Thanks for providing the always obligatory "Christians are much worse than this" post. Yes, for sure they are because the fact that they actually believe in God is oh so terrible to you personally. And don't forget to mention all those family members of yours that church down the street killed in a blood ritual.

What people like you don't get is the following.
1) Some people will always be religious. This crazy idea that one day all religions will go away is never going to happen.
2) When Christianity shrinks, you know what religion is uniquely positioned to grab the people in category #1? That's right - radical Islam. Why? It's messages of "All of your problems are being caused by non-believers" and "You can get a huge reward in the afterlife by doing a whole lot of killing here now" resonate with poor people who have no hope of improvement.

You fail to grasp that if radical Islam does one day show up at your door then they're going to do a lot worse to you as a non-believer than knocking on your door and asking to leave a pamphlet.

It's actually possible to both "pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region" and seriously underpay H1B workers at the same time. All you have to do is define the job in the right way to drive down the "prevailing wage" for it and then hire someone into the job but have their duties be different. Congratulations on being the exception to the rule. My employer, who I deliberately refuse to name, is actually pretty good, but we hire a lot more H1B workers than Americans for certain jobs and it's not logical to conclude that they are "better" than Americans. Cheaper? Yes. I also briefly dated an H1B worker at another company. I'm pretty sure she makes $20,000 to $30,000 less than an American would at her job, but her company is really small so they somehow get away with it, maybe by defining her job differently than what her actual duties are.

Corrections from above.

He's not entirely wrong. The underpinnings are critical of course, buy they're also sort of generic. But even as someone who primarily uses a CLI the Window Manager is still my primary point of interaction. Application switching, clipboard style, aesthetics, etc, I see the effects of the WM every time I interact with the machine.

Here I agree, I've never seen the plethora of distros as an issue. In fact I see them as a strength as they can very easily tailor and market for a specific audience without diluting their brand. I mean how well does apple actually do in the server space? They shouldn't have any trouble with their Unix underpinnings but I think a lot of people have trouble taking Apple seriously as a server because of their home user market focus.

If someone asks me for advice on installing Linux I generally recommend Fedora or Ubuntu depending on how bleeding edge they want to be (or for a laptop how well the LiveCD works). From a novice user's perspective the distro's are pretty generic.

I work for a Fortune 500 company. Our policy is that staff who need to be reachable/available outside of normal business hours have a company provided mobile phone where the bill goes straight to the company. If we purchase that phone with our own money and don't get reimbursed for the purchase cost, then the phone is ours to keep even if we leave the company. Our company does support the use of iPhones (I have one) and it has some kind of special software on it that they claim allows remote wiping. Our tech support people claim that if you leave, your phone gets wiped, but you can restore your non-work related stuff from a backup. I've been told that supposedly this wipes your company email and I think that's all it really does once you restore from a backup. I have limited contact with a few former employees and while I never specifically asked if they had any problems after the wipe job, nobody has explicitly mentioned it either. I do have a few co-workers who have a company phone and their own phone, but I don't really understand the reasoning for it except they just like to do it that way. I have the impression that my company doesn't care at all about the contacts in your phone but they definitely want to stop you from reading work email or connecting to the work networks via your phone once you leave. That reference to having the ability to turn off the business phone is quaint. I don't know of anybody in IT who can actually do that. While we rotate on call where I work through a decent number of employees so that we are on call for a week at a time about once every 2 months, even when not on call we need to be reachable in case of a work emergency.

Like Steve Jobs?

He's not teaching science, he's teaching business, a subject that as the former CEO of Microsoft he should know a lot about.

And so what if he didn't earn the title the same way a PhD did? (though he won't be a full Professor)

It's not about granting him some privilege, it's about giving the students the best business education and I have to think he's in a good position to do that.

I agree with you, but I think such a happening is highly unlikely, despite the fact that there are many Chinese citizens who aren't really happy with their government. Here's the reason. Did you know that the Chinese constitution has the PLA swearing to protect the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Think about that. Their job is to protect the CCP, not the nation or the citizens but the CCP. What this means, in my opinion as an outside observer (I have never lived in China, but I have visited there several times), is that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is composed of highly brainwashed individuals from the privates all the way up to the top generals who are pledged to save the CCP above all else. I'm a little concerned that the CCP may be losing control of the PLA. Right now they are in control, but I think that they just barely control it. All these decades of brainwashing have caused the entire military to be hair trigger that they are constantly under siege from outside forces, usually the USA, who want to beat the crap out of China and possibly destroy it militarily. It's not difficult for me to foresee a time in the future when the CCP finds it can't control the PLA. I wouldn't even rule out a military coup. But anyway, if there was another major Tienanmen Square protest, the CCP would simply have to tell the PLA to put it down and the PLA would happily kill as many protesters as they could.

Just wait a while and we'll evolve flame resistant birds.

I'm serious. Where did you go to school? Because I want to make sure that absolutely nobody I know goes there. Wow. If your plan was to take the daily prize for grammatical errors, missing words, lack of sense, and so on, well, congratulations as we have a winner.

You're (you might notice that I spelled that correctly) the only person I know of to ever mention individual state laws as a health care problem. A law can simply be passed making health care a federal matter to deal with that. And tuition to medical schools has always been high. This is not a recent occurrence. Outside of Los Angeles there just aren't all that many plastic surgery doctors so that's not really a problem either. However, this a shortage of general practitioners among younger doctors and that is because it doesn't pay as well as specialty medicine does, but doctors are going into all the specialist fields. There's no explosion of cosmetic doctors. And the system can only support so many specialists. Every medical school candidate simply can't go into the same specialty because there aren't enough training opportunities.

My first job after college was working for a branch of the Department of Defense as a civilian. I was a programmer at first and then a Unix system admin. You may not know how tight Microsoft is with Uncle Sam so it could be that SkyDrive was or even still is deliberately allowed. I could certainly see Microsoft telling some big shot manager "This can only be a good thing you for you" and they signed off on it. My experience was that security was highly variable and depended on how serious the people responsible for the systems were. It could just be an oversight or they may be operating under the bad "Permit anything not explicitly denied" policy. Both government employees and contractors have wildly varying skill sets and some people in both groups are barely qualified for the jobs they hold. Those people don't do security very well because they don't know enough to consider situations like this.

You really do not understand how the US legal system works. I'm not an attorney, but my best friend is. He has taught me a lot about how the legal system really works here. I can assure you that it is indeed quite possible to find a judge who would rule in favor of Rightscorp. Anything can happen in a US court - anything. I know of a case involving a business dispute in my city where an appellate court ruled that the court that decided the case made up the law out of thin air. Think about that - a court was found to have made up the law they ruled on. My friend told me he had never heard of that happening before. The Naxos vs. Capitol case,which had devastating results for those of us who hoped that copyrights might actually expire one day, in my opinion also resulted in a ruling where the court that heard the case made up the law they ruled on out of nothing. If the US Supreme Court was to get some kind of hypothetical case where the law technically was very clear and required a certain ruling but actually giving that ruling would destroy the United States, plunge it into civil war and directly lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people, at least 4 members of the current court would shrug their shoulders and give that ruling, acting powerless to do anything else. There were all kinds of crazy decisions made by courts allowing mass mailings of infringement notices some years ago and that was probably as big a violation of due process as is even possible, yet it took years before judges in general began to oppose the practice. And this isn't even getting into the practice of having juries decide complex patent cases. All I can tell you is that if you haven't served on a jury, you really cannot even comprehend how stupid and technically challenged many if not most jury members are.

There are three basic levels of users:

1) Complete novices: Don't really understand basic concepts but learn enough repetition to use their programs at a basic level.

2) Competent users: Get the main concepts fairly well, can manage applications and the computer settings fairly well, but they get out of their depth fairly quickly and don't know any coding.

3) Gurus: Whatever the task they'll figure it out eventually.

Group 1 is good with any OS because they're not doing anything more than clicking icons and using apps.

Group 3 will really excel with Linux because of the power and flexibility it gives them.

Group 2 is the Window's base. They're smart enough to master the Window's administration environment but Linux is too complex and text based.

The thing it that group 2 isn't really an issue in a corporate setting. The users, regardless of competency, are basically confined to acting like level 1 novices fiddling with apps but ignoring the OS. And the admin staff will be guru's regardless.

If there is a problem it likely has nothing to do with usability but instead is based on app availability. The big name high quality end user apps are still lacking on Linux, and those are the things people will miss.

One reason I'm rooting for an Altcoin is I'm worried about deflation if Bitcoin wins.

A limited amount of inflation is a good thing, if the cash sitting in your wallet gets progressively less valuable you have a motive to spend it and generate economic activity.

But there's a finite amount bitcoins, which means at some point they'll all be mined. At that point as the economy grows each bitcoin will represent an ever larger portion of the economy. People will be reluctant to spend bitcoin because they'll be forgoing those future price increases and the economy will suffer.

I'm not sure how well any Altcoins solve this problem, but I'd prefer a currency where the money supply grows in pace with the economy.

To me the problematic part isn't the risk, it's the relationship between the family and the people in the war. He's essentially treating the war and the people suffering it a bit like an educational exhibit and it sounds uncomfortably similar tourists who visit warzones for the experience.

I'm not saying he shouldn't have done it, and I think both his kids and the people they visited will benefit from the exchange. But there's still a slight dehumanizing aspect to the exchange.