You mean I could buy an unlimited parking card for 1/3 the price of... whatever it is 1/3 the price of, without the hassle of fucking with the hardware myself?! SIGN ME UP!!

My family's apartment in Japan had one of those, and the hot water wasn't "hot" at the best of times. Baths can be described as "tepid" when you get in and ten minutes later you're lucky if you're not shivering. And that's on a sunny day.

This was in the Kyoto region, about the same latitude as San Francisco.

And you consider goatse to be what, art?

Forced by, by whom? Probably the one paying for the overpriced software?

How did you manage to complain about the software's price and being forced to use it in a single sentence? If you don't like using it, then don't pay for it.

Newbie bashing? Poor form, Anonymous Cowardon. Just because you've been around longer doesn't make you better!

Wait, so the solution to Microsoft's anticompetitive behaviour is... to reduce competition in the market?

What happened to the long-toted problems of a monopoly becoming complacent and not improving their product, etc. etc.?

So wouldn't it be Opera's fault that it doesn't have Internet in its name? Why are "the clueless" responsible for being informed about obscure browsers when they don't really care? If the problem is really prevalent as you say, and Opera really wants to capture this totally-clueless-picks-browsers-based-on-the-name market, then isn't it Opera's job to change its name to say, Opera Internet Browser(c) or some such? After all, it's not the consumer's job to be informed about products and choices, it's the marketing department's job to inform their target market about their product.

Developers should take a lesson from this. I still cringe a little every time I open the GIMP.

That's funny, because I actually had to deploy some SVG-based webapp last week. Specifically, it was outputting scatter plots with some few thousand data points. I tested SVG performance in Opera, Safari, Chrome Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer with Adobe SVG Viewer 3.03, 6 (alpha? pre-alpha? No one knows...), and the RENESIS plugin for IE.

Here are the results:

Opera - Easily the slowest of the bunch. Took about 15 seconds to render the graph.
Safari - Got confused about the app's filetype and kept trying to save it.
Chrome - Pretty fast, took about 2 seconds to render the graph but strangely starts rendering the datapoints in small chunks after (it'd draw the first half of one series, the the next half, then the next series, etc).
Firefox - Not much faster than Opera.
Adobe SVG 3.03 - About as fast as Chrome but was missing some features, like changing the cursor display when you hover over interactivity points.
Adobe SVG 6 - The snappiest of the lot, and supports the cursor changing feature, but likes to draw erroneous datapoints. Too bad Adobe dropped development on this.
RENESIS - A little faster than Chrome but not as fast as SVG Viewer 6. No errors and wasn't missing any features as far as I could tell. This is what I ended up going with.

So, why is Opera "gloating" over IE when they themselves has a LOT of work to do on their own SVG support, to say the least, while there are free plugins for IE that pretty much trounce the competition? Does IE really need built-in SVG support when this is the case? Maybe it needs built-in flash support too?

To me, this just looks like another case of unwarranted smugness over "omg IE doesn't conform to standards!!1".

s/surveillance/security

Dammit, paranoia is contagious.

RTFA. It was caught on the surveillance camera.

Wait, how do weird fetishes disqualify someone from government appointments?

Hell, in the good ol' Roman days...

Ritual suicide isn't a way out of a difficult situation, or giving up in the face of a challenge.

I think your mistake is the impression that external observers despise failure and pressure someone into suicide. That is not the case. It's acknowledgement that there is nothing you could do to make up for your failure. It's a voluntary offering of your own life as the most sincere apology possible and the ultimate show of respect for those you've wronged.

I'm interested in the backstory - did a higher percentage of schools fall than other buildings, or what? If the buildings were indeed within the "entire towns and villages that disappeared", how does the reporter manage to justify her rather unsubtle implications that the government all but killed those children?

The world probably would not miss them :)

Possibly it has the same stigma as cannibalism or necrophilia? Sure, the person is dead either way and most probably don't give a damn, but some would still consider the above acts morally reprehensible.