Maybe one or two people chained to desks in the basement at Sony... I began to get really pissed about this when I found out that "HDTV ready" really means "Not ready for HDTV signals, you need another box." It's all !#$!#@$!@$ marketing terminology. After weeks of digging around I finally figured out that what I wanted was a tv set with 1080p in the specs, no mention of upconversion, and an internal digital tuner that didn't require an extra external box to decode anything. And in another few years I'd bet the #!$!@$s will change it all again. They should define a standard and stick to it for the average lifetime of a tv set.
Digital camera specs really vex me too. I bought a Canon AE-1 SLR camera in 1976, and it served me well for 30 years, during which I bought several additional lenses for it. When I started to investigate digital SLRs a few years ago, I discovered I could not buy a Canon camera body my lenses would fit onto, everything I owned was useless, top quality lenses I once paid many $hundreds for, all still in pristine condition (I take VERY good care of my equipment), were suddenly worth nothing, I had to start over again if I wanted to go digital. Photo gear for non-professional but knowledgeable photographers like me who want top quality equipment used to be something you could buy once in a lifetime. Now they're like personal computers, obsolete the moment you buy them. At the very least, people who make cameras should provide a way to use their older lenses with them. Most of them don't, and ought to be shot and pissed on for it. It's all marketing hype; megapixels really don't matter at all for 99% of photographers, a 3 megapixel camera will provide perfectly satisfactory print images up to at least 8x10, and you can't even buy a 3 megapixel camera anymore, except possibly as a camera of seriously poor optical quality built into a cell phone.
Other things that seriously bug me, that I really can't do anything about because the civil rights and free speech laws quite rightly prevent me from following my instincts:
Creationists, and their tarted up cousins, Intelligent Designers; they're either ignorant or stupid, possibly both.
New Age mystics; see above.
Kevin Trudeau, a multiply-convicted felon still promoting his crap about things "they" don't want you to know.
Jenny McArthy, the "vaccination causes autism" diva.
Oprah Winfrey. Gawd, where to begin...
Dr. Phil. See above.
Late night cable tv. Jesus, what a wasteland of woo-woo BS.
Conspiracy theorists. Learn to think, you fools, try to understand probability and evidence.
Religious fundamentalists, of any stripe. Your scriptures are transparent fables, your claims are demonstrably false, you have nothing sensible to contribute to any discussion.
Hmmm... maybe I've turned into a cranky old man. The list of things that bug me is endless.
, and most other people here don't either. But that wasn't the OP's question.
