My point was that you didn't get his point, apparently.

How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?

Shareware games->designed to get you hooked on the first few levels so you buy the game

Those little SNES consoles they set up at stores back in the day->designed to get you hooked on the game so you guy it.

hell even a lot of arcade games were intentionally designed to be really easy for the first stage or two so you would get hooked and feel compelled to pump more quarters in. This guy has some serious nostalgia goggles, the model has, and always will be to get gamers to spend money on the game by tempting them with a little taste of what is in store if they do spend money on the game. Free to play has just added another method for achieving the same objective.

You didn't actually read the entire article did you.

I had this happen to me back in May. The only reason I knew is because Apple sent me a receipt to the purchase of the app in question. When I looked online to see what the app was it was already pulled from the app store, but various caches online showed it was a very badly designed "game" about chinese words with the dev being a chinese name. At that point I knew someone hacked my account and bought the app (yup it was bought with credit I had on the acct).

I brought it to the attention of Apple and they immediately disabled my account. Then asked for proof that I was who I said I was. After I did so they reenabled my account, changed my password and credited me the money.

It was more of a PITA than anything, and left me scratching my head as to how they got my login info. Which is probably a worse feeling than losing $5 on an app purchase.

Taco is just attempting to make a Beowulf cluster of tech resignations.

What Taco forgot to mention he has named Jon Katz as CEO just to spite us. And then something about removing ones self from his recreational land planted with grasses.

I don't really see a distinction between a pseudonym username (ie, Captain Avenger) and a made up real name (ie Joe Smith). The later would be accepted by Google+ and FB, the former most likely not, and yet both are pseudonyms because they're not the actual name of the user.

As such I don't see why you would need a two-tiered system. Additionally, I don't see why you wouldn't just allow pseudonyms of any kind in any social network. You're not gaining anything by enforcing a "real name" because you can't actually enforce it without asking everyone for an ID to prove that's their actual name.

All you end up doing in the end is having people switch from a username like most of us have on slashdot to a pen name ala Mark Twain. But it's a distinction without a difference.

Code words for spamming, trolling, and PR astroturfing.

I am thrilled G+ doesn't allow psuedonyms. Makes it a much higher class establishment.

Spamming, trolling and astroturfing can easily be done with fake "real names" (ie, Joe Smith). Disallowing pseudonyms solves none of that.

This begs the question of what a "real name" is. Many people use nicknames in place of their first name, and a majority of people know them by that nickname. Is a "real name" then your legal name? Where is the line?

This also begs the question of why a real name is required in the first place. If it's to thwart spammers or to assume people will be nicer if they have to have all posts show their real name, nothing is stopping anyone from saying they're "Joe Smith" and spamming comments, incoming streams, et al with their crap. After all, "Joe Smith" is a REAL NAME.

If it's to allow Google to better link your data, then having your real name public is not needed. Google can ask for this as private data and still be able to do it's big data crunching. Requiring it just asks for people to put in fake (but real sounding) names to get around it which ends up poisoning Google's data well anyway.

I frankly can't think of any reason why it should be required.

Most engineers know next to nothing about marketing and sales... to the degree that they actually despise interacting with customers.

That's perfectly fine. Take the engineers that *are* good at marketing and sales (which there must be since you said "most" and not "all"), and put them in management positions. There will be fewer managers than overall engineers so this should work out just fine. Hell, you can even legitimately pay them more because they have skills that the typical engineer doesn't have. Win-win.

"Maybe your friends are just as odd as you then, nothing really wrong with that but the reason most of us feel the social pressure is because almost all my "old real" friends now are on Facebook. That's where they chatter and share pictures and make events and whatnot, it's not that they're purposely shutting you out but you're the special case. You're the one "being difficult", why can't you just get a profile just like everybody else?"

If they're really old friends, then why can't you just call them? Or text them? Or email them? Or stop by their house to say "hi"? There are a million different ways to stay connected, especially when it comes to long time friends but it seems everyone it too lazy to pick up a phone and have a real chat.

In some ways not being on social networks has its benefits. When you do hang out with your old buddies you actually have something interesting to talk about because you don't already know every little minute details of people's lives.

Having been a web designer for the better part of 15 years I think you should be careful when you lump designers into taking the blame for this. In doing so you give them way to much power.

Any real designer would consider the new Netflix site an abomination. It sucks for the reasons everyone knows it sucks. But if you've ever actually done design work you would know that these sorts of sites rarely are the brain child of a typical web designer. These horrible UI decisions are usually the result of many layers of bureaucracy inside a company, with middle managers inevitably deciding on their own pet ideas and influencing design ("Ohh bigger images, bigger!", "Hover scrolls! Those would be cool and fun!").

In fact, the hardest part of being a designer isn't design. That's not particularly difficult. No, it's the fact that design to most people is subjective and thus everyone feels the need to want to add their own bits and pieces into a design, even when they make no sense and are horrible ideas. This is why so much of design education is learning about critique, because inevitably, someone will want to add amazingly bad ideas to an otherwise decent UI and you need to learn how to argue for (or against) your ideas.

What this design says to me is that Netflix may have just gotten too big for its own good. Marketers and managers seem to be having way too much say on the user experience of the website. This happens to all big companies eventually, it's just unfortunate that Netflix has finally crossed that line.

Do you know how much you pay today if you earn more than 500Kin Connecticut today? With 35% federal, 6.5% state (and the governor wants to push it up by a few points), FICA is really irrelevant then, because it's capped at first 100K, but 2.9% Medicare tax is applied on the ENTIRE amount. This is only the income taxes, can you do the addition?

The problem is it's not entirely additive. That 35% number you quote for federal is only for the amount above $380k (when the 35% bracket kicks in). People often quote the highest rate as if that's the total tax for the entire amount. This often comes up when people talk about taxes 50 years ago at 90% tax rates. The problem with this is that taxes are progressive so quoting the highest rate is misleading.

If you want to talk about taxes due, you should be calculating the effective tax rate, not the top tax rate. On $500k it's about 29% with no deductions (which everyone gets). Start there and your point would have more weight.

The topic is about comparing one API to another.

In that context, even if you were to go into a semantic rant about it, John Carmack is the creator of Doom.

I read it as was why the need to describe who he is at all. On a site for nerds, just using the name John Carmack should be good enough for everyone to know who it is. It's akin to referring to Woz as "Apple creator".

I hear this a lot, that Ham radio is useful in disasters, but can anyone give some examples?

It's also useful in preventing disaster. I'm part of Skywarn, which is put on by the National Weather Service. They reach out to Ham Radio ops and teach them how to spot severe weather. You take a class to get a license (on top of your normal ham radio license) to do this. In the summer months we get alerts and calls to action to go out and weather spot, looking for severe weather and reporting in to weather nets.

It is all volunteer. Now, not only does the NWS get real time reports on the ground and valuable data on storms, but have you ever wondered how the local news knows that there is 1" hail or a wall cloud at a specific location? Radar is not going to tell you that information. They're monitoring the ham bands for that info. This can mean the difference between life and death when someone is alerted to the fact that a tornado is likely in their vicinity and they can take the precautions necessary to protect themselves.

It's a design trend right now because everyone wants things to be "app like", with their fixed nav bars and the like. What's funny though is that on things like the iPad, fixed positioning is turned off, so on the one device it might actually feel "native" this doesn't work at all.