You misunderstand, still, I guess. I'm not wound up or anything of the sort, it's simply I haven't checked in at Slashdot in all these months, and was just picking up where I'd left off, with your reply. (I'm fine to drop it though!)

As far as thread bleed goes -- that's hardly a concern is it? For a sub-thread marked troll at the start and our exchange 5 levels deep, I imagine it's not. Your concern it noted.

Cheers!

So, I never noticed that you replied to me many months ago. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1737958&cid=33093686 You didn't take my point, so I must have been communicating badly, but I'm still interested in the question I posed, the one I asked you to address. You said:

[...] I want to take notes on it with a stylus, [...] to be able stuff a USB stick in the side of it and put directories of data on it, not sync it to a [...] program running on an entirely separate computer [...]. The iPad is pricey [...] Bring on the rivals, I say.

And then I said:

Address the argument: Are you willing to pay more money than the cost of an iPad for a device that is bigger, has worse battery life, runs windows and lets you manage your own synchronization?[...] The truth is, those devices have existed since the ThinkPad and still exist [...]

See, what I was getting at is: your demands have already been met (and were met first 20 years ago, and HP and the like are still making Windows tablets, or were before better tablets gutted their segment), but you aren't complaining in the context of a device that you already own that meets those demands (they exist, you might have one, I've had several, but they could be improved), you are complaining about a device you don't own, appear to have no intention of buying, and doesn't prevent you from owning any other competitor's device. In fact, you go on to argue largely about quiche eating tone-troll bullshit and not the fact that Windows running, stylus using, expansion socketted tablet PCs have existed for ages and are still available right now. My point in asking "Are you willing to pay more money than the cost of an iPad for a device that is bigger, has worse battery life, runs windows and lets you manage your own synchronization?" is that you can have a Windows running, stylus using, expansion socketted tablet PC right now, but it might cost more than an iPad, it might be bigger than an iPad, and it might have worse battery life than an iPad. Those generally are 'trade-offs', but ones you might be willing to make. I asked because if you are willing to make those trade-offs then you don't need to complain about how it's "about fucking time" or any such nonsense (sorry when I said whinging, I wasn't trying to elicit more tone-trolling), the market is already providing your specifically requested features! Or I guess you could have simply answered 'no' to my question and further said, "I want all the features of the iPad, the cost of the iPad, and I want these other ones, too!" In that case, I guess you're right; that device doesn't exist yet, but Microsoft isn't going to invent it and sell it (not while Ballmer is still there anyhow).

The Galaxy Tab can use a stylus, but I haven't used it personally. Maybe it takes USB, maybe it's cheap, maybe it's big enough (or small enough), maybe it lasts long enough.

All of which is a long way of asking, has the market not met your short list of needs, or has the market not met your needs at your price?

Complaining about tone is ad hominem. Address the argument:

Are you willing to pay more money than the cost of an iPad for a device that is bigger, has worse battery life, runs windows and lets you manage your own synchronization?

You can't just whinge that the market isn't serving you.

The truth is, those devices have existed since the ThinkPad and still exist -- and yet you aren't saying you use or still use yours (never mind that the Newton was better by every metric that doesn't include running PhotoShop 3.5).

E.g., I've had one of these for almost 20 years: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:710T

You design or license a box of your own. You put video out on those boxes, and you pray your customers have a TV and your game demonstrates a great enough value to drive sales. Oh wait, you thought competing would be easy? You thought you could free-ride on your competitors hardware? They call the shots and you can agree to play by their rules or go it alone. Capitalism!

Sibling post is mine, but I may as well log in so maybe someone will see it:

This is why I propose an artificial government enforced monopoly on intended meaning rather than just expression.

Expression monopolies are so 19th century. We need to get on with monetizing the roots of expression: intent.

Just imagine how great that world will be!

(No really, the implications are awesome.)

Maybe they need "Lebensraum", because there are not many planets that sustain life?

You're a spacefaring civilisation capable of building an interstellar invasion fleet, and you're living on planets? Planets - those huge objects with totally predictable orbital paths, at the bottom of a deep gravity well? The ones that you might as well paint a big red target on and shout 'POINT THE RELATIVISTIC KILL VEHICLES HERE, GUYS!' And where 99.99999% of the usable mineral resources are miles down and under fantastically high pressure? Those things?

Wow. You know, I'd have thought that the art of creating artificial habitats in space would be one that a civilisation would master long before they get to the point of interstellar colonisation and conquest. I guess I was wrong.

Actually, the movie (and book) got the name from the NATO terminology for the Soviets' new super-fighter. The project that resulted in this aircraft began in the late eighties. Of course, back in the Cold War intelligence reports from the USSR were patchy, and nobody was quite certain whether the documentation they were seeing referred to conceptual designs for a future fighter, or to an actual flying prototype. It was just on the edge of plausibility that there was a real Firefox out there, not just a prototype.

It was the same in America: design and planning work on what became the F-22 began in 1981.

Unfortunately, the people who need to know this don't read the Jargon File.

I don't think that this is really a new thing. Once upon a time it was easy to get information about people - your name, address, family members, and person history was widely available when people lived in smaller towns and in tighter communities. I'm very comfortable living like this now - the risk of someone attacking me or trying to crack my bank account is much less important to me than making it easier for people who have a legitimate reason to contact me to do so. So I'm fine with having my contact details on Facebook - the privacy issue is unimportant to me.

This was also an attitude that was prevalent in the early days of the internet - check out some old school home pages and there's a huge amount of personal information there. These people weren't ignorant about privacy, they just had different values.

The second sentence doesn't necessarily support the first. There's a lot of things that could be going on here, like valuing male relatives more, for example, or the participants' views could be affected by their belief in familial gender roles. Family is special - you can't just say that since people feel this way about their relatives that they feel this way about all men and women.

It might be true, of course, but this doesn't prove it.

The DNA Lounge in San Francisco, run by Mozilla and XEmacs' one-time developer and hacker Jamie Zawinski, has done some similar things. You can check out their code and documentation here:

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/

In short, he's created secure Linux internet kiosks, streaming broadcasts, cameras, and scripts to automate much of it - in short, what you're trying to do but in nightclub form.

In fact, it's exactly the reason that we (civilized people) form them. That way, I can spend my life doing something more useful than making sure that I'm the best at bashing heads and grabbing loot.

TFA says:

This is incredibly true, and is exactly the thing that makes me resistant to gamers saying that video game violence is totally normal and acceptable and that people who are opposed to it have something wrong with them.

I recently was exposed to Gears of War for the first time, and the violence and hatred in that game was so horrific to me that I wanted to vomit. I was incredibly, incredibly troubled by it. And it wasn't just the brutality, the incredible realism of the violence, the curbstomping, but also the attitudes of the players online. People were not laughing and sharing something positive over the in-game chat, nor were the players in the house laughing and working together - they were expressing violent, hateful feelings.

Now, whether this is acceptable in the sense of free speech is one thing, and I think it is. But there's another question to me: is this the right thing? Is this healthy? If it's true that to non-gamers that the games being playing induce feeling of sickness, pain, and emotional trauma, which personal experience can attest that they do, then I don't believe it's reasonable to dismiss the concerns of the non-gaming population.

It is like free speech. Exercising your right to say whatever you please is not a good idea, even though it's legal to be constantly hurtful and hate-filled (and should be).

Again - I'm not arguing that gamers will kill people, or that these games should be banned. I'm arguing that there's definitely something to the belief that playing these games is not psychologically healthy.

Flame away, Slashdot.