Huh? Are you nuts? It might be just me, but there's this bit about "cruel and unusual punishment" in that old document... it's called the "Bill of Rights". Ever heard of it?
I've never cared too much about this. Maybe that's because I'm not a criminal trying to get away with something. Hm.
Lemme guess, registered Republican? Go back to listening to Hannity and let grownups run the country for a change.
The fosil layer can be replicated in a VERY short amount of time, think about it, the bones if they were sitting in the open air for even thousands of years, not packed in by dirt, would probably not fosilize. Remember grade school science class, a jar of junk and dirt and water, to see how the layers land... that took 5 minutes.
What the hell kind of fucked up ideas about God do you have to have to think that God would put all this proof into the world that disproves the story in the bible? Can't you just accept that it might have been an allegory (or did Solomon's wife had teeth made out of sheep and a fortified tower for a neck)?
If you were meaning to post the article as an example of how one can be both religious and a (non-ID believing crackpot) scientist I completely agree. If you were posting the article to show that ID proponents (e.g, those "who subscribe to a different theory") can be educated I'd point you to this quote:
"The big theories of science - like evolution and Big Bang cosmology - tend to become encrusted with all kinds of religious and scientific barnacles. But these should be scraped off to let the theories do what they are good at doing - and no more. For the Christian, God can bring about his intentions any way he chooses, and all that scientists can do is try to describe how he did it."
I have no problem with religious people who can see that science and religion are trying to do different things and answer different questions. The quote above is a great example of that. Intellegent Design as a science, however, is the equivalent of the flat earth theory. It's not science and we do a disservice to science to elevate it to the level of an equal argument with real scientific theory.
I think you may have misread the original post. You say:
"I'm all for informing the parent, and letting the parents of the child parent the frickin' child. But what he was doing was refusing to sell games to kids (it was implied the parents weren't there)."
but in the original post it reads:
"time after time, parent or grandparent would walk up to my counter buying GTA for a kid who was in his early teens or even younger"
Notice the word "armed". I can be armed as well. I can put a "trespassers will be shot" notice on my fence and mean it. Physical property is property not because the government says so, but because it can be defended.
Do you live in Texas? I live in Boston and if I shot someone for trespassing I'd end up in jail. Even if I could do that at some point I'll face a gang that I can't defeat and I'll either have to rely on some larger force (the government) for help or lose my property. I don't think its interesting to distinguish between personal and governmental force as I tend to see the later just as an extension of the former. My key point (and I think we agree here) is that property is property because someone claimed it and people who would take it are discouraged by the threat of force.
Yet I can take intellectual property from someone else without being stopped. There, I just did it! Hey, I did it again! Whoops, there it goes! You see, while you can protect the media that the information is on, you cannot protect the information itself without the application of coercive government enforcement.
You're correct that I can't protect intellectual property without the application of government enforcement. I'd argue, however, that the same is true for physical property.
That's not to say I don't think we've gone to far in protecting intellectual property. My point is only that we have the laws we have because we thing there's some benefit in granting a monopoly on intellectual property. You win the argument for lessening or removing restrictions on the use of intellectual property by showing the benefits society gets from removing those restrictions. However, any argument based on the premise that intellectual and physical property are different is just incorrect.
As an example, imagine that I invented a device that made it as easy to copy a physical object as it is today to copy software. Companies that made money from selling physical property would be asking for the same sorts of protections we currently give to intellectual property and society would have to balance the benefits of free physical property and restricted physical property.
If you can fence it, box it, stick it in your pocket, or lock it, then it's almost certainly property. IP doesn't have any material bounderies, and is as artificial a property as frequencies in the radio spectrum. It takes an act of government to create intellectual property.
If a gang of armed thugs breaks into your locked house (property) you might call the police to get them to go away. In that case an act of government (laws about breaking and entering or trespassing) would be required to protect your physical property. We have laws about breaking and entering and trespassing because we thing keeping unwanted people outside of your house is important.
Intellectual property is similarly protected by an act of government because we think there's value in granting people a limited monopoly on ideas. We may disagree with the length of the monopoly or even the need for its existence but its disingenuous to pretend that there's a difference between physical and intellectual property. They are both property because if you try and take them from someone a you'll be stopped.
Just a guess but if Sun were to open Solaris they could still make money selling hardware to run it on, professional services to get it to do what you want, or support for when it breaks. Adobe would probably be limited to selling Photoshop training and support so its a much less attractive option.
I'm an asshole? You just got through telling me I should take crappy software that doesn't do what I want and I damn well better like it. They you said people like me make you sick. You're idea of giving me a present is to saddle me with crap that I don't want and call me a bad person when I point it out. Gifts like that aren't something I need.
Susie, I am sorry we were not able to provide you a pony for Christmas. Many people find a dead rat a far superior alternative though. I realize that those people may be more motivated then you, apparently they are able to learn how to have fun with a dead rat without too much trouble and sing it's praises non stop after they have.
As someone who bothered to look at the rest of the quote that you not only selectivly quoted but misinterpreted allow me to correct you.
"You have asked for my views on the provision of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's counterintelligence bill that establishes a procedure for court orders approving physical searches conducted in the United States for foreign intelligence purposes.
At the outset, let me emphasize two very important points. First, the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the President has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General.
<b>Second, the Administration and the Attorney General support, in principle, legislation establishing judicial warrant procedures under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for physical searches undertaken for intelligence purposes.</b> However, whether specific legislation on this subject is desirable for the practical benefits it might add to intelligence collection, or undesirable as too much of a restriction on the President's authority to collect intelligence necessary for the national security, depends on how the legislation is crafted."
He concludes:
"As I stated earlier, we believe that existing directives that regulate the basis for seeking foreign intelligence search authority and the procedures to be followed satisfy all Constitutional requirements. Nevertheless, <b>I reiterate the Administration's willingness to support appropriate legislation that does not restrict the President's ability to collect foreign intelligence necessary for the national security. We need to strike a balance that sacrifices neither our security nor our civil liberties.</b>"
So intead of going out and conducting illegal warrentless searches (Bush) Gorelick was asking Congress to expand FISA to allow these sorts of searches. While I don't agree with Gorelick or Bush that allowing the President to conduct warrentless searches is consistent with the rest of the constition at least Gorelick was following the rules and trying to work within our system of checks and balances.
"The best system ever should be as easy as possible for #1 out of the box, but need to be very easily configurable to whatever complex system #3 and #4 need."
Unless you are designing and OS for the $100 laptop or one that's specifically targeted at complete computer novices there's really no point in testing users with absolutely no computer experience.
Think about the type of person most likely to use a Unix OS. I'd bet that the large majority of those users have previous experience with other operating systems (#2), and most of them with Windows. Thus, it probably makes the most sense to test users with prior Windows experience followed by (if the study is large enough) users of OSX and Linux/Other Unix-Like OS's in rough proportion to their market share. You may want to give added weight to Linux or other Unix users if data shows that users are more likely to switch between distros than between Windows and Unix.
The "usability" of a system is a property that only exists in the context of a group of users. To further complicate things, optimizing usability for one group of users may decrease the usability for other types of users (adding Clippy to help complete novices frustrates and annoys average and power users). Unless you are testing the types of users most likely to use your software you'll optimize for the wrong types of users and make less usable software than you had before.
Human factors is a great choice for people who are interested in technology but don't want to program. Its what I'm doing now (English Major, CS Minor) and balances my interest in technology and people and my hatred of math perfectly. If you're interested I'd consider minoring in CS and majoring or at least taking a lot of courses in psychology and getting a basic grounding in design. Library science is also useful for its focus on making it easy to browse and search through large amounts of information.
One of the common misconceptions when designing for accessibility is that it creates a boring or limited design. This article gives the case study of the OXO Good Grips as an example of how designing for accessibility can actually create a superior product. Its an interesting read and I hope it helps you.
I ran into the exact same problems recently. At work I run Windows XP and MS Office. I got a mac for home and figured that OpenOffice would allow me to work from home without spending $200+ on Word.
I'll admit that I'm a pretty heavy word user (embedded images, embedded Visio diagrams, heavy use of styles to allow easy changes to document formatting) but I was willing to make some minor changes to my routine in order to move seamlessly back and forth between MS Office and OpenOffice.
I took one of the simpler files I had and opened it up in OpenOffice just to see if it worked. I was impressed that a lot of the styles and the table of contents were still intact. My images were a little screwy but nothing I couldn't fix pretty quick. The major problem was that the headers and footers had grown to enourmous proportions during the conversion and when I tried to resize them OpenOffice just crashed.
I'll try again in a few releases to see if things are better but for now for what I need OpenOffice's word processor just isn't ready for primetime. I did find that the presentation and spreadsheet tools met pretty much all of my limited needs. Hopefully the word processor will improve with time.
My issue with IBM's "real things" approach is that by seeking to create direct parallels between real objects and their electronic counterparts they manage to take all of the disadvantages of those real objects and move them into the electronic world.
Take the real CD. You have to open the cover of the CD in order to view track information. The application now doubles in size. This doesn't seem like the best way to accomplish this common task.
When designing software that people will use metaphors are useful but they have to be loose enough that they give users a good indication of their behavior but don't create unrealistic expectations or map so tightly they sacrifice usability for metaphor. The desktop example is a good example of this. It works in a similar way to my real desktop in that I can keep things I'd like to access quickly right in front of me. However I can't create little piles of things on my computer desktop and I can't access other peoples desks (networked computers) from my physical desktop. While I agree with your point of an object setting reasonable expectations of its behaviour through its interface I think IBM's model goes too far and creates usability hurdles in order to maintain a direct mapping to a physical device.
In the case of designing a physical device (like what the poster is asking about) the goal of creating an interface that sets expectations through its design is a good one. This could be done through a good layout of the buttons on the device, good iconography and, as others have mentioned, optimizing for a users common tasks.
Downloading credit card numbers in just noviolent resistance against credit card companies. Hotwiring cars is just nonviolent resistance against those bastards at Ford.
If you take something that doesn't belong to you its stealing. It was true when you were 5 and its still true today no matter how much you'd like to justify it.
Sounds interesting. You might also want to check out The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski. He talks about the evolution of the paperclip, fork, and zipper amongst other things. I read it last summer and its an interesting read.
My summer reading list is pretty much things I've bought and neglected this spring. I still have to get through
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
Dante's Inferno (the new Pinsky translation which I hear is really good)
While its good to see Jakob Nielsen not just recommending Mosaic-era web pages this doesn't really seem different from anything he's written about online or published in the last few years. As an information architect I've read a lot of Nielsen and just see him as way to strict. Not all web pages have the sole purpose of efficiently distributing content. For a lot websites (like www.pepsi.com) reinforcing the companies brand is the primary goal and just about every website has it as a strong second or third.
Usability experts and designers like Donald Norman, Alan Cooper, and Bruce Tognazzini seem to me to be a lot more realistic in their mixing of user goals and business goals. If the business goals don't get met there is no company to meet the users goals. I wish Jakob would stop issuing these outdated proclamations ("If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.") and start taking a more realistic view of what it takes to get a site to achieve both the users and the businesses goals.
Not a marketing person myself but have worked with plenty.
The difference here is that online and offline advertising are measured by two different standards. In online advertising the measurement criteria is clickthrough. In other words your ad is only as successful when it intices people to directly respond to this. Since most people have realized that clicking on an ad will take them away from the task at hand there are really good reasons why they don't click and thus clickthrough rates are currently hovering at about.5% for a successful campaign. Offline advertising (with the exception of direct mail and telemarketing) is primaraly brand building. As was mentioned in a previous post the real reason Coke paid millions for superbowl commercials is not so that you will leave your house and buy a Coke but so when you are in a restuarant and looking for a soft drink the first name that pops to mind is Coke. Branding is a tricky thing to measure as it is indirect and requires getting out and talking to people and making some statistical leaps in order to prove your ad worked.
The great promise of direct response advertising was that it was supposed to eliminate this mess and give advertisers a concrete way to determine if their campaign was a success or if they should fire their agency.
As current web advertising schemes are dying companies are trying different ways to make them work. Some of the larger companies are starting to make web advertising more about branding than about direct response. We'll see if it works.
As for this instance it could work. The context is a game and previous games (You Don't Know Jack, etc...) seem to not be too bothered by this. I would imagine that while this might work in a game it would fail on a site where people wanted information or transactions.
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Huh? Are you nuts? It might be just me, but there's this bit about "cruel and unusual punishment" in that old document... it's called the "Bill of Rights". Ever heard of it?
I've never cared too much about this. Maybe that's because I'm not a criminal trying to get away with something. Hm.
Lemme guess, registered Republican? Go back to listening to Hannity and let grownups run the country for a change.
The fosil layer can be replicated in a VERY short amount of time, think about it, the bones if they were sitting in the open air for even thousands of years, not packed in by dirt, would probably not fosilize. Remember grade school science class, a jar of junk and dirt and water, to see how the layers land... that took 5 minutes.
What the hell kind of fucked up ideas about God do you have to have to think that God would put all this proof into the world that disproves the story in the bible? Can't you just accept that it might have been an allegory (or did Solomon's wife had teeth made out of sheep and a fortified tower for a neck)?
If you were meaning to post the article as an example of how one can be both religious and a (non-ID believing crackpot) scientist I completely agree. If you were posting the article to show that ID proponents (e.g, those "who subscribe to a different theory") can be educated I'd point you to this quote:
"The big theories of science - like evolution and Big Bang cosmology - tend to become encrusted with all kinds of religious and scientific barnacles. But these should be scraped off to let the theories do what they are good at doing - and no more. For the Christian, God can bring about his intentions any way he chooses, and all that scientists can do is try to describe how he did it."
I have no problem with religious people who can see that science and religion are trying to do different things and answer different questions. The quote above is a great example of that. Intellegent Design as a science, however, is the equivalent of the flat earth theory. It's not science and we do a disservice to science to elevate it to the level of an equal argument with real scientific theory.
I think you may have misread the original post. You say:
"I'm all for informing the parent, and letting the parents of the child parent the frickin' child. But what he was doing was refusing to sell games to kids (it was implied the parents weren't there)."
but in the original post it reads:
"time after time, parent or grandparent would walk up to my counter buying GTA for a kid who was in his early teens or even younger"
I think we may all be in violent agreement.
Exactly. I read this as "Sony sold 8 million UMD's [to Walmart and other retailers who can't even give them away]"
Notice the word "armed". I can be armed as well. I can put a "trespassers will be shot" notice on my fence and mean it. Physical property is property not because the government says so, but because it can be defended.
Do you live in Texas? I live in Boston and if I shot someone for trespassing I'd end up in jail. Even if I could do that at some point I'll face a gang that I can't defeat and I'll either have to rely on some larger force (the government) for help or lose my property. I don't think its interesting to distinguish between personal and governmental force as I tend to see the later just as an extension of the former. My key point (and I think we agree here) is that property is property because someone claimed it and people who would take it are discouraged by the threat of force.
Yet I can take intellectual property from someone else without being stopped. There, I just did it! Hey, I did it again! Whoops, there it goes! You see, while you can protect the media that the information is on, you cannot protect the information itself without the application of coercive government enforcement.
You're correct that I can't protect intellectual property without the application of government enforcement. I'd argue, however, that the same is true for physical property.
That's not to say I don't think we've gone to far in protecting intellectual property. My point is only that we have the laws we have because we thing there's some benefit in granting a monopoly on intellectual property. You win the argument for lessening or removing restrictions on the use of intellectual property by showing the benefits society gets from removing those restrictions. However, any argument based on the premise that intellectual and physical property are different is just incorrect.
As an example, imagine that I invented a device that made it as easy to copy a physical object as it is today to copy software. Companies that made money from selling physical property would be asking for the same sorts of protections we currently give to intellectual property and society would have to balance the benefits of free physical property and restricted physical property.
If you can fence it, box it, stick it in your pocket, or lock it, then it's almost certainly property. IP doesn't have any material bounderies, and is as artificial a property as frequencies in the radio spectrum. It takes an act of government to create intellectual property.
If a gang of armed thugs breaks into your locked house (property) you might call the police to get them to go away. In that case an act of government (laws about breaking and entering or trespassing) would be required to protect your physical property. We have laws about breaking and entering and trespassing because we thing keeping unwanted people outside of your house is important.
Intellectual property is similarly protected by an act of government because we think there's value in granting people a limited monopoly on ideas. We may disagree with the length of the monopoly or even the need for its existence but its disingenuous to pretend that there's a difference between physical and intellectual property. They are both property because if you try and take them from someone a you'll be stopped.
Just a guess but if Sun were to open Solaris they could still make money selling hardware to run it on, professional services to get it to do what you want, or support for when it breaks. Adobe would probably be limited to selling Photoshop training and support so its a much less attractive option.
I'm amazed at how worked up you get over software licensing. Seek professional help. Seriously.
I'm an asshole? You just got through telling me I should take crappy software that doesn't do what I want and I damn well better like it. They you said people like me make you sick. You're idea of giving me a present is to saddle me with crap that I don't want and call me a bad person when I point it out. Gifts like that aren't something I need.
Susie, I am sorry we were not able to provide you a pony for Christmas. Many people find a dead rat a far superior alternative though. I realize that those people may be more motivated then you, apparently they are able to learn how to have fun with a dead rat without too much trouble and sing it's praises non stop after they have.
As someone who bothered to look at the rest of the quote that you not only selectivly quoted but misinterpreted allow me to correct you.
"You have asked for my views on the provision of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's counterintelligence bill that establishes a procedure for court orders approving physical searches conducted in the United States for foreign intelligence purposes.
At the outset, let me emphasize two very important points. First, the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the President has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General.
<b>Second, the Administration and the Attorney General support, in principle, legislation establishing judicial warrant procedures under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for physical searches undertaken for intelligence purposes.</b> However, whether specific legislation on this subject is desirable for the practical benefits it might add to intelligence collection, or undesirable as too much of a restriction on the President's authority to collect intelligence necessary for the national security, depends on how the legislation is crafted."
He concludes:
"As I stated earlier, we believe that existing directives that regulate the basis for seeking foreign intelligence search authority and the procedures to be followed satisfy all Constitutional requirements. Nevertheless, <b>I reiterate the Administration's willingness to support appropriate legislation that does not restrict the President's ability to collect foreign intelligence necessary for the national security. We need to strike a balance that sacrifices neither our security nor our civil liberties.</b>"
So intead of going out and conducting illegal warrentless searches (Bush) Gorelick was asking Congress to expand FISA to allow these sorts of searches. While I don't agree with Gorelick or Bush that allowing the President to conduct warrentless searches is consistent with the rest of the constition at least Gorelick was following the rules and trying to work within our system of checks and balances.
"The best system ever should be as easy as possible for #1 out of the box, but need to be very easily configurable to whatever complex system #3 and #4 need."
Unless you are designing and OS for the $100 laptop or one that's specifically targeted at complete computer novices there's really no point in testing users with absolutely no computer experience.
Think about the type of person most likely to use a Unix OS. I'd bet that the large majority of those users have previous experience with other operating systems (#2), and most of them with Windows. Thus, it probably makes the most sense to test users with prior Windows experience followed by (if the study is large enough) users of OSX and Linux/Other Unix-Like OS's in rough proportion to their market share. You may want to give added weight to Linux or other Unix users if data shows that users are more likely to switch between distros than between Windows and Unix.
The "usability" of a system is a property that only exists in the context of a group of users. To further complicate things, optimizing usability for one group of users may decrease the usability for other types of users (adding Clippy to help complete novices frustrates and annoys average and power users). Unless you are testing the types of users most likely to use your software you'll optimize for the wrong types of users and make less usable software than you had before.
Human factors is a great choice for people who are interested in technology but don't want to program. Its what I'm doing now (English Major, CS Minor) and balances my interest in technology and people and my hatred of math perfectly. If you're interested I'd consider minoring in CS and majoring or at least taking a lot of courses in psychology and getting a basic grounding in design. Library science is also useful for its focus on making it easy to browse and search through large amounts of information.
One of the common misconceptions when designing for accessibility is that it creates a boring or limited design. This article gives the case study of the OXO Good Grips as an example of how designing for accessibility can actually create a superior product. Its an interesting read and I hope it helps you.
I ran into the exact same problems recently. At work I run Windows XP and MS Office. I got a mac for home and figured that OpenOffice would allow me to work from home without spending $200+ on Word.
I'll admit that I'm a pretty heavy word user (embedded images, embedded Visio diagrams, heavy use of styles to allow easy changes to document formatting) but I was willing to make some minor changes to my routine in order to move seamlessly back and forth between MS Office and OpenOffice.
I took one of the simpler files I had and opened it up in OpenOffice just to see if it worked. I was impressed that a lot of the styles and the table of contents were still intact. My images were a little screwy but nothing I couldn't fix pretty quick. The major problem was that the headers and footers had grown to enourmous proportions during the conversion and when I tried to resize them OpenOffice just crashed.
I'll try again in a few releases to see if things are better but for now for what I need OpenOffice's word processor just isn't ready for primetime. I did find that the presentation and spreadsheet tools met pretty much all of my limited needs. Hopefully the word processor will improve with time.
My issue with IBM's "real things" approach is that by seeking to create direct parallels between real objects and their electronic counterparts they manage to take all of the disadvantages of those real objects and move them into the electronic world.
Take the real CD. You have to open the cover of the CD in order to view track information. The application now doubles in size. This doesn't seem like the best way to accomplish this common task.
When designing software that people will use metaphors are useful but they have to be loose enough that they give users a good indication of their behavior but don't create unrealistic expectations or map so tightly they sacrifice usability for metaphor. The desktop example is a good example of this. It works in a similar way to my real desktop in that I can keep things I'd like to access quickly right in front of me. However I can't create little piles of things on my computer desktop and I can't access other peoples desks (networked computers) from my physical desktop. While I agree with your point of an object setting reasonable expectations of its behaviour through its interface I think IBM's model goes too far and creates usability hurdles in order to maintain a direct mapping to a physical device.
In the case of designing a physical device (like what the poster is asking about) the goal of creating an interface that sets expectations through its design is a good one. This could be done through a good layout of the buttons on the device, good iconography and, as others have mentioned, optimizing for a users common tasks.
Downloading credit card numbers in just noviolent resistance against credit card companies. Hotwiring cars is just nonviolent resistance against those bastards at Ford.
If you take something that doesn't belong to you its stealing. It was true when you were 5 and its still true today no matter how much you'd like to justify it.
Sounds interesting. You might also want to check out The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski. He talks about the evolution of the paperclip, fork, and zipper amongst other things. I read it last summer and its an interesting read.
My summer reading list is pretty much things I've bought and neglected this spring. I still have to get through
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
Dante's Inferno (the new Pinsky translation which I hear is really good)
and
Don Quixote
While its good to see Jakob Nielsen not just recommending Mosaic-era web pages this doesn't really seem different from anything he's written about online or published in the last few years. As an information architect I've read a lot of Nielsen and just see him as way to strict. Not all web pages have the sole purpose of efficiently distributing content. For a lot websites (like www.pepsi.com) reinforcing the companies brand is the primary goal and just about every website has it as a strong second or third.
Usability experts and designers like Donald Norman, Alan Cooper, and Bruce Tognazzini seem to me to be a lot more realistic in their mixing of user goals and business goals. If the business goals don't get met there is no company to meet the users goals. I wish Jakob would stop issuing these outdated proclamations ("If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.") and start taking a more realistic view of what it takes to get a site to achieve both the users and the businesses goals.
Not a marketing person myself but have worked with plenty.
.5% for a successful campaign. Offline advertising (with the exception of direct mail and telemarketing) is primaraly brand building. As was mentioned in a previous post the real reason Coke paid millions for superbowl commercials is not so that you will leave your house and buy a Coke but so when you are in a restuarant and looking for a soft drink the first name that pops to mind is Coke. Branding is a tricky thing to measure as it is indirect and requires getting out and talking to people and making some statistical leaps in order to prove your ad worked.
The difference here is that online and offline advertising are measured by two different standards. In online advertising the measurement criteria is clickthrough. In other words your ad is only as successful when it intices people to directly respond to this. Since most people have realized that clicking on an ad will take them away from the task at hand there are really good reasons why they don't click and thus clickthrough rates are currently hovering at about
The great promise of direct response advertising was that it was supposed to eliminate this mess and give advertisers a concrete way to determine if their campaign was a success or if they should fire their agency.
As current web advertising schemes are dying companies are trying different ways to make them work. Some of the larger companies are starting to make web advertising more about branding than about direct response. We'll see if it works.
As for this instance it could work. The context is a game and previous games (You Don't Know Jack, etc...) seem to not be too bothered by this. I would imagine that while this might work in a game it would fail on a site where people wanted information or transactions.