HOWTO: Spend A Billion Dollars 525
shine-shine writes: "Forbes is running an article helping you figure out how to spend that spare billion you got laying around (don't you just hate when that happens?). Apparently, a geek would buy 500 black-market clones of himself, while the narcissist would most likely build "a monument similar in size and scale to Mount Rushmore, featuring his own face.""
I would... (Score:4, Funny)
Over the Moon (Score:2)
You'd almost certainly have to form a consortium to get that far up. In which case funding this [space.com] is probably a better idea.
After the philanthropy had worn down, I myself would tile a wall with these these [fujitsugeneral.co.jp] and hook them to a few of these [sgi.com]. And I would go absolutely nuts with other technotoys [wired.com].
whores (Score:5, Funny)
Re:whores (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:whores (Score:2)
That has got to be the most fucked up post to ever be rated insightful.
Scary part is, in this context, it actually is insightful.
Re:whores (Score:3, Insightful)
You do if you don't want to wonder if they're only interested in you for the money.
Re:whores (Score:3, Funny)
Woman: Yes!
Man: Will you f*ck me for $50?
Woman: You asshole! What kind of a woman do you think I am?
Man: We've already established that. Now we're just quibling over the price.
Re:whores (Score:2)
Yeah well, that doesn't work for everyone! Look at Bill Gates - no hot chicks
Re:whores (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory Office Space quote (Score:5, Funny)
Lawrence: I'll tell you what I'd do, man, two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had a million dollars I could hook that up, 'cause chicks dig a dude with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well the kind of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Easy... (Score:2)
Or sit down to try to get an interactive music license from the RIAA.
Re:Easy... (Score:2, Funny)
Pay someone to buy a new P4, video card, et al. Preferably someone female with little to no inhibitions and a french maid outfit.
Even easier... (Score:2)
What would you do with your billion? (Score:5, Funny)
You hardly need that much (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What would you do with your billion? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, it'd be worth $1b just to see the looks on Hilary Rosen's and Jack Valenti's faces when their paid for Senators told them to go and blow Cowboy Neal. Priceless!
Found a typo (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously, this is meant to say 6.00 . I haven't grown in decades, so I haven't needed a new pair.
And did you notice that the phrase 'take over the world' doesn't appear once?
I'd never clone myself (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine the possibilities!
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'd never clone myself (Score:2, Funny)
Prepare to wait... (Score:2)
Please supply the exact same conditions your girlfriend had growing up, since you can never be sure what was nature and wat was nurture...
Re:Prepare to wait... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I'd never clone myself (Score:2)
Think of the time... (Score:2)
Re:I'd never clone myself (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'd never clone myself (Score:5, Interesting)
Which brings up an interesting question. If you clone yourself, and have sex with yourself, are you gay, or is it masturbation? And if you clone you girlfriend, and sleep with them all, is it really cheating?
Harcourt Fenton Mudd! (Score:4, Funny)
-- Terry
I'd buy a whole ton of those desktop tank robots.. (Score:5, Funny)
Okay, there'd be a lot of casualties, but for a billion bucks, I think I could afford a fleet sizable enough that eventually, one of my little robot warriors will plant themselves on Bills ass^H^H^Hdesk.
Failing that, I'd just get an island in Thailand, a whole bunch of hot chicks, some serious nuclear technology, and I'd spend the rest of my life batting away hero types.
Nobody touches my bitches.
Nobody.
Speaking of Bill Gates... (Score:5, Informative)
$1 billion over 20 years to establish the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program, which will support promising minority students through college and some kinds of graduate school.
$750 million over five years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which includes the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, Unicef, pharmaceutical companies and the World Bank.
$350 million over three years to teachers, administrators, school districts and schools to improve America's K-12 education, starting in Washington State.
$200 million to the Gates Library Program, which is wiring public libraries in America's poorest communities in an effort to close the "digital divide."
$100 million to the Gates Children's Vaccine Program, which will accelerate delivery of lifesaving vaccines to children in the poorest countries of the world.
$50 million to the Maternal Mortality Reduction Program, run by the Columbia University School of Public Health.
$50 million to the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, to conduct research on promising candidates for a malaria vaccine.
$50 million to an international group called the Alliance for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer.
$50 million to a fund for global polio eradication, led by the World Health Organization, Unicef, Rotary International and the U.N. Foundation.
$40 million to the International Vaccine Institute, a research program based in Seoul, South Korea.
$28 million to Unicef for the elimination of maternal and neonatal tetanus.
$25 million to the Sequella Global Tuberculosis Foundation.
$25 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which is creating coalitions of research scientists, pharmaceutical companies and governments in developing countries to look for a safe, effective, widely accessible vaccine against AIDS.
Re:Speaking of Bill Gates... (Score:2)
But I bet any money he's got one of those little tanks with the extra camera attachment from ThinkGeek
Bill's donation schedule (Score:2, Insightful)
[Dons his skeptic's hat]
Guess what? You need Flash to even see the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program site. And when you do, it's strictly elitist. Bill's essentially trying to buy the allegience of the best and brightest students in America. Only. The kind of people who would probably succeed without his intervention.
Looks more like an investment than a donation.
Specifically, to equip them with Windows?
All those hundreds of millions pouring into the vaccination industry is getting a bit frightening, even if some of those are dupes. You don't eradicate most diseases by swamping them in vaccine, you eradicate them by improving people's living conditions. By and large, Bill isn't doing that.
If he really wanted to make a durable name for himself, Bill could do a lot more for those poor countries by giving them cheap access to space industry [space.com] with either a $5G seed donation or $10G to get the first one working.
Re:Bill's donation schedule (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's some food for thought: Have you caught any fucking POLIO lately? How bout some smallpox? Do you have any idea how many babies die each year because they weren't properly vaccinated? Living conditions is one thing, but to discredit vaccines is ludicrous.
Specifically, to equip them with Windows?
Not like he's putting Linux on them or anything. Jesus, he's trying to help out underdeveloped areas in our own fucking country, and all you can do is be skeptical, like it's all part of his evil plan for world domination. Would you rather have those libraries have no computers and still be checking out books from the sixties? Umm, don't think so.
Swinging with the Big Dicks, more like... (Score:2)
$750 million over five years to [...] the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, Unicef, pharmaceutical companies and the World Bank.
Seems more like he bought a ticket with the Trilateral Commission, more than anything else.
Betcha any money ol' Billy Boy has some strange, Egyptian-like architecture in his big cityhouse. Stuff that looks surprisingly like a big floating eye over a pyramid.
Damned cult members. Taking over the world, and not letting anyone else play along
Re:Bill's donation schedule (Score:4, Interesting)
$50 million to the Maternal Mortality Reduction Program, run by the Columbia University School of Public Health.
$50 million to the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, to conduct research on promising candidates for a malaria vaccine.
$50 million to an international group called the Alliance for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer.
$50 million to a fund for global polio eradication, led by the World Health Organization, Unicef, Rotary International and the U.N. Foundation.
$40 million to the International Vaccine Institute, a research program based in Seoul, South Korea.
$28 million to Unicef for the elimination of maternal and neonatal tetanus.
$25 million to the Sequella Global Tuberculosis Foundation.
$25 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which is creating coalitions of research scientists, pharmaceutical companies and governments in developing countries to look for a safe, effective, widely accessible vaccine against AIDS.
Taking out the ones that you bitched about, here is what is left. Still totals over $400 Million. How much have you given lately?
Re:I'd buy a whole ton of those desktop tank robot (Score:2)
Well, I'd buy myself and my family / close friends house + car etc....
And then, I'd hire geeks.... about 30. Good geeks... And then I'd fix up everything I think is wrong with linux, and create a totally new kick-ass desktop system ala OSX. And then i'd give it away, under the GPL.
I'd spend the rest of my life at my beachfront house, fishing, drinking beer, driving around in my cool cars, and generally having a good time
Re:I'd buy a whole ton of those desktop tank robot (Score:3, Funny)
--Homer Simpson
Land, land, and more land (Score:3, Informative)
- Vacation home in Northern Europe
- Ski Chalet (Rockies)
- Plot in a Banana Republic
Of course, also I'd need...
- Multi-million dollar yacht
- Plane
- Fleet of cars for each residence
- 1967 AMC Ambassador SST
Computers...
I can't, really....several offerings from Sun, a top-o-da-line TiBook (every single time they release one that's better, I'd get a new one), Cray.....
With the rest, I'd put it into a trust where the interest will be protected, and I'll live on the interest. At death, Uncle Sam will get a cut (unfortunately), and the rest will go to worthy causes of my choice (my alma mater, Debian project....)
Re:Land, land, and more land (Score:2)
Re:Land, land, and more land (Score:5, Funny)
Please let hitsquad@debian.org know when you get that billion dollars. The bequest acceleration team will take care of the rest.
how about... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:how about... (Score:2)
Yup.
And then he'll use it to destroy Tokyo.
id make a documentary about myself (Score:2, Funny)
"you slept with 37 actresses?!?!"
"in a row?!"
Re:id make a documentary about myself (Score:4, Funny)
Heck, it might kill you, but at least you'd die with a smile on your face, although they might have trouble getting the lid on the coffin...
How to spend it best (Score:3, Informative)
Saving Farscape [savefarscape.com].
How we southerners would spend it... (Score:5, Funny)
Either that or I'd do it the Bart Simpson way:
Me: One billion dollars on black!
Dealer: Aaaaand, it's red.. red is the winner!
Me: Doh!
Bill Gates has a spare billion ... (Score:2, Funny)
So what does he do with it? Answer: like most true geeks, on accumulating more wealth and power due to a massive inferiority complex.
Has anyone ever even *heard* of poor old billg having any fun with all that money?
Okay, he might be working on the clone thing. Except, of course, they'll be so slow, liable to freezing up, susceptible to viruses, and busy try to catch up with the features the *other* clones had since the seventies (like being able to think about more than one thing at once), that they won't be all that effective.
Re:Bill Gates has a spare billion ... (Score:2)
Something tells me that he didn't do it for the money, really. As if anyone of you would say "oh shit, my company is starting to make money, I will open source everything at once and refuse to take money so I can be a cool "damn the man" guy who fights the establishment".
Funny that I haven't seen any comment on spending money on Linux. Makes me think that even if a guy had a billon bucks he wouldn't spend it on Linux ^_~
If I had a billon bucks I would have time to write my own OS, and I'll be damned if you could use it ^_~
Does it bother anyone... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Does it bother anyone... (Score:4, Insightful)
And why does an individual NEED that much money?! Honestly, once you have a nice place to live, food to last you the rest of your life, a car (not even mandatory depending on where you live or what your lifestyle is), and a few luxuries (I'm not talking about billion dollar boats here either), what good is another billion dollars going to do you?
Personally if I had that much dough, I'd give most of it, like maybe $950 million, away. The rest would take care of me and my entire extended family for the rest of our lives.
Re:Does it bother anyone... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with the system, you're just whining.
Re:Does it bother anyone... (Score:2)
What makes the article interesting is the fact that the purchaces are realistic. You can in fact buy all of the items listed.
It also gives you an idea of how much a billion dollars really is.
I also find it hard to imagine how anybody could really "warrant/earn" that much money. But that's more of a philosophical question.
No imagination (Score:5, Funny)
And what's up with their "the cost to bail out the Catholic Church from pending sexual misconduct charges"? If they're going to equate being liberal with being a NAMBLA member, they could at least have tried going over-the-top to make it funny.
Re:No imagination (Score:2, Informative)
Heck, you could deploy them as a smokescreen to cover your entry into otherwise inaccessible areas. Go to Area 51 and swipe some Switchblades! Install your favourite multi-monitor capable games on the computers at Cheyenne Mountain! The possibilities are endless. And only a zeppelin full of hot chicks can make it all a reality.
MSFT Shares (Score:5, Funny)
I'd make a big statue (Score:5, Funny)
I've wondered about this: how come it seems like the age of big statues is behind us? Mount Rushmore, Statue of Liberty, those kind of things, doesn't seem like people do those much anymore. Yes, I'm aware they're still working on Crazy Horse, but that was started a while ago.
I'd probably go the "Statue of Liberty" route, and make a big chick. Maybe I'd model it after Brooke Burke; that should be worth some poontang points with her.
(Yes, I'm aware using the phrase "poontang points" is worth negative poontang points. But what the hell, in this fantasy, I'm a billionaire, I can pay the slashdot editors to delete this post so she never sees the evidence.)
Mlutiple OC-3's right to my home! (Score:2)
If my home were on an island in the Carribean, some sort of banana republic where "copyright" means "duplicate correctly" (and it would be, given my enormous wealth), I could also start building the ultimate music archive using KaZaA!
now... back to that going to space thing (Score:2)
buyout pepsi [pepsi.com] - get Britney spears as your *personal* secretary [apple.com] - meet her in space [slashdot.org]
things...
I think I'd keep a few million... (Score:2, Insightful)
At least that might achieve something (which is probably better than the hot air generated at the "sustainable development" summit).
S
Couldn't resist... (Score:5, Funny)
500 Black-market clones: $1,700,000
Companionship: $40,000,000
Being able to afford a Beowulf cluster of anything: Priceless
There are some things money can buy, and then.. er, there's more things money can buy.
To all geeks that have girlfriends! (Score:2, Informative)
ever heard of buy-low sell-high? (Score:2, Interesting)
so if you buy and sell a certain stock, you can *always* make money from it, provided that you generate enough volume... so:
if i really had a billion bux, i will go wash it in MSFT stock. a lot. it will completely fuck up their stock price, and i will get really rich (erm... even more so... heh)
now... if only somebody will give me a job... (wall-street analyst or mutual fund manager, perhaps?)
A giant city-destroying robot! (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I'd like two smaller ones. Zoltar's mistake in Battle of the Planets was that he always launched a different attack each week with one city destroying robot. G-Force would show up, and save the day. What he should have done was save up for two weeks, build *two* robots, and let them loose on opposite sides of the Earth. With only one G-Force, one has to succeed!
So, one for Redmond, and one for
Socks. (Score:2)
R&D (Score:2, Insightful)
dont need to figure out the human genome or anything fancy to get something done with that cash.
Re:R&D (Score:2, Interesting)
I hate to break it to you hpavc, but there already is a pretty good water purification system available to villagers. Perhaps you have heard of it, it's called distillation. Heck, simply boiling the water would be good enough in most cases, or the addition of a little chlorine. Even the poorest of the poor can afford to boil water. And we already produce more than enough food, too.
You see, for the most part the problems of poverty have very little to do with moral problems like corruption. If there are people starving in Africa you can bet it is because someone in power there wants them to starve. Chances are good that they are working behind the scenes to get the donated food diverted to someone else too.
I used to feel the same way you do, but then I spent some time in Peru, and I learned that Peru's problems stem from the fact that the people in power want to keep the people poor and uneducated so that they are easier to control.
The only way to get out of this vicious cycle is the way that Chile has. Root out the corruption. Once you have cleaned up your government, getting investors to give you money isn't much of a problem.
Gengineering (Score:2)
How do I say this?
What would be truly useful is to provide these people with a system of morality that gave them a future, a reason for doing anything, the guts and insight to no longer fight each other or be suckered into stupid political deals, a humble but incredibly resolute attitude and a will to work. And then stand clear.
Dubyah's arrogant version of Christianity won't do it, similarly arrogant Roman Catholicism has had centuries to do it and failed miserably, Islam and other fatalistic systems have no chance and Atheism even less.
Oh, yes, and we'd also need make the IMF and a few other choice `helpful' organisations thoroughly extinct to stop them stuffing things up.
Re:R&D (Score:5, Funny)
> food/weed that will grown nearly anywhere.
It's called Marijuana.
there is also, always popular (Score:2)
hmm... actually they seem quite a bit more expensive than a billion... damn what's a guy gotta do to destroy the universe man...
Disapointed well sort of... (Score:2)
This story was quite amusing though. Didn't know you could buy your own town for the bargian price of 102 million.
What about us destructive types? (Score:2, Troll)
Goodbye Mona Lisa! Won't have to hear about you again!
What a billion *won't* buy you (Slashdot-style) (Score:2)
Feel free to extend this list...
If I had a billion dollars... (Score:2, Funny)
...I'd buy you a thousand green dresses (but not a thousand real green dresses, that would be cruel).
Obligatory Office Space quote (Score:5, Funny)
Lawrence: I'll tell you what I'd do, man, two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had a million dollars I could hook that up, cause chicks dig a dude with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well the kind of chicks that'd double up on me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Lawrence: What about you, what would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter Gibbons: I'd relax, sit on my ass all day, I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit.
slahsdot..yeeaah (Score:2)
Slashdot Editors & 1 billion! (Score:2)
Then i'd just waste the rest on good kind bud and booze(only top shelf) and women
Caves of Steel (Score:2)
TWW
Diedrich Bader says...... (Score:2)
Well, his CHARACTER, Lawrence, in Office Space said it.
http://www.bullshitjob.com/officespace/million1
"Fsckin A, man!"
j
There exists a novel on this topic (Score:2, Informative)
This is the second part of the HOWTO right ? (Score:2, Funny)
The one entitled "HOWTO: Get A Billion Dollars"
Re:This is the second part of the HOWTO right ? (Score:3, Funny)
Money Can't Buy Me Love (Score:2)
but a billion dollars would buy me something near enough and lots of it too!
Spending != Investing (Score:2)
I believe is it in fact very hard (except through donations) to spend a billion dollar, while it is extremely easy to invest them.
HYPE MACHINE! (Score:2)
I'd whack up the biggest fucking fence youve ever seen, and hire a binch of goons to patrol every hour of the day. The uniforms would have a little logo - probably based on a foot.
Then I'd have a fleet of big limos that come and go at all hours, getting busier when theres a conference on in a nearby city. Helicopters would fly in and out from time to time.
There would be fires set which were JUST visible from outwith the fence. Only ever on days when my star sign said I'd be in a bad mood. I'd seed a couple of rumours of deaths in 'the park' which were covered up.
The tabloids would love it!
5 years later I'd offer Oprah an exclusive tour of the place, having hired those Jim Henson dudes to create a smurf like alien for us. They would only be able to eat little rabbits - and would talk with a slight slur.
That would BITCH!
Spend it, no problem! (Score:3, Funny)
"developers! developers! developers!"
Get a Fab (Score:2)
Fabs pay for themselves within a few years. I'd say it's a hell of an investment.
can you imagine a... (Score:2)
5 Bills (Score:2)
I'm a narcissistic thrill seeking hedonistic liberal geek.
So where do I collect my 5 Bills ?
Re:5 Bills (Score:2)
So where do I collect my 5 Bills ?
Paying the worlds poor to watch me bungie jump from mount rushmore into a vat of beer !!!
Ultimate Warez server!! (Score:2)
What? Just buy the games instead?
Bring back Looking Glass (Score:2)
Waste of bits (Score:2)
Where did the author get these ideas? Did he actually do any research - contact some N geeks, narcissists, etc., and ask them? Or was the entire article removed from the author's nether orifice, and slapped still dripping onto the Forbes website?
While an article like this might have seemed at home on The Onion, or some other humor site, for a magazine like Forbes it seems wildly out of place.
For example, let's look at the geek items. Clone yourself 500 times? That sounds more like the narcissist to me. A true geek would first secure his future, then buy his way onto the top ten supercomputer list (followed shortly by achiving the top ten on SETI and DistributedNet), donate large sums to the FSF, EFF (and depending upon the particular geek the NRA or HCI), buy several top programs and then OSS them (Delorme [slashdot.org], anybody?) (Or better still, fund the development of OOP DCOM for Wine).
Or how about donating a large amount of money to your alma mater, on the condition that they terminate all athletics programs? Now that seems a geekly thing to do, IMNSHO.
How I'd blow a billion (Score:2)
Open a pinball company.
Buy a personal train.
Buy Iceland.
Go into space - maybe even have a special trip for two (be one of the founding member of the orbit club...).
Buy Clear Channel.
Pay someone to teach Ms. Spears to sing.
Buy a few Congress Critters and a president, have them pass a law outlawing money in politics.
Sue all media companies for failing in the public trust (this could be interesting).
Give the money to the Endowment of the Arts, National Public Radio and National Public Television and tell them all to piss off everyone.
Give to charity (Score:2)
Seriously if I had a billion dollars, I would donate $100 million to EFF. I would donate another $100 million to lobby all the politicans to outlaw pallidium and repeal the DMCA. Today's government serves money anyway and not the people. I would then buy Trolltech and gpl all the api's for all platforms and give Microsoft a headache.
If I had $10 billion instead of $1 billion I would purchase autodesk and gpl autocad and 3d studio MAX. Also if Microsoft effectively kills linux on x86 all thanks to palladium, I would invest $250 Million in apple under the condition that Steve Jobs requires all macs to have an option dual boot or linux only boot by default besides just macosX. I would convince Steve Jobs to write a letter to the opensource community about making the mac an ultimate linux box. The number of macs sold would increase astronomically from all the pissed off linux and windows users. I would also gain my money back quickly. I remember hearing that linux is beginning to catch up to macosx in desktop usage. Apple could almost double their marketshare.
I second the whores comment (Score:5, Funny)
Friends and family would know how to find me - just follow the trail of dead strippers.
I love being a crank :) (Score:3, Insightful)
How you ask?
Since software is abstract thought and since abstract thoughts are a dime a dozen, I would get a bunch of geeks and lawyers together and every day we would look at new software patent applications that get released. (It's nice that they release the applications early on now...so that you don't have as much of a chance of them extending their patent before you get your application in...)
Out of those applications, we would take the most promising and novel ones (usually from smaller companies) and get umbrella patents that surround whatever little idea they have with a bunch of "novel and nonobvious" extensions.
When I say "novel and nonobvious" I mean not only extensions made by daydreaming and thinking about the problem a little bit, but also extensions that are computer generated. For example, if you have IRC bots and MUD bots and chat room bots, then it's "novel and nonobvious" if you come up with the idea of an IM bot. Therefore, it's also probably nonobvious to come up with cellphone text messaging bots.
I think you see where I'm going with this. If someone patents something for "IM" then the "nonobvious" extensions would be for wireless networks, chatrooms, PDAs, cellphones, IRC and so forth. This could be algorithmically generated with a database of "related ideas" and "dongles" you can add to any invention.
It wouldn't just be for that one part of the invention, either. You have to look at products that exist and follow the "dongle and feature" web (where if at any time a version of feature1 was used with a version of feature2 in a product, then you adjoin all possible ways of having feature1 and/or feature2 in your "novel and nonobvious" extensions) to adjoin as many different features as you can think of. Then say you will use a "plurality" of these things within the invention. Have you noticed how patent lawyers love the word "plurality"? Heck, we could probably get rid of patents altogether (which I don't support) if we made the word "plurality" illegal. They wouldn't know what to do.
But anyway, you watch them when they release their products and if they add any of your "nonobvious" extensions, you sue them, not to make money, just to force them to cripple their products and remove them from market. Since "self-help" features that remotely shut down software for copyright reasons are or will become legal, I'm sure you could force them to invoke these features and shut down their products until they stop infringing on my valuable IP space.
Eventually, the government may wake up and realize that abstract thought patents can cripple innovation and perhaps we can get back to a time when we had the right to express our thoughts and use our property without getting sued. Or they might just not let me get any more patents.
Also, you should note that we wouldn't be writing software during this time. That's because if you understand software and you understand the breadth and triviality of software patents you know that you can't respect software patents and write software at the same time. So, in order to respect the patents, I would have to stop writing software. But it would be nice to try to crapflood the USPTO.
for a billion (Score:3, Funny)
With my Billion Dollars... (Score:3, Funny)
My evil would be wholly subjective, as I would dedicate $100 million to pushing back the Microsoft monopoly by donations to not just one or two, but a few dozen Open Source projects in key areas that Microsoft has yet to defeat. I'd drop ten million or so to the EFF, keeping plenty in reserve for ongoing expenses and the defense of my enclave against the BATF even though there wouldn't be many guns on site. (Unless ESR dropped by, then I'd be in trouble)
I would be a kind ruler, yet my iron fist would be felt across the globe. I wouldn't fight hunger, or disease, or educational flaws - other people with more of a conscience do that. My fleet of monochromatic black Suburbans would be well-known as they drove through cities and towns handing out black CD's loaded with the latest distribution of the Linux distribution dubbed "Overlord Linux" that I would have created in order to serve the desktop user with my "Obsidian" user interface (heavy on the black) and...
Okay, okay, okay, I'll take my damn ritalin. Shaddap already!
Re:A mark on this world? (Score:2)
The cost of paving the way alone would consume a chunk of that billion, not to mention the tax investigators who would keep buzzing around to make sure you weren't hiding anything from them.
I suppose you could conduct your operations in secret, but the instant you went public, the NSA and Congress would be all over your ass faster than ants on a picnic.
Bill Gates has billions. Consider the uproar if he actually tried to directly influence ANYTHING. He's done the smart thing and let the foundations that he funds worry about keeping various palms crossed with silver.
Re:What about a narcissist geek? (Score:2)
Re:Asimov's first law (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that all exists already. There is already way too much food in the world - the US and EU destroy millions of tonnes of it every year. After all, food surpluses are a precondition of population growth, not the other way round, and the population is growing [un.org].
Growing the food is easy - our civilization understood farming centuries ago. Distributing the food is easy - logistics is a well-developed science, practiced by Walmat, UPS and the Marines, you can even do a degree [lse.ac.uk] in it. The difficult part is purely in the realm of the political. So long as tyrants like Robert Mugabe use starvation as a tool of population control, or nations like Somalia keep feudal civil wars going, famines are inevitable.
These are the men with just enough "obscene amount of money", but have failed to act.
The Gates Foundation [gatesfoundation.org] has given billions away. Literally. What have you done?
3,000,000 counts of manslaughter per year.
If you really believed that, you wouldn't have a computer to post to