Hmmm... It seems like you have a dog in this particular race...

Take a look at Les Misérables. The film is goes south very quickly at the end.
After Jean Valjean becomes wealthy why did he become mayor? He was still a wanted man after all. That was a stupid risk to take.
Why after escaping and saving Cosette why did he still stay in France? He seemed to have access to much wealth so why not go to Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, or Canada? I mean how stupid was this man?
Simple... It would have made for a terrible story.
Most if not all the "errors" in Gravity were to make a good story.

Well probably the first step would be to create a rosetta stone for them. Encrypt something that will probably be around for for a very long time in multiple languages. I would suggest three religious texts the bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita.
Follow those by various texts on language, science, math, and history.
Next I would document all the data formats used in the rest of the data.
Then I would include things like all the patents and so forth.
Then store copies of all the data in lots of places. Places like monasteries, castles, forts, national parks, the dry valleys of Antarctica, the tops of the highest non-volcanic mountains of each continent, the Atacama Desert, the great pyramids, several of the Mesoamerican pyramids, Stonehenge, and finally Ísafjörður and Neskaupstaður Iceland. The last two are near the mid atlantic ridge but not near active volcanoes. With the seabed spreading at the mid atlantic ridge that land should be around the longest. Maybe it should be an ongoing project. Every 100 years each of the data stores gets updated.

Um. How is that different from a grocer card? The bribe is different—fuel discounts rather than food discounts—but the effect is the same: they track your purchases.

More likely the shelf will urge you to get the king size instead of the regular. What makes you think the advertisers will take your interests to heart?

Yes, it is. I suppose I was getting dangerously close to Poe's Law territory, wasn't I?

Maaaaybe. I'm inclined to go with AC: the editor might still have been insulting in dealing with a man, but probably would have used a different insult. And there are gender-neutral uses of "whore," but I don't think this is one of them.

Indeed. It's startlingly unprofessional either way.

Yep. I remember one kid who kept asking, "Will it hurt? Will it hurt?" and his mother kept saying, "No, not a bit, honey" and the like, and the kid clearly wasn't buying it. So I looked him in the eye and said, "This is going to hurt worse than anything you've ever felt in your life. It's going to hurt worse than anything you've ever imagined in your life. It's terrible. You'll be screaming. It will feel like your arm is getting chewed off by a wolf ..." While he was giggling, I gave him the shot and he barely even noticed it. I'm willing to bet he was a lot less fearful the next time he went in.

Of course! Everyone knows there's no such thing as sexism any more (except for sexism directed against men, of course, thanks to the feminazis). This is just yet another example of a woman whining because she's being treated like one of the guys, and if she can't take the heat she should stay out of the kitchen! Or, er, get back into the kitchen. Whatever.

So I've learned by reading the Slashdot comments every time a "women in ___" story comes up, anyway.

I've actually found that change tracking in Word is very easy to use—it's one of Word's better features. Revision control software typically falls down because it does line-by-line diffs rather than word-by-word diffs, and the diffs and their annotation can't be kept together easily. In principle revision control tools ought to totally rock for this kind of work, but in practice the UI isn't there except for übergeeks, and even for us it's really not all that convenient if the changes are extensive and need to be reviewed one by one.

Har! Yes, I'm sure it is.

It is also possible that this message was authored by an AI who is resident on the Internet and has no physical components at all. Call me Skynet. And be worried over whether I have launch control. Be very worried about whether I might tickle the stock markets a bit, just to see what kind of chaos I might cause.

You must be WOPR's little rug rat playing Fisher Price with the gullible planet. This is the level of misdirection of a toddler playing hide and go seek in the belief that if she can't see you, you can't see her.

...but keeps voting for them anyway (even going so far as to defend them now and again).

So why exactly is the big stupid middle not to be reviled just like the extremes? The outcome of all three groups' actions is exactly the same.

You may very well be right, in which case I weep for my country.