That's nice to hear. I always feel under appreciated on slashdot. :-)

You're dead on about the sociopath stuff. I never worked directly for him, but I had a number of projects where I was reporting to those who did. There was an employee communications meeting being held by an exec VP when Jobs came back which was particularly amusing. They opened up the floor to general questions and this bright eyed girl asked "What is he like in person?" VP pauses for a good 10 count and then says "Well, you kind of have to be a bit of a meglomaniac to do what he does."

And that's the truth of it. At the end of the day what separates Jobs from a number of other geniuses is a lot of those other people probably listen to the opinions of others.

People who "don't mind having choices made for them"...? Um, that's like the entire population of this country. On the count of 3, everyone say "baaaaaah!"

Why is it that when somebody blatantly steals design, form factor, user interface concepts or just blatantly copies Apple it's "fair competition" when the same practice anywhere else is obviously stealing? Why is it that Apple's innovations are public domain?

Good lord, the correct response was "Thank-you". His signature line was about usage and style and there was a GLARING error in the same genre. If I'd done the same, I would want someone to let me know. And I certainly wouldn't be all butt-hurt about it.

BTW - It's not grammar, it's an idiom. My 10 year old knows that. And just because you can use nazi in a sentence, doesn't mean you have two brain cells that ever rub together. See - that's a troll comment.

Understand the difference? No. This is exactly why a representative democracy does not work, because you are too stupid to be allowed to vote.

If only I had the power to make everyone go away...oh wait, I do.

It's "for all intents and purposes."

So a study conducted by a career site. Doesn't it seem like most of the people on CareerBuilder would sort of be, what's the word for it? Oh, yeah: Un-Employed.

So people without jobs are only working an hour a day.

I'm sorry, but the whole postal service crisis is BS. I get pounds, literally pounds of mail every week. Flyers, ads, coupons... These companies pay a fraction of a penny to dump this crap into my mailbox, and every time I put a stamp on something it's 2 cents more than last time!? Let them default. Let them go under. Get rid of the lazy bastards and subcontract the work to UPS or Fedex.

(paraphrasing...) The good of the many outweighs the good of the of the one.

I always thought the purpose of open source was to contribute to the collective of man-kind's resources. That the idea was to increase the value of what we all possess and have access to, in an effort to increase quality of life and human knowledge. Isn't it the concept that if you contribute to the pool, so will others, and we will ALL benefit from our shared resources and intellect?

As soon as they consumed versiontracker.com, there was bound to be evil soon to follow.

Politics is an emotional matter, everyone here keeps putting up wonderful, intelligent, insightful, and above all well reasoned thoughts. The reality is that *most* people's political views are absolutely, 100 percent about feelings...all discussion, justification or reasoning is simply rationalization after the fact.

So Microsoft IS the devil! It all makes sense now.

So as a judge, I have to ask you this question. With the imminent threat of legal action, I've seen many innocent people accept a plea to avoid even the potential threat of full blown legal proceedings (or just the cost).

Now this minor is being threatened with a misdemeanor, and he's seventeen so it may or may not be something that can be sealed or expunged (correct me if I'm wrong). The parents in this situation have to look at the actual cost of fighting this (time, stress and legal fees) along with the potential damage to their son's wellbeing (education, career, future).

I've seen this exact situation play out before, the parents take a plea bargain, because a sure thing infraction won't ruin their child's life, but the possible misdemeanor certainly could (college's refusing him, jobs which actually do background checks denying him - which is almost anything with a future). So they take the plea bargain. The DA get's another check for a criminal brought to justice, the parents feel they've dodged a bullet. Then the kid get's caught drinking at a party when he goes to college. Doh! Wouldn't have mattered at all for any of the other kids there, but whoops, he's got a court probation and he's a kid, didn't think about what those consequences really are.

It's not just the selectively enforceable laws here, it's the DA system where getting a conviction, any conviction, is a "win" that is turning what used to be a justice system into a machine for generating revenue, fear, and "criminals" who in fact aren't.

That said, I have to ask: as a judge, and knowing what due process is supposed to be, and knowing what actually occurs day to day to expedite activities in a courtroom, do you think justice will prevail here? Or do you think it's more likely that a stupid kid will get a permanent mark on his record for fear of what the court system could do to him? If this happened in your courtroom, and the DA brought up a plea bargain for you to sign. Would you rubber stamp it, or stop them entirely and call the DA to heel?

and yes, there instead of their. my spelling goes when I get worked up about a topic. ;-)

But it doesn't matter if they do go wrong or people do end up dead. There is NO accountability for law enforcement run rampant. Every major city has at least one of these stories in recent history, police go into a situation misinformed, respond disproportionately and someone innocent dies. Police gets bad press, officers get a slap on the wrist and told to be more careful next time.

The fact is the police have the resources (manpower & equipment) to keep themselves safe. They are wearing bullet proof vests, trained for how to subdue criminals, how to enter buildings, how to use their radios to set up a perimeter, etc. They should be held to a HIGHER standard than the general population. If a police officer kills someone in the line of duty, there should have been absolutely no other option. Which given their resources, this should almost never come up. The guy is in the house? So what? He hasn't invented a tele-porter has he? Surround the place and wait for him to come out. Unless their are hostages under threat, why would their ever be any hurry? And if the police kill some innocent old lady mistakenly, they should be tried for manslaughter, pure and simple (if not murder). It should be a greater crime to kill someone accidentally when you have been trained to be an expert in "protecting and serving".

It's whatever these jack-booted bastards feel like doing to you this week. And you can talk until you're blue in the face to people about how bad this is for all of us, how it's a slippery slope, but they'll just look at you and say stuff like 'but if the police went after them, they must have been doing something wrong'.

The only thing that ever convinces people that there's a problem is if they or someone close to them gets a taste of that boot, by which point it's too late, because now as far as everyone else is concerned they must have deserved whatever they got.

Here's a test. Ask 10 people if they think it's better for our justice system to accidentally lock up an innocent person now and again or if it's better to never lock up an innocent person but occasionally let a criminal go free. People I thought I knew really well were happy to lock up the neighbors they didn't know if it would also get some imaginary criminal threat off the streets. NIMBY is alive and well.