FredFredrickson

If this were attempted, I think we'd have a LOT of talk about what truly is an ad and what isn't.

I mean, the web banners and billboards we see every day don't do a lot to actually sell products. But your friend telling you they really love a particular product helps a lot.

But in a society where a movement such as you've described was in motion, would both be equally as bad? Are both not manipulative in their own way?

This is both ingenious and hilarious. The best kind of solution, in my opinion.

How many companies has that been true for, though? Apple is the only PC company who made it big as a phone manufacturer. It's a single point on the graph.

As an artist, this is exactly the point that I make when I argue with people who say patents should be abolished.

Without any kind of protection, anyone who has a greater means of production/marketing than you will always steal your ideas and profit more from them than you can.

Obviously we need to fix the process so that as few bad patents are awarded as possible. Someone's just got to figure out how!

You stated this as if it would be a controversial opinion, but I'm not sure I understand why that it would be.

It would be interesting to see what would happen to YouTube if the comments were removed from video / channel pages for a week or a month.

I don't see how that would keep people from visiting the site or watching videos (and of course, ads).

Whenever I'm writing CSS and I start getting to the point where I question whether or not I might as well be using inline styles, I know I'm doing something wrong and take a step back to evaluate where I went wrong.

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I fully agree - I hate having all kinds of junky game clients running on my computer when I ought to just be able to have one, Steam, which is obviously doing a decent job.

On the other hand, I think that competition will drive Steam to be better (or maybe, just maybe, result in something better than Steam), and so I don't necessarily want the other companies to stop trying to compete entirely, either.

I keep arguing with people about this. I just don't understand the hang-up.

I was one of those people who, many years ago and despite my own machine always having an online connection, would complain about these sorts of things. I would imagine all sorts of scenarios where my machine would lose a connection and I'd be unable to play for an hour or two, and I'd be upset.

Then WoW came along. And Guild Wars. And Diablo 3. And games like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 which didn't necessarily require a persistent online connection to play, but in the absence of a massive LAN, were virtually useless without it. I still enjoy single player games, but increasingly (and almost without my even noticing it), lots of the games I play depend on there being an online connection, and a pool of other people to play with.

So while I understand that SimCity is traditionally thought of as an offline game (and always really has been, with few exceptions), I don't understand the problem here. You're probably always online. It's awesome to have your city saves in a place where they won't be wiped out if you re-format or your hard drive gets corrupted. And if you lose your connection for a while, then do something else.

I think as long as customers are aware of this requirement at the outset, there's no harm in it. It's like any MMO, and when you think of it in that context, it's not weird or awful at all.

It implies that they can't have courage without being drunk, and certainly that's not a very nice thing to say about someone, let alone a huge group of people who obviously don't all fit that stereotype.

Interesting little story. Did your grandfather say anything about how the people out in the wilderness reacted?

Absolutely. It can go a long way to not be petty about it.

In these situations, I usually offer a normal bit of criticism, both positive and negative, and then let that be the end of it. Sometimes the client will come back, sometimes not.

Either way, you've preserved your relationship and they might well come back to you when they want to see some revisions down the road.

In my experience, as a graphic designer, who has seen my type of work be outsourced (right in front of me) to some cheapo place overseas, I think it's best to just shut up and let the client do it.

Most of the time, they will get something back that is awful, and if they actually have an eye for quality, it'll make them better appreciate the work you do. You might even get some more work from them after they've satisfied their fantasies of cheap labor.

If they don't have an eye for quality, and they go with the garbage the outsource comes up with, then you probably didn't want them as a client in the first place.

Or just hold the gun an inch or two away from the screen.

That's a pretty loose definition of the term 'success'.

Everyone knowing about it is a big hurdle to get over towards real success, but it's not really success in itself.