Bill Gates Is More Admired Than the Pope 470
walterbyrd writes "Americans admire Bill Gates more than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and even Glenn Beck. The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist was named the fifth most admired man of 2010, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll."
Problem: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Problem: (Score:5, Funny)
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Hey, never underestimate the power of "Has never covered up a massive multinational paedophilia ring" on your CV...
But everybody lies on their CV.
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The dogma of papal infallibility is widely misunderstood.
According to the Catholic church, only papal pronouncements made ex cathedra are covered by papal infallibility. That is to say, in order for it to apply, he has to make a big deal about making A Pronouncement. See Wikipedia.
So the Pope can lose pub quizzes without invalidating his own claimed role.
(I'm an atheist by the way)
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Sure, why make a thoughtful comment when you can be a jerk.
Because you have the papal prerogative?
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They were all male. Male mosquitos only feed on plant nectar.
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Heh. You can sex the pupae based off of size: the females are bigger than the males and you can get them with ~95% accuracy. There is a difference in 4th inst
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Yes. And the one reference I did find (https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/3714/1/V49N05_188.pdf [osu.edu]) tends to support your own findings.
I haven't found anything about the male/female ratio of adult mosquitoes in the wild.
Nonetheless, in the summertime, I fairly frequently find females in my house as they creep through open doors and holes in the screens. I very seldom find a male.
Perhaps it is something to do with life expectancy (do males live shorter lives?), or attraction (obviously, males have no re
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Many people simply assume that he has to be smart in order to have created Microsoft and made so much money. In a way, they are correct, but it doesn't necessarily mean he was the smartest technically, which is what also many assume.
I think if you got together many of the technical thinkers of our time and asked them who the 20 best computer innovators were, Gates would have a hard time on that list (as well as Jobs) and it would be filled with people whom the average guy would never have heard of. Gates' real accomplishment is being able to take other people's ideas, dumb them down, and give people a wink and a nod to make people think they are his without really lying.
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Cool, fine, but that's not what the poll was asking. And they were asking a large mixture of people.
I'm sure if you asked a bunch of astronomers or musicians or theologians who they admire most you'd get some names the average
Re:Problem: (Score:4, Insightful)
The proles have no taste. The fact they like Billy boy is nothing to get excited about.
Half of them probably read Ayn Rand and think they are Atlas.
Re:Problem: (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates is very intelligent. He wrote significant parts of Microsoft first set of products, he can code (or at least he could in the early 80s). In business he was a deceitful backstabbing manipulative bastard. And now his is spending billions on his philanthropy. I won't dismiss that Gates is/was an ass, but he does deserve some credit.
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How do you know that? Maybe many people admire him for building such a towering business as Microsoft.
Precisely why most people hate him. I like his philanthropy, though.
Re:Problem: (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but Obama is so far ahead in this poll that the others are all just a bunch of no account losers in comparison; Gates included. The message of this poll is not that Gates comes in ahead of the Pope; it's that Obama overshadows all the others put together.
Re:Problem: (Score:5, Funny)
One also needs to consider the competition. George the Clueless, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Clintons (both of them!!). With about three exceptions you could distill all the moral courage, integrity, and good sense of the folks on that list into a droplet about the size of an undernourished bacteria.
Upon reviewing the list, I think there is only one conclusion. We're doomed.
Duh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
Another thing, Catholicism never got out of beta. They are still working on the same code base as 2000 years ago. Can't keep people's attentions if you don't add new features.
I was raised devout Catholic. I got over it.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing, Catholicism never got out of beta. They are still working on the same code base as 2000 years ago. Can't keep people's attentions if you don't add new features.
You need to study your theology. Continuous implementation of new ideas. Slowly. And always with claiming its Gods will and its always been that way. But by no means the same codebase. Things like no married priests and stealing all the pagan holidays for themselves (christmas, etc) are much more recent than 2000 years. Think "GNU hurd" speed not "Linux" speed. Cathedral vs bazzar, literally.
Now if you want programming analogies, try codebase forks like the protestant revolution and holy wars like vi vs emacs.
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"You need to study your theology. Continuous implementation of new ideas."
LOL! Theology is nothing but inventing lame excuses for lame myths. Courtier's reply sums it quite nicely: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php [scienceblogs.com]
Theology was not able to adequately answer even the simplest questions: "Why there is evil?", "Why there are different religions?", "Should we rely on faith rather than facts?".
In this regard theology is even worse than philosophy (I'm not including theology as a
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
Thing is, when they really started adding new features in earnest during the Renaissance, some guys (like Martin Luther and Henry VIII) started getting so pissed off about that they forked the project. This led to a highly fragmented market and conflicts almost as bad as the Unix Wars.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Informative)
As long as a given saint or ritual has been approved by the Vatican for compatibility with the main codebase, any catholic individual or institution is free to snap it in to his/her/its devotional architecture, with each addition delivering its own fresh and exciting mixture of content, sightseeing destinations, and spiritual services.
(and, in practice, their is fairly broad acceptance of those catholics who, looking for a leaner, less resource-hungry, faith, use 'cLite' or similar tools to strip theoretically-required-but-architecturally-optional modules out of the base install.)
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
The Dali Lama, while he certainly strikes me as a nice, chill kind of guy, totally wouldn't mind having some people like him in the neighborhood, is a living PR machine on a scale that makes any president look like a piker: "Hey little kid, we've determined, by the traditions handed down through centuries of theocratic feudalism, that you are the reincarnated Lama." "Ok, so, I guess that I get to live in exile and jet-set around making serene and innoffensive to everyone except the Chinese statements about freedom and human dignity and stuff, with somebody else picking up the bill?" "Yeah, pretty much. As long as you aren't a total prick about it, you'll come out smelling like roses."
And the Pope? Our current bishop of Rome is, undoubtedly, a smart guy; but he is a pure reactionary water-carrier(and probable un-indicted criminal for his work during his 'congregation for the doctrine of the faith' days) for an organization that freely veers between covering up criminality and giving terrible health and family planning advice to desperately poor people. For fun, he occasionally appears in a cloth-of-gold robe on the steps of his gigantic marble live-in-museum-of-priceless-art to give a talk on how charity is a virtue and money-hungry atheism is a scourge upon the world.
I am deeply under-impressed with our current president, as I was sort of hoping to move away from our policies of unending foreign adventurism and unrestrained abuses by ever-multiplying clandestine agencies; but the idea that the Dali Lama or Pope deserve much in the way of respect and esteem seems pretty dodgy.
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The Dali Lama, while he certainly strikes me as a nice, chill kind of guy, totally wouldn't mind having some people like him in the neighborhood, is a living PR machine on a scale that makes any president look like a piker: "Hey little kid, we've determined, by the traditions handed down through centuries of theocratic feudalism, that you are the reincarnated Lama." "Ok, so, I guess that I get to live in exile and jet-set around making serene and innoffensive to everyone except the Chinese statements about freedom and human dignity and stuff, with somebody else picking up the bill?" "Yeah, pretty much. As long as you aren't a total prick about it, you'll come out smelling like roses."
Obviously you've got no clue as to the culture you're dealing with. The Chinese are a people that are very concerned with saving face, which is why you so often see the government throwing people in prison for saying the sorts of things that the Dali Lama is saying. There's a cultural expectation that the Chinese government is trying to enforce of harmony, even if it means that the people have to do without freedom. The sorts of comments that the Dali Lama has made are not ones that would offend a more bala
eww (Score:4, Insightful)
the fact that Glenn Beck and Billy Graham are even on this list makes me want to vomit.
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1. Barack Obama (22%)
2. George W. Bush (5%)
3. Bill Clinton (4%)
4. Nelson Mandela (2%)
5. Bill Gates (2%)
6. (tie) Pope Benedict XVI (2%)
6. (tie) Rev. Billy Graham (2%)
8. (tie) Jimmy Carter (2%)
8. (tie) Glenn Beck (2%)
10. The Dalai Lama (1%)
Personally, I think those ties are hilarious.
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I've got news for you, but Glen Beck is not a political figure.
You don't have hold a political office in order to be a political figure. And you can be other things too, like a talk show host and still be a political figure. I'd give as an example of his qualification as a political figure, his rally in Washington, DC.
One more proof (Score:2)
that America's true religion is money.
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Maybe rich Americans give to charity in an attempt to buy their souls back.
Anyway... I remember in the 90s that it was commonly known in the tech communities that Bill Gates gave less to charity (by percentage) than a welfare mom. Because it was so well known I always thought that the Gates foundation was partially for P.R. That doesn't lessen the good they have done and I think has been more and more about really helping people as Gates has gotten older.
Doing it wrong (Score:2)
That depends. You also have to include all of the Star Wars fans who sympathize with the Empire when you count the pope's supporters, since everyone knows he's the preincarnation of Emperor Palpatine.
News? (Score:2)
What is there to admire about the Pope?
Then again, there's not too much to admire about Bill Gates if you consider that the damage he's done with Windows may outstrip the philanthropic work he's done. I wonder how many homework assignments/theses etc have been lost to BSODs, and how much money people have lost to malware and zombie-assisted spam scams, etc.
A list of shady people (Score:2)
Most of them on the list are political and religious personalities. I wouldn't put any of them as admirable, they are all just very personable people who wants everyone else to think they way they do. Actually with that List Bill Gates is probably the most admirable one there. He is actually trying to make a difference where everyone else just talks about it.
I admire Jay Miner and Jack Tramiel more (Score:4, Interesting)
Also Nolan Bushnell. Most people have never heard of these guys, due to MS and Apple becoming dominant and rewriting history, but these guys were the True pioneers. Nolan Bushnell created the first successful videogames company. Atari was dominant from circa 1972 to 1984.
Commodore's Jack Tramiel had a "business is war" philosophy that put 30 million ~$200 computers in people's homes, and forced the competitors to drop their prices too (from the previous ~$3000 standard).
And Jay Miner practically invented the multimedia computer. First with the 128 color Atari video chip, then the more-advanced 128 color ANTIC used in the 400/800 computers, and eventually the 4000+ color GPU inside the Amiga. He also pioneered music-quality sound with his Paula device, and multitaking for home computers. It took the Mac/PC world ten years to catch-up.
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He also pioneered music-quality sound with his Paula device
No he didn't.
He copied, cheaply, from the synthesizer industry.. where more than a few companies were using sample-based synths.
Commodore should have stuck with the designer of the SID chip, because that guy is the one who revolutionized computer audio when he went to Ensoniq.
That 4-channel Amiga chip wasnt even the best in computers at the time, which happened to be in the AppleIIgs which sported a 16-channel Ensoniq DOC2 chip... and each channel was panable too. Fast foward a few years and the PC r
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FACT: Jay Miner did not, as you had claimed, pioneer music quality sound with Paula.
Just suck it up and live with your error, rude fan boy.
He is the lesser of two evils (Score:4, Interesting)
Some one had to say it.
Even Glenn Beck?? (Score:2, Funny)
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Maybe some thought that the poll was referring to Beck, purveyor of vaguely folkish alterna-rock?
Margin of Error? (Score:5, Informative)
The sample size quoted was 1019. At 95% confidence level, the simple statistical error is about 3%. That puts basically everyone from 2-9 at the same amount of admiration...
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Glad I'm not the only statistician in here.
Essentially, what this survey really says is that most Americans at least know their current president and remember the last one.
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what this survey really says is that most Americans at least know their current president and remember the last one.
No, it says that 22% of Americans know their current president, 5% think the last one is still in the White House, and 4% think the next to the last president is still there.
Great Choices (Score:2)
If you ask whether I'd rather have surprise diarrhea while having sex or while making a speech in front of a thousand people, I guess I'd still have to pick one.
Really? (Score:2)
I haven't read TFA, so i wouldn't be surprised if those weren't the only options, but from my perspective at least that's a pretty weird selection to choose for comparison.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd have to take Gates from those four as well.
Gates is monopolistic businessman, who has got out of that business now and is doing something worthwhile with the ill gotten gains.
Beck is either insane or an entertainer playing with fire.
The Pope and the Dalai Lama are both actively evil.
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Duh, Bill Gates never covered up for molesters (Score:5, Insightful)
People are distrustful of religion in general, and the Pope in particular. Bill Gates comes with none of that baggage. Aside from a few of us /. geeks, Bill Gates' reputation as both a philanthropist and entrepreneur is pretty much spotless among the general public. And, among much of the American public, Companies like MS and Apple are also seen as some of the few bright spots in an economy that has seen American manufacturing going into the shitter for the last 40 years. It wouldn't surprise me if Steve Jobs beat the Pope too.
No shit! (Score:2)
Why would anyone admire the pope? An idiot with a silly hat, that's all there is to him.
That special kind of love (Score:2)
Everyone was Expecting the Spanish Inquisition! (Score:3)
Pope Benedict XVI [wikimedia.org]
Americans admire wealth (Score:2)
Relative Terms (Score:2)
I hate Bill Gates, but I admire him more than I do the Pope. Yes, that's how much I don't admire the Pope at all.
I Love Beck! (Score:2)
Beck is awesome...Two Turntables, baby! I didn't know his first name was Glen.
Take a look at the list and judge the voters (Score:4, Interesting)
Most admired men, Top 3: Obama, Bush, Clinton.
Most admired women, Top 3: Clinton, Palin, Oprah.
So the top 3 admired men are the 3 most recent presidents (in order of forgetting). The top 3 women are two loudmouths and a dimwit. Pick yourself who is what.
I refuse to believe that this survey is representative for the US population. I know too many US people to simply assume that this is what Americans admire.
I'd rather have the gut feeling that this is what could be reached at home during daytime, i.e. when people who have a job go to work...
Everything old is new again (Score:2)
40 years ago, John Lennon said that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.
OTOH, I have never cursed the Pope by name, but I have often cursed Bill Gates while recovering from a crash or a lock-up.
Because .... (Score:3)
... Windows is a bigger religion.
(Ducking and running)
Glenn Beck Admired? (Score:3)
That is a truly troubling thought.
Why should the pope be admired? (Score:5, Interesting)
Outside of Catholic bashing by competing denominations, why should someone admire the Pope, either the office itself or Benedict personally? Aside from the extremely mixed record of the Catholic Church, Benedict was personally involved in covering up sex abuse scandals in Europe. When he wasn't doing that, he was pushing a conservative brand of Catholicism that rejected both abortion and birth control, and is rigidly anti-gay. He's not a moral exemplar, he hasn't accomplished great works of charity or mercy, and he's generally a force for nothing but the preservation of a worldwide institution's survival and autonomy.
Bill Gates, Glenn Beck (Score:3)
Hell, I admire Bill Gates more than Glenn Beck too.
I barely feel like punching Bill Gates in the face a tenth as much as I want to punch Glenn Beck.
Even more than Glenn Beck? (Score:3)
Glenn Beck? (Score:3)
Re:ADMIRED??? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ADMIRED??? (Score:5, Informative)
Philanthropy and the fact that Gates didn't run an organization which hid and shuffled its pedophiles around the world.
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You don't know that. Maybe Microsoft is just **WAY BETTER** at hiding and shuffling pedophiles around the world than the Catholic Church is?
Re:ADMIRED??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ADMIRED??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The man gave billions of his personal fortune to help make real change possible. Tangible things that save lives. The Pope may have done some great things too--but his biggest accomplishment is being politically successful in the church. That may require a higher level of personal generosity than does Bill Gates' decision to give billions away once he had them. But the church would have done good with a different pope. And most billionaires don't give so much of their fortune away.
Part of it may also be the institutional problem--people think of leaders as the individual doing something great more than of the individual making slight political changes to a major established institution.
A lot of it will also be the money. A lot of Americans have problems in their life that money can solve. Spiritual guidance may help them be content with their lot in life, and make them happier--but it doesn't solve the fact that you're out of work while your spouse has cancer and needs the insurance, or that your son or daughter needs money for college, or for legal bills about one really stupid thing they did. Money makes these things easier. It doesn't always make them easy, but it makes them easier.
Sounds like a classic book plot (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I can't shake the feeling that I've read that kind of argumentation before. Is it ok to do something evil, just because then you'll use (some of) the ill gotten gains to do something good? Oh, right, that's Dostoevsky's "Crime And Punishment".
Turns out that in America you can actually be admired for being a modern day Raskolnikov.
It also turns out that you don't even have to do all that soul-searching and all, either.
With one important difference (Score:5, Insightful)
With one important difference: Jean Valjean's fortune isn't a direct result of his crimes. He doesn't get to be the good guy by robbing Paul to give to Peter, no matter how far apart the two events are. Whereas Gates is getting to be the public philantropist hero with money made by breaking the antitrust laws in the '90's.
That's got yet another significant difference (Score:3)
That's got yet another significant difference, though.
The likes of Robin Hood and later Dick Turpin were lionized precisely because of a rise in popular sentiment against the era's equivalent of Bill Gates. Especially in the 18'th and 19'th centuries, as the slow rise of industrialism created a class of people even poorer and more exploited than even the medieval serfs had ever been.
And we're also talking an age when child labour rose to the extent of deliberately planning some mine shafts so they could onl
Re:ADMIRED??? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't like Catholics, however even I know John Paul II was a much better person than Gates. The Current Pope just seems like he doesn't care.
So we do need to quantify which Pope. The Pope that is or the one that was while Bill Gates was in office.
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More than the pope, less then GW Bush... (Score:2)
Read it and weep. I assume you're packing your bags already...
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Re:He only donated enormous amounts of money... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of drug lords donate enormous amounts of money to their cities neighborhoods. Go look in Columbia. It is one of the reasons they are adored in their own hometowns. Doesn't change the fact that they are drug lords and will kill people to make a profit.
So, perhaps we should look at the TOTALITY of Bill Gates career, rather than just what he did with the money after he got more than he could ever spend.
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Outside of slashdot not many people care that they're using Internet Explorer instead of Netscape. They just want it to be cheap, to be sure it connects to Facebook.
And has a working Flash player...
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Re:He only donated enormous amounts of money... (Score:4, Informative)
Again, half the crowd on /. likes to intentionally misunderstand in order to karma whore.
To those that really misunderstand: It is a worst case comparison. If you can see why someone as offensive as a drug lord can be adored, then it explains why someone less offensive (yet offensive) like Bill Gates can be adored. You still look at the damage he has done over the years to smaller businesses, which is not trivial.
What is the alternative argument? (Score:3)
That rich entrepreneurs should just do like Steve Jobs and keep it all for themsevles? Or are you arguing that no one should be allowed to be a rich entrepreneur?
Re:He only donated enormous amounts of money... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're trivializing what the cartels have done to those countries and the people who live within them by comparing Microsoft's relatively benign practices to the murders, rapes, enslavement and atrocities committed by the cartels.
Yes, Microsoft lead by Gates (and he was not the ONLY player there) has done some bad stuff. So had Oracle, so has Apple, so has *insert name of ANY corporation* - it's part of the whole corporate concept. Corporations are, by design, essentially sociopathic entities bent on profit at all costs.
But the fact of the matter is, there are lots of extremely wealthy people out there - people who, in many cases have made their fortunes in FAR more "evil" fashions than Gates, who have been responsible for killing hundreds or thousands of people and poisoned huge swaths of the Earth - who do exactly fuckall for anyone but themselves.
Looking at the ENTIRETY of Gates' career and comparing it to most other people - yes, Gates has done some rather admirable things and a few things that, since you decided to start comparing him and his organization to other groups - barely even rate on the scale of evil that corporations perpetrate every single day.
Re:He only donated enormous amounts of money... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I suspect it has to do with the fact that he as the "classical robber baron" thing going on, in an age where that is largely extinct. Back in the robber baron days, you had highly recognizable individuals who piled up huge fortunes by dubiously ethical/legal means(monopoly power on a scale that actually made the Sherman antitrust act popular, shooting strikers, that sort of thing); but then spent a pret
Re:It's a given (Score:5, Insightful)
Flamebait? It has been proven that the current pope personally acted to relocate molesters and hide the evidence of their misdeeds. If not a child molester himself, he is directly responsible for child molestation.
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It's okay. Moderation is just a number.
Someone felt that my post that is critical of the pope was designed to draw flames. Should I hold my tongue because I fear the censorship of small minded people with power?
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And yet they have so much in common.
What? (Score:3)
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Yep, none of them were married to Winnie Madela
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The pope is a cunt, a backwards, über-conservative dickhead who would rather ignore the problems facing his millions of subjects than take any real action. Problems like pedophilia, AIDS and crippling poverty and hunger.
Ignore? You mean aggravate, right?
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Gates is well-known for the predatory business practices by those of us in IT - but what about those who aren't?
I wonder if he's just seen as someone who started from relatively modest beginnings and has since built a huge company and an enormous fortune. Seen like that, he would appear to be a perfectly reasonable person to both respect and admire.
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Actually, he looks more like Palpatine [ebaumsworld.com].