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HOWTO: Spend A Billion Dollars
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'd love to spend a billion. I've gone through a million but a B-B-B-Billion would be cool.
Just give the billion dollar to me! :)
... most probably spend some of it to go into space or to the Moon. Also, a big badass Beowulf cluster would be helpful to speed up those lengthy Gentoo emerges. Look 'ma, I'm compiling Linux faster than you're booting Windows!
whores. more whores than charlie sheen and hugh grant combined could go through in a lifetime.
Buy a new P4 every time a new cpu is released, same with video cards, new hottest latest motherboard, and buy the fastest ram available in largest increemnts available.. Outdated driver? Buy a new system.
Or sit down to try to get an interactive music license from the RIAA.
First, I'd buy a house. Then I'd pay off my car. I'd spend the remaining 999.5 million buying two senators and a representative.
The average male uses about 600 pairs of underpants over his lifetime
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?
Well I dont know how much United airlines is going for these days, but I'm sure you could pick up a few airlines cheap these days, what with their business way down, and we all know airflight will be popular again before too long.
I'd clone my girlfriend (2 or 3 times should be enough)
Imagine the possibilities!
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
... from ThinkGeek (I'd get the camera option, I think I can afford that), stick little fluffy penguins on top, and march the whole affair into Redmond during rush hour. I'm thinking about 400,000 of them.
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.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
- Primary residence on North Carolina's Outer Banks
- 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....)
I for one would buy myself a space-shuttle, paint it with primer, and leave it up on blocks in my front yard...
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!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
wow, a thread about what you would do with a bunch of money. how interesting.
(Ala Booger in one of the Revenge of the Nerds movies, when he meets "Snot" and Snot out belches him.)
Master!
But I think I would hit up the turkish exchange and convert my 1 Billion USD to 1,664,000,000,000,001.00 TRL
Just to say I'm a Quadillionar (or what ever comes after trillionar)
Then I would probable buy 1/5th of the world a coke
... or two!
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.
... that 2 companies dominate with thier heirs or stock holders comprising of 8/10 of the top 10 richest persons in America. Also, it is slightly un-settling that Walmart alone keeps positions 4 to 8 in the list.
What kind of marketing drones did they poll to make this list? Especially "The Geek." Big Macs and a Russian bride? Where are the orbital weapons platforms, zeppelins full of hot chicks, and house with audience chamber built from the actual Imperial throne room set from Return of the Jedi?
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Enough voting shares to be a pain in their rear...especially all the write-in votes for Linus and CowboyNeal.
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.)
I'd become the ultimate LPB!
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!
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
subject says it all, and anyone say they would not is lying
buyout pepsi - get Britney spears as your *personal* secretary - meet her in space
things...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
for myself and family (frankly we don't need much) and then use the rest for a trust to do things such as buying wells for 3rd world nations.
At least that might achieve something (which is probably better than the hot air generated at the "sustainable development" summit).
S
1977 Star Wars poster: $400
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.
Here is what happens: when you buy a LOT of stock, you will artifically inflate the stock's price by a certain amount. the more the merrier. samething happens when you SELL a lot of stock. it will go lower.
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?)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This may sound a little simplistic, but Billy G. would give a billion away to charity.
$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.
what do they call it... a manage a twah? Ya, Chicks dig money so I think if I had a billion dollars I could make that happen.
office space owns.
Groo wondering: How much cheese dip can I buy for a million copins? Next since: Groo is sitting on a mountain of cheese dip. (An obscure comic book reference from Groo the warrior)
hmm, $1,000,000,000,000 eh? First step of course is to get rid of that funny thing called US citizenship and opt in to be an American National....no more taxes, you just got half your billion back into your hands. As for the money, it would have to go towards new systems every year, a personal OC3, and funding large open source projects. Not to mention the zepplin squadron needed to conduct feats of supervillainy on a Carmen Sandiego level. Just stealing the brooklyn birdge and hiding it egypt or j-random location.
C'mon, it's what we've all wanted forever ...
... let's say somewhere where lots of IP lawyers and media cartel execs hang out.
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
Lots of socks. Enough so that I could put on a fresh new pair every morning. Every night, I'd throw the used pair in a big bag which I'd give to the Salvation Army every so often, so the bums would all have warm feet, wearing bright white (barely used) socks.
c-hack.com |
if i had a billion dollars we would be 999 million dollars toward developing an affordable small village level water purification system, or sanitiation system. or possibly help engineer some sort of food/weed that will grown nearly anywhere. to ease the suffering of the people on this planet.
dont need to figure out the human genome or anything fancy to get something done with that cash.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Buy a island in internation waters. Declare sovernity. Stock it with serious military. Write a constitution on a napkin, and using a great connection to the net, stockpile, and encourage others to help you gather and distribute any material you see fit. Fight the good fight.
hmm... actually they seem quite a bit more expensive than a billion... damn what's a guy gotta do to destroy the universe man...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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.
Would a narcissist geek build 500 monuments, one for every clone?
Find funky gifts
Could you cure AIDS with a billion dollars? Probably not. Perhaps you could pay for one dose of every AIDS victim in the US alone, but a billion doesn't really dent that problem.
Could you end poverty in the world? No, it'd probably get skimmed off the top by greedy bureaucrats in third-world countries. Perhaps you could pay for a single meal for every person under the poverty line.
Could you change how computing is thought of? Possibly. Imagine if this billion dollars was used to fund several open-source projects, allowing the true innovators (those who weren't paid to program when they began) to develop a paradigm shift in the way we work with computers. If each programmer was paid $30,000 annually, we're talking over 650 programmers for 5 years. Do you think something would happen out of that? I would like to think so. If we could come up with merely ten things that shift our entire way of interacting with computers I think your mark would be left.
It is only in history do we see similar types of philanthropy and science merging. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, even the civilizations of the Renassaince (sp?) would undertake such endeavours, many times with success. The only example I can think of off the top of my head is in the literature realm. King James stands out merely because he encouraged the new version of the Bible, allowing many scholars to dedicate their lives to translating Greek and Hebrew correctly and efficiently. Could it not be the same for us in this time?
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
When I first read the subject line I though that it was a pice about how IBM spent "1 billion dollars on linux". Anybody know what ever happened to that? Where did that money go?
:)
This story was quite amusing though. Didn't know you could buy your own town for the bargian price of 102 million.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Screw cars, houses and whores. Dial 10-10-220 and you could talk to Doug Flutie and Alf for 27,179.8 years!
... that the narcissist would buy 500 clones of himself and the geek a penis on the scale of mount rushmore
Where are the people like me who would buy cherished works of art, and toss them in fire, just for kicks?
Goodbye Mona Lisa! Won't have to hear about you again!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I understand this is a humor piece but still...
"buy himself a small lion farm and a couple a keepers"
It's like seeing "supposebly" in print...sure, it could be a typo but, considering it's commonly mispronounced that way, it more than likely isn't.
And try adding up all the numbers they give.
According to opensecrets.org, they don't go for more than $7 million each. You could buy a few key states' worth and not have to worry.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Feel free to extend this list...
I would build my own army and rule the world!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA he he.... euh? one billion is not enough? Crap. Could I rule Columbia instead? That's where Shakira lives right?
The glass is half-full. With poison. And there are cracks in the glass. The dirty, dirty glass.
I would use it as all the open source companies out there has used it, I would spread BS about alternative service&support business-model and spend billions on development without any possibility to get it back.
...I'd buy you a thousand green dresses (but not a thousand real green dresses, that would be cruel).
"It sure was strange to see something on Usenet about me that didn't involve Klingon gang rape." -- Wil Wheaton
fembots, fembots, fembots, FEMBOTS!!!
[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 with either a $5G seed donation or $10G to get the first one working.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, wait, slashdot. Yeah, slashdot.org. Yeah...and then I'd recycle links and get authors like Jon Katz to write...
Wait......damn, it's been done!
shouldn't this come under "Ask Slashdot"?
(like everything else around here does...)
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
It's interesting that they put in a Limosine Liberal, but no Conservative Fat Cat (even though he's most likely to have an extra $1 billion laying around).
It would probably go something like this:
...oh. Wait. Now I see why they didn't include him...
supermodels turned whores. more supermodels turned whores then charlie sheen and hugh grant combined could go through in a lifetime.
I'd buy the writers over a Forbes a sense of humor.
Someone hates these cans.
An original 1977 poster print of Star Wars. $344
500 black-market clones of himself. At $1.7 million a pop..., that's $850 million.
Fifty-year supply of McDonald's Big Mac value meal: $9,836,750.
Pays $280,800 to have his mother-in-law overnight borscht every week for 60 years
Gives rest of fortune ($250 million) to a nonprofit scientific research organization...
Maybe the geek should have been smarter than a Forbes editor and bought a beo cluster to keep track of their (non-sexist language added intentionally) 1 billion so as not to overspend it by $$$150,122,944.
However, that's just me...
sig: There are two mistaakes in this sig.
and then have their hands and kneecaps broken
Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
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.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
-----
bling wallpapers australia bling
I would bribe TAco and Neal and then capture slashdot. All the geeks would have to read the stories of what i do and and what I want.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
nuclear? By then you'll have to face Bush's military threats, unless you giving up your superpower weapon to UN; but everybody knows Bush's real target is your bitches repository.
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.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I would give 990 million dollars evenly to the
countries in most poverty in the world. Directly, and
then spend the last 10 million to travle around and
see what it did good and make them show me what
they spent my money on.
ps. I would buy a racecar to.
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
I think if i had a billion bux i'd send all the slashdot editors to a Journalism school..
:)
Then i'd just waste the rest on good kind bud and booze(only top shelf) and women
One _being_ a heatsink? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
..constructing an island in the Atlantic Ocean. I am sure these guys can help out. Then lay fiber to USA and europe, become the next global crossing, earn another billion while paying no tax. Repeat in the Pacific. Finally, dominate the world information system.
If I had 1 billion dollars I would either a) Put a man on the moon b) Buy a country c) Buy a big boat (Think USS Enterprise) e) Create a moon base f) Fund alternative enegry research
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
see subject
I would permanently rent the best suite in Walt Disney World, and spend my life there!
...you're a Masochist then, are you? I should think that one woman nagging you would be more than enough. :)
modernise it and turn my 1billion into a hundred or so
I would pleasure myself at work like this woman.
"I tell ya what I'd do, man. Two chicks at the same time, man."
. wa v
Well, his CHARACTER, Lawrence, in Office Space said it.
http://www.bullshitjob.com/officespace/million1
"Fsckin A, man!"
j
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
don't forget the thousand K-Cars and treehouses!
#1, Gates, William H III
46 , self made
Source: Technology, Microsoft (quote, executives, news)
Net Worth: $43,000 mil down
Hometown: Seattle , WA
Marital Status: married , 2 children
WOW! when did bill get some?
I'd buy about 1,000,000 monkeys - and fund the millitary to train and equip them with flamethrowers, rocket launchers, and other implements of destruction, and then have them airlifted into Afghanistan to get Osama.
With the rest of my money... hmmm imagine the beowulf cluster I could put together! *lmao*
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Forbes ? Sheesh ! Not long now before we start seeing stories from AryanNation on the front page...
Some years ago German SF-writer Andreas Eschbach came out with a novel entitled "Eine Billion Dollar" (which actually means a /trillion/ dollar). It features the young son of a poor italian shoe maker, who suddenly turns out as the heir of a 16th century merchant (go igure: centuries are the time by which small fortunes grow into really big ones) and is meant to "change something". The novel, however, has IIRC not yet been translated into english.
Where is the first part ?
The one entitled "HOWTO: Get A Billion Dollars"
theefer
Through inaction....
It would take an obscene amount of money to feed everyone that is starving in the world, provide the infrastructure necessary to send the food everywhere it needs to go, and insure that they will be able to provide for themselves in the future.
3,000,000 people die each year from starvation/malnutrition.
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffet, Paul Allen.
These are the men with just enough "obscene amount of money", but have failed to act.
Bill Gates alone makes more money in a year than the bottom HALF of the united states combined.
3,000,000 counts of manslaughter per year.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Thank you.
You'd almost certainly have to form a consortium to get that far up. In which case funding this is probably a better idea.
After the philanthropy had worn down, I myself would tile a wall with these these and hook them to a few of these. And I would go absolutely nuts with other technotoys.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
BAH. What a waste of money, the clones would just want your money, cause all kinds of problems, etc.
How about permanent residence, and your own module on the ISS?
I would buy all the politicians in Washington and make selling CDs illegal and make the RIAA have only an online P2P offering of their music, each song = 25 cents!
And then throw that dog Hillary Rosen a bone, I mean $1 million... to shut her trap of course.
Sex-tards. Where are our sex-tards ? You would think that with all the money that's been ploughed into biotech in the last few years that we would have fully functioning (in a manner of speaking) sex-tards by now......but no! What have our scientist been wasting their time on ?
Now, with a billion to spend on a private research project, decent sex-tards could be in the shops within a year !
Please supply the exact same conditions your girlfriend had growing up, since you can never be sure what was nature and wat was nurture...
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
but a billion dollars would buy me something near enough and lots of it too!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
...ang give hime the (also cloned) brain of Richard M. Stallman.
And then swap those two.
Could be worse. Could be raining.
I would build my own interplanetary spaceship! Damn that would be great. Oh, and I would also buy a harem ;)
It is strange that Forbes confuses spending and investing. Most of their examples are actually investments, not expenses.
I believe is it in fact very hard (except through donations) to spend a billion dollar, while it is extremely easy to invest them.
IF I had a billion dollars
I'd buy you a green dress,
but not a real green dress that's cruel!
From Microsoft (Aren't they the owners yet??)
"To feed the 31.1 million Americans living in poverty a $6 tofu turkey sandwich with organic sprouts, tomatoes, non-dairy Swiss cheese on whole-wheat bread, the limo liberal spends $186.6 million. " Is Forbes affiliated with Foxnews? Anyway, he forgot to include Compassionate Conservative, who would spend a few hundred million establishing a monarchy in the USA and then using it's military to settle old scores.
I'd go on a hype exercise. I'd buy a big old plot of land (pref. with some crop circle history) in an area with a history of dodgy politics.
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!
I simply hate when i have one billion lying around uselessly, it's simply outrageous.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
* FSF so they can continue their good work and the GNU software. And to pay some patent lawsuits that are bound to come. /office filesystem. WITH good security, and desktop intergration.
* Someone to make Gnome and KDE the best desktops around.
* A few donations to the *BSDs.
* Pay some deveopers to produce an even better/faster gcc.
* Pay someone to develop a decent distributed
* The rest should go to whomever got some business to sort out in a court with Microsoft.
Why not buy 5 million xboxes?
With the money Microsoft lose on each box that will sure teach them a lesson.
(yes, I realise that it would be better not to buy them at all...)
If you are a geek with a girlfriend (a rarity), don't forget her to tell her that she is worth $40,000,000. It's one heck of a compliment, and now you have proof of in with this article ;-)
Remember that any clone must start out as a infant. Imagine the jail time, dude. : )
I would build an army of fluffy penguins on the redmond lawn infront of the main entrance. Just to see the reaction on the PHB's when they get to work. Maybe with some nice voice abilitys too and make them chant
"developers! developers! developers!"
HTTP/1.1 400
I will buy a computer able to play doom 3 medium details ! :)
>Marital Status: married , 2 children
According to my local newspaper, Gates Jr. Version 3.0 (a daughter) is out.
That the world desperately needs. Torture them until they pay back what they stole, then shoot them in the back of the head.
Might be worth getting a better trained monkey to be president too.
I'm not looking forward to staring at Bill Gates' face carved into Mt Ranier.
I would buy a server and 'net connection that can withstand Slashdotting...
Fabs pay for themselves within a few years. I'd say it's a hell of an investment.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
This investment strategy:
...
$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
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
If I had a billion dollars I would build 10s of thousands of monolithic domes around the country to be used as Storage Containers, Schools, Churches, Homes, and Emergency Shelters.
I would also start a mortgage company that would help people build monolithic domes.
Think round, build a dome.
Seriously, you'd get a big fucking cluster for $1 billion.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
How comfortably could you live off interest/investments from 1bn? (assuming you don't do anything risky) Don't forget, your going to need to pay wages for your servants and techs (your not going to maintain your 500 machine LAN yourself, especially when you have LAN-parties to host) and that big mansion doesn't come cheap. How much is aviation fuel these days?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I would be soo paranoid of loosing 1bn dollars. There are so many things that could go wrong. Well.. just like everything else in my life
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Well I know I could never spend a full billion on myself alone, I'd end up giving most of it to my congregation to use on mission works and such, but one of the first things on my list would still be a fully decked out dual 1.25GHz powermac with two 23" apple displays, YUM! :)
I'm a narcissistic thrill seeking hedonistic liberal geek.
So where do I collect my 5 Bills ?
I could setup the ultimate warez server!! Terabytes of disk space!! An OC3 just for myself!!
What? Just buy the games instead?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I would use the money to bring back Looking Glass. The people who made the games System Shock, Theif and all those other amazing classics. Even if the games sold at a loss, who cares, a billion dollars will keep everyone in business for a while. It's sad to see quality games get stomped out because of lack of profits...
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
do 2 chicks at the same time
Hmmm.... a billion dollars...
:)
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
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Did it strike anyone else that the Forbes article was a complete waste of bits?
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, 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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I guess there's only so many times you can run the story, "CEO Steals Candy from Baby" before it all just sort of fades into the static.
Hire Arthur Anderson to do your taxes . . .
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.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
You can donate your money to the "give Billly Gates some money" fund. Or better yet if you can donate some nice computer equipment. I wouldn't mind one of these babies as a portable and this as a dream workstation. If you had a billion lying around that you want to get rid of then I am your man. Infact I will make a deal. You post here on slashdot and I will always mod you up. No matter how trollish or lame the comment is. I will do it for life for just a fraction of your worth.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
It's pronounced "Nucular"...
--Homer Simpson
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
like this article was written (well, could have been) by bratty little kids in middle school during lunch? I know it's supposed to be a joke, but the answers all seem so juvenile. Substitute a few middle-school cliques for the categories forbes selected, and you have a article for the school paper. This article seems pretty poor journalism even for forbes.
AccountKiller
do what sonera did and buy 4.3 billions worth of air from germany in form of UMTS-licenses
How about the 2 senators and a congressman or 2 from a small state?
Mod point free since 2001
... this is what I wouldn't do:
- Sell my shares early cause of a tip
- Kill anyone, especially my wife
- Play with guns in my house
- Waste my money and life on drugs
- Get suckered in buying land here
and most of all, never never ever
- Turn into an idiot
Live web cams
2,000 chicks at the same time, man.
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
After reading some of the comments and after thinking seriously what I would do with a billion dollars, I'm not sure i would do anything different then what i am doing now.
That's not to say that i'm really financially well off or anything. Or that I have The Good LifeTM but the more i focus on the question "what would I do with a billion dollars." the more i sway to the conclusion that money isn't everything.
It would be nice to own a beautiful home, an exotic car, help the world by donating all of it to chairity...the options are endless when money becomes less of a factor.
Sometmes people forget that money isn't worth the paper it's printed on and that some of the best things in life are free. Some things you just can't place a monitary value on, like a loving relationship, a caring family. How could any one of you place a monitary value on your chlid's head, for example? I know I couldn't and I'm only 22 without children.
I was asked a simular question once before: "what would you do with an x amount of dollars", by my guidence counselor back when i was in high school. The question was supposed to get you to focus on what you wanted to do with your life if you didn't have to worry about money.
Could I donate it to help those in need? Sure it would help greatly, but would it have any lasting effect? I think it would only for the short-term.
Could I by one or a lot of products that makes me happy? Sure I could. I could name a few things I'd like to own that would make me feel happy. But how long would that happiness last? Once you get used to the item you bought for a little while, it just eventually becomes a thing you own. Again, short-term.
it's all how you define value and what you consider real happiness to be i guess.
To me, you can be dirt poor or filthy rich and be truely happy. In this context, money really doesn't matter at all.
Yes, i know money pays for food, water, shelter and a lot of people say you need at least these 3 things in order to survive. I agree. my point isn't that I think money means squat, it's that money is grossly overrated and the simple things in life that don't require money, are often times over looked.
*shrugs* There's a meaning in there somewhere.
A penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
Start making solar power satellites and such. Our energy needs didn't grow as fast as they predicted in the 70's, partly because of better computer controls and automatic regulation. But if we could make electricity cheap enough we could save the petroleum for plastics.
See O'Neill's The High Frontier for how to do it with 1970's tech. Imagine what we could do now. We've discovered that it's not trivial to build a small, closed-loop ecology (Biosphere II wasn't run well, but it still learned a few useful things) but we don't have to worry about making it closed-loop from the start.
Heck, if there's water ice on the Moon like they think, it'll be even easier. A billion ought to get things started, no problem.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
That would be Bill Clinton. Bush is a gay who's father buyed the elections so the real Texas man would stop making fun of him.
If I had a million dollars, if I had a million dollars
I'd buy you a house, I would buy you a house
If I had a million dollars, if I had a million dollars
I'd buy you furniture for your house, yup, like a chesterfield or an ottoman
If I had a million dollars, if I had a million dollars
I'd buy you a K-car, a nice Reliant automobile
If I had a million dollars, I'd buy your love...
If I had a million dollars, I wouldn't have to go to the store
If I had a million dollars, we'd take a limosine 'cause it costs more
If I had a million dollars, we wouldn't have to get Kraft Dinner
(but we would get Kraft Dinner. Of course we would, and get reeely expensive ketchup to go with it [mmMMmmmm!])
Hear the song
One version of the lyrics (there are many)
I'd spend it all on booze and whores and then just waste the rest.
Friends and family would know how to find me - just follow the trail of dead strippers.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
The richest man is not the one who has the most but the one who needs the least.
I would buy a giant LEGO clone of myself
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Anachronox 2.
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
With $1 billion, I could actually afford a dual G4 Mac. Hell, with that much money I could probably afford two.
I've always said that if I had that kinda cash I'd set up a Jet Pack Research Laboratory.
And I would, too.
I would use it to stop software patents.
:P
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.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Sheesh...a Mt. Rushmore sized Larry Ellison face. Talk about tacky...
------------------ D. A. Davenport: http://www.firebin.net
Fifty-year supply of McDonald's Big Mac value meal: $9,836,750.
So a mere $539 per day for value meals? I haven't been to McDonald's in a while, but that seems steep.
How freakin happy would you be if your child had both legs blown off by land mines produced in the US. To add salt to the wound, the US then claims we had nothing to do with the poor kid getting crippled. Yeah, that is really ethical and upstanding of American citizens. Before you start flaming, I am an American, but I disagree with a lot of the messed up stuff we do to other countries in the name of "progress". You think people would be feel the same way if the kid's father was George Bush, Dick Cheney, or some other fat politician. I seriously doubt it. People need to wake up and smell the damn fire. No one is innocent here. I'm not excluding myself from it either, since I just another guy getting screwed by our government.
for a billion dollars, i could finally pay for half of the stuff I stole off Kazaa!
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
For 2 reasons:
1) Some of that cost is fixed - lab equipment, training etc.
2) Volume. All the clones will need simillar processing.
So that cost is not accurate. A clone army will cost less than that.
Why in the world are we still defining "rich" in monetary terms? It's obvious the only thing extreme wealth leads to personal troubles. Look at the studies about lottery winners. Or better yet, look at the statistics about the divorce rate of the top 5%. You may have more toys, but people also hate your god damn guts because for every expensive car that's a couple starving families in America. Go ahead and flame away, because there's no good reason for any person to have 1 billion dollars.
Based on the next story, I'd put 66 satellites into geo-synchronous transfer orbit to start a global porn version of HBO. Then with the remaining $10 mil, buy up all the porn I can, and hit play. For $10 a month you can enjoy all the porn your heart desires.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
I'd do two chicks at one time.
100% Insightful
Just use the billion dollars to buy ourselves a few congressmen. Just imagine if we had this a few years ago, the DMCA would have been a joke amongst ourselves. Well, maybe it doesn't take a TON of money to buy one, but the more the better....aw heck with it, jsut buy the baddest Beowulf cluster you can with the remaining funds. I know I would.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
...Would spend $1 Billion dollars five times over to make his operating system "trustworthy"!
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
I would form my corporation, Liandri Mining Corporation and immediately begin a serious weapons research program. At the same time thousands of scientists and doctors would be perfecting my re-animator device. Once several factory locations were complete, I would invite over all of my friends ( I would have a lot 'cause I'm rich remember ) for an afternoon of fun and frolic. Once I achieved Godlike status and my "friends" were reduced to a steaming pile of gibbs, I would invest in hardier prison stock from well, actual prisons. I would be willing to commute their sentences by buying out their term with suitable pentance to the state and victims, and they would finally have a suitable place to live, work, and play.
To make me Moon Base. Hell! If they can lauch to geostationary orbit for a mere $15 million they can surely make a moon base for $1 billion.
I wonder why isn't the geek actually the one designated as narcissist... :-)
I'd have my body and face completely reshaped into forms that no woman could resist. Let them come to me.
clone Natalie Portman and wait 18 years...
And I'd buy a large number of monkeys and place themm behind the Slashdot Editorial typewriters.
Wait no difference!
Buy Microsoft
A large monument in the mountains sounds like a good idea, but not with MY face on it. I can think of several girls who would be worthy of the honnor of having their face in my personal monument. With any luck I could convince one to be my wife and skip the russian mail order thing. (Okay, a lot of luck, but it could happen. I'm still budgeting for the russian bride program though)
I think most of my money would be spent on randomlly paying for math education. I've always wanted to go bake to my school and for one quarter pay the tuition for every math class, with the only requirement that you get a C, and the class be difficult. (calc or above, Algebra is high school not college) I would at random go to schools and pay for it, but the announcement would not be made until after the last day to register for class.
hot hot hot hot hot grits
That article was awful. It looks like it was written by a 65 year old who doesn't know his ass from his mouth. The choices he made were awful, and weren't in the least bit funny or interesting.
The richest people in the Netherlands are quite diverse.
;-)
Number one is a family that is, among other things, into confection (that means clothes) in the El Cheapo category.
Second, true to our nation and people, is Freddy Heineken, whose last name is quite possibly familiar.
Third is the family Van Oranje (Of Orange). Also known as 'The Royal Family', because these are our Queen, Princes, Princesses and other assorted royalty.
I find it pretty depressing to note that even beer gets more money than the royal family
I would buy NORTEL (NT) stocks. They are worth 0.88$ now. They used to be worth 120.00$ (CAN money). They SURELY will get to 20$ again, so it'll be approx. 2500% profits. ;-)
That should take about a billion.
Why pay $102 million when you can just take some advise from the Geek and get a mail-order-Russian bride to take care of that obsession for you? (It'll only cost ya $5,000 per lady!)
Karma: NaN
3. Adopts 50,000 children for $24 a month for 50 years in Sally Struthers-sponsored Save the Children program. Cost: $720 million.
Sadly enough, not one childs life would be much better than it is now.
Isn't the age of irony over? How about engaging our leaders rather than marveling at their egos?
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
There are bound to be a few privately held (or public but still with heavy family ownership) companies out there that started small and grew rapidly. It's simple statistics; these folks are way off on the right side of the bell curve, and the amazing wealth is going to be spread around the family and the company.
Explosive companies produce noveau riche, because the money and prosperity doesn't have as much time to diffuse throughout the economy as it does with a slower-growing firm. The natural result is a temporary concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people. Once the company ceases its exponential growth, the money begins to diffuse. The first appearance of the name "Rockefeller" on the Forbes list, for instance, appears in the 73-spot, with $2.5 billion - still a lot, but a far cry from the man who still holds the inflation-adjusted record for the biggest fortune accumulated.
The fact that there's a concentration of money isn't a problem, because the money naturally goes away after a while as it's spent and donated and split among multiple heirs who eventually have to take real jobs.
We don't have an aristocracy here. We have money, and money moves from place to place. Sometimes a lot of it settles on one person. That's the economy for you.
I'd buy a block in the middle of a major city and knock down all of the buildings in it and turn it into a cow pasture. I can picture it now, office workers with their $tarbuck$ coffee shuffling by cows lazily chewing their cud.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Perhaps your stories would be all that's posted... but that, by no means whatsoever, guarantees that *anybody* is gonna read 'em.
Besides, what the hell is a "slahsdot?"
Oxfam estimates that it costs $20 to save a human
life, via rehydration and nutrition programs.
So a billion dollars translates to 50 million
people (although I think that's a bit optimistic).
Given a billion to spend, I think I'd undo the
human suffering of World War 2.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
After using half of it to lobby Congress in favor of Open Source, there are only three things worth spending that kind of cash on:
Beer, Pizza, and Hookers!
"Harcourt Fenton Mudd! Have you been DRINKING?!? ..."
-- Terry
Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
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.
Carthago delenda est!
...Bosendorfers with Gold/Platinum key tops.
Two of them. (One with inverted key colors.)
A castle made out of stainless steel, or hard-anodized alunimum. With a fully equipped lab/machining shop. And a cutting laser.
A unimog, and a porsche.
The rest will be for goofing off and for making projects.
Start putting prices on spammer's heads. 1 Billion might not be nearly enough to get them all, but it might make that "cost of doing business" a bit more expensive than "it's free."
And forget buying the island... I want an aircraft carrior... Start taking on refugees... Teach them some gibberish to say to reporters.
...a giant frickin' laser. Too big for even mini-me to hump. :)
Buy Internet stocks.
Wait.
That's the trouble with the world today, nobody's building enormous, useless monuments any more.
That's why I'd buy some land out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and build a new pyramid that's twice as big as the Great Pyramid in Egypt! Yeah! Of course, there'd be hidden passages and rooms inside, guarded by fiendish traps... and if you made it past them all, you'd find the prize: Geraldo Rivera!
The other thing I'd do is build a gigantic statue of Bruce Campbell (with chainsaw on one hand, shotgun in the other) standing astride Los Angeles/Long Beach harbor. It'd be the Colossus of Groovy!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Here's the plan:
(1) Steal Underpants.
(2) ????
(3) A Billion Dollars in PROFIT!
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
...and then I wouldn't *need* to buy any Congress-critters!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
What I would do:
1. Turn myself into a Fembot
2. Become Empress of a nation
3. Get a set of fanatical followers
What is this? You are being PRACTICAL? Jesus...
Someone call in the geek re-education coucil.
I had an casual friend at University who inherited a lot (between 10-50 million USD) while at university.
This was in the late 1970's
He took his best college buddy (also dorm room buddy) and bought a house on the beach in Hawaii, where he dedicated his life to surfing, and, er, other activities.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
If I had a billion dollars, I'd buy Forbes magazine, fire the staff, and hire some writers and managemnet who had some imagination.
What's with the crap that they're writing: McDonalds Hamburgers? Haircuts on the LAX runway? Dollywood? BOOORRRING!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Why buy 500 clones of myself? That means 500 more competitors! I'd rather have 500 clones of my girlfriend!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
did anyone notice this:
"Fifty-year supply of McDonald's Big Mac value meal: $9,836,750."
That's insane. do the math. 9836750/(50*365*3) = $179.66 per meal.
How about a faery tail castle (or some similar structure) in the Rocky's. Ideally visible from roads and highways up to 20 miles away, or better yet, from space. Could also be in the Seattle/Denver/Vancouver area where the entire city could see it.
Another possibility is the Zanatos building in the Gargoyles tv series.
(On a more realistic note, if you can take home $50,000 a year and live off of $10,000 a year, invest in 5% interest investments you can quit paid employment completely in only 6 years.)
All of it.
I'd have to say that it would be impossible for someone to actually spend $1 billion, assuming some limitations were set:
1.) No military vessels (i.e aircraft carriers).
2.) No buying up small nations.
3.) No space stations on the Moon.
Given those limitations, I don't see how one person could possibly spend $1 billion at a rate faster than it would accrue interest (assuming only three percent or so for argument's sake).
Let's see, you'd have to have a house. Maybe something like this? I've heard that it would probably cost $75 million to reproduce it. That would drop you a little, but in the time it would take to build it, your interest would likely make up for the entire construction cost.
Okay, now that you've got a house, how about a car? You could buy ten of each of the Bentley Azure, the Lamborghini Diablo, the Mercedes CL600 Coupe, and throw in a few million dollar 'collector cars' from here, and still not spend more than you'd make back in interest in the time it took for you to drive each one 1,000 miles.
How about some toys? Maybe a nice Gulfstream, since every billionaire must have one? How about two, since they only cost $40 million each? Maybe a yacht? This one is a mere $68 million for a 244 footer! Remember, once you've made your yearlong cruise of the world you've almost made up for the cost!
I can't personally think of much else, since the cost of a 'fine companion' to share this with could be any cost...;-). The point is, however, that unless you sought the goal of actually spending $1 billion and being left with nothing, you would probably be shocked as to how easily that pesky money would re-create itself as you were trying to spend it.
You are full of shit At any given time there is a limited amount of money on this planet. Money decides what gets done. If I break my arm and don't have any money, I'm SOL. What kind of society do we live in when a person with a broken arm can't go to the nearest hospital and get it set? Something is very wrong with the system.
I don't have a problem with someone making 100K/year. Really, I don't. Some people are acutally worth that much. Ex: Doctors, really good engineers, etc.
What I have a problem with is people who are worth 10 billion dollars. When one person has the economic and (arguably) the political influence of 10,000 people making 100k/year, something is fucked up.
What this country needs is a cap on individual wealth. Set it at say $20 million dollars. Assuming the average person makes $2 mil in their lifetime, this person can support himself and his family very well off half of that money. The other half he can use to buy 5 perrsonal slaves. What's that you say, slave ownership is illegal? Technically, yes, but if he has enough money to pay someone to do his whims for their entire life, they're basically his "economic" slave. Yes the specfic person could quit and go work somewhere else, but he would just hire someone else and own half of two lives. Remember that this person has enough money so he himself will never have to do any work to contribute to society at all.
Life is too short to proofread.
"Two Chicks at one time!"
"Two chicks?"
"Yeah sure, a guy like me'd need money to get that thing on."
I would build my $200,000,000 fortress of evil, nestled in the rockies. It would have a fake nuclear missile silo full of Apple Xserves running as a cluster to freely host worthy websites (and maybe some porn) over a dual T3 connection. I would carve a sheer rock wall out of the mountainside to project movies and television onto for my viewing pleasure, and that of any neighbor within fifty miles. I would encourage people to create a commune near my home where people would be encouraged to program OS X software by being provided with decent housing, three meals a day, and accesss to a Dual-G4 1.25Ghz tower. My sub... er, the programmers would be provided plenty of caffeinated beverages and weekend-long LAN parties for those who submit something credible to the CVS repository on site.
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!
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
I'd use it to build my secret underground "Moon Base" purchase a giant "Laser", aim it at the Earth, and threaten the heads of states to give me "One Billion Dollars" to replace the money I lost building the "Moon Base" and the "Laser", then fire the "Laser" at the Earth anyway. I would call it "The CowboyNeal Project" (raises pinky to corner of mouth, emits diabolical evil genius laugh).
With one billion dollars, I could have the State of California get me enough Oracle licenses for my wife, my daughter and myself to connect to an Oracle database, and still have enough left over to to see a first-release movie at night.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Whomever wrote that article was LAME! c'mon - why do they think that we would eat a lifetime suppy of Bic Fscking Macs!!!
Buy a russian bride?!
Losers are the people who have that vision of geeks.
At least I know I am not as narrow minded, prejudice and retarded as that writer.
If I had a billion I would buy that fool a clue....
oh - wait I wouldn't be able to afford it.
What?!
No one has suggested a life sized "Death Star" ride on your mansion property?? Your own multiscreen theatre in your house? No renting a few companies of Spetnatz commandos, squadron of MiGs, a few platoons of T80's, Airlift and logistics and take over a small 3rd world nation and call it Corusant and set yourself up as Emperor Palpatine the 1st? Fsuk the poor! in my land the poor would be just as ceushed under my iron heel as they ever previously, but I'd slash taxes, have American firms come into my land to exploit the population and pay me large amounts of cash, then tell Dubyah we were fully behind the
Hell, I'd buy the "Auryn" off of Steven Speilberg, have supermodels flown to my posh home, snort coke of their emaciated bodies and make them dress up as my favorite female characters from anime and do terrible things to them. *Of course, that'd mean dumping my gf for a "trophy whore" and getting myself a bigger entourage than Louis Farrakan or Puff Diddy* Did I mention having an OC3 or DS3 pipe and running the mother of all warez and pr0n servers?
I have no doubt money like that would completely corrupt me in mere moments....wow, my moral compass is spinning just thinking about it!
Calvin:"It takes an uncommon mind to think of these things Hobbes" Hobbes: "I'm afraid I'd have to agree with that."
PLA - Playboy MktCap $200 Mill
ATI- ATI MktCap $550 Mill
Omahasteaks.com Reported to be worth $150 mill
Got your whores, monster video games boxen, and a big fat steak. With enough to buy a 0.1% of the shares in M$.
First things first -- I'd take $100M of it, buy new houses for all my friends and family, pay off everyone's debt, and put the remainder of it in investments that guarantee me and my family a comfortable life off the interest/dividends for the rest of our lives. Now, with the remaining $900M.....
I'd go to Las Vegas and play Blackjack with $1M bets at a time.
I'd pay the transportation staff for Art Modell to drop him off in downtown Cleveland just before the Browns-Ravens game.
I'd buy Lichtenstein.
Free as in beer. For real.
I'd invest in donut shops. Because donuts taste good.
I'd invest in heart disease foundations. Because donuts taste good.
I'd book the most expensive suite aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship and renew every week for a year.
When cow-orkers ask what I'd like for lunch, I'll tell them Philly Cheesesteak, in Philadelphia. Tomorrow, New England clam chowder, in Boston. The day after, Jamaican jerk chicken....you get the picture.
One billion shares of Lucent stock.
There's many, many more....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
If i had a spare billion.. I'd hire assassins to kill off those 500 black market clones of myself.. damnit, there can be only one!
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
How about buying a magazine and a few news papers to peddle my pet political theories. Then, try to buy enough votes to become the US president while peddling a flat tax scheme?
1) Steal Underwear 2) ...
3) Profit!
First of all, what is money? That's the first thing one has to grasp. Money is simply a symbol of your labor. If you can agree with me there, then why does it seem logical to put artificial limits on how much money someone can earn for themselves?
Furthermore, it's an accepted practice that if you so choose, you can transfer these tokens of your labor to anyone else you see fit. Therefore, although you might find it upsetting somehow that rich business owners hand their wealth down to future generations - it's perfectly sensible and equitable.
Given our current system of government, those with large sums of money *do* end up forcibly giving some of it away every year. Either they're hit with high taxes, or in efforts to dodge such taxes, they have to spend some of it on charities and donations. (Why do you think Bill G. gave away that billion dollars so far, and will keep on doing so? I highly doubt it was simply because he had a sense of guilt, or just wanted to be a "nice guy" all of a sudden.)
At the most basic level, it's pretty easy to determine how much money someone "needs" to survive - but you have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. What's the cost of living index where the person currently resides? Do they have any special medical needs? Once you come up with that dollar amount, the rest is "unnecessary" - but most of it helps us live more fulfilling and enjoyable lives.
Don't forget, that guy with "too much money" who buys an expensive boat is helping other people make a living, too. Someone made a commission selling it to him, and certainly he'll employ maintenance people to fix the engine, etc. when it breaks down. Factory workers built everything in and on that boat, and somebody had to build the dock it's kept in. Still others are employed to do such things as dredge the rivers and lakes, so boats such as these can navigate through.
There are two ways to go about doing this but both require access to a poor (but lovable!) country. Let us say, for example, Guyana.
First and most socially acceptable, simply agree to purchase a small island. Not just to own, though- you want to actually secede, gaining not just property rights but complete legal autonomy and independence. You could perhaps enter into a set of treaties with the former-government to make it more palatable, such as non aggression and fishing rights, but the land would be completely and totally yours.
The second -and for some reason more frowned upon- option would be to buy the presidency. This could be done either in one of the old fashioned, underhanded ways (such as forming a rebel army or bribing officials to rig the election) or in a much more honest way: publicly offer the people of the country your entire fortune in exchange for the post of dictator-for-life. The money could be put into the national coffers, used to make public improvements, or distributed directly to the citizens. In the case of Guyana, this would come out to about $1400 for every man, woman, and child in the land. Assuming parents got their kids' money, this would be right around the half the annual income for an entire family. If nationalized, this would be more than the entire governmental budget for four years! Such an offer would be hard to resist for such a poor nation, and they may well look upon you as a national savior -perhaps even a god- should you choose to rule benevolently.
So one billion dollars can buy you a nation, with an option for godhood.
*******
"What good is science if no one gets hurt?!" - Professor Chromedome
I'm late to the party but after reading all the other comments, I can't believe no one said this:
I'd figure out how to build a lightsaber. More accurately, I'd pay *other* people to figure it out. I just want one.
Although I'm not sure this could be done for a billion but it'd sure be fun to try.
I would build the world's very first crenosphere.
Well, one billion dollars, if you look really hard at it, isn't really that much. I mean, look at bill gates. all of 43Billion he's got? You'll still be small time in the grand scheme of the richest people in the world. But hell, when you keep yourself in the fat fiber pipes and the fastests game servers out there, what more do you need? Just invite a couple friends over and LAN for eternity! Damn everyone else!
I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
That should be far enough away from humanity.
Apparently, a geek would buy 500 black-market clones of himself,
No geek I know would waste money on 500 clones, when one or two would do the job (or maybe five or so for multiply redundant backup purposes) and the savings fromt he other 495 could be put toward mainframes, building a sattelite network, an underground lair, mirrorring the internet, possibly getting a low-end fighter jet, or lots and lots of Jolt. Just to name a small subset.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
A billion dollars is enough cash to cover a lifetime worth of food, water, air, energy, tools and toys and move it all to a remote location outside of society's influence.
;)
I've wanted to drop out of the human race for a long time (since I was 8 or so). Similarly, much of the human race has wanted me to go away for the same length of time. It's a win-win proposition.
No, it's pronounced chowder!
Does anyone besides me notice that the geek spends $850 million on clones alone and still has $250 million to donate to scientific research? That's $100 million over the limit right there!
My life's goal is to get a score of +3!
A true geek knows he should spread his spending out and keep good investments. @10% interest, i=pe^rt=$274k per day, off interest. Top Secret documents go for $20k to $100k, so Non-disclosure source code would probably sell on the order of unity. Two commercially viable programs a day...
Or, if you've played Jagged Alliance, you know the worlds best mercenaries go for $10k a day - a 100 man strike force, including adequate h4x0rs, with $1 million in gear, in a town named Redmond, and a CD pirating factory in Tiajuana ($1 million) and more mass mailed cds than AOL. A few million can go a long way.
Since you bought a Cayman Island, when the Federales come kicking down your door, you can revert to banging models and counting your off-shore assets.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Well, not quite. I'd wait until it's possible to build a space elevater, then build a hotel up there. That just might cost more than a billion, though.
I'd buy 3D Realms ( "Make them an offer they couldn't refuse" ) and make them finally release Duke Nukem Forever.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
I would build an upside down Great Pyramid
i suppose i could enter and have a 50/50 chance of winning
Entitled to basic health care my ass, you have obviously never gotten a bill from a hospital. :)
And you are never going to make $20 million.
Yes people WORKING add to the sum of wealth in the world, but people sitting on their ass and earing interest does not. The money that they get as interest is actually just part of the wealth that people doing work and creating things has made.
Technically, economics is not zero sum, and so perhaps my title was misleading but a lot of other things that it is a mere abstraction of are. For instance, land ownership. Too many of you guys seem to forget that. I took Econ 101 at an Ivy-League University and got an A, but I know the difference between a model of reality and reality itself and I don't really care where either one of us was/wasn't educated. Your ideas you be able to stand on their own. Since you think where I was educated is what really matters, now that you know I expect you to bow in respect and awe at the size of my massive penis
Too many of you right-wing nutjobs think that because new wealth can be created, that any wealth someone gets is new. If I buy something for $10 and sell it for $100, I've just made $90. That doesn't mean I've contributed $90 worth of wealth to society. The thing existed both before and after I sold it and that $90 didn't appear from nowhere. Think about that for a while.
I didn't say corporations couldn't exist. They just wouldn't be controlled by a handful of ultra-rich people.
I don't think you have a right to unlimited personal wealth. Why should you be able to own all the land/oil/etc in the world? Do you honestly think it is your right to own more than you could ever possibly need and have the rest of the world leasing/buying it from you, while you sit on you ass and do nothing? I think my right to earn a living beats your right right to own whatever you want at some point.
Life is too short to proofread.
Strippers and Blackjack.
Dude, think about it...nothing would get done.
Forget rushmore. The statue of liberty would be the Statue of Me!!! Either that or I'd take 49 of my closest friends into space.
2. In a rash act of generosity, pops for idol Lance Bass' trip to the moon on a shoddily made Russian rocket ship. Cost: $20 million.
I'm sick of all these snaps on the Russian space dudes. Those Russkies are cool and have forgotten more about space than we (the West) know.
4. He'd wear diamonds on the soles of his shoes. Assuming a price of $800 to $900 per carat and covering the soles of his shoes with 3.5 ounces of diamonds, he'd spend about $422,450. Wearing diamonds on the soles of 50 pairs of shoes would cost him about $22,122,500. Keeping a lifetime supply of $67-an-ounce caviar: $490,000.
This is overpriced. There is no reason why the Hedonist would need gem-grade diamonds. He/she could use industrial-grade rocks and save a bundle.
Hay don't be cheap. Recast the hull and update other parts as well.
:)
Maybe a lazer upgrade.
Then your army reaches intact.
Unless they send in the millitary. So you want the final battle to happen at MSHQ...
I don't actually exist.
I would cash it into one hundred ten dollar bills each day and then spend my life impulse shopping and over tipping everyone.