At least with guns there is an argument about safety and accidents involving children and what not. No such argument is possible with encryption keys. Pure idiocy.
The end product of this "security from boogeymen" and "intellectual property" crapola (and these two are strangely related) is an actual, real, as oposed to a literary construct, Thought Police. Because only when your thoughts are somehow available for review to the "security apparatus" and only if every computer in the world is under constant surveilance, be it by the square-jawed, steely-eyed "security men" or valiant corporate defenders of God-given "creator rights", only then will we be "safe" and "free".
Otherwise the "terrorists" and/or "pedophiles" have already won.
Huge waves of counterspam would clog the bandwidth just like they are supposed to do, but when this is going on all the time on several fronts there would be a form of global internet gridlock, that would be worse.
Which would hopefully result in organzations like the Homeland Securty (and their various foreign counterparts) coming real hard on the cause of it all: spammers. I am sure that a couple of bullet-ridden corpses of spammers on national TV would stem that kind of spam warfare.
A guy named Jim Bell was working on this (not for spammers, but for any sufficiently unpopular public figure). He'd use untraceable digital cash to put up bounties. Potential assissins would (again, untraceably) make "predictions" on when said figure would meet his demise. The person "predicting" the correct date and time would collect the bounty. See the article at e2 on assassination politics. Jim Bell is currently in jail on IRS charges.
I predict Jim Bell's utimely demise by means of slipping on a bar of soap and hitting a cast bronze penguin-shaped umbrella stand, during a coctail party at the Playboy Mansion, on June 25th 2007, 21 hours 34 minutes and 11 seconds Zulu time.
After all, protecting creator rights is evil and wrong. Except when the GPL is violated, of course. Then it's time to sue!
The critical difference being of course that the GPL protects the rights of a whole community, while some draconian laws such as DMCA and associated draconian DRM technologies protect exclusively the "creators", or more accurately "the distributors and gatekeepers", at the expense of the said community.
But do not let that distinction bother your hate of the GPL.
Updated, modern, populist version of the ancient concept of "patronage" for example. I am sure other ways also not involving creating New Economic Royalty or some other corporate totalitarianism exist.
Incredible, a single joke managed to turn the whole thread into a giant waste of time for IgnoramusMaximus.
Well, at least judging from the logic (and general quality) of arguments in his comments, we are not distracting a productive member of society from creating something of any significant value.
What precisely is this post supposed to contribute? You feel compelled to declare someone's posts "waste of time", because he dares to disagree with you? With no further justification, or factual argument, naturally. And so you do waste time for the sole purpose of the world becoming aware of the extent of your snotty disapproval of "wasted time". Is that it?
Yes, they were. The original assumption behind Social Security was that payouts begin at age 65. It is perhaps helpful to note that at the time, the average life expectancy was...65.
Today, average life expectancy is 77+, as I recall.
So, we designed a system that didn't pay anything to anyone unless they lived longer than average. And we're now paying out to everyone who gets within a decade of average lifespan.
That is not the cause of the problem. The cause of the problem is the decline of revenue vs payouts due to the ratio of retirees to productive workers increasing, life-expectancy being merely one of the factors in that ratio, others, more important ones, being simply brain-dead policies resulting in overall decline of workforce vs the retirees. Once can simply increase the retirement age to match the life expectancy increases (which is by the way not designed to prevent payouts completely as vicious demagougic oponents of SS would have people believe), the other is to increase or maintain the ratio by simply having a viable economy and compensate for birth rates falling with immigration.
But the underlying problem is that without a functioning economy no plan like SS is possible, and never mind that, an old-fashoned economic collapse will occur regardless, as it is impossible to maintain the increasing retiree to worker ratio, SS or no SS, as the old (and the very young) always consume far more resources then their savings would afford.
I could save 6.2% of my income if it were not being syphoned away for social security, and I would probably be getting paid another 6.2% if my company didn't have to pay their share of the social security.
And that would mean starving to death a whole lot of old people, who did pay SS payments their whole lives. Are you OK with that? If not, where do you get the money to keep them fed? If you rather have them die, then you don't mind if I take that same attitude towards you, should some of your brilliant saving plans, all based on a whole lot of assumptions about the economy, investments and banking systems fail, do you?
I think it has more to do with the fact that the elderly are the single largest voting bloc, and nobody can propose any changes to their detriment without being demonized by his or her political opponents.
While that is probably also a major factor, the underlying problem is that the numerical assumptions which were used in calculating the retirement age and benefits to be paid out are clearly not corresponding to the current situation. The assumptions were actually rather reasonable and made by knowledgable people, but have failed to take into account the fact that some very greedy and very irresponsible individuals have managed to systematically de-construct the economy in favour of short-term profiteering for themselves. And now it is time to pay the piper for the fools who listened to their demagougery.
The status quo cannot stand. The problem is that there is no political will to do make any necessary changes.
I think the "lack of the political will" comes from the paralysis resulting from a realization that the whole "globalization" and job exporting strategy is about to implode. In face of that, tinkering with Social Security is paramount to shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
So Social Security isn't as "rapid" as a chain letter. Still it fits the other aspects. It depends on adding new investors, early investors fare a lot better than late ones - there's been a declining return on investment for Social Security recipients ever since its inception, and the long term steady state seems to be less than what you put in including general taxes.
That is a balancing problem not a fundamental failure of the scheme. In a normally functioning nation, the population would remain steady or (more likely) grow. So would the economy. In both cases, the number of retirees is a fraction of the workforce. In perpetuity. As seniors die, new workers join the force. That is the fundamental difference from a "ponzi" scheme which has finite and rapidly exausted supply of "investors". Only if these basic assumptions fail, or if the balancing of the scheme is incorrect (i.e. too low retirement age or too low contributions) will it fail.
Out of curiousity, what do you think Social Security does? It's not a retirement program.
It is. The initial problem with implementing it was that the destitute people during the Great Depression had to be paid even though they did not contribute to the scheme (either this or death by starvation). So a payout was made, forever putting the scheme on wrong footing: the revenues were spent before they were collected. But even then the scheme is workable, because of the assumptions of the dynamics of a nation: workforce should always outnumber the retirees by a certain factor. And economy grows. If any of these assumptions fail, the Social Security is the least of our problems: the whole economy of the nation will collapse. Which thanks to "globalization" and exporting of all the jobs overseas, combined with lack of immigration is a real risk, failure of Social Securtiy being only a tip of a far more devastating iceberg.
Just seems to me to be a wealth redistribution from young to old with the surplus, scraped off the top for generic government spending, being the primary point of the exercise.
When the scheme was implemented, the old were in dire straights, and after "baby boomers" pass, this new generation will be also in the same boat, impoverished old as no savings are possible for most at present.
Now there are 3 contributors for every retiree and the eligibility age is about 15 years lower than the average life span. With increasing life expectancy and declining birth rates, the problem is getting worse not better, and that will only accelerate.
Why? There are billions of possible immigrants willing to work and pay taxes waiting to get in. Instead the "globalization" idiots would have them working at $1 a day overseas. Why?
It won't be long until there are only two workers supporting each retiree, who is likely to collect for 20 years or more.
If idiotic policies hell-bent on reducing the population of productive workers by exporting their industries and not letting any immigrants in persist, then sure, you are breaking all the assumptions of the Social Security and it (along with the whole economy of the nation) will fail. Is that the plan?
Social Security is undoubtedly an intergenerational Ponzi scheme and the fat part of the pyramid is looking for their cut
Only because someone has decided to artificially restrict the influx of funds! That way anything can be a "pyramid" scheme. Put money in the bank and then have crooks steal it and sure enough you lost it! The whole premise was based on growth of economy and if you allow "free market globalization" idiots, combined with xenophobic bigots to run the show, the results are predictable. Both the Social Security and the nation's economy will collapse.
And this doesn't even take into account that the alleged Trust Fund is really just a big IOU from Congress.
And what is wrong with that? Do you plan on making sure that the Government is no good for it? Overspend it on wars? Or perhaps to eliminate taxes or reduce economy to nothing?
It's a matter of simple demographics that the worker to retiree ratio is going to be declining quite dramitically over the next thirty or so years, and that's assuming that population growth doesn't continue its downward trend.
No it is not. If it were, it would mean that the global economy is shrinking due to wonders of "free markets", no? There are literally billions of people out there working on $1 dollar a day, who would love to be working as US taxpayers, assuming that all the "globalization" idiots are kicked away from the controls.
The whole Social Security thing is quite straightforward and logical and it is truly a testimony to people's stupidity that they have managed to mess it up.
So why do they need to keep raising taxes or reducing benefits to keep it afloat? Hell, I can keep *any* scheme working as long as I can compel people to join and unilaterally dictate how much they get!
Because some growth asumptions and subsequently the amounts collected from the working "baby boomers" turned out to be incorrect. Mostly due to the fact that the job market seems to be going overseas, due to the same "free market" geniuses who are now complaining about Social Security. So adjustments are needed. Options are: increase working populace via immigration and protection of domestic industry, increase taxation or increase retirement age. And then plan more carefully.
That's utterly incorrect. Population growth is a fraction of what it once was. Worse, there is a large demographic "bulge" (known as the "baby boom") which is currently approaching the age at which they will draw money out of the system, and worse, they are living far longer than the generation that they paid for did, which will compound the effect of the bulge. The result is that the worker-to-retiree ratio is going to decerase quite substantially, for at least the next thirty or so years. Immigration does help somewhat, preventing situtations like they have in Japan or western Europe, but it's a drop in the bucket.
And that would have nothing to do with exporting all of the jobs overseas, yes? Look, if one is hell-bent on screwing up one's economy due to some hare-brained "free market uber alles" ideas which results in a decline in the growth of the job market, then one does not get to whine about schems which made some growth assumptions having difficulties. The obvious answers are of course to: increase immigration while ensuring existence of domestic industry, raise taxes or raise the reitrement age. And balance the whole scheme more carefully.
Sadly, you are wrong about the population growth & immigration being enough to take care of the top of the pyramid. Here, in Quebec, we are about 110 billion under the 'market cap'.. we would need an incredible amount of immigrants or general population growth..
Or simple re-balancing of the retirement age. It is really simple, to take a small tax spread out over a whole employment life-time of an individual and pay it back out at the last 10 or so years of his life. What is so complicated? The "imbalances" are caused by some seriously screwed up managment of the thing, not the underlying principle.
Quite right! Social Security is not a Pryamid Scheme. That's just silly!
It's a Ponzi Scheme
Its neither. The "ponzi" or "pyramid" schemes depend on rapidly adding new "investors" and channeling (exponentially) all money to the top of the pyramid resulting in running out of such "investors". No such thing holds true for Social Security, where future contributors will cover the cost of future recipients because, unlike for street scammers, such a thing is possible for a national government. The only two ways such a scheme can fail is: a rapid decrease in the number of taxpayers vs the recipients or rapid decline of tax revenue. The first, given the population growth and immigration dynamics is exceedingly unlikely, and the other will happen only of Libertarians take over the government. Which of course is the very reason for their whining: they plan on removing all tax revenue and thus indeed to bankrupt not only the Social Security but the government as a whole.
Social Security is only a "ponzi scheme" if you consider the plans of Libertarians, who, in their infinite selfisheness and greed, plan to make it happen by their own actions.
That might be true, but what makes it a scheme there is nothing invested in Social Security.
Err, the money is send to current recipients while the future recipients can expect their money from future taxpayers. The difference you are, willfully I assume, neglecting is that ponzi/pyramid schemes run into the ground because they run out of new "investors" while no such thing holds true for governments, unless you are expecting a rapid decline in either number of taxpayers or the social security revenue.
I actually suspect that it is the latter, Libertarians planning to take over at some point and to remove all tax revenue. So in that light the social security is a "ponzi scheme" only because Libertarians plan on making it so, in their infinite concern about themsevles and in love with their own greed.
When you get to the point where you Google things then think that you lived through them you should lay off the computer for awhile.
You have no idea about my experience, and my career, and yet you venture to make an "opinion" of that sort. That whizzing sound you've just heard was your credibility departing.
Generally, words that you are "emphasising" should be spelled correctly.
This is Slashdot, and while I sometimes have time to screw around with Slashdot edit boxes and previews, sometimes I am rushed and so spelling and grammatical errors do happen. So sue me.
It seems like you don't remember the capabilities of the machines that DOS and Windows originally targeted.
They were more powerful then the original 1960s mainframes. This relationship remained true till today. Most mainframe systems have fast and massive i/o capabilities but are very weak in CPU speed and memory sizes.
Networking wasn't ubiquitous.
Yes it was by the time DOS became mainstream. A multitude of systems existed, with varying topologies and media, like for example a very popular then Arcnet. No revisionist history please.
Memory protection didn't exist in the hardware.
Some UNIX systems worked quite effectively on 286 hardware. I remember a shipping company using UNIX-based application with over 50 terminals off of a 286 host. But by then Microsoft has successfully screwed the marketplace to the point where it was near impossible to obtain mainstream applications and support on such platforms, crazy-ass PC-on-every-desktop-mania was full on by then.
Processing power and memory were extremely limited. Storage was ridiculously expensive. The home market couldn't take advantage of these 'advanced technologies' because the power to do so simply wasn't there.
See above. The home market, and its lopsided, ignorant gobbling up of whatever Microsoft dished out is right up there with the reasons for all these problems. The hardware was cheap and powerful enough, but Microsoft had no need, and the ignorant consumer no knowledge to take advantage of its features.
Things evolved forward from that point
You misspelled "devolved".
the picture you paint is so revisionist it should be discarded
I was there to see it all first hand, all the way from Altair and PDP-11 before that. So take your sanctimony and stuff it. "Revisionist" is the definition of what you are spouting.
The reality is, you've bought into the "M$ EVIL" mindset, so you have to swallow it whole now.
No, I learned that attitude by experience, unlike, it seems, you. I did not start with such a low opinion of Microsoft, in fact at the loong bygone early days of PCs, which we thought were funky overgrown game consoles and all sorts of cool hobby project platforms was also when we thought that DOS was adequate for games, simple hacker projects and one-time, throw-away business uses. Nothing serious. It was when suddenly pointy-haired bosses got serious about Microsoft mantra of "PC on every desktop" when shit hit the fan.
How did Bill Gates "[set] the computing industry back by decades" ?
By discarding existing, advanced technologies and re-inventing the wheel, poorly, for the sole purpose of making sure that everything he touched will be in some way enslaved to Microsoft. Most of the components of Windows-based systems which are "new" today, particularly in Enterprise scenarios, existed as far back as 1960s (OS virtualization for example) and are only now re-appearing after a 40-year hiatus, in wake of the the scenic ride through the thorny bushes of the garden path Bill took us all on. Add to this technologies such as "thin clients" (i.e. 1970s graphical terminals), before that PC LANs crippled by horrendous single-user, non-multitasking nature of DOS (a problem well solved long before that, complete with the TCP/IP protocol) and so on. The list is very, very long. Microsoft simply relied on the general lack of know-how of the computer-technologies-illiterate public, combined with fraudulent advertising and other underhanded chickanery involivng suppliers, and later abuse of its monopoly powers to establish itself as the "innovator" while in fact its entire history, with few exceptions, consists of essentially playing a three-card monty with consumers.
Irrelevant. Does NPR have a time machine? If not, then they have a duty to report news as it happens, and if increasing casualties are newsworthy then decreasing ones are as well.
Which is exactly what I said, and which you would know, had you bothered reading my post to the end. Selective reporting is just a lesser version of the same evil all the other networks are guilty of, particularly FOX, which in addition to selective reporting also replaces a great number of its "news items" with outright fabrications or meaningles inflamatory invective.
Wow you just compared a dictator responsible for genocide to Bill Gates.
No, I just listed extreme examples of mindless attempts at whitewashing of evil individuals by focusing on their "good works". Both Adolph and Gates are in the same boat on this one, although it is quite obvious that the kind of evil they represented is drastically different, one was presiding over a genocide and the other over pilfering the world out of billions while setting the computing industry back by decades.
The depths of some peoples ignorance is astonishing. Good game.
At least you come to the discussion declaring your ignorance as "astonishing" upfront. For which we should be grateful, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
The end product of this "security from boogeymen" and "intellectual property" crapola (and these two are strangely related) is an actual, real, as oposed to a literary construct, Thought Police. Because only when your thoughts are somehow available for review to the "security apparatus" and only if every computer in the world is under constant surveilance, be it by the square-jawed, steely-eyed "security men" or valiant corporate defenders of God-given "creator rights", only then will we be "safe" and "free".
Otherwise the "terrorists" and/or "pedophiles" have already won.
Which would hopefully result in organzations like the Homeland Securty (and their various foreign counterparts) coming real hard on the cause of it all: spammers. I am sure that a couple of bullet-ridden corpses of spammers on national TV would stem that kind of spam warfare.
I predict Jim Bell's utimely demise by means of slipping on a bar of soap and hitting a cast bronze penguin-shaped umbrella stand, during a coctail party at the Playboy Mansion, on June 25th 2007, 21 hours 34 minutes and 11 seconds Zulu time.
The critical difference being of course that the GPL protects the rights of a whole community, while some draconian laws such as DMCA and associated draconian DRM technologies protect exclusively the "creators", or more accurately "the distributors and gatekeepers", at the expense of the said community.
But do not let that distinction bother your hate of the GPL.
Updated, modern, populist version of the ancient concept of "patronage" for example. I am sure other ways also not involving creating New Economic Royalty or some other corporate totalitarianism exist.
What precisely is this post supposed to contribute? You feel compelled to declare someone's posts "waste of time", because he dares to disagree with you? With no further justification, or factual argument, naturally. And so you do waste time for the sole purpose of the world becoming aware of the extent of your snotty disapproval of "wasted time". Is that it?
Today, average life expectancy is 77+, as I recall.
So, we designed a system that didn't pay anything to anyone unless they lived longer than average. And we're now paying out to everyone who gets within a decade of average lifespan.
That is not the cause of the problem. The cause of the problem is the decline of revenue vs payouts due to the ratio of retirees to productive workers increasing, life-expectancy being merely one of the factors in that ratio, others, more important ones, being simply brain-dead policies resulting in overall decline of workforce vs the retirees. Once can simply increase the retirement age to match the life expectancy increases (which is by the way not designed to prevent payouts completely as vicious demagougic oponents of SS would have people believe), the other is to increase or maintain the ratio by simply having a viable economy and compensate for birth rates falling with immigration.
But the underlying problem is that without a functioning economy no plan like SS is possible, and never mind that, an old-fashoned economic collapse will occur regardless, as it is impossible to maintain the increasing retiree to worker ratio, SS or no SS, as the old (and the very young) always consume far more resources then their savings would afford.
And that would mean starving to death a whole lot of old people, who did pay SS payments their whole lives. Are you OK with that? If not, where do you get the money to keep them fed? If you rather have them die, then you don't mind if I take that same attitude towards you, should some of your brilliant saving plans, all based on a whole lot of assumptions about the economy, investments and banking systems fail, do you?
While that is probably also a major factor, the underlying problem is that the numerical assumptions which were used in calculating the retirement age and benefits to be paid out are clearly not corresponding to the current situation. The assumptions were actually rather reasonable and made by knowledgable people, but have failed to take into account the fact that some very greedy and very irresponsible individuals have managed to systematically de-construct the economy in favour of short-term profiteering for themselves. And now it is time to pay the piper for the fools who listened to their demagougery.
I think the "lack of the political will" comes from the paralysis resulting from a realization that the whole "globalization" and job exporting strategy is about to implode. In face of that, tinkering with Social Security is paramount to shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
That is a balancing problem not a fundamental failure of the scheme. In a normally functioning nation, the population would remain steady or (more likely) grow. So would the economy. In both cases, the number of retirees is a fraction of the workforce. In perpetuity. As seniors die, new workers join the force. That is the fundamental difference from a "ponzi" scheme which has finite and rapidly exausted supply of "investors". Only if these basic assumptions fail, or if the balancing of the scheme is incorrect (i.e. too low retirement age or too low contributions) will it fail.
Out of curiousity, what do you think Social Security does? It's not a retirement program.
It is. The initial problem with implementing it was that the destitute people during the Great Depression had to be paid even though they did not contribute to the scheme (either this or death by starvation). So a payout was made, forever putting the scheme on wrong footing: the revenues were spent before they were collected. But even then the scheme is workable, because of the assumptions of the dynamics of a nation: workforce should always outnumber the retirees by a certain factor. And economy grows. If any of these assumptions fail, the Social Security is the least of our problems: the whole economy of the nation will collapse. Which thanks to "globalization" and exporting of all the jobs overseas, combined with lack of immigration is a real risk, failure of Social Securtiy being only a tip of a far more devastating iceberg.
Just seems to me to be a wealth redistribution from young to old with the surplus, scraped off the top for generic government spending, being the primary point of the exercise.
When the scheme was implemented, the old were in dire straights, and after "baby boomers" pass, this new generation will be also in the same boat, impoverished old as no savings are possible for most at present.
Why? There are billions of possible immigrants willing to work and pay taxes waiting to get in. Instead the "globalization" idiots would have them working at $1 a day overseas. Why?
It won't be long until there are only two workers supporting each retiree, who is likely to collect for 20 years or more.
If idiotic policies hell-bent on reducing the population of productive workers by exporting their industries and not letting any immigrants in persist, then sure, you are breaking all the assumptions of the Social Security and it (along with the whole economy of the nation) will fail. Is that the plan?
Social Security is undoubtedly an intergenerational Ponzi scheme and the fat part of the pyramid is looking for their cut
Only because someone has decided to artificially restrict the influx of funds! That way anything can be a "pyramid" scheme. Put money in the bank and then have crooks steal it and sure enough you lost it! The whole premise was based on growth of economy and if you allow "free market globalization" idiots, combined with xenophobic bigots to run the show, the results are predictable. Both the Social Security and the nation's economy will collapse.
And this doesn't even take into account that the alleged Trust Fund is really just a big IOU from Congress.
And what is wrong with that? Do you plan on making sure that the Government is no good for it? Overspend it on wars? Or perhaps to eliminate taxes or reduce economy to nothing?
No it is not. If it were, it would mean that the global economy is shrinking due to wonders of "free markets", no? There are literally billions of people out there working on $1 dollar a day, who would love to be working as US taxpayers, assuming that all the "globalization" idiots are kicked away from the controls.
The whole Social Security thing is quite straightforward and logical and it is truly a testimony to people's stupidity that they have managed to mess it up.
Because some growth asumptions and subsequently the amounts collected from the working "baby boomers" turned out to be incorrect. Mostly due to the fact that the job market seems to be going overseas, due to the same "free market" geniuses who are now complaining about Social Security. So adjustments are needed. Options are: increase working populace via immigration and protection of domestic industry, increase taxation or increase retirement age. And then plan more carefully.
And that would have nothing to do with exporting all of the jobs overseas, yes? Look, if one is hell-bent on screwing up one's economy due to some hare-brained "free market uber alles" ideas which results in a decline in the growth of the job market, then one does not get to whine about schems which made some growth assumptions having difficulties. The obvious answers are of course to: increase immigration while ensuring existence of domestic industry, raise taxes or raise the reitrement age. And balance the whole scheme more carefully.
Or simple re-balancing of the retirement age. It is really simple, to take a small tax spread out over a whole employment life-time of an individual and pay it back out at the last 10 or so years of his life. What is so complicated? The "imbalances" are caused by some seriously screwed up managment of the thing, not the underlying principle.
Message of: "I am unable to defend my arguments rationally, so I will settle on a critique of your account name instead" received loud and clear.
Its neither. The "ponzi" or "pyramid" schemes depend on rapidly adding new "investors" and channeling (exponentially) all money to the top of the pyramid resulting in running out of such "investors". No such thing holds true for Social Security, where future contributors will cover the cost of future recipients because, unlike for street scammers, such a thing is possible for a national government. The only two ways such a scheme can fail is: a rapid decrease in the number of taxpayers vs the recipients or rapid decline of tax revenue. The first, given the population growth and immigration dynamics is exceedingly unlikely, and the other will happen only of Libertarians take over the government. Which of course is the very reason for their whining: they plan on removing all tax revenue and thus indeed to bankrupt not only the Social Security but the government as a whole.
Social Security is only a "ponzi scheme" if you consider the plans of Libertarians, who, in their infinite selfisheness and greed, plan to make it happen by their own actions.
Err, the money is send to current recipients while the future recipients can expect their money from future taxpayers. The difference you are, willfully I assume, neglecting is that ponzi/pyramid schemes run into the ground because they run out of new "investors" while no such thing holds true for governments, unless you are expecting a rapid decline in either number of taxpayers or the social security revenue.
I actually suspect that it is the latter, Libertarians planning to take over at some point and to remove all tax revenue. So in that light the social security is a "ponzi scheme" only because Libertarians plan on making it so, in their infinite concern about themsevles and in love with their own greed.
You have no idea about my experience, and my career, and yet you venture to make an "opinion" of that sort. That whizzing sound you've just heard was your credibility departing.
This is Slashdot, and while I sometimes have time to screw around with Slashdot edit boxes and previews, sometimes I am rushed and so spelling and grammatical errors do happen. So sue me.
They were more powerful then the original 1960s mainframes. This relationship remained true till today. Most mainframe systems have fast and massive i/o capabilities but are very weak in CPU speed and memory sizes.
Networking wasn't ubiquitous.
Yes it was by the time DOS became mainstream. A multitude of systems existed, with varying topologies and media, like for example a very popular then Arcnet. No revisionist history please.
Memory protection didn't exist in the hardware.
Some UNIX systems worked quite effectively on 286 hardware. I remember a shipping company using UNIX-based application with over 50 terminals off of a 286 host. But by then Microsoft has successfully screwed the marketplace to the point where it was near impossible to obtain mainstream applications and support on such platforms, crazy-ass PC-on-every-desktop-mania was full on by then.
Processing power and memory were extremely limited. Storage was ridiculously expensive. The home market couldn't take advantage of these 'advanced technologies' because the power to do so simply wasn't there.
See above. The home market, and its lopsided, ignorant gobbling up of whatever Microsoft dished out is right up there with the reasons for all these problems. The hardware was cheap and powerful enough, but Microsoft had no need, and the ignorant consumer no knowledge to take advantage of its features.
Things evolved forward from that point
You misspelled "devolved".
the picture you paint is so revisionist it should be discarded
I was there to see it all first hand, all the way from Altair and PDP-11 before that. So take your sanctimony and stuff it. "Revisionist" is the definition of what you are spouting.
The reality is, you've bought into the "M$ EVIL" mindset, so you have to swallow it whole now.
No, I learned that attitude by experience, unlike, it seems, you. I did not start with such a low opinion of Microsoft, in fact at the loong bygone early days of PCs, which we thought were funky overgrown game consoles and all sorts of cool hobby project platforms was also when we thought that DOS was adequate for games, simple hacker projects and one-time, throw-away business uses. Nothing serious. It was when suddenly pointy-haired bosses got serious about Microsoft mantra of "PC on every desktop" when shit hit the fan.
By discarding existing, advanced technologies and re-inventing the wheel, poorly, for the sole purpose of making sure that everything he touched will be in some way enslaved to Microsoft. Most of the components of Windows-based systems which are "new" today, particularly in Enterprise scenarios, existed as far back as 1960s (OS virtualization for example) and are only now re-appearing after a 40-year hiatus, in wake of the the scenic ride through the thorny bushes of the garden path Bill took us all on. Add to this technologies such as "thin clients" (i.e. 1970s graphical terminals), before that PC LANs crippled by horrendous single-user, non-multitasking nature of DOS (a problem well solved long before that, complete with the TCP/IP protocol) and so on. The list is very, very long. Microsoft simply relied on the general lack of know-how of the computer-technologies-illiterate public, combined with fraudulent advertising and other underhanded chickanery involivng suppliers, and later abuse of its monopoly powers to establish itself as the "innovator" while in fact its entire history, with few exceptions, consists of essentially playing a three-card monty with consumers.
Which is exactly what I said, and which you would know, had you bothered reading my post to the end. Selective reporting is just a lesser version of the same evil all the other networks are guilty of, particularly FOX, which in addition to selective reporting also replaces a great number of its "news items" with outright fabrications or meaningles inflamatory invective.
No, I just listed extreme examples of mindless attempts at whitewashing of evil individuals by focusing on their "good works". Both Adolph and Gates are in the same boat on this one, although it is quite obvious that the kind of evil they represented is drastically different, one was presiding over a genocide and the other over pilfering the world out of billions while setting the computing industry back by decades.
The depths of some peoples ignorance is astonishing. Good game.
At least you come to the discussion declaring your ignorance as "astonishing" upfront. For which we should be grateful, I think.