This is pretty absurd, the idea that Larry Ellison can own the sixth largest Hawaiian Island.

On the one hand, it means the Hawaiians, on that island at least, have a royal family again.

On the other hand, he holds it due to fictitious numbers in a database, so what this really means is that the United States gave it to him.

The United States will take it back whenever it likes, unless he decides to be a king like Leopold and establish his own military to torment the inhabitants. In which case the United States will take it back after a rather short war.

But I'm sure he'll enjoy pretending to be king for a while.

Wii U looks a damn sight better than the new Xbox, which I believe Microsoft has named the Xbox Catastrophe. (It goes along with the Calamity operating system that they released for PC/Tablets.)

Well, the first thing to understand about this article is that it treats software engineering as a pure meritocracy.

Maybe at some places it is.

However, for me the important film is that timeless documentary, Office Space, which drummed into my head two things that I actually found to be true:

1. If you are good at office politics, you will be called "a straight shooter with upper management written all over him," if you are merely good at creating software you will be "Mr. Samir Naga... Naga... Naga... Not gonna work here anymore, anyway."

2. Even being a successful office politicker like Peter Gibbons or Bill Lumbergh, you will still possibly find that you have a hateful, soul crushing job that drains away your life and enthusiasm every day.

What does this mean? Well, it means that you have to decide early on whether you are chasing a good life or an early retirement. chasing the good life means hanging on until you get a job you can tolerate, early retirement means making as much as you can so you can get out as fast as you can. Or perhaps being hit by a truck so you can work at your real passion, "A Jump to Conclusions" mat.

All in all, I think wire fraud and armed robbery are probably more satisfying careers much of the time.

What laws have the Kochs demonstrably violated?

Trading with Iran.

For starters, and there's more if you look.

They should be swinging from lampposts right next to the one Bloomberg is swinging from, maybe across from the ones Jamie Dimon and Don Blankenship are strung up from.

The main problems will be really fat crows and running out of lamp posts.

It's a culture that lives in fear. Constantly. Daily. Days on, or days off.

If you like what you do, you aren't reading the TPS reports about your job, you are actually doing your job. There have been times when I got so much more work done off the clock (yes, working for free is stupid, but that stupidity is mitigated with a hard deadline and your job on the line) because I only worked, I didn't check every stupid piece of corporate sponsored spam in my inbox, and they never scheduled meetings about the proper way to fill in a request for more TPS pre-printed cover sheet request forms.

Checking Email? That's usually not work, that's corporate politics. The fine art of brown-nosing.

Look, police informants are not whistle blowers. You may think they deserve to be protected, but the term whistle blower has a specific meaning that does not equate to police informant.

There's no point in even comparing a smartphone to an Xbox. Conflating smartphones (still primarily used as phones, therefore always connected to network) with tablets (often WiFi only and connected only when an available network is within range) actually hurts your argument. (Xboxes are stationary so they don't have the same connectivity problems of Wifi tablets.)

No one I know uses Xbox Live, and of the 4 360 owners I know (myself and 3 others) I'm the only one who has it connected to the Internet. Two of the others are typical gamers who like shooting things, the other is a lady who bought it so she could use Kinect for... whatever it is one uses Kinect for. I think it's yoga or dancing or something... but I don't really know.

Now, the main reason those others never connected is because they don't have WiFi for their Xboxes and they don't have a hub near it due to the layout of their homes. Which brings us to our next difficulty and a fatal flaw in the current Microsoft strategy.

Microsoft, like many before them, has contempt for video games. They want a system that's an "everything box" and "used by the whole family." "Women are the new core, " is not just a pickup line for Microsoft executives, it signals a major change in how they are positioning the Xbox in the home.

Currently, my Xbox is hooked up in my office to a computer monitor with HDMI inputs. Why isn't it hooked to the big screen TV in the living room, one might ask? Because if it were, my wife would literally have killed me by now. Then she'd have all that blood to clean up off the carpet, not to mention disposing of the body. I love my wife, so I don't want to put her through that.

So, our set up now assures her that she will never have to miss a single episode of Law & Order: SVU, and I will never have to watch a single episode of Law & Order: SVU. Marital Bliss!

But it means I don't need to use the TV functions of the Xbox. If I want to watch Netflix, or Amazon, or HBOGo, I just switch the monitor over to my computer, although when I'm watching TV I prefer to do it with my wife (unless it's SVU or something about those non-Star Trek Cardassians.)

Now, if I do what Microsoft wants, and hook the Xbox One (which I'm not planning to ever get, but I said that about 360, so you never know) up in the living room, I will no longer be able to use it to play video games.

In which case, aren't I better off with a Web connected Blu Ray player, or a Roku Player?

Sounds like someone doesn't like their Telescreen....

1. Pick a Tablet (I suggest notApple unless you need Apple for work... well, or if you are rich and don't mind being a wastrel.)

2. Make sure the tablet has the following things:
Mini-HDMI Out (For when you have access to a decent sized monitor.)
Ability to connect Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse
BSSH
Ghost commander
Remote Desktop
Wifi
Some kind of case that doubles as a stand
bigger bag to carry tablet and accessories

3. Suggest buying 16gb and rigging up personal server for external storage.

4. Buy the tablet

5. set up tablet screen with stand, connect bluetooth keyboard and mouse, BSSH to linux box. (Or remote desktop, depending).

6. Use use Lynx, IRC, Pine.

You are now the coolest kid on your block.

People don't buy consoles for other applications, they buy them for games. To give you an idea of the problem with PCs (and understand, I'm perfectly ok with tossing all the consoles into the Crack of Doom and just having non-gimped PC hardware, in fact that sounds like a perfect world) I'll just talk about my joystick experience.

I have a lot of extra Wii classic controllers. I keep getting them as gifts, I've got like half a dozen of them. Seriously.

So, the crummy, used, knock-off XBox 360 controller clone I was using with my console-style PC games went to controller Hell, so I thought, "I'll buy an adaptor for my extra Wii controllers, and use them." and I did buy the adaptor.... and what did my console style Pc games say?

"Nah-ah! We only work with Monopoly brand controllers! Take your non-Microsoft controllers elsewhere, peasant!"

Now, I hunted around and found some hackware that said, "Use our clunky hack-ware into tricking your Pc into thinking that your non Xbox 360 controller is an xbox 360 controller."

Now, obviously, it's stupid to complain about this, because if I had an Xbox console, I wouldn't be given the option to use a Wii controller on it.

But I wasn't using a console, I was using a PC. It wasn't just adapted Wii controllers either, I checked, it was anything that you couldn't also plug into an Xbox and expect to work.

The main problem B&N has is the lack of truly open tablets. When I want to read one of my Nook books, I read it on my Kindle using the Nook app (or on my old E-ink Nook if it's a novel and not a technical manual).

So, given that, why were they in the tablet business? Because if they relied on other tablets to carry their application, they risked being muscled completely out of the market.Now the Nook app was trivial to install on my Kindle, but I expect that Amazon could break it in their gimped implementation/fork of Android if they wanted.

(Incidentally, before anyone thinks, "well you are the sucker who bought a gimped Android Kindle," I haven't bought either a Nook or a Kindle, they were both gifts. I did buy a Blackberry Playbook, so who be smart now? Yaaarr....)

i'm trying to figure out who "walled garden" is good for other than the first movers who get a demi-monopoly and the top also ran who gets to live on the edge of the cliff unless they take the throne. (See: The History of Video Games NES to Present.)

To me it's idiotic that Microsoft, who built their business on "we don't care who makes software as long as it's for our platform, though someday we may steal your idea and give it away for free with the OS," trying to be the 4th place Also-ran walled garden. but I'm just a simple country programmer... I still think there's money to be made by someone saying "screw the walled garden, we'll make it up in marketshare."

And this, too, can be laid at George Lucas's doorstep....

In Bioshock Infinite, Fink allowed potential to employees to bid on jobs. "Who can do it in 30 minutes?" I have 30 minutes. How about 15, who'll bid 15."

Utopia.

Although some might think it's insulting to a professional to have to bid for a job and pay for the bid with free work, I feel that this innovative thinking tells you what a wonderful place Facebook would be to work.

I only want such a mask if I also have the ability to summon hordes of flesh eating rats.