Google Donates $2 Million To the Wikimedia Foundation 181
k33l0r writes "Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and other projects, announced that it has received a $2 million donation from Google. This is the first time that Google has supported Wikipedia, and it has many wondering why. Anyone remember Knol, Google's answer to Wikipedia?"
Giving back (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Giving back (Score:4, Funny)
Yep, their results are usually within the top ten and usually what I'm looking for.
Then again.
I don't see them donating to any of the free porn pages.
Google makes me feel lucky (Score:2)
Who wouldn't love a 'suggest for Google Community Donation (tm)' button with that.
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No. E2 is a wonderful atmosphere, but it doesn't allow collaboration, just discussion. The wiki-aspect of Wikipedia is they key feature. E2 is a great participation site, but the end product just isn't so useful. Wikipedia is in many ways harder to contribute to positively, but it evolves into a great end product.
Disclaimer: I love E2. I started on the site most of a decade ago, and I think it's tremendous fun. If it were less addicting, I'd probably be on there more.
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It's trivial for a website to disallow Google's crawlers if the traffic they bring is a problem. Google owes nothing to Wikipedia. This is a charitable donation and not a matter of obligation.
Also, websites disappear from the web every day. Google doesn't have to change their algorithms to accommodate this. Wikipedia is at the top of search results because they contain valuable textual content relevant to specific queries, and because people link to Wikipedia from their sites. The point of Google's alg
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And I don't know where I read this (maybe slashdot) but a few years back when Google revamped its page rank system it did not count internal links (ie. one cnn article to another cnn article) but they made an exception for wikipedia so those articles would show up on the first page of results
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While what you say is true. Wikipedia makes enough internet traffic, and Googles XX% of it makes Google WAY more than 2 million bucks. So Google doesn't 'owe' Wikipedia anything, but it would be stupid not to have it.
I agree, but Google itself provides absolutely zero content. Google owes 100% of its revenue to content authors and publishers. I doubt Google will be cutting cheques to every other site in its index.
Not that Wikipedia creates any content either.. though I believe the donation was in fact to Wikimedia which releases its open source wiki server for free.
Re:Giving back (Score:4, Funny)
Google must get huge revenue from searches like $WHATEVER wikipedia
Not from me. I use Wikipedia to find the Google homepage.
eh... (Score:2)
...Google, please please please don't even think about offering to buy Wikimedia. I (and others that use their services) appreciate your donation, but it does make me a bit nervous...
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How do you buy a charity?
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A bit background info... (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing like that will happen. The Wikimedia Foundation has received large grants before (such as Omidyar's $2M grant [wikimediafoundation.org]). WMF isn't a company you can just 'buy out'. It's a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that is controlled by the Board of Trustees [wikimediafoundation.org], which is composed of 3 community-elected seats, 2 community-seats elected by chapters [wikimediafoundation.org], a "Jimbo-seat" for the Wikipedia founder, and up to four "Specific expertise" seats elected by the board itself (source [wikimedia.org]). Google could attempt to get a "Specific expertise" se
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I don't think Google has any interest in messing with what Wikipedia does, or it's day to day operations. But they could certainly show them how to technically do what they do on a leaner/meaner budget, getting more from the same hardware. And maybe that's the win for Google, a case study in integrating Google technology on a very large third party web site.
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WMF isn't a company you can just 'buy out'. It's a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that is controlled by the Board of Trustees
Interesting that you mention that. Because of WMF's classification, they are legally required to honor any stipulations that were specified along with the grant money. In other words, Google can ask them to spend the $2 million on specific things, and WMF has to either honor that request, or return the funds to Google. So I'm wondering if there were any interesting stipulations a
"completely unrestricted" grant (Score:2)
According to Sue Garnder's email [wikimedia.org] (she is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation), the gift is "completely unrestricted" (which isn't common - many major grants are restricted to a certain use, e.g. ford [wikimediafoundation.org], stanton [wikimediafoundation.org] gifts).
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Its difficult to buy a non-profit. You cant just put in an offer. You pretty much have to convince the board to switch to a private system and hand over the organization as a sale. I doubt Jimbo can even do this. The result would be a massive migration away from the Googlepedia and its collapse.
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So far, no amount of shady dealings and messups from Jimbo has caused mass migration and collapse. For good and bad, Wikipedia is a machine running on its own steam now. I'm not sure even an attempt to sell out (or should we say another? He has his for-profit sister project after all) would be sufficient.
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The article explains it already (Score:2, Informative)
As the article already states: there are "long-term motivations" at play here, (probably to soften its image) in preparation for some new project, as already mentioned with Firefox and Chrome.
As usual, since the article summary does not include this info which is easily found by reading the article, people will speculate here in the forums and end up rewriting the article themselves :D
May be (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice list... but Anonymous also donated a lot (Score:4, Funny)
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...does that mean WikiMedia will also be classified as kiddie porn in Australia now?
Probably. Just think about it: knowledge porn is just a gateway drug to greater evils ... ;)
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Only if WikiMedia's got small tits.
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You mean like in the UK? [slashdot.org] (more info [wikipedia.org])
Yahoo even mirrors them (Score:2)
As far as I know, Yahoo maintains a large set of Wikipedia servers all for free without strings attached.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_hosting [wikimedia.org]
Yahoo has an amazing PR problem, for sure.
Of course; If you consider people thinking "Hopefully, my browser won't hit google analytics after this donation.", perhaps Google's PR problem is deeper. I am personally amazed that they didn't donate a single cent before.
State of the Knol (Score:2)
I had completely forgotten Knol existed until right now. I promptly did a quick search for a popular video game's title and was given this [google.com].
Chilling the circuits is still not efficient if you are using more electricity to do it... But chilling the circuits in outer space could be done efficiently by using the cold environment of space itself to chill them...
It looks like they've basically reinvented Geocities.
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Meanwhile, a search for "mass spectrometry" gives me a page copied exactly from a mass spec manufacturer's web site. I can tell because Google helpfully flags the original site as "similar content" on the web. There's not much screening going on there!
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Knol isn't meant to be a general encyclopedia but a database for articles. It isn't collaborative and only one author can edit it. That means you're relying on the authors reputation and authority. So unlike an encyclopedia, you can cite it. A number of Wikipedia pages link to reputable sources on Knol.
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Actually, knol articles have three different collaboration settings: Open, like wikipedia, moderated (anyone can suggest changes but it has to be approved by someone with edit privileges) and closed (only the creator and people with explicit privileges).
It's just that the open mode is unpopular. People who prefer that write on wikipedia instead, it seems, or maybe it's just a result of defaults. Last 12 hours only 4 open articles were created, vs. 254 moderated, 13 closed.
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Makes sense to me. I wish I was that smart :)
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Re:$2m, not that much (Score:4, Funny)
Thut meens thut onlee evry too-hudnred-nd-fiftee typoz goze too funnd Wikkimedia. I kno tht I'mm gonnna increaze my owtput too shhow my suppport!
Wikileaks (Score:2)
I'd be more impressed if Google would donate even $50-100.000 to Wikileaks - it brings almost as much good as Wikipedia. Not every benefit is directly visible.
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Especially considering Wikileaks is currently offline [wikileaks.org] and looking for financial support to continue paying the bills.
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Wikileaks would reject it though, they have a policy against that.
I scratched my balls, people are wondering why... (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably mostly did it for publicity. And this article on Slashdot was probably $2 million worth of good press to them.
Remember, a lot of people on this site are avid technologists who are becoming suspicious of Google now over privacy and such things. But they are all going to have a geekgasm over this donation to Wikipedia.
H.264 License (Score:2)
Maybe Google will buy the Firefox guys an H.264 license. I wonder if they would accept it.
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Could Google just completely buy out whoever owns the H.264 patents?
Google would have to buy Apple (Score:2)
Could Google just completely buy out whoever owns the H.264 patents?
Hell no. I don't think Google has the cash to buy a 51 percent stake in each of these companies [mpegla.com]. For one thing, Google (market cap 171 billion USD) would have to buy Apple (market cap 184 billion USD).
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I didn't say they had to buy every company who purchased a license. They'd have to buy the patent owner.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc. have a history of purchasing patent owners rather than attempting to license themselves from time to time.
If Google bought the patent owner, then Apple and everyone on that list would have to pay license fees to Google.
MPEG LA is a LLC, not a publicly traded corp. So I can't easily figure out with a quick search what the approximate net worth of the company is. But it m
There is no single H.264 patent holder (Score:2)
I didn't say they had to buy every company who purchased a license. They'd have to buy the patent owner.
The page I linked has the title "licensors", which means "patent holders". There is no single H.264 patent holder; the patent pool is spread out among a couple dozen companies and administered by MPEG LA.
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It wouldn't matter. They still couldn't allow it to be redistributed. They would have to keep track of every Firefox download and pay a fee for each one. Nobody could include Firefox in any other download. Linux distros would have to fork it to strip the patented code out. Mozilla is making the right choice by pushing for an open video format instead of trying to find a 'workaround' for getting h.264 working. H.264 is a minefield and doesn't belong on an open and Free Internet.
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The licensor can license it under an arbitrary and discretionary license, should they chose.
Were Google to give them a huge chunk of money, they might just give Mozilla limited redistribution rights.
it has many wondering why (Score:3, Insightful)
Big companies give money to charity and Wikimedia makes sense for Internet based companies like Google because they make the web so much more worth using.
So what? (Score:2)
On the contrary (Score:2)
Probably a Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with giving to Wikimedia is that they have been so wasteful of the money they've been given. The move to the Bay Area is chief exhibit #1 - why move an organization whose whole purpose, mission, and asset is a web page to one of the most expensive real estate locations on earth?
I'm not the only one who thinks Wikimedia has more than enough money [kuro5hin.org].
Re:Probably a Waste (Score:4, Informative)
Even more interesting is to compare their 2007-2008 [wikimediafoundation.org] budget with their 2008-2009 [wikimediafoundation.org] budget.
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This is very interesting. So technology expenses as a percentage dropped by a total of 12% between 2008 and 2009? That's a big drop -- anyone have any idea what would account for this?
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Re:Probably a Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
The move to the Bay Area is chief exhibit #1 - why move an organization whose whole purpose, mission, and asset is a web page to one of the most expensive real estate locations on earth?
Easy -- close proximity and easy access to well-heeled donors.
I raise my hat (Score:2)
Wikipedia is an accomplishment of immense proportions.
For what is does directly as well as for the example it sets on what is possible on the Internet.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin have made a gesture recognizing this accomplishment, as the mission of Google shares a lot with Wikipedia's.
Kudos to them for applauding the work of a competitor. I raise my hat.
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Non-profits are often "non-profit" only in the sense that they don't follow the traditional business model and the organization itself doesn't keep the donations given to it. The employees who work for non-profits, however, can be compensated very well for their time.
(Disclaimer: I'm not dogging all non-profits here. I'm sure there are many that are run almost entirely on volunteers, have little overhead, and do a lot of good for the cause that they serve. But as an I.T. consultant, I've had an up-close vie
Why? Google is broken (Score:2)
On technical topics I just go directly to the place I know, like Wolfram.
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On any topic, Google's search engine is designed to be an interface to the rest of the web, not a source of its own.
Your complaint is like complaining that a car is useful only as a means of transportation.
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No he complaining that Google is not being an adequate interface to the rest of the web because the only things showing up in his search are Wikipedia and link farms. This is like complaining about a car that will only take you to the library and stores, and not any other building.
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Since he said it was good only as a gateway to Wikipedia, IMDB, and similar sites for popular queries, that's very different that your characterization. Sure, its a complaint that, for any given set of subject matter, there one or a small number of useful sites, and lots of parasitic ones, but that still leaves Google as useful for searching th
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Except I know for a fact that for many things I am searching for the problem isn't lack of sites with the correct information. I will search for information about product x, and get nothing but sites selling x for the first three pages. I will try searching for "x reviews" or simular and get nothing but link-farms and very poor quality sites (stuff like about.com). I will then restrict my search to a site that I know about, and sure enough they have the information I need.
So it isn't that sites containing t
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IME, using the search options and selecting "Fewer shopping sites" seems to do a fairly good job of living up to its name, eliminating most shopping sites from the result
For those of you who are wondering... (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol [wikipedia.org]
Excellent (Score:2)
why? (Score:2)
I just learned that Google earns 500m on typos alone. Wikipedia is full of typos (and incorrect 'facts', but that's another issue). The 2m is just a "thank you".
Google helps Wikimedia, a first! (Score:2)
Knol does not compete with Wikipedia (Score:2)
Re:No. No one remembers (Score:5, Insightful)
The impact of the Gates' money is immediate, but in the long run a well-funded knowledge base is much more effective at raising the standard of living worldwide. Again, Google upstages Microsoft. Is there anything they can't fail at?
No, Google donating $2 million to Wikipedia doesn't even come close to upstaging the enormous philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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No, Google donating $2 million to Wikipedia doesn't even come close to upstaging the enormous philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Do you mean, giving poor countries some drugs but only if they agree to not produce any more domestically?
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Re:No. No one remembers (Score:5, Informative)
That bare minimum only goes to the people that have health concerns because they work for/live close at the companies that polute, in which the Bill Gates foundation holds stock, so it's buying off the guilt.
[citation needed]
As someone who works with a variety of nonprofits which receive funding from the Gates Foundation, I must say: you are either an idiot, a troll, or a person with remarkably bad skills at satire. Hard to tell. GF funds work all over the world in ways that have nothing to do with corporate proximity or pollution.
Re:No. No one remembers (Score:5, Funny)
As someone who works with a variety of nonprofits which receive funding from the Gates Foundation, I must say: you are either an idiot, a troll, or a person with remarkably bad skills at satire. Hard to tell. GF funds work all over the world in ways that have nothing to do with corporate proximity or pollution.
This is slashdot. Bill Gates could sacrifice himself saving a toddler from a burning building and most of the comments on the story would likely be to the effect that the reason the building burned down in the firstplace was the firehall down the street had a computer in it running Windows.
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This is the result when you have people who have a reputation for saying they are going to stop doing some bad thing only to be caught doing it time and again. It's the same as crying wolf. After a while, people who recall the reputation (embrace, extend, extinguish for just one example) will suspect the future motives for everything they do, even if it really is noble this time (and I'm not saying that it is, but I haven't found anything particularly damning). It really shouldn't be that surprising when p
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No, Google donating $2 million to Wikipedia doesn't even come close to upstaging the enormous philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not Microsoft, it's the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Re:No. No one remembers (Score:5, Informative)
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is sitting on billions, but only spends 3% of their endowment in a given year.
The correct number is more like twice that, and is typical of foundations that spend money based on endowments, the point of an endowment is to allow an organization to do work over an extended period of time, something impossible to do if you spend 50% of your money every year.
If you looked at actual dollars handed out in a given year, I wouldn't be shocked if Google (and Google.org) hands out more cash than the Gates Foundation.
2009 Gates Foundation: $3.8B: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2632188420090126 [reuters.com]
Google.org's entire charitable endowment is less than a third of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google.org [wikipedia.org].
It ain't even close, you're off by at least two orders of magnitude.
The Gates Foundation has been asking others to give to them to hand out. The largest contributer to the Gates Foundation is Warren Buffet.
[citation needed]
Gates' donation to the foundation is of a similar size to Buffet's, the tho had known each other for many years (play bridge together, I'm told). The Gates Foundation survived for many years with no other contributions, and I'm unaware of a single dollar that's come from any other source.
There have been many well-researched in-depth pieces that suggest The Gates Foundation is doing more harm than good right now.
[citation needed]
The LA Times 2007 piece questioning the Foundations never made that particular claim, it did raise a signficant issue in that direction though. Because endowments must invest the money they hope to use for work in the future, conflicts arise when those investments do harm. It's entirely fair to say that it's irreponsible not to look those costs.
Of course, if you read, say, the articles in the Times that discussed this, you almost certainly saw the article in the Times a few days later saying that the Gates Foundation had decided to reassess its investments for social responsiblity.
(I'd admit, by the way, that those questions can still be pretty complex. A few obvious corporations aside, most corporations do quite a number of things, many of them bad, many of them good. "How much?" can be a very challenging thing to quantify.
When The Gates Foundation was pressed about it, they said they can't be bothered to research the firms they invest it.
[citation needed]
But there are people who've linked Gates Foundation investments to Microsoft contracts and strong-armed deals.
[citation needed]
Until it is clear that The Gates Foundation is doing more good than harm, I'm not sure we should be so quick to praise them, let alone donate money to them.
Nobody is asking you to, in fact, can you point me at a place where it is possible to donate to the Gates Foundation? No, you can't, because they don't accept external donations in general. Show me the donate button on this page, and we'll talk:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx [gatesfoundation.org]
Re:No. No one remembers (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody is asking you to, in fact, can you point me at a place where it is possible to donate to the Gates Foundation? No, you can't, because they don't accept external donations in general.
Were one to advocate for the devil one might point out that every purchase of a PC which has ever come preinstalled with Windows due to Microsoft's per-processor licenses was and is an involuntary donation to the Gates Foundation.
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I agree with the overall statements, and the OP obviously doesn't understand the purpose of an endowment, but what's the deal with all the [citation needed] stuff. This is /., not Wikipedia. People are allowed to wear tin-foil hats with out backing up their facts.
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People are allowed to wear tin-foil hats with out backing up their facts.
You're right, I should have just said "you're full of $#$!."
See also: http://xkcd.com/285/ [xkcd.com]
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You misunderstand. 3.8 billion is what they spent in 2009, they spent all of that figure. They have significantly more money than that.
I do not agree with your main point, though. Depending on the specific project involved, "blowing every penny you have" the first year can be madness. Vaccine research takes years to get from first investment to results, delivering vaccines or mosquito nets involves not only dropping the money but putting together an organization that can get those to the people who need
Re:No. No one remembers (Score:5, Insightful)
To paraphrase Anthony Burgess, "It's not good deeds that makes one good, but good intent."
And so what if he is doing it for the press? If he cures malaria, the people who are cured will not care why he did it. Viewpoints like yours tend to come from people who don't actually spend much time helping other people and haven't really thought things through.
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To paraphrase Anthony Burgess, "It's not good deeds that makes one good, but good intent."
I care far more about the good deeds then about whether the person doing them somehow becomes "good." Whether Bill Gates is a good person hardly seems relevant.
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Contract Bridge. It's not hard to google up references to it, e.g., http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005-12-19-bridge-schools_x.htm [usatoday.com]
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is sitting on billions, but only spends 3% of their endowment in a given year.
This is actually a smart move - it ensures that it's unlikely that the endowment loses value (it only needs to make a 3% return to maintain value). If you're playing for long-term gain (read: make your legacy "philanthropist and nice guy"), you want to keep handing out money as long as possible. It's easier to increase the payouts later than to decrease them.
Note that this doesn't mean anything in terms of what they're using the money for.
Re:No. No one remembers (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yeah right, because Gates does it out of their hearts... you're an idiot if you think that."
you are effectively trolling. Common notes to look for - Lack of supporting information for the claims, calling other people names.
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When Bill dies the foundation can be passed down to his children without any inheritance taxes.
In other words, the Foundation continues to exist, and would still be subject to the same legal requirements about what happens with the money as already exists. If you mean to suggest that the children could drop the cash on hookers and blow, you simply don't understand the legalities involved.
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I know, I know, but .. but http://xkcd.com/386/ [xkcd.com] :p
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You are insane. Really, get help.
I was going to explain how philanthropy really works, and then explain Gates' tax liability and the position that both he and Warren Buffet have about income taxes (that they both believe that marginal rates are too low) but you are in a bubble of irrational hatred.
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Although it wouldn't work as a straight tax shelter, I vaguely recall speculation when he first announced the foundation that it was intended to provide him cover to liquidate his stake in Microsoft. If I recall correctly, the foundation's initial endowment was a ginormous grant of Microsoft stock from one Mr. W. Gates. The intent was for them to liquidate it and use the proceeds. Now, the market would panic if Bill himself dumped billions of Microsoft stock all at once, but if a charitable foundation do
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Wow. Trolling this took talent. Both are good causes, and I would say vaccinating a population so they can survive will do wonders for raising their standard of living. It is hard to build knowledge when you are dead.
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No necessarily (Score:2)
It's extremely un-PC to say this, and it's also somewhat counterintuitive, but merely vaccinating a population doesn't *necessarily* raise their standard of living --- it may merely raise the *number* of people living in poverty. Africa is a prime example; it historically has been one of the biggest benefactors of vaccinations since vaccinations were first developed ... do most Africans now have a high standard of living? No, instead they have a massive population explosion but are still living about the sa
Re:No. No one remembers (Score:5, Insightful)
Again, Google upstages Microsoft.
Well, to be fair, that wasn't Microsoft, it was Bill Gates. Yes, he built his money from Microsoft but we need to wait and see what Larry and Sergey do with their cash when they hit Gates' age.
The impact of the Gates' money is immediate, but in the long run a well-funded knowledge base is much more effective at raising the standard of living worldwide.
Now you've gone and done it. Now you've put me in the very awkward position of defending William Gates. Recently the foundation committed $10 billion [news-medical.net] to Malaria Research and Development [gatesfoundation.org]. Not distribution and deployment but R&D. Technically this has no immediate effect but instead contributes to our "well-funded knowledge base" of vaccine development. It's entirely probable that the first world will benefit from $10 billion being dumped into any medical R&D. I'm not even going to get into the number of zeros that ten billion has compared to two million but I trust you to be able to discern between the significance.
... like who gets the money, where the money is spent and how American companies keep building their infrastructure off of it when you should probably be dumping it into the countries that you pledged to help.
I got my own problem with the Gates Foundation
Is there anything they [Google] can't fail at?
The summary lists Knol. Recently I watched Wave flounder. You're being disingenuous to claim that all Google touches is gold. Their advertising revenues support a lot of their endeavors similar to how Microsoft operating system stranglehold allowed them to elbow their way into hardware and gaming. Impressive? Yes. King Midas? No. Infallible? No.
Wave floundered? (Score:2)
Wave isn't even officially launched. It is also a protocol more than a service.
Let's not call Wave a flop just yet.
I think Google is sitting on a variety of different pieces that they haven't put together yet. I think they have the potential to put these pieces together and really changing the way people use the internet.
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Gimmicked page rankings? They're by definition gimmicked. If they tried to do it without human intervention 99.99% of of the top 10 results would be porn and scams.
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"Gimmicked", how? It's not like there's not a huge amount of people linking to Wikipedia. I'm not sure how boosted search rankings and the corresponding increased traffic helps keep an ad-free site "afloat" either.
Re:First Time Supported with *Cash* (Score:5, Insightful)
How is Google sending Wikimedia traffic keeping them "afloat"? Every unpaid-for GET is an anchor, not a lifebelt.
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How is Google sending Wikimedia traffic keeping them "afloat"? Every unpaid-for GET is an anchor, not a lifebelt.
Not every unpaid-for GET is unpaid-for. Some readers pay for their GET with their time by becoming editors.
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Wikimedia doesn't refuse donations from corporations...