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?
Or, perhaps, you only get ads when requested. "I'm in the market for a new refrigerator. Please show me ads for refrigerators."
But still, I have a fundamental problem with how all advertising has a slant, and at least a hint of a lie or manipulation. I do not like being lied to or manipulated, but I don't know what the alternative would be.
The followup article I saw here a few months ago suggested that Sao Paulo hasn't found that entirely successful, and has allowed a significant amount of advertising back.
I tried looking for this, I really did, but I couldn't find it. Can you find this information and put it in Wikipedia? I tried reading both the English and Portuguese articles, and I couldn't find what you are talking about. The only thing I saw in the Portuguese Wikipedia is that 8 years later they're having problems with illegal electoral flyers.
The alternative is for our culture to have standards and expect more, and to build the technology to support that level of transparency.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could instantly have a high level analysis of every refrigerator available (new or used) in terms of its objective qualities? With scientific units of measurement and everything? How about information on how the parts were sourced and manufactured?
Unfortunately the majority of the world aren't even close to being in a position to have such standards, expect more, and have the education to evaluate the evidence. The power is in all the wrong places.
you should stop browsing the web if you don't want to be manipulated or read content with a slant. 99% of the organic content on the web is trying to manipulate you.
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!
> 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.
Since you're an artist shouldn't you only care about copyright and trademarks? What's a patent going to do for you? If someone steals your designs then you can sue them through means other than patents. If they copied your idea but executed differently then well I guess that sucks to a degree but if it's an obvious evolution then more than likely it happened independent of you anyway.
I would imagine artists would have the least issue with just abolishing patents entirely so I'm curious why you do.
Well, because it seems as if the article suggested that nothing has filled the niche, and because the exploratory nature of Myst is present to a smaller extent, and various other features such as the "unassuming stranger" component are replaced.
And because I'm in a rhetorical mood tonight because of work-related communications sitting in my inbox, since you ask. :P
It wouldn't keep people from the site, but they would spend less time on it. Not sure if that would decrease their ad views, or increase views because users aren't wasting time reading comments.
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.
The other companies aren't really trying to compete with Steam per se, they just want to inject their own custom babysitter to analyze your computer and see if they're complying with their rules. When you open a game from Steam that's produced by one of these companies, it chains in its own loaders and achievements and stuff. It totally sucks, and it's a terrible end user experience.
It'll be exciting when the fogies in charge of these companies die out. They seem to have difficulty grasping the concept of computers and digital distribution.
I think they are probably more interested in avoiding the ~15-30% (rumored) cut that Steam takes for digital sales of their games. And I know in EA's case, they want to sell DLC through their game, not through Steam's client specifically to avoid that charge (that's the reason some EA games were removed from Steam when Valve changed their policy on the matter).
They do this even on games purchased directly through Steam. It's obviously not about cutting out Steam, because they still facilitate their sales via Steam and presumably are still obliged to render commissions. As Ubisoft says in their own announcement, UPlay did not accept payments directly; distribution channels like Steam or physical retail were still required to obtain the games.
This isn't really a market that benefits from competition doing anything less than the same the same thing, though. Steam is acting as more of a dumb distributor than a publisher, and are an established player. All Ubisoft and EA have is their own titles. They're not going to attract indie players, and they're not going to attract other publishers' work if all they're trying to do is utilize their titles to garner users. In other words, they're not currently trying to be the next Steam, they just want to take a bite out of Steam.
If either of those companies wants to make a real effort at getting a distribution platform off the ground by competing with Steam on the developer side and the pricing side, then that's competition I'm willing to see. As it stands, they're simply trying to leverage their developers' work into membership.
Can't speak for Ubisoft, but Origin sells games not published by EA. I think right now they sell Sega, Square and Warner Brother games. They also sell physical copies of games not published by them, including some Valve games. They're growing their catalog.
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.
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?