MSM

I'm not going to go look for the actual contract, but there has been controversy about the American Idol contract for years. Out of all the shows you could have picked, why would you pick one involving recording companies? :)

Here's a excerpt from the American Idol Wikipedia page, talking about the contract:

"The contract the contestants are required to sign gives Simon Fuller's company the right to oversee not just the recording deal for "American Idol" stars, but also control any merchandising, touring, sponsorship and movie deals."

This definitely rubs me the wrong way. Coupled with the fact that they froze the (point) account of Sam Mulroy in an effort to get him to nark on Vroom is just so shady.

It was later revealed that Vroom was in fact violating the rules, but the ends don't justify the means. Sam Mulroy and Auyon Mukharji didn't do anything illegal that I'm aware of, so why were they being detained?

I think that's equivalent to asking everyone to go to chef's school and describing the upside as 'People will realize that peeling potatoes can be done in a quarter the time they're doing it now!'

It's just... why? These people aren't going to be doing any programming daily. Why don't you take all that money, and all that time and let each non-programmer go to a deep dive conference of their choice for whatever their discipline is. Seems like a much better use of resources.

I have read a number of articles on "debunking" that statement, but they always have large holes.

This one in particular attacks what it considers consistency. It suggests that we cannot be sure that the data that is collected will consistently used accurately. It suggests that having ones fingerprints on file were the cause of a number of false arrests.

While I agree that if we collected no data, we'd probably have less false arrests, they convinently avoid talking about how many people have been correctly (as far as we can tell) convicted because of that data.

I'm not saying this has anything to do with the whole car article- I'm just saying that if someone is swayed either way by that simple computer weekly article, they haven't really thought the issue through themselves.

This is pretty awesome, this a great example of how to document your standard style.

After looking around I'm still not sure what they mean by 'eliminating locking'. Locking isn't just overhead, it's needed for transactions- how are transactions handled if there is no locking? Does the speed come at the cost of dirty reads and writes?