I'm much more surprised by the fact that they managed to take about 1% of the entire assets of the wanna-be bank. That's pretty disturbing - because that means that nothing was working right. Not their security, not their required privileges, not their fraud detection, nothing. Note to self: don't do business in SA.
would seem that buying it used is exactly identical to the developer NOT receiving money
You're exactly right. Developers - or more exactly, publishers - are complaining that they are NOT receiving the money they think they deserve. Except in the case of used games, they have ALREADY received money for the game.
Furthermore, here is where they are shooting themselves in the foot: someone who buys a game and sells it used later essentially bought a game at a terrific discount (well, less terrific if you go to Gamestop to sell it). But the publisher received the full amount on the initial purchase. If Econ 101 holds true, a lower price for an item means higher demand. In essence, is someone can buy a game new and resell for less, the publisher will get MORE than if people only buy it for the full price. Why? Because the used game sellers are taking advantage of the market that exists for the game at a lower price.
In short, killing the secondary market is actually going to reduce the amount of money that publishers make. For anyone pointing at WoW: that's not a game, that's a continuously updated Skinner Box. Slight difference.
I've said this a few times, but I guess there's little harm in repeating it one more time.
1) The way to identify astroturfers is not through content, but through posting patterns. Content is just a very small part that only indicates who hired that person. 2) Do you argue with ads? Do you also go one by one through ads, debunking every claim? Maybe you do it for a few, but it's not feasible to do it for every one. Furthermore, you can't have an honest debate with them. The best you can hope for is to alert others to the fact that the arguments are incorrect, and to move on. After the 15th debunking, you just leave it at "astroturf alert", and move on.
That's true, but I'm not talking about multiplayer. And even that is mostly just p2p - and in the case of XBLive, I ALREADY pay for the online service. The problem isn't companies taking down multiplayer servers for which they aren't getting paid. The problem is companies preventing owners (sorry, licensees) of software to actually use the game they bought.
That's very true. But we're talking about DCTech/SmithZ/InsightIn140Bytes or whatever else he is currently posting under. Feel free to check their posting history.
I fully understand the used game market hurts the developers;
WRONG WRONG WRONG. I'm sorry, but you've been bamboozled. The used game market doesn't hurt the developer. The used game market is a secondary market that exists in parallel to the primary market, wherein owners exchange goods in return for money. Any time a game enters the used game market, the developer has already received money for the game. Furthermore, if it's a true used game market, the games in circulation are originals, and don't involve CD-Rs. Therefore, from the perspective of the developer, any game that is in the used game market is identical to a game that is sitting in the closet of the first buyer of the game.
The argument that the used game market hurts developers is identical to the one that people who don't buy multiple copies of a game hurt a game developer, or who don't buy the same game every 6 months, or every 3 months. It is fundamentally based on the assumption that developers have a right to your money, and that you do not have a right to the product you're buying from them.
It is absolut bullshit, and every developer who pulls this argument gets put on my personal do not buy list. Yes, I'm down to buying a few games per year, mostly from small time developers. I still buy the occasional big-budget title, but after ME3, I'm probably done for a long time.
Bullshit. The posting pattern here is either mental derangement of clinical scale, or a paid astroturfing effort. Either one has nothing to do with any normal position, strictly adds noise, and deserves to be modded into oblivion. Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean you're right.
You're assuming that just because someone ran some posts through some number-crunching software, the numbers you get back are somehow meaningful. They may be, or they may not be. The point here is that no one can say for sure exactly what the numbers. Example: "I think that the ads portraying Romney as a douchebag are wrong." Is this is a positive for Romney? Maybe. For Gingrich? Maybe. For the SuperPAC running the ads? Probably not. Now realize that the best that the system can do is to run keyword frequency and position analysis. Romney is followed by douchebag is followed by wrong. Is douchebag in their keyword dictionary? How does it weight the fact that douchebag is wrong? Here's some more fun: "I think Romney is a douchebag.", "I think Gingrich thinks Romney is a douchebag", and "Romney sucks! The wind out of Gingrich's campaign. Hahah!"
Political sentiment analysis via semantic number crunching is nothing but snake oil. And yes, I studied semantic analysis in school and now have to answer people's questions about what our social metric software actually does.
Yes, he actually is wrong. He is setting the problem up as "TV over the Internet should work exactly the same way as TV has for the last 100 years". It doesn't.
And the insidiousness is that you can't even reason with him - he is being paid for his opinion, and no amount of logic will be able to change his advertisement (and yes, that's what it is) that Google is bad, and FB and MS are good.
If Politico actually believes that it can get useful information from the statistics alone, they paid a ton of money for absolutely nothing. People can hawk the social media tools all they want, but all they do is keyword analysis with some language heuristics thrown in. The vendors themselves will tell you (if they are honest) that they cannot tell you what the accuracy of their tool is, because nobody knows for sure how the training posts correlate with the posts in the wild.
And DCTech/InsightIn140Bytes/SmithZ/Whatever else you will post under in the next FB/MS/Google stories, I hope you get paid well. Your job is worse than that of a used car salesman. At least they don't lie about whether they are used car salesman.
The problem is that Young Earthers and ID folks who believe in evolution are just cherry-picking their position on evolution for their own convenience. There is no rational way to believe both that evolution works for bacterial resistance, but that it doesn't work for anything else.
Eh, there was one astroturfer (pretty sure it's still the same) who said "Yeah, I'm an astroturfer, here's why I feel it's not so bad." All it netted him was a smackdown. Rightfully so, as his argument essentially was "I'm just here to balance out the opposite fanboys." As if this is all just some sport where the only difference between teams are the colors on the jerseys.
He isn't. The alternative is that he has a script that alerts him to specific stories in the firehose and in the main page, or that he submits the stories himself. See also the previous Google is Evil story.
Looks like he sure did. To wit: - First Post, if a subscriber wouldn't have beaten him to it - First post with links and long, well crafted argument about how evil Google is. - Brand new account created for pretty much this story only - Only comments are MS is great and Google is evil.
The only person who beat him to the punch is a subscriber who can see the results early. My suspicion is that DCTech actually submitted the story.
Not sure what's going on here, as a user-agent string means nothing, and there's a lot of outsourcing going on. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the investigation Mocality did, and for the tools they have, it was fairly sophisticated.
What I'd like to know is how Google reacts to this. I'm generally of the opinion that someone is innocent until proven guilty (I've been wrong too many times to be able to still jump to conclusions). This might just be a lot of smoke without fire, but if Google is serious about its reputation, it needs to at least address the issue.
I think this is a far more interesting proposition than just assuming that Google is trying to scam a Kenyan upstart out of a few hundred dollars for hosting packages. There's no reason to think that Google can't do it, but the evidence so far is pretty weak.
True, but here's my beef: there's no rational discussion to be had with an astroturfer. It's like arguing with an ad: you can't do it. The arguments of an ad might not necessarily be wrong, but there is not rational discussion to be had.
Think about it for a second: do you really want to have Slashdot become the equivalent of the Superbowl ad segments, or the set of political ads that happen during an election year?
You might want to, but to me it's just trying to yell over noise. I have better things to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm much more surprised by the fact that they managed to take about 1% of the entire assets of the wanna-be bank. That's pretty disturbing - because that means that nothing was working right. Not their security, not their required privileges, not their fraud detection, nothing. Note to self: don't do business in SA.
Go away, DCTech. Eat your down mods like the office drone that you are.
You're confusing copyright with DRM. A work can be copyrighted but not be subjected to DRM, and vice versa.
Even more proof that adjudicating ideas to specific people and their descendants or to ever-living corporations is insanity.
would seem that buying it used is exactly identical to the developer NOT receiving money
You're exactly right. Developers - or more exactly, publishers - are complaining that they are NOT receiving the money they think they deserve. Except in the case of used games, they have ALREADY received money for the game.
Furthermore, here is where they are shooting themselves in the foot: someone who buys a game and sells it used later essentially bought a game at a terrific discount (well, less terrific if you go to Gamestop to sell it). But the publisher received the full amount on the initial purchase. If Econ 101 holds true, a lower price for an item means higher demand. In essence, is someone can buy a game new and resell for less, the publisher will get MORE than if people only buy it for the full price. Why? Because the used game sellers are taking advantage of the market that exists for the game at a lower price.
In short, killing the secondary market is actually going to reduce the amount of money that publishers make. For anyone pointing at WoW: that's not a game, that's a continuously updated Skinner Box. Slight difference.
I've said this a few times, but I guess there's little harm in repeating it one more time.
1) The way to identify astroturfers is not through content, but through posting patterns. Content is just a very small part that only indicates who hired that person.
2) Do you argue with ads? Do you also go one by one through ads, debunking every claim? Maybe you do it for a few, but it's not feasible to do it for every one. Furthermore, you can't have an honest debate with them. The best you can hope for is to alert others to the fact that the arguments are incorrect, and to move on. After the 15th debunking, you just leave it at "astroturf alert", and move on.
That's true, but I'm not talking about multiplayer. And even that is mostly just p2p - and in the case of XBLive, I ALREADY pay for the online service. The problem isn't companies taking down multiplayer servers for which they aren't getting paid. The problem is companies preventing owners (sorry, licensees) of software to actually use the game they bought.
That's very true. But we're talking about DCTech/SmithZ/InsightIn140Bytes or whatever else he is currently posting under. Feel free to check their posting history.
I fully understand the used game market hurts the developers;
WRONG WRONG WRONG. I'm sorry, but you've been bamboozled. The used game market doesn't hurt the developer. The used game market is a secondary market that exists in parallel to the primary market, wherein owners exchange goods in return for money. Any time a game enters the used game market, the developer has already received money for the game. Furthermore, if it's a true used game market, the games in circulation are originals, and don't involve CD-Rs. Therefore, from the perspective of the developer, any game that is in the used game market is identical to a game that is sitting in the closet of the first buyer of the game.
The argument that the used game market hurts developers is identical to the one that people who don't buy multiple copies of a game hurt a game developer, or who don't buy the same game every 6 months, or every 3 months. It is fundamentally based on the assumption that developers have a right to your money, and that you do not have a right to the product you're buying from them.
It is absolut bullshit, and every developer who pulls this argument gets put on my personal do not buy list. Yes, I'm down to buying a few games per year, mostly from small time developers. I still buy the occasional big-budget title, but after ME3, I'm probably done for a long time.
I'm sorry, a paid position is not a valid viewpoint, and has no business on here. Go buy some ad space on TV.
What happened, you don't go to work before 7AM?
It's called arguing with someone who is paid to hold a position. It's utterly pointless. Mod down and move on.
Bullshit. The posting pattern here is either mental derangement of clinical scale, or a paid astroturfing effort. Either one has nothing to do with any normal position, strictly adds noise, and deserves to be modded into oblivion. Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean you're right.
You're assuming that just because someone ran some posts through some number-crunching software, the numbers you get back are somehow meaningful. They may be, or they may not be. The point here is that no one can say for sure exactly what the numbers. Example: "I think that the ads portraying Romney as a douchebag are wrong." Is this is a positive for Romney? Maybe. For Gingrich? Maybe. For the SuperPAC running the ads? Probably not. Now realize that the best that the system can do is to run keyword frequency and position analysis. Romney is followed by douchebag is followed by wrong. Is douchebag in their keyword dictionary? How does it weight the fact that douchebag is wrong? Here's some more fun: "I think Romney is a douchebag.", "I think Gingrich thinks Romney is a douchebag", and "Romney sucks! The wind out of Gingrich's campaign. Hahah!"
Political sentiment analysis via semantic number crunching is nothing but snake oil. And yes, I studied semantic analysis in school and now have to answer people's questions about what our social metric software actually does.
Yes, he actually is wrong. He is setting the problem up as "TV over the Internet should work exactly the same way as TV has for the last 100 years". It doesn't.
And the insidiousness is that you can't even reason with him - he is being paid for his opinion, and no amount of logic will be able to change his advertisement (and yes, that's what it is) that Google is bad, and FB and MS are good.
If Politico actually believes that it can get useful information from the statistics alone, they paid a ton of money for absolutely nothing. People can hawk the social media tools all they want, but all they do is keyword analysis with some language heuristics thrown in. The vendors themselves will tell you (if they are honest) that they cannot tell you what the accuracy of their tool is, because nobody knows for sure how the training posts correlate with the posts in the wild.
And DCTech/InsightIn140Bytes/SmithZ/Whatever else you will post under in the next FB/MS/Google stories, I hope you get paid well. Your job is worse than that of a used car salesman. At least they don't lie about whether they are used car salesman.
The problem is that Young Earthers and ID folks who believe in evolution are just cherry-picking their position on evolution for their own convenience. There is no rational way to believe both that evolution works for bacterial resistance, but that it doesn't work for anything else.
Antibiotics are poisons. They just target a set of biochemical pathways that humans don't care too much about.
Eh, there was one astroturfer (pretty sure it's still the same) who said "Yeah, I'm an astroturfer, here's why I feel it's not so bad." All it netted him was a smackdown. Rightfully so, as his argument essentially was "I'm just here to balance out the opposite fanboys." As if this is all just some sport where the only difference between teams are the colors on the jerseys.
I have many Windows-based servers that only run GUI programs.
Considering your job is to post stories to social media sites, I'm pretty sure this means "I have a desktop and a laptop that both run MS Windows."
Be a subscriber (this is the key)
He isn't. The alternative is that he has a script that alerts him to specific stories in the firehose and in the main page, or that he submits the stories himself. See also the previous Google is Evil story.
Looks like he sure did. To wit:
- First Post, if a subscriber wouldn't have beaten him to it
- First post with links and long, well crafted argument about how evil Google is.
- Brand new account created for pretty much this story only
- Only comments are MS is great and Google is evil.
The only person who beat him to the punch is a subscriber who can see the results early. My suspicion is that DCTech actually submitted the story.
Not sure what's going on here, as a user-agent string means nothing, and there's a lot of outsourcing going on. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the investigation Mocality did, and for the tools they have, it was fairly sophisticated.
What I'd like to know is how Google reacts to this. I'm generally of the opinion that someone is innocent until proven guilty (I've been wrong too many times to be able to still jump to conclusions). This might just be a lot of smoke without fire, but if Google is serious about its reputation, it needs to at least address the issue.
I think this is a far more interesting proposition than just assuming that Google is trying to scam a Kenyan upstart out of a few hundred dollars for hosting packages. There's no reason to think that Google can't do it, but the evidence so far is pretty weak.
True, but here's my beef: there's no rational discussion to be had with an astroturfer. It's like arguing with an ad: you can't do it. The arguments of an ad might not necessarily be wrong, but there is not rational discussion to be had.
Think about it for a second: do you really want to have Slashdot become the equivalent of the Superbowl ad segments, or the set of political ads that happen during an election year?
You might want to, but to me it's just trying to yell over noise. I have better things to do.