Which is exactly how they work on Twitter and Facebook?

Which is why a lot of people stick the hashtags at the end of what they post and not in the middle. The fact that some people "misuse" them (although you can debate that) doesn't mean that they aren't fundamentally different from hyperlinks or they don't serve a useful purpose. They're effectively the <meta name="keywords"> tag in a medium that doesn't accept full HTML.

So basically you're only complaining about the presentation of the hashtag?

You don't understand the point of hashtags. The concept isn't to link to other tags, the concept is to make your post discoverable by other people. They're hashtags, after all, they tag a post as being related to some concept.

They're just like the tags underneath the Slashdot articles that no one pays attention to, like pleasestop and ohnoitsbennett. They're "reverse hyperlinks" if you will, designed not to send you to other pages, but to get you there from other pages.

Oh, no, I'm pretty sure the OP is trolling and that if he checked within iTunes he'd see he still has all his Ramones music. But my guess is that he's backing up from Windows/Mac OS X to Linux or something like that so anything special Mac OS X does for Time Machine wouldn't work, and that he does have an rsync log showing a bunch of files being deleted. It just should also show a bunch of new files with strangely similar names being added at the same time.

I'll bet if you do constantly rsync your iTunes music directory you will see deleted files. Because if you have iTunes set to "manage music" it will rename files according to some scheme that seems to randomly change over time. (Or because you changed some metadata like the song's name.) So it's entirely possible that a whole bunch of files were "deleted" - because iTunes moved them to a different location, and as far as I know, rsync doesn't have the ability to track files being moved around. (And a bit of Googling suggests this is in fact the case and offers some workarounds.)

Neither have I. I've never had it delete a song. What I have seen it do (multiple fucking times) is refuse to sync new music over to an iPhone. It'll get as far as "waiting for items to copy" and then just sit there for as long as you're willing to wait, not copying a thing. Googling (and bitching about it on Facebook) reveals I am nowhere near alone in experiencing this problem.

So, then, the other way around: OS X's filesystem (it is HFS, right?) on Windows. Because I've still never seen iTunes try to format a thumbdrive, but I've definitely seen Windows offer to format a thumbdrive it doesn't recognize the filesystem on.

Did iTunes do it or did the OS she was running do it?

Because as far as I know, unless the thumbdrive was an iPod itself, iTunes isn't capable of formatting it.

I'm guessing that you did something like create a thumbdrive using NTFS or whatever Mac OS X's file system is (HFS?) and then tried to use it on the opposite OS, which balked, and offered to reformat the drive into a filesystem it understood, which your niece just hit "OK" for.

Because iTunes may be a piece of shit (as far as I can tell, when iTunes Match released, Apple intentional broke syncing so it's no longer possible to sync music from iTunes), but I've never heard it do that. (I really should clarify that last one since you can get it to sync, but it easily breaks such that it will stop adding new music to an iPod/iPhone until you factory reset it and copy everything over again. At which point it will break again, so every time you get a new album outside of iTunes, you're in for another "factory reset and copy everything over again" loop. Which sounds like what this lawsuit is about, actually. Oh, and based on the last time this happened, it will then copy things over wrong so that metadata for songs refers to the wrong songs and some songs don't copy completely. I'm not arguing that iTunes isn't a completely broken piece of shit - it is - just that I've never seen it format thumbdrives.)

It looks like you need a Steam account to watch. You can view the list of public broadcasts, but attempting to watch them (even on the supported browsers) brings me to a login page. No idea if it works in just a browser if you have a Steam account.

Oh, and if you're at work, visiting that page also verified other reports that people were using it to stream porn. So visit it at your own risk.

So, none of them?

Honestly asking. I haven't bothered reading any video game specific site in years, primarily because video game sites seemed to either be the corporate "blatantly in bed with the publishers" type (IGN) or "shitty blog not worth anyone's time" type (Kotaku). I'm curious if any gaming review outlet actually turned down the offer and insisted on reviewing a release copy.

Which would explain how Zoosk got her postal code. Your Facebook name and profile picture are (by default at least) entirely public. Anyone going to your Facebook page can see them. They're available through Facebook's Graph API without any form of authentication.

Your postal code, on the other hand, is not. In fact, Facebook doesn't even record that type of information. Your "current location" is basically freeform. (Technically it's a "page" for a given city. But I think you can enter anything you want in there.)

Facebook's ads API, on the other hand, allows you to target by postal code...

The current version of OS X is 10.10.1. (10.10 is Yosemite. They stopped using big cat names with 10.9, which was Mavericks.)

The Windows kernel version has almost never matched the marketing versions:

Windows 95: 4.0
Windows 98: 4.10
Windows ME: 4.90
Windows 2000: 5.0
Windows XP: 5.1
Windows Vista: 6.0
Windows 7: 6.1
Windows 8: 6.2
Windows 8.1: 6.3

(Note: Starting with Windows 2000, the versions are NT versions, Windows 95/98/ME are actually numbered based on the DOS Windows (as in Windows 3.1).)

That's the reason given but it makes no sense. The Windows API doesn't give out names like that. The Windows 95 version was internally identified as version 4.0. Windows 98 was version 4.10. (ME was 4.90, and a separate flag indicates if the system was Windows NT-based, allowing programs to known the difference between Windows 95 (4.0) and Windows NT 4.0.)

So that explanation makes no sense.

Even more, if you check out the documentation on getting version information, the version returned is now tied to the application manifest as of Windows 8.1 anyway. So you'll only ever get version 6.2 (Windows 8) back unless you explicitly target later version of Windows, meaning the jump to version 10 can't cause problems with older software.

This whole "Windows 9*" check thing makes no sense. Well, except for Java applications, because Sun actually built Java to pull the version number and then translate it into a string rather than expose it via any public Java API. I guess the idea was that you shouldn't need to know the OS your Java app is running on, but as anyone who's done anything with Java knows, that never actually works in practice. As far as I know that's the only case where you'd ever be doing version checks against strings under Windows.

The majority of in-app purchases I've seen tied to your account, not your device, and allow you to restore them when you move to new devices. My experience is admittedly extremely limited (a couple of games my mom and brother own) but in those cases you were able to restore purchases from one device to a new device. More recent games even save to iCloud so you're now even able to keep your save games when moving to a new device, something that you weren't allowed to do earlier.

(For some dumbass reason the only way to transfer documents off iOS devices is still only through iCloud. You can't just connect an iPhone via USB and transfer documents off of it. If a given app doesn't support iCloud, your data is device-specific and can't be transferred off in any way. In 2014.)