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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.
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!"
... 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.)
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.
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.
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
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
...you're a Masochist then, are you? I should think that one woman nagging you would be more than enough. :)
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.
Here's some food for thought: Have you caught any fucking POLIO lately? How bout some smallpox? Do you have any idea how many babies die each year because they weren't properly vaccinated? Living conditions is one thing, but to discredit vaccines is ludicrous.
Specifically, to equip them with Windows?
Not like he's putting Linux on them or anything. Jesus, he's trying to help out underdeveloped areas in our own fucking country, and all you can do is be skeptical, like it's all part of his evil plan for world domination. Would you rather have those libraries have no computers and still be checking out books from the sixties? Umm, don't think so.
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
No problem: I can send you that one for the small fee of 100$.
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
$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.
Taking out the ones that you bitched about, here is what is left. Still totals over $400 Million. How much have you given lately?
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
> or possibly help engineer some sort of
:)
> food/weed that will grown nearly anywhere.
It's called Marijuana.
TODO: Something witty here...
It's pronounced "Nucular"...
--Homer Simpson
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
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 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
"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!
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