My guess is that she has the typo stored as a contact in whichever email client she uses, and just selects that other person from the list without thinking about it (or she doesn't know how to modify or delete contacts).

Thankfully these problems will be solved in the future when google introduces their Google+ID™ project, forcing every person in the world to have a Google profile with their real name and proper biometric identification, linked to their physical Google ID Card™. Google then declares all other forms of personal identification (online or offline) obsolete, including email addresses.

@TDWTF123 said:

Whoever didn't realise this was a half-hour project using a tool already on every user's desktop fucked up monumentally. They've not only insisted on reinventing the wheel, but on hand-crafting their wheel whilst sitting on the steps of a wheel-factory - and then criticising the person who told them to just buy a goddamn wheel in the first place.

Are you seriously saying that, if you have two servers, and you need to transfer data between them, using a simple script that does some HTTP calls is "reinventing the wheel" whereas manually copying the data to an Excel file and using Excel's functions to do HTTP calls is "the easy way"? (and that's not even what the manager was saying, she proposed sending them by email and manually merging them)

Let me put it another way: if the manager had never mentioned excel, and you had to find a way to send a list of product descriptions and pricing data every day to another server   (and we have no reason to believe that data is in excel files), would you have immediately thought "Ah, we'll create an excel file with that data and use Excel's functions to transfer it!"? Because that's what you're implying.

@Ronald said:

That's because you don't know what trolling is. It's a misconception that within a given forum, members posting opinions that are not in line with a vision shared by a larger number of other members are trolls; it just means that there is a general bias (which differs from common sense because of the selection criteria for the population).

 

That's true, the word "troll" is severely overused.

But someone who intentionally makes inflammatory posts with the intention of getting angry replies is trolling, and yes this definitely happens regularly in these forums.

And in defense of everyone who said you were trolling, your posts in this thread are so stupid that it's natural for people to assume you don't actually believe that.

@_leonardo_ said:

is it simple enough that my grandma could get past it?  yes.

is someone going to code a robot to exploit it?  probably not.  And if they did, you could change the 'hint' to 'remove all X's from this group of letters', and other easy human-readable instructions. 

i dub it:  good enough.  

 

... then again, if we could see under the hood, who knows what ghastly authentication we might find...

True, but it still shows lack of knowledge on what a captcha actually does. Because if you're trying to do an anti-spam system based on that (there are many sites that use one) you just add "type XYZ here to continue", or an invisible field, some javascript checks, whatever. You don't need to dynamically generate letters and spaces because the whole point is that nobody is going to spend even 30 seconds coding a spam bot just for your site.

Some time ago I tried searching for more info on "alternative Captchas" (the ones where you have to tell cats apart from dogs, or rotate a picture, etc.) and the amount of cargo cultism was astounding. There were hundreds of results that were just "Hey guys, I had an idea, what if instead of typing a word you just have to drag something from left to right?" that were clearly from people who thought a captcha is just a chore you have do do before you can register or send a message.

@El_Heffe said:

When I first read about Tor and "hidden" websites the very first thing I thought of was "If I can find these websites then so can anyone else -- including law enforcement". Apparently that never occured to a lot of people.

Yeah. Just like when
Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype. They didn't know you can download it for free!

@Ben L. said:

@Gurth said:

@ratchet freak said:

no love for lateX?

Adding LaTeX output was a lot easier than RTF, I know that, and I had more knowledge of RTF than of LaTeX before I started. Then again, that's not too surprising since LaTeX doesn't require you to think about presentation, while RTF forces you to do just about nothing else.

The downside of LaTeX: it's a 1.6GB download if you want to write anything using it.

Wow, what's there? A virtual machine running a full custom OS running LaTeX?

@derula said:

Now, everything that helps is to press the X in the upper right corner of the dialog. No, I don't think that's a nice thing of Google to do. In fact, WHAT THE FUCK GOOGLE, LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE! I FUCKING DON'T FUCKING WANT A FUCKING GOOGLE+ PROFILE! FUCK OFF!

I see what google is doing wrong. If they just made Google+ another part of google, and made it a standard part of google accounts, people wouldn't be trying so hard to avoid it. I mean you can't "opt out" of Gmail or YouTube, why should you be able to do the same with Google+? They already have your name.

Wanting to show your full name next to your YouTube comments and other public places, now that's a dick move. I don't see why anyone would want that.

@mott555 said:

@Lorne Kates said:

... they named their Health Care system after a fictional doctor who performed illegal experiments, poisoned himself, went insane and murdered innocent people?

Reminds me of Star Wars. I forget which novel, it was one of the later ones, but a character was commenting on how the Empire named their ships evil-sounding things like Accuser, Agonizer, Devastator, Malice, Rage, etc. They decided the Empire didn't even pretend it wasn't evil.

Obligatory

@boomzilla said:

@joe.edwards said:

@Severity One said:

"liberal" in the European sense of the word, not the American

I have trouble grasping what denizens of other countries mean when they use the same adjectives we do to mean different things.

Statists have learned that accurate descriptions of their ideas and values are bad for them. They ruined "progressive" nearly a hundred years ago. I guess enough time has passed that they can reuse that one, especially since their Orwellian appropriation of the term "liberal" has largely reached its end.

I'm not sure exactly what you're implying, but terms like "progressive", "conservative" or "freedomist" (aka liberal) are always going to be ambiguous. "I want freedom": sure, but what freedom? Personal freedom, economic freedom? Freedom from a government, or freedom from people who are not the government? If you are a "conservative", what do you want to conserve: money, traditions, laws? Etc.

@TheCPUWizard said:

@mikeTheLiar said:

When something as fundamental as staying healthy is so expensive simple that yet the average person can't afford be bothered to take care of it, out of his own therefore it must be paid out of somebody else's pocket , that is the problem we should be solving

 

Now that the comment has been fixed....I can agree. Yet the option of simply letting them die on the side of the street (or in their homes, etc..) is not acceptable to the vast majority. Therefore "insurance" which spreads the cost and the risk. The larger the pool (for a given set of claims) making payments into the system, the lower the per-capita per-claim cost.

I can't even begin to even

@ratchet freak said:

@anonymous235 said:

@dtech said:

@Ben L. said:

To be fair to RTF, the .doc format is more fucked up than the .rtf format.

So is a hooker with herpes compared to a hooker with syphilis. Doesn't mean I would want either of them.

So is there any rich text format which is good? I suppose basic HTML would work, but then there's always someone who will try to embed scripts, or interactive SVG, or load resources from external servers, or redirect, etc. causing incompatibilities.

no love for lateX?

 

Not supported in MS Office or LibreOffice. Whoever manages that format clearly doesn't give a fuck about end users using it, so neither do I.

@Mason Wheeler said:

We don't need 40 million less uninsured people in this country; we need about 250 million more.  When something as fundamental as staying healthy is so expensive that the average person can't afford to take care of it out of his own pocket, that is the problem we should be solving.  Insurance does nothing to decrease the underlying costs of health care; it just sweeps the problem under the rug.

True, if the health care costs are inflated, that should be the highest priority, but that doesn't mean insurance is unnecessary. Car accidents or cancer are always going to cost more than what the average person can pay.

Hmm, maybe we could make it so that if the price is too high, the person doesn't have to pay for it? Like some kind of global insurance managed by the state. I wonder if anyone's ever thought of that before!

@dtech said:

@Ben L. said:

To be fair to RTF, the .doc format is more fucked up than the .rtf format.

So is a hooker with herpes compared to a hooker with syphilis. Doesn't mean I would want either of them.

So is there any rich text format which is good? I suppose basic HTML would work, but then there's always someone who will try to embed scripts, or interactive SVG, or load resources from external servers, or redirect, etc. causing incompatibilities.