I would go further - literally: 12" is very uncomfortable. I don't look at things that closely when I'm trying to paint them, let alone trying to read text. And 8"? Come off it.

I'm wondering where this guy got his "typical" from.

OK, this story was in idle. Well done for pegging it right there. And I like the Oatmeal, so always happy to see it getting more exposure.

But this strip was posted weeks ago. So not only should this not have been on the front page, but it should have not been on the front page a long time ago.

What's next? Reposting every xkcd strip?

Thanks for giving me another reason to drop /. from my RSS reader.

Some phobias are disabling - agoraphobia, for instance, or a sufficiently developed fear of heights. Some phobias are inconvenient like fear of the number thirteen.

But fear of cockroaches? I call that healthy!

Unless your job requires you to go into cockroach-infested places and not freak out, I can't see any serious downside to cockroach phobia.

Too right. Priggish to the point of idiocy. And yet so many of the articles in the 'pedia make no sense at all if you don't already understand the subject you are reading about.

"The rate of global software piracy in 2009 was 43%, meaning that for every $100 worth of legitimate software sold in 2009, an additional $75 worth of unlicensed software also made its way into the market."

When did 43% of $100 start to come out to $75?

Hence all that lovely region coding - ensuring geographic market segmentation so there will not be a single global market.

I often wonder if Philips and the other CD standard signatories regret not inserting region coding into that first digital media standard.

You make it sound like superpower status was recently achieved.

It's the startup cost.

Software product companies are expensive to start, but they're nothing to companies making innovative physical objects. I used to work for a silicon startup - it was a cheap start for silicon company and it still burned through a phenomenal amount of money before it had a product. Software is just cheaper (and often quicker) to get to market.

So really blame the VCs and the addiction to short term returns in the US stock market.

No, 2000 sounds about right. There were SMS payment systems in place in the UK before I moved to the States in 2001 and was nauseated* by the state of mobile telephony here.

[*] I exaggerate for comic effect - I really don't care enough about mobile phones to feel sick at their poor state in, ahem, the States, but it was shockingly backward then.

This sounds an awful lot like what VisualAge had in the late 90s. That mutated into Eclipse of course.