It's interesting to think about -- we're nowhere near this level of sophistication currently, but will evolved viruses and bacteria eventually cease to be a threat once we thoroughly understand the proteome, and can simulate biological systems well enough to come up with vaccines in faster-than-evolutionary timeframes?
I'd expect such a world to include a dramatically increased thread of bioterrorism, however.
I don't foresee that happening for a while, if ever - even if we could make a plug-and-play vaccine framework, all it would take would be one benign-or-otherwise infectious organism coming up with a mechanism to effectively minimize vaccine response going forward without too much selection pressure against it, and then those infected would need some treatment beyond simply informing the adaptive parts of the immune system where to nuke. (And that's ignoring the faster-than-realtime simulation requirements at a truly staggering scale to keep up with the microorganisms involved.)
The thing I find most promising, these days, are results that show fundamentally different types of treatment (like phage therapy, or some of the stranger results with internal parasites) can be used in combination to weaken antibiotic resistance of resistant strains, and then you can wash out the remnants with those same antibiotics. [1] [2]
He robbed value from society by monopolizing the operating systems market with extremely nasty business practices. We are still suffering. Now he gets oodles of credit for throwing the change back at humanitarian projects which sometimes bear fruit. I'll change my mind about him when he donates 10 billion to open source software to offset the damage his company has done. It would be ideal if he gave the rest of his loot to democratic systems that allow local people to decide where to put the money. We don't need kings or emperors.
Nah, I lived through the entire period. Human nature is the reason we had a Microsoft monopoly. Apple didn’t care enough. The Linux people wanted lots of distributions, and couldn’t build a consumer business model with a gun to their heads.
Open Office was, and is, a piece of garbage.
I wasted a lot of time explaining to people that if we all bought our cars from GM, they would suck. That’s what Microsoft was.
Just let it go.
Although, it sure would have been nice if the Amiga carved out 10% market share.
> Human nature is the reason we had a Microsoft monopoly.
They straight up bribed the regulators. If Office stored data in an easy-to-parse open format, society may well have already created a universal flu vaccine.
That’s a really narrow view of the world by someone that’s probably never sold to business. MS products worked exactly the way people who were paid for them care they worked.
Stealing from the (relatively speaking) super rich can be, in some circumstances, according to a sufficiently utilitarian moral framework. One could argue that's what progressive taxes are all about.
I admit it's hard for me to quantify the damage Microsoft's business practices have caused (any helpful links/sources?), but it's extremely difficult to imagine it being worse than not saving millions of lives.
Gates could be, with little imagination, be a modern-day Robin Hood. Stealing from those rich enough to be able to worry about computers and bit sequences, and then giving back the money to the truly needy in the world.
I have zero knowledge of ethics and philosophy, but in the grand scheme of things, when you consider humanity as a whole and ignore Silicon Valley, it's all good. Even admirable.
It's a counterfactual- I suspect we'd have more advanced technology in other sectors and more global economic opportunity across the board if Microsoft hadn't abused their monopoly power and slowed progress in computing advancements, which could also have saved lives indirectly... but we'll never know.
What? How does your operating system limit the kind of computing that you can do?
Furthermore, how can you say that Microsoft's monopoly position didn't actually allow them to accelerate the progress of computing even further than their competitors might have otherwise?
Look up what "counterfactual" means. Sure, it's possible the world is a better place because of the Microsoft monopoly, just as the Microsoft apologists claim.
I’d argue the business practices of Microsoft in the 1990s and 2000s have set the technology industry back at least a decade. The side effect of this is lives of toil instead of productivity. May have saved six million lives but cost a billion people a future they could have had.
Could you elaborate? Setting us back by a decade seems like a pretty bold claim. And I say this as someone that, on balance, despises the Microsoft of the past (for monopolistic behaviour) and present (for spyware and normalizing hardware lockdown).
It's definitely a bold claim and one people don't want to discuss. Bar the points you mentioned, mainly that they seriously stunted the rise of the Internet and world wide web. When it did take off, due to market share and mindset, they actively locked people into their vision of it. People are still, right now in 2018, trying to escape some of their grasp. There's still ActiveX out there. Plus the damage they did to Java for example.
To put things in perspective, people felt something similar towards Alfred Nobel before his death and the establishment of the Nobel Foundation. He was nicknamed "The Merchant of Death".
Gates is exceptionally rich in the purest sense of exceptional. He's been the richest person on earth almost every year for over a decade.
When you're at that level you have to wonder what is really left to do but cultivate your legacy? Gates had developed a persona in the business world that did not bode well for a positive obituary. The Gates Foundation doesn't strike me so much as admirable as logical.
After forcing OEMs to install Windows for decades, yeah he does deserve a kind of prize but I am not thinking about the same one. Your present does not redeem your past actions.
A proper apology would be meaningful. I don't have strong feelings about whether what he's doing 'offsets' what he's done, but going on the record and apologizing would go a long way to get me off that particular fence.
Well, he certainly goes out of his way to make sure his name is attached to everything, which is one prerequisite to being positioned well for a Nobel.
Nobel Peace Prize? Yeah he should. We all know the kind of relevance Peace Prize nowadays have. Gate's foundations activities in India has come under the scanner for medicine testing and other such practices.
His foundation is doing a lot of good but merely giving money away should not be grounds for a Nobel.
That should be for people who actually dedicate their lives to doing good. Gates is facilitating other people doing good. He’s like Alfred Nobel himself, not like the recipients.
> I really hope Gates gets nominated for a Nobel Prize. He deserves it.
For creating a monopoly and setting back computer science and computing by decades? For sheltering his billions from taxes in a family controlled charity?
It's amazing what tens of millions in PR spending/campaign can do for a billionaire's reputation. There are people who actually believe bill gates is a good guy.
In 30 years, zuckerburg will retire, shelter his money in a family controlled "charity" and hire a top notch PR firm and the naive people will demand he be proclaimed a saint.
Between a potential universal flu vaccines and Norovirus vaccines[0], a lot of currently common illnesses could be slashed in the future. Exciting time to be alive and hopefully not be getting sick. The Norovirus one could also be interesting for another reason, it might be the first vaccine you swallow instead of is injected.
Organizations working along the lines of the challenge can apply for an initial grant of up to $2 million and then some more if things are going well. The idea is to identify underfunded ideas and reduce that particular problem.
I think about pink spotted aardvarks when I feel I’m about to come down with a cold. The cold usually doesn’t come. This is a lot quicker and less sweaty than the sauna trick.
But isn't the virus inside of you at a higher temperature than that? You can't change your body temperature without problems so how do you plan on killing viruses by heat once you're already infected?
> Gates Foundation launches $12M Grand Challenge for universal flu vaccine
Story 16 years ago on The Register (an agency undeniably prone to hyperbole & sarcasm, but also fiercely committed to truth in reporting):
> Gates gives $100 million to fight HIV, $421 million to fight Linux [1]
Right now the Gates Foundation is sitting on around 38,000 million (USD)
The foundation has some non-trivial criticisms [2]
Whenever anything about Bill's activities comes up in the modern era there's several demographics that appear - people wary of lionising people whose wealth was obtained at best unethically (at worst, illegally) - through to ends-justifies-the-means types.
Some commonly understood context around why different groups have vastly different takes on these announcements would be good for everyone involved.
EDIT: For any astroturfers keen to discourage comparative analysis, I'm happy to engage in an actual discussion around this. I appreciate it's a complex subject full of subtle nuances.
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2016/01/14/paul-glasziou-and-iain-c...