Where I grew up IRC was actually popular with the non-nerd crowd until ICQ came around, then that became the "standard" until some time around 2002-2003 when MSN Messenger started taking over more and more and remained the top IM client until Facebook became the one social networking platform to rule them all.

Amazingly enough America Online was never very popular outside the US...

I absolutely hate it when people at work have changed the default editor on a system to nano, always catches me off-guard and I can never remember the key bindings...

Plenty of people use cannabis and go hiking, hang out with friends and have normal lives.

Just check out /r/trees on reddit (or some similar forum), plenty of users there post "smoke spot" pictures from hiking trails and the like.

I use a bicycle as my primary means of transport year-round, in Sweden.

The main issue I have is that I often have to slow down not just to compensate for road conditions as such but also for motorists who don't realize that even with studded tires a cyclist might not want to ride as aggressively in winter as they do in summer (by "aggressively" I mean more "trusting others not to run you down after they've clearly seen you" than "break the law", in summer my brakes work flawlessly and if Mrs Soccer Mom or Mr Middle Management in their late-model Volvo decide to suddenly try to bully me out of the way I can hit the brakes or accelerate quickly, in winter such aggressive moves will cause me to fall and get run over by the idiot in question so I ride much more defensively which seems to annoy a lot of motorists).

FYI, I tend to stick to bicycle paths when possible but some have been taken over by pedestrians (who have the right of way on bike paths here in Sweden, "yay") to the point where it's faster and mostly safer to ride on a parallel street than zigzag between pedestrians who are walking four abreast and paying no attention to cyclists and other times the bike paths were clearly laid out by someone who doesn't cycle him-/herself and doesn't realize that looping a bike path around an entire city block is likely to be an unpopular move.

Urgh, carrier grade NAT is the last thing the Internet needs.

What's the point of the Internet if there is no end-to-end connectivity?

That would have about as much effect as pissing into the ocean would have on raising sea levels.

We need to move to IPv6 and if you're not prepared then yes, it will cost you more than if you had a bit of foresight and didn't keep buying IPv4-only software and hardware right up till the very end.

Ukraine was the country in possession of the nukes, not Russia. They were former USSR nukes belonging to Ukraine and not controlled by the Russian Federation.

In fact, they had the third largest stockpile in the world for a short while.

This is a pretty shitty argument.

I work on developing web applications and at work I have two 27" 2560x1600 monitors and the advantage of them isn't that I can run webapps in a 2560x1600 browser window but rather that I can fit a browser AND my tools on-screen.

I've coded on "mainstream-sized" screens in the past and it's pretty painful. Want Firebug and your browser window visible at the same time? Gotta shrink that browser window! Want a couple of terminals as well? Heh, good luck with that.

With my current setup I've got plenty of space which makes it working much more comfortable than if I always had to keep moving windows around to show the various things that I want to see at the same time (like say, two different logs in terminals, firebug, a browser window, an editor and finally an extra terminal window. This would hardly be a heavy setup but good luck fitting that on some "HD Ready" screen or even a single 1080p screen).

I think you've got your years wrong. I too remember talk of OS X going completely resolution independent but OS X hadn't even been released in 1998.

I remember seeing some examples of what UI scaling in OS X looked like back in the 10.5 (I think) days looked like when enabled (which it obviously wasn't in the actual release version of OS X). It was looking pretty good, a few minor glitches here and there but definitely promising. Sadly they abandoned this approach in favor of the bitmap-based solution they've got now (though it works surprisingly well, if you had told me in the mid 90s that by 2013 we'd be up- and down-scaling desktop-size bitmaps in realtime with no visible UI lag I would've thought you were full of shit).

And nine times out of ten Windows users are practically computer illiterate, what's your point?

(BTW, my point here is that I know more developers (when only counting those who have some kind of choice, if you're working for a bank that mandates Windows 2000 Pro on all developer desktops because it's corporate policy then you're not really interesting in this case) who use Macbooks/iMacs/Mac Pros running OS X than I know developers who use Windows Whatever)

I'd say the flat UI trend is more about minimalism and a better comparison would be the interior design minimalism trend (which is still going strong) contrasted with past trends such as the 1970's "shag carpets, saturated non-matching colors and wood paneling" trend. So, by this standard we're still in the infancy of minimalist UIs but it's still better than what we had before and it will hopefully get even better with time as we further refine things.