I've been going to Depression/Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA) meetings for over a year now, in Los Angeles and Maine. (Think of a support group, then subtract the woo, jargon, god and other b.s.) I have my own experience with depression, and I know people who've had it far worse.

According to the article, Blanchard is diagnosed with major depression. A running joke in DBSA groups is that you can tell the new people with depression from those with bipolar because they crack the most jokes. Without the high and low cycles of bipolar, we tend to grasp at any moment of levity we can attain or create. There's a common misconception that depression is a flat, constant low mood. This is rare. Typically one varies between extreme lows and more functional periods, with stops everywhere in between. One also gets very good at faking it for short periods of time.

Meds aren't a magic bullet either, more a set of blunt tools whose effect on any given person will be highly variable. Beginning treatment often means a period of medication roulette, where the prescriber and patient work to balance efficacy, side-effects and (in the U.S. at least) costs. In the long term, lifestyle adjustments, especially increased social involvement, are essential.

The bottom line is, if Blanchard wants to return to the working world, she's been doing exactly what she should be.

Manulife, on the other hand, took a very small risk, which makes perfect market sense. The chances of Blanchard fighting back the way she has were slim, and the financial savings for the company miniscule but real. Faced with the loss of their emergency income, many people with major depression would have retreated further into their shells. Some might have attempted suicide.

Let's just look at the top 50 sites to get an idea of the feasibility of this plan, as reported by Alexa.

First, we filter out all of the Google properties. By my count, that leaves 30.

Next, filter out Microsoft's properties, as the scheme would put theme in the antitrust crosshairs: That leaves 26.

Forget Yahoo; they make a lot more than $1MM annually from Google. We're down to 22.

What's left? Forget LinkedIn -- search results are their bread-and-butter. Likewise the IMDb, Craigslist, Twitter, eBay and Myspace. Wikipedia and the BBC would consider it a breach of their charters. Facebook might be tempted, but their users would protest too much. Only 13 out of 50 remain. Of these, which would play ball? RapidShare would -- they're rather be ignored by search traffic. The Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Turkish social networking sites might. Likewise the porn sites. In truth though, we have only five or six "maybes" in the top 50.

Bottom line, it's an absurd notion -- more old media fantasies of crippling the internet with blunt 19th century methods. I'm not saying that Google is unassailable, but a challenge by a competitor who hasn't put in the sweat-equity is a guaranteed to failure.

I blogged this last night. Short version: fail.

Problems:

1. You just doubled the amount of space I need between myself and the monitor.

2. Multitouch allows for more kinds of interaction: true! However, this interface steals ALL of them away from use by the applications.

3. Left and right sides of the screen aren't discoverable. Might as well be top and bottom -- i.e. bottom of the screen for application launching (call it a "dock") and top of the screen for context-specific options (a sort of "bar" of "menus").

4. Linear spatial overload of windows is no better than two-dimensional spatial overload of windows. Labelled zoom-all-the-way-out cheat no better than Expose and application switcher.

5. Where does file management fit into this scheme?

Lukas Mathis calls 10/GUI "one of the most dramatic reimaginations of the desktop user interface I've seen in a long time" but on examination it's an incremental hardware update with no real interface breakthroughs. Keyboard + mouse has gone on for far too long, as has the W.I.M.P. interface. A better direction would be a tactile multitouch surface which can be anything it needs to be, including a keyboard (for any language), coupled with a GUI that represents tasks and actors rather than objects in a space. 10/GUI does nothing about window and document clutter, squinting, scanning large lists, or making the computer's workings and status an organic part of its presentation. The video may be a slick investors' reel, but shows no real progress.

I suspect that this is more widespread than we'd all like to believe. I tried several times to post a negative (2 out of 5 star, short, clear and to the point) review of a Sony w580i phone I bought through Wirefly.com, and the review never seemed to go through. Plenty of decent reviews, though, for a phone I've already had to replace once, and whose replacement is falling apart after about six months' light use.

Short term solution: Research, research, research.

Long term solution: Identify, name and shame.

Having spent some time in Hollywood, I'll answer the poster's initial question. The general rule on movies is actually 1:1, production vs. marketing. Thus a studio that spends $30M producing a movie is expected to spend about another $30M on promotion.

This of course doesn't take into account the famous "Hollywood math" in which the cost of making a film can essentially be whatever the studio says it is. Essentially, any cost a production company incurs during the time of a film's production can be assigned to the budget of a film. This is done to make the film appear to have lost money or broken even no matter what its box office, DVD and television gross (Forrest Gump being the most famously ridiculous example of a "failure").

I would expect Hollywood math to have filtered in some form into the games industry by now, but how I can't imagine. Are annual software upgrades and new video cards charged to the budget of an individual game, or considered an unavoidable infrastructure cost? If a game studio purchases a setup to do basic mocap in-house, rather than having to contract out, is that cost eaten by the studio, assigned to the current game's budget, or spread among the twelve games the system is used on during its lifetime?

Accounting is a wooly and cutthroat art.

I'd suggest looking at projects for bringing SVG to smartphones. You may find an SVG library for Windows CE that would compile under (vanilla) Windows -- probably not feature complete, but chances are the Mobile SVG specs are enough for your needs. I believe there is at least one very trim branch of Firefox underway, though SVG support may be one of the things that it trimmed. Good luck.

The edges of American politics can be confusing, especially when one colonizes an apolitical site like Slashdot. You may find my definition of "Libertarian" from the Bestiary of Geekdom helpful:

While ostensible a political movement -- and indeed a real American political party -- the libertarian's one issue politics and long life at the political fringe places him more comfortably within the bestiary of geekdom than that of Washington. The libertarian is a fierce defender of civil liberties, more liberal than the Democrat in terms of letting the social cards fall where they may, and more conservative than the Republican inre: reducing the size and role of government. Philosophically hindered from mounting collective action, libertarians have been noted of late to be cross-breeding with Science Denialists in order to resist rising levels of climate change research.

Back when I did this proof-of-concept SVG game, I used Inkscape. While Inkscape is definitely coming along as a basic Illustrator alternative, it produces terrible SVG for DOM manipulation -- objects are defined with inline styles rather than attributes, and Inkscape would delete my inline JavaScript when I opened and saved the file.

Now that Safari supports full SVG and browsers are actually competing on JavaScript performance, I should really dust off that old project. Its time may have come.

Speaking as an animator and web developer, I'd rather see this effort on the part of Google and Mozilla put into 3D SVG. It would eliminate the need for yet another plugin, allow direct DOM access, and facilitate the mixing of 3d with other page elements.

Or maybe I just want Lain's web experience...

Looks like they've been Slashdotted. Couldn't connect at 5:50 PST, and can't do it now, four hours later.

I certainly hope this server-crushing interest translates into sales. I laughed my cheeks off to the Phantom Menace RT. Who else sells something that makes your existing movie collection better, you know?

Most of Yahoo's nerfy services aren't designed for the smug wannabe technocrats of Slashdot -- they're designed for their moms. That said, Flickr and del.icio.us are pretty good services, Yahoo Maps suffer only from a lack of imagination, and even Pipes has a reasonable geeky appeal.

What no one seems to be asking amidst all this keening and armchair reffing is what good Yahoo's failure would do for the web. Do you really want a duopoly on major web services? Yahoo's failure wouldn't clear any space in the canopy for new competitors -- Google and MS will continue to either buy or one-up them once they gain buzz, as they have all decade. Without the deep pockets of either of its competitors, it's amazing that Yahoo has survived this long.

Sorry to walk away from a good book-dumping, but I hope Yahoo survives.