He "earned" his monopoly because all his potential competitors at the time damn near sold every price of technology and accompanying rights to MS. These were business decisions that benefited both parties. When MS gained it's monopoly it was investigated and penalties, both monetary and operational, were implemented. And who really cares what you think if you can say the Gates Foundation almost 2 Billion dollars worth of world healthcare investments have not helped anyone.

The British survived the German air attacks and naval siege primarily because of US industrial and food assistance before the US officially even joined the war. The US also provided fuel, jeeps, trucks, weapons, and food to Russia using both US and British ships. This gave Stalin the time and resources he needed to locate all the military officers and scientists he condemned to the gulags prior to the war. Factories in the US were building Spitfires and other military equipment while practically ignoring the US Neutrality Act. The US Lend lease program also relied on President Eisenhower willfully ignoring the laws that had been passed proscribing US involvement when he handed over US naval vessels to Britain that had been sitting idle at the time. The President also extended US territorial waters by fiat to help protect British shipping which was being sent to the bottom of the ocean in record numbers. The French resistance displayed incredible bravery and commitment to defending their country but their contribution would not have won them their country back without outside assistance. Their effectiveness was waning as D-Day approached because the Germans had been improving their counter espionage network to hunt down any suspected resistance fighters. Of course none of this matters in the least today. The old alliances are weak and unreliable at best. The US has no reliable or even capable allies that would ever come to it's defense if a situation such as WW2 were to re-manifest today.

They surrendered because their various political groups were so busy undermining each other they had no time to actually defend the country. France had communists, fascists, monarchists, and parliamentary political divisions all fighting against one another instead of defending the citizens of France. They were a disgrace and the French citizens paid dearly for their political cowardice and back room deal making. Also a hell of a lot of French soldiers died providing the rear guard during the British evacuation of Dunkirk. The French suffered over 90% casualties providing Britain with the valuable time needed to extract their military. And like France Britain was also betrayed by it's infighting and cowardly political class who were so busy being "Lords" of the universe they left Britain damn near defenseless. Without the benefit of the English channel for a moat England would have been conquered and occupied in record time.

They just got the passwords from Snowden.

One more observation. If a company wants to increase their market share in both applications along with the corresponding hardware the applications run under they should go out of their way to make the barrier for developers as low as possible. The more developers they can attract means more applications are created for a particular OS or environment resulting in an increase in OS sales and overall system buy in. VB is probably the top reason of how MS gained it's overall dominance in the 90's. Regardless of the merits or flaws of VB it opened the door for new developers who didn't have to know and use C/C++or other lower languages to build applications. Windows development went from the developers implementing dialog classes and class templates to dragging a form icon and corresponding controls into their work space along with it's defined events and properties. Of course at the time you had to use Windows to take advantage of this magical developing capability in the eyes of those making corporate IT decisions.

I wasn't disputing your observations. I just added my observation of being able to use development only licences across multiple VM's or desktops provides a good app testing environment without the hassle of dealing with licensing costs in the development area. The MS development licenses I require are provided and managed through an MSDN subscription in conjunction with an MS Partner agreement which expands the number of developer only licenses. I have also obtained libraries built by non-MS vendors with the most recent example being libraries providing PLC and OMNI comm services. These libraries also came with an unlimited development only license from the vendor with any licensing costs only charged when distributing the applications that use these libraries. The cost of obtaining generous developer only licences more than makes up for the MSDN and MS Partner related costs.

VM's make excellent DEV and QA testing environments and can be used as many times as needed under most development only licensing options. VM's are good in production environments but this is where distribution licenses need to be taken into account. During development and testing VM's provide the ability to reset the entire environment back to the pre-testing state. Testing applications can end up creating and leaving behind invalid registries, assemblies, old installs, and event logs that make debugging errors more time consuming. Being able to revert back to a pristine environment for the next round of testing can be helpful especially when testing installation processes and application configuration changes that can effect the base OS level.

If the US really wanted him they would have had him one way or another a long time ago. He was and still is nothing but a bag boy who tried to manage the release of information in a way that best supported his political agenda and self image. He attempted to replace the state press agencies with one more in line with his political agenda that had just as much right and wrong as the governments justifications. And water boarding is old school. I mean there is like 4 or 5 people that had to endure this procedure. And you only get 4 or 5 people if you exclude the 1000's that under went the same procedure for training purposes. It's much more effective to dress someone up in an orange jump suit, force them to read a prepared statement while on their knees, and then sawing their fucking heads off so people know something really serious was being revealed. And before you try to fix a "wrong" you should first make sure you have actually identified a "wrong": and not some personal hangup created using hearsay, rank speculations, and pseudo intellectual bullshit.

Garands and Enfields served 2 different tactical rules in WW2 era combat.

My father has had one for over 60 years (bought used for $10) and it was already 10+ years old when he bought it. One day it will be passed down to me but I hope it does not happen too soon). It had the full stock that extended the length of the barrel which he later cut down to the size of a normal sporting rifle. He still uses every year for hunting deer and bear. It is extremely accurate and is in extremely good physical condition. My favorite feature is the 10 round clip that can be removed really fast since it was originally developed for the military. It is a hell of a lot better then the M1 Garand which made so much noise when popping it's empty clip it told the enemy "here I am and I am out of ammo so fire away".

The US doesn't appease Muslim Countries they do exactly what all the US haters want and ignore any internal policies that doesn't threaten US interests. One good example would be the 3 billion dollars the US has paid Egypt to stop working against Israel. It's work. Why should the US care about repression in Bahrain as long as the big naval base is being provided and paid for by the Bahrain government? Why should the US censure Saudi Arabia as long as they manage output to keep the oil prices at an acceptable level? People can't complain about US foreign interventions and undue influence then turn around and criticize the US for not using their authority to aid those being suppressed by their own governments . And the only solution to solve that paradox is for people to recognize it is not the US's burden or responsibility to protect the well being of foreign populations. For every benefit or bribe the US may offer to foreign countries to further US interests there is always someone willing to sellout the well being of their own citizens. Without that caveat the US would have very little power outside of military power ant that doesn't work well due to both foreign and domestic political side effects. The same applies to the other world leading countries such as China and Russia. I will leave Europe out it because they have neither the wealth or resources and their military power is non-existent without US assistance and the US will only provide that if they have something to gain.

Brilliant. After my first comment about intentionally infecting people I started to wonder how that could be done. Prick your finger so a little blood seeps out and then rub the bloody finger on the back of door handles and other public places where hand contact is common. But infecting yourself with Ebola and blowing yourself up in the middle of a bunch a people would do the job. Those not killed in the blast would be covered with blood and the first responders would be more worried about blast related injuries before testing for Ebola or any other infectious pathogens.

I believe it takes between 2 days up to as long as 3 weeks for symptoms to become noticeable. Someone looking to spread the contagion to as many people as possible would have plenty of time to do so. However, if they infected just a couple of people before being noticed by the authorities the ensuing panic would be overwhelming.

China, Russia, N. Korea, France, England, Germany, Israel, Japan, Brazil, and basically every other country on the planet with indoor plumbing and broadband internet service all contain governmental security services with ability to create an exploit such as this. And that group is probably dwarfed by the criminal enterprises around the world making money hand over fist by creating, selling, and using sophisticated exploits. So that being said where will you find people to fill your network security jobs after ruling out anyone associated with the US?

I know Russia, and everyone else, have missiles with penetration aides and multiple nuclear warheads per ICBM and any air defense against these weapons is damn near impossible, especially when they reach their terminal attack stage. But these missiles are vulnerable in their boost stage. That's why Russia objects to missile defense systems deployed near their borders.