Scott Adams Thread (Garfield Cartoonist)

[Piotrsko]

Escape velocity on the moon is somewhere around baseball pitching speed. 150 is orbital.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

Escape velocity on the moon is somewhere around baseball pitching speed. 150 is orbital.

I did mention it's about 2,200 MPH. A couple, 3x faster than a bullet and you're there. Practically nothing. Imagine firing a gun where the projectile persists in orbit forever. Government better not put up road signs on the moon, or the rednecks will put an insane amount of ordinance in orbit.

[freebeard]

Big data analysis could find an orbit that passes the maximum number of lunalogical features below their maximum height.

[redpoint5]

Enjoyed episode 1989. His take about Bill Gates is similar to mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DflF_c9ZE6Y

[freebeard]

This part?

...but he does a bad job of not looking like a monster...

Insofar as the island hopping, his ex-wife said it didn't help their marriage. I got to wondering if she is using the proceeds with evil intent the way Lauren Jobs and Bezos' ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, have.

8 Takeaways From Bill Gates' AMA: Banning Billionaires, His Friendship With Warren Buffett, and Why He Is Buying So Much Farmland
The Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation opened up to Reddit once again.

By Entrepreneur Staff
January 13, 2023
Bill Gates took to Reddit this week for his 11th Ask Me Anything (AMA), and over the course of the session, he answered questions about climate change, the ethics of being an extremely rich person, and some of the conspiracy theories revolving around his business practices.

I'll have to go ahead and disagree here.

if you ask me has he done anything ever in his life that would alarm me I would say probably
probably I don't know what it is but probably so I don't I'm not defending him of all
things I'm not telling you he's an angel not telling you he won't do anything to you tomorrow but at the moment it's hard

I know exactly what alarmed me --- he took the baby computer industry and perverted it to his own end, to be the richest dude in the World. Which World will never regain the Intellectual Property that was smothered in the crib.

He went from 'embrace. extend, extinguish' to providing a Central Registry as an attack vector so Windows was uniquely vulnerable to bad actors. Best money I ever made in my life was helping people pick up the pieces of their broken lives on the Norton Antivirus help line.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

This part?

Yeah, but more so that nobody is comprised of entirely evil or entirely good. That's essentially what Scott was saying, but he wasn't doing a good job of not looking like a clot.

Insofar as the island hopping, his ex-wife said it didn't help their marriage. I got to wondering if she is using the proceeds with evil intent the way Lauren Jobs and Bezos' ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, have.

I'm both dismayed that the truth is delayed in those matters, and agree with Scott that presumption of innocence is necessary. I wouldn't trust Gates around my (future) teen daughters, but I'm also not ready to Tweet about his pedo motivations to rescue people.

I'll have to go ahead and disagree here.

I've been waiting over a decade for you to be direct.

I know exactly what alarmed me --- he took the baby computer industry and perverted it to his own end, to be the richest dude in the World. Which World will never regain the Intellectual Property that was smothered in the crib.

He went from 'embrace. extend, extinguish' to providing a Central Registry as an attack vector so Windows was uniquely vulnerable to bad actors. Best money I ever made in my life was helping people pick up the pieces of their broken lives on the Norton Antivirus help line.

Scott has recently been mentioning how in our youth we do foolish things, and things done in our youth are not likely to be a good representation of who we've become.

To your point, I don't have firm opinions on many things. Gates probably exploited people early on. The Internet Explorer monopoly ruling seemed kinda dumb. You're a monopoly because you include certain things with the product you sell? Is my local Ixtapa a tortilla chip monopoly because they include unlimited chips with any meal? If someone offers more enticing tortilla chips, can I not choose to eat those instead? Just because people are clotberts doesn't mean someone has acted maliciously.

Registry... that's a design choice, not something intentionally done to screw people over.

From my understanding, there's a trade-off of providing a broader platform and restricting function to simplify and secure the environment. Windohs is roughly the middle between something like Linux with an open source and maximum customization, and iOS where you can't send a file via bluetooth or perform other basic functions because it's assumed you're too stupid.

Show me something specific Gates has said or a confirmed action I should be dismayed about, and I'll agree. I'm just not aware of anything specific at the moment. Sure, I'm not thrilled about him drinking too much of the progressive Kool Aid, but as long as he's not saying we need to fund sex changes for tweens, I'm not too worried.

Water in 3rd world countries is good. Trying to solve next-gen nuclear is good... I might not agree with every endeavor gates engages with, but attempting the next thing is something commendable. Providing an example of what not to do is valuable.

[freebeard]

Registry... that's a design choice, not something intentionally done to screw people over

Sure was convenient for the Three Letter Agencies. All the petty crime it enabled was just an oopsie-doodle.

Show me something specific Gates has said or a confirmed action I should be dismayed about, and I'll agree.

"640K should be enough for anyone"

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Sure was convenient for the Three Letter Agencies. All the petty crime it enabled was just an oopsie-doodle.



"640K should be enough for anyone"

I'm not familiar with the registry "crime".

"640k" is a wrong prediction, not a heinous proclamation.

In high school a kid told me he was building a home network, and I laughed an asked if he's too lazy to transfer data with floppy (3.5") disks, or even better yet, invest in a Zip Drive. Nobody would have a home network in the future, I predicted.

Internet on cell phones, that will never take off considering the cost and subpar performance compared to home internet.

SSDs are vastly superior! I proclaim that 51% of storage will be SSDs in 2 years, said me in 2008. I was only off by a little more than a decade. People are still buying a lot of spinning storage.


Most everything is obvious in hindsight. DLLs and the registry might make sense when computing is expensive, but not make sense when storage is dirt cheap. We make engineering decisions that make sense in the moment, and then paint into a corner. That's not a crime.

[freebeard]

I'm not familiar with the registry "crime".

Not the crime, the vector. The TLAs have moved on to social media.

DLLs and the registry might make sense when computing is expensive, but not make sense when storage is dirt cheap.

Nothing to do with storage. DOS had a architectural limit and Gates was gaslighting people about that limitation. There was an extended memory kludge.

Windows was a 'reimagining' of Apple's Macintosh OS. Apple used a 'circle of managers' architecture cribbed from the Japanese who got it from W. Edwards Deming. Windows uses a hierarchical structure with a single point of failure.

[redpoint5]

Gates designing a buggy OS that's exploitable doesn't give me cause to dislike him or consider all his motives and ideas to be bad.

I'm not a fan of Gates, but neither am I going to consider him as a "bad guy", at least not until I've become aware of sufficient evidence. Even then, bad guys sometimes have good ideas. I'll consider those ideas individually, without bias, to the extent I can manage.

Trying to figure out water seems like a good idea. Trying to figure out new nuclear power seems like a good idea. Doing that in China seems like a bad idea. Having no other option because of NIMBY US policy seems like a bad idea.