I think you'll find that the issues come from both sides not keeping to the specs...

If your cell-mate protests your imprisonment by staging a hunger strike, it might not help you out, but it's a nice gesture.
If your jailer protests your imprisonment by disposing of that symbolic key to your cell you can be pretty sure he's not really doing you a favour.

Your logic is flawed; you can only state that you would have no opinion had you been aborted. Otherwise you would not only have no opinion on abortion, but should not be able to form the opinion that the GP is likely a creationist.

Northland summer: "occasionally rising above 30C"
No wonder there aren't many Aussies there; the good weather of Australia starts in the 30s.

Australia isn't really that kind of lucky. It's more lucky in the sense of, "That <animal/insect/natural disaster> almost killed me. I keep surviving these things, aren't I lucky."

There are people who care about precise meanings, and people who don't care about precise meanings. Sometimes one group will win out on how we move forward, other times the other will. The imprecise side of the collective 'us' allowed the American/rest-of-us spelling rift to take place, but it was the precise side that formalised it. You can get annoyed at people who, through their laziness, make it difficult for you to understand what they are saying; or you can choose to let it go. Nobody is perfect, and there is often lots of fun in pointing out the stupid things people say without meaning to.

I bought my first dell computer a year or so ago. The hard drive died a couple of months later. After an eleven minute phone call they'd organised a tech to come out and replace the drive and check why the hinge light had been flickering. I've never had such a short phone call with tech support before, even when I already know the problem they usually insist on doing some dumb check or subtly hint that it was probably something stupid I'd done; but this guy was like, 'yep, sounds like you're right'. It would have been two days for the tech to come except I wasn't available that day. Does happen.

I don't know about where you're from, but in Oz we have this thing called "grass". It's what people normally expect a playground to be covered in... except for the sand-pit... oh and basketball courts, etc.

I hate onion. Seriously, no analogy, I hate onion. The rest of my family is obsessed with it. I tried expressing my distaste for it by calmly asking for it to be not added to my food; but in the end I lost out because it's easier to make one dish than two when there's only a minority that don't like one non-essential ingredient and the rest do. When I was a teenager, I did the teenager thing of getting really upset that 'nobody get's it'. Now my response is to pick the onion out and simply respond to the inevitable questions, "I don't like onion... I just don't."
If you don't understand why someone doesn't like onion, you'll never find out from me. It's worth neither your effort nor mine.

However there is one more thing I've learnt; expressing an opinion of distaste for something where it is clearly a matter of taste generally just degenerates into an baseless insult to the cook (or cartoonist). You don't find XKCD funny? Fair enough, but remember that's just your opinion. My mum thinks the Simpsons aren't funny, it's "just stupid"; that doesn't make it so. To state an opinion in the manner that I've seen on the XKCD sucks blog isn't enlightened, it's just playing the "I am so much smarter than ..." game that the site claims to abhor.
That's why I don't get XKCD sucks.

Using your example you should have interpreted the #-# as the first number is the one you know and the second number is the one you don't know. Thus you cross out the 0-0 and 0-1 because the known number is 1 and those have the known number as 0. So then you're left with the 1-0 and 1-1 as the possible ones so the probability is 50%

My experience of engineers who see programmers such are those who think programming is engineering's easier cousin; less of the brain work and more of a guess/check experience. They do an engineering degree, decide that's too much work, then get a job as a programmer and drive their co-workers nuts with their unjustified superiority complex. It's bad enough that by doing 'introduction to programming for engineers' they think they've become programming geniuses; even more than someone whose entire degree was based on programming. I knew one who insisted that Java was the best programming language in response to me suggesting that I preferred C. I asked him which other languages he'd used, but Java was the only one he knew. Of course, as an engineer he knew better than me. I had one engineer bragging about how high he scored on an online IQ test, and helpfully pointing out that if other people didn't score that high it's not necessarily a bad thing. I didn't have the heart to tell him I'd scored 10 points higher on the same test.

However, that said the arrogance I can easily deal with. It's the horrible code these guys produce that really riles me. Programmers might not follow engineering practices, but that doesn't mean we just hack some random code together without putting any degree of thought into it. But that's what these guys seem to think is acceptable.

Also, a hash is not an acceptable method of sorting a pair. The fact you had to skew your data to use the hash so should have suggested that perhaps there's a better way. Do not use DOM parsing if you're just going to traverse the tree linearly once and then throw the thing away. THINK!!!

I don't believe all engineers are like these. I'm just annoyed.

My personal favourite section is the 'HTTP Probes and Attacks Statistics'. It's just the way it's done.
"Microsoft fixed blah",
"Apple fixed blah, which would otherwise cause end-of-world",
"Problem found in Oracle which can cause end-of-world",
"Problem found in Microsoft, but it's been fixed so only dumb-dumbs affected".

Well, that's the gist anyway.

LEDs and glow in the dark dots have been going in and out of fashion for decades. I saw one and thought it was new and exciting, then found another that was probably 20 years old...

Whilst I agree with how nice the symmetrical Italians' plugs look, if you look closer they have two different, and incompatible, sizes for different rating. Having not seen this in use I don't know how inconvenient that is (maybe not at all...); but I have extensive experience with the Australian way and like the way that's done here.

That's shocking!

Ah, but if you're using sci-fi to allow your elephant to exist, then technically your elephant is sci-fi. And part of being science fiction is being fiction. Therefore your elephant still doesn't exist! Reality sucks sometimes.