Music festivals are notorious for this type of paranoia, because the performance and rehearsal rights are for the copy you purchased. They cannot buy a score and all the parts, then rehearse and perform from copies.
We know that kids are not always responsible, that they will add notes and markings and spill things and put a shoe mark all over it, and it happens, and then you don't have that oboe part, or that bassoon part.
If someone shows up and happens to spot-check the music and it's not all in order, you can get fined. Same as if someone shows up to a bar and they don't have a license for performing music but the band is playing copyrighted songs, they get fined.
I'm not saying it's right, but that's the law, and your suit would have been buried by iron-clad legalese from district heads.
The right thing to do would have been to sue publishers for discrimination based on your disability, and not providing accessible materials for the hard-of-seeing. My guess is you would have gotten a larger copy almost immediately, and had to fight this every time you needed something bigger. They would NOT have said "Fine, enlarge it yourself", and they would not have changed their policy to allow for larger sizes.
It's actually only in the high 60%'s, and the business is not legitimate. Put yourself in Opera's shoes, and think of what would have happened if IE had not been able to crush Netscape? Better browsers, more standards adherence, and fewer box model or CSS hacks for developers to implement. Netscape and IE and Opera all going for money would have resulted in a very different web experience today.
Opera's main complaint is that MS is a monopoly, and this has not been enforced, leading to the consumer being hurt because the web, being the most awesome thing ever, stagnated for 5 years while MS rested on their laurels. Excuse the run-on there, but they are simply asking for enforcement of what was, and continues to be, a problem.
If I did something that hurt your business and refused to pay the fines or report to jail or the court didn't even assign a punishment, would you be mad?
Also worth pointing out that my boss asks me how much research I have to do for my job, saying it's for tax purposes. We are encouraged to be creative with the answers for tax purposes. I would not be surprised that some of that money is simply salary time for the web guy having to update his skills from.NET 2.0 to 3.5 - anything outside training of course. The more you say, the bigger tax reduction you get, and the happier your boss gets.
So shareholders take note, it' probably not that much. Still a lot though.
I understand your point, but you're making it against the wrong thing. Whole-disk encryption done correctly does not get in anyone's way, and does not require working around. Losing a notebook on a trip, or having it stolen from your car while shopping is very easy to do. If someone steals my notebook, they can't get any company data out of it - best they can do is reformat it and have a free notebook.
I don't have to remember to encrypt something, or erase something - it's all done for me, with no interaction. This *is* what you need to secure. Anyone who makes the security decision not to safeguard something that can be carried by one person, using transparent encryption, should reconsider their career.
Sure someone who wants the information can hold me a gunpoint and get the password, but how often does that happen vs. a random burglary or lost item? Are these PCs that don't get taken on a trip? Think you don't need encryption because they won't leave the building? You'd be surprised where your missing inventory winds up. I know we were.
We paused a pointsec rollout because it blue-screens maybe 5% of the PCs, and once it does that you will never recover one bit of data on the drive. Lost countless hours of work, plus all of the time troubleshooting we did with the vendor and MS. It is a dirty word here now. We managed to get an update which did not have this problem, and it involved updating NTFS drivers along with Pointsec. I got the impression that it was similar to the delayed-write failures that XP suffered early on, with MS blaming drive manufacturers and drive mfrs pointing at earlier XP patches which did not have the problem.
I have noticed considerable slow-downs, probably because on large files it has to decrypt the whole thing from the beginning instead of being able to seek. Kinda like extracting the last file out of BZIP - they are TARred before compressing and that gives you better performance, but you can't re-create state until you start from the beginning. Of course, anti-virus has the same problem and compounds it with on-access scans.
Lesson: roll this out to some grunts first, for a month or two at least. If you have to do anything beyond reimaging the drive to get them working, they are not the right people to test it on. Stress test it by turning off the PC when it's in the middle of doing something - you can't control when you lose power or a battery dies, so make sure it's robust enough to deal with simple failures. I'm not saying to skip Pointsec, I'm saying there are probably subtle bugs in every product which may show up with your particular configuration. Our higher level executives found the bugs here and it was not pretty.
Web apps and desktop apps can share the same code. If you write ASP.NET and have some nifty classes/libraries/code snippets you can take them unchanged to the desktop. Qt will not run as a web app. I mean everything you can do in a CLR application on the desktop you can do in a web app. I have done some very strange things using ASP.NET, accessing all kinds of system information that would have been very difficult* to get with classic ASP.
You can use Java server side, but I don't know if you can take all JSP code and use it in a desktop app.
By 'same code' I mean if you do it right (not using HTTPContext or other server-only stuff) you can use a.NET dll with your desktop application.
Of course, every.NET application I run frustrates me with its slowness compared to normal applications, and every Java app I have used has been done so poorly I wonder if any good Java programmers exist. They certainly don't work for the big companies that's for sure. I was just searching today on why SQL Server Management Studio (.NET) is retardedly slow compared to Enterprise Manager (GUI over COM objects). Not much to explain there, turns out.
* I see someone getting ready to say What's so difficult about CreateObject()? Nothing, as long as an object exists that does what you want, and is installed.
I realize these are pretty high caps, but what happens at the end of the month when your heaviest users hit their caps? Isn't it going to be a stretch to say that you cap usage due to bandwidth constraints, yet because the heaviest users are not using it the available bandwidth skyrockets?
Another thought is, you buy/lease/subscribe to a line with 20mbps and that's what you expect out of your service. Is it reasonable to expect that they multiply each user by their speed and have enough bandwidth to supply all of their customers? We all seem to understand when phones get overloaded during emergencies, but if that internet doesn't come to us immediately it's suddenly bait and switch, that we can't use what we were sold?
My point is, I suppose, we are sold the connection to the ISP at a certain speed, but we are not guaranteed that it will function at that speed. If bandwidth is available, why the arbitrary cap? Shouldn't it be more like you lose priority after hitting a certain level?
You're obviously convinced that it works, and I agree it's a good product. From my experience, it did not do what I wanted, which is allow me to run a virtualized OS while continuing my normal desktop behavior (minus some CPU cycles of course).
I installed it and it installed network bridging which ground all traffic to a halt if I were doing anything other than simple web browsing. Under 1kbit/s no matter what, less than a bad dial-up modem. I did not want the virtual image to have any networking in the first place, and could not find any documentation to turn it off when installing. Removing VMWare did not solve the problem (my network settings were still modified), but when my computer died and I replaced it I vowed never to install VMWare again.
I did not keep my vow, and I learned a lesson. On my work notebook, I installed it for about 3 days. Uninstalling it completely broke all VPN-based communication. I tried reinstalling and uninstalling to see if I could overwrite and then wipe clean, but that had the same results. I had to manually reconfigure just about everything there is to configure on windows XP networking to get it working. One of our two VPN solutions still bluescreens when I use Outlook over it because I have not reinstalled windows yet.
Did I file a bug or ask for support? No, that's for loyalists like you, and I didn't pay for it. I found another solution that works for me. There's money to be made in not breaking things for your users.
Exactly. What I always found frustrating is the "You could damage your computer by using regedit" warnings. but then the instructions say to navigate to this key, then this key, then this one, and right-click here, new, and be sure to use DWORD because if you specify any other type it won't work.
It would be so much easier to just "Save this.reg file and double-click on it." that way it's impossible for the idiot user to screw up. At least closer to impossible anyway.
Or at least give a way to navigate directly to the subkey, like a "goto line number" function in a text editor. Of course they do have the "Select a file" dialog that allows you to select by clicking and waiting for the folder browser to read all the files and folders, and the subfolders as well to determine if it needs to put a plus sign there, but not paste in something from the clipboard which you already have. so maybe it was the same design team.
I don't know about you, but I prefer a link to a blog over the actual paper. Mostly because I don't speak Astrophysicsese.
I went ahead and clicked on the blog for you, and the link. Here's the paper (You can get a PDF if you want), it was submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology.
I understand your reluctance, after all you're the one who posted:
The last damn thing I want is to click a link out of curiosity and within five minutes be standing there having to listen to the IT guy say "here's your sign" or end up in the HR office explaining my seeming poor hand-eye coordination because I accidentally clicked on a link in an email from the fscking HR department. Don't these people have enough work to do?
Don't worry, you can continue to click on links out of curiosity. I put one above, go ahead, click it. You know you want to. everyone else is clicking it. Now with more fiber, and it cures Alzheimer's too.
I sure as hell do. But not intentionally. I hear something on the radio, google the lyrics, figure out who wrote it, go to Amazon and figure out what's on the CD. Torrent or other p2p and grab the album, listen to it, and say "glad I didn't pay money for THAT" and delete it.
If there were a way to return crappy music I'd feel better about paying for it, but they assume if you open the package all you did was copy it and try to get it for free. If they want to assume I'm a pirate I have to play their game, and it ends up hurting them.
Typical artist contract has fees included with the assumption that albums will get damaged or otherwise unsaleable in transit. They have to turn this around and realize that digital copies will have the same fate - losses due to a marginal amount of piracy.
They paid for airtime in order to get higher billboard rankings - I save them the money and play it for myself, no cost. They think I'm a pirate if i listen before buying so I do. And in the end, I'm really doing my ISP a disservice by downloading so much crap I have a roughly 85% chance of having no interest in.
The only thing that cares about the version number is applications which check for it. Microsoft is basically saying applications that run on Vista will run on W7 no problem. There are a lot of checks out there that say "Am I running on Vista?" and that software will still work.
In other words, it is entirely compatibility. If they completely changed Windows 7 so that the windows API runs on top of a linux kernel, they could still give it version number 6.1 internally if it is still compatible with Vista.
Any chance Obama was privy to additional information that made him change his mind? If that were the case, he really couldn't come out and say "There's information that I have been told but I can't tell you what it is but just trust me." I would have voted against him if he did that. Especially after becoming president, there are many promises that you simply can't keep because you didn't have enough information.
Your post basically says there is no hope so don't try to change anything. Instead, you should put effort into asking for more transparency. If we knew what was happening, and Russell Tice could say it matches what he saw happening, it would make a lot more sense. If it is an evil machine, we need to push to see what's happening. If it is just a bunch of normal people making normal mistakes, only on a national level, transparency can only help.
What you see as a conspiracy against normal people looks to me like a bunch of people allowed to operate in secrecy and not having to explain themselves.
It would be better for people to get behind drives like DownsizeDC. Even if you don't agree with the idea of downsizing government, many of their campaigns have no reasonable counterargument. Write the laws yourself instead of accepting industry-written text, read bills before voting, no bundling of unrelated riders. I'm no libertarian myself, so some campaigns make sense to me and some not so much. These kinds of things should be our focus, not surrender, cynicism, and apathy.
I understand your point, but Disney didn't sit on his ass. His company is still cranking out good stuff.
This is always where I get stuck in the argument. Disney is the reason copyrights were extended, and I can't argue that they stopped producing because of the revenue stream. Consumers actually benefit because of the additional money Disney could spend making theme parks and on software for the animation and good voice actors. And the people who work for Disney benefit since it is such a strong company.
Yes the one hit wonder who only collects residuals and royalties is of no benefit to society, but the vast majority of art becomes socially irrelevant before even a sane amount of time passes (17 years was the original I believe, and very few people are buying music from 1991.)
I would love to find something specific that shows how extended copyright is a burden, but everything I found is philosophy and rhetoric.
I would have expected the opposite. I figured the 2-year term House would be all for this, while the 6-year term Senate wouldn't really care. Quoting because they said it better than I would have:
All members of the House are up for election every two years. In effect, they are always running for election. This insures that members will maintain close personal contact with their local constituents, thus remaining constantly aware of their opinions and needs, and better able to act as their advocates in Washington. Elected for six-year terms, Senators remain somewhat more insulated from the people, thus less likely to be tempted to vote according to the short-term passions of public opinion.
It's adapt or die. And it's rarely the same people starting something as finishing. and not everyone in the company agrees that's the direction to take.
Usually the good people get fired if they aren't producing good results. Typically you'll have people who want to make a product, and do and get successful. Then they need to increase profits or minimize costs or something else, and they bring in the sociopath. If something makes money, and doesn't lose too many customers, it gets approved. The sociopath isn't making a product, he's making money. He's giving people what they are WILLING TO BUY at a given profit margin rather than what they WANT.
Every ruthless, faceless company got its start buy trying to sell something they believed in. Microsoft sold BASIC and wanted to have a good product, but now they make what companies want and tell individual consumers you'll buy what we give you. Google wanted to provide the best search results, now they seem to be working to get access to everything you do on the internet for targeted advertising. It gets perverted when you bring in the business types who start looking at the bottom line, and good people either adapt or get replaced.
In this case, I'm sure someone just made a suggestion and no one else really gave it thought. They all believe in their product of course, or they would change it and sell the new version instead. Posting something that you believe, under the guise of a product review, which is a single person's opinion, is hardly fraudulent in itself. If amazon's review system makes you check a box saying you bought and used the product, then yes it's fraudulent. Otherwise it's just someone's opinion, caveat emptor. Just getting some positive buzz out there on this Web 2.0 thingie. They should have seen the conflict of interest inherent in such an act, but they didn't bother making fake accounts.
I'll finish by saying, I disagree with a lot of things my employer does, but my work does not involve those things and I have no influence, so they keep happening. It's not my fault, but I am part of the problem, and I'm a good person.
Slashdot Mirror
Music festivals are notorious for this type of paranoia, because the performance and rehearsal rights are for the copy you purchased. They cannot buy a score and all the parts, then rehearse and perform from copies.
We know that kids are not always responsible, that they will add notes and markings and spill things and put a shoe mark all over it, and it happens, and then you don't have that oboe part, or that bassoon part.
If someone shows up and happens to spot-check the music and it's not all in order, you can get fined. Same as if someone shows up to a bar and they don't have a license for performing music but the band is playing copyrighted songs, they get fined.
I'm not saying it's right, but that's the law, and your suit would have been buried by iron-clad legalese from district heads.
The right thing to do would have been to sue publishers for discrimination based on your disability, and not providing accessible materials for the hard-of-seeing. My guess is you would have gotten a larger copy almost immediately, and had to fight this every time you needed something bigger. They would NOT have said "Fine, enlarge it yourself", and they would not have changed their policy to allow for larger sizes.
It's actually only in the high 60%'s, and the business is not legitimate. Put yourself in Opera's shoes, and think of what would have happened if IE had not been able to crush Netscape? Better browsers, more standards adherence, and fewer box model or CSS hacks for developers to implement. Netscape and IE and Opera all going for money would have resulted in a very different web experience today.
Opera's main complaint is that MS is a monopoly, and this has not been enforced, leading to the consumer being hurt because the web, being the most awesome thing ever, stagnated for 5 years while MS rested on their laurels. Excuse the run-on there, but they are simply asking for enforcement of what was, and continues to be, a problem.
If I did something that hurt your business and refused to pay the fines or report to jail or the court didn't even assign a punishment, would you be mad?
Also worth pointing out that my boss asks me how much research I have to do for my job, saying it's for tax purposes. We are encouraged to be creative with the answers for tax purposes. I would not be surprised that some of that money is simply salary time for the web guy having to update his skills from .NET 2.0 to 3.5 - anything outside training of course. The more you say, the bigger tax reduction you get, and the happier your boss gets.
So shareholders take note, it' probably not that much. Still a lot though.
Thanks for clarifying, the cheap ones usually mean it's Friday!
This will on having been the first post, if my calculations will be correct.
I understand your point, but you're making it against the wrong thing. Whole-disk encryption done correctly does not get in anyone's way, and does not require working around. Losing a notebook on a trip, or having it stolen from your car while shopping is very easy to do. If someone steals my notebook, they can't get any company data out of it - best they can do is reformat it and have a free notebook.
I don't have to remember to encrypt something, or erase something - it's all done for me, with no interaction. This *is* what you need to secure. Anyone who makes the security decision not to safeguard something that can be carried by one person, using transparent encryption, should reconsider their career.
Sure someone who wants the information can hold me a gunpoint and get the password, but how often does that happen vs. a random burglary or lost item? Are these PCs that don't get taken on a trip? Think you don't need encryption because they won't leave the building? You'd be surprised where your missing inventory winds up. I know we were.
We paused a pointsec rollout because it blue-screens maybe 5% of the PCs, and once it does that you will never recover one bit of data on the drive. Lost countless hours of work, plus all of the time troubleshooting we did with the vendor and MS. It is a dirty word here now. We managed to get an update which did not have this problem, and it involved updating NTFS drivers along with Pointsec. I got the impression that it was similar to the delayed-write failures that XP suffered early on, with MS blaming drive manufacturers and drive mfrs pointing at earlier XP patches which did not have the problem.
I have noticed considerable slow-downs, probably because on large files it has to decrypt the whole thing from the beginning instead of being able to seek. Kinda like extracting the last file out of BZIP - they are TARred before compressing and that gives you better performance, but you can't re-create state until you start from the beginning. Of course, anti-virus has the same problem and compounds it with on-access scans.
Lesson: roll this out to some grunts first, for a month or two at least. If you have to do anything beyond reimaging the drive to get them working, they are not the right people to test it on. Stress test it by turning off the PC when it's in the middle of doing something - you can't control when you lose power or a battery dies, so make sure it's robust enough to deal with simple failures. I'm not saying to skip Pointsec, I'm saying there are probably subtle bugs in every product which may show up with your particular configuration. Our higher level executives found the bugs here and it was not pretty.
Web apps and desktop apps can share the same code. If you write ASP.NET and have some nifty classes/libraries/code snippets you can take them unchanged to the desktop. Qt will not run as a web app. I mean everything you can do in a CLR application on the desktop you can do in a web app. I have done some very strange things using ASP.NET, accessing all kinds of system information that would have been very difficult* to get with classic ASP.
You can use Java server side, but I don't know if you can take all JSP code and use it in a desktop app.
By 'same code' I mean if you do it right (not using HTTPContext or other server-only stuff) you can use a .NET dll with your desktop application.
Of course, every .NET application I run frustrates me with its slowness compared to normal applications, and every Java app I have used has been done so poorly I wonder if any good Java programmers exist. They certainly don't work for the big companies that's for sure. I was just searching today on why SQL Server Management Studio (.NET) is retardedly slow compared to Enterprise Manager (GUI over COM objects). Not much to explain there, turns out.
* I see someone getting ready to say What's so difficult about CreateObject()? Nothing, as long as an object exists that does what you want, and is installed.
You sure it has nothing to do with population density?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density
I realize these are pretty high caps, but what happens at the end of the month when your heaviest users hit their caps? Isn't it going to be a stretch to say that you cap usage due to bandwidth constraints, yet because the heaviest users are not using it the available bandwidth skyrockets?
Another thought is, you buy/lease/subscribe to a line with 20mbps and that's what you expect out of your service. Is it reasonable to expect that they multiply each user by their speed and have enough bandwidth to supply all of their customers? We all seem to understand when phones get overloaded during emergencies, but if that internet doesn't come to us immediately it's suddenly bait and switch, that we can't use what we were sold?
My point is, I suppose, we are sold the connection to the ISP at a certain speed, but we are not guaranteed that it will function at that speed. If bandwidth is available, why the arbitrary cap? Shouldn't it be more like you lose priority after hitting a certain level?
You're obviously convinced that it works, and I agree it's a good product. From my experience, it did not do what I wanted, which is allow me to run a virtualized OS while continuing my normal desktop behavior (minus some CPU cycles of course).
I installed it and it installed network bridging which ground all traffic to a halt if I were doing anything other than simple web browsing. Under 1kbit/s no matter what, less than a bad dial-up modem. I did not want the virtual image to have any networking in the first place, and could not find any documentation to turn it off when installing. Removing VMWare did not solve the problem (my network settings were still modified), but when my computer died and I replaced it I vowed never to install VMWare again.
I did not keep my vow, and I learned a lesson. On my work notebook, I installed it for about 3 days. Uninstalling it completely broke all VPN-based communication. I tried reinstalling and uninstalling to see if I could overwrite and then wipe clean, but that had the same results. I had to manually reconfigure just about everything there is to configure on windows XP networking to get it working. One of our two VPN solutions still bluescreens when I use Outlook over it because I have not reinstalled windows yet.
Did I file a bug or ask for support? No, that's for loyalists like you, and I didn't pay for it. I found another solution that works for me. There's money to be made in not breaking things for your users.
In soviet russia, porn pays you!
Exactly. What I always found frustrating is the "You could damage your computer by using regedit" warnings. but then the instructions say to navigate to this key, then this key, then this one, and right-click here, new, and be sure to use DWORD because if you specify any other type it won't work.
It would be so much easier to just "Save this.reg file and double-click on it." that way it's impossible for the idiot user to screw up. At least closer to impossible anyway.
Or at least give a way to navigate directly to the subkey, like a "goto line number" function in a text editor. Of course they do have the "Select a file" dialog that allows you to select by clicking and waiting for the folder browser to read all the files and folders, and the subfolders as well to determine if it needs to put a plus sign there, but not paste in something from the clipboard which you already have. so maybe it was the same design team.
What happens if it's a flower named after a mythical being?
I don't know about you, but I prefer a link to a blog over the actual paper. Mostly because I don't speak Astrophysicsese.
I went ahead and clicked on the blog for you, and the link. Here's the paper (You can get a PDF if you want), it was submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3863
I understand your reluctance, after all you're the one who posted:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1112493&cid=26694469
Don't worry, you can continue to click on links out of curiosity. I put one above, go ahead, click it. You know you want to. everyone else is clicking it. Now with more fiber, and it cures Alzheimer's too.
how do you know that's all it does? because it hasn't done anything else that you noticed?
I sure as hell do. But not intentionally. I hear something on the radio, google the lyrics, figure out who wrote it, go to Amazon and figure out what's on the CD. Torrent or other p2p and grab the album, listen to it, and say "glad I didn't pay money for THAT" and delete it.
If there were a way to return crappy music I'd feel better about paying for it, but they assume if you open the package all you did was copy it and try to get it for free. If they want to assume I'm a pirate I have to play their game, and it ends up hurting them.
Typical artist contract has fees included with the assumption that albums will get damaged or otherwise unsaleable in transit. They have to turn this around and realize that digital copies will have the same fate - losses due to a marginal amount of piracy.
They paid for airtime in order to get higher billboard rankings - I save them the money and play it for myself, no cost. They think I'm a pirate if i listen before buying so I do. And in the end, I'm really doing my ISP a disservice by downloading so much crap I have a roughly 85% chance of having no interest in.
The only thing that cares about the version number is applications which check for it. Microsoft is basically saying applications that run on Vista will run on W7 no problem. There are a lot of checks out there that say "Am I running on Vista?" and that software will still work.
In other words, it is entirely compatibility. If they completely changed Windows 7 so that the windows API runs on top of a linux kernel, they could still give it version number 6.1 internally if it is still compatible with Vista.
Did Linus just with an argument on Slashdot? With himself? The guy's a superhero in my book.
Wow, the only thing more dense is Stanford's quantum hologram. A close second, as usual, is the first post, followed by the secretary at work.
Any chance Obama was privy to additional information that made him change his mind? If that were the case, he really couldn't come out and say "There's information that I have been told but I can't tell you what it is but just trust me." I would have voted against him if he did that. Especially after becoming president, there are many promises that you simply can't keep because you didn't have enough information.
Your post basically says there is no hope so don't try to change anything. Instead, you should put effort into asking for more transparency. If we knew what was happening, and Russell Tice could say it matches what he saw happening, it would make a lot more sense. If it is an evil machine, we need to push to see what's happening. If it is just a bunch of normal people making normal mistakes, only on a national level, transparency can only help.
What you see as a conspiracy against normal people looks to me like a bunch of people allowed to operate in secrecy and not having to explain themselves.
It would be better for people to get behind drives like DownsizeDC. Even if you don't agree with the idea of downsizing government, many of their campaigns have no reasonable counterargument. Write the laws yourself instead of accepting industry-written text, read bills before voting, no bundling of unrelated riders. I'm no libertarian myself, so some campaigns make sense to me and some not so much. These kinds of things should be our focus, not surrender, cynicism, and apathy.
I understand your point, but Disney didn't sit on his ass. His company is still cranking out good stuff.
This is always where I get stuck in the argument. Disney is the reason copyrights were extended, and I can't argue that they stopped producing because of the revenue stream. Consumers actually benefit because of the additional money Disney could spend making theme parks and on software for the animation and good voice actors. And the people who work for Disney benefit since it is such a strong company.
Yes the one hit wonder who only collects residuals and royalties is of no benefit to society, but the vast majority of art becomes socially irrelevant before even a sane amount of time passes (17 years was the original I believe, and very few people are buying music from 1991.)
I would love to find something specific that shows how extended copyright is a burden, but everything I found is philosophy and rhetoric.
I would have expected the opposite. I figured the 2-year term House would be all for this, while the 6-year term Senate wouldn't really care. Quoting because they said it better than I would have:
source
Yup, I have dandruff and am allergic to grass. How did you know?
It's adapt or die. And it's rarely the same people starting something as finishing. and not everyone in the company agrees that's the direction to take.
Usually the good people get fired if they aren't producing good results. Typically you'll have people who want to make a product, and do and get successful. Then they need to increase profits or minimize costs or something else, and they bring in the sociopath. If something makes money, and doesn't lose too many customers, it gets approved. The sociopath isn't making a product, he's making money. He's giving people what they are WILLING TO BUY at a given profit margin rather than what they WANT.
Every ruthless, faceless company got its start buy trying to sell something they believed in. Microsoft sold BASIC and wanted to have a good product, but now they make what companies want and tell individual consumers you'll buy what we give you. Google wanted to provide the best search results, now they seem to be working to get access to everything you do on the internet for targeted advertising. It gets perverted when you bring in the business types who start looking at the bottom line, and good people either adapt or get replaced.
In this case, I'm sure someone just made a suggestion and no one else really gave it thought. They all believe in their product of course, or they would change it and sell the new version instead. Posting something that you believe, under the guise of a product review, which is a single person's opinion, is hardly fraudulent in itself. If amazon's review system makes you check a box saying you bought and used the product, then yes it's fraudulent. Otherwise it's just someone's opinion, caveat emptor. Just getting some positive buzz out there on this Web 2.0 thingie. They should have seen the conflict of interest inherent in such an act, but they didn't bother making fake accounts.
I'll finish by saying, I disagree with a lot of things my employer does, but my work does not involve those things and I have no influence, so they keep happening. It's not my fault, but I am part of the problem, and I'm a good person.