My bad.

If they can't afford someone to reply to the correct article, they can still afford a $5 wench.

ROT-10 is safer, especially when used on ancient wooden chests.

Wow! That's the combination to the staple holding the energy source to my battery-powered equine robot -- the right one, not the wrong one.

they all have to be funny, but in different ways. Which is why current Top Gear works.

(scene) We are on a deserted airplane runway in Iceland

A car races by - with The Stig in it.

It pulls up to a shiny outdoor hot springs.

Another car races by.

It has a dark complexioned youth driving it. He's dressed in tweed and wears glasses. Thin Brit style. He gets out.

A third car races by.

It has a young short guy in it. He's done up for a footy game. He gets out.

A fourth car races by.

It opens, and the words Top Gear: Mark II appear.

It's a young British woman of mixed Asian descent.

The crowd goes wild.

even I think American Top Gear is weak sauce.

Now Aussie Top Gear, that's alright, mate.

Actually, Top Gear popularized electric cars for most of the world, by giving them the cachet of "man, that's cool".

Nice try, though.

I see you're unfamiliar with gear heads.

Try to avoid European footy matches and rugger and crickets scrums, is my personal advice.

Incidentally, the only reason I have a FB account is to coordinate art/music projects. However, FB chat is just too unreliable to use for anything too intense. I guess I could go back to the likes of ICQ, which I used to use with the less techy friends back in the day.

This wouldn't be an issue for the typical /.er, but it's hard to "sell" IRC with all its quirks when they see something like FB chat working without any extra config. Even basic IRC usage needs some setting up with the servers, and running the client on a separate shell account (aka 1960 tech, why would anybody use text terminals in the age of bling) would be rather hardcore.

Of course, the main problem is really about trust: you can receive messages offline only if you choose a third party like FB to store them. My non-techie friends basically need something more reliable than FB, so I guess I could go back to the likes of ICQ, or whatever is the closest equivalent today.

I haven't checked the latencies -- there's probably nothing wrong with SMTP itself, but the practical implementations are wildly different, due to different application realms. Email is more like a replacement for snailmail letters, and the infrastructure with multiple server routes and technologies (such as IMAP at the receiving end) is not optimized for simplicity and speed. Conversely, IM is closer to face-to-face talk, and the speed/simplicity is usually realized by minimizing different layers of software, at the expense of flexibility and independence (e.g. Facebook chat).

I guess you could make an email client with an IM-like interface and do some tweaks to minimize latencies, but there are good reasons why these are separate technologies.

He purchased the space with the designated purpose of writing code. This isn't akin to conducting business in an office setting (seeing clients, conducting meetings, etc.). It is more akin to writing prose. If he feels he is more productive in a personal setting, then this is no different from a novelist renting a cabin in the woods to finish that novel that's just not getting out. Would anyone recommend a novelist to rent office space instead of a somewhat isolated personal space to do creative work?

20 years ago, a hijacker would change the route to a different country. Now, he'd change it to the side of a building.