Thanks to asshats abusing their religious privileges, that's where we are today. Many places do require businesses offering a service to not discriminate based on personal preference.

If that Muslim baker makes Buddha cakes and Jesus cakes on request, yes....so he should limit his creativity across the board or not at all....or work in his mosque bakery.

If they make made to order pro choice cakes, yes, they should make made to order anti choice cakes.

If they make on request cakes for other notable figures, no....but I would expect Hitler to look pretty horrible.

Easy solution here, stop doing made to order cakes. Offer only what you're comfortable making, not requests, not personalized...have a catalog. Once you offer to make what the customer requests, you give up your right to be offended by it, for cash.

Edit: Keep in mind, this is often about being offended not by what they're asked to make, but who the customer is. Not rainbow wedding cakes with leather clad grooms and cocks everywhere, but fancy white cakes with flowers for a gay wedding.
Side note, Jews can't refuse service in their public establishments to any German, can they, and they have a much better reason to do so.

I'm going to be honest here.

I'm really tired of these. I've just lost my tolerance for negativity. The whole internet is one big Negafest. Whining and complaining about everything. Life is so much more. (I'm also guilty of being negative on the internet.) it's a place people come to fling poo in order to make themselves feel better because of all the crap in RL, a virtual retreat instead of just improving their lives.

Also, I'm just tired of people complaining about how movies aren't the way "the viewer would have done it." I mean lets also be honest about this. You can't mind-read everything and create movies based on a committee of EVERYONE. People need to learn how to watch and listen and appreciate someone Else's creativity.

Rant ended.. I feel better (irony complete)

Clearly the military is getting creative with their anti-air defense systems. Sadly, the new ordinance failed to engage the target and instead crashed into the ocean. The recovery operation was very speedy though.

"I mainly do it for the creative outlet it offers me"

My pretentiousness meter just went off the scale. You're an uber driver... there's no "creative outlet" here. You are literally a stop-gap until the law allows them to use automated vehicles.

Me too! Diamond Monster 3D. I remember GLquake and QuakeWorld. Wow. And then a Creative Labs 3D Blaster and on. http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/toys.html for my history.

Ha!
Yeah...if I was more creative and less lazy, I would put together a newt in a Dutch boy paint outfit or something.
What I use is my sweet (now deceased) golden retriever/lab puppy getting blown back by my neighbor's huge dog's hurricane bark.
Maybe someday I'll get off my ass and change it.

If you are not in the 1% you gotta get creative.

Eh, I dunno. Neat overall, and since it's the opening sequence it can probably be forgiven to an extent, but there was too much self-indulgent tech wanking going on IMO. I also worry that there is a little too much first person shooter going on in my space shooter. While it was very cool in the previous Wing Commander games that you could go to different areas of the ship and talk to the crew between missions, all you had to do to get around was click on doors and people. Actually having to walk your character around a big ship to activate the cut scenes is going to get old unless they find creative ways to keep it fresh. We will see. I just worry there is a lack of focus on core gameplay in favor of putting features in there just because they can. A lack of a focused vision and direction seems like it's the achilles heal of the whole Star Citizen project.

If you grow and bake your own, then you know exactly what's in them. That's about to be legal here in California.
This story was about being at least twice removed from those processes with zero information about what he took or even who made it. That's insane, the kind of insane I abandoned in my early 20's.

I also think this is likely creative writing and not recall.

LOL -- even if I somewhat agree with @ant, too.

Lucas maybe doesn't get enough credit for being a genius, Tolkien-esque "world creator".

Sure seems like he was at his best when he took that creative genius and paired it up with other people (NOT yes-men) to cover screenwriting duties (anything beyond broad-strokes, particularly dialog), directing, and probably casting etc. also. Given that, I breathed a sigh of relief when he sold to Disney. Star Wars wasn't going anywhere but down with him at the helm, but I like what Disney has done with it.

Then again, what do I know? His franchise to do with as he pleased. Just so happened that *I'm* also pleased with the net result...

Listen -- do you know how much high-grade Peruvian flake we were hoovering back in the late 70's? Steve Martin was the perfect comedian for coke-sniffers: wild and energetic, creative on script and off the cuff. We liked our comedians Wild and Crazy and our afternoon bumps in little McDonald's coffee-stirrer spoons.

Those were the days, my friend, those were the days.

GRAAAAAAAAAAAMPA BOUGHT A RUBBER!

If you don't know who Matthew Silver is:

"My role as a clown, trickster and village idiot is to parody excessive seriousness by playing with taboos, rules, and social norms. My inspiration comes from my heart. I perform for smiles and laughter, loosening people’s armor, and opening up a portal for imagination, creativity and love.

Some people see me as a raving lunatic, pompous “artistic” hipster, or attention-starved 9 year-old, but people don’t consciously understand the role of a clown in society. Read between the lines and you will start to see things from a different perspective. By breaking down boundaries, I provide you, the viewer, with permission to open your mind and realize it’s okay to act silly from time to time. We may trick ourselves into believing we know everything, constantly striving for perfection in a society that requires a civilized, job-holding, serious individual. We cannot be perfect. If we allow ourselves the chance to be flawed perhaps we can let the obstacles humble us, rather than make us rigid. In the end we can let our guards down to attain our most basic need of giving and receiving love."
http://www.maninwhitedress.com/?page_id=2

I think most artists / musicians / creative types know the secret of "letting go". You could redo, reiterate, keep working your way into a never-ending non-productivity loop. The most important aspect is the idea, work hard on it, polish it up and then get it out / let it the fuck go.

As a former employee under both Jobs and Cook, I can tell you exactly what is wrong with Apple.

When I started with Apple, every thing we were concerned with was innovating. What could we come up with next? Sure, there were plenty of misses, but when we hit, we hit big. It was ingrained in the culture of the company. Managers wanted creative people, people who might not have been the best worker bee, but that could come up with new concepts easily. Sometimes corporate rules were broken, but if you could show that you were actively working towards something new, then you were OK.

Fast forward to when Cook started running the show, Steve was still alive, but had taken a backseat really. Metrics became a thing. Performance became a watchword. Managers didn't want creative thought, they wanted people who would put their nose to the grindstone and only work on things that headquarters suggested. Apple was no longer worried about innovating, they were concerned with 'maintaining'.

Two examples which might help illustrate further:

1. One of the guys I was working with was constantly screwing around in any free moment with iMovie. He was annoyed at how slow it was in rendering, which at the time was done on the CPU power. Did some of his regular work suffer, yeah. But he was praised because his concepts helped to shift some of the processing to the GPU and allow real time effects. This functionality made iMovie HD 6 amazing to work with.

2. In a different section of the company, the support side, a new manager improved call times, customer service stats, customer satisfaction, and drastically cut down on escalations. However, his team was considered to be:

a. making the other teams look bad

and

b. abusing the use of customer satisfaction tools, like giving a free iPod shuffle (which literally costs a few dollars to make) to extremely upset customers.

Now they were allowed to do all of these things, no rules were being broken. But Cook was mostly in charge by that point and he was more concerned with every damn penny. So, soon after this team blew all the other teams away for the 3rd month in a row, the new manager was demoted and the team was broken up, to be integrated into other teams willy-nilly.

Doing smart things was no longer the 'thing'. Toeing the line was. Until that changes, nothing is going to get better for Apple. I know I personally left due to stress and health issues from the extreme pressure that Cook kept sending downstream on us worker bees. My job, which I had loved, literally destroyed my health over a year.

I don't agree that this statement is relevant to Apple.

Jobs is arguing that when you have a monopoly, your product people take a back seat to your sales/marketing guys. Fair enough, but that assumes Apple have a monopoly.
Far from it, they have:
- 13% of the smartphone market
- 24% of the tablet market (and that market is in decline)
- and a whopping 4% of the desktop market

How on any planet is that even close to a monopoly?

Don't get me wrong, I think Apple are in a bit of a creative slump at the moment. They desperately need new design blood.