Come to Chicago sometime and you can see how helpful the unions are when it comes to running a business ... right out of Illinois.

"success in one field (for Linus and Mitt) doesn't translate into viability with another." See: Krugman, Paul.

"Why can't we have jobs here in the US?" What planet are you on? God, the level of rank ignorance and left-wing shilling here at Slashdot is breath-taking. You guys really are idiots.

Quick! Change all of our "Occupy Wall Street" banners to "Occupy McDonald's"!

Your conspiracy theory seems like another example of the well-recognized cognitive dissonance that Democrats have about Republicans: We're all really stupid, except when we're able to hatch these amazingly sophisticated conspiracies to steal elections. Move on, indeed!

"The real questions should be around who all that money was stolen from to get so rich, because it's usually someone." Really? So Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods stole money from people to become rich? ... and before you start backpedaling and explaining that that's not what you meant, let me correct you and say it is - you're saying that if someone earned a lot of money, they probably didn't deserve it and that they took it from someone else. In Michael Jordan's case, that becomes a little harder to prove, since he just happened to be the best professional basketball player of all time AND people in this country and around the world find value in that - so they're willing to watch him play on TV, buy products he endorses, etc. No one puts a gun to someone's head and said, "You have to watch the Bulls play tonight!" People chose to do that. A lot of people. Now, from your worldview, Jordan should have given some of his pay to his fellow basketball players - let me correct that - to everyone who ever wanted to play basketball professionally (whether they succeeded or not) - because some of the outsized earnings he accumulated SHOULD've gone to them. You think that there's some fixed amount of dollars that is somehow magically allocated to the game basketball, and Jordan unfairly took most of that for himself. The fact is, Jordan expanded the amount of time and money people spend on enjoying the game of basketball, and he rightly deserves a significant portion of that. He practiced hard, he showed up for games, he made the difficult shots when it mattered most and deserves the rewards. Why does he owe anything to players that didn't make that commitment? The reason that most people, even those with a preference for state-driven wealth distribution, don't level these allegations at Michael Jordan or Tom Cruise or Taylor Swift is that they probably, at one time or another, played basketball in junior high, or did some stage acting or performed at an open mic and realize that Jordan and Cruise and Swift are REALLY GOOD at what they do. They deserve their wealth. However, most people have NOT tried to run a company with 100,000 employees, develop new products and services to bring to market, placate fickle customers and deal with mountains of regulators, lawyers and shareholders. They think that being the CEO of Target or Wal-Mart or Microsoft is easy - anyone can do it (how would they know otherwise?) - and so they clearly don't deserve their wealth. I would submit, though, that being the CEO of a large corporation demands as much dedication, focus and drive for excellence as being a top NBA ball player or chart-topping musician. The US economy is littered with the remains of once-large companies that couldn't hack it (Circuit City, Palm, Commodore, etc.), and the fact that Microsoft or Wal-Mart or Coca-Cola or GEICO are still going strong decades after their launch is something more than simply "luck". They deserve their success.

Thank you for stating this.

Now that's some civil discourse for you! Keep it up - you're doing your master proud!

Well said ... + 1.

Yes, because now parents may give permission to their children to open a Facebook account after reading this story, thinking that they are going to be protected from sexual predators when, the truth is, there is probably no way to 100% protect kids from this.

"There is nothing about this scheme that differs from gambling. Not... one... single... thing." ... and this is why you don't know what you're talking about. Gambling, by definition, is seeking to profit from a random event that is generated SPECIFICALLY so people can bet on it. Why do horses run around a track? So people can bet on it. Why do people throw dice at a craps table? So people can bet on it. Why does the blackjack dealer distribute 2 cards to each player? So people can bet on it. Compare that to a futures trader. The risk that the price of corn is going to go up or down has NOTHING to do with the fact there is a futures exchange. Because of the business they are in, farmers are shouldered with that risk, like it or not. It exists. The futures trader is willing to assume that pre-existing risk in the interest of making money, while the farmer is happy to have someone to take that risk off their hands. The risk has always been there, but a futures exchange allows people to transfer that risk.

I'm sure glad SOMEONE found out a way to inject politics into this discussion. Where would we be without you? Thanks!

Why is that a canard? Do you believe individuals simply float on a wave of historical forces, and the *lucky ones* inevitability say it was their hard work that got them where they are? Instead of saying "It's a confluence of factors that are by and large out of the individual's control ...", the fact is people make choices every minute of every day that affect the well-being of themselves and those around them: Do I spend or save? Do I get things done or do I procrastinate? Do I watch TV or go exercise? Do I read a book or surf the Internet? Do I work hard at school to get more education or do I go hang out with my friends? Do I spend time with my family or do I pursue things for my own gratification?

"... You can get better education, free or nearly free, in most of Europe ..." Really? Because the last time I looked, in any listing of the best universities and colleges in the world, the US beat every other country hands down.

Clearly, sir, you don't know the first thing about conservative principles. However, because you want to inject politics into this, let's do that. Tell me, do you think that conservatives support competition or not? In other words, do most conservative policies, such as school vouchers, less regulation, lower union involvement, a desire for reduced government subsidies, tend to support competition amongst companies or discourage it? That's right, they support competition ... and which is why conservative intellectual stalwarts like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell have pointed out again and again that big business is NOT pro-competition. History has shown that big business can collude amongst themselves and with their partners in Washington to take actions that are detrimental to the consumer: think of sugar subsidies that raise the price of sugar far above the international price to the benefit of large sugar interests. I don't know of any conservatives who support this kind of effort. Contrary to what you might think, conservatives don't think that everything a company does is magically right because it comes from the private sector - look at the Tea Party angst about the Wall Street bailouts. I think your assumption that conservatives are somehow in knee-jerk support of whatever corporations do is misguided. Think harder.