I disagree. If you're sane, you don't use those things at all.

Judging by the countless times that I've had to do tech support for people who get into trouble because they can't see the extension, and the expressions of surprise and joy that I hear when I set their machine to show them, I think that file extensions are far from meaningless for the ordinary user.

Perhaps you're misunderstanding. The idea is that the first x bytes of every file (usually 4) contains a code saying what the file type is. It's the same concept as a file extension, but in the file itself rather than in the filename. In this scheme, there is never a need to read more than the first few bytes to determine what the file actually is.

They're actually an artifact of CP/M (remember, DOS is half CP/M, half Unix).

And that reasoning is completely wrong. As an example of how broken the idea is, there are numerous installation packages that include both an "installme.exe" and an "installme.msi", where the .exe is what you run to install. Without showing file extensions, both of these files look like exectuables and it's completely opaque which one you need to run. Admittedly, this is a result of a terrible installer design -- but the OS shouldn't make things worse by hiding critical information.

No, it would only have to examine the first few bytes.

I never understood why Windows hides file extensions by default. Doing so makes Windows much more difficult to use. Changing that setting is literally the first thing I do with Windows. Hiding file extensions was one of the worst decisions made for Windows.

I think that's not as outrageous because that fact isn't exactly a secret. Everyone knows that they're signing up for that when they use iTunes. People who find it outrageous simply don't use iTunes in the first place.

They don't? Good for them. But they already lost all of my trust when they instigated the NymWars in the first place. It was one of the first examples of how little Google cares about its users.

Indeed, except even the "won't be staying up late" is going to far. I stay up late often to enjoy them. Sometimes all night. Here's a secret that might surprise the younger set: sex (and music) is much better at this age than when younger. A friend of mine summed it up nicely: "I really savor and enjoy sex a lot more now that it isn't the constant fucking emergency that it is when you're young."

I don't understand why people are mystified that this upset so many people. Playlists and music collections are personal, and so it's an intrusion to have someone else come in and unilaterally modify them. They should have asked permission.

It has nothing to do with the specific music involved, although U2's comments about this did make me dislike U2 as a business entity.

Personally, the U2 thing demonstrated to me that I can't trust iTunes (and therefore Apple) very much, and so it is a good reason to avoid purchasing devices that need to use it. Whether or not people actually listened to the songs does not measure whether or not this was a good thing for Apple to do.

Facebook doesn't really enforce their real names policy. G+ does.

Yes, I know. I have multiple accounts myself. However, in order to do this I have to give a fake name to some accounts -- which is a violation of the real names policy. I'm not sure how Google expects this to be done (unless they expect that each account will have the same name, which is impractical.)