"didn't Apple swipe their docks from NeXT OS"

Actually, Apple purchased NeXT in 1997 for $427 million. OS X was released in 2001.

How you describe it is how OS X works. Most of the time things work as you expect, and sometimes even better than you expect. For the first time yesterday, I dragged an image from a Web page in Firefox to an open Photoshop image and it copied it onto a new layer. Other times it fails, as when I tried to drag and drop a graphic from PowerPoint into an Illustrator window.

Immediate stock price is affected by perception, but the fundamentals drive the price over the long term. Think about this. Say Steve Jobs dies in a few months -- Apple stock tanks in the short term, but three months later, they release better than expected earnings, Macs, iPods and iPhones are still selling at a record pace. The stock will shoot up like it's the second coming. That's not to say that if SJ is gone, Apple might eventually lose market share and the stock price settle, but this immediate drop is not an indicator of anything.

Exactly! My kids love it when I act like a kid. I get to do things I hadn't done in years -- snowball fights, backyard football, flips on the trampoline. And video games! My kids are addicted to Rock Band.

If only there were some way to objectively judge these things.

Then you don't exist. And I don't exist to you, and any debate is meaningless. Maybe that's something you enjoy, but I don't. So I would say to you, enjoy your anonymity, and contribute your meaningless comments.

A couple of things... First, if the hostility, as you describe it, toward anonymous speech drives AC posters away, then I think those who are hostile will be pretty happy with that outcome, so I don't think you're going to sway many people with that logic. I also don't think you can consider yourself part of the community if you don't take any ownership of your contributions. Part of the essence of an online community is knowing who is part of the community, their past contributions, their credibility over time. If you always post AC, that can't be evaluated. Finally, how is having a username giving up your anonymity? Unless you tie it to your real name (as I do), it's just as anonymous as AC, with the exception that it allows people to evaluate your credibility based on your previous contributions. If, as you say, your contributions are logical and persuasive, there can't be harm in owning them in the limited sense that having a "handle" provides.