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Well yeah, no shit.

To be fair, the only notable impact I noticed from the takeover of OKC was the removal of one of their blog posts wherein they slammed for-pay dating sites using math and logic to make their argument. They may have moved a few mostly-trivial features behind their own paywall as well - I think you used to be able to easily see everybody who had rated you highly, and now that's slightly less convenient - and they advertise the paid accounts more heavily, but they have preserved most of the rest of their casual and largely irreverent attitude towards corporate issues. I always get a chuckle out of one of their survey questions, which reads:

If you have any STDs, please click here.

Good thing I did it the traditional / free way. I would have felt ripped off it was no better ;P

(Note: I love my wife very much. I just have a twisted sense of humor.)

Lots of places you can meet for free, even for dating.

Not at all. Actually if all you want is something small and portable to surf the web, a netbook makes more since than an iPad. All it adds is a tablet, but it uses a crippled OS. Actually after he saw a netbook in Target my brother-in-law asked me what I thought of it, he said he thought about getting one. But I hadn't seen one there so I couldn't say. I did tell him they were fine for causal web surfing and editing simple documents. Now I don't know if he got the one Target had but my sister now carries one around.

I've seen complete computer novices go out and buy those, and be completely fine with 10'' screens

I want something I can use for photography as well as development, a 10" screen does not cut it. Actually many photographers say the minimum size of monitor for editing photos is 21". Photo.net has a number of threads on monitors in it's forums, in some people ask what size monitor they should use, in some people say they use 27", 30", or bigger monitors that cost above US$2000. I want one 24" and am thinking of getting a 24" HP LP2475w, which costs about $600. It has an H-IPS panel, is wide gamut, and has been gotten good reviews from photographers. I'd then use my MBP's LCD to hold the panels and toolbars. That is when using my laptop. When using my desktop, er tower, PC I can use my 21" monitor, an old CRT, for them.

And I've never seen a website tell me to update my version of Flash, unless you're running an entire version behind. :P

I posted the Flash player version, 10,0,42,34, which is the latest. I even copied and pasted it from the Adobe test page I linked to.

• You Tube keeps saying i need to upgrade my adobe flash player but still cant play videos. Help!?
• "You need to upgrade your Flash Player by clicking this link" I did but still not working
• You need to upgrade your Flash Player

Google has many more results for need to upgrade flash player.

Falcon

Another good dating site that is free is Plenty of Fish. My girlfriend and I found each other on the site. It's not like okcupid or other sites which use formulas to match people, but it is free so no complaints. Last I logged on there (almost 2 years ago) the site had much to be desired in terms of design and usability, but it worked.

I have used it as well, with great success. (I am painfully shy in real life.)
I have put up a couple of ads lately and the email harvesters have found a new technique. They reply to your ad, if you respond to their mail, you are on their list. But they use the same text in the message every time. :) How can they expect anyone to fall for such a message?

"Kind of sucks that it's almost impossible to get dates through Craigslist now, though."
Try http://www.plentyoffish.com/

If you are interested in using an online dating site, there is basically only one important factor. The site that has the most people in your area. There are some really well-built, expensive, or high SNR sites out there. I'll leave out the commercial sites I've played with, but the freebie sites that I've used, and been pleased with, are PlentyOfFish and OkCupid.com. I've used craigslist as well, but got too much spam to pay attention to the good responses.

Good Luck.

I tried CL for awhile and came across the same shit. I would find some chick that sounds cool as hell (I'm not talking about ones with hot pics and kinky messages) and when responding I end up getting a stupid pr0n advertisement. The place that I found my awesome girlfriend (she isn't a geek) is here. The site isn't geared towards geeks specifically, but since it is free there are very diverse groups of people on that site. Definitely check it out even if you are just looking for friends!

Do you have hobbies that don't involve computers, those might be a good place to start. Of course, I do know of people who met women through their non-computing hobbies as well (WOW dating, who would'a though).

A lot of it depends on you. Your age, your interests, your taste in women, and of course your attitude. If you just want to meet people, you could try Plenty of Fish. I've found that since it doesn't charge, there's less interest in nickel-and-diming you and it's easier to meet people. Meeting people, of course, being an important prequisite to dating. Now saying so might sound like an "oh duh" thing, but in reality way too many people hit the scene or the net looking for a partner when they haven't even hit the friendship stage. In that case, you pretty much end up being in the "desperate" category, and meet people who are much the same. It's not always a bad thing, but not always the best place to start either. It's amazing how easy it is to "just meet somebody" when you've got a schedule full of friends (who may have friends who are interested in you). For more of a dating scene than a meeting scene, you could perhaps try Geek to Geek

Moving away from the online scene and back to common interests, how about things like book groups, sci-fi cons, anime cons, or whatever else along those lines may float your boat.

And of course, as a final possibility, there's always an age-old suggestion from IRC. As a good portion of my friends are foreigners, and my SO is from China, I'd say that suggestion works for me. I also have a few friends who have gone to Japan, etc and apparently "white guys" (which is an assumption on my part, but most slashdotters seem to be SWM's) are a pretty hot commodity over there, and body-type isn't even a huge fact in that (if my friends are any basis to go by).

The whole point why successful dating services (yeah who would have throught MMOs and Dating Services had something in common) charge is to create a cost-of-entry that separates serious participants from the rest of the population.

I would like to point out that one of the most succesful datingsites at the moment is Plenty of Fish... which is free.
I've used it for quite some time now (not necesarily looking for a relationship, but also for some extra friends), and I got to say that the amount of fake profiles, or rude behaviour is few and far between.

You obviously haven't been to any dating websites that offer video chat or sites like Stickam where people use the webcam and microphone through a flash application.

That's why.

It's not that the add-ons get too much permission, it's that every other program tries to install a fucking browser plugin.

I noticed that the 'n00bs' who's computers came loaded with Vista, run like absolute shit after a few months of owning it. They just don't understand these things when the installer runs, and they just click "next" to get the installation complete. This competition for browser dominance and brand-recognition is nauseating as all hell. I love the laptops that are stuck at resolutions like 1280x800, and you run their installation of IE, just to find half the screen covered in toolbars. Seriously now, what the fuck is that?!? Oh - gotta install the yahoo bar, oh gotta install the google bar, oh gotta install the pre-loaded with unofficial copy of Kazaa or Limewire toolbar, oh we need the weather toolbar, and the SuperAntivirus toolbar, and now the AVG toolbar - fuck I hate this shit so much.

Why do Mac users and Linux users manage to avoid most of this shit?

Okay, I understand the need for new and fresh content to keep the customers coming back, but an article about a dating site that uses town names from across America?

Let's think this through:

1. Anyone who wants to get more Obama can go to news.google.com and read through several dozen international news sources, as well as the Huffington Post and Fox "News", and get more than enough of the regular headlines.

2. Slashdot, as a news aggregator, is finding slim pickins on the tech side, as Obamamania sucks the oxygen out of every other news story. Cool for us political wonks, not so cool for CowboyNeal & co.

3. This really is a nationwide conspiracy. Every tiny suburb and exurb of Dallas is frequently spammed by these guys. I thought they were a local outfit, so it's very interesting to see the extent of their reach.

4. The way the guy investigated is cool, and I'm sorely tempted to upgrade my own DomainTools.com account to "paid" status, now that I know that it really works.

5. Last, but CERTAINLY not least, it's about a DATING SITE. Dating, as you may have heard, is part of the mating ritual of Homo Sapiens Solaris, aka "those of us who have emerged from our parents' basements". It involves meeting FEMALES, which is kind of an awesome concept when you think about it. Opportunities for +5 Funny moderations abound (deserved or not).

I think the "Together Dating" guerrilla marketing behemoth, with its sign spam, is reaching the same shallow end of the gene pool that buys enough v1@g@ra to keep our inboxes full of e-spam. Pretty sad. Especially when there's a free dating site that almost certainly generates better results. But I guess some folks think, if you don't pay for it, it's not worth anything. Hopefully, those folks won't be asking me for a date.

Calling me pathetic would be a 100% sure fire way to make sure I never visited your website.

Besides, Plenty of Fish is free.

As a side note, be aware that the majority of people who use online dating sites don't have the courtesy of replying to messages. In the case of women, they use the excuse, "I get so many a day I can't respond to them all!" while in the case of men it's, "Why would I want to talk to that dog?"

It's funny considering that people will claim they're outgoing, friendly and "living every day as if it were my last"*. Apparently friendly and outgoing only apply if you're a model (in the case of women) or George Clooney (in the case of men).

*If this were true, they wouldn't be spending it on a dating site. They would be out doing things that would get them jailed or killed because after all, if it's your last day, what does it matter?

First off, if you want to get rid of the stupid membership fee structure of Yahoo! et al., try Plenty of Fish. I met my girlfriend on there.

Second, it is fairly trivial to work around your correspondent not being a member of Yahoo! Personals so long as you are. What I did was put up a web page with a captcha-ish image of my e-mail address and give them the link. Maybe they've closed that loophole by now, but just as with DRM, people will keep finding ways to break the system.

One site that has made it easier to get responses (because someone has to look at your profile and at least click reject if they don't like it) is chemistry.com. However, it's rather expensive, and you can run into the same problem where if your correspondent is not a member, you cannot communicate.

I agree, though, that it is depressing how many more messages the ladies get than the guys (or at least this guy).

If they were really able to find you a suitable partner (a) they wouldn't need to be a service, and (b) they would loose all their customers. This is simple logic. If you believe otherwise, you are only deceiving yourself.

If you subscribe to any online dating site for a while you'll see there are two distinct populations: transients who are there because they are passing through a phase, and "lifers" who are clearly serial daters with lots of short relationships behind them. The second population is the larger of the two, as simple statistics would lead you to expect. In my age group the first population consists mostly of people who are re-entering the dating world post-divorce, and find such sites a non-intimidating way of doing it. Once we figure out that there's nothing to be intimidated about we tend to drop out and meet others in more traditional ways.

Being hard to cancel makes it possible for these sites to pull more cash out of the lifers, who would otherwise cancel and renew their subscription ever few months. Although from my own experience I haven't found cancellation to be a major issue with any of them--certainly nothing like the costly nightmare that Vonage was.

The big challenge for these sites are free sites that do at least as good a job, which is what I would recommend to anyone interested in online dating. The population represented there is similar to the pay sites, and there are no cancellation issues at all.

For what it's worth (and I imagine it's worth a lot to slashdot readers), my experiences with online dating have always been best with okcupid.

I've found the free sites generally better than the pay sites, too. Never met anyone from okcupid, but I met my current g/f on PlentyOfFish, and met a previous g/f there as well.

In about three years of online dating I've observed that:

1) Almost everyone lies, generally about age, appearance and relationship history. Lieing about appearance is the one that I haven't been able to make sense of. I've observed it myself in women, and according to many women I've dated lots of men do it too. One women described a guy she met as being, relative to his online picture, like the "before and after" of some terrible and ravaging disease. Lieing is a showstopper for me, so I have tended to drop a lot of women gently after a first meeting.

2) Even on the really skanky sites, women are either looking for a relationship or are really messed up. I've never dated anyone from such sites, but poked around out of curiousity. Really.

3) Free sites are better than pay sites. Lavalife is the best pay site I've used.

4) Different sites have different geographic representations. I live in a small town, and some sites have far more women in my area than others. I have no idea why.

5) By far the best strategy is to "meet early, meet often." After a couple of e-mail exchanges I ask if she wants to meet for coffee somewhere. If not, that's the end of it--life is too short to waste time on electronic interaction when five minutes face-to-face will tell you more than five months online.

Overall, online dating is a very good thing if people go into with reasonable expectations and treat it as an introduction service rather than a magic filter that will find them "the One" without any hard relationship-building work on their part.

That being said though, I'm pissed off at Yahoo now, since I signed up for a month to try it out and was possibly scammed since someone had "messaged" me before I signed up, but never messaged after I contacted them back.

They same thing happened to me on match.com! Someone interesting looking popped up when my sub was soon to be expiring, after I'd renewed it seemed she suddenly had second thoughts on communicating with me.

Actually something really funny happened a week or so ago. I recieved an email from match telling me someone had viewed my profile (they recently started allowing you to see what members have been viewing your profile, if you're a subscriber). And they were egging me on to resubscribe so I could see who it was.

The funny thing is my profile has been Hidden for months now (because I got involved with someone I met in real life).

Fortunately I've since been tipped off to the existence of 100% free sites like http://www.craigslist.com/ and http://www.plentyoffish.com/ which don't require you to pay. Plenty of Fish makes their money from Google advertising instead of scamming people with fake people.

There are also sites that charge per transaction, so if a relationship fizzles out after a few emails you haven't wasted a whole $25 if nothing else comes up in the next 30 days. One of them was Act For Love, but as I check now it appears they have moved to a normal subscription scheme, although it is less than many other sites. The more focused interest group it promotes may mean people who are closer to what other members are looking for and make up for the smaller pool when compared to match, yahoo, ect.

Plentyoffish doesn't have scammers, its run by a single guy who gives them all the boot. The site is also the 4rth largest dating site. You can delete your account from the Help menu http://www.plentyoffish.com/deleteaccount.aspx Huge discussion about paid sites scamming people and lots of examples. http://forums.plentyoffish.com/datingPosts2493442. aspx

Plentyoffish doesn't have scammers, its run by a single guy who gives them all the boot. The site is also the 4rth largest dating site. You can delete your account from the Help menu http://www.plentyoffish.com/deleteaccount.aspx Huge discussion about paid sites scamming people and lots of examples. http://forums.plentyoffish.com/datingPosts2493442. aspx

99% of the things you can pay for on the Internet are a scam if you don't get something tangible out of it that you can hold in your hands. And even then, there's things you can hold which are still a scam like drugs.

Don't spend what you can't afford to lose.

That being said though, I'm pissed off at Yahoo now, since I signed up for a month to try it out and was possibly scammed since someone had "messaged" me before I signed up, but never messaged after I contacted them back. Not even a note to blow me off, which I found strange, but figured she'd found someone else or my reply wasn't interesting. While I accepted that my shortlived subscription was just a Blind Date that was a bit expensive and failed, now I feel victimized too. There's no way to know if she was a Yahoo shill, or just some woman that didn't find me interesting. Either way it's not a happy outcome. There can't be too many happy online daters out there in cyberland today upon hearing this news.

Fortunately I've since been tipped off to the existence of 100% free sites like http://www.craigslist.com/ and http://www.plentyoffish.com/ which don't require you to pay. Plenty of Fish makes their money from Google advertising instead of scamming people with fake people.