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RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today
In anonymous reader writes "RMS will be moving his office to the new William H. Gates building at MIT's Stata Center starting today. This marks the end of MIT's use of building NE43, which housed the LCS and AI labs (now combined into CSAIL).
On a strangely unrelated note, shortly after Harvard, in a laudable attempt to retain solidarity with the Open Source community, dedicated the Maxwell Dworkin building (named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers respectively), Gates' credit card was hacked. After all, they did have his mother's maiden name... "
ah the irony is just to delicous
There's MIT, Stanford... anywhere else that Billy has seen fit to leave his mark?
... is the 'w' in 'Dworkin' silent?
How does this attempt to retain solidarity with the OSS community? The entire post is one gigantic run-on sentence, so maybe I am not reading it correctly?
Curious that a educational institution, one that prides themselves in open research and innovative thinking, would name buildings after people whom's sole goal in the lending of money was to stop that line of thinking (I.E. influence minds to support their corporate agenda and philosophy). Sad really.
So, does that mean that Ballmer is actually a 'Dwork'?
How stupid can you be? In the article, it says he stole the credit card numbers to prove how insecure things were. If that wasn't enough, he emailed the info to NBCi. Why do these people think that they're the "good guys" when they do this?
Gray says he is actually the good guy. He said "I just wanted to prove how insecure these sites are. I have done the honest thing, but I have been ignored."
That's like shooting someone just to prove how unsafe firearms are.
*shakes head*
Spread the RC luvin'
What did they order with it? And did Bill notice 100 being spent out of his 1,000,000,000,000,000.... bank account?
My Auction:Pan Tilt Ethernet Webcam, UK!
Typical - you fund a shiny new building but no sooner is it in use than some bearded hippy moves in and lowers the property values.
Hoarders may pay to fund new buildings,
that is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot choose their neighbours.
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
These articles hype up MIT (and their facilities) like it's the greatest engineering school. I know more unemployed MIT grads and undergrads than any other school. The world has changed.
Oh, the ironic...ness...icity!
Fine, I don't know what to say, it's just that this is kind of a strange and funny situation, and there's not much to comment on. I mean "RMS, in Bill Gates Building!" and then we all laugh, and it goes somewhat like "gauffle, gauffle, gauffle!"
Slashdot mods, please forgive me.
No way... so by buying Microsoftware, we supported the FSF?
my other sig is a 500 page novel
I think the term about those kids that felt that they were doing the "right thing" that is most apt is "shoot the messenger." Some young kids uncover security holes that could lead into millions of fraud if not patched, and then tell the authorities, let's arrest the kids. Makes it less likely that some good samaritin will do the same in the future, leaving security holes open for those less ethical to actually steal the money!
What's next, arresting the kid that stuck his finger into the dike?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
...make me think "Maximus Dorkus", which makes me think of Pilate's fwiends' names in "Life of Brian".
Harvard, in a laudable attempt to retain solidarity with the Open Source community, dedicated the Maxwell Dworkin building (named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers respectively)
I'm sure I'm just missing something here, but how does naming a building after the mothers of the cofounders of Microsoft build solidiarity with the OSS community in the least?
May we never see th
The computer labs at my old uni now have a shiny new William Gates Building which the Compscis moved into the year I left. The old building was too tall, weird and creaky but at least there were some good pubs nearby :-)
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
That the Bill Gates building is the home of "Artificial" intelligence. Perhaps now we will see The Borg incorporated in Emacs.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
And to top if off, he's now the most generous philanthropist too. His foundation, focused on fighting disease and promoting education will leave a bigger and longer lasting legacy than his business accomplishments.
Having some buildings names after him is a small token of apprecation in comparison to his generosity.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
Why does this just cause a picture in my mind of someone's long lost childhood friend showing up at your door after being kicked out by his wife and broke with no job?
I know that isn't what it's all about, but that was the the first picture that popped into my head.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Okay, so taking Bill Gates' credit card resulted in 3 million dollar in damages. Assuming that figure's actually correct, anyone want to bet those sites are still insecure? :)
As the parent poster mentions, these are often the people who have actually directly paid for them. This is nothing new. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie was not universally popular in his day, but we remember him today for his bequests, not for example his smashing of the union during the 1892 Homestead strike.
why is this on slashdot?
Gates' credit card was hacked ...
The hack -- by Curador -- took place in 2000.
See: PBS Interview with Curador.
-kgj
-kgj
"anywhere else that Billy has seen fit to leave his mark?"
On Melissa... of course, if the boy had any sense of fun, he would be leaving mark all over the face of every SI swimsuit model, and then working on the FHM 50 most eligable women list.
I just can't imagine Bill Gates having a credit card. It seems so... ordinary. I always imagined that billionaires had payment methods beyond mere credit cards - like an assistant with a suitcase full of diamonds or something.
Apparently, lots of machines (including gnu.org and debian mirrors) were being moved, which caused a significant outage.
Pretty ironic about RMS moving to William H Gates building :(
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I'd run Bill Gates and Microsoft into debt with all the stuff I would buy.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
I have a window cube looking out in the direction of the building, and it never ceases to amaze me how ungodly ugly the building is.
And the worst part is my only other option is to look at my computer and do work, using this ungodly awful Windows system.
Unless I go fooz, I can't get away from looking at Gates' handiwork. Ugh
First, what a trollish summary... According to the article, Gates' CC was hacked because the alleged culprits broke into a database, not because they knew his mother's maiden name.
Anyway... if some non-governmental org asks you for your mother's maiden name, most likely they just want to use it as a password. So just do that: give them a made-up name (but something you'll remember later).
I work at Harvard and was talking to one of the deans about the Maxwell Dworkin building. He mentioned that they used the [assembly] code for DOS (they went into the archives from when Bill G was at H) as an abstract pattern for a wall mural. I asked him whether anyone had checked the code to see if there where any buffer overflow vulnerabilities. It could make the building susceptible to a worm attack. He didn't get it. Conversation ended abruptly.
If you want female companionship, you won't find it on the Internet. The amount of trannies on the net is *enormous*. My suggestion is to go to a club, strike up a conversation with a chick and don't mention computers at all.
What?
I thought RMS retired from the MIT AI lab 20 years ago?
That's what his bio says too.. can anyone clarify?
its not the Linus Torvalds building.... all we'd hear for the next two years would be some insane analogy about how it would be like Thomas Jefferson moving into the "George Washington, founding document authors complex" - maybe even something more absurd.
I kid RMS...
When I think of "from scratch", I'm thinking of some dirt-poor immigrant or farmer who had to bust ass even to get a basic education-think someone like Colin Powell, although even he wasn't that bad off.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Interestingly, the new building uses RFID-based "proximity locks". This provoked a Stallman rant about privacy, including:
The general conclusion of privacy campaigners is that information, once collected, is easy to misuse; therefore, the reliable approach to safeguarding privacy is to design systems that don't, and can't, collect information about people.
Mechanical locks are an example of a system that can't collect tracking information. Card lock systems can also be set up so that they can't collect tracking information. If the card keys are special cards, not used for any other purpose, and if they do not identify the individuals who carry them, then the system can't be used to track people. By contrast, using the MIT ID card makes it easy to track people.
RFIDs are bad for privacy because they can be read anywhere without your knowing it. A swipe card has the virtue that it can't be read except when you swipe it.
Many people (including myself) agree with him: the geeky desire to play with "gee-whiz" technology is fine--- but not when it stands between me and getting my work done. Privacy concerns aside, mechanical locks are established technology that works reliably.
This move includes all the cryptography and network security people, so not surprisingly some folks are checking out the security of the RFID system. In email, they said is looks likely that one can hop from the the information broadcast by the key cards to accessing private MIT account information, but I gather they're still investigating.
"I'm a Juilliard graduate"
You know, I'm a very musical person, going through elementary school, high school, college, I was involved in every musical thing you could imagine.
People kept saying "you're going to study music, right? A professor in college said 'why aren't you studying music instead of CS' (this was a music professor, before the obvious joke appears)"
You know why? I was smart enough to know that to make it in the music biz, you either settle for low pay (music teacher, guy making diddly as a working musician), or no pay (unemployed).
The thing is, as good as I was (and I was pretty good), I knew to make it music, you have to be so fucking good that you are an unbelievable talent, and you have to practice 8 hours a day, and blah blah blah.
So I'm in computers for the last 30 years, and I make a comfortable living.
I see kids that have a little musical talent going into music, and the best thign somebody should do is pull them aside and say "Son, make music, have fun with it, but don't try to make a living *-because you're not good enough-*. Its cruel to be kind, but there's nothign worse than a masters degree in performance art with some poor schmuck trying to do dinner theater for almost free at age 28, still living at home, and hoping for god-knows -what. Its pathetic. They should have become an accountant and played on weekends for fun.
But no, they had a dream, and there's nothing sadder than when that dream finally ends at age 32 with nothign to show but scars.
I know so many people like that...the arts are full of people with dreams bigger than talent, and somebody should have nipped it in the bud when they were 17.
There are a few RMSes there, and on a news site an acronym should never be used without using the full form first.
Microsoft could have filled the building with special bugging devices that would enable them to get their hands on the code that RMS is writing.
Oh wait.
I wonder what sort of credit limit Bill Gates has on the card.
For what does it stand?
I first though the obvious one but seeing that the first link is about Ray and Maria Stata Center...
If s/he really wants to make it up to you, they'll offer you anal sex or at least a blowjob.
though it was a pretty obscure attempt at it. Maybe a [sarcasm][/sarcasm] would've helped.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
he did it back in 2000 and /. posts it like it happened last week.
+&x
How much did he have to start with? IIRC, he dropped out of Harvard to start his company. Studying at Harvard doesn't exactly fit my concept of "from scratch".
2) he's now the most generous philanthropist too
How much does he get back in tax breaks? One of the differences between rich people and the middle class is that the rich can choose how the government spends thir tax money.
n/t
I'm proud of what my government does down there. Burn, scum, burn!
And the building referenced was dedicated in 1999. So the summary was truthful, if not exactly timely.
Hmmm... Clearly some testing is required.
Maybe if somebody could forward it, I could test it out by buying something that will prove that it is actually Gates' card.
I'm thinking that South Dakota should be adequate for this task.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
BBC article on Grey's conviction.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
Don't get me wrong -- there's nothing wrong with taking grant money. Just because something isn't economically sustainable, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. I just get very tired of the way the "Free Software" folk insist that they've transcended the evils of software "ownership". Which they've never actually done. Their bills are paid for by revenues from the very businesses they are too pure to work for.
So of course RMS now works in a building that was paid for by the license fees that Microsoft gouged out of hapless computer buyers. What could be more appropriate?
Why is he sitting on nearly all of it? People need it now not 30 years down the road...
Oh yeah duh...
It's feel good PR for his company...
RMS has a job?!? What's next, is he gonna get a haircut? So much for hippie-culture in the 21:st century...
Prisoners who have never seen an "unveiled" woman before are forced to watch as the hookers touch their own naked bodies. One said an American girl had smeared menstrual blood across his face in an act of humiliation!
Wow! Sign me up! Can I get that hot OSDN chink to do these things for me?
Don't forget Mary Gates Hall at the University of Washington. Named after his mother, of course.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Anybody wonder whether Steve was the grand-child of Amber-o-files? As in named after Dworkin from the Amber series from Zelazny?
I dunno how the ages work out, but Dworkin is not exactly a common name, is it?
It would be nice if slashdot didn't partake in the sensationalisim that tends to pervade the media. The reason I say this is is that the summary reads "Gates' credit card was hacked. After all, they did have his mother's maiden name... "
If the moderators had read the article, they would have noted that Gates card number was not USED for anything, but that some stupid kid had it in his posession. And it's linked to a list of names stolen sometime in the past. As a result the kid was picked up by the FBI. Nothing actually happened concerning gates card.
Bah.
The total losses attributable to Gray's online pranks could exceed $3 million, according to the FBI.
I love how they come up with these arbitrarily chosen numbers for stuff.. someone tell me how they caused $3M in damages?
Fictitious-FBI-Guy says: "Well, we had a lot of help from security consultants who charged us $250,000 to do an Arin query, than there was the matter of calling the ISP they used (it was long distance) and it took the ISP people awhile to find the information we needed.. erm, well we didn't pay them anything, but if we did that would have accounted for some of it.. and of course there was expenses, like food and car rentals and stuff.. it really adds up you'd be surprised"
I hope the estimated cost to "fix" the problems in the systems exploited (that were there before) isn't counted as resolving damages.
If they're using RFID security that will surely be a step down from the old Building 20 days of random interdisciplinary wonderfulness. They've gone from a basic barracks that no cares about so you can do whatever to Pritzker Prize winner (Gehry) hyper-designed everything must be just so. RMS is a pain but he's usually right. I expect much lower real creativity there. But it will look cool, a monument to the dot bomb years.
The picture looks more like they were in the process of knocking it down rather than just completing it.
I fail to see how much he's given away has any bearing on the situation. He still has more money, by many many orders of magnitude, than me and everyone I personally know all put together. More than will pass through my and my acquaintances' hands in our lifetimes, I don't doubt. He's not going to want for money for the central heating in his dotage, is he? So pull him down off that pedestal, for God's sake.
He's a greedy and conniving man, with very little respect for the human race as far as I can tell. He does not deserve our admiration or our defence.
the layman's guide to computer science
He came from a broken home. Mom married a woodworker and then fooled around on the side with the Holy Spirit. So his biological daddy was powerful but JC never got to be President. Didn't serve in the army, neither.
He tried to do some nice things but only in a naive, small-scale way. Didn't do nothing fer the gross national product. Now Henry Ford... there's an imagination!
Ok, I'll give you that some of his idears helped found some really big monopolies after his death. But then, he wasn't around to enjoy the gravy. What kind of heroism is that?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Hey, hes got more money then most countries, of course he feels the need to leave his mark.
And with that cash, he gets too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
foo
Well, here was my reply to the article...
Regarding the story about the kids who hacked Bill Gate's CC number... the way you tell the story, it's obvious you want us to feel the kids are deeply in the wrong. "Well sorry buddy" demonstrates a bias and a lack of eloquence disturbing in someone purportedly reporting.
As you tell it, I can't see that they did anything that should be criminal, quite honestly. If the three million dollars in damages is because they bought things with the credit cards, or because they used them maliciously, then that's one thing. If the three million dollars is because now the companies they cracked have to clean up their security, and the CC holders have to get new numbers, that's quite another.
What would you say should be done when someone reports to a company "your site is insecure; anyone could steal from your customers" and they ignore it? Just assume the company will do the right thing? Or do something to make the companies take notice?
The crackers may well have been doing something illegal and immoral. But when I read a story with such obvious bias and leaving out critical details, I assume the writer left out the details because they don't support his bias.
> There's also the current issue with Windows Media
> Player. Tried to find anything else out there to
> compete with it?
There are lots of alternative players. I prefer winamp, personally and that plays video with playlists just fine. How about Blaze Media Pro? Have you tried that? As a matter of fact, my computer at work (HP Pavilion) came bundled with one, MusicMatch Jukebox I think it was.
I don't totally disagree with all the points you made, but there are alternatives to Windows Media Player.
This may sound corny, but I'm of the opinion that somebody who donates 10% of their meager substainance is far more generous than somebody that gives away 90% of his luxury, leaving him with, well, luxury.
It's nice that Gates is giving away money -- even if it was obtained dishonestly/unethically/illegally. However, to applaud his gifts is a bit silly methinks. The money he gives has little value to him, in the sense that it cannot be used to greatly improve his quality of life. Therefore, his gifts have cost him little.
So, from my perspective: he gives away plenty of money, but isn't at all generous with it.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Hey asshole, how about a goddamn warning on a link like that?
Jesus, I've lost my apetite for weeks now.
heh. Though reportedly Bill Gates did not take the Knoppix CD with him.
Ah, so the HURD is 20 years late because Stallman was busy packing.
While that is a great idea, remember that the motive is not strictly creating excellence, or the donation could be anonymous, or at least not carry a name of his/her choosing.
/.'er pointed about the oil and steel barons.
The goal is to one-up the other donations in both amount and prestige. This escalation accounts for the growth of giving in the richest circles. Rich people don't give away money (one reason that they are rich), they buy influence and recognition for themselves, their families and businesses. They also attempt to rewrite legacies, as another
The "Bill Gates Center for Ethics" at Prairie View A&M University would not get the recognition that anything at Harvard or MIT would get.
--
Check out "The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide" by Richard Conniff
PS: Preview and proofread, so your school actually looks good. Don't tell us how bad they (other school's grads) are, show us how good you are.
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
he was heard saying:
*mumble* I'll burn this place down *mumble*
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Are you sure that was named after Bill? I visited MTU several times in the late '70s and early '80s and I remember that building (and its name). Bill wasn't quite the big swinging **** he is now, so it's likely that the tennis center was named after someone else.
The official name is the MICROSOFT/Gates Building, and RMS will not dignify other names with a response. I mean, Gates wouldn't have any money without Microsoft, so you can't have one without the other!
It was Diogenes, not Socrates, that lived in a barrel.
Are these the same "religiously devout" folks who get promised 72 virgins for all eternity if they strap a bomb to themselves and blow up a few kindergartners?
... or my calendar is 8 days too fast
BFD.
How'd he get that $20 billion? That matters even more.
harvard won't name a building after living donors. i don't know
why bill and steve chose "maxwell-dworkin," but gates-ballmer
was never an option.
so much for the solidarity "theory."
Harvard: Yo momma.
The OSS Community: Word!
First, anonymous ftp is good because (unless you use SSL or some such) login information is sent plaintext which is in some sense worse than not logging in at all.
Second, undeletable folders? There's no such thing. You can use quotas to limit the space people can use up on your FTP site and/or have a script to clean it out at regular intervals. It is sad that people you don't know will happily use your FTP site, but that's life on the internet.
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
A building named "Bitch"?
Can we, as Slashdot users, make a Torvalds building?
I mean that's an assload of money. You could buy several small nations, arm them, and then command them to go to war against each other and still have $40 billion left.
This borders on the apocryphal.
Why would Bill Gates even have a credit card in his own name?
And why in hell would he use it online, instead of a one-time electronic transaction instrument?
And just what was he buying?
Preferably ones that spray Zyklon-B for the dirty kike.
No, it's more like the CEO of the nations most widely used body gaurd service being raped. The dude who's been selling his software to banks as "secure" aught to be ashamed at how poor a job he's done.
Your bud Twitter at work.
Kiss my ass, troll.
RMS now has plans to daily enter Bill Gate's through the back door, and occasionally the front as well ;=P
I made a couple billion knocking over 7/11's.
( I figured out how to make that scale, dude. )
Anyway, it is all OK, as I donated most of it to charity. Right?
Or maybe M-x assimilate-pinhead ?
If you move into a crime infested neighborhood, put your valuables in plain sight from the street, didn't lock your door, and announced to everyone about your arrival, people would call you an idiot for being so naive as to do such a thing. If *you* put *my* posessions in such a condition, I would want to sue you for negligence.
Of course the Internet is the "crime infested neighborhood" in this example. The problem is, it is so crime infested, and the scale of what you might put into the compromised state is so much bigger (e.g. credit card #'s, personal information, etc.) The stakes are higher, so people are going to try harder--and for little incremental effort on their part.
To anyone who knows better, it is so unconscionable to act unsecurely over the Internet, that people who do are flaming idiots--especially when they complain.
No, it is not your fault someone else broke the law--but you sure didn't help yourself.
If someone walks into your unlocked house in the crime infested neighborhood to leave a little memo that says a crack addict is about to move into your basement, I say Thank You!
How about the prosperity Microsoft brings to 55,000+ employees? Health benefits, matching 401K contributions, stock grants, etc? People can earn a great living making software at Microsoft. The shareholders of the company benefited from a top-notch growth stock that is now starting to pay dividends as a way to return earnings to shareholders.
The company he founded produces great benefits for its employess, resellers and investors. What's so evil about that?
"I thought RMS retired from the MIT AI lab 20 years ago?"
RMS rents office space at MIT.
For example, here is an old news item archived at:
http://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull6.html
"Hewlett-Packard is giving us $100,000. This money was given to us to make sure that we have funds to rent office space for several years. "
Everyone likes to bash how ugly Stata is on the outside. I like the way it looks, but I can see how others might not.
But, you really should walk through the "Student Street" area before making up your mind. It's pretty breathtaking: a big, open hallway with various corners of other buildings (made of brick, reflective aluminum, glass) sticking through the ceiling at odd angles. Walls painted with several strong, basic hues. Classrooms with cool polka-dotted echo-proof wood panels all over the walls (though these might give a headache after awhile). Lots of swooping stairwells that take you up to places where external walls from another building cut through the glass ceiling and continue all the way through the floor.
It's like a carnival funhouse. Soon to be inhabited by the carnies.
Details can also be found here, including the credit card number and Bill's hard-to-guess password.
(But don't get too excited, the card expired long ago.)
- shadowmatter
...after discovering that GNU applications are being used on Windows.
Nor for his (& Mellon's) culpability in the Johnstown flood...
http://www.johnstownpa.com/History/hist19.html
I'm sure the Gates building will be a popular target for being renamed in the middle of the night. Here are the suggestions that I've come up with:
-The What Do I Want The World To Do Today Building
-The Richard M Stallman Building
-The Linus Torvalds Building
-The GNU/William H Gates Building
Of course, because it's MIT, few people will notice that it actually has a name, and will continue to refer to it by number (seriously).
-Uberhund
Credit cards are for gay people.
Cash is for men.
I do all my charity works anonymously... I've never build anything as big as the MaxDork tho.
1) Since when is simply breaking into an ecommerce site and taking cc numbers cause for 3 million in losses? What'd they do, soak up that much bandwidth? Or did they actually use the cards and distribute the numbers? There's no mention. Sounds like an inflated figure to fuck them up.
2) What exactly is wrong/illigal about having someone else's credit card number? Sure, I know using it is illigal, but simply having a list isn't, is it? If so, certainly it's not something that would fall under "intent to use/distribute," no?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
CP/M on steriods
M$ had (or attempted to) sponsor(ed) new courses here, in Universirty of Waterloo. Public opinion forced the University and M$ to redesign the sponsorship.
I like the comparision of Gates to Carnegie. I had always kinda lumped him him with Edision, founder of a technology company that used "hardball" business tactics to assume ownership of the I.P. of the (workers|indentured servants) and squelch the competition.
The earlier comparison to Carnegie is interesting too, tho. Will M$ prosper post-Gates the way that G.E. has?
its not William H. Gates building, its GNU/William H. Gates building.
Muhahahahah!
Do a google for "RMS" - he's #1
When Richard Stallman gave Bill Gates the finger in front of Stanford's computer science building, I got nervous. No, it wasn't the real Bill Gates -- it was just his name, engraved in giant letters over the main entrance to the 2-year-old, Gates-funded building.
[...]
"Hey," Stallman called out to a graduate student opening the door in front of us, "is it the tradition here to give Bill the finger whenever you go through these doors?"
The student looked over his shoulder, twitched a nervous smile and disappeared inside. Stallman shrugged -- and right there on the spot decided to start his own protest movement. As we entered the building, out came what the ancient Romans used to call the "digit impudicus." Stallman flashed me a sly grin.
Got $300 million?
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Nah, they are placed with those guys though. Instead of 72 virgins, they get 72,000,000 furnaces to stoke while being peed on by pigs. Then they have to bathe in pig shit.
So MS foundation donates a building to MIT, and RMS has no ethical dilemma using this building to further his mantra that proprietary software is bad?
George Soros made a lot of money out of his financial speculations (including that one against the pound). He doesn't have the Bill Gates level of wealth because his charitable organisations (Soros Foundation and Open Society Institute) have been eating between 300 and 500 million dollars pro year since about 1989. Check out their web site for further details. His contributions are totally unrelated to his commercial activities.
See my journal, I write things there
'Baited' was right, so yeah, lots of irony.
I heard that MS got the pharmaceutical companies to give free drugs to Open Source developers to slow down the competition too. By the way, have you been working on any Open Source projects lately ...
Employing a crapload of programmers in his own country instead of the latest cheap labor country?
Putting other companies out of business for his own companies benefit? That's nothing new, and it's certainly not against what every business school teaches.Using barriers to exit to lock in customers? Again, standard MBA teachings.
All of his high crimes are things that nobody would write an article about your average businessman doing.I'm not saying that guy's any hero, but to crucify the guy for doing what most of his competetors would do if they were in the same place is lame.
Demanding his head on a stick for giving 20B when he could have given 40B (pulling numbers out of my ass) is very lame. Some would not have given it at all. (and some would have given more)Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
As a student of Michigan Tech I know that Gates Tennies Center is not named after Billy Boy.
Are you sure that wasn't Ozzie Osbourne?
You had two parents. You had seen a computer before you were 16, so you could actually get a job doing something other than flipping burgers. Your parents bootstrapped themselves: so did mine, but by the time you (and I) came along they had a solid work ethic and valued education. You could even join the military like I did and unlike many of the folks who grew up in shitty neighborhoods. (Police records, don't you know)
I don't doubt you busted ass to get where you got- I did too. But neither of us started at the bottom.
We've got a woman at school here who grew up in a Masai village. Normal schooling for girls stops at about the 3rd grade- after that you help your family on the farm and get married at 15. (And there's intense pressure from both parents and tribal elders to conform to this ethic) She didn't have running water, or electricity, or a computer, or very many books for that matter. She's going to graduate this spring with honors and wants to go on for a doctorate. She's going to get it too.
That's starting from scratch.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
1) Gates and company develop OS that, while it may have its flaws, is priced and marketed effectively, and results in a computer on every desktop. It's _arguable_ that another OS could have done this, but the fact is that MS Windows is what did it. What proves that MS was so effective at this? The fact that Bill Gates is so rich. Like it or not (and I like it), in the US system riches are (at least in the long run) proportional to how much other people are willing to spend on your efforts. If you want to see the alternative to this, look at the Tycho and Enron executives, or look at Russia or Cuba.
2) Gates and company generously fund universities, and help support RMS, who, while he may be a brilliant programmer, has been unable to come up with a method for even getting paid for his work. And, I would argue, his work is far less valuable than what Gates and company has done, because very few people in the world actually use RMS's work as compared to windows. This despite the fact that RMS denounces Gates as evil, and spends his time trying to build a replacement to windows. Of course, Gates was not funding RMS in particular here, so much as academic freedom in general.
3) Gates is roundly insulted with every name in the book (see the other comments in this thread).
Hackers with Bill Gate's credit card ordered from the Adam and Eve catalog... now access to and from his home is now impossible due to the vast number of free gifts they send.
Bill Gates is seeking asking that this be considered a DOS attack, and approperate criminal charges be pressed. Meanwhile this Saturday there will be a massive garage sale in Bellevue.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Before the roar of chuckling becomes too loud on the incredible irony that MIT would have a "Bill Gates Tower" and that RMS will work in it, it should be noted that at MIT the names of buildings are rarely used, and only occasionally even widely known. Instead, this building, like most others at MIT, will most likely be referred to by its number, "Building 32".
|>oug
Actually, RMS said that at one time he made enough money from distributing free software for a fee that he could live on it. He also mentions that he lives inexpensively. So, not only did he test these theories in the real world, he lived on them.
He also earned awards which paid well and allowed him to do interesting things with the money. This is a far cry from the description you offer which tries to make it sound like he has no idea what he's talking about.
To this day other organizations have tested these theories in the real world, and now there is an operating system one can run that proves his theories do work in the real world.
Do you mean businesses like IBM, Red Hat, SUSE, and Novell? I think many people work for those businesses. In what way was has free software not "transcended the evils of software ''ownership''"? The most popular free software license (the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL) grants us all the freedom to do virtually anything we want to do with the software, certainly the majority of things most hackers want to do most of the time, even though these hackers don't hold the copyright to the program they are improving or sharing.
Digital Citizen
Though, come to think of it, grant money does sometimes fall from the sky. I think that it's expired by now, but RMS used to be a MacArthur Fellow. This is a grant that's designed to provide a certain kind of people with a proper income, no strings attached. You can't apply for this fellowship -- you just go out and do things that impresses the foundation. Whereupon they call you up and inform you that you're on their books, and they need to know where to send your monthly check.
(I knew a women who this actually happened to. First she thought it was some kind of scam, and wouldn't return their calls. Then she found out it was legit and had a minor breakdown. She was a struggling grad student, and the sudden change in circumstances was, well, disorienting.)
When the MacArthur Foundation does stuff like this, I'm usually gratified, because they seem to like to subsidize people who make life more interesting for the rest of us. And I suppose RMS is just the kind of person such a program was meant for. But this once I question whether they really did him, or us, a favor. By further insulating him from economic reality, they promoted the aspects of his philosophy that I, for one, find most arrogant and irritating.
Did I say anything about locking anyone up? Btw I love your blame the victim defense.
"For you jackasses" "YOU dumbasses" "you mindnumbingly dimwitted moron"
I'd love to see you say that to my face. Too bad we'll never meet in real life. You fuck yourself asshole.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
On a strangely unrelated note, shortly after Harvard, in a laudable attempt to retain solidarity with the Open Source community, dedicated the Maxwell Dworkin building (named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers respectively), Gates' credit card was hacked. After all, they did have his mother's maiden name...
Edited:
On a strangely unrelated note, shortly after Harvard dedicated the Maxwell Dworkin building, named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers respectively, Gates' credit card was hacked. After all, they did have his mother's maiden name...
What does Harvard dedicating a building to Gates' and Ballmer's mothers have to do with them trying to gain credibility with the open source community? Non sequitur, eh?
Gee, yeah -- big windows all around the front come to think of it.
maxwell-dworkin
Also, they have a blow up a few pages of Willie's homework assignments hung in the foyer. His implementation of BASIC I think?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K. Dick
hey there r 2 people involved here W.H.G. and RMS :-))
but most posts here seem to be about Gates only
looks like Gates has monopolized this post too
lets call it the "W. H. Gates" post
Check out the map at http://www.csail.mit.edu/resources/maps/3/381.gif
I'd be more than happy to bear the shame of the building name, if I got to spend my lunchtime on the holodeck !
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
As someone else has pointed out, the Stata center (which is the new building complex housing CSAIL) contains both the Gates tower and the Dreyfoos tower. However, the poster incorrecly stated that RMS will be in the Dreyfoos tower. In fact he is in the space between the two towers - known as the "warehouse" space (for reasons which escape me).
:-)
Office location in the Stata Center can be identified by letters attached to the office number. Stallman's office is 32-381, here:
http://www.csail.mit.edu/resources/maps/3/381.gif
(I'm right across the hall, in 32-386.) A Gates office would be, e.g., 32-G585. A Dreyfoos office would be, e.g., 32-D585. Yes, as someone else pointed out, we have a holodeck.
Most of us are hoping / assuming that, like almost all other buildings at MIT, the new building(s) will be referred to by number, not by name.
IMHO MIT missed a great opportunity to influence the world for the better by publicly snubbing Gates' offer to fund (a small part of) the new building. But, I'm told, that's just not the way things work...
What a bunch of whining, jealous retards.
I've recently recieved an AMEX issued by Westpac (in Australia) which is a very dark shade of grey (background) and with lighter slades of grey in backgroud, it looks great!
-Jasa -- Linux - The SOURCE will be with you, ALWAYS
I've had similar thoughts to this such as why not develop a system where a credit card can be renewed every month, every week, or after every transaction.
You're free to do this, but they probably won't like it. I can see that my expiry date has changed from 5 years to 1 year with my latestest issue, so I think even the credit card companies can see the benefit.
"in order for them to be able to charge me again, I would need to give them a totally new transaction key"
A blog I run for the wealth
Is it not badass, getting arrested by a dude in red driving a moose?? Or is it all the Molsons I've been housing?
The only reference I find in the article is that an FBI estinmate says that "damages from these online pranks could total $3 million".
But, you know, that's damages as in overcharging manpower costs, estimating server downtime at some bizarre cost/hour basis, and multiplying it by everyone in every one of these affected companies who looked at the story on the company dime.
Nowhere have I seen any claim that these kids themselves actually bought or attempted to buy anything with these cards.
Perhaps you have a different source?
May be ?