(* 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.

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".

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.

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.

Perhaps your assumptions about what devices people own don't hold for everyone.

Quite right! I clearly made a grave error in assuming the average Slashdotter as an American and not a Luddite. Mea culpa.

If you live in the US, your cell phone also has one as required by law. You may not have access to it, but 911 and the police do.

I find it odd that "1-2" has the most votes - I have to suspect many people have no idea how many GPS receivers they really have.

Your phone has one. Your tablet probably has one. Some laptops and even PCs have one. Your digital camera probably has one. Any newer car has one (whether it has a nav system or not). Your nav system obviously has one (possibly shared, possibly separate from the car's). I would expect just those alone to easily push the baseline up to 3+.

And that doesn't even get into niche products like toy "drones". Between me and my housemate, I would estimate my household owns no fewer than 9 GPS enabled devices (and I've probably missed a few), and only one of them actually takes the form of a handheld dedicated GPSr.

Are you claiming that suicide == homicide?

Hoplophobes like to include suicide stats in that number because it makes their argument look somewhat better - As though someone deciding to end their own life via a fairly effective method somehow magically also endangers random children and strangers in a 10-mile radius around them.

Some even go further and claim that guns make you more likely to try to kill yourself (as opposed to merely more likely to succeed, two radically different concepts that they don't quite "get") - Because my sweet, sweet lord Satan tempts me with lullabies from the barrel, no doubt.

The whole argument, however, counts as inherently unwinnable by either side. Oh, no, wait - The pro-2nd-amendment side wins by default. Go team! XD

Uh-huh. Just keep telling yourself that, Mr. Stallman.

Don't worry, a GNU day will dawn... Eventually...

"So, Dr. Flyskippy1, how many papers did you get published this year? Oh, only eight? Yeah, we need you to move out of the corner office next week to make room for a star postdoc who helped solve a radio astronomy mystery that stumped you tenured geniuses for the past 17 years. No hard feelings, right?"

An 8ms (falling phase of the 60hz power cycle) broad-spectrum burst of microwaves from a tired old oven won't cause even the slightest bit of damage to you.

There was no HURD at the time, and people got tired of waiting.

As opposed to today, when... We still have no HURD, and people stopped waiting a decade ago?

if they know that they'll refuse to pay the 10 euro, that's how free markets are supposed to work,

No they won't - What you describe exists now, and we all merrily put up with it.

Hell, package forwarding from the US to Australia counts as its own niche industry designed exclusively to circumvent such BS. But while that may work for physical goods, it doesn't get around the same problem for virtual goods.

I can appreciate the difference between "I don't like this code because it looks different than how I would have written it", and "I don't like this code because the author clearly has no clue how to accomplish the required task and only barely managed to cobble together enough crap to get the desired outputs on a handful of test cases".

The former, I can work with (and sometimes learn from). The latter, I know that I will eventually need to waste more time "helping" the author repair it when it breaks, than I would have just doing it correctly the first time myself.

The real problem here comes not from professional programmers, for the most part (though yes, truly awful "professionals" do exist). The problem comes from having most of the people "programming" in a modern office environment not actually programmers. You have accountants writing god-awful VBA, you have help deskers writing crappy web forms to automate part of their work, you have business analysts who know juuust enough SQL to get an answer, albeit a completely wrong answer, from the data.

This has nothing to do with style, and everything to do with "programming" as an increasingly required bullet point on the average office worker's resume. Yeah, you know some VBA, good for you - Now learn when you can accomplish the same thing with normal Excel formulas, and quit turning every spreadsheet you touch into a smouldering heap of unmaintainable side effects.

Battery life of an existing device won't go up over time.

If a brand new one has only 30% at the end of the day, a year from now (or an OS update, whichever happens first) you'd better get used to charging your watch at lunch.