hands down, they won. They got absolutely everything they wanted. There was absolutely no material action taken against them whatsoever. This is especially bad when there were so many smoking guns, like the old "It's not done until Lotus 123 won't run" emails or the stuff they did to Beos. It doesn't help that the "Punishment" for killing Sun Java was giving their software to schools, something they'd been trying to do for decades. What kind of company gets a cherished reward as punishment?

Plus If you're into computers then you're frustrated because Microsoft tech has always been just barely good enough. If you remember the early days stuff like Novel and Wordperfect, the aforementioned Beos and even some of the Win 3.1 competitors were far superior to Microsoft's offerings, but backdoor deals killed a lot of that tech. Their "good enough" approach has held back a lot of real enhancements to computing :(.

So yeah, there's a lot of ill will floating around...

Yep, I do.

there's a lot of studies that show that once people develop a negative self image that they tend to take actions that reinforce that self image, often without realizing their doing it. i.e. if a person thinks they're dumb they become unable to do anything smart. This is where the "Precious Little Snowflake" movement came from. You praise kids even if they're not doing very well because if you don't they don't just get discouraged, they quickly come to believe that success is impossible and subconsciously sabotage themselves.

American Puritanicalism runs counter to this. The idea there is that adversity breeds character. I'm inclined to disagree with this. What I mostly see is adversity wears people down. The problem is that people who've been crushed at best fade away quietly and at worst end up in prison. Either way they're marginalized. The few that survive and prosper are much more visible. The phenomenon's called survival bias.

Real Freedom is economic security. That's why the 1% have been relentlessly attacking your economic security for 30 years. Declining wages, relentless attacks on Unions, starve the beast politics and boom/busts where they buy up property on the cheap because they're the only ones with any money left after the bust. They're all tools to make you poor so you'll do what they say.

Here, let This guy explain it. He's much better than I am.

just don't drink the water while you're doing it.

Is there anything Stackoverflow can't do?

60 hours a week @ $9/hr + $3k/yr in gov't benefits (being very generous here) = ~$31k/yr. Car/Gas/Insurance (required by most jobs): $200/mo A (cheap) 2 bedroom apt: $900/mo Utilities (no longer included, thanks 2008 housing collapse :( ) : $200/mo Food / Toiletries (3 ppl): $600/mo (eating very poorly) Health Care (with a kid): $400/mo Communications (2x Cheap cell phones) $60/mo It could work. I've left out two big thing though: 1. Low wage jobs have inconsistent hours. 2. Any emergency (car wreak, and the other guy drove off) and you're basically boned. I think I heard some economist call it a "Fragile Existence"

Until Apple burst on the scene Carriers locked their platforms down, charged insane amounts of money for dev kits ($20k+) and were generally jerks to their customers. They had little or no desire to improve since they were making lots of money selling slightly better handsets and super high prices. Google does a good job reigning that in. The carriers aren't powerless in this equation either you know. I like that they're all at each other's throats :P.

I haven't heard a good answer for that. Our entire society is built around work. You work, you get paid. The more people value your work ( regardless of it's objective value) the more you get paid. It's easy to sell the Narrative that it's morally wrong to give someone something for nothing. It's popular, and drives a substantial amount of American Politics at least. Nobody likes the idea of paying somebody to sit around and do nothing. They want that for themselves.

Also, if everybody is rich than nobody is. "Rich" means having more wealth than everyone else. If you're wealthy your status and power are based on your ability to control people's access to food, shelter, transportation, etc. It feels good to have people waiting on you hand on foot. You can't get that unless you have something (money) to give them in return.

there's a cut down JavaScript spec designed to work around this very issue. Static typing and all that jazz :P.

and it's become a valid question. Employees have fewer rights and less power than 20 years ago. A lot. Social mores are changing and questions like this are the inevitable conclusion when you take the narrative of "Personal Responsibility" to it's (il)logical conclusion :(.

Just about every major construction project I've ever seen has run over budget. All Contractors under bid on big projects because a) It's the only way to get in and b) you know that 9 months into a project nobody's gonna wanna switch horses in the middle of the thing.

It's not so simple. I approached the FBI with a proposal to use the military's already proven laser guidance and tracking systems to detect and rapidly respond to these threats. They apparently filed it under "kook" and never responded. The FBI is not interested in actually solving these cases. They're interested in finding someone to make an example out of and hopes that'll provide enough deterrence.

It won't.

They should have synergized their market paradigms more to create a more linguistically diverse user experience. It's only gonna get worse though... once Beta consumes the site, all that'll be left is the outward appearance of a badly edited blog.with comments enabled.

Did he really say 6% ?? Holie shit, that bad. Even back when I was a construction laborer 10 yrs ago, the company matched us dollar for dollar. And that was in a non-union job, all you needed was 3 yrs attendance. The had Oppenheimer manage it, it was a pretty good deal since we were paid really poor to begin with.