But curing diseases and solving the global food crisis is, it turns out, rather political, and Mr. Gates spends a lot of time persuading African and Asian governments that he’s not part of some Western plot, that the vaccines and flood-resistant seeds his foundation engineered aren’t foreign threats – and also paying for them to develop regulatory agencies so they can help themselves.

“I wouldn’t call myself a political lobbyist,” he says, but “that’s ended up being a much bigger category of my time than I expected …. If you’d asked me five years ago if I would expect to speak at a G20 meeting I would have said ‘No, I’ll be writing grants to great scientists and travelling to Africa!’ ”

And indeed, political lobbying was a big part of what he was doing in Cannes this week. As a philanthropist whose $33.5-billion endowment is larger than the foreign-aid programs of many governments, he still relies on those programs to match his funds and do the lion’s share of the work.

So he was here to praise countries like Britain, which upheld the promise they made in 2000 to raise their foreign-aid spending to 0.7 per cent of their economies – despite dire financial crises – and shame those like Canada, which currently spends less than half that amount, far short of its promise.

After all, he says, the world’s poor can’t rely on the largesse of billionaires. Amid all the talk of finding innovative ways to end inequality, Mr. Gates says it really just requires some smart money.

“I resist the term ‘innovative,’ the word is funny,” he says. “All these things we’re discussing here are taxes, or borrowing now to pay back later … The term suggests there’s a free source of money. No one yet has discovered a free source of money.” “

via Gates offers G20 a lesson in philanthropy – The Globe and Mail.

I don’t believe Barack Obama is consciously plotting to ruin our future, I just think he’s such an economic idiot, he has no idea what he’s doing.

Warren Buffett explaining to President Obama what a Balanced Budget means.

Obama’s opening gambit was the failed $800 billion stimulus that made unemployment rates rises and no new (private sector) jobs created or “saved”. His next trick was the constant railing against Wall Street, Big Banks, Billionaires and Millionaires. The President’s excuse for our economic doldrums was anything from the Japanese tsunami, the Arab spring, to his number one fallback; George W. Bush.

But all rhetoric aside, what finally opened my eyes to Obama’s stubborn left-wing ideology was what Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, was told in a White House meeting.

First, a little background, Mr Hamm discovered the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota. The Department of Energy’s data says North Dakota is on pace to surpass California in oil production in the next few years.

Harold Hamm, ranks 33rd in Forbe’s list of the wealthiest Americans, so he was invited last July to the White House with the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to join in their “Giving Pledge”, meaning the rich give more to charity.

Finally, Mr. Hamm had his chance to speak with President Obama, “I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this.”

President Obama replied, “Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.”

Mr. Hamm expressed his shock to Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, “Even if you believed that, why would you want to stop oil and gas development? It was pretty disappointing.”

Mr. Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, “I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties.” That’s more than the U.S. national debt.

With the right set of energy policies, Hamm believes the United States could be “completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century.”

However Obama and his advisers are betting everything on the wrong horse and pouring billions into “green energy” companies, like the bankrupt Solyndra. Under Steven Chu’s direction, the DOE is awaiting  approval for $6.5 billion in loans to green energy projects.

These loans will create only 283 jobs at a cost of $23 million per! During the 2008 campaign, Obama promised five million green energy jobs. Once again an unrealistic, unfulfilled promise from this failure, President Obama.

The administration is so single-tracked on green energy that it is using every government agency it can to put road blocks up to stop any new oil exploration and drilling.

The Interior Department delays drilling permits by months and even years. The Securities and Exchange Commission is now tasked with requiring oil companies to report their production and federal royalties on thousands of individual leases under the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules.

A few months ago the Obama Justice Department brought charges against Continental and six other oil companies in North Dakota for causing the death of 28 migratory birds, in violation of the Migratory Bird Act. Wind Turbines are responsible for over 33,000 bird kills annually, this from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Have you seen the DOJ charging anyone in the Turbine industry?

While the national unemployment rate is 9.1%, North Dakota is the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 3.5%.  Harold Hamm claims that, “the state has 18,000 unfilled jobs, and these are jobs that pay $60,000 to $80,000 a year.”

Barack Obama has the wrong energy policy, just like he has the wrong jobs policy. But there he is, in hyper campaign mode, running around the country, blaming the Republicans again and yelling “Pass this Jobs Bill now!”

Obama’s own party doesn’t want to pass it, but that’s his plan to see it fail and blame, you know who.

Meanwhile those anarchistic, left loonies are “Occupying Wall Street” and blaming capitalism. Instead, we should be organizing a Million Unemployed March on Washington and occupy the White House and Congress to show them what real gridlock is! While we are at it let’s bring our pitchforks and torches and then throw them out at the ballot box in November 2012.

The guillotine is too good for the likes of them.

Posted: 01:26PT
autone.wordpress.com

LONDON — International donors including Britain and billionaire Bill Gates pledged $4.3 billion on Monday to fund vaccination programmes to protect children in poor countries against diseases such as diarrhoea and pneumonia.

The funding would allow more than 250 million of the world’s poorest children to be vaccinated by 2015 and would prevent more than 4 million premature deaths, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) said.

“Today is an important moment in our collective commitment to protecting children in developing countries from disease,” said Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who attended the pledging conference in London.

“But every 20 seconds, a child still dies of a vaccine-preventable disease. There’s more work to be done.” British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has defended increased spending on aid at a time of sharp state spending cuts, pledged almost a third of the total raised, which beat the $3.7-billion target.

“Britain will play its full part. In addition to our existing support for GAVI, we will provide 814 million pounds ($1.33-billion) of new funding up to 2015,” Mr. Cameron told the conference, winning a standing ovation from the audience.

“This will help vaccinate over 80 million children and save 1.4 million lives.”

Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Gates, a major GAVI backer who helped set up the alliance more than a decade ago, also announced more funding.

“We are pledging an additional billion dollars,” Mr. Gates said, adding that the money would be spread over the next five years.

“It’s not every day that we give away a billion, but for a cause like this it’s exciting to be doing this.”

GAVI says it has helped prevent more than 5 million child deaths in the last decade with its immunisation programmes.

The alliance funds bulk-buys of childhood vaccines against diseases such as pneumococcal pneumonia, Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib disease, diphtheria, pertussis or whooping cough, tetanus, measles and rotavirus.

The World Health Organisation considers vaccination to be “one of the most successful and cost-effective public health interventions.” It estimates that between two and three million deaths are averted each year through immunisation.

A series of academic studies published last week found that if 90% of children in the more than 70 poor countries supported by GAVI were fully immunised, some 6.4 million children’s lives and more than $151-billion in treatment costs and lost productivity could be saved over 10 years, producing economic benefits of $231-billion.

© Reuters

Share the Proof from ONE Campaign on Vimeo.

He rejected many paintings from Van Gogh and Da Vinci to the Microsoft logo, but had chosen a graph that showed the number of dying children from 1960 to 2008, having fallen from 20 million to 9.3 million.

More on this story is in the link below, further information on the foundation can be found in the linked text above.

Bill Gates’s road map for saving 4 million lives – health – 21 October 2010 – New Scientist.

Conrad Blickenstorfer, publisher of the website Rugged PCs, , and the long-time editor-in-chief of Pen Computing Magazine, wrote that early efforts by software giant, Microsoft, as well as other vendors like GO, Nestor and CIC, did not produce the expected influx of demand for pen-based. Blickenstorfer wrote that by 1995 pen computing was all but dead. The idea of using anything other the keyboard to interact with a computing device did not die though. The market for such technology survived in niche vertical applications like digital design. Even today, there are still lots of pen-based digital devices from pocket digital dictionaries and personal digital assistants, and smartphones.

Bill Gates, co-founder and ex-CEO of Microsoft, has been a staunch supporter of the concept with various generations of the Microsoft Windows operating system being embedded with the technology (did you know that Microsoft introduced pen extensions into Windows 3.1?). But while there was enthusiasm for such as technology that would allow you to input data into a computer from anything other than a physical keyboard, the actual software and hardware technologies present at the time did not make the experience worth engaging users.

Next came Tablet PCs.

Even when Microsoft launched a tablet edition of its very popular Windows XP Professional operating system, the popularity of tablet PCs didn’t really catch on. Pundits like Steve Jobs of Apple Computer claimed the technology would never fly – that the product use was limited to surfing the web. Of course Steve Jobs should never be taken seriously when it comes to lambasting technologies Apple does not currently market. He is using what every militarist and aspiring business strategist uses – misdirection.

The launch of the iPhone and iPod Touch revived interes in the technology using the human fingers as the primary medium for entering data. But where Apple presented us with the notion that it is possible to use your fingers to enter data into a computing device, I’d argue that it was Microsoft’s development of the Surface Technology that gives us a glimpse of what is possible (in the future).

In the here and now, though, the arrival of touch-ready Microsoft Windows7 signals a commercial revival of the notion of pen computing or tablet computing or touch computing. In 2009, pundits and analysts predicted that 2010 will be the year of the tablet PC (or touch depending on who you talk to). True to form, we are starting to see new generations of computers that either have touch screens or trackpad that support multi-touch. But this only where the operating system is either Windows7 or Apple OSX. The Linux variants have yet to respond.

But let me make it clear. If you are interested in buying a new PC because you like what you read about multi-touch technology, if the software application you plan to use extensively on this new PC does not support the technology, you won’t benefit from its feature until the software developer makes it happen.

Side note: I bought my daughter an HP Touchsmart TX2 in 2009. It was running Windows Vista Home. It was both pen and touch base. And while it had its kinks (occasional software and hardware glitches), it worked for the most part. I made a mistake of buying Microsoft Windows7 Professional edition with the understanding that Microsoft put a Vista to 7 migration path. Little did I know that this only worked if you bought the same version of the next generation OS (ie., if you have Vista Home, get 7 Home. If you have Vista Professional, get 7 Professional). So I ended up doing a full install of Windows7. What both Microsoft and HP failed to tell me on their website though is that I would lose a lot of the original add-on software that HP created for the TX2 in the process.

So now I am tempted to do a full recovery on the TX2 just to get back most of the software that came with the original HP Touchsmart TX2. Bummer!

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Gates y Buffet en un Boeing Business Jet de Netjets (compañía propiedad de Buffet)

Bill Gates, el magnate filantropo co-fundador de Microsoft, vuelve al numero uno de la lista de los Billonarios del Mundo de Forbes (donde se usa el termino del billón americano, que equivale a mil millones de dólares).

Siguiendo a Gates, nos encontramos con Warren Buffet y en tercer lugar, Carlos Slim. Sin embargo la batalla del año pasado no fue por quien ‘gano más’, sino quien perdió menos, ya que Gates, quien el 2008 figuró tercero con 58.000 millones de dolares, hoy es primero con 40.000 millones.

Entre los 25 primeros, además del par Slim y Gates, nos encontramos con varios viejos conocidos del mundo de la tecnología e internet: Larry Ellison (Oracle), Michael Dell (Dell), Michael Otto (Otto Group) y David Thomson (Thomson Reuters). A continuación, los 25 primeros:

1. William Gates III
2. Warren Buffett
3. Carlos Slim Helu & familia
4. Lawrence Ellison
5. Ingvar Kamprad & familia
6. Karl Albrecht
7. Mukesh Ambani
8. Lakshmi Mittal
9. Theo Albrecht
10. Amancio Ortega
11. Jim Walton
12. Alice Walton
13. Christy Walton & familia
14. S Robson Walton
15. Bernard Arnault
16. Li Ka-shing
17. Michael Bloomberg
18. Stefan Persson
19. Charles Koch
20. David Koch
21. Liliane Bettencourt
22. Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud
23. Michael Otto & familia
24. David Thomson & familia
25. Michael Dell

Verbal: 700 Math: 710 Writing: 680

Yeah!!!!!! I then found this awesome thing on blogthings.com

Your SAT Score of 1410 Means:

You Scored Higher Than Howard Stern You Scored Higher Than George W. Bush You Scored Higher Than Al Gore You Scored Higher Than David Duchovny You Scored Higher Than Natalie Portman You Scored Lower Than Bill Gates Your IQ is most likely in the 130-140 range Equivalent ACT score: 32 Schools that Fit Your SAT Score: Amherst College Dartmouth College Williams College University of Pennsylvania Columbia University

“I’ll take your process off the run queue without even asking
‘Cause my flow is like reentrant and preemptive multitasking…”