The guy is 57 and has $13.5 billion dollars according to Wikipedia.

So he has more money than he could reasonably spend and has 20 years tops before his body really starts to fail him. Actually probably much less than that since it was announced in 2009 that he has been diagnosed with cancer again.
He could do literally anything with his remaining time and resources and he has decided to spend it acting as a parasite, exploiting weak spots and loopholes in the law to do damage to society in the hopes of getting an extra billion before he drops dead. I guess his dick stopped working so this is the only way he can continue to fuck people.

I wonder if it's the personality type that is more likely to become a billionaire, or if it's the act of spending a big chunk of your life accumulating wealth that causes these people to turn into mindless, selfish, pointless money collecting machines.

First of all there was never any sort of self-destruct device in the phone. The phone contains a bootloader that only loads signed roms which so far has prevented people from loading custom roms such as Cyanogen. The Motorola Milestone (european Droid) has the same issue, has been out for 8 months, and has yet to be cracked.

It's funny that the summary for this article has the text "putting to rest Andoid fans' fears that they would never gain access to the device's secrets due to a reported eFuse that would brick the phone" and links to a Slashdot story titled "Droid X Self-Destructs If You Try To Mod". So Slashdot posts a story with a bogus headline, and then later has another story saying how fear was created when it was "reported" that the phones would be bricked. Never stopping for a second to reflect on the fact that Slashdot itself was the one doing the bad "reporting".

While gaining root access is good news this particular exploit is one that has been around for a while and is ported from another version of Android on another phone. Not to dismiss the work that has been done here but the biggest problem for this device is and has always been the bootloader.

AT&T are a bunch of idiots for bringing this suit, and losing makes it even worse. A lot of people were already aware of how crappy their coverage is and now even more people are.

Verizon has pulled a lot of jackass moves in the past, like disabling half the features on a phone and making you pay for their crappy Verizon branded replacements. They also nickel-and-dime you to death, have big overage costs, few low-end plans, and way overpriced accessories ($30 for a car charger, what?). Also their customer support is bad, the people manning their kiosks (who are often not Verizon employees) will lie their asses off for a commission, and the corporate owned store employees will give you wrong information about half the time.

As a Verizon customer (through their assimilation of Alltel) what I will give them credit for the following:
1. The Droid kicks ass as a smart phone, and almost nothing is disabled other than tethering, which you can get around if so inclined. I didn't think they were capable of releasing an un-crippled decent phone but they did.
2. The 5GB cap everyone keeps bringing up (and was listed in those smartphone comparison charts) is a lie. The 5GB cap applies to non-smarphones like a simple flip phone, if you get a smartphone like the Droid you are forced to get a different data plan (with a different name) which is "unlimited" in that there is no cap listed in the terms. What they do say in the terms is they can cut you off if you have "excessive usage" which is in every phone company or ISP contract, but there is no hard cap. 2. Their network blows AT&T's out of the water in terms of coverage. While AT&T may be theoretically faster under perfect condition I care about what things are like in the real world, and if your signal sucks half the time then who cares how fast it is the rest of the time. A little anecdote, I can drive around town at 40mph (southern AZ) with Last.fm streaming and it almost never drops out. Most people I know with iphones, if they are in the wrong part of town, have to go outside to make a call and not have it drop after 5 minutes.

AT&T and Verizon are both bastards, the difference is Verizon has a functional network and AT&T just spent a bunch of money to point this out and make themselves look like crybabies who can't compete.

This article is bs, the only reason Sony allowed the installation of other operations systems was so they could get a break on import tariffs in certain regions where game consoles are hit more than general purpose computers.
As for removing the "final reason for the open source world to care about Sony", the Linux experience on the ps3 was never good to begin with, you never got full access to the hardware, I guess this might be unfortunate for some people but it's really not all that important.

With respect to the rootkit nonsense, what does that have to do with anything in the "open source world" other than a cheap way of saying "I think Sony stinks, here is something they are doing I think is stinky, also remember that one time they did something totally unrelated that was also stinky, so obviously I'm right Q.E.D."

Sony uses open source and contributes to some open source projects, for example they use the linux kernel and some other tools on their high-end televisions and DVRs, they also contributed kernel code to get support for the cell processor.
That said, this does not mean Sony is a "friend" to open source, or an enemy for that matter, they are like many other multinational corporations. Unless there are some people high up on the company or a large number of people elsewhere in the company that have a soft spot for a particular movement or project they are generally going to behave like a short-sighted sociopath and do what they want with little consideration for how it will be seen by anyone outside their target audience for a particular product (sometimes they don't even pay much attention to that). Anthropomorphizing corporations into heroes or villains might be useful in getting people emotionally engaged, might get you a lot of hits on your blog, and might give people casually interested in the issue a little talking point they can repeat giving them a feeling as though they have some insight into the situation. But in reality it does little toward giving readers anything beyond a very superficial understanding of the issue, the parties involved, or their motivations.