And indeed, some of us are. If you drive an electric car and live near a nuclear power plant, you might be one of them.

Ad hominem attacks are tedious, so for the sake of argument let's take it as given that I'm both. Now that we've got that out of the way, I'll ask again: how are Uber's high prices ripping anyone off? Does anyone actually pay those prices? If so, why? Is Uber pointing a gun to their heads?

I've always kind of wanted a bank account with built-in credit-card functionality. No overdraft fees possible, rather you pay credit-card style interest when your balance is negative, and earn bank-style interest when your balance is positive.

Of course, this is unlikely to be offered for just that reason... to the banks, overdraft fees are a profit center :(

Nobody is being forced to pay Uber's prices. There are still taxicabs in Sydney, are there not?

Semantic indentation? Blech.

If you want Python, go write Python. Don't ruin Lisp trying to turn it into Python.

They supposedly waited all those years for the right script to come along.

You don't give Apple programmers enough credit -- the USB transfer routine includes a surreptitious Bitcoin mining thread. That's how Apple builds up its cash reserves.

Is the latter action illegal? If so, under what circumstances?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any particularly compelling reason why company X should be required to permit a competitors' software to make use of the company X's servers.

Well, it might help indirectly. Every hour the developers don't spend trying to debug the OS is an hour they can instead spend on making the user interface work better. I suspect that a lot of mediocre products appear simply because there were so many showstopping bugs to chase down that there was never any time to smooth out the rough edges.

If there's any justice in the world, Keurig will be getting a lot of post-Christmas returns this year, when people realize that the coffee machine they just upgraded to is incompatible with most of the coffee they wanted to make.

When polled on this question, the number one response from consumers was: "What is DRM?"

Breakdown by region doesn't mean anything. IMHE, India should be a top offender. Maybe the fails in the US are all from native Indians and Bulgarians....we don't know.

Agreed, but the hope/expectation is that as the user base grows, the valuation will become less volatile, making it more useful as a currency.

But they had STYLE!

I don't know about NetHack. I started with Hack back in the late 80's, and have played that then NetHack off and on since, usually picking it up for a day to a few weeks then losing interest. Never finished the game. I'd usually play until I got a guy down pretty far with a great kit, then when he inevitably died from something stupid, I'd be annoyed and lose interest again.

It's a good game, maybe even a great game, but it's not a perfect game and it's not the best game ever. Too much of it is just not fun. The major design flaws in my mind:

* Once you hit the labyrinths and have to deal with the wizard following you around, it just becomes a grind. A little bit of a grind in order to achieve something afterwards is fine but when a game becomes work then that is not.
* It doesn't give you a fair way to figure out what to do. A lot of the actions required to finish the game are neither hinted at nor intuitive.
* It's too repetitive. It doesn't exercise my mind much; you just do the same things again and again.
* It's too time-consuming, and frequently unnecessarily so (which goes back to the repetitive point).


Anyway, just my thoughts.