Google has shown that it doesn't have programmers that know a damn thing about human-computer interaction time and time again (see YouTube). NIH also is alive and well at that place too. I thought Apple was bad! People tend to forget that the original Google+ rollout was a mess that looked like some random manager said "hey, looks good enough, get it live ASAP to make the CEO happy." Remember, just because you have a Ph. D. (or any random assortment of important looking letters after your name) doesn't mean you are qualified.

This would explain why my chat list is missing a few regulars. I knew something was up when my phone was bugging me about updating to Hangouts this morning (never EVER set your phone to autoupdate anything!) Whats funny is none of those people show up as blocked in the GMail Talk client like that forum post says, I'm likely blocked on their side and the distribution of people seems random. Funny that back in the day if AOL (remember them?) tried this crap with AIM, people would be howling. Google does this crap on a regular basis and people go "meh". Some of us just want a simple chat client with a list of contacts that works. I wonder how this will effect people who don't use Google clients or contact Google Talk clients via AIM or other IM services via their "gateway".

They used to have their own system. Sister sites CNN and Money used to too, but they switched to Facebook and later to Disqus (no reason was given why they dumped Facebook).. Someone must have seen some "savings" in outsourcing vs. keeping it in-house.

You may be able to activate it on Verizon by dialing *228 and selecting "activate phone" from the voice prompts which should program the phone over the air with an existing account. Some people had success activating non-VZW phones that way in the past. Prior to mid 2005, you used to be able to convince CSRs to activate non-VZW phones (thats how I got an unbranded/uncrippled Nokia 6255i on their network), but that loophole was closed.

Anybody remember when Microsoft was thinking about buying Intuit? Microsoft Money (heh) wasn't quite as nice as Quicken and they really wanted to get into the accounting software market big. Everyone balked, some screamed anti-trust. In the end MS threw in the towel and Intuit is doing well. Imagine if they had bought Quicken only to kill it later because of their incompetency.

A shame because Fios itself is a "new" network. They could have implemented IPv6 from the start of Fios deployment back in 2005.

What day are we up to in September again?

Things get more interesting when they have to determine what jurisdiction's taxes apply to the buyer. Does it apply to the buyer's billing or shipping address? Traditionally it is the latter, but the "use tax" loophole still exists. Plenty of people will ship stuff to a state with no sales tax even though they live somewhere with one (ex: Maryland resident ships stuff to a Delaware address).

#3 On your list has existed for years in various forms and failed. Remember BEST and Consumers Distributing?

You'll get slapped with customs fees and tariffs depending on the item if you purchase outside of the country.

Whats sad is that this really isn't that hard to do! PCI and USB vendor IDs are issued by their respective SIG and are readily available. Even if there is no central database of device specific IDs (aside from the wiki/user contributed ones), having the vendor's name is a good start.

Sweet 'n Low is saccharin, not aspartame. They both are significantly sweeter than regular table sugar so the powdered form is usually mostly filler. This difference in sweetness throws off soda recipes, hence the need to create a diet formula. I've always found diet soda to be somewhat sweeter. A good example is the North Carolina regional soda Cheerwine (its available in some parts of FL now). I actually prefer the Splenda sweetened diet version over the regular HFCS sweetened version. I have had the cane sugar bottled versions as well.

Tab is still available locally (reformulated with aspartame). I haven't actually tried it though.

Your aren't alone. A lot of people are sticking with Snow Leopard due to its speed, stability, and more importantly, its ability to run PowerPC apps. http://lowendmac.com/roundtable/12rt/038-snow-leopard.html
A similar situation exists with Tiger, the last PowerPC version of OS X that can run Classic and runs much faster than Leopard ever did on those machines.

or a basic PCL driver for that matter. Both are established printer standards at this point. Airprint appears to use PDF, which many printers support direct raster of nowadays, but does it in a non-standard way as opposed to using standard IPP, which many printers also support.