Just last week, we received notification that IBM is rolling out a "program" to upper-level employees with decades of experience. The idea is that we would work reduced hours for the next year at full pay, and then leave IBM after a year (next March, I believe.)

Of course, this is for US employees only. I think we can be sure that the replacements for these employees (if there are any) won't be in the US.

You didn't "cut cable" if you didn't have it in the first place; the number they're citing is a percentage of total households without cable, not the number of total households that had cable and got rid of it.

It was "proven false" by mathematicians who considered the number 200,000 to be the same as "infinite."

A quick Google shows that our resident village idiot's claim is nonsense; tuition was charged in the 1950s, although it was (even adjusting for inflation) much cheaper than it is today.

Sure there is; the search engines can ignore robots.txt for reddit.

It's one thing to use robots.txt to say that you don't want the content on your website indexed by search engines, but if reddit is pulling this kind of stunt (giving that access only to Google,) then there's no ethical problem with other web search engines bypassing whatever anti-scraping techniques that reddit uses.

Whenever I've had to return something that was obviously a prior return, I always take a sharpie and write "BROKEN" or something similar, in big letters, on the packaging. I figure that should keep them from trying to just send it out again.

I can just imagine a system where you get a "one minute charging speed boost!" when you choose to watch a video ad...

That's not what the person you replied to was talking about.

Apple will not allow an app to be hosted in their store if the service charges a higher price using payments through the app than it does using other methods.

It's funny, I keep hearing people say that, which was the exact opposite of my experience. I had a Discover card for six months last year, and in that time had more problems with their customer service than I have had, in total, in twenty-five years or so with other credit card companies.

Never had any experience with Capital One for a credit card, but all I can say is good riddance if they kill off Discover.

"A human" can't review them all in-depth. However, the most profitable company in the country can afford to hire multiple humans, who could review all of them.

I was responding to the claim that "Not even the biggest sites in the industry could afford an editorial team capable of playing 50 games a day to find and write about those worth highlighting." Exactly what "write about" means isn't defined, but as I've demonstrated it is certainly possible to do better than "one-word games". With their numbers, after you've weeded out the trash, you're left with 2 games per day. It should certainly be possible for a competent team to play that many games for a few hours and write a short review.

If you had to play for a significant time to discover that it's "worthless," then the game isn't "absolute dross," so it doesn't matter for the purposes of their argument.

This:

Is completely in opposition to this:

If 48 of the games are "absolute dross", then a reviewer should be able to identify that fact within, say, ten minutes. Say you've got a staff of five people to review new games; that hardly seems unreasonable for a storefront the size of Steam, so each one would have to review ten games per day. Determining which games of the ten are total crapware should take no more than a couple hours, which leaves you six hours during the working day to give a fair shot to those that have some promise.

It's kind of bizarre how they have convinced anyone to believe that this project will ultimately be successful. Apple is dead set against interoperability, and any time you find a hole in the methods they have to detect a non-official client, they'll be able to plug the hole in short order.

In the end all you're doing is helping them find and close the holes in their walled garden.

Any time someone calls or texts me to try to get me to vote a certain way, I make sure to let them know that it's their fault that I'm voting for the competition. The fit that some of these callers throw is some of the best entertainment of the political season.

They lock messages from non-Apple devices out of that with their point-blank refusal to support secure messages between Apple and non-Apple devices. It's incredibly disingenuous to pretend that Apple's motivations have anything to do with notifying the users about secured messaging.

The only "distinguishing feature" of iMessage is that it doesn't interoperate with other vendor's phones. Which is of course the point, because (despite your claim to the contrary) Apply absolutely loves and encourages petty behavior to drive more sales.