1. I find funny
2. I find asinine
3. I find insightfully true
4. And stand on their own, with little to no comment needed

Imagine my joy as I realized that I could make it 11:30 again, and go enjoy another lunch. Meeting at 3:30? No problem, just turn the hour hand up to 6:00 and go home! I can sleep as long as I want as long as I turn it back to 8:00 when I get to the office. All my work estimates are now "five minutes", and I complete them every time.

...

But people still try to mandate velocity.

My ultimate beef though is not a practical one. It's an idealogical one. We should encourage those who succeed to lead as examples for others so that they can see that success is something that's worth pursuing. The more successful people and companies we have in this country (or any country,) the more successful the economy at large will be, and the higher the standard of living we'll have. And individually, it's rewarding to see your ideas through to production, and moreso on a mega-scale.

Bill Gates has earned the right not to comb his hair on TV, and I'll bet that even Brooke Shields would like the same right. The cowering masses of admirers aren't what the real winners seek. They're a side effect of doing something that nobody else has done, and doing it exceedingly and emphatically well. Everyone admires Bill Gates, whether or not they'll admit it. He's a man of action, a man of success, and for some, the picture of what they can not aspire to be. They think that because they can never become like him that they should instead try to seize some of that which he has created (as in with lobbyists or legislation.) To slice off a chunk for those who will never do the things he has done, and will not lift a finger to that end.

That's where they're wrong. You can aspire to be as great as you like. You can pursue your path to the end of your days. Nobody is going to give it to you, and they shouldn't. It's the 'hard' part that makes it so great. If you don't make it to be as successful as you had aimed by the time you die, you won't be walking around cursing the fact.

.NET and Java are both prime examples of object-oriented programming gone stupid. Their class libraries have become so utterly huge that it becomes damn near impossible for an individual developer to suitably grasp anything more than a small portion of them.

Although they supposedly give more flexibility, something as essential as reading from and writing to a file becomes a hassle with .NET or Java. It's easy to get lost in whether we need a FileInputStream, or whether we should wrap a FileInputReader in a TextInputBuffer, and so forth. Give me fopen() any day.