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Bill Gates to be Knighted
gexen writes "According to an article in the Telegraph Bill Gates is going to be knighted by the Queen of England for "services to the global enterprise." She's just handing them out like candy these days!"
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No Sir! Stars who refused honors--CNN Article
Well, he has given away a very substantial amount of money to worthy causes through his and his wife's foundation.
Is this a good thing? Of course. Sort of. Where did the money come from? Basically from a sort of involuntary tax extracted from millions upon millions of PC users around the world. So it's good that the money is going to a good cause, just bad that progress and innovation had to be retarded to make that happen.
The real reason why he's getting a knighthood, however, has nothing to do with his gifts to good causes. It's a powerplay between the Prime Minister Mr. Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown. Mr. Blair is in serious political trouble at the moment, what with the 45 minute claim, the missing WMDs, the ongoing situation in Iraq and various political issues at home (tuition fees for Universities). By coincidence, Mr. Brown who fancies being PM one day is having all his friends in business over for a conference - flexing his muscles and making it known that he has "important" friends too. By all accounts Mr. Blair didn't even know about this conference until 2 weeks ago!
I'm a director of an entrepreneurial company in the UK (well, I like to think so anyway :-)
and we tried to get to go to this conference,
but we're firmly not invited. It's only for
those "innovators" in big business, see. This
makes me quite bitter because big business only
accounts for about 20% of the UK economy, making
them fairly irrelevant as far as growth and
innovation are concerned.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.
Does Bill count as having an office of profit or trust?
> Illegally? How so?
Microsoft added a message to Windows that gave a warning about incompatibility with DR-DOS. But Microsoft's own testing had shown DR-DOS's compatibility to be essentially perfect. The message was a lie, intended to defraud the public.
Microsoft also added intentional (and encrypted) incompatibilities to Windows 95, while keeping DR-DOS out of the Windows 95 test program. It was a deliberate act of sabotage.
But there are more recent examples of Microsoft's criminal activity:
Sabotage:
> "Strategic Objective [is to] kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market" -- Microsoft Pricing Proposal for VJ++ 6.0
Fraud:
> "As i [sic] told charlesf [Fitzgerald] on the phone, at this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps." -- Armstrong Decl., Ex. 23.
Extortion:
> Gates wrote, "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office...."
> In Waldman's words: Sounds like we give them the HTML control for nothing except making IE the "standard browser for Apple?" I think they should be doing this anyway. Though the language of the agreement uses the word "encourage," I think that the spirit is that Apple should be using it everywhere and if they don't do it, then we can use Office as a club.
Almost every one of Microsoft's "victories" has involved similar illegal behavior.
The sabotage of Java alone has delayed the introduction of e-commerce by years, resulting in a loss of as much as $100 billion per year for the U.S. economy. And when you take that much wealth out of the world, people die.
Bill Gates doesn't deserve a Knighthood. He deserves to be in jail.