Lets see - 44,000 thefts, times probably 4-6 hours each to resolve for each victim.... let's be nice and call it 4 hours per theft - about 20 years. Yes, decades before being able to be paroled seems about right, although I'd go with treble damages due to the scale of the criminal activity, so 60 years before being eligible for parole seems quite reasonable and even kind.
"Don't do the crime if you can't do the time"
Scale and scope of the crime should not work in your favor by minimizing punishment.
The regulation from the just IRS on for 501(c)(3) orgs is like being overseen by an absent boss compared to the regulations he'd have to follow via the SEC/IRS/board(s)/state entities/etc etc etc had he done anything else.
I have no doubt that Bill's sense of swindling has been honed to a new level under his Gates Foundation. Why, after all, does he only spend money to treat diseases? Why doesn't he actually research cures? He's a man who ruthlessly lied, cheated and stole throughout his entire career, never creating anything himself (well, other than that POS BASIC that they swapped out for a real GW BASIC compiler in MSDOS 3). My guess is that if you research the Gates Foundation, you'll find that it was a front that a) allowed Gates to divest himself of large amounts of MS shares in a way that wouldn't tank the stock and b) he gets to keep and control large amounts of money without regulator oversight and without having to deal with annoying things like taxes.
To be back on topic, I think Gates will be remembered much like the list in this group meaning either for named buildings he leaves behind or not at all. Jobs will be remembered as an Edison or Bell, for they oversaw and created businesses with significant effect. But the real question is how will they be remembered in comparison to others, such as perhaps Torvalds, Lee, or even Stallman, each having had great effect on how we use and perceive our world today even if not fully recognized.
Based on this comment you weren't around then. Netscape (now Firefox) was the one breaking all the standards and IE and Opera tried to play nice and according to standards.
There were an entire plethora of browsers coming out of the wood work back then, on multiple OSes. IE played nice until IE 4, IE 3.2 was the last "standards based" browser IIRC. And by standards based, we mean browsers that supported the standards, support of additional proprietary tags to enhance the web experience was pretty much "standard" at the time.
MS started to add proprietary tags in conjunction with changing the underlying standards based support, which lead to that absolutely awful POS IE 6. They've still not fully recovered from that fork, and fortunately, with the world switching away from IE as fast as it can, perhaps it will just die.
I tried their streaming content. Until real buffering comes along, HD streaming is unusable, IMSHO. Even DVD streaming has hiccups. And I have continuous 12 Mbps down on fiber, with bursts up to 25, so I don't think it's problems anywhere between me and the backbone.
There was a study that there are about 4% of the population that are true multi-taskers. The tests were done regarding cell phone talking and driving. I do believe that a small group can do more than one task at a time, such as typing this message and holding a conversation.
Good thing you remembered this nameless study, otherwise you'd have lost this argument! Phew!
There was a study that there are about 4% of the population that are true multi-taskers. The tests were done regarding cell phone talking and driving. I do believe that a small group can do more than one task at a time, such as typing this message and holding a conversation.
Reading up on Middle East history, the term is largely an American one now that's been adopted by others, and has been revised in scope significantly over the years. It's an arbitrary definition that in the late 50s early 60s was defined essentially as an area from Egypt to Iran, specifically excluding Afghanistan and Pakistan which had been included prior to then. So officially, you're correct that it is not part of the Middle East as that term appears to be defined today, although references often include both countries in the grouping anyways.
In 1993 it was more or less impossible to buy a PC without dos and Windows 3.x on it because Microsoft charged a lot less to OEMs if they agreed to ship a copy of Windows 3.x with every PC sold. (IIRC it was $99 per copy or $19 per copy if you agreed to ship Windows on every machine.)
Yes, that was known as the "Windows tax". MS imposed that contract in attempt to make windows ubiquitous as it was under fire from every direction. (I didn't say it was 1993 btw, that date was for Linux) DESQview, for instance, died off in 90-91 for all intents and purposes. And quite a few OSes stubbornly hung on through around 96, When even though proving that Win95 was in essence an application running on top of DOS and DOS could be swapped out with DRDOS, DRDOS and its brethren faded away. Another MS dirty trick that they lost in court, but won where it matters since those targeted competitors had all failed.
Minix is still alive and being used by Prof. Tanenbaum. Microsoft had all OEMs shipping Windows with every PC, and you claim it was a rich time in computing history? I am sorry but the writing was on the wall that Microsoft was going to win (painted on the wall by Microsoft, with their competitors blood)
Ironically, Bill Gates was one of the few people to see that web browsers could eventually be the Desktop OS. Hence, the decision to cut of Netscape's oxygen.
Minix still being used by it's creator is about as relevant as MS Bob still being used by Gates. Sorry, but the boat sailed long long ago wrt Minix. Same for the assumed tiny group that's still using BeOS. That one had promise but I never had the time to look at it and it essentially failed long before I got to it. Bill Gates entirely failed to see anything related to Web Browsers until Netscape had mopped the floor. That MS was able to displace Netscape and destroy them is a classic example of monopoly predatory practices. Giving IE away for free and including it with their OS distributions made it virtually impossible for Netscape to monetize their main product and raised the bar significantly on getting people to try Netscape.
While public schools can have problems (yes, I'm facing this issue today myself, I'm not speaking hypothetically) I still strongly believe that all children should go to public or accredited private schools that follow certain curriculum guidelines. If you want to home school, you must graduate from college with the appropriate degree and become a certified teacher and teach for 5 years prior to being allowed to home school your child(ren). Should you think this harsh and difficult to meet - you're correct. My opinion is that 99.999% of home schooled children are being robbed of opportunities and will be denied the ability to choose what could be best for them due to their parents short-comings/ignorance/prejudices/ignorance/etc.
Windows succeeded in a very different market to what Linux now competes in...
Dos came bundled, and windows was pushed as the natural progression from dos. It had very few competitors, most of which were considerably more expensive both for the software and the hardware required to run it on.
Linux on the other hand came much later, and is faced with a market already dominated by an incumbent player who has no interest in promoting linux as the natural progression away from their existing product.
You are incorrect. Linux was already solidly around by 93, with the first slackware release. (Yes, I own, or owned, either it or the second release, I think I donated that a long time ago) Several co-workers were using Linux at work and loved it (94). At that time, Windows was fighting a multi OS battle, including DESQView, GEMS, OS/2 and BeOS. It was a relatively rich time in OS history. The missing OS? Unix. It sucked on x86 in ways that are difficult to describe, and that's not even including it's $1K+ price tag.
If both windows and linux were introduced new to the market today, i think the story would be very different... Alternative OSs to the incumbents have a very rough time of it, commercial ones outright fail due to not being able to build marketshare fast enough to fund development (look at beos etc), desktop linux would have been considered a commercial failure and dropped years ago if it was a commercial product, only due to being open source and thus not dependent on revenue has it been able to build a user base slowly and steadily.
It depends, what's the incumbent OS? If it was DOS, there'd be a very low bar to overcome. Speaking of OSes that won't die, look at eStation, OS/2 reborn. AmigaOS is still around in new incarnations. What you will no longer find is any flavor of DOS, and I'm unaware of MINIX, VMS, or IRIX still existing. IRIX was a personal favorite of mine for a while, it had potential on many levels, but it failed. As did Solaris. As crappy as Linux is in many respects, it is still a far better system than windows. Linux also has a bigger foothold than any other single *nix, except for OS X, which is tied to a single hardware vendor, as far as desktops go.
Joe Average in the old days could and did run windows, it wasn't until XP SP3 and wireless becoming common that windows setup/configuration started being far beyond Joe Average. If you bought hardware, it came with Windows drivers. You plopped it in, installed the disk, and it worked, sort of. (We'll discount ATI drivers, those things were hit and miss in the early days) If you knew enough to download the latest drivers and had network access, you could get a working system up and running pretty easily. As MS layered more and more menus and bugs, er, features, into their systems, things quickly spiraled out of control and you get to the mess that's Win 8.
As for buying a Mac, I advise that method too, although if a Linux system came pre-installed on hardware, it would suffice also, as long as everything necessary was there. (Basically web browser, email client, and possibly office productivity) That covers the 80% easily. I just don't advise it. My Last Linux desktop is about to hit the recycling pile because it's too big a pain to maintain. This one is Ubuntu 10.10, and having installed SVN 1.6 on it with one small miscalculation trashed the system (SVN was not debian repo supported, but third party.... careful what commands you execute when enabling one of those - whoops) Reinstalled, reconfigured, and somewhere across the past 12 months, I either added something or did something that the last power cycle caused apparmor to kill mysql. Having gone round with apparmor a couple of times in the past for other apps, I decided rather than fight it this round, I'd go ahead and kill the desktop since it was being used less and less. I still use Linux extensively (and almost exclusively) for servers, which are paradoxically trivially easy to maintain in comparison.
Love the way you dropped in an Apple troll at the same time.
Guess Apple's crappy low quality Mac Air is the reason Intel had to dangle $300M in front of vendors to try to get them to compete in the Ultra book arena, since the lowest quoted price from PC vendors for anything comparing to a Mac Air was $1500. (Mac Airs run <$1K) and Intel didn't want to see a large segment of its low power CPU sales go to a single vendor that has ties to multiple CPU vendors and manufactures its own low-power CPU to boot.
it may have 3 concurrent threads, but it has a single primary thread that is CPU bound. All testing I've seen revealed that a fast dual core has the best performance for WoW, as dual cores usually can clock about the same as single cores, and quad cores+ max out lower (well, at least until recently with the addition of the throttling mechanisms) This was a while ago, after the initial release of the hex and octo core CPUs that showed no benefit for games beyond 2-3 cores.
Windows succeeded in the desktop where Linux failed by making it simple enough for joe average to deal with setting up and running a desktop. They have abandoned that process starting with Vista and making it worse in Win 7, at least for those who knew how to do it before. Sounds like Win8 will be worse no matter who you are, with no coherent story for configuration as of the pre-release candidate.
Linux has been getting much better in this regard, although managing a workstation can still be difficult for non-technical people. At least Ubuntu meets the needs of +90%. (just a guess) in its default installation which has become pretty darn easy.
OS X usually doesn't have to be installed, since it comes on a system, and the updates are usually just about click and done. I've only installed OSX on 1 workstation out of 4 because the HD was replaced with a bigger faster one and I wanted to try out the then new OS X version out. The install was as painless as any I've experienced. Default configuration is fine for +90% (same as Ubuntu at least) with most never needing to see their system preferences for much of anything.
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Lets see - 44,000 thefts, times probably 4-6 hours each to resolve for each victim.... let's be nice and call it 4 hours per theft - about 20 years. Yes, decades before being able to be paroled seems about right, although I'd go with treble damages due to the scale of the criminal activity, so 60 years before being eligible for parole seems quite reasonable and even kind.
"Don't do the crime if you can't do the time"
Scale and scope of the crime should not work in your favor by minimizing punishment.
Sort of, it's not exactly current nor compliant IIRC.
Sorry, I was busy frantically trying to verify all the other wholly unsubstantiated claims on the Internet to get to yours. My bad, dog.
And yet you found the 10s to post an insulting reply.
The regulation from the just IRS on for 501(c)(3) orgs is like being overseen by an absent boss compared to the regulations he'd have to follow via the SEC/IRS/board(s)/state entities/etc etc etc had he done anything else.
I have no doubt that Bill's sense of swindling has been honed to a new level under his Gates Foundation. Why, after all, does he only spend money to treat diseases? Why doesn't he actually research cures? He's a man who ruthlessly lied, cheated and stole throughout his entire career, never creating anything himself (well, other than that POS BASIC that they swapped out for a real GW BASIC compiler in MSDOS 3). My guess is that if you research the Gates Foundation, you'll find that it was a front that a) allowed Gates to divest himself of large amounts of MS shares in a way that wouldn't tank the stock and b) he gets to keep and control large amounts of money without regulator oversight and without having to deal with annoying things like taxes.
To be back on topic, I think Gates will be remembered much like the list in this group meaning either for named buildings he leaves behind or not at all. Jobs will be remembered as an Edison or Bell, for they oversaw and created businesses with significant effect. But the real question is how will they be remembered in comparison to others, such as perhaps Torvalds, Lee, or even Stallman, each having had great effect on how we use and perceive our world today even if not fully recognized.
Based on this comment you weren't around then. Netscape (now Firefox) was the one breaking all the standards and IE and Opera tried to play nice and according to standards.
There were an entire plethora of browsers coming out of the wood work back then, on multiple OSes. IE played nice until IE 4, IE 3.2 was the last "standards based" browser IIRC. And by standards based, we mean browsers that supported the standards, support of additional proprietary tags to enhance the web experience was pretty much "standard" at the time.
MS started to add proprietary tags in conjunction with changing the underlying standards based support, which lead to that absolutely awful POS IE 6. They've still not fully recovered from that fork, and fortunately, with the world switching away from IE as fast as it can, perhaps it will just die.
I tried their streaming content. Until real buffering comes along, HD streaming is unusable, IMSHO. Even DVD streaming has hiccups. And I have continuous 12 Mbps down on fiber, with bursts up to 25, so I don't think it's problems anywhere between me and the backbone.
There was a study that there are about 4% of the population that are true multi-taskers. The tests were done regarding cell phone talking and driving. I do believe that a small group can do more than one task at a time, such as typing this message and holding a conversation.
Good thing you remembered this nameless study, otherwise you'd have lost this argument! Phew!
Good thing I can apparently google cell phone driving multitasking in less than 5s and note the 3rd entry
I may have been lazy or in a hurry with the last post. You, however, should please turn in your geek card to the next real geek you meet.
Actually, non-subscribers can see a story about a minute before it goes live - they can't post, but they can read it. I've seen it multiple times.
There was a study that there are about 4% of the population that are true multi-taskers. The tests were done regarding cell phone talking and driving. I do believe that a small group can do more than one task at a time, such as typing this message and holding a conversation.
I'll just wait for it to show up on Netflix, then watch it on BD.
They did go from SciFi to SyFy afterall. And all their stuff is available on Hulu at some point.
Egads! Socialism!!! The Tea Party just became ineffective due to a collective massive conniption.
Awesome!
If I only had mod points and you weren't responding to me....
The Middle East never had anything to do with continental drift, as it is an arbitrary term that comprises countries across at least 2 continents.
Reading up on Middle East history, the term is largely an American one now that's been adopted by others, and has been revised in scope significantly over the years. It's an arbitrary definition that in the late 50s early 60s was defined essentially as an area from Egypt to Iran, specifically excluding Afghanistan and Pakistan which had been included prior to then. So officially, you're correct that it is not part of the Middle East as that term appears to be defined today, although references often include both countries in the grouping anyways.
Dell ships computers with freedos on them today.
Wow. Just... wow.
In 1993 it was more or less impossible to buy a PC without dos and Windows 3.x on it because Microsoft charged a lot less to OEMs if they agreed to ship a copy of Windows 3.x with every PC sold. (IIRC it was $99 per copy or $19 per copy if you agreed to ship Windows on every machine.)
Yes, that was known as the "Windows tax". MS imposed that contract in attempt to make windows ubiquitous as it was under fire from every direction. (I didn't say it was 1993 btw, that date was for Linux) DESQview, for instance, died off in 90-91 for all intents and purposes. And quite a few OSes stubbornly hung on through around 96, When even though proving that Win95 was in essence an application running on top of DOS and DOS could be swapped out with DRDOS, DRDOS and its brethren faded away. Another MS dirty trick that they lost in court, but won where it matters since those targeted competitors had all failed.
Minix is still alive and being used by Prof. Tanenbaum. Microsoft had all OEMs shipping Windows with every PC, and you claim it was a rich time in computing history? I am sorry but the writing was on the wall that Microsoft was going to win (painted on the wall by Microsoft, with their competitors blood)
Ironically, Bill Gates was one of the few people to see that web browsers could eventually be the Desktop OS. Hence, the decision to cut of Netscape's oxygen.
Minix still being used by it's creator is about as relevant as MS Bob still being used by Gates. Sorry, but the boat sailed long long ago wrt Minix. Same for the assumed tiny group that's still using BeOS. That one had promise but I never had the time to look at it and it essentially failed long before I got to it. Bill Gates entirely failed to see anything related to Web Browsers until Netscape had mopped the floor. That MS was able to displace Netscape and destroy them is a classic example of monopoly predatory practices. Giving IE away for free and including it with their OS distributions made it virtually impossible for Netscape to monetize their main product and raised the bar significantly on getting people to try Netscape.
N Korea being able to create this? Sorry, that one doesn't wash. There's a laundry list of countries ahead of N Korea in the capability list.
Second, since when is Pakistan not in the Middle East?
all true, which is why you keep multiple backups dating back months, right?
While public schools can have problems (yes, I'm facing this issue today myself, I'm not speaking hypothetically) I still strongly believe that all children should go to public or accredited private schools that follow certain curriculum guidelines. If you want to home school, you must graduate from college with the appropriate degree and become a certified teacher and teach for 5 years prior to being allowed to home school your child(ren). Should you think this harsh and difficult to meet - you're correct. My opinion is that 99.999% of home schooled children are being robbed of opportunities and will be denied the ability to choose what could be best for them due to their parents short-comings/ignorance/prejudices/ignorance/etc.
Windows succeeded in a very different market to what Linux now competes in...
Dos came bundled, and windows was pushed as the natural progression from dos. It had very few competitors, most of which were considerably more expensive both for the software and the hardware required to run it on.
Linux on the other hand came much later, and is faced with a market already dominated by an incumbent player who has no interest in promoting linux as the natural progression away from their existing product.
You are incorrect. Linux was already solidly around by 93, with the first slackware release. (Yes, I own, or owned, either it or the second release, I think I donated that a long time ago) Several co-workers were using Linux at work and loved it (94). At that time, Windows was fighting a multi OS battle, including DESQView, GEMS, OS/2 and BeOS. It was a relatively rich time in OS history. The missing OS? Unix. It sucked on x86 in ways that are difficult to describe, and that's not even including it's $1K+ price tag.
If both windows and linux were introduced new to the market today, i think the story would be very different... Alternative OSs to the incumbents have a very rough time of it, commercial ones outright fail due to not being able to build marketshare fast enough to fund development (look at beos etc), desktop linux would have been considered a commercial failure and dropped years ago if it was a commercial product, only due to being open source and thus not dependent on revenue has it been able to build a user base slowly and steadily.
It depends, what's the incumbent OS? If it was DOS, there'd be a very low bar to overcome. Speaking of OSes that won't die, look at eStation, OS/2 reborn. AmigaOS is still around in new incarnations. What you will no longer find is any flavor of DOS, and I'm unaware of MINIX, VMS, or IRIX still existing. IRIX was a personal favorite of mine for a while, it had potential on many levels, but it failed. As did Solaris. As crappy as Linux is in many respects, it is still a far better system than windows. Linux also has a bigger foothold than any other single *nix, except for OS X, which is tied to a single hardware vendor, as far as desktops go.
Joe Average in the old days could and did run windows, it wasn't until XP SP3 and wireless becoming common that windows setup/configuration started being far beyond Joe Average. If you bought hardware, it came with Windows drivers. You plopped it in, installed the disk, and it worked, sort of. (We'll discount ATI drivers, those things were hit and miss in the early days) If you knew enough to download the latest drivers and had network access, you could get a working system up and running pretty easily. As MS layered more and more menus and bugs, er, features, into their systems, things quickly spiraled out of control and you get to the mess that's Win 8.
As for buying a Mac, I advise that method too, although if a Linux system came pre-installed on hardware, it would suffice also, as long as everything necessary was there. (Basically web browser, email client, and possibly office productivity) That covers the 80% easily. I just don't advise it. My Last Linux desktop is about to hit the recycling pile because it's too big a pain to maintain. This one is Ubuntu 10.10, and having installed SVN 1.6 on it with one small miscalculation trashed the system (SVN was not debian repo supported, but third party.... careful what commands you execute when enabling one of those - whoops) Reinstalled, reconfigured, and somewhere across the past 12 months, I either added something or did something that the last power cycle caused apparmor to kill mysql. Having gone round with apparmor a couple of times in the past for other apps, I decided rather than fight it this round, I'd go ahead and kill the desktop since it was being used less and less. I still use Linux extensively (and almost exclusively) for servers, which are paradoxically trivially easy to maintain in comparison.
Love the way you dropped in an Apple troll at the same time.
Guess Apple's crappy low quality Mac Air is the reason Intel had to dangle $300M in front of vendors to try to get them to compete in the Ultra book arena, since the lowest quoted price from PC vendors for anything comparing to a Mac Air was $1500. (Mac Airs run <$1K) and Intel didn't want to see a large segment of its low power CPU sales go to a single vendor that has ties to multiple CPU vendors and manufactures its own low-power CPU to boot.
it may have 3 concurrent threads, but it has a single primary thread that is CPU bound. All testing I've seen revealed that a fast dual core has the best performance for WoW, as dual cores usually can clock about the same as single cores, and quad cores+ max out lower (well, at least until recently with the addition of the throttling mechanisms) This was a while ago, after the initial release of the hex and octo core CPUs that showed no benefit for games beyond 2-3 cores.
That is very true.
Windows succeeded in the desktop where Linux failed by making it simple enough for joe average to deal with setting up and running a desktop. They have abandoned that process starting with Vista and making it worse in Win 7, at least for those who knew how to do it before. Sounds like Win8 will be worse no matter who you are, with no coherent story for configuration as of the pre-release candidate.
Linux has been getting much better in this regard, although managing a workstation can still be difficult for non-technical people. At least Ubuntu meets the needs of +90%. (just a guess) in its default installation which has become pretty darn easy.
OS X usually doesn't have to be installed, since it comes on a system, and the updates are usually just about click and done. I've only installed OSX on 1 workstation out of 4 because the HD was replaced with a bigger faster one and I wanted to try out the then new OS X version out. The install was as painless as any I've experienced. Default configuration is fine for +90% (same as Ubuntu at least) with most never needing to see their system preferences for much of anything.