Why are you so completely obsessed with what others buy? Counting your posts in this thread, I'd clearly call that "obsession". What business is it of yours?

Non-Apple users' opinions do not matter to Apple. Why should they? If you're not their customer and aren't going to become one, you're irrelevant.

This is true of every business, including whatever PC passes your furious anonymous trolling.

I can't speak for any other workplace, but when I go through resumes I pay very little attention to the "Education" section. This is due to encountering so many people with Bachelor degrees in Computer Science that can barely write "Hello World" when asked to, and Masters degrees who can't write a simple recursive script to crawl a directory structure and do X to files with criteria Y. Putting it bluntly, college degrees have lost their credibility.

The industry I am in is network performance; I'm in QA. We need people who understand IP networking, who are good enough with Linux to administer their own test machines and get around on the command line of our (Linux-based) product, and who can write test automation scripts in Perl, Python, or bash. When I interview someone, I ask them to write a couple of very simple scripts in the language of their choice. I give them a couple of straightforward network-based problems (hint: the answer is that it's not working because of NAT). I ask a couple of simple Linux questions. And it's still damned hard to find anyone who can even do THAT, regardless of what their degree or GPA is.

In other words, at least from my perspective, the lack of a degree isn't an issue. What's important are specific skills, the ability to discuss them, and to demonstrate that they can perform those skills. Having projects that you can point to (such as a t1.micro instance in Amazon EC2 that's a fully-functional LAMP system that you can give a tour of, and demonstrate skills upon) is important. If coding skills are being claimed, something on Sourceforge that can be examined is good. Breaking in to the tech industry is very doable, and people are doing it all the time. But you have to have something that gets you past the first filtering session of resumes, and projects is the best way of doing that.

Suggestion: since your friend seems heavily Web-oriented, have him find a local non-profit group that interests him that has a crappy website. You can figure out what step 2 is... bam. Instance experience and project people can look at, complete with warm fuzzies for helping out a nonprofit.

And once he has his first tech job on his resume, the degree (or lack thereof) becomes much less important. Your degree gets you your first job, but not your second; after that, it's almost purely experience and references that matters. Recent password issues nonwithstanding, LinkedIn is a major pathway for getting into tech. It's served me very well, as well as most of my techy friends, and showing the initiative of tracking down recruiters on LinkedIn will eventually pay off with an interview.

Of course, the best way to get an interview is personal recommendations. Unless the hiring manager is a friend, the friend can only get you the interview; you still have to convince the manager and the rest of the team to take you on.

1. Space is risky. If you are going to go there, or benefit from going there (do you like having satellites able to inform where the hurricane is going to make landfall?) you are going to participate in that risk.

2. Sometimes, risk is imposed and you don't get an opt-out. The world is not made of Nerf. Neither are satellites or boost systems. You don't get to vote on this, otherwise we sink to the level of the loudest coward.

3. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is a greater threat to a country's ability to achieve great things than its lawyers and those who would employ them to their own benefit without regard to the costs to us all.

Life involves risk. Wear a helmet... unless you're a tort lawyer.

I've never had a hipster wave a knife at me.

Haven't been to Oakland, have you?

John De Lancie is clearly Best Po-- er, Best Villain.

Why... yes.

The Second Amendment is intended to ensure that the citizenry can engage is armed rebellion against the Senate, the House, the President and the military if circumstances warrant. In such circumstances, the law itself (and its application and its masters) are what are being attacked. When ""due process of the law" is reduced to "police and the political elite can abuse the citizenry without any reason other than the furtherance of their own power and wealth", then "due process" becomes meaningless, and you push the reset-button on the whole thing.

I'm not advocating popping random cops for writing tickets (or letting their buddies get away with not paying theirs). I am advocating the idea and means of saying "there is a line which police and government officials cross at the cost of their own lives", and thus encourage them to not cross that line. I amadvocating that it is possible that there will be a time when popping cops for seizing property and women for their own gains under the color of law (and getting away with it) would be justified, and that if it does become justified... people do it. We're not there now, and I don't want that day to ever happen... but I'm not going to pretend for one second that it's impossible. Vigilantism arises when the government fails in its duty to deal with criminals (real, not imagined)... or when the government is itself the criminal. Cops and congressmen should be afraid of incurring mass hatred, and therefore should be afraid of doing what causes that hatred. It is the ultimate check and balance: the ability to rebel successfully. "lan astaslem".

There has to be an ultimate ability of the people to collectively say "no" to the police and to the political machine and make it stick. Just as laws are meaningless without teeth, so also are protests by the powerless. Guns in the hands of citizens are an indirect, but very real, encouragement for courts to convict bad cops and to refuse to enforce oppressive law, and the courts and their enforcers need to be periodically reminded of that fact.

And if anyone thinks that a country like the US cannot be defeated by small arms... take a look at Iraq and Afghanistan. They aren't fielding T72s and MiGs, after all. Conversely, would-be tyrants know how to accomplish their goals. "How do you boil a frog? By turning up the heat so slowly it doesn't notice."

The necessary goal is to make current tyrants cheer from their graves.

The reason for private citizens to own guns is so we can execute corrupt police, tyrannical senators and presidents, and (oh yeah, way way down on the list) muggers. This is why police, senators and muggers favor disarmament. It's time we treated disarmament advocates as active collaborators with these people, and punish them accordingly.

Definition of moron: any person who isn't perfect (meaning: me) for any and all values of "me".

Gee, I wonder where the stereotype of the know-it-all-but-knows-nothing arrogant Slashdotter comes from?

Here we have the proposal for the one-party no-democracy system, in which a single viewpoint is mandated and all others are forced to obey. Here we have the hypocracy of the Slashdotter claiming to stand for "freedom" but who actually means "I'm fine with tyranny as long as I get to be the tyrant". Here we have the reason why the rest of the world still holds self-labelled intellectual elites in such base contempt.

How about "You can't convince people to your position by demonizing them"?

Stereotype of academics and scientists being utterly socially clueless: CONFIRMED.

There seem to be elongated star-trails and out-of-focus objects in the raw image. I've highlighted a few. What's interesting is that the star-trails aren't all in the same direction, or necessarily a spacecraft rotation artifact. Are these smaller objects in orbit around Methone, or the result of the image being a composite, perhaps?

Oh look. A clueless fucktard heterosexual. HOW SURPRISING.

Did anyone force him to be gay? YES. It's a genetic predisposition. Nobody chooses to be the target of frat-boys and jock-boys. Nobody chooses to be the target of screaming maniacs who justify their hate in the name of Jesus. Nobody chooses to play the role that Jews played in the 30's (complete with people like Ravi who intend only misery and death to their targets).

People like you, who obviously believe that gays are their personal punching bags and rightful targets of ridicule, are why these laws exist. You think it's okay to abuse others over their orientation. The law says it's not (though this 30-day sentence makes me think that dealing with people like Ravi with a noose rather than a judge is much more appropriate... if the courts won't defend gays, then gays must defend themselves by any means necessary). It's people like you who are the reason I carry a gun.

There is no honor between the swarm of resent-their-mommies script kiddies and petty credit card thieves that call themselves "Anonymous".

Lightspeed: the Enron of RF Spectrum.