I don't think that's particularly fair. The FTC doesn't have the time of the resources to chase every marketing term out there, and these definitions are horribly muddy. For example, it took many years before the government (the FDA if memory serves) could agree on a definition of organic. This wasn't due to lack of need or desire or even trying, it was because the industry just couldn't agree on it.
"Green" marketing terms are even worse. Some would claim that nuclear power is green, while others would not. Some think paper bags are green, while others think plastic is green. Is corn-based ethanol green if the fertilizer used to grow it ends up killing off most of the Gulf of Mexico? I doubt you could nail down any of these definitions in a few months, let alone a few days.
Finally, carbon offsets are relatively new, and problematic from a consumer perspective. It's difficult to verify that way you're paying for is being done, and almost entirely impossible to verify that someone isn't selling offset multiple times. Even if you could, you can never be quite sure that someone isn't selling you a false offset. This industry is totally ripe for fraud, and it seems reasonable for the FTC to look into it.
It really doesn't seem all that different than your average embedded dev-kit + a USB hub.
except that it has a chassis, battery and WiFi.
You can either go the gumstix route and roll your own, which seems painful and actually ends up being quite expensive, or you can try to hack existing portable music players, which, (at least until recently), wasn't really panning out.
Although the platform isn't very interesting at this point because of the lack of peripherals, the price is actually pretty good.
I'm interested in getting my hands on one to see how well it works.
Uh, exactly why would mammals have some natural resistance to these diseases such that they would survive better than the dinosaurs? Especially considering that some mammals (e.g., humans) don't have resistance to Malaria
First of all, I'm not a paleontologist.
But here are a couple ways that seem plausible: Lets assume larger animals usually have much longer life cycles. If animals accumulate parasitic infections over it's life cycle at the same rate, then the smaller mammals with their shorter life cycle would have an advantage, since they would have reproduced before they are likely to be overburdened by infection. This might also help explain why smaller dinosaurs seemed to have lived on and were able to eventually evolve into birds.
It's also possible that mammals biology was different enough than dinosaurs that most parasites preferred to infect dinosaurs. Since dinosaur-like animals had been around much longer in greater numbers it's reasonable to assume that there are more parasites that affect dinosaurs than mammals. This doesn't help explain why some dinosaurs may have lived longer than others, though smaller dinosaurs with a shorter life cycles may have been able to evolve parasitic resistance better than the larger ones.
Casually misremembering what you actually said is a disappointing and ugly behavior.
Whoa whoa whoa.
I responded to a post where you said: This work doesn't have one drop of emotion in it.
and I said they want to prove: "an OSS toolchain is a viable solution for game design." and went on to say that I though you were missing the point of the project. Apparently you said some things in other posts (which I didn't see) that were critical of the whole idea in general, which I have plenty of respect for.
Perhaps I should have said "_their_ OSS toolchain." I'm not some drooling OSS fanatic. I don't believe that the being OSS is a key to some sort of gaming engine nirvana. I just meant they wanted to create an OSS toolchain and prove that it could create a passable game. I thought that game designers would be interested. Apparently one is not, and I'm guessing more feel the same way. And that's OK.:)
From my perspective in silicon design, being OSS would be useful. But really, I don't know what I'm talking about with respect to game design. I'm guessing that you do. I'm interested ins seeing what comes out of the project, but you've made good strong points on why this won't really come to anything.
It sounds like your dealings with outside software have been very positive. That's great and somewhat surprising to me. For us $500,000 buys a crap tool with crap support and lying salesmen. I consider myself educated.
BTW, I really am in the silicon design industry. I'm not really interested in having my slashdot id associated with a particular company, which you have certainly heard of. We don't do ASICs, though.
> Can you name even one case of any game which has been built from the released source of a bad game, and nailed success? Just one will do.
Fair enough, I can't. It's not clear to me that that's 100% relevant. The gaming industry is becoming more and more of an industry and will likely need more outside, pre-written, pre-tested software. I'd defer to you on where things are going, but it seems likely to me.
> I'm in the silicon design industry
> >I don't believe you.
Shrug. Can't prove it can I?
>> and if someone wanted to demonstrate chip design using OSS tools
> And this would be why. Y'see, if you really did lay lines for a living, you'd know that there are a broad plethora of such > tools in circulation, and that there are dozens of chip designs, including successful commercial designs, which have been > released to the public.
There are OSS tools, but they're total outdated junk. Give me a timing verification system, an DRC/LVS solution and maybe a GUI layout/schematic editor that doesn't remind me of vi. Oh yeah, and an rc extractor, which as far as I can tell doesn't exist even a little bit. You'll probably also need some sort of contemporary spice simulator, though BSIM may work for some situations (we don't even try, not sure why, I don't evaluate those tools.).
Anyone can layout a 1990's era chip with Magic. For large modern ASICs or cpus you need real, high capacity tools that just don't exist outside vendor land.
> There are many such tools for verilog, atom, hvl and so forth. It's a little like someone saying they > write webservers for a living, then speculating what would happen if a major open source webserver ever > happened. Jesus, dude, don't pretend to be one until you know about the basic product set.
Those only scratch the surface of modern silicon design. Only the very largest firms (maybe top 2 or 3) can afford to roll their own everything.
Which is, more or less the point. These guys (and I don't claim that they're not misguided, I just claim they're not irrevocably stupid) just want to create a game platform that works, is accessible to more developers and creates a consulting business around it.
[...] > Since there are a pile of free graphics and audio resources out there, this game isn't breaking any ground there, either.
You're right, but if they can provide a coherent platform that any joe schmo can download and create a decent game out of, that's kind of a nice thing isn't it? Clearly they're not breaking any new ground, but perhaps in the creation of this game they'll be able to identify and fix limitations and holes in the current set of tools and allow games to be made on the cheap.
But hey, if you think they're lame and they're solving solved problems, that's fine, you obviously know much more about game design than I do. I just wanted to point out that the primary goal of the game wasn't to create a kickass game, but to create a decent tool set that could be borrowed and built upon. Not very exciting, but not doomed to failure either.
From my perspective, as game design grows and external tools get used more and more (which I see as inevitable), you guys would benefit a lot from having some modern OSS tools available, because vendors suck and salesmen lie. If you think that the situation is such that you have enough good tools (modelers, engines, etc.), that are high enough quality and have access to source for a reasonable price, then I'm totally wrong. Again, I was pointing out that most of the slashdot nay-sayers were missing the point about the project.
It seems to me that you (and just about all of slashdot) are missing the point.
I agree with you, the game is probably going to be crap. But even if they had a better than average chance of making a good game, it'd probably be crap, since most games are crap.
From what I see, the point of this game is to demonstrate that an OSS toolchain is a viable solution for game design. If they can create a game that works mostly and has reasonable gameplay, they will have accomplished the goal. If the game is lacking in the concept department, most people who make the decision to create a game will be able to see that although the game isn't vey good, the platform seems to work well enough to use as a foundation. If it ends up being a good game, it's a total home run, since they get free publicity.
I'm surprised that as a gaming professional, you don't see the possibilities here. I'm in the silicon design industry and if someone wanted to demonstrate chip design using OSS tools, I'd be mostly unconcerned about the final product.
The reality is that vendor tools are a serious pain an the ass. They are usually broken and support is mostly useless. Our internal tools are not much better as far as bugs, but since we have the source, there's at least some chance of getting it working in a reasonable amount of time. If someone demonstrated the 90% of what we needed was OSS and it had some miles under it, we'd be all over it.
That said, I'm sure they still have an uphill battle to achieve even a modest success, but I don't think it's hopeless.
What do you do when you've managed to grab a a wolf by there ears?
One approach would be to claim that it's not really a wolf, it's a bloodthirsty monster, and we don't really have it by the ears, and it's being well treated anyway. Plus no one else will grab it by the ears for us.
Or you can just take your licks for doing something that's so obviously stupid.
My claim is that you need to introduce them to the US judicial system and let it sort things out. Some bad guys might be able to slip through the cracks, but in my opinion we deserve any blowback that we get.
Positing that particles behave differently when being 'observed' would require you to provide a testable definition of 'observation' whic I don't think you can.
An observation is determining the eigenstate of a system. If the system was previously in a superposition of eigenstates this will resolve into one of those possibilities. This isn't a very satisfying definition, but describes any measurement that can be made on a quantum mechanical level.
The theory that particles behave the same whether or not they are under experimental conditions is an essential precondition for science.
I'm not sure that this is strictly necessary for science, and we know that this isn't the case. What we're arguing about is the mechanism. If you choose to believe on faster than light interactions with no known mechanism rather than observation causing changes to particle system that's fine. For what it's worth many scientists (e.g Einstein) thought QM was an incomplete theory for this reason, but among QM physicists the latter idea is a more popular view I think.
All QM tells us is that it is impossible to set up an experiment that measures two complimentary variables at the same time. The interaction necessary to measure one will disrupt the other. QM does not tell us that the decision to record the results of an experiment changes the outcome.
Again we know that observation cause systems to change, we just don't agree on the mechanism. What happens When we _don't_ do an experiment, is indeed a question for philosophers.
I don't care where you've studied. My education is not quite as prestigious as yours, but I also studied at a postgraduate level in QM.
Physical observation effects and hidden variables can not explain the violation of Bell's inequality.
Please pick you favorite reference and look up 'Quantum Entanglement" or "EPR paradox."
Exactly how you interpret these results a a matter of meta-physics, but your mechanism doesn't work, at least without positing the faster-than-light transfer of information.
"The uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics is sometimes erroneously explained by claiming that the measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle's momentum, and vice versa--i.e., that the uncertainty principle is a manifestation of the observer effect. Indeed, Heisenberg himself may have initially offered explanations which suggested this view. Prior to the more modern understanding, a measurement was often visualized as a physical disturbance inflicted directly on the measured system, being sometimes illustrated as a thought experiment called Heisenberg's microscope."
A simple example is the z component of the spin of an electron, as measured in the Stern-Gerlach experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experiment). You can re-measure the z component of spin over and over again, you'll always get the same result. If you take a supsequent measurement of the x component, you'll have a 50/50 probability of getting +-1/2. If you re-measure the z component, the electron forgets its previous spin value, and you have a 50/50 chance of getting +-1/2 again. T
16T will not necessarily levitate a frog. It takes a certain magnetic field gradient to achieve this. This is typically done with magnets that produce about 16T, but it depends on the design of th magnet.
You could also try to develop a temperature sensitive neural inhibitor. That seems more feasible since you don't necessarily have to identify the region you want to be affected.
in a couple of hundred years, when China, India and whoever else cares to try is out there galavanting sic around the solar system,
Space races aren't about "galavanting sic around the solar system," they are about achieving pointless objectives. Once the objectives are achieved, the programs are shelved. China and India will be no different.
Take a look at the hard science that has been possible due to space exploration. The vast majority has been enabled by unmanned exploration (the only exception i can think of was the HST repair). Everything else has been a political show.
> First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular.
All ellipses have a point of view where they project as a circle. Are you saying that his elliptical galaxies aren't elliptical? Even if they weren't, how would that create a selection bias?
> He doesn't give much real discussion to the error in the measurements, which is significant.
How would "error in the measurements" cause a selection to a particular orientation?
Random error wouldn't move the average, just make the distribution wider. In fact random error ought to make the distribution more isotropic.
From my understanding, most farmers need to buy new seed occasionaly because it evetually becomes contaminated, so I'm not sure that the economic benefit is really so great. This is likely on of the reasons that it's not marketed currently.
It also won't discourage determined people who want to get free GM seeds, since it seems likely that enough iterations of cross polination will get the set of traits you want, without the traits you don't. (I'm interested in hearing about why this wouldn't work, if anyone has any information on that).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that's particularly fair. The FTC doesn't have the time of the resources to chase every marketing term out there, and these definitions are horribly muddy. For example, it took many years before the government (the FDA if memory serves) could agree on a definition of organic. This wasn't due to lack of need or desire or even trying, it was because the industry just couldn't agree on it.
"Green" marketing terms are even worse. Some would claim that nuclear power is green, while others would not. Some think paper bags are green, while others think plastic is green. Is corn-based ethanol green if the fertilizer used to grow it ends up killing off most of the Gulf of Mexico? I doubt you could nail down any of these definitions in a few months, let alone a few days.
Finally, carbon offsets are relatively new, and problematic from a consumer perspective. It's difficult to verify that way you're paying for is being done, and almost entirely impossible to verify that someone isn't selling offset multiple times. Even if you could, you can never be quite sure that someone isn't selling you a false offset. This industry is totally ripe for fraud, and it seems reasonable for the FTC to look into it.
It really doesn't seem all that different than your average embedded dev-kit + a USB hub.
except that it has a chassis, battery and WiFi.
You can either go the gumstix route and roll your own, which seems painful and actually ends up being quite expensive, or you can try to hack existing portable music players, which, (at least until recently), wasn't really panning out.
Although the platform isn't very interesting at this point because of the lack of peripherals, the price is actually pretty good.
I'm interested in getting my hands on one to see how well it works.
Uh, exactly why would mammals have some natural resistance to these diseases such that they would survive better than the dinosaurs? Especially considering that some mammals (e.g., humans) don't have resistance to Malaria
First of all, I'm not a paleontologist.
But here are a couple ways that seem plausible:
Lets assume larger animals usually have much longer life cycles. If animals accumulate parasitic infections over it's life cycle at the same rate, then the smaller mammals with their shorter life cycle would have an advantage, since they would have reproduced before they are likely to be overburdened by infection. This might also help explain why smaller dinosaurs seemed to have lived on and were able to eventually evolve into birds.
It's also possible that mammals biology was different enough than dinosaurs that most parasites preferred to infect dinosaurs. Since dinosaur-like animals had been around much longer in greater numbers it's reasonable to assume that there are more parasites that affect dinosaurs than mammals. This doesn't help explain why some dinosaurs may have lived longer than others, though smaller dinosaurs with a shorter life cycles may have been able to evolve parasitic resistance better than the larger ones.
Casually misremembering what you actually said is a disappointing and ugly behavior.
:)
Whoa whoa whoa.
I responded to a post where you said:
This work doesn't have one drop of emotion in it.
and I said they want to prove:
"an OSS toolchain is a viable solution for game design." and went on to say that I though you were missing the point of the project. Apparently you said some things in other posts (which I didn't see) that were critical of the whole idea in general, which I have plenty of respect for.
Perhaps I should have said "_their_ OSS toolchain." I'm not some drooling OSS fanatic. I don't believe that the being OSS is a key to some sort of gaming engine nirvana. I just meant they wanted to create an OSS toolchain and prove that it could create a passable game. I thought that game designers would be interested. Apparently one is not, and I'm guessing more feel the same way. And that's OK.
From my perspective in silicon design, being OSS would be useful. But really, I don't know what I'm talking about with respect to game design. I'm guessing that you do. I'm interested ins seeing what comes out of the project, but you've made good strong points on why this won't really come to anything.
It sounds like your dealings with outside software have been very positive. That's great and somewhat surprising to me. For us $500,000 buys a crap tool with crap support and lying salesmen. I consider myself educated.
BTW, I really am in the silicon design industry. I'm not really interested in having my slashdot id associated with a particular company, which you have certainly heard of. We don't do ASICs, though.
> Can you name even one case of any game which has been built from the released source of a bad game, and nailed success? Just one will do.
Fair enough, I can't. It's not clear to me that that's 100% relevant. The gaming industry is becoming more and more of an industry and will likely need more outside, pre-written, pre-tested software. I'd defer to you on where things are going, but it seems likely to me.
> I'm in the silicon design industry
> >I don't believe you.
Shrug. Can't prove it can I?
>> and if someone wanted to demonstrate chip design using OSS tools
> And this would be why. Y'see, if you really did lay lines for a living, you'd know that there are a broad plethora of such > tools in circulation, and that there are dozens of chip designs, including successful commercial designs, which have been > released to the public.
There are OSS tools, but they're total outdated junk. Give me a timing verification system, an DRC/LVS solution and maybe a GUI layout/schematic editor that doesn't remind me of vi. Oh yeah, and an rc extractor, which as far as I can tell doesn't exist even a little bit. You'll probably also need some sort of contemporary spice simulator, though BSIM may work for some situations (we don't even try, not sure why, I don't evaluate those tools.).
Anyone can layout a 1990's era chip with Magic. For large modern ASICs or cpus you need real, high capacity tools that just don't exist outside vendor land.
> There are many such tools for verilog, atom, hvl and so forth. It's a little like someone saying they
> write webservers for a living, then speculating what would happen if a major open source webserver ever
> happened. Jesus, dude, don't pretend to be one until you know about the basic product set.
Those only scratch the surface of modern silicon design. Only the very largest firms (maybe top 2 or 3) can afford to roll their own everything.
Which is, more or less the point. These guys (and I don't claim that they're not misguided, I just claim they're not irrevocably stupid) just want to create a game platform that works, is accessible to more developers and creates a consulting business around it.
[...]
> Since there are a pile of free graphics and audio resources out there, this game isn't breaking any ground there, either.
You're right, but if they can provide a coherent platform that any joe schmo can download and create a decent game out of, that's kind of a nice thing isn't it? Clearly they're not breaking any new ground, but perhaps in the creation of this game they'll be able to identify and fix limitations and holes in the current set of tools and allow games to be made on the cheap.
But hey, if you think they're lame and they're solving solved problems, that's fine, you obviously know much more about game design than I do. I just wanted to point out that the primary goal of the game wasn't to create a kickass game, but to create a decent tool set that could be borrowed and built upon. Not very exciting, but not doomed to failure either.
From my perspective, as game design grows and external tools get used more and more (which I see as inevitable), you guys would benefit a lot from having some modern OSS tools available, because vendors suck and salesmen lie. If you think that the situation is such that you have enough good tools (modelers, engines, etc.), that are high enough quality and have access to source for a reasonable price, then I'm totally wrong. Again, I was pointing out that most of the slashdot nay-sayers were missing the point about the project.
It seems to me that you (and just about all of slashdot) are missing the point.
I agree with you, the game is probably going to be crap. But even if they had a better than average chance of making a good game, it'd probably be crap, since most games are crap.
From what I see, the point of this game is to demonstrate that an OSS toolchain is a viable solution for game design. If they can create a game that works mostly and has reasonable gameplay, they will have accomplished the goal. If the game is lacking in the concept department, most people who make the decision to create a game will be able to see that although the game isn't vey good, the platform seems to work well enough to use as a foundation. If it ends up being a good game, it's a total home run, since they get free publicity.
I'm surprised that as a gaming professional, you don't see the possibilities here. I'm in the silicon design industry and if someone wanted to demonstrate chip design using OSS tools, I'd be mostly unconcerned about the final product.
The reality is that vendor tools are a serious pain an the ass. They are usually broken and support is mostly useless. Our internal tools are not much better as far as bugs, but since we have the source, there's at least some chance of getting it working in a reasonable amount of time. If someone demonstrated the 90% of what we needed was OSS and it had some miles under it, we'd be all over it.
That said, I'm sure they still have an uphill battle to achieve even a modest success, but I don't think it's hopeless.
What do you do when you've managed to grab a a wolf by there ears?
One approach would be to claim that it's not really a wolf, it's a bloodthirsty monster, and we don't really have it by the ears, and it's being well treated anyway. Plus no one else will grab it by the ears for us.
Or you can just take your licks for doing something that's so obviously stupid.
My claim is that you need to introduce them to the US judicial system and let it sort things out. Some bad guys might be able to slip through the cracks, but in my opinion we deserve any blowback that we get.
Positing that particles behave differently when being 'observed' would require you to provide a testable definition of 'observation' whic I don't think you can.
An observation is determining the eigenstate of a system. If the system was previously in a superposition of eigenstates this will resolve into one of those possibilities. This isn't a very satisfying definition, but describes any measurement that can be made on a quantum mechanical level.
The theory that particles behave the same whether or not they are under experimental conditions is an essential precondition for science.
I'm not sure that this is strictly necessary for science, and we know that this isn't the case. What we're arguing about is the mechanism. If you choose to believe on faster than light interactions with no known mechanism rather than observation causing changes to particle system that's fine. For what it's worth many scientists (e.g Einstein) thought QM was an incomplete theory for this reason, but among QM physicists the latter idea is a more popular view I think.
All QM tells us is that it is impossible to set up an experiment that measures two complimentary variables at the same time. The interaction necessary to measure one will disrupt the other. QM does not tell us that the decision to record the results of an experiment changes the outcome.
Again we know that observation cause systems to change, we just don't agree on the mechanism. What happens When we _don't_ do an experiment, is indeed a question for philosophers.
I don't care where you've studied. My education is not quite as prestigious as yours, but I also studied at a postgraduate level in QM.
Physical observation effects and hidden variables can not explain the violation of Bell's inequality.
Please pick you favorite reference and look up 'Quantum Entanglement" or "EPR paradox."
Exactly how you interpret these results a a matter of meta-physics, but your mechanism doesn't work, at least without positing the faster-than-light transfer of information.
I refer to wikipedia because it's easily referenced. I read over the article and know it to be more or less factually correct.
Explaining Stern-Gerlach by reference to observation is an uhga-buhga approach to Quantum Physics.
A widely held one, though.
Your "defocusing" theory is fine, but is not born of any kind of physical observation or force. It is therefore no more or less "uhga-buhga".
Physical interaction theories also fail to account for the EPR paradox. These types of models or pretty much rejected.
In which case millions of physicists will start taking interest in SETI.
:)
Maybe.
>The point being made by Schroedinger is that observation inescapably means interaction and thus affecting the quantity being measured.
Nope.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
"The uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics is sometimes erroneously explained by claiming that the measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle's momentum, and vice versa--i.e., that the uncertainty principle is a manifestation of the observer effect. Indeed, Heisenberg himself may have initially offered explanations which suggested this view. Prior to the more modern understanding, a measurement was often visualized as a physical disturbance inflicted directly on the measured system, being sometimes illustrated as a thought experiment called Heisenberg's microscope."
A simple example is the z component of the spin of an electron, as measured in the Stern-Gerlach experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experiment). You can re-measure the z component of spin over and over again, you'll always get the same result. If you take a supsequent measurement of the x component, you'll have a 50/50 probability of getting +-1/2. If you re-measure the z component, the electron forgets its previous spin value, and you have a 50/50 chance of getting +-1/2 again. T
I've been following this and it looks interesting, but I'm waiting to hear about pricing.
I'm afraid I'm not going to like what I hear, though.
I'm so sick of all this OS stuff.
Really, all we users want are day to day applications.
It's high time we got rid of all of this unnecessary bloat, like VM systems and network protocols. What did they ever do for us anyway?
16T will not necessarily levitate a frog. It takes a certain magnetic field gradient to achieve this. This is typically done with magnets that produce about 16T, but it depends on the design of th magnet.
You could also try to develop a temperature sensitive neural inhibitor. That seems more feasible since you don't necessarily have to identify the region you want to be affected.
in a couple of hundred years, when China, India and whoever else cares to try is out there galavanting sic around the solar system,
Space races aren't about "galavanting sic around the solar system," they are about achieving pointless objectives. Once the objectives are achieved, the programs are shelved. China and India will be no different.
Take a look at the hard science that has been possible due to space exploration. The vast majority has been enabled by unmanned exploration (the only exception i can think of was the HST repair). Everything else has been a political show.
I'm surprised I don't see it.
I've used Python.
The syntactic whitespace is hard to get used to and causes hard to find bugs.
> First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular.
All ellipses have a point of view where they project as a circle. Are you saying that his elliptical galaxies aren't elliptical? Even if they weren't, how would that create a selection bias?
> He doesn't give much real discussion to the error in the measurements, which is significant.
How would "error in the measurements" cause a selection to a particular orientation?
Random error wouldn't move the average, just make the distribution wider. In fact random error ought to make the distribution more isotropic.
It's because slashdot stories can't even misspell things correctly.
> Ultimately, mainstream Democratic thought is little more than counter-cultural.
It's really difficult to talk about fixing the leaky faucet when the house is on fire.
From my understanding, most farmers need to buy new seed occasionaly because it evetually becomes contaminated, so I'm not sure that the economic benefit is really so great. This is likely on of the reasons that it's not marketed currently.
It also won't discourage determined people who want to get free GM seeds, since it seems likely that enough iterations of cross polination will get the set of traits you want, without the traits you don't. (I'm interested in hearing about why this wouldn't work, if anyone has any information on that).
It's kind of analogous to DRM, really.
I'm a bit surprised the Wall Street Journal would more or less paraphrase a vacuous press release and pass it off as an article.
I'm less surprised (but still surprised) that slashdot would pick up such a piece.
My suggestion for a tag:
pressreleaseaseasjournalism
When my employer tells the IRS how much I'm making it's reporting.
When eBay tells the IRS how much auctioneers are making it's snitching.
Funny how that works.