I learned how to set the magnetic declination on a compass when I was 8 years old.

It isn't about hypocrisy so much as a person's sense of inner worth. Think of it this way: there are some people out there who are highly competent professionals, but they wouldn't feel that way if they rolled into the office parking lot every morning in a rusty 1989 Nissan Pulsar with a blown muffler. But why? It makes no sense. Their performance in the workplace has nothing to do with the tool (the car) they used to get themselves there, yet somehow internally, that '89 Pulsar creates a conflict - they don't feel like a professional being seen in that car. They would never in a million years offer to drive their colleagues to lunch.

I've seen something related to this happen with disastrous results. I knew a guy who was a freelancer, and he liked to run cracked versions of everything. What's more, he would habitually seek out the latest releases of everything so he was constantly reinstalling new cracks. He was working on a big design job when his workstation went completely fucking nuts. Among other things, it was emailing invitations to a greeting card website to everybody in his address book (including me) - so you can only imagine what kinds of fun stuff he had installed along with those cracks.

One of the people who received a virus-ridden e-card was his client, who got pissed off and then got worried. The client phoned him and asked that he bundle up everything he'd been working on to date, and send it to him so he could do a status check. Since the machine was going fucking haywire he couldn't do it right away, and had to spend the next couple days trying to to hunt viruses and eventually reinstalling everything from scratch.

The client lost patience and simply yanked the job and gave it to another freelancer. It was a pretty nice job too, worth somewhere north of $15K IIRC. I remember sitting at a pub with this guy and three other associates of ours as he recounted his story. He was really upset - not at himself or at the website where he got his virus-riddled cracks, but at his client for yanking the work - and he was considering suing the client for breach of contract. The opinion around the table was basically "do you really want to get yourself into a courtroom somewhere and have to defend the fact you were completing (or attempting to complete) all this work with stolen software?" He let it go, but he never changed his habits. Last I heard, he was still installing the latest crack of everything on his workstation.

You can do a lot with orientation ... move these houses out of the shade of that big hillside in winter when solar radiation is at its most precious, make those houses face east in the morning and west in the afternoon, put these other houses near the forested park in summer so they don't need as much air conditioning, etc.

"... if you hear banjo music, you've gone too far."

Never heard of them. What game did they change?

Not sure what country GP is posting from, but many of the "third world" economies have an affluent and growing middle class, with lots of disposable income to toss at "premium" products. Apple ignores these markets at their peril. RIM was able to ride out some product misses and incomplete offerings in '09 and '10 by selling like hell in emerging markets, and ended up actually beating forecasts as a result. This gives them some breathing room while they figure out their R&D moves to compete with Apple and Android.

I'm going to name my next child "Cloudy McCloudster" ... come to think of it I better go register that domain right now.

Slashdot needs a new cloud icon to put beside stories like this.

You could.

If this were Microsoft, or Google, or just about any other company in the world, nobody would be making claims that $SERVICE_LAUNCH is going to change the economics of the entire software industry. It's because it's Apple, and these days people seem to work from the paradigm that Apple is the epicentre of technology - whether we're talking about devices, software, or services.

I've known a few freelancers who didn't buy the full product for fear of an audit - they bought the full product because they didn't want to feel like a smalltime crook every time they turned on their workstation to do some design work for a client. It's a state of mind thing: if my skills and professionalism are solid enough to land me a 5-figure design gig, I'm going to do that work using professional equipment, none of which is stolen.

Well, if you're willing to dig up this thread and hammer on it some more I guess I'm game too ...

Which arguments, and which specific logical fallacies am I engaging in?

I never made any claims about billions of anything. The only claim I made was that hundreds of millions of people manage to live a vegetarian lifestyle in at least one place on earth with no difficulties. They do not "go back" to eating meat and the do not become horribly sick. Hundreds of millions is a pretty decent number; the kind of number that carries some statistical weight if you want to start throwing generalizations around (as did GP) about inevitable health consequences of a vegetarian diet.

Yes, many restaurants offer different menus for different people, but in my observation quite a lot are also strictly veg - if they prepared even a single meat or egg-based dish inside their four walls, a certain percentage of their potential clientèle would never set foot inside the place, and they know it. For some other people, milk and eggs are fine most days of the week and year, and they use those to supplement their protein intake. No, not vegan, but still vegetarian by pretty much every definition I've seen.

Does observing the day-to-day or week-to-week life of several practising vegetarians from India count as real research or ignorant parroting? I have seen exactly how an ethnic vegetarian diet from India works - which grains complement which other grains to form complete amino acid groups, which vegetables and legumes complement the various starches. I've also eaten this diet for weeks at a time (though I'm an incurable omnivore and I can't see myself ever giving up meat entirely) and my health was fine ... great even, since vegetarian fare seems to help reduce the acid levels in my stomach after I've been at it for several days in a row.

Which argument is that? You seem to be confusing me with somebody who said "they do it over there so everyone should do it over here." I never actually said anything like that. I only stepped into this thread to offer some evidence to counter some rather outlandish claims I was reading.

Awwww, well now you're just trying to sweet-talk me.