I would bet that Gates fell for a suckers move. There are lots of quick checkmates if one player is much better than the other. Besides chess ability has been proven to not be related to IQ. If Gates proved the Riemann hypothesis in an hour I would say yes, he is the greatest genius that ever lived but in the mean time Gates has a few ahead of him: Euclid, Newton, Euler, Riemann, Einstein, and Feynman just for starters.

I have been using Unix professionally since 1984. I have developed on most flavors, some of which are long dead. The first thing I would teach students is that Microsoft which rules not only the business world as no other company except IBM ever has. Microsoft has also taken most of the technical world as well. The market share for the engineering desktop was overwhelmingly either Unix or VAX (try not laugh at the deceased) has gone to Microsoft. The niche left to Unix is servers and some databases, the smallest end of the computing world. Windows 2003 now rules the server world as well (since 2006 by unit sales).

The big dirty secret is that Windows is based upon Unix!!! Microsoft's first product was Zenix a flavor of Unix albeit a bad and really really slow one. If you dig deep enough (and I have) all those Unix O/S calls are there. It is not a coincidence that 2 years after Cal Berkley thru Unix source code over the fence to the public domain Windows NT appeared. Originally laughable (ever tried to hook a modem up to NT 3?) at the time it is the undisputed king of the civilized world.

Any time someone is foolish enough to talk about Apple computers, I remind them they are toys, not work tools. When you can design a bridge for both stability, controls, and dynamics on a Mac, output the bill of materials and send design documents to the subcontractors that they can build and bill to. I will call it a tool. In the meantime it is a toy. So what are we left with? Not much really.

1) IBM Mainframe a very small niche

2) VxWorks (very very much Berkley BSD with an interrupt handler, and deterministic scheduler) and a bunch of other realtime O/S products that have market share like a Windows Phone (proof Microsoft makes mistakes)

3) Vaxes and Solaris boxes bought for next to nothing

4) my personal favorite the SGI beer cooler

You want students to be employable? Teach them Microsoft and Visual Studio and all the Microsoft business technology because the odds are they will email with Exchange, work on a Microsoft desktop, and store documents in SharePoint, plan products with Project, and store data in SQL Server and do big data/big data table in Hadoop with SQL Server extensions.

In 5 years Oracle will stop making Sun boxes that only zealots with government money buy. Oracle already loses money on their hardware each and every quarter; are you listening Larry?. When thinking about Oracle think of Data General, Silicon Graphics and Integraph. Java will continue its ossification and decay.

Facebook and Google use copious amounts of cheap Linux boxes. Linux is free because it really isn't much good. The world does not need Facebook which will be gone in 10 years and the rest of the world will realize Google is a front end and that the NSA has backend superuser access to everything Google does in spite of public denials.

Other than that Microsoft, in spite of all their mistakes, will continue to rule the world, except maybe cell phones, but no one needs a cell phone like they need food, clothing, shelter and a business desktop to do work.

Apple will eventually be $20/share again. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world because he deserves to be. Linus Torvalds doesn't matter. BSD Unix matters and Windows is a BSD box with a windowing system and development tool set that are richer than anything else in the computing world.

Feel free to denounce me as a fool, but I accurately predicted the demise of Digital Equipment, Integraph, SGI and Sun. A lot of shareholders would have done a whole lot better had they listened to me instead of, well almost everyone else. The price of Apple stock is a bubble, fundamentals aren't their, ask Ben Graham or Warren Buffet. Clip this paragraph of mine and 5 years from now you will realize how prescient I am and will have wished you sold your Apple stock. In the meantime I have to get back to work on Windows desktop.

I still have a place for Unix: I am looking for the perfect 1994 Silicon Graphics 'Predator' box for my bonus that I can turn into a beer cooler for the bonus room. Onyx boxes are too passé. VAX's makes nice end tables but have no visual panache like vintage SGI.

I worked as a prime contractor on the STS program both at the Cape and Marshall. I personally know an astronaut from the heyday. These are not the people you want on any project unless bankruptcy and failure are the goal. There is lterally nothing new in the space business except privatization. The technology is stuck right where Von Braun left it, chemical rockets are a dead end, nothing new unless we start using nuclear weapons as propulsion! Theodore Taylor had a superb design for this type of space craft but no one listened ebven though he designed virtually every fission weapon in the arsena (every engineer should read his biography it is superb). See: http://www.lewrockwell.com/giles/giles31.html

It boils down to a simple concept that is well codified into law. It’s called the “Four Corners Doctrine” i.e. if it ain’t in the 4 corners of your employment contract it ain’t. You should have known this not when you got fired but when you got “HIRED!” No such thing as friends is business pal, allies and enemies is a better model, read Sun-Tzu. You never had that $100 million because you were stupid. Better a friendship based on business than a business based upon friendship. Zuckerberg fucked you and now he is fucking his stockholders because at this point he is lost. Facebook's business model is not Google and eventually the whole world will realize it is spyware, then the stock tanks. Zuckerberg is probably selling his as fast as he can. He is not the next Bill Gates, more like Apple, a fad. Fads fade, Apple stock will be $20/share again. Facebook will go to zero sooner. Remember how awesome Novell, the VAX and Silicon Graphics were?

The long history of failure in econometrics is because it is predicated on a bad axiom that of continuous functions. Human desire and human action vary in all human beings all the time which cannot be quantified. A better approach is to use graph theory, lattice theory, and functional integration to find bounds on inequalitites from which trends can be observed. The future is always opaque! Economics is the 'science' with the worst results, it really should not be called a hard science but a social science. No other discipline fails as often, or has as many bad results as economics/econometrics. This result is from an arrogant post doc who has yet to learn how little he knows. "An educated man knows how little he knows." ~Marquis De Laplace

I was an engineering manager for a NASA primae contractor for almost a decade, I have some experience. The "tether" will be multiple materials, wires, cable, sheathing etc, thus will be anisotropic so you will need a stress tensor for each material (now you will have to solve systems of partial differential equations). Each material will be in the non-linear zone which means solutions do not exist at all so the Stable Manifold Theorem will have to be invoked in order to create a "model". This model will not be real, but will be something that can be used for computation. The forces of destruction will be real and cannot be vanguished by saying that they approach zero (just becuase you want them to) and can be neglected. A finite element grid will have to be set up over the entire 100,000km tether, this will be way to large for any currently conceivable computer system. Grid computing won't wok cbecuase the grid synchronization overhead will be greater than the computstion itself, unless you want to wait an eternity. The forces themselves will be gravity, lift, drag, friction, surface boundary friction, plus viscous forces from the atmosphere and the solar wind. The tether will be a geodesic which means we will have to factor in the anisotropic natures of the forces as well as the materials. Do not forget magnetic forces since this cable will have a current in a magnetic, coriolis forces since it will be in orbit around a prolate obloid Stop reading science fiction, and sober up pal, the last one snapped and this one would snap as well except it will never be built, NASA actually having acquired some experience here. The rudeness of quantum mechanics, beyond non-linearity, is that all bonds strengths are finite which acts as a bound on such silliness.

This is folly, and as usual we want taxpayers to pick up the tab. The tether would snap long before it got to be 100,000km long. The non-linear forces would snap it. NASA already tried this less than a mile long in space and it snapped.

Of course it is sick, NO ONE writes software for free. This is the big lie of open source. All participants have ulterior motives, get a better job, be seen as an expert (when in fact you are not), start a money loser and hope deep pockets will buy you out with a big pay day so you really did not work for free (Red Hat/JBoss). Once the money never comes the old operant conditioning kicks in and the extinction response is on its way. Bill Gates was right (as always) stop stealing software and pay for it! What about all the crippled enterprises that have bought all this half-ass ware? XP Programming where programmers rule, not managers, where schedules are impossible to predict (think about that one). The code is "too cheap to measure" like java: write once, debug forever. The worst thing a business can have is someone else's source code, they want a product that works and the support that goes with it. Sun has the been at the forefront of wrecking the IT industry with this disingenuous crap. Solaris lost on the desktop, it lost in the data center and is draining the American economy with the illusion of free ware. Scott McNealy is the anti-christ of IT. He sells the maxmimum of his stock as the SEC will allow while the stockeholders take it from behoind and his disatrous business model sucks equity doen the big unix hole. Here's the source code is a virtual 'F*ck You letter'. I learned that bitter lesson more than 15 years ago when a vendor called and asked where I wanted the 1 million plus lines of source code escrow to be delivered. I said the null file! The future is not whayt it used to be, blame Scott McNealy, but you'll have yo do it from outside the bars of his gated community. Gates beat him like a rented mule. Unix is a dead horse, dismount and bury it. Have fun "worling" form your linux desktop

You are right on the money with the tin foil hat! However you might want to put it under a scully cap, run it all the way down to your shoulder, make the breathing holes point down. Also put on a pair of welding goggles since they will have a high metal content or glasses made from leaded crystal. Don't wear a paper dress the spark the hat gives off could ignite it. You may also want to put a kevlar vest on with a nice aluminum foil covering so the tasers will not work either. No amount of legislation will make Gauss's law go away.