Wow. Way to spread the FUD.

Most customers: t-who?

This is about Money, pure and simple; and not even Apple’s money. You stop doing hard core enforcement of the laws of the land, particularly the Trade Secret laws, and particularly in Silicon Valley, those businesses will wage war in retaliation by pulling their shit, doing minimal operations in your neck of the woods, potentially moving everything overseas, where they could potentially have a lot tougher laws, or a lot more leeway in enforcing their own internal rules. If you don’t think Apple would pull all operations out of Silicon Valley, and California, if they no longer had strong, prosecutable trade-secret laws, you’re on effing crack.

You can’t fight a drug war, a war on terror, provide healthcare, roads, schools, police, firemen, etc when you’re broke because you didn’t protect the interests of those creating the products, services, etc., that are generating tax revenue. Occasionally, when Corporations Talk and Governments Listen, its for legitimate purposes and not pocket-lining bullshit.

You're assuming that everybody idles with their mouse on the right. I'm right handed and idle on the left. Why? Because I READ left-to-right. I view controls left-to-right. I read the MenuBar left to right. I look at a table left-to-right, top to bottom. When I look a window on a computer, I look left to right. When I cascade windows, I want them cascaded left to right, so that the upper left corner of every window is visible (and closable).

I have a wheel, a trackpad, and arrow keys to control my position in a window, other than as a visual indicator of my position in the Window, a Scrollbar serves little purpose.

Right-justified stuff pisses me off. If you read in one of the dozens of languages that runs right-to-left, i'm sure you'd feel the same way about left-justified.

If the dude doesn't like it, he can go devote hours upon hours to his own fork of Debian or better yet, he can run his own version of the ubuntu code. What about all the people who WANTED the buttons on the other side? Suddenly ONLY his opinion matters?

Open Source software is has to be a Republic. Ultimately somebody has to make decisions that influence the whole, or they get made by a small committee, not the entire user base at large. You can get "elected" to represent your peers by putting in time, work, and being damned good at it. THEN you can start influencing decisions and shaping the future. Standing on the sidelines bitching about the results just makes you look like a fucking idiot.

It still doesn't change the fact that we dont' indite quentin tarantino for some of the outright freaky shit he comes up with and MAKES MOVIES ABOUT.

FTA:
[startribute]
"Tatro told police that the posts were "just me venting," she said. "I got dumped, which is never a nice thing. I was bitter and really angry about it. For whatever reason, this professor took it personally."

Police are not filing charges and consider the matter closed, U spokesman Daniel Wolter said by e-mail."

If I had reason to believe I was the person she was wanting to stab, I may take other actions.

I'd also like to point out, that part of her duties, and in fact as part of her embalming therapy lesson, she probably WAS going to ahve to stab somebody (or something) with a trocar. The fact that said person or thing would probably already be dead should have some bearing on that... Maybe she enjoys her work and finds it therapeutic for her psyche (hey, it takes a special breed to work with dead people, you can't expect their needs or thought processes to be the same as anybody else).

How long before we arrive at the Minority Report state where what we THINK is enough to get us incriminated? Somebody said it above, we're either for freedom of speech, or we're not. Talking about something isn't the same as doing it. And all this "for every disaster prevented" stuff is bullshit.

I work in IT. If I got nailed to a wall everytime I said I wanted to injure kill somebody, be it outloud, on twitter, facebook, whatever, I'd be serving dozens if not hundreds of consecutive life sentences. Its part of my vernacular and my charming personality. I say "Fuck You" a lot too, that doesn't mean I actively want to go have intercourse with that person.

Fucking people need to lighten up. We have gotten so scared of our own fucking shadow is despicable. If the chick has a past history of mental illness or a criminal record, then yeah, they should give things a look. Apparently the threat wasn't very credible if they waited until she arrived at class to detain her. Newsflash, the police can find your ass, and its not like she was actively trying to evade them.

The profs in question overreacted, BADLY. The University doubly so, handing down a campus ban like that.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856119011&cm_re=RS-233-_-56-119-011-_-Product

Basically a netbook in a box, for about $170US (each) i built a pair of small linux servers to handle all my chores...1.6Ghz Atom Procs, 2GB of RAM, 500GB 5400RPM drives.

The only downside i've found thus far is no gigabit, but they have a single PCI slot if you really need it, gig-e cards are cheap.

I have 0 complaints thus far, one box has been running since July, another i just brought up last week. The temperature in my office dropped 5 by turning off the box I replaced, and I went from about 120-130W constant draw to about 60W.

Its not as good as a Mini as power consumption, but I have two machines, and still have less than even the low-end mini in them in up-front costs.

I have been working on lowering my power consumption for just over a year now, with a lot of success (reduced my power bill by 20-30%). I did a couple of somewhat lame writeups on my website about my server upgrades and the power consumption changes:
http://www.peelman.us/wordpress/2009/08/01/new-server-pollux/
http://www.peelman.us/wordpress/2008/10/29/file-server-upgrades/