Bill Gates Plays Secret Santa To Reddit User

An anonymous reader writes "Gates fulfilled a Reddit users wish-list by buying several items and donating to a listed charity organization, although he did pass on getting the iPad on the list. From the article: 'The true identity of Rachel's Secret Santa was finally revealed when she found a photo of Gates holding the stuffed animal and the signed donation sent to Heifer International. An inscription in the book with a "really nice message" and note from Gates wishing Rachel a Merry Christmas and a Happy Birthday was the topper.'"

Comments

not the first time

[turkeydance]

he's done Duke things before.

Anybody else seriously disturbed by this?

[sideslash]

She opened the gift before Christmas. What's up with that?

Re:Anybody else seriously disturbed by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's that War on Christmas the Right's been warning us about, Gretchen Carlson was right all along!

This is done in the hopes Reddit will reciprocate

[Anonymous Coward]

and link to something.. ANYTHING slashdot has done in the last few years.

If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

could he not have tossed in a surface instead (I guess then they could count it as a sell, lord knows he probably has a pile of them in some closet)

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[mosb1000]

Why not just slap her in the face? She'd probably like that better. . .

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's the season to bring joy to one another, get with the spirit of the season man.

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

Would have doubled their sales figure for the Xmas season, too!

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's you who should be ashamed if a slap to the face equals rape to you. Go back to tumblr, social justice warriors don't really work here.

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[countach]

Why check his business bigotry at the door, and get her the iPad she wanted?

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[gl4ss]

although buying someone a surface is pretty near to rape, I don't think slap on the face quite counts. so you're now making everyone into a rapist because they didn't use their mod points on it! what the fuck? do you have any fucking idea how real rape victims would feel about that?? are all the women in the world who have slapped someone in the face RAPIST SLUTS????

so please go fuck yourself. sincerely, the spirit of christmas.

ps. and a happy goatse to all from the golden girls reunion at the gnaa!

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[tchdab1]

I'm inclined to interpret this as a nod from Bill that every action still counts as a move in his game. Can't ever turn it off.

Re: If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

totally agree, sueface is junk, microsoft know that!

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

Would having a Rolls-Royce on the wishlist instead of an Ipad change anything? A wishlist is a guide, not a rule. The woman seems thrilled to have gotten something from someone famous. Can it not be left at that?

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

Owning a surface is pretty horrific but you shouldn't equate it with rape like that, it belittles both experiences.

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[InsightfulPlusTwo]

Yeah, he's secretly consulting a medium so he can go on competing with dead Steve Jobs.

Re:If he wasn't giving her an iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to know what type of moron expects a $500 ipad in an anonymous gift exchange.

Petty

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have gotten the iPad as well.

Re:Petty

[Anonymous Coward]

The classy thing would have been to give her both the iPad and a Surface and say "let us know which you like better".

But I guess it's a rule that when your company puts out an inferior product you just have to be a dick instead.

Re:Petty

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about what you just said: someone is a dick because they didn't buy an overpriced tech toy for some stranger on the internet.

The cow was needed for the ritual sacrifice

[Anonymous Coward]

666 more days till Windows 8 EOL

Re:This is done in the hopes Reddit will reciproca

[FunkDup]

and link to something.. ANYTHING slashdot has done in the last few years.

what does slashdot do?

Scratch that. We pontificate. We're very good at that.

remember the spam?

[Neo-Rio-101]

What about the million dollars Gates offered to give away in all the spam emails I've got over the years?

Turd Polishing

[hoboroadie]

More of a PR ploy than a "secret" if he's going to put a picture in there. Reminds me of all those awesome Microsoft commercials through the years.
Takes a big roll of paper towels to get that blood off your hands.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on! It was a nice gesture. The man didn't _have_ to do this, but did anyway. This brought some joy to the world that wouldn't have been there otherwise and in my book that qualifies as a good thing.

(So M$ and BG has done some (very) objectionable things. I agree, but this wasn't one of them.)

Re:Turd Polishing

[ChromeAeonium]

Yes, indeed there is blood on that man's hands. I too remember the Great Internet Explorer Wars. Saw many good people lose their lives in that dark chapter of human history. What brutal, senseless suffering, and all because machines came pre-packaged with this one certain browser. Damn it Bill, why did you have to go and include a browser with every operating system, you heartless, greedy bastard! Were those ill gotten gains worth it?! And now you think you can just undo the sins of your past by eradicating malaria, hunger, and illiteracy? Well, it won't work! None of that can compare to the horrors of browser/operating system bundling. Truly, Micro$oft money is blood money.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh...someone who still thinks that the browser wars were the worst thing that Microsoft did...how cute.

If you're looking for blood, you'll find that Microsoft's illegal tactics killed BeOS and OS/2 through their OEM exclusive licensing deals. Or how about the swath of dead word processors left in the wake of Microsoft's proprietary office formats and unwillingness to export to any common format.

Really, the embedding of IE was probably 3rd or 4th on their list of illegal and unethical practices.

Re:Turd Polishing

[MildlyTangy]

oh dude get over it, business is business. Of course its cut throat, theres billions of dollars to be had.

This is not tiddlywinks, son.

Re:Turd Polishing

[ruir]

You are being too kind. How they cheated out Tim Patterson and resold "DOS" with a huge profit. How Stacker killed the hard-drive competition. How about Windows 3 hard coded error messages that killed DR-DOS, besides strong arming major suppliers into installing only DOS and then Windows in exchange for major "discounts"...how about hidden APIs and bug fixes to Windows 95 that only were applied when you installed Office. OS/2 was also clearly sabotaged from the inside, they were only there to steal the ideas. Or their sabotage of the Java APIs to prevent it to become a stable ubiquitous platform of development. How they swindled netscape and the HTLM standard. How Exchange had code to make IMAP protcolols slow to further the agenda of Windows/Outlook workstations. The creation of ASP to disrupt PHP. The inclusion of anti-virus in Windows. How they obfuscated so much protocols like SMB and the Office documents to delay their reverse engineering. How their business model is to continually disrupt their own products to create a need to buy the latest, and the latest training.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Be killed BeOS with stupid business decisions. I used to be a BeOS user and advocate, but even I could see how Jean-Louis Gasbag mismanaged the company into oblivion.

OS/2 disappeared as a desktop OS because it was more expensive than Windows and had much steeper system requirements.

Re:Turd Polishing

[LocalH]

TIL you can buy something outright and resell it, and you're "cheating out" the previous owner.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Jack Griffin]

Well played.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Jack Griffin]

As mentioned Business ain't tiddlywinks. And he's now saving lives, what are you doing?

Re:Turd Polishing

[drinkypoo]

Yes, indeed there is blood on that man's hands.

Remember this blood? It continues to pour.

And now you think you can just undo the sins of your past by eradicating malaria, hunger, and illiteracy? Well, it won't work!

In fact, the Gates foundation will cure none of these things.

Re:Turd Polishing

[ruir]

When you dont have any product to offer, you know you are about to do the business of the century, are dealing with the giant of the industry, and do everything you can to hide it from the seller just to pay a paltry sum, yep, you are being a scoundrel. Need I point the obvious?

Re:Turd Polishing

[Stuarticus]

Look how much free publicity it scored him, if it was truly altruistic why did he pop his picture in there?

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

he's in a position to give a thousand, a million, a billion people a better christmas.
he did one.
AND turned it into a public pr stunt.

If the average person had done this. Fucking awesome. But on the scale that billyg is rich... What he did is like giving a waitress a 2 cent tip on a 100,000 check.

At this point there's still a nice space in hell for him right next to steve jobs. In the section for people who could have changed the world. Who could have EASILY made a huge diffrence in improving humanity. And instead went for pr and profit.

Re:Turd Polishing

[msobkow]

Maybe because he wanted to give her something memorable instead of just donating to charity in her name?

Personally I'd think that note and photo were the far more valuable portion of the gift. For anyone who collects things like signatures, it'd be a family treasure. I know I'd be framing it and putting it on the wall, as proof that I once was contacted by the elusive Bill Gates.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Carewolf]

Nice list, you got a little carried away though. The Office documents are not obfuscated as much as designed for another time and lazily modernized (they are dumps of the in original in-memory representation of the documents in C++ saved to disk). And I don't think they "swindled" the HTML standard. IE4 was the first browser to implement CSS1 and HTML4, Netscape were the ones trying to abuse their dominance by making their own extensions. Of course after MS won, the situation changed and MS slowed down and made their own shit for IE6.

Other than that, yet pretty spot on. There were also updates in Windows 3.11 to break it in new ways when running inside OS/2. OS/2 ended up having to apply patches to unbreak the stuff MS put in to break OS/2, a slow arms race with patches distributed by floppies for a while. Sure that was a few more companies they screwed as well, it was hard to keep track of in the 90s.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people do nice things, that are as mundane to them, as this is to Bill Gates. We don't make a big deal of any of those. What's worse, a lot of people do nice things that cost a lot to them (and not just in the monetary sense) and achieve much more, and yet we turn a blind eye to them.

I'm sorry, but this is just not news at all. It's just a media stunt.

Re:Turd Polishing

[MozeeToby]

He started a charitable foundation with a donation of about 40 billion dollars, and while it isn't perfect (what $40 billion venture is?) it has made great strides in alleviating poverty and eradicating disease around the world. And he did this well after gathering more money than any one man could have any hope of using in his or his grand children's lifetimes; what exactly does he need PR for again?

Re:Turd Polishing

[VGPowerlord]

The creation of ASP to disrupt PHP.

You do know ASP was introduced in 1996, before PHP became popular? That was during the PHP/FI 1.0 days, which were followed by PHP/FI 2.0 before it became PHP 3 and started resembling the PHP we know today.

No, ASP was introduced to unseat Perl, which was the defacto language for CGI scripts at the time.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

TIL you can buy something outright and resell it, and you're "cheating out" the previous owner.

You make it sound as though they bought it, used it for a while, then sold it again like some sort of consumable. The developer got a little cash up front because he wrote something great but failed to see it's potential. Someone else recognized the potential and instead of making a business deal that would have benefitted everyone (ethical) they downplayed its perceived worth to snatch it up cheaply, then passed it off as their own creation and made millions (unethical)

It's just business, it's a dog eat dog world, you have to be ruthless to get ahead... You can justify it how ever you want, I doubt you would be so gracious if the swindling happened to you. The point of the discussion is that BG has done some unethical things in the past and needs to atone for them before we start calling him Saint Bill, IF the opinion old nerds like us that lived in the aftermath of his ruthless decisions matter to him, which I highly doubt.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is that the GP is making is that the end does not justify the means. You think it does, and that's fine. I personally don't mind if people die and starve as long as it serves me. Their end simply supports my means. That doesn't mean the GP doesn't have a point though.

Re:Turd Polishing

[ottothecow]

Because half of the gift (and lets be honest, this is reddit secret santa...it is filled with $20 gifts that will get thrown away next month) is the cool feeling this girl got upon discovering that Bill Gates was her secret santa.

If the return address just said bill gates, she wouldn't believe it (just some reddit user trying to stay anonymous)--now she knows it was him and can forever tell the story of how Bill Gates gave her a christmas present.

As to the content of the gift...the book and the stuffed cow are basically on par with what you might be expected to receive from the reddit SS. While I think it would be hilarious if he sent her a Surface instead of her requested iPad and said "here, try this instead", I don't really think that is in keeping with Bill's style. The cow donation is much more in line with Bill. He still managed to give a gift that is probably one of the most valuable reddit SS gifts (in dollar terms), but without turning the SS into some lottery where you buy your "ticket" for $20 (sending someone a gift) and hope that you get some super rich dude to come in and pay off your student loans. Online SS things (I've never done reddit, but have done it on smaller forums) are more fun when it's not about who spent the most $$$ on the gift, but rather who did the best job of stalking their recipient's post history to find them a gift that they would truly enjoy.
Honestly, an ipad is kind of a shitty gift--obviously anyone would be happy to receive one so it doesn't require any effort on the part of the giver other than pulling out $500.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

He gave gifts to two different people. The woman in the secret santa exchange and the charity. Hell, make that three people because also the family that will receive the cow gets something as well. There must be something wrong with you that you can't just see the kindness here.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

"Damn it Rockefeller, why did you have to go and offer everyone cheaper kerosene, you heartless, greedy bastard!"

Just because something isn't a "horror" to each person doesn't mean it's not a big deal when it's done millions of times. I bet you're the same person who doesn't think twice about driving a gas-guzzler to soccer practice.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is that the anon you're replying to is too stupid to even see what the hell went on here. Of course it was a PR stunt. But not one for Bill Gates. It was for Heifer International. Bill Gates lent his celebrity to a cause, it had nothing to do with money. Jesus fucking christ what a moron the prior anon is.

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

SS? Do you mean Secret Santa or SchutzStaffel (Nazis)? Maybe you mean both?

Re:Turd Polishing

[Anonymous Coward]

What you perceive as truly altruistic does not exist. If at any time you think something is truly altruistic, it means you simply do not understand the motives - it's a reflection on your lack of information or understanding, not on the nature of the action.

So when are the Google guys going to play Santa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh...right...

Hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure I'll get modded down for this, but I can't resist:

iPad: So expensive, even Bill Gates takes a pass!

Of course, his saving grace is he didn't see fit to punish her with a Surface, at least.

Re:Hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried the better surface? Beats iPad hands down. Unfortunately also costs a lot.

Re:Hahaha

[frinkster]

Of course, his saving grace is he didn't see fit to punish her with a Surface, at least.

Yes, MS screwed up the original Surface sales projections so badly that their corrected sales projections (and thus manufacturing capacity) for the Surface 2 are so low that they cannot meet demand. Have you been under a rock? This has been in all the financial press as a huge negative for their revenue and profit numbers.

So... Bill Gates isn't going to be giving away some device when there is a line of people waiting to buy it.

Re:Capture Every Tear Drop and Drink Them Mixed

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the bold font in the last line. Jesus Christ! Get it right!!

Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[phantomfive]

Do you think he reads Slashdot, too?

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Anonymous Coward]

does he sit on a diamond toilet? who cares!

off to groklaw with you!

at this rate, he could spill coffee on his hand and it would make the front page of /.

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[phantomfive]

No, you don't understand.

The possibility that I might have flamed and insulted Bill Gates without knowing it really brightens my day. It makes my diminutive heart grow 3 sizes larger all at once. It's like Christmas for me.

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a piece of shit you are.

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[fropenn]

If he does, I have two Christmas wishes of my own:
the first would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing in the spirit of harmony and peace...
...and the second would be for $30 million a month to be given to me, tax-free, in a Swiss bank account.

(Thanks, Steve Martin!)

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[ruir]

Actually 30 million in a swiss bank account, one time payment is enough, thank you.

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think he reads Slashdot, too?

Yes, but his posts are automatically modded down to -5 due to a signed int bug so you never see them. They are logged via a printer in the Slashdot lavatory that uses special 2-ply paper.

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Jerslan]

[sarcasm]Yes, because history shows that people who call people "pieces of shit" are SOOOOO much better... especially when they do so anonymously...[/sarcasm]

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Anonymous Coward]

The AC was not calling phantomfive anything. The AC was simply stating a fact.

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates is a career criminal who has hidden his wealth in a charitable foundation which invests the bulk of its money in evil corporations which kill people.[Citation needed]

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take that 30 million to my regular bank account. If I have to pay some sort of gift tax, then so be it. I would not spend 30 million minus gift tax in my lifetime anyway.

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[msobkow]

If his Geek Card is still valid, then yes, I'm sure he does.

He probably gets a hell of a giggle out of the ranting fanbois on all sides of the arguments now that he's retired from the industry...

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not even enough for one capable fighter jet. You'll never be able to acheive air supperiority, and you'll just be living under the thumb the government for the rest of your life. At least you can still have this

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you the "before Scrooge" or the "after Scrooge"? I honestly can't tell from you remarks...

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[antdude]

http://slashdot.org/~billgates :P

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[drinkypoo]

Bill Gates is a career criminal

Helmed Microsoft during a period in which it was found to have abused its monopoly position and engaged in other various anticompetitive behaviors, for which he was found personally (partly) culpable. Pardoned by Ashcroft under Bush.

who has hidden his wealth in a charitable foundation which invests the bulk of its money in evil corporations which kill people.[Citation needed]

Long, long ago, there was this citation. But now we also have this newer citation to play with.

This stuff isn't even from naturalnews. You can share it with your friends.

Re:Bill Gates reads Reddit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange, no search engine I use finds mentions Gates as being pardoned of anything, let alone by someone who was never the President of the United States.

The first link is old, and simply shows that investors cannot possibly know every little thing about their investment other than what is on paper and the company's mission statement. The second link is nonsequitur, other than maybe inferring the foundation fixed the problems with the first by now. The only thing that might be amiss in the second is the allegations of what a military contractor might be doing, but then whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

Re:So when are the Google guys going to play Santa

[Seumas]

You mean, keeping track of who is being naughty or nice and reporting it to the NSA, CIA, FBI, local law enforcement, and other commercial entities?

Re:This is done in the hopes Reddit will reciproca

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubtful. Even if that is the case, Slashdot is little more than a news aggregator with (usually) terrible article summaries and a comments section. Why would anything want to link to it? That would be even worse than citing a Wikipedia article as a credible source.

bill gates now a secret santa meme

[Anonymous Coward]

This is now a meme:
http://imgur.com/g/memes/K8hipiw

Re:So when are the Google guys going to play Santa

[Anonymous Coward]

Typically happens during Google I/O where they give away toys costing about twice what the conference costs to attend.

From the two years that I attended, I got 3 Android phones, a Google TV and preview access to Google Wave (which, in hindsight, was more like the proverbial lump of coal, but it's the thought that counts, right?)

Attendees in the years since have gotten Google Glass, MiFis with free service and I'm guessing quite a bit more.

Being born into money

[Anonymous Coward]

Has its advantages, one of which is better taste in certain circumstances. (Yes, Gates made his fortune through Microsoft, but he also had a privileged childhood including enrollment at exclusive private schools).

Contrast what Gates did with Richard Stallman's holiday gift advice.

Micorosft may be evil, but Gates seems nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying this is probably some form of sacrilege, considering my tendency to avoid MS products when possible -- my everyday desktop is Debian, for example -- but I have no problem separating the company from the man.

I don't like Microsoft's business practices, and generally don't care for their software, but Gates himself always seemed like an overall decent* guy with a passion for software and technology, unlike Jobs, who always sounded like a jackass to me. There's an irony in that, given the fanatical following of Jobs and general distaste people display toward BillG, presumably due to the business practices of Microsoft and ubiquity of its products.

Even if it's a PR stunt, it was a nice one, and handled in a classy way. He could have given away a bunch of XB1s and other branded products, for example, but didn't. What he did was thoughtful and nicely done, and he didn't even do it in a way that bragged about how many zeroes were on the donation made.

* Which doesn't mean he's a flawless person or always a nice guy. I'm sure he has plenty of flaws; if nothing else, he condoned or ignored Microsoft's various shady tactics over the years

And Obama?

[Anonymous Coward]

Commutes 8 crack cocaine dealers and a shit load of low lifers.

His kinda a people.

Yea right.

Fuck-n ass hole deserves a M16 up his ass.

Re:And Obama?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah the American racist, compensating for his microscopic dick.

Microsoft may be evil, but Gates seems nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying this is probably some form of sacrilege, considering my tendency to avoid MS products when possible -- my everyday desktop is Debian, for example -- but I have no problem separating the company from the man.

I don't like Microsoft's business practices, and generally don't care for their software, but Gates himself always seemed like an overall decent* guy with a passion for software and technology, unlike Jobs, who always sounded like a jackass to me. There's an irony in that, given the fanatical following of Jobs and general distaste people display toward BillG, presumably due to the business practices of Microsoft and ubiquity of its products.

Even if it's a PR stunt, it was a nice one, and handled in a classy way. He could have given away a bunch of XB1s and other branded products, for example, but didn't. What he did was thoughtful and nicely done, and he didn't even do it in a way that bragged about how many zeroes were on the donation made.

* Which doesn't mean he's a flawless person or always a nice guy. I'm sure he has plenty of flaws; if nothing else, he condoned or ignored Microsoft's various shady tactics over the years.

Re:Capture Every Tear Drop and Drink Them Mixed

[Anonymous Coward]

Try reading some Hans Christian Andersen next. He wrote much better fairy tales.

30 years of substandard software

[rsilvergun]

Microsoft set the bar, and set it low. When there were several very usable desktop environments that ran on the 386 (which was a ridiculously powerful computer) theirs (Windows 2.0) was junk. It was also cheap, and OEMs packaged it up so they could say they had a desktop environment w/o paying for one...

Don't get me started on Beos. I don't care so much that they killed the OS, but they buried the technology too. Beos had a multimedia filesystem with working meta data that was fully searchable in near real time in 1999 for God's sake, and it did that on a 400 Mhz AMD. Microsoft STILL can't get that working.

Microsoft has set back software development and usability at least 20 years. I keep hearing how amazing their engineers are, but I don't see much evidence of that. What I see a series of Alphas (Vista), turned into Betas (Win7) and then back again (Win8). Forget my flying car, why the hell can't I move a window on a screen without ghosting in 2013? I have 2 gig of ram on my VIDEO CARD... :(

PSYOP.

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess we'll forget Microsoft built in a NSA back door into Windows for targeting killings via the secret FISA case management systems ??? XKEYSCORE says they are tracking metadata from XML built into Windows software product.

Nothing new...

[RedHackTea]

Just Bill Gates again trying to get young kids to like him, and therefore Microsoft, so that they grow up only using Microsoft products. This is like a drug dealer buying a kid tons of toys, and then saying, "Hey, I bought you those gifts. *wink* *wink* I work on 6th Ave., and I'm a drug dealer." Boom!

I would have preferred the cow delivered...

[Rande]

...to my house.
I'd have to buy a chest freezer to fit all the meat, but a whole cow would last me 6 months.

Well He did not buy an Ipad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess he understands why I dont buy Windows.

How did slashdot come to this ..

[Anonymous Coward]

How did slashdot come to this, giving free publicity to the worlds chief software thief ..

Re:This is done in the hopes Reddit will reciproca

[RaceProUK]

Scratch that. We pontificate. We're very good at that.

Nah, we just hurl profanities and insults at each other in a misguided attempt to feel important. You numpty :P

Quit being douches!

[MistabewM]

Bill Gates has done more good for this world since he stepped down as the business leader of Microsoft then any of us will ever manage to do. As a business man he was decisive, aggressive and focused. He was arguably the best at what he did. As a philanthropist he appears to be doing the same thing.

It would have been easy for him to sit back with his riches and let them pile up and do nothing. But no, he does the hard thing. He tries to help the world be a better place, he tries to help the human race as a whole and you guys just continue shitting all over him for it.

Fuck Slashdot. I cannot even count how many years I have been here and you fucks have ruined it. Back in the day there would have been some conversation of this but it would not have turned into the circle jerk of wannabes waving their nerd peens.

Re:Quit being douches!

[maxrate]

And when you say something positive about microsoft, people accuse you of being 'paid' by them to say something nice. I've been on here before, simply stated I "like my windows phone" and I get trashed for saying it. Why are /. folks often so anti-microsoft? Businesses do 'shady' things all the time - all businesses suck. that's the world we live in - why single out MS when others are just or more deserving of that negative attention. If /. readers wouldn't be so close minded, your message should be scored no less than 3 out of 5 in my opinion. I'm a little disappointed with tech as a whole - Apple has won, Linux isn't installed in as many places as it could be - and the masses INCLUDING IT pros have bought into the cloud too much. Microsoft to me is still somewhat partner friendly, giving IT pros more opportunity for revenue potential by deploying solutions. "OLD IT" is on it's way out. Our jobs are being turned into cable tv repairman type of jobs as all the computing is done in closed data centers.

If Bill drops a $100

[Anonymous Coward]

If Bill drops a $100, it isn't worth it for him to bend down to pick it up. We have lost our perspective indeed. Bill paused to scratch his crotch, nothing more.

Comparison

[CohibaVancouver]

Reddit: "Cool! Well-done Bill. Sounds like a good charity that helps people.. Cute cow. Funny you didn't send her a Surface, ha ha ha. Merry Christmas, everybody!"

Slashdot: "FUCKING RAPIST! Yeah, RAPIST."

Jesus Christ.

Re:Comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I immediately noticed that as well. It really makes me wonder why I even come here anymore. Oh wait, it is my RSS feed. I think I will be changing that, especially since I cannot remember the last time Slashdot actually covered something I care about before I actually heard about it.

The real question here.

[Nam-Ereh-Won]

Who got Gates and what did he get?

Re:The real question here.

[GoCrazy]

Himself. And the iPad.

Re:This is done in the hopes Reddit will reciproca

[Wootery]

Numpty? You insensitive clod!

what?

[BringsApples]

Ok, so I didn't know wtf Reddit was, so I read the article. It appears that this is something where you get assigned a person, and get them some or all of their gifts that they request. In this case, the girl wanted:
teddy bear
magazine
iPad
donation to her favorite charity

So Bill Gates, one of the richest guys on the planet got her, and didn't even get her all of what she wanted, because of his business plan. What a dick! It doesn't mention how much the donation was.

Re:what?

[Anonymous Coward]

A wishlist is just that: a wishlist. It is a guide, not a rule. And no one expects to ever get everything on a wishlist. If a Rolls-Royce would have been on the list instead of an Ipad, would it really be any different? Or if it was a child with a list over 100 items long, some of which being impossible to get like spending a summer at Santa's house at the north pole?

The recipient seems thrilled to have gotten something from someone famous, and completely within the expectations of a secret santa system. Can it not just be left at that?

And what if Mr. Gates did get everything on the wishlist, even if an Ipad was not on the list? I bet there would be those saying he is just flaunting his money, or some such. It seems lose/lose to me. Also, since it was a secret santa system, Mr. Gates will likely get something in turn from someone else. Now, are people going to start accusing him of taking advantage of, or leeching from, the poor for participating in something as benign as secret santa?

I didn't think that actually worked!

[Java Pimp]

So I should have been reposting those "Bill Gates will give you $10,000" messages on Facebook!?! Damn!

The 'WHOOOSH' did not pass.....

[rts008]

On a practical and related note, several years running their was a guy I worked with that would buy several young steers and pigs to raise to butchering size. He had the perfect setup at his home to do this.

We would all chip in a modest fee to support the feeding and raising, he would take them to be 'processed and give us a call to come pick up our meat.

He got his 'free' for the work, and we all got range free, and range fed pork and beef at about 40% of current 'but it in the supermarket prices', and it was some AWESOME eating...everyone made out like a bandit.

You might inquire around your area for a similar arrangement.Call it a kickstarter campaign to be 'trendy'. ;-)

*BTW, the 'WHOOOSH' did not escape me...LOL.*

When it comes to quality food, I really miss my youth, growing up on farms and ranches. The food was superb, and FRESH! Well worth the little extra effort, and much cheaper by cutting a slew of middlemen and feedlots out of the loop. ;-)

Re:Bill Gates = Common Core, inBloom, NSA Kinect 2

[blackbeak]

Totally. And wait, there's more... a lot more:

Gates is not at all a newcomer to "the elite" as many are led to believe. The familiar story (see Wikipedia, Biography.com) of how he's just some regular upper middle class guy who gambled everything, quit Harvard, and managed to trick IBM top management into an exclusive software deal which ultimately became the platform which propelled him into becoming the world's richest man (worth approx. $75 billion) - leaves out some very interesting details.

Like how he's a descendant from English elites of Lancashire, one of his early settler relatives being Sir Thomas Gates, Governor of Virginia in 1611, further along came Thomas Sovereign Gates, President of Philadelphia Trust Company and partner in Drexel & Co. (1918) and J.P. Morgan (1921). Gates is related to at least two Vice-Presidents of the United States as well as to Harry Truman. Gates' great grandfather was a state legislator and mayor, another founded the First Interstate Bank in Seattle, his grandfather a president of a national bank and a prominent very wealthy lawyer. His father was an extremely well connected Washington lawyer, known as "Big Bill", was president of the State Bar Association and influential in the Republican party. Gates Sr. (actually William H. Gates II) was a partner in Preston Gates & Ellis, Washington's oldest law firm (1883) which had over 400 attorneys under its employ. William H. Gates III (duh, what sort of families use these sort of dynastic names?), known lovingly by gullible nerds everywhere today as Bill Jr., came from some pretty rarefied society. Who here thinks it's at all possible for a regular guy (however bright) to walk into a place like IBM, a military industrial giant that had spent 30+ years developing computer technologies for government and research use (using boatloads of taxpayer funds, too), and take advantage of their naiveté regarding the significant opportunities in software, just as all that research and development was on the cusp of bearing fruit commercially? Give me a f*ing break! IBM could easily have hired tens (hundreds?) of far better programmers, and they certainly would have foreseen the importance of software to computers.

Bill's mommy just happened to serve on several corporate boards - IBM being one, United Way another. (United Way, by the way, has been called a CIA front operation by more than one source.) It would be hard to find a more "elite" guy than Gates, and as the world's richest man, he's a "made" man. It appears as if, in Gates, the elites have created a modern type of "robber baron" from one of their own, the end result being some of the privately accomplished societal engineering brought up in the parent comment. End of story. And f*ck him. This is not an Horatio Alger story. He should have given the poor girl an iPad!

Re:Bill Gates = Common Core, inBloom, NSA Kinect 2

[Anonymous Coward]

>Who here thinks it's at all possible for a regular guy

Steve Jobs was legitimately a "regular guy" who did all that kind of shit...which is why working class geeks should respect Jobs a lot more than they do. He wasn't some patrician oligarch with roots going back to the puritans in Connecticut....

Re:Bill Gates = Common Core, inBloom, NSA Kinect 2

[blackbeak]

You're right, he was, and he deserves our respect. Job's accomplishments with personal computers outshine Gate's by the same factor that the Gate's fortune outshines Job's. You'll note that Jobs' estate is a tenth the size of Gate's fortune, that it wasn't built on elite "insider" connections, he wasn't simply handed a massive chunk of IBM's future earning potential as a schoolboy with a mere promise to produce an OS. Were Jobs interested in helping the poor, he would surely attend to practical projects with positive results, like potable water systems, and would certainly not not focus on vaccinating to sterilize or developing Orwellian systems to control the underclass.

Re:Turd Picking

[hoboroadie]

Yeah, I pick up other people's garbage on a very regular basis; Not for any noble reasons, I happen to walk there and it offends my eye.
Also in case I forget what pieces of shit most folks are, it reminds me.