Another Slashdot memory: Ah, the brick-and-mortar analogies...

So, I remembered another funny Slashdot exchange (again, no link).

Story: Some online retailer got in trouble for filtering their "customer reviews" so that only the positive remarks (about listed products) stayed and everything else was deleted.

A: "Wow, that's pretty scummy. They don't have the right to just clip out negative reviews."

B: "Don't they? I mean, it's their site; they have the right to set whatever editorial standards they want."

C: "Sure, but there's still an issue of consumer fraud and deception. For a brick-and-mortar analogy, imagine that Barnes and Noble started hosing 'book discussion nights' at their stores and promoted it as such. But you quickly notice that whenever someone says something negative about a book sold by B&N -- and only those books -- that person gets a tap on the shoulder from security, pulled aside, and asked to leave.

"In that case, it would indeed be correct to say they can expel whoever they want, but it's still fundamentally fraudulent to represent that event as being for 'book discussion' rather than 'book promotion'."

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In other news, I finally found one of the ones that I thought I couldn't! The Armadillo rocket failure mentioned in this post was actually this conversation. The actual (but truncated) exchange went like this (note the links to original comments):

A: "And to think, they want us all to ride in these things commercially...."

B: "John and his team have an excellent track record thus far, and have continued to make safety a main issue. I'm sure that this experience will teach them even more, helping to make the next flight even safer."

C: "You mean even safer than a huge orange fireball?

"I don't know, that's a pretty high bar."