About Microsoft
This comment was regarding a fairly typical, flattering post about Bill Gates.
Good lord.
This sort of column is a symptom of the larger problem we have in this nation - laziness. We're too lazy to fact check the "media" and politicians. We're too lazy to realize that someone acquiring massive wealth isn't congruent with "goodness." We're too lazy to do a little accounting to realize how much money we spend paying a tax to microsoft virtually every time we buy a computer... then pay the tax to the police-ware vendors for anti-virus, adware, and other "security" tools.
We're too lazy to learn something new. We're too lazy to learn how these things work so we will stop being gouged for unnecessary "upgrades." We're so lazy and scared that we turn a blind eye toward the only successful modern monopolist - worse, people throw the guy accolades as if he's actually created technology that has improved anything for anyone!
There are people with so little going on upstairs that they actually believe that if Bill Gates didn't live, we wouldn't have anything better than solar powered calculators to help us do our work. People have, in effect, said this to me! Literally, someone told me, "If it weren't for Bill Gates, you wouldn't have a job [in the computer networking field] today." Skipping past the personal affront, this couldn't be a more clear declaration of ignorance - especially given the fact that the speaker was also a systems engineer and should have known better!
Bill Gates formed a monopoly and used that power to make massive amounts of money. Sorry, but that's not even close to the respect Mendoza line for me... which isn't to say that I have unique or special expectations - it's just that people who break the law and make money in the process are normally not roundly embraced and loved by advanced societies.
I guess we're so envious of the obscenely wealthy to ask ourselves, "Can any human being ever really be worth $100 Billion?" Isn't there really something wrong when a red flag like that pops up? What in the world did this guy do to advance mankind that he deserves this much money?
(Hint: if you try to answer that last question, realize that there were large and small computers running operating systems long before there ever was a microsoft... MS-DOS was virtually a wholesale copy of CPM... oh, never mind... there are entire books on the subject... go to Amazon!)
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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