In the last '90s I worked as System Operator for a company which sent several thousand automated account renewals to credit card companies each month. We had been sending 9-track tapes via Fed Ex, and I was tasked with converting all these to digital transfers. We ended up with a mish-mash of different methods, dialup modem, encrypted email attachments, etc. but American Express had a rather unique approach.

They had us FTP an unencrypted, unzipped text file to a folder with our account number on their ftp site. Logged in as anonymous. With full access to all the other folders showing all their other customers' data transfers. They didn't clean up the folders either, so some of the other customers had a year's-worth of data transfers piled up. We couldn't believe it.

Wow, hard to believe that this still happens. First encountered this when I opened my first (and only) online banking account at SeaFirst bank in the late '90s. When I realized that in order to get into someone else's account all I had to do was change the account number in the URL I took some screen shots and sent it off to their webmaster. It was told that it was fixed within a couple of weeks, but I was so appalled that it was even possible that I had them delete my online profile and lock my account from changes made from an online account. Have never signed up for online banking since because every few years there's another of these stories appearing, I think the most recent was Chase just two years ago.

This is the inevitable result of outsourcing all your IT work to the lowest bidder.

no solid proof on the existence of any kind of god.

There seems to be some liquid proof though, at least according to Benjamin Franklin who said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Atheist != anti-theist. An atheist is simply someone who doesn't believe in religion, not necessarily someone who believes there isn't a god.

Oh, damn, and I've already commented so I can't mod this up.

"You can't fix stupid." - Ron White

And more importantly, a command and control structure, generally hierarchical. What use is a religion if you can't control anyone/anything with it?

One of the more amusing aspects of astrology is that the tables that they use were not accurate to start with, and didn't allow for precession, stellar movement, etc. Now 800 years later when "Jupiter is in Orion" according to their charts it probably isn't actually anywhere near it.

It's like we found the dumbest guy in the country and elected him president or something.

We in the US have a head start, we elected Reagan in 1980. His wife Nancy's astrologer seems to have had a say in a number of policy decisions, especially later in his second term when the Alzheimers was setting in.

It seems as though the quality of ACs has been deteriorating the last few years, while the number of them rises. It's too bad.

Horsepucky. Most allergic reactions are non-fatal, some are almost unnoticeable. Ever get a mosquito bite? That itching is your body's allergic reaction to the bug's saliva.

Think about delivering that line to 1400 audience members, half of whom are drunk, stoned, or both, and tell me which will be understood by more. And in this case the average and the median are so close it doesn't matter anyway.

Still doesn't do Quechua, which is spoken by over 14 million people.

I grew up in a tourist town and learned early that more people are killed crossing with the light than are killed jay walking, probably because the jay walker is actually paying attention to traffic rather than just assuming that the signal is correct.

I generally wear boots, and will give them a good kick in the quarter panel if they've cut me off. Scares the crap out of them, they think they've hit someone and their insurance will go up.

The issue I run into more often in Bellevue is people coming out of a parking lot driveway waiting for traffic to clear and only looking one direction to see if cars are coming, oblivious to the fact that pedestrians even exist. (The T-Mobile headquarters is especially bad for this.) If I'm in front of them and they start to move I'll slap my hand down hard on their hood to let them know I'm there. The better ones are appalled that they almost ran someone down, the executive-looking BMW types are just annoyed that I've touched their precious baby.