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Software choices don't . . . enslave people.

I don't agree. I know many people who don't feel they have any choice in office software - it's Microsoft Office. There is no alternative, and not buying it isn't an option for them. The business world is being held captive by Microsoft, and has developed a form of Stockholm Syndrome. The wikipedia article on vendor lock-in has a whole section dedicated to well-known players in the software industry and their efforts to prevent their customers from moving to another vendor.
As another example of software slavery, have you ever seen a large company transition from SAP to CA or vice versa? The difficulty and cost of doing so are prohibitive, so many stay with what they have despite huge known problems. For ERP systems just bringing forward your customizations from one major release to another is painful enough to require months for a dedicated IT crew to complete, and as a result I've seen companies adjust their business practices to the software to avoid that problem in the future. That employee time isn't producing anything that will give the company a return on investment, it's just a sunk cost. And no, the software vendor isn't going to send out an associate to help with the transition, they'll instead sell you training on how to do it yourself. From my perspective, the time I spent on version transitions for Computer Associates software weren't spent working for my employer, I was working for CA.
Captive, forced to work for others instead of yourself, and the only way out is difficult, dangerous, and painful? Sounds like slavery to me.

Of course [Stallman] already has the financial resources that enable him to totally ignore how his theories effect [sic] those actually working for a living.

Are you suggesting that the Free Software movement is putting programmers out of work? Like, right now? Or is it somehow stopping people from using Microsoft Office or SAP's ERP software? On the contrary, I'm pretty sure RMS is aware of the impact he's having and I agree with him that it's beneficial, not harmful. The LibreOffice suite is giving people options other than paying ridiculous prices for tools they need for their jobs. For those people (who work for a living) it's a benefit, not a problem. For others that doesn't work for, there's still Microsoft; no programmers have been fired in Redmond because too many people are using Free Software.
And if Stallman's fantasy world ever does come about and Microsoft has to close its doors, the reason will be because the world will be full of useful, freely available tools for doing useful work. There will still be programmers being paid, but it'll be by people who need new tools or improvements to existing tools. And once the tools are built they won't need to be imitated elsewhere, the work once done will benefit everyone. Even if this world requires fewer programmers, they'll be all working on new projects or improvements rather than wasting their time imitating someone else's work. That sounds more like actually working to me.

tl;dr: Asshole or not, RMS has a point about proprietary software enslaving you, and I'd rather live in the world he's trying to build than the ones Steve Jobs and Bill Gates spent their lives building.

P.S. - There's a rant to be made here about how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's goal "to help all people lead healthy, productive lives" apparently only applies to poor Africans, not Microsoft competitors, but I'll leave that for another post.

... tech billionaires used their cash to say, help find a cure for malaria, instead of telling kids not to get an education, and this latest anti-societal rant?

Not everyone can be Bill Gates.

But you need to consider this guy was one of the PayPal founders - a bank that's not a bank - customer service with no service, etc ...

The Gates Foundation is pushing AMCs, which have come in for a wary reception.

He seems to be somewhat dedicated to doing exactly that. Only his sights are set a little higher than the recording industry
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/

Yes, the Gates foundation is all about altruism.

I suspect this is related to the Bill and melinda Gates Foundation.

Just like the money the foundation lost from the BP oil spill? They lowered their payout they had promised following the American housing and financial crisis and I'm sure it's because they didn't get the money they thought was "already in the bag."

If you make 5% and spend 10%, it would take nearly 35 years for the overall payout to fall below that of the "sustaining" model of only paying out what you make in interest. So, the sad part is that they could have sucked up a one-time hit on the principal and still not had any real effect on the long-term viability of the foundation.

Agreed. This is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation approach to philanthropy. If you have a complaint about it, explain how you disagree with this approach.

Regarding nationalism, this explanation of their approach overtly expresses that one of their grant making priorities is "improving high school education in the United States." I cannot deny that this is America-centric, but I wholeheartedly support the idea that a wealthy person should contribute to the ongoing positive development of his own country.

No, you're full of bullshit. A one-time shot of a half-billion dollars will get pissed away in a year. Put that money in a foundation and consistently donate the interest, however, and you get a significant chunk of change going to the cause every year, forever.

Forever? Just like the stock market is going to last forever? Just like the money the foundation lost from the BP oil spill? They lowered their payout they had promised following the American housing and financial crisis and I'm sure it's because they didn't get the money they thought was "already in the bag." Of course we can't get at any hard figures of how much they had pre-market crash and right after it but I'm going to go ahead and say you're full of bullshit in thinking that they are investing in things that are consistently going to help. They are investing in the stock market. The stock market is a gamble. Any thoughts otherwise are true bullshit.

Bill Gates has recently done a HeelFaceTurn and is no longer a super villian. He is using his money for very good purposes. Stop with the bashing.

Like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which stipulates the use of Windows computers in all the efforts to which it contributes?

I looked it up, and actually they allow Mac OS X, too. But I found it interesting that such a stipulation exists at all. (Note, however, they do not specify Windows 7, so something tells me this is more of a guideline than a hard-and-fast rule.)

Dancing around like a monkey, signing "Need a new one?" on a MacBook, gift matching charity donations and other over-$1M relief effort payments, a history of amusing self-deprecating videos by executives... oh yeah, and that little $33.5 billion Foundation which is essentially Gates' MS money ploughed into a vaccination on every desktop.

Yup, corporations comprise humourless bastards - except Google!

Still a little way go before Bill's chances improve to pass through the eye of a needle:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%2010:24-10:25&version=KJV

But it looks like he and his wife are at least giving it a try:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/

Camel: "There's More Than One Way To Do It."
Needle: "No there isn't!"

Bill and Melinda's charity works can be seen via http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx or via the wiki version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_&_Melinda_Gates_Foundation - take your pick.

where do you think these single payer systems gain the medical advances they need to efficiently and effectively treat people?

Many of our big pharma firms here in the US get grants from Taxes, corporations and non profits to create new drugs. Many of the companies patenting new drugs are patenting minor changes and re-branding and marketing the new product for big money. The pharma argument is bogus and invalid, the drug patent system is broken. All the new drugs need to prove is that they are no more dangerous for the population, not that they provide material benefit over previous drugs.

In fact, much of modern medicine is taught and researched at publicly funded teaching university hospitals. Once again, we're already paying for a significant amount of the breakthroughs with our tax dollars. Big pharma and malpractice insurance are the industries that are getting wealthy, and it's at the expense of the lower and middle classes. What happened to the Health Care bill? For one thing, insurance companies are now hiking up thier premiums to finance their lobying expense from last year.

In short, We the People will continue to fund research, as will billionares who feel that they need to help the communities that helped them (charitable organizations such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is sitting on billions, but only spends 3% of their endowment in a given year.

The correct number is more like twice that, and is typical of foundations that spend money based on endowments, the point of an endowment is to allow an organization to do work over an extended period of time, something impossible to do if you spend 50% of your money every year.

If you looked at actual dollars handed out in a given year, I wouldn't be shocked if Google (and Google.org) hands out more cash than the Gates Foundation.

2009 Gates Foundation: $3.8B: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2632188420090126

Google.org's entire charitable endowment is less than a third of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google.org.

It ain't even close, you're off by at least two orders of magnitude.

The Gates Foundation has been asking others to give to them to hand out. The largest contributer to the Gates Foundation is Warren Buffet.

[citation needed]

Gates' donation to the foundation is of a similar size to Buffet's, the tho had known each other for many years (play bridge together, I'm told). The Gates Foundation survived for many years with no other contributions, and I'm unaware of a single dollar that's come from any other source.

There have been many well-researched in-depth pieces that suggest The Gates Foundation is doing more harm than good right now.

[citation needed]

The LA Times 2007 piece questioning the Foundations never made that particular claim, it did raise a signficant issue in that direction though. Because endowments must invest the money they hope to use for work in the future, conflicts arise when those investments do harm. It's entirely fair to say that it's irreponsible not to look those costs.

Of course, if you read, say, the articles in the Times that discussed this, you almost certainly saw the article in the Times a few days later saying that the Gates Foundation had decided to reassess its investments for social responsiblity.

(I'd admit, by the way, that those questions can still be pretty complex. A few obvious corporations aside, most corporations do quite a number of things, many of them bad, many of them good. "How much?" can be a very challenging thing to quantify.

When The Gates Foundation was pressed about it, they said they can't be bothered to research the firms they invest it.

[citation needed]

But there are people who've linked Gates Foundation investments to Microsoft contracts and strong-armed deals.

[citation needed]

Until it is clear that The Gates Foundation is doing more good than harm, I'm not sure we should be so quick to praise them, let alone donate money to them.

Nobody is asking you to, in fact, can you point me at a place where it is possible to donate to the Gates Foundation? No, you can't, because they don't accept external donations in general. Show me the donate button on this page, and we'll talk:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx

Again, Google upstages Microsoft.

Well, to be fair, that wasn't Microsoft, it was Bill Gates. Yes, he built his money from Microsoft but we need to wait and see what Larry and Sergey do with their cash when they hit Gates' age.

The impact of the Gates' money is immediate, but in the long run a well-funded knowledge base is much more effective at raising the standard of living worldwide.

Now you've gone and done it. Now you've put me in the very awkward position of defending William Gates. Recently the foundation committed $10 billion to Malaria Research and Development . Not distribution and deployment but R&D. Technically this has no immediate effect but instead contributes to our "well-funded knowledge base" of vaccine development. It's entirely probable that the first world will benefit from $10 billion being dumped into any medical R&D. I'm not even going to get into the number of zeros that ten billion has compared to two million but I trust you to be able to discern between the significance.

I got my own problem with the Gates Foundation ... like who gets the money, where the money is spent and how American companies keep building their infrastructure off of it when you should probably be dumping it into the countries that you pledged to help.

Is there anything they [Google] can't fail at?

The summary lists Knol. Recently I watched Wave flounder. You're being disingenuous to claim that all Google touches is gold. Their advertising revenues support a lot of their endeavors similar to how Microsoft operating system stranglehold allowed them to elbow their way into hardware and gaming. Impressive? Yes. King Midas? No. Infallible? No.

Retired? Really? Not a week ago. He may have given the CEO reins over to our favorite chair tosser, but he's still Chairman of Microsoft. No doubt his stock option package is quite good.

That's good for Microsoft, too. Three nines of companies don't long survive the loss of their founders. As Damon Runyon said, "The race may not always be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet".

The fall may have even begun before he retired as CEO. When SCO's backstop with Baystar dried up, Microsoft lost all of its credibility in the smoke filled rooms where the real money makes deals. Who knows how much this cost RBC and the other partners? Gates will spend the rest of his life trying to make amends, but those who suffered will never forget. You can't swing a billion dollars without somebody dies, and the dead stay dead no matter how many soup kitchens you volunteer in afterward.

Eventually, pigeons come home to roost. The devil will have his due.

An important lesson for you, a wealthy individual who made their money using illegal business tactics and whose company developed an admitted reputation for deceiving it's customers and who happens to have absolutely no qualifications in the area concerned should not be able to get in the position where the set government policy by the application of their wealth

I think that Gates has on board some people with significant qualifications, such as Dr. Vicki Philips, who was superintendent of Portland Public Schools, secretary of education and chief state school officer for the state of Pennsylvania, superintendent of the Lancaster, Pa., school district, worked in the U.S. Office of Education in Washington, D.C., and has been a middle and high school teacher.

The Gates foundation also announced grants to support research into the impact of teacher-level characteristics on student achievement to ACT Inc., Teach For America, the Educational Testing Service for a research collaboration with the RAND Corporation and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Federal oversight of education is absolutely required

I'm sure that will work just as well as Federal oversight of military spending. Personally, I'd prefer PARENTAL oversight of education spending, i.e. parents making decisions about which schools their children should attend within a free market. Of course, you'd have to end the socialist monopoly of schools first.

Bill Gates has not been actively involved with day-to-day Microsoft decision for at least a year. He is now involved with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation has relatively little to do with music, although a number of musicians do work with the foundation.

The equivalent to ./ stories like this would be to refer to Apple as "Steve Jobs made music 30% more expensive" (do the math).

And besides the headline was a serious troll.

When your company has an 80% margin and you donate stuff that costs you nothing, like "the right to use your software" and record the gift at retail price, you net a greater tax benefit than it costs you to make the gift. That's net profit for giving, which is not generous -- it's just good accounting. If, from your profits for giving stuff that costs you nothing, you also give "medicine" that's generous because it's not required. Still, if you net a profit from giving, your giving can't be considered anything more than an accounting trick because some good no matter how unlikely, might have been served by paying the tax - some tax money is spent generously or well and wisely after all.

It's not really philanthropy unless you give more than you got. This is charity. Here's my money. Give it away in the best way you can. That's also trust. They say trust is earned. Let's hope BillG deserved Warren Buffet's trust because the ill that can be done with that much gelt is serious.

Nearly all of the African continent is inflamed with horrors beyond imagining. Terror rules more of the modern world than it has for a very long time. The fate of South America is uncertain. Maybe the best use of the Gates Foundation would be to husband their resources well until such a time as they might have some hope to turn the tide. Now is not it. This groundbreaking of the $500M Gates Foundation Campus is definitely not it. You can do a lot of philanthropy for half a billion dollars.

In many cases all that is needed is soap and water.

So the real question would be, is any resistance encouraged by this nano-particle approach an expensive trait or not?

The thing is is once these approaches of using antibiotics gets started they won't end, at least not without something dramatic happening. Instead when a biotic becomes resistant industry will work to make a more powerful antibiotic. Strains of Mosquito born malaria are getting resistant so companies are trying to develop stronger drugs, that's one of the things the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working on.

Falcon

Agreed. However, I would like to take this opportunity to applaud the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their work: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm/. They've recently gotten a pledge to receive a majority, perhaps all, of the Buffet fortune as well. While he might not have made his money in the most forthcoming of ways, (what millionaire has?) he is putting his money to good use, outside of Microsoft. As for his children, they're well taken care of, but they aren't going to walk out the door when they turn 18, or when Bill and Melinda die, with hundreds of millions of dollars. They have trust funds, but all of the billions are going to the charity, as they should.

You may not like him, you may not like the company or the software, but you can't argue with the results. He obviously had some sort of business acumen, and there were a measure of people who thought the software was good.

Plus, what manufacturer or developer is actually going to say, "well our [product] is shit, but there isn't much else out there so..."

I mean seriously...what a total self-serving asshole.

*Insert one of those rolly eyes smilies here*

Kids in Africa are starving for reasons the Gates Foundation can't fix.

The U.S. gives more money to countries in need than anyone other country in the world...
If you're going to rattle off broad claims like this you should at least cite them.

The US give by far the most in dollars, but fairly low in terms of GNP. But that is only counting UN Official Development Assistance contributions. I couldn't find numbers for private donations or other non-military aid. Although the Gates Foundation wrote just over $2 billion in grants in 2007, which would put their giving on a level just between Denmark and Australia.

What's the point of http://www.gatesfoundation.org/ if it is not to buy good karma for Bill and MS?

If that's Microsoft's position, than clearly this organization is just another profiteer.

And a polluter which causes some of the problems the foundation is supposedly working to alleviate. It's one of the investors in the Italian petroleum giant Eni which has a bad environmental record.

from Wikipedia

Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006. Time also collectively named Gates, his wife Melinda and U2's lead singer Bono as the 2005 Persons of the Year for their humanitarian efforts. In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of "Heroes of our time".[56] Gates was listed in the Sunday Times power list in 1999, named CEO of the year by Chief Executive Officers magazine in 1994, ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber Elite" by Time in 1998, ranked number two in the Upside Elite 100 in 1999 and was included in The Guardian as one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001.

Bill and Melinda received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation on May 4, 2006, in recognition of their world impact through charity giving.[62] In November 2006, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the program "Un país de lectores".

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/globalhealth/otherinitiatives/emergencyrelief/announcements/announce-050318.htm

http://www.i4u.com/article6050.html

How do we harness the fruits of capitalism for the betterment of the unfortunate?

Here's a "creative capitalism" approach I ran across and kind of like, for the entrepreneurial and startup-employee types-- the stocktithe .

If you're starting a new company, why not donate 10% of your company's founding stock to a charity that tries to solve or mitigate global hunger and poverty problems?

Then you, and the company's employees, are working not just for your own wealth or success, but also to increase piece of wealth that has been dedicated to others, up-front.

Others who help you out along the way, whether employees or customers, can also enjoy taking part in contributing to your mission of not just earning a buck, but earning a buck for someone less fortunate.

Unlike corporate charity programs where "1%/2%/3%/10% of your purchase goes to charity", the customer doesn't feel like they're overpaying and would be better off donating the difference themselves to their own charity of choice. It's economically more efficient.

The price for them doesn't change, but the revenue and profit does help the company's stock price, and thus helps the charity and its beneficiaries since they own 10% of the founding stock.

Some of the awareness issues raised by Bill Gates's Harvard address, (starting work after college "with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world" and "What can I (concretely) do?") now become of interest to the corporate entity. If they (and the charity) neglect them, then the motivational value of the stock tithe decreases, but if they attend to them, employee motivation can be greater than experienced in a regular company.

Make your next company a stock tithe. Or tell me why it's a lousy idea.

Cheers,
Greg Weiss
slashdotgreg at gregweiss.com

P.S. I think the stock tithe concept, to some extent, fits into the hope Gates was looking for in his talk a year ago:

"We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism - if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world." --Bill Gates, Harvard address 2007

How do we harness the fruits of capitalism for the betterment of the unfortunate?

Here's a "creative capitalism" approach I ran across and kind of like, for the entrepreneurial and startup-employee types-- the stocktithe .

If you're starting a new company, why not donate 10% of your company's founding stock to a charity that tries to solve or mitigate global hunger and poverty problems?

Then you, and the company's employees, are working not just for your own wealth or success, but also to increase piece of wealth that has been dedicated to others, up-front.

Others who help you out along the way, whether employees or customers, can also enjoy taking part in contributing to your mission of not just earning a buck, but earning a buck for someone less fortunate.

Unlike corporate charity programs where "1%/2%/3%/10% of your purchase goes to charity", the customer doesn't feel like they're overpaying and would be better off donating the difference themselves to their own charity of choice. It's economically more efficient.

The price for them doesn't change, but the revenue and profit does help the company's stock price, and thus helps the charity and its beneficiaries since they own 10% of the founding stock.

Some of the awareness issues raised by Bill Gates's Harvard address, (starting work after college "with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world" and "What can I (concretely) do?") now become of interest to the corporate entity. If they (and the charity) neglect them, then the motivational value of the stock tithe decreases, but if they attend to them, employee motivation can be greater than experienced in a regular company.

Make your next company a stock tithe. Or tell me why it's a lousy idea.

Cheers,
Greg Weiss
slashdotgreg at gregweiss.com

P.S. I think the stock tithe concept, to some extent, fits into the hope Gates was looking for in his talk a year ago:

"We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism - if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world." --Bill Gates, Harvard address 2007

With all due respect, Bill and Melinda Gates are already doing quite a bit in that regard with their foundation (remember the funds coming in from Warren Buffet?). So, as fun as it is to poke fun at, mistrust, or even abhor Bill Gates and Microsoft (welcome to 1998), he's not just talking the talk.

Background.

"Educational Entrepreneurship" is an enormously powerful nation-wide effort to sub-contract educational administration, curriculum, and professional development services in low-income public school districts to private for-profit partners, after districts are taken over under NCLB. Mass Insight is a leader in this drive, and you can view its proposal to coordinate the takeover process for its partners in a report on its website. They are explicit, in their report, that their eventual target is to take over the entire public education system and run it, free of "bureaucratic interference."

Another powerful player is New Schools Venture Fund, which has just added former Mass. Education Board chairman Jim Peyser to its partners; The Gates Foundation is a backer, and the Harvard Business School now offers MBA classes in
Educational Entrepreneurship.

The eventual for-profit providers of services are located under several layers of interlocking "advocacy" organizations, with a conscious strategy of leveraging investment of public and private money to promote the takeover. Texas, Massachusetts, and California are epicenters of the project, where Republican governors have built Education Boards dominated by adherents. An example of a "partner" might be K-12 Inc, which went public last week with a stock offering that raised $108 million, according to the current issue of Education Week.

The rationale for forcing public schools to consume these private services is that the services are "research-based" and have proven their effectiveness. A problem is that the research is often biased or distorted by researchers with hidden agendas. In many cases, especially in Texas, it was fabricated outright [she means Reading First]. Most activity has been in math and reading, since those are the high-stakes targets of NCLB. But as concern has risen over the condition of science instruction, vast amounts of money have been appropriated to improve it, and entrepreneurial attention has now focused on science education.

As you may know [remember this was originally sent to other teachers], the federal "What Works" clearinghouse has

Bribery then, is the act of using incentives to influence the decision through either providing personal gain (the traditional "baksheesh" bribe) or change of bias (see http://www.gatesfoundation.org./ [www.gatesfoundation.org]

Just a minor note on your last statement. Bribery doesn't necessarily mean the pushing of an inferior product. Very often, decision makers will go with a cheaper solution or one they have a bias towards. They may be making a poor deal out of convenience, bias, incompetence, political reasons, et cetra.

Bribery then, is the act of using incentives to influence the decision through either providing personal gain (the traditional "baksheesh" bribe) or change of bias (see http://www.gatesfoundation.org./

Fishy things have been going on in Classmate PC Vs OLPC. Recently I read that Microsoft & Intel have already begun shipment to Libya of their classmate PCs. Libya had agreed to buy 1.2 million OLPCs but, of course, they aren't available yet.

What's really strange is I can't find anything on this from Microsoft or Intel. You're providing 150,000 laptops at only $200 each to a developing nation for the purposes of education and you don't have a press release outside of that country? Maybe they're just being humble? Or maybe someone was leveraging their ex-boss's many donations to African medicine & development to convince the Libyan government to take a different route?

You know, it's great that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is donating all that money to research and aide but if word gets out that they're using that to influence who those countries do business with, I don't think anyone's going to be impressed anymore. There's something fishy going on here, I'll bet you start to see many more countries make the switch to Classmate PCs over OLPCs ... and not for the technological reasons that they should be concerned with.

Yeah! What a fucking bastard!

Also, vaguely related to TV shows starting soon, House MD season premiere tomorrow. Who's excited? I know I am!

Yep, Bill Gates hates children so much that he and his wife created a charity that helps children. Oh wait.....

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundation

Please keep your geek card - we need more geeks like you.

I too get upset when people drag the gates foundation into these pissing contests. And I can't think of a better person than Bill Gates to do that sort of work. It takes many things to succeed the way MS has. You need good strategy, strong partnerships, and you need to be able to meet your objectives with whatever hand you have. He's proven capable of that time and again. With his mind, tenacity, and money, I think when all is said he will have done more for the good of this world (through the Gates Foundation) than all of /. combined.

The speech he gave at Harvard (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/Speech es/Co-ChairSpeeches/BillgSpeeches/BGSpeechHarvard- 070607.htm) gave me more hope than I have gotten from any political leader ever. If people in govt. had that kind of clarity of vision, and spoke thier minds like that, the world would really be a better place.

"There Gates will be, deciding who lives and who dies and charging everybody 50 cents to breathe"

Don't forget giving out free vacinations, building schools, improveing healthcare, researching technology, paying taxes and employing people. How darstedly evil!

Oh and between you and me, he plans to be both Evil Overlord and Good guy between loving and raising his children and being a good husband to his wife.

You might think im missing the point here, that his business tactics are evil. Well i agree, they were and still are. But thats not the point you raised, you implied that he has some kind of 1000 year fourth Richt plan for the human race. What im pointing out here is that he is a business man, living in the US, mainly concenred with technology, who has done some bad business things in the past, he has a loving wife and some beautiful kids. His investments do cover alot of fields yes, but so does any investors. Oh and he is the most charitable person in our generation.

Before you go and spend your time photoshoping hate images of Bill Gates for his most evil business moves read up on companies like Texaco, ExxonMobil, Amgen, The US Government, Shell, BP, Disney and Nike.

For all that is good and evil in this world, if Bill Gates and Microsoft is the worse we can do in the industry most of make a living from then we could ALOT worse. Now grow up and place your activism somewhere where it counts, say maybe worrying less about IT business and worrying more about the education and health tomorrows children. And in case your wondering where to start, heres a good charity: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm

According to http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/FactShe et/, the Gates Foundation's current endowment is $33.4, and they made grant payments of $1.56 billion in 2006 (a U.S. charitable foundation must grant a minimum 5% of its net worth each year.) Think what you will about Microsoft, but few people have given as large a percentage of their wealth at as young an age as Gates did.

An earlier post pointed out that caring for family isn't altruism at all but rather just survival instinct or something like that. Any decent person and plenty of less than decent people care for their family. It's in people's self interest. There's the whole survival of the fittest thing and parents get a lot emotionally etc. out of raising children from what I understand (not a parent myself).

Altruism is putting another's needs above your own, when you don't need to, even if you gain nothing from it or it costs you something.

Also your Bill Gates example isn't a good one. Bill Gates is the exception when it comes to the mega-wealthy - he does more than just give loose change to the poor as a token effort http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm. He doesn't need to and certainly doesn't gain from it so I would say he is altruistic.

I would say altruism isn't very widespread. Apathy and selfishness seem to be the dominant forces in society.

If this becomes a pattern, then I think you may see that private money to research and testing go down as a result.

Perhaps corporate money will. We might go back to the days when private funding for research was from rich people who want to spend their money in a good way.

As others have pointed out, big pharma spends oodles of money on advertising - including the channel called "your doctor". They also make tons of "luxury" products, e.g. for invented diseases or lifestyle-induced western health problems like "burnout".

I see this as free market in effect: Brazil is willing to pay a certain price for a drug, a manufacturer other than Merck was willing to provide the drug at the suggested price (which Merck already had been willing to offer to Thailand). As for the government-backed intellectual property laws: License abused, license "revoked".

You can view the giving money part and be happy, or you can look at the bigger picture and see something less.

And when his donations buy him enough press to in turn develop enough positive reputation to be elected POTUS, and he embraces and extends all over all of our asses, the laughter will be silent.

2% of the world's population holds 50% of the wealth. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I can only see BillyG's goals as to maintain that situation. If his first concern was helping people, then he'd be dumping every iota of his personal wealth and focusing on that goal.

I'm not expecting anyone to do that! But my point is that he is not motivated by altruism. And the claims that they want to help the world are shown to be hypocritical by the fact that they won't even use caution when making investments. It is quite simply not difficult to find environmentally- and otherwise friendly corporations to invest in, with a good human rights record, et cetera. But that would be difficult, and they're not willing to actually expend effort to help people. Just money.

And finally, let us not forget the fact, proven in numerous courts around the world, that the fortune in question was made illegally through the use of improper business practices and abuse of a monopoly position. Do you really think that BillyG is some kind of modern-day Robin Hood, stealing from the comparatively rich (try going down to someplace like Costa Rica sometime, tell the locals you own a car or two, then try convincing them that you're not rich) and giving to the poor? They invest in companies that kill people! If there's one, and they're willing to put out PR saying that they're not going to review their investments, there must be more, otherwise what are they afraid of?

If I ran a nonprofit whose charter stated it helped house the homeless, and then I invested some of its holdings in a corporation that specializes in identifying buildings squatted in by the homeless, and razing them for redevelopment, I don't think anyone would take me very seriously.

I can't even find the Gates Foundation's charter on their home page. They do have a page that talks about Guiding Principles, in which they disseminate several lies. For example, "We must be humble and mindful in our actions and words. We seek and heed the counsel of outside voices." Yeah, except when they tell you to be responsible about where you put your money, which is basically the most important decision you can make in a capitalistic world or society. Or how about "We treat our grantees as valued partners, and we treat the ultimate beneficiaries of our work with respect." Yes, it's very respectful to immunize people, and at the same time make investments in companies that are killing them. And of course, pure comedy gold: "We demand ethical behavior of ourselves." Riiiight. Tell that to the children with trouble breathing, whose degradation of health you are bankrolling.

The hits just keep coming, of course. Bill and Melinda believe that "every life has equal value". Unless that life is inconvenient to their investments, of course. Here's another goody: "The goal of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is to make sure that all people--no matter where they live--get the chance to live a healthy, productive life." Sure, unless they live next to a polluting investment.

Do I really need to provide more evidence of hypocrisy?

You can view the giving money part and be happy, or you can look at the bigger picture and see something less.

And when his donations buy him enough press to in turn develop enough positive reputation to be elected POTUS, and he embraces and extends all over all of our asses, the laughter will be silent.

2% of the world's population holds 50% of the wealth. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I can only see BillyG's goals as to maintain that situation. If his first concern was helping people, then he'd be dumping every iota of his personal wealth and focusing on that goal.

I'm not expecting anyone to do that! But my point is that he is not motivated by altruism. And the claims that they want to help the world are shown to be hypocritical by the fact that they won't even use caution when making investments. It is quite simply not difficult to find environmentally- and otherwise friendly corporations to invest in, with a good human rights record, et cetera. But that would be difficult, and they're not willing to actually expend effort to help people. Just money.

And finally, let us not forget the fact, proven in numerous courts around the world, that the fortune in question was made illegally through the use of improper business practices and abuse of a monopoly position. Do you really think that BillyG is some kind of modern-day Robin Hood, stealing from the comparatively rich (try going down to someplace like Costa Rica sometime, tell the locals you own a car or two, then try convincing them that you're not rich) and giving to the poor? They invest in companies that kill people! If there's one, and they're willing to put out PR saying that they're not going to review their investments, there must be more, otherwise what are they afraid of?

If I ran a nonprofit whose charter stated it helped house the homeless, and then I invested some of its holdings in a corporation that specializes in identifying buildings squatted in by the homeless, and razing them for redevelopment, I don't think anyone would take me very seriously.

I can't even find the Gates Foundation's charter on their home page. They do have a page that talks about Guiding Principles, in which they disseminate several lies. For example, "We must be humble and mindful in our actions and words. We seek and heed the counsel of outside voices." Yeah, except when they tell you to be responsible about where you put your money, which is basically the most important decision you can make in a capitalistic world or society. Or how about "We treat our grantees as valued partners, and we treat the ultimate beneficiaries of our work with respect." Yes, it's very respectful to immunize people, and at the same time make investments in companies that are killing them. And of course, pure comedy gold: "We demand ethical behavior of ourselves." Riiiight. Tell that to the children with trouble breathing, whose degradation of health you are bankrolling.

The hits just keep coming, of course. Bill and Melinda believe that "every life has equal value". Unless that life is inconvenient to their investments, of course. Here's another goody: "The goal of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is to make sure that all people--no matter where they live--get the chance to live a healthy, productive life." Sure, unless they live next to a polluting investment.

Do I really need to provide more evidence of hypocrisy?

Bringing an innovation in learning to the global community through a truly open document format?

Sounds like exactly the sort of thing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would want to, erm, "embrace". Or at least dedicate themselves to.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/UnitedStates/Specia lInitiatives/Announcements/Announce-020110.htm