Honestly I would be pretty disappointed. Maybe we are just selfish but a donation made on my behalf does not make me feel any better about my lack of expendable income. I think most people who don't have money to spare would be disappointed they are just too ashamed to admit it.WeepingAngels said:
Bill Gates Makes a Surprise in Reddit's Secret Santa
- Thread starter roseofbattle
- Start date
It's true, us poor people can barely pay the bills and don't really know what it feels like to donate money. If I ask for and got a PS4 from a family member but I was told that it was really for someone else and I was just the middle man, I wouldn't think of the PS4 as my gift.Robert Marrs said:
As noone else has explained this ill tryo to help. In most countries the way laws are set up to encourage donations is tax benefits. If you are donating part of your income, that income is not taxed by the income tax. Now the taxman cannot know about it beforehand and administrating this would be a hell in beurocracy, so how it works is that you pay full income tax, then donate and in your final tax report you enter that you donated X for something. Then they count how much income tax you have paid for that X and if you got no other tax problems you get that money transfered to your account. Same is true with study fees in some countries as well, for example due to me paying for my studies i receive most of my income tax back this way.WeepingAngels said:
I'm not really sure if he was personally involved in the decisions to do so, but there were a number of cases where Microsoft violated software patents and copyrights, essentially stealing other people's work to implement them into their operating systems.Akichi Daikashima said:
A good example of this is Stacker [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics]. It was a data compression tool that essentially doubled hard drive space, but unlike the existing data compression utilities at the time, it did so in the background, automatically compressing and decompressing data as necessary (as far as I'm aware, Stacker was the first program to do so, which made it much more user-friendly than the competition).
Microsoft negotiated with Stac (the company that made Stacker), ostensibly so that they could license the software and integrate it into MS-DOS. During the negotiations, Microsoft got a look at the source code for Stacker, and then released MS-DOS 6, which had its own data compression called DoubleSpace that was copied from Stacker. (Supposedly, DoubleSpace even had Stacker's copyright in the source code, but that may be an urban legend, since I've never found a source that confirmed it.)
Stacker was patented, so Stac sued Microsoft for patent infringement. And they actually won the lawsuit, which was surprising at the time, since Microsoft hadn't really been handed any defeats yet at that point.
So... I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world, but it's still a pretty major dick move.
Simple: If you wish to donate to a certain cause, but cannot afford to donate anything substantial, then having a donation made in your name alleviates that want.WeepingAngels said:
If you've never wanted to donate money, well, I can't explain that for you.
You are rich enough to have a computer(possibly a gaming PC), some console(this is a gaming site so I assume do) or some means of accessing the escapist, aside from internet access. You should consider yourself lucky for that alone.WeepingAngels said:
The benefit is the feeling of helping someone worse off than you.
Try watching Twilight Zone Night of the Meek, that might you some context. And yes this is a Muslim promoting a Christmas show.
That was a long time ago. Maybe he is trying to atone for things like that.UltimatheChosen said:
Besides, progress is based on copying someone else's work(with due credit and possibly payment) and making it better and more marketable. He should have paid the guy earlier but Stac still won in court.
Oh, I'm not saying he's irredeemable or anything (and, again, I have no idea whether or not that kind of thing was even his call). But he was the face of the company that did those things, so whether he was responsible for them or not, it's easy to understand why he'd catch flak for it.Arif_Sohaib said:
How lovely, I like Bill Gates more and more. I donate to a similar charity called Gospel for Asia. They do the same types of things such as Water filters, Water Buffaloes (the animal), Sewing machines, Chickens, Goats, help educate Women, and many other things. It is amazing how much of a quality of life improvement the people get over these small things.
A chicken can help feed a family, and they can sell the extra eggs at market. Goats can produce milk, cheese, and butter, all of which can be used or sold to support the family as well. A sewing machine can help a woman start a business (I know it sounds sexist, but this is not America. A lot of the poor women in the poor areas either beg or forced into prostitution. A sewing machine helps them leave that life. Even an educated woman has a hard time finding a job, because of the culture.)
So I am a really big fan of Organizations like Heifers International and Gospel for Asia, because they do not just give people food, they give people the means to support themselves and become prosperous as well.
A chicken can help feed a family, and they can sell the extra eggs at market. Goats can produce milk, cheese, and butter, all of which can be used or sold to support the family as well. A sewing machine can help a woman start a business (I know it sounds sexist, but this is not America. A lot of the poor women in the poor areas either beg or forced into prostitution. A sewing machine helps them leave that life. Even an educated woman has a hard time finding a job, because of the culture.)
So I am a really big fan of Organizations like Heifers International and Gospel for Asia, because they do not just give people food, they give people the means to support themselves and become prosperous as well.