-1 Wooooosh.
It doesn't make it okay; it makes it unlikely that the work environment increases the likelihood that the factory employees would choose to commit suicide.
Whether or not it's okay depends rather strongly on one's religious/moral views about suicide.
The factory in question supposedly employs 400,000 workers. The annual suicide rate in China (as reported by the WHO) is 16.7 per 100,000 people. That means that in a population of randomly selected Chinese the size of the factory workforce, we should expect to see 400000 people * 16.7 suicides/(100000 people * 1 year) * 5 months / 12 months = 27.8 suicides so far this year.
Can we conclude that assembling shiny gadgets makes it less likely that one will commit suicide? It meets the standards for publication...
One button for 3 seconds. Details, details.
Shrug. I was put in charge of a project with 4 million lines of source my second year out of school. You carefully analyze the code paths that you need to work on at any given point in time, you write good thorough tests, you make your changes, you re-run your tests, and fix any regressions. The killer isn't the number of lines of source, its the interdependency between different modules (and the Linux kernel really doesn't have the best reputation in that department, though I don't know how much of its bad rap is deserved).
Not at all. A large portion of the OS X user space has been open sourced by Apple as well. Windows, not so much.
Darwin is basically just BSD with an extra dose of weird.
... and tens of thousands of bug fixes and performance improvements, all of which have been released back to the community, even though (for the most part) Apple had no obligation to do so.
I read it.
Not only is it open source, but even the FSF considers the APSLv2 to be a free software license:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html
There's no call for rudeness, even on slashdot.
It absolutely is open source. It's not copyleft, and it's incompatible with the GPL, but even the FSF considers it to be a free software license.
Patent licensing is an orthogonal issue, and Microsoft is certainly no better in that regard, either.
The rest of the hardware contains an OS that is just as open.
What the hell are you talking about?
Most likely this:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1063/
Far more open than windows.
It's just as closed as Windows
Awesome! Where do I go to download the Windows 7 kernel source?
Any US tech companies giving out 6 months of bonus this year?
Yes, though typically in some form of RSU rather than straight cash bonus.
Your point about average salary in Taiwan is spot on, though.
Ha! Mod parent informative.
Pi is interesting in that regard -- there are algorithms that can compute the Nth digit without needing to compute the intermediate digits. If you want to compute all digits from 0 to N, however, there are more efficient algorithms.
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs