You are trolling, but I'll still bite.

Interestingly, this is is a time honored methodology for fighting against a much stronger force and is exactly how I would fight against the US, NATO, Russia, China, etc. if I were in a small country. Take to the hills, don't expose yourself to pitched battles that you will lose anyway and subject your opponent to death by a thousand paper cuts. Americans themselves successfully used this methodology against the British between 1775 and 1781.

The only real ways to fight against it are to either make yourself more popular among the populace than the resistance force (VERY difficult to do) or go full Ghengis Khan.

So..... its the summer of 1945. YOU are Harry Truman. The war has killed, what 50 million people so far. The battle of Okinawa has just finished and it killed.... oh about 200,000 people. (about half being soldiers of the two side and the rest civilians). That was essentially the dress rehearsal for the invasion of Japan itself. You've just been told about these new kinds of bombs. What would you do? Try to finish the war off by using them and then bluffing the Japanese by saying you have a thousand (you don't. you have two) or go ahead with the invasion?

Slashdot was the place to get modded down for going against the hive mind, before Reddit made getting modded down for going against the hive mind cool.

This does not refute the GP. All of those 50 bling buttons are like a honey pot for bad designers. And if MS did not offer them? People would whine about them not being in.

I'm a product manager for an IDE. The tool offers no component for adding gauge graphics to the app being built. What do customers ask or? How do you think they'd react to "gauges are chart junk and you'll just use them to create design abominations"? So yeah, gauges are on the roadmap. *sigh*

Why should it be free? The infrastructure costs money and they have a right to make a profit on it. TV is not a necessity - if anything, its a vice - , so you can't even make an argument that it should be subsidized for the poor.

Nothing is free, ever! Even things that may look free... like say roads, schools and clean water, cost money. People like me pay for them. I pay a mountain of taxes; much more than I eve get back. I'd rather do that than live like a king in a third world shithole.

And I never tried to steal cable TV either.

It is probably more insidious, given the nature of the allegations in Germany against the BND. Suppose you are a spy agency and want to spy on your own population, but are thwarted by laws about that pesky due process? No problem! Simply cut a deal with other spy agencies. "You spy on our people, because spying on foreigners is your job. We spy on your people, because spying on foreigners is our job. It all goes into the same database and no laws were technically broken".

When I saw this headline, my snarky alter ego asked if the Chinese had lost a sub in that area. The Glomar Explorer was my first thought.

Seriously, if I have a project where I can reduce development and maintenance costs OR use efficient design methods, then those efficient methods are not so efficient.

I am totally registering goats.uk if they do this.

What about those of us who live in Germany and like it just the way it is or was.

I lose if Facebook ceases to operate here. I have friends and family spread all over the world; Germany, Sweden, the US, India, etc. and it was always a lot of work to keep in touch with everyone. Facebook makes this easy.

I also lose if people started to use pseudonyms. Have you ever tracked down an old friend, or been tracked down by an old friend via Facebook?

I think you are partially right. I’ll presume that when the insurance company manages to rid itself of the bottom half of its driver pool, its payouts decrease more than its collected premiums. In effect, the insurance company is defecting against its competitors by sticking them with the higher cost customers.

People who refuse to do anything about a greater evil, lest they accept a smaller evil, piss me off. Suppose that the greater evil would win by one vote if you stayed home. Your choice in this case is to vote for the lesser evil, which is still evil, or not vote; which in this case is the same as voting for the greater evil. If Gore had been president in 2001, we’d not have had Dick Fucking Cheney using 9/11 to push the US into the Iraq war. Would we have had rendition? Torture? Since Cheney actively supported these things and was their biggest cheerleader, it made a BIG difference between having a smaller or bigger evil and in this case, we got the bigger evil.

Those people who voted for Nader in 2000, because “voting for the smaller evil is still evil” have the blood of the Iraq war on their hands!

i can write just fine in my utilkilt with no undies

So I guess valuing the (usually) smaller size of the archived xml marks me as clueless then.

Actually, from my perspective, there have been significant improvements in every version of Office. Then again, I'm also someone who writes a lot of VBA macros and the occasional c# .net plugin.

There is also a Green Party in the US. Interestingly, the Greens are classified as a "left libertarian" party and its platforms do overlap with the larger, but still insignificant, American Libertarian party.

There should be a moratorium on gesture patents. Right now, we're in a state where we can't say that any new developments would be non-obvious to an expert. You could make a list of a million gesture controls over a couple of beers.