Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:
Looks like the "independent" studies sponcered by the american tobacco industry to forstall lawsuits.
In political circles we call this spindoctoring.
Our industry would be well advised to avoid the corrupt methodologies of politicians. Programming and logic have more in common than politics and lying. Let us use our logic we learned when we took our first structured programming languages. We should leave lying to the experts in politics.
Too late. Over the past 10 years, our industry has become the model for the politicians. There are techniques that some huge vendors have used that would have made most politicians blush 15 years ago. It basically started with the focus-group magazines which existed entirely to support specific vendors and achieved prominance primarily through ads. By extremely well word-crafted reporting of 'independant evaluations', the vendors have been able to test and stretch the boundaries of our gullability. Nowadays we simply call it marketing.