So clickthroughs isn't what they should be measuring. Instead, they should be measuring actual purchases that occur as a result of the ad. It's kinda hard to fake a purchase.
So you recommend advertisers place ads on your site, then they tell you how many of the people you sent to them actually bought something. And when they promise to give you the real numbers and track it accurately, etc, you are going to trust them not to under-report those numbers? Click thru is the only mutually verifiable statistic, hence its the one that gets used; impressions relies on the website to give accurate data that the advertiser can't verify, close rates rely on the advertiser to give accurate data that the web site can't verify.
But this isn't enough, because no matter what you have someone can break it.
Which implies the goal of the computer theft is the data on it. Almost always, computer theft's target is the hardware, with the intent to resell. If its easiest for the criminal to activate the laptops "restore to factory condition", thats what he'll do rather than spend a day (or weeks or months) trying to access protected info. If the real goal was the data, you would swipe it from the coffee shop, clone the disk, the turn it in to lost and found ("Oops, I grabbed the wrong laptop!"). Then you can crack it w/o worries the worth of the data is being destroyed (re-issueing CC numbers, consumers aware their ID has been comprimised).
whenever they lose a laptop. $1000 would be enough of an incentive to make sure that they stopped leaving them in coffee shops.
It would ensure many wouldn't use their laptop, choosing to leave it locked to the desk instead. I imagine the majority of census workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and could not afford that risk.
By the way, I've always wondered..how the CA special emissions work.
Every X time period, you car has to pass an emissions test (required scores based on date of manufacture). If you car fails, you can't register it for use on public roads
What if you have a car you've bought outside the state...and move to the state with it.
Most cars these days a 50 state legal. If your's isn't, you are best off selling it outside the state and buying one that is, because the only way to register it in CA is to make it pass.
What if you want to modify your car (chips, exhaust, other higher perfomance stuff)?
What part of "For off-road use only" did you not understand when you did this to your car?
Do they make you take it off when you move there, or stop you at the state border and make you walk in?
So long as you are visiting, you don't need to change a thing. If you move to the state, you have X weeks to get a license and register your vehicles. (same in all states) Ok, some thing are plain illegal and will get you pulled over, but even those items will only earn you a ticket, it would have to be pretty serious for them to impound you vehicle.
I've always heard the joke about CA being the granola state
Its the land of fruits and nuts, get it straight. But compare the smag in LA or SF during the 70's to today; then realize there are 3x more cars on the road today. Pollution controls worked. Using them to call Californians crazy is akin to laughing at Linus T. for his idea to write his own OS.
While I doubt MySpace is using such a service, as a former employee of a firm that did a lot of anti-phising work, we used to identify phishing emails and send the URL's to other companies that specialized in flooding the site with bogus addresses while attempting to tie the site up and DOS just that port/virtual server. So its entirely possible the data being analized is largely bogus. Given that one of the most popular passwords was "fuckyou", I suspect there's at least a vigilante effect going on here...
I'd agree with you _if_ the only reason a server ever got put onto an RBL was due to relaying and misconfiguration. The trouble is that some addresses are inevitably put on the list due to a disagreement about terms of service or what constitutes "spam."
The RBL's all have different policies. Some are very explicit & limited, some are personal toys (I recall one that blocked all of MCI/UUnet). I start with the most restrictive, falling through about 4-5 total whose policies seem reasonable. Anything banned gets an email back explaining why and is logged, I pull daily reports with the IP's, RBL, Subject lines, etc from the logs (with a nice summarization header) so I can easily spot check their effectiveness. All client domains are whitelisted by default, most "leads" come in via webforms. Any list that blocks something I want gets scrutinized and removed, thans to the summaries I know RBL #4 is only blocking 150 spams a day anyway, so I can delete it (it might have caught more, but RBL #1 blocks 14k a day before #4 ever gets a shot at it). Another handy trick, use tighter controls on your lower priority servers, real mail almost never goes there, but spammers like to use them because they are less monitored, sometimes poorly configured, and less loaded.
Worked wonders. But implying all RBL's have low false positive rates in irresponsible.
Big companies see big companies as big consumers. The only "help" they offer each other is helping themselves to as much of the other guys money as possible. Small companies do the same. MS wants their DRM to work so Media companies will buy their DRM solution over Apple's or any number of otehr DRM companies (many of whom are small & desperate enough to include buggy rootkits as part of the package). In their turn, media companies who have paid MS for DRM could see this hole as an opportunity to sue for lost revenues due to rampant piracy.
Any company that helps another company out without a plan for compensation is either an Eron style front or due for a new CEO.
That's how people like Weird Al get away with what they do
You mean people should call and ask permission like Weird Al does?
The concert only stuff is called "concert only" for a reason. Either Al had a brief idea and the joke wouldn't survive a full length song, or permission was denied or never attempted.
3. When connected to untrusted network, policy is deny all inbound
4. When connected to trusted network, policy is allow all
SO how did you accomplish #4? I haven't seen where this is possible with XP SP2's FW. Ideally, I'd like a better test than "This network is the same IP range as my home network"; something like "Thats a valid AD server for my domain, I must be home" would be ideal
Second, the grammar is scrambled, yielding a mixed up Metaphor. We know what he was trying to say, he just did a really bad job of saying it. Dubyaspeak
If your windowing environment did proper font scaling
Font scaling is only half the problem, and most systems have the capability. Problem is Icon's don't scale, and many applications see fit to ignore the system font settings and use their own sizing because their graphics don't scale either. Sure, I can set the zoom to 200% and read really shard, detailed text on my screen, but the menus are still tiny, the icons are difficult to read, etc. So the bottom line is for now, 50% bigger pixels is the best solution for Mom & Dad, while I while away my time on the 50% smaller pixels of my D820
I agree with much of what you say, but being able to use much better screens, such as the large Dell TFT mentioned in the submission, is definitely a plus as far as I'm concerned.
But I use it just fine on Windows XP, I don't see how Vista will improve it at all. And I found the article comment on the pixel size on the 240FFPW surprising too, since its about the same as any other LCD. Now had he mentioned the display on my new D820, whose 15.4" display ALSO sports a 1920x1200 resolution, I might agree with him. But the reality is the display is so amazingly clear, its not much of an issue at all. My only real concern is mousing accross such an expanse tires out the finger, perhaps I need to reconsider "the stick".
That constitutes 'typo-squatting'.com in any above described instances.
ccTLD's have been using wildcard redirects like this long before Verisign instituted the SiteFinder service. And since they have not registered any domains, I would not call this "Typo-squatting" any more than I would call a Trojan Horse a Virus or Cat a Dog, they are two very distinct things that share a few common effects.
but you make it sound as if changing a corporate install without activation to a non-corp install with activation is actually a good thing.
Because Mom isn't likely to buy the 10 licenses of Windows XP needed to get a corporate key? If she wants to go legit, she'll want a standard single user copy.
You can argue the benefits of illegally running an unlicensed copy of software is outside the scope of the question.
The virtualization software is free, but when you're virtuallizing MS Windows, it's anything but free. You now have to pay for a license of each virtual machine.
Read your agreements closely. Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition can run in multiple instances on the same hardware for a single fee. I think we'll increasingly see VM aware licensing as the products evolve.
I think there's a difference between solely focused on the stock price and big draw to work with us is the option riches. The former would be a big concern to me. While I've worked with those who had hit the "options lottery" and therefore completely dismissed financial concerns in lieu of "cool work", I'm not one of those people. Perhaps we had two different interpretations of what that first comment meant, my last company barely survived the CEO handing out senior positions to his unqualified friends so they could get a cut of the "Dot Com Riches".
But at the same time, what you might perceive as "solely focused on the stock price" might be someone making sure that senior management realizes basic things like cash-in must exceed cash out and what their actual goals are. For instance, I don't want to work for a company whose exit strategy is to be bought by a bigger company, because I think they are doomed to collapse. But give me enough options to give me a stake in that buyout and I might be willing to put up with the radical change in environment that comes post buy-out, the added risk of lay-off, etc.
While it's great to make fun of MBA's in a tech forum, and certainly there's a set of them that are clueless, they are generally professionals who have chosen to study the intricacies of management the same way you may have chosen to study the intricacies of programming. Trust me, the MBA's are probably trying to decide if your an idiot or a genius programmer (or whatever you do thats not in their area of specialty) too.
One of the main rules of interview teams within startups I've been a part of... if their big draw to work with us is the option riches, reject.
So you're looking for people too stupid to consider their total compensation? Or maybe you think you're so special that people should be paying you for the privledge of working with you
Startups are inherently unstable and prone to failure. Quite often they can't afford to pay what stable companies can pay, and might be missing things like 401k's, wil require longer hours, can't afford to pay for training, etc. There's always the chance you come in tomorrow and find the doors loked and this months paycheck made of rubber. Folks take that chance becasue of the risk/reward, or because they can't get work elsewhere. Hiring in a startup, I look for the former, the folks who know they'll have a chance to drive the companies success and make those options riches. When I interview for a startup, I want to know what the odds are of getting to that point, because it also means I'm less likely to be surprised with that locked door. So I'll ask questions about company profitability, product plans, IPO's, management experience, company goals, etc. There's other rewards for working at a startup sometimes, sometimes you get to innovate new stuff, there could be rapid promotion opportunities, but I also have to put food on the table and a roof over my head
Of course, Google isn't a startup anymore. If I had signed up 4 years ago, I would have expected a modest return on my options, since I wasn't employee #10 in a high risk environment. If I signed up for Verizon I'd also expect a modest return on my options. But if I sign up today for Google, I expect the market will have come to its senses by the time I can exercise them, rendering them "worthless". So its a factor I would weigh when deciding what comapny to sign with. Options. Insurance. 401k. Training programs. Vacation Policies.
Maybe the hiring person just didn't have the heart to call you and tell you that you weren't qualified and up to snuff?
For the record, the notice I had passed the screening and was selected for a phone interview included an appointment for that interview set 1 month in the future. It sounded absurd so I verified it and was told it was normal. The hiring rate you mention doesn't mean much, they could have a 9 month process from application to offer and still hire a thousand people in a day. Almost nobody calls to tell you you have been "dropped from consideration", that would hardly be unusual.
The other curious bit is that despite the job being a management role, there was NO questions regarding management abilities, just a bunch of lame generic "technical trick" questions (which when challenged with outside the box thinking the questioner insisted on putting me back in the box he had to drive me to the answer he wanted). If they focus on the technology skills of their management team instead of the management skills, they are going to wind up a poorly managed company by default.
Google's going to fail with some of their efforts, but they've changed the landscape of the internet, and internet applications, software competition, and user choices. Hopefully, forever.
Google is collapsing under their own weight. I went through their hiring process looking to take on a management role, it was slow and focused on the wrong things. By th etime they would have come to a conclusion my search would have been over. And most of the things that would have been a big draw there 4 years ago are gone, they have IPO'd and their stock is massively overpriced, whatever options I might get awarded will likely be high and dry by the time I can exercise them, and their internal management does not seem to have handled the growth well, which is hardly surprising given the tech focus of their backgrounds.
Yeah, I've seen the raves about their hiring process, spent a few hours on the in B-school. It reminded me of all the other ground breaking cases we used that when we asked follow up questions, "Great, what happened 3 years later" you discover it all collapsed 6 months later. [Which is actually the beauty of an EMBA program, you are amongst all the other business leaders with the experience to see through the fluff and ask the important questions, they don't worry about the teacher not giving them an A because they already have an impressive resume and are actually looking to learn something]
Except Office 2003 is Office v11, take a look in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11, the standard install path. Just like Windows XP is NT 5.1, and Server 2003 is NT 5.2. Marketing calls it what they want, the engineers keep things sane.
So Maybe by late next year I will be running Office v12 on NT 6.0 (or will it be 5.3? Who has the Vista beta installed?)
Laws that are declared unconstitutional are considered unconstitutional from the moment they were enacted.
So do the Supreme Court judges jump in Thomas Jefferson's time machine to inform people in the past of what their future decisions are going to be? I didn't think so. Until an action is declared unconstitutional, its perfectly acceptable for athorities to continue with that action. The main caveat is that *IF* that action is found to be unconstitutional, any evidence gathered as a result of violating that right is also declared unusable in court, resulting in mistrials, etc. However, I suspect the administartion will avoid that problem by never bringing that evidence up in court, instead only using the illegally gathered info as a devining rod to determine who should be investigated further. Which is still illegal, but much harder to prove.
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
but getting sniped at the end of the auction you really wanted sure sucks
Wouldn't eBay's automatic bidding prevent that? If you were willing to bid $20 and it was currently at $10, th esniper needs to bid $21 to win, which is in theory more than you were willing to pay. Personally I'm suspicious of such tools, but the idea is in the event of a tie the earliest bidder wins, right?
Football is a more flowing game. There are a few set plays that get played out, they make up an extremely small part of the game due to the dynamic nature.
,br.
Actually I would suspect that its the opposite. Because of the start-stop nature, American Football has *ALWAYS* been more strategic, knowing the opponent is going to run vs short pass vs long pass on the next down is an obvious advantage, and so the opposition takes pains to avoid patterns. In soccer/football, the player is the one making the strategic decisions, constantly while under immediate pressure; my guess is he makes those decisions instictively. Instictive decision mean patterns, even if they aren't immediately obvious. This is what computers do, they data mine looking for patterns. This isn't "Player A passes right 75% of the time", this is "Player A, in a 1 on 1 situation with no other players in a 20 foot radius will attempt fake X when approached from the left front 80% of the time". Or maybe which side is the goalie strongest at defending? These are people who are making a living and dedicating their lives to this game, 80 hours a week minimum would not be unusual. The only thing that would be more difficult would be analyizing the data, and not being a soccer fan I'm not even sure about that.
I agree that software in the world cup *might* help strategy, But I think many times it becomes a crutch that makes people lazy
I *DOES* help strategy, NFL teams have been using similar techniques for years to analyze what their opponents might do in a given situation. This is especially critical in American Football, where the defenses don't have time to react to what is actually happening in that instant the ball is hiked. Its the difference between stopping a play in the backfield or giving up a 6 yard play. In soccer, being able to anticipate where a play is going could reduce the amount of running a team has to do, keeping players fresher and getting them into position sooner. This would yield a pretty good advantage, but probably not enough to overcome the gap between a great team and a mediocre one. More to the point, its more likely the great team is already doing similar analysis, and just not chatting about it.
Slashdot Mirror
So you recommend advertisers place ads on your site, then they tell you how many of the people you sent to them actually bought something. And when they promise to give you the real numbers and track it accurately, etc, you are going to trust them not to under-report those numbers? Click thru is the only mutually verifiable statistic, hence its the one that gets used; impressions relies on the website to give accurate data that the advertiser can't verify, close rates rely on the advertiser to give accurate data that the web site can't verify.
Which implies the goal of the computer theft is the data on it. Almost always, computer theft's target is the hardware, with the intent to resell. If its easiest for the criminal to activate the laptops "restore to factory condition", thats what he'll do rather than spend a day (or weeks or months) trying to access protected info. If the real goal was the data, you would swipe it from the coffee shop, clone the disk, the turn it in to lost and found ("Oops, I grabbed the wrong laptop!"). Then you can crack it w/o worries the worth of the data is being destroyed (re-issueing CC numbers, consumers aware their ID has been comprimised).
whenever they lose a laptop. $1000 would be enough of an incentive to make sure that they stopped leaving them in coffee shops.
It would ensure many wouldn't use their laptop, choosing to leave it locked to the desk instead. I imagine the majority of census workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and could not afford that risk.
Every X time period, you car has to pass an emissions test (required scores based on date of manufacture). If you car fails, you can't register it for use on public roads
What if you have a car you've bought outside the state...and move to the state with it.
Most cars these days a 50 state legal. If your's isn't, you are best off selling it outside the state and buying one that is, because the only way to register it in CA is to make it pass.
What if you want to modify your car (chips, exhaust, other higher perfomance stuff)?
What part of "For off-road use only" did you not understand when you did this to your car?
Do they make you take it off when you move there, or stop you at the state border and make you walk in?
So long as you are visiting, you don't need to change a thing. If you move to the state, you have X weeks to get a license and register your vehicles. (same in all states) Ok, some thing are plain illegal and will get you pulled over, but even those items will only earn you a ticket, it would have to be pretty serious for them to impound you vehicle.
I've always heard the joke about CA being the granola state
Its the land of fruits and nuts, get it straight. But compare the smag in LA or SF during the 70's to today; then realize there are 3x more cars on the road today. Pollution controls worked. Using them to call Californians crazy is akin to laughing at Linus T. for his idea to write his own OS.
While I doubt MySpace is using such a service, as a former employee of a firm that did a lot of anti-phising work, we used to identify phishing emails and send the URL's to other companies that specialized in flooding the site with bogus addresses while attempting to tie the site up and DOS just that port/virtual server. So its entirely possible the data being analized is largely bogus. Given that one of the most popular passwords was "fuckyou", I suspect there's at least a vigilante effect going on here...
Mattel has already tested the computer waters
The RBL's all have different policies. Some are very explicit & limited, some are personal toys (I recall one that blocked all of MCI/UUnet). I start with the most restrictive, falling through about 4-5 total whose policies seem reasonable. Anything banned gets an email back explaining why and is logged, I pull daily reports with the IP's, RBL, Subject lines, etc from the logs (with a nice summarization header) so I can easily spot check their effectiveness. All client domains are whitelisted by default, most "leads" come in via webforms. Any list that blocks something I want gets scrutinized and removed, thans to the summaries I know RBL #4 is only blocking 150 spams a day anyway, so I can delete it (it might have caught more, but RBL #1 blocks 14k a day before #4 ever gets a shot at it). Another handy trick, use tighter controls on your lower priority servers, real mail almost never goes there, but spammers like to use them because they are less monitored, sometimes poorly configured, and less loaded.
Worked wonders. But implying all RBL's have low false positive rates in irresponsible.
Big companies see big companies as big consumers. The only "help" they offer each other is helping themselves to as much of the other guys money as possible. Small companies do the same. MS wants their DRM to work so Media companies will buy their DRM solution over Apple's or any number of otehr DRM companies (many of whom are small & desperate enough to include buggy rootkits as part of the package). In their turn, media companies who have paid MS for DRM could see this hole as an opportunity to sue for lost revenues due to rampant piracy.
Any company that helps another company out without a plan for compensation is either an Eron style front or due for a new CEO.
You mean people should call and ask permission like Weird Al does?
Think of the ease of maintenance on that one! I can just imagine that line workers tool bag.
4. When connected to trusted network, policy is allow all
SO how did you accomplish #4? I haven't seen where this is possible with XP SP2's FW. Ideally, I'd like a better test than "This network is the same IP range as my home network"; something like "Thats a valid AD server for my domain, I must be home" would be ideal
First, its not a joke, its an observation.
Second, the grammar is scrambled, yielding a mixed up Metaphor. We know what he was trying to say, he just did a really bad job of saying it. Dubyaspeak
Font scaling is only half the problem, and most systems have the capability. Problem is Icon's don't scale, and many applications see fit to ignore the system font settings and use their own sizing because their graphics don't scale either. Sure, I can set the zoom to 200% and read really shard, detailed text on my screen, but the menus are still tiny, the icons are difficult to read, etc. So the bottom line is for now, 50% bigger pixels is the best solution for Mom & Dad, while I while away my time on the 50% smaller pixels of my D820
But I use it just fine on Windows XP, I don't see how Vista will improve it at all. And I found the article comment on the pixel size on the 240FFPW surprising too, since its about the same as any other LCD. Now had he mentioned the display on my new D820, whose 15.4" display ALSO sports a 1920x1200 resolution, I might agree with him. But the reality is the display is so amazingly clear, its not much of an issue at all. My only real concern is mousing accross such an expanse tires out the finger, perhaps I need to reconsider "the stick".
ccTLD's have been using wildcard redirects like this long before Verisign instituted the SiteFinder service. And since they have not registered any domains, I would not call this "Typo-squatting" any more than I would call a Trojan Horse a Virus or Cat a Dog, they are two very distinct things that share a few common effects.
Because Mom isn't likely to buy the 10 licenses of Windows XP needed to get a corporate key? If she wants to go legit, she'll want a standard single user copy.
You can argue the benefits of illegally running an unlicensed copy of software is outside the scope of the question.
Read your agreements closely. Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition can run in multiple instances on the same hardware for a single fee. I think we'll increasingly see VM aware licensing as the products evolve.
But at the same time, what you might perceive as "solely focused on the stock price" might be someone making sure that senior management realizes basic things like cash-in must exceed cash out and what their actual goals are. For instance, I don't want to work for a company whose exit strategy is to be bought by a bigger company, because I think they are doomed to collapse. But give me enough options to give me a stake in that buyout and I might be willing to put up with the radical change in environment that comes post buy-out, the added risk of lay-off, etc.
While it's great to make fun of MBA's in a tech forum, and certainly there's a set of them that are clueless, they are generally professionals who have chosen to study the intricacies of management the same way you may have chosen to study the intricacies of programming. Trust me, the MBA's are probably trying to decide if your an idiot or a genius programmer (or whatever you do thats not in their area of specialty) too.
So you're looking for people too stupid to consider their total compensation? Or maybe you think you're so special that people should be paying you for the privledge of working with you
Startups are inherently unstable and prone to failure. Quite often they can't afford to pay what stable companies can pay, and might be missing things like 401k's, wil require longer hours, can't afford to pay for training, etc. There's always the chance you come in tomorrow and find the doors loked and this months paycheck made of rubber. Folks take that chance becasue of the risk/reward, or because they can't get work elsewhere. Hiring in a startup, I look for the former, the folks who know they'll have a chance to drive the companies success and make those options riches. When I interview for a startup, I want to know what the odds are of getting to that point, because it also means I'm less likely to be surprised with that locked door. So I'll ask questions about company profitability, product plans, IPO's, management experience, company goals, etc. There's other rewards for working at a startup sometimes, sometimes you get to innovate new stuff, there could be rapid promotion opportunities, but I also have to put food on the table and a roof over my head
Of course, Google isn't a startup anymore. If I had signed up 4 years ago, I would have expected a modest return on my options, since I wasn't employee #10 in a high risk environment. If I signed up for Verizon I'd also expect a modest return on my options. But if I sign up today for Google, I expect the market will have come to its senses by the time I can exercise them, rendering them "worthless". So its a factor I would weigh when deciding what comapny to sign with. Options. Insurance. 401k. Training programs. Vacation Policies.
For the record, the notice I had passed the screening and was selected for a phone interview included an appointment for that interview set 1 month in the future. It sounded absurd so I verified it and was told it was normal. The hiring rate you mention doesn't mean much, they could have a 9 month process from application to offer and still hire a thousand people in a day. Almost nobody calls to tell you you have been "dropped from consideration", that would hardly be unusual.
The other curious bit is that despite the job being a management role, there was NO questions regarding management abilities, just a bunch of lame generic "technical trick" questions (which when challenged with outside the box thinking the questioner insisted on putting me back in the box he had to drive me to the answer he wanted). If they focus on the technology skills of their management team instead of the management skills, they are going to wind up a poorly managed company by default.
Google is collapsing under their own weight. I went through their hiring process looking to take on a management role, it was slow and focused on the wrong things. By th etime they would have come to a conclusion my search would have been over. And most of the things that would have been a big draw there 4 years ago are gone, they have IPO'd and their stock is massively overpriced, whatever options I might get awarded will likely be high and dry by the time I can exercise them, and their internal management does not seem to have handled the growth well, which is hardly surprising given the tech focus of their backgrounds.
Yeah, I've seen the raves about their hiring process, spent a few hours on the in B-school. It reminded me of all the other ground breaking cases we used that when we asked follow up questions, "Great, what happened 3 years later" you discover it all collapsed 6 months later. [Which is actually the beauty of an EMBA program, you are amongst all the other business leaders with the experience to see through the fluff and ask the important questions, they don't worry about the teacher not giving them an A because they already have an impressive resume and are actually looking to learn something]
Except Office 2003 is Office v11, take a look in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11, the standard install path. Just like Windows XP is NT 5.1, and Server 2003 is NT 5.2. Marketing calls it what they want, the engineers keep things sane.
So Maybe by late next year I will be running Office v12 on NT 6.0 (or will it be 5.3? Who has the Vista beta installed?)
So do the Supreme Court judges jump in Thomas Jefferson's time machine to inform people in the past of what their future decisions are going to be? I didn't think so. Until an action is declared unconstitutional, its perfectly acceptable for athorities to continue with that action. The main caveat is that *IF* that action is found to be unconstitutional, any evidence gathered as a result of violating that right is also declared unusable in court, resulting in mistrials, etc. However, I suspect the administartion will avoid that problem by never bringing that evidence up in court, instead only using the illegally gathered info as a devining rod to determine who should be investigated further. Which is still illegal, but much harder to prove.
Wouldn't eBay's automatic bidding prevent that? If you were willing to bid $20 and it was currently at $10, th esniper needs to bid $21 to win, which is in theory more than you were willing to pay. Personally I'm suspicious of such tools, but the idea is in the event of a tie the earliest bidder wins, right?
,br. Actually I would suspect that its the opposite. Because of the start-stop nature, American Football has *ALWAYS* been more strategic, knowing the opponent is going to run vs short pass vs long pass on the next down is an obvious advantage, and so the opposition takes pains to avoid patterns. In soccer/football, the player is the one making the strategic decisions, constantly while under immediate pressure; my guess is he makes those decisions instictively. Instictive decision mean patterns, even if they aren't immediately obvious. This is what computers do, they data mine looking for patterns. This isn't "Player A passes right 75% of the time", this is "Player A, in a 1 on 1 situation with no other players in a 20 foot radius will attempt fake X when approached from the left front 80% of the time". Or maybe which side is the goalie strongest at defending? These are people who are making a living and dedicating their lives to this game, 80 hours a week minimum would not be unusual. The only thing that would be more difficult would be analyizing the data, and not being a soccer fan I'm not even sure about that.
I *DOES* help strategy, NFL teams have been using similar techniques for years to analyze what their opponents might do in a given situation. This is especially critical in American Football, where the defenses don't have time to react to what is actually happening in that instant the ball is hiked. Its the difference between stopping a play in the backfield or giving up a 6 yard play. In soccer, being able to anticipate where a play is going could reduce the amount of running a team has to do, keeping players fresher and getting them into position sooner. This would yield a pretty good advantage, but probably not enough to overcome the gap between a great team and a mediocre one. More to the point, its more likely the great team is already doing similar analysis, and just not chatting about it.