Ballmer should have lowballed the sleaze bag and refused to give him even the amount is was valued at
 
Since Ballmer was far from being the only party interested in purchasing Clippers, what purpose would that serve other than having his offer rejected?

A company is making stuff expensive - EVIL!
A company is making stuff cheap - EVIL!

Something is wrong, somewhere, IMO. This Slashdot story is apparently about a PR release by Millward Brown, which is owned by Kantar Group, which is owned by WPP. Notice that the WPP web site is badly coded. It doesn't adjust for font size choices in browser configuration. The web site has, to my eyes, an ugly, cheap look.
 
Not sure what your point is regarding the web site design. There is no way to accurately measure the brand value but these rankings are legit as far as being respected and widely reported in serious press each year.

Here is a better story than the one linked: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d8ea...

Here are the full rankings: http://www.millwardbrown.com/b...

This is a better article than Guardian crap: http://www.wired.com/2013/10/l...

- June 28 - warrant for metadata for one user
- Lavabit fails to comply
- July 16 - warant for SSL keys
- Lavabit freaks out and still refuses to comply
- August 5 court threatens contempt and $5,000/day fine and Lavabit shuts down

Not making a comment on who is right. It's just misleading to ignore the first part hence you've been mislead.

We ARE better. We are not perfect and we are a lot harder on ourselves. A Chinese and Russian "Snowden" would have quickly disappeared with nobody knowing or caring.

The truth behind the story is that the government had a court warrant "to monitor a particular Lavabit user's metadata (name not disclosed, most likely Snowden), defined as 'information about each communication sent or received by the account, including the date and time of the communication, the method of communication, and the source and destination of the communication.'" He refused to comply with a court order and provide the metadata (email headers, not the body) after which the prosecutors obtained a warrant for SLL keys. Warrants for email headers are commonly obtained in criminal investigations and its not unusual or surprising that they wanted Snowden's as he is a subject of federal investigation for multiple serious crimes.

Silicon Valley tech employees are being abused by their employers!? Wow, what a ridiculous failure of perspective. I think those Google Bus protesters are pathetic scum, but reading comments like this make me feel just a little bit of sympathy with their view.

Libertarians are not against unions. Show me one source that shows that libertarians are against the right of people to associate or not associate however they wish. They are against laws that force employers to recognize unions and bargain with them as well as the laws that force employees to become paying union members even if they don't want to.

If all our senators were like Al Franken, the Senate debate would have sunk to an even lower level than it is today. His debate style seems to be calling his opponents the most vulgar names he can think off and trying to be a sort of Rush Limbaugh of the left except that his show had no listeners and his network went bankrupt. Then he stole an election.

SF has fewer parking spots than cars. That is a fail for the city planners and people are forced to pay illegally every day because there are simply no legal spots left.

Faced with the problem of having to spend a long time looking for parking, why not pay somebody to do it for you? I bet you pay people all the time in order to save time in one way or another and you don't consider yourself a cunt.

You can, nobody is stopping you. But if he charges you for it he will be encroaching on the taxi drivers' turf and cutting the city out of its share of the loot and for that he will be fined and/or imprisoned.

Occupational licencing in almost every case is nothing but a racket to artificially limit the number of practitioners and keep the prices high and to collect a tax by a different name. At least you can make a bogus safety argument when it comes to driving, but what about hairdressers, photographers, interior designers etc etc all of whom require a licence in many jurisdictions and who have to pay the city or the state an annual hefty fee in addition to taking useless courses and passing tests (more fees) in order to be able to work, despite the fact that many other jurisdictions don't have those requirements with provably zero ill effects. 1 in 3 Americans today are not allowed to work in their profession without a government license.

Exactly. In NYC a taxi licence costs one million dollars. Hardly about background check and vehicle inspection.

I have a friend who makes great money in similar way but with porn. He searches file sharing sites on behalf of a bunch of porn producers and looks for their content and then tries to figure out who shared it (some sites sneakily attach the member id to each downloaded clip and there are other ways too). Then he has his lawyer send them a letter threatening a lawsuit but offering to settle for $500 or something. He makes sure that the letter contains in big bold font the clip title as well as a detailed description of the contents. Decent enough percentage of them just mail the check.

Simple, you should be charged with murder. Look at it from the point of view of the 3 kids. They are perfectly safe until you hit them with a frigging train by deliberately sending it their way. You may have had good motives for it but they are not their problem. By the same token you can't kill a healthy person and harvest their organs in order to save 10 transplant patients. It's simply not your decision. Now if you can jump in front of the train to save 300 people, great, go for it. Your life is your's to give, the lives of others are not.

the least "big government"
 
I don't know but from all I read about NASA I get the impression that, as good as the engineers are at the one end, the bureaucracy and politics on the other end are just as bad as in the rest of the government. Space X doesn't have to build their components in 40 different states and in order to please 40 congressmen and get the funding etc.

Also, don't underestimate the power of competition. NASA only had to meet some arbitrarily set deadline and in the worst case get chewed up in a congressional committee after the 10th delay or cost overrun. Space X has to beat its competitors on price and service or else it goes out of business.