There's the right, there's the wrong, there's the lawful and there's the unlawful/illegal. Right and lawful aren't the same, as aren't wrong and unlawful. They should be, but they aren't. That said, there are people who tend to operate more along the right-wrong axis of the ethical plane, and those who tend to operate more along the lawful-unlawful one (and I thank D&D for the clear way in which they express this insight). From your described hypothetical reaction it's clear you're of the later persuasion (lawful-neutral perhaps?), as are, quite evidently, lawyers, judges, most CEOs etc. Hackers, however, operate mostly on the former, as would be the case with your ethical "chaotic-good" thief. And, as in the game, there's no resolution in sight for this real world clash of worldviews, the sad thing being that, whenever two "goods" battle trying to figure out which one is the "best", they both weaken, and the actual villains advance.

Yes, but my point wasn't that in practical matter both perspectives diverged much. The practice in both many times overlap, although where they diverge, they do diverge a lot. It's more a question of focus as well as opportunity really: the first approach wants to protect society despite potentially damaging the individual, while the second wants to reform the individual despite potentially damaging society (in the sense that softer/smaller/shorter punishments many times allow a criminal to go back and commit more crimes, thus damaging society).

The new notion is that reforming should be the goal. Reforming was observed before, sure, but it was taken more as a lucky by-product in the law enforcement activity than something that could be systematically employed, as the goal of said activities wasn't (and usually isn't) this. There's also a difference in both approaches as to what is considered a small enough crime to warrant a not so severe punishment. The first approach considers the effect in society, period, so a lot of things warrant extremely harsher punishments than the second approach, who thinks first on the feasibility of reforming the criminal, would employ in a similar case. So it's important to distinguish eventual softenings of the former as a change towards the later. Being less severe because you have lots of surplus money and can thus afford being magnanimous isn't the same as being softer because that's more conducive to reforming the criminal.

I myself have no defined position on the death penalty, but I know more or less the different arguments, and it seems to me they all can be reduced to two basic and incompatible opinions regarding what the punitive branch of the justice branch is for.

The first, and oldest, is the notion that the punitive branch goal is simply to protect society, what it accomplishes by removing from it those who violate (that) society rules. In this case society, which is what MUST be defended, is understood as a set of agreements on how one person should behave with another so that everyone can go on with their lives without causing trouble for each other and helping each other so that the end result is a net gain for everyone. So, if someone is being problematic, you punish him lightly so that he notices he's being a jerk and start behaving; if he does something more serious, you ostracize him temporarily (this ostracism can be literal in small enough societies, as you literally make the person get out of the village/tribe/whatever and taste living on his own, without the benefit of community support, so that he can start grasping how very much important being in it is -- and if he dies while "out", well, that's his problem); if he does something much more serious, you either ostracize him permanently (which, depending on context, is about equal to killing him), or disable him so that he cannot do that kind of damage to society anymore (this can take the form of amputation/castration, which, in more civilized societies, takes the form of lobotomy, chemical castration, inserting sensors to track the person every move, telling everyone who he is via public sex offender list etc.); and if his danger to society is understood be so extreme that you absolutely cannot take the risk of him remaining around, the next logical step is the death penalty, as it's the definite form of removal. Notice then that, from this perspective, being in any way nice to the criminal isn't part of the requirements at all. In fact, as long as he's being punished, or is an illegal alien, he's thought of as someone from without society, hence not deserving of any of societies niceties, which only actual society members deserve.

The second, and newest, is the notion that the punitive branch goal is to reform the criminal. This is similar to the above in many practical matters, since in many cases you remove the person from society, but the difference is that he's still considered part of it, hence deserving of protections, rights etc. As for the punishments, they're thought of as a means to an end whose focus is first the individual, and only secondarily society proper. As such, harsh punishments are usually frown upon and go unused, since they're not seen as conducive to any kind of individual reforming. As an obvious and necessary consequence of this point of view, the death penalty gets rejected, since if there's one thing that doesn't help one to become reformed it's being dead. Now, it's important to understand that this whole notion depends, to be valid, on the possibility of the majority of criminals reforming, which is something the defendants of the first approach don't think possible, or at least think possible only for a small minority of cases.

The current US system is clearly modeled on the first approach, with a few touches of the second one here and there. As such, even though on a moral basis alone it could reject the death penalty, keeping it around isn't incoherent, even the cost being the same. But where the overall approach to be change to the second one then sure, employing it wouldn't make sense, from any perspective, even a purely practical one.

Those Foxconn employees chose to work there because, to them, it's much better than working in the alternative business, namely, very dirty and very poor 4th world level farming. If big companies all around started refusing to work with Foxconn, it'd shrink, laying all that people off, back to the farms, to die of diseases they currently don't. So, even if the current situation is currently "bad" (from our perspective), the alternative is worse.

There's no magic trick. The only real solution for poor working conditions is to increase demand for labor more than the net growth of the workforce. Higher demand coupled with lower offer equals higher prices (in this case, higher wages). Once the demand over there is so high that companies start competing among themselves for workers, so that workers can start choosing were to work, a choice which usually includes considerations on working conditions, these companies will all find themselves compelled to improve working conditions, or start losing their best workers, then the average ones, and finally even the bad ones. Not being dumb, they'll follow the improvement path simply because there'll be no alternative.

All of which means, counter-intuitively as it seems, that people should actually do the opposite of what you suggested.

Hehe. Google tells me it's actually nicknamed OOCOBOL, but yeah, maybe COBOL++ would be better, given that Wikipedia tells me it (the ISO/ANSI COBOL 2002 standard) includes pointers and memory management functions, and there's support to work within/compile to .NET and Java. Quoting:

I have a friend who works for IBM programming mainframes with COBOL. He absolutely loves the job, and the language. I asked him how that was possible, given how COBOL is usually seen out there. His answer was something along these lines: "People look at how COBOL was in the past and believe it's still like that. It isn't. The language has evolved and incorporated modern programming paradigms and techniques. It's still verbose, but no more than Java, and with the advantage that, thanks to decades of debugging, libraries and reusable code are practically bug-free. It's a joy to work with."

Well, I never worked with COBOL, so I have no opinion on the matter. But it's interesting to see how diametrically opposed opinions on this language are. I wonder if there's someone out there who, knowing COBOL, neither hates nor loves it, but thinks of it merely as another language, good for some things, bad at others. Maybe there isn't. :-)

In Portuguese the word "bomba" can mean "bomb", "pump" or "eclair", so you infer the meaning from context. Now, guess what happened to a not-quite-fluent-in-English Brazilian businessman when, passing through US customs a few years ago with a pump, and asked by the customs officer what that were, he replied with an epic mistranslated "a water bomb"?

Other than opening Outlook once or twice in computers with Office, I haven't ever used it, much less with Exchange, so I don't know what it provides that's different from other e-mail and calendaring programs. I'm familiar with Gmail, Thunderbird, Eudora and a few others, plus the standard feature set of IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but that's about it. Could you provide a short list of the specific features corporations particularly like, specially when it comes to integration with other Microsoft solutions, that isn't available (or as easily available) in alternative solutions?

Not trolling, just curious.

(By the way, I use, and like, MS Office 2010, but it's a home installation, not a corporate-integrated one.)

True enough. But then, that's also why free market advocates defend a state/judicial system which deals only with preserving order by preventing one individual from interfering into another's liberty, so that each one can do whatever they like as long as it isn't damaging to 3rd parties, and with enforcing contracts. Anything else is conducive to all kinds of distortions, including those you mention. For instance, large corporation can become so large to the point of tilting the knowledge factor precisely because they have the backing of governments, which grant them special status and privileges so that they become more than the simple aggregate of individuals they should be. Add to this all the special rights, also government-granted, that only big corporations can actually employ effectively, such as copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets, as well as laws that make it impossible for small competitors to enter a market, such as the many regulatory/safety/anti-this-or-that/etc. laws, and you have a recipe for the total imbalance, with the end result being what you describe.

No, it's not. The concept of perfect information is a straw-man anti-free-market theorists use to easily dismiss actual free market theories without the need to actually engage them. On the contrary, contemporaneous free market theorist such as Mises, Hayek and others have written extensively on how one of the main characteristics of the free market is the lack of perfect information (and many times of any information at all) and the fact that people act non-rationally most of the time, then explaining why, counter-intuitively as it might sound, this works better than the alternative. The key is in the free market's lack of centralization, which results in, to use a modern analogy, a strongly optimized neural network in which each node (each individual or, more precisely, each individual at each atomic economic transaction in which he engages) is doing the best it can, input-output-wise, given the constraints under which it operates. This neural-network-like behavior, whose study Mises called "praxeology", the study of human action, is free market' actual central principle. It's a concept that goes against mainstream economics' macroeconomic ones, specially that which considers it possible to understand anything economic without reference to actual humans doing actual economic transactions powered at every instant by their own ordinal subjective valuations. To try to disprove it by modeling it into operations upon cardinal units such as money, amount of knowledge, game theory etc., then refuting such model, is to entirely miss the target, not to mention the point.