Bill Gates Answers Questions From Redditors

First time accepted submitter rroman writes "Bill Gates is answering questions on reddit. He talks about the work that is being done by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, about his life and about his opinions on various topics." Jump right to the answers.

Comments

Looking forward

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Looking forward to watching the usual mental gymnastics from you guys trying to make him out to be evil or something. Bonus points for not reading a word he says.

Re:Looking forward

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about the last time you saw Bill Gates on television. Did he look normal? Did he look quite how you remember him? If you were paying attention, you would have noticed that something was not quite the same.

The Chinese character for the JFK assassination looks a lot like the character for Bill Gates's name.

Invested parties have done a lot to make sure this stays under wraps.

In 1750, Benjamin Franklin was observed by over fifteen residents of Philadelphia as he branded an unidentified man with an Illuminati insignia. He was overheard telling one of his associates, "my work will be done once Bill Gates arrives to complete it."

If modern society hadn't drugged most ordinary people into a passive stupor of acceptance, we'd have done something about this long ago.

Shortly after the JFK assassination, the number of diabetes cases in children born to parents living nearby almost tripled. However, the government refuses to research this effect or compensate the affected families.

Corporate interests are preventing us from getting the truth out.

Consider the facts, and ask yourself: are you willing to let them get away with this? The answer should be a resounding no.

Re:Looking forward

[earlzdotnet]

I think we've all moved on to Steve Ballmer being an idiot rather than Bill Gates being evil

Re:Looking forward

[jaxtherat]

I read that in a Tracy Jordan voice.

Re:Looking forward

[hairyfish]

As soon as you try to explain why/how being rich is bad then we'll talk. Because of right now you're sounding a little bit crazy...

Re:Looking forward

[ShanghaiBill]

If you are young and briliant you have a choice, help the world or help yourself and become filthy rich

False dilemma. Profit seeking capitalists have done far more good for the world than philanthropists.

Re:Looking forward

[White Flame]

Big things don't happen without concentration of wealth giving people the opportunity to fund them and take large risks.

Throughout modern and ancient history, you'll find the "big names" were almost always backed by the funding of private magnates, aristocrats, religious organizations, and other concentrations of money. Otherwise, they'd be eccentrics doing small stuff in their garage that would be forgotten to time.

Re:Looking forward

[Alex Belits]

He's doing amazing things with his fortune since then.

Throwing money at the crowds of poor people is not "amazing", and this is what all "charity" of the rich always amounted to.

Re:Looking forward

[Capt James McCarthy]

If you are young and briliant you have a choice, help the world or help yourself and become filthy rich. Of course choosing the second leaves the option of later forming a massive foundation to help other people make the world a better place than you would if you chose the "good" option. And you still got to be rich.

Being young and brilliant (being savvy, lucky, brutal, and hardworking could be confused with brilliant I guess) you get to carry that 'brilliance' with you throughout your life. Now he's made a lot of money (though not his real goal, he just wants to be the winner), and being smart, what is one to do with all that money and be considered a winner throughout history? Let me see......how about starting a charitable foundation, that he controls, get the tax benefits, be able to pass along all of that power to whomever he chooses without the death tax, and be deemed a savior by all man kind. He has not and will not just give away all of his winnings.

Say what you will, he's still a vicious person who always wants to win at all costs. I don't hate him, but thinking that he somehow has seen the light is quite naive.

Re:Looking forward

[T.E.D.]

False dilemma. Profit seeking capitalists have done far more good for the world than philanthropists

Precisely. Ask yourself, who has contributed more to making the world a better place: Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., or Bill Gates and Sam Walton?

(honestly curious how this gets modded)

Sign of the times...

[xtracto]

Sign of the times... when /. is linking to Reddit.

Re:Sign of the times...

[AlphaWolf_HK]

From my observation of 10ish years on slashdot (I didn't register until some time of lurking,) slashdot *was* almost entirely in favor of apple, but no longer.

The common argument in favor of apple at the time was how open they are (e.g. using posix rules, incorporating samba, etc.) I frequently pointed out that if apple was as dominant as microsoft, they would impose far worse restrictions on user freedom than microsoft ever did. I was shot down at the time, but it turns out that I was right.

Anyways, most of slashdot now agrees with that assessment and is largely anti-apple these days.

Re:Long done

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had bothered to look, he has been answering for the last 6 or so hours, and his last post was only 5 minutes ago as of this posting.

Good Read

[GreggBz]

This really is an excellent AMA. It's good to see Mr. Gates mixing witty one-liners with several long, open and thoughtful answers.

In a weird way I wish that this was the Bill Gates that was still leading Microsoft. I mean, in that alternate universe it certainly wouldn't be all rainbows and freedom, but at least Microsoft would be a company that I could understand. These days, I have no clue where Microsoft is going and it kind of makes me sad that they are becoming a weaker, less competent rival to their open source and corporate opposition. Ah well, It's likely better that he's taken his drive and his billions and put it towards a noble cause.

Re:Good Read

[ShanghaiBill]

What cause would that be? Evading taxes?

The more taxes he can avoid, the better. He is putting the money to far better use than the government would.

Attempting to buy a legacy?

So what? What difference does it make what his motivations are? His foundation has already saved millions of lives, and improved the lives of millions more. All those lives are not worth less just because his motivations are not pure enough for you.

This was the device he used for the Q&A

[kentrel]

I want one!!
http://i.imgur.com/1JqrLVc.jpg

Re:Does he not know...

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Well, at least he actually knows how to program. Take a look at the CEOs of HP, IBM, Oracle, Dell, SAP, Cisco, . . . etc.

Most of them probably can't even manage to program themselves out of a paper bag.

Now, what programming languages does Steve Ballmer know . . . ?

Handwriting

[Dan East]

Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at "computers". Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways..

I'm very surprised he's still hung up on handwriting recognition. It is a DEAD END for human interfacing to a computer (with the sole exception of OCRing existing handwritten documents, and perhaps security as a form of credential). Think about it for one moment, the amount of muscle control, precision and time required to DRAW A SHAPE which is then interpreted as a single input glyph. It is a horribly slow and tedious method of input - I would rather (and literally have) key Morse Code into my android phone than write text.

It also shows he's still a bit out of touch, and still thinking stylus-centric (which, IMO, was one of the reasons Window Mobile / Windows CE failed, was because it never completely shook the stylus-required-to-interact-with-tiny-widgets problem). Is a person really expected to draw on a modern touch screen with their finger to write letters for the device to recognize (and feel like a preschooler fingerpainting)? Or are we going to step back into having to keep track of a stylus?

Just found it odd he threw in handwriting in this day and age. It was beat to death with Palm starting a decade and a half ago. It's gone. Dead. Byebye.

Re:Handwriting

[Kwyj1b0]

Just found it odd he threw in handwriting in this day and age. It was beat to death with Palm starting a decade and a half ago. It's gone. Dead. Byebye.

There was another article which stated that paper-and-pencils are the best tools in the classroom. While handwriting recognition (like all technologies) has had its hype, it is now becoming a serious tool. The stylus is actually a nice way to get work done on a computer in many technical fields (where drawings and notes are the way the people communicate).

I know faculty and students who use OneNote/EndNote and really like the Ink-to-Math and Ink-to-Text functionality.

Re:Handwriting

[T.E.D.]

It also shows he's still a bit out of touch, and still thinking stylus-centric

It isn't odd at all. Its perfectly in character for him. This is the same guy who looked at a impending revolution in ease of copying things, and thought to himself, "What this new ecosystem needs is old-fashioned steam-press era copyright law applied to it".

Bill Gates wasn't really born in the era of electronic information, and either never fully understood it, or just flat out isn't a fan of its implications for society.

Re:Windows 7 or 8?

[sd4f]

I like the windows 2000 response.

Why doesn't he answer questions on Slashdot?

[detritus.]

We love the guy!

Hope someone asked why he supports circumcision

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates supports circumcision as a way to fight HIV. That really is not an effective way to fight HIV, since many Americans are circumcised and still get HIV. Also, many European men are not circumcised and they don't get HIV as frequently as Americans. Using a condom is really the most effective way to protect yourself from HIV, and if you're going to use a condom, then there's no need to get circumcised.

Not to mention the fact that babies aren't even capable of having sex, so there's no need to circumcise a baby. When he's an adult, let him decide for himself whether he wants to permanently remove a body part that offers sexual benefits. And in 15-20 years there may be a REAL cure for HIV.

Saying that we should circumcise babies to protect them from HIV makes as much sense as saying we should give mastectomies to all young women to protect them from breast cancer.

Re:Hope someone asked why he supports circumcision

[dargaud]

Saying that we should circumcise babies to protect them from HIV makes as much sense as saying we should give mastectomies to all young women to protect them from breast cancer.

This is EXACTLY what I say to people who support sexual mutilations of babies. They usually mumble something about not being the same and quickly change the subject. I don't have mod points but this needs a '+5 insightful'.

Re:Does he not know...

[mrxak]

Everyone in my class learned Logo in 3rd grade. In middle school they taught everyone HTML. In high school we were using Scheme in several math classes.

I also learned C++ and Java in high school, though admittedly that was not everyone, and it was AP level classwork.

I think the earlier you teach kids computer languages, the better, and the quicker they'll pick it up. I don't think OOP is something terribly scary. After all, objects is kind of what people have to deal with every day in the real world. You explain it as nouns and verbs, and it's not that hard to understand.