There's a saying to the effect of "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity", and perhaps that applies here. It seems likely there's some kind of link between incidents and it's surely not "mass psychosis". The link could just be something as simple as a bureaucratic requirement for a certain product to be used by/for US personnel; maybe a particular pesticide, or maybe some cheap office supply-type product. Or maybe it really is the Russians attempting to spy and there's a glitch with their devices. Making the people you are spying on sick and thus drawing attention isn't really the goal after all.

Indeed, I don't think this whole thing would have been quite the fiasco that it is without the player base being fed up to the breaking point. Tons of people loudly declared they were abandoning the company's games immediately when the news broke - they were clearly already simmering over other issues with Blizzard.

I hope the real takeaway is that people are tired of reboot-quels, just continue your damned story with the old characters if you must.

They always told me when I was getting my math degree I could go on to do almost anything. Which wasn't helpful since I had no idea what I wanted to do (hence the math degree). I tried grad school but was fully uninterested. Many lifetimes later I am happily a developer.

I just got this:

Dear New York Times Reader,

You may have received an e-mail today from The New York Times with the subject line “Important information regarding your subscription."

This e-mail was sent by us in error. Please disregard the message. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

Sincerely,

The New York Times

I got one today as well. Thought it was strange since I have an account on the web site, but I'm not actually a subscriber. Good to know that it's a mistake and that I'm not using that account for anything important. Hope they weren't hacked though.

I always figured it was on purpose, the better to keep conversations about the same topic together. Seemed a bit ham-handed but I figured they had a reason. I mean there's no way they could not have known about it is there? All you would have to do would be to glance at one of the major stories and it would be obvious that the comments do not pertain to it directly and are old with thousands of responses.

The only test I care about is the one where I click the Firefox and Chrome shortcuts, in that order, and Chrome opens first every time. Until Firefox can remedy that, I just can't make myself use it anymore.

I'm with this guy. I have SLI and I have yet to find a single game that it actually improves. In fact, in most cases it cuts performance in half. As far as I can tell it's just a way to trick morons like me into buying twice as many video cards.

I actually watch a ton of stuff on tv land and nick@nite, and when they recently started showing infomercials instead of shows at 3 or 4 am I was fairly peeved. But this is far more annoying.

This kind of thing should never make it to the customer. As the customer, I don't care where you get channels from or what you pay, I only care about what I agreed to pay for what I agreed to buy. After the whole NFL network debacle (which is still ongoing), if they do this I'm going to have to finally get directv or that u-verse crap.

That is a fairly ridiculous conspiracy theory they've woven together there. I would rebut it with Hanlon's Razor but it doesn't even merit that.