Estimates by people who do estimates of this sort for a living, based on prior earnings and pre-raid customer-base. Basically it's the kind of thing they do all the time in the world of business and people can earn or lose rather much money on bad estimates so they take that kind of thing seriously, unlike you.
Well, the issue is that by all accounts he was operating within the law, so who's the gullible ones here?
Unlike Youtube where copyright infringement was rampant and encouraged by the leaders, MegaUpload always has seemed to follow the DMCA faithfully. Until google gets a helicopter raid you can stick that gullible thing up your ignorant ass.
The value of MegaUpload has been estimated to up to a billion dollars, not two hundred million. You need to take into account future earning potential.
Funny thing is that NZ 'forgot' to demand indemnification from the US in case the raid was illegal or the charges bullshit, meaning that NZ might very well be on the hook from (almost guaranteed) compensation for the raid itself for at least quite a few million dollars and possibly, but not entirely certain, for the billion dollars estimated to have been the value of MegaUpload.
Real heros?
How about a guy that got raided by Delta-force with assault rifles and helicopters, a billion dollar business destroyed with no due process, and illegal spying that is pretty close to getting a prime minister redhanded in illegalities?
What has gone down would be enough to produce a pretty damn good movie and you're questioning if he's been through enough to qualify for some support? Are you perhaps a sore dick mad at the world cause someone else has done cool stuff and you never got out of your mom's basement.
As said, coding style on that level is something everyone who writes code professionally can adapt to.
When learning at university I was very focused on writing the cleanest, best coding style possible and that kind of focus has paid off. You end up rewriting code many times but at the end you just get it, your code feels right and people tell you your code is good.
If you haven't spent every day of writing code back in university trying to figure out how to write clean code then you're more than likely one of the people I curse daily today.
Nothing actually works... Out of the box.
That's the issue, there's no one there to say "fuck that patch, I won't include it until things work again".
Except it is the code quality that is the issue, or rather the inability of people to use OpenStack without heavily modifying things and spending lots of time getting the setup right.
Linus would have rejected all patches until things worked again.
Favorit trick at my high-school was we installed a tool, don't remember the name, that allowed us to remotely control computers.
Lot's of people found themselves surfing hotbears and such sites.
The Third Reich had and extensive selection program where only the resourceful and educated jews survived, mainly through US visas and such.
Wait, what?
When did exchange consulting become the goal of CS students? That's what you get one of those MS certificate courses or something to get into.
Hackers of the world, unite!