@gWaldo, thanks for the edit. As you could probably tell, I wasn't feeling like spoon feeding when I posted the answer.

@TechZilla, perhaps you are unaware that we have recently updated the FAQ. Although nobody would consider it perfect the amount of effort and discussion that went into it means none of us are in a hurry to do it again any time soon. It's all here on Meta if you're interested. For the record, I don't fully agree with the harshness of our attitude to shopping questions but that attitude stems from the owners of Stack Exchange more than anyone else. Whether I agree with it or not, that's what we have and I voted accordingly.

On a website that gets revenue from ads they probably won't approve of us openly discussing such things. ;)

@syneticon-dj, unfortunately the same problem exists with nearly all public file servers. This is especially true at the moment with many of them either shutting down or no longer allowing public downloads.

RapidShare has become quite unreliable lately, at least as far as downloads goes. Constant timeouts and failures to resume. That might not be a problem with files of only few KB or MB but does need to be considered for large files.

@Legit, you do gain badges for some pretty whacky reasons on meta, although those badges are distinct from the ones you get on SF, unlike the rep which is common to both SF and MSF. Some things of Stack Exchange simply defy logic.

+1 My sentiments exactly. It's taken a long time to get to this point and the results have been worth the effort of culling inappropriate questions, which generally indicate the posted has failed to even look at the FAQ.

I've previously suggested, several times, that I'd like to see a discussion area where we could ask all those questions, including shopping ones, relevant to our jobs but which are off topic on SF.

Sadly, 10K+ users see all the deleted questions, whether we want to or not. Just as annoying as all the ads we had to put up with when we first started.

Nobody was born a sysadmin but on SF you're expected to already be a professional one.

@longneck, you, and whoever upvoted your comment, appear to have misunderstood things a bit. The daily cap only limits the rep a person can receive and is unrelated to the upvotes a person casts. Maybe you're thinking of the daily voting limit but that also is no dis-incentive against upvoting.

And yet there is no dis-incentive to curb upvoting, even when the questions or answers are absurd or totally incorrect.

Interesting. We used to close questions such as your example as 'too subjective'. I often use the 'not constructive' vote on them because even when worded that way they still seldom have a correct answer and have a strong tendency to turn into lengthy discussions.