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Bill Gates Is First Guest Editor In Time Magazine's 94-Year History (geekwire.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Time invited Bill Gates to be the first guest editor in the 94-year history of the magazine. Among the news Bill deemed fit to print in Time's first augmented-reality-enhanced issue were articles by wife Melinda and pal Bono, both of whom graced the cover of Time with Bill as the 2005 Persons of the Year... Another article reveals that "the four learning hacks Bill Gates swears by" include Khan Academy (a $10+ million Gates Foundation partner), tech-backed Code.org (to which Bill, the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and Steve Ballmer have given somewhere north of $17M), the Big History Project (to which Bill had contributed a "modest $10 million" as of 2014), and The Teaching Company (which got Bill stoked about Big History).
The issue also includes Gates' "four favorite ways to give back" and "six innovations that could change the world." In fact, the theme of the whole issue is "optimism," with 62-year-old Gates writing that "On the whole, the world is getting better. This is not some naively optimistic view; it's backed by data. Look at the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. Since 1990, that figure has been cut in half. That means 122 million children have been saved in a quarter-century, and countless families have been spared the heartbreak of losing a child."
Another optimistic essay came from Daily Show host Trever Noah, who writes, "Mock millennials all you want. Here's why they give me hope."
The issue also includes Gates' "four favorite ways to give back" and "six innovations that could change the world." In fact, the theme of the whole issue is "optimism," with 62-year-old Gates writing that "On the whole, the world is getting better. This is not some naively optimistic view; it's backed by data. Look at the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. Since 1990, that figure has been cut in half. That means 122 million children have been saved in a quarter-century, and countless families have been spared the heartbreak of losing a child."
Another optimistic essay came from Daily Show host Trever Noah, who writes, "Mock millennials all you want. Here's why they give me hope."
Give back to the people who worked for the corporations you drove out of business with illegally anticompetitive business practices, Bill. Give back to the people who had to clean up after your deliberate attempts to sabotage Linux. Give life back to the people that your investments have killed. Give back the tax revenues you've avoided paying even though you're one of the biggest beneficiaries of the system. Let us have back control of education. Please, Bill. Give Back.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And other bad ideas.
"Man last relevant in 2001 edits magazine last relevant in 1996! Details at 10!"
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
If Bill really wants to give back, then give me back some of my money your corporation made from its illegal business practices.
But that feeling may stem from the fact that I'm still pissed that the torturing war criminal George Bush torpedoed the court decision to break Microsoft up into multiple companies for Microsoft's multiple violations of our anti-trust laws.
> On the whole, the world is getting better.
Starving polar bears and the clear and present danger of global warming loudly say otherwise. :(
Sure, he gives to a bunch of good causes...that benefit his image, in between giving to causes that will benefit him politically and materially. But so what? A rich man with more money than he knows what to do with doles it out instead of taking it with him to the afterlife? A clever psychopath would do the exact same thing. Its like praising a bankrobber for using his fortune to set up a charity. He's not even giving away the money wholesale like he demands other people do with his lobbying for taxes and centralization of government. Rather its doled out in a carefully controlled and targeted fashion at all steps to precisely where he wants under the aegis of his foundation. People instantly forgot what he did to get this money the second he started throwing it in their faces. Maybe if he was really generous he should give that money back to the people he crushed it from so they can become beloved philanthropists.
...in 3-2-1...
Time has given Windows 10 a 5 star review. "The perfect software," the news weekly says.
Look at the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. Since 1990, that figure has been cut in half. That means 122 million children have been saved in a quarter-century, and countless families have been spared the heartbreak of losing a child."
Giving them prophylactics and education so they won't make children that die would also spare heartbreaks and help curb population growth. We're not an endangered species; we don't need as many child births as possible.
And, cynically, a small but significant number of children dying is helpful from an evolutionary point of view. Unless there is competition and culling, the gene pool will become less healthy over time. Make sterilization mandatory when saving a child's life, whether it's a rich child or a poor child.
No, not veteran coders at Microsoft. People who have wrestled with various MS products starting back with MS-DOS and are now... erm... "slightly damaged" by that experience. Config.sys and autoexec.bat come to mind. 640 Kb memory limit as well. Blue screens of death. Constant rebooting and restarting and reformatting of PCs. Flaky Windows installers. Viruses and malware in their tens of thousands. Plug and play that just did not work properly for years. Printers that wouldn't print. Soundblaster cards that couldn't be configured properly. Modems and other devices that Windows had to be beaten into seeing by turning them on and off and pluging them in and out 20 times over. Office files that aren't backwards compatible. The clusterfuck that is the Excel GUI. A lot of Windows 8 veterans for example have mental issues now. They walk the empty hallways of eerie mental institutions muttering "someone took my Start Button... someone took my Start Button..." or "Windows 8 hates me, Windows 8 hates me". A lot of people took bad shrapnel wounds from using Internet Exploder as well. Then there was MS Visual Studio with its ultra-funky GUI design, where you spend more time trying to understand what in God's name VS is showing you in its GUI than actually writing working code. Give generously, Billy G. We veterans need it.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Seriously, it seems like a bunch of virtue signalling to me. Bill post Microsoft, has been probably the greatest and smartest philanthropist of our time. So I'm guessing the hate has to be directed at Microsoft and his time there. Now if Microsoft is anywhere close to the top of your list of evil organizations then you have a serious lack of world knoledge. If you look at the details of Microsoft's abuses most of them are just being very competitive and a couple I would attribute to luck more than planning (e.g. Novell printer support).
The world likes standards. If you make software for home users you ideally only want to make it for one platform and you want it to be so simple your grandmother can use it without making a support call. Microsoft gave the world that and they also made it easy for developers. Ask anyone who ever created anything for a Mac in the early 90s how easy it was just to make a window appear. Microsoft also did everything possible to make your old programs run on new versions of their OS. So that accounting software that ran on DOS 5.1 still works under Windows 10. Microsoft gained their OS dominance through being smart and working hard.
Did they abuse their dominant position in the OS to gain an advantage else where? Yeah
Did they overreact and crush netscape when they felt threatened? Yeah
Did they give us an OS that most of us still use everyday at work, does it work pretty darn well and get stuff done for us? Yes
Of the platforms - Linux, iOS, Windows and the Android on you AT&T phone, windows doesn't even seem that locked down.
So competitive and occasionally evil but in the greater scheme of things Microsoft at it's worst was a better behaved company than 90% of the worlds large companies.
It's nice to hear that Sonny Bono is being productive these days.
How the erstwhile richest man on earth manages to buy himself this access to Time to, well, [i]signal his virtue[/i]... ... and yet remain utterly irrelevant as anything but the man who got rich holding us all back.
I no longer hate him or his company because neither has much of any relevance left: They can safely be ignored. What we do need to do is learn from the damage, and work around it where we can't repair it. There always was a lot to be done. Thanks to him, now that much more. But that's really all the impact he ever had, and ever will have.
He cannot even buy relevance, and he knows it; this shows it.
"graced the cover of Time with Bill as the 2005 Persons of the Year."
Like Stalin and Hitler who also 'graced' the cover in their day?
It's not an honor.
That would be an interesting Time Article .. ref