Intriguing; I wonder if Jesus agrees with the law of the excluded middle? Or would he be more of a ternary logic guy?

Why are the URLs so long to begin with?

Your post contains its own rebuttal:

I think the proper solution is to just stop making ridiculously long URLs to begin with, so we don't have to rely on obfuscation/hashing/shortening to accommodate services that have character limit restrictions. And we'd save bandwidth too, apparently. Win-win?

You had a link on "we'd save bandwidth too", pointing to this: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/27/2017250

If Slashdot used longer, descriptive URLs, I could mouseover it and see, perhaps, something like 'tech.slashdot.org/are-long-urls-wasting-bandwidth/'. Perhaps I remember reading the article a few weeks ago, and don't need to click. As it is, though, the only way I can find out what you're talking about is by clicking on the link and loading the page. That's wasting bandwidth.

In the original Elite, the first mission was to destroy some kind of experimental space ship that had been stolen. You were told that the ship had ECM, which meant that you needed to kill it in a dogfight; you couldn't just hit it with a missile.

...well, unless you got really close. Easiest way to win was to fly straight at it, target a missile, and launch at point-blank range. Boom.

At least devils are lawful...

..which is why they should allow Australian taxpayer-owned companies like HP to use their tech for free!

Wait...

It might not be stupid .. because a different group did the same thing?

You know, there's another possible conclusion we could draw...

I remember seeing a couple of documentaries on this a while ago...

Mod parent -1 catastrophically ignorant.

There's no way our politicians would work for 363 days in a year.

How could slashdot possibly run out of stories? They've got over ten years' worth of them to keep posting!

Is Jack the Ripper really the dodgiest connotation you can come up with for "slash"?

"You've seeded 4.3x as much as you've donwloaded overall. Increase that ratio to 5x to gain Level 3!

Yes, but only if it's air that no one else has breathed before.

Don't forget the American logo: Terrorist Buster!

Interestingly, there are over 5,000 google results for "vegan bacon"...

designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution

The scientific method?