While I agree with the gist of your statement, I fail to understand how exactly you come by the following:

... can't get rid of them due to union rules and stuff...

How many Information Technology unions do you know of out there? So far as I'm aware there are precious few, and those which do exist maintain low membership (and therefore weak bargaining power) at best.

Also, as a bit of an aside, what does the nebulous "and stuff" that bolstered our hypothetical dittohead in his or her promotion from IT grunt to middle management consist of?

... the judge is the trier of facts ...

This may be a bit pedantic, but in a jury trial such as this the judge is the trier of law and the jury is the trier of fact. If this was a bench trial however, you'd be correct - the judge would try both fact and law.

"Reverse-discrimination" is an oxymoron. It is a nonsensical term that makes no sense whatsoever. The reverse of discrimination is tolerance. Discrimination is discrimination regardless of the recipient's age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, et cetera. I understand the point that is being made, but that is no reason to create an utterly ridiculous, almost non-sequitur-like phrase. Being that you've put it in quotations yourself I do not know what you make of it, and my statement is not assuming either way. I have simply noticed this absurdity repeated on news channels and in other venues recently, and it appears to be gaining a sort of traction. Honestly, if Stephen Colbert satirizes it, that should say something.

Does Slashdot suddenly have an icon for McDonalds, of all things? All fast food is shit, but McDonalds is the king of shit. Why did someone decide to take the time, whether it was a minute or an hour, to create an icon for that shithole? Just resize a stock photo of some fat-ass walking down the street and call it a day.

I would be inclined to apply Occam's Razor and say that the reason there have been hundreds of deaths in Mexico and virtually none in the US (besides the child in Houston, who was from Mexico and may have died from other causes) is the respective health care systems. Health care in Mexico simply doesn't stand up in any way to what is available in the United States. Being that H1N1 seems to be a relatively moderate flu and easily treatable with standard flu medicines (Tamiflu, et cetera) if caught within a reasonable timeframe, I imagine that the deaths in Mexico are due to their inadequate health care and/or people simply not reporting to a hospital when the symptoms begin to show.

Good thinking! I hear the Debian maintainers are planning on upgrading to KDE 4.0 sometime in 2013.

Being a PPC Linux user, you should understand that unless a piece of software specifically offers a PPC download alongside the 'regular' (x86) one, well, it most likely ain't available for PPC. For some reason you seem not to.

Nano is as straightforward as it gets. The interface is basic, functional and unambiguous. We all know that Emacs is an operating system featuring a text editor, and while Vi may be powerful and save time once you know its ins and outs, I simply don't have the time to learn a bunch of arcane modes and commands. So for my needs, Nano does the job perfectly fine, and in an unobtrusive way.