It did, much to my disappointment. All mentions of other methods of teaching are those that have been imported. There was something about Prince Charles visiting in 1988, but it was only for the sake of analogy, and the British schooling system is rather lackluster. In fact the vignette seemed rather pointlessly antagonistic, but perhaps there was context somewhere between what the chapter itself described and the events of April 19, 1775 that I missed.

FP support in an OS? That's a stretch, especially when you could dump the lot of it and still have a functional OS (to the extent AppleDOS was an OS anyway). Had MS BASIC not been there, any number of people would have hacked together something to do floating point math in some flavor of BASIC. It wasn't exactly a hard problem.

Sure, there were some fanatic devotees of the CoCo, just as there are still some C64 devotees today, but that's not the market. The continued use of the CoCo didn't stop the PC, the Mac, or the Amiga from coming into existance as more powerful replacements.

There is simply nothing MS did that wouldn't have been done anyway and likely better had Gates not been at the right place at tghe right time with money in his pocket.

No need (for me) to save face. It's not my fault you forgot that math and arithmetic aren't the same thing.

Actually, I'm not. Understanding doesn't make you know that 6 times 5 is 30 any faster, but practice does. Apparently, a zap to the brain does too. That's all TFA is talking about. We have no idea if a zap to the brain will make you better at "word problems" AKA actual math where understanding comes into play.

You claimed that the bulk of the Apple DOS functionality was provided by MS BASIC. I refuted that.

Any OS and apps would have driven the continued demand for more computing power. Or did you not notice that the 4K TRS-80 was no longer seen as adequate even before the IBM PC was available. Or that very few people running Linux today are interested in a used '386 with 1MB of ram.

Without the hacker's end-run, modems wouldn't have existed. That is what practically everyone used to access the internet in the '90s.

Yes, the same sort of cunning any con man has. There was a big pile of luck to go with it.

Part of it seems to be the same statistical blindness that drives the lotto. They imagine they will one day be amongst the super-rich even though statistics say otherwise.

Actually, no, it doesn't have to be anyone, it just always seems to be. There is no reason a group of people with a litle disposable income ech can't come togetrher for things that need doing. In fact, markets only work properly when the economic power of buyers and sellers is nearly equal. About the tine you start seeing 'producers' and 'consumers', markets fail.

Honestly, it's no better than the old Feudalism where someone gets enough money and power and calls himself King. Then he makes up a bunch of BS about how God wanted it that way. (Or about how some watery tart threw a sword at him).

So Jehovah's Witnesses were right about something for once?

Right, it would be interesting to ask people whether they feel the same way about making guns in a machine shop, or making bullets in a machine shop. I bet the answer changes.

The answer to your question about regulation is that if you're making it for your own use, it's probably legal. The law is carefully worded so that a complete kit wouldn't be legal, but otherwise it's kind of what you'd expect the NRA to support.

How was it the "cover story" if that's almost exactly how it's worded in the constitution of Slashdot's home country? Let's compare:

"To promote the public good by protecting the interests of creative people for a limited time" --bdwoolman

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" --Framers

Eventually authors will run out of distinct works to create. See "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson.

In the diatonic scale, there are seven distinct intervals between pitches, and rhythm can be approximated as either a short or long time from one note to the next. This leaves fourteen possibilities for each note but the last, as the last note has no next note to make an interval or duration meaningful, or 14^(n - 1) distinct melodies of length n. But a song was deemed an infringement for having matched eight notes (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, the "My Sweet Lord" case). This sets n = 8, or 14^7 - 105 million distinct melodies. There are already far more people than that on this planet.

Without Microsoft, we would have comoditized PCs running DOS86 or CP/M. Then Linux would have taken over.

That's a different matter entirely. TFA is actually talking about arithmetic, not math.

Since you said company, I suspect it plans to turn a profit on this. Either convert to a non-profit and ask him to contribute or send him paying job offer.