Show codes.

When you ran into trouble with the way your document was displaying, you could hit show codes and edit the paired tags (a lot like HTML).

No program should ever hide your data so that you cannot directly edit it when the "interpretive" parts of the program guess incorrectly about what you want.

The first and foremost abuse of this is web-based comment fields with little mini-GUIs to help you format your text. When the system "guesses" the wrong bullet point, or line spacing, etc. you can fix the problem in three seconds with a show codes option.

Sadly, many programs and web sites do not do this. They think it's too complicated for their users. While this may be true of the 90%, it's not true for the rest, and they're slowing us down with the simpleton interface.

Grrr.

I can't "give" you passion. I'm not Martin Luther King Jr. and this isn't about Human Rights. Passion comes from within and if it's not there, I can't trigger you to release it. If all it required for passion was to saunter up to a counter and say "One passion, please" then we'd all be theoretical physicists musing over our all night analysis of LHC data whilst having tea with Stephen Hawking right now. Sorry to be so crass about it but all I can do is tell you what got the ball rolling inside of me to make computers do exactly what I bid them to and how that makes me feel at the end of the day. To tell you to go home and read Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug and then implement a Hidden Markov Model that learns on Bach Chorales in LISP is unlikely to do you any good. Me, on the other hand, that shit turned me from a hay bailing idiot farmhand into a programmer.

My friends and I talk about starcraft WITH our lady friends. Why would someone be with a lady friend that can't talk to about their hobbies?

There are more people during StarCraft matches than in normal time. Just as there are more people during football matches than in normal time. How would that imply that StarCraft fans go to the bar less often than football fans?

But for sports-bar owners, "Starcraft" viewers represent a key new source of revenue from a demographic—self-described geeks—they hadn't attracted before.

It's the difference between having an established market and custom-building a market. When you're a small player (10% now, 0% at start) you can afford to take some chances and break away from established ways of doing things . You don't really have that option when you're a big player, not without alienating a significant portion of your customer base.