welcome to slashdot, where you basic contentless anti-ms rant gets modded as "insightful." here we have a guy with an ipad - as closed a system as there ever was by a company which puts ms's sins to shame by any objective stanandard, but his blind anti-ms zealotry still peeks through and gets upvotes.

/ no, i do not work or have anything to do with MS. MS research opened a shiny new building not far from me though, though this affects my life only in that I had to sit through traffic more during the construction.

were you the guy complaining 10 years ago that all you want your phone to do is make phone calls and that you have a perfectly good computer to check your email?

time moves on, get over it. There are potential legitimate uses for the technology in question and if there aren't, the market will ignore it.

Japan would like to have a word with you.

and replace it with what?

slashdot's knee-jerk, karma whoring anti-microsoft nonsense notwithstanding,what would you use instead? there are two competitors for a desktop os replacement:

- OSX - anybody who tells you that this is somehow a better working environment than ms windows honestly is just lying. and then there's the philosophical issue of tighter coupling and control than even the worst slashdot fanboi ever accused microsoft of.
- Linux on the Desktop - the growth of OSX showed that the usual linux trope about there being no possibility for a competing desktop OS to succeed was bollocks. The reality is that when your product, priced at free in contrast to its relatively expensive competitors, gets near zero takeup, then it's time to face reality that the basic product isnt very good. its the brown tap water of a dasani world.

You phrased it wrong, which is why so many geniuses are replying with things like "i camt believe people get paid for playing baseball."

Nws flash: they dont get paid for playing baseball. They get paid for putting paid butts in seats. So, basically, i fully agree with the sentiment that i am amazed that there are people who would pay to put their butt in some seat to watch somebody play a video game, no matter how good that person may or may not be. Would i look in on a very good player? Maybe for a few minutes, sure, just like id look in on a good mime. However, i cant see myself ever paying to watch video gaming or buying a product because it was endorsed by such a "pro." Ymmv.

You guys have it all backwards the fact that it's a $4 textbook should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the issue was not "gouging" by textbook manufacturers as some are insinuating. The price of the book was well within the purchase ability of anybody who wanted one.

If the book was $400, you guys would complain that piracy is justified because it's gouging. If it's $4 you complain it's justified because it's trifling.

In all seriousness, Back when I first went into science and engineering about 20 years ago, I thought it was because it was an ethical pursuit with basically honest and noble people.. unlike, say, finance or lawyering. I am not exaggerating nor trolling when I say that more than a decade of reading the lamest possible pseudophilosophical justification of copyright infringement in slashdot fora have well beaten that naivete out of me.

Honestly, how is this crap even slightly insightful when he starts with an absolute statement that is trivially disprovable with any number of european and antipodean examples?

Note that his claim isn't a nuanced on that gun bans don't work everywhere.. it's some a rant claim that they work precisely nowhere, which is self-evidently false.

"fucking retarded?" fucking retarded is making a claim that " gun bans have NEVER worked and will NEVER work" that is self-evidently false and acting like a blowhard in your cock-sure wrongness.

of course, i'm sure you'll now play games with what your definition of "work" is, but it doesn't matter. reasonable people know you're full of it.

somebody who cannot afford $500 on a phone should not be buying a $500 phone with effectively high interest rate payments spread over 2-3 years.

For some reason, developers are going to flock to build cheap games for this substandard performing platform. Furthermore, gamers are going to use this for some reason because...

This thing has cue:cat scale flop written all over it. We won't hear about it again after the media hype dies down, as, simply, except for people who find that they can repurpose the hardware, nobody will buy the thing.

/ just like linux on the desktop.

where exactly is your regression analysis showing those ads 'just don't work?' data please, or your comments are just so much wishful thinking / pseudo internet expertism.

/ nevertheless "+5, insightful" on slashdot, apparently :(

I follow a simple rule: as soon as somebody uses the term "fiat currency", i stop paying attention to them just like i stop paying attention to people who use terms like "libs" or "personal lord and savior."

Double Bullshit, karma-whore.

Of course, there are plenty of problems for which excel is not suitable, such as when the data sets get too large. However, for quite a few other real world problems, it is far more than adequate. Anyway, this is slashdot so note how this was sold as an "Excel error" when clearly it was an operator error.

forgive me for responding to an AC, but what an absolutely dumb response you wrote.

there are clear standards for 'fair use'. You can read about them at
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

your "you want your stuff public" argument is bullshit. everything in a bookstore, movie theater, etc is "public." This doesn't automatically give the right for others to republish those things, in their entirety, for profit, as google does. your claim of "absolute control" is bullshit. i never claimed there should be - i specifically referenced fair use, which is the mechanism by which creators and rightsholders dont have "absolute control."

However, I contend that what google is doing is pretty much as close as you get to "absolute thievery" - total republishing for money. so, this in my view is not some trivial marginal case at the limits of fair use. in many ways, as far as the sites are concerned, its probably about as infringing as you can get.

or, if not, i'd like to hear some argument why not without the special pleading legally nonsensical "you want your stuff public?" casuistic schtick.

and what's more (to reply to my own post), google's profitability is FAR from irrelevant.

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

great. but i'm not talking about the snippets. i'm talking about the mechanism in google and elsewhere where you can see essentially complete copies of the webpages. have you even read the original article? moreover, do you think i can make such a reasoned objection (which you may or may not agree with) without knowing how search engines work?