I agree. Group behavior is much simpler than individual behavior. When people act in a group they become extensions of a system. When they act alone, they must justify (and rationalize) their action, and this process can become very complicated. For example, the health care Supreme Court decision. In-Trade got it completely wrong. Our modelling systems, which are well applied to aggregate decision-making, failed when trying to predict the actions of a single wildcard sitting on the Supreme Court, who acted unpredictably.

Right, and changing my theme is what I do whenever I set up a Ubuntu desktop. But I shouldn't have to change my theme to make my eyes stop bleeding.

Ok, so make the Chinese version of Ubuntu red. Most American desktop operating systems use blue because Americans tend to find blue soothing. Facebook is in blue for a reason. (OR rather, Facebook stayed blue for a reason.) I'm not advocating American centrism, just locality based color decisions.

  If I was culturally raised to find red warm, cheerful, and positive then I would find it that way. So I'm not saying this is innate. There's just what some of us do, versus others do. I personally find red abrasive to look at, which is why I tend to use themes that utilize blue/

Red is the color of alarm, of fear. It is abrasive to the eyes and to our visual processing system and is often used to signify errors for these reasons.

I know it seems unoriginal but Ubuntu needs to move over to a blue/green color palette. Mac OS X and Windows screens heavily utilize blue for this reason. It is psychologically soothing. It makes you feel like you're awash in the operating system as opposed to standing apart from it. I think if Ubuntu switches over to bluish colors we'll see a sharp increase in adoption.

Last minute bug fixes are one thing. Last minute features are another.

Last week I made a last-minute feature add that not only saved my job(the VP changed his mind about me), but got me promoted.

I don't mind saying: It was legendary.

Maybe give Joe Adler a call? (Yes, this is a perhaps copyright-infringing clip from Extract.)

Yes. If they really aren't concerned with international intervention or bottom-up revolution that is exactly what they would do to remain in power.

"This person was hired before we had sophisticated methods to verify international degrees," Aerospace spokeswoman Pamela Keeton said in a statement. "He failed to disclose his other employment as required."

Sophisticated methods...like calling them and asking.

And before you grew up(presumably), the 1918 flu pandemic killed literally tens of millions of people. Just because none of the flew strains that were carried in your youth were especially lethal doesn't mean that flu is some sort of inherently mild illness. It can be very dangerous.

You can always skip the handwriting recognition - just store them as hand-written notes using a paint program or some other solution. It won't help you with searching, but with cataloguing and retrieving it should be fine.

Others have probably mentioned this, but LiveScribe is also a really good example of a smartpen-only solution that will work to do this.

do I get to keep my stock options?

Because, honestly, that seems like the better option here. Not to mention the money I will recoup when I sue you for wrongful termination.

i'm sorry, when was this?

If/when I no longer need to write stupid iOS apps for a living, I'll happily dual-boot to Linux and continue enjoying the excellent hardware.

Or...wait until desktop Linux can actually compete on the desktop with OS X, and then dual-boot. At work, I split my time between Ubuntu and OS X. The times when I'm forced to use Ubuntu drop my productivity in half. It's nothing major, but little touches that someone on the Mac side clearly thought about while on the Ubuntu side they didn't. For instance, why does the standard terminal in Ubuntu by default make you press Shift-Control-C and -V for Copy/Paste instead of just Control-C? And to those Ubuntu fanatics out there(if there are any left after Ubuntu decided to go with Unity) please don't tell me that because I can change it it's not an issue. Of course I can change it - but I shouldn't have to. It's an obvious convenience and design choice not to break a UI convention that's been in use on computers for almost two decades.

And in Unity, why do windows maximize when they're brought to the top of the screen? It's unbelievably annoying.

There are lots of other little examples. If Linux wants to compete on the Desktop it needs to think about UI consistency - or just common sense - from the user's perspective much more than it does now. Otherwise, it has no shot.

The US government will never be put in charge of the US health care system. That was the whole take-away from the debate over health care law, remember? The bill that actually passed sets up a MARKETPLACE for PRIVATE INSURERS to SELL INSURANCE PRIVATELY to PEOPLE . That sounds like a conservative, market-based approach to me. That's probably because, oh wait, it is one - it's nearly identical to the system that Mitt Romney, a conservative Republican, put in place in Massachusetts, which, being identical, was also a conservative, market-based approach to universal health care. Mittens is now running away from his own law because 1) Obama passed a similar law 2) the crazy people who have taken over the Republican party can't even understand that, if they actually knew what their own principles were, THEY WOULD AGREE WITH IT. But for now their overriding, unthinking principle seems to be: We hate Obama, and if Obama did something, we hate that too.

I'm tired of know-nothing tea partiers trolling on this site. If you know nothing about something, try not to comment on it.

That rules android right out, as it still is more of a tech-demo than an OS

Huh? Android is the OS of 56% of all smartphones in use by consumers in the world. How is that a "tech-demo?" It still has a few bugs but otherwise it is a remarkably stable and competitive Linux-based OS.