The comparison is apt.

I had forgotten about F1, instead referring people to go online to find answers to their computer questions. But I wonder if I haven't been doing the wrong thing directing people to community support when they're ill-equipped to distinguish good advice from bad.

GP is comparing two broad classes of knowing how things works, and asserting that ignorance of one of them is a problem. This is not contradiction, it is drawing a distinction.

I don't need to know how my fuel injection system works, but I had better know what to do at a stop sign.

Excellent management of your forum persona.

I find that people who feel the need to write a post like this to make a point usually have trouble making a point in any other way, and a need for attention for themselves and their "thesis." Yes, we get it, you are superior to everyone. But you have no actual arguments for it beyond your pretentious attitude, and you're annoying.

I sort of see a face in the last one. Admittedly, it is the face of Rorschach, but it's still a start!

You mean that caffeinated bar was SOAP?

Google Analytics uses cookies called __utma, __utmb, __utmc, and __utmz (they have different expiry characteristics so GA can distinguish a "visit" from a "visitor"). Hands-on experiment: If you're not one of the people who blocks GA, open up your cookie jar right now and look for "utma". I expected to find a lot in mine, and I'm still surprised by how many are in there.

It's pretty darn slick. GA got to be popular on its merits. But now that it's everywhere I worry about the aggregative power available to Google (not the individual GA users). Now that NoScript is gaining ground I occasionally worry that I ought to be doing my tracking locally because I won't know how many people have opted out of GA by declining its cookies.