I erroneously assumed this was a patent concerning advertising ABOUT operating systems. Meaning that Microsoft could be restrained from referencing Apple's patented "I'm an X"--"And I'm a Y" ad pattern in their own ads. This might work out better for Microsoft because in saying that their users "are PC's" (having them exclaim "I'm a PC" in their commercials) they are dehumanizing their own user base, reducing them to the status of objects rather than people. Clue time: Justin Long and John Hodgman aren't supposed to be USERS of Macs and PCs, they are human representations of a Mac and a PC, anthropomorphized metaphors. When Microsoft makes their users shout "I'm a PC" they objectify their customers and imply that they are mechanistic devices rather than people. I use a Mac--that doesn't mean I *am* a Mac. But apparently according to Microsoft using a PC makes you become one. Meaning that... you get "stuck" when trying to accomplish more than one task, "crash" regularly, and are subject to rabid infection from a wide variety of easy-to-avoid ailments. Anyone proud to say "I'm a PC" is an idiot--who would want to represent themselves as a mere machine? (Apparently users of Windows... according to the very company which makes that product.) It just shows the lack of imagination in the minds of people who work at Microsoft in thinking that users should think of themselves AS the machines they use. Do they also scream "I'm a Buick!" or "I'm a Maytag!"???

So then what's the deal with that submarine, the Googlielmo, cruising around the deep blue seas snapping geolocated photos for something called "Google Maps - Ocean Floor View"?

Clearly you have not read that critical technical project planning text, "The Mythical Stadium-Ocean"...

Only some?

I would hope that even the most pigheaded freemarketer would have had that knowledge come to him in a flash of epiphany over the past few weeks.

What's amazing is how the people who advocate the Randian dogma always seem to be the ones in that 20%!!! It's EVERYBODY ELSE who's the problem, not them!! What are the chances? "The OTHERS are lazy, but I'm not! Why are THEY all being REWARDED?" In my experience, the ones who complain the loudest about their "not being rewarded" aren't doing any more work than the supposedly undeserving souls they whine about. But they complain anyway, and form an ideology around their complaints, more often than not a prejudicial, lopsided one.

This is the usual whiny complaint about the dreaded "socialism" - if everyone gets paid the same, no one will have the incentive to do better. I would rather be working with people who simply WANT to do the best job they can, rather than the ones who will only do so if there's money in it for them, because their greed ultimately gets in the way of such people really doing a genuinely good job.

And I think your whining about those other less-hard-working-than-you folks being the ones who get rewarded is bellyaching, too. So there. But I didn't like the book because it was a boring piece of tedious trash filled with lies from a biased lopsided thinker who also whined that "others who don't work as hard as me are getting rewarded, why not ME???" and built an ideology around the fantasy plotline. We should always be wary of those who build their ideology from bad science fiction, and that's all Atlas Shrugged is. Objectively (if not objectivistically) speaking, it's a piece of garbage. And Mark Ruff in "Sewer, Gas and Electric" skewered it quite nicely.