Dude, you went mainstream! You should be happy, isn't that what you always wanted?

Also no Unicode support.
It's a tech site from the 1980's.

Why do I have a feeling that on this online gambling site there will be a higher than normal chance of playing against a bunch of bots?

I don't think that word means what you think it does.

It's called almost every Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens and CVS in the United States. They have little kiosks where you can print from your phone or Facebook or Flickr or SD card or whatever.

And they don't have to support the infrastructure of a whole store by themselves. In fact they don't even have to be particularly profitable since part of the deal is you'll wander the rest of the store and buy stuff while waiting for your prints.

If you want to be properly pedantic it's pronounced "nihonshu". Sake pretty much means "alcohol" in Japanese. Walking into a Japanese bar and ordering sake is like walking into an american bar and saying "One alcohol, please!"

Why does software functionality depend on the date? Calculation issues maybe... but failure to lauch? WTF?

Some kind of half-assed copy protection or trial use. "Dude, you totally changed the date to get around our 30 day trial! No more software for you!"

Stupid, yes. But it exists.

Oh god, the last thing you want is someone who writes crap code working by himself. He'll create his or her own little empire of code madness that no one else can maintain.

The answer is simple: If you don't have the power to fire them you bring the problem to the attention of those who do.

We don't have to keep employing people who don't ear their keep.

Game companies like this because it takes traded in games off the market and so they'll sell more new games. This only serves as an inducement to make more violent games.

So, giant failure.

Even bigger failure is that there is no correlation between video games and violence. There are countless studies, but I like this fact: Japan has 0.6% as many gun deaths as the US.* I wonder if they play video games over there?

* 10.2 per 100,000 per year in the US vs 0.07 for Japan according to Wikipedia.

If citizens of Mother England are going to act like assholes like that then yes, the colonies are going to do everything they can do distance themselves from such pointless snobbery.

My experience says differently. I had given Google Docs a chance years ago, but it outright stank. I couldn't image why someone would want to use it.

Then a few months ago I started writing for a major tech publisher. When I asked what file format they wanted they responded "Word if you must but we love Google Docs". So Google Docs it was. And I was very pleasantly surprised. It worked slickly, speedily and no unexpected surprises. (This is with Chrome on OS X.) Compared to the OS X version of Word, which reminds me that the The Spinning Beach Ball of Death is still a real thing, I almost overwhelmingly preferred Goog.

There are a few things it won't let me do that I'm used to. Captioning images is one. Which doesn't work well in Word either, but is apparently not possible in Docs. I also use tables a lot and the table formatting options stink. But otherwise I found it met all my needs and worked better and faster than Word.

Well, your commend didn't add a damn thing to this discussion, so it seems like you're brining the rage to this party. Good luck with that.

Getting a site destroyed by /. is a lot more rare mostly because servers are vastly more robust than they were in the past. I have a Wordpress blog hosted on a $10 a month shared server that was linked on Slashdot last year. Brought in tens of thousand of hits in an hour if I remember correctly. Site stayed up, though a little slow. And that's just a single shared server, No AWS. 5-10 years ago that would have cost serious money for a site that could handle that. Now it's the cost of three cups of coffee.

I think Twitter is worth it because there are very few privacy concerns. Twitter is 98% public, and everyone who participates knows it. (I hope.)

Facebook is a privacy nightmare, and is crap for driving business to your web site. It does everything it can to keep all information on Facebook, including jerking everyone around. And that will only increase.

Once you post something on either service it's out of y our control. With Twitter it's pretty minor, 140 characters, and it will be gone eventually. (I believe they only archive the last 2000 Tweets or so.) Facebook is trying to make a timeline of people's entire lives and won't stop trying to make money off your content until well after you're dead.

... It's for the ability to east the separation of me from my money. I constantly think about it, every time I use a computer. "The one thing lacking in this OS, the one fault of the developer, is that not once did they think about my pocketbook and how it's too full. They really should divert development time from other features to make it easier to spend money. I really don't do enough of that, and there are so few ways for me to do it."

Dammit, and I was just getting to like Ubuntu as a mature competitor to the commercial offerings. I had even convinced a few friends to try it. Now I'll look like a fucking shill.

And here I was always told that security by obscurity was no security at all.