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Code.org Documentary Serving Multiple Agendas?
theodp writes "'Someday, and that day may never come,' Don Corleone says famously in The Godfather, 'I'll call upon you to do a service for me.' Back in 2010, filmmaker Lesley Chilcott produced Waiting for 'Superman', a controversial documentary that analyzed the failures of the American public education system, and presented charter schools as a glimmer of hope, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed KIPP Los Angeles Prep. Gates himself was a 'Superman' cast member, lamenting how U.S. public schools are producing 'American Idiots' of no use to high tech firms like Microsoft, forcing them to 'go half-way around the world to recruit the engineers and programmers they needed.' So some found it strange that when Chilcott teamed up with Gates again three years later to make Code.org's documentary short What Most Schools Don't Teach, kids from KIPP Empower Academy were called upon to demonstrate that U.S. schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do. In a nice coincidence, the film went viral just as leaders of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook pressed President Obama and Congress on immigration reform, citing a dearth of U.S. programming talent. And speaking of coincidences, the lone teacher in the Code.org film (James, Teacher@Mount View Elementary), whose classroom was tapped by Code.org as a model for the nation's schools, is Seattle teacher Jamie Ewing, who took top honors in Microsoft's Partners in Learning (PiL) U.S. Forum last summer, earning him a spot on PiL's 'Team USA' and the chance to showcase his project at the Microsoft PiL Global Forum in Prague in November (82-page Conference Guide). Ironically, had Ewing stuck to teaching the kids Scratch programming, as he's shown doing in the Code.org documentary, Microsoft wouldn't have seen fit to send him to its blowout at 'absolutely amazingly beautiful' Prague Castle. Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.' Fortunately, Ewing's project — described in his MSDN guest blog post — called for using PowerPoint and Skype. For the curious, here's Microsoft PiL's vision of what a classroom should be."
The near excessive use of hypertext in this article is precisely how HTML was envisioned to be.
It's beautiful. /sniff
And yet people freely share their information. For Zuckerberg, we aren't the customers, we're the product
For your information, Bill Gates and Zuckerburg have nothing to do with Google
Can you translate this to English, Spanish, American or some language humans speak? I'm pretty sure it's valid HTML, but WTF?
i have a kid in a NYC public school. one of the best elementary schools in the city. i also talk to people who have kids in other schools or work in other schools.
the curriculum is the same. the kids are not.
in my school the kindergarten kids at a minimum know the alphabet on the first day of kindergarten. most of the kids in my son's class already know how to read simple books when they come in to kindergarten. by the end of kindergarten all the kids in my son's school are expected to read Scholastic Level F books
i have talked to people and there are first graders in some schools who don't know the alphabet.
if you want smart kids, make them smart. some days my five year old only watches documentaries on netflix and no cartoons.
What a crapton of links in an article.... i have no idea what the point was either.
i guess i'll just go with the standard WE HATE MICROSOFT.
How could anyone find it surprising that a corporation is promoting use of it's own products. Please. Actually, Microsoft's got a couple of good products that I've used and been happy with. One's Microsoft Lync which we use at work to do messaging, desktop sharing etc. I just wished there was a linux client for the thing. It would make my life much better.
I'm Linux/Unix guy for a living but I do admit Microsoft makes some reasonable products. I wish the corporate lock-in was not as bad as it is and I wish they published docs documenting all their file formats for interoperability. They have made some strides in the last couple of years.
It seems inappropriate to call the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world self-serving.
I don't know about that. Everyone on /. seems to be a fuckin' critic, yet critics still have jobs.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Lots of words, so the point is what exactly? That people that know each other usually work together? what's your point?
none
it's up to us.
we're the ones who will provide the protocols that would permit the sorts of activities mentioned here to take place in a non-proprietary manner. sure, companies like microsoft seek to dominate their markets, and view lock-in one of the available tools. that's because we let them. we as a society have set up companies to be driven entirely by profit, and have not arranged our legal system to distinguish between proprietary and open systems.
look at tcp/ip, the single most successful open standard in the universe. it didn't just spring fully formed and without peers - there was lots of competition. it won because a few of the companies (and educational institutions and even government) found ways to make it into a world-scale protocol. companies get it if you say "interop is a non-negotiable precondition to purchase". government rightly gets involved not only as significant sales targets themselves, but also when they say (or should), that any utility-type monopolies granted must conform to non-proprietary standards.
imagine if mobile data service was non-proprietary: your phone simply negotiated a 5 minute service contract with the set of carriers it could detect at the moment, wherever you happen to be. (voice and text would simply layer over data, of course.) yes, that sort of thing is obvious to any techie as The Right Way, but it's our fault that the public has gone along the proprietary route: we need to speak up.
business tries to get away with whatever it can - that's just economic darwinism. we just need to set the rules.
Some of us believe that the way he got the money was inappropriate.
To highlight: if I gave some money I stole to charity would I be criminal or admirable?
emt 377 emt 4
Zuckerberg is just a lucky moron.
Gates was lucky but he's also a really smart guy.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
OMG, he made a product that most people liked and bought it
Being a good programmer is different from merely being a programmer, and I highly doubt most kids would turn out to be competent programmers to begin with.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Just lay out your accusations directly so we can see if they're merited by the evidence. The last part of the summary seems to kind of get to the point by implying that MS's contribution and involvement with these recent PSA causes were a way to market their products. Can we get some clarification?
It seems to me that people with strong opinions will tend to do things that are consistent with those opinions. People whose opinions differ might see that consistency of action over time as an organized conspiracy.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.'
This is no surprise, whether it's a requirement of theirs or not, it sure seems to be standard practice. It causes big problems though, people running the program, like those in charge of the department of computer science at my school, come to push MS products for everything and pigeon hole students into the MS technologies. It's amazing just how many students there are that have used MS all their lives, but are still inept at using even the Windows command line, FSM forbid that you present them with anything else. Innovative teaching of technology in grade school - university should involve a variety of technologies and platforms, especially in secondary education.
--There are two kinds of people in this world. I don't like either of them.
So it's only "real" charity when there's no strings attached?
FTFY. Nice try but the problem here is that Bill donates to a "third party" that is really working to further his and his friend's interests and always will. Their lip service is something like their primary interest is to eradicate malaria but it turns out all their buddies get rich selling nets and vaccines to third world countries. The Gates Foundation "gives" money but all that money comes right back to their friends. The Foundation gets the write off. The friends get the revenue (independent of how shitty or great their product is). The small time businesses in the third world that were trying to sell these things get wiped off the map. And the problems largely persist indefinitely with companies buying international PR while generating revenue for other companies. Smile and pat yourself on the back, at the end of the day you're not really accomplishing anything but moving money to look good to Wall Street and the UN.
Here's an interesting question: how much money did the B&G foundation lose when the American housing and financial markets plummeted?
If you call that strictly donating to charity, you have some pretty screwed up standards of charity.
"If they start teaching code in high school, EVERYONE will consider themselves a programmer, and the market will completely dry up."
We - several kids in my school - were taught programming in elementary school (zx spectrum, c+4/16 era) it was optional and extra-curricular but still) and in high school (where I was in a math-CS spec. class). After high school only around 20% of my class went to CS or IT related universities and jobs later. If 20% of everyone who learnt proper coding became a programmer, the US would have no shortage of them. The problem you are referring to is when people who didn't learn proper programming are considering themselves professionals and flood the job market with unusable "talent".
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Then get another job... Seriously. If what you do is so simple that any idiot can do it, then you should be worried. Don't piss on people trying to make their lives better because you are too lazy to stay competitive.
The kids in the public education system might turn out to be pretty decent Jeopardy players; that is, if they don't forget everything they 'learned' a year after graduating from high school...
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
What exactly is sick about contributing to the infrastructure of foreign nations, then hiring people? It's not like anybody is worse off for having received a computer for charity 20 years ago.
Agreed. Pointless post. Code.org is probably irrelevant anyway as people who want to code will learn how anyway, and most other people probably don't care.
Besides coding is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a huge difference between teaching a kid how to code in school and actually writing quality code, understanding relational databases, coding for real-time transaction processing, understanding source control, having the patience to sit in front of a monitor for 8-10 hours a day, etc, etc.
Most of the people I took coding classes ( Basic on Apple II's ) with in high-school aren't even coding or in IT at all now. In fact, some of the people I went to college with have even left the field.
Gates was lucky but he's also a really smart guy.
Really? Whenever I read stuff about Microsoft's early years, it seems like Paul Allen was the smart guy.
You know, the guy Gates and Ballmer forced out in the 80s when he had cancer?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
That is not all he did, and it is hard to believe you are unaware.
emt 377 emt 4
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
Or Pablo Escobar?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
No, señor, it's Carlos.
Mexican drug lords are often viewed as heroes because of how they bestow largess on the poor.
It seems inappropriate to call the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world self-serving.
In the Red-Blue bipolar imaginary Fun World, perhaps.
In the real world, you can be both, either, or neither. Nothing requires that one be dependent on the other.
You are aware Gates was a dropout right?
He made his business based on family connections at IBM.
Programming is not on the radar; nor should it be.
I see seniors who can't form complete sentences. I've seen kids who can barely use mice at all. Almost all of them will hit capslock to capitalize a single letter and then press it again to turn it off. Almost all of them cheat incessantly with cellphones or Googling answers or both.
Our problems are a lack of parents, a lack of social training (etiquette), rampant poverty, and unrelenting predation by the usual educational corporate behemoths.
available to work for $20,000 per year.
Sure the H1B's are making similar salaries but the thousands of programmers they interface with overseas are making $15,000 per year.
The good news?
Inflation is running over 25%.
I understand and agree that brilliant genius level programmers are rare and there won't be enough available in the U.S. But that's not a matter of schooling and training.
I worked directly with Infosys programmers from 2000-2013. In 2003, they were mostly masters degree candidates working in bachelor degree jobs. Today, they are mostly sub bachelor's degree candidates working in bachelor's degree jobs. The good 2003 programmers are all managers and executives now in infosys for the most part.
That level of programmer is available in the U.S.
The challenge is this: It is bloody hard to hire people. We spent 16 interviews over 5 months to get 2 positions filled. A company dedicated to IT can turn "on" 2 programmers almost instantly and it can also turn them "off" almost instantly (with no unemployment benefits). So a company like Infosys is like electric or gas or any other utility.
The problem being that infosys discriminates terribly. One hint, they require your high school graduation date on your resume. And that's just the start.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My name is Inigo Montoya.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Particularly when the price structure of things in the USA is geared towards those making $100K+ a year. "American idiots" have seen their 60 year old engineer parents fired for not other reason than the fact that they made too much money. "American idiots" have seen their jobs outsourced. Even if theirs has not, the threat is always there. "American Idiots" wonder, correctly, if the wonders of globalization will one day make any advanced degree they pursue worth about as much as the average janitorial salary.
While business media "journalists" will always be paid to spin something else, it is always about the money, and as we get older, it's about the job security, and the possibility that your benefits can be cut by the parent company arbitrarily.
It seems they've been complaining about 'the dearth' for long enough now that if they were actually serious about solving the problem, those who were in pre-school when the complaining started would have Bachelor and Master degrees in CS by now...
They've been operating on a shoestring budget since as long as I can remember. Shit wages make for shit teachers. Stop paying Administration with 6-digit salaries and distribute the difference among the staff and things will improve. Gates is a two-faced jackwagon blaming a systematically hamstrug public educational system that all his buddies want privatized.
Oh, and the reason Corporations go overseas for outsourcing is the H1B visa money, not talent. They couldn't give two shits about talent as long as someone is there to answer the support line.
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The equation involves luck, effort, and smarts.
Dark Reflection
May the Road Rise With You...
No, seriously, charity is literally the definitional opposite of self-serving behavior. I understand that Gates was not the nicest man when it came to running a business, but he's said, and is on course to, divest his entire wealth into a charity with the intent of intelligently benefiting all mankind by the time he dies. I would love to hear a definition of "self-serving" that seriously allows for that.
You obviously do get the point of this /. post. I don't even understand your reply..
I guess this is about something currently relevant (or more likely, in the mass media) inside the US.. there is nothing in this article that i understand or -by extension- once came across and found relevant.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Do they teach proper capitalization in your son's kindergarten?
Suck my dick.
From what I hear in the news, they do teach that in public schools.
You might want to ease up on the rum; you go by 'Dread Pirate Robberts' nowadays and don't want to let that secret slip.
Gates wrote a reasonable amount of Microsoft BASIC, which was the product that put the company on the map. He also used family connections to sell it to IBM, along with an operating system that they hadn't yet written, which implies a reasonable amount of sales skill, if not necessarily implying intelligence. He also designed and implemented the FAT filesystem in PC DOS (which later became MS DOS). Oh, and he published a paper on the optimal algorithm for flipping pancakes (which sounds silly, but is actually used in a number networking tasks). He's definitely intelligent.
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He dropped out of college, but because he decided to found Microsoft. He did not get kicked out, and he didn't get to Harvard by being an idiot.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I remember reading that he completed Harvard's Math 55, which isn't a small feat even for smartest freshmen.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Hell, it is already true that most programmers don't turn out to be competent programmers.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
They have acting skills second to none. In Brussels and in Washington, people like Bill Gates and various Wall Street bankers can swear in the most solemn tones to tell nothing but the truth, then look people straight in the eye and plead penury and desperation. Please, please, oh member of the Senate, have a heart, give us just a scrap, maybe another 200K visas. Or a tiny, pitiful trillion dollar bailout for our wee little global investment bank. I don't know what else I can do, I am at my wits end , woe is me, so desperate is my company ...
This is how the game is played at the top levels. Lying with flair and conviction. I can imagine Gates after his testimony to get more visas a few years back, doing a fist bump with one his corporate legal minions. "Nicely played, sir!"
Here's the gist of it: Waiting for Superman is a movie about how amazing charter schools are and how they'll be the savior of American education. It shows kids whose families desperately want them to win the lotteries for the charter schools, because their home districts are so ghetto, so their kid can have a better opportunity to make something of themselves.
The problem with Waiting for Superman is that the assumption that getting into a charter school increases a child's chances to succeed academically or professionally is false and such claims are false. The Gates Foundation throws money at charter schools -- sometimes in the form of Windows PCs with Microsoft Office. And they think the way to save our terrible education system is to make our high school kdis Microsoft Certified. They envision a technological future, one in which everything -- and I do mean everything is run on Microsoft technologies.
There's was a snag in this plan. Liberals hate charter schools because they're aware that they do nothing to fix the problem, so they're the biggest roadblock to mainstreaming Microsoft technologies to the kids who actually have a future. Charter schools just divert better students away from public schools, leaving public schools with the worst of the worst socializing and making failure the norm.
Conservatives are okay with the notion of charter schools for reasons that are irrelevant. The best way to trick liberals is with touching documentaries. So Waiting for Superman was made -- it cloaked its agenda with a tear-jerker, liberal-bait story of our tragic education system. If only more federal funding was given to charter schools, these children's lives wouldn't be ruined. This is the conclusion.
This story basically tells a bunch of liberals that thought Waiting for Superman was a tragic and poignant documentary, on an issue they care dearly about, that they got duped. A wolf in sheep's clothing.
Why do we have to choose. You can be both admirable and criminal. One is a legal definition, and the other an opinion on the man's morality. There are people who aren't stuck in second grade morality that know morality can be a complex determination that can vary from one person to the next.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Gatto makes a lot of complaints about the school system but offers almost no suggestions for improvement. He also mixes some libertarian rants in with his criticism of the schools. As for his idea that the American education system was designed primarily to support corporate needs, his only evidence is a few random quotes. With that sort of "research" you can prove almost anything you want.
They teach math in high school yet not every HS graduate is considered a mathematician.
Owning most of the most successful software company in history?
The problem is that it's hard to find American students who are bright enough to become good programmers, but dumb enough to believe they should try and make a living at it.
He got into Harvard because he came from a rich family ... the usual connections.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Rockerfeller employed private armies who murdered striking workers and their supporters. There's a decent argument that he gave to charity for the same reason ancient kings had gigantic monuments erected to themselves.
There is so much wrong with this summary, I don't even know where to begin:
- Did the poster just learn about hyperlinks? The posting looks like the time my 3 year old got into my wife's makeup
- Did we need hyperlinks to items like Don Careleone's quote? The venue of the Partner's in learning conference? A picture of James Ewing standing in front of a trifold?
- ti;dr; too incoherent, didn't read. The posting seems to be a bunch of ramblings attempting to draw connections between the Gates foundation, Code.org and immigration reform. It reads like the worst of conspiracy theories...detailing a bunch of information in a sequence that makes it appear to be connected, but without actually providing any connections
- Extraneous information much? What does the letter that sent to Obama have to do with anything? Why the link to what Microsoft's PiL's classroom should look like? What does the Godfather quote have to do with anything?
Worst Slashdot Article Ever (so far this week).
"like when Gates bought CP/M..."
Um....No. Just plain No.
Remind me of all the murders Gates is responsible for. I get we don't like Microsoft much.
Exactly. Why does being evil imply being stupid? Has he never heard of evil geniuses?
It's not that evil is implying stupidity, but rather than accusations of stupidity and evilness are easy ad hominem attacks on people that are not liked. It's like how the government can both be incredibly incompetent and diabolically all controlling at the same time.
Nice about the "second grade morality".
Yes, you can be both. The part about stealing then donating was meant to show the issue by taking it out of the complex determination arena.
emt 377 emt 4
We were talking about "the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world", which, in adjusted dollars, seems to be Rockefeller. In any case, I didn't say that Gates had anyone killed, I was simply pointing out a good example of how it's possible for someone to simultaneously donate a large amount to charity and also be self-serving.
Yes, he was smart enough to realize that he was in the right place, at the right time, with a skill set and personality that were better suited to entrepreneurialism, at that point, than the opportunities academia might have afforded over time. And, it's a good thing Microsoft was able to buy QDOS from Tim Paterson when it did, or we might not be having this trivial exchange.
One of my schoolmates went to Harvard, and he couldn't even get into the gifted program in school. So it wasn't a high IQ that got him there. He had OK grades but wasn't stellar.
I think you are massively over estimating the correlation between being intelligent and high grades/gifted programs at schools.
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
It depends more on whom you stole it from.
So are you trolling, or are you suggesting that Bill Gates benefited from racial quotas?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm sure his family connections helped. Nevertheless, he was objectively very bright. He was nearly perfect on his SATs and he wrote a "pancake" sorting algorithm that went unchallenged as "fastest" for 30 years.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
WTH? Those links don't say the things you say they do.
The worst indictment I see following those links to their original source is that the Gates foundation buys stock in arguably unethical companies (oil and gas companies primarily). I see nothing in those links about Paul Allen, or about "boosing their friend's revenues".
Oh, and BTW....slashdot is not a great source for meaningful sources of information. If you want to link, link to the original sources of your claims.
Janitors make better money for the little experience required. It is stable and not out sourced; it is necessary. Same with garbage, mechanics, and other frowned upon jobs. Real estate, Sales, Small Business are ok because they can make a lot of money despite them not needing education or brains.
Education adds less value every year and it is always measured in salary when security and stress are equally important factors.
Truth is, that the 'thinking' jobs are going to be not worth the cost, we will outsource them to places with cheaper education and lower costs of living. Even if college is made free, for the sake of keeping our "thinking" jobs so we can have an economy; why would people want to do all that when they can make a little less as a janitor but have stability and low stress?
As far as quality students, that is largely another situation. Previously, certain demographics went for the education and they proved to be highly valuable employees, the pay somewhat reflected that. Then everybody else wanted that pay and incorrectly formulated that the education is what caused the higher pay. Now we have a large number of educated people that are hard to distinguish from the ones who made it desirable in the 1st place. Not to say it doesn't improve people, but it isn't the sole reason why college education was desirable. Its almost just an HR filter for applicants today (in which case tell the kids, get an easy cheap degree.)
The whole economy is slowly imploding, this system never was sustainable and things are going to get worse - it all ties together in an incredibly complex web of "life" even if it is a partially artificial one.
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schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do
Considering what I see in my day-to-day affairs, the vast majority of programmers are still clueless about what they do.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
That's fair. And my hyperbole wasn't entirely warranted.
I do believe that he is smart but to get into Harvard you need to have money and connections and that is how he got in.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Gates is not Darth Vader, Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan. He has done - and doubtless will continue to do many very admirable things.
However, he has also done some really slimy things, both personally and via his minions at Microsoft. Hopefully no one died, but definitely some things that I don't respect him for.
In short, he's a human being. Not all saint, not all sinner. Most of us won't be able to do things on as grand a scale as he has, but we're not all that different.
As a practical matter, you also need to be smart. It is an edge case to be a complete moron attending Harvard.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
no because Digital research blew off IBM when they came calling about CP/M
Yes...all those poor small time businesses in the third world that were working to eradicate HIV or polio.
Those mom-and-pop water sanitation plant workers, and family planning councilors losing their jobs and forced to live on the street. How very sad.
Please...sell your crazy somewhere else. We're all full up here.
So why don't you be that smart entrepreneur who first implements it? Start your own training - if it really works out the way you say it will, you'll be able to supply droves of cheap workers to all those corporations who keep saying that they desperately need them - and make a lot of money in the process. Seeing how this is a limited opportunity thing - until someone does it and crashes the market - you should probably start right away instead of writing comments on Slashdot.
I know right, they started teaching history in high school, now everyone considers themselves a historian and the hard working historians are out of work!
We need the next generation to be as dumb as possible, so we can be employed for as long as possible.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
It's like how the government can both be incredibly incompetent and diabolically all controlling at the same time.
Often with the same person claiming both in the same post. Always interesting to see someone who's a candidate for an olympic gold medal in mental gymnastics (even if I wouldn't want to actually talk to them).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
a) Yale is not Harvard. Incidentally, he also had his MBA from Harvard so I'm not sure why you mentioned Yale.
b) He is exactly the kind of edge case I was talking about.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Exactly. The trick to staying successfully employed in a high paying job is... to be useful! The task I am doing today is not the task I will be doing next year. They will most likely be related, but I am not a one trick pony. I do not insert tab A into slot B on an assembly line. I solve problems. Each problem only needs to be solved once and then I move onto the next problem. There will always be more problems and as long as I can solve them, I get to keep my job.
There is a difference between a code monkey and a software engineer. Code monkeys are a dime a dozen and easily replaceable. Engineers are problem solvers. As soon as you become complacent and turn into a code monkey just doing whatever you are told to do, that is when you risk being replaced.
To claim that you have a *right* to your position and that other, hard working people do not is selfish. Why are you so much more special than the guy down the street? Why do you deserve a job over him? If the answer is "I'm American RAR!" or "I was here first" then you seriously need to rethink your position. If you answer is not along the lines of "I'm better than him because I can do X and he can't", you have a problem and it isn't with the job market or your employer or the guy down the street willing to do your job for half your salary. It's with you.
The guy down the street wants a better life for himself and his kids. Shame on you for trying to trash his dreams because you can't figure out how to make yourself employable.
"like when Gates stole CP/M..."
Um....No. Just plain No.
Fixed that for them...