greyish_water's comments

This is unrealistic in practice. The Simple Dollar article cited describes making >$7 in an hour, but $6.55 of that comes from writing an article on email autoresponder marketing and writing a review of an unspecified service. Those aren't the kind of tasks that anybody can accomplish in a timely and competent manner, nor is the supply of those tasks reliable.

In fact, WOA only supports running code that has been distributed through Windows Update along with the full spectrum of Windows Store applications.

WOA PCs will be serviced only through Windows or Microsoft Update, and consumer apps will only come from the Windows Store, so you never have to worry if a program will run because you are not downloading or installing from a DVD outside of the store experience. A WOA PC will feel like a consumer electronics device in terms of how it is used and managed.

I don't think you've thought that through.

Forcing people into pirating

Nobody is forced into pirating.

Google has done a lot to confuse this by referring to everything as just "open". They were still calling Android open even when it didn't meet Andy Rubin's own tweeted 'definition of open'.

(Edit: You'll downvote me, but not the troll? WTF?)

I'm not going to engage you on this, because I don't know what it has to do with anything I wrote. You seem to have just jumped on the idea that I'm trying to have some kind of stupid fanboy argument with you. I wasn't. I was trying to point out that your description omitted a relevant fact: saying "Nobody but Apple sued another company..." has a different interpretation when the actual basis of the suit is considered.

Any an all existing licensing agreement were immaterial...

The existing licensing agreement was why they sued in the first place and one of the main reasons the courts cited in the rulings. It can't possibly be immaterial: it's central to their case! You make it sound like they just came out of nowhere and claimed to own all GUIs or something, but the actual case revolved around the existing licensing agreement and the (then untested) claim that "look and feel" as a whole was subject to copyright.

*...as the technology wasn't owned by Apple in the first place. That's what the courts found..."

That's not what the court found, though! Yes, Apple lost the case (rightly), but it was on the basis that most of what they claimed was subject to the prior licensing agreement and that the broader "look and feel" wasn't copyright-able at all, by anybody. Not even Xerox.

That's disingenuous. Apple v. Microsoft stemmed from their existing licensing agreement. It also didn't claim "ownership of the GUI", but tried to assert copyright over the "look and feel" of the Macintosh UI specifically.

(edit: I mistook who I was responding to and changed the comment accordingly.)

I simply found it odd (very odd) that someone who uses a word that denotes aggression or attack to describe that situation would simultaneously find it totally alien to think of it as competitive.

I think you did that fine on your own, to be honest. The attitude expressed in your posts reeks of pride in ignorance. It's like you genuinely don't care what the truth might be, but don't want anybody to believe this could be anything close to it. You blast the study you didn't read as "unscientific trash" and yet rail against preconceptions while vividly illuminating your own. I did not think you were stupid, but I won't deny I think this thread a singular parade of foolishness.

Don't just imply that I'm stupid

I'm was not implying that you're stupid. Perhaps I should have said "don't" instead of "can't" understand. There may be many reasons why you don't see those interactions you call harassment as competitive that don't involve you being stupid. For instance: your definition of "competition" may have a much narrower scope than the one meant. You may also be conflating competition with antagonism or hostility, which doesn't necessarily follow.

explain to me what the competition actually is

The salesman has an incentive to get you buy, and when you buy, to spend more, because then he gets paid more. This is at cross purposes with your desire to spend less while still getting only what you want and nothing you don't want.

In a sense is a competition over your money, but as the salesman does not attempt to physically pry the money from your hands, it can better be though of as a competition over your will.

(All of this is more evident in situations where directly haggling over price is permitted. If you wanted an avenue with which to consider cultural factors, the variable global popularity of haggling vs. fixed prices would be one. But the basically competitive nature of bargaining in general seems, with the sole exception of you, to be uncontroversial.)

and why I am automatically triggered into participating just because I have a penis.

That's a straw man under construction. Nobody said anything about being "automatically triggered" or about having a penis causing you do anything. You're injecting your own preconceptions about what the cited study claims, just as you injected the scenario of dealing with salespeople.

I think I am attacking a piece of tenuous and speculative suggestion the author has made.

What you think and what you've written appear to be at odds. You attacked an entire field of study[1] and singled out the authors[2] of the particular study on the basis of the blogger's interpretation[3] of that study, which you didn't read[4], while providing no evidence at all beyond personally disagreeing with the implication that human behavior might have something to do with the human body.

The reason I call this a "monumentally tired argument" is that it's been lashed out like a giant reactionary noodle against every bit of evidence ever recorded that human behavior is anything more complicated than the things humans are consciously aware of then they behave.

[1]:"The entire field is known for making stuff up in a manner that is consistent with the cultural background and expectations of the study's authors." [2]: (I can't actually quote this because you edited your post to remove the part where you claimed the entire blog post was about selling Cialdini's book.) [3]: "...showed that men seem more responsive to email because it bypasses their competitive tendencies." (Which the study doesn't actually conclude.) [4]: "It costs $11 to read that thing and I assure you, nobody has read it (except maybe now that I said it out of spite). It looky like every other pop-psy study out there, many of which have been discredited over the years..."

It astonishes me that you're able to describe interactions with salespeople as being "harassed" yet can't understand how it could be construed as competitive.

(Not that the study you're dismissing has anything to do with salespeople... You'd be better off attacking the tenuous and speculative suggestion that author has made based on a reading that study rather than attempting to nuke the proverbial site from orbit with such a monumentally tired argument as "I don't believe it so it can't possibly be true".)