Thanks for the great link. I'm just going to jump in to clarify some points you made...
They were allowed to interview two of them, but only with an Apple representative present.
According to the article, US News talked to three switchers, one without any Apple representative.
Furthermore, all of the Apple switchers were paid for their involvement. Who wouldn't switch if they were given a free Powerbook + expenses?
US News says one of the switchers says he was paid.
...or work for magazines which receive large amounts of Apple advertising, etc.
The magazine is the New Yorker. The amount of advertising is never mentioned. What USNews and this poster also fail to examine is whether the New Yorker prints ads for Apple competitors. Although I don't know, I can probably assume this safely.
It's just kind of interesting. Microsoft's advertising tactics have never been as unethical as what Apple has been doing with the switch campaign, and yet who bears the brunt of the attacks here?
I think the main difference here is that there is evidence that the Windows switcher works for Microsoft indirectly. I think anyone who appears in commercials should get paid for their time and effort, but the Mallinson woman was on the payroll for another reason entirely.
You can bet that the first people to get speeding citations based on their entry/exit times will be those who chose to give up their privacy for convenience by buying "SpeedPass". Those devices are begging to be abused by law enforcement.
The Jargon File has a good entry for the multiple meanings of the word "spam". But they only speak briefly about how the term began to be applied.
[from "Monty Python's Flying Circus"]
...the term `spam' has gone mainstream, though without its original sense or folkloric freight - there is apparently a widespread myth among lusers that "spamming" is what happens when you dump cans of Spam into a revolving fan.
I have heard another story claiming that spam (messages) drown out legitimate discourse the way the vikings' song drowns out conversation at the restaurant.
My belief had always been, however, that it was the fact that the messages were not crossposted. This meant you got multiple copies of the same message to all the usenet servers. This is like ordering "spam spam spam eggs and spam".
By invisibly inserting the redirect into Web surfers' browsers, StreamCast can make it look like it is referring traffic to shopping Web sites without the shopper ever being aware that the Morpheus technology was involved.
Yet you beleive this does not mean your point 1 (the invisible re-directs) and point 3 (the referrals) are related? That is explicitly what the article says. (What's the opposite of FUD?)
I have been searching without success for the/. story about the software that used to let surfers annotate web pages. It was a browser plug-in that you could type comments into, and then when other people visited the same site they could read your comments.
Some big company got mad because they didn't like the comments that were "appended" to their site. They claimed it was vandalism and infringed their rights to present their pages the way they wanted.
Eventually, the company that made the plug-in went under.
Some quick analysis of the comments on that story would show how many people stood in support of that software, but now stand against SmartLinks.
Personally, as much as I hate Microsoft, I think that they get a knee-jerk reaction from this crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
They were allowed to interview two of them, but only with an Apple representative present.
According to the article, US News talked to three switchers, one without any Apple representative.
Furthermore, all of the Apple switchers were paid for their involvement. Who wouldn't switch if they were given a free Powerbook + expenses?
US News says one of the switchers says he was paid.
The magazine is the New Yorker. The amount of advertising is never mentioned. What USNews and this poster also fail to examine is whether the New Yorker prints ads for Apple competitors. Although I don't know, I can probably assume this safely.
It's just kind of interesting. Microsoft's advertising tactics have never been as unethical as what Apple has been doing with the switch campaign, and yet who bears the brunt of the attacks here?
I think the main difference here is that there is evidence that the Windows switcher works for Microsoft indirectly. I think anyone who appears in commercials should get paid for their time and effort, but the Mallinson woman was on the payroll for another reason entirely.
You can bet that the first people to get speeding citations based on their entry/exit times will be those who chose to give up their privacy for convenience by buying "SpeedPass". Those devices are begging to be abused by law enforcement.
I just went there and found the phrase missing. Where were you looking?
Perhaps a better analogy that might work for both sides is "CPDTPA on my computer is like mandatory trigger locks that can't be removed."
I have heard another story claiming that spam (messages) drown out legitimate discourse the way the vikings' song drowns out conversation at the restaurant.
My belief had always been, however, that it was the fact that the messages were not crossposted. This meant you got multiple copies of the same message to all the usenet servers. This is like ordering "spam spam spam eggs and spam".
At 10:45am EST, the search "scientology site:xenu.net" currently brings up about 1,300 documents.
It looks more like a victory, at least.
Yet you beleive this does not mean your point 1 (the invisible re-directs) and point 3 (the referrals) are related? That is explicitly what the article says. (What's the opposite of FUD?)
Some big company got mad because they didn't like the comments that were "appended" to their site. They claimed it was vandalism and infringed their rights to present their pages the way they wanted. Eventually, the company that made the plug-in went under.
Some quick analysis of the comments on that story would show how many people stood in support of that software, but now stand against SmartLinks.
Personally, as much as I hate Microsoft, I think that they get a knee-jerk reaction from this crowd.