CHEATING

THIS SITE HAS TURNED INTO LAG HELL WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP

The lag does not depend only on the speed of your local network.  It also depends on the speed of the multiple networks through which your moves must travel to get to your opponent and back.  Lag also depends on the speed of your opponent's local network.  You cannot avoid lag just by speeding up your own local connection.

The time added to the opponent's clock is due to the fact that she moved seconds before the move arrived at your computer.  All moves are time-stamped.  The JAVA software running on your computer takes the difference between the time-stamp and the actual arrival-time, then adds this difference to the opponent's clock.  Both players in a lagged game experience the very same shocking site of seeing the opponent's clock increase when a move arrives.

Dude, chess.com is using JAVA for live games?

Since when?

I thought it was JavaScript, because I don't have that trash installed durrh... It probably has more 'sploits than flash, yuck.

Chess.com uses both JAVA and JavaScript (and I think PHP too).  Whichever programming language is being used in live-play makes no difference towards how lag is compensated.  I agree with you that JAVA has security holes, but fortunately this site will be rid of it soon (or at least that's what Erik promised).

Well, I've never had JAVA installed and I've always been able to play live chess...

It sure is confusing to hear JAVA though as it's much like mentioning VB out of the blue.

Many of the apps here run JAVA.  For example, Chess Mentor's "Analysis Board", Tactics Trainer's "Try vs computer", Online Chess' "Finish game vs computer", and ChessKid.com's "Computer Workout".  No doubt this explains why this site has had (and continues to have) so many bugs.