Price inflation would happen. But it would be a huge equalizer. If we assume that $25,000 is the current household average, then giving every household another $25K will double the amount of money in the economy, hence we will assume the doubling the price of all goods and services (not the 250x increase you propose).
Now that everything costs twice as much, the person getting by on $10000 a year now has $35000, which amounts to $17,500 in pre-inflation dollars. In short, he just got a pay raise.
Meanwhile, the family which once earned $1,000,000 a year suddenly finds everything twice as expensive, lowering their effective income to $500,000.
Further, whatever debts you owed could be paid back much more easily in an inflationary economy. If a loaf of bread really costs $500, then you could pay off all your student loans by baking thirty loaves of bread. Inflation has always been better for debtors than for creditors. Read up on the whole "gold standard" politics of the late 1800s. It's dry reading, but relevant.
Finally, you ignore the overall thrust of the article: He is proposing this plan because, in the world he envisions, there is a vast amount of wealth being created by robots, with all the wealth going to the owners of the robots. Average schmoes are locked out of that stream because they can no longer provide any services that the owners would exchange their wealth for, because a robot can do unskilled (and even low-skilled) labor better, faster, and cheaper.
America has never been a purely capitalistic government. The government has taken it upon itself to do things like divy up land, control imports and exports, build armies, and a host of other things rather than let "The Market" find its own solutions. Every regulation is an affront to the ideal of a purely capitalistic marketplace. This state of affairs is A Good Thing. Would we want to live in a world where Biggasse Corp could dump their toxic waste on the outskirts of Smelterville, MI because its residents were too poor to make it expensive to do so? Where any amount of pollutants could be flung into the atmosphere because the corporation doing the flinging didn't have to bear the costs that pollution imposes on the rest of us? There are places where capitalism works, and places where it doesn't. The entire point of the article is that we're about to run up against a situation where capitalism Does Not Work.
"To be sure, the proposal is very preliminary. By putting it down on paper, state rulemakers are hoping to hear from businesses and others on how it would affect them, says the Department of Revenue's Bruns."
Instead of doing the research to see whether this is a good idea or not, just write the legislation and start it through the process, and let the people who are about to get hosed do the legwork for you.
Can anyone here suggest a state where the legislators aren't complete morons? I can have my stuff packed and be there within 48 hours.
1) When hacking into any computer system, the system will tell you that you are in by flashing "ACCESS GRANTED" or something similar in HUGE letters across your screen.
It's merely a plot device. Would you prefer that the audience be rewarded with the output of the 'fortune' program?
2) Any technical problem can be solved by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow (Dr. Who)
3) Any humanoid or machine that is devoid of emotion will always somehow develop emotion.
I hate this, too. Treating emotions like something that can just be injected into any self-aware piece of silicon strikes me as odd, to say the least.
4) If you travel to a distant planet that you've never been to, (IE Dagobah) to see someone you've never met (Yoda), you will manage to land in just the right place. (Star Wars and others)
This doesn't bug me in the least. The alternative is to watch the person not meet with the critical person for weeks or months at a time. I guess it could be cut down to a two-minute montage.
5) All planets other then Earth have just one climate type (Hoth - Ice, Tatooine - Desert, Dagobah - Swamp) (Star Wars)
Dagobah is the only one here that leaves me confused. With Hoth, you could at least imagine that they were living in the tropical regions, and the rest of the planet was even worse. Tattoine might be the same deal.
6) Even if you don't have a protocol droid, you can communicate with an Alien slimeball in English, and he will understand you, and likewise you will understand his language. (Star Wars)
It's all thanks to the English Only bill the Imperial Senate ratified about five hundred years ago. Yeah, that's it.::wave hand in front of your face:: There is no problem. This is not the plot hole you were looking for. Move along.
7) Space Ships can travel planet to planet and can easily escape gravity, and never have to worry about burning up upon reentry.
Just speak the magic words, "cool technology," and all your difficulties will disappear.
8) No matter unhumanlike your species, you will find Earth women attractive.
Are you saying Carrie Fisher wasn't hot? You gay or something? Even a slime-covered slug with no legs could recognize the hotness of Carrie Fisher. This point is laughable.::waves hand again::
The only thing that makes any piece of fiction worth serious consideration is the fact that there is something recognizable about the world being depicted.
For example, say you were watching a movie where you see a young couple, obviously in love. Next scene, the guy is brutally murdered. Scene after that, the girl goes down to the morgue to ID the body. But instead of being inconsolable, she's joking with people, chatting on her cell phone, complaining about the weather. You get the idea. The movie has just violated some important social rules.
Your arguments could be repeated here, but they would be equally unconvincing: "Those of us who know better refer to this stuff as FICTION." "[...]fiction is[...] 'An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.'" Doesn't matter. Unless some convincing explanation is given for her behavior, the audience will hate the movie, and justifiably so.
In successful fiction, the audience is snookered into entertaining a fake reality because their BS detectors never trigger. The fiction isn't describing something that happened, but it has to be describing something the audience believes could have happened. You can write a fictional world any way you like. Throw in vampires, government conspiracies, ninjas who shoot lasers out of their eyeballs, whatever. But the moment you defy common sense without explanation, you lose.
Technical people are simply cursed because they're aware of a set of rules the movie should be adhering to, while the moviegoing public (or worse, the film writers) may be oblivious to the same rules.
Screw dignity. When I grow old, I want to be able to take long walks, open even the tightest pickle jar, and crush the skulls of my enemies between my steel claws. When you have that, you don't need any stinking dignity.
Without having read the comments, I'll break them down into the following:
5% Still not as pretty as KDE/MacOSX/the command line. 12% But does it run Linux? 17% So well rendered, it must be virtually crashproof! (15% sarcastically) 11% Here, click on this goatse link! 6% Man, if Bill Gates only had a million dollars for every pretty blue widget... 49% They just violated SCO's intellectual property.
So far, what has Neo actually done? Sure, he's discovered his calling and taken out a few agents. But he also destroyed the only pocket of resistance left in order to save his girlfriend.
He'd better get his act together by the third movie, or we're all screwed.
While I don't believe that your Ultimate Goal is feasible--human-level intelligence without self-awareness--I don't think that fact will make a big difference. I'm cynical enough to believe that the vast majority of people simply wouldn't care if our metal slaves felt bored or unfulfilled, or that they feared death. They would be too different from us to trigger empathy in most people.
So, we build them. Our slaves, happy or not, create practically unlimited wealth. Then the question is how the wealth will be distributed. You list two options: the wealth will be distributed in a reasonably equal way, or it will go primarily to a small sliver of the population. The third possibility is that we just breed our way back into scarcity, but I don't believe that will be the case.
For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that there are sufficient safeguards to ensure that the robots don't go all Matrix on us.
No technological wonder has ever been created in a cultural vacuum, and new technologies tend to reinforce social positions as often as they undercut them. While I would like to believe that we can jettison the whole social-climbing mindset we inherited from our monkey forefathers, I think there are a lot of obstacles which may need to be blasted away first.
So, dude, did you drop out of Discrete Mathematics? You just disappeared half way through the term, and I was wondering what happened to you.
In every prior revolution, every time a worker lost a job to a machine, somebody else had to be employed to build, maintain, and run those machines. Those were the rules of the game.
This time (or possibly the time after this one, or... anyhow, sooner or later) there's one little detail that not only ends the game, but knocks the board over: The machines will be able to run and repair themselves. Humans will only be needed to design the machines and provide overall direction. Design work will go only to the extremely gifted, and it will be up to the owners to direct them.
At that point, the ultimate communist nightmare could come true. The owners would no longer need the proles to keep the economy moving. If they wished, they could simply build some kickass gated communities, wall themselves in, post super-rats at the front gate, and leave everyone else to starve.
Sure, it sounds completely heartless and cruel. But if you look at the near slave wages many large companies provide for the people they *need*, I don't see them giving away wealth out of concern for their fellow man.
Why would artificial intelligence be impossible in theory? Assuming that we could create an atomically perfect simulation of the human brain, along with the sensory inputs needed to "boot" it, why would the resulting program lack intelligence?
Of course, accurate simulation would take ridiculous computing power, but if you're going to deny the possibility even in principle, then we get to ignore mundane practical limitations.
Are you crazy? Where would we have gotten if people had attacked the idea of gravity? Electricity? General relativity? What if, when the first person to come up with the idea of using vacuum tubes to perform calculations, the idea had been attacked as unworkable? We wouldn't have PCs, the Internet, or Luigi's Mansion.
Ideas are fragile, beautiful things. They must be nurtured. Attack people, not ideas.
To take nothing away from the likely suckage of Gigli (I have't seen it myself, and plan on keeping it that way), it's really hard to trust a poll where half the movies on the list were made within the last five years. On the upside, it's comforting to know that most truly crappy movies (with hilariously bad exceptions like Eegah, and Manos: The Hands of Fate) are quickly forgotten.
I think you're both expressing the same thing here.
The value of software consists of three parts:
1) The value you can get from using it. 2) The value you can get from selling it. 3) The value you can get from supporting it.
Every time a bug is fixed, 1 and 2 increase, while 3 decreases (there is less need for the tech support you're selling). When a company decides to break compatability with a previous product in order to force upgrades, 2 goes up while 1 goes down.
So when a piece of software is given away under the GPL, the use value increases (it doesn't cost the user money to start using it) and the support value increases (more people are using the software, hence more customers). But the value you can get for charging money for the software goes to nearly zero.
The biggest thing keeping many companies from GPLing software is the chance that they will destroy the sale value without commensurate increases in use and support value. Even if the overall value increases due to the decision, the benefits of that increased value may not return to them.
"That is an excellent question. As you well know, SCO is committed to maintaining the value of intellectual property rights. To that end, we have begun gathering proof that thousands of lines of our System V code have found their way into Samba software."
Sure, they've claimed that the GPL isn't worth the paper it's printed on, and it's true that they continue to distribute the Linux code even as they deny anyone the right to redistribute that code. They've even demanded licensing fees in violation of the license under which they distribute the kernel.
The question now is, does this give SAMBA a right to pull their license? I don't believe it does, or that such a rule would be productive. Unless the GPL is written in such a way that violating one piece of GPL'ed software revokes distribution rights of *all* GPL'ed software, Samba cannot revoke the GPL on Samba.
The reason is, they can say whatever they want about the GPL, just as I can stand outside Microsoft's campus with leaflets about why EULAs may not be legally enforceable. What I'm doing isn't violating the EULA of any software I have. By the same reasoning, until SCO actually violates the GPL with regards to Samba software, I think they're legal.
I think that the best thing the Samba team could do would be to draft a letter, asking Darl and Co. to reaffirm their commitment to complying with the terms under which SCO received their intellectual property. Chances are, SCO will ignore it--as I said, I don't think that Samba currently has grounds to revoke the license--but at least it will highlight the hypocrisy of SCO's behavior and provide some good PR for the community.
I knew what you were trying to say, and I wasn't actually insulted or anything. I've just grown accustomed to thinking of myself as a professional student. I've met the kids you describe, and they're invariably hell to tutor.
That's a good way of putting it. Okay, I'm a "tenured student" now.
Hmm. I remember reading a book by Richard Dawkins, where he mentions the life cycle of a sea squirt. Once the squirt navigates itself to a rocky outcropping and latches on, it stays there forever. Having no further use for its brain, the sea squirt dissolves and consumes it.
Dawkins described it as "kind of like being awarded tenure." But I digress.
If you go to a site called "pointlesswasteoftime.com" expecting to find an insightful, thought-provoking article with journalistic merit, you must have been hitting the celebratory champagne pretty hard.
As a professional student, I'm a bit insulted that you would cheapen the title by applying it to the "get in, get the A, get out, forget the crap because there aren't any more tests on it" crowd.
Real professional students aren't there to get a quick degree that will put them on the fast track to a high paying management position. Real professional students don't look at the graduation requirements; they take classes pretty much on whims. Real professional students study hard, but make the mistake of learning the material rather than the teacher, and can occasionally be found studying chapters that will never be covered in class.
Real professional students would come out of school with a B average, if there was even a remote possibility of extricating them from the campus. Real professional students love to learn for learning's sake, often to the detriment of their careers and social lives. In short, real professional students relate to books the way real geeks relate to computers.
I am An Onerous Coward, and I am a professional student!
What the hell are you talking about? Do you really want your Windows computers and your Unix computers replicating with each other? Right in the server room? When your boss walks in and sees two Intel boxes replicating right there on the server room floor, just what are you going to tell him?
And just what will the offspring of this Windows/Unix replication be like? Will its NT kernel be able to handle Unix-style system calls? Or will the offspring be a penguin with Bill Gates' face?
No matter how I look at this, I just cannot see that this "replication" can be a good thing. You're going to create an abomination that will bring only misery to the world. Keep your computers on opposite sides of the room, with very short power cables, or you will doom us all.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no.
Price inflation would happen. But it would be a huge equalizer. If we assume that $25,000 is the current household average, then giving every household another $25K will double the amount of money in the economy, hence we will assume the doubling the price of all goods and services (not the 250x increase you propose).
Now that everything costs twice as much, the person getting by on $10000 a year now has $35000, which amounts to $17,500 in pre-inflation dollars. In short, he just got a pay raise.
Meanwhile, the family which once earned $1,000,000 a year suddenly finds everything twice as expensive, lowering their effective income to $500,000.
Further, whatever debts you owed could be paid back much more easily in an inflationary economy. If a loaf of bread really costs $500, then you could pay off all your student loans by baking thirty loaves of bread. Inflation has always been better for debtors than for creditors. Read up on the whole "gold standard" politics of the late 1800s. It's dry reading, but relevant.
Finally, you ignore the overall thrust of the article: He is proposing this plan because, in the world he envisions, there is a vast amount of wealth being created by robots, with all the wealth going to the owners of the robots. Average schmoes are locked out of that stream because they can no longer provide any services that the owners would exchange their wealth for, because a robot can do unskilled (and even low-skilled) labor better, faster, and cheaper.
America has never been a purely capitalistic government. The government has taken it upon itself to do things like divy up land, control imports and exports, build armies, and a host of other things rather than let "The Market" find its own solutions. Every regulation is an affront to the ideal of a purely capitalistic marketplace. This state of affairs is A Good Thing. Would we want to live in a world where Biggasse Corp could dump their toxic waste on the outskirts of Smelterville, MI because its residents were too poor to make it expensive to do so? Where any amount of pollutants could be flung into the atmosphere because the corporation doing the flinging didn't have to bear the costs that pollution imposes on the rest of us? There are places where capitalism works, and places where it doesn't. The entire point of the article is that we're about to run up against a situation where capitalism Does Not Work.
Instead of doing the research to see whether this is a good idea or not, just write the legislation and start it through the process, and let the people who are about to get hosed do the legwork for you.
Can anyone here suggest a state where the legislators aren't complete morons? I can have my stuff packed and be there within 48 hours.
Or by spinning around it.
I hate this, too. Treating emotions like something that can just be injected into any self-aware piece of silicon strikes me as odd, to say the least.
This doesn't bug me in the least. The alternative is to watch the person not meet with the critical person for weeks or months at a time. I guess it could be cut down to a two-minute montage.
Dagobah is the only one here that leaves me confused. With Hoth, you could at least imagine that they were living in the tropical regions, and the rest of the planet was even worse. Tattoine might be the same deal.
It's all thanks to the English Only bill the Imperial Senate ratified about five hundred years ago. Yeah, that's it.
Just speak the magic words, "cool technology," and all your difficulties will disappear.
Are you saying Carrie Fisher wasn't hot? You gay or something? Even a slime-covered slug with no legs could recognize the hotness of Carrie Fisher. This point is laughable.
Your post is utter blather, and you are a troll.
The only thing that makes any piece of fiction worth serious consideration is the fact that there is something recognizable about the world being depicted.
For example, say you were watching a movie where you see a young couple, obviously in love. Next scene, the guy is brutally murdered. Scene after that, the girl goes down to the morgue to ID the body. But instead of being inconsolable, she's joking with people, chatting on her cell phone, complaining about the weather. You get the idea. The movie has just violated some important social rules.
Your arguments could be repeated here, but they would be equally unconvincing: "Those of us who know better refer to this stuff as FICTION." "[...]fiction is[...] 'An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.'" Doesn't matter. Unless some convincing explanation is given for her behavior, the audience will hate the movie, and justifiably so.
In successful fiction, the audience is snookered into entertaining a fake reality because their BS detectors never trigger. The fiction isn't describing something that happened, but it has to be describing something the audience believes could have happened. You can write a fictional world any way you like. Throw in vampires, government conspiracies, ninjas who shoot lasers out of their eyeballs, whatever. But the moment you defy common sense without explanation, you lose.
Technical people are simply cursed because they're aware of a set of rules the movie should be adhering to, while the moviegoing public (or worse, the film writers) may be oblivious to the same rules.
Thanks. That's been bothering me for months.
I'm confused. When did the Catholic Church start forbidding coffee?
Regarding the Jesus quote:
"They laughed at Aristotle. They laughed at Gallileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --Carl Sagan
Screw dignity. When I grow old, I want to be able to take long walks, open even the tightest pickle jar, and crush the skulls of my enemies between my steel claws. When you have that, you don't need any stinking dignity.
Theoretically, if it were one of the right ones, the removal of a single line would collapse the kernel.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
Without having read the comments, I'll break them down into the following:
5% Still not as pretty as KDE/MacOSX/the command line.
12% But does it run Linux?
17% So well rendered, it must be virtually crashproof! (15% sarcastically)
11% Here, click on this goatse link!
6% Man, if Bill Gates only had a million dollars for every pretty blue widget...
49% They just violated SCO's intellectual property.
So far, what has Neo actually done? Sure, he's discovered his calling and taken out a few agents. But he also destroyed the only pocket of resistance left in order to save his girlfriend.
He'd better get his act together by the third movie, or we're all screwed.
While I don't believe that your Ultimate Goal is feasible--human-level intelligence without self-awareness--I don't think that fact will make a big difference. I'm cynical enough to believe that the vast majority of people simply wouldn't care if our metal slaves felt bored or unfulfilled, or that they feared death. They would be too different from us to trigger empathy in most people.
So, we build them. Our slaves, happy or not, create practically unlimited wealth. Then the question is how the wealth will be distributed. You list two options: the wealth will be distributed in a reasonably equal way, or it will go primarily to a small sliver of the population. The third possibility is that we just breed our way back into scarcity, but I don't believe that will be the case.
For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that there are sufficient safeguards to ensure that the robots don't go all Matrix on us.
No technological wonder has ever been created in a cultural vacuum, and new technologies tend to reinforce social positions as often as they undercut them. While I would like to believe that we can jettison the whole social-climbing mindset we inherited from our monkey forefathers, I think there are a lot of obstacles which may need to be blasted away first.
So, dude, did you drop out of Discrete Mathematics? You just disappeared half way through the term, and I was wondering what happened to you.
Less erroneous now, I believe.
In every prior revolution, every time a worker lost a job to a machine, somebody else had to be employed to build, maintain, and run those machines. Those were the rules of the game.
This time (or possibly the time after this one, or... anyhow, sooner or later) there's one little detail that not only ends the game, but knocks the board over: The machines will be able to run and repair themselves. Humans will only be needed to design the machines and provide overall direction. Design work will go only to the extremely gifted, and it will be up to the owners to direct them.
At that point, the ultimate communist nightmare could come true. The owners would no longer need the proles to keep the economy moving. If they wished, they could simply build some kickass gated communities, wall themselves in, post super-rats at the front gate, and leave everyone else to starve.
Sure, it sounds completely heartless and cruel. But if you look at the near slave wages many large companies provide for the people they *need*, I don't see them giving away wealth out of concern for their fellow man.
Why would artificial intelligence be impossible in theory? Assuming that we could create an atomically perfect simulation of the human brain, along with the sensory inputs needed to "boot" it, why would the resulting program lack intelligence?
Of course, accurate simulation would take ridiculous computing power, but if you're going to deny the possibility even in principle, then we get to ignore mundane practical limitations.
You may as well say "Let's not invest any more in this 'radio' fad." Instead, let's work on streamlining and enlarging our telegraph infrastructure.
Assuming the money is spent responsibly, the payoff should be way bigger than for your average government program.
Are you crazy? Where would we have gotten if people had attacked the idea of gravity? Electricity? General relativity? What if, when the first person to come up with the idea of using vacuum tubes to perform calculations, the idea had been attacked as unworkable? We wouldn't have PCs, the Internet, or Luigi's Mansion.
Ideas are fragile, beautiful things. They must be nurtured. Attack people, not ideas.
[apologies to the dude whose sig inspired this]
To take nothing away from the likely suckage of Gigli (I have't seen it myself, and plan on keeping it that way), it's really hard to trust a poll where half the movies on the list were made within the last five years. On the upside, it's comforting to know that most truly crappy movies (with hilariously bad exceptions like Eegah, and Manos: The Hands of Fate) are quickly forgotten.
I think you're both expressing the same thing here.
The value of software consists of three parts:
1) The value you can get from using it.
2) The value you can get from selling it.
3) The value you can get from supporting it.
Every time a bug is fixed, 1 and 2 increase, while 3 decreases (there is less need for the tech support you're selling). When a company decides to break compatability with a previous product in order to force upgrades, 2 goes up while 1 goes down.
So when a piece of software is given away under the GPL, the use value increases (it doesn't cost the user money to start using it) and the support value increases (more people are using the software, hence more customers). But the value you can get for charging money for the software goes to nearly zero.
The biggest thing keeping many companies from GPLing software is the chance that they will destroy the sale value without commensurate increases in use and support value. Even if the overall value increases due to the decision, the benefits of that increased value may not return to them.
Darl pauses for a few seconds.
"That is an excellent question. As you well know, SCO is committed to maintaining the value of intellectual property rights. To that end, we have begun gathering proof that thousands of lines of our System V code have found their way into Samba software."
I'm not sure this is true.
Sure, they've claimed that the GPL isn't worth the paper it's printed on, and it's true that they continue to distribute the Linux code even as they deny anyone the right to redistribute that code. They've even demanded licensing fees in violation of the license under which they distribute the kernel.
The question now is, does this give SAMBA a right to pull their license? I don't believe it does, or that such a rule would be productive. Unless the GPL is written in such a way that violating one piece of GPL'ed software revokes distribution rights of *all* GPL'ed software, Samba cannot revoke the GPL on Samba.
The reason is, they can say whatever they want about the GPL, just as I can stand outside Microsoft's campus with leaflets about why EULAs may not be legally enforceable. What I'm doing isn't violating the EULA of any software I have. By the same reasoning, until SCO actually violates the GPL with regards to Samba software, I think they're legal.
I think that the best thing the Samba team could do would be to draft a letter, asking Darl and Co. to reaffirm their commitment to complying with the terms under which SCO received their intellectual property. Chances are, SCO will ignore it--as I said, I don't think that Samba currently has grounds to revoke the license--but at least it will highlight the hypocrisy of SCO's behavior and provide some good PR for the community.
I knew what you were trying to say, and I wasn't actually insulted or anything. I've just grown accustomed to thinking of myself as a professional student. I've met the kids you describe, and they're invariably hell to tutor.
That's a good way of putting it. Okay, I'm a "tenured student" now.
Hmm. I remember reading a book by Richard Dawkins, where he mentions the life cycle of a sea squirt. Once the squirt navigates itself to a rocky outcropping and latches on, it stays there forever. Having no further use for its brain, the sea squirt dissolves and consumes it.
Dawkins described it as "kind of like being awarded tenure." But I digress.
If you go to a site called "pointlesswasteoftime.com" expecting to find an insightful, thought-provoking article with journalistic merit, you must have been hitting the celebratory champagne pretty hard.
It's funny. Laugh.
Real professional students aren't there to get a quick degree that will put them on the fast track to a high paying management position. Real professional students don't look at the graduation requirements; they take classes pretty much on whims. Real professional students study hard, but make the mistake of learning the material rather than the teacher, and can occasionally be found studying chapters that will never be covered in class.
Real professional students would come out of school with a B average, if there was even a remote possibility of extricating them from the campus. Real professional students love to learn for learning's sake, often to the detriment of their careers and social lives. In short, real professional students relate to books the way real geeks relate to computers.
I am An Onerous Coward, and I am a professional student!
And just what will the offspring of this Windows/Unix replication be like? Will its NT kernel be able to handle Unix-style system calls? Or will the offspring be a penguin with Bill Gates' face?
No matter how I look at this, I just cannot see that this "replication" can be a good thing. You're going to create an abomination that will bring only misery to the world. Keep your computers on opposite sides of the room, with very short power cables, or you will doom us all.
/me goes off to look up "replication."
I would be tempted to chalk it up to one of the following:
1) Diversification.
B) The realization that, for years now, it hasn't been possible for Microsoft's stock to perform the way it did in the eighties.
4) Bill needs some cash on hand for the purchase of one or more of the following:
- Jet skis.
- Tahitian slave girls.
- A formidable nuclear arsenal.
- Twizzlers.