I dunno, the idea that "ad-supported = cheap" is ingrained in our consciousness from experience of rentals and the web. A product with ads in it radiates cheapness, and so long as there are free services supported by ads, people will continue to make that association. It's not a positive one and I think it's going to be a wake-up call for these companies sooner or later. And frankly ads which piss people off are going to have low enough success rates that it'll teach them not to make them.
According to Edge "a less annoying way" was part of their terms with the agency from the outset. The ads were supposed to match the game aesthetic for a start. Guess the agency decided to cut corners, put up some random ad from their stock, and Sony weren't actually screening the ads for compliance.
This is why having shareholders can suck for a business's bosses. If you want to do what's best for them, then the stock price pretty much steers your business decisions, regardless of what you might want for your business to do. I imagine that's why MS made the huge offer in the first place - even if the terms are sucky, your shareholders are going to want you to accept if it doubles their investment.
I'm sure it'll get plenty of interest from academic research groups, but no amount of prize money is going to tip it over into the "new research investment" category, which is normally the situation for using prizes to draw in academics.
Re:The prize seems kind of paltry
on
Mario AI Competition
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· Score: 2, Insightful
On the other hand offering a larger prize for a competition of this nature is pointless. I doubt that you'd get MIT to devote a research grant even if it was offering up $500,000.
Re:Let's see if any of these guys have a go...
on
Mario AI Competition
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm doubt that would count, seeing as you've just got a human doing the decisions. It's "artificial intelligence" not "artificial fingers".
Funnily enough 750,000 seems to be the go-to figure for jobs, either created or lost. I read "Risk" by Martin Gardener recently and I've found it's great for noticing when people use their memory of other numbers to cue-up made-up stats like these. (That will also take you to some debunkings of those numbers.)
I have never met a scenario in which a company made the fulfilment of their warranty obligations conditional on the signing of a legal settlement. It's simply not normal.
Yeah, the internal politics of two of the biggest companies in personal computing in the wake of the Google Voice debacle are of absolutely no interest to anyone. What we need is wiring diagrams, dammit.
It does seem like it was a standard settlement boilerplate, and the family misinterpreted it. Mind you, companies are happy to barf legalese at us when we can misunderstand it in their favour, so I'm happy to see someone misunderstand that legalese in a way that harms a company's PR.
The article states that they dropped it first, at that. It wasn't a spontaneous battery eruption of the kind we got used to when that batch of bad cells went out 5 years ago. That Apple could appear in the wrong in that sort of scenario tells you how much of a PR fail that NDA was.
The manufacturer warranty is in addition to their existing statutory rights in the UK, which say that the company selling you the goods has to deal with any lemons (the key limits being wear-and-tear, misuse, and how long a product can be "reasonably" expected to last) so Argos would've been held responsible for refunding them or replacing the item. Presumably the alarming nature of the fault caused them to bring in Apple, and Apple took the unusual step of offering a refund themselves as a way of getting the NDA into play.
"Self-plagiarisim" is actually a real concern, not in the "oh that's so unfair you cheater" sense but in terms of academic conduct. Plenty of researchers have been hauled up for republishing the same results or the same entire papers several times in order to boost publication records, which completely fucks with the scientific process, and it pisses off publishers for obvious reasons.
I imagine that saying the product is "sold" would be false advertising, too, if it cannot be expected to be retained by the purchaser. Sale involves the transfer of ownership of a product. It's really just an "extended rental" or "access licencing", and should only be marketed as such.
The companies pushing the intensive fertilising are the same companies that run the $20Bn organic foods industry, though. So long as "organic food" means "organic food at my supermarket", you're just funding the same awful agribusiness machine.
No, it isn't written specifically to undermine organic food. It's an honest, scientific report that happens to find the opposite to what you want to hear, and you've post-hoc concluded that it must be a fraud to preserve your original opinions.
Trans-fats are not carcinogens. Even now, it's an open question as to their health risks. "No trans-fats!" is marketing to make you feel like your processed cheese-style barbecue slices are healthier. (The char on your burgers is a proven human carcinogen. Nobody cooks to the "golden rule" because it's not worth anything to anyone's marketing department.)
Not it all. The organic food market pre-1990s was honest, small-scale farmers. These days it's a $20Bn industry in the US alone. It's actually rivalling the money that's spent on pesticides! That's not honest, small-scale farmers. That's agribusiness and neighbourhood-crushing retail conglomerates like ASDA-Walmart at work exploiting a new luxury market segment.
The only "flavour enhancer" is salt and fat, though. That's actually their slogan in the UK: nothing but beef and salt goes into the burgers. And that's more than enough to convince your brain it's getting something super-tasty that it should seek out in future.
I imagine that's purely because it's the "luxury line" for the produce aisle, like the fancier biscuits or the seeded bread, and therefore has higher quality control standards. The organic product that looks weird or the producer that starts to have lower market research flavour scores will be bumped over to the processed organic products or the non-organic ranges. If you grow your own food, then you will get some crappy or hideous tomatoes now and again.
It's "quite frankly, frightening", but that doesn't mean it's greater than the weight in favour. I could use some hard comparisons here, and not just a "summary of the many scientific papers" for one side.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, the idea that "ad-supported = cheap" is ingrained in our consciousness from experience of rentals and the web. A product with ads in it radiates cheapness, and so long as there are free services supported by ads, people will continue to make that association. It's not a positive one and I think it's going to be a wake-up call for these companies sooner or later. And frankly ads which piss people off are going to have low enough success rates that it'll teach them not to make them.
According to Edge "a less annoying way" was part of their terms with the agency from the outset. The ads were supposed to match the game aesthetic for a start. Guess the agency decided to cut corners, put up some random ad from their stock, and Sony weren't actually screening the ads for compliance.
This is why having shareholders can suck for a business's bosses. If you want to do what's best for them, then the stock price pretty much steers your business decisions, regardless of what you might want for your business to do. I imagine that's why MS made the huge offer in the first place - even if the terms are sucky, your shareholders are going to want you to accept if it doubles their investment.
I'm sure it'll get plenty of interest from academic research groups, but no amount of prize money is going to tip it over into the "new research investment" category, which is normally the situation for using prizes to draw in academics.
On the other hand offering a larger prize for a competition of this nature is pointless. I doubt that you'd get MIT to devote a research grant even if it was offering up $500,000.
I'm doubt that would count, seeing as you've just got a human doing the decisions. It's "artificial intelligence" not "artificial fingers".
I'd like to direct you to this story which has been sitting on Pending for, like, forever.
D'oh, yes.
Funnily enough 750,000 seems to be the go-to figure for jobs, either created or lost. I read "Risk" by Martin Gardener recently and I've found it's great for noticing when people use their memory of other numbers to cue-up made-up stats like these. (That will also take you to some debunkings of those numbers.)
They pulled the ad when they found out it changed the load time. They had an agreement with the ad provider that any ads would match the game's aesthetic, too.
I have never met a scenario in which a company made the fulfilment of their warranty obligations conditional on the signing of a legal settlement. It's simply not normal.
Yeah, the internal politics of two of the biggest companies in personal computing in the wake of the Google Voice debacle are of absolutely no interest to anyone. What we need is wiring diagrams, dammit.
It does seem like it was a standard settlement boilerplate, and the family misinterpreted it. Mind you, companies are happy to barf legalese at us when we can misunderstand it in their favour, so I'm happy to see someone misunderstand that legalese in a way that harms a company's PR.
The article states that they dropped it first, at that. It wasn't a spontaneous battery eruption of the kind we got used to when that batch of bad cells went out 5 years ago. That Apple could appear in the wrong in that sort of scenario tells you how much of a PR fail that NDA was.
The manufacturer warranty is in addition to their existing statutory rights in the UK, which say that the company selling you the goods has to deal with any lemons (the key limits being wear-and-tear, misuse, and how long a product can be "reasonably" expected to last) so Argos would've been held responsible for refunding them or replacing the item. Presumably the alarming nature of the fault caused them to bring in Apple, and Apple took the unusual step of offering a refund themselves as a way of getting the NDA into play.
"Self-plagiarisim" is actually a real concern, not in the "oh that's so unfair you cheater" sense but in terms of academic conduct. Plenty of researchers have been hauled up for republishing the same results or the same entire papers several times in order to boost publication records, which completely fucks with the scientific process, and it pisses off publishers for obvious reasons.
I imagine that saying the product is "sold" would be false advertising, too, if it cannot be expected to be retained by the purchaser. Sale involves the transfer of ownership of a product. It's really just an "extended rental" or "access licencing", and should only be marketed as such.
The companies pushing the intensive fertilising are the same companies that run the $20Bn organic foods industry, though. So long as "organic food" means "organic food at my supermarket", you're just funding the same awful agribusiness machine.
No, it isn't written specifically to undermine organic food. It's an honest, scientific report that happens to find the opposite to what you want to hear, and you've post-hoc concluded that it must be a fraud to preserve your original opinions.
Trans-fats are not carcinogens. Even now, it's an open question as to their health risks. "No trans-fats!" is marketing to make you feel like your processed cheese-style barbecue slices are healthier. (The char on your burgers is a proven human carcinogen. Nobody cooks to the "golden rule" because it's not worth anything to anyone's marketing department.)
Not it all. The organic food market pre-1990s was honest, small-scale farmers. These days it's a $20Bn industry in the US alone. It's actually rivalling the money that's spent on pesticides! That's not honest, small-scale farmers. That's agribusiness and neighbourhood-crushing retail conglomerates like ASDA-Walmart at work exploiting a new luxury market segment.
The only "flavour enhancer" is salt and fat, though. That's actually their slogan in the UK: nothing but beef and salt goes into the burgers. And that's more than enough to convince your brain it's getting something super-tasty that it should seek out in future.
Uh, if organic food was healthier, wouldn't that be one of the "health benefits" that the study explicitly states it could not find?
I imagine that's purely because it's the "luxury line" for the produce aisle, like the fancier biscuits or the seeded bread, and therefore has higher quality control standards. The organic product that looks weird or the producer that starts to have lower market research flavour scores will be bumped over to the processed organic products or the non-organic ranges. If you grow your own food, then you will get some crappy or hideous tomatoes now and again.
It's "quite frankly, frightening", but that doesn't mean it's greater than the weight in favour. I could use some hard comparisons here, and not just a "summary of the many scientific papers" for one side.