No shortage of challenging/stimulating environments out there for a variety of skills. Environments clearly matter too. It's more interesting to assess what conditions produce well-adjusted members of society who respond well to being pushed beyond their limits. Can we build uncommon resiliency in people without stunting other aspects?
It might be a bug, but the networksolutions.com checkout process also acts opportunistically when you add a domain to a new account. It will ask if you want to 'auto-renew the purchased domains AND all others you previously purchased'. If you change the setting to 'don't auto-renew' and then make a validation error (miss the terms of service checkbox), it will keep state for all other fields, but magically the auto-renew value switches back to the default.
Clever idea but I think the ad space is better utilized delivering the message as legibly as possible within that space. "Abused? Call NNN-NNN." This would increase effective range, making it harder for the abuser to evade. You can argue that it makes it easier to evade, but in a busy subway, or other closed environs, legibility is hard to suppress. They can also mix and match font and background colors to make it harder for the abuser to detect Banner patterns for avoidance. It would also be smart if the campaign could pseudo-randomize display spots, again making it harder to consciously evade the message.
If we had to go with the lenticular approach, they could also experiment with sound frequencies that kids are sensitive to, but adults would struggle with. That could be a cool hailing beacon to couple with the display.
There is something therapeutic about this process, for the individual and the communities they influence. Sharing emotions and wisdom emphatically clearly resonates with the general populace.
Speaking from experience because we've launched an iPhone app called Quipio that lets people create and share such quotes in seconds (possibly this author's worst nightmare).
We've seen it grow pretty dramatically in the first three weeks: 42K quotes have been created, 115K+ shares. 70K+ downloads on the app store. There is no question that people reveal their emotional states through them. Makes for an interesting graph.
Majorly spotty. My own service is only sporadically able to share. First advertising.twitter.com went down, then API hooks seem to get shaky and looks like the site wobbled for a while and now might be down. Wasn't even able to retweet from status.twitter.com ...
While marketing/buzz might be one of the motivations, another factor could simply be Brin wanting a first-hand look at what every day, quick to quip, New Yorkers think of his new accoutrement. This research might be something he could delegate to others, but I respect that he doesn't.
