In South American countries we have recently (last 5 years or so) started receiving cars made in china, and there are A LOT of brands.
Many of their models are cheap knock-offs of known models by other manufacturers (see Chery QQ vs Chevrolet Spark, or BYD F3 vs Toyota Corolla), and all of them sell a lot cheaper than the other brands. Usually lacking in the safety side, but sadly on par with the cars made in Brazil or Argentina for our local markets. And in a country (Uruguay) where, due to taxes, a Honda Civic costs U$S 40.000, and a Chevrolet Spark costs U$S 15000, these brands are slowly eating the low-end with cheap (~ U$S 15000) sedans like the Lifan 620 or the BYD F3.

Some of the known brands around here: Lifan, Chery, Geely, Great Wall, JAC, BYD, FAW, Haima.

I don't think your "online" and the parent's "online" mean the same thing :)

More like everybody uses everybody else's cards randomly (at the same time, actually, but that makes no sense in the card analogy).

We say "If everybody is special, then nobody is", and with the same reasoning we could say "if everybody likes everything, then nobody likes anything".

Well, for one thing, if you download ALL the ads you might have seen, you are leaving behind a profile that might be harder to make sense of, from an advertiser's perspective. Open all ads in a private window isolated from cookies or data from the others, and maybe it is not such a bad idea.

And on the other hand, if enough people use adblock, then one could argue that those who don't use it are easier to target... of course one can't be responsible for what other people do (or don't do, like running an ad blocker).

yes, only problem is that android on these systems is absolutely horrible for anything but media center work. If you want a PC, then don't go for any of those. I have a mk802 II and its capabilities as a general purpose machine are pathetic

Sametime works... if you have several GB of RAM, which I didn't have when I had to use Notes due to company policy. It would randomly freeze for a few seconds, and it was slow as hell. I still can't believe they built it over Eclipse.

Pidgin had exactly the same functionality everyone used Sametime for, and used a tenth of the system resources.

Both Notes and Sametime are horribly resource-hungry considering their functionality

Note to self: read the comments entirely before attempting to do a lame joke

You mean like "StarOffice"?

In addition to that, take into account that there are some mail clients (both web and desktop) that add email addresses to contact list when you send a mail (or when you send x number of emails) to them.

I hate that feature. I hate the mindless "send this crap to everybody you know" features. I hate it more when people uses distribution lists from work to join social networks, and everybody gets spammed by the site.

I guess it is again a cultural thing. It is not generally well seen to leave a job at the first opportunity, after a short period. It's a matter of trust and commitment, I guess (and also of government paperwork, around here that part is costly).
If I join a company, I know I am expected to stay a certain period of time, at least until the company is earning money with me. Depending on the job, that is estimated to take around 6 months. If I leave after a short time, the company probably spent more money on me than the money it earned from my work.

It may not be the case where you live, but here the IT world is a small place, and the chance of applying again to a job in the same company is not as small as one would like to believe. Quitting your job in good terms will most surely allow you to come back if the opportunity arises. Quitting after a short period of time will probably not be "good terms" for your boss.

Even if you hate your job, you will find out that connections matter. I worked 5 years for a big company, and then moved to a company leaded by a former boss. Now I am working at another big company, thanks to recommendations from a former colleague. If things go wrong with my current job, I know I can talk with my former bosses and see if they have any positions open.
Also, people in management positions know each other, specially if they work in the same city, and even more if they have many years of experience. Work professionally, and your ex boss will recommend you (if he's not an asshole) if he gets asked you by a friend in the company you are trying to join. The opposite holds, of course.

I don't want to imply that you should bend over to the company's requirements, but one should know how to move around in the job market :)

While I agree with the sentiment, this is a cultural thing. As an applicant I want to know if I made it or not, because while waiting for reply from what I believe is a good position, I might end up rejecting or delaying my application to other not-so-good opportunities.
Where I live, however, most companies just never reply if you are not selected, and that is seen as normal. (There are other differences, like requesting a recent photo to be added to the CV, where in other places that is illegal)

Web developers mainly. The whole "compatibility" and "don't break any page" bullshit has always been developers' fault.

But one needs to be aware that probably, when all this started, there was no good way of doing "capability testing" instead of browser sniffing, as Javascript was there but was a "stupider" language. Also, browsers did do things in a very different way, not like nowaways when most differences are small layout issues.

There was also no automatic updates, so probably the first version of IE was there along with the improved version, so if you just sent frames to everyone, old IE versions would break.

Still, there is no excuse in doing this nowadays, period. Browsers should break the goddamn sites that still do this, and for developers: if you haven't updated your site from the time when this kind of browser sniffing was required, please get out of the internet, you are making it a worse place.

Opera was the only browser that really tried to not spoof any other browser's identity (unless required). When it got to version 10, it broke many pages.

Well, I have a RPi and a MK802, and the MK802 ends up being cheaper for this use case. The cost of the Pi, plus cable, sd card, a case, and the HDMI cable ends up being higher than the MK802. And the MK802 runs Android, meaning lots of apps ready to use. For me, the RPi is a cheap home server. And even on that use case, the MK802 with Linux is a better machine

Same in Uruguay. They changed their system a few years back, and when they changed it, the password for the new system was the same as the old one, truncated to 8 characters. Both systems allowed only certain characters, but at least the old one allowed me to have longer passwords.

Let me repeat in case the horror was not clear enough: they migrated the accounts to the new system, they reduced the maximum password length, and automatically set the passwords in the new system to the first 8 characters of the old system's password

Your answer reminded me of how difficult can some UNIX-related searches be. when I google

man unzip
man find
man sleep
man fsck

and others, I always feel a little dirty...