I try OpenLibreOffice every few years. To date it has not been able to consistently open and display MS-created files. It can get back to me when it does.

Exactly. Everyone Libertarian I've ever encountered is exactly the opposite.

... on the rare occasions that their goofy formats / software requirements are usable.

System vendors have always been like that. All of them, not just Apple.

Agreed, though this view is often unpopular. Clarence Thomas got blasted a while back for (rightly) thinking that affirmative action is insulting. If any ethnic/racial/gender group is getting discriminated for/against in hiring, that's one thing -- and a thing that shouldn't ever happen. If there are educational / opportunity barriers to ethnic / racial / gender groups getting getting educated, that's where the focus should be, equal opportunities. I worked for a tech company back around 1991 or so. The VP of engineering left and there was speculation as to who would replace him. A co-worker asserted that a certain software doc manager should get the job, but that she wouldn't because she was a woman. The idea that maybe a tech writer with *any* set of chromosomes might not be the right choice to lead a hardware / OS engineering department fell on deaf ears. That said, when I read this article on MacRumors, my first thought was "Are all the Indians considered White???".

Agreed. After all the outcry over the ribbon foo, when I finally saw it I was like "What's the big fuss?"

That, plus when they do actually hire people, it's at 2/3 the going pay. I looked at government jobs during my last search, the pay was pathetic.

And what is one to do if there is no available GOBN to troll for a job? In my last search, pestering everyone I know about job openings got me nowhere. What did get me hired was applying for a position via a company's online job site. A well-designed LinkedIn profile is also valuable, though it does result in being spammed by offers for worthless contract jobs.

And whose butt are those employee referrals supposed to be pulled from? I did once get a job this way, in 1989, though that was a bit of an anomaly. It's a different world now and a different market.

Some argue that happened years ago when the hypen was removed and the logo buggered.

You're pretty much accurately depicted Bruce Bohmke there.

Maybe their "carrier-class" gear is better than the WAP from them I had and tossed out in disgust. Dropped connections frequently, the goofy management application was no more robust and had to be reinstalled with every new firmware version, which was inevitably a beta as they never seemed to offer real releases. When the thing's resets became more common and it died entirely, I engaged warranty service, and it took something like two months for them to send me a replacement, because -- get this -- they didn't have any! I gave up and bought an ASUS that's been working well, though the coverage pattern is bizarre.

And what happens when someone changes the input on the TV connected to the thing? It'll sit there "broken" indefinitely. How many times have you walked into a coffee shop or even someone's home and found their big expensive TV stuck on the wrong zoom mode, then come back a year later and found it unchanged? Oh and what happens when Samsung buys that product and kills it? Like my Boxee Box?

... and right there you've nailed why this isn't a viable solution.

Yes, it is unfortunate that Napster did not succeed in staunching Metallica's creative death-spiral. But In this case, here we have Lionsgate mostly creating advertising. It's a second sequel to a movie nobody heard about in the first place. If 180k downloads have happened, that's probably double the number who would have seen it theatrically. "Near DVD quality" is hardly impressive in 2014 and they worked hard to find six obscure sites. I'm not getting into the copyright argument on either side here, but I think it likely that this is more about publicity for a bomb of a movie than the ostensible rights.

This seemed to start when people started devolving to Linux in significant numbers. First time I subjected myself to a Linux desktop I was puzzled by the names. "Bonobo"? Seriously? And then when OpenOffice became OpenOffice.org that was just stupid.