If they paid more taxes I would pay less

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.

Test equipment is allowed to transmit and receive on those frequencies. If it looks like a radio, it can't. I have a number of cellular testers hanging around here that can act like base stations, mostly because I buy them used as spectrum analyzers and never use the (obsolete) cellular facilities. Government has different rules regarding what it can and can't do in the name of law enforcement, although FCC has been very reluctant to allow them to use cellular jammers.

If you can afford it, something from Ettus would better suit your application.

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.

Well, no.

He claimed to be a son of God. And he also said "You are ALL sons of God.", unless the Aramaic was improperly translated, and it should be children of God.

Then religous people made him into "THE son of God", and nobody else has a claim. But that wasn't what J.C. claimed.

I think it's that the religious rites involved things a lot more powerful than wine. (Mushrooms are frequently mentioned.) So I expect there may well have been a lot more direct religious experience. After all, if it weren't something the brain was capable of, nobody would experince it, so the potential is there. Also many "ecstatic saints" appear to have had some form of epilepsy (it comes in lots of forms).

Programming is basically research and development You are building something which has never been built before. As such how do you estimate something if you have nothing to compare it to?

Actually though I have a limited amount of experience using Function Point Analysis. Some of the aspects of it are old, it was created before web apps became pervasive, but that doesn't matter. The principles are the same and there are dimensionless constants you can use to tune the FPA model to your organization. Eventually you end up with an empirical model of your programming team, development environment, tool suite, management efficiency, complexity of the problem domain, people quitting or dying, etc. You need to avoid over fitting however and recalibrate from time-to-time.

Agile keeps story points and velocity which serve the same purpose as the dimensionless constants of FPA. Unfortunately managers try to translate them to mythical man hours. But if you keep velocity or function points, whether you are using Agile or not, you should be able to get some idea. You have to be a bit scientific about it.

That and 'T-Shirt Sizing' is about as good as it gets.