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Get on the 'Gates for President' Bandwagon
netbuzz writes "Dilbert's Scott Adams kicked off the idea in his November 19th blog post, saying there isn't anything wrong with this country that President Bill Gates couldn't cure in less time than it takes to get a new operating system out the door. Today, the idea is moving forward with a brand-new 'Bill Gates for President' Web site. Adams is also back on the campaign trail, flogging the site and Gates' candidacy." A blog post at Network World includes a lot of eye-rolling about this idea, but neither Adams nor the folks at the 'Gates for President' website seem to be taking this lightly.
Hmmm...I seem to remember that Bill say that he was going to be stepping down as Microsoft CEO in a couple of years...right about when the 2008 Presidential campaign would be heating up.
Microsoft decided to get into the console gaming arena without any prior experience. Perhaps Bill is thinking this same thing with politics. After all, Arnold Schwatzenegger and Jesse Ventura both won state governorships primarily on name recognition. And as much as I despise is company's tactics, he is quite intelligent and has real management skills.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
Geez ... if people thought Dick Cheney was cold and ruthless, wait until they have Bill Gates in charge. Plus, imagine some of the innovations we'd see:
... the new city will be named Capitol 2.0
... at first you may think it looks just like DC, but we actually repainted all the buildings, and added innovative new parking meters that destroy your car if you try to park in same parking spot more than 3 times.
Pres Gates Day 1: The U.S. needs to become the most innovative country in the world, so I have decided in interest of attaining this goal we will rebuild Washington D.C.
Pres Gates Day 365: The Capital 2.0 is running ahead of schedule, I know it's been tough living and working out of trailers, but we should be finished within a year
Pres Gates Day 700: Due to the new competition from Tokyo's rebuilding operations, we have decided to restart our Capitol 2.0 project, but the delay will be worth it since our new Capitol will be even better than the original one planned
Pres Gates Day 1000: We have found that the Capitol 2.0 subway system was incompatible with the Capitol 2.0 sewage system, so we will rebuild DC's old subway system and try to make it work within the Capitol 2.0 structure
Pres Gates on his last day: On my final day in office, I am proud to unveil Capitol 2.0
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
I personally welcome our new DOS-stealing philanthopist overlord.
But on a serious note, it might be nice to have a president who has become more philanthropist than tycoon and who is notable because of his business and humanitarian accomplishments, not because of a life of playing to political interests. He already has extensive experience with large organizations. Might be more interested in following his own vision than listening to what the people want, though, although that seems to be the case with most great leaders...
"Blue State of Death" ?
"there isn't anything wrong with this country that President Bill Gates couldn't cure in less time than it takes to get a new operating system out the door"
Have things really got that bad?
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Steve Forbes for president? Or Ross Perot? Look how far those two smart, rich, successful businessmen went.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
at least open source paid for by governments.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Maybe twenty years ago. Now I'm more behind Craig Newmark for president. If our government ran a fifth as efficient as his website does, I'd be ten times as happy as I am now with it.
My little site.
My calendar is about to say December 1, not April 1. This is really dumb. I don't bash Bill Gates a lot. I admire him in some ways. But come on, who wants a president whose company has been conviceted of being an illegal monopoly, that has been found gulty of being a predator, that has stifled innovation while claiming the opposite, that has run roughshod over consumer rights and then tried to weasel out of every penalty anyone ever tried to impose on it?
Oh, wait... is he running as a Republican?
1. He wants to buy an old Cesna, paintit flashy colors, and call it Air Force '95.
2. He heard that some government agencies were using UNIX.
3. He wants to get that illegal sports car in SF Bay into the US.
4. He just thinks it would be neat to be president of two big thingies.
5. He's hot for Janet Reno.
6. His ego needs to be inflated.
7. He lost the key to his mansion, so he needs a new place to live.
8. He thinks that he can use MS Money to balance the budget.
9. He feels that Perot just didn't throw enough money at it.
10. He wants to make Windows '95 the official operating system of the USA.
Ok, those look kind of dated...but still funny
On the serious side, I wonder how many people with the power to see into the mysterious future, were tempted to e-mail the editor about a SERIOUS problem with this story!
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
No.
I’ve been saying for years that we need to stop electing millionaires.
Careful what ya wish for, I suppose.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
For innumerous jokes about constantly having to reboot the government. And the need for constant government upgrades.
Let's forget open-source software for any public activities.
Er...uh...*cowers*
On the flip side, special interest groups declare bankruptancy. Groups claim they became ineffective because when ever they tried to buy Bill Gates he declined expressing that he already had enough headaches trying to spend the billions he already has.
...but I wouldn't mind voting for Scott Adams!
Circumcision is child abuse.
My main objection to a Gates presidency is that Bill can do far more good for the world as the head of a well-funded private foundation than he could possibly do as master of ceremonies and chief law enforcement officer of the United States. Now that he's stepping down as Borg Queen, he has an unprecedented opportunity to improve the quality of living for so much of the human population... why waste a man like that on a job where he'll have to negotiate with Congress, waste time overseeing dozens of secretaries, etc.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Thank you, Scott.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One way to make sure it doesn't happen:
Slashdot it!!
Quick, someone tell Digg, then Fark!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Crow T. Trollbot
Will there be a "Cowboy Neal" option on the ballot?
Monstar L
Comment removed based on user account deletion
On the flip side, special interest groups declare bankruptancy. Groups claim they became ineffective because when ever they tried to buy Bill Gates he declined expressing that he already had enough headaches trying to spend the billions he already has.
He would have the capability to do his own thing, 100%, all the way. No political backing, no SIG's, no anything. Pick his agenda, pick his priorities, open office to anyone without a corporate interest. Now that would be interesting.
So what does he do for the other 23 hours and 55 minutes?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm kind of confused, all the posts here on Slashdot talk about how Bill Gates shouldn't be president because [insert other person here] would be better. Or that he ran a company convicted of being an illegal monopoly.
Why isn't anyone discussing how his years of experience both managing a bank account the size of a small country's GDP and running a huge corporation would be beneficial/detrimental to him being a President? Seems to me like everyone here is arguing emotion. For example, "I don't like him" isn't a useful tidbit of information.
...and extend it...
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Yow! A brand new mindless hot-button issue! Stop the presses! A guy who actually knows how to operate a computer should be president! Not some pen-wielding dipshit, not some bozo who can't tell the backtick from an apostrophe, but a guy who can actually bring up a certain word processing program, type something in it, and successfully print it and save it to disk! Brilliant, Holmes, brilliant!
Where can we find such a strange and noble leader? Elect him at once, I say! I for one welcome our new mouse-button-pressing overlord!
Of course, he did gratuitously use a backslash instead of a forward slash in pathnames. And, not to be picky, but the space in the "Program Files" directory name was not a good idea, nor was the two-character sequence in DOS file carriage returns. And that whole monopoly thing, are we over that yet?
...are we scared yet?
Bill Gates for President? I'm a Microsoft employee, and even I don't think that's a good idea.
Why not? Well, Billg is a very smart guy, he's extremely intense, extremely intelligent - can pick out and remember the smallest details from specs that are hundreds of pages long - and has generally been a pretty good leader for Microsoft. Not many people can make the transition from running a small business with 3 employees to having that business become the biggest software company in the world, with over 60,000 employees. He did, and he did it well. He's got real talent.
However, Microsoft is also a frigging bureaucratic mess of unbelievable proportions. A lot of you have probalby read that Joel on Software article about the shutdown menu in Vista, and the dev's response to it in which he describes a year-long process of weekly meetings mostly spent arguing over design features. The thing is, the whole company is like that. While I'm pretty sure Billg is a nice guy (I don't know him pesonally, but it's my impression) and he's very smart and I'm sure he has far more integrity than most politicians, I don't really want to put anyone who oversaw the creation of such a bureaucracy in charge of the government. After all, it took government far longer to evolve such a horrid bureacracy, Microsoft did it in only 30 years, and most of that happened in the last 20.
So, while I have tremendous respect for Billg for his accomplishments at Microsoft, and also for Linus Torvalds and Steve Jobs for their accomplishments, I wouldn't like to see any of them become president of the United States, thank you very much (not that Linus could, because of the stricture on being a citizen by birth, of course).
And as much as I despise is company's tactics, he is quite intelligent and has real management skills.
The very same things which make us hate M$... ...would probably make him an exceptional President. All except enforcing the use of Microsoft software in government.
He's brilliantly intelligent, with an amazing ability to run a company. His ruthless determination to implement his ideas would be a terrific asset. His management and business experience is likely to make him a Republican, though at least socially he seems to be quite liberal.
My only fear with President Gates is that he has the same ruthless determination and utter self-assurance that he's doing a good thing for the world with only one other person: Adolf Hitler.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Build a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Seriously, if you claim that was just dumb luck, well, don't expect me to respond. There are a million things that could've killed Microsoft (or any company) in its infancy.
Yes, we can tell you hate microsoft, but lets not discount how difficult it is to build a successful business, let alone the most successful business in its industry.
I admit to not having read a great deal of the comments so far. I assume there are the usual high temperatures.
What I want to post about, though, is that this is not a bad idea. I don't care what you think about Bill or Microsoft, there is one thing that is indisputable: Bill (and by extension MS under Bill) is fantastic as the underdog. Look at the evidence, the history. Whenever Bill has been the low man he has always shone and come out on top.
Now, for our Rush audience, it might be necessary to say it, the U.S.A. is in an underdog position right now. We have a gigantic amount of things we need to dig out from underneath of. We need to get back to our more respectable levels of performance. Plus, our William is more-or-less politically unaligned. He'd essentially have to run as a 3rd party -- another underdog situation for him to triumph over, which, as we know, he excels at. Also he has the large-scale management experience necessary for the job.
So we have a man who is godly when put in the exact position demanded here, and has the experience and charisma required to make it happen (seriously, Bill is a geek but he is capable of motivating people to his point of view). Why would we not want to have him as President?
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Anyone else getting tired of corporations getting fined instead of their leaders going to jail for crimes committed?
http://www.billgatesforpresident.net/ was running Apache on Linux when last queried at 30-Nov-2006 21:41:05 GMT
Duh.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Perot got almost 19% of the popular vote - Clinton won with only 43%!
That was running against a rather centrist democrat. What would happen if a third party candidate as viable as Perot ran against far more extemeist candidates from both the Republicans and Democrat sides? I think the tenor of politics has polarized so much that a third choice is very viable right now, if they are the right person (I'm not sure Gates has the personality for this) and have enough financial backing (there Gates is doing just fine thanks). What if in fact Perot had been running this last presidential election? Is it so impossible to think he would have won - handily?
In every election now the swing votes are the independents. If they all have someone else to swing to, and republicans and democrats swing as well... you have a winner right there.
It doesn't even have to be libertarian, another new party created from scratch (as Perot did) would work just fine. Heck, reassemble the Perot party! You could even use the same charts he used today.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In U.S. history people from following classes have been elected President:
1. State Governors
2. Vice-Presidents
3. U.S. Congressional Representatives
4. Generals
5 (almost never, but once in a century or so) a U.S. Senator
This means that the following people will NOT be elected President in 2008:
Bill Gates
Condoleeza Rice
Rudy Guliani
and the following people have a real chance only if their opponent is also a U.S. Senator:
John Kerry
Hillary Clinton
John McCain
John Edwards
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
I know there's already a top ten list related but bear with me...
The Top Ten Actions of The Newly Elected President Gates
10) Air Force One? To paraphrase the Stones, Paint it Brown!
9) Civics classes in school now include mandatory read of "The Road Ahead".
8) Stallman put on "Do Not Fly or Speak" list.
7) What's key to the countries economy? Housing Developers, Housing Developers, Housing Developers! Oops, wrong pres.
6) All military fighter jets retrofitted with iDrive, trunk opening code wired to missile launch.
5) Congress split into Congress Home and Congress Business divisions (you can guess where all the current members go)
4) "The White House isn't wired for GigE? Where's my hammer"
3) Calling Jobs, Ellison, and McNeal and making them sing "Hail to the Chief".
2) Nuclear command infrastructure wired to Vista speech recognition, hijinks ensue.
1) "Hey pie guy, where ya' going?" "I'm going to Gitmo!".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If I had to pick geek icons for office I'd like to see Linus as President and RMS as vice president. Mr. Torvalds is a very good leader - he motivates people, he listens to people, he does a good job at picking others to lead under him. He is intelligent, much more ethical than Mr. Gates, and I think a far better leader than Mr. Gates. RMS would be a good VP because he is to crazy to give power to directly but he often has good points and knows how to get his voice out there to actually make a difference in the world.
Sure Linus is from Finland but I'm willing to vote for him - something I'll never do for Mr. Gates. If I can't have Linus then I'd consider people from the EFF or any major American free software hacker. Seriously - I'll vote for you if you run guys. We need a pro consumer and pro science/technology President.
I think I'm scared. What if the election comes down to being between Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates? I'd have to kill myself rather than be around when either of those two takes the lead of our country. Hillary is just an off her rocker lib that's never done anything but spout crap and Bill would slaughter fair use and similar consumer protection and anti-trust laws.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Scott said it best:
Like it or not, capitalism is the name of our American game. Compared to Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Condi Rice or (God help us) Rudy Giuliani-- it's the first name I've heard that hasn't made me cringe.
Plus it sets a nice prescedent. As far as I'm concerned, we geeks should be running the show.
barack to the future?