omd

Yeah, well deceiving 400 million people will do that to a guy.

Maybe it's from working on the Internet too much, reading about innovation, collaboration, open source, etc, but somehow I get the feeling the oil industry needs to evolve much like the old media was forced to. I bet if BP used crowdsourcing instead of asking the "old school engineers" for ideas, some smart 14-year-old somewhere would have thought of a better plan than to stuff the hole with golf balls.

I was in the exact same situation years ago after starting a company with a longtime friend. The company was growing like crazy, but then my partner wanted to slow it down to spend more time with his family. Everyone I talked to (an investor, lawyer, friends) agreed he was holding the company back and should leave, but it wouldn't be easy. It would have been difficult and costly because he was a shareholder as well as one of the lead technicians.

Finally, someone explained it to me from a different perspective: If my partner didn't want to leave then I was the one with the problem, not him. Instead of looking at what I was missing by him being there (a fact I couldn't get around), I should look at what I could be doing on my own without him. I talked to my partner about it and we agreed I would leave and keep some of my shares instead of a buy-out which the company couldn't afford at the time.

8 years later he's still running the company the way it was after I left. I sold my shares to a new partner for a price that was many times what I would have received if I was bought out when I left. In the past years I've been able to build a company like I envisioned the first time, sold it and am now in the process of repeating that for a second time.

Looking back I've come much further than I would have if I stayed at the company. My former partner found the perfect balance between his company and his family life, and we've been closer friends for the past years than we had been before working together.

>As it stands, they should append this to the end:

>"but the architecture of our site lets Amazon log it."

This is the best suggestion yet. Of course there are numerous hacks possible to make it more secure, but each one at the cost of user experience. DDG has so many things going for it, I don't think for the majority of users security is at the top of their list.

I love the design! The first thing I thought of was that this would be a great gift for my sister who just bought a house and loves gardening. Maybe you could add a "Buy as a gift" option or sell gift cards?

It's true. I built the website for my brother's company 6 years ago and it looks, well, 6 years old. Even so his company gets 80% of new clients through the website. He always asks people why they chose him. Most say because they felt it looked like a professional company compared to the "flashy" companies that have more modern websites. I hate how it looks and he's embarrassed to refer people to it, but as long as it works we don't want to touch it.

Through the years we've watched the competition go through one design after another and try all kinds of SEO, but our crappy, framed, obtrusive javascript website still outranks them. The only downside is the constant calls we get from SEO and design firms offering to "help us out".

Google cache: http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:h1M0xdV67_EJ:pastebin.co...

That's true for immigrants that came to the U.S. for economical reasons, but don't forget the refugees that fled their country because of war or seeking political asylum.

I talk to a lot of them through my job, and almost all of them would prefer to return to their country if it were safe to do so. That is one reason you see so many Chinese going back.