do before checking a box in an iTunes dialog? The onus is on Apple to not offer stupid things that would coincidentally inflate the installed base of an enterprise utility.
I would have thought the onus was on users not to operate their computers blindly and not install software unthinkingly. After all, do you think the malware writers are going to play nice one this front? There's no excuse for stupidity, and you shouldn't be excusing it.
It got attention. Isn't that the point of marketing?
And I dare say MS wasn't expecting to convert slashdot posters with usernames like "ihatewinXP" to using Windows 7 with these ads...:)
Selling more product, or raising your brand's identity is the point of marketing. This does the opposite. The point of this story is that it's not just slashdot folk who are hearing about this - it's all over the mainstream media. The problem (for Microsoft) is that the Windows 7 launch is supposed to remove the negative associations that Vista caused people to have. For a while, the "buzz on the street" was that Windows 7 is actually a decent OS, unlike Vista. But as soon as the average person sees this House Party video, they are going to be very suspicious that Windows 7 is nothing but marketing hype, and may not actually be a decent OS after all. That's very bad for Microsoft, especially after the success they've had in viral marketing of Windows 7 so far.
Absolutely not in my experience. We use some of this outdated shit at work, we'd love to get rid of IE and all the cruft. It's just that the vendor doesn't care and won't respond to our requests. Why we keep paying for it is a mystery to me.
If you're charging money for your product this has to be the case - You need a steady stream of innovations to retain existing customers,
It seems you've never worked with "enterprise software," whose customers seem to keep paying for any old shit, no matter how bad it is. And the developers don't seem to be very concerned, much of this crap still requires IE6, for fuck's sake!
When was this? I cut my computing teeth in the 1980s, and security was basically non-existent for personal machines. The concerns about security have only really come into effect since the rise of the internet. So, what timeline are you talking about?
Even worse, maybe we should reflect on how we've turned a subject that has such a huge potential for good, into a nerdy hell: full of jargon, technobabble and misinformation.
I think many "IT people" like it like that; it makes them feel superior, and gives them a weapon to "pwn newbs" or whatever. It's also popular among management, who have their own variations of the dialect that is used to shut out people and lower the discourse. I think if the IT industry looked inwards on itself, it would probably decide that things are going just as planned. After all, the industry is there to make a profit, and that's easier when you can deceive customers.
Pretending to be a customer would qualify as "undercover." I also don't recall anybody referring to him as a "hot shot" investigator, other than yourself.
2. Does anybody really think that cars have not gotten safer in the past 50 years?
From reading this slashdot thread, apparently so.
4. It wasted a very restoreable car for nothing. That car could have been restored are made into a very nice street rod.
And what would be the point of that? Expending time and effort to put a wasteful vehicle on the road that wastes space for show, when it could be recycled to make something useful?
Because the road rules there are even sillier than they are in Australia and their enforcement even more corrupt ? Come on, you pick one of the few countries in the civilised world that is worse for this sort of thing than Australia, then try to use that as an example of how good Australia is ?
My point is that they have almost nothing in common. Enforcement isn't corrupt in Australia - everybody gets the same treatment. While in America, your infringement is either totally ignored, you get busted for driving while black, get a free pass for driving while being a cute female, or used as an excuse for drug searches.
What makes you say that enforcement in Australia is corrupt?
If the relationship were as you describe, then the higher-speed roads in Europe (and in general - ie: as opposed to lower speed urban and residential roads) would be deathtraps. The unrestricted German Autobahns would be clearly more dangerous than other motorway systems. In actual fact, they're amongst the safest in the world [wikipedia.org].
That's of little relevance, as autobahns are very different to the roads that most of us do our driving on. They are designed for high speeds.
I doubt "all modern cars" would have done so well as the Malibu
Of course, but that doesn't mean the Bel-Air would do in better in those tests, just that a less safe modern car would do worse. In fact, the Bel-Air would likely come off worse against a less-safe car, as the safer car is also absorbing the impact to the benefit of the Bel-Air.
Why can't you just use exclamation points? All-caps may be yelling... for idiots. English already has a convention for that. Besides, it would be more effective if you expressed it more artfully through your writing, rather than resorting the the cheapest possible method.
Lily Allen is still going to complete her tour, but states that she won't release another track.
I think that's called "quitting while you're ahead." I don't think she has enough new ideas to continue releasing albums (not that that ever stopped anyone). She can move on to her TV Celebrity career or whatever, and not have to worry about being creative.
Slashdot Mirror
The straw man is you redefining "corruption" in the context of this discussion and then making an unsupported assertion about it, in an attempt to divert the discussion away from something you don't want to address.
Bullshit. I was just having a friendly discussion of some cultural differences that I think are important. That you think it irrelevant, does not make my argument a straw man.
Incidentally, if you don't think those things happen in Australia, you're pretty naive.
I never said that. It's just nowhere near as endemic.
Actually, I did provide evidence of roads with higher speed limits have no worse (or better) safety statistics.
But you haven't shown a causal link. The differences could be due to many things, for example, Europe being more public transit friendly, so people are less likely to depend on cars when their driving ability or physical condition deteriorates, or have to drive home from a party or something. You also didn't provide any figures. For this to be true, you'd have to show that EVERY country with higher or unrestricted speed limits have substantially lower accident rates, and that would still just be correlation.
Speed limits have not been _raised_ despite dramatic improvements to vehicles and roads applying upward pressure on 85th percentile speeds.
But why should we be using the "85th percentile" it doesn't seem like very good assumptions, and is based on flawed premise and methodology. What reason is there to raise speed limits?
Probably because my primary argument is not that faster is safer, but that faster is not inherently more dangerous.
But it is. Did you fail basic physics or something?
A straw man again - and an ironic one at that. My argument was that a higher speed limit without higher fatality rates demonstrates there is not a causative relationship between speed and safety,
Not a strawman, and no, you haven't demonstrated it. You seem to think that any veering from your talking points is a straw man. Very odd.
Another straw man.
How? it's a perfectly relevant question. I just think you don't want a real discussion, you just want to preach.
That would be the part where you start going on about "driving while black", etc.
How does telling a truth that makes you feel uncomfortable make it a strawman? A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position. As I said, I don't think you even understand what the term means. I wasn't even attacking any argument, let alone making up an argument of yours to attack.
Pretty sure I've already covered my reasoning.
But provided no evidence. The speed limit in Australia has been 100-110km/h for many years, well before speed cameras and such. So, where is the evidence that seed limits have been lowered for financial gain?
Considering one of your (not to mention the Government's) key arguments seems to be "faster == more dangerous", why is the level of safety on the roads with the highest vehicle speeds not relevant ?
Because you're not providing any evidence that faster is safer. Just pointing to the autobahns is irrelevant, because drivers there have a different standard of training, different vehicles, etc. Correlation is not causation. Even if their speed limit is higher, and there are fewer accidents, does not mean it's because of the higher speed limit. Do you really believe that if the speed limit was lowered on the autobahns, and it was obeyed, that there would suddenly be more accidents?
Any action against Net Neutrality, for one, will be one step towards establishing a Pirate Party here at home. Any action that tries to legislate morality on the internet will be one step towards a viable Pirate Party third party. The only real chance legislators have in the U.S. of stopping the growth of the Pirate Party here is ironically to embrace the tenets of the Pirate Party and implement the freedom of information it espouses.
So, you're saying that the US should be more draconian about establishing morality laws for the internet?
NAH, IT'S KAFKA-ESQUE! I mean, hey. It's not an Apple product, so WE MUST DUMP ON IT!
Wow, insane much?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming".
Wow, insane much?
Are you saying that you have no reading comprehension skills whatsoever?
Do we see people roll in and viciously attack Apple like we all would attack Microsoft if IE8 had Bing's Javascript Attackable Toolbar checked by default on installation? Or Microsoft's indexing service that eats up all your cycles whenever it feels like it? No, no,
Errr, yes, actually. What do you think your post, and dozens of other in this thread are doing?
How much research do you think people do before checking a box in an iTunes dialog? The onus is on Apple to not offer stupid things that would coincidentally inflate the installed base of an enterprise utility.
I would have thought the onus was on users not to operate their computers blindly and not install software unthinkingly. After all, do you think the malware writers are going to play nice one this front? There's no excuse for stupidity, and you shouldn't be excusing it.
Essentially what they are doing is kickstarting a quality viral campaign. Snigger all you want at the ad, that's what they want you do do.
Utter bullshit. That was not the intention with this. It was meant earnestly.
Bullshit. Tux and Beastie are both cool.
Didn't you say you are over 60 years old?
It got attention. Isn't that the point of marketing? And I dare say MS wasn't expecting to convert slashdot posters with usernames like "ihatewinXP" to using Windows 7 with these ads... :)
Selling more product, or raising your brand's identity is the point of marketing. This does the opposite. The point of this story is that it's not just slashdot folk who are hearing about this - it's all over the mainstream media. The problem (for Microsoft) is that the Windows 7 launch is supposed to remove the negative associations that Vista caused people to have. For a while, the "buzz on the street" was that Windows 7 is actually a decent OS, unlike Vista. But as soon as the average person sees this House Party video, they are going to be very suspicious that Windows 7 is nothing but marketing hype, and may not actually be a decent OS after all. That's very bad for Microsoft, especially after the success they've had in viral marketing of Windows 7 so far.
Absolutely not in my experience. We use some of this outdated shit at work, we'd love to get rid of IE and all the cruft. It's just that the vendor doesn't care and won't respond to our requests. Why we keep paying for it is a mystery to me.
This is what's called a straw man.
How is it a straw man? Do you even know what that term means?
Because the laws are designed and enforced with a an objective of revenue raising, rather than road safety.
What evidence do you have of that?
The typical Autobahn is designed no differently from any reasonably modern Australian Motorway.
But most of our driving isn't done on motorways, it's done on streets and roads. So autobahns and highways are mostly irrelevant.
We don't need to educate people about computers - we need to educate people about the value of professional IT training and certification.
Like those oh-so-valuable Microsoft certifications? I think this idea might backfire on you, given the nature of the industry.
If you're charging money for your product this has to be the case - You need a steady stream of innovations to retain existing customers,
It seems you've never worked with "enterprise software," whose customers seem to keep paying for any old shit, no matter how bad it is. And the developers don't seem to be very concerned, much of this crap still requires IE6, for fuck's sake!
Back before ease of use eclipsed security,
When was this? I cut my computing teeth in the 1980s, and security was basically non-existent for personal machines. The concerns about security have only really come into effect since the rise of the internet. So, what timeline are you talking about?
Even worse, maybe we should reflect on how we've turned a subject that has such a huge potential for good, into a nerdy hell: full of jargon, technobabble and misinformation.
I think many "IT people" like it like that; it makes them feel superior, and gives them a weapon to "pwn newbs" or whatever. It's also popular among management, who have their own variations of the dialect that is used to shut out people and lower the discourse. I think if the IT industry looked inwards on itself, it would probably decide that things are going just as planned. After all, the industry is there to make a profit, and that's easier when you can deceive customers.
Pretending to be a customer would qualify as "undercover." I also don't recall anybody referring to him as a "hot shot" investigator, other than yourself.
2. Does anybody really think that cars have not gotten safer in the past 50 years?
From reading this slashdot thread, apparently so.
4. It wasted a very restoreable car for nothing. That car could have been restored are made into a very nice street rod.
And what would be the point of that? Expending time and effort to put a wasteful vehicle on the road that wastes space for show, when it could be recycled to make something useful?
Because the road rules there are even sillier than they are in Australia and their enforcement even more corrupt ? Come on, you pick one of the few countries in the civilised world that is worse for this sort of thing than Australia, then try to use that as an example of how good Australia is ?
My point is that they have almost nothing in common. Enforcement isn't corrupt in Australia - everybody gets the same treatment. While in America, your infringement is either totally ignored, you get busted for driving while black, get a free pass for driving while being a cute female, or used as an excuse for drug searches.
What makes you say that enforcement in Australia is corrupt?
If the relationship were as you describe, then the higher-speed roads in Europe (and in general - ie: as opposed to lower speed urban and residential roads) would be deathtraps. The unrestricted German Autobahns would be clearly more dangerous than other motorway systems. In actual fact, they're amongst the safest in the world [wikipedia.org].
That's of little relevance, as autobahns are very different to the roads that most of us do our driving on. They are designed for high speeds.
I doubt "all modern cars" would have done so well as the Malibu
Of course, but that doesn't mean the Bel-Air would do in better in those tests, just that a less safe modern car would do worse. In fact, the Bel-Air would likely come off worse against a less-safe car, as the safer car is also absorbing the impact to the benefit of the Bel-Air.
Why can't you just use exclamation points? All-caps may be yelling... for idiots. English already has a convention for that. Besides, it would be more effective if you expressed it more artfully through your writing, rather than resorting the the cheapest possible method.
Lets take the closest physical thing to the music industry, a book store.
Ummm, wouldn't the closest physical thing to the music industry be a music store?
Dude, lay off the shift key. That's really annoying.
Lily Allen is still going to complete her tour, but states that she won't release another track.
I think that's called "quitting while you're ahead." I don't think she has enough new ideas to continue releasing albums (not that that ever stopped anyone). She can move on to her TV Celebrity career or whatever, and not have to worry about being creative.
That's all well and good, but what the hell does this issue have to do with Free Speech?