Raw capitalism will maximize profits but might cost nintendo a lot of good will. Then it won't maximize profits, especially long-term profits. Difficulty seeing more than a quarter into the future has become disturbingly common among publicly held companies. This is what annoys me about people here saying "it's the company's legal obligation to maximise profit for shareholders, yadda yadda yadda..." (*) Even if that were the case, there is *always* the issue of how long-term this is supposed to be. Goodwill will have an effect on the future business of the store, and therefore profits, so of course it's quite acceptable to run a business taking that into account! Obviously it has to be balanced (giving away crisp banknotes would generate goodwill, but be disastrous for profit margins), but in most cases screwing people over in the short term is going to be horrible for profits in the long term.
(*) IANAL, and I don't know what I'm talking about(!) However, I'd assume this much may be correct. Although it sounds theoretically okay that a company should be able to pursue whatever motives it wanted (i.e. concentrate on giving all its assets away to the Stockholm Cats' Home instead of maximising profit), in practice this would be a problem with publicly held companies (and jointly-held private ones). For example, if a shareholder with a 55% holding votes to give away all the business's assets to the cats' home (or to his nephews!), this might be unacceptable to the other shareholders. So I would assume that there must be legal structures in place to prevent this sort of thing.
Sue, sue everybody. Sue the now defunct company that lost your domain. Sue the company that bought your domain. Sue the owners of said companies directly. Sue their parents, their wives, and their children. Sue their pets. Sue everybody! Is this what happens when Keyser Söze goes down the legal route?
It was not my intention to start an American vs. Brit literary battle. Who would honestly suspect that anyone would believe the American literary tradition in any way compares to the British--outside of extension? You missed the point. When I said "Yeah, I'm a literary genius" I was being sarcastic (pretty obviously, I thought) and taking the piss out of *my own* clumsy attempt to rewrite a cliche for my own use. It had nothing directly to do with what I was saying to you.
this is especially useful for unconventional web developers who don't actually have access to the internet. I agree with you in some ways, but there are still many cases where a well-written book with all the important information in one place beats wading through a bunch of websites.
When I was at university (five or so years back), I was pretty surprised that the library was still so useful. You'd have thought that the Internet would have taken away a lot of its utility, but although the net was great for filling the inevitable gaps, it was also quite patchy, and I wasted a *very* high proportion of my time simply trying to find information amongst countless search results. I spent time (e.g.) looking at pages that turned out not to be useful at all, those that had fragments of useful information, but not enough, because they were written from a different angle and/or for a different reason than what I needed, and.... and also, books are nice because they're generally written as a *coherent* and complementary whole. This is a major failing of simply searching many overlapping websites.
Anyway, books *are* useful. A PDF copy can be even better for certain uses; although they're not as good as HTML in a lot of respects, they're a nice (portable *and* searchable) alternative to the dead tree version of the book. Though if I'm going to read the whole thing, I still prefer paper.
And though I wouldn't read the "CSS Pocket Reference" from beginning to end, I own an earlier edition, and it's certainly worth having, even in these days of near-universal Internet access. You wouldn't expect that from a small reference volume, but it's true.
Top hit ring a bell? If you didn't understand from the other replies, let me explain very simply; "the bugger" refers to a person, (probably in a mildly insulting but humorous manner). It's akin to saying "shut the asshole up" or "someone shut that asshole up".
Bollocks isn't remotely a replacement for "fuck" anyway- it's much milder, doesn't mean the same thing and isn't interchangable with "fuck" in the majority of situations.
Oh, and in a nice case of the pot calling the not-very-black-kettle black (*), I believe it was your lot that invented (and seriously) use the euphemism "freaking". Use that word in this country and people would think you were freakin... uh, *fucking* stupid.
I love the little thing, but still the bastard doesn't support mp3. In the context of what you said, I assume that you meant it doesn't support Ogg Vorbis. It certainly supports MP3.
Maybe he was lulled into thinking Ogg would be a big player in audio formats because of all the positive press Ogg regularly receives Maybe he believed the hype? Yes.
He took the plunge into using an improved technology, and the market let him down. That assumes that the market owes anyone anything, even in a vague sense. Basically, he took a risk that the market would start supporting Ogg more than they had in the past, and they didn't.
Don't think he's got ulterior motives simply because he did something you wouldn't. If you read what I said, it's obvious that I wasn't calling him a troll. I merely noted that *had* smacked of that possibility until I checked his comment history (and Googled the comment text). Reason being that there are many trolls along the lines of "I'd heard good stuff about [X technology] and decided to try it out, investing [time/money/opportunity cost] into it- and it let me down badly". I couldn't believe that anyone who would have known about Ogg Vorbis wouldn't have known of the potential drawbacks, but it seems that this *was* the case here.
I ripped my whole CD collection in ogg about a year ago. Last week, I went to buy my first mp3 player, and I can't find a single one in my "budget" price range that has ogg support. I'm stuck re-ripping or downloading my entire library. I find it hard to believe that this didn't occur to you a year back. Seriously, anyone who knows enough to want to rip their collection to Ogg would almost certainly know that it wasn't as widely-supported as MP3.
Personally, I'm happy to accept that Ogg is a better format (in terms of the space/quality tradeoff) than MP3. But I also know that MP3 is almost universally supported and Ogg isn't.
I genuinely had my suspicions that the quote above was a cut-and-paste anti-Ogg troll; it has the air of masquerading as someone who'd tried out the open source choice and been burnt by it... except that- as I mentioned- most potential Ogg users would already have known about these issues. I'm genuinely surprised that you didn't look into this before you decided to rip your music collection.
Re:Couple Thoughts
on
Where are Wii?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Post an ad for a "Wee with 3 games". If any resellers take the bait, send them exactly that -- a sealed container of "wee" with three games. Isn't that taking the piss?
There are new hidden manufacturers of harddisks in the black market that they don't pay taxes.
Their harddisks are cheaper and reliable;D
And Seagate will have problems in the white market.
More problems => You lose $$$ going to zero cent., hehehe, and you pay taxes too, hehehe.
--- they are many harddisks as many pirates there are in the world --- I'm probably not the only person here who's wondering.... what the *fuck* are you going on about??!!
All my drives are made by Seagate (and I've got quite some machines / drives per machine). Not just mines: the ones I buy for customers (SMEs) and friends/family. Out of curiosity, do you (or anyone else) know what the situation is with "Maxtor" and "Seagate" branded drives since the former took over the latter?
I was always under the impression that Maxtor were one of the less reliable drive brands and Seagate were one of the better ones (*). Seagate's low-end drives always seemed to be as cheap- if not cheaper- than most others, so I would normally buy them.
But now I don't know if that cheap "Seagate" is actually a Maxtor-produced drive; or if the "Maxtor" is just a cheap Seagate. The question I'm really trying to ask is, are the two operations and their production facilities still distinct, retaining their previous standards, or have they been merged? And if so, does the brand on the drive still reflect this?
I notice that some local shops seem to buy/sell Maxtors cheaper than Seagates, which would suggest that Seagate are using Maxtor as a low-end brand. I also notice that dabs.com's Maxtor range seems to be all cheap <=320 GB models, which seems to confirm that; but on the other hand, unlike the local stores, dabs' low-end Seagate range appears comparable in price with the equivalent Maxtors.
So, is there any way of differentiating a "genuine" Seagate-produced drive from a Maxtor-produced one, or is the distinction no longer meaningful?
(*) On average, over a large number of drives. HDs are one of those things where, for *any* brand, you'll find people who've had a bad experience with it, making anecdotal evidence not too useful in itself.
Tower was my favorite of the non-independent stores I remember visiting one of the branches of Tower in another town in the UK (there wasn't one where I was staying at the time), circa 1999-2001. I'd heard it was supposed to be this great shop, but it seemed just like another large HMV/Virgin-style chain store with overpriced CDs to me. Wasn't particularly bothered when the UK opearation closed.
Ironically, checking the WP article (no refs, hence pinch of salt, etc) it seems that unlike some "Tower" operations, that one wasn't a franchise.
I don't see how franchising can be bad for a company, since it means it's getting money for its brand. Then you clearly haven't thought about it for more than 5 seconds. If the franchisee(s) aren't up to the standards of the original chain or generally screw things up, they damage the name of the franchise, and that reputation can feed back to the original store.
In short, you lose some control of your own name, and while you can impose conditions on the franchisees, there have to be limits.
Now, the benefit of a franchise is also its disadvantage; people associate the local franchised operation with its original owner, and if this isn't up to scratch, then- at best- people may assume that other franchises are run to poor standards and- at worst- people assume that the original company is responsible and at fault.
"But... but... it wasn't us, it was one of our franchisees" won't cut it in the face of widespread complaints that swamp the ability of your PR to explain the true situation. And do the public care anyway? It's a double-edged sword- if a company is willing to exploit its name (and associated reputation) by selling it to others, it has no right to complain if it's too lax or greedy in controlling the franchise and these actions come back to haunt it.
If programmer's actually USED the resources we have like we used to on those old systems, man our software today would kick ass. There's actually quite a deep issue nestling away in there. I've wondered on more than one occasion just how fast a modern computer would theoretically be- and what it would be capable of- if its resources were programmed/used as efficiently as the old 1-16KB 8-bit machines typically were.
People wrote chess programs for the 1KB ZX81, for ****'s sake! (I'd consider this a reasonably "optimum" use of the facilities available). A typical new PC will include 1GB, a million times as much memory and run..... much, *much* faster. But what is it *theoretically* capable of if programmed to the same efficiency (regardless of how difficult that was or how much time it would take to write)?
I suspect that the answer would shock us if we ever found out.
Neither did the tape drive I had an Atari 800XL (close descendant of the Atari 800), and while I may get nostalgic about most of it, the one thing I will never miss is the bloody cassette deck.
At best they worked and were horribly slow. At worst they were horribly unreliable, tempramental and... horrifically slow.
Although it was supposedly twice the speed of the C64's deck (default 300 baud), for some reason there were never any turbo loader games that worked with the standard Atari deck. Maybe it wasn't possible with the way the tape subsystem was designed. At any rate, it was slooooow.
The speed may have been acceptable when it was designed, memory was small- and consequently, so were games. It wasn't so much fun when games were being written to fill the memory of the larger models... 48K games could easily take 15 to 20 minutes to load. The multiload cassette version of "Ace of Aces" took around 25-30 minutes to get airborne. (Probably written with a disc drive in mind, as the US market would have been almost exlusively disc-based by that stage. Actually, a lot of UK Atari owners had disc drives too, but the retail channels were still based around cassette software, so I had to put up with the stuff even though I had a disc drive!)
I even remember the difference in sound between a "healthy" load and a failed load, and while it doesn't really annoy me the way it used to (quite simply because I know I'll never *need* to rely on a tape deck to load data again), it's something I've no interest in returning to.
Really, if you're not well into your twenties, you probably won't realise how clunky and annoying loading from cassette was. And yet, it's only when I stop and think about it that way, in a modern context, that it strikes *me* just how archaic it seems. The Atari floppies would seem slow and low-capacity to a child growing up these days, but at least they'd almost always work first time (or did back then) and games loaded in a time comparable to modern ones. Once they'd finished laughing at the obvious limitations and datedness, they'd still be able to relate to it.
Loading from cassette, though? It would seem like something from the stone age to them.
CD's aren't dead. I use them all the time to burn my MP3's too for backup and for playback in my cars (can you believe it? a 2006 and 2007 car radio STILL doesn't have MP3 CD players standard?) Two words- FM transmitter. Plug it into an MP3 player and voila.
Don't worry if the guards come, you can just jump on their heads. Consider this- are computer games harmless? Imagine that a bunch of teenagers play out what they've learned in Mario games for real.
They go out at night dressed in red and blue costumes and viciously assault their enemies by jumping on their heads. This sounds more like something out of "A Clockwork Orange" to me.:-/
What, you thought they set up the site out of the goodness of their hearts? They see users as moneycows to be milked until they bleat in agony. No, I think you're setting up a false dichotomy between running something as a totally undiscriminating charity and as a business that'll screw everyone over at the first whiff of money. Hint; it might be true that their aim is to make money... but it's also true that screwing your customers over in the short term could be very counterproductive to making money in the long term.
Yes, they have to learn a few new tricks and features here and there to better optimize the juice from the newest gen of hardware, but it doesn't take them two or three years to get up to speed on the latest NVIDIA or ATI card. That's probably because PC gamers are expected to have a relatively new graphics card to get the best graphics anyway. I doubt PC developers worry about getting their games to look amazing on 3+ year old cards- and PC gamers who are bothered enough would probably have bought a new card anyway. It's open to question which is leading which- probably a bit of both.
But they can't do that with consoles. Also, there's only one basic hardware configuration for a given console, which no doubt makes it easier to learn and optimise.
Certainly, in the old days with computers, the exact same thing happened. The games coming out for (say) the Commodore 64 in the late 1980s were technically miles ahead of the ones released six or seven years earlier. Same goes for a lot of other (basically) fixed-capability 8-bit machines. I suspect the reasons for the improvements were (a) improved experience, (b) pressure from the newer 16-bit machines, (c) the ability to use nice tools running on those shiny new machines to make games running on the old computers... and (d) just the general upward pressure on standards.
This might be useful for some people. It shows you how to block Facebook's Beacon. Not to demean the solution you gave, which I'm sure does its intended job well. However, it's really just a technical fix that is papering over one of the symptoms.
It doesn't- and can't- address the far more serious underlying cause. Namely that Facebook and the other companies involved are clearly totally contemptuous of their users' privacy and quite happy to screw them over in the name of a few quick bucks. And then hide this behind a weaselish and unclear "opt-in-by-default" agreement. (Yes, it's acceptable for them to make money from a free website; no, it's absolutely *not* acceptable for them to do it in this way).
Frankly, I'm glad I don't use Facebook. At one stage I may have believed that it was possibe to balance the invasion one's privacy by controlling what appeared on their page- and then some low-down **** like this comes along. It's one thing to have your Facebook information publicly available, quite another to have your activities on apparently unrelated sites made public.
I wouldn't touch Facebook with a ******* barge pole now. Your fix may work on the current problem, but what happens when the next moneygrabbing exploit comes along? What happens when these assholes figure out a totally different way to use the information they already have on you?
Seriously, fuck that, and fuck Facebook. Their behaviour was already unacceptable- regardless of how they snuck it into the legal agreement. With this latest news on top, I seriously hope that this marks a turning point in Facebook's fortunes. Joe Public isn't as concerned about his privacy as he should be, but when it comes to blabbing about his Christmas present purchases without his knowledge, it puts it in more concrete terms.
Yeah, I don't understand why you would ever refer to a large group of people as singular, either. I guess some people are just dense. Bad phrasing on my part? Possibly. Though I suspect that it was more of an excuse for a joke than a genuine misunderstanding.
But let me take what you said to restate my point anyway. Consider someone addressing a class of students. Would we refer to what "it" thought or what "its response" was, or would we say things like "they thought" and "their response was"?
Yet, it's a class of students.
You could argue that in this case we're referring to the "students" in "a class of students", and that's why it's plural. But the same applies to "a large group of people".
Some code cannot be copyrighted. HTML, for instance, cannot be locked away and hidden in a vault because it relies on being there so the browser can render it at the time of the download. Just because you can easily view it doesn't mean that it's not copyrighted. What on earth made you think otherwise?!
Realistically, of course, there's the question of how far you can copyright many (small) HTML fragments and techniques anyway, but that's not the point you were making.
Why do Brits refer to a business or organiz(s)ational entity as plural? Why do Americans refer to a large group of people as singular? Because that's the way it is, and that's pretty much all there is to it.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone explicitly ran with your argument and used computer-programming-style "logic" to argue that organisations are a single entity/object and should be referred to as such. But one could also argue (equally if not more correctly) that organisations are seen *by humans* as groups of people and are referred to accordingly. (BTW, if someone tries to shoehorn the ubiquitous-but-dreaded "car" analogy into this discussion, I'll slap them silly:)
The simple answer is that spoken/written languages aren't that logical, and that alleged logic can be misapplied by geeks to argue for either side in cases like this... in other words, the ultimate answer to your question is "just because languages vary".
If Hormel loses, we will no longer know if we are getting the genuine SPAM, or an imitator, when we go the supermarket. No, they won't. Trade marks only apply to certain fields. They weren't discussing the use of the term with relation to processed meat products.
To quote the article:-
"The case is limited to the e-mail usage of the word spam, which will not detract from the fame associated with Hormel's meat products trademark "Insightful", my arse.
Slashdot Mirror
(*) IANAL, and I don't know what I'm talking about(!) However, I'd assume this much may be correct. Although it sounds theoretically okay that a company should be able to pursue whatever motives it wanted (i.e. concentrate on giving all its assets away to the Stockholm Cats' Home instead of maximising profit), in practice this would be a problem with publicly held companies (and jointly-held private ones). For example, if a shareholder with a 55% holding votes to give away all the business's assets to the cats' home (or to his nephews!), this might be unacceptable to the other shareholders. So I would assume that there must be legal structures in place to prevent this sort of thing.
When I was at university (five or so years back), I was pretty surprised that the library was still so useful. You'd have thought that the Internet would have taken away a lot of its utility, but although the net was great for filling the inevitable gaps, it was also quite patchy, and I wasted a *very* high proportion of my time simply trying to find information amongst countless search results. I spent time (e.g.) looking at pages that turned out not to be useful at all, those that had fragments of useful information, but not enough, because they were written from a different angle and/or for a different reason than what I needed, and.... and also, books are nice because they're generally written as a *coherent* and complementary whole. This is a major failing of simply searching many overlapping websites.
Anyway, books *are* useful. A PDF copy can be even better for certain uses; although they're not as good as HTML in a lot of respects, they're a nice (portable *and* searchable) alternative to the dead tree version of the book. Though if I'm going to read the whole thing, I still prefer paper.
And though I wouldn't read the "CSS Pocket Reference" from beginning to end, I own an earlier edition, and it's certainly worth having, even in these days of near-universal Internet access. You wouldn't expect that from a small reference volume, but it's true.
Bollocks isn't remotely a replacement for "fuck" anyway- it's much milder, doesn't mean the same thing and isn't interchangable with "fuck" in the majority of situations.
Oh, and in a nice case of the pot calling the not-very-black-kettle black (*), I believe it was your lot that invented (and seriously) use the euphemism "freaking". Use that word in this country and people would think you were freakin... uh, *fucking* stupid.
(*) Yeah, I'm a literary genius.
Personally, I'm happy to accept that Ogg is a better format (in terms of the space/quality tradeoff) than MP3. But I also know that MP3 is almost universally supported and Ogg isn't.
I genuinely had my suspicions that the quote above was a cut-and-paste anti-Ogg troll; it has the air of masquerading as someone who'd tried out the open source choice and been burnt by it... except that- as I mentioned- most potential Ogg users would already have known about these issues. I'm genuinely surprised that you didn't look into this before you decided to rip your music collection.
Their harddisks are cheaper and reliable
And Seagate will have problems in the white market.
More problems => You lose $$$ going to zero cent., hehehe, and you pay taxes too, hehehe.
--- they are many harddisks as many pirates there are in the world --- I'm probably not the only person here who's wondering.... what the *fuck* are you going on about??!!
I was always under the impression that Maxtor were one of the less reliable drive brands and Seagate were one of the better ones (*). Seagate's low-end drives always seemed to be as cheap- if not cheaper- than most others, so I would normally buy them.
But now I don't know if that cheap "Seagate" is actually a Maxtor-produced drive; or if the "Maxtor" is just a cheap Seagate. The question I'm really trying to ask is, are the two operations and their production facilities still distinct, retaining their previous standards, or have they been merged? And if so, does the brand on the drive still reflect this?
I notice that some local shops seem to buy/sell Maxtors cheaper than Seagates, which would suggest that Seagate are using Maxtor as a low-end brand. I also notice that dabs.com's Maxtor range seems to be all cheap <=320 GB models, which seems to confirm that; but on the other hand, unlike the local stores, dabs' low-end Seagate range appears comparable in price with the equivalent Maxtors.
So, is there any way of differentiating a "genuine" Seagate-produced drive from a Maxtor-produced one, or is the distinction no longer meaningful?
(*) On average, over a large number of drives. HDs are one of those things where, for *any* brand, you'll find people who've had a bad experience with it, making anecdotal evidence not too useful in itself.
Ironically, checking the WP article (no refs, hence pinch of salt, etc) it seems that unlike some "Tower" operations, that one wasn't a franchise.
In short, you lose some control of your own name, and while you can impose conditions on the franchisees, there have to be limits.
Now, the benefit of a franchise is also its disadvantage; people associate the local franchised operation with its original owner, and if this isn't up to scratch, then- at best- people may assume that other franchises are run to poor standards and- at worst- people assume that the original company is responsible and at fault.
"But... but... it wasn't us, it was one of our franchisees" won't cut it in the face of widespread complaints that swamp the ability of your PR to explain the true situation. And do the public care anyway? It's a double-edged sword- if a company is willing to exploit its name (and associated reputation) by selling it to others, it has no right to complain if it's too lax or greedy in controlling the franchise and these actions come back to haunt it.
People wrote chess programs for the 1KB ZX81, for ****'s sake! (I'd consider this a reasonably "optimum" use of the facilities available). A typical new PC will include 1GB, a million times as much memory and run..... much, *much* faster. But what is it *theoretically* capable of if programmed to the same efficiency (regardless of how difficult that was or how much time it would take to write)?
I suspect that the answer would shock us if we ever found out.
At best they worked and were horribly slow. At worst they were horribly unreliable, tempramental and... horrifically slow.
Although it was supposedly twice the speed of the C64's deck (default 300 baud), for some reason there were never any turbo loader games that worked with the standard Atari deck. Maybe it wasn't possible with the way the tape subsystem was designed. At any rate, it was slooooow.
The speed may have been acceptable when it was designed, memory was small- and consequently, so were games. It wasn't so much fun when games were being written to fill the memory of the larger models... 48K games could easily take 15 to 20 minutes to load. The multiload cassette version of "Ace of Aces" took around 25-30 minutes to get airborne. (Probably written with a disc drive in mind, as the US market would have been almost exlusively disc-based by that stage. Actually, a lot of UK Atari owners had disc drives too, but the retail channels were still based around cassette software, so I had to put up with the stuff even though I had a disc drive!)
I even remember the difference in sound between a "healthy" load and a failed load, and while it doesn't really annoy me the way it used to (quite simply because I know I'll never *need* to rely on a tape deck to load data again), it's something I've no interest in returning to.
Really, if you're not well into your twenties, you probably won't realise how clunky and annoying loading from cassette was. And yet, it's only when I stop and think about it that way, in a modern context, that it strikes *me* just how archaic it seems. The Atari floppies would seem slow and low-capacity to a child growing up these days, but at least they'd almost always work first time (or did back then) and games loaded in a time comparable to modern ones. Once they'd finished laughing at the obvious limitations and datedness, they'd still be able to relate to it.
Loading from cassette, though? It would seem like something from the stone age to them.
They go out at night dressed in red and blue costumes and viciously assault their enemies by jumping on their heads. This sounds more like something out of "A Clockwork Orange" to me.
But they can't do that with consoles. Also, there's only one basic hardware configuration for a given console, which no doubt makes it easier to learn and optimise.
Certainly, in the old days with computers, the exact same thing happened. The games coming out for (say) the Commodore 64 in the late 1980s were technically miles ahead of the ones released six or seven years earlier. Same goes for a lot of other (basically) fixed-capability 8-bit machines. I suspect the reasons for the improvements were (a) improved experience, (b) pressure from the newer 16-bit machines, (c) the ability to use nice tools running on those shiny new machines to make games running on the old computers... and (d) just the general upward pressure on standards.
It doesn't- and can't- address the far more serious underlying cause. Namely that Facebook and the other companies involved are clearly totally contemptuous of their users' privacy and quite happy to screw them over in the name of a few quick bucks. And then hide this behind a weaselish and unclear "opt-in-by-default" agreement. (Yes, it's acceptable for them to make money from a free website; no, it's absolutely *not* acceptable for them to do it in this way).
Frankly, I'm glad I don't use Facebook. At one stage I may have believed that it was possibe to balance the invasion one's privacy by controlling what appeared on their page- and then some low-down **** like this comes along. It's one thing to have your Facebook information publicly available, quite another to have your activities on apparently unrelated sites made public.
I wouldn't touch Facebook with a ******* barge pole now. Your fix may work on the current problem, but what happens when the next moneygrabbing exploit comes along? What happens when these assholes figure out a totally different way to use the information they already have on you?
Seriously, fuck that, and fuck Facebook. Their behaviour was already unacceptable- regardless of how they snuck it into the legal agreement. With this latest news on top, I seriously hope that this marks a turning point in Facebook's fortunes. Joe Public isn't as concerned about his privacy as he should be, but when it comes to blabbing about his Christmas present purchases without his knowledge, it puts it in more concrete terms.
But let me take what you said to restate my point anyway. Consider someone addressing a class of students. Would we refer to what "it" thought or what "its response" was, or would we say things like "they thought" and "their response was"?
Yet, it's a class of students.
You could argue that in this case we're referring to the "students" in "a class of students", and that's why it's plural. But the same applies to "a large group of people".
Realistically, of course, there's the question of how far you can copyright many (small) HTML fragments and techniques anyway, but that's not the point you were making.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone explicitly ran with your argument and used computer-programming-style "logic" to argue that organisations are a single entity/object and should be referred to as such. But one could also argue (equally if not more correctly) that organisations are seen *by humans* as groups of people and are referred to accordingly. (BTW, if someone tries to shoehorn the ubiquitous-but-dreaded "car" analogy into this discussion, I'll slap them silly
The simple answer is that spoken/written languages aren't that logical, and that alleged logic can be misapplied by geeks to argue for either side in cases like this... in other words, the ultimate answer to your question is "just because languages vary".
To quote the article:- "The case is limited to the e-mail usage of the word spam, which will not detract from the fame associated with Hormel's meat products trademark "Insightful", my arse.