Precisely my point. There is clearly room for improvement.

What about detecting domains that have just expired, but haven't been removed yet? And not just for .com but for other TLDs (and second-level domains as appropriate, see http://publicsuffix.org/) as well.

Yes. This. Just trying to figure out "is this domain registered, or is it available?" is a complete pain in the ass, for any sort of automated system.

That's a really insightful comment. Thanks for posting.

If I remember correctly, Sun acquired MySQL prior to being acquired by Oracle, and Oracle's reasons for buying Sun had nothing to do with MySQL. Somebody correct me if I'm mistaken!

Not if the whole reason for recording your gender in a database has to do with other people identifying you. If you self-identify as female but I think you look like a guy in a dress, that may not qualify as a success.

The thief sells your phone to someone who will ship it to another country, wipe it to factory defaults, and sell it on the black market - possibly repackaged as new, if it's in good enough condition.

You said the thief doesn't get the charger, but I can buy an iPhone 4 USB cable for about $6 retail, which means the wholesale price is closer to $2, and I'm sure they can be obtained for less. The new iPhone 5 ones are probably a little more just because they're new. I expect many other phones use Micro USB, since that's the official standard in Europe, and obviously those are dirt cheap.

An international stolen device registry would prevent these stolen phones from operating, which means people will stop buying them, which means the market will dry up, which means people will stop stealing them because they no longer have value. It won't happen overnight, but if everyone's on board, it will help a lot.

Oh come on. We're far too apathetic to commit to an actual civil war. It's gonna take a lot longer than a year or two to get normal people upset enough to start killing people. At this point it's not even the lunatic fringe yet.

The Constitution describes what the government has the power to do, and what it does not have the power to do. It does not specify against whom that power may be wielded.

You lose some of the miracles, but not all of them. Sometimes a "miracle" is just a totally naturally occurring phenomenon, which God set in motion from the time of Creation just so that it would happen at a specific place and time so that it would have a special meaning in the context of what was going on.

If you use the Bible as the foundation upon which to build your hypothesis, then you can use real science to test it, and when you've disproven your hypothesis you go back to the Bible to seek out a better interpretation and form a new hypothesis you can test. That sounds crazy to some, but it's totally consistent with the scientific method.

You're also forgetting the part where W3C was sitting in their ivory tower doing nothing useful, so the browser vendors (sans Microsoft) got together and formed their own group, WHATWG, which created HTML5. W3C only decided to adopt HTML5 after it became clear that all the browser vendors (except Microsoft) were already committed to implementing it. (Microsoft didn't get on board until W3C's adoption.)

But you're right, the expectation is that JavaScript is a big part of how the web is supposed to work.

Some of them are in HTML5, but browsers haven't implemented them yet, and since everybody uses JavaScript anyway (and will continue to use JavaScript to support older browsers for the next decade) there's no pressure for browser devs to implement them.

Well done sir.

Thank you for having the courage to stand up to the nutjobs who would demean your service.

I believe his implication was that the Start menu has to return in order for people to want to buy it. Microsoft isn't required to do what customers want, and... customers are not required to remain customers.