Bill Gates etc.

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Anyone agree or disagree with this? Undiagnosing Gates, Jefferson and Einstein

How? By listing their neurotypical qualities, much like their Asperger traits have been listed? The checks and balances by which such judgements are made are arbitrary.

Pretty much. The writer also says that rocking can be a symptom of schizophrenia or cerebral palsy (and even NTs due it occasionally) and asks why people think Gates' rocking could specifically indicate autism rather than any of these other possible causes.

Bill Gates certainly does ROCK, with regard to his charity work.

Bill Gates is a back stabbing cut throat businessman before he's a computer programer and before he's ASD.

Interesting, but I don't agree with it.

I am an Aspie, did not have dating problems (one guy I dated ended up being a professional baseball player), am married to a wonderful man and I have an 18 month old daughter. I have been told that I am friendly and easy to talk to. Aspies can make quite good sales-people actually, especially if what they are selling is interesting to them. Some Aspies wouldn't. It is different for everybody. I also have a gifted IQ level and many of the traits of giftedness overlap with AS traits. So, it makes sense that people are saying Einstein was and Bill Gates is autistic.

I think that the guy's article shows the narrow-mindedness and tunnel vision of a lot of Aspies.

I met Bill Gates when I worked at FAO Schwarz. Ms. Gates (although this was before they were married) was showing him who Barney (the big purple dinosaur) was. I knew it was him the minute I saw him and he just looked up at me and said, "I had no idea there was such a thing." I just laughed and said, "be glad you don't," and he just stared at me and then after about 4 uncomfortable seconds, he smiled. Looking back, I think that experience alone makes me think he is an Aspie. Later I managed a deli at one of the MS campuses and Mrs. Gates came in all the time. She was very shy, but also very nice. I liked her immediately and I didn't recognize her for quite a while.

The other argument for Gates being an Aspie is that he has created a haven for Aspies at MS. We have several friends who work there and having worked on campus myself, many of those people (my friends not included) had absolutely horrible hygeine! They would walk into the cafeteria barefoot and they were absolutely rotten to get along with. They were patronizing and downright rude. They smelled. The cool thing is they were able to arrange their offices any way they wanted. One guy had a giant paper mache brain hanging over his chair. Some had very dim ambient lighting and blankets and other offices were outrageously bright.

Okay, I need to shut up, I am babbling.

Tallgirl.

Bill is part of the forces of darkness.

Disagreed. He's an entrepeneur who has lifted billions out of poverty by driving a market for cheaper computers. Now children in the third world have little computers in their hands because PCs have become so inexpensive to produce and distribute. All that progress is thanks to people like Bill Gates.

Computers would be cheaper again if they let you use the one windows license on all your home machines. That's sort of like buying a new CD for every different music player you have or summin. Could you explain what Bill Gates has done to make computers more affordable for people here and in the third world? Not that i doubt you but id like it if you could explain this view exactly.

I have a pretty neutral view of Bill Gates

It's pretty simple really. At one time only computer geeks like us people here owned computers. They were big, clunky, expensive and very technical to use. They couldn't do much and what little they could do relied heavily on the intelligence and invention of the user.

Then Bill Gates created Windows. The graphical user interface operating system. He started the ball rolling towards anyone being able to "point and click" their way through tasks on a computer in a relatively easy manner compared to previous text-based operating systems.

He kept on pioneering with his company and created Windows 95. He marketed it incredibly well and being an astonishingly accessible, attractive and useful product most people began to buy computers.

That in turn drove computer prices down. The trend still continues. Every new generation of computing hardware is cheaper in real terms than the last. Value for money keeps on improving which is how palm PCs have been managed to be sold to governments in the third world.

Why is this so impressive? Because Bill Gates through his entrepeneurial skill has made computing a mass-produced mega-business that benefits people in a quicker, more instant way than humans could ever think was possible.

Now kids in the third world can pick up a little computer and can read information on it, chat to people around the world, be educated in ways books could not educate them. More impressive still, these poor kids are gaining skills from a young age that are useful in the first world.

Special Projects - Grant

February 21, 2000

University of Washington Foundation
Seattle, WA
$5,000,000 over 1 year to support an autism center

Here's more info on the autism center there -> http://depts.washington.edu/uwautism/ They provide ABA and such there.


It seems Bill Gates' foundation is also involved in supporting an autism center. As well as funding research and all with new vaccines (to dismay of parents that believe Autism is caused by mercury/vaccines).

Thought that was interesting to find out.

One thing that I'm surprised that the article didn't mention is the risk that Bill Gates took in giving up such a secure prospect for the future, in favour of what was then dangerous new ground. I'm not suggesting that anyone with an ASD doesn't have any ambition or act on it; but we do tend to like routine and security. Sure, history has vindicated Gates' gamble and the hard work he put in to make it pay; we now live in a world where IT is a highly lucrative field. 30 years ago, however, few people if any believed that anyone would ever want to own a personal computer...and anyone who did would have to have been well advised to want to take that step. Being well advised means knowing who you can trust, which is hard to do when you're not good with social or communication skills.

Bill Gates didn't create Windows. He bought or copied a lot of it, and it took them quite a few versions of Windows to release something that didn't crash. Apple was actually the company that made the graphical user interface a viable option, and point and clicking originated from another company entirely.




Win95 was nice, user-wise, but it was still mostly DOS with a GUI, with some very fancy marketing and even fancier anti-competitive tactics. Also, don't forget that the first passable version of Windows (NT) was actually co-developed with IBM, until they pulled out and briefly tried their hand at it as the OS/2 operating system. Which was nice, BTW, sort of.

Oh, and M$ and Gates totally missed the Internet at first, too. Win95 didn't include any means of connecting to the Internet when it first appeared because Gates thought the www wouldn't last (he had his own version, MSN). And since we're talking about Mr Gates' visionary qualities, another one of his "visions" was that no-one would ever need more than 640k of RAM, causing DOS and Windows users headaches for nearly two decades.




The hardware is cheaper in spite of M$, not because of it. For example, one of their tactics is to force a copy of WIndows on users, whether they want it or not. Don't believe me? Try to order a Dell without XP. It might work, now, but if it does in the US, it's because for a while, the US government threatened to split the company if they continued with their practises. For years, it didn't work, with the result that Dell hardware cost more, not less.

Or have a look at the EU vs M$ case. Or how M$ have tried to change public standards into proprietary ones (TCP, JScript...). There are lots and lots of examples on how they've used less than admirable tactics to sell Windows and other M$ software. Do a Google search and read for yourself.

I've been reading the article and some others and I really think that Bill Gates isn't an aspie at all. Einstein and Jefferson were most likely aspies. The guy acts that the fact that Einstien married and had affairs meant he couldn't be an aspie at all.Some one even said in an article that the fact that Einstein was political made AS unlikely. I happen to think the guy who wrote the article had an axe to grind or something.

Capitalism in its purest form is strictly a "law of the jungle" affair. It just so happens that backstabbing cutthroats are the ones who get farthest up the ladder.