- Operating systems for computer-like things without a decent command line. This primarily means Microsoft Windows, although supposedly now they have a reasonable command line called PowerShell. Also, the iPad really makes me say "no thanks".
- PowerShell is very nice. Not so nice as to tempt me away from UNIX, but nice enough that if you learn the PowerShell syntax, you can be pretty productive on a Windows machine.
- Therapy Bullshit: the Inner Child, Oprah Winfrey, sensitivity training etc.
- "Not to be aware of a miserable childhood is prima facie evidence, in the eyes of Recovery, of "denial" - the assumption being that everyone had one, and is thus a potential source of revenue. The cult of the abused Inner Child has a very important use in modern America: it tells you that personal gievance transcends political utterance, and that the upward production curve of maudlin narcissism need not intersect with the descending spiral of cultural triviality. Thus the pursuit of the Inner Child has taken over just at the moment when Americans ought to be figuring out where their Inner Adult is, and how that disregarded oldster got buried under the rubble of pop psychology and specious short-term gratification." (Robert Hughes,Culture of Complaint, p.6-7)
- Monarchy. I just about tolerate the current Queen of the United Kingdom, Mrs. Elizabeth Windsor. Her son is a complete waste of space, and is the best argument for republicanism ever to walk the earth. He's also a dangerous buffoon who promotes idiotic alternative health crap like coffee enemas instead of things that work.
- The inability of otherwise rational and logical people to apply the standards they'd use when evaluating whether or not to purchase a used car to other aspects of their lives. This most notably applies to religion, or rather epistemological and metaphysical meta-religious questions - for instance, the misapplication of the word 'faith' to absolutely everything by a whole array of idiotic, self-serving columnists who wouldn't understand the Gettier Problem if it sneaked up behind them and gave them a surprise goatse.
- The Religious Right: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and all the other intolerant asshats who want to control people's lives.
- Misapplication of the Pareto Principle to things which it is less than optimally suited. Aeroplanes should not be subject to the "80:20" rule, or popular misunderstandings thereof.
- Members of the nontheist community who reflexively dismiss academic philosophy, and then always try and make exceptions for the philosophers they like/agree with by somehow arguing they aren't philosophers (Dennett, Bertrand Russell, the Churchlands etc.)
- Pride in one's own mental incompetence. Example: Sarah Palin.
- Most newspaper opinion columnists. They seem to make tremendous amounts of money writing sophistry and cant about things which they know very little about. There are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, opinion columnists are a bunch of tossers.
- Celebrities.
- Geek Gurus
- Airport security. Yeah, we all hate that, right? Go read Bruce Schneier. You know he is right even if you don't want to consciously acknowledge it.
- Ringtones. Really, if you feel the need to put a tinny "grime" track on your mobile and then not answer the phone for twenty seconds so you know that everyone nearby can hear it, please, do humanity a favour and stick either your dick or your head into a blender.
- The utterly unintuitive train doors on Electrostar trains (as they use for mainline journeys on Southern and SouthEastern trains in the UK). I have watched countless people stand by them unable to open the door because the way the door opens is completely unintuitive.
- Software: most software sucks. Be honest. It does.
- PHP: see PHP Sucks. It sucks so much that I'm in the middle of writing some code to make it suck marginally less so I can fix some sucky code I wrote in this sucky language because I haven't got enough time in my life to port said sucky code into a non-sucky language.
- To be fair, it now has anonymous functions without all the clusterfuck of create_function.
- Outlook: bloody inflexible, encourages bad e-mail practices, generally causes more pain that it resolves.
- Newline differences. Windows, Mac and UNIX represent newlines differently. Can we just pick one and use it?
- KDE 4: They've copied all the sexy UI changes in Windows 7. They haven't copied any of the good bits.
- MySQL: the date-time behaviour is absolutely intolerable. Seriously. Put in an invalid date-time into MySQL and instead of giving you an error, it just inserts 0000-00-00 00:00:00 into your database. There is plenty more to hate about MySQL. If you actually want a database, use PostgreSQL.
- SQLite: You'd think putting a datatype on a column would mean that the database would enforce some constraints. If you say a column is an int, it might be quite nice if when you put a string into it, it raises a bit of a fuss. No way. SQLite ignores all that. The type you specify isn't so much a type constraint as friendly advice to the database. This is called type affinity. People who like SQLite will tell you this is absolutely fantastic. And, yes, there are times to use SQLite - embedded systems, small hacks, stuff where you aren't too bothered about type constraints etc. But if you think about it like a programmer: would you use a language like Java or C where you had to make explicit type declarations if the compiler did precisely nothing with the type declaration? Of course you wouldn't! If you are happy with method signatures like "def whatever(a, b)" over method signatures like "def whatever(a: Int, b: String)" you'd use Python or Ruby and get all the advantages of a more dynamic type system. Now, you might say "well, it's useful to know what sort of thing is in the column". Sure, it is useful to know that everything in a column is an int (say). But you can't do that without iterating through them and checking they match the type. Or you could use PostgreSQL or (if you really feel you need to) MySQL - the software may actually do the job rather than you.
- Date formats that don't conform to ISO 8601.
- Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. These are not useful tools for writing anything beyond a business letter. If you are a secretary, great. If you aren't, stop using this shit.
- Photoshop: way too bloated, takes way too long to load. The fact that the only serious competitor to it is The GIMP makes me very sad. Come on. Sort it out.
- CVS (Concurrent Versioning System): intolerably slow and painful. I occasionally have to get a fairly large repo off a server that, for any other application than CVS, is very fast and reliable. CVS isn't fast. Listen to Linus Torvalds: git is fast and it doesn't suck.
- The fact that it has taken me around 36 hours to get the following things working in Debian on my Eee: sound, display modes, the function keys to turn the trackpad off and adjust the volume, getting GVim to go full screen. And the fact I still cannot just shut the lid and have the machine go to sleep. And a whole bunch more.