Newsweek: Microsoft Pushing Steve Ballmer Out

[dsolom3]

[citation][nom]back_by_demand[/nom]MS is hardly evil, have you seen what Bill Gates is doing with his cash?[/citation]

Yeah, after wasting BILLIONS of man-hours, spent in
A) The fits of sheer rage and madness when a windows BSODs during a: FPS match, email being sent, photo auto-fixed with 3-rd party tool, music file being played, document being typed, browsing a HDD's contents, loading up a webpage, playing a Youtube video, posting on Facebook, rendering a NX file, simulating an electrical circuit with CAD, etc...
B) re-doing anything that might have been lost during the initial BSOD

I say that he damn better help the world in some other way!

 

[ossie]

Was about time to ditch the idiot monkey... Not that micro$uxx would be any better. It "innovation" still just a copy, grab and marketing bu$iness.
[citation][nom]back_by_demand[/nom]MS is hardly evil, have you seen what Bill Gates is doing with his cash?[/citation]
Like Monsanto's GMO tech, or big pharma industry, or promoting m$ junk in it's neo-colonialist projects? Of course, all profits tax free...
You're just a wintarded micro$uxx fankiddie.

 

[ossie]

The Gates Foundation made its first foray into agriculture in 2006 with a $100 million grant to create an initiative with the Rockefeller Foundation called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
Based in Nairobi, AGRA took as its model the original Green Revolution, which helped relieve widespread famine in the 1940s through the 1960s by boosting production of maize, wheat and rice in Latin America and Asia.
Part of the controversy lies in the Gates Foundation’s choosing that approach.
Using strains of crops that required fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation, the Green Revolution methods increased yields. But they also damaged the environment, favored wealthier farmers and left some poorer ones deeper in debt.

The situation was further complicated when former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, now chairman of AGRA’s board, made a statement that African journalists interpreted as rejecting the use of genetically modified seeds.
The Gates Foundation later said Annan was misquoted.

The Gates Foundation, whose science-and-technology efforts are led by a former Monsanto researcher, is helping African governments develop biosafety standards and regulations and training local researchers in the latest plant breeding.

Illustrative is the Monsanto Corporation’s global marketing vision from a 2005 company document: “full adoption of GM crops globally would result in income gains of US$210 billion per year within the next decade, with the largest potential gains occurring in developing countries at a rate of 2.1 percent gross national product per year” (Lopez Villar et al., 2007).
Much of this push is being done with the help of US foreign aid agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as well as well-endowed nGos such as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations (African Centre for Biosafety, 2007; Ho, 2007; Lopez Villar et al., 2007). USAID is mandated to partner with US biotechnology corporations to promote the companies’ crops in developing countries (Brenner, 2004).

This is hypocrisy of the vilest sort. In fact, U.N. agencies, programs and policies themselves have prevented farmers in the developing world from obtaining the tools they need to become more productive. That gets us back to Bill Gates and his big plans: His choice last year of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to head a new group intended to achieve a “green revolution” in African agriculture, the Alliance for a Green Revolution–established with an initial $150 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation–was incomprehensible. If past performance is any indication, the only things likely to become greener are the numbered bank accounts of Annan and his cronies.

 

[ossie]

Bill and Melinda Gates said Friday they were encouraging government and business leaders to keep investing in health and development in poor countries — especially during the global financial crisis.

To a large extent, this means paying a lot of money to pharmaceutical giants whose medicine is invariantly withheld from those in need, owing to patents and the likes of such mechanisms. More importantly, Microsoft’s Gates is a big investor in these very same pharmaceuticals, so he essentially makes money when budgets are passed from governments (that he invests in too) to pharmaceuticals.

Some people may say that the pharmaceutical industry cannot be that bad. Unfortunately, it is. Fortunately, however, it is very easy for everyone to understand why this industry has such a detrimental effect on millions of human lives.
It is not about individual drugs or individual companies. It is about the principles – the laws – of the pharmaceutical ‘business with disease’.

Since it is public knowledge that the Gates Foundation has placed strategic investments into the pharmaceutical industry, it was only a question of time until the question would be answered whether Gates is serious about controlling diseases or whether he is just another spin doctor of the pharmaceutical “business with disease” who helps to expand and promote diseases under the deceptive veil of a “Mother Theresa”.

 

[ossie]

THE INFLUENCE GAME: Bill Gates sways govt dollars
The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been the biggest player by far in the school reform movement, spending around $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education.

The Office of the Basic Education Commission, Ministry of Education and Microsoft Thailand have officially announced their extended collaboration for the successful Partners in Learning program (PiL) over the next five years (2009 กV 2013). In a MOU signing ceremony held today, the two parties both looked to the future and celebrated five years of achievements through the program which was established with a goal of transforming education through the integration of information and technology

The Gates Foundation is routinely used as a financial vehicle to promote Microsoft’s agenda without it actually looking like Microsoft bribes for deals. Bill Gates is giving it billions of dollar and the government then signs multi-billion dollar deals with Microsoft.

A sampling of the Gates Foundation’s largest investments:
Above $1.5 billion
* Berkshire Hathaway**
* Canadian government
Between $1 billion and $1.5 billion
* Fannie Mae
* German government
Between $100 million and $1 billion
* Abbott Laboratories
* Archer Daniels Midland
* British Petroleum
* Canadian National Railway
* Exxon Mobil
* Freddie Mac
* French government
* Japanese government
* Merck
* Schering Plough
* Tyco International
* Waste Management

*Might include stocks, bonds and other securities
**Warren Buffett committed his first installment of Berkshire Hathaway stock in June.
Sources: Gates tax and Securities and Exchange Commission filings— Los Angeles Times

The Bill Gates Foundation is interested in entering the microfinance sector in Peru, reported the head of the Superintendency of Banking, Insurance and Pension Fund Administrators of this country, Philip Tam”
This will increase pressure on small && medium size companies by ensuring loans to them only if they get into the proprietary bondage. Digital colonialism at its highest:
“”In the national micro finance sector are important players such as the BBVA Microfinance Foundation, other foundations are also very important as that of Bill Gates, who also wants to Peru,” Tam said the agency Andina.”
Knowing the corrupt authorities in Latin America this will perpetuate Microsoft bondage on emergent economies. This will give more leverage to MS to do what the did in Colombia by bribing them to vote for MSXLM standard ISO approval, and the way they try to derail FLOSS advances in Eastern Europe, South Africa and other countries. This also will give them leverage to press for software patents not only in Peru but all Latin America. Remember they’re afraid that everyone’s follows Brazil’s path to technological independence.
I hope that the Peruvian youth and free entrepreneurs don’t bite the lure to perpetual bondage and follow Brazil’s path to technological independence that leads to economical independence.

 

[ossie]

Microsoft Corp. will distribute free software to nonprofit groups to boost charity in India, a company official said Monday.
The software donation will be routed through a technology assistance program that India’s NASSCOM Foundation is offering in partnership with TechSoup, a San Francisco-based group that partners in charity work with companies like Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Symantec.
NASSCOM Foundation, the philanthropy arm of the trade body of technology companies operating in India, introduced the program Monday – titled BiG Tech....
Nearly 35,000 nonprofit groups in India will be eligible for such software donations.
Of course, there has to be some trade-offs, because there should never be free lunch, even for the ones who starve: Microsoft, according to this article, has conditioned its help to Indian NGOs to their support of OOXML. What the NGOs had to do was to send letters of support on OOXML to the federal government of India.

Brickfish, the social media marketing solution, and Microsoft have teamed up for a three-phase social media campaign around its Windows and Windows Live products. Located at http/www.brickfish.com/Windows, the “Windows Brand Ambassador” campaign will begin with a Call for Entries, in which entrants are asked to create photos, videos or blogs that showcase why they use PC’s and / or should be Windows Brand Ambassadors. Of all eligible entries, the top 200 highest scoring entries will advance to the Semi-Finals where they will be voted on by the community. From the top 100, as voted on by the community, the Windows Social Media Team will choose 40 Semi-Finalists as Windows Brand Ambassadors for the next eight weeks. During the next eight weeks, the 40 Windows Brand Ambassadors will receive weekly video challenges from Microsoft. Each week’s challenge will highlight a different way the Windows Brand Ambassadors use Windows every day. The winner of each challenge will be selected by relevancy of their response, creativity, and the volume of viral buzz they generate during that week’s challenge. The Windows Social Media Team will choose one of the “Windows Brand Ambassadors” as the grand prize winner, and will reward them with a trip for two to Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, WA.

“We don’t tell them not to write” about bad experiences, “but most want to only write positive things,” said Stacy Becker of Coyne Public Relations. She was talking about General Mills’ new blogger network, “MyBlogSpark.” Coyne built the network of “more than 900 bloggers — over 80 percent are moms,” and General Mills will “feed them free products and enable them to run giveaways for their audiences.” General Mills requires participating bloggers to “contact the MyBlogSpark team before posting any content … if you feel you cannot write a positive post regarding the product or service.”

 

[ossie]

"Feeding" the hungry with GM crops to rise profits for Monsanto and co. ...
"Healing" the sick while human testing new products, for huge big pharma profits...
"Teaching" those without schools that the only $w is m$ (drug dealers also give out free samples, until addiction occurs), for increasing even more micro$uxx' obscene profits...
Of course, all that while oiling the wheels with bribes for proper officials, and tax exempt profits for billy boy's scam machine.

If you still didn't got it: Big bu$iness gives tax deductible money for nGov foundation, which bribes the proper officials to buy only big bu$iness' products, with public money - all under the "good" cause pretext, for the whole scam, by which public money from taxes (both US, by tax deduction, and mostly the target country's ones) is funneled in big bu$iness' coffers.

 

[ossie]

Millions of people die due the limitless greed of corporations, and corrupt individuals, and officials. Are you really such an idiot, that you believe they would care just a tiny bit of anything else than profits, and enriching? You're just a gullible moron...
No, I don't own an idiot box - programs are just crap anyways, full of dumbing propaganda - and would never ingest any Cola junk - best way to ruin your health, and especially the stomach.
Regarding the internet, you're the hypocrite, as it's obviously the mean by which we express our views.