Bill Gates Promotes Vaccine Projects, Swipes At Google 481
Nerval's Lobster writes "In a new interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Bill Gates discussed his Foundation's work to eradicate polio and malaria, while suggesting that vaccine programs and similar initiatives to fight disease and poverty will ultimately do much more for the world than technology projects devoted to connecting everybody to the Internet. While Gates professes his belief in the so-called digital revolution, he doesn't think projects such as Google's Internet blimps (designed to transmit WiFi signals over hundreds of miles, bringing Internet to underserved areas in the process) will do the third world nearly as much as good as basic healthcare. "When you're dying of malaria, I suppose you'll look up and see that [Internet] balloon, and I'm not sure how it'll help you," he said. "When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there's no website that relieves that." Gates then sharpened his attack on the search-engine giant: "Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down." Google focusing on its core mission is fine, he added, "but the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor." The Microsoft co-founder also has no intention of following Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech entrepreneurs into the realm of space exploration. "I guess it's fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air," he said. "But it's not an area that I'll be putting money into.""
Vaccine's are bad (Score:0, Funny)
Appropriate: http://www.deesillustration.com/artwork.asp?item=618&cat=satire
Re:Idea (Score:3, Funny)
"Look at Hitler. He also liked dogs."
Can we get over this childish need to declare that everything which isn't pure Randite Objectivism is indistinguishable from Stalinism?
Re:Idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Idea (Score:4, Funny)
Well clearly, until we find a charity that is perfect in all regards we should only give our money towards getting faster internet.
Re: Idea (Score:5, Funny)
He should hoard money like Ellison, Brin, Page, and Jobs! That will help the poor!
They may not be helping the poor, but at least the other fellows aren't kicking them while they're down.
The Internet lately has been full of the meme that Gates will be famous centuries from now while Jobs will be forgotten. Here's an alternate scenario: Gates concentrates more and more on wiping out disease and feeding the world. This enables the population to balloon out of all sustainability, wrecking the environment. Then when humanity is like a teeming Petri dish, a pathogen evolves which incurable and virulent and takes out 90% of humans. Gates' name is cursed by the wretched survivors trying to survive on a poisoned, strip-mined Earth.