Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids In Khan Academy
theodp writes "At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who's been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. 'This guy is amazing,' Gates wrote. 'It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.' Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the 'unbelievable' Khan Academy tutorials that 'I've been using with my kids.'"
He gives money away that he has no use for anyway. Result: He can steer the direction of research that 'his' money goes to, he gets to decide which charities get money. With being an criminal in how he did business in Microsoft, he's effectively stolen money from hundreds of millions of people, driven other business into the ground, and taken away the choice to give to charity to other people. Whether that would have been done is another matter, he's still taken away the choice. Oh and as to giving away 'his' money, from what I've read he has not actually done so but in effect set up another business (the business of providing money to his selected charities) which is based on 'his' money but mainly giving other people's money, those people who have given their money to his foundation, away to his selected charities.
You make it sound as if he made most of his money by charging the Windows tax for every computer sold, because that's the only really troublesome thing he did.
Since you're talking about "choice", almost always people had the choice not to buy MS software. Almost always there was a viable alternative. If they paid for an overpriced product, almost none was forced to.
And suggesting he's not giving his own money is just plain ignorant. Look it up - he gave $3.5 billion of his own money just in the last few years. And it's estimated that over his whole life, he's given $28 billion of his own assets away.
Beetle B.
TeX and LaTeX produce the most beautiful documents I've ever seen off a computer. If you're googling for them, be sure to include "document preparation system" in your keywords, though. Otherwise you'll have to wash your brain.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I tell you one example when the schools didn't have choice:
Hungarian government seals a 25 billion HUF deal with Microsoft. That includes both academic and government licenses. The universities had no say whether how would they prefer to spend the money spent in their name.
Unfortunately, Word and OpenOffice still can't seem to agree on formatting. It's subtle, but it does result in screwing up my every attempt to place appropriate page breaks -- one will make the text just slightly longer than the other.
I've found a safe solution is to use OpenOffice, but ultimately produce a PDF if I care about printing. If I don't, I use something like Markdown and HTML.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Yes. And I have a choice to buy elsewhere or build my own. As it happens, that's exactly what I do.
Good for you.
I go to a public university. As part of my computer science degree, I get a "free" -- that is, paid through via either tuition or tax dollars -- copy of several versions of Windows, Visual Studio, and about a dozen other random Microsoft products. In addition, there are dozens of computer labs around campus which are available to me for "free", meaning whether or not I use them, I'm paying for them one way or another.
So you see, it doesn't matter that my laptop came with Ubuntu preinstalled. I still have to pay for Windows, one way or another. Even if I went to another university, my tax dollars would still end up here.
Now, I don't have a huge problem with this, as there are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of random deals the university makes with outside vendors to give me free shit. I'm sitting here with a "free" water bottle that I got just for moving into the dorms.
But even you aren't pretending you can avoid Microsoft:
My business buys some MS products that my business uses (like SQL Server and Windows Server) and very cheaply at that.
Yep.
Nobody forced us to do this and we could switch to an open-source alternative if we wanted to (and we have a few reasons why we might one day, but not yet).
I'm betting the "not yet" reasons are significant, or you'd already have switched.
How many products does MS make? You want to get rid of every single one of them because they got convicted of bundling browsers and Windows pre-installation schemes?
I would, actually. It would send a powerful message -- when the head of your company is corrupt, you get fucked. If you don't want all your eggs in one basket that way, don't make a single gigantic corporation -- because it takes a gigantic corporation to make truly gigantic fuck-ups that even the government can't control.
It won't happen, of course. If the government won't do it to BP, I can't imagine they would do it to Microsoft.
How many businesses and consumers that depend on MS (out of their choice!) would be screwed out of a livelihood
When your livelihood is that tightly tied to a single vendor, you're in a dangerous situation anyway. I know -- I worked for a startup which lost everything that way.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If it makes you feel any better, this is also a problem between different versions of Word. Sucks but true.
Qxe4
Um, whom are you referring to when you say "he should 'give something back'" ? The lectures are not by Bill Gates, they're by Sal Khan. I don't think anybody accuses Khan of not giving back. Bill Gates is merely stating that Sal Khan is doing a good job, but Sal Khan does not work for Bill Gates or for Microsoft. Nor do Bill Gates or Microsoft seem to donate any money to Sal Khan.