Ok, have to give SOME credit to SC5 for this. You don't have to micromanage getting utilities to everyone. The distribution system appears random and thus can be sucky if your building is out of water or power and is off on a long branch with a bunch of buildings in between. It will take forever to get the utility watering or powering them again.
Upgradable buildings is another plus, though I have hosed myself several times by not leaving space to upgrade around the building itself. Come on people, build UP!
Most of the rest of SC5 is suck, suck and more suck.

Wish I could get myself to stop playing it.

SC4 was the best graphically and simulation wise to date. The awful part of SC$ was the stupid side missions which must be accomplished to unlock this or that thing, most of which involved trying to control a vehicle on a diagonal roadway with a keyboard. Total setup for the BS which is Simcity5 Online Version.

I never used disasters in my cities if I could turn it off. Fires and whatnot are disaster enough. I never had any urge to destroy what I had made. I especially hate the unrealistic disasters. Come on, giant monster? Alien attack?

In SC5, the traffic algorithm is so broken that a grid layout will leave you awash in traffic jams. The most efficient layout in SC5 is a snake pattern with one end being the (single) connection to the region.

I've heard tell of some people who managed to get 600k or so in SC5, but yes, it is crap. Highly visual and oooh shiny crap, but crap.
For those unaware, they finally came out with the offline version back in March, but I was so disgusted with the initial online only launch that I didn't even know this until a few weeks ago. I bought it, and am highly, highly disappointed. A HUGE step backward from Simcity4 in almost every area.
The city sizes are tiny. Basically, you can get a perhaps 10 by 10 city blocks in the city. This is probably about 5% of the size in a large city in SC4. It is unrealistic that a city of 10 by 10 blocks would sprout populations of huge skyscrapers and boast populations of over 200k. Unless it were a city within a sprawling metropolis, but that is not what SC5 is. You have huge empty regions with absolutely nothing between anywhere from 3 to 8 or so cities that are limited in size and have incredibly dense population.
Maxis says that the reason for this is that they thought peoples computers wouldn't be able to handle larger sized cities. Well, tough titty if they have to upgrade their computer once a decade. My three year old computer handles SC5 without a hiccup even with cities over 200k in size. Perhaps if people are having framerate issues, they should (gasp!) back off the sliders? Frankly, I think the Maxis response is a lie to cover the fact that online probably can't handle the large city sizes, and they are too proud to admit that online is a complete and utter fail and waste for a game like Simcity.

Power naps, caffeine naps, 8 hour versus 10+ hour days, etc have been studied for years and it has been scientifically proven that they improve productivity. But here is the problem: Employers are not interested in increasing productivity. They are interested in the appearance of productivity. And that means, people awake and working, with butts in chairs.

Same here, they don't care if you do it during the day or at night as long as it gets done... Oh, and as long as you are here from 8:30 to 5:30 because it looks bad to the other departments if you are not here. You can go ahead and work nights at your discretion, but your butt does need to be in the chair from 8:30 until 5:30.
A few months ago, I got a call at 6:00 in the morning about an issue. I worked on it until 9, took a shower and went to work. On the way to work, and issue came up, and I asked if someone else could look at it because I was on the way to work. It got escalated to the CEO who demanded to know why I was not at work at that hour. I explained that I was called early in the morning and was working on an issue at home. he replied that occasional early morning calls are a fact of life and not an excuse for not getting to work on time.
So in order to perform my job to the expectations of management, I have to be able to foretell the future, so that I know whether I have to get up at 5:30 and go to the office and wait for the support call that I already foretold, or whether I can get up at 7:30 and go to the office because there will be no support call that day or I might get one, but I can complete it before I need to head to the office.

it is possible to scientifically test dowsing, it would just be expensive and scientists have already decided that dowsing is BS and don't want to do the research to prove it.
All you have to do is have a dowser go out and do his/her thing. Where they indicate there is water, dig. Also, dig 10 or 20 other random holes and figure out if there is water within about the same depth. Repeat about 100 times at different geologically separated and diversified areas. Shouldn't cost more than 10 or 20 million to put this to bed one way or another.

Lighting (the Mozilla calendar app) is also pretty nice. Rust is gaining a lot of interest as a systems programming language, although not so much in the application space.

Again, hand waving without specifics. The most noticeable change for me was that they button to customise the UI is now on the toolbar by default, rather than hidden away somewhere. What can you no longer customise that you could previously?

I really don't understand this complaint. The UI changes were relatively small, and one of the biggest ones was making the 'customize UI' button more prominent in the new versions.

I switched to Firefox on Android recently because Chrome for Android has the same handicapped cookie management policy as the older Android Browser, but Firefox lets me run the self-destructing cookies plugin, which does exactly what I've wished for the last 15 years all browsers would do by default.

No, it's developed in the open, but it's really hard to get changes pushed upstream. We have a bunch of patches for the FreeBSD support and to improve sandboxing, and it looks like it will end up taking 2-3 years to get them all upstreamed. Meanwhile, the code follows the traditional Google development model of gratuitously refactoring things (are Google people paid by number of lines of code changed?), so it's a lot of effort just to keep the patches up to date.

Building schools after you've been seen to come in and overthrow their government doesn't buy you nearly as much goodwill as building schools after you've just helped them overthrow a foreign invader and then removed your military presence from the country.

Apparently on slashdot, the plural of anecdote is the exception that proves the rule. So five or 10 people have seen witching work. Therefore it doesn't work.

Gas lines, water lines, sewer lines, coaxial lines, electric lines can all be found with a minimum of effort without witching sticks. All you have to do is go to a random spot, any old spot, it doesn't even have to be within 1000 miles of a human settlement, and dig. If you do not hit one of the above, you will at the very least cut the only fiber connection to an entire continent.