So, I looked up the SMTP RFC, and yeah, the "local-part" (as it is determined) is to be treated as opaque by everyone BUT the domain in the address. Meaning that everyone must treat the addresses differently regardless of how GMail or anyone else interprets the semantics...

AND THEN, it turns out that while things are required to be case-insensitive, things are ALSO required to be case-sensitive. Basically, no one should ever assume that the local-part of the email address can be treated as caseless.

So, there you go, if Amazon doesn't let you sign up as both smith@example.com and Smith@example.com, then they're totally out of spec...

But to the deeper part, why would Amazon not disable an account when someone with a local-part semantic collision calls in to object to getting the emails? "These two addresses are treated as semantically identical by my email provider, please figure out how to fix the other person's account," doesn't seem like a horribly unreasonable request... I'm sure they'd do it for Smith@example.com coming from smith@example.com...

Bitching about the RFCs and complaining that GMail is the problem is entirely misreading the RFC, and misreading reality in fact...

So, much like the WMF flaw, "working as intended"?

I just got the brilliant notion of using Hololens to do all the dungeon and minifig stuff that has previously been just on the board...

That would be pretty freaking cool... unnecessary, but WHO CARES IT'S COOL!

You don't want an 'undervalued' city - you want a city whose value is in line with your willingness to pay it. Raleigh and Ann Arbor are not inexpensive cities, for instance, even though they're cheap compared to the Bay Area. Austin (where I live) is heinously expensive compared to many parts of Texas, but even with the tremendous growth and increase in cost of living, it doesn't begin to approach the Bay Area. The brand new 3000sq ft house we just bought fairly close to downtown Austin would have cost north of of 2 million in San Francisco.

city-data.com is a great place to start for cost of living comparisons and questions about specific towns. Ask this question on the Raleigh board, the Omaha board, or the Austin board. Findyourspot.com is also an interesting exercise though not necessarily conclusive.

You want some harsh criticism? And some direct, blunt communication?

People don't scare quote "hetero", because it's the antonym of "homo-". So why the hell are you scare quoting "cis-" when it's the antonym of "trans-"? This is basic Latin, and if you didn't take Latin, then it's basic Chem, and if you didn't take basic Chem, then GET OFF MY INTERNET.

Unless you're going to argue that transgendered/transsexual people don't exist, then stop scare quoting "cis-" like it's some sort of boogie word. It's the natural choice for referring to individuals who are not "trans-". And if "trans" is a word, then "cis" is a word. Just like "hetero" and "homo".

Don't like it? TOUGH! That's how language works.

Comment rejected: insufficiently polite.

So, you mean the fact that I wrote a c-intercal parser that used obscure opcodes to actually perform the interweave and or and xor isn't a good thing to put on my resume?

Also, my favorite obscure language is LIRL, and that has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ME BEING THE AUTHOR... rather, it's an interesting concept of, "what if Perl raped LISP and LISP was forced by the republican state government to carry that baby to term?"

The answer is: implied parentheses. To be clear, the language is absolutely context sensitive...

I ended up booting into DOS directly for most of these reasons.

Oddly, I barely even use 95... went straight from 3.x to 98. Where I still booted into DOS to do my gaming.

Ah... back in the day... I had to tetris my drivers to make sure I had enough conventional and XMS memory for the game I wanted to play... BOTH WAYS!

Are you aware, that companies that produce lead-free solder in Europe, must have their product labeled with "may contain lead" in California?

Because California's lead restrictions are something like 9X (1 part per billion) where as Europe's standard is at 6X (1 part per million)... even though both of them can be described best and most easily with homeopathic dilution values...

So what? I had a gigabit home network back in 2001...

Paper doesn't scale to the level required. Trust me, I've attended presentations from ex-Googlers on the topic.

Especially, when the paper weighs so much that it started deforming a building...

Usually the problem is something like, "it isn't giving me the newest driver" or simply the poor quality of the drivers in the first place. (For awhile there, if I clicked on the start button, it would cause my screen to reset!) And a lot of "your driver stopped responding so we turned it off, then back on again."

In some ways, I like that the drivers are being pushed to me automatically, but at the same time, if I'm doing multiple reinstalls in a single day, I've already downloaded the drivers... I don't need them to be downloaded YET AGAIN, every install...

At Facebook, it's memcached, with an HDD backup, eventually put onto tape...

At Google, it's a ramdisk, backed up to SSD/HDD, eventually put onto tape...

For anyone who can't afford half a petabyte of RAM with the commensurate number of computers? I have no good ideas... except maybe RAM cache of SSD, cache of HDD, backed up on tape...

Using something like HDFS to store your data in a Hadoop cluster of file requests, is likely the best F/OSS solution you're going to get for that...

Yeah, I don't normally get feed back either. But it is kind of suspicious when I do get feedback...

I think it's a lot related to the xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/385/

If I spend a bunch of time rewriting code (which everyone does), as a man they might think "oh, well, he's just refactoring, or having a bad day." But when I do it, they think "wow, women can't code..." and then reject me out of hand without attempting to rationalize an explanation for why it should be overlooked...

Not that I'm particularly complaining here... this is just life as a woman in the tech industry... that and "oh wow, what does your boyfriend do at Google?" Actually, he's a literature teacher, I'm the genius programmer troubleshooter who knows almost everything about computers...

Actually, that's precisely the problem with acupuncture working better than placebo. Acupuncture works whether you're following their "rules" or just randomly sticking needles into people...

Basically, it turns out, that forcing a person to lay still for a long time has the same benefits of destressing as just laying on a sofa and chilling... or a massage, or any other relaxing activity...