After circuit city is officially gone, best buy will have numerous markets without even token competition for consumer electronics (unless you count walmart).
Agreed. Only the strong survive, after all. Soon we will be a nation of Wal*Mart, H&R Block, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Toyota, Comcast and Best Buy...reminds me of the horrible scene form Idiocracy..."Welcome to CostCO, I love you...Welcome to CostCO, I love you...Welcome to CostCO, I love you...Welcome to CostCO, I love you..."
=Smidge=
Re:A good review from a non fanboi
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: -1
*snort* Yeah, maybe back in the 80's I'd have given that review some credence. The fact is he's gone soft; I like the old beat-down Ebert trading body-blows with Siskel, but the post-sickly man he's become makes me doubt pretty much anything he writes these days. I have a feeling Siskel is looking down from Heaven (or up from Hell as the case may be) and slowly shaking his head at the drivel passing as critical review from Ebert's withered, watered-down, like-everything style.
It's too bad but the fact remains: Ebert needs to be put down like a sick animal.
The Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tri
Quoth: "Merceneries. Elementals. Necromongers. Shit, I've never been so popular. I should probaly slip these chains and open up a few arteries. But why drive when you can get driven? Free ticket to Crematoria. Thanks Toombs. Got me some business there, named Jack. And once we settle up, I walk away forever. So I'll just wait... all back-of-the-bus for now."
So if identify myself as a Christian and a Hindu finds that offensive I can be banned? Or if I choose the username 'Bevets' I can haz bannination from Fark plz k thnx bai.
"Botnets, worldwide botnets. What kind of boxes are on botnets?
Compaq, HP, Dell and Sony, TRUE! Gateway, Packard Bell, maybe even Asus, too.
Are boxes, found on botnets. All running Windows, FOO [fu]!"
=Smidge=
Re:Ah, the era of homepages
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 0
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
Yep. Those awful 90's Geocitites user-generated content pages get my vote for worst use of disk space EVAH. Here's my resume (identical to every 90's college student CIS rez) here's my girlfriend (identical to every 90's college student g/f pics), here' my Honda Civic (ditto), here's pics of my g/f's cats.
My request to all media is to stand up and speak out on this issue. Freedom of speech and freedom of press are essential to India keeping true to its democratic tradition.
The judges of even the higher courts have to pay close attention to developing trends including social networking and impact on society and cultural norms. Criticism of political parties has to be protected...
God has called me to tell the story you are about to read. It was excruciating for me to relive it as I wrote the words. But, I knew that it was God's Will for me to follow through. I believe, at some point, it will be my son's story to tell, but until he's ready to do so, I'll tell it. It is my prayer that this story will plant a spiritual seed in the hearts of many and set them on the path to discovering just how magnificent God's power and glory really is. My story spans many pages, but please read every word of it, even if you feel that some of the content is irrelevant to your life. Since it was God's Will for me to write this, I have to believe that His Holy Spirit is within these pages. And, where His Holy Spirit is, blessings, too, will be.
In my mind, I had always pictured that if anything ever happened to one of my children, I would just start screaming and never stop. On April 17th, 2005, at about 9:30 a.m., in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas, I was awakened from a dead sleep by my husband's frantic words that I will never forget as long as I live: "TAMMY, SOMETHING'S HAPPENED TO BRANDIN!" Brandin, my son who was 16 years old at that time, had been critically injured.
In the midst of my hysteria, I gathered what little information there was at the moment from Brandin's very distraught Grandmother. He had been involved in a rollover accident and had been ejected from the vehicle. She only knew that he was critically injured and that he was being airlifted at that moment to Everett Tower, a Severe Trauma hospital in Oklahoma City.
There is no description for the torment I felt on that 3-hour trip from Dallas to Oklahoma City. My prayer is that no mother ever has to be in a position to ask God to please forgive any sins her son may have committed if he should die without getting the chance to ask himself. I went back and forth between that and begging God to save his life, and the hysteria continued. My worst fear was that he would die with no one there who loves him. Thank God my sister and stepmother lived in Norman, OK, so they were able to get to Everett Tower shortly after he arrived and give me updates until I could get there.
I knew before I walked in the hospital that Brandin had suffered a severe blow to the head and that he had considerable damage to his face and brain. But, nothing on earth could have prepared me for walking in that ER and seeing my baby.... broken... lying there lifeless. He appeared to have gauze packed in the right side of his head where the impact occurred. I add such a gruesome detail not to exploit Brandin's injuries but to help you, the audience, to understand the severity of his condition. Words cannot describe the sheer terror I felt. I just knew I'd lost him.
His list of injuries was extensive. He had crushed almost every bone in the right side of his face except his lower jaw. They were concerned that he could lose the use of his right eye. He had bleeding at the base of his brain. The impact had shifted his brain to the left side of his skull. But, of the most concern was the fact that his right carotid artery, where it branches and goes inside the skull to feed the right side of the brain, was completely occluded (blocked). That, combined with all the other trauma, put him at a very high risk for stroke. Brandin was in a drug-induced coma in an effort to allow his brain every opportunity to heal. He would need reconstruction on the right side of his face, but that was secondary to the brain injury and would have to wait until his brain had healed enough to withstand a surgery.
The paramedics had placed a device known as a "bolt" in his head, which measured the pressure in the brain. It was measured by a number, and if that number climbed too high,... Well, I don't know what would have happened because I never had to find out, thank God.
If this may hunt pirates to appear in a bad light, then I believe it is either a little stupid scriptkiddie somewhere that does not understand it, or any file sharing opponents actually want to win sympathy by running with a bit of foul play. It is possible of course, but how likely is it I do not know.
Dare I say: is someone who is nice when he accused person becomes upset and says that this is not appreciated? And that the hack would not favor the matter should properly be obvious. Or the whole idea of the network for that matter, an open network.
It is not great to be accused and afflicted. If any of that should be on the right side being behaving like idiots, it is rejected twice. And chop the plaintiff's website is idiocy.
There are intelligent ways to support, for example, by using the brain.
You may recall that last year year, astroturfing, sock puppetry and other forms of fake-blog bullshit were made illegal by SCOTUS, POTUS & HOWE.
Section 22 of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive is absolutely clear, making it illegal to go around "falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer".
Has it made a difference? Nope. Just ask Roland Piquepaille (who is currently posting as StandardDeviant).
Roland is a blogger, and a few weeks back he did a typical blogger thing. He'd been mucked about by a health club, which messed up his cancellation and continued to charge him, so he vented his frustration on his blog.
Time passed, and then a new poster turned up, disagreeing strongly with what he'd written in a number of messages. You're talking out of your backside, the commenter told him. I've been dealing with that firm for a million years, and they're bloody great, he said. They're the nicest, smartest, funkiest, sexiest company on the face of the Earth, and they're probably the best company in the universe, too. You're a big fat liar.
Roland idly Googled the commenter's name. Surprise! He's a middle manager in the very company Mike was blogging about. So Roland did another typical blogger thing. He blogged about that, too, outing the manager on his blog and accusing him of astroturfing. That's when the legal letters started.
You know the drill. You're defaming our client, the letters said. Take down the posts, or we'll sue you until you squeak.
The thing is, the lawyers didn't say that he was wrong. Quite the opposite. The poster was indeed a manager of the very health club Roland had blogged about. They didn't dispute that.
However, they said that the company hadn't asked the manager to post anything and certainly didn't approve of such behaviour. Because Roland had named the company, his posts about astroturfing were therefore defamatory.
Was Roland in the right? I think so, but that doesn't really matter. He wouldn't get legal aid to fight a defamation case, so if he went to court and lost, the costs would ruin him â" and even if he won, the costs would still ruin him.
He could try to get the firm prosecuted for astroturfing, but all that stuff about 5K fines and two-year jail sentences is for the really bad guys. In a case like this, it'd be tough to persuade Trading Standards or the OFT to even investigate; if they did, the punishment wouldn't be anything more severe than a stern letter.
Faced with a battle he couldn't possibly win, he took the posts down. It doesn't matter that his posts were honest and accurate, or that the accusations he made were absolutely true. All a company needs to do when caught astroturfing is to say "we knew nothing about it" and send the lawyers in.
As ever, when it comes to companies behaving badly online, might beats right every time.
I was recently asked by the publisher to review Collective Intelligence in Action. The author is Satnam Alag, a Bay area engineer with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Alag is VP of NextBio, a specialized search engine. The first chapter is free and so is the source code used in the book.
The book is for Java developers who want to implement "Collective Intelligence" applications in Java. It tells us about extracting and applying data from blogs, wikis and social network applications. I am not one to praise, but this book succeeds brilliantly. If you are a Java engineer and work with Web technologies, you must get this book. It covers topics such as computing similarity measures using vector models, Bayes Classifiers, inverse document frequency (idf), Machine Learning (using the Weka API), building a crawler with regular expressions, collaborative filtering (with links to open source tools), and so on.
Even if you do not work with Java, if you care for high-end Web applications, this book is for you. It reminds me of Java Digital Signal Processing book. It offers the gist of what academia knows, but focuses on what people (engineers and researchers) do in practise. The book is not meant for academia however. There are references, but no theorem.
Disclaimer: I did not get paid to review this book, and I do not stand to gain anything if you buy the book. I have no relationship with the publisher or the author.
The book covers the wide breadth of the topics with amazing focus and detail-architecture for adding intelligence, tagging and tag clouds, content aggregation through focused web crawling and from the blogospare, leveraging machine learning techniques such as clustering and predictive modeling, intelligent search and building recommendation engine. I particularly liked the approach to explain the mathematical concepts with simple examples, followed by implementing it in simple Java and then leveraging open-source software.
This book can be very useful if you are interested in integrating different Open Source Softwares to deliver Enterprise Class Application.
I also liked the authors style of providing summary at the end of each chapter. He also provides huge set of very useful resources for reading further on the topics covered into the chapters.
You must pickup this book if you are
[1]. serious (developer/manager/architect type of Eng) on adding search or intelligent/smartness into your Application [2]. person involved in developing (programmer, tester, manager) Social Networking Application. [3]. involved in managing "Knowledge Management Infrastructure" of any size organization
we still don't see our reflections in the mirror in most games. And we still don't get blood dribbling down walls in most games. And we still don't get bloody, or slimy footprints, or shrink rays, or jet packs, or aliens sitting on fucking toilets.
Agreed. I'd stick w/ Doom II any day of the week. Not quite sure about the aliens on toilets, though. I don't seem to recall...facilities... aboard the Enterprise.
Slashdot Mirror
Will you be my Facebook friend? [ ] Yes [ ] No [ ] Maybe [X] Fuck no.
After circuit city is officially gone, best buy will have numerous markets without even token competition for consumer electronics (unless you count walmart).
Agreed. Only the strong survive, after all. Soon we will be a nation of Wal*Mart, H&R Block, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Toyota, Comcast and Best Buy...reminds me of the horrible scene form Idiocracy..."Welcome to CostCO, I love you...Welcome to CostCO, I love you...Welcome to CostCO, I love you...Welcome to CostCO, I love you..."
=Smidge=
*snort* Yeah, maybe back in the 80's I'd have given that review some credence. The fact is he's gone soft; I like the old beat-down Ebert trading body-blows with Siskel, but the post-sickly man he's become makes me doubt pretty much anything he writes these days. I have a feeling Siskel is looking down from Heaven (or up from Hell as the case may be) and slowly shaking his head at the drivel passing as critical review from Ebert's withered, watered-down, like-everything style.
It's too bad but the fact remains: Ebert needs to be put down like a sick animal.
=Smidge=
I'm waiting until GM's stock price hits $0.00
I hear Circuit City is close: $0.01
=Smidge=
Please God, tell me it's not too late for me to invest in your company!
I dunno, Hulu worked out pretty well after all. Whoa. Scratch that. ;-)
=Smidge=
The Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but doesThe Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tri
Hail Eris -- full of mischief.
=Smidge=
Interesting; but how is babby formmed? With HTML 5 stupid content here tags?
=Smidge=
Quoth: "Merceneries. Elementals. Necromongers. Shit, I've never been so popular. I should probaly slip these chains and open up a few arteries. But why drive when you can get driven? Free ticket to Crematoria. Thanks Toombs. Got me some business there, named Jack. And once we settle up, I walk away forever. So I'll just wait... all back-of-the-bus for now."
=Smidge=
*ahem* [taps microphone]
DO YOUR OWN FUCKING RESEARCH.
Thank you. HTH. HAND.
=Smidge=
So if identify myself as a Christian and a Hindu finds that offensive I can be banned? Or if I choose the username 'Bevets' I can haz bannination from Fark plz k thnx bai.
=Smidge=
No, but Bootcamp is a lot harder than Grub, though. ;-)
=Smidge=
I like females.
You, sir, are definitely in the wrong building. Security will see you out. HAND.
=Smidge=
*ahem* [taps microphone, clears throat again] *ahem*
And a five, six, seven, eight:
"Botnets, worldwide botnets.
What kind of boxes are on botnets?
Compaq, HP, Dell and Sony, TRUE!
Gateway, Packard Bell, maybe even Asus, too.
Are boxes, found on botnets.
All running Windows, FOO [fu]!"
=Smidge=
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
Yep. Those awful 90's Geocitites user-generated content pages get my vote for worst use of disk space EVAH. Here's my resume (identical to every 90's college student CIS rez) here's my girlfriend (identical to every 90's college student g/f pics), here' my Honda Civic (ditto), here's pics of my g/f's cats.
=Smidge=
Nope; that just plays Flight Simulator. ;-)
=Smidge=
My request to all media is to stand up and speak out on this issue. Freedom of speech and freedom of press are essential to India keeping true to its democratic tradition.
The judges of even the higher courts have to pay close attention to developing trends including social networking and impact on society and cultural norms. Criticism of
political parties has to be protected...
=Smidge=
...I need Windows for a few things.
No you don't; you need wine. :-)
Cheers.
God has called me to tell the story you are about to read. It was
excruciating for me to relive it as I wrote the words. But, I knew
that it was God's Will for me to follow through. I believe, at some
point, it will be my son's story to tell, but until he's ready to do
so, I'll tell it. It is my prayer that this story will plant a
spiritual seed in the hearts of many and set them on the path to
discovering just how magnificent God's power and glory really is. My
story spans many pages, but please read every word of it, even if you
feel that some of the content is irrelevant to your life. Since it
was God's Will for me to write this, I have to believe that His Holy
Spirit is within these pages. And, where His Holy Spirit is,
blessings, too, will be.
In my mind, I had always pictured that if anything ever happened to
one of my children, I would just start screaming and never stop. On
April 17th, 2005, at about 9:30 a.m., in a hotel room in Dallas,
Texas, I was awakened from a dead sleep by my husband's frantic words
that I will never forget as long as I live: "TAMMY, SOMETHING'S
HAPPENED TO BRANDIN!" Brandin, my son who was 16 years old at that
time, had been critically injured.
In the midst of my hysteria, I gathered what little information there
was at the moment from Brandin's very distraught Grandmother. He had
been involved in a rollover accident and had been ejected from the
vehicle. She only knew that he was critically injured and that he was
being airlifted at that moment to Everett Tower, a Severe Trauma
hospital in Oklahoma City.
There is no description for the torment I felt on that 3-hour trip
from Dallas to Oklahoma City. My prayer is that no mother ever has to
be in a position to ask God to please forgive any sins her son may
have committed if he should die without getting the chance to ask
himself. I went back and forth between that and begging God to save
his life, and the hysteria continued. My worst fear was that he would
die with no one there who loves him. Thank God my sister and
stepmother lived in Norman, OK, so they were able to get to Everett
Tower shortly after he arrived and give me updates until I could get
there.
I knew before I walked in the hospital that Brandin had suffered a
severe blow to the head and that he had considerable damage to his
face and brain. But, nothing on earth could have prepared me for
walking in that ER and seeing my baby.... broken... lying there
lifeless. He appeared to have gauze packed in the right side of his
head where the impact occurred. I add such a gruesome detail not to
exploit Brandin's injuries but to help you, the audience, to
understand the severity of his condition. Words cannot describe the
sheer terror I felt. I just knew I'd lost him.
His list of injuries was extensive. He had crushed almost every bone
in the right side of his face except his lower jaw. They were
concerned that he could lose the use of his right eye. He had
bleeding at the base of his brain. The impact had shifted his brain
to the left side of his skull. But, of the most concern was the fact
that his right carotid artery, where it branches and goes inside the
skull to feed the right side of the brain, was completely occluded
(blocked). That, combined with all the other trauma, put him at a
very high risk for stroke. Brandin was in a drug-induced coma in an
effort to allow his brain every opportunity to heal. He would need
reconstruction on the right side of his face, but that was secondary
to the brain injury and would have to wait until his brain had healed
enough to withstand a surgery.
The paramedics had placed a device known as a "bolt" in his head,
which measured the pressure in the brain. It was measured by a
number, and if that number climbed too high,... Well, I don't know what
would have happened because I never had to find out, thank God.
Once the medical team felt that Bra
isn't Atlantis supposed to have been a Ring City around a central harbour and volcano?
No, that was Santorini (Thera).
=Smidge=
Gah. What's up with the 'chicky' cartoon people on their homepage? Real professional, that. :rolls eyes:
=Smidge=
If this may hunt pirates to appear in a bad light, then I believe it is either a little stupid scriptkiddie somewhere that does not understand it, or any file sharing opponents actually want to win sympathy by running with a bit of foul play. It is possible of course, but how likely is it I do not know.
Dare I say: is someone who is nice when he accused person becomes upset and says that this is not appreciated? And that the hack would not favor the matter should properly be obvious. Or the whole idea of the network for that matter, an open network.
It is not great to be accused and afflicted. If any of that should be on the right side being behaving like idiots, it is rejected twice. And chop the plaintiff's website is idiocy.
There are intelligent ways to support, for example, by using the brain.
=Smidge=
You may recall that last year year, astroturfing, sock puppetry and other forms of fake-blog bullshit were made illegal by SCOTUS, POTUS & HOWE.
Section 22 of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive is absolutely clear, making it illegal to go around "falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer".
Has it made a difference? Nope. Just ask Roland Piquepaille (who is currently posting as StandardDeviant).
Roland is a blogger, and a few weeks back he did a typical blogger thing. He'd been mucked about by a health club, which messed up his cancellation and continued to charge him, so he vented his frustration on his blog.
Time passed, and then a new poster turned up, disagreeing strongly with what he'd written in a number of messages. You're talking out of your backside, the commenter told him. I've been dealing with that firm for a million years, and they're bloody great, he said. They're the nicest, smartest, funkiest, sexiest company on the face of the Earth, and they're probably the best company in the universe, too. You're a big fat liar.
Roland idly Googled the commenter's name. Surprise! He's a middle manager in the very company Mike was blogging about. So Roland did another typical blogger thing. He blogged about that, too, outing the manager on his blog and accusing him of astroturfing. That's when the legal letters started.
You know the drill. You're defaming our client, the letters said. Take down the posts, or we'll sue you until you squeak.
The thing is, the lawyers didn't say that he was wrong. Quite the opposite. The poster was indeed a manager of the very health club Roland had blogged about. They didn't dispute that.
However, they said that the company hadn't asked the manager to post anything and certainly didn't approve of such behaviour. Because Roland had named the company, his posts about astroturfing were therefore defamatory.
Was Roland in the right? I think so, but that doesn't really matter. He wouldn't get legal aid to fight a defamation case, so if he went to court and lost, the costs would ruin him â" and even if he won, the costs would still ruin him.
He could try to get the firm prosecuted for astroturfing, but all that stuff about 5K fines and two-year jail sentences is for the really bad guys. In a case like this, it'd be tough to persuade Trading Standards or the OFT to even investigate; if they did, the punishment wouldn't be anything more severe than a stern letter.
Faced with a battle he couldn't possibly win, he took the posts down. It doesn't matter that his posts were honest and accurate, or that the accusations he made were absolutely true. All a company needs to do when caught astroturfing is to say "we knew nothing about it" and send the lawyers in.
As ever, when it comes to companies behaving badly online, might beats right every time.
=Smidge=
I was recently asked by the publisher to review Collective Intelligence in Action. The author is Satnam Alag, a Bay area engineer with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Alag is VP of NextBio, a specialized search engine. The first chapter is free and so is the source code used in the book.
The book is for Java developers who want to implement "Collective Intelligence" applications in Java. It tells us about extracting and applying data from blogs, wikis and social network applications. I am not one to praise, but this book succeeds brilliantly. If you are a Java engineer and work with Web technologies, you must get this book. It covers topics such as computing similarity measures using vector models, Bayes Classifiers, inverse document frequency (idf), Machine Learning (using the Weka API), building a crawler with regular expressions, collaborative filtering (with links to open source tools), and so on.
Even if you do not work with Java, if you care for high-end Web applications, this book is for you. It reminds me of Java Digital Signal Processing book. It offers the gist of what academia knows, but focuses on what people (engineers and researchers) do in practise. The book is not meant for academia however. There are references, but no theorem.
Disclaimer: I did not get paid to review this book, and I do not stand to gain anything if you buy the book. I have no relationship with the publisher or the author.
The book covers the wide breadth of the topics with amazing focus and detail-architecture for adding intelligence, tagging and tag clouds, content aggregation through focused web crawling and from the blogospare, leveraging machine learning techniques such as clustering and predictive modeling, intelligent search and building recommendation engine. I particularly liked the approach to explain the mathematical concepts with simple examples, followed by implementing it in simple Java and then leveraging open-source software.
This book can be very useful if you are interested in integrating different Open Source Softwares to deliver Enterprise Class Application.
I also liked the authors style of providing summary at the end of each chapter. He also provides huge set of very useful resources for reading further on the topics covered into the chapters.
You must pickup this book if you are
[1]. serious (developer/manager/architect type of Eng) on adding search or
intelligent/smartness into your Application
[2]. person involved in developing (programmer, tester, manager) Social
Networking Application.
[3]. involved in managing "Knowledge Management Infrastructure" of any size organization
I highly recommend it.
=Smidge=
we still don't see our reflections in the mirror in most games. And we still don't get blood dribbling down walls in most games. And we still don't get bloody, or slimy footprints, or shrink rays, or jet packs, or aliens sitting on fucking toilets.
Agreed. I'd stick w/ Doom II any day of the week. Not quite sure about the aliens on toilets, though. I don't seem to recall...facilities... aboard the Enterprise.
=Smidge=