p2pnet.net News:- Bill Gates has been doing the rounds in China and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a great Associated Press photo by Greg Baker showing Microsoft founder Bill Gates answering questions while he’s demonstrating a Tablet PC to students at a middle school in Beijing Thursday July 1.

"Gates donated computers and software to the school, and launched an initiative to build computer labs in rural Chinese schools," says the caption.

And in a Wi-Fi Connected World story on the trip here, Gates says, "We believe that technology is one of the most powerful tools that teachers and governments can use to educate and inform people of any age."

It also says, "With a symbolic toss of soil to plant a pair of young trees at the entrance to a middle school here, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates helped senior officials of the Chinese Ministry of Education launch the first of 100 computer classrooms - most of them in rural China - to be equipped through an ambitious government initiative supported by Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program."

Talking to other students, this time at the University of Washington’s business school students in 1998, he’s also quoted as saying:

"Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours.

"They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

The next decade is here and Gates is keeping his promise.

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