(Alcatel-)Lucent involved in a new massive layoff? It's another 90s revival. The scars never quite healed from starting my career there in the 90s.

My old boss used to kill his laptops with a glass of wine every year or so. So far my cats have yet to fully kill a computer (though they did zap a motherboard with static electricity once).

MondoMouse only claims to support 10.5 and 10.6. Non starter.

And I haven't heard of any third party mouse drivers supporting FFM. Could you point me to one, so that I can buy that mouse?

No. The employee's lost time and productivity of an employee dealing with a broken device will almost certainly cost the company more than just replacing the device promptly, without any fussing. A new standard keyboard or mouse is on the order of $20. I'd imagine that the cost to a Silicon Valley tech company of having an employee with a broken keyboard for the day, or away from his/her desk fetching a new keyboard is on the order of $50-$100. No brainer.

There are lots of these magic ways to make gas (bio waste to gas for instance) that actually work in a pilot plant. In mass production...

OS History Roughly
MS/DOS 3, MacOS 6, CP/M -> MS Xenix (On a TRS/80 Model 2 modded to 16b specs) -> Minix -> SLS -> MCC (IIRC) -> Slackware -> Red Hat -> Mandrake -> Debian -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Windows Xp, Windows 7, MacOS X

With occasional excursions to BSD/386, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD choking due to unsupported or fussy hardware, and later discarded due to a userspace that made Linux feel full featured and easy. And probably a few other visits to Debian along the way.

Getting pretty close to the root there. I think I started on SLS, but went to MCC because I wanted something that wasn't so bloaty.

Yes, but what OS on the TRS 80? For that matter what TRS 80? 'Cause you got TRS DOS (IIRC), CP/M, Xenix, and maybe a couple other OSish options, on hardware that at times was barely related.

Is there evidence that Apple actually hates them? Or is this more like those side bar ads:

Astronomers Hate Her. Housewife discovers 10 secrets for firm abs.

I got a broken case about six years ago. When that couldn't be returned I vowed, and stuck to never shopping there again.

Well, at least I'll have my memories of Chicago winter to keep me warm after I move there next week. It's way warmer than Seattle is cold right now.

True. And also true that I don't do or say anything much that would be substantially offensive. But keeping my private life apart from my work life is something that I do value. And even if I didn't value it, the problem isn't nearly so much the employer as the employer's customers. I've quite deliberately not friended even my friends at work, because that's a social network that could easily expand to a lot of people in front of whom I have an obligation to behave with a modicum of professionalism.

j(.*)mitchel(.*) is a common name, located in a large city.

Why would I have any problem working for a company that forced me to join a social network? I wouldn't join with the same profile that I used personally. I would keep my business activities with the site strictly segregated from my personal persona (if any). But if the cost of losing your privacy as an employee to a google or a Facebook accrues almost entirely to your employer, not to you.

Fuck all.