And, well, fuck the non-disparagement agreement. It's not disparagement to post factual information.

Wait, WTF?

From your first link:

But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

That's some rather petty bullshit, truth be told - by all parties involved, including the author of that blog entry. Now if they were fighting over something, you know, *technical*, I'd be more sympathetic, but really - ideological bullshit like that? Call me when the dude added some actual code to the damn thing and got rude treatment.

No. If an open source project's leadership accepts monetary or other sponsorship, then the leadership of that project has to do the corporation's bidding. The other contributors can still do whatever the fuck they want.

To be honest, unless there's a contract (with a term) involved, the project's leadership can change or reject the terms at any time, and can definitely negotiate or even reject any changes (proposed or actual in their relationship with the sponsor.

Finally, this is a two-way street - the sponsor must accept that the project they took on simply is what it is.

I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.

It also provides a very useful ejection seat of sorts in case of corporate asshattery (see also OpenOffice/Libre Office), patent follies, or worse. Also, consider this: Closed-Source/proprietary software can be just as prone to this kind of internal dissent as OSS, but you the end-user will never have a say in the results.

Forking is awesome to have as an option - either as a threat or as an actuality. A company who knows that their shit could be forked will either behave themselves, or they will lose control of their product. IMHO that's a damned good thing.

Agreed, though it brings up a bigger (albeit personal) bitch-n-moan on my part...

We went from zero to Moon in about 24 years (1945-1969), but then did approximately bupkis in the realm of manned exploration for 45 years after that (okay, Space Shuttle, ISS, etc - but we're talking manned planetary exploration here, not just repeating the same shit we've done over and over again with only trivial increments.)

I remember as a kid anticipating a shot of going to distant worlds as an adult, but damn - by the time they *finally* get around to putting someone on Mars, I'll be damned near retired (and definitely too old for consideration of such a thing.) I just wish NASA would have gotten their shit straight and kept pushing, instead of dropping it in the early 1970s and deciding 'hey, let's make this shuttle thingy!'

Some of us would have wanted to see things happen faster, and sooner - I know I'm not alone in thinking this...

Fair call, but consider that it costs a pretty penny to get an app into any of those marketplaces, and they're almost orders of magnitude smaller than even Blackberry's App store...

No - it's Microsoft's incarnation of Apple's AppNap feature.
(think of it as an aggressive and automatic version of the *nix renice function with a suspend feature latched onto it.)

A handful out of several million ain't half bad, considering.

I think the only other app store that could do better would be Blackberry, but only due to the fact that nobody uses it anymore (or at least not enough to have found and purchased a scam app).

Quoted for visibility: Most folks, when not given a sufficient reason for something, will come up with one of their own. A child isn't going to know (much less comprehend) all the (let's face it, oftentimes dumb) nuances of ideology or politics, so they'll often come up with and go for the simplest explanation they can contrive given what they know.

Depends, really. When my ex-wife first began nursing school, the only guys you saw in her class were considered to be homosexual (even by many of the female classmates). This stemmed from the perception of nursing as a caring and nurturing profession, more akin to motherhood than to traditional male traits.

I suspect that aside form what other guys think, there's also the 'ick' factor among male patients who have a male nurse, especially when it comes to things involving the more intimate bits of the human body; it's one thing to have a woman shaving your nether regions in preparation for a surgery or giving you an enema (or similar), but some dude doing it to you introduces a bit of mental discomfort in guys. I suspect the biggest reason stems from nearly everyone having had their mother bathe them and care for them when they were kids, so it's easier to overcome if a woman does it. Mind you this isn't sexism, but the result of conditioning.

No, no you wouldn't. You would only know what the prosecution and defense could find and present. Nothing more, nothing less.

As it so happens, the DA promised to release all the evidence they have to the public shortly. When, how, and in what format I do not know, but nonetheless, that's what they intend to do according to their statement.

Agreed. The reason for having one in the first place is to determine whether there is enough credible evidence and testimony to be worth a trial.

This... IIRC, they teamed up with U2 (the band) to do it. You bought a candy apple red iPod (IIRC) it came with a free U2 album on it, and a portion of the proceeds went towards AIDS research. Nothing new about that or TFA.

PS: Jobs was just as much of an ideological left-winger then as his replacement is now - likely more so.

As for future product lines? Dunno. None of that shit is easy, Jobs was just damned good at picking the winners.

...assuming it works, doesn't require the entire GDP of multiple nations, and a timescale that would put trees to shame, let alone humans.

Here's the funny part: in your haste to make a snark, you forget something: Humans can certainly alter clime - on a micro scale. Whether or not they can do it on a macro scale (let alone global) within any sort of sane time frame is a whole different (and honestly open) debate.

Seriously - the two biggest (ab)users of the H1B system are Tata and Infosys... and they're both Indian corporations.

{rant}I guess in fairness to Obama, he managed to screw both blue and white-collar workers in one fell swoop...{/rant}

Anyone know the lobbyist money trail for this bit of it, or can I safely guess Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, etc... ?

That's true even outside of the Bay area.

Here in PDX, I've worked in boiler rooms, for amoral shitheaded corporations, clueless startups, and similar places. I lost count of how many interviews I would suddenly walk out of due to a strong sense that the place is completely wrong to work for.

I've finally found a place where the folks running the show actually give a damn about their employees, and are willing to prove it in spades. It's a non-profit org, but damn it feels good to go home every day...