I keep the following quote pinned in Google Keep to remind myself of what happens when corporate communications becomes completely divorced from reality:

In other words, better execution and innovation through strategy and goal and discipline and engineering coherence.

From the previous Microsoft CEO. Nice to see that Ballmer's ghostwriters are still with the company.

Of course it has a boss

Um... no. Pure communism is incompatible with the entire concept of "boss", unless you're using "boss" as some kind of shorthand for "what society needs".

Real communism doesn't even have a "boss"

Theoretical communism doesn't have a "boss".

Real communism, as practiced by real people, has an entire class of people who are "the boss".

It might be interesting, not to mention somewhat obvious, to quantify how much things have changed in the last decade or two given the trend towards never being more than an arms length away from entertainment.

Which government has working days like that?

A better question is "which hackers have working days like that"? Why would anyone expect criminals to work 9-to-5 jobs? I'd expect something more along the line of noon-to-hey-let's-go-get-piss-drunk-and-sleep-in-until-noon.

This is true. I'm questioning that said patents are really such an "ace up the sleeve" if someone else is beating you to market with devices that already do what your patents purportedly cover. There's only a limited set of physiological sensors that are going to be useful in headphones and that aren't already in their phones, and LG just nailed the main one. Body temperature would be the next obvious.

IMHO, Apple's ace up its sleeve is the same thing it's always been... to ability to pump out a product that's just plain nicer than anyone elses product. Patents just muddy the water.

But Apple has an ace up its sleeve, in the form of patents for a set of headphones with 'one or more integrated physiological sensors' designed to help users keep track of their body stats.

You mean like these. Somehow, I have a feeling those patents might not be as useful as someone might think...

Vim is pretty much the standard vi/editor/$VISUAL on every Linux distribution I use.

It is for me too, after I type "apt-get purge nano".

I assure you, I mean lazy in a very complimentary way here. ;-)

Oh, I understand what you mean. But calling it "lazy" is... well, lazy.

Programmers are generally not lazy people. They're willing to work pretty hard at stuff that matters or that they care about. They just don't like to waste their time, nor do they like to do poor work.

Tedious manual error-prone processes that could be done more efficiently and correctly by making a machine to do it are exactly the sorts of jobs programmers don't like to do.

Granted, not wanting to do a job the way someone expects you to do it or the way it's always been done might *look* lazy...