Ok fair enough. Pedantry has its place. The previous reference was of course to the character Wil Wheaton from the same show, played coincidentally by an actor named Wil Wheaton.

I thought that was Jim Parsons.

So, what I'm hearing is that SLM is the comic IP equivalent of a patent troll?

If true, I wonder how Lee himself came to terms with his name being directly associated with such an odious business model?

I'mmmmm.... not sure I want to take that bait. Best to just walk away.

Hm. Are you really talking to me, or are you talking to someone with whom you recently had this argument?

Yes, I would call that the classic definition of a union. A bit different than the organizations that call themselves unions now.

I'm tempted to say that's a first world view. It's a lofty ideal, and might work if the playing field were more level, but when you're incorporating programmers from third world countries, who are looking forward to a subsistence wage in some craphole, it's hard to tell them to go on strike. These people are looking forward to 70 hour weeks (I've seen this, with H-1B workers locally) at lower-middle-class wages, as something that's *still* one hell of a lot better than they came from.

I suspect that attempts to organize will be taken as first worlders trying to save their overly-cushy jobs.

Exactly. Let's not get wrapped up in partisanship. It's wrong when either side does it, and both sides have.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I don't discount your experiences. There are different kinds of people, with different work methods, and that's why there are different products.

Running Adobe CS in a virtual instance should be possible, but would require a lot more studly hardware than I have presently. And I suspect it doesn't really solve the problem, which is having to deal with Windows. You're still having to do that, but arguably only for the apps that necessitate it, which admittedly may be an improvement.

Maybe I could get used to Windows 8. I started PCs with DOS [1] and had to deal with every single desktop version (except for Windows on Alpha) and many of the server versions that Microsoft has crapped out since then. If there was absolutely no other choice, I could learn to deal with Windows 8. But the point is, there are other choices. (Although I cringe at the thought of buying a Mac...) At some point the madness has got to stop. I just want to get my work done. I don't want to be an OS geek.

[1] I actually started *computers* with 4.1 BSD, then SunOS, and didn't switch to a PC until the eighties.

...management was born.

Mod this up! Oh, wait...

Yes, it is an important distinction. What I said was worded to be glib, but by "let's" I meant, let's have the FCC disincentivize their scummy behavior, and then let's us consumers make them redeem themselves morally, by not doing business with them, and telling them why.

I agree, having the government force a company to redeem itself morally usually doesn't end well. You only have to consider the source to see why that might not work out.

> The UI is not a *lot* worse than windows 7 because the UI is nearly the same as 7. You are not forced to use metro. You can consider it just one more of many features of windows you never need to use.

My first thought was that this statement was profoundly disingenuous, but then I realized that you may have used Win8 for awhile, put in a start menu replacement, disabled the hot corners and all the Metro stuff, went through file associations and changed every one from a Metro app to something that isn't Metro, and if on a laptop made the required registry changes to make the screen resolution and things like ACPI work correctly. You may not even remember having to do all of that. Or you may have been profoundly lucky and not had to do some of it. (The screen res and acpi issues seem to affect only laptops from certain vendors.) You may even not have a use for the control panel items that are in tablet-friendly-but-KVM-unfriendly places now. Or maybe you just put the effort in to learn all the foibles of using a touch based UI on a non-touch machine. I am not looking over your shoulder, so I don't know.

The thing about Win8 is that the "extra UI choice" is not really a choice, it's something I had to dink with every time I touched the computer. It was a Bad User Experience, and frankly, it was easier to go back to Win7 than it was to twist Win8 into something I could work with comfortably.

As to considering leaving Windows carefully, I use the Adobe creative suite extensively in my work. If it's ever ported to Linux (and runs well) I'm outta here. (I've supported Linux both server and (a few) desktops, and I'm comfortable with it.) It *is* ported to Macintosh. I'm not a big fan of Apple (their products are boutique priced and the cult-like fanbase is irritating) but they *do* run the software I need. Just sayin'.

I feel like popping some popcorn. And I don't even like popcorn.

Oh, let's make them do both.