Gates to join Simonyi in Space?
gadgetopia writes "On Russian state television, cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin tells journalists in a live video interview from the ISS that "Charles said that Bill Gates is also preparing to visit space"." Gotta wonder what that insurance premium is going to look like.
Where can we donate to the "Leave Bill on the Moon" cause?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Looks like you're missing an anchor tag there. I highly recommend it. They're great for linking!
Oh wait, this is a story about Bill Gates. Is this a joke about how IE doesn't follow w3 standards for HTML? If so, it's not that funny.
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
On a more serious note, however, the Slashdot editting have reached a new low.
...as he sits there in his spacesuit in his capsule next to the Russian cosmonaut commander as "Soyuz 12 - Powered by Windows Vista" flashes up on the main control screen just before the primary engine ignition sequence...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Slashdot provides a link to what Fyodor Yurchikhin said about what Charles Simonyi said about what Bill Gates supposedly intends to do.
Anyone heard whether Steve Ballmer is thinking of taking the trip too ?
Read radical news here
No. Apparently the mission objectives are a dozen orbits around Ballmer's ego while safely retrieving items of loose furniture in unstable orbits around him.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Why would Gates even have insurance, it's not like he needs one with that wealth.
Reminds me of an old Ukrainian joke how when Gagarin went into space some guy announced that Russians have gone into space to which the auditory hopefuly asked if all of them and was greatly disapointed to learn that only one.
Gates would go to orbit only if Steve Jobs goes there first. He would not understand why Steve went, but just to be sure he has would not be blind sided like he was with iPod, he would go there.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...kept in static geostationary orbit only by the sheer magical power created in chanting repeatedly the word "developers" while performing an ancient ritualistic dance.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Oh, you'll get there. The question is, will you be able to get back?
"What do you mean 'a fatal error has occurred'?"
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
...and he has to wait three months for a patch to fix it?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"Houston to Bill, Houston to Bill, do you read Bill?"
"Loud and clear Houston. Go ahead."
"Bill, we're all go here. We just need you to push the big red button in front of you."
"OK Houston, I'm pushing the button, and... huh?"
"What is it Bill?"
"This big window just popped up saying 'You do not have privileges to access applications Orbit and Space.' Oh, now the whole screen's gone blue. Is that normal Houston?"
Work smarter, not harder.
It's already fallen.
Like Andrew Carnegie, Gates is like a bear who went over the mountain, saw another mountain, and being somewhat smarter than the average bear had a shrewd guess about what he'd find on the other side of that mountain.
We're in the post-Gates era of Microsoft now. If he wanted to be back in charge, he could be, but he's onto phase II of his career, which is not about Microsoft. There'd be no ego gratification, no fun in maintaining the status quo. So he's on to changing the world. It's not an unheard of late career move for the evil genius who has no Sherlock Holmes against whom he can test his mettle. If Spassky hit his mid career, and found the only people left to challenge him played chess like me, he'd have taken up crochet instead.
What would you do if you had to be Bill Gates, not for day, but every day for, say, the next forty or fifty years? You'd want to do something pretty damned amazing with your life, not only amazing, but amazing compared to what you did with the first half of your life.
Now you have Microsoft, which is built around Bill Gates ego, except Bill Gates' ego is on to bigger and better things. They're a ghost of their former selves. Seriously, the old Microsoft would not have been humiliated by a startup whose motto was "do no evil". Google would have been crushed or coopted. Crushed and coopted more likely, in whatever order suited Bill Gates master plan best.
I think we can expect better things from both Gates and Microsoft in the coming years than we've seen from them yet, but the transition is going to be painful for people who are overinvested in Microsoft. Overinvested in more ways than money.
So, overall, I think people, even Microsoft haters, ought to be rooting for Gates to make it back to the Earth.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.