This is a big problem in terms of legibility. Sometimes, it's easy to tell that you're starting your post in the middle of a sentence, but sometimes, it's impossible. I would say it's worse than posting in ALL CAPS, and around as bad as not having punctuation and paragraph breaks (depending on the length of the text).

If only there was a -1 unintelligibility mod option. Posts that start in the subject and continue in the body, among the other aforementioned transgressions, would slot perfectly in.

You're right that businesses should respond to negative reviews and customer complaints. However, the burden is rather high on small businesses to be constantly doing this. And hiring an outside firm to do it doesn't guarantee satisfactory results all the time either.

Since Google's being forced to delist web pages (DMCA and all), Yelp and other such directory sites probably should be forced to have a delist procedure as well. In fact, I would think that a lot of issues with fake reviews and fake updates and such would be solved if many of these things were opt-in (in the same way that Craig's List or eBay or Amazon Marketplace or Google Shopping is opt-in). At the very least, there should be an ability to opt-out.

I mean, it's one thing to complain when the system you took part in is working against you, but it's something else to be forced into the system that without your active involvement is being gamed against you.

People forget that consumer protection is not just about protecting the consumer directly, but also about preventing unfair business practices to maintain a competitive landscape (this falls in the same vein as price collusion, except it's one bad actor instead of multiple bad actors).

Boeing's safe because you know where your money is going and you'll probably see it again come next campaign donation season.

SpaceX is exciting because you only think you know where it's going, when it fact it might actually go back to spaceflight R&D.

Since this is Long Island, you forgot the women putting on makeup and the guys doing their hair while going 75.

The new touch screen center consoles don't help either (and the steering wheel buttons don't really have all of the functionality of even a non-touch screen system). Yeah, I get it, backup camera and all that. But there's no reason every piece of functionality has to be through the screen.

But the really dangerous people are not the ones who are texting or distracted in gridlock. The really dangerous ones are the guys racing down the LIE at 90 MPH weaving between lanes and cutting cars off while everyone else can only go 55-60 due to light traffic. And they're definitely racing because there's usually two or three of them at a time. The distracted drivers just end up rear-ending someone as a result of these people (assuming they themselves don't flip over first). Not that the distracted drivers aren't at fault, but they're not the only ones that caused the accident.

Not that your statement about the US is true (most people get their licenses revoked permanently after enough times), and simply driving without a license or with fake credentials is an easy way to defeat such measures anyway, but a lot of it has to do with population density and poorly-planned, developer-interest-based suburbia.

Most people live in the suburbs, mostly because living in most city centers suck (either prohibitively costly or prohibitively crime-ridden or it's no different from living in the suburb except you don't get much personal space). You have to drive in the suburbs. Hell, in a ton of city centers you still have to drive.

Reducing reliance of cars in all of the U.S. would be a great thing, but there's too much moneied interests (and a bit of misguided nationalism) involved for that to happen. To fix the problem, the culture itself needs to be changed, and the moneied interests (oil, auto, etc.) need to go away. And then you can talk about redeveloping the suburbs into real towns and revitializing city centers and increasing mass (local as well as regional) transit.

So are you saying your unique password was revealed along with your username? For curiosity sake, was it a strong password, or something an enhanced dictionary could attack?

I am so not using your coffee machine.

You forgot to qualify what makes a watch great (it's not the mechanics or the features just in case you're wondering). Watches are great because of the style, and the limited availability.

People who collect watches, those are the guys with serious money. Most (real) Swiss watches cost more than limited edition top end luxury cars. Even the crappier Japanese and American watches begin at 4 figures and move up from there.

A watch is a fashion statement. Not a toy.

Now, sports watches are a different story. But those are specific-purpose watches, worn for very specific occasions. Nobody's going to go to a black tie party with a sports watch. Hell, nobody over the age of 10 is going to wear one of them while wearing anything fancier than a sweaty t-shirt and shorts.

The wearable electronics fad is never going to take off using watches as the core. It'd be more practical to focus on electronic headbands. Now glasses, there's something there. But electronics in glasses are off-putting to society for a variety of reasons, and Google really didn't help the situation by being the first one to it.

Especially since courts nowadays interpret "eventually" and "limited" as "forever - 1 day".

And then you have the mods that may or may not violate other people's IP (pixelmon mod anybody?).

Microsoft would shut those things down right away. Hell, they'd shut down any mod attempts and the whole mod API project in general.

It'd be the death of the game. And since nobody's got patents on the game, there'll definitely be clones coming out to eat away at the mindshare itself. But man, what a way to go. That $2B better be in cash, Notch. Don't get fooled by offers in shares.

Active Directory. For that, there is no competition.

You're mixing the three branches of the Feds with the "government." The government is everything from your DMV clerk to the NSA analyst who wrote the software that's automatically reading and categorizing this.

Once, the program somehow found itself in an infinite loop and had to be killed with -9. This despite it having been proved terminating.

Microsoft Bib. Bob for the Internet.

That only works if you either 1) have a test system you can test patches on or 2) turn off automatic updates. Either way, you need to be savvier than your average Windows user.

Fortunately, the big corps that give Microsoft the majority of its sales tend to have sufficiently capable tech teams. It's the small businesses that really lose (the personal/home users can mostly hit the reboot button or hold the power button down for 5 seconds or whatever passes for a hard reset these days).