Industrial tribunal? Do those actually exist somewhere in the world?

There were several factors; This was in Paris, TN for one thing, and a very well paying job for the area, which never has enough jobs. It was also 1986. He could have had 5 people with essentially the same qualifications there to interview the next morning.
Also, the person in question was the OWNER; he built the factory from the ground up over a 30+ year period, was in his 70's, and I doubt he was very used to anyone disagreeing with him. He also, probably, didn't have a firm grasp on what it was I did for the company.
I also said "You are kidding" when he said it was OK to drink Coffee at your desk but not Pepsi, because he took me so off guard and it sounded so bizarre. He obviously had some sort of reason he thought the way he did, I obviously thought it was a joke.

You are sort of right, but the situation was a little different than you describe; I had gotten to work early, the people walking in when I was walking out were people who had just got there getting their coffee.
We were on the shop ethic primarily though; fixed breaks throughout the plant. I think he perceived me as talking back to him when I couldn't believe it was alright to drink Coffee in the mornings, but not soft drinks, and said "your kidding".

No, I had a lot of respect for the guy...he was in his 70's, built the company from scratch, and by the time I realized he wasn't kidding, it was already at the quit or be fired stage. Since I had absolutely nothing lined up, and their were really not many jobs at the time, I went ahead with fired so I could score unemployment.

Sort of different, sort of similar.
I was working doing CAD at a place called Campbell-Rhea in the mid 80's. My habit at the time was when i got to work, I would grab a bottle of Pepsi from the machine in the breakroom, go to my cube, and review what I had to do for the day, what I did yesterday, while sipping Pepsi.
One day, the owner was walking by in the hall as I was walking out of the breakroom, trying to dodge the various people grabbing their morning coffee; when I got to my cube, my department head told me the boss wanted to see me. went to his office, and he started asking why I was taking a break before I even got to work. I told him that I didn't like coffee, so unlike everyone else, I grabbed a Pepsi when I first got in.
long story short, Coffee was perfectly acceptable 1st thing at the job drink, but soft drinks were only for breaks.
I was still sort of caffeine shy, and very confused; I kept thinking he was trying to haze me in some way, so i tried to get him to explain it.
10 minutes after I walked into his office, he was nice enough to give me the option of quitting, or being fired.
BTW, I was his fastest, most accurate CAD guy out of 7. got a raise 2 weeks before this for productivity.
The Moral: The Boss is the Boss. sometimes they do stupid shit. either live with it, or leave.

I see laws as formalized morals, personally.
But I don't see the issue here; If someone is doing something Evil, with a very precise and limited definition of Evil (like, for instance, actually causing physical damage to someone against their will, with the expectation that it will continue to happen in the future), it would be wrong, IMO, to not use whatever tools are at hand to stop it, regardless of legality.
Besides, I didn't say the hypothetical person wasn't breaking any laws; I was indicating that there was no usable evidence that would allow them to be arrested for the greater crime.

If that is not what I managed to convey, I apologize.

I'm not arguing.
well, except a little on point 1.
Sometimes, for whatever reason, evidence isn't admissible in court. If you know a person is doing evil, it would be moral to use whatever you CAN use to put them away.
Note, I said Evil, not breaking the law.

I'm not saying that there is a backdoor into AES-256, but I AM saying I wouldn't trust the security of any information on a system that has a TPM chip.
And, no, I don't have any inside information. It just seems obvious to me that TPM is a privacy and anonymity nightmare.

I have some experience on this from the law enforcement side of things.
I can see a few possibilities:
1) They know the guy did something, but they can't back it up with evidence; they make a deal with the DA to bust him for what they CAN find evidence for.
2) A lot of departments & agencies have dedicated child porn people; they have a soft quota that they have to meet to justify their budget. They might not have to bust 4 people a month, but if they don't bust close to 48 a year, they are going to lose funding.
3) He pissed someone off. The DA may be a copyright vigilante, and the guy had tons of copyrighted stuff he had download. The image was the only thing they could use in a criminal prosecution. Or someone just didn't like him.

It's just sad that GDW isn't still in business (I originally thought TFA was about GDW, which sort of freaked me out); Surely GDW could take any argument GW is using to destroy them in court.

huh?

How many years? I was a True Blue Full Bore Star Trek geek up until about 1990, and I never heard of it.

It's safe for microsoft to give kudos to opera, because their is almost no chance that an IE user will switch to opera; disaffected IE users already switched to Firefox.
I think Opera gets the most of it's users from Diehard netscape fans and people who switched from macs.
Since TFA has essentially no details about how they did their study, I will continue to use Seamonkey and firefox, and continue to worry about which of my plugins is trying to kill me.

Infoseek was better. I may be remembering things through a rose colored monitor, but I remember them being really close to google, when they started out at least, when it came to accuracy. Too bad Disney destroyed the search code, FWIH.
But AltaVista was always better at finding the truly obscure stuff.

I'm also pretty surprised by how Palm is handling this; one of the strengths of the platform (well, up until they did away with garnet, at least, I don't have a pre, the chick on the commercial is just too creepy) is that it has always been so easy to develop for; a quick google found a 3rd party application for Garnet that allows you to use a remotely controlled PC to act as a go-between for iTunes, for instance.
  So that's another thing I can do besides watch TV, have a universal remote, watch or listen to any media format on the planet, emulate any hand-held well except for the PSP, hack WEP protected WiFi, record conversations on nearby peoples bluetooth headsets, really damned near anything you can conceive of.
Except, of course, run a decent Linux implementation except on a Pre.