The NFL's lawyers stated the NFL competes in the "entertainment marketplace" (http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?renderfor...) and operates as a single entity, not as 32 teams. The NFL makes a large portion of its revenue from television, and ratings are higher on close, competitive games.
What prevents owners from keeping the games close or trading wins/losses now to help a storyline in exchange for markers for future wins when they're on a championship track?
While it is illegal to fix sporting events for gambling purposes, evidently you can fix sports for entertainment purposes. The All 22 footage would make this more difficult because this type of stuff would be easier for fans to detect.
Anyone else get the feeling that all of this "hacker" stuff in the media is serving to raise the profile of "hackers" and position them as the new "terrorists" in an effort to create an environment of fear that will lead to support for upcoming Internet regulations?
What data sources does Facebook use to trigger the email?
And are emails manually approved before they go out? If so, does that mean a Facebook employee looks at the data source that triggered email, which in some cases may be the user's private messages?
A few weeks ago I had a situation where Facebook contacted me about a job, and it appeared that Facebook may have been reading (or at the least mining) private messages related to my startup (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3035376). A Facebook employee replied to the thread but wouldn't provide details.
Google absolutely is an arbiter of your page's reputation -- you can see the 0-9 logarithmic scale on Google's Toolbar.
In the early days of Google/PageRank, the SEO world was abuzz with talk of Google's reputation score for each website, and everyone eagerly awaited the Google update to see how the scores changed.
Google is a private company that controls your site's reputation via PageRank -- assuming most of us have a personal site/blog, how is this that much different?
Is it the case that some people only respect and respond to fear?
So Jobs, rather than waste time trying to figure out what makes every Apple employee tick (which wasn't a practical option considering Apple's size), he instituted a culture of fear and awe. This is akin to him wearing the same black turtleneck every day because he didn't want to waste brain cycles figuring out what to wear.
Moreover there have been several politically-beneficial wins in the last 10 years -- the Patriots winning the Super Bowl after 911, the Saints winning it after Katrina, the Jets winning this year's Sunday night opener on the 10th anniversary of 911, in a metaphorical come-from-behind victory -- did you see how that game went down?
In the Jets game, Romo literally had to throw the game away in the 4th to lose it, and then his reputation was restored the next two weeks after two dramatic, media-hyped come-from-behind victories while playing with broken ribs and a punctured lung.
I'm referring more to the marquee players whom are in position to control the outcome of a game. Presumably directives would come from the owner and the deals would be made between individual teams and/or the league.
For example, owners might trade wins/losses now to help a storyline in exchange for markers for future wins when they're on a championship track.
I wonder how much this quest for storylines has seeped into professional sports. It seems like more and more the NBA and NFL are manufacturing/assisting storylines rather than concerning themselves with the purity of competition.