And yet I don't hear anybody complaining loudly they had to buy a Blu-ray player and an HDTV with HDMI to play Blu-ray discs. Same draconian DRM, same barriers; artificial and otherwise. The difference seems to be that you'd be hard-pressed to find a modern HDTV that doesn't have HDMI inputs — but the same should be true of HDCP-compatible monitors by the time Windows 7 hits shelves, if it isn't already. (When I bought my newest monitor a couple of months ago, most of the models I looked at were HDCP-compatible, and many had HDMI-in.)

Disappointed that you're locked out of using your existing physically-capable equipment? Do you also complain that you can't attach a Blu-ray player to the S-Video port on your old big-screen TV?

...Thanks to Google Analytics. One of the many pieces of useful information GA tracks by default is site visitors' Flash capabilities (down to the minor version number). If you don't think Google is already tracking those numbers in aggregate form across all the sites they service with GA, you probably don't quite grasp the business Google is in.

Anecdotally, Adobe's 99% claim is broadly supported by the Google Analytics stats on the mid-sized corporate web site I maintain: of ~35,000 unique visitors this month, a little under 97% reported some version of Flash installed (and of that number, a total of 11 reported an open source Flash player).

I've seen it called "the dole" — presumably from the verb "to dole", as in "doling out" support to those less fortunate. I've never seen it capitalized as a proper noun, however.

...Bob? Elizabeth?

Who needs a vote when you can buy your politician outright?

I'm a Democrat, Apple is overrated, and you're a fucking tool with a persecution complex.

What makes you so certain the mods were European, fuckhead? Plenty of non-European nationalities are capable of recognizing flamebait.

I'm sure I could find a kinder way to phrase this if I cared to try, but don't be fucking retarded.

Saving my game right before I plunge into a room full of enemies with limited cover and even more limited ammo doesn't prevent me from dying once, twice, a hundred times before I develop a winning strategy. It doesn't mean that I win just for showing up. It does mean I get to focus my effort on overcoming the challenge at hand, rather than being forced to replay some arbitrary chunk of the game over and over again just to get to the bit that overwhelmed me. (Why should the penalty for failure be endless tedium? That sounds too much like real life to qualify as entertainment.)

Parent is very nearly correct: the Acid test series purposely test CSS edge cases in order to catch rendering bugs. The CSS they use to do so looks very little like any CSS you would be likely to find in a production web site. That doesn't invalidate Acid, but it should be recognized that the tests are essentially synthetic, and any results should be evaluated with that understanding.

I know you're trolling, but: http://www.ieaddons.com/. (Mostly crap, but then, so is https://addons.mozilla.org/.)

Even better: http://www.bhelpuri.net/Trixie/. Trixie enables user scripts (ala Greasemonkey) in IE.

Bullshit. The German Workers' Party renamed themselves the National Socialist German Workers' Party to capitalize on the popularity of socialism in Weimar Germany. They were never remotely "left-wing". Their primary political opponents prior to taking power in 1933 were the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the most popular left-wing party in pre-war Germany.

Only if (assuming we're still in the MVC paradigm) your Controller logic is incredibly simple — or you implement it client-side, and use your web service merely to implement a data store (a terrible idea from a security/data integrity perspective).

YHBT; YHL. HAND.

It's called the Presidential Records Act.

(Ah, but what's this? An Executive Order from President George W. Bush? I wonder what that's about...)