To any newbies that don't know how to do it, you can hide all of redelm's spam crap. Click his name, then click the little orb by his name, and make him a foe.

Then go the comments preferences page, scroll down, and set a -5 (or whatever) modifier to your foes. You won't have to see his crap again.

If my cell phone can understand the intricacies of all the time zone rules of the world, I think we can manage for a computerized car to obey differing traffic laws.

While I mostly agree with you, it's not all of them. Google Play Music (which is the music streaming service that I primarily use) isn't included. (That being said, I regularly go over my 500mb quota, and I've NEVER been penalized or noticeably throttled when I do. So I can't complain at all)

Believe me, it took me a long time to find that screenshot.

If their website's design is anything like their OS design, count me out. I'm not sure how that's supposed to be usable and elegant.

To see a sample screenshot of the desktop, I click on a tiny thumbnail of a seashell? Or a pink feathery-looking thing? Why are those icons the only way to see screenshots of the thing? And the majority of the text on the page is nothing more than flowery text explaining that it's open-source. Where's any actual description of what makes it different from other distributions?

Not that there's anything horribly wrong about all that, but for an OS that's supposed to be all about design, usability and elegance, their website looks like a fluff PR piece. It sure doesn't inspire me to want to try it.

(Although, to be honest, I'm happy that the main page of their project actually tells what the project is, instead a list of bullets about news items, which seems to be the case with most open-source projects)

In my town, there's a perpetual 45-minute line of people at the comcast office. Even though the lady that works there is helpful and friendly, I'd rather talk to an idiot on the phone for 20 minutes than waste an hour or more driving to the office, waiting in line, and dealing with the issue in person.

Is the line shorter in other towns?

I don't know, the message from No-IP includes the statement: "While we are extremely pleased with the settlement terms, we are outraged by Microsoft’s tactics and that we were not able to completely and immediately restore services to the majority of our valuable customers that had been affected." This sounds an awful lot like code for "Microsoft paid us a metric crap-ton of money, but part of the agreement is that we wouldn't tell how much."

See my statement above. I apologize for spreading false information, but I DID get that false information from an error message on Google's web page.

Looks like you're right. Although, today, when I tried to install it in firefox (version 29), I got this error message, which told me that I needed to download Chrome (it did NOT tell me that my browser was too old).

So I stand corrected, I apologize, but I do cast some of that blame onto their own error message.

This is coming from the company that recently decided that Hangouts only works in their Chrome browser.

I recently read an article (I wish I could find it again) that describes how and why Netflix does this. Basically, they train their viewers to watch for many certain qualities and attributes of movies, which are then tagged and categorized to set up their recommendation and category systems.

For example, they might use a few movies as a baseline for a ratings system so their viewer/ranker staff are on the same page ("on a scale of 1-10, how sweet and sappy is this movie? Does it have a strong female lead? Does it feature cute animals?"), then the viewers watch the film and fill out extensive and standardized tagging information about it, which they build their ratings from.

The article describes it in much better detail, but it's clear that the level of standardization and depth in their tagging and categorizing is beyond what you'd be able to get from the general public.

Ah, your post reminds me that I forgot an argument:

5. The pebble already does this!

Ok, the pebble fails at your couple requirements (while it's not much bigger overall than a regular watch, the rectangular corners and whatnot make it more cumbersome. It always get caught in my long sleeves. And it's cheesy-looking), it is waterproof and the battery lasts almost a week.

Here we go again. Let's just skip ahead to the arguments made every time there's a story about smart watches. Please note that the exclamation point at the end of each argument is the indicator that THIS argument is right, and everyone else is a moron.

1. Nobody wears watches anymore, they are just jewelry!
  1a. These are too cheap and ugly to count as jewelry. I only wear a $180000 dollar watch to show off how awesome I am!
  1b. I wear a watch, because I hate pulling my cell phone out of my pocket!

2. These are dumb, the charge doesn't last long enough to be useful.
  2a. My $5 watch from 1993 never needs to be charged!
  2b. My $180000 watch doesn't have a battery, it is wound by a servant that comes into my room every night to care for the watch!

3. They aren't rugged/waterproof enough!
  3a. Neither is your $1800000 jewelry watch!
  3b. I don't care what happens to my $5 watch, but it keeps on working, what about these?
  3c. I regularly go scuba diving, parachuting, race car driving, and enjoying fine wine on my yacht. That's when I'm not busy having great sex twice a day. This watch won't work for me!

4. I don't want to be MORE plugged in! What happened to just getting away from all your notifications and enjoying life?

Ok, now that we've gotten those out of the way, is there any NEW discussion about these things, or should we just move on?

And unfortunately, with a family, it's still more expensive than driving.

I live a half-mile from an amTrak station, so I almost always check amTrak before a trip to see if it would save me money or time or both. So far, it's never been cheaper OR faster for any trip that I've investigated. If you're traveling alone, the price is comparable to driving. Once you get to 2 or 3 people (let alone a family of 5), driving is significantly cheaper. And you get to go directly to your destination, as opposed to ending at a train station. And you have a car when you get there. I keep hoping that the train makes sense someday, but today is not that day.

<grammar police>That site lists it as an adjective. He used it as a verb. I don't think that qualifies as cromulent in that case.</grammar police>