Posted on 02/04/2009 7:47:30 PM PST by beagleone
TED, the annual gathering of the most pretentious people from the fields of technology, entertainment, and design, just got punk'd. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitos into the crowd.
Ending malaria is a particular passion of Gates's, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent millions fighting the disease. But he apparently didn't feel like TED attendees were taking the threat seriously. "Not only poor people should experience this," Gates said as he let the bugs loose on his audience, according to Facebook manager Dave Morin. (eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Twitter CEO Ev Williams confirm the report.)
A showman's way of making a point, perhaps. But it doesn't do much to undo Gates's reputation, borne out of the Microsoft antitrust investigations of the 1990s, that the man considers himself above the law. Doesn't California's Health and Safety Code have something to say about insect infestations?
Trained Assault Mosquitos bump
Those are “features”, not “bugs” in MS speak. I’m a Windows abuser since ver. 3.1 and still not amused by this OS. We use it only because applications we need are written for Windows and do not function easily in Linux.
I swear I didn’t know turkeys couldn’t fly.
It’s criminal, plain and simple.
Even if the bugs could be proved to be carrying no infections, there’s nothing that would prevent them from spreading any diseases from one person to another.
He oughta be facing charges for this!
You don’t endanger peoples health to prove some stupid point, I don’t give a crap how passionate you are about it!
Yeah, did Bill Gates test EVERY mosquito for malaria or West Nile before releasing it?
I hope he gets his butt sued off.
No kidding. He's lucky someone didn't bean him with an apple in response.
You guys are overreacting. All the mosquitos were beta so none of them worked.
FRiend you’ve got it all wrong. Solving the problem is not the goal. Working on it for decades to prove your deep concern for the less fortunate is. If you can milk it all the way to the grave you win.
Wonder how many lawsuits he created?
Oh I understand perfectly.
Like the man said, If you aren’t part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem.
b&m couldn’t care less about helping people, as you said, it’s all about showing concern for the less fortunate.
That was the funniest episode in the entire series!
(wonder if anyone else here remembers it)
Oh, the humanity!
I do. The funniest episode of a sit-com ever.
I swear you can't make this $#!t up.
Sounds like assault to me.
Well...
My opinion on Vista is a bit tainted, being primarily a Macintosh user. But now that disclaimer is out of the way:
Windows XP is FAR more stable.
Vista still throws an odd error now and then
Vista locks up my work laptop every so often (a fairly nice HP). Each and every time, the report suggests some other party other than MS is responsible - usually either the audio driver or the video driver.
Compatibility is still an issue with some hardware and quite a few software titles.
Vista’s security “features” will drive you nuts when you try to install anything (including many software updates).
Eye candy - take it or leave it - huge resource hog.
Vista overall is a resource hog. Turn off as much of the eye candy you can and it is a bit better.
The incredible disappearing “Recycle Bin” - I have had this happen 3 times now in the last 4 months. Apparently a known issue that no-one can seem to explain. You can get it back by going into the control panels and unchecking and rechecking the option to show the recycle bin on the desktop. But why????
Other various odd behaviors that lack a good explanation.
That being said, Vista is better than many previous version of Windows (other than XP). Vista will go down as the worst version of Windows ever released (with the possible exception of Windows Me).
Where to start.
Right now, I'm trying to shrink the NTFS partition so I can give space to Linux. I'm running W2K in a VM that eats up a bit of space would and also like to try, and Lord knows why, vista in a VM as well. Vista came on the system, but I don't really use it except to poke around it from time to time so I don't need the 60GB currently allocated to it, but don't want to get rid of the native just yet.
I've removed, the pagefile, shadow copies, hibernation, and I still can't shrink it further. I'm sure I'm probably missing some obscure, little documented.. something...
The UAC BS. Reboot after this, reboot after that, reboot, reboot, reboot.... arggg!
Oh and a whole host of other crap. Absolutely the worst POS OS I've ever seen.
Bill Gates has lost his marbles.
No "possible" about it. As bad as Vista is, it doesn't hold a candle to the horror that was ME. I was never so glad to leave an OS in my life, as I was to put ME behind me...
the infowarrior
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