Yes, it's stupid, but it's optional and only exists for some ISPs. Hardly the great firewall of China.

And this is the wonderful world they created for us.

According to the article, the comment was added in revisions after peer review. It should have been caught before publication, but it's not the reviewers' fault.

One other thing: to catch this reliably, you need to have someone read through it who knows that it's the final version. Otherwise they may well assume that it's still an active question, waiting for views. And of course, you should always word your notes more politely!

We don't need social networks at all.

... there won't be any more camels.

The whole idea of inspecting the contents of arbitrary variables is a bug. Variables can contain any data the user chooses, and the fact that it happens to look like a function definition is none of the shell's business. Bash should have defined a single variable for the purpose in which all the function definitions are packaged up, or at least have defined a class of variables (e.g. BASH_FUNCTION_*) for the purpose.

There has never been a referendum on independence in Scotland before. There were two referendums on devolution: the one in 1979 was narrowly in favour but failed because it did not reach the required 40% of the electorate, and the one in 1997 succeeded, establishing the Scottish Parliament.

Shetland is *not* closer to Norway than to Scotland. Check on Google Earth. It's true, as is often said, that it's closer to Norway than to Edinburgh, but then San Francisco is closer to Mexico than to Washington, and Canterbury is closer to France than to London.

Next: I'm going to toss a coin, which way do you think it will come down?

I predict a great increase in users' blood pressure due to constantly checking their heart rate.

They are not "dodecadrons", nor are they dodecahedral. They have a cross-section which is a dodecagon.

There are ads on Slashdot???

"Ireland" can mean either the island or the country called the Republic of Ireland, which is about 80% of the island. The Republic is not part of the UK, it is a completely independent country. Northern Ireland (the northern 20%) is part of the UK. The "Irish Free State" was the name of what is now the Republic of Ireland in the 1920s and 30s and is not a term used any more.

... if I'd ever heard of MetaFilter.

If you were the maker of Bitcoin, you could afford it.