Yeah, put me down for a big "me too" on that. The fan's been running pretty much nonstop on my original (867MHz) 12" PBG4 since I updated... and man, is it loud! Anything that puts the processor over 1% usage, it seems, causes the fan to start up. Granted, it ran a lot before the update, but never this much.
By the way, what are you using to check your CPU temperature? I just found this utility today: Temperature Monitor. I'd been under the impression, from programs like MenuMeters, that my PowerBook didn't have an internal thermometer, but apparently it does--it's just not very well publicized. Try this in the terminal:
ioreg -l | grep -C10 temp
This fan is really starting to get on my nerves. I thought Macs were supposed to be the quiet ones? Here's to hoping Apple figures out a way to make these things run cooler in the future.
I'm sure the commericalization of artwork would be severely limited, though. Having never lived in a world without copyright protection, I have no idea how it would affect artists' work.
Well, I was trying to avoid referring to "original content" in strictly the paint-and-canvas sense. There's all kinds of useful innovations that I'm certain we wouldn't see as much of without the artifice of copyright (and patent protection) to reward content creators. For example, and this is just off the top of my head, antiretroviral drugs to control HIV, useful encyclopedias (Wikipedia doesn't count), Mac OS X, Kylie Minogue (okay, maybe that's a stretch).
No, I think the problem is it favors copyright owners too heavily....
after all copyrights wern't made for compensation, but for geting stuff out into the public domain. Right?
How is that "stuff" going to get made without the promise of compensation for creators?
If we adopted a system whereby nobody was rewarded for originality, I don't doubt some people would continue to create--there'll always be the Van Goghs of the world. But I promise you the volume of original content would be nowhere near what we enjoy today.
You can consider artists' and innovators' compensation the fair price of enjoying all this content that we wouldn't otherwise have.
One last thing. Copyright law, as it exists on the books today, generally favors creators too heavily. Don't take that observation and leap to the conclusion that copyright is fundamentally broken. It isn't.
let me get this straight... for somthing that doesn't have natural limits in supply and demand, you want to attach artificial limits on supply and demand[?]
Yes, that's right, in a colloquial sense. But let me ask you this. Have you considered what it means for there to be a "natural limit" on something?
I'm guessing you'd say that the idea that physical objects can belong to somebody is a "natural" concept, since you draw the contrast (apparently) between natural limits and artificial limits. But when you really get down to it, the truth is that it takes a lot of "artificial" coercion to enforce property rights on physical goods. Specifically, it takes the cooperation of governments, police, society and mutual trust to enforce our so-called "natural" property rights. So. Property rights on physical goods is an artificial construct. Now riddle me this: how is it any different to set artificial limits on intellectual property?
I would argue that it's no different. The protection of intellectual property (including copyrighted material) is just as bullshit a concept as the protection of physical goods.
As bullshit concepts go, however, it's a damn mighty useful one. For example, how do you think we'd have useful drugs like antiretrovirals if it wasn't for patent law?
(Yes, the original post was about copyright. But the parent seemed to be railing against intellectual property in general, so I felt this tangent was warranted.)
I wholeheartedly agree with you that the copyright laws on the books today suck. I think it's clear that lawmakers long ago abandoned the principles that made copyright such a worthwhile construct in the first place. Copyright law, as practiced today, probably stymies more "progress of science and useful arts" than it promotes.
On top of that, and this is a separate issue, it's getting easier and easier to break copyright, from a technical standpoint.
But do either of these developments mean that the concept of copyright is invalid? Not at all. We need not destroy copyright law, but rather reform it to bring it back to its original principles; i.e., we should kick Michael Eisner and the board of Disney in the collective balls and adopt a more sensible set of copyright rules. I don't claim to know what those rules would be, but I do know the solution is emphatically not to do away with the concept of copyright entirely.
As for the argument that copyright is obsolete because it's getting easier to break, I call bullshit. (I know you didn't directly mention this, but I thought I'd bring it up anyway just for the pleasure of calling bullshit on it.) Copyright's always been easy to break, compared to the labor-intensive task of coming up with original, copyrightable material. Even when printing was "a difficult and expensive operation not carried out by individuals," the cost of printing content without having to invest the time or money to come up with said content has always been lower than the total cost of printing that same content plus the cost of coming up with material worth printing on your own.
I think that was a really wordy way of saying the following: The point is, despite the flaws in its present implementation, copyright is still a useful construct that's not going away just because "information wants to be free." Copyright is badly broken, but it's fixable.
Copyright was never meant to affect the individual. In its original conception, copyright only affected corporations - those with the ability to copy.
Now, I have to admit I don't really know what you were trying to get at with this (dubiously valid) observation. Can you explain further, please?
As for RMS, I read his writings once, and I thought: "What a smart guy... makes sense to me!" Fortunately, I'm not twelve years old anymore.
Yeah, but if I sent a 100 million coppies of my house key... blah blah blah... taxpayers to fund... DRM... blah blah blah
That analogy has to die. Really.
Look, of course information is easy to copy, it "wants" to be free and all that bullshit. But see, that's the whole POINT of copyright--to make it harder to copy information. Copyright makes intellectual property behave (in a limited fashion) like "real" property, in that it is illegal to enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor without putting in the effort to earn it. This means that if you acquire the source to Windows and post it on your homepage, don't act all self-righteous when Microsoft uses copyright law--and yes, taxpayer money--to beat the shit out of you, because they'll only be using copyright for the purpose it was designed, designed, in fact, by people far smarter than you or I. You can say that's an unnatural restriction on the free flow of information, and in a superficial sense you're right. But society decided long ago that that's a sacrifice we're willing to make in order to promote creativity.
I don't expect you to fully understand this. Maybe when you're a little older. Sorry if I sound patronizing, and I don't mean to be hurtful, but I don't have the time right now to color my writing in rose for you.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but there are plenty of black actors in the LOTR trilogy. The fact that they were all cast as bad guys is another matter.
Come on. Really, who gives a shit if it's a PR effort? Not the students in cash-strapped schools who benefit from his donations, I assure you, nor the HIV-positive Africans who can afford treatment thanks to his donations.
The point is, PR effort or no, many people are better off because of his money. If he gets a public relations boost from his (significant) contributions to education and global health, then so be it.
You seem to be saying that my friend Joe, a cook at Burger King, is a better person for donating 100% of his income than Mr. Gates, who donates 50%. But you know, I'm not so sure the people on the receiving end of his charity would agree with you there.
I don't know. Isn't the difference between their "form of sentience" and ours essentially a difference of degree, not of type? How about this thought experiment: Take your brain, a perfectly functioning human brain in that it (apparently) has the capacity for abstract thought, and remove one neuron; repeat until you're a vegetable. Where do you draw the line between our thinking and apes'?
I think the best we can do is to attach labels to these states of being--sentience, self-awareness, vegetable, whatever--for the sake of discussion, while remembering that the difference is fuzzy. But it's probably not accurate to say apes have a lower "form" of sentience unless you qualify what you mean more precisely.
It sounds like you might be interested in the process of testing animals for what is called the "theory of mind," if you're not already familiar with the topic.
According to this, it's just gonna be Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Code Red, unfortunately. Personally I'd have preferred a deal with Dr Pepper, but what can you do...
I know it's bad form to reply to your own message and all, but I found a thread with a few screenshots here.
And yes, it looks like the widgets (particularly the popup menus) are in Jaguar style rather than Panther. Dialog boxes and menus are Windows themed. Still looks good, though...
...which is just your opinion, and this is just mine: I think brushed metal looks great when it's tastefully done. QuickTime Player from 1997 was ugly, but Safari is gorgeous.
Pinstripes, on the other hand... they're so... so 2001.
"common, neutral ground.... without one party being at a disadvantage..."
But it's not common ground. The language uses Roman characters, for starters, and the roots are pulled almost exclusively from Western languages. How does this not place people at a disadvantage who grew up reading and writing CJK or Arabic?
Even if the script were something nobody'd ever seen before, and the roots were also completely invented, I would still argue that Esperanto has a strong Western bias. Its comprehension depends on phonetics, not pitches and inflections (as comprehension of Chinese does to a large degree), and Esperanto's pronunciations are much easier for a speaker of a Western language to pick up than, say, a native Japanese speaker (you've seen Lost In Translation, right? "Lip them! Lip my stocking!")
You can try to address these problems, but at the expense of making the language much harder to learn for people of any background, which (correct me if I'm wrong) essentially negates Esperanto's whole raison d'etre.
Not to mention that every language, even Esperanto, has evolved to express a certain range of ideas and a certain way of thought. You can stretch this (poetry anyone?), but the result is rarely elegant or intuitive. Western linguistic anthropologists have "discovered" languages in which there is no easy way to express the passage of time--present, future, past tenses simply aren't important for some people on this great planet. So even by assuming a familiarity with time, Esperanto reveals its bias. More broadly, this problem of relative cultural importance is a problem that I doubt any so-called "common" language can solve gracefully.
"It is, to a degree, misty-eyed idealism."
Yes, and that's the whole problem...
I don't know, I just find it worse than useless--downright counterproductive, even. This whole mentality smacks of condescension to me: "Oh, you poor noble savages," says the bearded Western intellectual, "we don't speak your language, and you don't speak ours; I'll invent a common ground and we shall meet halfway!" Then he goes and creates a language that is of course every bit as culturally loaded as every other language, but he is so thrilled at his own worldly generosity that he does not realize what an ass he is making of himself.
I wonder why you choose "the physical reproduction of the human race" as your definition of wealth--isn't this just as arbitrary as any other definition? Not that I necessarily disagree, as long as we remember it's only an intellectual construct (as are all concepts). Things that contribute to the perpetuation of our species, after all, tend to be the same things that make us happy. I would even go so far as to argue that on some level, even the things that wouldn't at first seem to help our species' cause, upon further analysis, turn out in fact to be beneficial on the whole. For example, Vincent van Gogh was a childless bachelor who killed himself, and one might argue that he serves as a counterexample to this argument. Yet van Gogh contributed enormously both to the happiness of subsequent generations and to "the physical reproduction of the human race" (even if he himself didn't reproduce)--just think of how many relationships have blossomed in art galleries and wine & cheese parties over the last 100 years, all because of his genius! But I'll admit that I'm getting into Johnnie Cochran territory here, and anyway, it's all tangential.
Now about grain futures: I agree that there is a qualitative difference between food and a slip of paper, but that doesn't mean those slips of paper are worthless. The systems and institutions built around trading those papers, after all, are what ensure Chicago doesn't starve the winter after a poor harvest. Surely, then, grain futures make Chicago more "wealthy" by your definition as well as mine?
Hi. Casinos, teachers, stock brokers all create wealth. Everything, everything creates wealth. If I were to set up a barbecue grill on the sidewalk and invite people to toast their cash, that would create wealth. I'm no libertarian, and I hate Ayn Rand, but it is my firm opinion that presumably passersby would throw money on the grill because, God knows why, they get something out of it (happiness, utility, or whatever you want to call it) that outweighs the value of their cash.
I can already see a million holes in my above argument, so let's turn to history. The markets in grain futures that sprang up during the mid-19th century in Chicago helped Midwestern farmers absorb the risk of drought or overproduction, thus creating--what do you know--wealth for all involved. Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I presume you would argue that trading in futures is not a wealth-creating activity. Your view is exactly the same as that of those farmers who refused to broker their grain sales through futures, wrongly embittered against traders whom they perceived were engaged in a zero-sum game of profiteering with the products of their labor. Those farmers, needless to say, didn't last long in competition with the smarter folk. You are just as wrong as they.
"people who never break a sweat spend hundreds of dollars on fancy athletic shoes, and where a tee-shirt with a designer's logo on it has surplanted actual designer clothes"
I'd argue this is perfectly rational behavior. I wear designer clothes 'cuz it's what the ladies like (heh).
Just like a peacock's tail might be "unnecessary" for the individual's survival, strictly speaking, but the theory is that flashy tails help female peacocks pick their mates based on which ones can afford to spend all that extra energy on growing and preening their tails. It's evolutionary.
at this point people like Gates and Ellison have no financial incentive to work at all
Leaving aside everything else in your post I disagree with, I sincerely hope you'll reconsider this point in particular. I believe Gates has previously stated his intention to eradicate malaria in his lifetime, an effort the financial cost of which will be measured in tens of billions of dollars. This vision of a better world may be incentive enough for Gates to keep working.
Quite simply, his ambitions are on a completely different level than yours or mine. He'll never have to worry about making rent; his concern is that his foundation invest his fortune wisely to make an appreciable impact in world health and education. His current net worth is $46 billion, but he'll need more than that to realize his goal.
Is he doing it just so his name gets in the history books? Maybe, but so what? If that's his ambition, then I'm glad he's fulfilling it by working to improve health and education in the countries that need it most. Personally, I think you're a little off-target when you accuse him of playing "games."
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, what are you using to check your CPU temperature? I just found this utility today: Temperature Monitor. I'd been under the impression, from programs like MenuMeters, that my PowerBook didn't have an internal thermometer, but apparently it does--it's just not very well publicized. Try this in the terminal: This fan is really starting to get on my nerves. I thought Macs were supposed to be the quiet ones? Here's to hoping Apple figures out a way to make these things run cooler in the future.
yours
Well, I was trying to avoid referring to "original content" in strictly the paint-and-canvas sense. There's all kinds of useful innovations that I'm certain we wouldn't see as much of without the artifice of copyright (and patent protection) to reward content creators. For example, and this is just off the top of my head, antiretroviral drugs to control HIV, useful encyclopedias (Wikipedia doesn't count), Mac OS X, Kylie Minogue (okay, maybe that's a stretch).
Hmm, good point. A fine distinction.
yours
after all copyrights wern't made for compensation, but for geting stuff out into the public domain. Right?
How is that "stuff" going to get made without the promise of compensation for creators?
If we adopted a system whereby nobody was rewarded for originality, I don't doubt some people would continue to create--there'll always be the Van Goghs of the world. But I promise you the volume of original content would be nowhere near what we enjoy today.
You can consider artists' and innovators' compensation the fair price of enjoying all this content that we wouldn't otherwise have.
One last thing. Copyright law, as it exists on the books today, generally favors creators too heavily. Don't take that observation and leap to the conclusion that copyright is fundamentally broken. It isn't.
yours
Ooh boy. I'll try to be brief.
Yes, that's right, in a colloquial sense. But let me ask you this. Have you considered what it means for there to be a "natural limit" on something?
I'm guessing you'd say that the idea that physical objects can belong to somebody is a "natural" concept, since you draw the contrast (apparently) between natural limits and artificial limits. But when you really get down to it, the truth is that it takes a lot of "artificial" coercion to enforce property rights on physical goods. Specifically, it takes the cooperation of governments, police, society and mutual trust to enforce our so-called "natural" property rights. So. Property rights on physical goods is an artificial construct. Now riddle me this: how is it any different to set artificial limits on intellectual property?
I would argue that it's no different. The protection of intellectual property (including copyrighted material) is just as bullshit a concept as the protection of physical goods.
As bullshit concepts go, however, it's a damn mighty useful one. For example, how do you think we'd have useful drugs like antiretrovirals if it wasn't for patent law?
(Yes, the original post was about copyright. But the parent seemed to be railing against intellectual property in general, so I felt this tangent was warranted.)
I wholeheartedly agree with you that the copyright laws on the books today suck. I think it's clear that lawmakers long ago abandoned the principles that made copyright such a worthwhile construct in the first place. Copyright law, as practiced today, probably stymies more "progress of science and useful arts" than it promotes.
:-)
On top of that, and this is a separate issue, it's getting easier and easier to break copyright, from a technical standpoint.
But do either of these developments mean that the concept of copyright is invalid? Not at all. We need not destroy copyright law, but rather reform it to bring it back to its original principles; i.e., we should kick Michael Eisner and the board of Disney in the collective balls and adopt a more sensible set of copyright rules. I don't claim to know what those rules would be, but I do know the solution is emphatically not to do away with the concept of copyright entirely.
As for the argument that copyright is obsolete because it's getting easier to break, I call bullshit. (I know you didn't directly mention this, but I thought I'd bring it up anyway just for the pleasure of calling bullshit on it.) Copyright's always been easy to break, compared to the labor-intensive task of coming up with original, copyrightable material. Even when printing was "a difficult and expensive operation not carried out by individuals," the cost of printing content without having to invest the time or money to come up with said content has always been lower than the total cost of printing that same content plus the cost of coming up with material worth printing on your own.
I think that was a really wordy way of saying the following: The point is, despite the flaws in its present implementation, copyright is still a useful construct that's not going away just because "information wants to be free." Copyright is badly broken, but it's fixable.
Copyright was never meant to affect the individual. In its original conception, copyright only affected corporations - those with the ability to copy.
Now, I have to admit I don't really know what you were trying to get at with this (dubiously valid) observation. Can you explain further, please?
As for RMS, I read his writings once, and I thought: "What a smart guy... makes sense to me!" Fortunately, I'm not twelve years old anymore.
(yeah... that's flamebait.)
Yeah, but if I sent a 100 million coppies of my house key ... blah blah blah ... taxpayers to fund ... DRM ... blah blah blah
That analogy has to die. Really.
Look, of course information is easy to copy, it "wants" to be free and all that bullshit. But see, that's the whole POINT of copyright--to make it harder to copy information. Copyright makes intellectual property behave (in a limited fashion) like "real" property, in that it is illegal to enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor without putting in the effort to earn it. This means that if you acquire the source to Windows and post it on your homepage, don't act all self-righteous when Microsoft uses copyright law--and yes, taxpayer money--to beat the shit out of you, because they'll only be using copyright for the purpose it was designed, designed, in fact, by people far smarter than you or I. You can say that's an unnatural restriction on the free flow of information, and in a superficial sense you're right. But society decided long ago that that's a sacrifice we're willing to make in order to promote creativity.
I don't expect you to fully understand this. Maybe when you're a little older. Sorry if I sound patronizing, and I don't mean to be hurtful, but I don't have the time right now to color my writing in rose for you.
yours
Sorry to rain on your parade, but there are plenty of black actors in the LOTR trilogy. The fact that they were all cast as bad guys is another matter.
Because the possession of mod points will turn otherwise intelligent, responsible people into gibbering retards. Witness my karma.
Hahaha! Nice.
There's a sign in my dorm's lobby for PC PhoneHome (MacPhoneHome), which is supposed to do what you describe.
Come on. Really, who gives a shit if it's a PR effort? Not the students in cash-strapped schools who benefit from his donations, I assure you, nor the HIV-positive Africans who can afford treatment thanks to his donations.
The point is, PR effort or no, many people are better off because of his money. If he gets a public relations boost from his (significant) contributions to education and global health, then so be it.
You seem to be saying that my friend Joe, a cook at Burger King, is a better person for donating 100% of his income than Mr. Gates, who donates 50%. But you know, I'm not so sure the people on the receiving end of his charity would agree with you there.
I don't know. Isn't the difference between their "form of sentience" and ours essentially a difference of degree, not of type? How about this thought experiment: Take your brain, a perfectly functioning human brain in that it (apparently) has the capacity for abstract thought, and remove one neuron; repeat until you're a vegetable. Where do you draw the line between our thinking and apes'?
I think the best we can do is to attach labels to these states of being--sentience, self-awareness, vegetable, whatever--for the sake of discussion, while remembering that the difference is fuzzy. But it's probably not accurate to say apes have a lower "form" of sentience unless you qualify what you mean more precisely.
It sounds like you might be interested in the process of testing animals for what is called the "theory of mind," if you're not already familiar with the topic.
yours
According to this, it's just gonna be Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Code Red, unfortunately. Personally I'd have preferred a deal with Dr Pepper, but what can you do...
I know it's bad form to reply to your own message and all, but I found a thread with a few screenshots here.
And yes, it looks like the widgets (particularly the popup menus) are in Jaguar style rather than Panther. Dialog boxes and menus are Windows themed. Still looks good, though...
Does anyone have screenshots of this? It would be interesting to know, among other things, if they used the UI widgets from Panther or Jaguar.
Interestingly, this would never have happened if you were using a Mac. :)
...which is just your opinion, and this is just mine: I think brushed metal looks great when it's tastefully done. QuickTime Player from 1997 was ugly, but Safari is gorgeous.
Pinstripes, on the other hand... they're so... so 2001.
1. Did you know beauty is more than just skin-deep?
2. "Ugly," on the other hand, looks just like your desktop.
"common, neutral ground. ... without one party being at a disadvantage ..."
But it's not common ground. The language uses Roman characters, for starters, and the roots are pulled almost exclusively from Western languages. How does this not place people at a disadvantage who grew up reading and writing CJK or Arabic?
Even if the script were something nobody'd ever seen before, and the roots were also completely invented, I would still argue that Esperanto has a strong Western bias. Its comprehension depends on phonetics, not pitches and inflections (as comprehension of Chinese does to a large degree), and Esperanto's pronunciations are much easier for a speaker of a Western language to pick up than, say, a native Japanese speaker (you've seen Lost In Translation, right? "Lip them! Lip my stocking!")
You can try to address these problems, but at the expense of making the language much harder to learn for people of any background, which (correct me if I'm wrong) essentially negates Esperanto's whole raison d'etre.
Not to mention that every language, even Esperanto, has evolved to express a certain range of ideas and a certain way of thought. You can stretch this (poetry anyone?), but the result is rarely elegant or intuitive. Western linguistic anthropologists have "discovered" languages in which there is no easy way to express the passage of time--present, future, past tenses simply aren't important for some people on this great planet. So even by assuming a familiarity with time, Esperanto reveals its bias. More broadly, this problem of relative cultural importance is a problem that I doubt any so-called "common" language can solve gracefully.
"It is, to a degree, misty-eyed idealism."
Yes, and that's the whole problem...
I don't know, I just find it worse than useless--downright counterproductive, even. This whole mentality smacks of condescension to me: "Oh, you poor noble savages," says the bearded Western intellectual, "we don't speak your language, and you don't speak ours; I'll invent a common ground and we shall meet halfway!" Then he goes and creates a language that is of course every bit as culturally loaded as every other language, but he is so thrilled at his own worldly generosity that he does not realize what an ass he is making of himself.
But, to each his own.
yours
I wonder why you choose "the physical reproduction of the human race" as your definition of wealth--isn't this just as arbitrary as any other definition? Not that I necessarily disagree, as long as we remember it's only an intellectual construct (as are all concepts). Things that contribute to the perpetuation of our species, after all, tend to be the same things that make us happy. I would even go so far as to argue that on some level, even the things that wouldn't at first seem to help our species' cause, upon further analysis, turn out in fact to be beneficial on the whole. For example, Vincent van Gogh was a childless bachelor who killed himself, and one might argue that he serves as a counterexample to this argument. Yet van Gogh contributed enormously both to the happiness of subsequent generations and to "the physical reproduction of the human race" (even if he himself didn't reproduce)--just think of how many relationships have blossomed in art galleries and wine & cheese parties over the last 100 years, all because of his genius! But I'll admit that I'm getting into Johnnie Cochran territory here, and anyway, it's all tangential.
Now about grain futures: I agree that there is a qualitative difference between food and a slip of paper, but that doesn't mean those slips of paper are worthless. The systems and institutions built around trading those papers, after all, are what ensure Chicago doesn't starve the winter after a poor harvest. Surely, then, grain futures make Chicago more "wealthy" by your definition as well as mine?
yours
Hi. Casinos, teachers, stock brokers all create wealth. Everything, everything creates wealth. If I were to set up a barbecue grill on the sidewalk and invite people to toast their cash, that would create wealth. I'm no libertarian, and I hate Ayn Rand, but it is my firm opinion that presumably passersby would throw money on the grill because, God knows why, they get something out of it (happiness, utility, or whatever you want to call it) that outweighs the value of their cash.
I can already see a million holes in my above argument, so let's turn to history. The markets in grain futures that sprang up during the mid-19th century in Chicago helped Midwestern farmers absorb the risk of drought or overproduction, thus creating--what do you know--wealth for all involved. Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I presume you would argue that trading in futures is not a wealth-creating activity. Your view is exactly the same as that of those farmers who refused to broker their grain sales through futures, wrongly embittered against traders whom they perceived were engaged in a zero-sum game of profiteering with the products of their labor. Those farmers, needless to say, didn't last long in competition with the smarter folk. You are just as wrong as they.
yours
I made this test case a while ago, but it seems relevant again. Can you make out this well-known slogan?
Now imagine trying to decipher the letters individually.
"people who never break a sweat spend hundreds of dollars on fancy athletic shoes, and where a tee-shirt with a designer's logo on it has surplanted actual designer clothes"
I'd argue this is perfectly rational behavior. I wear designer clothes 'cuz it's what the ladies like (heh).
Just like a peacock's tail might be "unnecessary" for the individual's survival, strictly speaking, but the theory is that flashy tails help female peacocks pick their mates based on which ones can afford to spend all that extra energy on growing and preening their tails. It's evolutionary.
Please resist the obvious lewd puns...
yours
Leaving aside everything else in your post I disagree with, I sincerely hope you'll reconsider this point in particular. I believe Gates has previously stated his intention to eradicate malaria in his lifetime, an effort the financial cost of which will be measured in tens of billions of dollars. This vision of a better world may be incentive enough for Gates to keep working.
Quite simply, his ambitions are on a completely different level than yours or mine. He'll never have to worry about making rent; his concern is that his foundation invest his fortune wisely to make an appreciable impact in world health and education. His current net worth is $46 billion, but he'll need more than that to realize his goal.
Is he doing it just so his name gets in the history books? Maybe, but so what? If that's his ambition, then I'm glad he's fulfilling it by working to improve health and education in the countries that need it most. Personally, I think you're a little off-target when you accuse him of playing "games."
yours