I will be meeting Bill Gates in April and will have the opportunity to ask him some questions. Does anyone have any good questions they'd like asked?

Serious responses only, please.

What would be the next OS?

Will *nix & windows merge for the new OS?

don't need gates to answer that. longhorn and no, in that order

Then there's no new breakthroughs in os a couple of years later.

There's no questions to ask bill gates afaic

yep?

disavowed,
before requesting serious questions for BlGt, firstly you should imagine:
Whether BlGt will answer on really serious questions!?

disavowed:
Will any kind of actions be taken in Longhorn to discourage people from continuing to develop normal win32 applications, and make everyone migrate to the new type of programs? In that case, which? Will old win32 applications continue to work just like before in all ways at least?

May we ask what kind of meeting this is? You and five thousand other people in a room, or something better? Are you really serious?

deLTa, you are too strong with him

+ trikie Q to him
"& what serious question are you plain to ask BG yourself?"

yes, i will actually be expected to ask some very serious questions

again, no need to ask gates this question. the documentation on microsoft.com clearly states that the answer is: no.

again, answered on their website. answer is: yes

no, it will be a relatively small crowd. and yes, i am serious

i would rather not say for anonymity reasons

ok, thanks for answers, disavowed.

>yes, i will actually be expected to ask some very serious questions
maybe you not understood my question?
i mean: are you sure, BlGt will answer on "very serious questions".
but no prob at all, you will see.

now for your anonymity:
1. because you declared about "very serious questions", so you can catched on them.
solution: ask you "very serious questions" after some other's "very serious questions".

2. relly, don't ask 3d person's Q, only your..;
(place here those's Q, we will anal-ze them)


thanks for fun.

--

deLTa, hehe, M$-RTM to you

I would like to know about Windows Security.
Is it Security by Obscurity?
If Windows source code became publicly available, would Windows machines became even more vulnerable? (see the news)
Is that one of the reasons why Win OS sources are kept a trade secret?

evaluator, thanks

again, reading www.microsoft.com ("http://www.microsoft.com") will explain that they are not trying to do security by obscurity
microsoft has said in the past: yes
see above

I guess, in the end, it is very hard to come up with a serious question that noone has ever asked him before, and that is not published anywhere. What the hell, ask him at what age he lost his virginity then.

instead, deLTA, I think so:

without any looking in m$-web, you can easy answer on any serious q yourself.

lets play little game, you ask q, I will answer(if understand subj)
& then disavowed(~from m$ side will confirm.

Ask if he will remove ActiveX from IE.

well, i wasn't 100% truthful... the gates thing was really yesterday, not in april (http://www.cornell.edu/CUHomePage/gates.html ("http://www.cornell.edu/CUHomePage/gates.html"))
when i originally posted, i was under the impression that there wasn't supposed to be much publicity about it, so i didn't want to post the actual day and location until after-the-fact.

as it turned out, only four or five questions were taken before the end (including some pretty crappy questions like, "what's your favorite program?". although i was on line to ask my question, i didn't get the opportunity to ask it. don evaluator, since you were interested, here's the question i was going to ask:

According to the Business Software Alliance, the software industry lost more than $13 billion in 2002 due to software piracy. The Motion Picture Association of America reports that more than $3 billion is lost every year due to piracy of movies, while the Recording Industry Association of America claims that $1 million is lost every day due to music piracy. Despite the loss of income, no one has yet been able to develop foolproof copy-protection technology for software or digital media. If such technology were developed, the royalties from the patent alone would be staggering, not to mention the cutting of billions of dollars lost every year due to piracy.

Do you believe that a technology will ever be developed that can prevent the copying of software or digital media? And if so, do you think Microsoft would use such technology in their software, possibly causing countries with high-piracy rates to migrate to open-source software?

according to http://www.mse.cs.cmu.edu/News-Gates.html ("http://www.mse.cs.cmu.edu/News-Gates.html"), he will also be visiting UIUC, CMU, MIT, Harvard (well, he visited CMU already, i'm not sure about the others). if anyone here sees him at one of these other schools and wants to ask my question, feel free to use it.

oh well... at least it was cool getting to be only a couple of feet away from him

Yes, I think the TCPA will sove this problems, next question please

----------

Blah, should have thrown a pie. /grin/

You bet your ass he would

**
thank for your actual question!

Unfortunately, it does not depend on our desire or an opportunity;
(in In corresponding labs all is ready)
All rests in human rights.
But we firmly hope in common sense of legislators,
And when will happens this moment of happiness,
together with the corrected human rights The world will receive
new computers+systems, on which will be impossible to make something illegal;

As to the third countries, you too exaggerate a degree of their independence.
**

evaluator, i think i would have laughed my ass off had bill gates responded with that, word-for-word

jimmyclif, according to microsoft, tcpa (i assume you mean ngscb) will not be used to counter piracy. rather, it will help with rights-managment. think of it this way... company A modifies product B such that only user C can use B. at this point, the binary B can only be used by C. however, once C makes use of B, C could be able to remove the protection and distribute an unprotected B. thus, there is attestation, but still no real copy-protection.

disa,

the ngscb if searched at google brings me to microsoft on a page leading to the trusted computing group which then leads me to tcpa. let's not be picky MS just renamed it - isn't it so?

I assumed quite some other things about it, maybe the way you describe it is the way they try to make it all appeal to the general public Sounds like ProductActivation˛ to me :-)