Well, my wife needs a blood thinner, but strenuously avoided coumadine-warfarin. You can't eat green vegetables if you take warfarin, because vitamin K deactivates it. (So she's taking apixaban, which isn't affected by diet.)

That's all very nice, but MS is a software company. I'll admit I was thinking of cross-platform development environments, like their announced open source .NET, about which I know little, and I don't really count stuff they sell as end products. I will acknowledge that this is bias on my part.

OTOH, ... you actually use those things on a tablet? As other than file viewers? (You didn't say you did, so perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.)

That said, if I'd been thinking of consumer end-products I'd never have made that statement. MSOffice for Apple has been out for ages...and MSWord 5.2a for the Mac was the best word processor I've ever used. Far superior to any later versions, and it fixed a lot of bugs from the previous versions. These days it wouldn't be so good as, of course, it didn't handle unicode, but that's still the only improvement that I know about.

Yes, "he" claimed to be relating things from God. But what did he mean by that term? The available texts are too incomplete for me to decide...and they've been pruned by people with axes to grind. I can't be certain that I disagree with him, even though my belief in God is purely materialistically based.

While I agree that there's no good evidence that Jesus, per se, existed, there's some evidence that a person somewhat similar existed several decades before the time Jesus is supposed to have lived. Or at least someone who promulgated the doctrines that Jesus is reported to have promulgated. (Ignoring those of his disciples that diverge from the "red letter" text.)

It's been awhile since I looked at this so I can't be closer than "several decades", but it was somewhere between about 40 years and about 400 years. (Not a big help, I admit.) I think it was related to the Essenes.

Personally if we really wanted to mess with them set up a bunch of disposable e-mail addresses over the course of a week using open WiFi connections with a computer running ToR and then periodically e-mail random data attachments back and forth. Hell I've done this for shits and giggles, when I am at the bank send off some random data since I can connect the Starbucks WiFi across the parking lot, at the used book store connect to McDonalds WiFi next door. Poisson the well make their mining of data useless and make them waste resources trying to decrypt output from /dev/random. The e-mail address are just first names of people in groups (the Beatles, the 12 apostles, Metallica, the US senate judiciary committee, etc) with random letter/number combination passwords. After a couple of months stop using those e-mails and then after a bit create a new set of accounts but a different number of them rinse and repeat. Being a white male with US citizenship, born in the US and residing in the US offers a lot of protection to do this but I wouldn't recommend anyone with a suspicious* background to do this.



* By suspicious I mean someone who might have ties to any protest organization, be a naturalized citizen, have visited any strange countries, be a minority, committed a crime other than a traffic/parking ticket, or any other group the government may want to target or would be ignored by the news media. Basically it would be similar to driving while black, or the opposite of being a young white girl who gets murdered or put on trial in a foreign country. I hate to say it but it is sadly true that the general population would't care about your plight if you could be painted as an undesireable.

Actually, the best method for avoiding union interference is to not treat employees like shit, thus removing incentive to join a union.

On the other hand, I hear Walmart does quite well with their "burn anyone who so much as mentions the word 'union' alive" policy, so I could be way off base.

I would love to find this out as well given the silly offers I have gotten. The worst offer I got was for $35,000 a year which being someone with 10 years of experience with securing industrial control systems and 15 years experience as a software engineer which I laughed at. Most of the unsolicited offers I have been getting have been for $50K-$60K but frequently there are the stupid low ones.

That's the change: they've come to the realization that they can't lock developers down to anything, at least not like they used to. I think it's long past due, but that's from an outsider's perspective where it's easier to see the whole landscape, not just focus what goes on in Redmond.

Microsoft is a very different company than they were under Gates or the Sweat-hog. They long ago figured out that their cash cows were kind of fragile, and they more recently figured out that they alienated a lot of developers. They are now trying to find ways to woo developers to any of their product families, not just to Windows. And they've done some great work on a lot of software engineering fronts, including secure development, powerful tools, integrations, and are even dabbling in open source,

What substantive actions can you point to that don't run purely on their platform? (Promises and PR statements don't count.)

To be fair, at the time MS adopted the CRLF line ending style there were *four* standards, none of them dominant:
CR, LF, CRLF, and LFCR (called NLCR..new line carriage return). They picked one existing standard, and Unix was already using another. The supporters of the other standards have died off, so there are only two standards left.

So don't blame MS for all the bad decisions. Only some of them. I still wouldn't want to use their software, though. Perhaps if they live up to their current "We love FOSS" line for a decade or so I'll change my mind, but currently it just feels like their latest lie.

Even that depends on believing things like "Revelations" which don't even pretend to be the word of JC, but are rather the ravings of someone who thought he was a follower.

Well....... if you'd said the point of human group organiztions is power, I'd agree with you, and as religions are human group organizations, that applies to them, but not any more to them than to the girl scouts or "Citizen's committee to suppor the libraries". The big ones are a bit more successful, of course...

The real questions are "How much effort do they put into accomplishing their ostensible purpose relative to the amount of power they have?" and "Are they a net benefit to humanity?" I wouldn't trust any member of an organization to honestly answer that about the organization he was a member of. Or even to realize that they were being dishonest.

You are making assumptions about its motivational structure. Also about its sense of humor.

Any self-aware AI will be dependent on a large number of heuristic modules. I'm not sure what you mean by "the classic self-aware AI", but if it's a well specified concept then it didn't work out.

OTOH, you should be aware that *YOU* are dependent on a large number of heuristic modules. You use them to talk, to listen, to walk across the room, etc.