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Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.
Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

Замечательное стихотворение для знатоков английского языка, в порядке психологической подготовки к приближающейся зиме. Thx 2 @stricky_.

The Cremation of Sam McGee

by Robert W. Service
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
    By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
    That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
    But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
    I cremated Sam McGee.

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"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever."
- Thomas Jefferson

Я дрожу за свою страну, когда я размышляю о том, что Бог справедлив, и Его правосудие не может спать вечно."
- Томас Джефферсон

(Кстати, взял отсюда: http://www.dailypaul.com/node/57948 - гуглю реакцию на фоксовский ролик с девочкой.)

What do you raise an outcry over, national bards?
Why do you threaten Russia with Anathema?
What stirred you up? The throes of Lithuania?
Desist: this is a strife of Slavs among themselves,
An old domestic strife, already weighed by fate,
An issue not to be resolved by you.

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"...nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart - nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.
And doing so in the open, and allowing all these different entities to cross-pollinate their ideas with each other, and not having arbitrary boundaries with NDA’s and “you cannot look at how we did this”, is just a better way.
I compare it with science and witchcraft (or alchemy). Science may take a few hundred years to figure out how the world works, but it does actually get there, exactly because people can build on each others knowledge, and it evolves over time. In contrast, witchcraft/alchemy may be about smart people, but the knowledge body never “accumulates” anywhere. It might be passed down to an apprentice, but the hiding of information basically means that it can never really become any better than what a single person/company can understand."

Linus Torvalds, http://www.oneopensource.it/interview-linus-torvalds/