OUR recent complaints about the Huffington Post's incestuous relationship with Microsoft [1, 2] have received some response which we thought was worth elucidating. One reader has shown us proof that Arianna Huffington and Bill Gates are indeed no strangers. They rub each others' back, so to speak.
“One reader has shown us proof that Arianna Huffington and Bill Gates are indeed no strangers.”Microsoft has been mostly effective as a political movement, especially with Bill's preexisting valuable connections inside the family (parents and grandparents). A few decades ago when Gates spoke to a computer magazine he actually said he wanted to just control everything (or something to that effect). He was a lot younger back then and he was not careful about saying alarming things which would resurface a long time later. Now we know for a fact that he is trying to control more than just computing. He was never an engineer (professionally speaking, in terms of education). He studied law.
An article from The Register (from one of their Microsoft boosters) was quoted as saying that Huffington Post is where some of Microsoft's latest lobbying was seeded, but the seeding was also done by a public talk that Brad Smith had given. It is possible that the Huffington Post placement was based on that talk, but either way, it was written by Smith himself, so it was not coverage of the talk, it was just an advertisement of Microsoft's agenda. Microsoft is no ordinary company, as the US DOJ can attest to.
Just for a little bit of fun, we thought it would be worth reminding readers that Bill Gates started his career in computing when he sabotaged PCs. Only later he committed more serious offences that got him detained, but he was released quickly because his family was extremely wealthy and privileged.
Guess who is still not paying his taxes? That would be Bill Gates, who puts his money in a tax haven (tax dodge/evasion with the Gates Foundation is a subject we have covered here many times before). It's also the case when it comes to the company he helped create. Now watch this:
Bill Gates Suggests Taxing Banks to Cut Federal Deficit
Bill, let's be honest, it's hypocritical to suggest taxing banks to reduce the federal deficit while your company Microsoft contributes to Washington State's $2.6 billion deficit with its alleged $728 million evasion of the royalty tax.
You say the federal deficit could be the "next crisis". What about your home state's impending insolvency? What about our current local crisis?
But Gregoire will suggest closing some tax "loopholes," including a plan that could net about $100 million by adjusting tax policy for out-of-state companies that operate in Washington and home-state firms that do business elsewhere - including Microsoft Corp.
[...]
The change also could apply to Washington-based companies, such as Microsoft. The software company collects royalties on software licenses sold through a subsidiary in Nevada; if the law were changed as Gregoire proposes, Microsoft would have to pay state B&O taxes on royalties collected from Washington state customers.
Unfortunately, Bill Gates is not a wizard. Even worse, he is a bad programmer. When Martin Eller, a Microsoft programmer, found an error in the flood fill routine of the MS-Basic interpreter, he exclaimed "Which moron wrote this brainless sh*t?" only to find out it was Gates himself who wrote the "brainless sh*t". I think it is safe to say that Bill Gates is hardly the technical wizard he would so much like to be.
Bricklin sent waves of laughter through the auditorium by reading a passage from Lammers' interview with Bill Gates in which the young Microsoft founder explained that his work on different versions of Microsoft's BASIC compiler was shaped by looking at how other programmers had gone about the same task. Gates went on to say that young programmers don't need computer science degrees: "The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems."