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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.""
... 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 Outdated driver?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?
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!"
... 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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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...
The problem is, to do anything REALLY great, you've got to buy off loads of politicians and bureaucrats (not to mention the occassional judge or two.) Otherwise, the instant you try to buy land, launch a nuclear spacecraft, or affect foreign policy, you'll get hordes of know-nothings with too much time on their hands screwing with your operations.
The cost of paving the way alone would consume a chunk of that billion, not to mention the tax investigators who would keep buzzing around to make sure you weren't hiding anything from them.
I suppose you could conduct your operations in secret, but the instant you went public, the NSA and Congress would be all over your ass faster than ants on a picnic.
Bill Gates has billions. Consider the uproar if he actually tried to directly influence ANYTHING. He's done the smart thing and let the foundations that he funds worry about keeping various palms crossed with silver.
...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
[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
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
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
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 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
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
...you're a Masochist then, are you? I should think that one woman nagging you would be more than enough. :)
"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.
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
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
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 -----------------------------------
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.
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!
He'd build a gigantic monument to his 1337 c0d1n6 5k!llz
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
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
/. from, or indeed any other posessions. You would have given every cent to charity and right now be working for free on a subsistence farm in the third world. But you'd rather sit on the sidelines and run your mouth about things that are far beyond your understanding.
Actually, that all exists already. There is already way too much food in the world - the US and EU destroy millions of tonnes of it every year. After all, food surpluses are a precondition of population growth, not the other way round, and the population is growing.
Growing the food is easy - our civilization understood farming centuries ago. Distributing the food is easy - logistics is a well-developed science, practiced by Walmat, UPS and the Marines, you can even do a degree in it. The difficult part is purely in the realm of the political. So long as tyrants like Robert Mugabe use starvation as a tool of population control, or nations like Somalia keep feudal civil wars going, famines are inevitable.
These are the men with just enough "obscene amount of money", but have failed to act.
The Gates Foundation has given billions away. Literally. What have you done?
3,000,000 counts of manslaughter per year.
If you really believed that, you wouldn't have a computer to post to
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. --
Seriously, you'd get a big fucking cluster for $1 billion.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
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
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
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!
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
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.
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.
I would buy a giant LEGO clone of myself
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
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!
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
I'd have my body and face completely reshaped into forms that no woman could resist. Let them come to me.
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.
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
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-
"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!
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
...and then I wouldn't *need* to buy any Congress-critters!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
(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.)
"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
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.
um, you're talking about someone with nothing but spare change (all of 'em).
Bill giving money to charity is no big deal, though, 'cause he can write it off his taxes just like I can (I'm sure he itemizes).
5% of his net worth yearly, or ever?
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.
I want my pre-wrapped bacon!
/. stupidity)...
(Trying to type slowly to avoid the
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.
I would hire the worlds best assassin. Then I'd start going down the list of the worlds worst tyrants (and overpaid executives).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.