Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Good thing climate change isn't real! (Score 1) 293

My first hit for "Global warming"+"times faster" yields this link: As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.

All the opinions you mentioned are, at best, poorly informed.

-

Comment "Pay us to fix our own defects"??? (Score 1, Offtopic) 59

download the file, pay $3.49 for it, and print it at home

Umm, no, nice try - I don't pay the original manufacturer to fix their own defective merchandise for them. I would expect them to host files like that entirely for free, the same way PC hardware makers currently let you download drivers.

Of course, I don't actually expect them to do so; but that matters not at all, since countless other sources will.

Comment Re:More hoops before travelling through USA (Score 4, Insightful) 200

If you want to arrive unmolested you might try not taking part in an ongoing criminal conspiracy.

Unfortunately, I pay taxes in the US, thereby providing material support to a terrorist organization.

Easy to say "just don't do it", not so easy to spend a few years in Club Fed for resisting the IRS' annual shake-down.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 202

(* 25 * $2.5M = $62.5M, $62.5M - $53M (the amount they already have) = $9.5M still needed)

Try another $522M - The FP's "$2.5 million" counts as an extremely misleading number from someone with an obvious agenda. That $2.5 million literally only covers bandwidth and electricity; WMF actually has an annual budget of almost 10x that, $23M.


Okay, so you're saying that Wikipedia will raise another $9.5 million* and then stop, right? If they do that, then I won't complain.

Would they stop begging for donations if someone handed them a check for half a billion tomorrow? I can't say even if they should... That would depend on whether they have aspirations to make the WMF something even bigger and currently just don't have the funding to take it to the next level. If not, then yes, I'd like to think they would invest it and operate off the proceeds.

Realistically though, it amounts to a moot point. They won't ever reach that level of funds in reserve; but the closer they get, the more their investment yield reduces the need for immediate donations on a quarterly basis.

Comment Re:Missing The Point! (Score 1) 950

which should focus not only on biology and safety, but also on emotions, physical contact and romantic relationships.

Yeah, that will certainly encourage boys to turn down what they perceive as a superior good (porn). Let's make them directly confront aspects of sexuality that even adult males try to minimize, in a context with the highest potential to lead to embarrassment in front of their peer group, at an age when they still haven't even figured out the basic logic of "to date a girl, ask her out".

Comment Re:Investments? (Score 3, Insightful) 202

They have annual expenses of roughly $23 million (do you go to work for free every day?), not just the $2.5 they spend to physically keep the lights on. That makes their current position comfortable but still not self-sustaining.

Realistically, they need 13+ times that much in investments to have a self-sustaining income stream.

Comment Re:So? (Score 5, Insightful) 202

Yes, they most certainly do. Every nonprofit on the planet has the long-term goal of having an endowment large enough that they can focus on their core mission rather than bullshit fundraising drives. In order to do that sustainably, they need to have an endowment approximately 25x their annual operating budget, plain and simple.

Nonprofits still function as corporate entities that need to pay the bills, they just don't have - as you might infer from their name - "profit" as their primary mission.

I have my objections to Wiki's policies (primarily editorial), but the fact that they have targeted a self-sustaining endowment, I don't fault them for - Quite the opposite, I give them credit for actually having a viable business plan. Yes, "business plan" - Nonprofits still need one of those, like it or not.

Submission + - Study reveals that Wikipedia is "awash in money" 3

Harold Dumbacher writes: Few things seen on Wikipedia aggravate its users more than the annual fundraising banners. Yet millions of people continue to contribute, seeming to think that Wikipedia will "go offline" if they aren't given more donations. Yet as this new Wikipediocracy blog post reveals, the Wikimedia Foundation is rolling in dough — $53 million in net assets as of this year (that's actual hard sitting-around currency, currently put into various investment vehicles). Meanwhile it only costs about $2.5 million to actually keep Wikimedia project servers online and handling user traffic. The rest of the WMF's annual donations go for "staff salaries, travel and miscellaneous". And evidently, many people are growing disgruntled with this ongoing state of affairs, even Wikimedia staff who benefit from it.

Slashdot Top Deals

God help those who do not help themselves. -- Wilson Mizner

Working...