Um, that's kind of the whole problem with this ruling.
What? No, you your argument is based entirely on the assumption that anyone can make a small community with its own legal system to further a petty political agenda (false) and that such communities could pass any law they want (also false).
Like I said, if such a small community were to exist, have its own legal system, and be legally recognised, they would need to abide by certain restrictions imposed by their state and country. For example, they wouldn't be allowed to say, women don't get a vote in local elections, or they wouldn't be able impose a local dictatorship.
Similarly so, you wouldn't be able to arbitrarily say you oppose a certain site, without giving a good reason why. It would be unconstitutional, and even worse, it would be the kind of unconstitutional that the courts would actually sit up and take notice of.
There would be reasonable restrictions on what you can call a town. A judge wouldn't rule favourably on it if he knew it was merely to ban a website. Doubly so if it wasn't to ban a website, more just to make a (rather flawed) point.
Anyway, towns can't just go around passing any law they feel like. They do have a partial responsibility to their state and national governments and populations.
I would like to see the actual ruling before assuming the worst. The ruling could be as reasonable as forcing US websites to be legal everywhere in the US.
Unfortunately, the article is no help, and I can't seem to find it using google.
If only researchers would read slashdot. Then they could benefit from our superior knowledge, and we would never have to say "correlation != causation" again.
Wait, doesn't that make the ISP guilty in your analogy? In your equating of illegal downloads and murder, the ISPs are the equivalent of the murderers.
Yes and no. It helps to act on the assumption that things will work out worse than predicted, but you can go too far. I mean, for all we know, there's some secret government conspiracy to completely strip us of our rights, lobotomise us, and keep us as slaves. Of course, such a thing is ridiculous for a number of reasons, but it is technically possible, and is pretty much the worst, extrapolating from today's trajectory.
Just remember that a government is an inefficient mess made of thousands of people playing a highly competitive game of shameless self-promotion and power struggles. Organising it for anything, including the systematic destruction of our civil liberties, is, for all intents and purposes, impossible without general support from the voters.
Correction: democracy is running the world, but you aren't. I can't say I know your specific beefs with whichever government is in power in whichever country you live in, but in my experience, most people who complain about democracy are just frustrated that their wants are not being recognised by the government.
One such common complaint in two party systems is that the two parties are very similar. This is, of course, inevitable, since they represent the same population, with the same political views. If your views happen to be in the minority on any given subject, then suddenly it's going to seem like the parties are just the same.
And, the politicians are sock-puppets for these majority viewpoints. They act like its their idea, that they came up with the policies, and they agree with them wholeheartedly and absolutely, simply because it's better for their image. How many members of a political party do you think actually agree with every element of the party line?
How ironic. My two posts countering this notion of "fight makes right" are modded "overrated"; the one negative mod that is not meta-moderated and for which the chicken-shit moderator is not accountable.
Security keeps increasing... As well as criminality. Can we see a pattern here?
Absolutely. As criminality increases, we tighten security in an effort to combat it. I don't see how this is empirical proof that the approach is useless.
Scaring large groups of the population by threatening to report them for a terrorism-related fate of certain doom could in itself be considered an act of terrorism...
That's quite a stretch. If you want an actual guideline of terrorism according to UK law, the following is a link to the full text of the Terrorism Act 2000 (or TACT), and right up the top, we have a definition:
It's not pacifism that causes this fear. The poster seems to believe that the will to fight for your beliefs is sufficient to be in the right. That pretty much gives him the moral license to do whatever he wants so long as he gets drunk first!
I know that my opinions have been strongly influenced by/. discussions that I have read (but not participated in) over the years, even if only on topics that I did not already have an opinion/view. Perhaps this is not the case for you.
I was more influenced during my teens, when I first started posting. Nowadays, it's extremely rare for something on slashdot to convince me of anything. It usually takes a piece of fundamentally important new information on the subject, but even then, it's not a given.
Any convincing also takes time. Lots and lots of time. It's not usually enough to see it once or twice from one or two people. It usually takes many people many days (weeks or even months) to actually make a dent in my opinions. There also needs to be some form of a consensus among high rated comments, otherwise people just pepper the discussion with retorts, some of which actually stick.
So, for a company to actually make dent in my opinion, they would have to essentially hijack the moderation system and create several accounts saying essentially the same thing. The/. groupthink may be a weakness of/., but it also is a highly effective shield against such influences.
The thing is, whether or not there are corporate shills on/. is a matter of fact - we may never know what that fact is, but there either are or there aren't. If there aren't then I am doing a disservice by encouraging an overly suspicious mentality. While if there are, your arguments may lead others to be less critical of posters' motives than is appropriate.
By the same logic, we should abide by the tenets of every single religion, in case one of them happens to be true. If you do, and none are right, then you've lead a slightly harder life. If you don't, and one is right, then you may burn in agony for an eternity/be struck down by a higher power/reincarnate as a tapeworm/etc.
Besides, I actually have a larger beef with the paranoia about shills that is so common here. Most of the time, it seems it's used as a way of discrediting a valid opinion, without actually refuting it with reason or evidence. Essentially, it is just another ad hominem argument. And, as one of those people who thinks that certain favourite corporate punching bags don't deserve the flak they get (it's not just MS), I often run into problems with this mentality.
It actually gets me thinking: what exactly is the problem we have with shills? It seems we have some kind of anxiety about rhetoric, like it's going to somehow overwhelm our core principles and brainwash us. The worst they can do is say something wrong, so that we have to refute (and possibly ridicule). They might even say something right!
It all comes back to how apt/. is for convincing people. A shill would just become yet another talking head in a line-up of thousands. Probably not a very popular one at that.
One final counterpoint to your last statement about shilling + buying articles being redundant, and a waste of money. I would propose a parallel, in politics, with town hall meetings. Although the greatest effect a politician would have would be to control the moderator, it seems like having shills in the audience also helps to sway public opinion, especially when the supporting voices seem to come from the local community itself.
Yeah, fair enough. I'll concede that point.
Similarly, (as you have shown by your own opinions on the matter) many/.ers are more wary of an agenda behind a news source than they are of an agenda behind an individual post from a regular user.
Everyone has an agenda. That's constantly at the back of my mind whenever reading slashdot. It's uncommon to see a post here which even strives for some kind of unbiased truth, and it's rare not see the posters' biases clearly displayed even when they try to eliminate them. In terms of swaying people's grasp on the "truth", I hardly see how a shill could be worse.
Facts 1-4 caused customers to put off replacing their PC in droves, fearing getting stuck with "the suckage that is Vista."
...
But note that sales weren't through the roof even with the pent up demand.
Do you have numbers to back up this claim? I'm not sure the demand was as pent up amongst non-geeks as you think they were. I think that these sales figures for windows 7 are fairly healthy, even given the so called "vista nightmare".
Besides, you never actually addressed my question. You claimed that the figures were unimportant, seemingly because of two conflicting reasons. Now, it seems, from what you've written, the figures are unimportant because they are a reflection on vista. In that case, what this tells you is that people are still eager to buy a PC with windows on it. It's still a loss for linux.
Do you really think the only shot Linux had was the window of opportunity while Microsoft was pushing Vista?
I said a loss for linux as in a loss of an opportunity, not a "game over, pack up and go home" kind of loss.
Anyway, my point was that these numbers are significant. Sure, the OS market is dominated by bundling, but these numbers show MS's continued domination of the PC market. Are they lower than expected? Depends what you expect. If vista was recognised to be so bad, you would expect less loyalty towards windows and Microsoft.
At first I was interested by your multiple points (if slightly redundant) that you made in this article, but on examining your comment history [slashdot.org] (just over the last month) it seems increasingly likely that you are a Microsoft shill
I know that this kind of approach doesn't work against conspiracy theorists, but what the hell...
...
Loosen up dude. They're not out to get you.
Nice ad hominem.
Learned from the master.
This is me talking about real business, not how you imagine you would run a multibillion dollar corporation
Hmm. Perhaps this is just my starry-eyed idealism talking, but I could have sworn that corporations were run purely for profit.
You don't believe it's worth Google, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, etc. time to astroturf/advocate at the most popular tech news & discussion website in the world [alexa.com] (I don't consider what Digg does "discussion")?
No, I don't! We could be shiniest advertising turd in the jewellery shop, but that doesn't make it a good strategy.
Do you honestly believe major multinational companies only advertise using the most cost effective method, and disregard all other methods?
No, but I think they take better opportunities when they come along. For example, as I already mentioned, going after the many news aggregators is fundamentally stupid when they could be going after the news sources. And they do. Constantly. Any astroturfing on specific sites, even the most popular one, would be largely redundant.
How many developers do MS, Apple, Google et al employ?
Roughly speaking, exactly as many as they need to develop their code, no more, no less. They have marketing guys for exactly that: marketing. Developers are good for developing and marketers are good for marketing. And they have far better usages for their manpower.
Say you pay 5 developers that are working @ $30/hr (more than entry level) to post on Slashdot for 2 hrs every day. That's $300/day, a little over $100K a year to have your products/services defended and your competitors' products/customers criticized and mocked - on the most influential open forum for techies.
On a 24 hour news aggregator, with a fairly extensive population of people who are anti-MS, with an even more extensive population of people who cry "corporate shill!" at the drop of an only semi-vitriolic word, and a moderation system that only promotes comments in line with the/. groupthink, 2 hours a day of someone posting here is going to do fuck all.
Look at us here. How many discussions do you actually see where a person dramatically (or even slightly) changes their mind? A positive post about MS brings about an equal if not greater measure of posts slamming MS, and sometimes even deservedly.
It doesn't make any sense. Compare this to paying perhaps a grand or two to some of the more open news sites. Perhaps send them an early beta/prototype, a wad of cash, and enough hype to drown a small fishing village. Do that to a few sites a few times a year, and it might cost you half a million at the most, and you will get straight through to not only/., but every other news aggregator, and those who actually RTFAs themselves. It may cost more (it may also cost less; I don't know), but it actually does something positive for them, unlike trying to establish a presence here.
But, just because it's most efficient/profitable for Apple to sell it's products online, doesn't mean it's not profitable to also set up retail stores.
I see your point, but retail and online services are largely different markets. There is some overlap, but there's enough people w
"This law is ineffective" in no way implies that "the behaviour pertaining to this law is safe, and does not need to be restricted". This is not a perfect world, where "needs to be restricted" == "the law is effective". The study(s) (which I admit I haven't read) saying that phones are dangerous while driving should be enough of an indication that we need to curb this behaviour.
So yeah, the correct response is either "How can the law be changed to restrict behaviour more effectively?", or "Are we sure that the study is reliable?". We have absolutely no evidence to suggest the latter, but you are welcome to dig for it.
We don't ignore them, we understand them to be unimportant.
Translation: I don't like them, so I'll ignore them.
Please take your astroturf campaign somewhere people won't call you out and laugh.
How about, first you take your paranoia elsewhere, so that people won't call you out and wince.
Just means that after a couple of YEARS of pent up demand because of the Vista fiasco retailers had a decent Xmas selling season for PCs despite the generally crappy economy. Almost none of those 7 licenses were actual retail sales in the normal meaning of the word.
Wait, so which is it now? Is it:
a) Vista was crap, and now people are falling over themselves to buy a windows 7, or a PC with windows 7, or b) Almost all of windows 7 sales were involuntary, and not a product of demand
You can't have it both ways. I suspect it's somewhere between the two Microsoft-bashing extremes. Anyway, however which way you slice it, it's a win for Microsoft and a loss for Linux. It doesn't help Linux for you to deny this.
Meh. At least most Apple users DO upgrade when a new OS ships instead of waiting for their next system purchase to get it rammed down their throat whether they want/like it or not. But Apple is just a niche player and their business model requires them to remain a niche player. Unlike His Steveness who only aspires to be a cult leader, we want "World Domination"
You know, the point of this story was not that Apple released snow leopard (it's not like geeks ignore OSX releases). The point was that windows 7, released at a similar time, was getting more customer satisfaction than snow leopard. A part which I noticed you studiously ignored.
You say that like you guys in Redmond are proud of it or something. It is a sign of a saturated market. Odds are over half of that 10% was people getting a new machine for Xmas because the penetration numbers for 7 before that was still fairly small. Compare and contrast to Win95's release and deployment rate. That was a product people really wanted enough to suffer through the pain of upgrading.
You say it like it's something to be ashamed of or something. No matter how it's deployed, 10% of the huge PC market is extremely large. Hell, it's still early days, and you can still pick up Vista machines, or install XP, or install Linux. Remember, these aren't sales figures, these are usage figures. Face it: people are using windows 7, and by and large, they are satisfied with it.
Even you seemed satisfied with it to certain degree, as rabid a linux zealot as you are.
I know that this kind of approach doesn't work against conspiracy theorists, but what the hell...
Think about this for a moment. Think about how big Microsoft is. Think about how much money they rake in from involuntary sales of windows. Think about how many individuals and businesses there are that are stuck with MS products. Think about how many people worldwide they sell to. Think about how much marketing bang-for-your-buck they expect.
Now consider the number of people on the net, the number of people using slashdot. Even if they deemed it worth the money to pay someone to shill on slashdot, they wouldn't pay nearly the number of people who actually defend Microsoft during these MS-bashing sessions on slashdot. The chances of you finding an MS shill are actually extremely small.
However, I don't even think they would bother shilling on slashdot. It's far easier, cheaper, and more effective, to donate to the news sources, and get them to make puff pieces on their new products. It has the advantage of simultaneously reaching slashdot and every other tech-based news aggregation site.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's the republican party's voters who are planning on overthrowing the existing government. Have they registered?
Well, if they're voting, then yes, actually.
What? No, you your argument is based entirely on the assumption that anyone can make a small community with its own legal system to further a petty political agenda (false) and that such communities could pass any law they want (also false).
Like I said, if such a small community were to exist, have its own legal system, and be legally recognised, they would need to abide by certain restrictions imposed by their state and country. For example, they wouldn't be allowed to say, women don't get a vote in local elections, or they wouldn't be able impose a local dictatorship.
Similarly so, you wouldn't be able to arbitrarily say you oppose a certain site, without giving a good reason why. It would be unconstitutional, and even worse, it would be the kind of unconstitutional that the courts would actually sit up and take notice of.
There would be reasonable restrictions on what you can call a town. A judge wouldn't rule favourably on it if he knew it was merely to ban a website. Doubly so if it wasn't to ban a website, more just to make a (rather flawed) point.
Anyway, towns can't just go around passing any law they feel like. They do have a partial responsibility to their state and national governments and populations.
I would like to see the actual ruling before assuming the worst. The ruling could be as reasonable as forcing US websites to be legal everywhere in the US.
Unfortunately, the article is no help, and I can't seem to find it using google.
Yes! Exactly! Correlation != causation!
If only researchers would read slashdot. Then they could benefit from our superior knowledge, and we would never have to say "correlation != causation" again.
*sigh*
Yes, and Slashdot is eligible for a Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to counteract this effect.
Wait, doesn't that make the ISP guilty in your analogy? In your equating of illegal downloads and murder, the ISPs are the equivalent of the murderers.
Yes and no. It helps to act on the assumption that things will work out worse than predicted, but you can go too far. I mean, for all we know, there's some secret government conspiracy to completely strip us of our rights, lobotomise us, and keep us as slaves. Of course, such a thing is ridiculous for a number of reasons, but it is technically possible, and is pretty much the worst, extrapolating from today's trajectory.
Just remember that a government is an inefficient mess made of thousands of people playing a highly competitive game of shameless self-promotion and power struggles. Organising it for anything, including the systematic destruction of our civil liberties, is, for all intents and purposes, impossible without general support from the voters.
Correction: democracy is running the world, but you aren't. I can't say I know your specific beefs with whichever government is in power in whichever country you live in, but in my experience, most people who complain about democracy are just frustrated that their wants are not being recognised by the government.
One such common complaint in two party systems is that the two parties are very similar. This is, of course, inevitable, since they represent the same population, with the same political views. If your views happen to be in the minority on any given subject, then suddenly it's going to seem like the parties are just the same.
And, the politicians are sock-puppets for these majority viewpoints. They act like its their idea, that they came up with the policies, and they agree with them wholeheartedly and absolutely, simply because it's better for their image. How many members of a political party do you think actually agree with every element of the party line?
How ironic. My two posts countering this notion of "fight makes right" are modded "overrated"; the one negative mod that is not meta-moderated and for which the chicken-shit moderator is not accountable.
Absolutely. As criminality increases, we tighten security in an effort to combat it. I don't see how this is empirical proof that the approach is useless.
Hmm. I think you're the one who's confused.
Making these tools free to use is pragmatic, and could come from any reasonable advocate of free software.
Hard line refusing to use proprietary software/platforms is more RMS's philosophy, and is, for most people, not at all pragmatic.
Does that clear things up?
Here's some information linked from the reporting page:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/CrimeJusticeAndTheLaw/Counterterrorism/DG_183993
That's quite a stretch. If you want an actual guideline of terrorism according to UK law, the following is a link to the full text of the Terrorism Act 2000 (or TACT), and right up the top, we have a definition:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/ukpga_20000011_en_2#pt1-l1g1
Scaring people is not enough. It actually has to be a threat.
I've wasted my life.
It was a half-assed attempt at simultaneous funny and flamebait. I'm really out of practice though. ;-)
It's not pacifism that causes this fear. The poster seems to believe that the will to fight for your beliefs is sufficient to be in the right. That pretty much gives him the moral license to do whatever he wants so long as he gets drunk first!
I find that mentality rather scary.
But then again, so did the Jews during WWII.
Hmm... the belief in pure evil, the gun metaphor...
You're a conservative, are you not?
I was more influenced during my teens, when I first started posting. Nowadays, it's extremely rare for something on slashdot to convince me of anything. It usually takes a piece of fundamentally important new information on the subject, but even then, it's not a given.
Any convincing also takes time. Lots and lots of time. It's not usually enough to see it once or twice from one or two people. It usually takes many people many days (weeks or even months) to actually make a dent in my opinions. There also needs to be some form of a consensus among high rated comments, otherwise people just pepper the discussion with retorts, some of which actually stick.
So, for a company to actually make dent in my opinion, they would have to essentially hijack the moderation system and create several accounts saying essentially the same thing. The /. groupthink may be a weakness of /., but it also is a highly effective shield against such influences.
By the same logic, we should abide by the tenets of every single religion, in case one of them happens to be true. If you do, and none are right, then you've lead a slightly harder life. If you don't, and one is right, then you may burn in agony for an eternity/be struck down by a higher power/reincarnate as a tapeworm/etc.
Besides, I actually have a larger beef with the paranoia about shills that is so common here. Most of the time, it seems it's used as a way of discrediting a valid opinion, without actually refuting it with reason or evidence. Essentially, it is just another ad hominem argument. And, as one of those people who thinks that certain favourite corporate punching bags don't deserve the flak they get (it's not just MS), I often run into problems with this mentality.
It actually gets me thinking: what exactly is the problem we have with shills? It seems we have some kind of anxiety about rhetoric, like it's going to somehow overwhelm our core principles and brainwash us. The worst they can do is say something wrong, so that we have to refute (and possibly ridicule). They might even say something right!
It all comes back to how apt /. is for convincing people. A shill would just become yet another talking head in a line-up of thousands. Probably not a very popular one at that.
Yeah, fair enough. I'll concede that point.
Everyone has an agenda. That's constantly at the back of my mind whenever reading slashdot. It's uncommon to see a post here which even strives for some kind of unbiased truth, and it's rare not see the posters' biases clearly displayed even when they try to eliminate them. In terms of swaying people's grasp on the "truth", I hardly see how a shill could be worse.
Do you have numbers to back up this claim? I'm not sure the demand was as pent up amongst non-geeks as you think they were. I think that these sales figures for windows 7 are fairly healthy, even given the so called "vista nightmare".
Besides, you never actually addressed my question. You claimed that the figures were unimportant, seemingly because of two conflicting reasons. Now, it seems, from what you've written, the figures are unimportant because they are a reflection on vista. In that case, what this tells you is that people are still eager to buy a PC with windows on it. It's still a loss for linux.
I said a loss for linux as in a loss of an opportunity, not a "game over, pack up and go home" kind of loss.
Anyway, my point was that these numbers are significant. Sure, the OS market is dominated by bundling, but these numbers show MS's continued domination of the PC market. Are they lower than expected? Depends what you expect. If vista was recognised to be so bad, you would expect less loyalty towards windows and Microsoft.
Learned from the master.
Hmm. Perhaps this is just my starry-eyed idealism talking, but I could have sworn that corporations were run purely for profit.
No, I don't! We could be shiniest advertising turd in the jewellery shop, but that doesn't make it a good strategy.
No, but I think they take better opportunities when they come along. For example, as I already mentioned, going after the many news aggregators is fundamentally stupid when they could be going after the news sources. And they do. Constantly. Any astroturfing on specific sites, even the most popular one, would be largely redundant.
Roughly speaking, exactly as many as they need to develop their code, no more, no less. They have marketing guys for exactly that: marketing. Developers are good for developing and marketers are good for marketing. And they have far better usages for their manpower.
On a 24 hour news aggregator, with a fairly extensive population of people who are anti-MS, with an even more extensive population of people who cry "corporate shill!" at the drop of an only semi-vitriolic word, and a moderation system that only promotes comments in line with the /. groupthink, 2 hours a day of someone posting here is going to do fuck all.
Look at us here. How many discussions do you actually see where a person dramatically (or even slightly) changes their mind? A positive post about MS brings about an equal if not greater measure of posts slamming MS, and sometimes even deservedly.
It doesn't make any sense. Compare this to paying perhaps a grand or two to some of the more open news sites. Perhaps send them an early beta/prototype, a wad of cash, and enough hype to drown a small fishing village. Do that to a few sites a few times a year, and it might cost you half a million at the most, and you will get straight through to not only /., but every other news aggregator, and those who actually RTFAs themselves. It may cost more (it may also cost less; I don't know), but it actually does something positive for them, unlike trying to establish a presence here.
I see your point, but retail and online services are largely different markets. There is some overlap, but there's enough people w
"This law is ineffective" in no way implies that "the behaviour pertaining to this law is safe, and does not need to be restricted". This is not a perfect world, where "needs to be restricted" == "the law is effective". The study(s) (which I admit I haven't read) saying that phones are dangerous while driving should be enough of an indication that we need to curb this behaviour.
So yeah, the correct response is either "How can the law be changed to restrict behaviour more effectively?", or "Are we sure that the study is reliable?". We have absolutely no evidence to suggest the latter, but you are welcome to dig for it.
Translation: I don't like them, so I'll ignore them.
How about, first you take your paranoia elsewhere, so that people won't call you out and wince.
Wait, so which is it now? Is it:
a) Vista was crap, and now people are falling over themselves to buy a windows 7, or a PC with windows 7, or
b) Almost all of windows 7 sales were involuntary, and not a product of demand
You can't have it both ways. I suspect it's somewhere between the two Microsoft-bashing extremes. Anyway, however which way you slice it, it's a win for Microsoft and a loss for Linux. It doesn't help Linux for you to deny this.
You know, the point of this story was not that Apple released snow leopard (it's not like geeks ignore OSX releases). The point was that windows 7, released at a similar time, was getting more customer satisfaction than snow leopard. A part which I noticed you studiously ignored.
You say it like it's something to be ashamed of or something. No matter how it's deployed, 10% of the huge PC market is extremely large. Hell, it's still early days, and you can still pick up Vista machines, or install XP, or install Linux. Remember, these aren't sales figures, these are usage figures. Face it: people are using windows 7, and by and large, they are satisfied with it.
Even you seemed satisfied with it to certain degree, as rabid a linux zealot as you are.
Or people with conscience.
I know that this kind of approach doesn't work against conspiracy theorists, but what the hell...
Think about this for a moment. Think about how big Microsoft is. Think about how much money they rake in from involuntary sales of windows. Think about how many individuals and businesses there are that are stuck with MS products. Think about how many people worldwide they sell to. Think about how much marketing bang-for-your-buck they expect.
Now consider the number of people on the net, the number of people using slashdot. Even if they deemed it worth the money to pay someone to shill on slashdot, they wouldn't pay nearly the number of people who actually defend Microsoft during these MS-bashing sessions on slashdot. The chances of you finding an MS shill are actually extremely small.
However, I don't even think they would bother shilling on slashdot. It's far easier, cheaper, and more effective, to donate to the news sources, and get them to make puff pieces on their new products. It has the advantage of simultaneously reaching slashdot and every other tech-based news aggregation site.
Loosen up dude. They're not out to get you.