Good corporate management types can spew that stuff on demand. Pacify the angry mobs, and don't promise anything. Hell, that's most of their job.

ixnay on the pluterday talk, you'll get the 1%'s whining about class warfare again.

Or you know, have the balls to not send the money?

"US labor participation rate is the lowest it's been in 40 years. Only jobs being created are all part-time. Under-employment is at an all time high."

The labor pool is filled with horribly undereducated people. Of course they don't have jobs. IF public education was not a steaming mess and if college actually was affordable or free like it is in the other 95% of the world, this would be very different.

If those damn democrats did not keep cutting funding for education programs and other entitlements..... oh wait, it's the other guys that did that.

Notice he is typing it on a first gen surface pro WITH THE KEYBOARD.

As all generations of the surface are pretty useless without the keyboard. (I own one, I know this as a fact)

That is why the surface is not a success, Microsoft's inability to get user interfaces right. The hardware is sound and great. It's the steaming crap OS that is installed by default that is the problem.

And more importantly, all the banks repaid the government the money that they were lent.... ...unlike Greek banks or Greece.

I'm pretty sure that was a high altitude joke sailing by at mach 1.

I am generally anti-Apple and think Steve Jobs was a massive cock, but I still think that's true. Look at how ineffectual Apple is without him.

Perhaps, but I just don't agree that "but he made a lot of money" excuses cruelty or nastiness. We didn't and still don't need Apple.

It's often criticized, and over the last few conversations on the subject I'd say that the tone on slashdot has been more muted, with less support for his level of abuse. On the other hand, when has Linus gone off on someone who hadn't definitely earned a less-than-polite brush-off?

That's great, but for many years every nasty, unprofessional, over-the-top tantrum he's thrown has been received overwhelmingly glowingly by the slashdot commentariat. I think it's probably the best instance of what I'm talking about, this idea of noticing your own flaws on a successful person and trying to explain those flaws as virtues that explain the success.

Where are those people now? We haven't heard from them basically since... well, you know. Since their argument got taken away..

They were defending him after the guilty verdict. Even after he led police to the body, there were some people on slashdot seriously trying to come up with explanations how he could know where the body was but not have killed her. And, of course, loudly insisting that even if he did kill her there was reasonable doubt during the trial (which there absolutely was not). The defenses tended to be "he's just a geek, he's being persecuted for being uncomfortable with people like me!"

He was in a position of awesome responsibility and performed his job duties to the best of his ability. That's a fairly useless level of integrity in my opinion, but yeah, a very high level as well. He was only arrested after actually having made arrangements to hand over the passwords, as well.

The problem is he did not do his job; he created a new job in his head and did that one. And any administrator who sets himself up as the sole accessor of mission-critical hardware is doing a poor job per se. But in any event, the response here was over-the-top support

Oh no, he's both. He's an easy target, but still a target.

But around here any criticisms of his personality are frequently met with insinuations that it's just the US trying to destroy him. I really don't see the big deal in dropping charges, raising them again, etc.. It's actually not uncommon in criminal prosecutions at least in the US, as decision-making authority moves from police to prosecutors to maybe a higher level prosecutor.

My BMW X3 is quieter than a Leaf at highway speeds. and it has a 3 Liter V6.

Yes I know this is a fact. Rode in a friends leaf, they are not quiet unless they are sitting still.

They go for $29K. I dont know where you keep coming up with this massively low number. Not one Nissan dealer I can find has them listed at $20K.

Considering teens around here have their parents buy them $15,000 to $50,000 cars for their 16th birthday, a dirt cheap $3000 toy is nothing.

And that is the problem. You dont have to have any IQ at all to own and operate a quadracopter like that. Only need a checkbook or credit card.

Honestly, I think they need undercover cops to walk around and just taze the hell out of drone owners that do that crap. No warning, just a tazer to the balls for 5 minutes and then say, "Stop being an asshole, have a nice day."

There's always been this weird dynamic on Slashdot where if someone has done something good or useful, or is perceived as "one of us," you get this absolute defense of every single action of that person, no matter how objectionable. A lot of it seems to be based on perceiving oneself in that person, and I suspect wanting to defend them from criticisms they themselves have received in real life.

Examples: Steve Jobs was a cruel narcissist, but he "had to be" to turn Apple into what it is. Linus Torvalds has on occasion treated people nastily, but that's something to be absolutely admired and never criticized. Hans Reiser was being persecuted because he was a geek. Terry Childs was the epitome of integrity for locking out his supervisors. Julian Assange isn't a self-obsessed narcissist, he's the noble target of an international conspiracy to besmirch his good name.

Here's my view:
Julian Assange did a lot of good through wikileaks, and should be praised for that.
He's also on a personal level an objectionable human being and that should not be excused or explained away.
If he is accused of committing a crime in Sweden, he should fight those charges in Sweden.
Whether he's innocent or not of those charges, he's probably not innocent of violating bail, and should be charged with that as well.
The first point I made above is completely consistent with all the ones that follow. people who were I think a lot of it is a sort of

"So you agree that it's the US, not Swedish law, that wants him imprisoned and made an example of? Because your assertion doesn't really make sense otherwise." That does not logically follow. Both US and Sweden can want him imprisoned, and Ecuador could be acting to thwart just the US. Alternately, just Sweden can want him imprisoned, and Ecuador could just mistakenly believe that the US wants him imprisoned and are acting on that false belief.

I suspect there are two problems for them in being too clear. First, I suspect they can't guarantee to reuse every cartridge - some of them will be damaged or contaminated, I imagine; second, they won't want to validate third party cartridge refills by admitting they actually do refills themselves! I recycle my Lexmark cartridges by mailing them back (with a prepaid shipping label they include with every new cartridge); my guess is they will refill and reset perfect-condition cartridges, recondition damaged or older ones, and recover the raw materials from unusable ones, but they won't want to be too open about the details. The "new" cartridges aren't exactly cheap, admitting they're sometimes actually refills would probably hurt sales.