Wow, what a generalization? "Most publications of any merit grant independence to the senior editorial staff..." How do we know this? Is there a multitude of watchdog or independent industry groups, aside from yourself, that will come to a consensus and verify your claim that magazines are able to maintain independence from their sponsors. I seriously doubt it. And cynicism is not a disservice, being gullible is.
Ask yourself this, if you were a company and you put out a crap product with a big marketing budget, would you continue to advertise where you received a crap review? No and thus we see where the leverage is. Do you think that magazines and websites exist on member subscriptions? Not a chance. Magazines, and many websites, exist for the sole purpose of creating an audience such that they can make advertising revenue. Is that such a stretch? What do you think Google is - an eyeball magnet. Where are you going to advertise if you are a company? You will advertise where the most eyeballs go that might be interested in your product. And if you can use the amount of money you spend on advertising with a particular venue, you betcha you will try to persuade against negative reviews. And if you are a owner of a company, do you care if your reviews are honest? I doubt it. All you care about is making a buck. That is why you went into business.
If you want a venue that is more genuine, then participate in member owned venues like Consumer Reports. Like I mentioned in a previous post, if something has the appearance of a conflict of interest, than it might as well be a conflict of interest because there is no way to determine that what appears as a duck is not a duck. Taking money from sponsors for ads creates an appearance of a conflict of interest and therefore compromises any kind of claim to objectivity. The review may still be objective, but it will always have an albatross wrapped around its neck.
"Readers should fairly expect there to be an inviolable firewall between advertising and editorial in journalism, and game journalism (yes, that includes "just reviews") is no different."
Since when? You are an idiot if you trust reviews in magazines/web sites that have sponsored advertising. Publishers want you to believe the myth that there is some sort of inviolable wall. What do you think makes Consumer Reports somewhat credible? Because taking money from sponsors and reviewing their products creates the appearance of a conflict of interest. And the appearance of a conflict of interest compromises the trust in a review. Duh!
Hats off to any reviewer that is critical(that does not mean negative) in their review. A reader that relies on one source for their impressions is an idiot and has not been taught to think critically themselves.
do not give a hoot about their customers. If they did, they would understand what DRM means and would protect a consumers property so that it is useful in the future. Companies do not care and people should give them the finger for not caring about those that would patronize their services.
I think if this is to become a trend, then it is in the public's interest to have the format for the records be a standard. This way people can move their records from service to service and have choice as to who is managing their records. Paper is a nice interoperable exchange because it will fit in any file cabinet; hopefully, the same can be said about digital records especially if the big boys are getting into the market.
Hmmm, are you familiar with something called public domain? Maybe you live in a world where everything has a copyright, but I don't. Copyrights expire and for good reason; so the public can take the work and expand it which can enrich the market more so than the original work - think Shakespeare, Dickens, etc. So, is this advertising to pirates? I don't think so. Although, when a pirate sees the above article, that is what they read. Please take your myopic blinders off and remember that the world has been creating content since the beginning of recorded history, not just the twentieth century.
I am sorry, but I took a cursory look into Usenet.com(splash page and 'Why Usenet.com?') and I do not see advertisements to download copyrighted material. It seems that they take privacy seriously by protecting a persons anonymity; why is that crime? Does the fact that you cash make you a criminal because you can't track the transaction back to an individual? I expect you use credit cards so that all your purchases are recorded, otherwise we all should raise an eyebrow to your private behavior. I guess in your world, if you are not broadcasting your behavior, you are hiding criminal intent. That is bogus. Maybe the police should be pulling you over more often since you seem to equate privacy with criminal behavior. Some of us are not hiding anything, we just do not think it is anyone's business to know my business. There is a difference.
But then again, maybe I am not seeing the obvious and explicit advertisements to pirate copyrighted material.
So, are you saying that NNTP will not allow you to attach a binary file to a post in any other area of usenet but the binaries groups? That sounds wrong to me, but it might be the case. binaries seems to be an arbitrary label on a set of groups. I do not see any reason why other groups/channels could not be created to circumvent this.
What does the "spirit" of the rules mean? If the spirit cannot be reflected in language on paper, then it does not exist. How else can you communicate spirit if it is not reproducible and enforceable through words? By the way, I know what you mean by spirit.
One other point, if it is decided that this means the process was broke, should ISO start over from prior to the OOXML vote? Does the acknowledgement that the process is broke warrant erasing the decision for the vote that exposed the broken process? Here is another kicker, what do you do about all the votes prior to the OOXML vote because they should be seen as compromised votes as I am sure this is not the first time someone has gamed ISO. Why should we believe that?
I guess if they allow for members to join spontaneously and upgrade their memnbership without showing any commitment to the standards body, then they get to sit in their own shit and do nothing now. Thank you MS for doing your part in exposing the ridiculousness of this standards body's regulations and processes.
the phone companies chose to listen to, they chose the executive branch over the oversight legislative branch? Which do you think you would clarify with and work with? I would work with the branch that passes laws, has a long-term memory, and controls the oversight. In addition, who are the phone companies listening to that suggests they not listen to Congress? What if Congress is right and the White House is wrong? I would expect punitive measures taken against the phone companies because of illegal behavior even if it was at the behest of illegal requests from the White House. I do not remember anything in the US Constitution that says if a request comes from the White House, you receive immunity for your illegal activities even if you did not know better. You could have taken the case to the court system as I am sure neither of the 3 phone companies have ever done. So, if the companies mentioned are not shy about fighting something out in court, why did they just roll over in this case? It is because they were not interested in clarifying that the request was legal.
I do not think developers work on open source because of the license wrapped around the code; they do it for the code irrespective of the license. Although, I imagine there are some developers that are politically divided over types of license, I doubt most are. So, this article just seems like FUD about GPLv3.
It is imperative that the business understand security so they can make educated decisions and know how to measure it to determine if security is meeting their needs. After all, this is their product that they make money from and they should know their options and how to measure the success of those decisions. Otherwise, they are making a decision in a vacuum and that wastes money. There should be business value associated with every feature in an app because there is cost associated to implementing the feature.
Don't you think there is a difference between taking a photo as an amateur and taking a photo that is being used to generate revenue? I definitely see a difference. For one, if your picture was taken and used by a commercial entity, don't you think you should be asked permission first? After all, they are profiting on your image that you did not agree to distribute. It seems that we all should own the copyright on our own images and distribution is barred unless agreed to by the owner of the copyright. However, amateur photography is another issue altogether because generally, it does not generate revenue. However, if it did and my image was responsible for the revenue because it is in your picture, than I believe I would be entitled to some of that revenue unless I gave you the legal right to make money off of my image.
I am not sure what business this article is talking about, but big business will update or move to another OS it can get support for. Eventually, Windows XP and 2003 will EOS and that will push corporations to move because they generally want support for everything.
A better statistic is how many desktops this 30% represents. I am guessing that this 30% of businesses does not represent 30% of business' desktops. That would be a better number, not this FUD. And I am not a MS fanboy as a Java developer.
It sounds like the patent office wants to put open source/public domain out of business. OS/PD projects will have to hire lawyers to scrub OS/PD for patents for protection from future legal action. I would estimate that the only way OS/PD will be able to compete is to be given time from a lawyer to do the work. I do not think many OS/PD projects have the budget to hire lawyers. And I am not speaking about copyright. If OS/PD projects do not do due dilligence, I imagine they can be threatened by someone that has been granted a patent on some "innovation" that was realized in the OS/PD.
A smart person would scrub open source for patent ideas and start patenting away. Shoot, scrub commercial products for innovations that exist that others may have not seen previously. Now, if someone could lift out some patents from MS products, Amazon, etc that the respective companies hadn't thought of, we can patent their hard work and send them a bill for all the money that was made as a result of said patent.
I think something you allude to in your post indicates something more positive about not having patents. Let's pretend that "spectator mode" was novel at the time of submission for MS and it was patentable. We can only imagine that a tax would be applied to all other games that used this mechanism and life would go on. But that wasn't the case and who ever was the first to develop the feature of "spectator mode" did not patent the idea. We see that the market thrived with that new feature and we saw it make it into new games all over the place without a special tax or threatening letters to sue, etc. Amazing! So, patents are supposed to give an exclusive right to a holder to develop an idea. This right is supposed to help the marketplace by encouraging innovation because without protecting your investment into innovation, what would encourage you to innovate? But that is not what we see at all in this case. Innovation happened without patents for "spectator mode". This leaves me feeling that there are definitely areas of innovation that are questionable as to patentability and the so-called benefit that extending exclusive rights to the holder to affect the marketplace. What percentage of patents fall into this category? The opposite effect of patents is to use patents as a club to chill innovation. Evidence of this exists because patent development has become an aspect of business development for many companies - not innovation. And the return on investment for investing in patent development is the power to chill the marketplace in order to extract a tax. And that is considered innovation?
Really? I have never talked with anyone that says the virtual world is as real as the world outside and I have been playing MMORPGs for several years now with many friends that also play. This assertion can easily be proved false. So, if you want to hang onto your own assertion based on a false premise, go ahead. But maybe you are just trolling which is rich and delightful.
It is not Republican vs Democrat at all; that is not a philosophy at all. It is rather conservative vs liberal. The court in question at the time in the Kelo case was a conservative court and it still is. So answer me how a conservative court finds not in favor of a conservative issue - private property rights. It is not so simple, but because the justices are given a lifetime membership, they don't always stick to their philosophy as politicians and the rest of us would like and that makes their decisions somewhat anomalous. But that is the exact reason that they are given lifetime membership, so they can act independently. The parties have no sway over them except when it comes to picking and accepting them.
Exactly. Has anyone heard of firmware or microcode? Hasn't anyone patched their motherboard with a newer firmware? What do you think that is doing but reprogramming a hardware chip? The strange thing about the article is that it doesn't specifically mention this breakthrough technology that Berkley has produced. I have no doubt they have done something significant in programmable chips, but the article is oddly vague about what it is. And it certainly is not some great new thing that Microsoft is doing. LOL.
Here is an article on wikipedia to ASICs - the more general category that FPGA falls under: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_ integrated_circuit.
I guess my point is that there didn't seem to be evidence of what he says is happening. We could create any infinite of stories that we assert are true without providing evidence. For instance, if you happen to listen to conservative radio, they maintain there is a liberal conspiracy in big media, but there is never any evidence of this so called conspiracy nor do they ever try to prove there is one that doesn't utilize a fallacy. Those sympathetic to that message embrace it wholeheartedly. I am not saying that what the author says is not true, just that he doesn't back it up. For instance, if it is so easy to setup these botnets and influence story rankings on digg, then why doesn't someone, like the author of the article, setup an experiment that creates a botnet to game digg? Then he could post his results and try to correlate what the experiment did to what was occuring on digg and draw a conclusion.
One other point I did not bring up, is that for the author to criticize web 2.0, he only brings up one example. This is far from creating a convincing article that this behavior occurs all over the place. This is called painting with a broad paintbrush.
I think the links to articles you provide are spot on as to gaming the system(not sure about anti-slash.org). I am not sure if this is abuse though. It is up to the individual to think critically about what is and what is not. Every burger joint advertizes they have the world's greatest burger. Is that gaming the system because it should be obvious this cannot be true? It shouldn't be a wonder that magazines that take advertising dollars from companies cannot be critical for the products for those companies. That is why consumer reports is a better magazine if you are looking for a more critical look at consumer products; they don't take advertising dollars to produce their magazine.
Sure, we see a great straw man drawn for us, but I don't see evidence that this is occuring. Does the author maintain there is a conspiracy against users like P9? What evidence is there for a conspiracy? Where are the conspirators meeting? There should be evidence of people meeting in other forums to conspire to bury P9? Is it possible that P9s stories he dugg up suck? I think all these things need to be considered, but I don't see any critical thinking done.
On a similar note, even though the author can dream up a scheme that might possibly bury Digg, is there evidence that an entity has gamed digg as he has explained? Maybe it seems possible that someone could grab 100 C class addresses to create 100 users and they could moderate someone into purgatory, is that all it takes? Has someone ran this experiment to verify that this is true? I don't know why someone could not run this experiment to see if what the author asserts could be true. This article seems more hyperbole and anecdotal in its evidence of gaming the system. For one, if it was possible to game digg, then why not setup a company to do so and make a little money? I imagine there are marketting companies that game all the systems. Just the fact that some people will take this article as true when it doesn't back up its assertions with evidence is an example of gaming. After all, the article is a diss against digg and I am sure some readers use it to back up their own notions that digg sucks. That sounds like gaming to me.
If your readers don't think critically about the content they consume, then you can take your pick of fallacies like generalization and straw man to write up an article that people will take as true. Isn't that gaming the system or the reader? I am not sure if Kevin Mitnick was known for his great technical hacking, but he was definitely known for his great social hacking of people that would willingly give up their passwords.
Right on. Thanks for the correction. Yeah, I overlooked this. You are right that a something would have to return the HTTP 404. If I did a ping, it would just timeout. So, what does the browser return if the domain is non-existant?
I think my point is still valid, that this is oppportunism on the part of Earthlink. I don't think you were disp uting this. Thanks for the correction. I should have known this as a web app engineer. Damn my mind! Damn the booze!
Regards,
Snotman
The rest of the world has to be laughing at the US. We claim to have a capitalist system based on market forces and competition, yet cable companies maintain monopolies in markets. I have no choice as to my cable provider. Sure, I could go satallite, but why is it cable companies don't compete over cable. The problem for me is broadband and there is no competition to keep down prices or provide a more competitive product. Now, the cable companies want to be able to direct traffic across the copper infrastructure the public should own so they can make even more money. When are these guys going to become freind of the consumer? Never. We need to remove their ability to be the exclusive provider of content over cable. This behavior is creating fat, inefficient companies that whine like spoiled children and this seems to be counter capitalist/free market belief. There is no why if this act passes that it would cost the customer more unless cable companies are inflating their operations on purpose.
This is a money grab plain and simple. I prefer to get a 404 response when I fat finger a URL and then use my brain to figure out that I might have fat fingered the domain. I don't want to ever be redirected to a commercial search engine not of my choice. For one, is the search engine going to remain agnostic and return a naked list without censorship or insertion of their own interest? Or is it going to push a preferred list of commercial site owners that paid a premium to have their site show up on a list for people that fat finger? The other money grab here is that now competitors have a way to associate themselves with a site that already did the hard work of creating the interest for the user to type in the URL. This seems to be powerful for what would be ordinarily a site that does not exist for the user; isn't it powerful to create something out of nothing? When I want to find competitors on a subject or for a site, I directly go to a search engine. This seems like opportunism. For instance, if I type in www.McDonards.com and I am redirected to a search engine that interprets my mistake that I want to look up fast food or hamburgers, a search engine can now affiliate with McDonalds other hanmburger restaurants and fast food. It is quite possible these competitors did not invest in marketting like McDonalds to create the impulse for a user to visit their website. However, with Earthlink's redirect to their search engine, a competitor can pay a small fee, nothing probably compared to what McDonalds pays in advertising, and they are instantly associated with McDonalds message even if it is a tiny amount. It is certainly more than what the previously nothing-site had in the user's mind before the redirect. This is hijacking. Also, you have an adsense type thing where advertisers can pay even more premium to jump on the coat tails of someone elses marketting.
Do you really expect Earthlink to be honest about its motives? When does the customer ever come first in a for profit company? This service costs money and customers aren't paying more, so this is Earthlink's business development and it will probably net Earthlink more money at the expense of spamming their customers with paid ads and advertising of sites that wouldn't have normally occurred in the course of things. 404 does not advertise, it tells you that you made a mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, what a generalization? "Most publications of any merit grant independence to the senior editorial staff..." How do we know this? Is there a multitude of watchdog or independent industry groups, aside from yourself, that will come to a consensus and verify your claim that magazines are able to maintain independence from their sponsors. I seriously doubt it. And cynicism is not a disservice, being gullible is.
Ask yourself this, if you were a company and you put out a crap product with a big marketing budget, would you continue to advertise where you received a crap review? No and thus we see where the leverage is. Do you think that magazines and websites exist on member subscriptions? Not a chance. Magazines, and many websites, exist for the sole purpose of creating an audience such that they can make advertising revenue. Is that such a stretch? What do you think Google is - an eyeball magnet. Where are you going to advertise if you are a company? You will advertise where the most eyeballs go that might be interested in your product. And if you can use the amount of money you spend on advertising with a particular venue, you betcha you will try to persuade against negative reviews. And if you are a owner of a company, do you care if your reviews are honest? I doubt it. All you care about is making a buck. That is why you went into business.
If you want a venue that is more genuine, then participate in member owned venues like Consumer Reports. Like I mentioned in a previous post, if something has the appearance of a conflict of interest, than it might as well be a conflict of interest because there is no way to determine that what appears as a duck is not a duck. Taking money from sponsors for ads creates an appearance of a conflict of interest and therefore compromises any kind of claim to objectivity. The review may still be objective, but it will always have an albatross wrapped around its neck.
"Readers should fairly expect there to be an inviolable firewall between advertising and editorial in journalism, and game journalism (yes, that includes "just reviews") is no different."
Since when? You are an idiot if you trust reviews in magazines/web sites that have sponsored advertising. Publishers want you to believe the myth that there is some sort of inviolable wall. What do you think makes Consumer Reports somewhat credible? Because taking money from sponsors and reviewing their products creates the appearance of a conflict of interest. And the appearance of a conflict of interest compromises the trust in a review. Duh!
Hats off to any reviewer that is critical(that does not mean negative) in their review. A reader that relies on one source for their impressions is an idiot and has not been taught to think critically themselves.
do not give a hoot about their customers. If they did, they would understand what DRM means and would protect a consumers property so that it is useful in the future. Companies do not care and people should give them the finger for not caring about those that would patronize their services.
I think if this is to become a trend, then it is in the public's interest to have the format for the records be a standard. This way people can move their records from service to service and have choice as to who is managing their records. Paper is a nice interoperable exchange because it will fit in any file cabinet; hopefully, the same can be said about digital records especially if the big boys are getting into the market.
Hmmm, are you familiar with something called public domain? Maybe you live in a world where everything has a copyright, but I don't. Copyrights expire and for good reason; so the public can take the work and expand it which can enrich the market more so than the original work - think Shakespeare, Dickens, etc. So, is this advertising to pirates? I don't think so. Although, when a pirate sees the above article, that is what they read. Please take your myopic blinders off and remember that the world has been creating content since the beginning of recorded history, not just the twentieth century.
I am sorry, but I took a cursory look into Usenet.com(splash page and 'Why Usenet.com?') and I do not see advertisements to download copyrighted material. It seems that they take privacy seriously by protecting a persons anonymity; why is that crime? Does the fact that you cash make you a criminal because you can't track the transaction back to an individual? I expect you use credit cards so that all your purchases are recorded, otherwise we all should raise an eyebrow to your private behavior. I guess in your world, if you are not broadcasting your behavior, you are hiding criminal intent. That is bogus. Maybe the police should be pulling you over more often since you seem to equate privacy with criminal behavior. Some of us are not hiding anything, we just do not think it is anyone's business to know my business. There is a difference.
But then again, maybe I am not seeing the obvious and explicit advertisements to pirate copyrighted material.
So, are you saying that NNTP will not allow you to attach a binary file to a post in any other area of usenet but the binaries groups? That sounds wrong to me, but it might be the case. binaries seems to be an arbitrary label on a set of groups. I do not see any reason why other groups/channels could not be created to circumvent this.
What does the "spirit" of the rules mean? If the spirit cannot be reflected in language on paper, then it does not exist. How else can you communicate spirit if it is not reproducible and enforceable through words? By the way, I know what you mean by spirit. One other point, if it is decided that this means the process was broke, should ISO start over from prior to the OOXML vote? Does the acknowledgement that the process is broke warrant erasing the decision for the vote that exposed the broken process? Here is another kicker, what do you do about all the votes prior to the OOXML vote because they should be seen as compromised votes as I am sure this is not the first time someone has gamed ISO. Why should we believe that?
I guess if they allow for members to join spontaneously and upgrade their memnbership without showing any commitment to the standards body, then they get to sit in their own shit and do nothing now. Thank you MS for doing your part in exposing the ridiculousness of this standards body's regulations and processes.
the phone companies chose to listen to, they chose the executive branch over the oversight legislative branch? Which do you think you would clarify with and work with? I would work with the branch that passes laws, has a long-term memory, and controls the oversight. In addition, who are the phone companies listening to that suggests they not listen to Congress? What if Congress is right and the White House is wrong? I would expect punitive measures taken against the phone companies because of illegal behavior even if it was at the behest of illegal requests from the White House. I do not remember anything in the US Constitution that says if a request comes from the White House, you receive immunity for your illegal activities even if you did not know better. You could have taken the case to the court system as I am sure neither of the 3 phone companies have ever done. So, if the companies mentioned are not shy about fighting something out in court, why did they just roll over in this case? It is because they were not interested in clarifying that the request was legal.
I do not think developers work on open source because of the license wrapped around the code; they do it for the code irrespective of the license. Although, I imagine there are some developers that are politically divided over types of license, I doubt most are. So, this article just seems like FUD about GPLv3.
Dan
It is imperative that the business understand security so they can make educated decisions and know how to measure it to determine if security is meeting their needs. After all, this is their product that they make money from and they should know their options and how to measure the success of those decisions. Otherwise, they are making a decision in a vacuum and that wastes money. There should be business value associated with every feature in an app because there is cost associated to implementing the feature.
And which company would this be - Consumer Reports?
Don't you think there is a difference between taking a photo as an amateur and taking a photo that is being used to generate revenue? I definitely see a difference. For one, if your picture was taken and used by a commercial entity, don't you think you should be asked permission first? After all, they are profiting on your image that you did not agree to distribute. It seems that we all should own the copyright on our own images and distribution is barred unless agreed to by the owner of the copyright. However, amateur photography is another issue altogether because generally, it does not generate revenue. However, if it did and my image was responsible for the revenue because it is in your picture, than I believe I would be entitled to some of that revenue unless I gave you the legal right to make money off of my image.
I am not sure what business this article is talking about, but big business will update or move to another OS it can get support for. Eventually, Windows XP and 2003 will EOS and that will push corporations to move because they generally want support for everything.
A better statistic is how many desktops this 30% represents. I am guessing that this 30% of businesses does not represent 30% of business' desktops. That would be a better number, not this FUD. And I am not a MS fanboy as a Java developer.
It sounds like the patent office wants to put open source/public domain out of business. OS/PD projects will have to hire lawyers to scrub OS/PD for patents for protection from future legal action. I would estimate that the only way OS/PD will be able to compete is to be given time from a lawyer to do the work. I do not think many OS/PD projects have the budget to hire lawyers. And I am not speaking about copyright. If OS/PD projects do not do due dilligence, I imagine they can be threatened by someone that has been granted a patent on some "innovation" that was realized in the OS/PD.
A smart person would scrub open source for patent ideas and start patenting away. Shoot, scrub commercial products for innovations that exist that others may have not seen previously. Now, if someone could lift out some patents from MS products, Amazon, etc that the respective companies hadn't thought of, we can patent their hard work and send them a bill for all the money that was made as a result of said patent.
I think something you allude to in your post indicates something more positive about not having patents. Let's pretend that "spectator mode" was novel at the time of submission for MS and it was patentable. We can only imagine that a tax would be applied to all other games that used this mechanism and life would go on. But that wasn't the case and who ever was the first to develop the feature of "spectator mode" did not patent the idea. We see that the market thrived with that new feature and we saw it make it into new games all over the place without a special tax or threatening letters to sue, etc. Amazing! So, patents are supposed to give an exclusive right to a holder to develop an idea. This right is supposed to help the marketplace by encouraging innovation because without protecting your investment into innovation, what would encourage you to innovate? But that is not what we see at all in this case. Innovation happened without patents for "spectator mode". This leaves me feeling that there are definitely areas of innovation that are questionable as to patentability and the so-called benefit that extending exclusive rights to the holder to affect the marketplace. What percentage of patents fall into this category? The opposite effect of patents is to use patents as a club to chill innovation. Evidence of this exists because patent development has become an aspect of business development for many companies - not innovation. And the return on investment for investing in patent development is the power to chill the marketplace in order to extract a tax. And that is considered innovation?
Really? I have never talked with anyone that says the virtual world is as real as the world outside and I have been playing MMORPGs for several years now with many friends that also play. This assertion can easily be proved false. So, if you want to hang onto your own assertion based on a false premise, go ahead. But maybe you are just trolling which is rich and delightful.
It is not Republican vs Democrat at all; that is not a philosophy at all. It is rather conservative vs liberal. The court in question at the time in the Kelo case was a conservative court and it still is. So answer me how a conservative court finds not in favor of a conservative issue - private property rights. It is not so simple, but because the justices are given a lifetime membership, they don't always stick to their philosophy as politicians and the rest of us would like and that makes their decisions somewhat anomalous. But that is the exact reason that they are given lifetime membership, so they can act independently. The parties have no sway over them except when it comes to picking and accepting them.
Exactly. Has anyone heard of firmware or microcode? Hasn't anyone patched their motherboard with a newer firmware? What do you think that is doing but reprogramming a hardware chip? The strange thing about the article is that it doesn't specifically mention this breakthrough technology that Berkley has produced. I have no doubt they have done something significant in programmable chips, but the article is oddly vague about what it is. And it certainly is not some great new thing that Microsoft is doing. LOL. Here is an article on wikipedia to ASICs - the more general category that FPGA falls under: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_ integrated_circuit.
I guess my point is that there didn't seem to be evidence of what he says is happening. We could create any infinite of stories that we assert are true without providing evidence. For instance, if you happen to listen to conservative radio, they maintain there is a liberal conspiracy in big media, but there is never any evidence of this so called conspiracy nor do they ever try to prove there is one that doesn't utilize a fallacy. Those sympathetic to that message embrace it wholeheartedly. I am not saying that what the author says is not true, just that he doesn't back it up. For instance, if it is so easy to setup these botnets and influence story rankings on digg, then why doesn't someone, like the author of the article, setup an experiment that creates a botnet to game digg? Then he could post his results and try to correlate what the experiment did to what was occuring on digg and draw a conclusion.
One other point I did not bring up, is that for the author to criticize web 2.0, he only brings up one example. This is far from creating a convincing article that this behavior occurs all over the place. This is called painting with a broad paintbrush.
I think the links to articles you provide are spot on as to gaming the system(not sure about anti-slash.org). I am not sure if this is abuse though. It is up to the individual to think critically about what is and what is not. Every burger joint advertizes they have the world's greatest burger. Is that gaming the system because it should be obvious this cannot be true? It shouldn't be a wonder that magazines that take advertising dollars from companies cannot be critical for the products for those companies. That is why consumer reports is a better magazine if you are looking for a more critical look at consumer products; they don't take advertising dollars to produce their magazine.
Sure, we see a great straw man drawn for us, but I don't see evidence that this is occuring. Does the author maintain there is a conspiracy against users like P9? What evidence is there for a conspiracy? Where are the conspirators meeting? There should be evidence of people meeting in other forums to conspire to bury P9? Is it possible that P9s stories he dugg up suck? I think all these things need to be considered, but I don't see any critical thinking done.
On a similar note, even though the author can dream up a scheme that might possibly bury Digg, is there evidence that an entity has gamed digg as he has explained? Maybe it seems possible that someone could grab 100 C class addresses to create 100 users and they could moderate someone into purgatory, is that all it takes? Has someone ran this experiment to verify that this is true? I don't know why someone could not run this experiment to see if what the author asserts could be true. This article seems more hyperbole and anecdotal in its evidence of gaming the system. For one, if it was possible to game digg, then why not setup a company to do so and make a little money? I imagine there are marketting companies that game all the systems. Just the fact that some people will take this article as true when it doesn't back up its assertions with evidence is an example of gaming. After all, the article is a diss against digg and I am sure some readers use it to back up their own notions that digg sucks. That sounds like gaming to me.
If your readers don't think critically about the content they consume, then you can take your pick of fallacies like generalization and straw man to write up an article that people will take as true. Isn't that gaming the system or the reader? I am not sure if Kevin Mitnick was known for his great technical hacking, but he was definitely known for his great social hacking of people that would willingly give up their passwords.
Right on. Thanks for the correction. Yeah, I overlooked this. You are right that a something would have to return the HTTP 404. If I did a ping, it would just timeout. So, what does the browser return if the domain is non-existant? I think my point is still valid, that this is oppportunism on the part of Earthlink. I don't think you were disp uting this. Thanks for the correction. I should have known this as a web app engineer. Damn my mind! Damn the booze! Regards, Snotman
The rest of the world has to be laughing at the US. We claim to have a capitalist system based on market forces and competition, yet cable companies maintain monopolies in markets. I have no choice as to my cable provider. Sure, I could go satallite, but why is it cable companies don't compete over cable. The problem for me is broadband and there is no competition to keep down prices or provide a more competitive product. Now, the cable companies want to be able to direct traffic across the copper infrastructure the public should own so they can make even more money. When are these guys going to become freind of the consumer? Never. We need to remove their ability to be the exclusive provider of content over cable. This behavior is creating fat, inefficient companies that whine like spoiled children and this seems to be counter capitalist/free market belief. There is no why if this act passes that it would cost the customer more unless cable companies are inflating their operations on purpose.
This is a money grab plain and simple. I prefer to get a 404 response when I fat finger a URL and then use my brain to figure out that I might have fat fingered the domain. I don't want to ever be redirected to a commercial search engine not of my choice. For one, is the search engine going to remain agnostic and return a naked list without censorship or insertion of their own interest? Or is it going to push a preferred list of commercial site owners that paid a premium to have their site show up on a list for people that fat finger? The other money grab here is that now competitors have a way to associate themselves with a site that already did the hard work of creating the interest for the user to type in the URL. This seems to be powerful for what would be ordinarily a site that does not exist for the user; isn't it powerful to create something out of nothing? When I want to find competitors on a subject or for a site, I directly go to a search engine. This seems like opportunism. For instance, if I type in www.McDonards.com and I am redirected to a search engine that interprets my mistake that I want to look up fast food or hamburgers, a search engine can now affiliate with McDonalds other hanmburger restaurants and fast food. It is quite possible these competitors did not invest in marketting like McDonalds to create the impulse for a user to visit their website. However, with Earthlink's redirect to their search engine, a competitor can pay a small fee, nothing probably compared to what McDonalds pays in advertising, and they are instantly associated with McDonalds message even if it is a tiny amount. It is certainly more than what the previously nothing-site had in the user's mind before the redirect. This is hijacking. Also, you have an adsense type thing where advertisers can pay even more premium to jump on the coat tails of someone elses marketting.
Do you really expect Earthlink to be honest about its motives? When does the customer ever come first in a for profit company? This service costs money and customers aren't paying more, so this is Earthlink's business development and it will probably net Earthlink more money at the expense of spamming their customers with paid ads and advertising of sites that wouldn't have normally occurred in the course of things. 404 does not advertise, it tells you that you made a mistake.