Bill Gates Answers Questions From Redditors 154
First time accepted submitter rroman writes "Bill Gates is answering questions on reddit. He talks about the work that is being done by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, about his life and about his opinions on various topics."
Jump right to the answers.
Looking forward (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Looking forward (Score:4, Funny)
Think about the last time you saw Bill Gates on television. Did he look normal? Did he look quite how you remember him? If you were paying attention, you would have noticed that something was not quite the same.
The Chinese character for the JFK assassination looks a lot like the character for Bill Gates's name.
Invested parties have done a lot to make sure this stays under wraps.
In 1750, Benjamin Franklin was observed by over fifteen residents of Philadelphia as he branded an unidentified man with an Illuminati insignia. He was overheard telling one of his associates, "my work will be done once Bill Gates arrives to complete it."
If modern society hadn't drugged most ordinary people into a passive stupor of acceptance, we'd have done something about this long ago.
Shortly after the JFK assassination, the number of diabetes cases in children born to parents living nearby almost tripled. However, the government refuses to research this effect or compensate the affected families.
Corporate interests are preventing us from getting the truth out.
Consider the facts, and ask yourself: are you willing to let them get away with this? The answer should be a resounding no.
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Aaaah Slashdot. You never disappoint.
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I read that in a Tracy Jordan voice.
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Consider the facts, and ask yourself: are you willing to let them get away with this?
They can get away with it, as long as they bring me my Breakfast Mountain Dew
Re:Looking forward (Score:5, Interesting)
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The human need to paint characters in black and white is annoying. Evil Gates is as annoying as those that want to paint a hagiography of him and not accept any criticism.
He was a ruthless businessman and set back computing in some ways that we are still feeling today. He's doing amazing things with his fortune since then.
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He's doing amazing things with his fortune since then.
Throwing money at the crowds of poor people is not "amazing", and this is what all "charity" of the rich always amounted to.
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The amount of evil that he did, can not be undone by the whole population of Earth in half a century -- and only by virtue of forgetting his crap while people like me develop new technology.
What he does now, can be done by one office worker 1 hour a week -- and much better, too. All he does is distributing money that he and his foundation should've not be allowed to touch in the first place.
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If the only people who diss my code are those who believe that Bill Gates is anything but a self-absorbed psychopath, I am certainly doing something right.
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If you see the potential in emerging technology, have a fortunate enough background to mark a sizeable degree of influence, proclaim yourself part of the movement by accepting the efforts of a sea of talented peers, and then on the cusp of a social revolution, turn it into a closed system, ignore a history of dedicated research culture which aimed to increase possibilties, not curate them, you no longer are capable of understanding your own role in the deviation of that potential back towards to the establi
Re:Looking forward (Score:4)
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If you are young and briliant you have a choice, help the world or help yourself and become filthy rich. Of course choosing the second leaves the option of later forming a massive foundation to help other people make the world a better place than you would if you chose the "good" option. And you still got to be rich.
Re:Looking forward (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are young and briliant you have a choice, help the world or help yourself and become filthy rich
False dilemma. Profit seeking capitalists have done far more good for the world than philanthropists.
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False dilemma. Profit seeking capitalists have done far more good for the world than philanthropists.
I'm going to go down to my local Carnegie Library and look that up...
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Those two groups are not mutually exclusive, and profit seeking capitalists have also done far more damage to the world than most.
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Profit seeking capitlists have taken a cut of most of the good that has been done in this world. But the actual good is done by labor.
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False dilemma. Profit seeking capitalists have done far more good for the world than philanthropists
Precisely. Ask yourself, who has contributed more to making the world a better place: Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., or Bill Gates and Sam Walton?
(honestly curious how this gets modded)
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Ghandi and MLK. Next question.
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(honestly curious how this gets modded)
Well, looking at my modding and responses so far, I have to give Slashdot +2 for understanding the world, and -2 for understanding sarcasm.
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False dichotomy. Philanthropy is not possible without resources. Successful profit-seeking capitalists have more resources, and more opportunity for philanthropy. The very word "philanthropist" evokes the image of a monocled gentleman strewing money around. Philanthropy and capitalism are not mutually exclusive.
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If you are young and briliant you have a choice, help the world or help yourself and become filthy rich. Of course choosing the second leaves the option of later forming a massive foundation to help other people make the world a better place than you would if you chose the "good" option. And you still got to be rich.
Being young and brilliant (being savvy, lucky, brutal, and hardworking could be confused with brilliant I guess) you get to carry that 'brilliance' with you throughout your life. Now he's made a lot of money (though not his real goal, he just wants to be the winner), and being smart, what is one to do with all that money and be considered a winner throughout history? Let me see......how about starting a charitable foundation, that he controls, get the tax benefits, be able to pass along all of that power to
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...and he still pushes Microsoft products, even when he's being "charitable".
He wants to help other countries, but that help often includes Microsoft products, even when there are cheaper alternatives that meet all the requirements. He says he wants to help schools, but that help often comes with the expectation to buy Microsoft products in exclusion of other solutions. He wants to help scientific research, but you're less likely to get that help if you're labs are currently based on Apple or Linux systems.
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Speaking of Carnegie, even in his more altruistic endeavors he often had shrewd, secondary considerations. As a case in point, years ago I toured Carnegie Mellon University and the tour guide informed the audience that one of the main buildings that we were passing was built with an intentional grade rather than being level. The reason for this grade was that if the university did not take off he could then repurpose the building as a factory with an assembly line that would move down the slope. I found
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Basically, Bill skimmed a lot of money from the productivity of others and continued to do so long after he stopped needing/wanting additional cash.
If Bill disbursed 50 billion (leaving himself with a paltry 16 billion), he could have provided every MS employee in the US with $877K. Given that there are plenty of non-rich MS employees, an additional 877K (87K additional salary for 10 years, 43k additional salary for 20 years) would have been far more economically useful to them than it would be as an additi
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That might be a valid point if Microsoft employees weren't historically and presently treated/co
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Historically large differences in relative wealth (gini coefficients) are strongly correlelated with the breakdown of society and revolutions etc. The US is already pretty high in OECD terms, and has pretty appalling stats in access to health care incarceration rates, crime, educational outcomes for poor kids etc that tend to go along with having a high gini coefficient. You have a huge and growing pool of americans who have little to no real hope of being able to get their kids into even the middle class
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Big things don't happen without concentration of wealth giving people the opportunity to fund them and take large risks.
Throughout modern and ancient history, you'll find the "big names" were almost always backed by the funding of private magnates, aristocrats, religious organizations, and other concentrations of money. Otherwise, they'd be eccentrics doing small stuff in their garage that would be forgotten to time.
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Whilst not so young, before fooling with DOS, Windows 3.1, '95, '98, and (shudder) Me, my first OS experience was Win2K. I don't think Bill has enough cash to atone for the routine crash thing, and it scarcely even afflicted me personally. Were we always in such a rush to upgrade that the bazillion lines of code could not be debugged?
What really chaps my hide is the DRM. I've never pirated so much as a Pop Song, yet I must grit my teeth and ignore my need to slap someone every time one of my Windows compute
Sign of the times... (Score:5, Funny)
Sign of the times... when /. is linking to Reddit.
Re:Sign of the times... (Score:5, Interesting)
From my observation of 10ish years on slashdot (I didn't register until some time of lurking,) slashdot *was* almost entirely in favor of apple, but no longer.
The common argument in favor of apple at the time was how open they are (e.g. using posix rules, incorporating samba, etc.) I frequently pointed out that if apple was as dominant as microsoft, they would impose far worse restrictions on user freedom than microsoft ever did. I was shot down at the time, but it turns out that I was right.
Anyways, most of slashdot now agrees with that assessment and is largely anti-apple these days.
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I don't know, Slashdot was all over the iPhone too. I had to make a filter rule for Apple because there were at least two articles of the daily (either iPhone or iPad).
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From my observation of 10ish years on slashdot (I didn't register until some time of lurking,) slashdot *was* almost entirely in favor of apple, but no longer.
More like 15 years here, and I have to say, I don't really remember that. I do seem to remember Apple being a pioneer in software patent trolling.
Then again, I don't remember a lot of things these days...
Does he not know... (Score:1, Insightful)
Not as much as I would like to. I write some C, C# and some Basic. I am surprised new languages have not made more progress in simplifying programming. It would be great if most high school kids were exposed to programming...
Does Gates not know about Python? Python IMO is a whole lot easier to learn than BASIC ever was and you can do a lot more with it. And Python is much easier than C/C#/C++ to learn and is much, much, much cleaner than Java.
:)
Slap on a few libraries and you can do just about anything in Python in less lines of code. AND you can actually read it when you're done
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Well, at least he actually knows how to program. Take a look at the CEOs of HP, IBM, Oracle, Dell, SAP, Cisco, . . . etc.
Most of them probably can't even manage to program themselves out of a paper bag.
Now, what programming languages does Steve Ballmer know . . . ?
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Now, what programming languages does Steve Ballmer know . . . ?
Oh, he knows Turbo Pascal quite well...
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Well, at least he actually knows how to program. Take a look at the CEOs of HP, IBM, Oracle, Dell, SAP, Cisco, . . . etc.
Most of them probably can't even manage to program themselves out of a paper bag.
I'm working on the documentation for my game engine's (domain specific) entity interaction language. Thank you for your help in naming the example project that comes after the eponymous "Hello World". With a small change to the shape of the objects and the forces being applied from within rather than externally, the simplistic collision detection demo shall be dubbed "Paper Bag" so that we may finally have a definitive test with which to quantify the aforementioned skill level.
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Does Gates not know about Python? Python IMO is a whole lot easier to learn than BASIC ever was and you can do a lot more with it. And Python is much easier than C/C#/C++ to learn and is much, much, much cleaner than Java. Slap on a few libraries and you can do just about anything in Python in less lines of code. AND you can actually read it when you're done :)
While that might be true, it still doesn't say much about the ease of learning Python compared to other traditional activities a high school student might engage in. I think Python is fairly neat, but I think that the abstractions required for modern OOP languages is something that is not easily understood by most people. Remember, this is high school he is talking about.
What you'd need is a language that is easy to learn, and can be related to other classes/life without too much programming. For example,
Re:Does he not know... (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone in my class learned Logo in 3rd grade. In middle school they taught everyone HTML. In high school we were using Scheme in several math classes.
I also learned C++ and Java in high school, though admittedly that was not everyone, and it was AP level classwork.
I think the earlier you teach kids computer languages, the better, and the quicker they'll pick it up. I don't think OOP is something terribly scary. After all, objects is kind of what people have to deal with every day in the real world. You explain it as nouns and verbs, and it's not that hard to understand.
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He's wondering why no one has built an easy programming language that anyone can use. You can use mixins in Python, it's not an easy language.
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> Python IMO is a whole lot easier to learn than BASIC ever was and you can do a lot more with it.
The language you already know every corner of is almost always faster if you just want to get something done.
Since Microsoft got started with a basic compiler [wikipedia.org], I assume that Bill Gates know BASIC pretty well.
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>And Python is much easier than C/C#/C++ to learn and is much, much, much cleaner than Java.
Python is a filthy scripting language with no types. Every other language you list is a JIT/compiled language with type safety. They are like comparing apples and oranges. For any software project beyond simple scripting, Python is inappropriate as a tool. It does not perform, has less exception safety, and does not scale.
You can measure the experience of a programmer by how he/she discusses the pros and cons
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Does Gates not know about Python? Python IMO is a whole lot easier to learn than BASIC ever was and you can do a lot more with it.
They are both turing complete languages. So what can you do in Python that can't be done in BASIC?
Slap a few libraries on ANY language and you get do anything in less lines of codes. That's what libraries are for.
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They are both turing complete languages. So what can you do in Python that can't be done in BASIC?
Linked lists, since classic BASIC doesn't have full-fledged pointers or any equivalent.
(yes, yes, you can do it with PEEK and POKE, or by using indices into a dynamically reallocated array as pseudo-pointers - and you can do OOP in assembly too; but when we talk about doing something "in language X", it usually implies some higher-level abstractions)
Good Read (Score:5, Interesting)
In a weird way I wish that this was the Bill Gates that was still leading Microsoft. I mean, in that alternate universe it certainly wouldn't be all rainbows and freedom, but at least Microsoft would be a company that I could understand. These days, I have no clue where Microsoft is going and it kind of makes me sad that they are becoming a weaker, less competent rival to their open source and corporate opposition. Ah well, It's likely better that he's taken his drive and his billions and put it towards a noble cause.
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These days, I have no clue where Microsoft is going
Oh, that's easy to figure out. Just look at what Apple did in the last year and expect Microsoft to go there in two years.
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These days, I have no clue where Microsoft is going
Oh, that's easy to figure out. Just look at what Apple did in the last year and expect Microsoft to go there in two years.
Ummm... shed 40% of the stock price in the last 5 months? I think it will happen to MS sooner than 2 years.
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Ummm... shed 40% of the stock price in the last 5 months? I think it will happen to MS sooner than 2 years.
I think the opposite, wanna short some MSFT from me?
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I wish that this was the Bill Gates that was still leading Microsoft.
He may be back. Medvedev did it..
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What cause would that be? Evading taxes?
The more taxes he can avoid, the better. He is putting the money to far better use than the government would.
Attempting to buy a legacy?
So what? What difference does it make what his motivations are? His foundation has already saved millions of lives, and improved the lives of millions more. All those lives are not worth less just because his motivations are not pure enough for you.
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What difference does it make what his motivations are?
If you want to get into ethics, it makes a huge difference. Not to mention that he's not actually saving the world -- in proportion to his wealth he's doing very little good and it hardly offsets the type of economic disparity pirates such as himself have created by plundering the American economy.
I normally don't care when people donate money to charities for third world countries -- I just think they're fools who lack perspective. But when a person spends an entire career damaging the American economy --
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It's interesting but it's not contradictory unless you buy into the bullshit that life is sacred. [youtube.com]
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This was the device he used for the Q&A (Score:4, Informative)
I want one!!
http://i.imgur.com/1JqrLVc.jpg [imgur.com]
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It's a Surface Pro:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/c8dd2t2 [reddit.com]
I just got my Surface Pro a week ago and it is very nice.
I am using a Perceptive Pixel display right now - huge Windows 8 touch whiteboard. These will come down in price over time and be pervasive... ( http://i.imgur.com/1JqrLVc.jpg [imgur.com] )
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Mea Culpa, I got confused about what parent was asking about.
Windows 7 or 8? (Score:2)
And Mr. Gates' answer? Higher is better. ;)
Ah, I guess that was the developers' motto during product design as well.
Re:Windows 7 or 8? (Score:5, Funny)
Handwriting (Score:5, Interesting)
Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at "computers". Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways..
I'm very surprised he's still hung up on handwriting recognition. It is a DEAD END for human interfacing to a computer (with the sole exception of OCRing existing handwritten documents, and perhaps security as a form of credential). Think about it for one moment, the amount of muscle control, precision and time required to DRAW A SHAPE which is then interpreted as a single input glyph. It is a horribly slow and tedious method of input - I would rather (and literally have) key Morse Code into my android phone than write text.
It also shows he's still a bit out of touch, and still thinking stylus-centric (which, IMO, was one of the reasons Window Mobile / Windows CE failed, was because it never completely shook the stylus-required-to-interact-with-tiny-widgets problem). Is a person really expected to draw on a modern touch screen with their finger to write letters for the device to recognize (and feel like a preschooler fingerpainting)? Or are we going to step back into having to keep track of a stylus?
Just found it odd he threw in handwriting in this day and age. It was beat to death with Palm starting a decade and a half ago. It's gone. Dead. Byebye.
Re:Handwriting (Score:5, Interesting)
Just found it odd he threw in handwriting in this day and age. It was beat to death with Palm starting a decade and a half ago. It's gone. Dead. Byebye.
There was another article which stated that paper-and-pencils are the best tools in the classroom. While handwriting recognition (like all technologies) has had its hype, it is now becoming a serious tool. The stylus is actually a nice way to get work done on a computer in many technical fields (where drawings and notes are the way the people communicate).
I know faculty and students who use OneNote/EndNote and really like the Ink-to-Math and Ink-to-Text functionality.
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Windows CE didn't fail. It is all over industrial handheld devices (barcode scanners mainly, but also embedded computers). I have yet to see a multitude of Android / Windows Phone devices. There are some, but the large majority is Windows CE5.
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That's because you work stocking shelves at Wal-Mart.
No. I work as the CEO of a industrial automation company [www.tbwb.nl] in the Netherlands. We actually sell these things, and are well informed on what the market has to offer. Even the suppliers of barcode scanners agree that there are just a few Android devices.
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We actually sell these things
To Wal-Mart.
That market is gone. Never should've existed in the first place, as wifi barcode reader is the most that could be justified for that purpose.
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Read again. I am in the Netherlands. There is no Wal-Mart here.
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I wouldn't handwrite a book, but it might help with carpal tunnel and you know there are languages where it is easier to draw a character (like Japanese/Chinese) than use a front end processor / dictionary which happens to also use up cpu. Also really understanding what you are doing with a pen is a hard AI problem. It would be cool if you could annotate something on an e-ink display even if it is just underlining or putting a star on something and a few letters long steno type comment. Where you are commun
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It also shows he's still a bit out of touch, and still thinking stylus-centric
It isn't odd at all. Its perfectly in character for him. This is the same guy who looked at a impending revolution in ease of copying things, and thought to himself, "What this new ecosystem needs is old-fashioned steam-press era copyright law [wikipedia.org] applied to it".
Bill Gates wasn't really born in the era of electronic information, and either never fully understood it, or just flat out isn't a fan of its implications for society.
Why doesn't he answer questions on Slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
We love the guy!
Did he confirm the rumors (Score:1)
of the cage match with Stallman?
Hope someone asked why he supports circumcision (Score:3, Insightful)
Bill Gates supports circumcision as a way to fight HIV. That really is not an effective way to fight HIV, since many Americans are circumcised and still get HIV. Also, many European men are not circumcised and they don't get HIV as frequently as Americans. Using a condom is really the most effective way to protect yourself from HIV, and if you're going to use a condom, then there's no need to get circumcised.
Not to mention the fact that babies aren't even capable of having sex, so there's no need to circumcise a baby. When he's an adult, let him decide for himself whether he wants to permanently remove a body part that offers sexual benefits. And in 15-20 years there may be a REAL cure for HIV.
Saying that we should circumcise babies to protect them from HIV makes as much sense as saying we should give mastectomies to all young women to protect them from breast cancer.
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Using a condom is really the most effective way to protect yourself from HIV
Not exchanging body fluids with people who have HIV is the most effective way to protect yourself from HIV. Just sayin'.
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Re:Hope someone asked why he supports circumcision (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying that we should circumcise babies to protect them from HIV makes as much sense as saying we should give mastectomies to all young women to protect them from breast cancer.
This is EXACTLY what I say to people who support sexual mutilations of babies. They usually mumble something about not being the same and quickly change the subject. I don't have mod points but this needs a '+5 insightful'.
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According to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation website, circumcision reduces the risk of HIV transmission by 60 percent. I have no means of verifying that claim, but if it is really true, why shouldn't he pursue it? Sure, it won't make people immune, but it would at least slow propagation of the virus down.
And yes, condoms are obviously better (and doesn't the Foundation also support them?), but backwards societies such as what you see in many places in Africa often frown on them for various cultural
Reddit AMAs are stupid (Score:1)
Pirates of Silicon Valley reasonably accurate? (Score:2)
@thisisbillgates: "That portrayal was reasonably accurate"....
--
"We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage". Bill Gates [groklaw.net]
"You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app would do that would make it run with MSDOS
Doing stupid shit with the money (Score:1)
Something I might've asked him was posed by Louis C.K [youtube.com]
With $85B (or whatever it is nowadays), "how do you not do that?"
Re:Long done (Score:5, Informative)
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How typical of Slashdot that some AC gets upvoted to +5 for blatantly lying.
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Nevertheless, this is funny to me: http://www.reddit.com/r/slashdot/ [reddit.com]