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Bill Gates Looks to Reinvent the Toilet
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the German government are working on a $10 million project to provide innovative sanitation facilities to 800,000 Kenyans over the next five years. From the article: "The goal is to find 'innovative solutions' for sanitation in poor urban areas. Gates says it's time to move on from the era of the classic toilet. He points out that, despite all the recent achievements, 40% of the world's population, or some 2.5 billion people, still lives without proper means of flushing away excrement. But just giving them Western-style toilets isn't possible because of the world's limited water resources." I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is.
I'm just curious how someone will find a way to spin this as a bad thing. Will it be "Gates will probably insist they use only Windows toilets!"? Or maybe it will be "This is just a ploy for him to sell more Windows copies to the poor people after they take a shit!" Or perhaps "I'll be he'll ban Linux and Apple from these shithouses!"
Come on, I know there are plenty of Slashdotters just ACHING to find SOME way, ANY way to bash him some more. Forget that Steve Jobs does NO charitable activities (Steve don't do charity) or that this has nothing to do with Linux. Someone will find a way. He's the guy with the Borg picture, after all.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The last comment in the story about BSoDs is disappointing. I like to poke fun at Windows and Microsoft software in general as much as the next person over but I have genuine respect for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They're doing more to solve world problems than most countries are. I can recognize a good thing when I see it and making BSoD jokes when it comes to the foundation just belittles the work they do.
We all might make fun of gates but he's putting money into something that is worth while and often over looked. Having a safe place to poo is a pretty big deal, as it stands now a lot of places that don't end up draining into rivers and other water sources and making people sick.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but that's no longer the same thing as Bill Gates. I've been a /. user for around a decade and have certainly made my share of bad Bill Gates jokes, but the guy is literally trying to save the world now. He has the money and the connections to do it, and the projects he's working on are incredibly selfless. Let's give him a break. OP was being very immature IMHO.
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I'm not quite sure what this problem looks like in your imagination, but the fact is, we're approaching the stage where most of the world's population live in cities.
Population density without the infrastructure to remove the waste is the problem. It's a very hard logistics problem.
You can't just dig a hole 30m down the road in an urban environment.
Also, "planning an outhouse", yes that's another problem since lack of infrastructure, poverty, filth and improvised shelter, ie slums, are all part of the mix.
Lots of perfectly functional, albeit hippyish solutions like composting toilets do not scale to urban environments.
But there is a difference between not having a degree in biology or waste management and living under the control of people that tell you to pray for rain in a massive drought. Or who believe raping a baby (or any virgin but easiest with a baby) cures aids. Or eat albino people to gain their powers. And don't act so high and mighty, it wasn't so long ago in the west we burned people alive for voodoo, oops witchcraft or killed people for their faith and made lampshades out of them.
Civilization, you never truly appreciate it until every last bit of it has been stripped away from you. There are still houses in western Europe where you can see the design for crapping out on to the street. The London sewer system isn't all that old (compared to civilized man capable of building a toilet) but us modern humans still rely on it because we are no longer capable of the massive engineering it took to build it to upgrade it to modern needs.
A hole in the ground that is all? What about leach area, the radius around the hole in which you shouldn't dig or grow crops etc? How do you know? For thousands of year NO human knew. We thought smell kept evil spirits away. You and I can drink purest water from the tap for less then the cost of a peanut but drink instead poisoned water from plastic bottles at outrages prices and waste most of it for flushing the toilet.
I sit here within easy reach of enough food to last me a week, pure water how ever much I want, power for a dozen gadgets, in building that doesn't even budge in the worsed storms. Maybe you are too, but I don't pretend that my state in the norm in the rest of the world. Am I grateful for it? Hell no, I am a spoiled westerner but at least sometimes a story like this reminds me there are other places in the world. Maybe you should too. Even knowledge we consider basic is not universal. Just because you had over a decade maybe even two of education doesn't mean everyone has.
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