CrankyPants

One could argue that all features add value. Should all features then be à la carte via in-app purchases? That'd be absurd.

Things can be both absurd and simple. Really.

I'm not sure that's entirely true, either. Not judging, just saying.

Seriously, yes, our prison system is really, really screwed up, but we got here largely out of public myopia and apathy, and to indicate we arrived at this place for reasons bearing any similarity to North Korea's is ignorant, at best.

And: if that's what qualifies as thinly-viled advertising...

Not trying to be mean. Just sayin'.

Would you mind sharing the 80/20 gist of what aspect mainly contributed to that? I'm sure the best method would be to follow the program totally, but if one wanted just to see gains in that area with the least possible investment, what would you recommend?

I'll also second the n-for-1 suggestion.

And after seeing all of the African urine generator stories that didn't have even the slightest amount of scientific rigor to them, that didn't help.

But that said, one could argue that if thousands of people with traditional backgrounds all attacked the same problem and couldn't crack it, if it's ever going to be cracked it might require someone who comes from a completely different system.

Still: to many, it's not as mild as you think.

And you're right: it has everything to do with the reaction it gets. Many would disagree about your characterization of it as being "mild," or whether it's "lost any bite," and there's the rub: whether or not that's correct is up for debate, but I'd also submit that it's largely irrelevant whether or not that is, in fact, as inoffensive as you believe it to be.

While you may not think it offensive, many do, and would consider it a thoughtless treatment of something that's important to them. We can all argue about whether or not that's reasonable, but it's the reality, nonetheless.

It's one thing if you know your audience, but it's another thing to be commenting in a public place.

Consider this variation:

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It has nothing to do with what I think, it has to do with the way the phrase is typically used, and the reaction it gets: In normal usage, it's mild.

This is true of many religious words used in this manner ... they've pretty much lost any bite they once had. E.g. "[racial epithet/gay slur/nationalistic slur/etc.]! <complain complain>" is similar: 75 years ago maybe you'd have had people up in arms over that, but these days nobody will even notice.

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I'm sure inside those brackets there are plenty of things I could say that wouldn't feel offensive to me, or even many of the people I'm around in the real world, but if I care about making my point without it instantly becoming about how I made my point, then I'm probably not going to start my comment off with something completely irrelevant to my point that runs a non-trivial chance of offending someone who reads it.

Thanks for the link. I've read it, and all I can say is that, in my highly unqualified opinion, the two things seem to be treated with enough overlap that we'd be, at best, quibbling, at least relative to how much I care about the distinction, if nothing else. That said, for someone with extensive formal training in the subject, I can also see how the distinction would make all the difference. The devil being in the details, and all.

So my response, then, is this:

You originally took issue with it being about obscenity, and not hard-core pornography (which seems to be the more common view, correct or not). Stating that it's about obscenity, not pornography, does not end an argument. And, when you cite the decision, please offer your own words supporting your own interpretation.

You started out with an unreasoned, unsupported correction to his comment. I accept that you're trying to support it by citing Jacobellis, which may be sufficient in a room full of lawyers, but I don't think it is here.

I'm completely open to being convinced on this, but you're probably going to have to do some actual convincing for that to happen.

And while you're at it, if you think Wikipedia's wrong and can so demonstrate, please go correct it, and add your reasoning to the Talk page.

1. His constituents were terrified of the Soviet space program dropping something nasty on their heads, and didn't want to be behind the curve in that arena. 2. His assassination effectively canonized the program. (I think he'd argue my terming that an "advantage.") Cutting it after his death would have been political suicide. Where space exploration often has the same inherent challenge as nuclear power–specifically that the length of any serious endeavor will span several presidents, congresses, senates, to say nothing of economic cycles, (see CxP)–the Apollo program, despite being 2.2% of all federal outlays, had broad support.

There were numerous other factors, but I think those two played a big part in its success.

And personally speaking, just last night I signed in to the dashboard, saw the ads, and thought to myself, "So it's come to this: I have to choose between being monetized by ads, or by rootkits. Great."

I agree, but I also factor my time, patience, stress levels, and other things into the cost. (That said, I'm probably more bothered by this stuff than most, so my costs are not your costs.)

Where I disagree is that I think big production stuff can happen without ad dollars, but without data to support it, I'm just supposing.

And I also think that, on a per-dollar basis, we might even wind up paying less. Similarly suppositional, but I think we underestimate the amount of ad budgets baked into products we'd buy either way, the amount of worthless junk we pay for–either directly, or indirectly–but wouldn't, if our collective view of things was a bit more grounded and mature, and so on.

And, yeah, a trojan horse in the shape of shiny phones has certainly done wonders for that. All I can think is that perhaps desktop apps being more the domain of earlier adopters and business users, at least relative to phone sales, must be part of it.

That said, developers were doing it before iOS had an ad network, and before Android, so one could take the good-faith assumption that they were more concerned about developers making bad, annoying ads that would spoil it for everyone else (I vaguely remember Apple making some comments about that at the time), and I'm sure Google didn't want someone besides them controlling how things were presented and doing a bad job of it.

I assume that everyone is doing what they think is in their own best interest.

I'm just not sure consumers are, on balance, right in their assumptions.

And I don't even necessarily see ad-supported free versions as the worst option. A lot of developers find the paid version winds up getting them far more revenue, and from better customers, which magnifies the gains. So if that's a good gateway for them, great, and if that's a good filter by which to learn that they should ditch the free version, even better.

I don't love it. I think a truly enlightened society would look for better ways to connect customers with the products they'd enjoy and find value in, but having an ad-supported version plus a paid version, seems to be a step in the right direction. One could argue that's what's being done by networks who broadcast their shows for free and sell them on iTunes/Amazon, but I'd like it if: they came out at the same time, and if it wasn't clear the ad-supported model is largely necessary because most of their products are garbage, and they rely on the big hits to subsidize their general lack of taste. (Same goes for the music industry.)

Now, I've made donations to sites that disable the ads for donors, and I get why they do that. I don't judge the guys who see an ad-supported version as their only potential way of gaining some traction (though I might not always agree with that assessment). They're scrappy, and doing what they have to.

What I think really drives me nuts is this frantic, 90s-like gold rush push for the ability to corner the market on every square inch at which eyeballs point, with the aim towards placing corporate sponsorship there. And hey, for the square-inches that aren't digital, let's put glasses between your eyes and it!

(Don't get me wrong, wearable displays will be massively useful, and massively 'disruptive,' to use the local dialect, but I'd just as soon get mine from someone who wants to make a really good one, and sell it to me for a profit, and then carry on designing the next, even better one, as opposed to spending most of their time thinking about how to monetize my life even more. But that's probably just me.)

Photoshop is an interesting example to me, because I count Photoshop as another model that has had to change with the times: it used to be for pure professionals only, at a time when professionals often worked for companies that bought their licenses. Like the sports tickets of software. Crazy expensive, but if you did it as a full-time job, it was more than easily absorbed. After all, it required expensive (and technically challenging) hardware to run it on, so that barrier was already crossed by potential customers.

Today, everyone's a designer. Alright, that's not a fair assessment, but the number of people who have design skills–ranging from minor editing to some real mind-blowing stuff–but don't depend on them to feed their family, is astonishingly high compared to just a couple of decades ago. People who never consider themselves graphic artists find a lot of utility value in Photoshop, or one of its offshoots.

So its old price point, relative to everything else, just doesn't make sense if broad adoption is their goal, unless they're totally happy to capture just the pure pro crowd, who, for perspective, can run it quite handily on hardware that costs what a night or two in a mid-grade hotel in any big city does. The technical and cost barriers have fallen dramatically.

So that's changing.

Now, consider if Photoshop were ad-supported, and had been so for long enough to where designers grew up with that being the new normal.

Then, imagine someone comes out with an ad-free image-editing program, with no ads, that costs a reasonable amount. In some ways, better than Photoshop, in other ways, probably not as specialized, not as built-out, but pretty solid.

I think there's a market there for the taking.

Adobe's trying to strike that balance, and I'm not here to say whether or not they're doing a good job at it with their current approach (that's a much longer post and I doubt my ability to think about it as clearly as I believe I can other segments of the industry), but my point is that well-made products at a reasonable price is something I still want to believe there's a huge market for.

And we tend to underestimate it because of all the sub-par stuff, our conditioning to which we don't even realize.

I'd like to think that enough humanity still has the innate thoughtfulness to be slightly skeptical when being pitched to trade hours of their life (that is, the money they earned by working) for a given product, to provide a market for it.

And if we've all reached the point where we'll happily trade our time, attention spans, compromise our abilities to focus and concentrate, and reveal a wealth of personal data so as to pay a bit less, well, then we get what we deserve. But that's probably outside the scope of this particular comment.

Edit: Fixed a typo.