Six of its top institutional investors are - surprise, surprise - also top investors in Microsoft. The whole thing is a complete joke. Education, poverty and disease are perfect targets - you can throw money at them endlessly, accomplish nothing and still receive plaudettes and smiles for having "tackled" such grave and "intractable" problems. All his foundation does is make the world's biggest poverty pimp.

I'll believe Gates is serious when he actually contributes something concrete HERE, in the United States. Here's an idea: A massive job program for those in inner-cities and ghettos, followed by a Levittown-style building boom of small, affordable houses for the folks who take those jobs. But no, that would be too much like REALLY giving his money away, and we can't have that, can we?

And I wish Farhad would stop getting his facts so drastically wrong. According to the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds", the reason Gates and Allen were able to sell an operating system to IBM was because they purchased it for $56,000 from a disgruntled ex-employee of Gary Kildall who had created his own , vastly inferior knock-off of Kildall's OS called QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System. Gates and Allen then slapped the name MS-DOS onto it and sold it to IBM. Mrs. Gates's social connection had little or nothing to do with it. IBM wanted Kidall's OS, but he foolishly blew them off. When Gates and Allen heard about it, they acted quickly. That's about all the credit they deserve.

"And certainly people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould aren't walking around glum all the time, saying, "Oh, life has no purpose, I think I'll just kill myself." They are very energetic people who love life and do lots of fun things. I don't think Christians are wise to say we've got the corner on purpose." [emphasis added]

Of course, Stephen Jay Gould has been DEAD for several years now.

And to the arrogant gasbag whose letter got posted first, I say that YOU are an example of exactly you would deride. Religion is based upon faith in much the same way science is based upon research and investigation. Though I've always believed that eventually - and ironically - science will be the way in which mankind finally opens that last door and looks God in the face. And God will of course smile, invite those future people into his home and say "What took you so long?"

What a bunch of miserable bastards. They're actually going to try and go after individual YouTubers for uploading copyrighted clips, and I'm betting they will ALSO go after a select group of YouTubers whose only "crime" was to WATCH said material. Viacom learned nothing from the debacle the RIAA experienced when they went after individual file sharers, including a ten-year-old girl and her grandmother. Sales of music CDs are at an all-time low and, furious with the RIAA's Gestapo tactics, a whole legion of young folks are refusing to use legal, fee-based music sites like iTunes.

It will be more difficult to make Viacom pay a price for the nastiness they are sure to inflict on some people, but pay they will. Trust me - you don't fuck over the American people and get away with it.

General Giap said that??

I want a citation from a reliable source before I'll believe it.

They should embrace feminists for their libidos' sake!