It depends. At AOL, I spent a great deal of time on alt.aol-sucks; engaging in discussions with people who hated our product was a great way to learn what to fix. (A lesson @ComcastCares has repopularized today.) To engage there, I had to be honest; nobody's going to talk to a happy-shiny marketing shill. I'd talk about why we did something we did, and about the trade-offs we made, and I'd even hint about whether I agreed or not. I wouldn't have posted my own rant, but I'd certainly quote others, and I think newsgroup quoting is roughly equivalent to blog linking.

So no, not every corporation is going to insist that every employee toe the company line. The smart ones don't.

The government, of course, is not known for innovation in social media communications or anywhere else. There are Lots Of Rules, and that's not even including the security clearance that this guy had.

Isn't Spotify P2P-based on desktops? It probably can't do that (or can't do it as well) on mobile, so you pay to leech.

This is an honest question, not snark - I'm not nearly as scientifically grounded as many Slashdotters. Didn't quantum mechanics develop well before we had high-energies to play with? I've had the impression that we've known since the early 20th century that Newtonian physics wasn't complete, and that one of the amazing things about quantum physics is the ability of the early thought-experiments to get proven out by later real-world experiments and even incorporated into engineering principles (a la GPS). Is that accurate? And if true, what's the modern-day analogue to quantum physics here?

Fast forward ten years...

Gman003: "wow. They really did have a revolution in MRI technology, and they're using it to catch terrorists."
MRI: Beep! Revolution! Terrorists!
TSA: Sir, could you step out of the line, please?

Google uses hundreds of signals to determine search rankings. They're researching adding one more. I'm pretty sure they have a good concept of signal-to-noise and spammers gaming the system by now. It's what they do for a living.

Southern folks shut down when there is 2 INCHES of snow

True story: In the 1990s, Montgomery County, MD schools once closed because it might snow the next day.

we have told bug reporters we don't care about their bug reports, that's not actually true. He is suggesting that this is what it might seem like.

As a longtime Firefox and Thunderbird bug submitter, let me assure you that this is in fact what it does seem like, and so it is effectively true. I've had some bugs open for 7 or 8 years; I recently saw a bug report complaining that it'd been open for 11. This doesn't cover those odd, irreproducible cases users will always submit - these were just plain bugs.

I would guess that only about 20% my of reported bugs ever got fixed.

I try to be self-deprecating, but I suck at it.

We don't even know if the Martians use big-endian encodings yet.

Ok, so let's use median instead of mode. What's the median number of legs, and what percentage of the population has a below-median number of legs?

This was the impetus for the Office ribbon; the top 10 requested features for Office were already in Office, but buried in the menu bar.

I can't say I've ever done that, but I have clicked on blue links in a color printout.

No, half the population is NOT necessarily below average; that's only true when there's a normal distribution.

Hint: Most people have an above-average number of legs.

If requiring real names killed Friendster, why would it not have also killed Facebook?

Optimal satisfaction with your zero-radius mower, and the fact that you bought it, requires that the number of U-turns be maximized.