Didn't most of the nasty comments come after the transplant? Other transplant recipients I've known have to live on prednisone (or something similar). Prednisonemakes me nasty after a few days. I'm no Jobs apologist, but I wonder how much of the vitriol was due to living on something like that?

In related news, the group building the memorial had to ~pay~ MLK's family 800,000 dollars for the rights to his image and words. http://goodnightsnack.com/2011/08/26/martin-luther-king-jr-family-charges-800k-to-use-his-words-on-commemorative-dc-statue-greed/

But it still makes me sad.

You're correct. These days I equate the two because there's very little difference in day to day interactions. If a TSA agent doesn't like the way you behave, they can have you strip searched. It's true they can't arrest you though.

Fair enough (on paper), but that's not where we're headed in practice. Good points.

Who said it was? I'm more concerned about precedent. Is this something that every LEO in the country would be able to cite, from the TSA to a cop in a coffee shop, to force decryption.

Do they have to show cause first or is this a new tool in the arsenal of the TSA?

This beautifully illustrates why there should be some punishment for this type of behavior. He's obviously ignoring all prior art and forcing an already overloaded system to deal with this crap. Fine him.

The court said that parents should filter what their children see and do. Score one against the nanny state monitoring us for our own good.

I've not used it, but here's the link: http://hackety-hack.com/ Looks like more of a general purpose intro for beginners to Ruby and/or coding.

It's lightweight, portable, and has a ton of interesting projects for learning. Start here at http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ Check out the "Try Ruby in Your Browser link" on the right hand side.

Whether you love or hate Ruby, you should look at how the Ruby community has sold itself. It's a language that's designed (according to evangelists) to be fun. Frameworks like Rails are about making the work fun. Again, I'm quoting pitches... but.... But it's interesting what kind of a community that sales pitch draws in.

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In other words, start off students with easy wins and clear syntax (like Ruby). Don't make them spend hours debugging pointer bugs (C/C++). There's plenty of time for that later. First get them hooked on creating. That's where the fun in programming is... making something new that actually works. I suspect most of us remember the first time we wrote a program that actually did something. That's the high, the rush, that we want potential programmers to feel. How easy can we make it get their first hit?

How can we do this instead of depending on their internal motivation? I'm sure we'll rope in a few that don't have the chops for it, but I bet we'll find a lot more who do but never considered the field because the barriers to entry were too high.

Palin's not running for office. Focus on the currently elected leaders instead. This article sums it up pretty well. http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/11/welch.palin.email/index.html

It's not like it's rocket science or anything.... ;)

We've allowed our bed to be made. Now will we continue to use services that require us to give up our privacy while we complain loudly at the loss of privacy? Come on everyone. Pick one.