This isn't the first time this happened. In late 2012, there was a promo where you by an LG (I think that was the brand) HDTV and get a year of netflix for free. The problem was, you could just go onto the LG website and enter your serial number, and the website would accept any made up number as long as it started with the correct 2 or 3 digit sequence (or something like that). That was all over slickdeals too.

Why isn't that useful to consumers? I can't tell you the number of time I've spent 10 minutes looking for a product, going up and down aisles, ask an employee which aisle it's in, still can't find it, and then finally realize I've walked right by it a half dozen times. If I could just pull out my phone and it could lead me right to it, I'd love it. That's not them forcing something on me...it's helping me more easily find something I already know I want.

Still, such a thing is probably quite a ways out. Just think about how often stores reorganize their merchandise. Any maps like this would quickly be out of date. It's not really feasible until it would be cheap enough for a store to own a mappinig robot of their very own and have it automatically map the aisles by itself at night once a week.

Wow. I didn't realize google glass was storing its data on magnetic media. Or do you mean that the eye piece is actually a mini CRT?

Are you sure? You might want to check you mailbox again, or your spam filters. I've received the following emails from them:

Dec 20 - Letter from Target’s CEO Gregg Steinhafel and Important Notice
Dec 23 - Important Information for our REDcard Holders

Not sure how you figured that. Target has 1921 stores, and is generally open 14 hours per day for the holiday season (8am-10pm). 40 milllion spread across that and over 19 days comes to 1 transaction every 46 seconds
Awesome work with the math. But let me give you one tiny bit of info you might have missed. Did you realize Target is more than 1 store? Actually, 1921 stores to be exact. So that's (lets round up) 20823 per store. Spread over 19 days, that's 1096 per store per day. The stores are open probably closer to an average of 14 hours a day for the holiday season. So that's 78 per hour, or one transaction every 46 seconds. Somehow I think they can manage a bit more than that. Even if you factor in that not every transaction is a credit/debit transaction, I think it's still very believable.

And yet, to someone like me (a non-physicist) the rubber sheet analogy makes a lot of sense to me, while the orange analogy....well, I'm not exactly sure where you are going with that because it helps me understand nothing. Maybe you just didn't explain it fully or correctly, but I'm not finding it very useful

Or three (I saw it on Friday).

From the other clues, I had the first 3 letters. The only think that made sense to me for the 4th letter was "E". I thought "well, I guess that kind of makes sense, though that's a really awkward way of phrasing it". It wasn't until later I realized that was the wrong answer. When I found the correct answer I was a bit surprised. Not being a big fan of crosswords, I didn't realize they did that in answers (trying to be vague in my reply, so as not to spoil it for anyone).

Whine whine. Your typical slashdot "google this google that...blah blah blah...do no evil...now give me my +5" post. Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that asking you to sign up for google+ qualifies as EVIL? My god, the bar for that one has really gotten low lately. You've offered me a decent service for free while only very slightly inconveniencing me....EVIL!!!!!!!!11!!!1!!!!!one!!!

Google does a ton of things in the last decade that benefit users, or at least myself, greatly:
1) youtube - Great place for me to host videos to share with my family. They're all private URLs so not publicly searchable, and I know pretty much anybody that I want to share the url with can see them, even on a tablet or phone. And if google wants to do some video datamining of my 3 year old daughter doing something cute, who the fuck cares.

2) maps - Nevermind that it's not even 10 years old. Most of the best improvements (street view, real time traffic, predictive traffic, navigation, public transit) were all created in the last 5-6 years. All accessible from my android phone. It's amazing how useful this is. In 2004 I visited Chicago for a weekend and used only public transit. As a tourist, I remember how nervous I was using it. I had the maps, trying to figure out what bus to take to where, and what connections I need to pick up and seeing how they all timed up. Nightmare to me. I visited there again this summer and unlike last time, I didn't plan a thing as far as how to get here or there. When I needed to go somewhere, I just put in the location and it showed me all the options for bus or rail. In 2004, I didn't go anywhere without knowing exactly where I was in relation to everywhere else. This time, I couldn't tell you shit about where I was, as I didn't need to know. Just followed a few simple instructions and I was where I needed to be

3) google+ - yes, some of us actually use it. I can't stand facebook. You have little control over what you see, they're always breaking your privacy settings, and it's filled with crap (half the "posts" are some score or achievement somebody in farmville or some other crappy game). Google let me control exactly what/who I want to see, and they've always been pretty good at not "breaking" privacy options.

4) gmail - even this is less than a decade old (launched in 2004), but I'll give you a break there. But still, tons of great improvements in UI design over the last 5 years. There has been cool enhancements, like the Google Talk feature

5) video chat - text chat has already been pretty easy to do among different os and device options, but video was a different story. Even 2-3 years ago, I remember trying to do video chats between android and ipad. So very few options. The ones I did try were all buggy (ex: some devices the video would be upside down), and blatantly missing support for obvious features (like rotating displays). The ones that worked halfway decent quickly made themselves annoying after some updates were released. Since google got serious about this in the last year or so, this is has become a piece of cake

6) voice - Thanks google. With the help of a $40 obi device, I haven't paid a penny for my home phone service in 3 years (sadly it looks like that may be coming to and end in the next 5 months or so). The abilty to ring mulitple phones (and use your contacts to control who rings to what phones) is awesome. The spam call detection is fairly good (looking at my history, google has saved me from a ton of useless interruptions)

7) android - I had an i-device, and it always drove me crazy. I've been much happier since moving to android. And all of the above mentioned features are accessible from it.

I'm sure I could go on, but despite your typical troll response with the "do no evil" buzz-phrase in it, I've found much of what google has done to be immensely beneficial to me. Perfect? Hell no. But FAR ahead of most everything else that's been offered by others so far. And I haven't paid a penny for any of it (except my nexus 4)

I'm neither defending nor criticizing the president, but that statement was clearly a bit of hyperbole, and you'd have to be an idiot to take it at face value. Why do I say that?
1) The statement was made about plans that existed prior to the ACA going into effect
2) One of the major problems that the ACA was created to address was the fact that insurance companies could (and routinely did) cancel people's policies for any reason at all.
3) Laws cannot be made to retroactively force people/companies to do something.

So I think the point was, there was nothing in the law that could cause you to lose the coverage you had. However, there was no way to prevent insurance companies from cancelling policies on their own whim before the ACA went into effect.

But you've got to admin that's a damn funny phone number for them to have. And hey, I guess it works, because before I had no clue what the phone number is (don't care, because I've got good insurance through work). Now I've got it memorized and I'm sure I'll never forget it.

Actually, unlike Microsoft and Sony, all Nintendo has to do is sell the system and they've already made a profit, even on launch day.

As far as selling games goes, well let's take a look at the top selling games across all consoles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#All_Consoles

If we disregard Wii Sports (since it was included for free) and all previous generation consoles, then we have the following:
Mario Kart Wii
Wii Sports Resort (some of these were included, but some were purchases separately
Wii Play
New Super Mario Bros Wii
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Wii Fit
Wii Fit Plus
GTA V

That's 5 or 6 top sellers for the Wii (depending on if you count Resort), and only 2 for the competition. Looks like they aren't hurting too bad. But what about just the overall total of all games sold for the console, worldwide?

http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Software/Global/

Wii: 901 million games
360: 826 million games
PS3: 749 million games

Yep, that is indeed an odd form of success. Most hardware sold (with none of it sold at a loss), and most games sold. What a total failure.

Oh, and since you said you didn't know the answer about the tie-ratio:
http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Tie-Ratio/Global/

Wii: 8.99
360: 10.48
PS3: 9.35

So yeah, they are on the bottom of that metric, but still very respectable...only 4% lower than the PS3 and 15% lower than the 360. Not bad at all considering all those system supposedly sitting unused on shelves.

Assuming you and the GGP are the same AC...moving the goalposts a bit now, huh? You said, when referring to the volt, that you should get 1000 mph out of THIS CONFIGURATION. Well guess what...THAT configuration has a 16kwh battery array, not 60kwh or 85kwh as the model S does. Now suddenly you are talking about adding the volt's engine to an array the size of the model S. Guess what...not you've got the inefficiencies of having to do the power conversion, plus you have the weight of the huge battery array, plus you have the weight of the ICE, plus the weight of the gas. Oh...and lets not forget about costs. Instead of a $40k or $80k car, you're added all of this expense and complexity together, so you are now probably talking about a $100k car. Yeah, I'm sure that's going to sell great, even if you could get that mythical 1000 mile range out of it.

See...again, you've moved the goalposts. The configuration we were talking about WAS a hybrid solution. That's what your 1000 mile range figure was based on...what a configuration like the volt has should get. Now you are saying "oh yeah, well hybrid IS going to suck". Well guess what....if it's not hybrid...if it's purely electric, then you DO NOT HAVE AN ICE in the car to recharge the battery. So how exactly do you "charge the batteries 3 times" without having an ICE in the car?

You're all over the place here. It seems like you just have a hatred for GM and/or the Volt and it's causing you to just start spewing garbage without even thinking about what you are saying. Let's be real here. The Volt is far from perfect, but lets have some reality in the criticisms of it, and not just go spewing garbage that makes no sense.

Wow, not sure how you get +4 with utter crap like that. You thing that setup should be sporting near 1000 miles? OK, lets see about that. Presumably, you don't think that the model S has a pathetic range, so we'll use that as a baseline for what you think a car should get. The modelS gets 230 miles off a 60kwh battery. So that means the Volts 16kwh battery should get 60 miles. So yes, the Tesla makes more efficient use of the battery. But lets get back to that 1000 mile figure. So we've got 60 miles from the included battery. That means you think it should get 940 miles from the included fuel capacity. Well, it has a 9.3 gallon tank, so apparently you think it should be getting 101 MPG? Sorry, but even the best production motorcycles don't get that high. For production cars, the best ones only get about half of that.

So I think about 500 miles would be the absolute tops you could hope for in a really efficient car with those specs. Granted that's a bit better than its actual 380 mile range, but it's a far cry from your BS 1000 mile figure. If you are throwing out fantasy numbers, why didn't you just say 5000 miles?

Why is it at all sad that, after 20 years, I've forgotten the implementation details of a specific algorithm that I've NEVER had to implement (other than as part of the learning process back then) since it's already been implemented in the standard library of just about every language or API that I've ever worked with (and that implementation has probably been done better than I could do it, because it has likely been done by someone who has studied sorting algorithms in much more detail than I ever did)? What does that have to do with forgetting how to program? I rebuilt an engine in high school, but I don't remember how to do it now. Does that mean I've forgotten how to repair my car, too?

And how does it work? Well, I could tell you now, since the curious part of me went and looked it up on wikipedia to refresh my memory the second I finished making that post. And you might think that's fine, since that proves I can actually do it, except for the fact that, had I first ran into Jane Q. Public in an interview rather than on slashdot, I would have failed that requirement at the time.

But to answer your question with the knowledge I had at that time, the only part of it I could remember is that divide and conquer is part of it. But I couldn't remember how it dealt with getting values sorted between the left and right halves (doing a rough sort before dividing), nor anything about the pivot point or how to select it.

I'm sad to learn that, by your standards, I'm not currently a programmer, but merely a hack just out of high school, as I couldn't write a quicksort to save my life. Ironically, though, 20 years ago, when I WAS just out of high school (and WAY less experienced/skilled), I apparently was a programmer back then because I could and did write a quicksort at that time.

Or, maybe you're just really bad at expressing yourself.