You know how at Hallowe'en, you get a bunch of candy so you dump it out into a bowl and go for the best stuff right away, and there's a few lime lollipops in there, so you eagerly tear the wrapping off and jam that sucker in your mouth to grab all the luscious citrusy goodness and after a moment of unrealized bliss you spit it out and exclaim in horror "FUCK! GREEN APPLE?!" Yeah, like that.

Summary: green sucks.

Man, only one mention of the Pit. I loved that game. Dimly remember getting the Vorpal Blade (?) and just carving through enemies.

SRE was great. I think it had the same "feature" as GWar did though - they were turn-based, but by day. If you dialed in just before midnight, you could take that day's turn, and then hang up and immediately dial back *after* midnight, and take another turn. You'd have to live through the entire 24-hour period after that, but if you timed it right, having two turns in a row could give huge rewards. (If I'm thinking of the right game - they were all fun. Now I feel old though. I miss you, Amiga 500.)

They're variants. Either is fine.

Fill in the blank: fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from __________.

Interesting! Hey, I didn't say they didn't exist, I said I'd be surprised. :) Some points:

- Amazon's policy says one thing, but it's actually really easy to do it yourself - there's a list on your account of gift cards you've sent. If you resend it, it'll cancel the old one and generate a new one. I blame the lawyers.

- SeaWorld I don't know about, not having been there since I was six. :) Sounds like they just have an old whacky system though.

- Wendy's is dumb. There's no reason they have to do it that way, assuming they don't register you at time of purchase. I think they just want your email or something. Point for that though.

- Ticketmaster... *sigh* This one actually doesn't surprise me, just because they're such bastards. Absolutely no sense to that, except it makes them money on people's misfortune. The only possibility I can think of is that they'll wait until somebody buys tickets, and then arrest them at the show when the tickets get scanned. ha ha ha heh ehhhhhh... Not likely.

One interesting store I encountered was WalMart - it looks like they don't replace them at all, unless you register them online, and then it's only good for online purchases (?). I don't quite understand that. They're plenty big enough to figure it out.

The reason this stuff is easy is that stores have no real excuse for replacing these things. They absolutely know when the cards are used, and for what, and by whom if they'd like to check that too. They're reaping the benefits without wanting to deal with the issues. Imagine if you lost your credit card, and they said "bummer, sorry. Your loss. It's not like we can tell what's being done with it."

Any easy way to get a friendlier policy is to either use Visa or MasterCard gift cards or deal with stores whose gift cards are handled as such.

Yep, absolutely. Or pay for it with a credit card with a better policy. Or with a credit card through PayPal. :) Keep stacking up protections if you can. Let AmEx and PayPal gang on up Ticketmaster. I'll be somewhere else, getting on with my life.

Wrong again.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Help-Topics/Gift-Cards/pcmcat203400050004.c?id=pcmcat203400050004

Lost or Stolen Gift Cards

We can replace the remaining balance on a lost, stolen or damaged gift card, as long as you have the original purchase receipt. Please call 1-888-716-7994.

Many stores don't reprint gift cards if they are lost, stolen, or destroyed IRL.

They sure do. (Disclaimer: I code gift cards for a pretty big outfit.) I'd be surprised at any place bigger than mom n' pop's that doesn't cover stuff like that. They're basically credit cards now - each has an individual serial, so it's easy to tell if the value's been used. If it gets lost, you just cancel that one and issue them a new one. Whomever tries to use the old one will be declined at checkout. Simple.

Don't be stupid. They all point to intent. It's perfectly legal for me to carry a knife around. It's the point where I stab someone in the neck that's against the LAW.

Less than 24 hours ago, the readers of Slashdot launched a competition to find an editing algorithm that performs better than the official "editors" of the site. The competition requires entrants to build their comment systems based on the results of over 9,000 historical submissions. Entrants then test their algorithms by predicting the results of the next 7,809 dup^H^H^Hstories. Already three teams have managed to create systems that make more accurate predictions than the official /. approach. It's not a surprise that Timothy has been outdone -- after all, he was invented half a century ago before English had been standardized. However, it is no big surprise that Slashdot has been bettered done so quickly! The winner: Texas Instruments!

Another four here. 24" Acers. I was going to do 2x2 (and bought the corresponding rack), but before it showed up, I tried three across and kinda liked that, so now I have three on the bottom and one above the middle.
Made me realize what a PITA X is. In Windows 7, it took about 45 seconds to get the layout right. I'm still trying to get it right in lunix. The ATI config tool is useless. Shouldn't be *that* hard, right? Four of the exact same screen, on two of the exact same cards. Bah.

Sure, that's the beauty of both the internet and humour. If you think it would be very funny, some other people might too.

Option 3:
Make the whole thing up (or generous parts) to tell a funny little story, in a similar vein as his other, oh... 50 or so tales, and watch the outrage and moral anguish fly.

This would not be surprising. Looking at the national crime statistics, blacks commit robbery at a per-capita rate far higher than any other ethnic group. Not mentioning this information because it is politically incorrect only makes the underlying problems harder to address.

They do more drugs too. Oh, did you mean "are convicted of" instead of "commit?" How does the mortgage crash fit into your robbery rate? That was all blacks too.

Some annoyances like that here. Double-clicking on an empty page used to bring you to your home page. Doesn't do anything anymore. Flash is broken yet again (spinner forever), but I'm not sure I can blame that on them. I will anyway though. :) And putting in an incomplete address doesn't seem to automatically send you to the .com - e.g. type 'example' into the address bar. It'll do a search on 'example,' rather than taking you to example.com. Blah.

71 million as of March, 2010.