Whoever decided to use backslash as a directory separator on DOS, carrying it over from CP/M (or is that CP\M?), and whoever decided to keep using it in Windows. Forever after requiring people to ask “You mean forward slash, or backward slash?” There is no forward slash. There is only slash and backslash.
Whoever came up with the message after yet another endless Windows patch: “You must restart your computer to complete the installation. Do you want to restart your computer now?” No, I don’t want to restart my computer now, but apparently I have to. As in the Bugs Bunny routine: “Do you want to shoot me now, or wait till you get home?” “Shoot him now, shoot him now!” “He doesn’t have to shoot you now.” Et cetera.
Whoever decided to call unleaded gas “regular unleaded”, back when there used to be a choice between “regular” and “unleaded.” I prefer “Magna Sin.”
Sony. Because they keep making boneheaded decisions to stick with proprietary and/or homegrown media and formats. Sony makes awesome hardware, then cripples it — not letting it run standard MP3s, or in the case of their “Palm-compatible” Clié handhelds, making it just barely not Palm-compatible so you had to use their version of the sync software. Some blame this on Sony owning Sony Media. I blame it on “Not Invented Here” syndrome: you think everything you make must be the best, so there’s no reason to adhere to an obviously inferior standard like, say, the one everyone else uses.
People who keep saying Muslims should like us because we support religious freedom. Don’t you get it — that’s exactly why they hate us even more. It’s one thing to have different beliefs. It’s another to be indifferent to all of them. As a high school professor once said: “The opposite of love is not hatred, but what? Indifference.” Religious freedom, as we apply it, means the government says you can believe whatever you want — the government is agnostic. Ironically, it’s the born-again Christian right that seems to hate the Muslims. Which is not what Jesus taught, was it? Pretty sure it wasn’t.