Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
he's done Duke things before.
She opened the gift before Christmas. What's up with that?
and link to something.. ANYTHING slashdot has done in the last few years.
IMO, someone wants power, badly.
Matthew 6:3
But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,
Matthew 6:4
That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
Matthew 6:6
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
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)
I'd have gotten the iPad as well.
IMO, someone wants power, badly.
Matthew 6:3
But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,
Matthew 6:4
That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
Matthew 6:6
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
666 more days till Windows 8 EOL
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.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds -- Albert Einstein
What about the million dollars Gates offered to give away in all the spam emails I've got over the years?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Ah, a puff piece for Gates from the owners of Slashdot- how unexpected- NOT!
Meanwhile Gates partnered with Rupert Murdoch- you know, the war mongering propagandist that owns Fox news- in order to create the full surveillance database system designed to record EVERY aspect of every American child's life, including sexual development, under the inBloom corporation.
Meanwhile, Gates placed his full resources behind the 'Common Core' initiative in the schools where kids like those of Gates never have to set foot.
Meanwhile, Gates oversaw billions of Microsoft money used to buy every available depth-sensing motion sensor company, so Gates could partner with the NSA to place a military grade, time-of-flight depth sensor in the new Kinect 2 sensor block provided with every Xbox One console. Kinect 2, with its ordinary light camera, infra-red camera (that sees in the 'dark), depth sensor and microphone array gives the NSA unthinkable access to the homes of millions of Americans.
Gates dedicated so much of the Xbox One's hardware to NSA spying functions, that the console is far less powerful for games than Sony's PS4, yet costs more, and uses far more power in standby (because the NSA spy sensors are ALWAYS active on the Xbox One). The Xbox One is always recording high resolution face shots of every one who enters the room, and uploads these images to NSA servers in the so-called MS cloud multiple times a day, so that NSA systems can attempt to run face recognition algorithms, and build up comprehensive databases of the timed presence of individuals at the consoles known location.
Gates intends that his Xbox One is a fore-runner for the next generation of NSA full surveillance programs, and grooms the US public to expect direct spying on their lives in their own homes. Every Xbox One has a unique cryptology key, and a full list of all these keys is held by the NSA. Every online Xbox One reports this fact to an NSA master server, and ANY online Xbox One can be ordered to immediately begin capturing, compressing, encrypting and uploading high quality sound and audio stream. Gates ordered the Xbox One to be able to do this with ZERO impact on user functions, so even AAA gaming will be unaffected when the console is capturing and transmitting video.
However, Gates went much further than this. The NSA can down load trigger conditions to any online console, forcing the console to be CONSTANTLY (even in stand-by) processing input from all the sensors, looking for a 'match'. The triggers can include the presence of a given individual, general sound patterns, noises or words, or even sexual activity in the 'dark'. If the console is 'offline' when the trigger occurs, the video stream is simply held on a dedicated area set aside on the internal hard-drive for later uploading.
The Xbox One runs THREE simultaneous OSes, one dedicated to the NSA spy platform (at the cost of gaming performance). The Xbox One dedicates a significant chunk of the hardware, including dedicated CPUs from the eight available, and a large chunk of the RAM, to Kinect functionality, even when the user is using ZERO kinect functions.
Gates gave the Xbox One a microphone array that he boasts can, much of the time, hear conversations in adjoining rooms.
With Common Core, inBloom and the Kinect 2 spy platform, Gates is attempting to convince his colleagues in what Gates himself calls 'the elite' that the American public can be pushed far, far further than previously thought, without risk of backlash. Gates' argument is that when the people of America won't even stand up to protect their children against the abuses targeted at them by initiatives like inBloom, it proves they are now so subservient, it is time to take things to the next step. The owners of Slashdot would certainly agree with this analysis.
Oh...right...
Worker crushed to death at Amazon identified as grandfather from Irvington:
http://www.nj.com/middlesex/index.ssf/2013/12/worker_crushed_to_death_at_amazon_identified_as_grandfather_from_irvington.html#incart_river_default
Slaughtered by Jeff Bezo's greed right before Christmas!
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.
nothing but piss for you, chump, IN 3-D!!!!!
Do you think he reads Slashdot, too?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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?
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.
This is now a meme:
http://imgur.com/g/memes/K8hipiw
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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!
The G
When I was in high school in 2000 I thought Microsoft was evil. IT was the "cool" thing to do among geeks.
As time went on I came to realize just how petty and small the criticisms against Microsoft are. Bundling a browser so your OS can display HTML and reach the internet out of the box? Refusing to adopt some open source format for your office suite? Paying a guy for his OS without telling him why they're doing it?
Nothing wrong with any of these.
...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.
Guess he understands why I dont buy Windows.
How did slashdot come to this, giving free publicity to the worlds chief software thief ..
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
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
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.
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
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.
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.
Who got Gates and what did he get?
Numpty? You insensitive clod!
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.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
So I should have been reposting those "Bill Gates will give you $10,000" messages on Facebook!?! Damn!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
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. ;-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.