Comments on: 15 Big Cheats and Fakers Who Won

By: Beau

Beau — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:09:16 +0000

Paying someone for QDOS wasn’t the cheat. The fact that he sold a licensing agreement to IBM before he purchased the OS is what makes him a cheat. A fantastic one, but a cheat nonetheless.

By: Whoa

Whoa — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:23:44 +0000

Paying someone for a license, modding the software and re-selling it under an new name isn’t theft ?
What is it, then ?

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:38:30 +0000

Paying someone $50k for an operating system is not “theft” as some of the comments would like to believe. I believe it’s called “commerce”.

By: r

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:37:48 +0000

I used to work w/ Tim Patterson at MS. He was pretty happy about the whole licensing of QDOS and his subsequent deal at MS. I always had the sense that he felt he made much more $ through the MS employment than he would have otherwise…

By: JJJ

JJJ — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:13:01 +0000

I read the James Frey book before he was outed as a fraud. I thought it was an interesting read, but kept thinking there was something wrong. I’ve killed my share of brain cells, and the truth is that you just don’t remember these events all that vividly as he described (if at all).

By: Steph

Steph — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:21:32 +0000

Umm. I don’t know if you can say Milli Vanilli “won.” One of them killed himself later after all the jokes and insults. Not really a win

By: Fabris

Fabris — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:04:36 +0000

What? No Philip Glass?

By: jose

jose — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:36:07 +0000

XEROX – Bill stole everything from the mouse…..

By: Scottw232

Scottw232 — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:04:23 +0000

And to Anonymous,
Have you used Google and or Wikipedia for Nikolai Tesla? Do it sometimes.

And when you get done with that, try Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt8Y93k0pB0

By: Scottw232

Scottw232 — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:59:56 +0000

To all the Bill Gates Comments defending him.

Yes, Bill Gates did do some pretty amazing things, and it lead to a big break in the tech world, but come on, it wasn’t his original idea, he got it from someone else…Paid for or not. It’s like turning in a research paper that you paid a geek to write for you, it’s still wrong.

Enjoy this article for what it is. I thought this was a very interesting article. Good job. And to all the people that don’t agree or like it? Why don’t you write a better one? Go on… Write a WHOLE article about how GREAT Bill Gates is, I’m sure it will be a literary work of genius.

By: Luftmensch

Luftmensch — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:46:52 +0000

Try Alexander Graham Bell. Biggest, most successful fraud until recently.

By: Wonderin'

Wonderin' — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:54:00 +0000

When did Oprah change her last name to “herself”?

Man, what a snarky piece of unsupported, undocumented envy and bitterness….

By: Gene Callahan

Gene Callahan — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:52:18 +0000

“Bill Gates stole BASIC (built and unlicensed copy of Dartmouth’s invention. Dartmouth didn’t sue because they wanted to continue the widespread adoption of the language.)”

WTF are you talking about? Why would they need a license to write a BASIC interpreter? People write compilers and interpreters all the time for languages without needing to “license” the language.

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:17:50 +0000

Hey Brent, throw your mom in there. You a Jets fan? EVERYONE in sports cheats… it happens all the time, as for football, I could care less, don’t be a hypocrite.

Who the hell cares about a fake picture of a jumping wolf, or a picture of some douche that wrote a fake book and got his balls snipped by Okrah.

Bernie Madoff. Plain, simple and whomever wrote this piece of trash of an article should be writing for the NY Post. Utter shite.

By: Bruno Marone

Bruno Marone — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:43:09 +0000

You forgot to mention the ancestor of INTERNET….THE TELEPHONE

The Telephone was invented by ANTONIO MEUCCI in 1854 and patented in 1971 but he didn´t have the money to renew the patent and it was later assigned in 1876 to GRAHAM BELL

By: Gord

Gord — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:15:18 +0000

Do I dare mention “Lisa” in the same breath with Bill Gates? (Avoids the Apple fans’ great and furious anger)

By: Brody

Brody — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:30:51 +0000

Bill Gates stole BASIC (built and unlicensed copy of Dartmouth’s invention. Dartmouth didn’t sue because they wanted to continue the widespread adoption of the language.) He lied and misrepresented what he was going to use QDOS for, and Gary Kildall of Seattle Computer Products eventually won a long, protracted lawsuit against Microsoft regarding the re-licensing of QDOS to IBM. Even though Kildall won, he got peanuts relative to the value of DOS to Microsoft. All you idiot Microsoft fanbois really need to learn a little more about the man you hold in high regard. IMO he is a liar and a thief. Microsoft has continually locked out the competition through evil and illegal acts, and are a convicted monopolist. Go read about Embrace-Extend-Extinguish (invented by IBM, BTW) and you might learn how Microsoft has stayed on top so long. He may have been a good coder once, but ALL his predictions that he bothered to put in a book were wrong.

By: Brent

Brent — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:06:12 +0000

Where are the New England Patriots?

By: rebeliousTexan

rebeliousTexan — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:42:22 +0000

Where is George W. Bush and The Republican Party in this list? They helped him cheat his way into the Presidency and surely deserve a nomination. From the wide spread voter repression in mostly poor and black areas of Florida (i.e. Democrats) in the ‘00 election to the confirmed election machine rigging and anomalous results in Ohio in the ‘04 election, they have perpetrated the greatest cheat of all on the American public for 8 years.

By: Mikey

Mikey — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:09:34 +0000

I’m sorry, but the AC generator and distribution systems were not Edison’s idea, or his design, but Nikola Tesla’s. Edison’s own idea was DC power, which is more dangerous than AC at the same power levels, and also dismally inefficient to distribute as it looses far more energy when transmitted through power lines.

By: ninjitsioux

ninjitsioux — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:43:23 +0000

Bernard “Bernie” Madoff with your money thats where he’s at

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:39:57 +0000

This article was mildly interesting until you got to Bill Gates and then it just turned to complete garbage. Really, you have no business writing if you cant go to Google or Wikipedia and look up your topics.

Others have lambasted you for Bill Gates so I’ll skip that but what really ticks me off is your idiot crap about Thomas Edison. No he didn’t invent the incandescent filament, Davy Humphry did that 70 years previous.

What Edison did was invent the *system* of electric lighting that was required to actually delivery a marketable product to peoples homes. Part of that was perfecting the filament and bulb itself that had frustrated so many others up to that point. The most important part however is the generator and distribution components.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb

Try using Google and Wikipedia sometime; it’s easy and fun!

And it will keep you from looking completely retarded.

By: david wayne osedach

david wayne osedach — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:33:59 +0000

I still can’t believe how Octo-mom pulled it off. From phony plastic surgery to over-insemination she knew exactly what she wanted. And went for it!

By: Jess woods

Jess woods — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:32:28 +0000

LOL, seems like the 80s were just yesterday!

Jess
http://www.online-privacy.int.tc

By: david

david — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:31:42 +0000

My favorite of the bunch? James Frey. After all the hype on Oprah I bought his book and stopped reading it mid-way as fraudulent. I gave it to our local library and they sold it for 25 cents.