Where did the poster say he was quitting his current job first?

At my last job our team had 6 developers, 4 of us used Linux on a daily basis. The company decided it was going all Windows, we were able to hold out a while but the Linux portions of the environment were getting more and more marginalized.

We all had the option of moving over to the MS side, but frankly if we wanted to work with MS there were better options, and within a year all 4 of us were gone.

A job should be something you enjoy, and if you have the ability to find enjoyment in the tools you use that counts for a lot.

As for those complaining about him looking for a new job while everyone else is struggling with unemployment... Well I hear there's about to be an opening for someone willing to work with Windows.

Except he didn't really find a hole in their systems. He found he could email some employees malware, trick them into opening it, and now he has a backdoor into the system. Now they could stand to strengthen up their IT policies/employee training a bit, but this isn't like he found a backdoor in their web server, and it's possible the docs he accessed weren't even particularly confidential.

Probably the reason he couldn't arrange an IT job interview with Marriott, and claim good security skills is he didn't have good security skills. Frankly I've come to suspect that 90% of the hacking incidents we hear about are basically script kiddies trying a bit of social engineering. I'm sure there's a few real genuine black hat hackers who are writing the rootkits and malware, but I have a feeling we'd be unimpressed by the quality of most "hackers".

And besides, what kind of work environment does he expect when he "demanded a job with Marriott in order to prevent the public release of the Marriott documents".

I won't bother to post all the links here, but there is very little reason to believe that Byron Sonne is a terrorist. That he got arrested is no surprise as I believe that was partially his intent (to see if he could set off enough red flags to get arrested), but from every source I've seen he should have been released a day or two after he was arrested, when they realized he was just a geek, not held without bail for almost a year.

We're talking about suspicion that there's about to be an attack, particularly one involving the T-word, frankly 3 days is a little slow (but who knows when the trade show was).

Not the first time unfortunately

1. He's Arab and presumably Muslim, he and a ton of people like him have probably been monitored to some degree for a while.
2. see 1), particularly if he's part of a mosque you probably don't have to follow that many links to find someone with terrorist ties (you can do the same thing with Christian Churches involving pedophiles and pro-life extremists).
3) Some analyst saw the message, assumed he was a terrorist, saw a couple other things that while innocent, still fit the bill, then freaked out. Once it became clear that he was completely innocent they had to drop charges, but they'd already investigated him and they knew if he ever DID get involved with terrorism in the future, they'd risk having huge egg on the faces, thus they're leaving the marker on his record as a CYA (Cover Your Ass).

A similar question could have been asked of perpetual motion machines, and in that case there would have been a payout, which I think is partially his point

The impetus for this prize was a post on Dick Lipton’s blog, entitled “Perpetual Motion of the 21st Century?” (See also this followup post.) [...] Anyway, in the comments section of the post, I pointed out that a refutation of scalable QC would require, not merely poking this or that hole in the Fault-Tolerance Theorem, but the construction of a dramatically-new, classically-efficiently-simulable picture of physical reality: something I don’t expect but would welcome as the scientific thrill of my life.

I think he's saying that while a general quantum computer might be a very long way off, the underlying theory that allows such a thing to exist is on very solid ground (which is why he's putting up the money). Of course this prize might still cost him since if the news of the prize goes viral he's going to spend the next decade getting spammed by kooks.

Did they give a justification for this? I can think of two reasons.

The first is cost, which you seem to blame, where the written exams are cheaper to administrate.

The second is CYA (Cover Your Ass), that for something like licensing, if someone complains about your decision (you fail someone, or you pass someone who later gets involved in a malpractice suit), it's a lot easier to defer blame to a written test. (of course they probably wouldn't admit this reason)

Well I did just cover that point with the second sentence. But besides, the fact that treatment is unfeasible still doesn't make non-treatment humane, it's possible that the necessary choice is cruel and heartless.

So their offer might not be as good as I thought.

Honestly I have no idea what a good system would be.

Clearly letting someone die when there's a drug that can save them is inhumane.

But even with a public system there comes a point where a certain treatment is just too expensive. And there's still the question of how to price these things. It's entirely possible that it would not have been economical for them to develop the drug without charging $300,000 for a prescription, but when a drug is literally a lifesaver it's hard to come up with an appropriate number.

I don't think he's a sociopath, but he could certainly be a psychopath.

I don't believe all politicians are psychopaths (Obama seems like a genuinely good person) but I think Republicans got themselves into a bind with the Tea Party where the only way to be a viable candidate was to be some grade of nutjob (Bachmann, Santorum, Cain, etc), or an otherwise sane person who tells them what they want to hear such as Gingrich or Romney.

I think Gingrich can pull it off since he's enough of a narcissist that he believes he is being genuine, but for Romney I really feel like his entire persona and everything he says is built around gaining power.

Gingrich would certainly be a disaster as a president because advisors would have trouble keeping the dumb ideas in check, and a lot of policy would be directed by appeasing Gingrich's ego. But for Romney I'm actually having some trouble justifying the belief that being a psychopath is necessarily a bad thing for a president. He really just follows the power, and that probably keeps him in pretty moderate waters.