DD/MM/YYYY is better than MM/DD/YYYY

Why? Dealing with a lot of daily paperwork and having to reference back to some that's weeks or months old I would rank YYYY/MM/DD the most useful and DD/MM/YYYY the least in terms of efficiency. You want to start with large divisions which you can bypass or zero your search in on rather than small ones.

I won't make any apologies for a two sentence post on Slashdot not being a comprehensive guide to website security. It was a simple, common example. You presented robots.txt as some kind of solution to what happened when it not only *isn't*, it could have easily made the situation much worse by pointing a big, blinking arrow to where the sensitive information is. I'm not the only person who interpreted it that way and your overreaction to it suggests you aren't as confident in your knowledge as you pretend to be.

Really? All that is needed is a well placed .htaccess file to secure an IIS server?

No. Why would you jump to that conclusion?

You'll also need an htaccess file. Otherwise you're telling any spiders who don't obey robots.txt and malicious users exactly where to go (though you shouldn't be storing credit card numbers on a web server anyway).

Some planets suitable for life have almost certainly existed in this galaxy for billions of years longer than the Earth.

Why couldn't Earth be the first? Some planet's got to be.

Companies are often very resistant to high upfront costs even when it can provide significant long-term savings.

Calling represents a loss of time

I find the exact opposite: written communication tends to be much slower. At my work I've spent days shooting emails back and forth with customers when a simple three minute call would have accomplished the same thing. And unless you can text more than 150 words per minute, it's going to be faster to call even with the excruciating agony of having to wait for the phone to ring a couple times.