The consumerist has already debunked EA's attempt to spin this. The link should have been included with the story to prevent EA from blaming this on homophobes or people who didn't like the athlete on the jacket of one of their games.
Shill accounts are not only created by computers though. High quality shill accounts are created and managed by human beings who do so as their professional job. Some accounts are quite obvious, however other accounts are created and professionally maintained for years.
You can buy cheap shills and you can pay for high quality shills, it all depends on what your needs are. Professional companies or industry lobbying groups will maintain and develop shill accounts for years or even decades to increase their value and perceived trust. They are no different from the spammers or the malware authors in that they are professionals who have made a career in monetizing their product. They would certainly take the time to add in 'legitimate' looking sisters and other adjunct accounts for high quality accounts as a form of quality control.
How on earth is this any less susceptible to astroturfing? Linked-in like every other form of social media has large numbers of fake accounts that are available as shill accounts. Has anyone thought this through at any appreciable level? Most enterprise management software has requirements that you either go through a sales team to get an evaluation or often times has license restrictions that prevent you from freely discussing and or bench marking it without prior approval. The only way to get approval is to have results that are for all intents and purposes written by the company themselves.
Even if you don't have to worry about license issues for reviews you still have to worry about the logistical issues of implementing enterprise management software tools. These tools often involve dedicated architects, consultants that get paid hundreds of dollars per hours for months on end, dedicated SQL servers and months of exclusive staff time in order to implement correctly. Implementing a tool like this correctly easily runs into the tens of thousands of dollars on the small side and multi-million dollar budgets are common. Dedicated servers are required that can easily cost tens of thousands dollars just in hardware, never mind license costs for things like SQL server licensing and maintenance. The idea that someone who doesn't have a clue could possibly provide a meaningful review of an enterprise management product is as absurd as expecting a freshly minted college grad to work as an enterprise architect.
The idea that you can install an enterprise management tool and run a review like you can the latest version of a game shows me that the people proposing this have absolutely no experience actually doing this. This is why white papers are written, because people sink these costs into real world projects and write up about their experiences and lessons learned. You want a review of a product, find the white paper, or surf the forums for vendors product. I'm sorry, but this has got to be the dumbest idea I have ever seen submitted to Slashdot.
The grandson of Rockefeller (who owned Standard Oil) commented that his grandfather ended up making more money after he lost the anti-trust case and had his monopoly broken up than he did before in "The Men who built America" on the History Channel.
Let's hope all the like companies do this, it would be great for the American public. Once they do this we can then take the considerable bandwidth that is being allocated on TV and use it for more useful things like next generation wireless devices. I for one must encourage this behavior and the removal of public TV from public airwaves. We also gain the benefit of removing decades old indecency standards from the days of the Model T.
How many people would sign a petition in support of this measure?
Gif's that animate in less than a second are the modern blink tag and just as bloody annoying. I'm looking at you Gawker properties with your obsession with Gif's that animate in less than and are/very/ distracting. It's the same bloody problem in a different bloody package, and it's pretty bloody annoying. Thankfully I can block them when I see them with ad block plus...
The judge made one truly epic level bad decision with the Apple Samsung case, is anyone surprised she did the same thing with another case? The whole situation is deplorable and needs a significant legal remedy to prevent it from ever happening again.
Feinstein has always had problems with Constitutional protections for anything she doesn't like. She likes to pretend that the Constitution only protects the things that she favors. If a Senator will blatantly attack the 2nd amendment, why would it surprise someone that she would go after the 1st?
You have to give her credit in her consistent disregard for peoples rights, her track record is as bad as other Senator currently serving in Congress. She's a hardcore extremist and thinks nothing of using the law to trample anyone that doesn't think like she does. Left wing and right wing extremists are both just as bad at having trouble understanding rights are rights and that they should not mess with them.
Big oil already owns many of the worlds top green energy companies. For example BP has been one of the top producers of solar cells for many years. Your ire would be better directed at those actually putting up road blocks to green energy.
Energy companies are in the business of selling energy, and frankly they typically don't care what that source of energy is. Most companies sell gas, propane, diesel, and natural gas at a minimum and many have business relationships that go far beyond that.
At this point all we have in conjecture as actually studying what would happen is for all intents and purposes impossible. Are you crushed, burned alive by everything else, toasted by radiation, spaghettified, or some other horrible fate?
The only thing that we/really/ know is that any possible fate you would have from falling into a black hole would be painful. Unless you are killed so quickly your body never has a chance to transmit the signals for excruciating pain. The bottom line is that we really don't know and this is something that is necessarily always going to be a theory.
When I first got out of high school I worked as a security guard in a bank skyscraper. We had a form for people calling in bomb threats as this was one of the tallest buildings in a large metropolitan area and it attracted it's share of nutcases.
One of the very first questions that we would ask callers is what their name is. People instinctively answer certain questions with Freudian slips all the time and the bank knew this. You would be surprised how many people got arrested after answering that question.
We never had a real threat of course, just the crazies who should have been in the loony bin.
It's a Facebook app for those who treat Facebook more like crackbook. Who care's? There are thousands of different android phones out there, this one just happens to have one particular app ingrained as a theme. This phone isn't going to hurt anyone and it will benefit those who live their lives through that particular corporations product.
Might I suggest the much more usable and robust CAT themed smartphone instead? At least that phone should survive any drunken friends or small children that happen to get their hands on it.
That comes from a poor misunderstanding of how taxes affect the poor. They still have to pay income tax, and they have to pay another significant amount of their income in sales taxes of many kinds (gas, phone etc). Simply put they have very little flexibility between their minimum payment out (housing), utilities (taxed) and the rest of their spending (taxed). When you add everything up they are taxed at a higher rate by percentage of income than they think they are.
Sales taxes are what actually disproportionally affect the poor for most people far more than income tax. Taken into context with all of the hidden taxes most people don't realize they pay (telephone taxes etc) and it adds up to a significant amount of their spendable money.
If your paying the minimum amount of Federal and State tax and your turning around and spending another 8% or so of all your income on one kind of sales tax or another you can easily end up raising your effective tax rate quite a bit. A flat tax has to be tied to getting rid of all secondary taxes to avoid disproportionately affecting the poor, something you will note I called out to do.
Here is a side by side of the two versions of the Surface I found with a quick Google search. Without reading the descriptions can you tell which one is which simply by looking at them? There are differences, and if you know what to look for you can tell them apart. However for the lay person who plays with one they simply aren't going to do so.
Considering that I have had times I made less than that years ago the answer is yes, I can imagine that. Someone who makes that amount of money still has a portion of their money taken out as taxes anyways.
They then turn around and pay another portion of their money in sales tax and gas taxes and similar taxes. When you add everything up I would imagine that your typical person making that kind of money spends a lot more on taxes than they realize. Remember that a person making that kind of money is likely spending almost all of it on things that have a sales tax.
Things like this are why I like the idea of a flat tax. It doesn't matter what the source of your income is, you (person or business) pay a given portion in taxes. Get your money from stocks, working, day trading, who cares, pay the same as everyone else. Don't punish success and don't let people weasel their way out of their obligations. If you hide money like this it should be subject to 100% forfeiture. Get rid of things like the Irish sandwich that is a favorite for getting out of business taxes (why don't multibillion dollar companies pay their share).
Let people earn assets and property and don't tax them on it. This gives people a reason to work hard, succeed and own things like houses or condors (homeowners are better neighbors). Tax income and give people incentive to spend their money wisely.
You then have to do one other thing to make sure that a flat tax doesn't disproportionately affect the poor. Get rid of all other taxes such as sales tax, fuel taxes, and so on. This would have the added benefit of saving literally billions of dollars spent every year by people and businesses that have to pay accountants just to do their taxes.
Once you have done that than you go back to your partisan bickering over what the rate of the flat tax is. This is not a bad thing though as it would expose a lot of hidden taxes that most people don't realize they pay. Have an honest debate and meet somewhere in the middle.
To put some perspective on your point consider that a pre-paid replacement battery set for a Tesla is $12,000 I would say that they have some headway to work with. That figure is what they estimate the price will drop down to in several years, and for insurance purposes the batteries have a listed replacement cost of $30,000.
The real question is how long can these batteries last for like kind performance and life (number of recharge cycles etc)? Once you have that you can perform an apples to apples comparison.
They want a similar look and feel to get people to start thinking of windows as being the same thing regardless of platform. They desperately want to embrace Apple's app store market, get rid of legacy software and get people to stop thinking of windows as only being for 'computers'.
The means to achieve this end is to make the different versions of windows look and feel the same to the 'average' person on the street - not the tech types. The result is that you have devices that for all intents and purposes look just like actual Windows 8 devices. The net result is that the store, which has average people and not technical people working in it, got confused.
It's a little bit like having two display cases of oranges, both look like oranges, both feel like oranges and both are labeled 'orange'. It's only if you pay careful attention,/and/ know enough to know better that you realize the difference between "Orange 8" and "Orange RT". The lay person doesn't pay that much attention or know enough to know better and Microsoft damn well knows it.
How the hell did this thing ever make it through the approval process? This is going to piss of their users as a basic trust issue and is borderline fraudulent. The entire point of getting a drive like this is to get something/faster/ than you would other wise get. This drive is going to be entirely dependent on a very limited number of benchmarks to get any kind of approval at all.
This is akin to selling a new sports car with a decade old engine that was outdated by the model 2 generations ago. This has got to be one of the biggest epic fails of the last couple years outside of Windows 8 itself. The advertising and marketing on this can't possibly be honest without playing lawyer and splitting hairs very finely.
That's one hell of a thing for the article to leave out and that changes the entire story. If I had mod points and hadn't already commented I would be giving one to your comment right now.
Solution to that is ban NIMBY environmental lawsuits from greenpeace et al that prevent the construction of a repository. Lawsuits have kept the construction or consideration of repositories from happening for literally decades. The result has been that we can't build new plants that are built to better standards and instead we built a generation of coal power plants that caused far more environmental harm.
Want to get real about helping the environment? Get greenpeace and similar anti-nuke fascists to back off their anti-nuke agenda simply because they don't like the perceived military connotations. They have done more harm to the environment with their foolish zeal than and given industrialist you can name, even the Koch brothers. Frankly they do so much harm to the environmental causes with their misled and foolish propaganda that I wouldn't be surprised if the Koch brothers secretly funded them as Republicans funded Nader when he ran against Gore.
And he knowing laundered hundreds of billions of dollars in drug money, terrorist financing, and even money helping Iran's nuclear program. Yet, the CEO of HSBC isn't doing any time, so your argument falls apart.
My argument doesn't fall apart at all, as I'm of the opinion that he and other like crooks that destroyed the economy several years back should also be in prison. My argument stands.
I read this article before it was posted on Slashdot, so I have had a chance to think about it. My biggest problem with this case is the guy's credibility. When it came time to make the money (lots of money) installing the traps he was content to play dumb. When it came time to cooperate with the Fed's after reality caught up to the guy all of a sudden he was in so much fear for his life about these guys that cooperating the Feds (they offered a sweetheart deal) was inconceivable to him.
Let's put it this way, it would be a little bit like one of the guys in Columbia that makes private submarines in the middle of jungle claiming that he thought they were for recreational purposes. This guy knew damn well what his traps were being used for and went right on making them and profiting off of them anyways. Point being that the guy knowingly facilitated the drug trade for profit, how is he any different from a dealer or a crooked border agent?
Slashdot Mirror
The consumerist has already debunked EA's attempt to spin this. The link should have been included with the story to prevent EA from blaming this on homophobes or people who didn't like the athlete on the jacket of one of their games.
Shill accounts are not only created by computers though. High quality shill accounts are created and managed by human beings who do so as their professional job. Some accounts are quite obvious, however other accounts are created and professionally maintained for years.
You can buy cheap shills and you can pay for high quality shills, it all depends on what your needs are. Professional companies or industry lobbying groups will maintain and develop shill accounts for years or even decades to increase their value and perceived trust. They are no different from the spammers or the malware authors in that they are professionals who have made a career in monetizing their product. They would certainly take the time to add in 'legitimate' looking sisters and other adjunct accounts for high quality accounts as a form of quality control.
How on earth is this any less susceptible to astroturfing? Linked-in like every other form of social media has large numbers of fake accounts that are available as shill accounts. Has anyone thought this through at any appreciable level? Most enterprise management software has requirements that you either go through a sales team to get an evaluation or often times has license restrictions that prevent you from freely discussing and or bench marking it without prior approval. The only way to get approval is to have results that are for all intents and purposes written by the company themselves.
Even if you don't have to worry about license issues for reviews you still have to worry about the logistical issues of implementing enterprise management software tools. These tools often involve dedicated architects, consultants that get paid hundreds of dollars per hours for months on end, dedicated SQL servers and months of exclusive staff time in order to implement correctly. Implementing a tool like this correctly easily runs into the tens of thousands of dollars on the small side and multi-million dollar budgets are common. Dedicated servers are required that can easily cost tens of thousands dollars just in hardware, never mind license costs for things like SQL server licensing and maintenance. The idea that someone who doesn't have a clue could possibly provide a meaningful review of an enterprise management product is as absurd as expecting a freshly minted college grad to work as an enterprise architect.
The idea that you can install an enterprise management tool and run a review like you can the latest version of a game shows me that the people proposing this have absolutely no experience actually doing this. This is why white papers are written, because people sink these costs into real world projects and write up about their experiences and lessons learned. You want a review of a product, find the white paper, or surf the forums for vendors product. I'm sorry, but this has got to be the dumbest idea I have ever seen submitted to Slashdot.
The grandson of Rockefeller (who owned Standard Oil) commented that his grandfather ended up making more money after he lost the anti-trust case and had his monopoly broken up than he did before in "The Men who built America" on the History Channel.
Let's hope all the like companies do this, it would be great for the American public. Once they do this we can then take the considerable bandwidth that is being allocated on TV and use it for more useful things like next generation wireless devices. I for one must encourage this behavior and the removal of public TV from public airwaves. We also gain the benefit of removing decades old indecency standards from the days of the Model T.
How many people would sign a petition in support of this measure?
Gif's that animate in less than a second are the modern blink tag and just as bloody annoying. I'm looking at you Gawker properties with your obsession with Gif's that animate in less than and are /very/ distracting. It's the same bloody problem in a different bloody package, and it's pretty bloody annoying. Thankfully I can block them when I see them with ad block plus...
Well put response to a half-wit comment by someone that get's their idea of the military from watching Rambo and taking it as a documentary.
The judge made one truly epic level bad decision with the Apple Samsung case, is anyone surprised she did the same thing with another case? The whole situation is deplorable and needs a significant legal remedy to prevent it from ever happening again.
Feinstein has always had problems with Constitutional protections for anything she doesn't like. She likes to pretend that the Constitution only protects the things that she favors. If a Senator will blatantly attack the 2nd amendment, why would it surprise someone that she would go after the 1st?
You have to give her credit in her consistent disregard for peoples rights, her track record is as bad as other Senator currently serving in Congress. She's a hardcore extremist and thinks nothing of using the law to trample anyone that doesn't think like she does. Left wing and right wing extremists are both just as bad at having trouble understanding rights are rights and that they should not mess with them.
Moderate in the middle that supports all rights.
Big oil already owns many of the worlds top green energy companies. For example BP has been one of the top producers of solar cells for many years. Your ire would be better directed at those actually putting up road blocks to green energy.
Energy companies are in the business of selling energy, and frankly they typically don't care what that source of energy is. Most companies sell gas, propane, diesel, and natural gas at a minimum and many have business relationships that go far beyond that.
At this point all we have in conjecture as actually studying what would happen is for all intents and purposes impossible. Are you crushed, burned alive by everything else, toasted by radiation, spaghettified, or some other horrible fate?
The only thing that we /really/ know is that any possible fate you would have from falling into a black hole would be painful. Unless you are killed so quickly your body never has a chance to transmit the signals for excruciating pain. The bottom line is that we really don't know and this is something that is necessarily always going to be a theory.
When I first got out of high school I worked as a security guard in a bank skyscraper. We had a form for people calling in bomb threats as this was one of the tallest buildings in a large metropolitan area and it attracted it's share of nutcases.
One of the very first questions that we would ask callers is what their name is. People instinctively answer certain questions with Freudian slips all the time and the bank knew this. You would be surprised how many people got arrested after answering that question.
We never had a real threat of course, just the crazies who should have been in the loony bin.
It's a Facebook app for those who treat Facebook more like crackbook. Who care's? There are thousands of different android phones out there, this one just happens to have one particular app ingrained as a theme. This phone isn't going to hurt anyone and it will benefit those who live their lives through that particular corporations product.
Might I suggest the much more usable and robust CAT themed smartphone instead? At least that phone should survive any drunken friends or small children that happen to get their hands on it.
That comes from a poor misunderstanding of how taxes affect the poor. They still have to pay income tax, and they have to pay another significant amount of their income in sales taxes of many kinds (gas, phone etc). Simply put they have very little flexibility between their minimum payment out (housing), utilities (taxed) and the rest of their spending (taxed). When you add everything up they are taxed at a higher rate by percentage of income than they think they are.
Sales taxes are what actually disproportionally affect the poor for most people far more than income tax. Taken into context with all of the hidden taxes most people don't realize they pay (telephone taxes etc) and it adds up to a significant amount of their spendable money.
If your paying the minimum amount of Federal and State tax and your turning around and spending another 8% or so of all your income on one kind of sales tax or another you can easily end up raising your effective tax rate quite a bit. A flat tax has to be tied to getting rid of all secondary taxes to avoid disproportionately affecting the poor, something you will note I called out to do.
Not a rich person.
Here is a side by side of the two versions of the Surface I found with a quick Google search. Without reading the descriptions can you tell which one is which simply by looking at them? There are differences, and if you know what to look for you can tell them apart. However for the lay person who plays with one they simply aren't going to do so.
Considering that I have had times I made less than that years ago the answer is yes, I can imagine that. Someone who makes that amount of money still has a portion of their money taken out as taxes anyways.
They then turn around and pay another portion of their money in sales tax and gas taxes and similar taxes. When you add everything up I would imagine that your typical person making that kind of money spends a lot more on taxes than they realize. Remember that a person making that kind of money is likely spending almost all of it on things that have a sales tax.
Things like this are why I like the idea of a flat tax. It doesn't matter what the source of your income is, you (person or business) pay a given portion in taxes. Get your money from stocks, working, day trading, who cares, pay the same as everyone else. Don't punish success and don't let people weasel their way out of their obligations. If you hide money like this it should be subject to 100% forfeiture. Get rid of things like the Irish sandwich that is a favorite for getting out of business taxes (why don't multibillion dollar companies pay their share).
Let people earn assets and property and don't tax them on it. This gives people a reason to work hard, succeed and own things like houses or condors (homeowners are better neighbors). Tax income and give people incentive to spend their money wisely.
You then have to do one other thing to make sure that a flat tax doesn't disproportionately affect the poor. Get rid of all other taxes such as sales tax, fuel taxes, and so on. This would have the added benefit of saving literally billions of dollars spent every year by people and businesses that have to pay accountants just to do their taxes.
Once you have done that than you go back to your partisan bickering over what the rate of the flat tax is. This is not a bad thing though as it would expose a lot of hidden taxes that most people don't realize they pay. Have an honest debate and meet somewhere in the middle.
To put some perspective on your point consider that a pre-paid replacement battery set for a Tesla is $12,000 I would say that they have some headway to work with. That figure is what they estimate the price will drop down to in several years, and for insurance purposes the batteries have a listed replacement cost of $30,000.
The real question is how long can these batteries last for like kind performance and life (number of recharge cycles etc)? Once you have that you can perform an apples to apples comparison.
They want a similar look and feel to get people to start thinking of windows as being the same thing regardless of platform. They desperately want to embrace Apple's app store market, get rid of legacy software and get people to stop thinking of windows as only being for 'computers'.
The means to achieve this end is to make the different versions of windows look and feel the same to the 'average' person on the street - not the tech types. The result is that you have devices that for all intents and purposes look just like actual Windows 8 devices. The net result is that the store, which has average people and not technical people working in it, got confused.
It's a little bit like having two display cases of oranges, both look like oranges, both feel like oranges and both are labeled 'orange'. It's only if you pay careful attention, /and/ know enough to know better that you realize the difference between "Orange 8" and "Orange RT". The lay person doesn't pay that much attention or know enough to know better and Microsoft damn well knows it.
Interesting answer with some good points for consideration.
How the hell did this thing ever make it through the approval process? This is going to piss of their users as a basic trust issue and is borderline fraudulent. The entire point of getting a drive like this is to get something /faster/ than you would other wise get. This drive is going to be entirely dependent on a very limited number of benchmarks to get any kind of approval at all.
This is akin to selling a new sports car with a decade old engine that was outdated by the model 2 generations ago. This has got to be one of the biggest epic fails of the last couple years outside of Windows 8 itself. The advertising and marketing on this can't possibly be honest without playing lawyer and splitting hairs very finely.
That's one hell of a thing for the article to leave out and that changes the entire story. If I had mod points and hadn't already commented I would be giving one to your comment right now.
Solution to that is ban NIMBY environmental lawsuits from greenpeace et al that prevent the construction of a repository. Lawsuits have kept the construction or consideration of repositories from happening for literally decades. The result has been that we can't build new plants that are built to better standards and instead we built a generation of coal power plants that caused far more environmental harm.
Want to get real about helping the environment? Get greenpeace and similar anti-nuke fascists to back off their anti-nuke agenda simply because they don't like the perceived military connotations. They have done more harm to the environment with their foolish zeal than and given industrialist you can name, even the Koch brothers. Frankly they do so much harm to the environmental causes with their misled and foolish propaganda that I wouldn't be surprised if the Koch brothers secretly funded them as Republicans funded Nader when he ran against Gore.
My argument doesn't fall apart at all, as I'm of the opinion that he and other like crooks that destroyed the economy several years back should also be in prison. My argument stands.
I read this article before it was posted on Slashdot, so I have had a chance to think about it. My biggest problem with this case is the guy's credibility. When it came time to make the money (lots of money) installing the traps he was content to play dumb. When it came time to cooperate with the Fed's after reality caught up to the guy all of a sudden he was in so much fear for his life about these guys that cooperating the Feds (they offered a sweetheart deal) was inconceivable to him.
Let's put it this way, it would be a little bit like one of the guys in Columbia that makes private submarines in the middle of jungle claiming that he thought they were for recreational purposes. This guy knew damn well what his traps were being used for and went right on making them and profiting off of them anyways. Point being that the guy knowingly facilitated the drug trade for profit, how is he any different from a dealer or a crooked border agent?